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Unbelievable - not to be missed - this undercover video expose of Acorn, on Andrew Breitbart's new site, BigGovernment.com, will fry your brain.
I had the pleasure of being interviewed this week by Vipul Vyas of Skewz. Skewz is a great site that brings Liberals and Conservatives together, showing articles from both perspectives on a wide variety of subjects. My interview included thoughts on the evolution of the blogosphere, and then focused on the most current arguments against Obama. Links relevant to the subjects discussed are available in the following two posts:
Comprehensive Review of the Most Current, Hard-Hitting Arguments Against Obama
Obama and Odinga: Politico Called it an Unfounded Rumor - But Multiple Reports from 2006 Confirm It
The interview is available currently on the Skewz home page.
Don't miss this great new weblog, Regular Folks United, founded by Lori Roman, with articles from Roman, Evan Sayet, Grover Norquist, Kerri Houston Toloczko, Todd Kruse, Dennis Gray, and Anita Crane. It's got great posts, an innovative layout, and cool rating features.
In an ill-considered, knee-jerk response to pressure put on it by CAIR, PACE University has called the police and had arrested, a student, for putting a Koran in a toilet. This, when flag-burning is protected free speech, and desecration of Christian religious symbols is called "art" and put in museums. The public outrage from Americans who love free speech is threatening to turn this into a firestorm of public outrage directed against PACE. The topic is red-hot on LGF and is looking like a gathering blogswarm, with Google showing 110 blog posts on the subject in the past 12 hours. It appears likely that this subject will dominate talk radio tomorrow.
Earlier today I emailed this to the President of PACE University, Stephen J. Friedman:
Dear Mr. Friedman,
PACE has called the police to prosecute Mr. Shmulevich in response to pressure put on PACE by CAIR. Please reconsider. PACE is about to be on the receiving end of a massive public outcry from Americans outraged that PACE has, in error and without specifically intending it, launched a legal attack on U.S. freedom of speech.
To see the depth of the passion of Americans who love our free speech and our way of life, I strongly advise you to read the comments on this post (link) on a site that has tens of thousands of visits a day. There are already over 500 comments as I compose this email.
You are unintentionally making PACE the center of a firestorm of public outrage. And PACE is on the wrong side - standing against freedom of speech, which should be the top priority of a great University such as yours.
Act now to prevent a debacle, and massive international damage to PACE's reputation. Stand up for Mr. Shmulevich's right to free speech. Drop the charges.
I included the first 460 comments from the second LGF post on the subject, including:
#1 pbird 7/29/2007 8:20:06 am PDT
You described it perfectly Charles. I am speechless. So frightening.
...#3 m 7/29/2007 8:20:30 am PDTAnd Mr. Shmulevich needs a paypal account. This is ########.
#4 BabbaZee 7/29/2007 8:20:56 am PDT
re: #3 m
Amen.
#5 newsjunkie_ky 7/29/2007 8:21:48 am PDT
This scares the sh*t out of me. What next?
#6 NinoBrown79 7/29/2007 8:22:08 am PDT
A koran in the toilet and the guy gets thrown in jail? Is this America or Iran?
#7 mrsoc 7/29/2007 8:22:44 am PDT
Well, are we going to help him, or not?
#8 albemarle 7/29/2007 8:22:46 am PDT
How long before he gets his own fatwa ?
#9 Cartman 7/29/2007 8:22:56 am PDT
This is gonna be really interesting.
#10 christheprofessor 7/29/2007 8:23:18 am PDT
I can't seem to find any instance of PU's (somehow, that abbreviation seems so appropriate) having arrested somebody for burning an American flag....
#11 Roger 7/29/2007 8:23:37 am PDT
Will do, Charles.
I can't find which campus?
If anyone knows a good timing and if they are going to go, let me know.
#12 m 7/29/2007 8:23:41 am PDT
Who the f' was he harassing? The plumbers? Aggrevated harassment at that!
#13 Armigerous 7/29/2007 8:23:55 am PDT
From what I understand about the case,the Koran in question belonged to the university and not to him personally....can anybody verify that?..that would seem to be the crux of the problem
#14 BabbaZee 7/29/2007 8:24:11 am PDT
re: #7 mrsoc
Absolutely we are going to help him.
Any way we can.
...#16 distwalker 7/29/2007 8:24:21 am PDTYou can burn an American flag and get police protection.
You can create an image of the Virgin Mary in elephant dung and get it in a New York museum.
You can create performance art in which you insert a crucifix in your anus on stage and get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
You can burn a pile of bibles and get an article in the New York Times.
One Koran in the toilet results in two felony charges?
People, this is the center of the god damned storm. This is where we make our stand. If we can't win this one for this man, we have lost the war.
Institutions like PACE respond to pressure from the public. So far, CAIR is pressuring them, and they are responding. If they start hearing directly from us, demanding the protection of free speech, and the destruction of nascent double standards for Islam, the situation will change.
As a blogger, from time to time you see what appear to be echoes of your views appearing in various public statements, and occasionally you wonder if you may have been one of many contributing to the expression of those views in those statements.
Yesterday there was a lot of public discussion of a dust-up that happened on Sunday between Senators Graham and Webb on the subject of Iraq. From Senator's Graham's remarks:
GRAHAM: If General Petraeus comes back, he will tell us these things. I want to leave. No American wants to occupy Iraq, but history will judge us, my friend, not when we left but what we left behind. Do we leave a resurgent Al-Qaeda that will kill every moderate who helped us? Do we empower Iran, do they control the south of Iraq? Nobody ever asks the consequences, polls the consequences of this idea, just wash your hands of Iraq. I'm going to listen to this general and I'm not going to let any politician take the place of the general.
Just a few days previously I had made precisely this point regarding a recent poll on Iraq, and provided evidence for it. The post was linked by Pajamas Media, as well.
Posting will be light for several days while I catch up on work after an out-of-town trip.
As I discussed in this previous post, one of the things that hampers MSM so much is that its expertise is in acquiring and reporting information, rather than in analyzing what that information means. I'm reminded of this by a Reuter's article today, which shows severe internal contradictions:
President George W. Bush's administration has crippled al Qaeda's ability to carry out major attacks on U.S. soil but at a political and economic cost that could leave the country more vulnerable in years to come, experts say.
Even as al Qaeda tries to rebuild operations in Pakistan, experts including current and former intelligence officials believe the group would have a hard time staging another September 11 because of U.S. success at killing or capturing senior members whose skills and experience have not been replaced.
"If the question is why al Qaeda hasn't carried out another 9/11 attack, the answer I think is that if they could have, they would have," said a former senior U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
...Look at al Qaeda's plans," said Michael Scheuer, who once led the CIA team devoted to finding al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. "They're very simply defined in two phrases: spread out America's forces and bleed the United States to bankruptcy. I'd argue America has been under attack successfully every day since 9/11 from that perspective.
"If you're looking at it from the cave, or wherever al Qaeda is hiding at the moment, you have to be pretty happy with the way the world is moving," he said.
So per this analysis from Reuters, the al Qaeda members hiding in a cave, due to the success of the U.S. in killing and capturing so many of their senior members, are pretty happy about the way the world is moving, due to what it has cost the U.S. to accomplish their destruction.
As I noted in that previous post (same link):
The Strengths of MSM
MSM excels at gathering information. They can often get it even when many of the people involved don't want to reveal it. This is a totally different skill set from analyzing that information. There is no reason to expect anyone to be good at both. MSM is so unskilled at information analysis, that it even applies the same pre-packaged analysis, to almost every story. According to MSM, almost every story means that GWB is bad, the Iraq war is bad, America is bad, capitalism is bad, and whoever the Democrats are running should be elected. Stories that can't be made to fit this analysis -- for example, the current Air America scandal, the Swift Boat vets of the 2004 Presidential campaign, or the U.N. report that Hussein had busted up giant factories capable of building WMD's and shipped them out of Iraq before and during the war -- are either ignored altogether, or printed once on a back page, and never discussed again.
The Strengths of the Blogosphere
Analysis, however -- figuring out what things mean -- what they were caused by, what they will cause, and how to apply that understanding to make new decisions -- is precisely what the blogosphere excels at. Go to any of the biggest blogs, and you will note that the majority of posts cite facts from MSM and elsewhere, and provide new analysis.
That post was from August of 2005, and now in April of 2007, it still rings true: "According to MSM, almost every story means that GWB is bad, the Iraq war is bad, America is bad, capitalism is bad, and whoever the Democrats are running should be elected."
Prof. Elliot McGucken organized the Hero's Journey Entrepreneurship Festival which took place Saturday at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. Panelists and speakers discussed entrepreneurship in media such as blogs, videogames, film, etc., in terms of the hero's journey as discussed by Joseph Campbell. Per McGucken:
Entrepreneurship is the force that continually rights the world by rewarding those who serve--those who battle the bureaucracy with a better way. Entrepreneurship is an epic story wherein the world is continually "begun anew," as the humble risk-taker--the reluctant hero--the fount of lasting cultural and monetary wealth--happens upon an innovation, invention, or epiphany, and takes a risk in rendering it real for others.
It was an excellent event. Panelists and speakers included David Whatley, who demonstrated some amazing world-building software his team is using to create the upcoming Hero's Journey MMORPG; videogame writers Flint Dille and John Zuur; Andrew Breitbart, co-founder of the Drudge Report, and founder of Breitbart.com; screenwriting guru Skip Press; film producers Jonathan and Deborah Flora; William Fay, Executive producer of the film 300; and others, including -- me. Prof. McGucken asked me to join a panel to discuss blogging.
Here are my introductory remarks (from my prepared notes):
Hi, I'm Vik Rubenfeld, of the Big Picture weblog, at BigPicWeblog.com. I'm a Pajamas Media blogger. Pajamas Media is one of the biggest stories in the blogosphere over the past year or so. Pajamas is like a Drudge Report of the blogosphere, bringing together links to many of the best blog articles each day; it's also a place where many leading bloggers and pundits post original articles.
This is a key time in world history, and it takes all of us who are interested in this, to contribute to figuring out what's going on, and what to do about it. It used to be that to make a contribution to the public debate, you had to be elected or appointed to some substantial position. The blogosphere changed all that.
Even at this time, mainstream media pooh-poohs the blogosphere. I'll read you 3 sentences from an AP story that ran this past week:
Blogs are Web sites that tend to be narrow in focus and directed at a niche audience. Most operate without editors and give instant reaction to the news. Their freewheeling, open nature makes them popular but also ripe for unverified statements.
When I post something that even has an implication that someone might disagree with, I hear about it, from commenters. So there is a lot of fact-checking in the blogosphere. On the other hand, you've all probably heard about the phony photo that AP ran. They had to withdraw it. Patterico.com busts the LA TIMES every day on errors and omissions.
So I think the strength of blogosphere is precisely that it does not have editors. Bloggers are free of the restrictions on what can be said within a giant mainstream media institution.
I'll give you an example. This is from something I posted yesterday. You're probably going to hear a lot today about the film 300. Many commentators are greeting this film as a possible signal of the end of moral ambiguity. The heroes in the film are fighting for something that is an absolute moral good. So I jumped off from that:
An end of moral ambiguity could have a massive impact on global geopolitics. To take one example, it's time for Israel to thrill the world by saying, loud and clear, that Israel stands for freedom, democracy, achievement, science, and equality of the sexes, and that those who do not recognize its right to exist, have neither freedom, nor democracy, nor achievements, nor science, nor equality of the sexes. That alone would electrify - and change - the world.
You may agree with me; you may disagree with me; the point is that I was able to say it and have it be heard and discussed. It was linked by Pajamas, and as of this morning, it had been seen by 400 people.
So blogging gives us all a voice and a chance to be heard. And all of us together - do add up - to something heroic.
Thank you.
My remarks got big applause. It was a pleasure to appear at this event.
Cathy Seipp, at the Roast in Her Honor, September 2006
I was only in the periphery of Cathy's world, but I am grateful to her for the significant contribution she helped make to my life. I first met her in May 2004, at a panel she hosted at AFI titled, "The Inside Story: Hollywood and the Media Deconstructed." I'd started blogging about a year earlier, and I owed my invitation to this event to Amy Alkon, who I'd made contact with, as a fellow LA blogger. This event was ground zero for my introduction to so many others who are well-known in the LA blogging world, including Moxie, Andrew Breitbart, Matt Welch, Luke Ford, and Cathy herself. In fact, it was that night that I assisted in introducing Moxie to Andrew Breitbart - a noteworthy event to those in the scene here. (I'm not trying to hint at anything - they're just two well-known folks, and it's interesting that this was the night they met.) I'd kept my eye out for Moxie, as a well-known blogger I'd first become aware of via an Instapundit link, and made sure to say hello when she appeared. She was on the second of two panels Cathy hosted that evening. Moxie expressed an interest in meeting Andrew, who, if I recall correctly, had been on the first panel, and I somehow introduced them, even though I'd never met either of them before. I believe I said to Moxie, come over this way, and just walked over to Andrew, and introduced them. Of course it was easy since they were both panelists. Afterwards, Matt Welch, who'd also been on one of the panels, and his wife Emmanuel, invited a number of us over to their place. I felt very fortunate to have the opportunity to hang out with this crowd, for whom I had a lot of admiration. As I posted the following day:
A Great Night in the Blogosphere
Well, last night’s event was great fun. Amy Alkon’s live-blogging of the panels is here.
Afterwards Matt and Emmanuelle Welch invited people over for drinks. Andrew Breitbart, Cathy Seipp, Luke Ford, Martin Devon, Moxie, and I, among others, joined the Welch’s. As you can imagine a party among bloggers, the conversation was just non-stop irresistible. It went on until after 4 a.m. Nobody wanted to leave.
Moxie took great pics, and I took a good one of her as well, which may appear on her site.
Update: the pic I snapped of her is up on Moxie’s site.
Cathy, Amy, and Emmanuelle regularly organized meetings of the LA Press Club, and, again thanks to Amy and Cathy, I began being invited to these as well (and blogged about many of them on this site). At these events I was able to stay in touch with these very cool people, and meet many more as well. As a new blogger, this meant quite a lot to me, and it still continues to do so.
My principal contacts with Cathy were at these Press Club events, but she was always warm and friendly to me, as I believe she was to all. In May of 2005, she called on her site for anyone who might be able to supply a freeze-frame from her recent appearance on Dennis Miller, and I was able to provide one which she subsequently used in a widely-read post.
When I last saw Cathy, it was at the roast in her honor, last September (where I took the above photo). She remembered the Dennis Miller picture and expressed her appreciation to me. I'm glad to have contributed something even so small. I saw with my own eyes how much she contributed to the community.
Rest in peace, Cathy.
Today is the 4-year blogaversary of The Big Picture weblog.
The very Liberal Bill Maher gets it about Islam. This is a huge indication that Conservatives and Liberals may find themselves in agreement on this tremendously significant issue.
But let me back up for a minute before I transcribe some of Bill's comments. Last week in an article titled, "'What Accounts For The Almost Psychotic Aversion To Knowledge About Islam?'", I noted:
Westerners believe that all major religions are about finding happiness. They find it almost incomprehensible that there may be a widely-followed religion that is a rejection of that - that is about rejecting happiness on earth - that tells you that the only way to achieve heaven is to attack those who do not share your religion -- to attack them in every way, including through physical violence. And indeed, it is almost incomprehensible to us that there could be a religion that teaches its followers to act so brutally against their own earthly happiness. But many who practice Islam describe it as being precisely that, and practice it in exactly that way.
A perfect example of this was provided by one of Bill's guests in the clip above - I believe it's the actor, Steven Weber.
Weber: But I mean, don't those people [terrorists] represent a more extremist view, of Islam? You know? Aren't religions at first, aren't they supposed to appeal to people's moderate tastes - moderate instincts? To win them over? And then aren't they co-opted by extremists - by radical extremists?
That's exactly what I was referring to. Americans believe that all religions teach peace, love, and understanding, and help people pursue success and happiness. Weber cannot yet begin to even consider the possibility that Islam may not conform to this description.
I should note that while I do not believe that Islam conforms to this description, I do agree that this is a description of a what the word "religion" means, in the Western sense of the word. This is why former Muslims I've quoted on this site state that Islam is not a religion in the Western sense:
In the film, Islam: What the West Needs to Know, former Muslim Walid Shoebat points out that Westerners consider religion to be about a person's relationship to himself and to God. Islam is primarily a political and legal structure, and is first and foremost about man's relationship to his fellow man, specifically, the relationship of enforcing Sharia law on all fellow men.
Wafa Sultan: "...Islam should not be considered a religion, but a political ideology that applies its policy violently."
Now, here's Maher's response to Weber, transcribed from the clip:
Maher: No! They're not all alike! It was extremist to begin with. Mohammed was a warrior. The big lie is that all religions are basically alike. They all preach the same thing. Well of course the Bible is full of a lot of violence. I mean, God in the Old Testament is a psychopath - he just kills, kills, kills, for no reason, good reasons, bad reasons, he's jealous, he just wants to kill. [Laughter]. He is. He's the rifleman. [Laughter]. But he doesn't seem to aim it so much at outsiders. He wipes out the Jews except for Noah because they were bad to him or whatever. But he doesn't keep saying, as the Koran, it seems to me [....] it seems to me that in the Koran god keeps saying, if you're not one of us, you're an infidel, and burning would be too good for you.
...And they still whack people. You know, every religion has elements in it that are very mafia-like. Godfather III, a movie I liked and nobody else did, but I thought it was a good movie, was about how the Catholic church, is very much like Michael Corleone's mob family. But the Catholic church has calmed down a lot since the 14th century. But, you know, [to Hirsi Ali], there's a death threat on you. There's a death threat on people in your country that still speak out, there's a death threat on Salmon Rushdie. They still whack people, in Islam. There's still a lot of, you disagree with me, we'll settle it by getting whacked.
When someone like Bill Maher, known for his very Liberal views, gets it, there is reason to believe that word may be getting out.
When Instapundit and NZ Bear first launched the Porkbusters campaign, to cut fat from the federal budget, it seemed daring and audacious. Could bloggers really have a beneficial effect on government spending, via investigating, calling their representatives, and blogging about it?
The answer turns out to be "yes." The Porkbusters campaign was launched on September 18, 2005. Wikipedia states that in its first six weeks of operation it secured "$84,000,000 in specific budget cut commitments out of various Representatives and non-specific agreements out of many more."
Even more importantly, the campaign appears to be responsible for making the topic of earmarks, a matter of national debate. A Google News search for "earmark OR earmarks" for the year prior to the start of the campaign, shows 6,000 links ... versus 14,900 links for the year following the start of the campaign.
And today GWB made the subject a key part of his 2007 economic initiatives:
Bush Urges Democrats on ‘Earmarks’
Mr. Bush asked the incoming Democratic-controlled Congress today to make good on campaign promises by shining light on the previously clandestine expenditures known as “earmarks,” through legislation to require disclosure of their sponsors and other details.
Speaking in the White House’s rose garden after the Cabinet meeting, Mr. Bush noted that the soon-to-be chairmen of the House and Senate appropriations committees had agreed on a temporary moratorium on earmarks, which are parochial spending measures slipped into larger, often unrelated bills at the behest of one or a few members.
“But we need to do more,” Mr. Bush said. “Congress needs to adopt real reform that requires full disclosure of the sponsors, the costs, the recipients and the justification for every earmark.”
And he said Congress “needs to cut the number and cost of earmarks next year by half.”
The blogosphere makes Democracy more powerful and more efficient.
Update 1-12-07: Welcome, Instapundit readers!
Once again I'm seeing a lot of extra visitors on the site at the moment. Was this site mentioned on the radio today by any chance? If so, please leave a comment to let me know - and welcome to the site!
