Bloggasm

Dean Esmay is a democracy and human rights advocate who lives near Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is also a freelance writer and editor, and one of the internet’s most popular webloggers. He is a senior contributor to Pajamas Media. He is a board member and co-founder of Operation Give, a charity that does major works helping distribute medical supplies and toys to children in Iraq. He is a graduate of Colorado Technical University, a husband and a father.

He is also a blogger for Dean’s World.

Simon Owens: One of the hotbed issues dealing with Middle Eastern terrorism has to do with access to weapons, and as you indicate in your post “Reports: Yemen Arming Somalia Again,” we are having a hard time with this particular problem. How do you think our US military should go about solving it?

Dean Esmay: The international arms trade is much like the international drug trade, and there is very little the U.S. military can do about either one. The State Department can apply pressure to government regimes that are irresponsible in the arms trade, such as Yemen. The U.S. military can find and destroy weapons caches in areas it controls, such as Iraq, but otherwise this is a matter of diplomacy and international finance, not military action.

Simon Owens: As a follow up question, do you think that the best way to fight terrorism is to cut off their weapons resources?

Dean Esmay: No. This is like saying that the best way to fight drug abuse is to cut off access to drugs to the drug dealers. No, the best way to fight terrorism is to help promote democracy, promote human freedom, and to put pressure on those government regimes which coopoerate with terrorist networks (all of which are non-democratic states, I might add).

Simon Owens: Do you tend to blog about whatever issue is the most talked-about at the time of posting, or do you like to search for the overlooked stories that nobody has noticed yet?

Dean Esmay: More the latter than the former. Obviously some stories are so big you can’t help but remark upon them, but we usually try to avoid the mad rush of the 24 hour news cycle.

Simon Owens: How do you go about finding the articles you link to in your blog? Do you find them from other blogs, or are there particular news services you monitor?

Dean Esmay: I get a ton of links mailed to me every day. I’d say about a quarter of my links come from that. I also enjoy randomly browsing the blogs from my blogroll, looking for something interesting. And yes, I scan a few different internet news services periodically.

Simon Owens: Do you think that as each election cycle comes around, political blogs gain more and more influence over the political process?

Dean Esmay: Yes. And they’re alread more important than most people think. But not in the way some bloggers would like to think. It’s not that so many people read political blogs, or that a majority of voters will ever read them. That’s not what makes blogs important. Ditto the impact of blogs as a fundraising tool, which can be significant but will never replace traditional fundraising channels.

What’s most important and powerful in politics is ideas. In the past, most political ideas were nurtured in the pages of political journals like The Nation, The New Republic, The National Review, and other such publications. Those journals at their height never had more than 100,000 readers, usually less. But they were read by decision makers, political figures, academics, an so on, and were enormously influential on the nation in ways that many people even today are unaware of. And I see political blogs as the modern equivalent of that. To the extent that they discuss ideas, they have a cumulaitive long-term impact that’s difficult to measure, but it’s large and it’s growing.

There are people in the White House whose job it is to monitor political blogs. What does that tell you, even if you don’t read blogs yourself?

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own blog?

Dean Esmay: My wife Rosemary’s blog, The Queen of All Evil. She’s far more conservative than I am, and daily rides into battle with the lefties of The Daily Kos, Eschaton, and other far-left blogs. She’s always fun, too.

Trudy Schuett’s Desert Light Journal, covering issues of domestic violence and gender issues from a perspective that’s too rarely seen in the mainstream media.

Michael Demmons’ Gay Orbit. A GLBT community blog with an attitude and a perspective you don’t see much in traditional sources. Plus very funny.

Austin Bay. International relations and military analysis from a fine mind and a terrific writer.

Mohammed and Omar’s Iraq The Model. Whenever I really want to know what’s going on in Baghda, they tell me.

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Cori E. Dauber is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies (and Adjunct Professor of Peace, War, and Defense) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Research Fellow at the Triangle Institute for Security Studies. She has published in journals such as Security Studies, Armed Forces and Society, Contemporary Security Policy, and Rhetoric and Public Affairs. Her research focuses on the way the media represents war, the military, and terrorism, and since 9/11 her work has focusesd on the press coverage of the War on Terror, including the war in Iraq. She has presented her work in a variety of forums, including the US Army War College, the Canadian Forces College, and the Kennedy Center for Special Warfare. Her blog, Rantingprofs.com, offers daily commentary on the press coverage of the War on Terror.

Simon Owens: One of the hot new political issues right now is the distribution of security funds for anti-terrorism. Did you agree with this distribution? How should it have been done differently?

Cori Dauber: I agree with the general notion that the money should be distributed according to a risk formula, but it seems as if the cuts in New York and DC’s funding were awfully sharp. So I would say that I agree with the general approach that was supposed to be used, but it seems to me that without more explanation of the way they went about applying that approach, it’s hard to understand the result they got.

Simon Owens: As a professor, how do you feel when pundits like Bill O’reilly call for the firing of professors for their political rhetoric? Do you find this notion dangerous?

Cori Dauber: I don’t generally watch O’Reilly, so I can’t comment on anything he’s said specifically, but I would make two comments. One is that in general people (and I would include many of my colleagues in this, actually) often confuse the political and free speech rights that professors have, the same as any other citizen, and academic freedom. I have the same rights you or anyone else does to express myself in the public square. That’s different from academic freedom, which is my right to express my best judgment on matters pertaining to my field in my research and in the classroom. (It doesn’t mean, by the way, that I can say anything I want about any topic I want in the classroom, nor does it mean I am free to violate standards of academic integrity regarding standards of evidence etc etc in my research.) I think the way those two get confused is dangerous, and the way that tends to get played out is in calls for eliminating tenure. I worked very, very hard for a long time to get tenure, and I’m at a University where we continue to be evaluated both as teachers and as reseachers forever after (which I think is now the norm, by the way.) Tenure provides very important protections in all kinds of ways, and I think that it’s easy to pull out examples of particular comments that can be used to make the system look bad, but you can do that with individuals in any profession.

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Blackfive: I enlisted in the military when I was seventeen. I briefly served as an Army aircraft crew chief before becoming a paratrooper and then joining Special Operations. After receiving a Commission as a Cavalry Officer, I served in units in Europe, Asia and Southwest Asia before working as an Intelligence Officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). I left the military as a Major in the US Army Reserve in July of 2001. I have a Masters of Science Degree from the University of Chicago. Currently, I am an IT Executive in Chicago.

A good friend of mine, Major Mathew Schram, was killed on Memorial Day, 2003. In fighting his way out of an ambush, he saved the life of a Newsweek reporter who never wrote a story about Mat.

http://www.blackfive.net/main/2004/05/one_year.html

Newsweek really pissed me off and I started blogging about the good, the bad, the humorous and the ugly of military life because most MSM outlets like Newsweek weren’t. If it didn’t fit the template of “Bush sucks, the war sucks, the military is failing,” then it didn’t get published by most of the MSM.

There was a distinct void of coverage of what was actually happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. My friends were sending emails, reports, after-action-reviews, and photos that were contradicting what I was reading in the NYTimes and the WashPo. So I started posting about them. And Blackfive.net took on a life of it’s own…

Simon Owens: Much of the rhetoric in the 2004 election and in political dicussions today involve the “message” we send the troops when criticising the war. As a military blogger, what is the notion of this “message,” and does it imply that we’re sending false messages of reality to the troops in order to boost morale?

Blackfive: Well, you are asking first about the message you send the troops when you criticize the war. Saying that you support the troops and not the war, sends the troops the message that (1) you don’t support their mission which,ergo, means them and (2) that you don’t approve of what they are doing.

I have no idea what you mean about “sending false messages of reality to the troops in order to boost morale.” The messages you describe at the beginning of your question clearly would not boost morale. In fact, I would argue that it would have the opposite effect.

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A few days ago, I posted an interview with the Agitator, and in response to the way I asked a certain question, the blog To the People described it as a turd question. When asked why the question was crap, the blogger had this to say:

Simon,

As Minerva notes, Mexicans are not a race any more than “Americans” or “Chinese” are a race. No “Mexican”, to the best of my knowledge, has ever voted in the United States.

I responded that the term “Mexican” can be used as a racial term, and provided several points as to why this is. So in response, he put up a post in which he offered $100 to the organization of my choice, and a public apology if I were to prove him wrong:

So here’s my offer, Simon: Find a legitimate, scholarly source that supports your claim of one Mexican race. (For example, a university professor who does not belong to the Aryan Brotherhood would suffice.) Then send me information in the form of a paper or link. If you can find such a source, not only will I publish the link and admit I was wrong, but I will immediately donate $100 to the charity of your choice.

Of course, if you look in the comments field of that post, I provided several sources (including one he linked to himself, apparently without even reading it), including one from a professor who “does not belong to the Aryan Brotherhood” (as he put it).

Since then, his readers have engaged in multiple semantics games, but I’ve clearly found several sources that actually used the term “Mexican Race,” and pointed out that Mexicans were labeled as an ethnic group in the Wikipedia article he linked to (and if you look in any thesaurus, a synonym for “race” is “ethnic” group).

So, that was on the 23rd. Has he issued an apology to me yet and sent that $100 check to the ACLU like I requested? Nope! Did I ever think he actually would? No. At best, he’ll either pretend like he never posted that offer and ignore it completely, delete the post, or just run to google in search of a single web-page that argues that Mexicans aren’t a race, and say that this discounts all my sources, even though that wasn’t part of the deal.

Business as usual.

In this week’s series of interviews with conservative bloggers, our first up to be questioned is The Agitator.

Simon Owens: As the election season begins to warm up, how do you think the Immigration issues will affect the election results? Will there be a mass mobilization of Mexicans to the polls to vote for Democrats?

Radley Balko: I’m not sure about that. The Democrats seem to be pretty pro-immigrant. But then, so is the White House and the RNC. I suppose it’s possible that Hispanics might try to send a message to the anti-immigrant wing of the GOP, but remember, only U.S. citizens can vote. That rules out all of the undocumented immigrants, as well as all non-citizen immigrants here legally.

On the other side, I think you may also be looking at a wash. Immigration opponents have more allies in the GOP than they do with the Democrats. But they also seem to be frustrated that the White House and Republican leadership in Congress hasn’t taken more drastic action. Neither party is giving them what they want (as someone who supports liberal immigration policies, I’m more than happy with that).

My guess is that given that neither party’s really representing them, come November the nativist right is more likely to be disillusioned than angry.

Simon Owens: By calling your blog “The Agitator,” you seem to be commenting on the edgy conflicts in politics and how they can reach a climax within the anonymous confines of the internet. Do you ever find this to be counter-productive to your cause?

Radley Balko: Not really. I chose the name because it’s memorable, marketable, and the domain happened to be available. “Agitator” also commonly pops up to describe many of the people I admire from history, too.

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When I was conducting my interviews with liberal bloggers, one of the things I heard repeated over and over again is that right-wing blogs don’t create spin, they simply repeat the spin given to them.

Well, the Right Wing blogs are at it again. Many are pointing to a Brit Hume Special Report in which he highlighted a quote from General Zinni in a Meet the Press interview with Tim Russert:

“What bothered me … [was that] I was hearing a depiction of the intelligence that didn’t fit what I knew. There was no solid proof, that I ever saw, that Saddam had WMD.”

And then Hume put this next to another quote from Zinni, made in 2000 in front of Congress:

Iraq remains the most significant near-term threat to U.S. interests in the Arabian Gulf region,” adding, “Iraq probably is continuing clandestine nuclear research, [and] retains stocks of chemical and biological munitions … Even if Baghdad reversed its course and surrendered all WMD capabilities, it retains scientific, technical, and industrial infrastructure to replace agents and munitions within weeks or months.

To the average person watching Brit Hume, he or she would assume that when Zinni says “There was no solid proof, that I ever saw, that Saddam had WMD,” that he means he never saw proof that Saddam had WMDs back when he was a general (pre-2000).

Let’s ignore for a second his use of “solid proof” in the first quote and his use of the word “probably” in the second quote, and look at the actual transcript of the Tim Russert interview.

Said by Russert right before the quote highlighted by Brit Hume:

Though retired for nearly two years, Zinni says, he remained current on the intelligence through his consulting with the CIA and the military. ‘I did consulting work for the agency, right up to the beginning of the war. I never saw anything. I’d say to analysts, “Where’s the threat?”’ Their response, he recalls, was, ‘Silence.’

Gee whiz. Do you think since Tim Russert had JUST GOT DONE (must fight the urge to put the words “FUCKING” in between “JUST” and “DONE”) making reference to Zinni’s CIA consulting work leading up to the war, that Zinni in his RESPONSE TO RUSSERT, was referring to that consulting when he said “I was hearing a depiction of the intelligence that didn’t fit what I knew” instead of what his thoughts were all the way back in 2000?

Of course not! That would be, you know, practical or something!

But let’s go even further into how much the spin machines love to take things out of context. Said right after the quote Brit Hume mentioned:

Now, I’d be the first to say we had to assume he had WMD left over that wasn’t accounted for: artillery rounds, chemical rounds, a SCUD missile or two. But these things, over time, degrade.

As I put it in the comments thread of a right-wing blogger: Zinni, in the most recent quote, is referring to the lead-up to the Iraq War, post 9/11. Pre 9/11, Saddam Hussein probably was the most “significant near-term threat” at the time. That was before Osama Bin Laden. You know, that guy that the average American barely knew existed before 9/11? Pundits like to hee and haw and about pre and post 9/11 mindsets, but when it comes to what a general said in 2000 being confused with his views concerning the political climate of 2003, apparently 9/11 never happened!

This is besides the fact that you’ve ignored his use of the word “probably” in his 2000 quote and “solid proof” in his 2006 quote, but who’s taking notes? And for that matter, who cares if the administration’s cross-hairs would logically be more deeply focused on Iraq in 2003 than in 2000, and therefore be expected to be more accurate than a general assessment before a war is even on the table? Hell, before there was even an intense investigation into whether or not Iraq had WMD’s, which would have provided more accuracy to Zinni’s opinion?

Ok, I now await your usual rebuttal that I see commonly in this thread. Here, I’ll even start it for you: “Simon, u r a iDiot111. Liberals r stoopid.”

With the new legislation passed in South Dakota banning abortion, many are worried that this might be the Right’s best chance at overturning Roe v Wade.

Some questions are going through our heads: How then will women be able to get safe, healthy abortions? What is the best method to do so?

Well, I have managed to find one alternative: Frank’s Home Abortion

via mikey