Photography with the Left Eye

Gosh, the options are too sweet. Edwin Meese and his whining about the Prop 8 case in San Francisco (remember…California voters took away the right of some people to marry) or Sarah Palin as commentator for Fox “news.”

Ok, the Sarahnator wins out. It’s just too rich to pass up.

Here’s what we have to look forward to:

A little truthiness. But not much truth.

Lotsa folksy say’ins, ya betcha

And when the going gets tough, you can betcha that Sarah will be going. She will have some other important thing to do. Also.

Jessi again

Dealing with a loved one who has end stage terminal disease is wrenching. The people (usually close relatives) who have to carry out that person’s wishes (assuming they were expressed ahead of time) has to do so with compassion and wisdom, all the while watching a person who was once vital deteriorate and suffer. Often these people become someone else…whether due to the disease or the drugs used in treatment.

I was in that situation not long ago, and I was lucky that my siblings and I together worked through it, and that my parents didn’t suffer too much, it was something I would wish on nobody–but something most of us will face.

That is why it is stunning for the Republicans, and a certain failed vice presidential candidate, have created a vast lie ("death panels") from a provision in the health bill that allows for end of life counseling. It is certainly why we haven’t heard the word “compassionate” anywhere near the term “conservative” for a good long while.

These people will simply stoop to the most blatant of lies to prevent any kind of health insurance reform. It’s a bit trite, but it seems more and more true that the members of Congress who are opposing the bill are doing so…because they have health insurance. And that’s all that counts.

(Anon.)

Many blog writers, and more than a few comic strip writers, frequently mention an evil thing they call the MSM. Ooooh…what is that? It’s the mainstream media. Dead trees. Almost extinct newspapers. And lots of other derisive terms.

They are missing the point. For all of its warts, the print media (I’m not now addressing broadcast media) serve an incredibly important function, and if (when?) it disappears, we will be the worse for it.

First, and most important, the daily newspaper at least pretends toward objectivity. Most small town papers regularly fail; most papers have a variety of axes to grind, depending on who is in charge, and some of the best have failed in spectacular ways (the New York Times, arguably the paper with the best reporters and longest history of actually being fair and balanced, might be solely responsible for failing to halt WPE GWBush’s stupid march to war with Iraq through poor oversight of a single reporter).

So newspapers at least pretend (and mostly truly try) to objectively report the news. What would replace the newspaper? Well, the bloggers, of course! They will provide the news, quickly and accurately. But wait….most of them us have an agenda. The Drudge report is one of the earliest examples of a blog posing as a “news” source, but, as we know, a clearly biased one. And on the left, I love Daily Kos, but to mistake most of what is written as objective news would be…a mistake.

Second, none of the alternatives even have a fraction of the budget to place capable reporters in the places that the news happens. Sure, Daily Kos has people who are in and write about Washington, DC and Portland, Maine. But when bad stuff flares up in Kosovo, they are not going to be able to send a reporter. And when they find someone who is willing to blog, who is going to vet the accuracy of what they write?

And the on-line news aggregators will ultimately need to find a way to pay their sources. Sure, I read Yahoo news and others to get my hourly fix, but I also subscribe to three newspapers, so I am supporting the infrastructure that makes it possible. How will you find out what really happened when the MSM are gone?

NBell over the weekend. She really is upside down. In the air.
This is a good time to remind you about the workshop I wrote about recently…scroll down for more.

But it doesn’t treat its customers as if it cares too much about them. One of its (IMO, somewhat strange) obsessions is that it wants all of users to be “real people.” Never mind that it might be a bad idea to disclose some information about that real person in a public way. Never mind stalkers. Never mind that your prospective employer might look for clues about you. Anyway, they’re now kicking users off when they think you have a fake name (from the SF Chron):

Alicia Istanbul woke up one recent day to find herself locked out of the Facebook account she opened in 2007, one that Facebook suddenly deemed fake.

“They should at least give you a warning, or at least give you the benefit of the doubt,” she said. “I was on it all day. I had built my entire social network around it. That’s what Facebook wants you to do.”

Let’s see. The easiest thing to do is the think of a plausible, fake name. So FB is going after the implausible names (i.e., the ones more likely to be real). And they don’t bother to even ask. That’s just stupid.

Oh. And I care, a little. FB seems to have kicked me off. They didn’t give warning, or a reason. I just couldn’t log in one day. Fortunately, I had not done what Ms. Istanbul did (although one client emailed me with some alarm)….I did not build my social network around FB. And I won’t rely very much on any service that can act in a simply capricious way and decide (or have ‘bots decide) that you don’t fit them, today.

Deluxious and Kamilion, a few days ago.

Is it “enhanced interrogation techniques?”

Is it “harsh treatment?”

Is it “waterboarding?”

It is torture. Or water torture.

Great post here about the language of torture (and how the media has played along, helping to soften what should be even more outrage).

Meg