Welcome to the new weekend. - 22 October 2010

It's Friday. Surprisingly enough. And I suddenly have a lot of people signing on. My ears, they burn. Say hi, new people, and tell me a bit about yourselves as I wander through your blogs to say hello and express my awe at your creative talents.

If you'd like to start our day with what it feels like to be disabled, trouble has provided a pretty easy way for that experience - and thus, you understand why I don't like linking videos all by themselves. Not just because I had a computer that would crash the instant it was asked to do soemthing with Flash, but also because I do beleive in the value of transcripts and text accompanying video or audio.

Official announcements of the recission of GoH status for Elizabeth Moon are still without details, but they have garnered significant amounts of discussion about whether the concom's actions were appropriate. Which is sort of the extension of the debate started about whether or not to rescind, although now we have the added dimension of allegations of censorship based on non-conformity of opinions.

Finally, President Obama recorded his own message for It Gets Better, which makes a lot of people happy that he's noticing and taking the time for it. (And, because they do actually care about accessibility, here's the transcript for that video.) for those who don't want to wait until it gets better, here are ways that everyone on the QUILTBAG acronym can make things better for themselves and others. Especially if you're an administrator or teacher looking for ways to make your school more friendly and less bully-sheltering.

Out in the world today, Afghanistan's ban on the use of non-military security in the country has been met with reconstruction projects halting as U.S. companies insist they have to have their own privately-hired people. Funny that - the government is worried those firms will act as the law unto themselves, instead of obeying the local laws. Wonder where that has happened before?

Activitiy has been detected at a known North Korean nuclear site, with speculation that a nother nuclear test may be on the way, although not necessarily any time soon.

Finally, Mr. Bush and the Republicans should be proud - Iraq is standing so well on its own feet that it's disregarding the United States' advice on forming government and asking regional neighbors on how to go about the process.

Domestically, one thousand words to Mr. Tom Toles, who summarizes politics up in a picture.

Those people involved in the fake arrest of a reporter? Yeah, a couple of them were active duty military, with no permission at all from the current chain of command to participate. So it could get even more awful than it is right now.

Fake grassroots organization FreedomWorks was hit by a malicious hacker right before they planned to bring on-line a major money-raising donation campaign.

Last out, Sharron Angle is not alone in advocating that conservatives and Tea Partiers take up violent revolution if they don't get what they want through the elections of this year. The denial from the Republican Party boss in the area was of the form "well, I don't think we're there yet".

Technology and sciences opens with something that the Annals of Improbable Research will likely capture and archive long after Fluid Dynamics does - the optimum oscillation speed for an animal to shake itself dry. For most large hairy beings, it's somewhere around 4 Hz.

A crater on Luna has a significant amount of water ice, boosting hopes that we can build some sort of base on our own moon at some point.

At the end of science and tech, a rethink of complex life that suggests the acquisition of mitochondria was the event that sparked evolution, and that such an event would need to happen elsewhere in the universe for complex life to develop on other planets.

Into opinions, where the matter on Mr. Juan williams and his dismissal from NPR will be covered separately in a Special Comment.

Mr. Bredesen walks through an experiment where private employers find they can save money, penalties and all, by not offering any sort of health care coverage once the federal exchanges are in place. He doesn't make a decision as to whether this is deliberate or accidental, but he foresees significan extra debt for the government as employers work out this calculus and dump all their employees into the subsidized exchange pools. We share his unknowing - enough people dropped into the federal pool and the government suddenly has power over insurance companies to regulate or to cut them off entirely from the people they need to survive. With that, they could slow-walk or quick-march the country into a single-payer system, the intended goal of many a progressive liberal, and tout it as freeing up money for the private sector as well as getting the insured the coverage and protections they deserve. It could be a financial anchor and drag everything down with it, requiring significant amounts of new taxes and audits on evaders to pay for it.

Mr. Rove thinks the White House is driving away voters from the Democrats by not focusing only on jobs and the economy, and that their tone is condescending to the voters they want - because the President rightly points out that scared people don't think clearly and his opponents are running fear campaigns designed to attack the lizard brain. Mr. Rove also repeats the canard that the Democratic majorities could have rammed through anything they wanted, because Democrats are totally a united block and had enough people to overcome the Tarantino, dismisses the importance of anonymous and potentially foreign donors buying votes with dollars and not disclosing who's rigging the elections, and has an almost belligerent confidence that the accomplishments of the last two years are albatrosses and not strengths for the Democrats.

Mr. Brown says the failure of the recent bid from Canada to retain a seat on the Security Council was entirely the fault of the Americans not campaigning for them, either out of pure anti-Israel spite that manifested in not helping the Harper government or as part of a quid-pro-quo deal that had Brazil help block Venezuela in exchange for the U.S> supporting Portugal. Either way, says Mr. Brown, Canada should be proud of having been snubbed by the U.N., because it is merely a collection of tinpot dictators, Muslim fanatics, and anti-Israel liberals. Who wants to be part of that stupid club, anyway?

Mr. Carroll wants the country to abandon the idea that requireing renewable energy sources is worth pursuing, because renewable energy will forever be more expensive than conventional coal power and teh American people don't want to have to pay higher prices for their energy. So perhaps when they discover some form of zero-point energy, maybe only then will Heritage want to switch over - although not first without complaining that it will kill all the jobs of the people working in the current energy industry and the liberal government in charge should be pilloried as job-killers.

Ms. Noonan posits the Tea Party merging into the Republican Party saves the Republicans from a disaster, as the non-Tea Republicans had been rejected as being part of the problem the Tea Partiers were trying to fix - encrusted, established government that worked for itself instead of stopping by, doing things to dismantle the structure already in place, and then going home. The Tea Party provided impetus for reinvention to get away from Reagan-Bush-Bush policies of increased government, spending, think tanks, and the like, and it got the conservative base energized. Ms. Noonan also says the midterm elections will be about Barack Obama, but not because he's black or any other fringe reason - because he's the establishment, and Tea Partiers are against that. Which would make sense - if the candidates that are Tea Party darlings weren't drawing large amounts of applause and conservative support for being precisely those fringe candidates Ms. Noonan claims the Tea Party isn't about.

Last for tonight, it takes a while to load, but a glossary of the usage of animated gifs and the statements they are usually representing.

Special Comment: Juan Williams - Fired for expressing his opinion?

The objective events: Juan Williams is dismissed from NPR for expressing his own anti-Muslim stances and feelings and providing reinforcement and justification for Bill' O'Reilly's similar stances and statements. Fox, in response, has decided to up the ante on the story by resigning Mr. Williams to a multi-year deal with a raise.

Aaaaaand, let the opinion columns commence. Mr. Trzupek believes that Mr. Williams was fired for Speaking Politically Incorrect Truth To Power, while citing several of the standards that NPR used to dismiss him that forbade their analysts from participating in punditry and speculation-based shows, taking positions on controversial issues, and airing opinions on other places that they would not be willing to air as NPR journalists. According to Mr. Trzupek, that's not the actual reason - Mr. Williams saying that Muslims are at war with us and that we have to be afraid of them and anyone who dresses in Muslim-looking attire was the truth NPR didn't want to hear, and so they fired him for saying it. Mr. Trzupek also says that Mr. Williams was a liberal, now cruelly driven away by the forces of ideological purity, liberals should be ashamed of having done so, and anyone who isn't a liberal should take notice of this as the thuggery that liberalism displays to those who aren't in lock-step with them. And worse, we're told, taxpayers fund NPR's far-left, truth-denying agenda, so conservatives should demand that their tax money stop going and not give anything during pledge drives. Mr. Gonzalez also tries to spin the remarks made so that Mr. Williams was really saying that he had these awful feelings, but he said them so that he could exhort everyone to get over them and come together as humans. Mr. Dabul picks up that thread and says, "He was just saying what everyone thinks. He shouldn't be fired or censored for that.". So, we have Truth to Power, Embrassing Self-Revelation, and Expressing Majority Will as the reasons why Mr. Williams shouldn't have been fired.

Putting his pen against all of these justifications, Mr. Greenwald dismisses the argument to Truth (the comments were fairly fact-free) the argument to P.C. censorship (lots of other people were dismissed for other non-P.C. remarks without a conservative outrage), and the argument that Mr. Williams was somehow airing out his fears to dismiss them as irrational (Mr. Williams himself confimed that wasn't it). In addition, Mr. Greenwald makes an excellent point while reporting on this, one that actually does stand up and require thought - if you're going to dismiss people for saying stuff, then apply the standard equally across all places. If broadcasters and radio places and the rest did that consistently and according to their own guidelines, they might find out why it's kind of stupid to dismiss people just for saying stuff, but there's nothing worse than a bad standard applied inconsistenly and with favoritism.

If your analysts and hosts can't pull in the ratings or the sponsors, or if what they're saying is clear fiction when they're supposed to be journalists reporting facts, that's a different story entirely, and is clearly in the realm of grounds for dismissal. For all the other, alternate explanations, it seems pretty clear that Mr. Williams was in violation of the posted standards of conduct for NPR people, and those alternate explanations and reasons rely on the fact that he was dismissed for those stated reasons. I know full well that a lot of people want opinionated blowhards on their airwaves, left and right. That's not intrinsically wrong - in fact, it makes for entertaining media wars, ratings, and donations to political campaigns and parties. We should let them have free discourse, blog, respond to all of those things, send letters to the editor about how stupid, wrongheaded, and factually incorrect they are, and fact-check everything, including stuff from supposedly unbiased and objective sources, from here to the heat death of the universe. It's how this works. Nobody is Unbiased (not even Us), but a good reader can discern what is actually true compared to what is merely spin.

In all of these commentaries, they're dancing around a single point, a very important one, but one that is sitting catty-corner to the axes of censorship that all of the voices are claiming is the central theme. We decry censorship because we value having the input of multiple voices into a discussion and think that arbitrarily shutting off viewpoints and information being available to others because of our own biases is improper. The underlying assumption on that point, though, is that we believe that people have the ability to filter the noise and garbage out and then think about what's left. We assume that the people listening to the stream are intelligent beings capable of thought and reasoning. So when someone shouts "censorship!" at someone else, they're accusing them of the worst kind of hubris - that the people can't do their own filtering, and thus must have it done for them, for their own safety, so that improper ideas don't get into their heads and corrupt them into being poor members of society. Most people would bristle at being called that stupid (and some of them would bristle at a parent calling their kid that stupid), but when it comes to their pet issues, they're all for censorship, because it's just wrong, can't you see?

Inigo is usually unhappy when someone starts throwing around the word censorship, because most of the people who say that NPR is censoring viewpoints that they shouldn't will then turn around and say that private entities totally have the right to fire people who publicly say stuff that's not in line with the corporate philosophy. Private people get to censor, taxpayer-funded entities don't? If that's the case, then a lot of supposedly private entities have a Fairness Doctrine hanging over them, because they get taxpayer-funding through corporate welfare and subsidies. That means we should repeal the Children's Internet Protection Act, which forces any entity that receives subsidized Internet access or technology to censor material from those under 17 (can't you hear the THINK OF THE CHILDRENS people campaigning now against flooding innocent eyes with porn?). Those who lease broadcast spectrum from the government would have to let all viewpoints on, since the government still owns the airwaves. Mr. Greenwald's point stands - if you're going to enforce a bad standard, enforce it evenly and to everyone, so that everyone can see just how bad the standard is and call for its change.

Juan Williams was fired because he violated the terms of his employment contract. Whether those terms are fair is up to debate, and whether it's fair to selectively enforce those terms is definitely up for debate.