Slashdot Mirror

Strangely enough, somewhere.com offers anti-spam services as well as other consulting things. Could it be that they have set up someone@somewhere.com as a black hole to track spammers? That sure would rock. There is always some misuse when you post your email address online. Don't do it. Simply code a form for contacting you via email and let PHP or whatever send it to you behind the scenes. This halts any kind of email harvesting, and results in the use of faked email addresses, or obvious ones, like admin@DOMAIN.com or whatever. If you have a catchall, you should disable it and let them all bounce. When enough email bounces, someone somewhere will figure out something to solve the problem of spam, or run of the mill spammers will just give up.

I was always taught to start out with a positive comment [...]

A laudable practice, though if you'll forgive me for saying so, your "positive comment" in this case bears the whiff of overweening politeness intended as mockery (or "damning with faint praise"), which I doubt your instructor would have approved of.

Unfortunately, I can not find a shred of evidence to support any of your claims.

Then you didn't read my reference (beyond looking for quotes to yank out of context), as it provided its own references.

IMHO the only way you could make the statements you have quite an emotional investment in the issue and I doubt any rational discussion would change this.

I concluded much the same of you, but I figured I should answer you anyway for the benefit of our other readers.

For those to lazy to follow the link, here are some exerpts from this in-depth "analysis":

Ooh, quoting out of context, there's a winning strategy. Here are a few more relevant quotes:

[...] You see, I have a law practice to attend to. (Yes, I exist. Yes, I'm a practicing lawyer in Los Angeles. I graduated Yale Law School in 1992, and I am a member of the Calfornia Bar. My practice consists entirely of litigation, with a strong appellate practice.) [...]

[...] All of the facts in my Q&A are well-documented, either in the US Supreme Court opinion, Federal Law (3 USC Sec. 5), former Supreme Court case-law, the Florida Supreme Court and the Florida courts below, or, occasionally, press accounts. [...]

[...] While there are humorous aspects to the Q&A, it is indeed serious. The illogical opinion of the Supreme Court, one of the worst and ill-reasoned opinions in US history is, unfortunately, no joke. [...]

(And just in case it wasn't clear, I am not the author of the site I'm referring to.)

Of course, this is all moot as Bush would have won the election no matter how many times your recounted, even under the most Gore-favorable criteria.

No, he wouldn't. [These are, unfortunately, from pay-to-read archives, so I can only cite the summaries. Relevant quotes below:

While the vast majority of Florida's overvotes could never have been assigned legally to any presidential candidate, experts say there are some clues in the ballots that offer at least evidence of, if not proof, for whom voters meant to vote. And that evidence suggests Al Gore was preferred by more voters than George W. Bush. Among the clues: 71,548 overvote ballots had a vote for Gore, but not Bush. There were 25,082 overvote ballots that had a vote for Bush, but not Gore.

Democrat Al Gore might be president today if Fl

Unfortunately, I can not find a shred of evidence to support any of your claims. I honestly debated even responding, for one, because to do so effectively would require lots of references and I am feeling somewhat lazy, and two because I don't quite seem the point because IMHO the only way you could make the statements you have quite an emotional investment in the issue and I doubt any rational discussion would change this.

I am beginning to understand your confusion on the issue. Having followed and read the sole reference in your post, I myself am confused... is this really the source of your info or were you joking. For those to lazy to follow the link, here are some exerpts from this in-depth "analysis":

As AOL allows me to send out only 50 names or so at a time, I have only responded to those of you who question my existence or have asked for a clean, ungarbled copy of the "Layman's Guide" which I provide below.

further down the 'analysis' begins:

Q: I'm not a lawyer and I don't understand the recent Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore. Can you explain it to me?

A: Sure. I'm a lawyer. I read it. It says Bush wins, even if Gore got the most votes.

Q: But wait a second. The US Supreme Court has to give a reason, right?

A: Right.

To get you up to speed on what actually happened in 2000. I suggest the following, rather-unbiased law school FAQ. If you want to broaden your view and actually listen to an opposing viewpoint, you could try this obviously biased site. The main page of the site looks like they obviously have an agenda, but at least some the arguements are tracable, as opposed to your reference.

Of course, this is all moot as Bush would have won the election no matter how many times your recounted, even under the most Gore-favorable criteria. link (please read all of it) and link. (Is CNN part of the 'vast right wing conspiracy now too?')

Having spent the last couple hours looking reading up on this, I really am too tired now to respong to each of your assertions. However, I did want to highlight a few:

...the US Supreme Court then unconstitutionally intervened...

Pretty odd statement considering that the Supreme Court has the final say on constitutionality. By definition, the Supreme Court can not do anything "unconstitutional".

...The Florida Supreme Court tried to enforce existing Florida election law...

The Florida Supreme Court extended the deadline for performing recounts beyond the law, as passed by the legislature.

The problem was neither the butterfly ballot nor the 170,000 or 3% of Democratic-leaning voters (largely African-Americans) disenfranchised. The problem is that somewhat less than 0.01% of the ballots (less than 600 votes) may have been determined under ever-so-slightly different standards by judges and county officials recording votes under strict public scrutiny, as Americans have done for more than 200 years. The single judge overseeing the entire process might miss a vote or two.

I don't know what the heck you are trying to say here. If you are referring to the mass intimidations, and other irregularities, those have pretty much all been debunked IIRC.

They imposed a deadline of December 12 for the recount, whereas under normal federal election law Florida would have had until January 6 to complete the recount

Anyone who actually took time to *read* about the election troubles in Florida would know the facts.

Yes, they would; clearly you didn't, because you don't. The reference I cited for the previous poster also neatly demolishes your "facts":

1) Gore is the one that took the battle to the courts after Florida was ready to declare Bush the winner.

Nope. Bush's lawyers went to court to stop the recounts before Gore filed a single lawsuit, on the (justified) fear that Bush's miniscule apparent lead would evaporate and reverse if the recounts were completed.

2) The Gore campaign wanted votes counted differently for areas where they felt they didn't get the vote they expected.

The Gore campaign, and the Florida Supreme Court, wanted votes counted according to existing Florida election law, including the well-established "clear intent of the voter" standard.

The Supremes ruled simply that if there was to be a recount, ALL votes in the entire state would have to be recounted using the same standards (i.e. was a hanging "chad" a vote).

The Supremes ruled that the Florida Supreme Court should have somehow changed Florida's election laws to correct this supposed "equal protection" problem --- except that the FSC doesn't have the authority to do that, and if they had tried to, the USSC would have ruled against them for doing so.

3) Gore won the popular vote but not the electoral votes.

No, Gore won the electoral vote, too, because he won Florida. You can be forgiven for not knowing about this, because the supposedly "liberal" mainstream media quietly memory-holed the massive election fraud involved.

Think, people. Don't just believe tin-hat stories because they fall in line with your hatred of the president.

Funny, that's what we kept saying to Republicans during the Clinton years, but they wouldn't listen. Project much?

Tin-foil hat alert!

Well, yours is clearly on tight. Apparently you followed the 2000 election by way of Fox "News". I humbly submit a handy summary of what actually happened.

The law of the land was followed to the "T".

Yes, until the US Supreme Court stepped in.

The Democrats tried to force an unconstitutional recount to ensure that Gore would win the election.

Read: The Florida Supreme Court tried to enforce existing Florida election law, as it had been interpreted via precedent extending back more than a century; the US Supreme Court then unconstitutionally intervened, to ensure that Bush "won" the election.

In fact, there were two legal, certified recounts in Florida, and Bush won them both.

Those are the ones the supposedly "liberal" mainstream media emphasized. There was also a full statewide recount (which, for reference, is what the Florida Supreme Court had ordered, and what would have happened if the Scalia Five had not intervened); Bush lost that one.

The Democrats employed judicial activism at its worst to change the standards of for recounting ballots after the election [...]

The Florida Supreme court did not change the rules of the election; the US Supreme Court even acknowledged as much. They then employed judicial activism at its worst by ruling that the FSC should have changed the election rules, to alleviate the supposed "equal protection" problems you dutifully parrot below --- except, of course, that if the FSC had done that, the USSC would have ruled against them because they had done so. Neat scam, huh?

[...] in such a way that certain citizens votes would weigh more heavily than others.

Yes; specifically, such that votes whose intent was clear would weigh more heavily than votes whose intent was not clear. That's why they call it the "clear intent of the voter" standard, after all.

The US Supreme Court ruled that this recount violated the equal protection rights of the citizens whose votes would not be recounted under the new, heavily-biased standards.

I think my above cite skewers that better than I could:

The problem was neither the butterfly ballot nor the 170,000 or 3% of Democratic-leaning voters (largely African-Americans) disenfranchised. The problem is that somewhat less than 0.01% of the ballots (less than 600 votes) may have been determined under ever-so-slightly different standards by judges and county officials recording votes under strict public scrutiny, as Americans have done for more than 200 years. The single judge overseeing the entire process might miss a vote or two.

They did not even "stop" the recount.

`Fraid they did. They imposed a deadline of December 12 for the recount, whereas under normal federal election law Florida would have had until January 6 to complete the recount. Note that the ruling in which they imposed this artificial deadline was issued at 10pm on December 12, giving Florida less than two hours to complete any recount before a deadline they wouldn't have had but for the USSC.

Exactly how is this an "appointment"?

I don't expect you to acknowledge any of these inconvenient facts, of course; in fact, I suspect that by the second paragraph or so, you already had your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears and were loudly chanting, "La la la, George Bush was legitimately elected President, la la la, I can't heeeear you..."

Wikipedia is an interesting experiment, perhaps worthy of financial support, but it's by no means clear that the technology-supported-consensus-opinion facilitated by the wiki will yield information that is consistently unbiased fair and true. You describe this process as "democratic", which perhaps it is to some degree, but only those with access to the internet get to "vote". Since we know that participation in the internet remains skewed with respect to economic class, race, education level, and gender, some degree of bias and elitism is inherent in the wiki process -- at least until such time as internet access is truly universal.

So, "unbiased" seems at risk from the outset. It's not clear how to evaluate "fair" as applies to the non-editorial presentation of unbiased information. When it comes to information about history or current events, substantiated facts might be generally preferred over "fairness". Perhaps most history and other information would be perceived as unfair by someone, regardless of whether a majority voted it to be unbiased and factually true. Minority oppression is one of the greatest risks of a democratic process.

With respect to the ability of a democratic process to determine truth, consider the now classic case study of Al Gore's alleged claim to have invented the internet. Widely accepted and unquestioned by most people as a fact, Mr. Gore in truth made no such claim, even though variously measured majorities would almost certainly claim it to be true. Also consider that pollsters periodically test people's basic and strictly objective knowledge on some subject or another and find it sadly wanting.

The democratic process as a model for truth building seems a foundation of sand, at least so long as ignorance remains rampant.

...to say that others are spinning what Gore said is inaccurate.

<a href="http://somewhere.com/">http://somewhere.com/ </a>

</a>

For reference, there's an updated version of your "George W Bush might not be President" link in the Red Rock Eater Digest. Good stuff.

I think the no retractions policy is to protect eBay from lawsuits. If they don't allow retractions, they will claim that they are an arms length from the process, and they can't be accused of selectively allowing some changes and disallowing others. There are plenty of problems with eBay's feedback mechanisim; I think the no retraction policy is probably a good idea. I think Phil Agre wrote an excellent piece on what's wrong with the system.

My notes on the conference can be found at http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/2003/Technology. Notes.from.th.html. The really quick summary--everyone's got content-filtering fever, and I think they are nuts. You're trying to filter something that is NP-complete (Javascript email) and then do natural language understanding on it? I don't think so. Just as an example, consider the following three spams I've received recently.

1. A message that said, "Please subscribing me to your mailing list." The only clue that it was spam (other than a careful header examination)--the .sig pointed to a soft-porn site and contained a photo of a come-hither 20-something.
2. A message claiming to be reporting a message as spam from my system. The clue (again, other than the headers)? I got the same message at multiple unrelated email addresses.
3. A message containing nothing but an image with a text message in the image. (What, we're going to do OCR too?)

Content filtering is doomed.

Oh yes, about blocking port 25. This is always followed by "and then your sysadmin can run SMTP on a different port so that you can connect to it via that." And if this becomes common, how long do you think until the spammers start scanning for alternate SMTP ports and doing direct delivery? In any case, it's moot. 90% of your spam isn't being sent from this country anyway. You're not going to persuade those remote sysadmins to block outbound port 25 any more than we've managed to get them to close their open relays. This is big business and big bucks.

And in fact, it seems Al barely even misspoke. Phil Agre put together a good overview of the "Al Gore invented the Internet" story that shows how it can mainly be traced to bad reporting by Wired News. (The reason I never read anything by Declan McCullagh)

Yes he said something along those lines, but through shoddy journalism, it became generally accepted that Al Gore was boasting about being the father of the Internet.

And of course Republican pundits and presidental candidates further distorted the story into proof that Al Gore is a big fat liar. How many votes did they get off that during the election?

Bush said the ruling "points up the fact that we need common-sense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God. And those are the kind of judges I intend to put on the bench."

Clause 3:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

As you'd expect from that, the Presidential Oath or Affirmation in Article II.1.8 is "merely"

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
that's what he said. that's all. look it up.
http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Gore. and.the.Inte1.html

Oh, it is so much more comfortable to anchor in the harbor or ignorance than to set sail on the stormy seas of thought.
It's amusing to see the political censorship come out when a petty Slashdot moderation tyrant sees something he can't deal with - namely, the truth. You appear to be one of those "first thinkers" as I like to call them. Other people like to call them conservatives but they don't conserve much of anything except their own power. You'll never hear one say, "on second thought..." because they never get that far. The simple, oft repeated lie is easier for their minds to grasp than the truth which they will try to bury if anyone brings it to light as illustrated by the down-modding of my previous post as "Flame Bait." Obviously, it wasn't flame bait because it drew no replies thus disproving your moderation.
You can mod me down as often as you like because I could care less about Slashdot karma. What's more important to me is the freedom to express my views as guaranteed me by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. You, on the other hand, appear to have no respect for the Constitution or freedom and would rather engage in the practice of censorship.
Go ahead, mod me down again. I'll just keep posting and we can have a little censorship tango in the spotlight. I've noticed that roaches really hate bright lights.

Here again is the true story behind the "Gore claimed to have invented the Internet" lie.

Score:5 ?????!!!!!!
On an ancient and disproven cheap shot like that?
Really, you guys need to get a clue.
Here's the real story behind the crap being peddled.

The story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet has been thoroughly debunked by Phil Agre in http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Gore. and.the.Inte.html and rebutted further later
That meme was a creation of Declan McCullagh, a "reporter" for Wired News who is politically a dogmatic Libertarian so extreme that he managed to get a book chapter using him as a poster-boy for Libertarian ideologues, and a different book chapter using him as Libertarian joke-fodder.

If you think this is flame-bait, the aspect of his fabricated story being a Liberatarian hit-piece on Al Gore was extensively discussed in a debunking by Salon

After Declan McCullagh was repeatedly taken to task for his hatchet-job, over more than year, by everyone who was there, from Dave Farberto Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, Declan finally grudgingly retracted the "story"

But people still repeat it, because urban legends never die.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

The story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet has been thoroughly debunked by Phil Agre in http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Gore. and.the.Inte.html and rebutted further later
That meme was a creation of Declan McCullagh, a "reporter" for Wired News who is politically a dogmatic Libertarian so extreme that he managed to get a book chapter using him as a poster-boy for Libertarian ideologues, and a different book chapter using him as Libertarian joke-fodder.
If you think this is flame-bait, the aspect of his fabricated story being a Liberatarian hit-piece on Al Gore was extensively discussed in a debunking by Salon

After Declan McCullagh was repeatedly taken to task for his hatchet-job, over more than year, by everyone who was there, from Dave Farberto Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, Declan finally grudgingly retracted the "story"

But people still repeat it, because urban legends never die.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Phil Agre has written an article about this which I recommend reading. Some of the language is a bit opaque, but he makes some interesting points about exactly how new this "war" really would be: if we allow our leaders to begin it, the war will extend to every facet of our lives, permanently.

Why bother typing so many tags if they all lead to fair.org?

(shrug) I was rushed for time; I went somewhere that I was fairly sure would have most of what I needed.

Yes, I have read the letter written by the parents [...] Were you aware that most of them were present *during* the original interviews [...]

Um, yes, that was mentioned in the letter. That is, after all, how they were able to observe that Stossel "asked leading questions to get [the kids] to say what [he] wanted". I asked because you didn't seem to have grasped that point (about which more below).

[...] and only protested after being cajoled by environmentalists?

Riiiiiight. What's your source for this?

Regarding Stossels record, of course I'm aware of the nonexistent test (it was not 'faked', as you claim, [...]

He 'faked' that the tests existed at all. You're engaging in tetrapyloctomy.

[...] rather he was erroneously told by a producer that it had occurred)

Mm-hmm. "It was just a mistake. Honest." Very credible. Not at all the sort of thing one might say to cover one's ass or the asses of one's colleagues.

Furthermore, I find your line about 'just the one he got caught on' quite laughable.

(shrug) A poor choice of words, perhaps; "caught and held accountable for" was what I was aiming for. This one was sufficiently egregious that ABC couldn't just sweep it under the rug, like it's done with so many others.

His every move is scrutinized by people such as you who don't believe any viewpoint other than their own should even be voiced.

Hmm. Calling Stossel out on verifiable errors of fact is now somehow equivalent to attempting to silence him because of his opinions. No presentation of any actual rational connection between these concepts, of course; the point is merely to create the mental association between the two. Associationism, on top of projection of conservatives' (and possibly also the accuser's) censorial inclinations onto amorphous "people such as you" (whatever sort that might be). Are you with the cult, perchance?

As for the resignations of the producers, have you considered that they are as politically biased as you and can't abide the airing of opinions that don't match their own?

(shrug) I considered it, but it seemed far less plausible than their stated reasons for leaving: that they couldn't abide being associated with the airing of opinions that were contradicted by actual evidence (which evidence was indeed thrown out precisely because it contradicted said opinions).

And you *still* have not addressed the point of my original article [...]

Yes, I did; you just ignored it, presumably because you couldn't answer it.

(find it yourself...I'm not as link-addicted as you)

namely that the kids parrotted the opinions of the environmentalists, never acknowledging the merest possibility that alternative views exist.

The kids that were shown. Stossel has a history of dismissing or ignoring evidence that doesn't support the position he wants to present; how much of the metaphorical cutting room floor is littered with kids that didn't "parrot[] the opinions of the environmentalists", or that didn't present themselves as 'scared' by the environmentalists (the position Stossel was pushing), or that responded with actual evidence supporting the environmentalists' positions or refuting the "alternative views" (or that otherwise couldn't be edited to make it look like "parrot[ing]")? And don't forget the "leading questions" from above (not to mention "ask[ing] and re-ask[ing] questions until he got material he could edit [...] to support his position", as described elsewhere); how many of the kids who did say what Stossel wanted to hear were prompted into doing so by Stossel himself? Given his "interviewing" tactics as witnessed by the aforementioned parents, we have no reason to believe that what was shown on air bore any resemblance to what the majority of the kids actually said or believed, and plenty of reason to believe that it didn't.

[...] but you still can't tell me what temperature it will be on August 16th in Berlin, whether 2001 or 2101.

Ooh, nice straw-man misrepresentation of the position you're attacking (another common tactic of the cult; I'm guessing you are a member, then). One does not have to be able to predict the exact temperature in Berlin on August 16, 2101 (morning or evening? you didn't specify) to be able to predict, for instance, what the average temperature of the entire planet is likely to be in the early 22nd century, or that it will be sufficiently higher than the current average planetary temperature to cause significant ecological problems.
--
#/usr/bin/perl
require 6.0;

Why bother typing so many tags if they all lead to fair.org?

(shrug) I was rushed for time; I went somewhere that I was fairly sure would have most of what I needed.

Yes, I have read the letter written by the parents [...] Were you aware that most of them were present *during* the original interviews [...]

Um, yes, that was mentioned in the letter. That is, after all, how they were able to observe that Stossel "asked leading questions to get [the kids] to say what [he] wanted". I asked because you didn't seem to have grasped that point (about which more below).

[...] and only protested after being cajoled by environmentalists?

Riiiiiight. What's your source for this?

Regarding Stossels record, of course I'm aware of the nonexistent test (it was not 'faked', as you claim, [...]

He 'faked' that the tests existed at all. You're engaging in tetrapyloctomy.

[...] rather he was erroneously told by a producer that it had occurred)

Mm-hmm. "It was just a mistake. Honest." Very credible. Not at all the sort of thing one might say to cover one's ass or the asses of one's colleagues.

Furthermore, I find your line about 'just the one he got caught on' quite laughable.

(shrug) A poor choice of words, perhaps; "caught and held accountable for" was what I was aiming for. This one was sufficiently egregious that ABC couldn't just sweep it under the rug, like it's done with so many others.

His every move is scrutinized by people such as you who don't believe any viewpoint other than their own should even be voiced.

Hmm. Calling Stossel out on verifiable errors of fact is now somehow equivalent to attempting to silence him because of his opinions. No presentation of any actual rational connection between these concepts, of course; the point is merely to create the mental association between the two. Associationism, on top of projection of conservatives' (and possibly also the accuser's) censorial inclinations onto amorphous "people such as you" (whatever sort that might be). Are you with the cult, perchance?

As for the resignations of the producers, have you considered that they are as politically biased as you and can't abide the airing of opinions that don't match their own?

(shrug) I considered it, but it seemed far less plausible than their stated reasons for leaving: that they couldn't abide being associated with the airing of opinions that were contradicted by actual evidence (which evidence was indeed thrown out precisely because it contradicted said opinions).

And you *still* have not addressed the point of my original article [...]

Yes, I did; you just ignored it, presumably because you couldn't answer it.

(find it yourself...I'm not as link-addicted as you)

namely that the kids parrotted the opinions of the environmentalists, never acknowledging the merest possibility that alternative views exist.

The kids that were shown. Stossel has a history of dismissing or ignoring evidence that doesn't support the position he wants to present; how much of the metaphorical cutting room floor is littered with kids that didn't "parrot[] the opinions of the environmentalists", or that didn't present themselves as 'scared' by the environmentalists (the position Stossel was pushing), or that responded with actual evidence supporting the environmentalists' positions or refuting the "alternative views" (or that otherwise couldn't be edited to make it look like "parrot[ing]")? And don't forget the "leading questions" from above (not to mention "ask[ing] and re-ask[ing] questions until he got material he could edit [...] to support his position", as described elsewhere); how many of the kids who did say what Stossel wanted to hear were prompted into doing so by Stossel himself? Given his "interviewing" tactics as witnessed by the aforementioned parents, we have no reason to believe that what was shown on air bore any resemblance to what the majority of the kids actually said or believed, and plenty of reason to believe that it didn't.

[...] but you still can't tell me what temperature it will be on August 16th in Berlin, whether 2001 or 2101.

Ooh, nice straw-man misrepresentation of the position you're attacking (another common tactic of the cult; I'm guessing you are a member, then). One does not have to be able to predict the exact temperature in Berlin on August 16, 2101 (morning or evening? you didn't specify) to be able to predict, for instance, what the average temperature of the entire planet is likely to be in the early 22nd century, or that it will be sufficiently higher than the current average planetary temperature to cause significant ecological problems.
--
#/usr/bin/perl
require 6.0;

Listen stop crying about something you cannot change.

Ah, the tired old "crying" attack. You're a member of the cult too, eh?

Did you realy want the inventor of the internet (yeah right) as President?

*sigh* For the 4,387,295th time, Al Gore did not claim to have invented the Internet.
--
#/usr/bin/perl
require 6.0;

Yes, he won the first count, and then he won the next 35 or so recounts.

No, he didn't.

Hold on... "I'm the next president! I'm the President!" (Repeat 3000 times).. Now I'm the president!

Doesn't work if you just do it yourself; you've got to get the media to do it with you. Not to mention the Supreme Court.
--
#/usr/bin/perl
require 6.0;

• Commentary: Phil Agre's Election 2000 wrapup, which was sent Dec. 23, 2000, to subscribers to his Red Rock Eater Digest mailing list. No one tears into political jargon and other dissembling rhetoric the way Agre does, and this post-election contribution was widely forwarded around the Net after its publication.
• Feature Journalism: The Bleat by James Lileks, a daily column that's among the best feature writing in any medium, which is more impressive because his subject matter is nothing -- more specifically, the minutiae of his daily life, like movies, moving and odd yearbook discoveries.
• Commentary: Deb Weiss. Though her columns are hosted by the Drudge Report, Weiss is an amateur commentator who graduated from writing letters to the editor, not a professional. Though I disagree with her on every single political issue that matters, I have to admit that in columns like this Oct. 19, 2000, recap of the first Gore-Bush debate, Weiss rips into everyone to the left of Pat Buchanan with style, intelligence and savage wit.

PHP and JSP are scripting environments.

Perl CGI is a programming language and library.

A proper comparison would have been PHP, JSP and Perl environments such as Perl ASP, Mason or (my favorite) Embperl. For a more detailed (and wider-spread) comparison, see Web Scripting Tools - Compare and Contrast.

The story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet has been thoroughly debunked by Phil Agre in http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Gore. and.the.Inte.html and rebutted further later
That meme was a creation of Declan McCullagh, a "reporter" for Wired News who is a fanatical Libertarian so extreme that he managed to have a chapter of a book using him as a poster-boy for Libertarian ideologues If you think I'm just flaming, this aspect of his fabricated story being a Liberatarian hit-piece was extensively discussed in a debunking by Salon

After Declan McCullagh was repeatedly taken to task for his hatchet-job, over more than year, by everyone who was there, from Dave Farber to Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf he finally grudgingly retracted

But people still repeat it, because urban legends never die.

Now look at privacy policies like Microsoft's. Sure they've "fixed" it. But I note that they haven't removed this piece.

Microsoft reserves the right to change the terms, conditions, and notices under which the Passport Web Site and Passport Services are offered. You are responsible for regularly reviewing these terms and conditions. Continued use of the Passport Web Site or Passport Services after any such changes shall constitute your consent to such changes.

Web services are nothing more than subscription software sites. And privacy agreements can be "upgraded" at anytime. Show me one site that promises that their privacy agreement will never become less restrictive. And if you can, promise me that the agreement will survive a bankruptcy proceeding or even a sale of the company.

You have no privacy guarantees, on the web or off. In fact, it's worse off the web - see this Red Rock Eater Digest analysis of the new medical privacy rules, and then consider going to Defend Your Privacy and filling out the petition there.

But don't worry. Your video rental records are secure.

From Red Rock Eater mailing list. Scroll down to point number 4.

I think giving two electoral college votes to each state corresponding to the two senators must be abolished.

QUOTE

But there is another factor as well: the Electoral College gives each state a vote equal to the number of its Senators plus the number of its Representatives. This is a bias toward the rural states, which tend to be more conservative. Was it a deciding bias in the present case? It's easy enough to tell. I went back to the Electoral College results thus far and re-added both Bush's and Gore's totals counting only the Representatives, not the Senators -- in other words, reducing each state's electoral vote by two. The total electoral vote is thus 436 instead of 536 (in other words, the membership of the House plus one for the District of Columbia), and 219 votes are needed to win. Does Al Gore have more than 219 votes without Florida? Easily: under the House-only Electoral College system, Gore has 225 votes to Bush's 188 votes. That does not itself mean, of course, that anyone should claim a victory for Gore, except for the partial moral victory that he has rightly earned. The rule of law requires that, barring extreme illegitimacy, we should stick with the rules until they can be changed. But it does mean that the supposed anomaly was not random at all, but is the consequence of a political bias that for historical reasons became lodged in our laws.

ENDQUOTE

As an American, I'm not embarrassed by an election that takes a lot of time and a lot of lawsuits, as long as it's eventually resolved peacefully. Resolving our differences through appeal to law--byzantine and tedious though it may be--is a lot better than bloody revolution or assassination, two popular alternatives which don't look likely here (notwithstanding some rioting in Florida). Believe it or not, this is how it's supposed to work.

You don't own the bits. That's RIAA's position, and that's the reason MP3.Com's MyMP3 service got sued. If you owned the bits, then it would have been perfectly legal.

The following is from a conversation I had with a RIAA rep:

nazgul@somewhere.com: Finally, I'm curious about the legality of the following. If I take a CD over to a friend's house to tape (let's say he has a better tape recorder than I do), then so long as I only use that tape for my own personal use, that's fair use, correct? What if I go to his house with my CD and it turns out that he owns the same CD, and it's in his player, so instead of making a copy of my CD, I make a copy of his? Did we just break the law? Which of us did?

JSimson@riaa.com: Your example regarding the "copying of CD's" poses the question well: it is technically infringing - when you make your copy from his CD.

nazgul@somewhere.com: So it's the atoms that matter, not the bits.

nazgul@somewhere.com: When I posed my original question it was because I had gradually been ripping my CD's to MP3's in order to more easily listen to them at home and at work. I'd done about 30 CDs at the time. Since then of course, MP3.Com introduced their my.mp3.com service, saving me many hours of processing and gigabytes of storage. I have over 300 CDs that I can now access online (my only annoyance is that my wife and I can't listen at the same time, but that restriction is understandable). In the past few months I've listened to hundreds of albums that I hadn't had time to listen to for years. The ability to play my songs randomly and/or by genre greatly expands what I'll listen to--what's too much by album may be just fine scattered in the middle of 3000+ tracks. I've rediscovered artists and songs I'd completely forgotten, causing me to search out what they've released since I first heard them.

nazgul@somewhere.com: For my sake, and the sake of the recording artists who will benefit from greater use of their material by their legal licensees, I sincerely hope you lose your suit against MP3.Com.

nazgul@somewhere.com: I strongly recommend you read "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" by Lawrence Lessig. If you lose the fair use battle, you will be sorely tempted to take the "code" route, as was done with DAT. Think about the impact on society before you do. Limiting a licensees personal use of licensed information is beneficial to neither licensee nor licensor. And concern about atoms should definitely be left in the 1900's.

Needless to say, I did not receive a response to my final email message. Of course with MyMP3 shutdown, I had to give up on that. Instead I ripped all my CDs myself and now anyone can listen to them via Live365. How this was a win for the record company, I have no idea. http://www.somewhere.com/radio.pls"

For the past week, I've been watching and reading the news with increasing trepidation as one person after another attempts to pass off their partisan opinon as the one and only correct, unbiased interpretation of the law. Campaign staffers, GOP and Dem politicians, regular voters, the digerati, and even the press. I view both the Democrats and the Republicans with equal distaste, and am equally unhappy with either candidate. I think that's about as unbiased as you're gonna get. Am I the only one in America?

Ironically, the most level-headed non-partisan statement I've heard yet has come from Al Gore. And not even that was without a slant.

And as I've been watching this whole circus, I've been hollering at the TV screen and muttering to my newspaper, "stop acting like third world politicians, pretending you aren't arguing from an extreme position!" All these people, especially James Baker and Mindy Tucker, seem to have absolutely no clue as to how biased they sound when they make their public statements. They're so blinded by their partisanship they can't see how hypocritical they look to people who are only interested in a fair outcome.

Of course, what should I expect from Florida? Chicago and Louisiana may have the reputations as corrupt, but I used to live in Florida. Based on the amount of corruption, con artisanship, and good ole boy networking I endured there, I was immediately cracking jokes about how ironic it was that the outcome of the presidential election would depend on the integrity of Florida officials. It is a banana republic folks, in a lot of ways.

There are a lot of Americans who believe that we have the most honest, ethical system of government in the world. And they have good reason to believe it - it's drummed into us from day one. And it may still be true. But always remember and never forget: that doesn't mean it's completely honest and totally ethical. To say "it can never happen here" is to leave the door wide open for corruption. And I fear that's what we have done.

Look at it this way: when money can buy policy in DC, the way it does now, just how soon will it be until money can buy an election? And has it happened already?? We need to keep asking those questions, or else it will happen right under our noses.

Heck, that's exactly why I voted for Nader. There's too much influence in Washington by special interests with lots of money. Nobody there does anything if it's not greased by megabucks. Is that ethical? Is it good government? It disturbs me that these practices are so widely accepted. I know I'm not the only one, but it seems there aren't enough of us.

And, in closing, I have to unleash my inner conspiracy theorist or he's gonna eat a hole in my spleen: it sure smells a lot to me like the Bush boys tried to buy an election, and it blew up in their faces. But we'll probably never see any evidence to support that... then again, stranger things (cough, Monica, cough) have happened!

The story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet has been extensively and convincingly debunked. That you repeat it here pretty much destroys the credibility of your other claims - many of which are also debunked on the Red Rock Eater story already posted to Slashdot. FWIW I think they're both scum and wouldn't vote for either even if I lived in the US, but there's no point repeating nonsense.
--

Actually, Al Gore never said that. He said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Several people, including Vint Cerf, have aggressively backed Gore's involvement in the creation of the Internet.

Here's an interesting article on media distortions of various quotes by both candidates:

Al Gore and the Internet

1) This is liberal.

2) Character assasination is not new.

Number one. Perhaps, but is there anything in the article that is unfair or untrue? Care to do more than name-call? What's not true about the article specifically? Why does the bona-fide appearance of anything liberal provoke hostility and howling?

Number two. Agre's discussed this in some other articles. It's a tough case to make for this being new, agreed, but perhaps new watersheds are being crossed... We've had a decade or so of intense work in PR houses and think tanks to develop rhetorical patterns which are very difficult to respond to. Continuing the Gore example -- if you were him, how would you resopnd to this? To demonstrably false accusations, continuously repeated from all corners of the press. It's pretty weird, really. Put yourself in his shoes, and then ask if you feel safe in this environment yourself. I'm not whining -- I think we need to talk about these. (Agre, I think is better at the task than many of us.)

Plug: Agre's Red Rock Eater News usually focuses on computing & society issues. Highly recommended.

When trying to discredit someone, you should use sources that are not discredited themselves. The link in this very story http://commo ns. somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.The.New.Science.of.C.ht ml is dominated by articles from the Boston Globe that are picked apart and shown to be full of false statements. What you are doing here is basically the same as using a word to define itself. Also, Op-Ed pieces are opinions, not facts, and are nothing very creidible on which to base an argument.

GINGRICH: In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is - and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got there, we were both part of a 'futures group' - the fact is, in the Clinton administration the world we had talked about in the '80s began to actually happen. You can see it in your own life, between the Internet, the computer, the cell phone.

starting in 1994, Gore has added two years to his journalistic experience, upping the figures from the five years he once claimed to seven.

Al Gore and the Internet

The New Science of Character Assassination

campaign lunacy

BTW, a vote for Bush means a dismantling of all kinds of environmental controls: smog/pollution controls, the superfund project, decimating natural treasures for corporate greed, overturning the recent designations of national treasures all over the country that would protect those areas from development, etc., etc.

-c o r e

Al Gore and the Internet

The New Science of Character Assassination

campaign lunacy

BTW, a vote for Bush means a dismantling of all kinds of environmental controls: smog/pollution controls, the superfund project, decimating natural treasures for corporate greed, overturning the recent designations of national treasures all over the country that would protect those areas from development, etc., etc.

-c o r e

Al Gore and the Internet

The New Science of Character Assassination

campaign lunacy

BTW, a vote for Bush means a dismantling of all kinds of environmental controls: smog/pollution controls, the superfund project, decimating natural treasures for corporate greed, overturning the recent designations of national treasures all over the country that would protect those areas from development, etc., etc.

-c o r e

The New Science of Character Assassination
Phil Agre
15 October 2000

You are welcome to forward this article electronically to anyone for any noncommercial purpose.

The past ten days will go down as a turning point in American history. This is what it's like when the far right is taking over your country: the people support Al Gore's policies, but the polls are shifting toward George W. Bush because the media is filled with false attacks on Al Gore's character. A story in today's (10/15/00) New York Times states openly what has been clear all along, that this campaign of character assassination has been planned and executed over a long period by the Republicans.
--Story Link--

Character assassination is, of course, nothing new for Republicans, who mastered the art in the days of Richard Nixon. What's new is that the press constantly repeats the lies. Not just once or twice, not just the occasional slip, but over and over and over.

Let us consider the New York Times story in detail. Written by Alison Mitchell, it describes Al Gore's abject apology for two trivial and much-exaggerated errors in the first debate as "the culmination of a skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy".

The New York Times discerns four landmarks in this campaign, and they are as follows:

• Landmark number one:

• ... in December 1997 ... the [Republican National] committee announced it had started a contest to come up with a slogan for Mr. Gore after he told reporters that the hero and heroine in the novel "Love Story" were modeled after him and his wife, Tipper. (Erich Segal, the author, soon said that his protagonist, Oliver Barrett IV, was only partly based on Mr. Gore, while Jenny Cavilleri had nothing to do with Tipper Gore.)

  In this case, the RNC's claim was false. Gore had not told anyone that Love Story was based on him and his wife. Rather, he had mentioned a newspaper article that had inaccurately said that, and was carefully to say that he only had the article's word to go on. Observe that Mitchell repeats the RNC's false account, and then (following the longstanding convention) makes it sound as though Segal was contradicting Gore, when in fact he was defending him. The false "Love Story" store continues to be repeated to the present day.
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number two:

• So when Mr. Gore said in an interview with CNN in March 1999 that "during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet", Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, issued this mocking statement: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the paper clip".

  The problem, of course, was that Gore's claim was correct. As the Internet's scientific leaders attest, often heatedly, Gore recognized the significance of the Internet very early, and took the initiative in doing the political work and articulating the public vision that made the Internet possible. His sentence, which is often not quoted in its entirety, makes perfectly clear that he was talking about the work he did in the context of his Congressional service, and that he is not claiming, ridiculously, to have done the technical work as well. Mitchell shades the story by omitting the Republicans' (and media's) most common distortion of the matter, that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. This falsehood has been repeated on literally hundreds of occasions, and George W. Bush routinely uses it in his speeches.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number three:

• On the day Mr. Gore announced his candidacy in Carthage, Tenn., his family's hometown, Jim Nicholson, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had a more elaborate stunt. He rode in a wagon pulled by mules to the hotel on Embassy Row in Washington where Mr. Gore lived for much of his youth.

  "He has tried to pass himself off as this hardscrabble, homespun central Tennessee farm boy and that is not what he is", said Mr. Nicholson, playing off the fact that Mr. Gore had told The Des Moines Register that he had learned to slop hogs and clear land on the family farm. Friends later told reporters that Mr. Gore's father had kept him on a backbreaking work schedule during summers on the family farm.

  The problem, again, is that Gore's claim was true. He did work on his family farm as a child. This time, Mitchell admits that the Republicans were making it up. But she still shades the story by making it sound as though the truth hadn't come out until later, and as though the contrary view rests solely on the word of Gore's friends. In fact the childhood farm chores had been extensively reported for a decade. The false claim that Gore had lied about the chores was repeated on many occasions in the press.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number four:

• The Republicans got help as well from an unexpected source. When the Democratic primary fight became bitter, former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey insisted that Mr. Gore had deliberately distorted his policy positions in what he called a "pattern of misrepresentation". At one point, Mr. Bradley spat out, "Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don't tell the truth as a candidate?"

  The problem is that Bradley is endlessly quoted to this effect without any attempt to determine whether he is right. In fact Bradley often wrongly accused Gore of distorting his positions.

And that's it. That, according to the New York Times, is the story of the Republicans' campaign to paint Al Gore as an embellisher. The New York Times cites four accusations, all of them false, and in every case the New York Times either repeats the false accusations as truth or else provides misleading accounts of them.

The New York Times' article is not an aberration. The list of false attacks on Al Gore's character that have been circulated in the media for the last two years is extraordinary. In some cases, as in the ones (mis)cited by the New York Times, Gore is accused of lying when he was actually telling the truth:

• Several publications have called Gore a liar in very harsh terms because he claimed that his father was a pioneer in the civil rights movement. It is true that his father lost his nerve on the Civil Rights Act, but that does not change the overwhelming and (until recently) universally accepted evidence of his leadership on civil rights. Gore's assertion is perfectly accurate.
• 
  --Story Link--
• In probably the single most vicious attack of the entire campaign, several publications have suggested that Gore lied when claiming to have been present at his sister's death. The only evidence they offer is that he also made a political speech the same day, and Gore's driver has explained his schedule for that day in detail.
• 
  --Story Link--

In other cases, Gore's words are twisted, misquoted, or simply made up to make him sound as though he were making a claim that he was not making. For example, some publications have even claimed, falsely, that Gore literally uttered the words "inventing the Internet".
--Story Link--

There are many others:

• In the closing moments of Gore's second debate with George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer falsely accused Gore of having called Bush a "bumbler" in one of his campaign commercials.
• 
  --Story Link--

  Was this simply a mistake on Lehrer's part? Okay, but Lehrer made his "mistake" in the context of rebuking Gore for his own miniscule mistakes in the first debate.

• Gore told a a union audience that his mother had sung the "union label" song to him as a child. Gore's comment was obviously a joke and the audience took it as a joke. Yet, incredibly, numerous supposed journalists have asserted that he meant it seriously, or else tried (on no evidence) to cast doubt on Gore's obviously-true claim that it was a joke.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When Gore spoke of his proposal to put Social Security and Medicare in a "lockbox", some "journalists" accused him of dissembling on the astonishing grounds that he was not actually proposing to put the money into a physical box.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When the Washington Post finally gave up on the "Love Story" story, pretending that it had only recently been disproven, they moved to another falsehood. Gore had claimed that his sister was the first volunteer for the Peace Corps. This claim was accurate, inasmuch as his sister had in fact worked for the Corps without pay from its earliest days, only later joining its paid staff. But the Post called Gore's claim a "lie", on the grounds that she had not worked as a volunteer *overseas*, which Gore had never claimed; they did not mention that she worked without pay.
• 
  --Story Link--
• Gore told some students in New Hampshire the story of a Tennessee community activist who brought his attention to a toxic dump, whereupon he looked for other examples, found Love Canal, and held the first hearings on the issue. "Journalists" first misquoted him as having claimed to to have started the issue, when in fact he was giving credit to the activists. Even when the misquotation was grudgingly corrected, they continued to distort his words, as if he were claiming to have discovered the toxic pollution at Love Canal.

In yet other cases, Gore made a trivial error that has been exaggerated by his critics, and the exaggeration has been falsely attributed to him. Such is the case with the school in Florida that Gore cited in the first of his debates with George W. Bush.
--Story Link--

These are just a few examples among many. People make mistakes all the time. Al Gore is one of them, and it's surprising that an army of opposition researchers hasn't come up with more substantive errors after fact-checking a whole life of public statements. So is George W. Bush, whose errors during the two debates so far have been dramatically worse than those of Gore. To start with, Bush falsely implied that the Europeans have no troops in Kosovo, when in fact they have tens of thousands, and that the United States has significant numbers of troops in Haiti, when it does not. And he made numerous false statements:

• that Gore was outspending him, when the opposite was true;
• that the rate of uninsured people was falling in Texas and rising nationally, when the opposite was true;
• that the men who killed James Byrd would be put to death, when only two had been sentenced to death and their appeals had not been exhausted;
• that middle-income seniors would get drug coverage immediately under his Medicare plan;
• that Gore had lied about this;
• that the new spending in his budget plan is equal to the tax cuts;
• that "most of the tax reductions [in his plan] go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder";
• that the president is unable to influence the actions of the Food and Drug Administration;
• that Hillary Clinton's 1993 national health insurance initiative would have entailed nationalizing health care; and
• that Gore had claimed to be the author of the Earned Income Tax Credit law.

That is just a partial list of Bush's "mistakes" in two ninety-minute debates, and it doesn't include the dubious numbers he quoted from Republicans in the Senate or the mess he made of education, taxes, Social Security, and the Middle East. Nor does it include the "mistakes" that littered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, or the especially egregious "mistakes" of his brutal campaign against John McCain in South Carolina, and so on.
--Story Link--

With only a few exceptions (like the one just cited), the press has gone to great lengths to cover up or minimize Bush's false statements. Press coverage of the first debate focused overwhelmingly on Gore's two comparatively trivial errors and on endless suggestions that Gore was rude for having sighed several times.
--Story Link--

Of course, the sighs were often exaggerated by turning the volume up. (Falsely calling someone a liar, as Bush did several times, is not rude?) Pundits bizarrely praised Bush for his command of the issues after the first debate despite his lengthy catalog of errors:
--Catalog Link--

And the 10/5/00 Washington Post buried the Democrats' list of Bush errors at the end of a long story about Bush's accusations against Gore.

The problem is systemic. A reporter for a British newspaper, the Observer, was struck at the completely different approaches of the reporters covering Gore and Bush, and reported a disturbing incident in which a Washington Post reporter well-known for her open hostility to Gore held a toy gun to his head.
--Story Link--

Indeed, press coverage of Gore has been spun in a strongly negative fashion for a long time.
--Story Link--
--Story Link--
--Story Link--

The press, following the lead of Republican "investigators", has repeatedly falsified and spun the famous Buddhist temple event, among others.
--Story Link--

They have also falsified and exaggerated Gore's performance in earlier debates, thereby creating a caricuture of him as a vicious attacker.
--Story Link--

Yes, the press has suggested that Bush is not mentally competent to run the country. But it has not fabricated huge amounts of evidence to support this charge, and it has not routinely used vocabulary that is remotely as harsh as that used against Gore. You have rarely seen the media call Bush a "moron" or "idiot", but Gore has routinely been called much worse. Here is a very partial list:

• "evil"
• "imperious&qu ot;, "repellent"
• "lethal", "ruthless", "liar"
• "ruthless", "relentless", "bully", "maniacal"
• "manipulative", "dishonest"

(I am citing the Daily Howler for most of these examples so that you can read some analysis of them. But the Howler provides precise citations for the originals, which should be easy to look up.)

Indeed, Bush's alleged mental incompetence is often tacitly used to excuse his falsehoods -- he doesn't know what he's talking about, so he can't be lying. Or Gore is accused of a "pattern" of false and exaggerated statements, but then Bush escapes the same accusation for the simple reason that nobody bothers to gather Bush's false and exaggerated statements in one place.

This is just the press. We're not even talking about the conservatives on the Internet that have been circulating long lists of Gore's supposed lies and exaggerations -- most of which are, of course, themselves lies or exaggerations, including garbled and embellished versions of the already false versions in the press. Some of these lists are credited to the RNC, but of course it is hard to know for sure.

The new science of character assassination, then, has several components:

• It starts with a strategy: a conscious choice by a political party that it is going to position its opponent in a certain way. The 10/15/00 Washington Post quotes a Republican consultant as saying that "PR 101 is define your opponent before he tries to define himself", and the whole campaign is clearly organized by the principles of PR.
• It requires a clearinghouse to distribute "facts" that fit the strategy. In this case the burden has been carried by the Republican National Committee and by the office of House majority leader Dick Armey, which got its start by circulating the original fraudulent charges from Wired News about Gore's Internet statement.
• It requires rank-and-file supporters who are willing to pass along any junk that fits the party line.
• But above all, it requires a press corps that has decided to go along with it. Part of the problem is that the press operates in packs -- an echo chamber of lazy pundits in which every "fact" that fits a prevailing stereotype gets endlessly repeated.

But it's not just that. It is not surprising that Rupert Murdoch's media properties, such as Fox and the New York Post, publish smears against people who disagree with Murdoch's far-right views. But it can hardly be an accident that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press have all assigned reporters to the Gore campaign who write, day in and day out, the same sorts of exaggerated smears. To be sure, the press is not unanimous in spreading Republican lies as truth; the contrast between the NYT/Post/AP axis and the calm reporting of the Los Angeles Times could hardly be greater. But the Post, Times, and AP, all well-connected and widely syndicated, set the tone for the press as a whole. The fix is clearly in, and these establishment media operations are clearly down with it. They see which way the wind is blowing, and they don't want to get left behind.

A kind of coup is in effect, continuing the pattern of the Whitewater hoax and impeachment. If the far right succeeds in its campaign, then the incoming government will be staffed by people who are trained in the new science of character assassination. It's all they know. And having destroyed Al Gore, they will come after the rest of us.

Copyright (c) 2000 by Philip E. Agre.
All rights reserved.

The New Science of Character Assassination
Phil Agre
15 October 2000

You are welcome to forward this article electronically to anyone for any noncommercial purpose.

The past ten days will go down as a turning point in American history. This is what it's like when the far right is taking over your country: the people support Al Gore's policies, but the polls are shifting toward George W. Bush because the media is filled with false attacks on Al Gore's character. A story in today's (10/15/00) New York Times states openly what has been clear all along, that this campaign of character assassination has been planned and executed over a long period by the Republicans.
--Story Link--

Character assassination is, of course, nothing new for Republicans, who mastered the art in the days of Richard Nixon. What's new is that the press constantly repeats the lies. Not just once or twice, not just the occasional slip, but over and over and over.

Let us consider the New York Times story in detail. Written by Alison Mitchell, it describes Al Gore's abject apology for two trivial and much-exaggerated errors in the first debate as "the culmination of a skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy".

The New York Times discerns four landmarks in this campaign, and they are as follows:

• Landmark number one:

• ... in December 1997 ... the [Republican National] committee announced it had started a contest to come up with a slogan for Mr. Gore after he told reporters that the hero and heroine in the novel "Love Story" were modeled after him and his wife, Tipper. (Erich Segal, the author, soon said that his protagonist, Oliver Barrett IV, was only partly based on Mr. Gore, while Jenny Cavilleri had nothing to do with Tipper Gore.)

  In this case, the RNC's claim was false. Gore had not told anyone that Love Story was based on him and his wife. Rather, he had mentioned a newspaper article that had inaccurately said that, and was carefully to say that he only had the article's word to go on. Observe that Mitchell repeats the RNC's false account, and then (following the longstanding convention) makes it sound as though Segal was contradicting Gore, when in fact he was defending him. The false "Love Story" store continues to be repeated to the present day.
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number two:

• So when Mr. Gore said in an interview with CNN in March 1999 that "during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet", Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, issued this mocking statement: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the paper clip".

  The problem, of course, was that Gore's claim was correct. As the Internet's scientific leaders attest, often heatedly, Gore recognized the significance of the Internet very early, and took the initiative in doing the political work and articulating the public vision that made the Internet possible. His sentence, which is often not quoted in its entirety, makes perfectly clear that he was talking about the work he did in the context of his Congressional service, and that he is not claiming, ridiculously, to have done the technical work as well. Mitchell shades the story by omitting the Republicans' (and media's) most common distortion of the matter, that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. This falsehood has been repeated on literally hundreds of occasions, and George W. Bush routinely uses it in his speeches.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number three:

• On the day Mr. Gore announced his candidacy in Carthage, Tenn., his family's hometown, Jim Nicholson, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had a more elaborate stunt. He rode in a wagon pulled by mules to the hotel on Embassy Row in Washington where Mr. Gore lived for much of his youth.

  "He has tried to pass himself off as this hardscrabble, homespun central Tennessee farm boy and that is not what he is", said Mr. Nicholson, playing off the fact that Mr. Gore had told The Des Moines Register that he had learned to slop hogs and clear land on the family farm. Friends later told reporters that Mr. Gore's father had kept him on a backbreaking work schedule during summers on the family farm.

  The problem, again, is that Gore's claim was true. He did work on his family farm as a child. This time, Mitchell admits that the Republicans were making it up. But she still shades the story by making it sound as though the truth hadn't come out until later, and as though the contrary view rests solely on the word of Gore's friends. In fact the childhood farm chores had been extensively reported for a decade. The false claim that Gore had lied about the chores was repeated on many occasions in the press.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number four:

• The Republicans got help as well from an unexpected source. When the Democratic primary fight became bitter, former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey insisted that Mr. Gore had deliberately distorted his policy positions in what he called a "pattern of misrepresentation". At one point, Mr. Bradley spat out, "Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don't tell the truth as a candidate?"

  The problem is that Bradley is endlessly quoted to this effect without any attempt to determine whether he is right. In fact Bradley often wrongly accused Gore of distorting his positions.

And that's it. That, according to the New York Times, is the story of the Republicans' campaign to paint Al Gore as an embellisher. The New York Times cites four accusations, all of them false, and in every case the New York Times either repeats the false accusations as truth or else provides misleading accounts of them.

The New York Times' article is not an aberration. The list of false attacks on Al Gore's character that have been circulated in the media for the last two years is extraordinary. In some cases, as in the ones (mis)cited by the New York Times, Gore is accused of lying when he was actually telling the truth:

• Several publications have called Gore a liar in very harsh terms because he claimed that his father was a pioneer in the civil rights movement. It is true that his father lost his nerve on the Civil Rights Act, but that does not change the overwhelming and (until recently) universally accepted evidence of his leadership on civil rights. Gore's assertion is perfectly accurate.
• 
  --Story Link--
• In probably the single most vicious attack of the entire campaign, several publications have suggested that Gore lied when claiming to have been present at his sister's death. The only evidence they offer is that he also made a political speech the same day, and Gore's driver has explained his schedule for that day in detail.
• 
  --Story Link--

In other cases, Gore's words are twisted, misquoted, or simply made up to make him sound as though he were making a claim that he was not making. For example, some publications have even claimed, falsely, that Gore literally uttered the words "inventing the Internet".
--Story Link--

There are many others:

• In the closing moments of Gore's second debate with George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer falsely accused Gore of having called Bush a "bumbler" in one of his campaign commercials.
• 
  --Story Link--

  Was this simply a mistake on Lehrer's part? Okay, but Lehrer made his "mistake" in the context of rebuking Gore for his own miniscule mistakes in the first debate.

• Gore told a a union audience that his mother had sung the "union label" song to him as a child. Gore's comment was obviously a joke and the audience took it as a joke. Yet, incredibly, numerous supposed journalists have asserted that he meant it seriously, or else tried (on no evidence) to cast doubt on Gore's obviously-true claim that it was a joke.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When Gore spoke of his proposal to put Social Security and Medicare in a "lockbox", some "journalists" accused him of dissembling on the astonishing grounds that he was not actually proposing to put the money into a physical box.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When the Washington Post finally gave up on the "Love Story" story, pretending that it had only recently been disproven, they moved to another falsehood. Gore had claimed that his sister was the first volunteer for the Peace Corps. This claim was accurate, inasmuch as his sister had in fact worked for the Corps without pay from its earliest days, only later joining its paid staff. But the Post called Gore's claim a "lie", on the grounds that she had not worked as a volunteer *overseas*, which Gore had never claimed; they did not mention that she worked without pay.
• 
  --Story Link--
• Gore told some students in New Hampshire the story of a Tennessee community activist who brought his attention to a toxic dump, whereupon he looked for other examples, found Love Canal, and held the first hearings on the issue. "Journalists" first misquoted him as having claimed to to have started the issue, when in fact he was giving credit to the activists. Even when the misquotation was grudgingly corrected, they continued to distort his words, as if he were claiming to have discovered the toxic pollution at Love Canal.

In yet other cases, Gore made a trivial error that has been exaggerated by his critics, and the exaggeration has been falsely attributed to him. Such is the case with the school in Florida that Gore cited in the first of his debates with George W. Bush.
--Story Link--

These are just a few examples among many. People make mistakes all the time. Al Gore is one of them, and it's surprising that an army of opposition researchers hasn't come up with more substantive errors after fact-checking a whole life of public statements. So is George W. Bush, whose errors during the two debates so far have been dramatically worse than those of Gore. To start with, Bush falsely implied that the Europeans have no troops in Kosovo, when in fact they have tens of thousands, and that the United States has significant numbers of troops in Haiti, when it does not. And he made numerous false statements:

• that Gore was outspending him, when the opposite was true;
• that the rate of uninsured people was falling in Texas and rising nationally, when the opposite was true;
• that the men who killed James Byrd would be put to death, when only two had been sentenced to death and their appeals had not been exhausted;
• that middle-income seniors would get drug coverage immediately under his Medicare plan;
• that Gore had lied about this;
• that the new spending in his budget plan is equal to the tax cuts;
• that "most of the tax reductions [in his plan] go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder";
• that the president is unable to influence the actions of the Food and Drug Administration;
• that Hillary Clinton's 1993 national health insurance initiative would have entailed nationalizing health care; and
• that Gore had claimed to be the author of the Earned Income Tax Credit law.

That is just a partial list of Bush's "mistakes" in two ninety-minute debates, and it doesn't include the dubious numbers he quoted from Republicans in the Senate or the mess he made of education, taxes, Social Security, and the Middle East. Nor does it include the "mistakes" that littered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, or the especially egregious "mistakes" of his brutal campaign against John McCain in South Carolina, and so on.
--Story Link--

With only a few exceptions (like the one just cited), the press has gone to great lengths to cover up or minimize Bush's false statements. Press coverage of the first debate focused overwhelmingly on Gore's two comparatively trivial errors and on endless suggestions that Gore was rude for having sighed several times.
--Story Link--

Of course, the sighs were often exaggerated by turning the volume up. (Falsely calling someone a liar, as Bush did several times, is not rude?) Pundits bizarrely praised Bush for his command of the issues after the first debate despite his lengthy catalog of errors:
--Catalog Link--

And the 10/5/00 Washington Post buried the Democrats' list of Bush errors at the end of a long story about Bush's accusations against Gore.

The problem is systemic. A reporter for a British newspaper, the Observer, was struck at the completely different approaches of the reporters covering Gore and Bush, and reported a disturbing incident in which a Washington Post reporter well-known for her open hostility to Gore held a toy gun to his head.
--Story Link--

Indeed, press coverage of Gore has been spun in a strongly negative fashion for a long time.
--Story Link--
--Story Link--
--Story Link--

The press, following the lead of Republican "investigators", has repeatedly falsified and spun the famous Buddhist temple event, among others.
--Story Link--

They have also falsified and exaggerated Gore's performance in earlier debates, thereby creating a caricuture of him as a vicious attacker.
--Story Link--

Yes, the press has suggested that Bush is not mentally competent to run the country. But it has not fabricated huge amounts of evidence to support this charge, and it has not routinely used vocabulary that is remotely as harsh as that used against Gore. You have rarely seen the media call Bush a "moron" or "idiot", but Gore has routinely been called much worse. Here is a very partial list:

• "evil"
• "imperious&qu ot;, "repellent"
• "lethal", "ruthless", "liar"
• "ruthless", "relentless", "bully", "maniacal"
• "manipulative", "dishonest"

(I am citing the Daily Howler for most of these examples so that you can read some analysis of them. But the Howler provides precise citations for the originals, which should be easy to look up.)

Indeed, Bush's alleged mental incompetence is often tacitly used to excuse his falsehoods -- he doesn't know what he's talking about, so he can't be lying. Or Gore is accused of a "pattern" of false and exaggerated statements, but then Bush escapes the same accusation for the simple reason that nobody bothers to gather Bush's false and exaggerated statements in one place.

This is just the press. We're not even talking about the conservatives on the Internet that have been circulating long lists of Gore's supposed lies and exaggerations -- most of which are, of course, themselves lies or exaggerations, including garbled and embellished versions of the already false versions in the press. Some of these lists are credited to the RNC, but of course it is hard to know for sure.

The new science of character assassination, then, has several components:

• It starts with a strategy: a conscious choice by a political party that it is going to position its opponent in a certain way. The 10/15/00 Washington Post quotes a Republican consultant as saying that "PR 101 is define your opponent before he tries to define himself", and the whole campaign is clearly organized by the principles of PR.
• It requires a clearinghouse to distribute "facts" that fit the strategy. In this case the burden has been carried by the Republican National Committee and by the office of House majority leader Dick Armey, which got its start by circulating the original fraudulent charges from Wired News about Gore's Internet statement.
• It requires rank-and-file supporters who are willing to pass along any junk that fits the party line.
• But above all, it requires a press corps that has decided to go along with it. Part of the problem is that the press operates in packs -- an echo chamber of lazy pundits in which every "fact" that fits a prevailing stereotype gets endlessly repeated.

But it's not just that. It is not surprising that Rupert Murdoch's media properties, such as Fox and the New York Post, publish smears against people who disagree with Murdoch's far-right views. But it can hardly be an accident that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press have all assigned reporters to the Gore campaign who write, day in and day out, the same sorts of exaggerated smears. To be sure, the press is not unanimous in spreading Republican lies as truth; the contrast between the NYT/Post/AP axis and the calm reporting of the Los Angeles Times could hardly be greater. But the Post, Times, and AP, all well-connected and widely syndicated, set the tone for the press as a whole. The fix is clearly in, and these establishment media operations are clearly down with it. They see which way the wind is blowing, and they don't want to get left behind.

A kind of coup is in effect, continuing the pattern of the Whitewater hoax and impeachment. If the far right succeeds in its campaign, then the incoming government will be staffed by people who are trained in the new science of character assassination. It's all they know. And having destroyed Al Gore, they will come after the rest of us.

Copyright (c) 2000 by Philip E. Agre.
All rights reserved.

There was a pretty good description of what happened in Seattle, as opposed to what was presented in mainstream media, in Paul Hawken's essay and more at the Red Rock Eater.

Check it out.

Different scary attack thoughts: Samhain (mirrors - linux-list, Red Rock Eater, bugtraq).