drat fink
View current page
...more recent posts
Thursday, Aug 26, 2004
frame game
"BERKELEY – With the Democratic National Convention over and the Republican one beginning next week, it seemed a good time to check in with George Lakoff, the UC Berkeley professor of cognitive linguistics whose scrutiny of the language of politics has begun to bring him national recognition. The author of the seminal book "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think," Lakoff's specialty is dissecting "framing," or the ways in which conservatives and liberals position issues to fit their respective moral worldviews. (For more on framing, read this excerpt from the NewsCenter's October 2003 interview with Lakoff.) He grasps how Republicans use language more effectively than Democrats, and what Democrats can do about it."
walk, dont run
naomi klein and todd gitlin spar over protesting at rnc convention on democracy now.
marriage penalty
a few weeks back in the glow of the democratic convention, george will claimed that for 95% of the delegates the most important issue was gay marriage. this claim went unchallenged on This Weak when uttered. it was an obvious overstatement which im sure will if pressed would have said he was exaggerating for effect and that delegates are part of the "activist' wing of the party. as we all know most of these fabrications go unchecked. here from the pew center we have their annual report on americans and religion and public life. when asked what are their voting priorities, gay marriage ranked last (among those listed) for both democrats and swing voters (pg 10). plenty of other baubles to ponder within.
your song
"Ludlow Music dropped its demands that JibJab, a small web animation site, stop using Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" in a satirical Flash cartoon. It turned out Ludlow did not own the rights to the song as it claimed, a lawyer representing JibJab said on Tuesday."
exit music
sweet goodbye from tbogg to his father.
heat of the moment
another back2iraq episode from our intrepid reporter in najaf.
Wednesday, Aug 25, 2004
red flag
"Aug. 24, 2004 -- Military officials are cracking down on blogs written by soldiers and Marines in Iraq, saying some of them reveal sensitive information. Critics say it's an attempt to suppress unflattering truths about the U.S. occupation. NPR's Eric Niiler reports."
registered male
"Within seconds, Daniels, a computer consultant whose company is based in Annapolis, joined 125 other local travelers who signed up yesterday to become "registered travelers" at Reagan National Airport. The test project, which aims to give frequent fliers a quicker pass through security checkpoints, is already underway at four other airports. It relies on the latest biometric technologies to verify a passenger's identity with increased precision. Digital fingerprint scans and photographs are already used to identify foreigners traveling on a visa, and U.S. officials plan to encode a facial recognition technology into passports."
even flow
"The conservative media had been pushing the fabrication story energetically. How did it deal with this new evidence undermining it? As it turns out, at almost every turn it soft-pedaled the new evidence or outright ignored it, showing its bias throughout."
testing your endurance
"Malkin may think of this all as an exercise in polemics, all in the pursuit of "debunking" critics of modern-day racial profiling in the "war on terror." But the truth is that, by defending the indefensible -- which, in the end, is what the was -- she has replicated almost exactly the mistakes of her forebears in 1942, impugning the loyalty of nearly 80,000 citizens and another 40,000 longtime resident immigrants without a whit of solid evidence to support her."