Darned Mexicans
Mayor Ray Nagin, who fiddled while New Orleans burned and caught zero crap for it has opened his mouth real wide in order to get his shoe into it… As Mexicans flood into the city to do the work that its own residents won’t do, Nagin wonders how he can keep the city from being overrun by immigrant workers. Good question.

Of course, Mike over at No Nanny State has a solution:

I’d answer his racist question quite easily. I’d tell him that if he stopped the Nanny State payments to the blacks in his city, they’d get off of their collective asses, go to work, and there would be no need for outside labor. Since he continues to dole out money and make excuses for failure, the blacks in his city have no incentive to work. Work needs to be done, so the Mexican workers are simply filling a worker vacuum.

Run for office, Mike. You’d have my vote.

Ginsburg a Moderate?!?
Label bias epitomized.

When President Clinton announced his pick of Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the Supreme Court, labels defining her ideology were notably absent from the coverage. Newsbusters.org has an interesting contrast:

Tuesday’s lead New York Times story on Bush’s Supreme Court pick (by Elisabeth Bumiller and Carl Hulse) plays up Alito’s ideology from the start, nothing the federal appeals court judge has a “conservative record on abortion.” Later they note he is “solidly conservative” and has “bona fide conservative credentials” and the paper’s front-page subhead emphasizes that he’s “Hailed By Right.”

By contrast, when President Bill Clinton nominated Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, Richard Berke’s lead story in the June 15, 1993 edition didn’t describe Ginsburg, a feminist and former ACLU lawyer, as liberal. Berke even let Clinton get away with saying (without rebuttal from Republicans or anyone else): “Ruth Bader Ginsburg cannot be called a liberal or conservative. She has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels.”

They sure do like to beat on Alito being a massive conservative evil right wing baby eater. Kinda makes you wonder, though, if they got their talking points from the DNC who thinks everyone to the right of Stalin is Hitler, or if they looked at his record. To prove it isn’t the latter, check out this piece from the Christian Science Monitor. We’ve heard plenty about Alito’s anti-abortion beliefs, but has anyone actually looked at his record? Probably not because here are the four actual cases he looked at on the appeals court:

• A 1991 challenge to a Pennsylvania law requiring married women to notify their husbands before seeking an abortion. The court struck down the restriction. Alito dissented.

• A 1995 challenge to a Pennsylvania law that required women seeking to use Medicaid funds to abort a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest to report the incident to law enforcement officials and identify the offender. Alito provided the decisive vote striking down the abortion restriction.

• A 1997 challenge to a New Jersey law that prevents parents from suing for damages on behalf of the wrongful death of a fetus. Alito ruled that the Constitution does not afford protection to the unborn.

• A 2000 challenge to New Jersey’s ban on so-called partial-birth abortions. Alito struck down the law based on a recent Supreme Court decision.

So in other words, he votes on the issues based on how they’re presented before him and the merits of the case. No wonder the left is terrified by him; he’s a judge who actually is going to judge cases, not write legislation.

Family Media Guide.com
A new site launched, and its premise is very interesting:

“We listened to the market. Parents were saying ‘don’t tell me what’s appropriate for my seven year old, tell me what’s in it and I’ll make that decision for myself,’” says David G. Kinney, Founder and CEO of parent company Media Data Corporation. “And that’s exactly what we’ve done. We created a system that puts parents and all consumers in control by providing them with the objective facts about what’s in every program, movie or game.”

So instead of saying, “Your 10 year old shouldn’t play this,” they lay out the content and let parents decide. Hard to believe such a novel approach hasn’t been taken already, but as someone who consumes more than his fair share of media, I can’t say I’ve ever seen it before. Well done on their part.

Hollywood out to destroy fair use… Again…
DRM-crazy Hollywood is out to stop your use of the media you purchase. What a shock, right? Well, this time, the implications are downright terrifying. Wait until you read this one:

Hollywood has fielded a shockingly ambitious piece of “Analog Hole” legislation while everyone was out partying in costume. Under a new proposed Analog Hole bill, it will be illegal to make anything capable of digitizing video unless it either has all its outputs approved by the Hollywood studios, or is closed-source, proprietary and tamper-resistant. The idea is to make it impossible to create an MPEG from a video signal unless Hollywood approves it.

You gotta wonder why people aren’t more outraged by being treated like criminals by Hollywood. The only thing I can assume is that they just don’t realize what’s capable with their media and don’t really care about DRM because it doesn’t apply to them. By the time people catch up technically, they’re gonna be pretty surprised to find that fair use has pretty much vanished.

Revver… Flickr for video?
Many sites are trying to be the first “Flickr for Video,” and some have come really close. Revver has an interesting model:

Unlike most video sites that take videos and give nothing back to creators, we created Revver from the beginning to support videomakers. When you upload a video, we’ll attach a RevTag — a single frame ad at the end of the video. Every time someone clicks on the ad, you’ll earn money.

Let’s see how long it lasts. For now, I’ll stick with Vimeo as far as video sharing goes. In reality, Vimeo is a LOT closer to Flickr and it isn’t as commercialized (which means you won’t have people posting stuff there just to make a buck). If you have video and want to share it, there are tons of services out there that let you do it. Check out this roundup for more ideas.

More Indie Media… Yawn…
Let’s face facts… Most independent music and video is really trash, but is absorbed by the collective masses because it’s trendy and cool and “outside the mainstream, man”

Spare me.

Anyway, a new service has launched and has opened up a call for indie musicians to help fill up its service. I understand the concept that being an indie artist means you’re outside the industry and you’re not going to load your music and video up with DRM; lovely. But honestly, half the stuff out there, I wouldn’t even want to watch or listen to anyway! I mean, it’s nice that there are people who don’t want to be a part of the DRM silliness going on, but I’m more interested in the content than the means that are used to protect it.

He likes me… He really likes me!
Well, not exactly. I’d say we could file this in the heaping pile of sarcasm bin.

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from Steve Safran over at Lost Remote. Surely you remember my quote about him from a few days ago:

Steve Safran, of Lost Remote, is one of my least favorite people in the blogosphere. A mostly self-important jerk, he consistently toes whatever left-wing line the media spits out and does so while constantly claiming his impartiality.

Apparently he found my little home on the net, and sent me a nice email:

But I like you.
Best,
Steve

Er, thanks Steve.

ON two personal notes:

1. Spencer and Heather had their baby! Well, actually Heather had the baby… Spencer just probably stood there telling Heather to breathe. Congratulations, guys! Poor Spencer… The only guy in the house with 3 girls… Oy…

2. My National Novel Writing Month project is hurtling along quite nicely! I have 3,066 words in the book. At this pace, I’ll either have it finished in the middle of the month, or have 90,000 words of novel ready at the end of the month.

That’s it for today. See ya in the ’sphere!