30 June 2008 @ 8:13PM >> This is an old quote from a six-time Socialist Party candidate for President who died in 1968, but as the years go by, it looks more and more accurate:

The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.
Norman Thomas

28 June 2008 @ 3:00PM >> If religion is characterized by the presence of faith in the absence of evidence, then some of the most pious people in America are those who believe government can cure all social ills.

24 June 2008 @ 9:25AM >> Are you interested in film? Do you have narrative or documentary ideas that touch on themes of economic freedom or individual liberty?

Then you might want to check out the filmmaker’s workshop being held in Los Angeles from August 15th through the 17th.

If you’re interested, submit an application. Those who are accepted into the program will have all costs paid—including travel, lodging and food—courtesy of American Film Renaissance. The application deadline is July 9th.

23 June 2008 @ 9:09AM >> Saint Barack Obama, the post-racial candidate sent from on high to redeem the racist American nation, is now engaging in the healing politics of Hope and Change by preemptively accusing his opponents of racism:

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama said on Friday he expects Republicans to highlight the fact that he is black as part of an effort to make voters afraid of him.

[...]

“They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

I admired Barack Obama back when he was the first black presidential candidate not to play the race card. But after learning about Reverend Wright and witnessing Obama’s feeble efforts to explain why he spent 20 years eagerly lapping up sermons from Chicago’s version of Al Sharpton, it became clear that Obama wasn’t some new kind of post-racial healer. He’s just better at hiding who he really is.

And now that he’s saying Republicans will attack his race before it has even happened, Obama shows that he’s not above playing the race card whenever it suits him.

What a phony this guy is.

17 June 2008 @ 11:52PM >> The Associated Press, which is currently threatening legal action against bloggers who quote excerpts of AP stories, has been caught extensively quoting from a blog without permission.

The copyright doctrine of fair use is generally lenient in allowing works to be quoted or reproduced for news and commentary purposes. Yet earlier this year, the Associated Press forced the website SnappedShot to take down various AP photos which had been posted for the purpose of criticism. Brian C. Ledbetter, who runs SnappedShot, believed he was well within his fair use rights, but he lacked the resources to fight the media powerhouse.

And within the last week, it came to light that AP lawyers threatened the proprietor of another blog for posting excerpts of AP articles. Considering that none of the excerpts posted were longer than 79 words, the AP’s stance seemed extreme to many, and the incident led to a lot of outrage online.

So it is odd timing, then, that just yesterday the Associated Press published a story lifting content from a blog without permission:

In a news item about the e-mail from Judge Kozinski’s wife that I posted on this site, an AP article lifted numerous passages.

I counted 154 words quoted from my post. That’s almost twice the number of words contained in the most extensive quotation in the Drudge Retort.

So am I going to be an ass and threaten to charge them, or sue them, or demand that they remove the quotes? Of course not. They benefited from my content and I benefited from their link.

Just like when the Drudge Retort quoted them.

And I’m going to go on quoting AP stories, within fair use guidelines.

And if they start threatening me, I’ll have to remind them that they did the same to me.

This isn’t the first time the Associated Press has been busted for taking content without permission from online sources.

It seems that fair use rights are only afforded to those with enough resources to defend those rights in court.

14 June 2008 @ 1:52PM >> A reader and viewer of Indoctrinate U recently wrote to me asking about a t-shirt I wore in the film: “I caught a glimpse of one of the t-shirts you were wearing, but didn’t really get the whole thing. It looked like it had a Republican elephant on it with a circle and a line through it. What was it really?”

I wrote back:

You correctly identified the t-shirt. It had the Republican Party logo with a circle-slash through it, and below that the text: “I Hate Republicans.”

For a while during the shooting, I wore a series of shirts deliberately intended to help me blend in to the environment, similar to the way that some species camouflage themselves.

The shirts (two more of which are shown in the attached photos: a CCCP shirt with the Soviet hammer and sickle, and a Joseph Stalin t-shirt) were originally part of an experiment that was intended to be a scene in the film. I wore different politically-themed t-shirts around campus and tried to capture various reactions. We did get a number of under-the-breath comments disparaging my “Viva la Reagan Revolucion!” t-shirt done in the iconic Che style and my “Proud Republican” t-shirt, but unfortunately, we had trouble finding the right mic setup to reliably capture such comments. So we pretty quickly scrapped the idea.

But after I realized that certain t-shirts granted me better access to the campus, I kept wearing those ones around.

Speaking of t-shirts, we’ve now got a few available over at the Indoctrinate U store, where we’ve just added a bunch of Indoctrinate U gear.

However, I should warn you in advance that these shirts probably won’t grant you better access on campus. Quite the opposite, possibly.

11 June 2008 @ 9:07AM >> This poll backs up my recent argument that bias undoubtedly affects the public’s perception of the news media and that it’s eroding trust in reporting:

Just 17% of voters nationwide believe that most reporters try to offer unbiased coverage of election campaigns. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that four times as many—68%—believe most reporters try to help the candidate that they want to win.

The perception that reporters are advocates rather than observers is held by 82% of Republicans, 56% of Democrats, and 69% of voters not affiliated with either major party. The skepticism about reporters cuts across income, racial, gender, and age barriers.

Ideologically, political liberals give the least pessimistic assessment of reporters, but even 50% of those on the political left see bias. Thirty-three percent (33%) of liberals believe most reporters try to be objective. Moderates, by a 65% to 17% margin, see reporters as advocates, not scribes. Among political conservatives, only 7% see reporters as objective while 83% believe they are biased.

[...]

Looking ahead to the fall campaign, 44% believe most reporters will try to help Obama while only 13% believe that most will try to help McCain. Twenty-four percent (24%) are optimistic enough to believe that most reporters will try to offer unbiased coverage.

Even Democrats tend to believe their candidate will receive better treatment—27% of those in Obama’s party believe most reporters will try to help him win while only 16% believe they will help McCain. A plurality of Democrats—34%—believe most reporters will be unbiased.

Among unaffiliated voters, 44% believe reporters will try to help Obama and 14% believe they will try to help McCain. Seventy percent (70%) of Republicans expect Obama to receive preferential treatment while only 8% believe reporters will try to help McCain.

Voters aren’t as gullible as some in the media seem to think.

9 June 2008 @ 9:17PM >> Indoctrinate U is coming to Los Angeles this weekend!

The film will be shown Sunday night, June 15th at 8PM in downtown Los Angeles.

For the rest of the details, visit the Screenings page over at the Indoctrinate U website.

9 June 2008 @ 9:06AM >> At the art college of Cooper Union in New York City, a faculty-selected art exhibit features several controversial paintings by Felipe Baeza. One painting, called “The day I became a Catholic,” features a man with his pants down and a crucifix shoved in his posterior.

What brave, groundbreaking art!

Baeza’s not stupid. He knows what groups he can offend and still make it through the faculty selection process. He knows Catholics aren’t going to erupt in a global orgy of violence over his paintings. He knows there will be no fatwas issued or calls for jihad. And he knows he won’t be slaughtered in broad daylight like Theo van Gogh.

He’ll simply piss off enough people to cause a stir, and that will help him sell his paintings. Cha-ching!

Yep, Baeza’s gonna get famous and nobody’s going to chop his head off. That’s why it’s smart to pick on Catholics, even though two decades after “Piss Christ,” it isn’t exactly edgy.

So where were all these gutsy artists and faculty members during the Cartoon Intifada? Fear and political correctness required that they stay silent as Muslims around the world rioted and killed over cartoons that were pretty tame compared to Baeza’s work.

It’s sad that so many people whose livelihoods rely on freedom of expression refuse to stand up in defense of that freedom whenever it is threatened.

Eventually, the only groups that will be criticized are those groups whose members won’t kill you over it.

Is that really the incentive structure we want to be creating?

7 June 2008 @ 11:14AM >> Courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle, another nausea-inducing dispatch from the Cult of Obama:

Barack Obama isn’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.

[...]

No, it’s not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn’t have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity.

Dismiss it all you like, but I’ve heard from far too many enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who’ve been intuitively blown away by Obama’s presence - not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence - to say it’s just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile soul-sucking lobbyist whores, with Obama as their suddenly evil, cackling overlord.

Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

4 June 2008 @ 11:16PM >> The psychology of Bill Clinton as portrayed in the recent Vanity Fair piece “The Comeback Id” (you know, the article that caused the former president to refer to its author as a “sleazy,” “slimy” “scumbag”), reminded me of how I described my perception of the man in “The Shallowness of Clinton.”

I wrote that piece in the spring of 2002, back when Bill Clinton was still a darling of devoted Democrats and the establishment media.

It’s a bit reassuring that so many of his former blind followers finally see him the way I always have.

But still, one thing bothers me...

Did all these folks really not notice the real Clinton? For eight years? Or did they just not care because he had the “right” political enemies?

Bill Clinton was a pretty good con-man, so maybe I should go a little easy on all you former patsies out there.

You’re a little late to reality, but we’ll welcome you anyway.

2 June 2008 @ 8:29AM >> When a blue-blooded old media outlet like the Washington Post raises the possibility of victory in Iraq on its editorial pages, it’s news:

THERE’S BEEN a relative lull in news coverage and debate about Iraq in recent weeks — which is odd, because May could turn out to have been one of the most important months of the war. While Washington’s attention has been fixed elsewhere, military analysts have watched with astonishment as the Iraqi government and army have gained control for the first time of the port city of Basra and the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, routing the Shiite militias that have ruled them for years and sending key militants scurrying to Iran. At the same time, Iraqi and U.S. forces have pushed forward with a long-promised offensive in Mosul, the last urban refuge of al-Qaeda. So many of its leaders have now been captured or killed that U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, renowned for his cautious assessments, said that the terrorists have “never been closer to defeat than they are now.”

Iraq passed a turning point last fall when the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign launched in early 2007 produced a dramatic drop in violence and quelled the incipient sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Now, another tipping point may be near, one that sees the Iraqi government and army restoring order in almost all of the country, dispersing both rival militias and the Iranian-trained “special groups” that have used them as cover to wage war against Americans. It is — of course — too early to celebrate; though now in disarray, the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr could still regroup, and Iran will almost certainly seek to stir up new violence before the U.S. and Iraqi elections this fall. Still, the rapidly improving conditions should allow U.S. commanders to make some welcome adjustments — and it ought to mandate an already-overdue rethinking by the “this-war-is-lost” caucus in Washington, including Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

It is funny to see the editors say it’s “odd” that the stunning turnaround in Iraq isn’t getting more press coverage. If they think it’s under-reported, isn’t a rather simple solution to report it more? In fact, wouldn’t that be the only journalistically responsible thing to do?

After all, it’s not as though the Washington Post exists in a vacuum; if the paper decided to cover success in Iraq as vigorously as it covered failure, other media outlets would have a harder time continuing to peddle a storyline of defeat.

Eventually, politicians would even have to acknowledge the emerging reality. But as the Post notes, that might be problematic for certain candidates.

Perhaps that’s why these improvements aren’t being reported more.

Still, it’s refreshing to see the Post acknowledge the very real successes of the past year. Will other outlets follow suit?