Day: October 24, 2004

The much-rumored Washington Times piece on Kerry is out:
Council members deny meeting Kerry
U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq…
Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in December 2003, Mr. Kerry explained that he understood the “real readiness” of the United Nations to “take this seriously” because he met “with the entire Security Council, and we spent a couple of hours talking about what they saw as the path to a united front in order to be able to deal with Saddam Hussein.”
But of the five ambassadors on the Security Council in 2002 who were reached directly for comment, four said they had never met Mr. Kerry. The four also said that no one who worked for their countries’ U.N. missions had met with Mr. Kerry either.
Inital reactions from those opposing Kerry in the blogosphere seem muted, such as this from Kevin at Wizbang: “I must say I’m underwhelmed at this juncture as well. It rings of the “imaginary foreign leaders” flap. With the media in his corner Kerry is like Teflon.”
Without lapsing into blogger triumphalism, countering the mainstream media’s tendency to ignore Kerry’s flaws is, after all, what we’re here for, isn’t it? (Or Bush’s flaws, for that matter, but others have that beat covered pretty well.)
I’ll admit, my first reaction was a bit of a yawn myself. But then I thought about why that was, and I think it comes down to the fact that I expect Kerry to exaggerate and outright lie when it serves his political purpose of the moment. But the fact that he’s a serial exaggerator is exactly why this story should receive attention, not why it should be shrugged off.
So let’s not treat Mr. Kerry with the “soft bigotry of low expectations” that I’m sure his squishly little liberal heart would find so offensive. The standard is a simple one: tell the damned truth. It would appear he didn’t in a crucial discussion of one of the most critical policy decisions made in years.
So let’s make sure that everyone we possibly can reach knows that. And let’s not conclude that Teflon John is going to get away with this one just yet — because the one thing that is true is that if the blogosphere doesn’t light a fire under this one, he will walk…
More from:
Matt Margolis, who shares Kevin’s disappointment.
Bill, who — bless his heart — seems to feel more as I do: “These aren’t exaggerations. This isn’t a case of lying about sex. It’s a story about a man that’s pathological enough to look a nationally televised audience of 55 million people in the eye and tell them a manufactured story that has no basis in either subjective analysis, wishful interpretation or fact, and then use it to propose a conclusion about a deadly serious matter of foreign policy.”
Bill Quick is not impressed.
But Captain Ed thinks it could cost Kerry a few points
Not much from the PowerLine crew as yet… must be bedtime in Minnesota!
Roger Simon asks: “Is John Kerry a sociopath?”. Good question!
Spoons yawns. For the record, I agree with him that the pre-story rumors on this piece were a dumb idea, and have proved extremely counterproductive…
And on the other side of the blogosphere, Kos, not surprisingly, downplays the story. (Note to my erstwhile colleagues on the right who don’t think this story is worthwhile: you’re agreeing with Kos. Might want to consider that a bit of a warning sign…) But more interestingly, he makes a rather bold statement:
But there is a punchline — The story is wrong. Kerry did meet with everyone…
Update: I know I haven’t sourced the assertion that Kerry met with everyone. When we see the story, with the names of the ambassadors who claim not to have met with Kerry, then it’ll be easy enough to refute the allegations.
Well, the story is out, and names three ambassadors:
Ambassador Andres Franco, Columbia
Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Mexico
Stefan Tafrov, Bulgaria
If there’s a refutation to be had, I’m listening. The floor is yours, Kos…

Folks:
I’ve been hinting at a new self-service interface for a long while now, and tonight the first piece of it is finally ready.
The challenge that I have faced is that I wanted to develop a system that would accomplish two major goals:
– It would not require manual intervention on my part (slow, tedious, unreliable)
– It would prevent abuse and ensure that only a blog’s true owner could make a change
I think I’ve settled on a system that works on both counts. The first feature to be implemented and operational is the ability to change a weblog’s URL — tonight, in certain limited cases, later, in all.
Tonight’s functionality allows you to change your weblog’s URL in the Ecosystem if you have not added a duplicate entry in the Ecosystem for your new blog’s URL. If you’ve already done that, and therefore have two URL’s in the Ecosystem, fear not: I will be implementing the code to handle that, and ‘merge’ the history of your two URLs. Just, er, not tonight.
So: the way to tell the Ecosystem about your new URL depends on whether or not you have ‘gone live’ with your new URL or not.
If you have turned on your new URL, and are automatically redirecting traffic to it from your old URL, then add the following tags to your new URL’s front page in the header section:
&lt link rel=”DCTERMS.replaces” href=”http://www.myoldblogurl.com” /&gt
&lt meta name=”DC.Identifier” content=”http://www.mynewblogurl.com”&gt
Make sure that ‘http://www.myoldblogurl.com’ matches the old URL that the Ecosystem is tracking exactly.
If you have not turned on your new URL, or are not automatically redirecting traffic from your old URL, you can simply add the following tag to your old URL’s front page in the header section:
&lt link rel=”DCTERMS.isreplacedby” href=”http://www.mynewblogurl.com/” /&gt
The tags will be picked up on the next evening’s nightly scan, so check back the following morning and you should see your URL updated all nice and neat. And if you don’t, please let me know.
Once the URL swap has occurred, you can remove the tags. But I have tried to create the tags based on proper Core metadata standards, which means that any other application that understands Dublin Core could also understand them. So you can also leave them there, if you like.
Anyway: enough for tonight. Coming soon, I’ll get the ‘merge’ code implemented, as I know many of the URL switches that need to happen already have duplicate entries…
PS: I’ve also started cleaning out a lot of the obvious duplicates blogs that show up on the Traffic Ranking pages. Only got through the top 250 tonight, but it’s a start…

So perhaps some of the more legal-minded folks of the blogosphere can help me understand something.
Point 1: Currently, the US has in place on Syria which impose a “Prohibition on the export to Syria of products of the United States, other than food and medicine” .
Point 2: Michael Moore’s film, Farenheit 9/11, a product of the United States, is being distributed in Syria (and elsewhere) by the UAE based company Front Row Entertainment, which has obtained international distribution rights to the film.
So: Is the fact that F9/11 isn’t being directly exported to Syria (but is being routed through a UAE-based company) enough to avoid violating the sanctions?
And if not…?

Some of you might remember The Blogopshere Daily News, a feature on TTLB a ways back which I eventually put on hiatus.
Well, guess what: it’s back!
On the News page, you’ll find a roundup of the most popular weblog posts in the blogosphere, updated each morning.
The page is currently a work in progress, but I think it is stable enough to do a ‘soft launch’ and let folks start playing with it. Feedback, as always, is most welcome…