Joe Daugherty waxes poetic about the Pocket Disc, a 4-inch vinyl record format that didn't catch on in the '60s. Their slogan: "Carry them in your pocket -- they won't scratch."

Music · 2004/12/14 · Comment · Link

Deliver Us From Sean Hannity

Caught a minute of Sean Hannity's radio show last night, and it was enough time to break my brain. He claimed that this newspaper item on Jimmy Carter demonstrates that the former president is a limousine liberal:

As one of the most prolific authors ever to sit in the Oval Office, former President Jimmy Carter knows how to sell books. As he hawks his 19th, Sharing Good Times, Carter reveals his secret to reaching the bestseller list: Pitch buyers at discount warehouses. "Sam's Club and Costco," he says, "have a vast array of customers. So they're very valuable assets." Carter, who favors Costco for West Coast book signings and Sam's in the East, says the warehouses draw a different audience than do bookstores. "Barnes & Noble people go there almost by definition to buy books," he says, "where at Sam's they come in to buy different items ... and as an aside a lot of them just come by and buy one of my books because they announce on the loudspeaker system that I'm there signing books." The customers are "not sophisticates," though he adds, "Anybody who buys my books is a good person."

I read that as a funny example of Carter's self-effacing humility -- he thinks people only show up at his signings because they're already there to buy 80-roll packs of Charmin toilet paper.

The evil simpleton of the airwaves, Hannity said that it shows liberals like Carter fly on private planes and have people make their peanut butter sandwiches for them, looking down their noses at people in the middle class "like us."

Hannity charges $100,000 a speech and requires private planes to get him there.

Carter makes free speeches or donates the fee to the Carter Center charity. He lives in a modest house in Plains, Georgia, that he's owned for decades, according to a 1999 Money magazine article, and refuses to cash out on his presidency by joining corporate boards:

John Moores, who owns the San Diego Padres and sits on the board of the Carter Center, says, "I couldn't possibly live the way he does. ... He is as insensitive to material goods as anyone I've ever met."

Publishing · Politics · 2004/12/14 · 10 COMMENTS · Link

AIDS Conspiracist Takes the Prize

The Nobel Foundation gave the yearly Peace Prize today to a Kenyan environmental activist who believes that the HIV virus is a biological weapon created to kill blacks.

Wangari Maathai, honored for a long career of empowering women highlighted by a movement that planted 30 million trees, made the claim to an AIDS workshop in Nyeri, Kenya, Aug. 30, according to the East African Standard:

AIDS is not a curse from God to Africans or the black people. It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists.

Though Maathai now claims she was taken out of context, she reiterated the belief in a press conference on Oct. 9, the day after news broke she would win the prize:

Us black people are dying more than any other people in this planet. ... it is created by a scientist for biological warfare."

Politics · 2004/12/10 · Comment · Link

The magazine eWeek broke a huge tech story that got lost over Thanksgiving: Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen of the Free Software Foundation are working on the first new version of the GNU Public License in 13 years.

The changes planned for the next release, Version 3, a draft of which is due next year, focus on several broad topics that reflect the dynamic change in the software industry since the early 1990s—intellectual property licensing and patent issues, the question of how to deal with software used over a network, and concerns around trusted computing.

Linux · 2004/12/09 · Comment · Link

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 · 94 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

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