Oops! It’s time for the media to reassure us again that there is no threat posed by the eliminationist rhetoric coming from the radical right every day on talk radio:
Authorities say a gunman entered the Arkansas Democratic Party headquarters and shot the party chairman, Bill Gwatney, who is hospitalized in critical condition.
Police say the gunman asked to speak to the party chairman and fired three shots.
Police say the suspect was chased into Grant County, south of Little Rock, and apprehended after being shot. The suspect’s condition was not known.
Sarah Lee, a sales clerk at a flower shop across street from the party headquarters, said that around noon Gwatney’s secretary ran into the shop and asked someone to call 911. She said a man had come into the party and shot Gwatney multiple times.
She said the secretary described the man as in his 40s and white and drove off in a blue truck.
Let me make a wild and irresponsible guess: this asshole is a dittohead. Nothing else about him will be noteworthy other than the fact that he’s obviously some kind of loser who takes Rush seriously when Rush jokes about killing liberals.
Bill Gwatney is the head of a state political party. This isn’t a murder attempt, it’s an assassination attempt, and should be reported as such.
[more]
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Kevin Donovan makes a critical observation of why copyright laws no longer serve our purposes.
Because copying used to be expensive, it was reasonable to assume that someone making a copy was going to sell it. Copyright law was aimed at that action to funnel money back to the original creators. It had the side effect of limiting plagiarism by making it more costly, but it was never copyright’s goal to mandate proper attribution. Now, however, copying isn’t anything extraordinary; in fact, it is the very nature of digital technologies. With the decrease in the price of copies, the cost associated with plagiarism has plummeted, too. O’Brien tells the story of a DJ friend who is more than happy to have her works widely distributed through copies online, but when she learned that another DJ was passing her creation off as his own, she became upset. Shirking copyright law for publicity’s sake was fine, but when the historical side-effect of proper attribution also disappeared, she was more worried. Although plagiarism isn’t always as troublesome as many assume, as attribution becomes untangled from copyright, the two ideas will be increasingly approached differently by creators.
Bottom line? Copyright no longer serves a useful purpose, but attribution most certainly does. Content creators would do better to get credit, rather than remain caught up in the current absurd legal game of permission and obstruction.
Case in point: how on earth do the weasels who “own” Footloose benefit from shutting down a video parody of Footloose done Emo style? [via Rex]
Instead of benefiting from renewed interest in what is now a cult movie, the owners have decided to turn Footloose into some sort of self-contained cyst. It is what it is, and they won’t allow anyone to interact with it. Take it as it is, or forget about it.
Already, I can feel myself forgetting about Footloose….
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Ohio is suing Diebold. OK, but seriously, wouldn’t dragging their Republican CEO out in the street for a lengthy and thorough public beating be much more effective as a deterrent to future electronic vote fraud? [Obviously, in light of my lead item, this sentiment may seem a bit hypocritical, but I would assert that there is a huge difference between advocating limited violence against traitors to the Constitution, and ideologues trying to kill politicians.]
There are counties in Ohio where more votes were stolen by Diebold than by all the illegal voters nationwide put together.
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The IOC is censoring Olympic videos on YouTube, deleting anything that mentions protests.
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Still more proof that THC alone is not necessarily a good thing. Vaporizer users take note!
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Errol Morris on photography as a weapon.
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