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Tracking Policies & Investigative Stories: Public relations: also known as corporate damage control
In an ideal world companies would have nothing to hide. Journalists would have no need to be pushy, intrusive and sceptical. Spin doctors and PR would be redundant or eking out a pittance. Instead both are big business, they work for big business and they make a motza. Usually their work is invisible to the public although journalists and politicians are often very aware they are being manipulated by professionals paid to shape the news.
· James Hardie's secret plan to spin the media and the politicians [link first seen at AFR ]
· See Also A Field Guide to Swing Voters
· See Also Illicit Drugs in Australia: Use, Harm and Policy Responses
· See Also World Migration 2003: Managing Migration - Challenges and Responses for People on the Move
· See Also Naked in the Gymnasium: Women as Agents of Social Change
· See Also Canadian Parliamentary Trivia

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Given the fact that when they were in power Democrats had little use for the notion of ministerial responsibility, their sudden discovery of it over Abu Ghraib suggests that this has little to do with principle...
Washington Post, Krauthammer

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Bush and Blair speed up their exit strategy

· CATHERINE MacLEOD: USA AND BRITAIN PLAN QUICK EXIT FROM IRAQ
· See Also New Technology Loosens Controls Over Images of War [ via The Needle in the Database: The Impact of Technology on Current Events and Freedom of Information ]
· See Also Bouncing Czechs and balances: The most defective part of the Federal Constitution, beyond all question, is that which relates to the executive department
· See Also A new American dream: On how Europe remains the society against which the US measures itself
· See Also Finding the words: Europe and the United States look at terrorism in different ways
· See Also Spheres of influence around Bush’s candidacy: top givers to GOP candidates and committees, and the laundry industry’s role in a regulatory action that saved it millions
· See Also Nigerian Nobel prize-winning author Wole Soyinka vows more protests after his arrest
· They Shoot Hawks, don’t they?
Sarin Nerve Agent Bomb Explodes in Iraq
· See Also Lucio - A Lover AND a Fighter: If only the United States had the suave sophistication and Constitutional plasticity of Ecuador, they could still have Bill Clinton as President! (Spannish)

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Terry Sedgwick is standing in for David Tiley who stood in for Tim Dunlop who stood in for the man who danced with a man who danced with the Prince of Wales: Blogjam9 World appears to be swamped by a rolling tsumani of apologies. Bush, Blair, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, Kimmit ...

The Blog, The Press, The Media: We, the Media by Dan Gillmor
Just finished reading the Galley Proof of We, the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People by Dan Gillmor. O'Reilly is the publisher and it should be coming out mid-July. The book will be published under a Creative Commons license and you will be able to download it free for non-commercial use.
Dan is one of the few professional journalists that really understands the impact of blogs and other new technologies on journalism. It's amazing how many professional journalists I know pooh pooh blogs and keep on chugging like nothing is changing.
· Anyway, it's an amazingly important book for anyone interested in journalism and democracy. It goes well with Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture and Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs [ courtesy of Joi Ito]
· See Also A French blogger arrested by the Police because of his blogging
· See Also Gossip Wants to Be Free, to Be Free: In defense of online scandal mongering
· See Also Eliminate the middleman: Information is both invaluable and impossible to value
Get Me Rewrite! Stories make the world go around. So how come liberals can’t tell one?
· See Also Howell Raines underestimated the intensity of staff unrest, the “guerrilla war” in his newsroom. Here is his own account of his downfall in the uncut version
· See Also Look ma, I'm blogging... Seth Finkelstein writes about whether the Internet can be shaped. It can, but it's hard
· Internet translates into success. The business of translation has taken off with the rise of the Internet, globalization and international conflicts

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And Julian Baggini on how That's a hypothetical question” has become a favored tool of evasion for politicians the world over

Strong Leaders Encourage Dissent The Buck Stops … Where? - Stop blaming your henchmen
Fred Kaplan in Slate focuses on the aspect of the White House culpability story that is being drowned out by the disgusting spectacles of Abu Ghraib and Nick Berg: the deliberate negligence of Zarqawi :It's a tossup which is more disturbing: a president who passes up the chance to kill a top-level enemy in the war on terrorism for the sake of pursuing a reckless diversion in Iraq?
· Collective Sigh: Reckless or Intentional Disregard? [link first seen at ]
· See Also Double standards with respect to the Geneva Convention; On my name day, March 19, 2004, President Bush asked: Who would prefer that Saddam's torture chambers still be open?
· See Also The Gray Zone... Sy Hersh: (who also uncovered the My Lai massacre)
· See Also The government finds a new way to nail old tax evaders

The deluge of books about Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler apparently knows no end...
· See Also Jean Bethke Elshtain on why Hitler and the Nazis continue to fascinate

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What aren't we frightened enough about now?

Invisible Hands & Markets: Scarier Than Protectionism
This prosperity is vital to all of us. It will spur growth here. It will weaken fundamentalism elsewhere. It is the product of the laws that Adam Smith taught us. It is the consequence of the lessons that America has been teaching the world for generations - that free markets free people.
Yet we call this great good bad. We amplify anxiety through code words like outsourcing, and our rhetoric invites policies that would return this nation to the darkest days of the Depression
· Lawrence Lessig:
· See Also Good advertising doesn't cure all problems, but it's a really good indicator of whether the people involved actually care about what they do
· See Also Building Economist Reviews: mix of murder and maths
· See Also If I wear my watch on my left wrist, I need not be conscious that I am accepting a tradition: Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994) was born in surreal Vienna [courtesy of My Surreal Vienna ]
· See Also The government finds a new way to nail old tax evaders

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Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, was once a revered symbol of moral resistance to the Soviet state. He probably deserves more credit than any other person for stripping away communism’s moral prestige among Western intellectuals.

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: "We're Just Friends": Myth Construction of Freedom
I can see freedom, the red of nature's sunset/ and God on a sharp razor ....
One upside of tyranny is the way it acts as a spur to creativity, Keneally says, only partly tongue-in-cheek. Reams of poetry and verse are being written in the country's detention centres, while outside them, a thriving "refugee art" genre has emerged on the country's stages, concert halls and theatres in the past few years.
He believes that after a slow start, people are being galvanised to take action through the sheer weight of private conscience, and developments in the political domain. It takes time for a head of opposition and dissent to grow. I've been in America recently, and the same thing is happening there
· A lot of Americans are starting to state their opposition to their Government's present policies, to things being done in their name
· See Also The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a novel firmly rooted in its time has, despite so much spilt politics, oddly not dated...
· See Also If France makes movies for the French, and Amerika makes movies for the world, who's left to make movies for Amerika?
· See Also Pravda: how war encourages sexual instincts in people
· See Also Jane Jacobs, the matchless analyst of all things urban, gives birth to a new book, Dark Age Ahead
· See Also Exiles in a small world: Pnin is Vladimir Nabokov as he might have turned out in U.S. exile: an odd, eccentric, sad figure, doomed never to grasp the society in which he finds himself...
· See Also Olympian War of Words: Sydney v Athens
· Writers take a note of the Light Age Ahead for (my) Dragon Tooth Submissions Department[ courtesy of When Dragon meets Descartes]
· See Also Brilliant review of Slavoj Zizek's The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity; sadly in pdf version

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The story of Abdurahman Khadr and his journey from Osama bin Laden to the CIA provides insight into Al Qaeda, US intelligence and the hidden world inside Guantanamo Bay. “Al Qaeda Family” @ 8.30 pm Monday 17 May ABC TV

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Marco Polos: Microsoft-Sponsored Trips
Katherine M. Skiba and Jeff Nelson of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reviewed congressional travel records to find that Microsoft and affiliated firms have lavished $180,429 on members of Congress, their spouses and aides in the 16 months ending in April, the records show. Most trips were to Microsoft headquarters, records show. Some trips involved Microsoft product launches, while seven spouses accompanied lawmakers on trips since January 2003. Rep. H. James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, along with his wife and staff, accepted trips worth $72,405.
· Pacific Islanders & Parliamentary Clerks [ via Scoop]
· See Also Havel says the obvious: Europe is lacking politicians capable of implementing their visions -- politicians who can stick to their beliefs despite fickle public opinion
· See Also Bill Clinton is back: The final sentence of his memoirs completed... & this time Clinton is getting personal about Bush
· See Also Berg Case Gets Even More Bizarre
· See Also Devika Hovell: Legal obligation or not, we must do more than express disgust
· See Also The Rule of Law and the Rules of War: Counsel to the President Alberto Gonzales says the United States is bound to observe the rules of war in the Geneva Conventions
· See Also Where is the outcry over these accounts of physical and mental harm in our detention camps?
· See Also Terrorism and International Law: A Catholic Perspective
· See Also Catholically Courageous Carr Casting the First Stone: Clubs Politics to Turn Extremely Personal [ Club Called Panthers ]

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Assorted reflections on the nature of blogging: Blogging provides a kind of safety valve that bleeds off pressure in the day to day insanity of life. First danger is to make sure blogging doesn’t spoil your appetite for real life contact with real people... you have to avoid the rock on the one hand and the dragon monster on the other!!!

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Forget the Beast, Let’s Deal with those Ducks
Old San Francisco Examiner had a newsroom culture that was equal parts Sun Tzu, Homer Simpson and Hunter Thompson. When I became metro editor, my management training consisted of this advice from a predecessor: This job is like being nibbled to death by ducks. Don’t let them get to you.
That was many years ago, and the old Examiner is gone. But the ducks are thriving in newsrooms across the country, biting the ankles and nipping at the shins of front-line editors, quacking up a storm about budget lines, weekend shifts, seating arrangements, the company car and so much more, distracting those editors from what they were hired to do: Good journalism.
It’s not a fun place to be, in the middle. Bosses want long-term vision converted to daily reality. Reporters have needs and idiosyncrasies. The news beast is ravenous around the clock.
· Training for managers: Tomorrow’s Workforce [ courtesy of Tim Porter]
· See Also The CEO-to-reporter pay ratio in this case is 36 to 1: CEOs are too busy slopping at the salary-and-bonus trough to look up long enough, wipe off their chins and read this
· See Also Blogrolling Security
· See Also In light of recent reporting fabrication scandals, some Pulitzer Prize judges were suspicious of unattributed, imprecise or anonymous sourcing
· See Also Google: On your marks, get set, search

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I really don't want to blog about war anymore, but it just keeps getting worse and worse...as my 23rd birthday lunch on the Australia's soil is being heated up, it looks as if the oil game might be coming to its end for Americans in Iraq. The top emailed article at the amazing Sydney Morning Herald is today by Margo Kingston who undresses the deeper motives before the Antipodean, and even global eyes,: Oils ain't just oils, they're to die for

Tracking Policies & Investigative Stories: The Politics of Petroleum
Ken Silverstein of the Los Angeles Times has a series on oil companies’ efforts in Kazakhstan and Angola, based on internal company documents and other records. In the first piece, Silverstein writes that a group of influential Americans, including a former Secretary of State and the former executive director of the Democratic National Committee, pressed for U.S. support of the authoritarian Kazakh government. The paper found dozens of former government officials “who have worked for the oil industry or for foreign governments with extensive energy reserves - and, almost invariably, poor human rights records.” The second story, on Angola, details how oil firms “have won favor with the Dos Santos regime by steering contracts to Angolan insiders and by giving millions of dollars to foundations controlled by the ruling family.”
· Other stories are forthcoming [link first seen at Scoop ]
· See Also Utility authorities fail to disclose and notify residents of toxic contamination of their drinking water
· See Also EU Council Plans to Scrap Parliamentary Vote without Discussion
· See Also Australia’s rules on political lobbying are loose and inadequate, according to Allan Fels
· See Also A political party whose predecessor, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, enforced censorship, says without a hint of irony that its draft law was inspired by the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms
· See Also Municipal corruption has been a persistent problem since democracy dawned in the country in 1989
· See Also Same as the Old Boss: Agbar Technologies, the company that won the right to succeed Envirotest

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Soulful extract digged up by Barista: Lest we feel too grim, the Anglo-American-Australian group blog Crooked Timber resurrects a statement from English television writer in an interview three weeks before his death from cancer:
I can celebrate life. Below my window there?s an apple tree in blossom. It's white. And looking at it, instead of saying, "Oh, that's a nice blossom', now, looking at it through the window, I see the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be. The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous. If you see the present tense, boy, do you see it. And boy, do you celebrate it.

Feeding the Soul: Polar Labrador Bookends
I like this time of the year
and then having to settle on crisp as a tag for autumn
when spring reigns in the blogosphere
I like our stamp- the seasons as a last stand of regionalism
I like the smell of lemon scented gums
and finding a random gumtree in the googlepile
and seeking the place from where the link was stripped...
I like the way spam can go glam with a bit of imagination
I like thrift shop voices and the possible metaphor of web as thrift store
· What can we do today to provoke a smile, a wink, a hug, a kiss, some sort of heartfelt exchange? [link first seen at Scorecards ]
· See Also More Than Words Can Say: It's not enough for authors to just get up and read; readings have migrated to bars

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As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
It's too bad Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has stopped reading newspapers because he missed great journalism battle this week. Every day, the New York Times and the Washington Post tried to break the better story. It amounted to the journalistic equivalent of the Olympics...What makes Rummy run?

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Kurt Vonnegut: Cold (River) Turkey
Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.
But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces.
· They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas [ Follow the link here It's not exactly every day that the Pentagon warns military personnel to stay away from Fox News]
· See Also We need a bigger Army. We got a bigger budget - but the money is going to CEOs, not to G.I. Joe [Link Poached from I'm probably the last person on earth to link this ]
· See Also Berg Beheading: Busy lulling themselves to sleep in their elitist coccoon of arrogance [Czech Out INDC Journal Interviews the Instapundit
· See Also Gandhi triumphs in India election
· See Also 1st Internet President Roh Returned to Power by the Constitutional Court in South Koreas

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The risk of disliking a speaker is one many will take. Writers are popular speakers. Some challenge. Some reinforce. Some inspire. Some deflate. Some tap into dreams. Some sketch nightmares. Some illuminate paths, or warn of ways best not taken. Some explain feelings held, but not yet examined. Some examine feelings not widely held. All have something to say to someone, somewhere. This coming week is a chance for Sydney to hear them say it aloud.
William Faulkner nailed the self-absorption often shown by writers when he wrote: If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: I'm Not Making this Up
David Sedaris writes stories of personal disclosure as funny as they are strange. Competitive storytelling was a skill David Sedaris learned in a household of six children. Just as in the Imrich Familia, everyone wanted mother's attention...
When you write at home it doesn't really qualify as work. It doesn't engage you with the world. The days are much better if you do something you don't want to do.
· Sedaris will read from his work at the Sydney Writers' Festival, at 8.30pm on May 21 [link digged up after reading Editorial II Sydney Writers' Festival: A Week of Words]
· See Also Tough world, tiny market for NZ books
· See Also Are Big Publishers Bribing Bookstores For Better Shelf Placement? Sweetener trips for the retail chains
· See Also How to write your doctoral thesis: Loved ones will forgive you, since they will be deluded into believing that after the process is complete, you will have a sense of achievement, and more earning potential. They are wrong...
· See Also Getting behind my flesh and blood meme: I have a coat that has six arms. I Inherited this coat from Gregor Samsa

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The Blog, The Press, The Media: Whaddya mean, "we"?
So yes, we do get that blogs are all about communication with readers, not processed info dump-and-run. And we get that people want to know who's giving them that information. We also get that this is a new medium and that despite the conventions of the blogosphere, not everything is set in stone when it comes to blog style and tone.
· Googleblog: Not everything is set in stone when it comes to blog style and tone [ courtesy of Google has some fun features that may be unfamiliar to many ]
· See Also One of the things that I like most about iLaw is the retelling of the stories, and explanation of the theories, that are at the core of the field of internet law [ courtesy of Is Your Website Good or Evil?]
· See Also Searching Idol: The top five reasons why search is still way too hard

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To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
-George Orwell

Invisible Hands & Markets: The Meritocracy Myth
But we're not failures. In a lot of ways, we're the ones who keep things humming by doing the jobs that have to be done but nobody else wants to do. We keep your office clean and cook and serve your food, we stock the shelves so you'll have things to buy when you go to the store (think a manager's going to lower himself to do that every day?), we plow your streets and rake your leaves and take care of you when you're sick, we teach your kids and watch them when you're at work and empty your septic tank and pick your vegetables and staple your recliner so you won't fall through it when you sit down.
· We're a lot more important than you think. [link first seen at FromTheTrenches ]
· See Also The Neoconomists of Revolution: elbowing each other
· For Hollywood, news biz is turning into showbiz: Doubts whether viewers would buy the idea of journalists as noble knights tilting at the windmills of corruption and social inequality... one reason the emphasis now is on journalism as comedy
· See Also Frogtown Crime
· See Also How the slot machine was remade, and how it's remaking America
· See Also Visible Officials Hold Fake Degrees