I’m pondering whether or not Stuart Green from Rutgers Law is a moron, a liar, or a hack. It may not be possible for me to know which category he falls into. His opinion piece at the Monitor is so full of errors and distortions that it certainly seems as if it could have been his intent to be dishonest. Though the simpler answer is that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Based on the accounts that I’ve read Brian Hogan went above and beyond the call of duty in trying to return that iPhone prototype. He had absolutely no way of knowing who the person who left the phone at the bar is. It’s pretty damn reasonable to assume that a person who leaves the phone they’ve been using at a bar is the owner of that phone. It’s not so reasonable to assume that the owner is the firm that manufactured the device. Mr. Hogan originally believed the device was an iPhone 3GS. The device had been disguised to give that appearance. When Mr. Hogan later examined the phone closely and found that it wasn’t a standard 3GS, he took the step of contacting Apple and telling them what he’d found. How much struggling to notify someone at an enormous multinational corporation do you have to do to have satisfied Stuart Green’s standards?

Mr. Green’s assertion that this is a clear case of theft couldn’t be more wrong. I see neither an intent to steal nor an act of theft. I see a young man who made reasonable attempts and then some to notify the owner of this property that he possessed it. If Mr. Hogan isn’t guilty of theft, then the entire “case” that Stuart Green makes against Gizmodo and Jason Chen falls apart. The California shield law should have applied to Mr. Chen’s home. He should not have had his home searched by the police. The judge who issued the warrant to do so and the police who served it, after being informed of the shield law’s validity in this case should be disciplined.

http://rebelreports.com/post/103831597/al-jazeera-strikes-back-at-pentagon-releases-unedited

I have seen consistent reports of this kind of stuff in Iraq and Afghanistan since we first went in there. The hunting people for Jesus stuff is just weird and sick, but the distribution of bibles in the Dari and Pashto languages should be criminal.

I think the entire military chaplaincy needs to be pulled out by the roots and replaced.

In the last week, I’ve really been bothered by something. Arlen Specter has said that his vote on EFCA is a sign that he’s not going to be an automatic 60th vote for the Democrats. He’s cited that has a sign of his independence, said it’s a bad bill, and used the GOP talking point/lie about how it takes away the right to have a secret ballot election.

Two sessions ago, Specter was a sponsor of EFCA. In the last session, he voted for cloture on the bill. It’s quite obvious that he only came out against EFCA because he hoped doing so would help him against Toomey in the GOP primary. I’ve seen various reporters and talking heads mention this disparity. I’ve never seen a single one of them challenge him directly on it when they’ve interviewed him. Maybe someone has, but in multiple interviews I’ve seen on CBS, MSNBC, and CNN, it hasn’t been brought up. I might be willing to let it go if Specter didn’t so consistently cite this one vote in interviews. The hypocrisy is galling, but the media complicity is more so.

Specter may well be an important vote on getting good health care reform through the senate this year. I’ll take it if it comes, but if Joe Sestak ends up challenging Specter in the primary I’ll donate money to Sestak’s campaign.

David and Amy Goodman are on Forum right now. Amy said something today that really irked me. I can’t tell if she’s intentionally being oversimplistic for propaganda purposes or if she has a fundamental blind spot in how the media functions. She said that politicians need reporters more than reporters need politicians. This is only true in the aggregate. Things don’t actually work in the aggregate. Let me explain. If you put all reporters in a bucket and all politicians in another bucket, what she said would be true. The reporters have a platform and the politicians would need to access that platform. If all of the reporters chose to act in unison, they could make or break anyone or everyone in that bucket of politicians. While it is true that often, especially if we limit our survey to the so-called mainstream media, a really large majority of the reporters end up acting in unison, it’s not because they conspired to do so at the beginning of any particular story. As is achingly true all too often with theories that evolve from the conventional left mindset of the 70s and earlier, this theory of media operation ignores individual agency. In a system where ratings and advertising dollars drive the media, individual reporters’ success or failure depends on their ability to bring in eyeballs. When you pull your media figures and your politicians out of the buckets that we put them into, individual reporters need access to individual politicians more than is the true of the reverse. Way more. I hate the neo-liberal tendency to put all things into market terminology, but I think this is a simple case of supply and demand. There are way more media figures than there are politicians. There is a scarcity of politicians relative to the abundance of reporters.

Today is the last day for Denver’s Rocky Mountain News. The paper won four Pulitzers in the last eight years. The paper would have celebrated its 150th anniversary in April. It was the oldest continually run business in the state. This is its own self obituary. Who knows how long that’ll remain online, though.

I expect I’ll make a bunch of posts like this in the next year or two. The owners of 33 different daily papers have gone into Chapter 11 since December. This is a big deal, people. Daily newspapers have been the only real brake on corruption in huge chunks of this country for much of its existence. A good newspaper is beating heart of its local community. It’s true that the same economics that are closing newspapers right now have forced a decline in their quality over the last decade. Newspapers are not what they once were, but they’re still important.

Denver still has The Post. The two papers have been running under a joint operating agreement for a while. Many of the cities that will lose their newspapers in the next year or two won’t have another daily. We may soon see major cities without a daily newspaper. That is sad and frightening.

I just saw a commercial during Countdown with Keith Olbermann for a global warming denier business group. In plain text on the screen, one part of their message was “Global warming is the hoax”. This group’s ad was every radical fringe of the chamber of commerce cliche you’ve ever heard: the only green in green energy is the money Washington is taking from us, etc. Their goal appeared to be trying to stop the stimulus bill. It’s far from a perfect bill. Hell, I’m not sure it’s a good bill, but the arguments they were trying to use are not going to get much traction with Olbermann’s audience.

The media and, seemingly, much of the country has been having a good laugh at the Bush-Cheney legacy tour. At a certain level, it is laughable. Few people who have lived as conscious adults or adolescents through the last eight years, let along the better ones before them, would think this has been a good time in America or that Bush has been a good leader. Don’t count on that sentiment to hold over time. It might. The last eight years might turn out for many Americans to be an even worse time than we think it was and Bush may be widely vilified.

My favorite column from Paul Krugman starts out like this: “Historical narratives matter.That’s why conservatives are still writing books denouncing F.D.R. and the New Deal;they understand that the way Americans perceive bygone eras, even eras from the seemingly distant past, affects politics today.”

The Bush-Cheney legacy tour may be a ham-fisted start to the project of rehabilitating their legacies, but it won’t be the end of that project. Once the GOP has done whatever self examination it’s going to do, it will find ways to claim successes over the last few years. It will spin some of the things that we find most objectionable as being among those successes. You can be damn sure that they’re not going to give up on their “regulation is bad” philosophy even if they have to tone down the rhetoric for a while.

I ask this favor of anyone reading this. For the rest of your life, if you hear any mention of anything positive that came out of the Bush presidency and/or Republican control of congress during much of it, you jump on that. Be clear that these are lies. Point out just how bad the Bush presidency was for the world and for most Americans. The GOP already has a set of lying talking points that are meant to distort the achievements of FDR and keep us from ever going down the path of creating an even halfway equitable society. We’ve seen those trudged out during the current economic crisis. These guys play the long game. We need to, too. If not, you may live long enough to someday find yourself flying into George W. Bush airport in New York or celebrating George W. Bush’s birthday as holiday.

It’s weird to see a sports columnist for a national newspaper like the Washington Post who is completely out of touch with the sports she covers. An article today by Sally Jenkins demonstrates that this particular columnist has missed the entire evolution of employment at the top ranks of college sports over the last couple of DECADES. Boston College fired their head football coach because he interviewed for a job with the NFL’s NY Jets. This is complicated a bit by the fact that the Athletic Director who fired the coach is a longtime personal friend. The coach’s contract did not forbid him from interviewing for other jobs. It didn’t even state that other organizations would have to notify the school or seek permission to interview him. Boston College admits they fired the coach without cause. If the coach had accepted another job, he would have violated the contract and would have been forced to pay the university some money. If he had not taken the job, he would have continued to coach a program that has won two consecutive Atlantic Division titles under his watch.

College coaches interview or have informal discussions about other jobs all the time. Sometimes they take them, sometimes they don’t. Employment contracts at that level are financial arrangements. Period. There’s nothing ethical or moral about them. They just guarantee that if one party breaks the contract, the other gets compensation. On the other side of the coin, universities with big time sports programs fire coaches every year and have to pay out all or part of the remainder of their contract.

If this were the moral or ethical issue that BC’s athletic director of WaPo columnist Sally Jenkins were trying to make it out to be, BC wouldn’t be engaged in exactly the same behavior. Yeah, the AD who is all upset over this has done the same thing to, at least, one other university. The head coach of the women’s basketball team was the head coach at and under contract to Ohio University when he hired her away from that institution..

Here’s the video of that shooting. It comes about a minute and fifteen seconds in, but it’s worth watching the whole thing leading up to it. The video seemed clearer on TV than it does online. It’s cell phone video, so it’s going to be fuzzy anyway, but it seems clear enough as to what’s going on.

I just watched footage of a cop murdering a guy at a BART station the other day. It doesn’t appear to be on KTVU’s website yet. They have a bunch of other raw video on their website from the disturbance that led to the murder, though.

Friday morning, my wife and I watched a report about this “officer involved shooting”. Reports that the cops had confiscated pretty much every cell phone and camera they could get their hands on made us skeptical of claims that this was a justified shooting. If a cop has acted lawfully, they have nothing to fear from being seen on camera…as thousands of camera equipped patrol cars have demonstrated. As soon as I can find a link for this video on their website I’ll post it. This is clean cut murder, though.

The victim was subdued by a cop. He was on the ground, laying face down. He was struggling, but had two cops on him. One of the cops was on his back. That cop got up, un-holstered his weapon, pointed it at the victim and shot him. He shot an unarmed, subdued guy in the back while that guy was laying face down. This is exactly what witnesses told KTVU on Friday morning. It is exactly what BART and its cops denied having happened. That cop should sit in jail for the rest of his life. Every single cop who lied for him should lose their badge and do time.