Breitbart to Media: You Want a War? A War it is What You Are Going to Get

Saturday in Quincy, IL, at the site of the sixth Lincoln Douglass Debate, Andrew Breitbart called out the legacy media. In his closing remarks he said: "You want a war? A war it is that you are going to get." His comments were made defending the cutting edge reporting that he has produced on BigGovernment.com this past week and were aimed squarely at the coastal elites. Breitbart was clearly disgusted that Acorn accused investigative journalists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles of racism and that media outlets like CNN tried to re-frame O'Keefe and Giles' undercover video coverage of corruption at a tax payer funded non-profit into an attack on FoxNEWS.

Obama's Libertarian Voters Have Buyers Remorse

David Bernstein at The Volokh Conspiracy (via Instapundit) wonders: "how many libertarian fans Obama has left?" Nick Gillespie of Reason made a similar point when he asked:

Question to the folks, including some of the libertarian persuasion (you fools!), who were bullish on Obama back when the alternative was John McCain, the Terri Schiavo of presidential candidates: When are you going to admit that Barry O stinks on ice?

Obama's actions bear little resemblance to his promises. The media provide cover for him, but I wonder if it's possible to quantify that. Is it possible to say that the average Democrat can get away with 30% more broken promises? If you're an enterprising political science PhD candidate, think about formulating your thesis around that question. We all know that politicians lie, but how much lying can a pol get away with when they have a friendly press versus when the press is hostile.

FWIW, I prefer a hounded government to one with a lapdog press. If that's important to you, consider which political party is held to the higher standard and vote accordingly.

Advice for Citizen Journalists

The Washington Post has a great article about the role newspaper journalists have played in checking police abuse. As newspapers continue their downward spiral, citizen journalists need to step up. Here are some quotes:

In the halcyon days when American newspapers were feared rather than pitied, I had the pleasure of reporting on crime in the prodigiously criminal environs of Baltimore. The city was a wonderland of chaos, dirt and miscalculation, and loyal adversaries were many. Among them, I could count police commanders who felt it was their duty to demonstrate that crime never occurred in their precincts, desk sergeants who believed that they had a right to arrest and detain citizens without reporting it and, of course, homicide detectives and patrolmen who, when it suited them, argued convincingly that to provide the basic details of any incident might lead to the escape of some heinous felon. Everyone had very good reasons for why nearly every fact about a crime should go unreported.

In response to such flummery, I had in my wallet, next to my Baltimore Sun press pass, a business card for Chief Judge Robert F. Sweeney of the Maryland District Court, with his home phone number on the back. When confronted with a desk sergeant or police spokesman convinced that the public had no right to know who had shot whom in the 1400 block of North Bentalou Street, I would dial the judge.

And then I would stand, secretly delighted, as yet another police officer learned not only the fundamentals of Maryland's public information law, but the fact that as custodian of public records, he needed to kick out the face sheet of any incident report and open his arrest log to immediate inspection. There are civil penalties for refusing to do so, the judge would assure him. And as chief judge of the District Court, he would declare, I may well invoke said penalties if you go further down this path.

Delays of even 24 hours? Nope, not acceptable. Requiring written notification from the newspaper? No, the judge would explain. Even ordinary citizens have a right to those reports. And woe to any fool who tried to suggest to His Honor that he would need a 30-day state Public Information Act request for something as basic as a face sheet or an arrest log.

Read the whole thing.

St Louis Tea Party Pictures

That is the best picture I took at the St Louis Tea Party. That girl is just beaming. Those kids were having a great time on a cold day and I hope they got some hot chocolate afterward!
That's me with my 8 week old protest babe. Thanks to whoever took the picture—I found it on facebook. The other half of my social security plan had a play date, so there are no pictures of her.

I planned to interview people and upload the interviews to YouTube; however, even though my camera had charged overnight, it was DOA at the event. I think it has a charging problem or the battery's shot.

I had backup options. I brought both my video capable cell phone and my MP3 (audio-only) recorder; however, the cold weather combined with everything I was carrying convinced me that you have to either be a protester or a journalist. With better weather, maybe I could've done both.

Another lesson learned is that you need to bring a real bullhorn. The one they had could not be clearly heard towards the back of the crowd. Here's one of the speakers with the bullhorn:
My beef is not just with the government. I also feel that the media has been biased towards left-liberal causes in their reporting, so I issued myself media credentials for this event ;-) I don't think there are any great pictures of them, though they are partially visible in the picture of me at 24thstate.com. Here's the text: RebootCongress.blogspot.com / Media Credentials / Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of... the press...

If you're a blogger, please do the same! There's no reason the implosion of newspapers cannot spread further up the media food chain. All you have to do is the job they aren't doing and do it for free with the help of YouTube....

Update: Thanks for the picture Shamed! I think that's the best shot of my little one. As you can see she fainted when she heard that DC's already spent >$11k on her behalf.

Update 2: Thanks for the link Tim! Another good picture. It was a good idea to crop-out my bad hair. Thanks again!

Surveilling Sickness

Drudge has a flash up about Google volunteering to provide a new tool to help federal officials determine where searches for "flu" are coming from geographically. I've included the full text of the Drudge flash below.

I think there are some really valuable uses for Google's aggregated hive mind. Perhaps this is one of them. Is this sort of thing easy to subvert? If you wanted to make it appear that there's more interest in "flu" somewhere, you would have to generate more searches from that area. I don't think it would be hard for a nefarious group to drive around to various local wireless hotspots and do that. It sounds like Google's using a cluster of search terms, so maybe it is not easily subverted.

And how do they deal with local media inadvertently driving the searches? For example, if a local news report causes a spike in the searches for "flu", does the CDC respond before figuring out that there are no more flu cases than usual? Are these sorts of false positives common enough to obscure the signal in a lot of noise? I guess we will find out.

Update: Slashdot has more including a link to the new Google Flu Trends which includes information on how it works.

Update 2: Instapundit has a couple of links covering the privacy angle. In one, Orin Kerr promises to write an article on a Search Engine Privacy Act. In the other, the Vodkapundit's Stephen Green, reminds us of Google's moto: don't be evil. I still think Google's Flu Trends is possible without infringing on privacy, but I understand the concern. Drudge's headline "Sick Surveillance" is much more inflammatory than it needs to be. That said, I'm very interested in Orin Kerr's Search Engine Privacy Act.

Full text on Drudge:

SICK SURVEILLANCE: GOOGLE REPORTS FLU SEARCHES, LOCATIONS TO FEDS
Tue Nov 11 2008 15:34:50 ET

GOOGLE will launch a new tool that will help federal officials "track sickness".

"Flu Trends" uses search terms that people put into the web giant to figure out where influenza is heating up, and will notify the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time!

GOOGLE, continuing to work closely with government, claims it would keep individual user data confidential: "GOOGLE FLU TRENDS can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week."

Engineers will capture keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and others.

Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at CDC: "One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data. The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used... as early warning signal for flu activity."

Eric Schmidt, GOOGLE's chief executive vows: "From a technological perspective, it is the beginning."

Thomas Malone, professor at M.I.T.: "I think we are just scratching the surface of what's possible with collective intelligence."

Developing...

Hope or Insight?

The media is one of the least trusted institutions in the country. Many people think that the media openly lies to promote their own agenda. If you are one of those people that does not trust the MSM, would you feel compelled to honestly tell them your preferred presidential candidate? Are you going to be truthful with the WashingtonPost-ABC news poll, CNN/Opinion Research, Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby, or Fox News/Opinion Dynamics? What about Gallup or Rasmussen? Since the two linked articles above are based on polls, what good are they anyway?

I think this is one of the reasons that there's so little confidence in the horserace polls this year.

Update: In light of Obama's historic victory, it must have been hope that buoyed my doubts about polling. The polls proved to be more or less spot on. I'm sure Pollster.com has more to say about that.

Congratulations to President elect Obama!

I Just Hung-up on Rassmussen

That's (at least) the third pollster I've hung-up on this political season. I'm not the only one doing it. Jerry Pournelle (via Instapundit) has hung-up on five pollsters. Jerry remarks:

The polls do not record the "refused to respond"... and I suspect that more McCain people refuse to respond than the trendier Obama enthusiasts.
...
But the election is not over. There are more decline to answer voters than it takes to change the election.
...
The way to win elections is to get those who intend to vote for your candidate to go vote. Few readers here are not capable of getting two or three voters to the polls. That's well over a million votes. Think on it.

Don't just think on that. Make a plan to vote. Talk to your friends and relatives and plan for the great voting field trip. My daughter will be in pre-school so I'll have a couple hours to wait in line to vote. If you've got an infant, toddlers, or multiple schedules to work around, then you need a voting buddy. Ask a friend or relative to join you on your trek. One of you can supervise the kids at Monkey Joes or McDonalds or even at home while the other votes. Perhaps you and your voting buddy are in the same precinct and can help each other corral the tots at the polls. Think of it as a good civics lesson topped off with a trip for hot chocolate afterwards.

I want to return to polling for a second... I've been thinking to myself: "why do I keep hanging-up on pollsters?" And I think I have an answer. I've noticed that I'm generally pretty agitated when I learn that it's a pollster—I get at least one sales call a day, every day, and I'm never as annoyed as I've been when I get a pollster. Annoyed isn't quite right... I'm livid when it's a pollster.

I see the pollsters as part of the MSM. There's the WashingtonPost-ABC news poll, CNN/Opinion Research, Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby, and Fox News/Opinion Dynamics. Rassmussen and Gallup may not have an explicit media sponsor, but they still seem like part of the MSM. As a conservative, I'm certain that the MSM is covering for Obama, so I believe my refusal to talk to pollsters comes from the reasonable fear that those pollsters will use my opinion to carry more water for the Obama campaign.

As Victor Davis Hanson observed the other day: "we have never quite seen anything like the current media infatuation with Barack Obama." It's not only the MSM that's coming to an end. Their implosion will continue to result in damage to organizations and individuals within their orbit.

Lesson Learned

We've been hearing about the media bias in this election for months now. This Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll captures in startling detail how blatantly biased the media has been. By an astounding margin of 61% (70% to 9%) voters say that the press want Obama to win.

Lesson: Propaganda does not require government sponsorship.

Update: The Anchoress makes the point that the MSM are bidding to become propagandists. Hey, everyone's NPR now! Here's how she puts it:

I personally believe that the press is going “all in” on Obama because they figure it’s the best way to shut down alternative media - which is killing them - and go back to being the only game in town. The only game in town, and completely beholden to the government. That’s scary as hell.

Glenn Reynolds (and The Anchoress) points to Michael Malone's Editing their Way to Oblivion post. The quote I found most interesting was: "A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer”, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist."