Meet the founder of Conservapedia
Stephen Colbert recently interviewed Andy Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia. Learn how Jesus was a big free-market advocate:
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Andy Schlafly | ||||
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A proposed media shield law protects bloggers like Ben Franklin and Thomas Paine
The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved its version of a "media shield law," designed to protect the confidential sources of journalists. The law now moves to the full Senate, and it would need to be reconciled with a similar bill in the House before being presented to Barack Obama. The passage of a media shield bill is critically important, in that the threat of imprisonment for refusal to comply with subpoenas discourages journalists from covering numerous serious issues. According to Huffpo, the bill not only protects full time journalists, but "uses a broad definition of journalists by including bloggers, citizen journalists and freelancers." According to the Examiner,
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) endorsed the "carefully crafted" bill's inclusion of bloggers, and hailed Benjamin Franklin for his "anonymous blogs" that explained "the reasons why this country should exist." Pamphleteer Thomas Paine likewise got a few mentions as the senators debated whether to define a journalist as someone employed by a mainstream organization.The protection allowed by this version of the bill are not absolute; they can be overridden:
With the exception of national security cases, the bill establishes a balancing test to determine whether a reporter must reveal their source. A federal judge would weigh the public's right to know versus national security claims made by the government.The burden of proof depends on whether the case from which the subpoena is issued is a criminal case or a civil case. In criminal cases, the journalist would have to show that guarding the anonymity of sources is in the public interest. In non-criminal cases, the government bears the burden of showing that disclosure of a confidential source outweighs the public interest in news-gathering. I was elated to see that bloggers and citizen journalists are being considered for this protection, especially given the fact that so much important information being published these days is by people who are not full-time professional journalists. And see here for an illustration of the problem with mainstream" journalists." For a related post, see these three short videos featuring John Nichols and Robert McChesney, the founders of Free Press (from the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform), discussing the role of citizen journalists, among many other important media reform topics).
Aggressive journalists desperately needed.
Glenn Greenwald asks why there aren't more journalists willing to conduct hardball interviews of politically powerful guests. What he has in mind is the kind of interrogation Rachel Maddow expertly conducted with an anti-gay blowhard. Greenwald sets forth the particular strategies that made Maddow's interview effective. For example, where the guests opinions are not entitled to respect and deference, don't give any. Key quote:
Just imagine how much better things could be if our political leaders were routinely subjected to the kind of surgically probing, lie-exposing interrogation which Rachel imposed on her homosexual-converter guest. But the reasons they almost never are speak volumes about our media stars and their true function.
It’s time to break the taboo and to talk frankly about human overpopulation
If you are feeling brave, take a look at the World Clock. You'll see that more than twice as many people are being born as are dying for any given interval (click the "Now" button to see the numbers spinning out from the present). 
Click the "Deaths" tab and note that for every 100 deaths, there are also more than 60 abortions, and yet the Earth's population still spirals out of control. Click around on the other tabs and you will probably find yourself transfixed by magnitude of these numbers. Notice the vast amount of forest being decimated by clicking on the "Environment" tab. Under the "Energy" tab, notice the incredibly disconcerting "Oil Depletion Timer," indicating that we have 40 years of oil left on the entire planet (you'll need to do the math, dividing the days left by 365--this estimate is based on the admittedly laughable assumption that it would be economically viable to scoop up every drop of oil). Notice the ghastly numbers of entire species being lost each week (almost 300 extinctions per week). Notice the many thousands of preventable deaths every week (under the Death tab), including ghastly numbers of children dying from preventable things like lack of nutrition.
The World Clock sends me into an existential swirl. Watching these numbers accumulate fascinates me and, regarding some categories, horrifies me. Regarding the needless deaths, for example, it occurs to me that no human being has sufficient cognitive capacity or sufficient empathy to properly understand or react to numbers of this magnitude. It is impossible to feel sufficient empathy for the needless deaths of thousands people, week after week.
Last year, I posted on an effort by Global Population Speak Out (GPSO) to discuss the need to discuss overpopulation. But many people are too horrified to even consider this topic. One such person repeatedly vilified me in the comments, arguing that I was an elitist (and worse) because I merely dared to raise this issue.
But this issue of overpopulation is too important to ignore.
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Medical marijuana is coming to DC
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition is reporting that Congress is giving the OK to medical marijuana in Washington DC. Who is LEAP?
A group of police and judges who want to legalize drugs pointed to new FBI numbers released today as evidence that the "war on drugs" is a failure that can never be won. The data, from the FBI's "Crime in the United States" report, shows that in 2008 there were 1,702,537 arrests for drug law violations, or one drug arrest every 18 seconds. "In our current economic climate, we simply cannot afford to keep arresting more than three people every minute in the failed 'war on drugs,'" said Jack Cole, a retired undercover narcotics detective who now heads the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). "Plus, if we legalized and taxed drug sales, we could actually create new revenue in addition to the money we'd save from ending the cruel policy of arresting users."LEAP's motto is that while drug use is bad, "The War on Drugs is Worse."