Landmark Court Ruling Orders Apple To Pay $700,000 For Blogger's Legal Fees
January 30, 2007 4:55 p.m. EST
Julie Farby - All Headline News Staff Writer

Santa Clara, CA (AHN)-In a landmark ruling in favor of bloggers and cyber journalists, a Santa Clara County Court defended the First Amendment rights of online journalists to protect their confidential sources, effectively giving web journalists the same protections afforded to traditional print journalists. [...]

The ruling was hailed by web journalists and EFF staff members as a legal victory in the battle to defend and protect the rights of online journalists.

Kasper Jade, publisher of AppleInsider.com, one of the defendants in the case, said, "The court's ruling is a victory for journalists of all mediums and a tremendous blow to those firms that believe their stature affords them the right to silence the media. Hopefully, Apple will think twice the next time it considers a campaign to bully the little guy into submission."
[allheadlinenews]

###

How exactly do people tolerate this sort of garbage?

Mr. Biden is equally skeptical—albeit in a slightly more backhanded way—about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

NY Observer]


###

So uber intellectual John Kerry has announced that he out of the running in the 2008 presidential election.

How nice of the senator to enlighten the lesser beings with a glimpse of the stunningly obvious. John's out? I can't recall him ever being in it actually, but maybe that's just being overly nuanced.

Come on John. It seems more than a little likely that the missus told you that, "No, you will not be playing that game and putting me through that embarrassment again."
It seems written on the face of the senator every time he opens his mouth, whether insulting his nation or her military.

"So we have a crisis of confidence in the Middle East - in the world, really. I've never seen our country as isolated, as much as a sort of international pariah for a number of reasons as it is today."

Kerry, who voted against funding the war in Iraq (before voting for it!) and who has said that he would have voted for the Iraq war resolution even if he had known that no weapons would be found has now decided that he is going to dedicate his time (aside from regurgitating his lines from 30 years ago) "to organize grassroots opposition to the war in Iraq."

What a clown and his continued clown act stateside and abroad should make all of the hyper intellectuals that supported him previously as disgusted as those that did not.

transmission at 2:59 AM | Permalink

Mark Steyn - [chicago sun-times]

The problem isn't that our politics is ''bitter'' and ''partisan,'' so much as that it's post-modern. In Congress, Democrats have decided to chip away at the war with various symbolic postures but not to oppose it outright: That way, if things go well, they can muscle in on the credit, but if things go badly, they'll be able to say they told you so without getting stuck with the blame.

Over on the other side, the usual Republican squishes (Olympia Snowe et al.) have decided that ''the facts on the ground'' have mysteriously changed and their position on the war is now ''evolving.'' By ''the facts on the ground,'' they mean the ground around the polling booths back home rather than any ground in Baghdad or the Sunni Triangle.

Somewhere far away there is a real country called Iraq where real people live and die. But Iraq in domestic terms is now mostly a political calculation and, when it comes to calibrating the precise degree of Defeat Lite that works best for one, most Democrats and more and more Republicans are pushing the rest of the planet to the farthest fringes of the map.


###

Christopher Hitchens on Mark Steyn’s book, America Alone.
[cityjournal]

transmission at 2:59 AM | Permalink

From the Classroom to the War
Victor Davis Hanson
January 8, 2007

Cry the Once Beloved University

What are we to make of this increasingly corrupt institution, whose health is so necessary to the welfare and competitiveness of the United States? It brags that American higher education is the strongest on the globe, but that is largely true only because of the non-political and still untainted hard sciences, engineering, and informational and computer sciences—and despite the humanities, particularly literature, philosophy, and history that have become increasingly ideological and theoretical.

[...]

We should at least insist on a little accountability from this increasingly medieval institution. After teaching some twenty years in the university and writing about its endemic problems, I keep asking myself the same questions.

Why? Why? Why?

[...]

Why when academia is so critical of other American institutions, from the Republican party and corporations to churches and the military, does it ignore its own colossal failures?

The level of knowledge of the today’s graduate is the stuff of jokes, exactly what one would expect once a common shared instruction in science, history, literature, languages, and mathematics largely disappeared, replaced by a General Education potpourri of specialized classes in gender, race, class, and politics masquerading as knowledge-based?

[...]

What a weird sick world. The more globalized we become, the more we make the fallacy that the resulting world village is Carmel rather than Tombstone. The latest absurdity is the daughter of the mass-murdering Saddam Hussein complaining to the British Daily Mail that she couldn’t call daddy one last time. Not much worry about how she got her millions or where she was when Pop was gassing the Kurds.

Indeed, the entire Western hysteria over the uncouth hanging of Saddam revealed more about pious intellectuals than it did abstract notions of justice. All executions are messy. Prisoners and guards banter all the time. That an Iraqi hanging was far cruder than our own lethal injections is to be regretted—but expected. In the end, one’s qualms about how exactly Saddam went into Hell depends to some degree on which end of his wood-chipper you were likely to end up on.
[read more]

transmission at 2:58 AM | Permalink