Al Franken signed a two-year extension with Air America Radio, putting him on the network through 2006.

I listen to his show often on XM Radio. Some of the comedy is forced -- no one drills a humorous premise into the ground deeper than a Saturday Night Live writer -- but I can't pass up the chance to hear genuine liberal voices on the air like Paul Krugman, David Sirota, Amy Sullivan, and Joe Conason.

I wish I could find a clip of Franken's phone interview Monday with weblogger Chris Bowers, publisher of MyDD. When a space heater in Bowers' house kept making a sickly humming sound, Franken and co-host Katherine Lanpher became convinced that Bowers had a person trussed up and gagged, moaning like the Gimp in Pulp Fiction.

Politics · 2004/12/08 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Bush's Military Jacket a Dud

President Bush's handlers created a military jacket, complete with epaulets, a presidential seal, and an embroidered "Commander in Chief" nametag, that he could wear during a speech to Marines today at Camp Pendleton in California.

By appearing in military garb, most notoriously for the "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier landing in 2003, Bush has broken a long-standing presidential tradition, according to Dana Milbank of the Washington Post:

... the experts I checked with said it is unlikely any president had done that since Teddy Roosevelt, and that was before such images would be broadcast into millions of homes. Even true military figures, such as Eisenhower, avoided wearing uniform as president.

President Eisenhower, who as an Army general had led four million troops in the invasion of France during World War II, was concerned that such attire would be contrary to the constitutional principle of civilian control of the military.

Update: Glenn Reynolds weighs in with a link to Clinton looking goofy in his own commander-in-chief jacket back in 1996.

Though I'm a yellow-dog Democrat, Reynolds himself suggested after the flight-suit photo op that a sartorial line was being crossed. He even used Ike to make his point:

... when Eisenhower was President, he made it very clear that he was an ex-General. ... It's the blurring of the lines that bothers me here. The President is the civilian commander-in-chief of the military, not a part of the military himself.

Politics · 2004/12/07 · 95 COMMENTS · Link

David Brock, founder of the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America, has written a letter urging Creators Syndicate to dump Samuel Francis, the columnist who condemned interracial relationships as abnormal and immoral:

We strongly condemn the clear bigotry in this column and assume that newspaper editors across the country feel the same way, as a search of newspapers available on Nexis revealed that none have chosen to run the column. Regardless, Creators' willingness to distribute such abhorrent views calls into question the syndicate's ethical and editorial standards.

Journalism · Politics · 2004/12/07 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Absinthe: Don't End Up in the Drink

I rejected an ad submitted to one of my sites from a British company selling absinthe, the notorious hallucinogenic liquor that's coming back into fashion with the repeal of its prohibition in several European countries.

Absinthe containing thujone cannot be legally sold or imported into the U.S. The FAQ from the seller's site was not particularly reassuring on this point:

... don't worry; we don't think the Feds will shoot a stun grenade through your window for placing a little online order. They're too busy looking for Osama and Saddam.

A Google search for the term absinthe appears to show that the company isn't accepting ads for the product.

2004/12/06 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

You Can't Handle the Knuth

As an unabashedly liberal computer geek, I've grown accustomed to feeling outnumbered politically among the "cognitive elite," Eric S. Raymond's onanistic term for our tribe, since BBSing in the early '80s. You could find more libertarians among that crowd than liberals; I'm not surprised that the Libertarian Party presidential nominee this year is a programmer.

For this reason, it's unpleasant but not unexpected to discover that a technologist I admire, most recently Jeremy Bowers, believes that my kind would be happier in Europe, are invested in losing the Iraq War, and consider Republicans to be our subhuman enemies. (Jeremy: You left off the part where we want to sell your guns to Iraqi insurgents to fund partial-birth abortions for evangelical teens.)

A page discovered this morning balances the scales. We may have lost Bowers, but we've got Donald Knuth:

Fundamentally I don't see how the government of my country has done anything whatsoever to address and correct the root causes of international terrorism. Quite the contrary; every action I can see seems almost designed to have the opposite effect --- as if orchestrated to maximize the finances of those who make armaments, by maximizing the number of people who now hate me personally for actions that I do not personally condone. How can I be a proud citizen of a country that unilaterally pulls out of widely accepted treaties, that refuses to accept a world court, that flouts fair trade with shameful policies regarding steel and agriculture, and that almost blindly supports Israel's increasingly unjustifiable occupation?

Publishing · Politics · 2004/12/06 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Are You Ready for Some Race Mixing?

Samuel Francis, a newspaper columnist distributed by Creators Syndicate, believes the Terrell Owens/Nicolette Sheridan skit on Monday Night Football was an insidious effort to promote interracial sex:

If only morals and taste had been the targets, the producers could easily have found white actresses who are less obviously Nordic than the golden-locked Sheridan, but Nordic is what the ad's producers no doubt wanted. For that matter, if you only wanted to take a swipe at morals and taste, you could find a black woman to rip her towel off or replace Owens with a famous white athlete (there are still a few).

But that wasn't the point, was it? The point was not just to hurl a pie in the face of morals and good taste, but also of white racial and cultural identity. The message of the ad was that white women are eager to have sex with black men, that they should be eager and that black men should take them up on it.

... the ad's message also was that interracial sex is normal and legitimate, a fairly radical concept for both the dominant media as well as its audience. Nevertheless, for decades, interracial couples of different sexes have been sneaked into advertising, movies and television series, and almost certainly not because of popular demand from either race. The Owens-Sheridan match is only the most notorious to date.

There are 1.1 million interracial marriages in the U.S., by the most recent U.S. Census. I wasn't aware that the normality of these relationships was still an unsettled question in the mainstream press.

Surely there can't be another syndicated columnist in the U.S. fulminating publicly against race mixing. I don't know whether to applaud Creators Syndicate for publishing such an offensive commentator or picket their offices.

Sports · Publishing · Politics · Journalism · 2004/12/04 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Before you install MT-Workbench to close old Movable Type entries to feedback, take a look at Conversation Killer, the plug-in I wish I knew about before I did all of that coding.

Movable Type · 2004/12/04 · Comment · Link

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