Month: October 2004

Blogging the presidency: pros and cons

Some reflections on blogging, journalism, and my last post. A common cry of bloggers is that journalists don’t touch investigations with lots of hard work, uncertain payoff, and that are politically sensitive. A complaint from many liberal bloggers was that the press parroted GOP criticisms of Kerry’s war record while staying silent on George W. Bush’s service—spotty attendance and all—in the Reserves. When CBS went after the story in a big way, I cheered—until one of the memos proved a forgery. Then I fumed. Once Big Media was burned, I figured, they wouldn’t touch the story again and it would die down—even though the rest of the allegations about Bush’s record were provable.

Thankfully, this is where bloggers come in. Paul Lukasiak, aka The AWOL Project, has been collecting information and going after Bush’s Reserve record using regulations, publicly available documents, and hard work to uncover the meaning behind the codes. This is a thankless job that few journalists would touch, especially after CBS’s embarrassment; but bloggers have continued to chase the story and are turning up some valuable findings.

So what’s the problem? I think there’s a danger that a lot of us spend a lot of energy on issues like this one precisely because they’re bloggable and lend themselves to being addressed by individuals with time on their hands, rather than looking at less personal issues about the president like his health care policies and education strategies. The problem, which the Kerry campaign appears fortunately to have identified, is that health care and education are two of the three hot-button issues for voters this election. So where are all the health care bloggers? That’s something I’d like to be reading about.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the AWOL Project is doing great work, and it’s a kind of work I’ve done in the past as well (see “Hunting for the Halliburton Contract” and “How to Spend $2 Billion”). But we need to get the blogosphere past the point where we focus on one or two issues at the expense of others that might be equally valuable to explore.

PTI 961: What really happened to our absentee president

The Mystery of PTI 961 takes an obscure code on George W. Bush’s discharge papers and gives it meaning from DOD regulations: “when an ‘action is reported by the 9xx PTIs’ it represents a ‘loss to the Air Force strength.’  In other words, despite the fact that Bush had almost eight months left on his six year Military Service Obligation at the time, Texas Air National Guard officers were signaling that Bush was essentially worthless to the Air Force, and should not even be retained in the ‘Ready Reserves’ for call up in the event of a national emergency.” The rest of the document is a close reading of the president’s file and the relevant regulations, concluding that Bush was discharged under Rule 8 in Chapter 12 of the Air Reserve Forces Personnel Manual AFM 35-3: that is, he was “unqualified for service.”

This isn’t a surprising finding, since he hadn’t done his flight hours and had refused to take a physical. But it is striking because it is one of the few places where Bush’s records show what is common knowledge among all but his most ardent supporters: that he was mustered out of the Air Reserves because he was unfit for duty.

Thanks to Hooblogger The Rittenhouse Review for the link.

When the going gets tough…

…the crazies come out. Don’t blink, you might miss the dirty tricks machine, as well as some true faces that don’t pop up unless they think they can energize their base without ticking off undecided voters or the opposition.

Exhibit 1: State and national Republican officials are trying to get 63 Philadelphia polling places moved at the last minute. About 53 of the 63 are less than 10% white. I get confused every year about the time and place I have to go to vote, and I have a master’s degree. Can’t imagine why someone would want to wait until the last minute to do this.

Exhibit 2: Instapundit comes out in favor of George Bush. (His position is, I think, obvious, but his explicitly stating it is news.) Good on Tony for calling him out, and for staying on his back.

Exhibit 3: Anti-gay forces in Ohio are gathering reasoned support from all over, including the intellectual spawn of the Inquisition: “The proof for the Christian ethic which condemns homosexual marriage is the impossibility of the contrary. Reject the Christian ethic and you have no basis for making moral judgments.“ Quote from Dr. Patrick Johnston, vice chairman of the Ohio branch of an organization bearing the Orwellian name of the Constitution Party. (See page 3 of the Salon article.)

Weekend in purgatory

No, not the trip: our wommitin’ dog didn’t up any chuck on the way back home. I’m talking about sports.

First I should mention that we were in Hazleton, PA, up in the coal mountains, until about 7:30 and were on more or less rural parts of I-80 until about 8:30, so I wasn’t able to check the score of the Virginia–Florida State game until about 5 minutes from the end of the first half. At which point, ESPN’s mobile channel informed me on my phone, the score was 19 to 0. I refreshed the game page until my battery ran out on my phone (I hadn’t charged the phone the previous night), so I saw Marques Hagans’ last minute goal-line stand turn into a field goal when he couldn’t complete a pass from the five-yard line. That field goal would be the Cavaliers’ only score of the game. 36–3 smarts. But at least we weren’t the only top-10 ranked college football team to get pantsed this weekend.

And the Yankees vs. the Sox? Less said about Saturday the better. We caught the game on the radio in the bottom of the second, a few minutes before the Sox got on the scoreboard to tie it up with a homer and go into the lead with another run. Another hour later and at the bottom of the fourth the Yanks had retaken the lead, 11–6, after some of the worst pitching I’ve ever had the privilege to hear. As the one announcer put it, “Okay, folks, bottom of the fourth, we’re entering the third hour of play, and there’s no end to this inning in sight. Like the Snickers folks say, ‘when you know you’re not going anywhere for a long time’…” At least we’re still in contention, by our fingernails, after last night’s win.

More fun than a barrel of monkeys

We’re really starting off the week with a bang. The electricians we needed to come and do about six jobs for us arrived at 7:45 on the dot and got to work. Right now one of them is fishing a snake up from my shop, where he punched a small hole in the finished corner (plaster, naturally; why is nothing in old houses easy?), came up through the firebreak, and is working on getting wire run up to where we’ll be installing some wall sconces for light.

One other project is already finished: a utility outlet under the sink for the garbage disposal we want to install. The previous owner had run wire under there, but we didn’t know from where. As it turns out, mercifully it was run from the breaker box!

The electrician has poked a hole in the living room wall for the first sconce and run back downstairs to snake the wire for the second one. This of course gives me the opportunity to poke around. Surprise: the back wall of the living room is actually plaster over backing board, not plaster over lathe (though the back side is still lathe and plaster). Second surprise: the stud spacing, at least near the outside wall, is about 14 inches. Third: the wall near the arch (which connects the living room to the small hall that accesses the first-floor bedroom, back bathroom, and kitchen) is plaster over board on both sides; no lathe in sight when the electrician opens the wall to install a new switch.

And that’s just the first two projects. Can’t wait to see what happens with the bathroom and garage outlets and the phone wire.

Off

We have a family wedding this weekend in Pennsylvania. Lisa and I just arrived in New Jersey, our base of operations. After a very long drive from Boston through what felt like 40 days and 40 nights of rain, one wommitin’ dog (“aye, she’s wommitin’ bad, sorr”) and various other tribulations, we’re here and I’m going to bed. Blogging might resume on Sunday.

Links that wouldn’t go away

So how do I deal with those links that won‘t die? In a word: bullet lists.

Blogging style

My workflow for blogging has changed with NetNewsWire. With 264 subscriptions, I can’t read everything in detail. I scan headlines, pick out the ones I want to pay attention to, and open them in browser tab windows in NetNewsWire. Then I’ll read the tabs that are open, and close the ones that I’m done thinking about. There will always be one or two that I want to blog immediately; I’ll switch to MarsEdit and write about those (though since my style is to combine two or three different links in a post, I don’t generally take as much advantage of the MarsEdit integration with NNW as I might).

But there are always tabs left over after that. I like that NNW saves my open browser tabs. If I find one or two that persist across sessions, I’ll come back and blog those later.

So what makes me blog something? Generally, these days, I don’t point to things unless I have something to say about them. They could make me mad; make me laugh (not as often as I’d like); make me say “This is really cool”; or tickle a connection with something else I’ve read, said, or thought. The last is my favorite category of blogging material—it’s where I can actually add value as a blogger.

The return of William Gibson

William Gibson’s blog, silent since the end of the author’s tour for Pattern Recognition, crackled back to life yesterday. The natural question, “Why?”, is the first word of the posting. I excerpt the rest of the post in its entirety here, because it’s short, sweet, and right on point:

Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succintly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.

And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, “At times, to be silent is to lie.”

Nice.

Special off-topic bonus: Pattern Recognition is one of Gibson’s works or concepts to inspire a Sonic Youth song. The other, of course, was the Neuromancer trilogy, which is linkable directly to “The Sprawl” on Daydream Nation. So which Yoot is a Gibson fan?

Blocking comment spam, and other fun stuff

Very long time readers of this site (and you two know who you are) will remember it used to live at another domain, on Userland’s free servers. When I switched over, even though all the content migrated, the Google index didn’t pick things up right away so I left everything in place, put a note at the top of each page with the new site address, and forgot about it.

Until this morning, when I woke up and found two pieces of comment spam on the site. I promptly deleted them and blocked the member who left the comments, but now I’m wondering if it’s time to take more drastic action on that site.

Manila gurus: is it possible to do page-level redirects on a Manila site such that someone coming to http://jarretthousenorth.editthispage.com/faq ends up at http://www.www.jarretthousenorth.com/faq instead?

Or should I just blow the content away? I hate that it’s attracting comment spam.

Last debate

I’ve passed on liveblogging this debate, partly because I don’t think there’s a lot to be gained, but partly because Lisa was coming back after a business trip tonight. Sorry, folks; priorities. Interesting, though, this last question, to find the humanity in the candidates? Also interesting that Kerry punts the “strong women” question to his mom, rather than Teresa. I don’t think Kerry is coming away a winner in this debate—unless, of course, you count all the lies that the administration is telling through Bush; and unless you weigh the administration on its record rather than Bush’s words.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Item 1: A private voter-registration firm in Las Vegas is under attack from its own employees, who allege that the firm has been throwing away Democratic registration forms by the hundreds while keeping all the Republican registrations. The firm is under contract in another case for door-to-door canvassers by the GOP, and has also done work in Arizona for Ralph Nader. There are some dots waiting to be connected here…

Item 2: From the dirty-tricks file, Josh Marshall connects the dots and fingers Jim Tobin, New England regional chairman for the Bush-Cheney campaign and former Northeast political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, as being deeply involved in the felonious “phone jamming incident” that knocked a Democratic get-out-the-vote operation out of commission on Election Day in 2002.

Item 3: Sinclair Broadcasting, owner of 62 stations across the country has committed to airing an anti-Kerry broadcast two weeks before the election, funded by “Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth,” attacking Kerry’s Vietnam record. (Note Tony Pierce’s reaction: “if the dems can be derailed by a dumbass swiftboat talkie despite [twelve points including ‘bush’s failure to find obl,’ ‘bush’s military record cover up,’ and ‘five gop senators coming out against him,’] then the dems don’t deserve to win ever.”) Interesting side note: Sinclair has a subsidiary, Jadoo Power Systems, Inc., that just won a big contract to supply the US Special Operations Command in the war on terror.

Item 4: Veterans of the Iraq conflict are self-funding a TV ad that focuses on the failures of the Bush administration’s preparation, conduct, and post-war support in Iraq and the consequences for veterans. They call BS on claims that the lack of body armor is an “urban legend,” and discuss how the war has cost them dearly while at the same time the administration is cutting VA benefits.

It seems to me that if the Bush/Cheney campaign wasn’t so busy trying to disenfranchise voters and mislead the public instead of taking care of the boys (and girls) they sent to Iraq who are now coming home maimed and angry—or in boxes—they might actually be making some headway in public opinion.