Is God talking to George W. Bush?

From the mainstream Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

According to [Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud] Abbas, immediately thereafter Bush said: "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."

Gibson on our Orwellian times

William Gibson in Wednesday's NY Times on Orwell, surveillance, police states and more.

BBC gets heavy into RSS

Dave Winer points out the 68 new RSS feeds at BBC News. Yowza.

Internet sparks a copyright fire

Washington Post: Internet Sparks a Copyright Fire. A Short History of Copyright in the Digital Age.

And from last week ... Dan Kennedy in the Boston Phoenix: Breaking the Internet copyright impasse.

Thanks to Mary H. at bIPlog and Donna W. at copyfight for the pointers.

Google: You don't know me

Sheila's getting married Sunday, but she's still bloggin' away. Her latest:

At a page called Google Weblog [created by blogger Aaron Swartz]: "Want to see what ads AdSense thinks are relevant to your page? Just enter its URL:

So I did. The results: poliglut.org and three conservative sites. Oops.

But maybe it was an anomaly. So I put in J.D. Lasica's site. (He's a senior editor of Online Journalism Review.) His top hit is Sharpton for President. Oops again.

Oops is right.

Reaction to Supremes' library filter ruling

Jenny Levine, the Shifted Librarian, has the best roundup of links and commentary I've seen on the Supreme Court's decision Monday to censor library Internet access.

And a friend, who works with schools and libraries, says that Justices Breyer's and Kennedy's decisive ruling, which suggests that libraries can just "turn off" the anti-filtering software at a patron's request, is a bunch of nonsense.

Should TV news anchors get into the opinion game?

Bill O'Reilly: The audience for dispassionate news is shrinking, and the demand for passionate reporting and analysis is on the rise.

Here's Dead Parrots' take on O'Reilly's suggestion that TV news anchors ought to get into the opinionated journalism game.

I agree with O'Reilly (for a change) that people want more analysis, interpretation and insight from the news. (O'Reilly's one of the last people I would turn to for insight, but millions disagree.) And people can get that kind of journalism in thousands of different places today. Personal journalism is a chief reason why the blogosphere has taken off in popularity. And, yes, the right-wing political slant evident in almost all Fox News anchors has drawn a considerable audience.

But I doubt most Americans want Rather, Jennings, Brokaw and Lehrer to start spouting their personal views of the news. Who gives a shit what Brokaw's personal opinion of affirmative action is? That's not why I watch NBC News. Having worked at metropolitan newspapers where the slightest hint of bias in a headline or an article would draw a raft of invective from readers on both sides of the political aisle, I can tell you that a large portion of the public isn't hungry for O'Reilly's recipe for news anchors. Perhaps in a generation, but not today.

We'll see personal journalism, personal commentary and passionate reporting continue to flourish. Just not from the TV anchors' chair.

ONA, USC team up

The Online News Association is ending its partnership with Columbia University and joining with the University of Southern California's Annenberg School (home of the Online Journalism Review) to administer its annual awards, which honors the best in online journalism.

The contest opens July 1 and will accept entries through July 21.

Below is the press release that went out today.

LOS ANGELES, June 24, 2003 - The USC Annenberg School for Communication
and the Online News Association announced today that they will partner
to present the 2003 Online Journalism Awards, journalism's highest
honor for writing, reporting and editing on the Internet and other
digital platforms.

"Online reporters and editors continue to be on the cutting edge,
redefining the field of journalism itself," said Geoffrey Cowan, dean
of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. "The Online Journalism
Awards recognize the best in the profession, and we are delighted to
encourage and develop standards for excellence in the field."

"Since we established the Online Journalism Awards four years ago, it
has become the premier program honoring excellence and creativity in
digital journalism," said Bruce Koon, Online News Association president
and executive news editor of Knight Ridder Digital. "USC Annenberg,
known for its commitment to online journalism through academic
programs, the Online Journalism Review and other publications, brings
new energy to the awards. We are very pleased to partner with the
Annenberg School to celebrate the best in online journalism."

The 2003 Online Journalism Awards will be presented at the annual
conference of the Online News Association, to be held November 14-15 in
Chicago. Judging will take place October 2-4 at the USC Annenberg
School in Los Angeles.

Entries will be accepted between July 1, 2003 and July 21, 2003. For
information on how to enter, visit the ONA web site,
www.journalists.org. Categories of recognition include enterprise
reporting, breaking news, service reporting, feature writing,
commentary, and general excellence. The Online Journalism Awards were
first awarded in 2000 and have been presented annually ever since.

The Online News Association (www.journalists.org), which was founded in
1999, is open to journalists from around the world who produce news on
the Internet and other digital platforms, as well as to educators,
students and others with an interest in online journalism. ONA's
mission is to strive for editorial integrity, editorial independence,
journalistic excellence, freedom of expression and freedom of access in
the online world.

The USC Annenberg School is home to two other major journalism awards.
The Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting recognizes the year's
best investigative reporting in print journalism with a $35,000 prize,
the highest in journalism. The USC Annenberg Walter Cronkite Awards for
Outstanding Television Political Journalism are presented biannually to
television stations, reporters, and networks for political reporting in
election years.

Located in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California, the
USC Annenberg School for Communication (www.annenberg.usc.edu) is among
the nation's leading institutions devoted to the study of journalism
and communication, and their impact on politics, culture and society.
With an enrollment of more than 1,500 graduate and undergraduate
students, USC Annenberg offers B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in
journalism, communication, and public relations.

For further information contact
Online News Association
Phone: 802-434-6176
Fax : 802-654-2560
Email: HelpDesk@journalists.org
http://www.journalists.org

A wireless revolution in unexpected places

Business 2.0's July cover story takes a look at the wireless revolution. Instead of Wi-Fi and other small-scale schemes for building wireless local area networks, the great engine powering us into the new wireless age is ... the cell phone. Every year a third of all cell-phone users -- now 1.2 billion and climbing -- upgrade to newer models, and itís this relentless churn that drives innovation.

Worth a read.

GoodContacts keeps your address book fresh

Susannah Gardner asked me to update my contact info in her address book by using GoodContacts. Looks like a nifty little program that mails from your address book and then incorporates the updates.

The anti-environment EPA candidate

Here's a story that won't get much play:

EPA candidate's state record

Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, President Bush's top candidate to head the Environmental Protection Agency, has cut his state's environmental budget three times and sharply reduced enforcement of environmental regulations.

During Kempthorne's 4 1/2-year tenure, Idaho's pristine air has gotten dirtier, more rivers have been polluted, fewer polluters have been inspected and more toxins have contaminated the air, water and land, according to a Knight Ridder analysis of Idaho pollution data from EPA and state records.

In the same period, the nation's air and water have gotten cleaner on average, and fewer toxins have been emitted, EPA officials said Monday in a draft report.

California hard ball

Two instructive stories by political reporter Robert Salladay in the SF Chronicle:

Recall drive has almost half on petition

The recall campaign against Gov. Gray Davis has collected almost half of the signatures needed to qualify the measure for the ballot, county elections officials reported, as the deadline for organizers to prove themselves quickly approaches.

The Davis Recall Committee said it had turned in 429,531 signatures to county elections office as of June 16, an official counting date, but a spot check by the Associated Press and The Chronicle shows that about 400,000 signatures were reported. ...

The magic number is 897,158 verified signatures from registered voters. But recall organizers want to collect at least 1.25 million by July 11 -- enough over the legal threshold to qualify for a special election in the fall or winter.

That looks like it won't happen now, but there's still a fair chance of a recall election next March.

By the way, the NY Times reported on Sunday that recall organizers had turned in 700,000 signatures and that a recall was all but certain. Wrong-o.

Potential swing votes feel GOP heat on budget

... (State) Senate GOP leader Jim Brulte recently warned that if any Republicans voted for tax increases, he would work against them in the next primary. Lawmakers and Capitol observers were shocked, but then came the sucker punch.

Across the hallway in the Assembly, a conservative lawmaker arranged for anti-tax crusader Stephen Moore, visiting the Capitol from Washington, D.C., to lecture California Republicans on economics -- and then finish with another, more powerful warning.

It involved something dear to the political heart: money. Moore's group, the Club for Growth, spent $330,000 to defeat Republican Mike Briggs from Fresno County, after Briggs crossed party lines and voted for a state budget last year that included tax increases.

"Remember Mike Briggs? We kind of nuked him," Moore said in an interview. "One of the purposes of my visit was to remind people that if any Republican votes for tax increase, we would come out full guns. . . . They don't want to suffer the same near-death experience Briggs did. He was destroyed politically. "

Moore, whose group is funded by conservatives around the country, said he would spend in the "six figures" to defeat any Republican who voted for tax increases. ...

Nowhere in the article -- nor in a related story about Brulte's popularity in his home district -- does it mention that California faces a $38.2 billion shortfall, and that it's all but impossible to close that gap with spending cuts alone.

But what does Brulte care? He's term limited, and won't be around when California crumbles.

Denial and deception

Paul Krugman in the NY Times:

Politics is full of ironies. On the White House Web site, George W. Bush's speech from Oct. 7, 2002 ó in which he made the case for war with Iraq ó bears the headline "Denial and Deception." Indeed.

There is no longer any serious doubt that Bush administration officials deceived us into war. The key question now is why so many influential people are in denial, unwilling to admit the obvious.

About the deception: Leaks from professional intelligence analysts, who are furious over the way their work was abused, have given us a far more complete picture of how America went to war. Thanks to reporting by my colleague Nicholas Kristof, other reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and a magisterial article by John Judis and Spencer Ackerman in The New Republic, we now know that top officials, including Mr. Bush, sought to convey an impression about the Iraqi threat that was not supported by actual intelligence reports.

NYT's sorry reader forums

Hate to say it, but the NY Times' reader forum is one of the lamest I've ever seen.

This one, with Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse, puts all Supreme Court decisions & issues in one bucket, so you'll have to wade through the 7,924 postings there to figure out where the affirmative action thread begins.

I posted an entry last night, but today I can't find it and haven't even spotted a single reply by Ms. Greenhouse, though it's likely she has responded ... somewhere.

Maybe Kuro5hin can take over this sorry mess.