It's been a state for almost 50 years, Cokie

Photo of the Punchbowl National Memorial Cemetery in Honolulu. Image by JPhilipson

I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii, and I know Hawaii is a state. But …

- Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs (aka "Cokie") Roberts, explaining why Barack Obama looks like an elitist for visiting an American state during an American election.

Cokie apparently believes that there are “real” Americans, and then there are a lot of other people who somehow ended up with the right to vote for our president.

Hawaii is a state. It’s people are Americans. Just because they don’t live like Cokie doesn’t make them some sort of exotic, foreign tribe.

Michael Moore: pinko or capitalist genius?

Rob at SayAnything is outraged at Michael Moore's comments that he doesn't mind if people share copies of his movie "Sicko" over the internet.

“I don’t agree with the copyright laws and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people,” said Moore when asked about pirating. “I make these books and movies and TV shows because I want things to change, so the more people that get to see them the better, so I’m happy when that happens. I think information and art, ideas should be shared.”

Rob has decided to call Moore's bluff by posting the whole thing on his site, expecting to be shut down immediately. I don't know if Moore's legal team have shut it down or if Rob's bandwidth is saturated, it wasn't playing when I dropped by.

But Rob shouldn't be so quick to outrage over Moore's "fair use" policy. After all, Moore is already a wealthy man, and there are lots of examples of good capitalists who give away things of value and still make a fortune. Google is the most obvious case in point: most of us use their services daily and never pay a dime for it. And the company’s founders are now billionaires.

Everyone with a blog also knows that they can get set up on a server for free - and I don’t see Blogger or Wordpress going out of business any time soon.

And of course, we’ve been listening to music free over the radio for about a hundred years now.

The key is to find something of greater value than the original item. Michael Moore is willing to trade some revenue for a bigger reputation and a bigger audience (including people like Rob and his readers who would likely never have paid to see a Michael Moore film in the first place).

Now if the music industry ever stops suing it’s customers for pirating music, they might figure out how to make some money on the internet, too.

h/t MvdG

Leslie Stahl's contradictions

Leslie Stahl, describing Lou Dobbs in her 60 minutes report, makes a series of non-sequiturs that reveal more about her own views of American politics than any inconsistencies in Dobbs worldview:

Lou is full of contradictions.

He's pro-abortion rights, but against gun control.

A fiscal conservative who supports government regulation.

What do abortion rights and gun control have to do with one another?

And considering that deregulation led to the collapse of Enron, Worldcom and Arthur Anderson (with considerable fallout for the government), why would any fiscal conservative not believe in a well regulated market system?

The views Stahl cites aren't contradictions, they simply don't fit the cookie cutter mold of either the Republican or Democratic parties that she's used to considering. They're inconsistent with the political landscape, not with internal logic.

In short, she's challenging Dobbs for having views that fall outside the acceptable range of opinion, not for having opinions themselves.

via C&L