Washington Post: What About Integrity?

If you are as concerned as I am about the state of corporate news media, this story is a sad but unsurprising one: the White House spins a story to the media with the caveat that they get no counterpoint from Democrats. The Washington Post is advocating the White House position instead of providing balanced reporting of the news.

Have we become so morally bankrupt that we accept such blatant violations of trust? To the editorial board, have you forgotten the tenets of journalistic integrity? You must follow the guidelines of truthfulness, accuracy, and impartiality. Your legitimacy demands more than providing short-term shareholder value. More importantly, even if you believe biased reporting will add to the bottom line, it is not sustainable when your audience or the public realizes they've been hoodwinked.

Hopefully the Post will get letters and complaints for this unethical behavior; you can send one to letters@washpost.com or reach their Ombudsman, Michael Getler, at ombudsman@washpost.com.

Bloomberg: Your Apologies Are Worthless

As evidence of our new found police state in NYC, stories are now circulating about the tour bus raid Sunday by the NYPD. To summarize, a Gray Line bus supervisor called police claiming that there were 5 suspicious men boarding a double decker sightseeing bus who had backpacks and all purchased their tickets in advance. So police raided the bus, detained all 60 passengers for 90 minutes, including handcuffing the 5 men indicated by the supervisor.

However, the men had no backpacks. The Gray Line supervisor seemingly lied to the police because his only real suspicion was that the men were South Asian. Publicly the Mayor and the NYPD have insisted that transit searches would be randomly selected to avoid racial profiling. However this supervisor committed this exact act of racism when contacting the police.

And here's the problem: your words do not match your actions. The FBI Most Wanted Terrorists, linked on the NYPD home page, is almost exclusively brown-skinned men. We are constantly told to report "suspicious" activity to the authorities, without ever defining the term. So when untrained citizens start spying on their neighbors, they are insensitive to race and will automatically finger the profile they see on TV or read in the paper.

This is unacceptable. Mayor Bloomberg, you are responsible for all of NYC's inhabitants, regardless of their race or creed. Mr. Bloomberg, frankly your apologies are meaningless; empty words will not restore my faith that this is a one time incident. In fact this will systematically continue to occur unless the racist undertones are removed from your publications, posters, and the mainstream news. It will continue because citizens aren't trained to spot criminal activity and human nature so quickly reverts to tribalistic, "us vs them" behavior.

Mayor Bloomberg, perhaps you need to reevaluate how the NYPD responds to these sorts of issues because most suspicious calls will turn up nothing and no one should feel intimidated to go about their business in the City.

NYPD: Do you really trust them?

So the paranoia has reached a new height: "random" subway searches. All the local rags are writing about it today like the NYT's reaction piece. Great, the Fearful Ones have another pacifier to make them feel safer. Let's be frank: random searches are going to be fruitless. If you're supportive of this new invasion of our privacy, let me posit this question: do you really expect it to be random? The only randomness will be the police man's profiles.

At what point do we stop this madness. Our country's leadership has deceptively put us into danger on the back of Our Tragedy (9/11 for you dolts). And now they wish to erode our fundamental rights to instill the Fear. After all, Fear is good for control and power. Make no mistake, this is the inevitable result of the road the Fearful Ones have put us on. Keeping us Fearful is the best way to consolidate power and hoodwink us from their apparently corrupt nature.

Don't tell me things like "I've got nothing to hide" because it only demonstrates your fundamental lack of perspective and your overwhelming ignorance. White blindness is so infuriating; society is not equal for all and whites are never subjected to egregious overreach of power. You don't pass policemen or National Guardsmen with automatic weapons and feel intimidated, concerned that your skin color will raise their suspicions. Nor have you gotten the long stares as you board your train to get to work or go out for a few drinks on the weekend.

Your feelings of safety are being carved out of my sense of security. And that's unacceptable to me as a minority and even more so as an American.

The NYC Subway Guide or How I Hate My Fellow (Fat) Man

There's a funny post over at ThisIsWhatWeDoNow.com that rants about NYC's subways. Larry nails a lot of good gripes if you're a daily rider of this world class underground rail system. And evidently some of the comments are none too pleased with his obesity complaints.

Well here's a scoop: you made a fucking CHOICE to get to where you are. This wasn't some overnight phenomenon; it was a systematic process of gorging yourself and not being active enough. Your corpulence may be acceptable among rural and suburban areas of this country but you're taking up VALUABLE SPACE in the city. Space that the city can ill-afford to give you with your clogging up space in trains or backing up sidewalk traffic.

And for the record, calling Larry a bigot is deeply insulting to those of us who have seen real bigotry. But it''s not surprising considering you lack even the perspective to maintain a healthy weight...

Roberts, the new Thomas?

Remember when the first Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court? For me, it was a poor pick based on his lack of judicial experience, his hostility towards civil rights (irony notwithstanding), and his rather questionable ABA rating. Unfortunately politics degenerated the confirmation hearings into an embarrassing case of "he said she said", distracting the public from the real problems with Thomas's nomination.

But in the end, Thomas was an unknown; there were educated guesses but nothing concrete to evaluate him on. He would not answer questions relating to cases like Roe v. Wade, for instance insisting that he had not formulated views on abortion. Sadly this was a successful tactic that was aided by the Anita Hill distractions.

I hope that Dems in Washington remember this as we move into the confirmation process. The best advice I would have is to ask the tough questions (like those posed by Chuck Schumer) and insist on getting substantial answers. Keep in mind that the GOP runs Capitol Hill and the filibuster is inappropriate for this nominee. The White House is weakened as of late and their nomination definitely reflects this. Keep that in mind when you do your Constitutional duties and publicly scrutinize this nominee.

Scoble's Dell About Face

I gotta say that I'm a fan of Scoble. I like to think of him as Microsoft's Chief Blogging Officer since he likes to prod his colleagues into increased dialog through blogs. And as a corporation, I think MS is way ahead of everyone on that front. MSDN is a very valuable resource for a techie professional like me. From all accounts Robert has been the big cheerleader and I think it's been paying off for Microsoft's customer base.

That's why I was a little surprised to see Scoble posting today about Dell. Essentially reversing his previous position (and through various other posts) lamenting on Dell's closed door policy, needling them along the way. Now he's saying:

I think I was wrong to join in the pile on on [sic] Dell. It's not really fair to beat up a company for not blogging and life isn't fair anyway.

Life may be unfair but it doesn't mean we shouldn't pursue the discourse. Dell is the biggest PC maker out there and they have fallen way out of touch with their customers. Why should Dell be recommended moving forward? You claim their equipment "rocks" and you're a happy customer. However, and this is an important point, do you deal with them as a typical end user when it comes to sales and support?

I have found their support to be nightmarish like many other customers except when dealing with their business lines like the PowerEdge/Latitude/Optiplex. My company was a happy Dell shop until a couple years ago when their equipment became less reliable and their support became the excuse-generator rather than problem-solver. I've sought other vendors and have been much happier.

I no longer advise people to buy Dell equipment and their latest actions solidify that recommendation. Robert, if you're not answering your customer needs, why should you have the industry's leadership role? Microsoft seems to be learning this (in no small part by your efforts) so why are you letting Dell off the hook? Not to be conspiratorial but why the sudden change in feelings?

Bend Over, Ohio: You're Getting Shafted

For those of you keeping tabs, here's the 3759th reason America is fucked. Ohio's chief justice, a Republican, has disqualified every judge in Cuyahoga County (evidently largely Democrats) from hearing a corruption case brought by that country's commissioner against high level Republicans including the state's governor. Check out the link for all the gory details so I don't have to summarize it like you're in grade school.

Ohio: clean up your fucking act. Partisan politics is one thing but this smells dirtier than a bordello in Thailand. The "perception of bias" is pretty fucking apparent in this situation: GOP operatives are manipulating Justice. The only real link between the commissioner and the Cuyahoga judges is their political party association. Hagan (said commissioner) controls the budget? So fucking what! If he manipulates the budgets to reward or punish the judges involved, the press should nail him to a stake. I'm confident that the D after his name would guarantee that nowadays...

From where I'm sitting it looks like the Chief Justice is going to be picking the judge he'd like to hear this case. The stench of complicity is overwhelming.

Mac bloggers, how do you do it?

Motherfucking web. Shitty little Blogger. Goddamn Mac.

Fuck the fact that the Web is supposed to be platform agnostic. It ain't. You get reminded of this frequently when you're using a Mac. I'm sure the Linux boys come across this too even though they're usually too caught up in their hobbyist PC bullshit nonsense to admit as much.

Anyway to my point: Blogger fucking doesn't work with any of the browsers I use on my Mac. Safari can't handle rendering the fancy toolbar in Compose mode. Camino gets you a bit further but it's a cock tease: Javascript errors prevent you from actually using the damn Compost mode. Internet Exploiter leaves you wishing for an enema. Something, anything, that'll help you feel cleaner...

Yes, yes, I've since found Blogger's happy help section which gleefully lets me know that I need to use Firefox or that bloated Netscape shit. So Firefox it is even though I'm grumbling the whole way. Funny thing is that I have this love affair with the 'Fox on my PC but I think it looks like ass on the Mac. Probably because Camino is my fall back Mac browser for the times that Safari's KHTML rendering does a shit poor job.

Eh fuck it. I've got more interesting things to rant about. This should work until I get my own website going. Of course I'm sure WordPress is gonna give me the same bile-rising anger for some reason or another...

Well so much for writing about how much I hate Karl Rove or whatever this post was initially going to be... I'm sure I'll have plenty to bitch about later. Which leads me to ask: why the fuck are you still reading this? You're like a fucking perv watching me jerk off on this posting...