Day: February 13, 2003

Alterman, Limbaugh and Apologies

While doing a little research on Eric Alterman’s wish in Esquire that Rush Limbaugh had gone deaf, I came across this post on a blog that makes an erroneous statement about one of Limbaugh’s more reprehensible statements.

During his television show’s run, Limbaugh told a story about a mythical White House dog and at the end of his bit a picture of Chelsea Clinton was displayed (Clinton was 12 or 13 at the time). According to the weblog linked to above. Alterman mentions this incident in his apology about his Limbaugh comment, and the blogger linked to above has this to say,

But since Limbaugh has apologized for the quip directed at Chelsea Clinton (which Alterman quotes), and Alterman clearly still holds it against him regardless, it’s fair to have the same standard for Alterman’s own apology.

But Limbaugh has never unequivocally apologized for his comments about Chelsea. As far as I can tell, the closest he’s come to apologizing was December 2002 when both he and Hillary Clinton were at the same wedding and the New York Observer reported that Limbaugh had privately apologized to Hillary Clinton about his comments about Chelsea.

Instead, at the time Limbaugh tried to pass off his insulting comments as a mistake by a staffer who supposedly showed the wrong picture — which is why his alleged apology to Hillary Clinton, if it actually happened, would have been news.

Conspiracy Theories About Google

Dave Winer is apparently impressed by Daniel Brandt’s anti-Google rantings. But as this Salon.Com article documents, Brandt is a nutty conspiracy theorist (just go a few links deep at his NameBase.Org who is pissed off because *his* page about Donald Rumsfeld, and a whole host of other people, doesn’t show up very high in Google searches.

I particularly love the brief explanation Brandt offers of why Google’s PageRank sucks,

It’s democratic in the same way that capitalism is democratic. You could have the cure for cancer on the Web and not find it in Google because ‘important’ sites don’t link to it.

But, of course, if there were a cure for cancer posted on the web, then it is likely that lots of people would link to it, much like many scientists would end up citing a paper that outlined a successful cure for cancer.

What Brandt wants is for Google to be democratic in the same way that the Democratic Republic of North Korea is Democratic.

In fact, as Salon notes, Brandt believes that if you search on “Donald Rumsfeld” his page about Rumsfeld should be shown before Rumsfeld’s DoD biography page, even though it is largely useless and almost impossible to navigate (the main problem with NameBase is that it is an index of citations largely of the conspiracy literature which Brandt has personally read).

Update: A good example of one of Brandt’s nutty conspiracy theories his his speculation about China’s blocking of Google in which Brandt argues that “China may be well-advised to block the use of U.S. engines to protect their own national security” because Google may be sharing data about Chinese users with the National Security Agency which would, in Brandt’s mind, “put the NSA at a tremendous advantage in determining where pro-U.S. sentiment may exist in China.”