The Daily Mis-Lead via the Wash­ing­ton Post Swift Boat Vet Got $40M Con­tract From Bush Administration.

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Oth­ers with stronger stom­achs are watch­ing or blog­ging the Repub­li­can con­ven­tion this week, so you won’t find much com­men­tary here. But I can point you to this dis­patch, which reports that CNN and ABC cor­re­spon­dents were aghast over the Repub­li­can con­ven­tion del­e­gates who were wear­ing pur­ple heart Band-Aids mock­ing John Kerry.

This is out­ra­geous, of course, but in keep­ing with these faux-patriots’ shriv­eled sense of decency. Sheila Lennon over at projo.com sums it up nicely: Del­e­gates’ purple-heart ban­dages dimin­ish the wounded, and them­selves. Excerpt:

These aren’t pro­test­ers in the streets, “anar­chists”: These are offi­cial del­e­gates and GOP party lead­ers, dur­ing their tele­vised pitch to the nation to con­tinue their con­trol of the White House and Con­gress, mak­ing fun of awards for wounds incurred by our troops. …

In the midst of a scripted con­ven­tion dur­ing an unpop­u­lar war that has offi­cially claimed 974 Amer­i­can lives and resulted in some 3,700 pur­ple hearts being awarded to its wounded, this Mad Mag­a­zine gig­gle­fest by GOP lead­ers recalls noth­ing so much as the John Lennon line, “But the one thing you can’t hide is when you’re crip­pled inside.”

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CBS Mar­ket­watch (reg­is­tra­tion required): Reporters from the Chicago Tri­bune, the Boston Globe and other media out­lets are blog­ging from the Repub­li­can con­ven­tion. Also: New York Mag­a­zine has a con­ven­tion blog.

Thanks to IWant­Media for the pointer.

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Post-Gazette.com: Good Books That Take a Hard Look at Media Empires. With the elec­tion two months away, sev­eral books are attack­ing the news media’s “ever-metastasizing pun­dit class.” Among them: James Wolcott’s Attack Poo­dles and Other Media Mutants.

Mean­time, Van­ity Fair edi­tor Gray­don Carter has never shown much inter­est in pol­i­tics. But now he has writ­ten a pas­sion­ate dia­tribe against George Bush. He tells the Guardian UK why. And here’s an extract from the book.

Thanks to IWant­Media for the pointers.

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Salon: The Ben Barnes black­out. Even with new video of the Texas pol say­ing he’s “ashamed” of help­ing Pres­i­dent Bush get his National Guard slot, the story gets lit­tle play from the media.

The explo­sive com­ments from a cen­tral player in the National Guard drama — cap­tured on video and avail­able online — have received just cur­sory cov­er­age in the main­stream media since it was brought to light on Fri­day. The shoulder-shrugging response stands in stark con­trast to the media orgy that has greeted the hol­low, sec­ond­hand alle­ga­tions made about John Kerry’s Viet­nam ser­vice by the Republican-financed Swift Boat Vet­er­ans for Truth, which has yet to make a sin­gle fac­tual alle­ga­tion stick about the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing Kerry’s five war medals.

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Here’s Michael Moore’s first dis­patch from the Repub­li­can con­ven­tion as a cor­re­spon­dent for USA Today.

… I’ve often found that if I go down the list of “lib­eral” issues with peo­ple who say they’re Repub­li­can, they are quite lib­eral and not in sync with the Repub­li­cans who run the coun­try. Most don’t want Amer­ica to be the world’s police offi­cer and pre­fer peace to war. They applaud civil rights, believe all Amer­i­cans should have health insur­ance and think assault weapons should be banned. Though they may per­son­ally oppose abor­tion, they usu­ally don’t think the gov­ern­ment has the right to tell a women what to do with her body. …

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My inter­view with Motion Pic­ture Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica chief Jack Valenti, which appeared in Engad­get yes­ter­day, got Slash­dot­ted today, with 520 com­ments so far.

Valenti, who has been the bane of the techie com­mu­nity for years, steps down from his post today.

The Slash­dot­ters were greatly amused by his Cognac glasses anal­ogy. Wrote dewdrops:

No one ever asked movie com­pa­nies to give out free backup copies. What we want is to not get sued or put in jail if we copy a DVD, or rip it to an mp4 on our lap­top to take on vaca­tion, or do any num­ber of things with the DVD we just bought.

Bas­cially, we’d like to be treated the same as when we buy a set of glasses: once, we’ve bought it, we can do any­thing we want with it. Glass­mak­ers don’t try to have peo­ple put in jail for post[ing] arti­cles on how to blow glass.

Beyond Slash­dot, Prince­ton pro­fes­sor Ed Fel­ten has this to say after read­ing the interview:

We can only hope Valenti’s suc­ces­sor stops believ­ing in “tech­no­log­i­cal magic” and instead teaches the indus­try to accept tech­ni­cal real­ity. File shar­ing can­not be wished away. The indus­try needs to fig­ure out how to deal with it.

And in the com­ments field, “DVD Jon” (aka Jon Lech Johansen) weighs in.

Later: Yale’s Ernest Miller and Berkman’s Derek Slater also slam Jack.

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I’ve been play­ing poker since I was a kid (with my par­ents’ chips), so I couldn’t help but notice that the return of the Travel Channel’s World Poker Tour coin­cided with this arti­cle in yesterday’s San Jose Merc: Big stakes in online poker. Inter­net gam­bling soars as thou­sands play for cash.

Con­tinue reading »

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In These Times: We’re Not in Lake Wobe­gon Any­more, by Gar­ri­son Keil­lor. How did the Party of Lin­coln and Lib­erty trans­mo­grify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch pres­i­dent, a dull and rigid man, whose phi­los­o­phy is a jum­ble of badly sutured body parts try­ing to walk?

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The San Jose Merc has a cou­ple of sto­ries today about Dan­ger, the Palo Alto startup that makes the Side­kick II, a wire­less device sim­i­lar to the Treo600 (but more fun!) due out in about a month for $299 plus a one-year sub­scrip­tion to T-Mobile.

Startup that pio­neered Side­kick enters uncharted territory

Lang­berg: Side­kick II a sig­nif­i­cant improvement

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