News of the World

The President is giving a speech about Iraq shortly, but instead of listening to his tired and delusional reasoning for endangering the lives of men and women who could and should be looking after a few of the other messes we've created in the last four years(Afghanistan, anyone?), I'm going to have a drink. In case you don't feel like watching either, Daily Kos has a link to some excerpts released earlier today. It's the same old same old, so let's look at a couple of things we should be paying more attention to:

1. Robert Novak roams free while Judy Miller and Matt Cooper are gearing up for prison life. I don't care how many times it's been said before, this is a gross miscarriage of justice. Robert Novak committed Treason when he named Valerie Plame as a CIA agent-it's not exaclty rocket science-and he's being protected by some demonic force, and the government just struck a huge blow to journalistic freedom. Judith Miller is a bad journalist-that's not rocket science either-but she didn't even write an article using the information she received from her source. The New York Times was right in their editorial. However, they were wrong about

2. This Supreme Court Decision. Yes, internet piracy is bad. Theft is wrong. But. I think the Times is wrong support the Court's hairsplitting on what new technologies can and can't do. I'm not an expert on this(start reading Larry Lessig's blog for that-right now), but the public domain is shrinking, and if you've ever read the license agreements you have to agree to before using software(again, if you don't, start now-scary), you know that corporations already exercise enormous power over what normal people can and can't do with content. The internet is still developing, even if the "tech bubble" has long since burst, and the conglomerate interests have done a pretty good job making sure they control what we see and how we use things we purchase(Lessig's book Free Culture covers e-books and other such things and how awful it is that we don't have control over content we own). Could it be the New York Times is still sore over losing this lawsuit?

3. John Tierney is still a dipshit. What kind of permits do you need for scalping?

4. Finally, Poland wants us to remember them, but in a slightly different way than GW wants us to. They want to bring harmony to the EU. Who would ever be afraid of a Polish plumber who looks like that? He looks more likely to listen to the Pet Shop Boys' version of "Go West" than actually go West. I don't think it's fair to make fun of the whole country for not being influential enough to pull of a compromise. Just because Italian monastaries are prettier than Soviet-style panelacki...