Author: N.Z. Bear

The deal is done!
Jacob Weisberg: ” for one, welcome our new ink-stained masters!”
No word yet as to whether Mickey will be losing his Boeing privileges.

It seems slightly unfair to criticize the Amish on the Internet, because by definition, no devout Amish (and my understanding is that there is no other kind) is going to be reading this or be able to effectively respond.
But, I’m going to do it anyway. Who says the holiday spirit is dead?
Apparently, some folks think its a good idea to special privleges for the Amish in Ohio law:
The Amish, who shun judging others under their faith, would be excused from jury service on religious reasons under a bill sent to Governor Bob Taft for a signature…
Ohio judges routinely release Amish who cite religious principles when they get called for jury duty, Geauga County Common Pleas Judge Forrest Burt said.
The county assembles a new pool of potential jurors every four months. About 10 Amish are excused each time, Burt said, most often after they quote a verse from Matthew’s Gospel: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”
So the idea is to create a legal right to avoid jury duty for a special segment of the population who have a certain set of religious beliefs that the government has decided are deserving of protection not given to any other religious beliefs. (Paging the establishment clause! Establishment clause, please call your office…)
Yes, I think this is a horrible idea. The special nature of jury duty essentially requires voluntary participation: unlike paying taxes, you can’t really force a person to serve on a jury and get the result you were looking for. So I understand if judges have to exempt individual Amish from jury service — I don’t like it, but I accept it. But elevating that practice to law is both unnecessary and a disasterous precedent.
Being a citizen of the United States should mean the exact same thing to anyone, regardless of race or religion. That means every citizen should have the same rights, and the same responsibilities. But this law would give the Amish a pass on one of the key responsibilities: and ironically, it is being championed because the fear of jury service is actually causing the Amish to voluntarily surrender one of their rights:
The intent of the exemption is to encourage more Amish to sign up to vote, said state Rep. Tim Grendell, a Geauga County Republican who inserted the provision in a larger jury service bill.
Ohio courts pick prospective jurors from lists of registered voters or licensed drivers.
The Amish, who don’t drive and aren’t on the license lists, often forgo voting. Studies put Amish voter participation at less than 10 percent.
“They’re being disenfranchised from their voting rights because of concerns about jury duty,” said Grendell, whose district includes a sizable Amish settlement around Middlefield east of Cleveland.
This actually seems a reasonably satisfactory outcome, to me. In an ideal world, the Amish would be deprived of the right to trial-by-jury, to balance their refusal to participate in providing that same right to their fellow citizens. But sacrificing the right to vote will do, I suppose.
This is the exact same issue that we face with recent immigrants to America, and which Europe faces with increasing pockets of Muslim immigrants who refuse to assimilate. America and other modern democracies are based on the principle that there are certain rights and responsibilities that every citizen has that form the boundries of our society. Those boundaries have been quite deliberately framed as broadly as possible, so that there’s a wide degree of freedom for different religious and political beliefs within them.
But at the end of the day, if you want to play our little open-society game, you’ve got to sign up to the basic rules. Equal rights for all people. Freedom of speech. Trial by jury. Paying taxes (how much should be paid is one of those arguable points). And yes, serving on a jury.
Carve out a special exemption for the Amish to refuse this responsibility of citizenship, and why shouldn’t we offer every religious group the legal right to pick and choose the parts of our system that they like and dislike?
The rules are consistent for a reason, and with all due respect to the Amish, they should stay that way…

No, I don’t know going on with Ali at Iraq The Model — and near as I can tell, neither does anybody else.
Having met his brothers last week, I can only wish him the best, and hope that the troubles that are leading him to choose to walk away from the blog are not as serious as they sound from his rather ominous posting…

align=”right” src=”http://www.time.com/time/images/covers/1101040103_120.jpg”>TIME has announced George Bush as their Person of the Year.
More precisely, “President George W. Bush: American Revolutionary”, according to the cover shot.
And more importantly (well, for our little community): TIME devotes significant ink to blogs in the issue, including noting 10 Things We Learned About Blogs, and an extensive profile of the Power Line crew.
The profile is well done, and worth reading, particularly if you know of Power Line in a vague sense but don’t really know much about the three gentlemen behind it. The author, Lev Grossman, is a novelist, and he spins some wonderful lines into the story. My favorites:
On the Power Line gang: “They’re a fun bunch, in a lawyerly way.”
On blogs: “It takes about 20 sec. to read a typical blog post, and when you’re finished you’ve got the basic facts up to the minute plus a dab of analysis and a dash of spin. If you’re not satisfied, you can click the link for more. If you are, you can go back to checking your e-mail and jiggering your spreadsheets or whatever you do for a living. This is news Jetsons-style. If it were any neater and quicker, it would come in a pill.”

I’m trying out compression on many of the main pages around TTLB. Allegedly this will provide a nice performance boost (faster page loads) as well as significantly reducing bandwidth usage. Seems to be working thus far: please let me know if you notice any changes (either for better or worse).

By special request of TTLB’s “house liberal” commenter, my old friend Lisa…
August 8: I’m going to go on record and predict that the Swift Boat Veterans kerfuffle won’t just be a major negative for Kerry: it will be a campaign-killer…
Unless Kerry’s campaign manages to completely discredit the Swifties — which seems increasingly unlikely — the campaign is over; Kerry is done. And after Election Day has passed, I expect that anyone looking backwards will wonder why in the world the Democrats ever thought making Kerry’s Vietnam service a centerpiece was a good idea in the first place.

Mary Beth Cahill, December 15: The campaign manager for Sen. John Kerry (news – web sites)’s failed presidential bid said Wednesday she regrets underestimating the impact of an attack advertisement that questioned Kerry’s Vietnam War record.
Mary Beth Cahill, who spoke at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government with Ken Mehlman, President Bush (news – web sites)’s campaign manager, said the Massachusetts senator’s campaign initially thought there would be “no reach” to the ad from Swift Boat Veterans for Truth…
“In hindsight, maybe we should have put Senator Kerry out earlier, perhaps we could have cut it off earlier.”
Mehlman said that it was natural that the ad had the reach and impact it did, because Kerry decided to make his Vietnam record a central part of his campaign.
“Because Senator Kerry was so focused on that part of his biography, it came out as an issue,” he said.
Ms. Cahill, Mr. Kerry, and yes, even Ms. Clinton are welcome to call upon my services when next they find themselves in need of political advice…

Well, I haven’t seen an ‘official’ announcement, but I believe the of America Friends of Iraq challenge is now complete.
As of this morning, the TTLB EcoTeam raised $1,687 for SoA, which put us in the #4 slot out of 23 teams competing — not bad for a bunch of insignificant microbes!
We have to extend congratulations to the three teams that surpassed us: Team Pajamahdeen was lagging for a long while and then blew our doors off in the last few days to end with $5,035; Castle Argghhh’s Fighting Fusileers for Freedom finished with $6,560; and those blasted Northern Alliance chaps blew the curve for everybody by bringing in a whopping $12,095. Fine work by all!
And as for the TTLB EcoTeam, let me extend my thanks and gratitude one more time to all the bloggers who joined the team and promoted the effort, and to everyone who donated. As time passes and I get to know Spirit of America’s work more and more, I only find myself growing even more enthusiastic for their cause. We’ve done good, folks!
And so for one more moment of glory, I present the TTLB EcoTeam:
Stand In the Trenches
It Is What It Is
Adrian Warnock
Cao’s Blog
Mark A. Kilmer
Rebel Rouser
Broken Masterpieces
Feste…a foolsblog
One Year Bible Blog
Pillage Idiot
The Liberal Coalition
kj4ever
Belief Seeking Understanding
Intermittent Stream
Pull on Superman’s Cape
Bloggledygook
Yankee from Mississippi
The Spoons Experience
Slublog
Vince Aut Morire
ccs178

Tonight the Spirit of America Friends of Iraq Blogger Challenge is coming to a close. If you haven’t done so already — and hey, even if you have — there’s one last chance to a donation during the challenge!

A quick note: we’ve behind into fourth place in the team competition! Team Pajamahdeen has squeaked ahead of us by a mere $36.
Would somebody please step up to the plate and fix that?

Have you voted yet?
If not: too late! Kevin has posted results for most categories.
Congrats to all the winners…

Well, if you weren’t aware of the Weblog Awards, you’ve obviously been living in a cave for the past month. But I’ve been rather remiss in promoting the awards, especially given that some of them are actually based on Ecosystem categories.
Voting closes tomorrow, so if you haven’t voted yet, by all means, go do so!

With only four days left in the fundraising drive, the EcoTeam is in a strong third place in the team competition with $1,574 raised to date. There’s still time to join the team and make a donation, so let’s see what we can do for a big last push towards the finish line!
And on that note, let me welcome the latest additions to the team:
Slublog
Vince Aut Morire
ccs178
…and, blogless though he may be, let me also say thanks to Papa Bear for chipping in a donation!

Some folks have noticed that there has been some weirdness on the Ecosytem lately.
First, a little over a week ago, everybody’s total link counts took a steep plunge. This was on purpose. The Ecosystem is meant to track ‘current’ links that each blog is receiving; not every link going back forever. But, for various technical reasons, I had to stop clearing out old links for a while — and everybody’s counts continued to drift upward.
Around 11/27, I fixed that, and cleared out all the old links. Unfortunately, that created a bit of an abrupt change in the rankings. But, from here on, things should stabilize.
Now, that wasn’t the big problem. For the past 10 days, I’ve been chasing what I thought was a nasty SQL database corruption issue. Yesterday, I finally figured it out. It wasn’t corruption at all — at least of the techincal kind.
For a while now, the Ecosystem has been the target of commerical spam-websites, which try to register themselves with bogus URLs that guarantee high rankings. There is validation code to prevent such abuse, but it is still a bit leaky and there are holes.
Well, I realized yesterday that it was in fact one of those attacks which was the cause of all the problems of the last week. In a nutshell, one of our fine spammy friends managed to get a blog with URL “http://” into the Ecosystem, which resulted in everybody’s links being assigned to that blog. I caught him on the first day, and marked the blog as suspended — but what I realized yesterday is that the method I used to suspend it prevented it from showing up in the listings — but didn’t prevent it from grabbing everyone’s links in the actual database.
Anyway: now that I know the issue I’m plugging up all the remaining vaildation holes, and starting today things should begin to return to normal. I expect that within a few hours, I’ll have the Ecosystem fully operational, and hopefully the Daily News as well.
Thanks for everyone’s patience…

Please welcome the EcoTeam’s latest members:
which is one of the best blog names I’ve seen in a while
Yankee from Mississippi
and, I’m especially pleased to welcome good friend Spoons on board the team.
Still room for plenty more!

Glenn seems very happy with his new wireless data card. This isn’t a WiFi card, but rather, works on the cellular network and therefore has access anywhere there is appropriate cell site coverage.
I’ve looked at the Verizon card, but at $80/month for unlimited access, it was a little pricey for me to justify given my limited needs.
So, I found a more affordable solution: for $30/month, you can use a T-Mobile AirCard for unlimited access. The drawback is that unlike Verizon’s coverage, T-Mobile is currently strictly dialup speeds — about 56kbps.
That’s not great for high powered web surfing, but I’ve found it is still extremely handy to be able to grab e-mail, be on instant messaging, and blog from anywhere.

Thanks to the generous support of the EcoTeam blogger members and readers, we’ve now raised $1,147 for Spirit of America! This puts us in third place for blog-teams; behind Castle Argghhh’s Fighting Fusileers for Freedom and the dreaded Northern Alliance.
Please welcome the latest additions to the team:
ChrisCam’s Intermittent Stream
Pull On Superman’s Cape

Please give a belated welcome to Douglas at Seeking Understanding, who joined several days back but I somehow managed to miss. Welcome aboard, Douglas!

Carnivorous Conservative has interesting analysis of SiteMeter statistics:
Who is read “more”, for example, Andrew Sullivan, Powerline, Protein Wisdom or Ace of Spades? Depending on how you want to interpret the numbers – and with the caveat that I’m no internet know it all – $20 says you probably guessed wrong. What if I told you that at least in one measure the numbers actually prove that both PW and ACE individually beat Powerline and Sullivan COMBINED!!
I think his methodology is sound, as is his logic. The only question, as always, is just how accurate SiteMeter’s data actually is…
Update: The Commissar points out one potential issue with the analysis: the large number of “zero-second” visits. I am fairly sure that zero-second visits represent visits where the user simply hit one page — since there is only one timestamp, there is no way to calculate how long they were viewing the blog overall.
Also, another interpretation for Carnivorous’ finding that Protein Wisdom receives more blog reader-time than Powerline: maybe Protein Wisdom fans just read really, really slow…

Please welcome the latest addition to the TTLB EcoTeam:
In addition, I’m also especially pleased to welcome N. Todd of the Liberal Coalition on board the TTLB EcoTeam in the Friends of Iraq Blogger Challenge. N.Todd is reaching across the partisan divide to support SoA’s effort despite severe misgivings about Bush’s policies and the Iraq war — an example I sincerely hope many others on the left will follow.
Today is the first official day of fundraising in the challenge, so if you haven’t donated already, I humbly ask that you reach into your heart, and then into your wallet, and click here to support SoA’s fine efforts to help the Iraqi and Afghan people. Thanks!
For more on TTLB’s participation in the Friends of Iraq challenge, see here.

Merriam-Webster Inc. has announced that “blog” is the most searched-on word from its sites:
Merriam-Webster Inc. said on Tuesday that blog, defined as “a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks,” was one of the most looked-up words on its Internet sites this year…
Springfield, Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster compiles the list each year by taking the most researched words on its Web sites and then excluding perennials such as affect/effect and profanity.
The full list is:
1. blog
2. incumbent
3. electoral
4. insurgent
5. hurricane
6. cicada
7. peloton
8. partisan
9. sovereignty
10. defenestration

Which, of course, absolutely demands that we rise to the challenge of using all ten words in a sentence. Here’s my entry:
In 2004, while the vast peloton of the mainstream media peddled furiously onward in an electoral campaign aimed at the defenstration of incumbent President Bush, the insurgent forces of the blog world unleashed a hurricane of criticism on the media itself, plaguing Dan Rather and other liberal talking heads like a swarm of cicadas, slowly but inexorably devouring Big Media’s sovereignty as sole arbiters of Truth and exposing them as the partisan hacks we always knew them to be.
Additional suggestions welcome; leave yours in the comments!