gawker stole ian shapira's story.

i loved this article in today's washington post.

at first glance, it seems like another "how will newspapers survive in the internet age" sort of story. but i think the point made is valid:

Current law basically allows the Gawkers of the world to appropriate others' work, repurpose it and sell ads against it with no payment to or legal recourse for the company that paid me while I sat through two hours of a generational seminar.

Marburger compared my article and the Gawker posting and concluded: "This is what in our opinion is a huge contributor to the demise of those who are originating news reports. If you don't change the law to stop this, originators of news reports cannot survive."

i don't pick up near the traffic a site like gawker does. at least not yet. but i like to think there is a responsibilty on the part of the blogosphere to give credit where credit is due. but i also think it's interesting how newspapers and aggregators both need each other in order to survive, yet the former is faltering financially while the latter is cleaning up. a good read and thought-starter, for sure.

orly taitz

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Born Identity
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Joke of the Day

i first heard about this woman via the daily show [ because jon stewart is, after all, the most trusted man in america ]. but then i read this article in oc weekly. [ obviously the crazies are concentrated in orange county ]. then the washington post's secular corner ran this.

when is the truth not good enough for us anymore?? i'm reminded of a bit lewis black did, and i'm scouring the internet trying to find it. basically, he talks about how you can't look at a piece of footage [ in this case, it was whether george bush was told about bin laden ] and say that it didn't happen. he then relates it to cat suicide. [ natch ].

but seriously, when did facts and evidence become not good enough? has photoshop made us overly cynical, even when we shouldn't be? do we just want to be upset, to be upset? someone please enlighten me.

best excerpts of the oc weekly piece:

The problem is most of the above facts aren’t true.

For starters, the Pakistan “travel ban” is a complete fabrication based on zero evidence and completely contradicted by State Department records and a 1981 New York Times article. The full transcript from Obama’s grandmother shows that she never said he was born in Kenya—in fact, she repeatedly said he was born in Hawaii. The law allowing foreign-born children to obtain Hawaiian COLBs didn’t exist until 20 years after Obama was born, while Obama’s published COLB says his birth information was recorded four days after his birth in 1961. And those “forensic experts” who say Obama’s document is phony? There have only been three of them: Two haven’t published their real names or any verifiable credentials (one went by the moniker “TechDude”), and the other merely said that she can’t make a determination of a document’s authenticity based solely on a JPEG.

***

“It’s just fascinating,” says Bob Haggard, a frequent poster on Politijab’s Orly Taitz forum. “She runs around the country doing things that amount to absolutely nothing. She tells her followers that she ‘files’ all sorts of documents, but she never files anything. She drops stuff off.”

Patrick McKinnion of Yes to Democracy puts it a different way: “There’s a certain amount of fascination with unbridled insanity, and that’s what you’re seeing with the birthers: a level of hatred that borders, if not absolutely pole-vaults, into insanity.”

two recent post articles about sarah palin

i'm kind of in love with this op-ed written by barbara boxer and john kerry, refuting a palin op-ed about energy. i hate that anyone has to take her seriously, but i like how the senators subtly mention her ties to oil companies, and state how scare tactics used in the past to stymie environmental legislation have no basis.

the other article i'm digging is the results of a post-abc news poll. while palin still has her GOP following, she's clearly losing ground, and for that i am thankful. more people don't think she's a strong leader, or clearly understands complex national policies. my favorite excerpt is as follows:

Rick Buila, 38, of Sharonville, Ohio, who works in finance and voted for the McCain-Palin ticket in November, said his opinion of the governor has changed. "I don't think that she is cut out to be on the national stage," he said. "I look at her education and her background and the way she carries herself and her [resignation] speech, and when you have someone who's out there saying 'You betcha' about 50 times, I don't think that's the person we want to have negotiating with other countries."

amen.

utah kiss-ins

we're all god's children. until we're not.

A police report said they sat down for a kiss and were approached by a pair of church security guards, who asked them to leave because their behavior was "unwanted."

smart seafood

speaking of seafood sensation.... via the washington post's smart living section, an easy way to navigate the confusing world of seafood sustainability.

The most straightforward thing you can do is avoid eating any species that has been consistently overfished. According to a recent report from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, 28 percent of global fish stocks were overexploited, depleted or recovering from depletion in 2007. Another 52 percent were fully exploited, meaning that catch levels had either been reached or were close to their maximum sustainable limits. (For more on the world's overfishing problems, watch the new documentary "The End of the Line," billed as "An Inconvenient Truth" for the seafood industry.)

To find out how your favorite fish is doing, check out the Monterey Bay Aquarium's popular Seafood Watch program, which rates both wild-caught and farm-raised seafood as "best choice," "good alternative" or "avoid." For wild-caught fish, the program looks at stock levels but also takes fishing techniques into account, because some types of gear result in greater damage to the marine environment or higher levels of collateral damage to nontarget species. For farmed fish, which are often raised in net-pens in the open ocean, Seafood Watch looks at the potential for pollution and disease transference to the ecosystem. (Wild-caught Alaskan salmon, canned albacore tuna and farmed rainbow trout all get high marks under this program.) In the supermarket, look for the Marine Stewardship Council's eco-label, a blue oval with a fish and a checkmark. That certifies that products come from sustainable fisheries.

i visited the monterey bay site, and discovered they also offer a handy iphone app, so you can make better choices when you're in a store or restaurant. while the post article points out there's not much info about carbon footprints, that info isn't very widely available. and even if we can make our choices a little more smart, that's better than an altogether dumb one.

obama's commencement speeches

i love president obama with the intensity of my disdain for george w. bush. i make no secret of this. but i have especially loved how he has taken the past two university controversies and confronted them head-on. this write-up in the washington post sums it up pretty well.

The failure of both sides to use "fair-minded words," he said, overly inflames an important debate. As an example, he described his own 2004 campaign Web site, which at one point referred to "right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman's right to choose."

It was not until a doctor e-mailed him about the phrase that Obama ordered it taken down, he said.

"I didn't change my underlying position, but I did tell my staff to change the words on my Web site," he told the crowd. "And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that . . . that's when we discover at least the possibility of common ground."

i think obama has played the controversy so smartly. by acknowledging that "at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable," he simply calls for a civilized debate. is it naive? perhaps. but he's right. there are crazies on both sides (i am one of them). and the crazies aren't doing anything to forge understanding.

at ASU, obama also addressed the university's decision to deny him an honorary degree, saying 

"Your own body of work is also yet to come," he told 60,000 people at the stadium. "Building a body of work is all about . . . the daily labor, the many individual acts, the choices large and small that add up over time, over a lifetime, to a lasting legacy. That's what you want on your tombstone. It's about not being satisfied with the latest achievement, the latest gold star -- because the one thing I know about a body of work is that it's never finished."

mmmmmm, smart words. of course, nothing illustrates this point quite so finely as this daily show video.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Arizona State Snubs Obama
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor