The Bush administration asserts that there should be no media-related photographic documentation (news footage or still photography) of the homecoming of the war dead. This policy was implemented ostensibly to protect the sensitivities of military stakeholders: families, friends, and fellow soldiers.

Jeff Cohen, editor of The Houston Chronicle, sees it a little differently. He disagrees with the ban, saying "I believe there should be a free flow of information between the government and the media. The government can't dictate what you can and cannot publish. The newspaper has to look at every story and print what it feels is necessary for public examination."

"We went to war with Saddam Hussein because he was a ruthless dictator who denied his people of their freedoms and (the) liberties of a free society," he says. "We have to be very careful that our government does not do the same thing."

Zack Rosen of DeanSpace (now CivicSpace) has created a site that aggregates messages from 33 progressive email lists, organized by category and message type, and accessible via RSS. [Link]

A silly New York Times article contends that IRC chat rooms are evil because they can be used by *anybody* to communicate *anything*. Sorta like the telephone, no?

NYT says: "The pirated copies of music, films, games and other software were generally distributed using a separate Internet file-transfer system, said a Justice Department spokesman, but the actual pirates generally used I.R.C. to communicate and coordinate with one another."

Okay, consider this version:

"The pirated copies of music, films, games and other software were generally distributed using a separate Internet file-transfer system, said a Justice Department spokesman, but the actual pirates generally used the telephone to communicate and coordinate with one another."

Or this...

"The whole idea behind I.R.C. is freedom of speech. There is really no structure on the Internet for policing I.R.C., and there are intentionally no rules. Obviously you're not allowed to hack the Pentagon, but there are no rules like 'You can't say this' or 'You can't do that.' "

Replaced with

"The whole idea behind the telephone is freedom of speech. There is really no structure ... for policing telephones, and there are intentionally no rules. Obviously you're not allowed to hack the Pentagon, but there are no rules like 'You can't say this' or 'You can't do that.' "

The NYT can be pretty lame, and I'm not just saying that because they spelled my name wrong earlier this week.

[Link]

Mark Pilgrim of Dive Into Mark has a few choice words about Movable Type's new price structure, which still has a free level but will require people like Mark, who has eleven blogs set up with MT, to pay serious cash if they want to migrate to version 3.0. Some people are dropping MT in favor of WordPress, which is published with the General Public License. I haven't decided what to do with Weblogsky. WordPress does look interesting....

(Thinking aloud...) Beverly Veltman sent me this link to something called the Human Values Project of the Union of International Associations. The specific page lists value classes and talks about how holders of each class of values demonize the others. My response was to note that humans can evidently be screwy or vicious regardless of their class of values. I added:

I probably don't think enough about the values substructure for the political work I'm doing... but I've been looking for ways to connect people who think differently (or have different values) and have them collaborate and, as a happy byproduct, form some synthesis of their approaches. A group-nurturing form of facilitation seems to work best.

The defining breakthrough of the 2003 primary season may have been the accidental innovation of registering "members" of a campaign. People accustomed to registering at other web sites were happy to register at deanforamerica.com as they do elsewhere. From registration, it's a series of baby steps to Meeting Up, contributing, house partying, and all the rest of the Dean magic. Unfortunately, registering on any web site is a broadly acknowledged impediment to becoming involved. Who knows? For each supporter who signed up, perhaps there were 10 others who never took the trouble.

This is a bizarre turn: a press release saying that Andy Kaufman faked his death, is a life and living in New York City. He's got a blog, of course. Our friends at snopes.com, however, are skeptical. [Link]

Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

I have a sneaking suspicion that what you have done here and the response from everyone at the festival, you will assure that the American people will see this film. I can't thank you enough for that. You've put a huge light on this and many people want the truth and many want to put it in the closet, just walk away. There was a great Republican president who once said, if you just give the people the truth, the republicans, the Americans will be saved.

Here's a new link with more info:
Yahoo News Story.

[Link]

On tour to support his latest book The Zenith Angle, Bruce Sterling's been ranting, in part, about his SXSW Party this year, trying to get his head around the turnout, which was 600 (about twice the max turnout for previous parties).

So, this is my problem, right? I have reached some kind of critical limit in these parties. You keep adding quantity and eventually there is a qualitative phase change here. They were nice about it and finally I got them to leave. I just announced that all of the liquor had been drunk and they left. There were no casualties and it was fine. But that's not what concerns me. What concerns me is next year's party. Because I don't have any way to define the proportions of this party nor do I have any security mechanisms in place, nor do the police. Which is kind of interesting....

Michael Moore's big win at Cannes invites scrutiny – this article by Andrew Anthony of The Observer suggests that Moore, as he says himself, "deeply flawed." [Link]

What I think, after my short time in his company, is that Moore is a man you would not want as an opponent, but also one you'd think twice about calling a friend. Though a talented film-maker and a clever showman, a populist who knows how to play the maverick, he is too often both big-headed and small-minded. In his desire to be seen as the decent man telling truth to power, he is too ready to blame those less powerful than himself for his shortcomings. He was justly revered in the Palais, but out on the street no one had a kind word to say about him. At Cannes, Moore may have been the star but he was not, it seems, the man of the people.

"I never thought I'd revive Cheech Wizard because he was too personal to my father," Mr. Bode said. The 70's creature, seen frontally, is a flaccid yellow hat with cartoony red legs and questionable underquarters. "Cheech was my father's alter ego," he added, "a bad-mouth hat with no respect for anyone, completely the opposite of Vaughn, who was charismatic but shy." At first, the son said, he felt intimidated reviving his father's best-known character. The Cheech strip was enormously popular when it ran in National Lampoon magazine in the early 1970's.