Now, with the blogosphere, we are at least somewhat empowered to counter that thrust, and replace it with the interests of ourselves, the common people.

BTW, excellent blog, La Shawn!

* There is the Fortune article

Sincerely,

A

Happy New Year! Since I’ve been in Arabic training over the last few months, I really haven’t had much time to blog much. However, allow me to state what was, in my mind, a major social event in 2004. One name, two words:

BILL COSBY!

The actor, comedian and philantropist gave Black America a much-needed kick in the past last May in Washington, DC, during a ceremony commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board. To astonishment, laughter and applause, Cosby took low-income blacks to the woodshet, mocking everything from urban fashion to black spending and speaking habits.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal,” he declared. “These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids — $500 sneakers for what? And won’t spend $200 for ‘Hooked on Phonics.’ . . .

“They’re standing on the corner and they can’t speak English,” he exclaimed. “I can’t even talk the way these people talk: ‘Why you ain’t,’ ‘Where you is’ . . . And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. . . . Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. . . . You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!”

National Review Online’s Matt Rosenberg has a blogsite containing outtakes of Cosby’s remarks (that many in the media did not quote):

http://www.rosenblog.com/2004/05/23/outtakes_from_cosbys_speech_to_naacp.html

Happy New Year!

COMMUNITY

We are a community.

In her comments Andrea said she doesn’t have a blog so what is she? Andrea, like me, you are a “reader.” But you and I are still part of the COMMUNITY.

And an exciting year it will be for us all….

The same for me personally. The Swift Boat Vet and my revisiting Kerry’s unscripted remarks to the Fullbright Commission (as oppose to his opening remarks) are what really did it for me. The blogosphere had a huge effect in getting this information to me in a timely fashion. Ten years ago, with the more-or-less complete media black-out on the SBVT charges, I probably would have ended up shrugging my future and not changed my vote.

As it stands, here is something that I wrote in response to my research on Kerry and his influence on our abortive withdrawal from Vietnam:

Kerry’s lies and distortions at the Fulbright Commission, when combined with the negative associations from My Lai, were instrumental in creating a political environment in which unilateral withdrawal became the only option. There is nothing I can say which could express the level of disgust I have for a political opportunist who would throw away his own nation’s strategic interest for his short-term gain.

For people who are going to call me crazy, here is what I think should have happened (read this then call me crazy):

A successful model already existed in North vs. South Korea. By 1971, the Viet Cong had been reduced to a noneffective fighting force. Keeping Vietnam separated by an armisist line would have spared the lives of millions of people, and equally important would not have needlessly thrown away the sacrifice of American and South Vietnamese soldiers.

I still can’t believe that Kerry was accused of shooting himself on purpose and people actually believed them. I don’t think there has ever been a more despicable negative campaign in our nations history.

Congratulations to Blogs and Radio and Fox News for straightening out America’s “stinginess’ as accused by the UN and Euro Weenies and NY Times etc..

And thanks for discussing other issues this week – the Tsunami has had enough coverage.

Cetainly the election itself provided energy to the inevitable rise of blogging (for the all the reasons stated elsewhere above). And the election polarization created by some demo candidates flying in the face of God Almighty intensified the normal level of energy by born-again Christians. And I suspect just as they voted in overwhelming numbers, likewise they were empassioned to blog & network. Perhaps many believe as I do… “Truth will prevail, and Truth at the speed-of-light will prevail at the speed of Light”.

Secondly, let me suggest that this year’s announcement of an Internet Evangelism Day (4/24/2005) is a form of official recognition by Christians of this God-given tool we call the internet. Suddenly even a Christian ‘Blogging University’ has arisen to train ecapable Christians in this new tool.

And lastly, let me propose that My.Yahoo’s web-based aggregator (beta) serves as a signal from popular portals that the last vestige of old media has been broken — the wire service… to be replaced by Really Simple Syndication (RSS). That Google bought Blogger and IPO’d on Wall Street… probably added market-credible evidence on top of everything else.

Congrats on using this new tool to query your readership! God bless.

Neil

The Swift Boat Vets’ story is what influenced me to be against Kerry more than anything.

The attitude of the MSM toward bloggers is amusing. They remind me of how Nietzsche affected the British author, Joan Morris. We asked her about her spiritual journey and she said that she became a Christian by reading Nietzsche. She grew up an atheist and had always taken atheism for granted. Then she started reading Nietzsche. She said that he spent so much time and energy railing against God that she decided there might be something there. She studied further, became a Christian and joined the Catholic Church.

Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis Star Tribune rails against bloggers, especially the Powerline crew. Even if you’ve never heard of a blog before, you can’t help but wonder if why these “bloggers” have so much influence. If I were to summarize Coleman’s column, I would say, “These bloggers have really ticked Coleman off and he used his newspaper column to say a lot of bad things about them.” He said, they operate “without oversight, disclosure of conflicts of interest, or professional standards.” Yet when a Powerline person called the Star Tribune to find out what their standards and oversight were and the answer was not forthcoming. Having watched various “professionals” not do very much about fellow professionals who have behaved unethically, I don’t have much faith in standards being enforced.

I used to read Nick Coleman’s column regularly when he was published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. He was a delight to read. Now he has turned into a bitter old man. How sad. Is it the fault of the bloggers? Yes. In the same way that automobile makers put buggy whip manufacturers out of work. Whether it is Nick Coleman’s hissy-fit or the patronizing, dismissive comments of the network anchormen it looks as though bloggers are having a tremendous impact.

Dan Rather put his 25 years of credibility on the line by looking us in the eye and saying that the memos CBS was using to try to smear President Bush came from “an unimpeachable source.” The bloggers took Rather down. This year wasn’t the birth of the blog but it was the year a lot of us realized that not to read blogs was to be uninformed.

For all the breast-thumping on the conservative blogs lately about the tsunami of tsunami giving, I would bet that democrats have given more. There’s no way of knowing for sure, but giving goes hand in hand with being a ‘bleeding heart’, so it seems logical.