Inherently evident

With Cindy Sheehan working three shifts as an activist, there probably isn't enough time in the day to, you know, write stuff. Consider Cindy Sheehan: Commas for Profit, a recent guest contribution at Buzzflash.com.

Halfway through the piece, the Anti-war Mom is in character: Simple words, short sentences, and feel-good sentiments:

Casey was three dimensional and had hopes and dreams. He wanted to finish college and teach elementary school. He wanted to marry and have babies. I wanted him to marry and have babies. I wanted to hold his children and spoil them and love them like a grandmother should.

All believably Sheehan, but only four graphs later, she has stopped moving her lips as she types and gone to graduate school. Is this "Cindy" the same person? You decide (emphasis mine):

I am sorry that the leader of our once great nation is so callous towards the people whose lives he has destroyed. If one agrees with President Chavez of Venezuela, or not, it is inherently evident in our country and the world that we should agree with him when he says democracy is not imposed by "bombs and Marines." Democracy rises from the people. Great Britain did not go to war with our forebears to impose democracy, but to stop it.

One writer per piece, luv, and go easy on the drag-and-drop. I'm just here to help.

Another banner day for Egyptian tourism

The same media hypocrites who pillory Pat Robertson for his every fifth utterance won’t report on stuff like this. Ever.

An excerpt from MEMRITV: Egyptian Cleric Explains Fatwa Sanctioning Killing of Israelis Visiting Egypt:

Mona Shazli, Presenter: Sheikh Safwat Higazi is one of the most well-known people to appear on TV who talks about religious matters and fatwas. He is one of the most well-known preachers, and he has a show on Al-Nas TV.

[...]

He said, among other things, that if he saw an Israeli on the street, in Egypt, he would kill him. This may give the impression of being a fatwa to kill any Israeli Jew walking down the street.

[...]

Safwat Higazi: I did not call upon people to kill Israelis in the streets. I never said such a thing.

[...]

When I said what I said, I was dreaming a beautiful dream, which I hope will come true, and that we all agree upon it. I dreamt that we are the Arab Islamic States, not just Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine. I was truly dreaming that we are the Arab Islamic States. Get a map of the Arab homeland, and erase the borders... Or maybe these can be borders between counties or states, like the USA, in which 49 [sic] states were united into one country. I had a dream that we were one country, called the Arab Islamic States. The capital of this country is Egypt, and the president of Egypt and its government head this country. This is the dream I dreamed.

Predictably, the backtracking goes on like this for a while. Read the whole thing.

Wine in a Can

Let’s face it: White wine in a can isn’t a good idea. But is having a recent DUI arrestee promoting it any better?

From ANSA:

Producers and fans of Italian Prosecco are up in arms over plans by an Austrian company to market the sparkling white wine in a can.

The wine in a can is called Rich Prosecco and American heiress and jetsetter Paris Hilton has been hired to be the product's pitch girl.

Makers of quality Prosecco, which is produced in the northeast zones of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, are very worried that the reputation of their wine will suffer from the marketing of an inferior product.

This should set back efforts to take Valdobbiadene upmarket by, oh, a century. Red Bull should also be worried.

And in the red trunks, weighing in at 106 pounds…

The fight is on for the ACLU – or at least the name and donor lists. A dissident group of “longtime ACLU loyalists– members, donors, supporters and activists, including former staff and members of the national or affiliate boards” has launched savetheaclu.org.

From the group’s mission statement:

We applaud the ACLU’s recent fundraising successes, but they cannot compensate for or justify persistent breaches of principle or the abandonment of honesty when those breaches are revealed. The ACLU now stands exposed, and widely ridiculed, for repeatedly acting in contempt of its own core principles, and for chilling and even attempting to prohibit dissent within its own ranks.

Over the past three years, these breaches of principle include the ACLU’s approval of grant agreements that restrict speech and associational rights; efforts by management to impose gag rules on staff and to subject staff to email surveillance; a proposal to bar ACLU board members from publicly criticizing the ACLU; and informal campaigns to purge the ACLU of its internal critics.

All of these breaches, as well as others, violate the ACLU’s historic commitment to free speech. We take little comfort from the fact that some were reversed after bad publicity and donor complaints.

We’ll find out whether these guys can feed the leadership’s bunker mentality and prompt even greater backlashes. Pass the popcorn.

Hat tip: Stoptheaclu.com

Hugo, Put Down the Crack Pipe

When Charlie Rangel took exception at Hugo Chavez talking smack in his district, pundits were shocked. Aren’t Democrats supposed to titter at the lame sulfur jokes? Be frozen by the prospect of chiding their enemy’s enemy? Well, I’m shocked that they’re shocked.

It was the smart move for Rangel all along. He noticed the growing silence and figured the man-bites-dog aspect of the story would net a Democrat airtime aplenty.

With a safe seat and the possibility of being the next Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, where’s the downside for a man who just last year called Bill Clinton a redneck?

He can take any intra-party heat. Most of his spineless wonder colleagues should be ashamed.

Wikipedia as Linguistics Resource

Companies performing automatic text analysis can gain insights from blogs and message boards, but can't understand neologisms that don’t appear in semantic lexicons.

According to NewScientistTech, a program called Zeitgeist could help when the going gets colloquial. To understand a new word like, say, "megamercial" or "hypertasker," it searches Wikipedia and can make guesses about intention when a good enough definition cannot be determined.

It's no cordless extension cord, but pretty cool all the same.

Faithful Democrats

In a 1993 rant to the Christian Coalition, DNC Chairman (and Clinton’s 1992 campaign manager) David Wilhelm claimed that “God is an Independent” and rebuked the group for, among other sins, not backing socialized medicine:

When you call yourselves the “Christian Coalition” and savagely attack members of Congress for their point of view, implicit in that attack is the message that those who disagree have taken an un-Christian position.

Thirteen year later, with elections looming and a Pew survey showing that only 26 percent of Americans see the Democrats as friendly to religion, Wilhelm’s combative message is repackaged in FaithfulDemocrats.com ("An online Christian community").

To make sure the public buys it this time, the site enlists Tennessee Senator Roy Herron, whose folksy letter on the site’s home page churns out “religious” sound bites at a sixth-grade cognitive level:

In recent election seasons, many preachers have proclaimed not the Good News, but the Bad. They have told faithful members of their congregations that they cannot be Christians.

"Christians," they declare from the pulpit and beyond, "cannot be Democrats!"

If there’s any evidence to back up that assertion, I’d love to see it. Herron teaches divinity and law at Vanderbilt, so I’m sure he didn’t simply make it up for rhetorical effect.

Not many Christians will be influenced by the FaithfulDemocrats.com one way or the other, but at the end of the day, it is more a tool to provide sound bites to complement Democrats’ show Bibles. Here’s some more Herron:

We also prayed together before meals. I don't recall us ever eating at home without saying what Dad called "Grace" or Mother called "The Blessing." Mother and Dad, having been through the Depression, always were thankful. And they knew Whom to thank. My parents knew that they and our family and many neighbors had survived the Depression through the grace of God. And, quite frankly, through the policies of the Democratic Party.

I don’t know how that guy can sleep at night – or for that matter why Republicans should lose any sleep over FaithfulDemocrats.com.

Such a Deal

Hezbollah was hoping for Louis “Red” Klotz or maybe the guy who traded Christie Mathewson for Amos Rusie, but they’ll find they can probably work with this German:

A SENIOR German intelligence official has arrived in Beirut in an attempt to mediate a prisoner exchange between Israel and Lebanon, an issue that threatens to rekindle hostilities unless speedily resolved.

Ernst Uhrlau, head of Germany's foreign intelligence service, BND, was involved in the last such swap two years ago, when Israel released 429 Arab prisoners for an Israeli businessman captured by Hezbollah and the bodies of three soldiers.

At long last, maybe Israel has the final solution to their history of lopsided prisoner exchanges.

Disappointing Hybrids

If lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math, what are Toyota’s profits from Prius sales? The thought was in the back of my mind when I came across the 2006 Alternative Powertrain Study by J.D. Power and Associates.

The study finds that consumers considering hybrid vehicles expect an average fuel economy bump of – hold onto your hats – 28 mpg over a comparable gas-only vehicle (actual improvement: 9 mpg). These expectations aren’t just weird, but 200-mpg carburetor weird.

Though the typical Prius owner may be annoyed to learn he can’t drive from Berkeley to Takoma Park on a gallon of Venezuelan, the shock of realization is less acute than that of the affluent burgher who finds he sometimes needs two credit cards to fill up his H2.

The average hybrid owner is 55 years old with a household income of $113,400 according to the study. That pesky $3,000-$10,000 premium over a comparable gas-only vehicle doesn’t loom large for this buyer, and he probably sees the rolling appliance as a platform for that leftover Re-Defeat Bush bumper sticker, not as a way to save $1.59 per on his next twenty trips to Wal-Mart. This segment is small, with hybrids accounting for just 1.2 percent of light vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2005.

The expectation disconnect is unsustainable and the cost of wringing it out will be borne by the auto industry as it seeks to expand the vehicles’ appeal to younger, less-affluent consumers. With credit cards scorched by a summer of $80 fill-ups, the car-shopping public may be astonished to discover that hybrid fuel economy hasn’t reached a permanently high plateau.

The technology will get there. Though the actual R&D is slow and costly, I am confident that any technical hurdle can be overcome by sufficient application of wishful thinking, as is my understanding from watching politicians who play energy experts on television.

Is That a Fact?

A thought for today, from David Bohm:

When we say 'this is a fact' we then imply a certain ability of the fact to 'stand up to' a wide range of different kinds of testing. Thus, the fact is established, i.e. it is shown to be stable, in the sense that it is not liable to collapse, or to be nullified at any moment, in a subsequent observation of the general sort that has already been carried out. Of course this stability is only relative, because the fact is always being tested again and again, both in ways that are familiar and in new ways that are continually being explored. So it may be refined, modified, and even radically changed, through further observation, experiment, and experience. But in order to be a 'real fact', it evidently has, in this way, to remain constantly valid, at least in certain contexts or over a certain period of time.

One-Newspaper Nation

In Panic on 43rd Street, Michael Wolff argues that the Gray Lady is losing its core market and becoming an Everyman suburban daily:

Unlike The Washington Post, which has put much of its editorial and business energies into dominating its local market, the Times's strategy—a doomsday scenario, foreseeing a one-newspaper nation, a last-man-standing paper—has been to make the paper national. Hence, The New York Times is no longer principally a metropolitan paper. With a daily circulation of 260,000 in the five boroughs, it's no longer even creditably a New York paper. (Its two tabloid competitors, the Daily News and the New York Post, have far more readers in New York City.) It's an Everyman suburban daily.

You can see this strategy in liberal Montgomery Country, where blue newspaper bags (New York Times) outnumber the orange (Washington Times) handily in many neighborhoods. The New York Post would make a better Everyman national newspaper, though.

One PowerPoint Over the Line

In Everything You Wanted to Know About Getting a Job in Silicon Valley But Didn’t Know Who to Ask, Guy Kawasaki weighs in on the pros and cons of the four-page CV:

As a rule of thumb, if you can’t pitch your company in ten slides or pitch yourself in one page, your idea is stupid and you suck, respectively.

Any questions?

Another Gift to Japanese Hardliners

The Russian Border Guards Service has killed an unarmed Japanese crab fisherman in the Kurils. He was minding his own business and maybe fishing illegally when they shot him in the head with what they described as a “warning shot.” They later explained that his trawler -- no doubt menacingly fast and maneuverable -- had tried to ram their patrol boat.

It’s in the Way that You Use It

Many in the media claim the Katyusha has no military value because, well, it is inaccurate. That would have been news to the Soviet army, which demonstrated as far back as 1941 that truck-mounted Katyushas could saturate a target area with salvo fire and then quickly drive off. Used correctly, this multiple-launch weapon (referred to by the Germans as Stalin’s organ for its rumbling booms) caused extensive casualties and shock.

Today, however, the various small, unguided rockets the media calls Katyushas have been adapted by guerilla groups for single-launch use, in Hezbollah's case to avoid rapid and punishing Israeli counter-battery fire. This has stripped the rocket of its military value, leading some to call it a “terror weapon,” as though it were a sort of poor man’s V-2. Yet even with Hezbollah’s profligate use (4,000 and counting) a single Katyusha incoming is more annoying than terrifying, especially for civilians who have moved beyond its short range. What, then, is it good for?

Andrew McGregor, writing in Jamestown’s Terrorism Monitor, argues that Hezbollah’s use of the rocket “signals its mastery of media warfare.” I think he’s exactly right. For low self-esteem television audiences in the Muslim world accustomed to folding Arab armies, watching a ghost town like Kiryat Shemona (population: three jumpy alley cats) get pounded must seem like cause to throw candy. And given its recruitment and propaganda function, Hezbollah terrorists probably don’t lose too much sleep over the Katyusha’s inaccuracy.

Deep Thought of the Day

If you’re delivering a speech to a conservative gathering, and you’re just dying up there, say something about Reagan and then sit down before the audience does.

Blah. More News You Probably Missed

Achy thumbs down: The BlackBerry is now a HackBerry
North Korea’s very weird Dear Leader has not been seen since July 4th
Meanwhile, mistrust between Japan and South Korea is at its deepest since a poll began in 1995
Yarr: Lloyd’s, noting less piracy, has dropped its war risk designation for the Malacca Strait
A new tool to fight drug counterfeiting: IBM has launched an RFID system for pharmaceutical tracking across the supply chain...
...but an RFID survey shows shockingly slow adoption by retailers
A dim view of Tom Hayden and the far left’s “bid to Vietnamize the Iraq liberation effort”
The ACLU of Louisiana hassles St. Bernard Parish over a Katrina memorial

Global News & Opinion You May Have Missed

More light summer reading: Mein Kampf hits number three on Ankara bestseller list
Ouch: Dr. Gono moves to stem 1,200% inflation in Zimbabwe
Chad and China reestablish diplomatic ties
A fatwa banning Muslims from helping Hezbollah gets argued...
...while another in Pakistan bans women from working for NGOs.
Bradley Burson argues that Israel is losing World War III
"Our worst fears have materialized": Cadeverous Rolling Stones trash German soccer pitch
Libya releases five Bulgarian nurses on bail, having held them seven years on absurd trumped-up charges
Christians still missing in China’s Zhejiang province after mega-church destruction
X-ray equipment tuned to the iron in ancient ink reveals hidden text in The Archimedes Palimpsest

Will DVD Album Kill the CD?

Warner Music Group is launching DVD album in a bold attempt to end the CD’s 24-year reign as physical format of choice for music. The new discs will play on today’s DVD players, but are not backward compatible with CD players, disintermediating an installed base of approximately 96 quintillion CD players.

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece on the new format:

Warner, the world's fourth-largest music company, is in the final stages of securing technical licenses that will enable it to sell a bundle of music and extra features on a single DVD, according to people familiar with the matter. The DVD would include a music album that plays in both stereo and surround-sound on a standard DVD player -- plus video footage that plays on a DVD player or a computer. There will also be song remixes, ring tones, photos and other digital extras that can be accessed on a computer.

The company plans to make the new format available to its subsidiary record labels for product-planning purposes as early as next week and to introduce the discs to consumers with a handful of titles in October. A full-blown launch is planned for early next year. The hope is to fuel increased sales of both new product and catalog titles, in the process lifting the industry just as the 1982 introduction of the CD boosted sales as consumers replaced cassettes and vinyl albums.

Referring to the new format as “DVD album” is clueless, even for the record industry. Album means “two good tracks and ten tracks of filler.” Yes, I understand it’s not the final name, but you didn’t catch Microsoft referring to Longhorn as Microsoft Heifer before it became Vista.

Then there’s the matter of a price point higher than already-overpriced CDs. Filling the disc with shovelware might answer the question “what do we do with the extra capacity?” or “how do we clog up the hard drives of pirates?” but ring tones (??), remixes, and interviews are worth zero to most buyers, plus or minus a few cents. Besides, consumers have more pressing questions these days, such as “does this refrigerator come with an iPod dock?”

As for offering better sound, consumers wouldn’t be opposed to the idea. It’s just that they have [expletive deleted - Ed] in their ears and don’t care about anything better than, oh, 128 kbps.

Unlike previous failed formats, DVD album could kill off the CD if the entire industry got behind it. However, it is still a physical format, which puts it on the wrong side of history. Bricks and mortar record stores may long for a new format -- especially one that arrives before that last going out of business sale -- but it’s easy to resist the idea of buying your record collection all over again.

Meathead’s Candidate

A financial report shows that Hillary continued to work her contributor network at a Ron Burkle event this spring, adding to her $43 million campaign war chest with $4,000 from Billy Crystal, $2,100 from Robert Iger, and $3,200 in smart money from Rob Reiner.

By locking in high-dollar donors early, Hillary pushes likely Democratic candidates toward MoveOn.org-style Internet strategies aimed at smaller donors. And because such grassroots efforts require attention-grabbing positions, those elbows on each side of the fundraising pie may also shift the pack leftward earlier.

It's true -- ask Meathead.

A Glow of Health

There hasn’t been a nuclear power plant built in the United States since the 1970s, but that may be about to change.

Amarillo Power is proposing the plant that, pending regulatory approval, could be completed and online within a decade, according to a copyrighted story in Tuesday's Amarillo-Globe News.

The proposal calls for a two-unit, 2,700-megawatt advanced boiled water reactor designed by General Electric, documents obtained by the newspaper through the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other sources show.

A megawatt is enough power to serve between 700 and 1,000 homes.

This approximately $5 billion project is the second sign of a nuclear revival following a June filing by NRG Energy to add 2,700 MW of nuclear generation capacity (not to mention a thousand jobs) at its existing South Texas Project.

Given that every anti-nuclear and nanny state group will gear up to stop them, I would think utilities interested in diverse energy supplies and a sustained nuclear revival could help by expediting any letters of intent they may be thinking about.