Month: July 2005

Gay Camp Takes the Wrong Approach

This New York Times story, about religious parents who sent their gay kid to a camp to cure him, really mystifies me.

So the parents have a 16-year-old son who says he’s gay. This horrifies them, so they send him to a religious camp with rules appropriate for a monastery. This is completely the wrong approach.

Look, they want to turn the kid hetero, right? Fine, instead of sending him off to a retreat with a bunch of other young men (yeah, there’s a brilliant strategy), they need to be taking him to strip clubs or buying him porn. Force the kid to have lunch at Hooters at least three times a week.

Sorry, son, no doing your homework until you’ve finished that latest Jenna Jameson video.

Did Paul Begala Really Say Republicans Want to Kill Us?

Matt Drudge has a link on his site at the moment featuring a photo of Democrat hack Paul Begala above the words, “Ex-Clinton Aide Charges Republicans ‘Want to Kill Us’…” Did Begala really say something that stupid? Well, the article that Drudge links to makes that claim, but a close reading suggests that Begala is being taken out of context.

The quote comes from this CNS News article by Jered Ede. Ede writes,

Begala’s presence on the panel created a stir when he declared that Republicans had “done a p***-poor job of defending” the U.S.

Republicans, he said, “want to kill us.

“I was driving past the Pentagon when that plane hit” on Sept. 11, 2001. “I had friends on that plane; this is deadly serious to me,” Begala said.

“They want to kill me and my children if they can. But if they just kill me and not my children, they want my children to be comforted — that while they didn’t protect me because they cut my taxes, my children won’t have to pay any money on the money they inherit,” Begala said. “That is bulls*** national defense, and we should say that.”

Begala is a very poor speaker, as anyone who watched CNN’s Crossfire can attest. In the last paragraph he switches the pronoun “they” back and forth between Al Qaeda and Republicans without missing a beat or realizing how confusing he’s being.

Since, all we have here for the “Republicans want to kill us” line is the sentence fragment “want to kill us,” its highly likely Begala said something like, “They want to kill us” and Ede mistakenly thinks Begala was referring to Republicans rather than Al Qaeda.

At a minimum, I’d want to see a transcript showing the full context of that “want to kill us” remark before rushing to judgment as Drudge has done.

Source:

Ex-Clinton Aide Charges Republicans ‘Want to Kill Us’. Jared Edge, CNS News, July 15, 2005.

There Is No Right to Read in Canada

This story is just bizarre. Some Canadian bookseller accidentally sold 14 copies of the new Harry Potter novel before they were supposed to go on sale. So the publisher asked for and received an injunction which makes it illegal for those people to actually read the copies of the book they purchased.

The Times reports,

The supreme court of British Columbia issued a court order preventing anyone from “displaying, reading, offering for sale, selling or exhibiting in public” their books. J. K. RowlingÂ’s legal advisers said that the author was entitled to prevent buyers from reading their own books even though they had not broken the law.

“The fact is that this is property that should not have been in their possession,” said Neil Blair, a legal specialist for Christopher Little, the authorÂ’s literary agent. “Copyright holders are entitled to protect their work. If the content of the book is confidential until July 16, which it is, why shouldnÂ’t someone who has the physical book be prevented from reading it and thereby obtaining the confidential information? How they came to have access to the book is immaterial.”

British lawyers described the injunction as “unfair and excessive” but added that the reader did not have a right in law to read the book. Korieh Duodu, a media lawyer for David Price Solicitors and Advocates, said: “I have never heard of such a wide-ranging order. One sympathises with the reader from a non-legal point of view, but property rights often trump civil liberties. There is no human right to read.”

No human right to read? WTF?

Source:

Reading ban on leaked Harry Potter. The Times (London), July 13, 2005.

Treasonous Articles, Cool Cities and the Idiot Michigan Governor

Okay, this is funny. The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed awhile ago which sliced and diced Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s tax proposals. Granholm is between a rock and a hard place with Michigan’s downward spiraling economy, but she just doesn’t seem to understand that the way out of Michigan’s mess is to make the state more business friendly rather than increasing taxes.

A member of our legislature, Rich Baxter, wrote an article saying as much, and Granholm lashed out saying the article was “treasonous for the state of Michigan” and telling the Michigan Republican Party,

When you are so engaged in building up your political party in such a way that you damage the state, that to me, that representative should be removed from office.

Although I don’t agree with her policies, Granholm is very personable and generally does a pretty good job selling her decisions, so this sort of outburst is very uncharacteristic.

Of course, it could be calculated. One of the Republican candidates vying to run against her in November is Richard DeVoss, and Democrats are already all over him because his family’s company, Amway, shipped jobs out of Michigan oversees. So maybe this is part of a “the problem isn’t Michigan’s high taxes and poor business environment, but rather its the Republicans sending jobs to China and telling people about our state” campaign.

Source:

Granholm: Legislator betrayed the state. George Weeks, The Detroit News, July 11, 2005.

Of Taxes and ‘Treason’. Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2005.

Declan McCullagh Jumps the Gun

On July 7, Muslim extremists bombed London’s mass transportation system. Later that day Declan McCullagh pulled one of his typical bone-headed moves in wondering why there was no footage being aired yet from the thousands of security cameras deployed throughout London?

And with all
those CCTV cameras littered about London, where’s the footage of the
bombers? Is there none because the cameras weren’t pervasive/invasive
enough?

Now, of course, a week later, we know that the cameras were working and captured the terrorists. Because of the existence of the footage, police were able to quickly determine that the bombings were probably suicide attacks, and were able to identify the prepetrators and search their residences.

The impetus coming out of the bombing will, if anything, likely tilt toward upgrading and improving London’s CCTV system given how the existing network of cameras has been in the bombing investigation. In addition, U.S. law enforcement will surely use the success of the London CCTV system to push further for such systems in American cities.

Glib, premature comments by civil libertarians like McCullagh’s only reinforce the view that those concerned about such extensive surveillance are out of touch with real world concerns.