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March 15, 2004

Even the BBC
: Even the BBC is forced to admit that things are better in Iraq. The people of Iraq said so:

An opinion poll carried out in Iraq will make good reading for US President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The poll suggests that Iraqis are happier than they were before the invasion, optimistic about the future and opposed to violence.
The poll, of more than 2,500 adults, was commissioned by the BBC in association with other international broadcasters.
It suggests that the reporting of the daily attacks on the occupying forces in Iraq could be obscuring another picture.
This opinion poll gives a glimpse into the real life of Iraqis, who appear to be overwhelmingly pre-occupied with bread and butter issues - whether the lights go on or not, and the restoration of the economy.
Seventy percent said that things were going well or quite well in their lives, while only 29% felt things were bad.
And 56% said that things were better now than they were before the war.
Almost half (49%) believed the invasion of Iraq by the US-led coalition was right, although 41% felt that the invasion "humiliated Iraq".
More than three quarters (79%) want Iraq to remain united, and only 20% want it to become an Islamic state.

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Divorce
: I can't imagine it's easy to maintain a group blog. I would be very difficult to live with, what with my blog snoring and all. Al Giordano just left BopNews.

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The perfect blogging tools
: Lots of people gave lots of great suggestions in response to Dave Winer's call for blog tool dreams. Lisa Williams did a great job compiling them. Then more folks compiled. And now we need a compilation of the compilations.

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Hermit
: For years, I played the hermit and never went to conferences. Then I went to a few and enjoyed meeting all the folks I'd been reading in blogs. So I tortured myself wondering whether I should go to more. But the hermit in me won out and I've been staying home, watching the conferences online and even joining in from a very distant peanut gallery. Judging from the reviews of the latest conferences, I'm glad I stayed home with my wi-fi and electric plugs and nobody to tell me where I can and can't take pictures or blog or wander.

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Will our election protect us?
: I wonder whether our upcoming election will protect us from al Qaeda attacks.
They obviously wanted to affect Spain's elections -- and succeeded, getting rid of the Conservative government allied with Bush's war effort.
But if they want to get rid of Bush, the worst thing they could do is attack here. I do not believe that American voters would react to an attack -- like the Spanish -- and blame the guy the terrorists blame. Quite to the contrary, an attack would make us angry and defiant and would send us toward Bush, especially since he is still the one acting tougher on terrorism.
And the terrorists are not idiots, politically. So if they want to show they can wage influence in world politics, they are more likely, unfortunately, to go after America's other allies. God forbid.

: But even the anti-war Guardian says that an attack in England would not help the terrorists get rid of Bush-ally Blair:

...ministers are privately calculating the prospects for a "security election" in Britain in which a similar attack may be attempted....
But Labour's leadership believes that an attack similar to Madrid would have the effect of driving British voters, more evenly divided on the war, behind strong and established leadership.
With the Conservatives (unlike Spain's socialists) pro-war, the Liberal Democrats may benefit most from anti-Blair voting.
The Tory defence spokesman, Nicholas Soames, backed the Blair analysis. "In times of trouble, you don't want change, you want the status quo." conceded another senior opposition MP.

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Good-bye and thank you
: Robert Zangas was working in Iraq as a civilian -- after having served there as a Marine reservist -- to help teach Iraqis how to be journalists. He was killed while on a road with a fellow CPA employee and interpreter.
Robert Zangas was also a blogger. Here is the last post of a generous, optimistic, hard-working man.

I know it is not my money that I am giving away and I am not interested in receiving thanks. But it points out to the fact that this is a society that is in desperate need of everything. It is like pouring a cup of water out in a dry desert. The water disappears and you are left with the feeling of “did it do any good?” Sometimes the answer is “yes.” Sometimes the answer is “no.” Sometimes you wait for the flower to grow. I don’t mean to sound depressed because I am not. I am enjoying this work immensely. It is very gratifying…as long as the flowers grow eventually. I have hope that they will.

Robert Zangas, 44, was a father of three.
God bless him. [via Robert & Lt. Smash]

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Satblog
: Steve MacLaughlin has a satellite radio blog and now he has a big story to watch in Howard Stern.

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You know it's business when it's in the Wall St. Journal
: Advertising on weblogs -- and Henry Copeland's BlogAds -- get a well-deserved story in the Wall Street Journal today.

The Chandler campaign is evidence of the latest step in the evolution of the Internet. Blogs, once derided as solipsistic exercises by self-important nobodies, are starting to go commercial as their readership grows.
The trend is in its early stages; big advertisers like Coke and Procter & Gamble aren't yet hawking their wares on blogs. Indeed, much of the advertising is found on politically oriented blogs, which are experiencing a spike in readership from the presidential election. Many people wonder if the blog ad boomlet will outlast the election.
But other Internet institutions have had similarly modest origins; recall that eBay started out as a place to trade Beanie Babies and Pez dispensers. And it's no surprise that as blogs grow in popularity, they are beginning to attract advertisers.

I am confident that weblogs and citizens' media are going to be a tremendous medium for marketing and will make real money for their proprieters. It always takes time for advertisers and agencies to catch up -- hell, they're still catching up to the Internet... and cable -- but catch up, they will. I've written here frequently that we still need some infrastructure to support marketing (see, for example, yesterday's note on RSS and measurement) but once it is in place, this will explode.

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The tactics and morality of support

: My friend Steven Johnson says he wants to make clear that a reason why he and others opposed the war in Iraq was because it could fire up al Qaeda and cause an attack like Spain's tragic 3/11. (He emailed me saying I was his imaginary debating opponent as he wrote the post; so I'll make it real). Says Steven:

With the elections yesterday giving control of the Spanish government to the Socialists, over the coalition of the willing's Popular Party, we're going to see a wave of posts and op-eds explaining how the 3/11 terrorist attacks threw the election to the party "soft on terror," thereby allowing Al Qaeda to get exactly what they wanted: a regime that would be "friendly" to them. No doubt a version of this argument will be trotted out again and again during the runup to the 2004 election here....
This formulation needs to be drilled into people's heads: we opposed the Iraq war because we predicted that this particular engagement would lead to more Al Qaeda strikes, not less. (We supported the Afghanistan war because we felt it would, on the whole, lead to less.) In other words, we thought that invading Iraq was ultimately "friendly" to Al Qaeda: hard on Hussein and his secular dictatorship, but soft on the shadowy, nationless networks of Islamo-fascism. So when the Spanish vote out the Popular Party, or the US votes out the Bush Administration, it's not that we're trying to give the terrorists a break. It's that we think the Bush Administration has been playing directly into the hands of Al Qaeda for the past two years, enraging young Arab men with elective wars that do nothing to combat Bin Laden and his minions directly.

I have many problems with this line of thinking for it is just so much thin moral soup.

First, I do not find it acceptable to decide not to oust Saddam Hussein because we're afraid it would get terrorists' dander up. You can have other reasons to say we shouldn't have invaded Iraq (I don't), but that's not one of them. That is allowing the terrorists to manage us. We cannot find ourselves in a position of deciding what we should and should not do in the world based on what bin Laden might do.

Second, I also find it unacceptable to leave millions of people suffering under a tyrant we should have ousted a decade ago just because we are afraid of terrorists.

Third, by this logic, Great Britain would not and should not have entered World War II to defend Europe against Hitler. Nor should we have. Don't want to piss off Hitler. Don't want to piss of bin Laden. Same difference.

Fourth, by this same logic, no one should ever support us and we should support no one. The U.N. is pretty much useless now but you might as well shut it down completely and turn it into condos, because any nation that supports another when it is attacked is a damned fool. So no one should have supported us after 9/11 and we should have not supported Kuwait or the people of the former Yugoslavia. That's clearly unacceptable.

Fifth, there is absolutely no basis for the belief that if we had not invaded Iraq, 3/11 would not have happened. You could try to argue that if Spain had not helped us, they might have picked another country but, again, that is the clearest definition of shirking moral responsibility (aw, let 'em bomb England) and, besides, bin Laden does, remember, have this thing about the Crusades.

Now as to the Spanish elections: Yes, the terrorists had a clear impact on the outcome of the Spanish vote and, as I said yesterday, that may have been the result of the ruling Conservatives' self-centered insitence on trying to blame this on ETA. But having the vote is itself a victory against the terrorists.

And as to our own elections: If -- God forbid! -- there is another attack in this country before our elections aimed at steering them, I would not call either possible outcome a victory for the terrorists. A free election is a defeat for them. But before that election, this is why it is now all the more important to have a strong debate on how best to protect us against this terror. And the last thing I want to hear Kerry do is echo this logic that he will protect us by trying not to piss off terrorists.

The best way to piss off terrorists is to hunt them down and exterminate them and I want to hear Kerry and Bush battle for the right to the title of Toughest on Terrorism. I want the President of the United States to piss off terrorists as much as he possibly can. I want to see him continue to put pressure on countries that harbor and grow terrorists (read: Libya). I want to see him bring democracy to the Middle East, for that is the best way to stop bringing up generations of pissed off victims (I am a Tom Friedman liberal hawk).

But let's be clear: Being soft on terrorism or on Saddam Hussein would not have prevented the tragedy of 3/11.

: Olivier Travers says it far more eloquently than I do:

you can't have your "Iraq is not connected to terrorism" cake and eat it too.

Amen.

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The Daily Stern

: UNCLEAR CHANNEL: Hmmm. Clear Channel gets hit for a quarter million of fines for Elliot in the Morning... but he isn't fired. Bubba's fined and fired. Howard is not fined and he's fired. Elliot is fined but he's not.

: SIRIUS: Roger Friedman says he's heard that Howard Stern visited the offices of Sirius satellite radio last week. "If Stern takes this turn, he'll be remembered for launching an entire medium."

: SATELLITE JITTERS: Hei Lun at Begging to Differ reports that what with all the talk about Howard Stern and others jumping from broadcast to satellite, broadcast is getting nervous.

Howard Stern's threat of going to satellite radio is being taken seriously.
On Friday, then again this morning on a different radio station, I heard two different versions of a radio ad against satellite radio. In the ads, people who are supposedly former subscribers of satellite radio talk about how much it stinks....
The second ad is amusing in an odd way because it spend more than half the time having people complain about foul language. Someone complains about hearing swearing in songs when normally it's bleeped out on regular radio (yeah, people love it when radio edits the song of their favorite bands); another person talks about how he often forgot to change the dial when his kid gets in the car so the kid hears all the swearing (forego satellite radio--for the children!). Then another guy talks about the cost of having one in his car, then having to pay for it again on his wife's car. The ads both end with "a message from your hometown stations".

The audience who'd switch with Stern wouldn't be concerned about dirty words. I'm sympathetic with the problem of being less portable (I want to listen to satellite in my car, in my home, while running, in my office... that will be tough). But anything in the cause of free speech....

: UPDATE: Bubba the Love Sponge, fired shock jock, does an Internet webcast.

AFTERNOON UPDATE: KCRW, the LA public radio station, rescinds its firing of Sandra Tsing Loh for accidentally letting the f word out of the air; she issues a joint statement saying she chooses not to return to the station. Face-saving all around. LA Observed has the news.
Sandra has her say on Cathy's blog:

"My decision is to never set foot upon the toxic soil of KCRW again as my personal statement about the poor way I was treated," she added. "Aside from that, I wish KCRW the very best."

PREVIOUS STERN POSTS: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

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Addiction
: I had a panic attack last night. I posted to the blog and suddenly got one of those frightening error messages you dread, something about connections to MySQL not working through the Mars rover. I emailed half the world. I had trouble getting to sleep. I woke up before 5 this morning and have to admit I went to the email to see, with great relief and gratitude, that (a) Movable Type was nice enough to send me advice and (b) Hosting Matters fixed the MySQL problem (which, by the way, is why comments did not work for sometime last night... I'm hoping that various trolls feared it was their fault, but I doubt it). I am the poster child for a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.

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