I've completed the second phase of the Watching the Watchers relaunch, which I began in late May. The site has become a digest of interesting news and commentary from sites that permit redistribution. As you can see, the traffic graph's become a lot more fun to look at lately.

The site now includes stories that were published under a Creative Commons license that permits reuse. If you're unfamiliar with Creative Commons, it's a popular way to allow your copyrighted work -- whether it's text, photos, audio or video -- to be reused by others under terms that you select. On the RSS Advisory Board, we use the license to share the RSS specification, RSS best practices profile and other documentation we author. Some people have used our license to create foreign-language translations of those documents.

Here's a sampling of stories I've republished on Watching the Watchers that came in over the commons:

• End Public Radio Fund Drives
• SEC Must Constrain Abusive Short Selling
• Tweet Could Land Guatemalan in Jail
• A Salute to the Iranian People

I wrote a Java application that looks for weblog content shared under Creative Commons and a PHP web application that lets me manually review stories for potential republication. So far, the richest source of reusable content is coming from WordPress blogs because they include content:encoded, an RSS element explicitly defined as the full text of a weblog entry. WordPress does not use the Creative Commons RSS namespace in its feeds, so my Java application loads the web page associated with a blog entry and looks for HTML markup that identifies a license. Here's an example of that markup:

The contents of this website are licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License</a>.

As I was reviewing stories that came in, I decided to expand the focus of the site beyond liberal news and commentary and make it non-partisan. If I find something compelling that's worth sharing with a wider audience, I don't want to leave it out because it expresses a conservative or libertarian viewpoint or isn't political at all.

The August 2009 issue of Runner's World includes a Q&A with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin about her lifelong interest in jogging. The interview reveals that she took an unreported fall while running with the Secret Service before the vice presidential debate and describes how Sen. John McCain loves being up a creek:

I used to joke around with John McCain during the campaign about coming jogging with me. And once I asked him what his favorite exercise was, and he said, 'I go wading.' Wading. He lives on a creek in Arizona, so he goes wading. That cracked me up.

The most newsworthy part of the story is probably the last question, where she affirms her support for Title IX, the gender equity law that requires schools to offer as many programs for female athletes as for males:

Is there anything else the world should know about you as a runner?

The only other thing I'd like to add is I've been very fortunate to be a recipient of all the efforts people put into Title IX all those years ago where girls got equal opportunity to participate in sports and extracurricular activities because sports growing up were my world. I'm so thankful for Title IX allowing equal access to these opportunities, and I'm a huge proponent of girls being able to realize what they're made of by participating in sports and whatever I can do there I'm going to be doing.

The story includes eight photos of Palin in running attire, and the last one shows that Palin still has a knack for turning a harmless publicity stunt -- like pardoning a turkey -- into a potential black eye.

Palin's violating the U.S. Flag Code, which you can read on the American Legion's site, in how that U.S. flag is treated in the photo. Under the heading Respect for the Flag, the code states, "The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise." There's also a rule against using it as drapery.

Though adherance to the Flag Code is optional, some people take it pretty seriously, as the American Flag wall of shame demonstrates, and a lot of them are in what Palin would consider the "pro-America areas of this great nation." You shouldn't drape it over a chair like a cover you bought at Bed Bath and Beyond.

It's a wonder that Palin hasn't shot her publicity team from a helicopter.

Update: A commenter points out a picture of Palin wrapping herself in the flag that was reprinted in Newsweek and taken by Wasilla, Alaska, photographer Judy Patrick, who has included it in her Palin calendar.

Roger Ebert's review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen appears to be considerably more entertaining than the film itself:

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

The plot is incomprehensible. The dialog of the Autobots, Decepticons and Otherbots is meaningless word flap. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars. Their appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock. They share the film with human characters who are much more interesting, and that is very faint praise indeed.

Ebert writes more about the movie on his blog:

The day will come when Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will be studied in film classes and shown at cult film festivals. It will be seen, in retrospect, as marking the end of an era. Of course there will be many more CGI-based action epics, but never again one this bloated, excessive, incomprehensible, long (149 minutes) or expensive (more than $200 million). Like the dinosaurs, the species has grown too big to survive, and will be wiped out in a cataclysmic event, replaced by more compact, durable forms. ...

The action scenes can perhaps best be understood as abstract art. The Autobots and Decepticons, which are assembled out of auto parts, make no functional or aesthetic sense. They have evolved into forms too complex to be comprehended. When two or more of the Bots are in battle, it is nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other. You can't comprehend most of what they're doing, except for an occasional fist flying, a built-in missile firing, or the always dependable belching of flames.

I'm surprised that Ebert thinks the film will make a huge amount of money. My kids saw the first Transformers but have shown absolutely no interest in seeing them again, thus robbing me of several opportunities to see Megan Fox running in slow-motion. Films that feed dad's nostalgia for childhood don't go over well in my house. No amount of pleading on my part could get the family to see Speed Racer.

Before Michael Jackson's death Friday, I wasn't aware that I had any affection left for the King of Pop. Like millions of others, I grew up watching Jackson and the rest of his family grow up. Janet Jackson's my age, and when she played Penny as a 10-year-old on the sitcom Good Times, I was in love. I decided to save myself for her -- not that she appreciated it -- until I finally gave up at age 18.

I'm not the only one who still had some affection for Jackson, but the extent of the tonguebath he's getting from the mainstream media has surprised me. It's one thing to downplay the accusations about child molestation and other inappropriate behavior with children that dogged the last 15 years of his life, but another thing entirely to explicitly make excuses for him. Writing for Time magazine, movie critic Richard Corliss rationalizes that even if Jackson molested kids, he was not a sexual predator because he thought of himself as a child:

Yet Jackson's profound weirdness — not just the glove or the seaweed hair striping his face but the blanched skin, the pained eyes, the tremulous soul -- hinted that Peter Pan was the wrong role for him. Wasn't Jackson really one of Peter's Lost Boys, stranded between childhood and adolescence, loved by the public yet feeling caged and abandoned, and searching, groping for the Edenic innocence he believed was any child's birthright? ...

When he welcomed handicapped kids to the ranch, he felt he was their equal, and they were friends he could play with, or sing to -- or, he must have thought, love, in the purest sense of the word. The litany of alleged misbehavior in the 2005 trial -- making prank phone calls, sneaking drinks, scanning porn sites, even a lesson in masturbation -- is not unfamiliar among preteens. If Jackson committed these acts, it was not predator-to-prey but peer-to-peer. Having forgiven the father who abused him, could he not forgive himself for bonding with the children who came into his Neverland bed? Could this Lost Boy even understand the difference between hugging and fondling, affection and assault, generosity and lechery?

If you find any other examples of the media making excuses for child sex abuse when celebrities are involved, share the link.

The movie reference site IMDB has a parents guide feature that's useful when determining whether a movie contains sexual content that would be inappropriate for your children. (Like most Americans I'm much more comfortable exposing the younguns to movies that contain bloodshed than any film that makes even the slightest reference to sex. I blame my Catholic upbringing and spaghetti Westerns.)

The feature is edited by users in the manner of Wikipedia and does not get editorial oversight from IMDB.

When considering whether to see Year One this weekend, I found that the users had been incredibly thorough in describing scenes that had anything to do with sex or nudity. Here's the full text of the warning, which looks like it spoils at least a dozen scenes:

A large orgy is shown on screen: over 50 people are shown engaging in sexual acts, passionately rubbing against one another, laying on one another, groping and kissing, as half-dressed people are shown walking about the room. Two people are shown in a passionate embrace, kissing then falling to the ground, off screen, and sexual moans are heard, as well as the man asking if he should remove his underclothing; the two emerge later and announce that they had just had intercourse and that it was enjoyable and they would like to have intercourse again. A man instructs a woman that they should kiss with their mouths open. A man erotically licks the face of a woman. A woman is shown licking the face and ear of another woman. A man and a woman are shown in a passionate embrace, kissing. A man and a woman are shown kissing passionately. A man and woman dance together suggestively. Two men are shown lying in the same bed, after a man offers that they can "lay" with one another. A shirtless man demands that a young man pour oil on his body and rub it in with his hands and genitals; the young man pours oil on his chest and rubs his chest with his hand as the man moans and makes sexual and suggestive comments. A man states that he has sex with animals and is later shown trying to have sex with an animal. A statue is shown bearing an exaggeratedly large erection, a man closely inspects the statue, places his hand on the erection, accidentally snaps off the statue's genitals and then tries to hide the broken parts. A woman is shown running her hands up and down two spears in a purposefully suggestive fashion, which two men discuss as being blatantly sexual in nature. A woman leans over, her cleavage exposed, and two men are shown ogling her breasts. Men and women look at one another in a very suggestive manner. A man looks at a young man and licks his lips suggestively. A man stands before a woman with his leg up, and it is implied that the woman can see his genitals and she smiles. A woman is shown erotically eating and licking a banana and two men talk about the sexual nature of her eating the banana and a man tries to imitate her by erotically eating a chunk of meat. A man jokes about incest, saying that it was awkward the morning after he had sexual intercourse with his mother, so he would not have sexual intercourse with his sister. A woman is asked how she can be "had." A man offers his daughter for sex, saying that people need to be fruitful and multiply. A man tells a woman that he wants to have sex with her and makes two crude references to erections. A woman rebukes a man's advances for sex, saying instead that she is sexually interested in women and that she is a practicing lesbian. A man is told, "sodomize this" and is pushed into a rioting crowd. A man speaks in a suggestive manner to a young man, stating that he would like to see the man perform sexual acts. A man says he just received a "rub and scrub." A young man discusses how his body was painted by another man, with a focus on his genitals. The phrase "where sinners are winners" is used after a discussion of free sex, orgies, and over-consumption of alcohol, including a remark that any ill behavior that takes place will not be discussed once leaving the city. People discuss prostitution and the practice of sodomy, encouraging participation in open sex (both homosexual and heterosexual) orgies, and sexually transmitted diseases. People discuss how virgins are pure of sexual mark, and a man talks about being a virgin himself. A man introduces himself as a eunuch and explains the process of how he became a eunuch, including retaining a portion of his male genitalia which he keeps in a pouch. A man is shown with hair on his hands and mentions that the hair was pubic hair as well as chest hair from giving another man a massage with oil. A man mentions that he had just had a "long, wet, hot" bath with another man. People discuss a fertility dance and how it would be an excellent opportunity to dance with a person who they are sexually interested in (the dance is never shown on screen). Two men discuss "laying" with a woman, implying having sexual intercourse. A man advises another man that he can simply hit a woman over the head and then drag her back to his house to have sex with her, even if she shows no interest in doing so, and then adds that women like it that way. A man says he does not want to wake up his parents while having loud intercourse. Men repeatedly speak of "lying with" women meaning intercourse, and a person asks where babies come from. A man makes a crude reference to masturbation. A man tells another man that he would be happy if the man produced many children with his sister. A man says that he will use his "short spear" to "straighten out" a group of men (while he means this as a violent threat, the implication of his speech is sexual). A man discusses how he will perform circumcision on three other men, he explains in detail the actions required to perform circumcision, including crude and vulgar terms for parts of the male genitalia. People discuss, at length, circumcision and the sexual implications of circumcision, including making crude references to the act of circumcision and male genitalia and the appearance of male genitalia after circumcision. When being attacked by a snake, a man is instructed to stick a finger in its "hole" (the man does not do so). A man holds up the cooked carcass of an animal and asks a question implying that the carcass resembles the nude female figure. A man offers to kiss another man. Women are shown wearing low-cut tops, shirts which expose bare mid-drift, and short skirts.

We didn't see the film.

Dave Winer on Twitter Sunday:

BTW, it's lame to change your location to Tehran and your timezone to GMT +3.30. Instead, our friends at twitter.com should detect and block about 13 hours ago from web

It should be against the terms of service to use the Twitter API to persecute and kill users. Yes? about 12 hours ago from web

There's a lot of cringe-inducing commentary coming from American bloggers and twitterers about the situation in Iran. Although most of it is well-intentioned, the massive outbreak of overnight expertise reminds me of warbloggers lining up Muslim countries for the U.S. to bomb in the days after 9/11.

Who knew there were thousands of people who could speak with authority on the complex internal politics of an anti-American Islamic theocracy halfway around the globe? Take that, Juan Cole! You may have a master's degree in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, but I reloaded Andrew Sullivan's blog 150 times on Saturday alone. And I stayed at a Holiday Inn last night.

The situation in Iran also has sparked numerous calls for symbolic gestures like turning your web site green or switching your Twitter timezone to GMT +3:30 and your location to Tehran, thus making it harder for Iranian authorities to find and crack down on real Iranian protesters using the service.

I love Winer's suggestion that the Twitter API be amended to forbid its use to "persecute and kill users."

If the Iranian regime decides to hunt down its own citizens for participating in Twitter during the election unrest, I'm not convinced that it could be stopped by a terms of service agreement.

You may not know this, but there's a fourth Jonas Brother -- a ginormous bald black guy named Big Rob who comes out occasionally to supplement their musical caterwauling with rap.

Until I found a blog entry by Rickey Laurentiis, I was not aware that Big Rob was an attempt to establish white supremacy in an unsuspecting audience of tween girls:

I've seen them around, figuratively, on the covers of magazines and on the TV, but I didn't really take notice until So You Think You Can Dance final where they performed. I was bored, to say the least, until this big, black guy came jumping onto the stage like the Koolaid Man. He appeared to be some sort of hype man ... rapping or whatever. I didn't really listen after the first few minutes. I was nauseated.

I just couldn't help but think about the (national) image of black men as soon as he -- I've learned his name is Big Rob and he's the brothers' body guard -- appeared. I mean, historically and presently. The black man as monster, brute, murderous; the black man as mandigo, rapist, oversexed animal; gross, perverse. Perhaps, perhaps I'm overreacting (but, sorry, I'm not white so I don't have the privilege not to think of these things), but when I see Big Rob flanked by the three other Jonas Brothers, I can't help but to see a very strategic move:

Big Rob is mostly obviously Other. On that stage, in that audience. His skin, bald head and not mention very large, tall size completely otherize him. In turn, as the surrogate "what is that?", The Jonas Brothers, their whiteness, is cemented, so to speak.

When I saw the Jonas Brothers perform on the broadcast of the Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving game last fall, I noticed there was something different about Big Rob too. I think he's adopted.