instapundit Posts

A new poll out there shows that only 64% of Americans believe that the National Security Agency (NSA) should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States. One wonders what the numbers would have been if "people living in the United States" were replaced by "Americans." Even so, 64% approval is pretty low in these fear of terrorism times.

Some random chatter on the blogs: Americablog's New domestic spying poll numbers are very bad for Bush, Ezra Klein's Trust, But Verify & Stephen Kaus at Huffington's Popping the Wrong Question, Instapundit's cryptic I guess Kaus was right and Michelle Malkin's Sorry NYTimes: America is OK with the NSA.

Nonviolence.org readers may not be aware that my personal site has been the talk of the political internet for the last few days. Since posting an account of getting a phone call from a CBS News publicist, I've been linked to by a Who's Who of blogging gliteratti: Wonkette, Instapundit, The Volokh Conspiracy, Little Green Footballs, RatherBiased, etc. For a short time yesterday, the story was a part of the second-ranked article on Technorati's Politics Attention index.

A hack from CBS News called me to say they were doing a program on an issue that's central to Nonviolence.org's mandate: conscientious resistance to military service. After looking over the material, I thought the interviews of resisters who have fled to Canada would be interesting to my readers and so wrote a short entry on it. Thinking it all a little funny that a publicist would care about Nonviolence.org, I mentioned the incident in the "Stories of Nonviolence.org" section of my personal site. One by one the leading political sites of the blogosphere have run the story as further proof of the vast left-wing mainstream media conspiracy. It's rather funny actually.

I have to wonder is who's kidding who with all this feigned outrage? For those missing the irony gene: the Nonviolence.org PayPal account currently has a balance $6.18, the bulk of which comes from the last donation--$5.00 back on November 20th. My corner of the left wing conspiracy is funded by the vast personal wealth I accumulate as a bookstore clerk.

Wonkette's pages advertise "sponsorship opportunities," she's a recent cover girl on New York Times Magazine, her husband is an editor at New York magazine and in October she cashed out her blogging fame for a $275,000 advance for her first novel ("It's not Bridget Jones does Washington, it's Nick Hornby does politics": good grief). Eugene Volokh has clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court (for Sandra Day O'Connor), teaches law at UCLA and just had a big op-ed in the Times. Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds teaches law at the University of Tennessee, has served on White House advisory panels, and is a paid correspondent for MSNBC. Yet he, like the others, calls a two minute phone call "recruiting"?

I'm beginning to think the real interest comes from the fact that this top tier of bloggers is totally in bed (literally) with the MSM. Their income comes from their connections with media and political power. Their carefully-crafted fascade of snarkish independence would crumble if their phone logs were made public. They're not really blogging in their pajamas, folks.

By mentioning the existance of blog publicists, I've threatened to blow their cover. Pay no attention to the men behind the curtains: my social gaffe was in publicly admitting that the mainstream media courts political blogs. Kudos to journalist Derek Rose on admitting the practice:

But why shouldn't a news organization's publicity department court bloggers? As a MSM member, I get emails from TV flacks all the time promoting their scoops. From ABC, for example, I've received emails regarding a tape they got of the Beltway sniper's call to the Rockville police; Barbara Walters' Hillary Clinton interview; and their 'Azzam the American' video ... as well as a Rush Limbaugh drug laundering story that never panned out. I even got attention from publicists when I was working for a newspaper that didn't have a 20th of the circulation of Instapundit...

Rose aside, there's incredible distortion in the "reporting," a term I have to use very loosely. Wonkette says "Kelley claims that a CBS minion put the screws to him to post something about a '60 Minutes' package on conscientious objectors" yet all readers have to do is follow the link to see I never said anything like that. Why do the cream of bloggers feel like a posse of self-absorbed seventh graders? When I started Nonviolence.org back in 1995, I thought the brave new political world of the internet might be All the President's Men. Boy was I wrong: it turns it's just Heathers. God help us.

My regular readers may not be aware that Quaker Ranter is the talk of the political internet for the last few days. Since posting my "account of getting a phone call from a CBS News publicist", I've been linked to by a Who's Who of blogging gliteratti: Wonkette, Instapundit, The Volokh Conspiracy, Little Green Footballs, RatherBiased, etc. For a short time yesterday, the story was a part of the second-ranked article on Technorati's Politics Attention index. See The Left Wing Conspiracy Revealed by Nonviolence.org on the main site.

Yesterday I got a call from a publicist for CBS News's 60 Minutes. They're running a story tonight on "Deserters," U.S. military personnel who have fled to Canada rather than serve in Iraq. She was requesting that I talk up the program on Nonviolence.org (I have here: CBS News Covers New Conscientious Objectors. In nine years of publishing the peace site, I can't remember ever getting a call from a publicist before. I've talked to reporters from major news networks and papers, and I've talked a booking agent or two to arranging appearances on radio shows, but never a publicist.

The most exagerrated story of the iraq War has to be that of Private Jessica Lynch's capture, torture and rescue. Now "Lynch is criticizing the official U.S. propaganda about her ordeal":www.nytimes.com/2003/11/07/national/07LYNC.html?ex=1068872400&. Lynch has apparently felt "hurt and ashamed" by the misleading accounts of her heroism. So will the idiots over at "Instapundit":http://www.instapundit.com/archives/012398.php and "National Review":http://www.nationalreview.com/ponnuru/ponnuru040303.asp now stop repeating the debunked stories. Will they apologize to Lynch? For those interested, here's some "Nonviolence.org articles on Lynch":http://www.nonviolence.org/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&IncludeBlogs=2&IncludeBlogs=3&IncludeBlogs=4&IncludeBlogs=5&IncludeBlogs=6&search=lynch.

Conservative godfather of the internet "Instapundit almost linked to Nonviolence.org":http://www.instapundit.com/archives/011100.php the other day. He didn't like our take on the enola Gay exhibit, but instead of linking directly to us so his readers could see what we had to say, he linked to Bill Hobbs' critique. I guess Instapundit alter ego Glen Reynolds must not think his readership can handle dissenting voices. Instapundit readers who cut and pasted to get here: * Yes, the Japanese were secretly trying to surrender _before_ the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski. The U.S. thought incinerating 150,000-some people was a good negotiating tactic, and it worked: the Japanese government to instantly agree to unconditional surrender. * Yes, the U.S. takeover of Hawaii and the Philippines were aggressive acts to secure shipping routes in the South Pacific. In 1854, a U.S. warship under the command of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry sailed to Japan and forced it to sign treaties opening up its markets. The threat of Russian expansion from the West and U.S. expansion from the south and east was a large part of the reason Japan militarized in the first place. These are the kind of facts one should have when standing in the Smithsonian gazing up at _enola Gay_ and wondering how it ever came to be that the U.S. would drop two nuclear weapons over two heavily-populated cities.

So there's been a flurry of blogging about Confessions of an Anti-Sanctions Activist, an article condemning the activist group Voices in the Wilderness by one of it's former members. Lots of conservative blogs, including the very influential Instapundit are commenting on it. But so far I've seen no pacifist responses other than my own and Voices' website is silent. What's up with this? Is everyone just figuring it's better to let this all die down or do they not know the publicity value of such a prominent article?