Mr. Ridge, I Question Your Timing

You give the administration the benefit of the doubt, thinking "No morally sound human being would put the nation on alert for political reasons. The Bush Administration might be misguided, but they're certainly not evil." And then you find out the terror information they cited as a specific, impending danger turns out to be at least three years old.

Yes, I believe in erring on the side of caution. But to cry wolf yet again when the information predates the attacks of 9/11/2001 is alarmist. No, there weren't any dry runs and nothing indicates that anything was underway.

Federal authorities said on Monday that they had uncovered no evidence that any of the surveillance activities described in the documents was currently under way. They said officials in New Jersey had been mistaken in saying on Sunday that some suspects had been found with blueprints and may have recently practiced "test runs'' aimed at the Prudential building in Newark.

I'm just appalled. Chalk this one up in the "contributing actively to the Culture of Fear" column.

Specific Chatter

Something was bugging me quite a bit about the recent specific terrorist threats and how they're being handled, but I couldn't put my finger on it until I watched some of the news coverage last night, as well as an episode of "Command Decisions" on the History Channel. News commentators were asking whether or not giving the specifics of threatened buildings and institutions would force the terrorists to go to Plan B and pick new, unknown targets. Coincidentally, the Command Decisions episode was all about Nimitz and how he knew the Japanese were going to attack Midway with aircraft carriers. Instead of warning Midway that there was an attack coming, he positioned his forces and lured the Japanese fleet into a trap.

With no information, it's tough to know what's the right choice here, but I wonder if making public the knowledge that we know where the terrorists are planning to attack robs us of an opportunity to catch them and round many of them up. I don't want to suggest that we should use people as bait, but is there a better way to do this than to warn everybody very publicly that we know about this stuff? Maybe we should have warned just the financial institutions that have been targeted and worked out something on the QT so that we might catch some of these terrorists and interrogate them. Maybe that's right and maybe that's wrong - maybe we could make more informed decisions if we knew more.

Bloggers vs. Journalists

A lot has been written recently on many of my favorite blogs about mainstream news media criticism of bloggers. Seems to me that the criticism is nothing more than posturing. No editors? Well maybe that's a good thing. We're seeing a demand for transparency in our news media these days. At least when bloggers put something containing a mistake up, it stays up and doesn't mysteriously disappear from the web, to be replaced with corrected versions later with nary a mention of what led the "journalist" to make the mistake in the first place. Typically, when a blogger screws up, the mistake gets corrected with strikethrough, and the world gets to see the screwup for what it is.

And what's this about no fact-checkers? Isn't that a bit silly? Everyone in the blogosphere can be a fact-checker. When bloggers get something wrong, the fact-checkers show up in comments and trackbacks. More often than not, any mistakes are corrected, which is more than one can say for many journalists whose front-page mistakes might or might not be corrected, usually buried on page B36 in a tiny paragraph.

Gimme a break...

Yes, Margaret. Martha Deserves Jail Time

I decided to head over to Margaret Cho's blog to see what all the fuss what about. Generally, it's a decent read, until you get to this post.

What exactly did Martha Stewart do that was so wrong that she needs to go to jail for five months?

Umm, she received an inside tip from her broker, acted on it, and then lied about it. On top of that, she continues to insist that she did nothing wrong. She's lucky she wasn't charged with insider trading.

I don't think she is any danger to herself or society. Getting her off the streets and into the Big House just doesn't make sense. Why are we wasting all this taxpayer money to put her in her place? It isn't worth it. I am not afraid of Martha Stewart. I think prison should be for people who may be harmful to others, and I just cannot imagine that her passion for entertaining is going to turn her into a menace to society.

Putting Martha in the Big House is exactly what we need to do. And it makes perfect sense. We need to discourage insider trading because letting people get away with it allows investors who engage in insider trading to make money at the expense of other investors who play by the rules. If we let this kind of behavior go unchecked, institutional investors would screw all of us out of money we've put into the market. Something about being screwed out of my retirement plan money doesn't appeal to me. Call me crazy.

That was the main criticism against Stewart. She wasn't a nice lady. Why are manners always going to have to be part of the package? If you mind your p's and q's, is that going to be what keeps you out of jail?

No, but it helps. I'm reminded of a story my friend told me about Martha Stewart. In a store in Connecticut, Martha cut the line of people waiting to pay at the register. When my friend told her she had cut the line, Martha insisted she was entitled to do so.

While line-cutting isn't exactly a crime, I think this story is telling. Martha thinks the rules don't apply to her. And when you stand convicted of a crime, it doesn't help to show everyone that your sense of entitlement is out of control by constantly parroting "I've done nothing wrong" when the courts just proved that you did.

Martha Stewart is a political prisoner. The unceremonious denial of her freedom should make us seriously question our own.

No, Martha Stewart is a criminal. And she's not just a criminal - she's an unrepentant criminal. She's lucky she didn't end up in the pokey for years instead of months. I don't care how many doilies she knits for Connecticut's underprivileged. She committed a crime, lied about it, and refuses to admit she did wrong. I say send her up the river.