Sunday, November 14, 2004

Dept. of Clear-headed Thinking Frank Rich is on to something. It's far from the end of the world for progressives and "blue state" values. On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide. There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. It is fiction. By FRANK RICH. [NYT > Arts] Before we all get freaked out thinking that the U.S. is turning into some sort of fundie Disneyland, we should remember that progressive ideas are winning, and winning big, in the marketplace of ideas and on the screens of our theaters and televisions. Frank Rich crunches the numbers from the infamous "moral values" poll and shows that really, the "values voters" aren't some surprising majority, but the same old prudish cranks: The 22 percent of voters who told pollsters that "moral values" were their top election issue - 79 percent of whom voted for Bush-Cheney - corresponds almost exactly to the number of voters (23 percent) who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. Sure, Bu$hCo paid lip-service to the vote-again crowd, but they'll be turned away from the White House agenda faster than Mary and Joseph from the Bethlehem Motel 6. Mr. Wittman echoes Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?," by common consent the year's most prescient political book. "Values," Mr. Frank writes, "always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won." Under this perennial "trick," as he calls it, Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force the culture industry "to clean up its act" - until the votes are counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting capital gains and estate taxes. Mr. Murdoch and his fellow cultural barons - from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing C.E.O. of Viacom, to Richard Parsons, the Republican C.E.O. of Time Warner, to Jeffrey Immelt, the Bush-contributing C.E.O. of G.E. (NBC Universal) - are about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious entertainment. It's they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, who actually set the cultural agenda Gary Bauer and company say they despise. Republican, heal thyself! Yeah, the graphic of Paris is nothing more than a Fox-like attempt at higher ratings. (But she is mentioned in Rich's piece!) 2:57:15 PM     leave/read comments []

Dept. of Clever For an Enterprise fan like me in a UPN-free zone, this is a boon and a half! HOWTO: make a free TiVo-oid BitTorrent service. Cory Doctorow: On Pealco.net, a recipe for automatically grabbing your favorite TV shows by BitTorrent as soon as they are put online -- the author calls it "something like Tivo, but free." I'm bad at watching TV. I always miss my favorite shows like The West Wing and Enterprise. I can never remember when they're on and when I do, they're already three-quarters through. My solution thus far has been to go to Suprnova and download the torrent. This, of course, requires that I remember that to do that, and then I have to wait three hours. Wouldn't it be better if the morning after the show aired a high quality copy of the show sat sitting on my hard drive waiting for me to watch it? The answer is yes, yes it would. The are many solutions to this problem, but this is how I do it. Basically what's happening is that the BT client checks an RSS feed for torrents that match certain criteria. When it detects those criteria, it begins to download the torrent. The result is something like TiVo, but free. Link (via Waxy) [Boing Boing] 1:46:07 PM     leave/read comments []