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March 26, 2006

Catching up on links: Noteworthy blogs; Texas's war on tipsy; San Francisco mayor wants wi-fi for all

A few links from the notebook while I take a break this weekend to catch up on sleep and novels. We played family Scrabble last night -- the 8-year-old played alone for the first time, which was frustrating for him. He knows more words than he knows how to spell (netin?). Turning "razors" into "crazors" cracked us all up.

Notable blogs: After the Levees: A New Orleans group blog at lefty site Talking Points Memo. "We have a cultural anthropologist, poverty lawyer, geographer, sociologist, and noted literary figure to help in this process."

Everest Bloggers: Mt. Everest climbers pause to write.

Moses Brown School - Service Trip to the Dominican Republic 2006. A photo blog with the students writing in the comments.

Nice blog design: Elaine Nelson's epersonae

Timeshifting: CBS' '60 Minutes' clocks in at Yahoo: News.com,

CBS said Thursday that it will showcase segments from its popular "60 Minutes" television news magazine on Yahoo as it seeks a wider audience for its news programs.

The tie-up will begin at the start of the 2006/2007 broadcast season in the third quarter, when "60 Minutes" will open its 39th season on the air.

Each week, following the Sunday night broadcast of "60 Minutes," viewers can turn to a dedicated Yahoo site that will expand on segments seen during the program, with unaired footage as well as archival material and blogs.

Who's out of control? Stephen Gordon's Texas blog Hammer for Truth and his readers are all over what happens when the state gives the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission too much money -- they hired 100 agents to arrest people in bars for being intoxicated, including out-of-towners in hotel bars. (Neoprohibitionist Update: Preemptive War Continues in Texas).

"I can understand if we had somebody laying in a booth and they were basically passed out and drunk, I could understand for them to go in with the flashlights and take them out of the booth and arrest them, but these people were standing and doing fine," he said. -- Texas bar owner.

But my favorite reponse comes from Startle Grams: Taking all the fun out of drinking,

All that's left is being drunk at home, and where's the fun in that?

Most of us have already been drunk with everybody at home.

Sometimes you just need to be drunk with different people.

If Texans want Texas effectively dry, they should vote on it. Some of those arrested were drinking in the bar of the hotel at which they were guests. The alleged drunk argued lucidly that she was not endangering herself or anyone else, she was going up to her room to go to sleep. The robotic response was that by being intoxicated she was endangering herself and others.

And if Texas's motivation is actually its DWI rate, why is it aggressively arresting drinkers who aren't driving? It's a legal substance, and they aren't vagrants staggering on the streets.

Have they taken their act to country clubs as well?

An arbitrary and punitive change in the interpretation by police of any law, not just public intoxication, is not a good demo for the democracy we're trying to peddle around the world.

Texas, this doesn't make us want to visit you.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome: J.D. Lasica hears him say,

San Francisco wants to become the first city with free wireless access. "It is a disgrace that we're talking about it when it should have been done all across the nation five years ago." He equated free wi-fi with the public library system, adding, "We need to get serious about eliminating the digital divide."

...He hauled out his biggest guns to blast the telecoms, which are lobbying Congress to prevent cities like San Franciso from providing free wi-fi. "They've got lobbylists. They've got lawyers. Type in my name and wifi and you'll get 18 million blog entries [a bit of an exaggeration, but point taken]. They're scared to death."

Dick Cheney: "If they (Democrats) are competent to fight this war, then I ought to be singing on American Idol."

Mr Cheney's fellow executives have yet to prove themselves competent to fight this war, and most Americans wouldn't have started it, don't want to fight it, and want to end it.

We'd love to hear Mr. Cheney sing.

Related: Good versus evil isn't a strategy "Bush's worldview fails to see that in the Middle East, power politics is the key." By former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 3:49 PM | Permalink