Death of a Blogger

Wish I had the words to properly convey my respect and admiration for Rami Ahmad Al-Sayeed, a Syrian video blogger who so capably earned and richly deserved the designation “citizen journalist”, an epithet claimed by many but merited by few.

Rami was killed by mortar fire this week while trying –- via his video blog syriapioneer -- to get the word out to the world about the genocide that is taking place in Homs while society looks on, seemingly helpless to arrest it.

Those of us who follow the profession of journalism, either as practitioners or as acolytes, might pause a moment to honor his selfless devotion to his chosen calling. For details see: http://blog.bambuser.com/2012/02/we-mourn-loss-of-very-brave-syrian.html

Ars Gratia Artis

We note in The Barnstable Patriot that the management of the “new” Barnstable Municipal Airport is throwing a bash on February 15 for the Hyannis, Yarmouth and Cape Cod chambers of commerce. Also invited is the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod.

No doubt some Cape Cod artists will see this invitation as a shallow make-nice gesture to an organization which is helping to facilitate the decoration of the airport by encouraging local artists to loan their work gratis.

This corner has no dog in the fight, but we suggest that as a step to help diffuse the contretemps, the airport might also invite the Cultural Center of Cape Cod, repository of a contrary view, as a show of good faith. They might even go so far as to re-cast the event as an art-acquisition fund-raiser.

SOPA Opera Redux

Can’t help but wonder whether Rupert Murdoch, if his $580M investment in MySpace hadn’t so spectacularly crashed and burned, would be sputtering out tweets accusing the President of “throwing in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters” over the Administration’s negative position vis a vis the seriously flawed SOPA and PIPA bills now pending before Congress,

Overkill

As a former player in the MSM arena, I continue to be flabbergasted by the propensity of today’s strapped publishers to waste vast quantities of ink, airtime and man-hours shooting at paper tigers when such resources could, Lord knows, be put to far more productive use.

Case in point: The New Yorker’s Katie-bar-the-door takedown of Newt Gingrich in the lead column of its most recent issue. It’s as though a recklessly extravagant one-percenter had so much ready cash burning a hole in his pocket, he had to exhaust it all in one fell swoop or burst.

You’d think that an editor as savvy as Hendrik Hertzberg, or an avatar as seasoned to the fickleness of shifting political winds as Eustace Tilley, would recognize that Gingrich has about as much chance of being elected president as Kim Kardashian has of scoring the Pope to officiate at her next wedding.

Neither is it likely that anyone who reads The New Yorker would ever vote for, or needs to be convinced not to vote for Mrs. Gingrich’s precocious boy, a contender as much a victim of his own hubris as of Mitt’s Super-PAC.

So, why the overkill? It’s almost as though they know the guy is about to go into eclipse, and they want to fire off all the juicy negatives they’ve been saving up before they become worthless currency in the ongoing press wars.

SOPA Opera

What with the 3-ring circus surrounding the GOP presidential-nomination sweepstakes dominating the news media this past week, there was comparatively little ink or airtime left to deal with SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, a colorful tag for the long-simmering clash of media giants for hegemony over what you and I may be permitted to watch, upload, download, copy, reference, forward, like, send, or steal, from the internet.  

Politico has a good score-sheet article as to who the players – and what the issues – are, but it boils down to the usual suspects: the networks, the MPAA, BMI, Sony, etc., vs. Google, ebay, Yahoo, Facebook, et al, over gatekeeping; in this case the right to close down “rogue” sites for real or alleged copyright violation.
The stakes are huge, as indicated by the millions in lobbying money that the contenders’ lobbyists are lavishing on Congress.

Of course, as we all know from recent history, today’s rogue site is tomorrow’s ISP and next week’s IPO, and once we start closing down the rogues (another colorful tag), is it just a matter of time and whim before they come for the rest of us? There’s already plenty of copyright-protection law on the books and further restrictions in the free flow of information are not what I believe the Constitution had in mind when, in Art. I, Sec. 8, it promised protection from exploitation to “Authors and inventors.”

Hence, this corner opts for the opponents of the bill as being the white (if not totally unsullied) hats in this particular shootout and takes the position that in this case, freedom to publish trumps the right to censor.

And You Thought You’d Heard it All

Boehner calls on Obama to help Congress avoid automatic cuts
By Russell Berman

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Thursday called on President Obama to intercede in the growing push to change the automatic spending cuts to military and domestic programs triggered by the congressional supercommittee’s failure to strike a deficit reduction deal.

The $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts will take effect in 2013, and Republican leaders, along with some Democrats, have said they want to change them to protect the military. Obama has threatened to veto any effort to undo the trigger, known as sequestration, although the White House is still pushing for a broad deficit pact.

“I really believe that the president of the United States has a responsibility here as well,” Boehner told reporters. “He’s the commander in chief, he knows what those cuts will mean to the military and so I frankly believe the Congress still must work with the president to find a solution to our long-term debt.”

                                        The Hill, 12/1/11

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Wherein Boehner brings a whole new meaning to the term “ironic” (to say nothing of elevating “cynical” and “chutzpah” to new heights of ignominy).

Fall Follies Redux

Back at the beginning of August, shortly after the Supercommittee was announced, I posted an item entitled “Fall Follies”, which started off by asking, “Is there anyone out there who actually believes that this bunch will produce anything of benefit to the electorate, or that they will not replicate the farcical dance attending the recent debt ceiling negotiations… ?”.
Now, this prediction took no magical powers of divination to come up with, the committee’s assured failure having been effectively forecast by Republican member Jon Kyl when he asserted that if the committee got into any discussion involving cuts to the defense budget, he was picking up his marbles and going home. Kyl is top deputy to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell whose dedication to doing whatever is necessary to insure that Obama is a one-term president is a matter of record, even if, presumably, the GOP has to bring down the country in its efforts to discredit the Administration.
And sure enough, Speaker John Boehner couldn’t get to his PC fast enough following the collapse of talks to fire off a press release blaming the President for the committee’s failure, conveniently forgetting about Constitutional provisions concerning the separation of powers. In fact, having stayed clear of this ideological sinkhole is probably the smartest thing Mr.Obama has done since his inauguration.
No matter what flows out of Republican propaganda mills over the next few days, the bottom line is that it came down to the question of raising (or, not lowering) taxes. Had the GOP given even an inch on this issue they would have won substantial concessions on social program cuts from the Democrats. But, how was that possibly going to happen when every single one of the Republican members had drunk from Grover Norquist’s cup and signed his no-new-taxes pledge? So, not only was what was left of their reputations at stake, but their honor as well; a toxic political compound guaranteed to produce only stalemate. QED.