Free Republic

When I was a kid, rumor had it that “antidisestablishmentarianism” was the longest word in the English language. I actually looked it up once, and discovered it had something to do with the status of the Church of England — which sort of took the fun out of the word. But in college, I decided I liked the idea of defending the establishment against those who sought to disestablish it. Well, I’m older now, and have consorted a bit with various establishments. To know them is not to love them. I’m now a disestablishmentarian. I’ve come to believe that, to...

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s two daughters, Malia, 9, and Sasha, 6, are big fans of Hannah Montana – and maybe there’s a reason why. Teen star Miley Cyrus, known as Hannah Montana in the Disney Channel TV series television of the same name, is now crusading for global warming alarmism. But she admits she isn’t really sure what it means. Disney, conveniently owns ABC, a network that often hypes climate change alarmism. On the 15-year-old singer’s recently released album “Breakout,” she sings that she wants America to wake up and deal with global warming. The song, “Wake Up...

A certain amount of celebrity glow has long been a part of both political parties’ gatherings. But thanks in part to the youthful charisma of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive nominee, the Democratic convention, which begins on Monday in Denver, is shaping up as an unlikely hot spot for the music world, with multiplatinum rappers, indie-rock scenesters, D.J.’s and Jennifer Lopez arriving by the van- and private planeload to perform, rally or schmooze with the political elite. “It’s the Sundance Film Festival for politicos,” said Laura Dawn, the cultural director of MoveOn.org, who also happens to sing with Moby... Kanye...

ASPEN, Colo.--Recording industry and motion picture lobbyists are renewing their push to convince broadband providers to monitor customers and detect copyright infringements, claiming the concept is working abroad and should be adopted in the United States. A representative of the recording industry said on Monday that her companies would prefer to enter into voluntary "partnerships" with Internet service providers, but pointedly noted that some governments are mandating such surveillance "if you don't work something out." "Despite our best efforts, we can't do this alone," said Shira Perlmutter, a vice president for global legal policy at the International Federation of the...

In Part 1 of this series, I wrote of the great elephants of India, who, although they have the physical capacity to uproot trees during the day, can be restrained all night long by a piece of twine and a twig. How is this possible? The elephant’s training begins when it is still young and considerably less powerful. Removed from its mother, the elephant is then shackled with an iron chain to a large tree. For days and weeks on end, the baby elephant strains against its restraints, only to find that all exertion is useless. Then slowly, over a...

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. -- A new state law went on the books Tuesday saying people could bring guns to work if they kept them locked in their car. Disney, though, said it was exempt from the new law and its 62,000 employees needed to keep their guns at home. Friday, a worker who protested the park’s decision told Channel 9 he was suspended. The worker was well aware that he could end up losing his job when he took the gun to work Friday morning, but said that the principle at stake means enough to him that he was willing...

Bloggers: Big Media Is Watching As content recognition software gets more sophisticated, expect more copyright-related battles online like the recent AP-blogger flap by Peter Burrows The Associated Press unleashed a firestorm in the blogosphere earlier this month when it demanded that a political site take down AP content it said violated copyrights. Bloggers, including Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com and Markos Moulitas of Daily Kos, cried foul, saying the AP's move threatened the free flow of information over the Web. The furor abated a few days later when the AP tempered its demands. But the dustup between the AP and bloggers...

Not content with the current (and already massive) statutory damages allowed under copyright law, the RIAA is pushing to expand the provision. The issue is compilations, which now are treated as a single work. In the RIAA's perfect world, each copied track would count as a separate act of infringement, meaning that a copying a ten-song CD even one time could end up costing a defendant $1.5 million if done willfully. Sound fair? Proportional? Necessary? Not really, but that doesn't mean it won't become law. The change to statutory damages is contained in the PRO-IP Act that is currently up...

Chances are that as you read this article, it is passing over part of AT&T's network. That matters, because last week AT&T announced that it is seriously considering plans to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of U.S. intellectual property laws. The prospect of AT&T, already accused of spying on our telephone calls, now scanning every e-mail and download for outlawed content is way too totalitarian for my tastes. But the bizarre twist is that the proposal is such a bad idea that it would be not just a disservice to the public but probably a disaster...

Today, the NY Times has the first part of a special series - War Torn:Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles. It appears that the troops are coming home and becoming murderers. Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: "Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife." Pierre, S.D.: "Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress." Colorado Springs: "Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring." Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the...

The RIAA has quickly become one of the most disliked organizations in the world. Working ostensibly with the interests of the artists in mind, the organization has single-handedly instituted a policy of lawsuits and education in an attempt to curb the piracy of music. Although this has been going on for quite some time now, I recently read a press release from the organization outlining its successes and what 2008 will look like for its College Deterrence program. The press release tells us that the RIAA (on behalf of the music industry) has sent out "a new wave of 407...

TORONTO (Billboard) - A revolutionary plan that would effectively legitimize file-sharing here has been slammed as "a pipe dream" by Canadian labels. The Songwriters Assn. of Canada proposes to allow domestic consumers access to all recorded music available online in return for adding a $5 Canadian (2.5 pound) monthly fee to every wireless and Internet account in the country. The SAC claims that the proposal, which has been presented to labels' bodies the Canadian Record Industry Assn. (CRIA) and Canadian Independent Record Production Assn. as well as publishers' groups, would raise approximately $1 billion Canadian ($993 million) annually. Although the...

Things are looking up for the World's Dumbest File Sharer, Jammie Thomas, who became the first American to go to court in a P2P case in October A jury of her peers found Thomas guilty of copyright infringement and set a fine of $222,000 - but now she's been dumped by the person most responsible for leaving her in this predicament (apart from Jammie herself) - her attorney Brian Toder. It was Toder who foolishly advised her to make a principled fight of the matter in court - thereby turning what would have been a $2,000 tax into a candidate...

Border broadcasters fret over digital switchFree stations in Mexico may mean many viewers won't convert sets By SUZANNE GAMBOA Associated Press Dec. 21, 2007, 11:39PM WASHINGTON — Broadcasters along the U.S.-Mexico border fear they will be at a competitive disadvantage when the U.S. switches to digital television in 2009 because residents can still pick up Mexican stations on old TVs. On Feb. 18, 2009, tens of millions of televisions that are not equipped to receive digital signals will no longer be able to receive programming. People in the U.S. with old televisions will have to buy converter boxes or subscribe...

In the year ahead, a long-heralded revolution in wireless communications will finally come to pass. It may throw handset makers and service providers into turmoil, but over time it should be great for consumers. Fast, wireless data will become more widely available, the choice of data devices and mobile handsets will expand, and service just might get cheaper. The biggest driver of change is an event slated for February, 2009. It is, of all things, the shutdown of analog television broadcasting. The conversion to digital TV will free up space now occupied by UHF channels 52 to 69. A chunk...

In the aftermath of the $222,000 jury verdict that the Recording Industry Association of America recently won against a Minnesota woman who shared 24 songs on Kazaa, the U.S. Congress is preparing to amend copyright law. Politicians want to increase penalties for copyright infringement. It's no joke. Top Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday introduced a sweeping 69-page bill that ratchets up civil penalties for copyright infringement, boosts criminal enforcement, and even creates a new federal agency charged with bringing about a national and international copyright crackdown. "By providing additional resources for enforcement of intellectual...

Back in April, a court found that Kaleidescape's high end DVD jukebox was perfectly legal, despite complaints from the entertainment industry. The DVD jukebox clearly was not for pirating materials. It would rip DVDs and store them on a hard drive, but it included all kinds of copy protection and cost $27,000. This wasn't for kids ripping DVDs in their bedrooms. When that lawsuit came out, the group in charge of the DVD spec, DVD-CCA whined that the lawsuit would delay the rollout of the latest DVD specs -- though it wasn't clear why. Now we know. PC Magazine has...

MUSIC and software industry lobby groups have been accused of touting "absurd" piracy figures in an effort to get tougher copyright laws and more police resources to enforce them. A draft Australian Institute of Criminology report on intellectual property crime - obtained by The Australian- describes some industry research as "self-serving hyperbole" and warns that exaggerated statistics are being used to get government attention. "Demonstrated higher levels of piracy and counterfeiting would invariably result in additional federal government resources being diverted to enforcement activities," the report says.

PARIS, Oct. 8 — It took more than 10 minutes to persuade the Paris police station’s highest-ranking officer that a crime might have taken place, but that did not deter Jérôme Martinez and his two companions. After all, the three had marched halfway across the Latin Quarter one evening in late September, accompanied by about 40 fellow advocates, waving banners and handing out parking-ticket-style leaflets that claimed they had committed a number of offenses. Among their crimes was listening to a song purchased from iTunes on a device not made by Apple Computer. The group, StopDRM, largely made up of...

The back cover of “Southern Smoke 27” also says something about the current status of mixtapes. It’s chock-a-block with corporate logos: BET, MTV and Geffen Records (Field Mob’s label) are all represented, and there are advertisements for DJ Smallz’s syndicated radio shows (on both satellite — Sirius — and terrestrial radio). “Southern Smoke 27” is a corporate-sponsored CD, even though you can’t legally buy it, which means that it’s probably also an endangered species; the era of major-label bootlegs can’t last forever. But then, mixtapes aren’t supposed to last forever. Like magazines, which they resemble in both price and energy,...

As experts weigh what's happening in Iraq, Baghdadis just know things are getting worse BAGHDAD, IRAQ - Deep within the Pentagon, they're trying to piece together a picture of an Iraqi civil war. What would it look like? Donald Rumsfeld asks. Here on the streets of Baghdad, it looks like hell. Corpses, coldly executed, are turning up by the minibus-load. Mortar shells are casually lobbed into rival neighborhoods. Car bombs are killing people wholesale, while assassins hunt them down one by one. Is it civil war? "In Iraq it is no longer a matter of definition — 'civil war' or...

Is anyone watching this Hisory Channel hitpiece on the Bush Admin? Katrina: American Catastrophe

When Dan Rather retired a year early as anchor of CBS Evening News this March, his departure symbolized the end of an era of liberal media dominance and the onset of the new media era that is proving far friendlier to the ideas and arguments of the Right. Gone are the days when the Big Three networks, plus the New York Times and the Washington Post, decided what was newsworthy, usually with a liberal spin. Even if intrepid bloggers hadn’t debunked Rather’s specious September 60 Minutes II scoop that President Bush shirked his National Guard duties decades ago—a humiliation to...

The execution of Terri Schiavo -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: April 4, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 Creators Syndicate, Inc. Terri Schiavo is dead. She did not die a natural death, unless you believe a court order to cut off food and water to a disabled woman until she dies of starvation and thirst is natural. No, Terri Schiavo was executed by the state of Florida. Her crime? She was so mentally disabled as to be unworthy of life in the judgment of Judge George Greer. The execution was carried out at Woodside Hospice. An autopsy will reveal that Terri's vital organs...

AUSTIN - For years journalists have been hesitant to lobby for a shield law to protect their notes and tapes, but now is the time, many say, before it becomes too late. "We run the very real risk of seeing our reporters and photographers and editors jailed for simply doing their jobs," said Donnis Baggett, publisher of the Bryan-College Station Eagle and legislative chairman of the Texas Daily Newspaper Association and the Texas Press Association. "We are on dangerously thin ice." A Senate committee heard testimony last week on a bill that would give journalists a qualified privilege for the...

Congressional leaders are playing a dangerous game with their intrusion into the hotly publicized fight in Florida over maintaining life support for a severely brain-damaged woman. With state legislative and court appeals being exhausted, the House and Senate began some grim one-upsmanship to stop the removal of the feeding tube from Terri Schiavo. She is the 41-year-old woman who has been in a persistent vegetative state for the last 15 years, with her parents contesting that sad diagnosis. They also challenged the careful decisions by Florida's trial and appellate courts, based largely on the testimony of her husband that their...

Subject: Politech Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 10:32:44 -0500 From: Jamey Vester Websense is now blocking foxnews.com as an advocacy group. I really don't have any comment about this, except that cnn, msnbc, etc. are not blocked at all except for their sports sections. I have attached a screenshot. Jamey Vester ------------ Access to this web page is restricted at this time. Reason: The Websense category "Advocacy Groups" is filtered. URL: http://www.foxnews.com/

WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) - Lawmakers' pique over the networks' incredible shrinking news hole is prompting legislation that will both shorten the time broadcasters have between license renewals and require full commission review of 5% of all licenses. The legislation was introduced by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on Tuesday after the release of a report by the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California found evening TV newscasts contained little coverage of local political campaigns last year. It also would require broadcasters to post on their Internet sites information detailing their commitment to local public-affairs programming, and it calls...

Report just issues, mapes finally fired

REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW PANEL DICK THORNBURGH AND LOUIS D. BOCCARDI ON THE SEPTEMBER 8, 2004 60 MINUTES WEDNESDAY SEGMENT “FOR THE RECORD” CONCERNING PRESIDENT BUSH’S TEXAS AIR NATIONAL GUARD SERVICE JANUARY 5, 2005 KIRKPATRICK & LOCKHART NICHOLSON GRAHAM LLP Michael J. Missal, Esq. Lawrence Coe Lanpher, Esq. 1800 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036 (202) 778-9000 Counsel to the Independent Review Panel i TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION..............................................................................................................1 II. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ...............................................................................................4 A. 60 Minutes Wednesday Background..............................................................................6 B. The Pursuit of a Story on President Bush’s TexANG Service ......................................7 C. Obtaining Documents ....................................................................................................8 D. The Production of...

Columbia House, famous for its "12 CDs for a penny" record clubs, will launch its own adult video club with Playboy Entertainment at the end of this month. The service, called Hush, will sell pornography through direct mail and a Web site. While 50-year-old Columbia House is eager to cash in on the $12 billion porn business, officials are pretty hush hush about Hush.

AJAX, Ontario ROB MacARTHUR, a part-time music promoter, has a cardboard box full of nearly 60 CD's at his bar in this town half an hour east of Toronto, sent to him by independent Canadian musicians hoping for a shot at getting their songs on the radio. For many of these artists the odds are slim, admits Mr. MacArthur, who is a guitarist in country bands himself. The music is good, but there isn't enough space on the radio for everyone, said the 43-year-old, who with his long gray hair and ready smile has the look of an aging country...

Publishers Weekly Names 'America' (The Book) Jon Stewarts Riff on Politics, Book of the Year Jon Stewarts' 'America,' (The Book) the television commentators riff on politics and other matters of historical staire, has been named Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, the industry trade magazine.In announcing the award Monday, Pubishers Weekly called the book 'a serious critique of the two party system, the corporations that finance it, and the spinless cowards in the press who aggressively print allegiation and rumor independent of accuracy and fairness.'Stewart's book was released in September and immediately topped best seller lists even as Wal...

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - A "60 Minutes" interview with Bob Dylan that was set to air Sunday about his new autobiography marked the third Simon & Schuster book this year to get exposure on television's most venerated newsmagazine. The publisher's marketing department might want to take all the credit. But it probably doesn't hurt that S&S and the network "60 Minutes" calls home, CBS, are owned by the same parent company, Viacom. The newsmagazine stirred up angst among media watchdogs in March for not disclosing that fact on-air during a report on the S&S-published book about the Bush administration...

LONDON, England -- Video recorders have taken a step closer to extinction after Britain's largest electrical supplier said it would stop selling VCRs to concentrate on their successor, the DVD. [snip] Dixons said it now expected to sell its remaining stock of VCRs by Christmas, although other electrical retailers said they would continue to sell them for the foreseeable future.

It is [said]... the only sure winner in American politics is the media.... Maybe not this time. Big Media lost big. But it was more than a loss. It was an abdication of authority. Large media institutions, such as CBS or the New York Times, have been regarded as nothing if not authoritative. In the Information Age, authority is a priceless franchise. But it is this franchise that Big Media, incredibly, has just thrown away. It did so by choosing to go into overt opposition to one party's candidate, a sitting president. It stooped to conquer... National Guard... Abu Ghraib......

By Jim Emerson Editor, RogerEbert.com October 14, 2004Who's the, uh, biggest villain in "Team America"? Kim Jong Il or Hollywood celebrities?"You should learn to keep your opinions OUT of your reviews!" Every critic I know has received at least one letter like that from an indignant reader. Of course, it's an absurd proposition; critics are paid to express their opinions, and the good ones (who exercise what is known across all disciplines as "critical thinking") are also able to cite examples and employ sound reasoning to build an argument, showing you how and why they reached their verdict. Well, since...

Don't believe ANY reporting from any source that relies on the results of yesterday's exit polls. Every statistic within them is flawed. Example: Gender gap was Bush +7 for men and -7 for women, but turnout showed a +8 edge for women. This is statistically impossible given the now known results. If this BASIC number is so flawed, then NOTHING in the exit polls can be relied upon. Having said that, the MSM will continue to cite their flawed poll to support whatever 13th hour arguments they make regarding the "meaning" of this election and the "direction" Bush should govern...

Will 'The West Wing' go Republican? With Bartlet term's end in sight, producer thinks of future LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- The prospect of a change in the White House tends to draw a strong reaction, pro or con. Not from "The West Wing" executive producer John Wells, though. He seems unfazed by the coming end of Democratic President Josiah "Jed" Bartlet's tenure -- and maybe even a Republican successor. "We were a year and a half into the administration when we started the show," Wells said of the NBC drama entering its sixth season. "We have term limits in...

Despite shattering box-office records and dominating headlines for months, "The Passion of the Christ" and "Fahrenheit 9/11" face real obstacles in the race for an Oscar nomination for best picture. As Senior Writer Sean Smith reports in the current issue of Newsweek, many of the high-placed studio executives, producers, Oscar strategists, publicists and Academy members interviewed think that "Fahrenheit's" chances depend on the results of the presidential election, and all say that a "Passion" best-picture nod is almost unthinkable. "A lot of older Academy voters, who are largely Jewish, refuse to even see this movie," says one Oscar-campaign vet. "There's...

Given what I had written about them, I had no right to expect my lunch companions to be friendly. But apart from one fraught moment (of which more later), the spokesmen for the international music industry were perfectly amicable. I had written several columns and editorials arguing that the internet had deprived the record companies of their purpose, that the bullying of teenagers who downloaded free music smacked of desperation and that the industry's only hope of survival was finding a new business model. Determined to convince me that I was wrong were Jay Berman, chairman of the International Federation...

If the Internet disseminates information, then the Blogosphere disseminates knowledge. According to recent events in the Blogosphere, we are at the beginning of a discontinuous shift in the way knowledge is made available to the public. This shift will be particularly chaotic for events that have the capacity to challenge the way we *think* things run in the world. Any knowledge of such events that lead to a conclusion, other than the one that reported information led us to, will result in varying degrees of social strife and uncertainty. By way of example, the following are fairly isolated blog efforts...

I was wrong. When I'm wrong, I admit it. And I was wrong. Five months ago, I predicted John Kerry would win the presidential election. I really thought he would for several reasons: President Bush's record – especially on domestic issues – was weak. He didn't show any desire to curtail illegal immigration. He even proposed yet another amnesty program, an idea entirely unpopular with the American people at any time, but I thought politically lethal at a time when the country is facing dramatic terrorist attacks. He also increased spending on a host of programs for which there is...

...The election coverage from Big Media has been unusually partisan this time around. As Newsweek's Evan Thomas famously remarked: "Let's talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win... that's going to be worth maybe 15 points." ...Mr. Kerry, as even many Dems are admitting, is a weak candidate. But the big media advantage doesn't seem to have turned out to be as big as some thought. ...In a Boston Herald ...Mr. Kerry wrote: "On more than one occasion, I, like Martin Sheen in 'Apocalypse Now,' took my patrol boat into Cambodia...." But the story...

In an election year, it is the front pages of the nation's major papers that set the tone for how political stories are covered. The Los Angeles Times is a major player in the election by any reckoning -- and the decisions it makes about how to place stories on its front pages help determine how the public thinks about politics

Long after Stanford students have gone home for the summer, John McManus is still passing out grades in the Department of Communication. McManus, 56, runs Grade the News, a Web site concerned with product, not people. What is Grade the News? An effort to do for news in the Bay Area what Consumer Reports magazine does for cars and computers. How does it work? We've created seven yardsticks of journalism performance that are derived from the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists. What's the most important criterion? Newsworthiness. You get more points for a story that's about...

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?By DANIEL OKRENTPublished: July 25, 2004 F course it is.The fattest file on my hard drive is jammed with letters from the disappointed, the dismayed and the irate who find in this newspaper a liberal bias that infects not just political coverage but a range of issues from abortion to zoology to the appointment of an admitted Democrat to be its watchdog. (That would be me.) By contrast, readers who attack The Times from the left - and there are plenty - generally confine their complaints to the paper's coverage of electoral politics...

What passes these days for the artsy-intellectual set in America has gone completely bonkers over the prospect of George W. Bush winning a second term as president. Current polls show that Bush continues to run neck-and-neck with John Kerry despite a slower-than-expected economic recovery, bloody setbacks in Iraq, and cheerleading for Democrats from a press corps that admits to an unprecedented identification with the left. The proportion of national journalists calling themselves liberal, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center, has risen 50 percent since 1995. Currently, 34 percent of journalists say they are liberal, 7 percent...

MICAH WRIGHT: "I WAS NEVER AN ARMY RANGER"On his Delphi forum, Micah Wright has posted a confession – he never was an Army Ranger, something he had claimed since shortly after his debut as a comics writer, as well as the author of remixed Propaganda, a book which lampooned World War II-era American propaganda posters. A version of statement had been on Wright's website since April 25th apparently, however, he opted to post it on his Delphi forum Saturday. Wright began his statement (which has since been edited) with a recap of what he used to tout as his...