Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:01 PM

In my previous post, I pointed out that Fox's story on Al Franken's court victory was hardly fair. And then, that version of the story vanished from Fox's website, to be replaced by a longer version.

Since both versions were credited to AP (as opposed to in-house reporters), I went in search of AP newswires to see if that version of the story was still available anywhere else.

Sure enough, the 5:09 PM AP story is almost identical to the one I saw on Foxnews...

...but with one important difference.

The final paragraph I quoted, the one that solely repeats slurs that "the suit says" about Franken is nowhere to be found in the AP versions.

So:

• Fox credited a story to AP, with no disclaimer that Foxnews had edited the original report, and
• modified the text to add further slurs against Al Franken.

Are news organizations allowed to modify AP wire stories without providing some notice?

That proves (as if more proof was needed) that Fox News unethically distorts the news, rather than merely reporting it.

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:35 PM

Given my computer hassles of the afternoon, I only remembered on the drive home that the judge heard Fox v. Franken today at 3:30 PM. So, I went and checked Google News for the latest.

No real surprise; the judge ruled in Franken's favor, saying "This case is wholly without merit both factually and legally."

I was amused that the second link on Google News was this one from Fox News itself. It's credited to AP newswire, but I find it very interesting that though the start of the article talks about this afternoon's hearing, the article closes with two paragraphs repeating all the anti-Franken slurs in the suit.

In case Fox removes the article or updates the link, here are the final two paragraphs of the article as seen on Fox's website:

The lawsuit described Franken as a "C-level political commentator" who is "increasingly unfunny." It suggests he was "intoxicated or deranged" when he confronted a table of Fox personalities at a correspondents' dinner in April.

"He is not a well-respected voice in American politics; rather, he appears to be shrill and unstable," the suit says. "His views lack any serious depth or insight."

What kind of impression does that leave one with? In fact, there's more space in the article devoted to repeating the charges against Franken than to the judge's decision.

Added later: Yup, as expected, Fox has changed the article in the hour since I posted about it.

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:35 PM

Ok, something odd is going on and its got me worried. All of a sudden, at about 4:55 pm, any attempt I make to open any URL on osmond-riba.org gives me a shopping page. Running a ping or traceroute from my computer says that osmond-riba.org is associated with the IP address [207.44.236.157]. That is not the correct IP address for the site! A reverse lookup shows that IP address is in San Francisco!

I checked from Panix and had Ian check from home, and they're seeing the correct page.
Ok, I just had a coworker check from his machine (to see if it was something with the company's connection) and he could see the real site.

Hopefully, that means it's just my computer and I have to clear some adware off it. Worst case scenario, this is a preliminary warning sign of some broader attack on my domain. [Odd that it should happen just after I get lifeandliberty.info]

Anyway, if anybody else experiences problems out-of-the-ordinary when trying to connect to osmond-riba.org, let me know. As I said before, comments are hosted on a different site and should be available even when this host is down.

Added later: I'm home again. At several people's suggestion, I installed AdAware on my work computer, and its scans found a little hijacker called ShopNav. I tried AdAware's tools for cleaning it off, but still couldn't access osmond-riba.org. However, I suspect that's the culprit and Monday morning will go through the registry and explorer to pick off any last remnants, and hopefully that will resolve my problem.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:59 AM

Sorry for the silence of late. RL concerns (writing ads so we can rent our apartment, rewriting our leases, dealing with finances, etcetera) have gotten in the way.

At any rate, I've spent some time poking around at the official lifeandliberty.gov site. Here's some of what I found:

• HTML coding is really sloppy, W3C's Validator can't even read it. Designed with Dreamweaver. One of the bulleted lists on the opening page uses separate <UL> tags for each element!
• The site also isn't accessible, failing to meet guidelines for both U.S. Section 508 and WAI Content Accessibility [Evaluated with Bobby].
• The site has only 11 internal pages. Given such a limited source, creating a parallel structure to the original, with corrected information, shouldn't be too difficult. Not only that, but it should also be possible to build an accessible site with the same UI, thus reaching more people than the original. In fact, I've already started to mock up the opening page at www.osmond-riba.org/lis/lifeandliberty/, just to get a feel for how it might be done.

Here's what I'd like to see out of lifeandliberty.info:

• A website that is entirely valid HTML and meets accessibility guidelines
• Rebut all falsehoods and misleading info on the government site point-by-point
• Provide factual information, with sources whereever possible
• Avoid exaggerated claims that won't hold up (anything dubious may make the rest of the site appear less plausible)
• Respect for other people's intellectual property. Limit quotes and excerpts to fair use. We can always link to longer pieces if we can't get permission to reproduce.

We might consider expanding the coverage of the site to include further information on the VICTORY Act and action items and other things beyond a mere debunking, but the primary goal of this site is to counteract the government site, so that should be the first priority.

As much as possible, I want this site to be above-the-board, upfront and honest. The cleaner we can keep our noses, the less chance we have of being accused of the lies we're trying to rebut.

I've got a lot on my plate, and can't do all this on my own.

So, what needs to be done?

• We definitely need a better place to discuss this than my comments box.
  To this end, I've started up a separate weblog and am inviting everybody who's volunteered so far to become members of it. That way, anyone who wants to can post and discuss matters there. I'm willing to make any interested parties into members, so don't feel shut out of the conversation if you didn't already offer. Blogger does have its limitations, so if you've got a better idea, please share.
• A better hosting site or help configuring nameservers and such would also be useful. Not only have people experienced technical difficulties accessing osmond-riba.org, but if this is to be a collaborative effort, I may become a bottleneck, because I may not be able to give wider access to the server for uploading of files (that's why I was thinking of doing this as a Wiki).
• Help coding the pages
• Content, content, content: researching, rebutting and 'riting

It's ambitious, but it all seems feasible, and the more people working together, the easier it will be.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:11 AM

Less than six months after the invasion began, the Boston Globe reports on someone whom "Army officials say is the first known homeless veteran of the war in Iraq."

Sadly, it didn't take long for this to happen. And who foresaw such events? Some did. Or, more to the point, who cares? Clearly not the GOP leadership, which has been cutting veterans medical benefits left and right.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:40 PM

Wow.
Every time I wonder how thoughtlessly stupid and insensitive Bush can be, he sinks even lower. His re-election site features a "Photo Album" section, grouped by topic. Every Single Photo in the Compassion section features him surrounded by people of black or brown skin.

Twenty photos and the only ones without non-Caucasian faces are pictures of Bush standing alone, one of which is set before the National Urban League and the other in front a map of Africa.

Hmmm... What message could he possibly be trying to send here?

If the whole site showed such diversity, that would be a positive. However, the only non-whites in 15 Homeland Security images and 16 National Security are Powell and Rice, and I think there's one African American park ranger off to the side in one photo of the 16 on the Environment.

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:44 PM

Several stories in the day's news about people trying to recall or trying to bury items that happened in the past.

But how about some better news about people uncovering secrets and little known historic facts:

Posted by Lis Riba at 2:35 PM

As I mentioned in my previous post, the Justice Department has just launched www.lifeandliberty.gov, a new website for their pro-PATRIOT Act Propaganda.

In response, I have just registered www.lifeandliberty.info, with which I intend to combat their false propaganda claims.

The site is not up yet. (I only registered it an hour ago.) I haven't even decided on a format, whether it be static pages reflecting and rebutting the originals, a weblog, a wiki, or something else entirely.

If anybody would like to work with me on this site, I'd love to hear from you. [If the ACLU or EFF or other such organizations are interested, I'm even willing to sell or give away the registration, so long as it will be dedicated to the use described above.]

Respond in the comments and lets see what we can do!

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:15 PM

The Justice Department has created a new domain, Preserving Life & Liberty, specifically as pro-PATRIOT Act Propaganda.
I kid you not! Quoting from a speech Ashcroft gave yesterday:

To address all of the issues surrounding the Patriot Act would require more time than we have here. It is critical, however, for everyone to understand what the Patriot Act means for our success in the war against terrorism. I would encourage Americans to take a few minutes and log on to a new web site, www.lifeandliberty.gov. There, you can read about the Patriot Act, read what members of Congress and others have said about the Patriot Act, and find out how it is keeping our nation safe and secure.

Within 30 seconds of opening the home page and scrolling down, I already found one falsehood.

The very last bullet, at the bottom of the page, says the Act "[e]liminates the statutes of limitations for certain terrorism crimes and lengthens them for other terrorist crimes."

But the Supreme Court overturned such retroactive laws two months ago!!!

I've already noticed other clauses in the Dispelling the myths page that parallel Comstock's claims that I already discredited. I think I've got some fact-checking in the near future.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:10 PM

ABCNEWS.com : Draft Bill Seeks Broad Power in 'Narco-Terror' Fight via Sisyphus Shrugged

ABCNEWS.com has obtained a draft of the Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act of 2003, or VICTORY Act, which could be introduced to Congress this fall, and which appears to have been prepared by the office of Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The measure would give law enforcement increased subpoena powers and more leeway over wire-tap evidence and on classifying some drug offenses as terrorism.

The draft is a complex 89-page document that, like the Patriot Act, the massive anti-terror law that passed overwhelmingly six weeks after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, would amend various existing statutes, ostensibly to allow law enforcement to work more efficiently.

Provisions in the draft would:

• Raise the threshold for rejecting illegal wiretaps. The draft reads: "A court may not grant a motion to suppress the contents of a wire or oral communication, or evidence derived therefrom, unless the court finds that the violation of this chapter involved bad faith by law enforcement."
• Extend subpoena powers by giving giving law enforcement the authority to issue non-judicial subpoenas which require a person suspected of involvement in money laundering to turn over financial records and appear in a prosecutor's office to answer questions.
• Extend the power of the attorney general to issue so-called administrative "sneak-and-peek" subpoenas to drug cases. These subpoenas allow law enforcement to gather evidence from wire communication, financial records or other sources before the subject of the search is notified.
• Allow law enforcement to seek a court order to require the "provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service" or a financial institution to delay notifying a customer that their records had been subpoenaed.

Drug crimes intertwined with terrorism? Yeah, because those stoners at the rock concert are such a threat.
Courts must approve all wiretaps unless law enforcement acted in bad faith?
Putting ISPs and financial institutions under the same gag order as libraries?

And, yet again, none of these provisions would've stopped the 9/11 hijackers; this is just a blatant power grab by the Justice Department, taking away our constitutional rights.

This is bad, people!

Justice Department officials are denying this, just as they denied the leaked proposal for the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (dubbed PATRIOT Act II). [If you don't remember that, refresh your memory here and here.] But just because they change course and pull the plug on something doesn't mean it wasn't a serious proposal.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:50 AM

Everybody seems to like Rob Brezsny's weekly horoscopes (updated Tuesday nights/Wednesday mornings), so here's my latest:

So begins the information-gathering phase of your yearly cycle, Cancerian.

[Phase? My whole life is information-gathering! Unless he's saying that I'll have to stop sometime!?]

You'll align yourself with the cosmic ebb and flow whenever you engage in activities that excite your love of learning and enhance your skills as a student of life.

[Again, already a truism about myself that I know.]

Here's a gem from poet Heather McHugh to inspire your quest: "The knowledge I'm interested in is not something you buy and then have and can be comfortable with. The knowledge I'm interested in keeps opening wider and wider, making me smaller and more amazed, until I see I cannot have it all -- and then delight in that as a freedom."

Okay, so nothing new, nothing I didn't already know about myself, and nothing specific about this week, but still a fairly accurate description of me in general. Oh well. They can't all be gems.

I may still add that last bit to my Quotes page, but I still prefer this one by Carl Ally:

"The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth-century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six months, or six years down the road. But he has faith that it will happen."

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:45 AM

Well, it looks like our old friend Barbara Comstock, Justice Department spokeswoman, is at it again. Atrios and TalkLeft both quote her as: "dismiss[ing] criticism of the Patriot Act as the work of 'a small, vocal minority' spreading misinformation."

Just remember, the last time she made that claim, in a Boston Globe article, I found and debunked FIVE factual errors in her two sentence quote.

Justice Department Spokeswoman Barbara Comstock is a proven liar!

[Sometimes it's so easy, that if it weren't such a worthy cause, I'd be ashamed of myself.]

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:30 PM

The New York Times provided an interactive comparison of satellite views of the NorthEastern US, the night of the blackout and the day before.
Look at how much light pollution there normally is! No wonder we could see the stars so clearly on Friday night.

Link from Making Light [via BT!]

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:01 AM

Lieberman, Landsman...

I read this morning's Washington Post article, and I'm disappointed in you. Look at our history. How many times have individual Jews badmouthed their fellow Jews before the authorities in order to garner personal power? Maybe they claimed they were doing it for the betterment of all Jews, but in order to achieve that, they always first needed to gain power for themselves. And once they were accepted by the ruling class, by the mainstream, they had distanced themselves so well from the rest of the Jews that they couldn't effectively help. Study your history for what's happened to these Jews, and what happened to the Jewish communities that spawned them. It rarely worked out well.

Joe, Bubeleh. That's what I see you doing here. You can't help the Democrats by attacking them in this manner -- you only make our enemies' jobs easier. Please reconsider these tactics, before its too late and the damage insurmountable. [via BT!]

Postscript: Somehow I'm tempted to add that just because you're closely related to an Esther (Mrs. Lieberman's name is Hadassah), that doesn't make you a modern Mordechai.

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:05 PM

I am amused by one of the elevators in my office building. After being completely nonfunctional for months and then needing another month or so for repairs, it is finally operational.
However, the indicator never changes -- it always reads G for Ground level, no matter what floor the doors open to.
Me, I like to think that the elevator never, in fact, moves from the ground floor. The rest of the world just rises and falls around it.

Oh, one other link I meant to post this morning. I grew up listening to Allan Sherman's "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh." Well, Saturday's LA Times included some of the story behind the song, in a piece written by the camp counselor of Sherman's son. The registration for the LA Times site sucks, imo, constantly intercepting the actual URL with their login screen and then redirecting to nowhere. You can log in using member name "corporatemedia" and password "stillsucks" But if you get past that, it's a fascinating article.

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:50 PM

So, I've gotten myself into a huge lengthy flamewar discussion on pornography and obscenity and free speech. And I would like to extract some of my own comments into a more coherent post. This is still a work in progress; a collection of interrelated ideas that I'm still struggling with in hopes of assembling into a unified argument. But, IMO, they're each interesting points on their own merits, and could benefit from other eyes besides my own.

For example, there's a particular analogy that I've used repeatedly over the years in Usenet and Soapbox and LJs, that I don't believe I've shared here. [Besides, I'm tired of hunting all those sites whenever I wish to make that point.] It applies to calls for censorship against all kinds of material, including hate speech, pornography, violence and religious blasphemy. For shorthand purposes, I'm using speech in the constitutional sense, encompassing many different types of communication:

There is no equivalent to Monty Python's "Killer Joke" that harms everybody who comes into contact with it.

Speech isn't good or evil. Speech is neutral -- the uses it can be put to may be good or evil, but the speech itself is just speech. If someone can benefit from it, then that speech must be good for that person. Speech that is "not good" presumably harms everyone that comes into contact with it, and I can't think of a single instance where that has happened.

For example, some readers of Mein Kampf are inspired to commit horrific acts, but many other people read the same material to research anti-Semitism and prevent future genocides. Same thing with the Turner Diaries, which some experts blamed for Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. Since these same experts read the book to understand McVeigh, then the book itself can't be inherently bad. A book with instructions on bomb-building can be a good reference for authors or scientists. Some people blame pornography for a host of indirect social ills, while those in sexual minorities often report that it's been a lifesaver to know they're not alone.

Scientific studies on the impact of media are inconclusive, and many of the laboratory studies are based upon fallacious reasoning. I looked at Internet censorship for my final paper in Social Informatics. I read books on multiple sides of the issues, and not only did different studies conflict, but to quote from my paper:

In many cases, the same controlled experiment is used to justify completely antithetical conclusions.
In a very famous study, ten-year-olds watched a fifteen minute television program -- sometimes violent, sometimes not -- and were then asked to monitor the behavior of two younger children by means of a television monitor. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the kindergartners they were supervising were actually prerecorded so all children saw the same staged fight. Grossman uses this as an example of desensitization: "The children who had just finished watching fifteen minutes of television violence were five times more likely to simply fail to summon help." (p. 33) Jones takes a less alarmist tone, going so far as to suggest, "calling for adult intervention at the first sign of aggression might not have been the wisest course." (p. 107).

Gerard Jones also took on one of the most famous studies of children imitating media violence. Quoting from his book:

The cornerstone of all media-aggression experimentation was the Albert Bandura study of 1963, which showed that children who had watched films of someone punching an inflatable clown doll subsequently punched an identical clown doll more often that a group of children who had not. Hundreds of similar experiments, with similar results, have followed over the decades since then. Clearly there's a basic truth to these experiments; we all know from experience that if kids see something exciting on TV they're likely to imitate it in play immediately afterward. But we need to step back from the interpretation put on those studies by generations of commentators, get outside of terminology that speaks of "heightened aggression" and look at what the kids are actually doing:

They're punching an inflatable clown.
<snip>
There is no evidence to suggest that punching an inflatable clown has any connection to real-life violence. There is no evidence that kids who love to punch inflatable clowns are more prone to playground aggression or later delinquency. There IS anecdotal evidence that clown-punching is beneficial when it has any effect at all.

I wrote a great deal on the issue of children exposed to and acting out violence during some of the hysteria after Columbine. Unfortunately, I don't currently have access to most of my writings from that time (as they were largely on an internal discussion list at my former employer's). I did find this interview with teacher and author Jane Katch a worthwhile contribution to thinking about children's violent play.

I think it's very important for us to limit the violence our children are exposed to, especially for the younger ones. But since they will be exposed to some violence, it's important to understand that their playing it is the equivalent of adults conversing about it.
For instance, the day after the Columbine shooting, all the teachers were talking about what it must have felt like to be there -- to be a parent or a teacher or a student. If our principal had come in saying, "Anyone who is talking about Columbine is in danger of becoming a Columbine shooter," it would have been detrimental to our well-being. We needed to talk about those things to process them.
Children process things through their play: One child stands up and another child points a finger and says "Bang, bang," and the first child falls down and then laughs and gets up. That is the child asking: What would it feel like to have been there? What did those children feel like? What would those mothers (whom they saw on the television screen) feel like? We do that through conversation; they do that through play. Could this really happen here? Play is their way to ask that question.
So if we focus on the violence of the content [of their play], we might lose the opportunity to focus on what they are worried about. That's not to say that we should ignore the violent content -- we need to focus on it in a productive way, rather than make them feel bad for even thinking about it.

And I do worry about the harmful effects of bottling things up, rather than being able to express and deal with them. When speech about a particular topic is restricted, it doesn't vanish, it just goes underground, disguising the warning signs of trouble and making it harder for others to identify and take action against the truly dangerous stuff.

As far as pornography is concerned, as long as things are legal, the government can mandate consent forms and age restrictions and labor laws to protect the models. If its illegal, porn will continue to be produced, but without such protections.

I'm reminded of the books I recently read about the 18th century gin scares. Among the lessons from that and Prohibition, outlawing something most people partake in and few see as criminal (a) diminishes respect for the law and (b) prevents the government from taking more effective steps to protect the public. It's like the popular slogan, "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." If pornography is criminalized, criminals will control the porn industry.

I'm not even going to address the arguments that all pornography is misogynist. I mean, it's slightly amusing to watch folks jump through hoops to explain gay male porn in terms of this framework (which manages to be misogynistic either by indulging in gender stereotypes or insults through omission) but on the whole, arguing that form of ideology holds little appeal for me.

At any rate, I would like to address one of the other accusations against porn, which is that objectification is inherently harmful.

I disagree. Inappropriate objectification can be harmful, but under many circumstances, objectification is not only acceptable, it can be necessary.

I mean, my current job is (largely) telephone technical support. People phoning in for help with their software have no interest nor need to deal with the whole me, with my financial worries and political opinions -- they only want my ears, voice, and the portions of my brain that can help resolve their technical issues. Besides, I'm an introvert. Dealing with too many people leaves me feeling drained and physically exhausted.

During the time Ian was studying speech and rhetoric academically, he explained the purposes and reasons for small talk:

People evolved as tribal-level hunter-gatherers who lived in family groups of perhaps a couple dozen individuals. What this means is that most people have the ability to really *know* only a few people. One can learn the interaction patterns of, perhaps, a dozen people or so. Some people can learn more -- some *many* more -- some fewer.

In other words, there is a limit to how many very close friends you can really know. That limit is different for different people: some people may be able to maintain close friendships with a hundred people, some people may be able to maintain two or three. But, probably most people can learn to interact with about dozen people.

This is fine if you're only going to interact with a dozen people regularly. Unfortunately, as civilizations developed and people started living in larger groups, this became insufficient. But people are nothing if not creative and resourceful.

Today, we have to interact with dozens of people a day. Clearly, we don't have the energy to really understand everyone that we encounter. Yet we still have to be able to interact with them somehow. We need to be able to buy things in stores, take cab rides, get directions from subway information booth people.

So we developed masks. Each culture creates an artifical personality -- or perhaps a few artifical personalities -- which everyone can learn to interact with. So, people are taught how to pretend to be this artifical personality, and they can just have their mask interact with someone else's mask, and you can get stuff done, but you don't have to really *know* people.
<snip>
"Small talk" is how masks interact with masks. It's very important, for a number of reasons. For one thing, even if we're using masks, we still need social interaction to keep a society bound together. For another, it's the first step in getting to know someone.

"Small talk" follows certain conversational paths, is usually limited to certain, more-or-less inoffensive topics, and is limited in what it can express. But two people following the same conversational script forms a social bonding: you've created something together, even if all it is is a kit-built conversation.

And, for some interactions, that's really the entire purpose of small talk. If I say, "Have a good one," to the cashier at the grocery store, and zie says "Take care" in response, we've created a very small conversation together, and have demonstrated to each other that we are part of the same society, and have spun one very tenuous strand of connection between the two of us. But if everyone spins very tenuous strands of connection with everyone -- then you have a society that holds together, at least somewhat. All those individual tenuous strands add up to something significant.

He goes on, but that's sufficient to make my point. [Generally speaking, the semantic content of small-talk is "Ping" -- acknowledging the other person's humanity without going beyond the masks.]

But just because I "objectify" the guy behind the counter at McDonalds as nothing more than someone who will take my order and money and give me the food I've requested, that doesn't inhibit my ability to relate in a more meaningful way to other people in similar roles. For example, in a more meaningful way (such as the people who work at the local diner; I see them more often and we know each other better).

IMO, the answer too situations of harmful speech, whether pornography or violence or hate speech or whatever, is not to shut it down or shut it up, but to try to drown them out by producing more good speech. It's not easy, but it can be done, and I think it's more effective in the long run.

I guess that's about all I have to say on this now.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:25 AM

A few tidbits found over the weekend

• Oh cool! ISSNs for weblogs! I want one! [major thanks to AlanD for forwarding this along.]
• A couple updates on Valerie Plame (how quickly people forget):
  • Will there be an investigation? Only if John Ashcroft and George Tenet (known for their impartiality towards administration excesses) decide to authorize one. Oh well. [via Tom Spencer]
  • Or maybe not, Wilson told the St. Pete Times that he thinks he knows who blew the lid off his wife's cover and may expose it if nobody officially investigates the matter.
  • Meanwhile, John Dean has written on the story, calling is "repulsive. If I thought I had seen dirty political tricks as nasty and vile as they could get at the Nixon White House, I was wrong. ... Indeed, this is arguably worse. Nixon never set up a hit on one of his enemies' wives." Dean also goes into the relevant laws that have been violated. [via Mark Kleiman]
• And speaking of John Dean and scandals, Saturday morning's Herald had an editorial by Bill O'Reilly on the lawsuit against Franken. Waah waah waah, cry me a river. If FOX is not conservative as he asserts, then why does he keep emphasizing that those opposing FOX are liberals? And get a load of the tortured logic in this paragraph:

  "Attempting to smear and destroy the reputations of those with whom you politically disagree is not satire. If that were the case Richard Nixon's Watergate plumbers would all be writing for Saturday Night Live."

  Say what?
  I can't wait to see his reaction to Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting upcoming September release, The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly.
• Finally, most of you have probably heard that Ralph Nader was hit with a pie at a California event. Continuing my efforts to be somewhat fair and balanced in my slams, I'll close with this tidbit from Joe Conason's Journal:

  The San Francisco Examiner reports that Nader "hurled the pie back, striking a bystander," which serves as a perfect metaphor for Naderite politics.