HometownSource Blogs

Here’s a question we didn’t ponder when we decided to start ECM Blogs: What becomes of an author’s blog when they are no longer with the company?

Tomorrow is my last day with ECM, and I imagine the UpsiderBlog will either be archived or deleted altogether. Who knows?

The UpsiderBlog started on May 23, 2007 and has been going strong ever since. At the time ECM Blogs had two authors, me and Howie. Now ECM Blogs hosts 19 authors bringing a huge variety of content to the table, from sports, to health, lefties to righties and everything in between. Tim Budig has brought capitol coverage to the sphere, and Don Heinzman embraced this new technology.

Every one of the authors has contributed to making ECM Blogs a vibrant community I have no doubt will continue and improve. It’s a credit to ECM that it has trust enough in its employees to allow this unedited forum for opinion.

All the best to all of my fellow ECM bloggers. Being a part of this experiment is something I will miss a great deal. From now on I will be just another anonymous reader-slash-commenter, which means Matt is finally going to have to be nice to me. Ha ha!

Thanks to you all, writers and readers alike. You make this a fun and challenging place.

Peace. Out.

The single best coverage of the war in Iraq has come from free lance journalist Michael Yon. He was never shy about how bad things were going, and I think was the first person to state openly that Iraq was in a state of civil war. How does he feel now? Here’s what he told Glenn Reynolds:

“The war is over and we won.”

More at the link. Yon is off to Afghanistan where he says things are much more bleak at this time. Meanwhile, Rasmussen is reporting the highest level of optimism about the war on terror yet recorded in this country.

If President-Elect Obama is able to bring the troops home any time soon, it will be with a victory in their pocket and with George W. Bush to thank for it. However, it is unlikely he will use the word victory (he and the left can barely bring themselves to acknowledge the success of the surge, much less the war), and he will acknowledge W’s tenacity and determination when pigs fly.

Gay Patriot links to this video of “No on 8″ supporters shouting down an elderly woman and stomping on her cross, and asks:

Why this refusal to understand their opponents? Why this insistence on silencing them? Do such people deserve the privilege of state sanction of their unions?

I never understood this either. Generally when you are trying to accomplish something politically, you court opposition. In the case of gay marriage, the strategy seems to be insult, denigrate, silence and shame opposition into supporting the cause. Why would anyone even consider supporting the cause of a group, a cause based on a call for tolerance and respect, when the movement shows absolutely no tolerance or respect for others.

If this is what we can expect every time a traditional marriage measure passes, we can expect them to pass for a very long time.

It’s revenge time for the “No on 8″ folks: A California musical theater director has been forced to step down for contributing to the upholding of the state’s gay marriage ban.

Proponents of gay marriage have even set up a Web site: Anti-gay blacklist.

Subtle.

And thus the championing of diversity continues, provided that diversity doesn’t conflict with diversity, in which case diversity will not be tolerated in any way, shape, or form.

The Strib does a marvelous job today on a wonderful video featuring an old friend of mine’s father, who survived the Bataan Death March.

Thanks to Mr. Porwoll and to all the veterans we honor today.

On Sunday, WaPo ombusdsman Deborah Howell confirmed many of the suspicions voiced here at the UpsiderBlog over the last month. Namely, a decided tilt in coverage of the presidency. Some of it she finds reasonable, some…not so much.

The passing of Michael Crichton has been a sad occasion for many of us. Not because his writing led to great movies (Jurassic Park stunk), or because ER is great television (eeww!), but because he provided an early, courageous, voice to the argument against the global warming consensus. With his passing, the WSJ pays homage with a reprint of one of Crichton’s most famous speeches. Here’s an excerpt:

Let’s be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

In the time since this speech was given, the climate reality and the theoretical climate consensus have gotten further and further apart. Since the speech was given, the number of scientists willing to come forward and question the consensus has grown exponentially. Crichton’s legacy is not his monetary success, it is his courage in the face of demand for ideological purity. For that he will be missed.

There’s a good column in the Australian today, regarding Obama’s election in America and what it means, from Greg Sheridan:

So as we salute Obama, let’s salute America as well.

The left liberal caricature of America was always nonsense. The militarism of American society is vastly overstated, just as its profound willingness to make sacrifice for other people’s freedom is under-appreciated.

Of course, the odds that the Noam Chomskys and Ward Churchills of the world will ever recognize any of this is zero.

While I certainly have issues with his policies, there can be no doubt that the election of Barack Obama is a wonderful and historic moment in America. Jonah Goldberg puts it well:

It is a wonderful thing to have the first African-American president. It is a wonderful thing that in a country where feelings are so intense that power can be transferred so peacefully. Let us hope that the Obama his most dedicated — and most sensible! — fans see turns out to be the real Obama. Let us hope that Obama succeeds and becomes a great president, for all the right reasons.

Congratulations to President-Elect Obama. And thus ends one of the liveliest, and longest, campaigns of all time. Along the way a presumptive nominee was toppled and a war hero vanquished. Quite a feat for someone who is, in all fairness, a relative upstart.

The next four years promise to be some of the most interesting ever. And you know what they say? “May you live in interesting times.”

Let’s hope this doesn’t happen en masse in the wake of a probable Obama victory:

…upon Obama’s passing his new redistribution plan, I will slow my work schedule, lay off a few people (Obama’s got their back) and let someone else bust his tail since I will now be able to get “redistributed wealth” from those poor fools who are ambitious, energetic, work hard and have made good decisions.

I cannot wait, as I need a break. And it will be nice to not be vilified by politicians. It will feel good to be liked again.

Than again, why wouldn’t you? All the rewards and affection for far less productivity. It’s the new American dream.

This blog is desperately in need of some humor. Do you know Iowahawk? In my opinion he may very well be the finest political satirist of our time. Do read his take down of the Republican aristocracy at the National Review. A sample:

Just last week conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks and I were enjoying an apres-badminton apertif at the family weekend house in Montauk with my good friend Viscount Klaus-Maria Von Wallensheim, the conservative EU Agricultural Pricing Minister with whom I shared an Alpine chalet and manservant during our years as classmates at a Swiss boarding school.

Pure genius.

(By all means, leave favorite lines in comments. If you can choose just one.)

Regarding a recent “faux-debate” around here on nationalized health care, government belt-tightening (inevitable and to the detriment of those in need of health care), and increased wait times are forcing the question in Canada: Should it embrace a private health care system?

Ironically, the answer, “no,” right now seems directed solely at protecting the public system from further erosion. That doctors and other health care professionals would choose to work in a privatized industry, speaks volumes about what they think of the public version.

Once again, the Obama campaign is perceived to be persecuting media outlets deemed unfavorable to his campaign:

Obama spokesman Bill Burton confirms Drudge’s report that two right-leaning papers, the Washington Times and the New York Post, have lost their seats on the Obama plane, along with the Dallas Morning News.

My goodness, were this a Republican candidate there would no end to the hysteria from the Antique Media.  My guess is all these episodes will pass with barely a whimper.

Former LA Times reporter Evan Maxwell on that paper’s rather frightening decision to withhold a video of a current presidential candidate speaking to an audience:

this situation presents a real breakdown of editorial judgement. Journalists can’t withhold the best evidence of any news event from the reader and at the same time characterize the contents and draw conclusions and impressions. That kind of gate-keeping arrogance, in the present climate, is unacceptable…The moment a journalist says he is using a secret report to validate his work, and then refuses to reveal the full contents of the report, he is guilty of the kind of conduct that deservedly brought Sen. Joseph McCarthy to disgrace.

Not only will the Times not release the video, they refuse to even release a transcript of what is on the video.

Remind me again, are we still having that “bias in media” discussion? Well, not anymore.

Writing in the Boston Herald, Michael Graham pulls a lot of this “co-called bias” stuff together and reaches a depressing conclusion:

The percentage of Americans who rate reporters as objective and not favoring either candidate? Eight percent.

My friends in the Partisan Press, your reputation has now fallen lower than both President Bush (25 percent) and the Democratic Congress (18 percent). Journalistic integrity now ranks along side communicable diseases and nuclear mishaps.

I don’t know, this all seems a little vague. After all, Graham didn’t specify which communicable disease. There is a world of difference between chicken pox and anthrax.