BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
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For bio, published work, and links to other blogs, visit
www.dankennedy.net.
For information on Dan Kennedy's book, Little People: Learning to
See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Friday, September 12, 2003
Johnny Cash, 1932-2003. The
greatest country musician ever has died. MSNBC.com has
the
AP story plus a piece from
the Today show that's well worth watching. It includes clips
from his last video, "Hurt."
You probably won't be able to get
into JohnnyCash.com
for a while, but here's something called "Steve's
Johnny Cash Home Page" that
looks pretty cool. I would also keep an eye on BobDylan.com
in the next few weeks -- Zimmy's likely to perform a Cash standard or
two in concert that will pop up in the "Performances"
section.
Cash was 71, and had been in poor
health for some time. His wife, June Carter Cash, died earlier this
year.
Johnny and June ... RIP.
posted at 10:44 AM |
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Electronic Nation.
The Nation
joins the other political weeklies -- the New
Republic and the
Weekly
Standard -- in making
all of its content available online to subscribers.
Unlike its ideological competitors,
the Nation does not appear to offer the option of downloading
the entire issue as a PDF file. In other words, you can't take your
laptop to the bathroom unless you've got WiFi. I also don't see an
option to buy an online-only subscription, as you can with TNR
and the Standard, but maybe I haven't looked closely
enough.
The new
cover story (subscribers
only), by John Nichols, befits the Nation's political stance.
At a moment when most pundits are asking if Howard Dean is too
liberal to defeat George W. Bush, the Nation asks instead
whether he's far enough to the left to warrant progressives'
supporting him over Dennis Kucinich. Writes Nichols:
It is Kucinich who has
fought the hard fights against the Bush Administration in Congress
-- frequently going against the party leadership in exactly the
manner Dean backers say Democrats should. As co-chair of the
Progressive Caucus, Kucinich has led challenges to the Bush
Administration not just on the war but on nuclear disarmament,
military spending and the Patriot Act. Even now, while Dean
supports keeping US troops in Iraq, Kucinich calls for bringing
them home. While Dean says he represents Paul Wellstone's
"democratic wing of the Democratic Party," there are few issues on
which Kucinich cannot claim to be a truer heir to Wellstone's
progressive populist mantle.
Well, okay. Of course, this doesn't
answer the question, "So just how badly do you want to lose,
anyway?"
Not that Nichols is any sort of
advocate for Kucinich. His bottom line, sensibly, is that it is Dean
who has energized the Democratic base, and though he might not
represent the fulfillment of every left-wing dream, he is a man of
progressive, populist instincts who continues to grow.
Whatever happened to Craig
Unger? The former
Boston magazine editor
answers that question with a major piece in the new Vanity
Fair on the unseemly favors that the Bush White House did for the
bin Laden family (and other well-connected Saudis) to help get them
out of the US in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
The article isn't online, but
according to National
Journal media columnist William
Powers, Unger "breathes new
life into an old story," and "dramatically
raise[s] the temperature around this touchy issue, with
enough suggestive material to make any reasonably curious soul want
to know more."
posted at 9:15 AM |
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Thursday, September 11, 2003
A cynical way to honor the
dead. Leave it to George W. Bush to mark the second anniversary
of the terrorist attacks by seeking to take away more of our
liberties. In a speech yesterday, Bush read off a few items from his
Patriot Act II wish list -- shelved earlier this year because of
bipartisan outrage.
His desire for an expanded death
penalty is depressing but unsurprising. Withholding bail from
terrorism suspects may actually not be a bad idea, although
this
Washington Post story
warns that it could be abused to hold entirely non-violent
suspects.
The big enchilada, though, would
allow federal authorities to issue subpoenas without having to go to
the bother of explaining themselves to judges or grand
juries.
The New York Times quotes
Bush making a
characteristically ridiculous
analogy, noting that such
administrative subpoenas are used to investigate health-care fraud:
"If we can use these subpoenas to catch crooked doctors, the Congress
should allow law enforcement officials to use them in catching
terrorists."
What he fails to mention is that
the stakes are considerably higher for a terrorism suspect than for a
doctor who's been goosing up his invoices to Medicare. Dr. Feelgood
faces a fine, at worst; the terrorism suspect faces the death
penalty.
What is it about Bush and judges
anyway? You'd think he'd like them -- after all, five of them made
him president. Yet he continually seeks to cut the judiciary out of
any meaningful oversight role in his crusade against
terrorism.
New in this week's
Phoenix. Speaking of the Patriot Act, the Phoenix's
Camille Dodero and I took in Attorney General John Ashcroft's
protest-spiced appearance at Faneuil Hall on Tuesday. Click
here
for Dodero's story, and here
for mine.
posted at 10:54 AM |
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Wednesday, September 10, 2003
True compassion. The
Globe's Kevin
Cullen comes up with the
best explanation for why Archbishop Seán O'Malley was able to
wrap up settlement talks so quickly with the victims of pedophile
priests. He writes:
Also noticed by victims
was O'Malley's response to the family of Gregory Ford, a
25-year-old Newton man who says he was raped by a priest almost 20
years ago.
When Ford, who said the Rev.
Paul R. Shanley abused him, suffered an emotional breakdown a week
after Geoghan was killed, O'Malley immediately agreed to pay for
specialized residential treatment for Ford. O'Malley had met
privately with Ford's parents, Rodney and Paula Ford, and pledged
to do whatever he could to help their troubled son.
Last year, [Cardinal
Bernard] Law's lawyer had sent a legal response to the Fords'
lawsuit against the archdiocese, suggesting the parents were
negligent in allowing their son to be abused.
Rodney and Paula Ford, who had
done so much to point out the failings of Cardinal Law, were now
vouching for his successor, an endorsement that carried enormous
weight inside the tight-knit milieu of alleged victims and their
lawyers.
There will be hard times ahead for
O'Malley, especially when he attempts -- as he inevitably will -- to
assert the Catholic Church's conservative cultural agenda on issues
such as gay and lesbian rights and reproductive choice.
But his genuine compassion has
already won him more good will than Law was able to garner for
himself in nearly two decades. Even a non-Christian like me thinks
we're lucky to have him.
Copywrong. Here's something
to consider as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
goes about trying to sue
its best potential customers into
penury for sharing
downloaded music files: at least some of them might have no idea of
what they're doing.
The Media Log household makes
limited use of LimeWire,
which is the Macintosh equivalent of the better-known KaZaA. My
12-year-old son, Tim, has used it to download such classics as the
theme to one of the Mario video games as well as some Beavis and
Butt-head sound clips.
I've grabbed a few rarities that --
to my knowledge -- are not available for legitimate sale at any
price. (Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan dueting on "Just a Closer Walk with
Thee," anyone?)
Yet recently, after reading a story
about the lawsuits, I checked Tim's LimeWire settings -- and saw, to
my horror, that the program had automatically set things up so
that dozens of songs he had copied from legally purchased CDs to the
iMac were available for other Limewire users to download.
I futzed with the settings and
turned off file-sharing. Whew! But to think we could have been sued
for something a piece of software had done without our knowledge was
unsettling, to say the least.
posted at 10:52 AM |
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Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Hillary, Al, and W. Got back
from John Ashcroft's Repressapalooza stop at Faneuil Hall a little
while ago, and am just briefly checking in before getting down to the
grim business of trying to figure out how critical I can be of the
Patriot Act without risking deportation. (Pssst! I'm one-fourth
French!)
But I had to share the latest from
Dick
Morris's wacky New York Post
column today, which I
picked up from Drudge.
The highlights:
- Hillary -- ever a Morris
obsession -- wants Dean to win the Democratic nomination so that
he'll be slaughtered by Bush and clear the path for her own
presidential run in 2008.
- Gore looks like he's getting
ready to run -- and the polling shows a 2000-style photo finish
between him and Bush, with a decent chance of Gore's
winning.
- Weirdly (this is Dick
Morris), no mention of Wesley Clark, who -- if he catches a lucky
break -- could dispatch Kerry, turn the Democratic contest into a
Dean-Clark race, and then pose a significant threat to Bush in
November. As Drudge also notes, the New York Times reports
that Bill
Clinton, at least, knows who Clark
is.
The most entertaining part of
Morris's column is his wretched conclusion:
Why is Bush falling so
badly? The superficial reasons are the Iraq casualties, the
failure to find WMDs and the continuing inability to round up
Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. But the real reason is that
terror is receding as an issue, largely due to Bush's
success.
The solution for Bush is to put
terrorism back on the front burner by high profile and aggressive
action against Iran and/or North Korea. It's not necessary to wag
the dog, but Bush should wag his tongue and raise the profile of
these two remaining threats to our security.
That Bush! He's just doing too good
a job to get elected. If only he'd scare us some more, everything
would be fine.
posted at 1:28 PM |
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Monday, September 08, 2003
The redcoats are coming! The
redcoats are coming! Attorney General John Ashcroft will be
speaking to an audience of mainly law-enforcement officials tomorrow
at 9:20 a.m. in Faneuil Hall.
Once, patriots gathered inside
Faneuil Hall to plot against oppression. Now, Ashcroft is coming to
town to rally for the Patriot Act, the very definition of latter-day
oppression.
A coalition of civil-liberties
groups will protest outside the hall starting at 8 a.m. Here is the
lead paragraph of an ACLU press release:
On Tuesday, September 9,
beginning at 8 a.m., hundreds of people from across the
Commonwealth will gather in Sam Adams plaza outside Boston's
historic Faneuil Hall to voice their concerns about Attorney
General John Ashcroft's assault on basic constitutional freedoms
in the name of fighting terrorism. The rally will include a press
conference at 8:30 a.m. near the Sam Adams Statue.
Here is an
ACLU fact sheet on how the
Patriot Act threatens your personal liberties.
You know what to do.
posted at 7:07 PM |
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Fighting back against the media
monopoly. The progressive advocacy group MoveOn.org
is trying to get 100,000 signatures from people who oppose the FCC's
decision last June to deregulate the media even more than it already
had been (see "Don't
Quote Me," June
6).
At stake: a proposal to allow the
major broadcast networks to buy more local television stations, and
to allow a single owner to control a newspaper, a television station,
and a radio station in the same community.
MoveOn.org is looking for the
signatures by this Wednesday so that it can present them at a news
conference it is holding with two anti-deregulation senators,
Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine and Democrat Byron Dorgan of North
Dakota.
For more information, as well as
instructions on how to sign the electronic petition, go to
MoveOn.org's "Stop
the FCC" page.
posted at 12:26 PM |
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Ombudsman column is up.
Christine Chindlund's column on "terrorist" and "militant"
organizations has now been posted on the Globe website. Read
it here.
A nuance worth noting [Good grief; I originally wrote "A nuance worth nothing" -- DK]: though the
Globe itself is loath to label organizations as "terrorist,"
it "routinely points out the State Department designation of
Palestinian groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad as terrorist
organizations."
posted at 11:53 AM |
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Terrorists and militants.
Globe ombudsman Christine Chinlund today tries to explain why
the paper refrains from identifying some organizations that engage in
terrorist acts as, well, you know, terrorists.
I would love to link to it, but it
has yet to be posted on the Globe's extremely fine new
website. Too bad. Chinlund takes a thoughtful approach that defies
easy lampooning -- much as it may seem absurd not to label Hamas, for
instance, a terrorist organization.
Her main point is that the
Globe will label terrorist acts as terrorist acts, but it
will, in most cases, not identify the groups that condone, plan, and
carry out those acts as terrorist organizations. She writes: "One
person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter; it's not for
journalists to judge."
And she quotes Globe editor
Martin Baron as saying, "The overall approach here is to describe
events and present facts rather than to attack labels to individuals
or groups. We particularly seek to avoid hot-button language that has
become associated with a point of view ..."
Well, now. It strikes me (and the
American
Heritage Dictionary) that a
terrorist is a person who carries out acts of terrorism. And what is
terrorism? Let's turn
to the dictionary
again:
The unlawful use or
threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized
group against people or property with the intention of
intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for
ideological or political reasons.
Chinlund notes that the
Globe does not refer to Hamas as a terrorist organization,
although she observes, "The wisdom of this approach is,
understandably, the subject of renewed debate in the wake of the
recent, horrible bus bombing in Jerusalem that killed 21 people." And
she closes by noting an exception: Al Qaeda. To refrain from labeling
Al Qaeda as terrorist, she says, "ignores one of our most profound
national experiences, 9/11."
At the risk of oversimplifying, it
seems that, by this reasoning, a group that attacks us is terrorist,
but a group that attacks someone else -- like Israel -- is merely
"militant."
Chinlund has done an admirable job
of trying to explain the Globe's policy. But that doesn't mean
it makes a lot of sense.
Don't worry about media
concentration. The business is falling apart! So says
David
Kirkpatrick in today's
New York Times.
posted at 10:49 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
