Category: Metablogging

One endless Rathergate

John Quiggin32 Comments

The rightwing blogosphere, with assistance from the usual MSM types like Howard Kurtz has spent the last week or two trying to discredit a soldier, Scott Beauchamp, who wrote a “Baghdad Diary” for The New Republic, which included various examples of casually callous behavior on the part of US soldiers (nothing on the scale of Abu Ghraib or other proven cases).

For the wingers, this is a continuous pattern. Before this, there was a flap about a report that failures by contractors were resulting in troops in the field not getting adequate food. Before that, it was the Jamil Hussein case, a months-long brawl with AP arising from a report by a stringer about attacks on mosques. Before that, it was reports from Lebanon of ambulances being hit by Israeli fire. And so on.[1] There’s too much of this to try and give comprehensive coverage, and I’m not interested in debating the details, but a search on Instapundit will usually get you started.

The Beauchamp case fits the general pattern pretty well. First, the wingers claimed that the Diary was a fabrication and that “Scott Thomas” was the creation of a writer who’d never been near Iraq. Then, when it became evident he was a real person, they rolled out the slime machine to discredit him. Then they engaged in amateur forensics to discredit particular items in his account (acres of screen space have been devoted to the question of whether the driver of a Bradley fighting vehicle can run over a dog). Then they got to the central point – true or false, material like this is bad for the cause and shouldn’t be printed.

All of this, of course, is an attempt to replicate the one undoubted triumph of the blogospheric right, Rathergate. For those who somehow missed it, Dan Rather and CBS fooled by a bogus memo purportedly from Bush’s National Guard commander, and Rather eventually lost his job as a result.

As I said, I’m not interested in, and won’t debate, the details of these stories. The main question is: How anyone could imagine that this kind of exercise can have any value?
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Plea for help

John Quiggin1 Comment

I’ve reached the limit of my technical ability with the problems that have been plaguing the blog for the last few months, most recently the blank pages problem. It’s time for me to abandon the solo effort and call for collaborator(s) with the WordPress skills to keep the site running properly (or maybe the capacity to migrate to yet another system). So, if you’re interested, please drop me a line.

Default theme

John Quiggin2 Comments

I’ve gone back to the default theme in the hope of solving the problems I’ve had with blank pages and similar. If readers could advise on whether this seems to be more reliable, I’d be very grateful.

Those bloggers can be so mean!

John Quiggin5 Comments

Following the conviction of Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby for perjury in relation to the Plame case, pleas for clemency have been pouring into the courts from the great and good, including Bolton, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. But the great and good have become a little shy lately, and its all because of those beastly bloggers. According to the New York Times, Libby’s lawyers argued against the release of the letters to the media on the grounds that

the real possibility that these letters, once released, would be published on the Internet and their authors discussed, even mocked, by bloggers

Judge Reggie B. Walton appears to be well aware of the fun bloggers can have when high-powered advocates of the unfettered power of the executive turn out to be soft on crime. He refused the application. Then he granted the petition of twelve leading lights of the legal profession to submit an amicus curiae brief, noting, in a footnote

It is an impressive show of public service when twelve prominent and distinguished current and former law professors of well-respected schools are able to amass their collective wisdom in the course of only several days to provide their legal expertise to the Court on behalf of a criminal defendant. The Court trusts that this is a reflection of these eminent academics’ willingness in the future to step to the plate and provide like assistance in cases involving any of the numerous litigants, both in this Court and throughout the courts of our nation, who lack the financial means to fully and properly articulate the merits of their legal positions even in instances where failure to do so could result in monetary penalties, incarceration, or worse. The Court will certainly not hesitate to call for such assistance from these luminaries, as necessary in the interests of justice and equity, whenever similar questions arise in the cases that come before it.

Somehow I think Judge Walton thought bloggers might want to quote that statement, and I’m not going to disappoint him (via a comment in Unfogged, via BitchPhD).
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Red State

John Quiggin12 Comments

Now that I’ve got the upper hand (for the moment) in the endless struggle with spam, I’ve had time to experiment a bit with layout and so on. I’ve moved back from a blue to a red theme, but I’ve also added a widget in the sidebar that lets you pick your own theme if you prefer something more restful. As always, comments and suggestions will be gratefully accepted.

New on the RSMG blog

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There’s a heap of interesting stuff on the RSMG blog, up and running again now that the site slowdown problems seem to have been solved. And if you haven’t already, visit our sparkling new website with loads of working papers, reports and info.

Management response to the drought: The case of dairy

Upcoming events

Why be sustainable if the world is about to end?

Chile, and Australia’s role for investment and development

Farm Succession and Capital Gain

Water: Recent action and the state of play

Patenting Lives: A question of Law, Economics or Ethics?

Freakonomics and environmental economics

Really back this time

John Quiggin1 Comment

I’ve found and fixed the problem on the site which was being bogged down by the Akismet plugin. I’m still getting heaps of spam in the moderation queue, so I’ll be looking for suggestions to fix this, along with other improvements to the site. But posting should be back to normal from now on, and commenting should be reasonably easy.

UpdateOf course, the moment I post this, the site bogged down again, but it seems to have been just a glitch.