Hillary Clinton and the Liberal Blogosphere

The divisions in the blogosphere over Hillary Clinton can be seen in a diary by Alegre at Daily Kos which calls for a strike by Clinton supporters who are unhappy with how they are treated at the site. This is significant not because of being a dispute at one blog but because it demonstrates the rifts in the liberal blogosphere. Marc Ambinder explains:

Who Hillary Clinton is and what she represents has been THE debate among Democratic activists for years. It is now THE national debate. The Democratic Party may well come together and support its nominee. But the debate about Clinton, her (and his) politics, the legacy, the tactics — will endure.

Bloggers tend to have strong opinions or they wouldn’t be bothering with blogs. Blogs also tend to bring out a number of people who behave quite terribly, even if they represent a tiny minority of the supporters for any candidate. The problem faced by Clinton supporters is that she represents many of the views and the type of politics which many of us are protesting in our blogging. While the dispute at Kos is being framed as being between Obama supporters and Clinton supporters that is not quite accurate. Many Obama supporters, such as myself, are not backers of Barack Obama specifically but have been opposed to Clinton for much of the primary race. The dishonesty of Clinton’s campaign since she was challenged by Obama this winter further reinforces our view that Hillary Clinton is unfit to be president.

Many of us preferred other candidates who are no longer in the race. Some of us now back Obama because of the viable major party candidates he is the only one without strong negatives which prevent us from supporting him, leaving him as our only choice. The dispute isn’t so much Obama supporters versus Clinton supporters but a dispute between the attitudes of the majority of the liberal blogosphere and the attitudes of Clinton’s apologists.

For many of us Clinton’s views and conduct cause us to see her as not being significantly better than George Bush and John McCain. The most obvious example of this is her support of the war. Her efforts to rewrite history regarding her views and the views of Obama do nothing to increase our support for her but do create a great deal of contempt for the Clinton supporters who promote lies of this magnitude.

Another reason many turned to the blogosphere in protest over the policies of George Bush has been the extension of presidential power. Clinton fails as an alternative on the issues of presidential power and executive privilege. Clinton has supported decreased transparency and would be more likely to continue, and I fear abuse, the powers taken by George Bush.

While the conventional wisdom is that Obama and Clinton have similar views, I’ve noted considerable differences after moving beyond party line votes. For example, Clinton opposed needle exchange programs, favored strict sentences for drug use (while Obama has favored retroactive changes), supported legislation to ban flag burning, supported censorship of video games, and opposed the banning of cluster bombs. These are just some of the areas where Clinton has supported the status quo while Obama has been on the right side.

Besides being a supporter of the status quo, the Clintons have shown a disturbing tendency to compromise on matters of principle out of political expediency. After the 2004 election it was revealed that Bill Clinton had called John Kerry advising him to support the Constitutional amendments banning same sex marriage where they were on the ballot, arguing that Kerry would have a better chance of winning such states. Kerry refused to compromise principle in this matter, but does anyone really doubt that Hillary Clinton would have taken Bills advice?

With Clinton being on the conservative side on foreign policy, civil liberties, and social issues it is no wonder that many of us do not find Clinton to be an acceptable candidate. The dishonesty of her campaign, and willingness to engage in tactics which many of us see as being tantamount to stealing an election makes Clinton even less tolerable an option.

I’ve reviewed many of Clinton’s dishonest statements in multiple previous posts. For example, Clinton has sent out mailers which were totally misleading regarding Obama’s positions on issues such as Social Security, abortion rights, Iraq, and health care. Clinton’s distortions on abortion rights led Lorna Brett Howard, the former President of Chicago NOW, to drop her support for Clinton and back Obama. Clinton has also raised bogus charges such on plagiarism, distorted the meaning of voting present in the Illinois legislature, and distorting Obama’s references to Ronald Reagan in an interview. Lawrence Lessig made an excellent video summarizing the reasons to oppose Clinton due to her character. I have previously posted both the video and a transcript here. Bill Bradley has also commented on Clinton’s dishonesty recently as as noted here.

Ultimately the democratic process is more important than any individual issue. The mere fact that Clinton campaigns against Obama by repeatedly distorting Obama’s positions in her stump speeches, mailers, and robo-calls is already damaging to the democratic process which is dependent upon voters making an informed choice between the candidates. Clinton’s manipulation of the facts has been every bit as Orwellian, and every bit as disturbing, as the dishonesty we see from the Bush administration. Clinton’s attempts to seat delegates elected outside of party rules in Michigan and Florida, and her more recent talk about going after pledged delegates, are seen as even more serious attempts to break the rules and steal an election.

It was largely a combination of the feeling that George Bush had stolen an election, along with his support for the war, which fueled the early opposition to George Bush and the development of the liberal blogosphere. We cannot simultaneously oppose George Bush and accept the same problems from Hillary Clinton. Those who will write justifications for  Hillary Clinton will inevitably wind up in conflict with the majority of liberal bloggers, making such disputes at Daily Kos inevitable.

Clinton’s Problems With Experience and Consistency

There has been a lot of talk recently regarding why the experience argument has not worked for Clinton, which I’ve also been arguing for quite a while. Via Mattew Yglesias we have this post from Scott Lemieux:

Related to this point, arguments for Clinton proceeding from her allegedly greater experience have always been unpersuasive, precisely because if Clinton’s rather marginal and contestable experiential advantages over Obama should be decisive any of the other major Democratic candidates would be unquestionably preferable to either. (And, even worse, the same would be true of McCain in the general.) Fortunately for the Dems in November, I also agree with Yglesias that experience tends to be “the time-honored election argument of losers.” I think there may be exceptions in cases of long-time executive or high-ranking military experience, but no viable candidate has that.

Justin Gardner responds with yet something else I’ve been arguing throughout this race:

And so this is why Obama’s winning and it’s why he’ll continue to win. He’s simply better positioned for the general election than Hillary because it’s about judgement, not experience.

Another aspect of the experience issue is that the type of experience matters, not simply years in public life. Clinton counts every year since she graduated from law school when claiming thirty-five years of experience, but this does not give her a real advantage over Obama. As I’ve previously written:

If we are to count every year since graduation from law school, Clinton does have more years with some experience. What is more important is the type of experience and what was done with it. While Clinton’s experience was frequently based upon seeking government solutions to problems, Obama was involved as a community organizer. This might partially explain why Clinton concentrates on imposing government solutions for problems while Obama also considers ways in which people can help themselves.

While Clinton was practicing corporate law, Obama was teaching Constitutional law. This has had an impact in his strong support for separation of church and state and the differences in their views on presidential power and executive privilege as Clinton supports decreased transparency and would be more likely to continue, and I fear abuse, the powers taken by George Bush.

I’ve noted Obama’s legislative record in another post this morning. In contrast, Clinton has supported the Iraq war, voted for Kyl-Lieberman, opposed needle exchange programs, favored strict sentences for drug use (while Obama has favored retroactive changes), supported legislation to ban flag burning, supported censorship of video games, and opposed the banning of cluster bombs. These are just some of the areas where I feel Clinton was wrong and Obama was right. Clinton’s experience certainly does not mean having better judgment on the issues

If Clinton were to be the Democratic candidate against John McCain, she would be vulnerable on another argument besides experience. Once again we would be subjected to claims of flip-flopping by the Democrat. The most obvious case would be whenever Clinton criticizes McCain on the war. With her recent complaints regarding Obama’s mailers, we now have a second major area with NAFTA.

Clinton is on record multiple times where she expresses support for NAFTA, but she suddenly objects to an Obama mailer which notes her previous support. Although she has often spoken in support of NAFTA, Clinton biographer Sally Bedell Smith has shown that she was a late convert to the idea when her husband was president. It is certainly possible that Clinton opposed the idea but supported it to back her husband, but the Republicans will still have a field day with her contradictory public statements.

Clinton’s Experience Claims Debunked by Congressional Quarterly

One reason that Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been unsuccessful is that she has failed to provide a compelling reason for many of us to vote for her. Initially Clinton’s campaign was based upon her being the inevitable winner, but that collapsed when she lost the Iowa caucus. She also claims experience as a reason to vote for her, but that argument doesn’t hold up very well either. Congressional Quarterly evaluated her claims and found they were untrue. First they reviewed her claims:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton often boasts that she has a long resume — 35 years long, to be precise.

“I have 35 years’ experience making change,” she said in a TV ad.

“I’ve gotten up for 35 years every day and tried to figure out what I could do to help somebody else,” she said in a TV interview.

Asked about the difference between her and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama , she replied, “Well, about 35 years of experience.”

She has used the phrase “35 years” in at least 55 speeches, debates and interviews since 2004, according to our search of a public statements database maintained by Project Vote Smart. So it’s no surprise that a Google search of “Hillary Clinton” and “35 years” yields 515,000 hits.

Next they determined if her claims were true:

In simple terms, any experience counts as experience, but it’s clear from the context of Clinton’s remarks that she’s speaking about public policy experience, so that’s how we have focused our examination. We’ll start with the math.

Clinton is 60, so if we assume that her 35 years were consecutive, they would have begun in 1973 when she graduated from Yale Law School at age 25. That year she joined the Children’s Defense Fund, an advocacy group for children.

But her math was way off when she claimed the difference with Obama is “35 years of experience.” By our count, Obama, who is 14 years younger than Clinton, has three years of experience as a community organizer, four years as a full-time attorney handling voting rights, employment and housing cases, and 11 years in the Illinois Senate and U.S. Senate. That’s a total of 18 years. So the difference between Clinton and Obama is really 17 years. We rate her claim False.

Has Clinton really awakened every morning for 35 years and “tried to figure out what I could do to help somebody else,” as she claims? We can’t read the senator’s mind, so this one’s not verifiable. If she’s like us, our first thought every morning is about coffee, not helping mankind.

Clinton has some experience during the past thirty-five years but it is hardly sufficient to consider her more qualified to be president. Often the experience consisted of assignment to part times posts while she was primarily working in corporate law. This included sitting on the board of Wal-Mart as they fought unions. Her years as first lady are of some value, but again are hardly sufficient to qualify her to be president. I’ve previously noted reports that Clinton did not have national security clearance as first lady. Her major action as first lady was on health care, which didn’t turn out very well. In contrast, Obama was successful in his efforts at expanding health care in Illinois. It is also notable that, although she is running on her experience, she is keeping the records from her years as first lady secret until after the election.

If we are to count every year since graduation from law school, Clinton does have more years with some experience. What is more important is the type of experience and what was done with it. While Clinton’s experience was frequently based upon seeking government solutions to problems, Obama was involved as a community organizer. This might partially explain why Clinton concentrates on imposing government solutions for problems while Obama also considers ways in which people can help themselves.

While Clinton was practicing corporate law, Obama was teaching Constitutional law. This has had an impact in his strong support for separation of church and state and the differences in their views on presidential power and executive privilege as Clinton supports decreased transparency and would be more likely to continue, and I fear abuse, the powers taken by George Bush.

I’ve noted Obama’s legislative record in another post this morning. In contrast, Clinton has supported the Iraq war, voted for Kyl-Lieberman, opposed needle exchange programs, favored strict sentences for drug use (while Obama has favored retroactive changes), supported legislation to ban flag burning, supported censorship of video games, and opposed the banning of cluster bombs. These are just some of the areas where I feel Clinton was wrong and Obama was right. Clinton’s experience certainly does not mean having better judgment on the issues

Cross posted at The Carpetbagger Report

Oversimplificaton in Libertarian versus Big Government Choices

Michael Kinsley predicts that libertarians are rising but the more notable aspect of his essay is in showing how dividing politicians along libertarian versus big government grounds is not as easy as it may seem. I would take his arguments further to add that a choice versus libertarianism and big government is an over-simplification as is the belief that libertarian candidates are always those who would bring about more freedom. Kinsley begins:

To oversimplify: Democrats are for Big Government; Republicans are against it.

To oversimplify somewhat less, Democrats aren’t always for Big Government, and Republicans aren’t always against it. Democrats treasure civil liberties, whereas Republicans are more tolerant of government censorship to protect children from pornography, or of wiretapping to catch a criminal, or of torture in the war against terrorism. War in general and Iraq in particular–certainly Big Government exercises–are projects Republicans tend to be more enthusiastic about. Likewise the criminal process: Republicans tend to want to make more things illegal and to send more people to jail for longer. Republicans also consider themselves more concerned about the moral tone of the country, and they are more disposed toward using the government in trying to improve it. In particular, Republicans think religion needs more help from society, through the government, while Democrats are touchier about the separation of church and state.

Many people feel that neither party offers a coherent set of principles that they can agree with. For them, the choice is whether you believe in Big Government or you don’t. And if you don’t, you call yourself a libertarian. Libertarians are against government in all its manifestations. Domestically, they are against social-welfare programs. They favor self-reliance (as they see it) over Big Government spending. Internationally, they are isolationists. Like George Washington, they loathe “foreign entanglements,” and they think the rest of the world can go to hell without America’s help. They don’t care–or at least they don’t think the government should care–about what people are reading, thinking, drinking, smoking or doing in bed. And what is the opposite of libertarianism? Libertarians would say fascism. But in the American political context, it is something infinitely milder that calls itself communitarianism. The term is not as familiar, and communitarians are far less organized as a movement than libertarians, ironically enough. But in general communitarians emphasize society rather than the individual and believe that group responsibilities (to family, community, nation, the globe) should trump individual rights.

The relationship of these two ways of thinking to the two established parties is peculiar. Republicans are far more likely to identify themselves as libertarians and to vilify the government in the abstract. And yet Republicans have a clearer vision of what constitutes a good society and a well-run planet and are quicker to try to impose this vision on the rest of us. Now that the Republican Party is in trouble, critics are advising it to free itself of the religious right on issues like abortion and gay rights. That is, the party should become less communitarian and more libertarian. With Democrats, it’s the other way around.

Very few Democrats self-identify as libertarians, but they are in fact much more likely to have a live-and-let-live attitude toward the lesbian couple next door or the Islamofascist dictator halfway around the world. And every time the Democrats lose an election, critics scold that they must put less emphasis on the sterile rights of individuals and more emphasis on responsibilities to society. That is, they should become less libertarian and more communitarian. Usually this boils down to advocating mandatory so-called voluntary national service by people younger than whoever is doing the advocating.

There are actually many Democrats who self-identify as leaning libertarian, and few Democrats who would believe that a live-and-let-live attitude towards Islamofascist dictators is an accurate description of their foreign policy beliefs. Beyond these points, Kinsley does describe the dilemma that I, and many other voters face in choosing between Democrats and Republicans. We want a government which is liberal on social issues and respects separation of church and state. On economic issues the choice is less clear as we oppose both the corporate welfare of the Republicans and the big spending special interest politics of many Democrats.

The error in Kinsley’s argument is to assume that the libertarians offer the solution to this dilemma. While the views I describe above lean in a libertarian direction, many who hold such views differ from strict libertarianism in not necessarily opposing all government programs. Libertarians argue that all government is bad, and then ignore any evidence of situations where government action is beneficial. Consistent libertarians would support the total dismantling of all social welfare programs, while many of us do support maintaining a safety net. For us, a realignment along a choice of a libertarian versus a big government party could be beneficial, but not if the only choice is pure libertarianism versus big government.

The choice of a libertarian adds additional complications when the libertarian candidate is not really so libertarian. Ron Paul has been running more as a social conservative than a libertarian on many issues, and many fear that Paul’s beliefs would actually result in a reduction of liberty despite his libertarian rhetoric.

Paul’s view of the Constitution radically differs from established views as well the pro-liberty view in a few areas. Paul fails to recognize the profoundly secular nature of the main body of the Constitution as well as the intended meaning of the First Amendment. Paul, as well as many of his supporters, promote the same revisionist history advocated by the religious right which denies the separation of church and state intended by the founding fathers. Paul takes this further in advocating policies which would effectively repeal separation of church and state such as backing Constitutional amendments supporting school prayer. In addition to my recent post on this topic, Ed Brayton raised similar issues yesterday. Ed also points out Paul’s endorsement from Christian reconstructionists such as Gary North, who was previously on his staff. Orcinus has several posts documenting Paul’s relationship with extremist groups.

Paul also ignores the extension the original Bill of Rights to acts of the states under the Fourteenth Amendment. In addition, he is inconsistent on this point. He cites states rights as justification for his opposition to abortion rights, however he also voted for the federal ban on so-called partial birth abortions. As you go to smaller levels of government it is more likely that a repressive group can obtain a majority vote in a region to restrict rights. Questions of individual rights must not be determined by majority vote in a region if we are to preserve our liberties.

Paul’s opposition to the principles of separation of church and state, along with his opposition to defending rights on a federal level, make his views highly attractive to the far right and Neo-Nazi groups which have endorsed him. The fact that he often seems to encourage such support also increases skepticism of him. As a blogger at Orcinus who reviewed Paul’s association with extremist groups which are hostile to freedom recently warned:

If America ever becomes a fascist state, it will be Ron Paul’s long-time followers who bring it about. And we — progressives, miniorities, feminists, gays, “intellectuals,” and Jews like Maher and Stewart — with be the first ones to feel their genocidal rage. We cannot overlook his long association with far-right extremists just because he agrees with us that the war is wrong and pot should be legal. If Bush has taught us anything, it’s that we need to hold ourselves and our candidates to much higher standards than that. What we choose to overlook now, we will live to regret later.

Michael Kinsley began his essay by showing the problems of over-simplification of the views of Democrats and Republicans. This applies just as much to those who call themselves libertarians.

Bush Wins 2007 Jefferson Muzzle Award, First Place For Second Year

Who says George Bush is a total loser? For the second year in a row, Bush came in first place in the Muzzle Awards from the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. This year’s award:

For its unprecedented efforts of discouraging, changing, and sometimes censoring the reports and studies of government scientists in order to make them more supportive of political policies, a 2007 Jefferson Muzzle goes to… the Bush Administration.

Tension between government policy and scientific research is nothing new. Perhaps the most famous example is the conviction of John Scopes in 1925 for violating a Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools. Many political debates have been fueled by the existence of scientific research supporting different sides of an argument. Yet, scientific research itself is predicated on dispassionate analysis of verifiable and replicable results. When scientific findings are altered for any reason other than empirical accuracy, suspicion is raised. Unfortunately, under the Bush administration examples of political interference in science no longer appear to be to isolated incidents but “a system-wide epidemic,” says Dr. Francesca Grifo, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Scientific Integrity Program.

  • In testimony before the House Government Reform Committee in March 2007, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the first scientists to raise concerns about climate change in the early 1980’s, stated “interference with communications of science to the public has been greater during the current administration than at any time during my career.” Hansen recounted a 2005 incident in which a 24-year-old NASA public affairs official told him he could not take part in a National Public Radio interview on global warming. The press officer, who also testified at the hearing, stated he was “relaying” the orders of senior NASA public affairs officials in not allowing Hansen to participate in the interview.
  • The House Government Reform Committee also heard testimony from Phillip Cooney, former chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Cooney’s appearance was the first time he publicly answered questions about some 181 changes he made to three government climate reports. Cooney acknowledged that some of the changes were made “to align these communications with the administration’s stated policy” on climate change, but he defended many of the changes claiming they were made to reflect the uncertainties of climate change science. Cooney’s defense is questionable, however, given his lack of qualifications to make judgments regarding the conclusions of scientific research. Before working at the White House, Cooney was an oil industry lobbyist. He left the White House in 2005 to work for Exxon Mobil.
  • In September 2006, the science journal Nature reported on the comments of scientists for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (“NOAA”) who claimed political appointees suppressed a NOAA fact sheet suggesting global warming was contributing to increased hurricane activity.
  • A 2006 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability project included a survey of hundreds of federal scientists at seven federal agencies and dozens of in-depth interviews that revealed 73 percent of respondents perceived inappropriate interference with climate science research over the past five years.

Although interference in communicating global warming/climate change research has been the most widely reported, the speech and research outcomes of government scientists in other fields have also been threatened. According to Political Science: A Report on Science & Censorship (pdf), produced by The Knowledge Project of the National Coalition Against Censorship, such incidents have also occurred at numerous other federal departments and agencies, including the Department of the Interior (endangered species/ conservation) and the Food and Drug Administration (contraceptive drugs). Also cited is an EPA inspector general report of February 2005 that concluded agency scientists had been pressured to change their scientific findings about risks from mercury. The former director of EPA’s Air Enforcement division reportedly complained “The new mercury rules were hatched at the White House; the Environmental Protection Agency’s experts were simply not consulted at all.”

These are but a few of the reported incidents of political interference in the communication of scientific research. Indeed, scores of reported incidents have been complied by the Union of Concerned Scientists in its A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science.

The awarding of this Muzzle should not be interpreted as supporting one side or the other in any scientific debate. Nor should it be seen to question the Bush Administration’s right to insist that government employed scientists acknowledge when their public statements do not represent the official positions of the government. Yet, as aptly stated by the National Coalition Against Censorship in Political Science, “Government need not embrace the available science, but it may not silence it.” Over the course of the past five years, government scientists have felt an unprecedented degree of political interference in communicating their research to the public thereby making the Bush Administration a deserving recipient of a 2007 Jefferson Muzzle.

Last year George Bush won “for unilaterally authorizing warrantless NSA wiretapping of the conversations of presumably innocent U.S. citizens.”

Web Censorship Spreads

While recent posts have noted a favorable trend in China with regard to greater respect for property rights, China and other countries remain restrictive with regards to internet access. The Financial TImes reports on the goblal spread of web censorship:

A recent six-month investigation into whether 40 countries use censorship shows the practice is spreading, with new countries learning from experienced practitioners such as China and benefiting from technological improvements.

OpenNet Initiative, a project by Harvard Law School and the universities of Toronto, Cambridge and Oxford, repeatedly tried to call up specific websites from 1,000 international news and other sites in the countries concerned, and a selection of local-language sites.

The research found a trend towards censorship or, as John Palfrey, executive director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said, “a big trend in the reverse direction”, with many countries recently starting to adopt forms of online censorship.

Ronald Deibert, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, said 10 countries had become “pervasive blockers”, regularly preventing their citizens seeing a range of online material. These included China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Burma and Uzbekistan.

New censorship techniques include the periodic barring of complete applications, such as China’s block on Wikipedia or Pakistan’s ban on Google’s blogging service, and the use of more advanced technologies such as “keyword filtering”, which is used to track down material by identifying sensitive words.

Scientists Protest Interference From Bush Administration

The BBC reports on a statement from 10,000 US scientists protesting government interference in science which was released at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting. The statement includes signatures from science advisors to previous Democratic and Republican Presidents going back to Eisenhower. They have expressed the hope that the new Democratic Congress will show a greater commitment to protecting the integrity of the scientific process:

Some 10,000 US researchers have signed a statement protesting about political interference in the scientific process.

The statement, which includes the backing of 52 Nobel Laureates, demands a restoration of scientific integrity in government policy.

According to the American Union of Concerned Scientists, data is being misrepresented for political reasons.

It claims scientists working for federal agencies have been asked to change data to fit policy initiatives.

The Union has released an “A to Z” guide that it says documents dozens of recent allegations involving censorship and political interference in federal science, covering issues ranging from global warming to sex education.

Campaigners say that in recent years the White House has been able to censor the work of agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration because a Republican congress has been loath to stand up for scientific integrity.

“It’s very difficult to make good public policy without good science, and it’s even harder to make good public policy with bad science,” said Dr Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security.

“In the last several years, we’ve seen an increase in both the misuse of science and I would say an increase of bad science in a number of very important issues; for example, in global climate change, international peace and security, and water resources.”

Tool To Circumvent Internet Censorship

Despite all the unreasoned arguing in the blogosphere, we do have areas of common ground. Hat tip to Michelle Malkin for this story. There’s a new tool to get around censorship of the internet in countries which do not allow free access:

Researchers at University of Toronto plan to introduce a software tool on Friday that aims to help people in countries that censor the World Wide Web.

Psiphon (pronounced sigh-fawn), a web-based utility, lets individuals in a country that censors the internet sign on to a server that gives them secure access to web pages anywhere, bypassing government restrictions…

“We’re aiming at giving people access to sites like Wikipedia,” a free, user-maintained online encyclopedia, and other information and news sources, Michael Hull, psiphon’s lead engineer, told CBC News Online.

Citing countries such as China and Iran among some 40 countries that censor the internet, Hull said that the way in which access to information is cut off is troubling.

It is interesting that, after responding to an article on article which argues that the blogospere is a “world, increasingly driven by unreason” which is polarized between left and right, I find both this area of agreement with a right wing blogger, and a liberal blogger responding to my post gives a good demonstration of the lack of reason shown by some on the left. The divisions between left and right are great, but these are not the only divisions I’m concerned with.

Rating Video Games and Movies

Looking thru my RSS reader I clicked on one story due to the title, War on Christmas Update at Centerfield. The post actually had nothing to do with the War on Christmas. It was actually on a report that the National Institute on Media and the Family has released its 11th annual Video Game Report Card, which rates violence, aggression and sexual content in video games.

I always have mixed feelings about such lists. Do they promote censorship, or do they reduce the need for government censorship by giving parents the information needed to make a decision without government intervention? Such lists aren’t necessarily bad as long as parents use their own judgement as opposed to buying or not buying purely based upon whether something is on somebody’s list.

As someone who is both a parent and strongly opposed to censorship I welcome such ratings as long as they are kept voluntary and intended as a source of information as opposed to promoting censorship. One problem I see with this list is that there really is not very much information here. You either accept their judgement or not.

My daughter never got very much into video games so I haven’t had to become concerned with these ratings, but I’ve welcomed comparable ratings of movies. When my daughter was younger I often used a very conservative web site to review movies. The site gave the specifics of every sexual innuendo and anything anybody could find in any way objectionable. Some things were listed which I would not want my daughter to see, but other things really did not sound like a problem to me.

It would have been a big mistake to avoid all movies which their listings considered heavy in sexual content. However, being able to see a list of everything possibly objectionable in a movie I could decide whether the movie really had anything to be concerned about.

Right Wingers Attack Olbermann For Speaking Out

Conservatives are upset about Keith Olbermann’s recent commentary which was highly critical of George Bush. NewsBusters, a site which presumably wants to bust the news media so that nobody can refute the talking points of the authoritarian right, recommends sending in protests to MSNBC.

I wonder if they were among those who claimed that liberal blogs were practicing censorship for criticizing The Path to 9/11. Protesting blatantly false information being passed off as fact on the public airwaves is hardly censorship. While protesting Olbermann’s cable commentary isn’t censorship either, but it would sure be hypocritical to condemn those who protested about The Path to 9/11 while attacking a commentary, which by definition is a biased presentation.

NewsBusters sent their protest to MSNBC’s general manager: Dan Abrams c/o MSNBC TV, One MSNBC Plaza, Secaucus, N.J. 07094. Email addresses were provided for Mr. Abrams and two other sources at MSNBC: dabrams@msnbc.com, sidebar@msnbc.com, viewerservices@msnbc.com .

Perhaps we should drop Mr. Abrams a note encouraging MSNBC to continue to stand up to Bush and the authoritarian right before the right wingers get their dream and all news shows are clones of Pravda, just like over at Fox News. I’ll drop him a line, right after I follow up my earlier protest to investor relations over at Disney.