Category: Uncategorized

First as tragedy … then as more tragedy

I’m reading Fred Kaplan by way of Josh Marshall on the Bush administration’s encouraging Georgia to stick its finger in Russia’s eye in recent years, only to find itself powerless to help now that Vladimir Putin has decided he’s had enough. (Not that that’s stopped the bellicose rhetoric emanating from the White House and the McCain campaign.)

It reminds me of President Bush’s father, who encouraged the Shiites in the southern part of Iraq to rise up against Saddam Hussein in 1991, only to stand by as they were slaughtered.

What’s happening now is a tragedy, but at least Russia isn’t Iraq. And Putin isn’t Saddam. This isn’t our fight, and it’s a shame we led the Georgians to think we would do more than we could. It’s a mistake we’ve made over and over again. (Hungary in 1956, anyone?)

Template quirk

A reader pointed out an odd quirk with the new design — if you narrow the window too much, the right-hand column slides off and disappears to the bottom. My correspondent said the problem appeared to be with Firefox for Windows 2.0.0.16, and he didn’t mention the window width. But I’ve been able to reproduce the problem with the Mac version of Firefox and Safari.

Ideally, the window would hold steady as you narrow it, as it does with the site I recently put together for our church using WordPress.com. If you narrow the window there, you’ll see that the page holds steady.

I don’t know what to do about this; it must be inherent in the template, and not amenable to a quick CSS tweak. All the more reason to think that, someday, Media Nation will move to WordPress.com.

It’s been an interesting day — Blogger’s been more up than down, and both my Gmail and Northeastern e-mail accounts have been acting up. So there you have it.

Fixed. Again, thanks to Steve. By the time we’re done, he ought to be able to sell a modified version of this template.

Sorry, Charlie — no free speech for you

Charles Evans Hughes forgot something when he wrote the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Near v. Minnesota decision in 1931.

The chief justice listed national security, obscenity and the imminent threat of violence as essentially the only three reasons that the courts could ever step in and order someone not to exercise his right to free speech. What he left out: information that could result in the MBTA’s losing some fare money. What a bonehead, eh?

Boston Globe reporter John Guilfoil (a former student of mine, by the way) wrote yesterday that U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock had granted the T’s request for an injunction preventing three MIT students from presenting their findings on security defects in the Charlie Card, the T’s electronic ticketing system. They had been scheduled to speak at the DEFCON 16 conference in Las Vegas.

For good measure, the T is suing MIT, too, for the grave offense of not teaching its students how to be good, Charlie Card-paying citizens.

In today’s Boston Herald, O’Ryan Johnson reports that one of the students is saying the trio offered to show MBTA officials their findings so they could fix their flawed system. Instead, the T decided to sue them.

For those of you with long memories, you may recall that Judge Woodlock is a piece of work. During the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Woodlock ruled that a cage set up by officials for the use of protesters was “an offense to the spirit of the First Amendment” — but then declined to do anything about it. He’s not big on newspaper boxes, either.

In 2005, Woodlock was the proud winner of a Boston Phoenix Muzzle Award for his outrages against free speech. It looks like he’s well on his way to a second statuette.

This story had gone nationwide — heck, worldwide — even before the Globe and the Herald got hold of it, as Universal Hub showed on Saturday. This will not end well for Woodlock. In the meantime, though, he’s created an unnecessary hassle for everyone concerned, and emboldened the T, which — wouldn’t you know — won a Muzzle in 2006.

Photo (cc) by David Bruce and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Kurtz on why the media choked

Everyone is writing thumb-sucker pieces on John Edwards and the media. But I think Howard Kurtz perfectly nails how and why the media failed by giving him a months-long pass on news of his affair with Rielle Hunter:

The fact that big newspapers, magazines and networks have standards — that is, they refuse to print every stray rumor just because it’s “out there” — is one of their strengths. But in the latter stages of this case, it made them look clueless. Perhaps there is a middle ground where media outlets can report on a burgeoning controversy without vouching for the underlying allegations, being candid with readers and viewers about what they know and don’t know.

In the end, the much-derided MSM were superfluous, their monopoly a faded memory. People have hundreds of ways to obtain information in today’s instantaneous media culture, and are capable of reaching their own conclusions about what is reliable and what is not.

Kurtz also quotes chief Edwards inquisitor Mickey Kaus as saying that the chief reason the reporters laid off was out of solicitude for Elizabeth Edwards. But, as Kaus wrote, “If a politician whose chief appeal is his self-advertised loyalty to his brave, ill wife cheats on his brave ill wife, what’s he good for again?”

Follow the money

The media shouldn’t give John Edwards a pass just because his political career appears to be over. A New York Times story today summarizes a number of loose ends over his affair with Rielle Hunter. Here are some questions:

  • Edwards says he’s willing to take a paternity test, but Hunter has refused. Why? To put it another way: Who benefits from her refusal? And what would she risk if she said “yes”?
  • If Edwards’ friend Andrew Young really is the father, why isn’t his name on the birth certificate? Why has he made what the Times calls “conflicting statements” about his paternity?
  • Why would Fred Baron throw his own money at both Young and Hunter to help them get out of Dodge? Yes, he’s described as a wealthy Edwards supporter, but doesn’t that seem like a bit much? Again, to put it another way: Was it really his own money? His personal wealth is the perfect cover, is it not?
  • Baron has already been pushed into denying that the money came from Edwards’ campaign funds. OK, but that is the question, isn’t it?

The counter-argument is that the media should leave Edwards alone now that he’s no longer in public life. What good could come of turning over rocks and watching to see what crawls out?

My answer is that the media couldn’t have anticipated the effects of their decision last fall to cover up evidence of Edwards’ affair with Hunter. As I argued yesterday, that decision may have changed the outcome of the presidential race.

Let the rock-turning commence.

Calling all code warriors

Now that I’ve got a template I like, I was wondering if anyone out there in Media Nation could help me with a small tweak. I would like to change the template so that content in the center well doesn’t actually touch the line separating it from the right-hand column. I want a margin of a few pixels on the right, matching the margin on the left. (You can really see what I mean in my second Dylan post.)

The template I’m using is called Sand Dollar, and you’ll find it here.

Sunday morning update: Problem solved. Thanks, Steve. And thanks to Jess as well.