CNN? MSNBC? When you shows actual news — not rehashed FOX screaming — people will watch.
Radical idea, I know, but it just might be crazy enough to work.
That title is probably going to anger a lot of people, but I think its important to point out that the doping allegations that have hounded Armstrong are not without reason. First, Armstrong came back form cancer a much, much better rider than he was before he got cancer. Second, he has an open and acknowledged relationship with a doctor who has been caught giving performance enhancing drugs to other riders. Third, the sport of racing is absolutely infested with doping. Finally, there has been at least one person who ahs come forward and publicly stated that Lance asked them to dispose of doping paraphernalia.
None of this is proof. The drug tests, if they can be substantiated, would be, but there are still questions surrounding them. And I am not suggesting that Armstrong be stripped of his victories - - we don’t hang people for the suspicion of murder. But this story is more complicated than the “the French hate Lance” storyline that too much of our media seem content to regurgitate.
The LA Times has an interesting, if disturbing, article on evangelical leaders’ attempts to create a class of politicians that are little more than non-thinking rubber stampers for whatever said leaders tell them to do. And they intend to tell their newly minted office holding drones to dictate to you your private life:
To which Lynn responds, with exasperation: “He says that because he knows in a majority Christian country, the Christian view is going to be expressed by more voters. They have no problem imposing their biblical worldview on every American.”
Evangelical conservatives acknowledge that’s their goal.
And they now have a systematic plan for achieving it.
So what does this have to do with Roberts? Roberts does not believe in a right to privacy. That means he does not believe in a limit to the government’s power to reach into your personal life and to shape it in any fashion it desires. Without a right to privacy, there is no protection from government interference in your life. Without a right to privacy, there is no where the government cannot reach. Without a right to privacy, the evangelical leaders and their trained-seal representatives are free to tell you who you can live your life with, how you have to raise your children, what you can do in your bedroom, etc, etc, etc.
And Roberts does not think the Constitution contains a right to privacy.
Parts of the revised draft of the proposed Iraqi Constitution are here. This is not the final text, though it is significantly tighter than the text released yesterday. Major points of contention remain, including the primacy of sharia, the size and independence of the autonomous regional units, and the distribution of oil revenue. But the main sticking point, from the perspective of human rights, has to do with the balance between sharia and the rights of individuals, especially for women. And here, the issue is not at all clear.
Do I even need to ask the question?
Speaking to reporters, Duffy said that Bush “can understand that people don’t share his view that we must win the war on terror, and we cannot retreat and cut and run from terrorists, but he just has a different view. He believes it would be a fundamental mistake right now for us to cut and run in the face of terrorism, because if we’ve learned anything, especially from the 9/11 Commission Report, it is that to continue to retreat after the Cole, after Beirut and Somalia is to only empower terrorists and to give them more recruiting tools as they try to identify ways to harm Americans.
Just to be clear: people opposed to Bush’s decisions and actions with regards to the war on terror aren’t in favor of losing the war — they want to win it. That’s why we oppose Bush’s actions — because he is losing the war on terrorism. We want to win, Bush doesn’t have the first clue how. Hence the opposition. Just because the Red Sox fired Grady Little doesn’t mean they did not want to beat the Yankees — it meant that they realized he was a crappy manager who could never beat the Yankees. Bush is the political equivalent of Grady Little.
But I suspect the Bushies know that. They just don’t have any actual arguments. Every time they have been faced with criticism, they have resorted to this kind of disgusting McCarthyism. They have no plans they can defend, they have no success they can point to, they have no defense against the charge of incompetence, and since they apparently have no morals or sense of duty to the nation at large, they slander their opponents with the most disgusting charges. They are without a single good idea or, apparently, a single ounce of decency.
They hate Americans who have the gall to criticism them, and they are quite vocal in telling their followers that their critics are traitors.
In response to this post, Prof. Cooper said this in the comments:
The EA Sports/NFL video game issue raises some difficult problems, which this post well notes, but they aren’t copyright problems. The problem isn’t, in other words, that copyright law prevents others from taking and building upon EA Sports’ code base (under a compulsory license or not); rather, the problem is that the NFL/EA Sports contract prevents others from publishing games with NFL (and NFLPA) trademarks. And while there may be good arguments for compulsory licensing of copyright (at least in some areas–indeed, it already exists in the music world), I think it’s a lot harder to make the case for compulsory licensing of trademarks, given that the sole basis for trademark protection is to allow the holder of the trademark to protect its public image from non-authorized use.
First, I should bow to the Professor’s expertise. I had thought the trademark and copyright were very similar legally, and that is apparently not correct. I apologize for leading anyone astray.
But I am not entirely sure that the situation is that morally different. If trademarks can be kept exclusive, then we are still left with the monopoly-creating situation that EA and the NFL have engendered. Sometimes monopolies are appropriate, but only if they serve the public good. In this case, I would think that there is no public good being served by allowing the NFL and NFLPA to create monopolies with other companies. Which leads to the obvious question about what to do about it.
I can understand the argument that a company should be able to control it’s image, but, as I said earlier, I am not impressed with that argument:
Second, satire is still an iron-clad fair use case, and the satiric association of copyrighted and trademarked material with causes anathema to them has hardly stopped people from creating. I doubt that would change in a world where everyone knows that the presence of a copyrighted entity in another work could not be prevented.
I don’t see why that is substantially wrong with regards to trademarks. If it’s not, then I would argue that we should move to prevent trademark holders form preventing their use — with attribution — by others. Perhaps would could require people to place a “Not approved by” notation, just to make it clear that the trademark holder did not consent. Obviously, trademark holders could then charge for the right to place an “Approved by” label on the product. As a further compromise, I would even be willing to let trademark holders withhold their trademarks form an entire segment or industry. For example, no one could make NFL porn if the NFL prevented anyone from making NFL porn. But if anyone was allowed to make NFL porn, then all porn makes should be allowed to. That takes care of the problem of trademarks creating artificial and harmful monopolies while still giving trademark holders a great deal of control over the use of their images.
I also want to deal with the issue of computer code that Prof. Cooper mentions here:
The problem isn’t, in other words, that copyright law prevents others from taking and building upon EA Sports’ code base (under a compulsory license or not);
My “graduating thesis” in college argued that source code is speech, but was not arguing that copyrighted material should be allowed to be copied through the process of forced licensing. Licenses should be used to extend the culture, not allow people to lift work wholesale. Plagiarism is not an extension of someone’s work. In the same vein, taking someone’s source code and simply adding to it would not be allowed. Since it would contain the original code, it would be a form of plagiarism. If someone wanted to extend what EA had done, they would have to figure out how to do it without taking their code directly. I didn’t mean to give a contrary impression. The words J.K. Rowling used to create the world of Harry Potter should be protected, even if its better for society if others are allowed to play within the world she created.
Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: "Kings. What a good idea." Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
