I’m stuck on hold with Micron try­ing to get through to their tech sup­port, and the hold music is by some­body I know (Vienna Teng). It’s a first, although I sup­pose it will hap­pen more often as peo­ple I’ve pho­tographed gain wider recognition.

Ahmadine­jad Opposes Finger-Print Bill. [AP World News]

Speak­ing to a crowd in the north­ern Tehran sub­urb of Shemi­ranat, Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad said he had asked Iran­ian leg­is­la­tors to set aside a bill that would require immi­gra­tion offi­cials to take fin­ger­prints of all U.S. pass­port holders.

“We do not have a prob­lem with Amer­i­can peo­ple. We oppose only the U.S. government’s bul­ly­ing and arro­gance,” Ahmadine­jad said Mon­day night, accord­ing to the offi­cial Islamic Repub­lic News Agency.

The bill, which passed a pre­lim­i­nary read­ing in the Iran­ian par­lia­ment ear­lier this month, was drafted by con­ser­v­a­tives who sought to retal­i­ate for the U.S. require­ment that Iran­ian vis­i­tors be fingerprinted.

I find it inter­est­ing that Pres­i­dent Ahmadine­jad, who is con­stantly accused of being a crazy tyrant by the Bushe­viks, is show­ing more respect for the pri­vacy and dig­nity of for­eign vis­i­tors to Iran than the Bushe­viks do for for­eign vis­i­tors to America.

Count­down Spe­cial Com­ment: Death of Habeas Cor­pus: “Your words are lies, Sir.” [Crooks and Liars]

There’s a video float­ing around of some TV news guy com­ment­ing on Bush’s sign­ing of the Enabling Act Mil­i­tary Com­mis­sions Act. I’d never heard of him before (I haven’t watched TV news in many years), but he has one of the best com­men­taries I’ve seen on it. The link con­tains a transcript.

I saw a cou­ple of good posts today on the way the main­stream media ignores or down­plays impor­tant sto­ries. First is this post on cov­er­age of Bush’s sign­ing of the Enabling Act, and sec­ond is this story about an alter­na­tive the­ory on global warming.

How pros report the news.

A lot of peo­ple paint a Mr Smith Goes to Wash­ing­ton pic­ture of inves­tiga­tive report­ing, and maybe some­times it does work that way, but really, not very often. There aren’t too many Wood­wards and Bern­steins. Most of the report­ing that goes on is pretty mun­dane worka­day stuff, that fol­lows a pretty sim­ple template.

1. Get an idea. It could come from read­ing a colleague’s arti­cle at another paper (news sto­ries tend to come in droves, once an idea is reported by one pub­li­ca­tion, it can often be repeated by others).

2. Make a hand­ful of phone calls, ask peo­ple what they think. Write down some of what they say. The parts you don’t quote might be impor­tant to what the per­son thinks, but you can’t write it all down. Also at this point very often errors get intro­duced, also known as the “mis­quote.” The reporter may or may not under­stand the gist of what the per­son is say­ing, but that’s not impor­tant, because nei­ther will the reader. Look for the juicy quote, that’s what they pay you the big bucks for. It doesn’t mat­ter, emphat­i­cally, if the quote reflects the beliefs of the per­son you’re quot­ing. You’re try­ing to catch them say­ing some­thing inter­est­ing, and that’s usu­ally some­thing embarass­ing, either to them­selves, or some­one else. Or some­thing you can make sound embarass­ing (or stu­pid) by putting it after some­thing that sounds rea­son­able or intelligent.

3. Do some search­ing on the Inter­net to get some impressive-sounding statistics.

4. Now it’s time to write your lead and your close. See if you can find the “mid­dle ground.” Pick two extreme posi­tions, and imply or directly say that the truth lies some­where between. Even if the ques­tion is some­thing that is true or false, like the sun revolves around the earth, or the moon is larger than the sun (it looks that way, doesn’t it, and per­cep­tion is every­thing, they say).

[Script­ing News]

I’ve noticed this myself. The big excep­tion is when the story involves some very pow­er­ful entity which might shut the reporter out from future press con­fer­ences, etc. (gov­ern­ment agen­cies being the most com­mon exam­ple), in which case the reporter will basi­cally regur­gi­tate what­ever they’re told to say.

More on the Gam­bling Ban.

Been doing inter­views all day, includ­ing one with the BBC, which should air tonight.

Here’s the state­ment I issued through Cato:

This bill is pater­nal­is­tic, mor­al­iz­ing big gov­ern­ment at its worst. It won’t erad­i­cate online gam­bling, it will only make those gam­bling sites that are incor­po­rated and pub­licly traded and reg­u­lated in coun­tries like Great Britain unavail­able to U.S. cus­tomers. But the $12 bil­lion per year U.S. cus­tomers spend on online gam­ing won’t dry up. Instead, much of it will now go shady off­shore sites based in coun­tries less steeped in the rule of law, mean­ing more poten­tial for fraud, abuse, prey­ing on minors, and involve­ment from orga­nized crime and ter­ror­ist groups. Mean­while, state lot­ter­ies (which stud­ies show are among the most addic­tive forms of gam­bling) will exploit the exemp­tion the bill grants them, and con­tinue to spend mil­lions of dol­lars encour­ag­ing their cit­i­zens to engage in government-run gam­bling, with far less favor­able odds.

From House Repub­li­can lead­ers’ baf­fling attempts to invoke the shame of Jack Abramoff and pass the ban in the name of “lob­by­ing reform,” to Sen­a­tor Frist attach­ing the ban to a port secu­rity bill late at night on the last day of Con­gress, noth­ing about the way the GOP has pushed this bill has been hon­est. It is the height of hubris that the last law enacted by a party beset by charges of cor­rup­tion and abuse of power was a moral­is­tic bill pass­ing judg­ment on the mil­lions of Amer­i­cans who play online poker and other games recre­ation­ally and responsibly.

[The Agi­ta­tor]

I’ve never had any inter­est in gam­bling per­son­ally, but I have been hear­ing for years that The Gold Casino is a reli­able and hon­est oper­a­tion. Every­thing I’ve heard from their cus­tomers has been highly com­pli­men­tary. As the name sug­gests, they accept e-gold, so you don’t have to worry about your credit card com­pany sell­ing you out to the Evil Empire.

Buy­ing Your Way Into the Debate. [Hit and Run]

While there was ini­tially some doubt that his stunt would work, Lib­er­tar­ian Party Sen­ate can­di­date in Wash­ing­ton state Bruce Guthrie man­aged to meet the stated rules for get­ting invited to a can­di­date debate by lend­ing $1.2 mil­lion of his own money to his cam­paign. Thus, he will be appear­ing at an Oct. 17^th debate spon­sored by local TV sta­tion KING-5, the Seat­tle Times, and a gag­gle of other local media and civic organizations.

He’ll be up against incum­bent Demo­c­rat Maria Cantwell and Repub­li­can chal­lenger Mike McGav­ick. Cantwell has been lead­ing 8–10 per­cent in the polls. Guthrie needed to have gath­ered at least 10 per­cent of what the pre­vi­ous win­ner, Sen. Patty Mur­ray, has gath­ered, which was $12.1 mil­lion in third quar­ter 2004.

It’s ironic (although not at all sur­pris­ing) that the con­se­quence of the cam­paign finance laws, which gen­er­ally have a stated pur­pose of “keep­ing money out of pol­i­tics,” have the effect of explic­itly and openly requir­ing that any­one want­ing to par­tic­i­pate in the sys­tem be a rich per­son who can buy his way in.

The Heirs of Lib­erty.

Each morn­ing, the 16,000 stu­dents in the Spring Inde­pen­dent School Dis­trict in sub­ur­ban Hous­ton swipe their ID tags as they climb onto the school bus. A radio fre­quency tag tracks them, as it does when they arrive at school and as they leave the building.

Nearly 1,000 cam­eras watch them all day. Every vis­i­tor — par­ents, vol­un­teers, the guy who fills the Coke machine — must sur­ren­der his or her driver’s license to a sec­re­tary who checks it against a national data­base of sex offend­ers. This fall, nearly one in three schools lit­er­ally trap vis­i­tors inside a “secure vestibule,” a bul­let­proof glass room, until they’re checked out.

From the peo­ple who bring us “gun free schools” come con­di­tion­ing camps designed to pro­duce inmates, not sovereigns.

And remem­ber: Our ene­mies hate us because we’re free. [The War on Guns]

After thir­teen years of this, the sur­vivors are rather unlikely to even be able to con­ceive of a free soci­ety, let alone want to live in one. Of course, that’s the whole point.

Ter­ror­ist plot in Britain?. Also in Britain, we learn about a raid that found the largest haul of chem­i­cal explo­sives ever found at a res­i­dence in the coun­try, a rocket launcher, and “some kind of mas­ter plan” to use these weapons.

Why haven’t you heard about it? Appar­ently, because the sus­pects are right-wing extrem­ists asso­ci­ated with the British National Party, rather than being Muslims.

[…]

I think we all know that if the sus­pects had been Mus­lims, this would be a huge news story with much hyper­ven­ti­lat­ing. To see it get so lit­tle cov­er­age when the sus­pects are white right-wing extrem­ists makes the dou­ble stan­dard pretty darn bla­tant. [Al-Muhajabah’s Islamic Blogs]

The post has links to sev­eral small local news­pa­pers’ sto­ries on the raid. Of course she’s right about the double-standard–this sounds sim­i­lar to the “liq­uid bomb” busi­ness, except that those guys didn’t actu­ally have any­thing that was imme­di­ately usable, like a rocket launcher.

This Is What “Water­board­ing” Looks Like. Pic­tures and descrip­tions of what it is (tor­ture) and how it works (makes the vic­tim suck in water until they pass out). It’s a throw back to the medieval days when forced con­fes­sions were the norm. We are mov­ing back­wards as a cul­ture when oth­er­wise decent peo­ple try and defend this and other such prac­tices, even on osten­si­bly util­i­tar­ian or prac­ti­cal grounds.

Via the Alter­Net blog. [Strike The Root]

Like many other aspects of their domes­tic and for­eign poli­cies, the Bushe­viks copied their tor­ture cham­bers from now-defunct Com­mu­nist countries.

I do dis­agree with the author on one point, though: any­one who tries to defend tor­ture is, by def­i­n­i­tion, not a decent per­son at all.