Monthly Archives: August 2007

Speaking of Craig and sex scandals

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Barney Frank puts the latest Republican gay sex scandal in perspective, urging the Larry Craig character not to resign:

“What he did, it’s hypocritical, but it’s not an abuse of his office in the sense that he was taking money for corrupt votes,” Frank told the Associated Press.

“I think people should resign when they have clearly done the job in a way that is dishonest.”

Frank went on to tell the AP: “It’s one thing to say that someone can’t be trusted to vote without being corrupt, it’s another to say that he can’t be trusted to go to the bathroom by himself.”

Pressure has been mounting, particularly within the GOP, for Craig to step down, after he admitted this week to pleading guilty earlier this month to a charge of disorderly conduct following his June 11 arrest in a men’s room at the Minneapolis airport.

I’m not even sure it’s hypocritical, as the Republican attitude toward sex seems to be “women for duty, boys for pleasure.” Craig opposes gay marriage, not gay sex, so where’s the hypocrisy?

I’d prefer he not cruise public washrooms, for the sake of the children, so somebody should teach him about Craig’s List. And Slate is to be congratulated for coining the term “Craig’s Lust,” it’s awfully cute.

Has America’s Pimp Retired?

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Craig’s List has drawn the attention of the Atlanta police as a hub for child prostitution, and amid the furor we learn that Craig has retired:

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin has called on a popular Web site to take responsibility for what she said is the company’s role in promoting child prostitution.

“Children are being marketed through craigslist,” Franklin said Tuesday during an update on the mayor’s “Dear John” campaign, a crackdown on the city’s child prostitution industry.

Craigslist, found on the Web at craigslist.org, may be best known as a bulletin board for people who want to sell a car, buy a home or meet people. But Atlanta vice officer Kelleita Thurman said Tuesday that craigslist and similar sites account for 85 percent of the sexual liaisons men arrange in Atlanta with boys and girls.

In a letter sent Tuesday to the company, Franklin said the site could do more to prevent itself from being used “as a means of promoting and enabling child prostitution.” She called on the site to revise its warning on pages for erotic services and personal ads and to remove postings that offer sexual services for sale, among other things.

Craigslist spokeswoman Susan MacTavish Best said in an e-mail that she and Chief Executive Officer Jim Buckmaster are in Europe and “neither of us are aware of such a letter so it would not be possible to comment about this.”

Company founder Craig Newmark, who also was mailed Franklin’s letter, no longer is involved in the company’s daily affairs and is traveling, Best said.

I assume Craig has resigned from the prostitution service in order to devote full time to promoting network neutrality, the second most dubious cause of 2006.

Bad news for Behe

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The unraveling of Mike Behe’s mutation math continues, with this common-sense finding:

Beneficial mutations in the bacterium Escherichia coli occur 1,000 times more frequently than previously predicted, according to research from a group in Portugal.

In a study of E. coli populations of various different sizes, Isabel Gordo and her collaborators at the Gulbenkian Science Institute in Oeiras, Portugal, found that thousands of mutations that could lead to modest increases in fitness were going unseen because good mutations were outperformed by better ones1. The authors say that the work could explain why bacteria are so quick to develop resistance to antibiotics.

“It’s changed the way I think about things,” says Frederick Cohan, a biology professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He adds that although the principles involved were understood, no one expected to find such a high rate of adaptive mutation.

Oops. Never fear, the dominionist spin machine is already in high dudgeon, cranking out deflections and distractions on secret blogs as we speak.

Frum gets the Rove thing

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David Frum isn’t one of my favorite people, or even one of my favorite Republicans, but he understands Karl Rove better than anyone:

Mr. Rove often reminded me of a miner extracting the last nuggets from an exhausted seam. His attempts to prospect a new motherlode have led the Republican party into the immigration debacle…

Building coalitions is essential to political success. But it is not the same thing as political success. The point of politics is to elect governments, and political organizations are ultimately judged by the quality of government they deliver. Paradoxically, the antigovernment conservatives of the 1980s took the problems of government far more seriously than the pro-government conservatives of the 2000s.

The outlook is not, however, entirely bleak for Republicans. I notice that much of the Democratic party, and especially its activist netroots, has decided that the way to beat Rove Republicanism is by emulating it. They are practicing the politics of polarization; they are elevating “framing” above policy; they have decided that winning the next election by any means is all that matters — and never mind what happens on the day after that.

There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Karl Rove and Markos Moulitsas. They’re both in the business of exploiting emotional weakness and creating division, and they’ve both profited handsomely from this ability.

The Democrats will most likely elect the next president since Bush has made such a hash of things that he’s given them a free pass to the White House. But, to the extent that netroots fanaticism is instrumental in picking the Party’s champion, the nation and the Party will suffer.

Maybe that’s the secret to Rove’s search for a “permanent Republican majority:” get the Democrats to blow themselves up by embracing extremism and hysteria. If it’s a long-term strategy, it’s working, now all that has to happen is for the Republicans to abandon their irrational roots. I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

White Space Faux Pas

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The great white space coalition’s submissions to the FCC are a big bust:

A group of companies including Microsoft and Google had hoped to convince regulators that some new devices could carry high-speed Internet connections over television airwaves without interfering with broadcast signals.

But it didn’t work as planned, according to a report released this week by the Federal Communications Commission. After four months of testing, the agency concluded that the devices either interfered with TV signals or could not detect them in order to skirt them.

Why am I not surprised?

See more discussion by free marketeer Jerry Brito at TLF and by consumer warrior Harry Feld at Public Knowledge.