Daily Archives: May 26, 2003

Truth in Advertising

This entry was posted in bush on by (updated on )

From Cursor.org on 5/26 a pointer to this New Republic partial accounting of truth in advertising by Peter Beinart:

For conservatives, it seems, this administration’s decency and honesty are ideological axioms that require no empirical defense. President Bush is not President Clinton. That’s all they need to know.

Well, he is the Commander in Chief and to defend him would imply that he might not be infallible and to even hint at this would be unpatriotic.

PS: Too bad there are not links to each of Cursor’s snippets.

Chasing Grover

This entry was posted in Politics on by (updated on )

Dave Johnson, Seeing the Forest, has a solution to counter the right’s massive propaganda machine: stop funding specific programs. Instead:

Moderate and progressive philanthropists and foundations must step up to the plate and begin providing general operating funding to advocacy organizations…

He has a point, but he probably needs to come up with a way to double the effort given the 30 year head start that must be overcome. And, while I agree with Dave that it is not the politicians who will change public opinion they can, indeed, influence the philanthropists to make sound long term investments.

The Dems

This entry was posted in Election 2004 on by (updated on )

There are a bunch of folks with their names up on the Democrats 2004 nomination dart board. I think it is too soon to pay much attention to most of them and have purposely avoided doing much research. Why go through the hassle, right? They will sort themselves out between now and primary time (or shortly after).

Then along comes the Patio Pundit who makes it too easy. Martin has a link to each candidates web page and a mini review of the site. Next thing I knew I was over reading Kucinich and Dean. And planning to go back for more.

Prescribed by Nurse Ratched.

Buying the Times

This entry was posted in Information on by (updated on )

I was just over at Busy, Busy, Busy reading his Shorter Bill Safire from May 15. Clicked through to read the original NY Times article and blam: hit the $ for premium content on a ten day old op ed piece (it looks like material as recent as one week old is getting moved into the premium category).

I like the NYT well enough to to frequently read the online headlines and some articles and to buy a newstand issue several times a month: no matter which side of an issue you live the articles/op eds generally make you think (oh, and now, we can search for the truth as well). If I lived in NYC or the NE US I would have a full sub to the print edition.

I do not like it well enough to continue using it as a source for material in this blog if my readers must pay $2.95/article to read linked articles.

Don’t get me wrong: the NYT certainly has every right to charge for its content. But I’m not going to pay $2.95 to read a 10 day old 700 word op ed piece and likely would not pay it for a 7000 word article. If I won’t why should I lead my readers to this choice?

Some possible consequences of this policy (didn’t I read discussion a month or so ago about concerns with charges for 90 day old content?):

The NYT will reduce their bandwidth costs due to reduced online access. Surely this is not what the charge is about, is it?

People that read blogs will skip over posts over a week old that refer to NYT articles

Bloggers will use the NYT less often as a source or quote much more extensively

(1st Option Corollary: The blogosphere’s circulatory system will be healthier due to a huge reduction in Krugman bashing)

2nd Option Corollary: Krugman will no longer be quoted out of context.

Overall NYT readership will slowly decline

To counter the previous point a viable micropayment mechanism will be developed (There is some price between $0.00 and $2.95 at which I and many others will buy the article without second thought)

The development of a viable micropayment system would make this whole exercise worth while.