Everyone Who Uses Must Converge

Last March, Ashley Smith was taken hostage by Brian Nichols after he shot a judge and three other people to death escaping an Atlanta courthouse. During a seven-hour ordeal, she read to him from the Bible and The Purpose-Driven Life. He eventually let the 27-year-old woman leave and tell the police his whereabouts, surrendering peacefully.

Wall Street Journal pundit Peggy Noonan was deeply moved by the incident:

Ashley Smith and Brian Nichols were together for seven hours. This is Nichols's mug shot. This is Nichols's face after he gave himself up to police Saturday.

Something changed.

Something happened. ...

It is an amazing and beautiful story. And for all its unlikeliness you know it happened as Smith said. You know she told the truth. It's funny how we all know this.

Something did happen. Smith revealed a secret in her new memoir that she kept from police, the press, and Peggy -- during the ordeal, she gave Nichols some of her crystal meth:

... as the night wore on -- after Nichols had snorted some of Smith's meth -- she tried to win Nichols' trust by talking about her faith in God and relating to him her personal stories. ...

She writes that she asked Nichols if he wanted to see the danger of drugs and lifted up her tank top several inches to reveal a five-inch scar down the center of her torso -- the aftermath of a car wreck caused by drug-induced psychosis. She says she let go of the steering wheel when she heard a voice saying, "Let go and let God."

In the short term, crystal meth brings reduced fatigue and a deep feeling of well-being, intelligence and power. (In the long term, not so much).

Noonan found in Nichols' transformation a redemptive Easter miracle:

This is all quite a mystery, too big to be understood, too beautiful to be ignored.

I just feel like bowing to everyone, all the victims and all the survivors, the good judge, the good guards, the good woman, the reporters, all of whom became part of something big and without borders. The only lesson is love. I feel certain this is true.

Oops.

Update: Lee Siegel, a critic for the New Republic, questioned Smith's story from the beginning, faulting the broadcast media for spinning a fable that omitted her criminal record, the circumstances of her husband's murder and the reason she lost custody of her child.

Politics · Journalism · 2005/10/05 · 13 COMMENTS · Link

$500,000 for a Flying Fish

There may be no fat left in the federal budget, if you believe the assessment of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, but there's a lot of protein and Omega 3 fatty acids.

A non-profit in Alaska led by a Republican Congressman's son spent $500,000 in federal funds to paint an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-400 like a salmon, according to the Anchorage Daily News.

A team of 30 painters and airbrush artists used more than 140 gallons of paint and took 24 days to render the lifelike chinook -- triple the time normally needed to coat an airliner.

"There's no question, at least in my mind, that this is the finest airline art ever conceived," said Bill MacKay, the company's Anchorage-based senior vice president. "People will just be amazed at the detail."

The fishy expenditure comes from the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board, whose chairman Ben Stevens was spawned by U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens. The board received $29 million in federal funding to promote Alaskan seafood.

Politics · 2005/10/05 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Bill Bennett's Reproducible Error

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post responds to Bill Bennett's on-air musing about blacks and abortion:

He should know enough history to understand why black Americans would react strongly when whites start imagining experiments to limit black reproduction. For hundreds of years, this country was obsessed with the supposed menace of black sexuality and fertility. Bennett's remarks have to make you wonder whether that obsession has really vanished or just been deemed off-limits in polite discourse.

Bennett quit his job as chairman of the board of the educational curriculum company K12 this weekend, claiming to be the victim of a "coordinated campaign willfully distorting my views, my record, and my statements."

I spoke to a producer of the Ed Schultz radio show yesterday who told me exactly how this vast left-wing conspiracy began. Schultz heard Bennett's show while driving, couldn't believe his ears, and asked his producer to see if Media Matters had the audio.

Media Matters ran the audio, dozens of bloggers picked it up, and the media followed the story.

Bennett probably could have aborted this controversy with an apology, but humility must be missing from his book of virtues:

A thought experiment about public policy, on national radio, should not have received the condemnations it has. Anyone paying attention to this debate should be offended by those who have selectively quoted me, distorted my meaning, and taken out of context the dialogue I engaged in this week. Such distortions from 'leaders' of organizations and parties is a disgrace not only to the organizations and institutions they serve, but to the First Amendment.

Why do people always wrap themselves in the First Amendment when their words get them into trouble? I'm not clear on how criticizing Bennett is any less an expression of free speech than his expressed belief that blacks are more prone to criminality.

Radio · Politics · 2005/10/04 · 37 COMMENTS · Link

This post on The Corner, the weblog of contributors to the conservative magazine National Review, sums up how the Harriet Miers pick is going over with the right wing:

I am actually hoping there are no more vacancies during this presidency.

ConfirmThem appears to be considering a name change.

Politics · 2005/10/03 · 1 COMMENT · Link

A story on the 10th anniversary of the O.J. Simpson verdict notes his recent plans:

Last year, on the 10th anniversary of the murders, he told Fox News that he was about to re-enter public life with a TV show in which he would pull practical jokes on unsuspecting victims. On a scale of one to 10, "it's 7 or 8 that it's gonna happen," he said. It never happened.

I haven't seen much reality TV since Married by America perfected the form, but I'd watch an alleged double murderer being sprung on unsuspecting prank victims. O.J. would be the new Allen Funt, who had to go off-camera towards the end of his Candid Camera days because he was scaring the hell out of people.

If Juic'd became a hit, think of the copycats it would spawn: Kobe Bryant runs a rape crisis hotline! Roman Polanski teaches junior high girl's soccer! John Bolton serves as U.N. ambassador!

Television · 2005/10/03 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Don't Fall for Scamazon.Com

Considering the sophistication of the scam e-mails that I've been receiving lately, there must be a huge black market in phishing, the practice of tricking people into revealing their passwords from ecommerce sites and banks.

A phony Amazon.Com e-mail I received last night is pretty convincing:

Dear Amazon member,

Due to concerns we have for the safety and integrity of the Amazon community we have issued this warning.

Per the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning, temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or us. We may also take these actions if we are unable to verify or authenticate any information you provide to us.

Please follow the link below:

[link removed]

and update your account information.

We apreciate your support and understanding, as we work together to keep Amazon market a safe place to trade.

Thank you for your attention on this serious matter.

Regards,
Amazon Safety Department

NOTE: This message was sent to you by an automated e-mail system. Please don't reply to it. Amazon treats your personal information with the utmost care, and our Privacy Policy is designed to protect you and your information.

The link had the Chinese hostname www.amazon.com.encrypted-inquiry.cn, which resolves to an IP address in Germany. Yesterday, a net abuse monitor reported on Usenet that it had a different IP address in Thailand. The site looks exactly like Amazon.Com and asks for your username, password and credit card information.

Never respond to an e-mail asking for your account or credit card information, no matter how official it looks. These are always scams, run professionally by criminals who will rapidly hit your accounts for everything they can get and are unlikely to ever be caught. Most operate outside the U.S., as this globe-trotting Chinese/German/Thai effort demonstrates.

Considering the importance of ecommerce, browser users need more help detecting these scams. I could tell that the host encrypted-inquiry.cn was suspicious because I am a domain name geek, and Amazon.Com would never use a host in China for American customers. A Microsoft program manager was not so lucky, falling for a similar e-mail because he had just ordered from Amazon.

The server monitoring company Netcraft offers a free Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox toolbar that warns users of known phishing sites, providing hosting information about each site you visit. When I installed it this morning, it already had the Amazon scam attempt in its database, alerting me not to visit before I loaded the page.

The toolbar displays detailed information about each site, revealing where it's hosted, what company controls the IP address, and how long it has been online. Toolbar links open detailed reports on each site.

Security · Publishing · 2005/10/02 · 13 COMMENTS · Link

This is Anna Badkhen

The most compelling stories from a newspaper reporter in Iraq are being penned by Anna Badkhen, a 29-year-old foreign correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. She frequently writes stories that bring first-hand accounts from frontline soldiers home, such as her article this morning of a Marine platoon outside Sada, a town near the Syrian border that's one of five controlled by insurgents:

The mortar rounds hit in the early morning. The first one, a harbinger of the assault to come, whooshed up from the sleepy border town of Sada at around 5:30 a.m. Friday, landing in a burst of sparks several hundred yards short of the sandstone cliffs where U.S. Marines were camped out.

The shell's trajectory left a momentary orange trace in the predawn sky, but the impact was almost inaudible, and most of the Marines slept right through it, wrapped in their sleeping bags in the foxholes they had dug in the hard-packed desert dust.

The second round landed closer ...

Badkhen has a novelist's ear for dialogue, relating Thursday how desert-encamped Marines make their beds:

"It's like digging a grave," he says. "I'll lay in my little grave, I'll put my sleeping bag on top of me, and I'll be warm. I've found out that the deeper you dig, the warmer it gets."

"Last time we were out," he continued, "the first day, I dug like a champion. The second day, I didn't dig deep enough, and I was cold."

The Chronicle thinks so much of Badkhen's work that it sent her from one warzone to another, assigning her to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Badkhen, who publishes an online journal for the paper, described herself as anti-war in a 2003 interview. Before bias monitors make too much of that, it appears to be an apolitical expression of sympathy for civilians caught in a warzone:

I don't like wars. I think wars are bad. I see a lot of people suffer ... If one government doesn't like the other government and they go to war, or if one regime doesn't like the separatists, and they go to war, then the people who suffer are not just the government and the separatists. The people who suffer are the people in between, just people who are living their lives. I'm on their side.

Another blogger has discovered Badkhen, complimenting her ability to note things that "snottier, glitzier reporters don't."

The more I read of her work, the more it feels like the next Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

Politics · Journalism · 2005/10/01 · 14 COMMENTS · Link

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