Will Warren’s neat / His is no mean feat / It even beats a bleat
: Will Warren of Unremitting Verse — the weblog with rhythm and rhyme — is the bravest of the bloggers. Any good blog — like any good column — requires the writer to put him or herself on display: the real you, nearly naked, ready to be embraced or shot at. Warren just started his blog in poetry and he puts himself on the line with every line. This is risky to do. It could flop like a stand-up comedy routine. Every time I start reading I get nervous for him. But every time, he wins me over. His latest is an LOL hit and will surely get him lots of hits (because it’s about blogs). With OJR’s Tim Cavanaugh in the role of Hiawatha, Warren sends him on a journey to our land of legend and mystery:
Filled with fear and fascination
Went the trembling Hiawatha,
Went to find the savage Bloggers,
Went to find the fearsome tribesmen,
Went to find the ones who dared to
Offer up their rude and savage
Postings while completely lacking
Institutional umbrella.
He comes upon many of the bloggers (thanks for my stanza, Will) and hits them with bullseyes:
Then he saw the Layne-and-Welch man,
Saw the weasel whipper walking,
Walking on four legs instead of
Two like everybody elseís;
Then he saw the fearsome creature
Was composed of two men fastened,
Fastened by a thousand tiny
Sutures made of links back-atcha….
Sitting in the clearingís center
Sat the largest of the Bloggers,
Sat the fiercest of the Bloggers,
Sat the one called InstaPundit,
And the fearstruck Hiawatha
Saw that he was typing faster,
Typing many times as fast as
All the other fearsome Bloggers;
With his left hand he drank coffee,
With his right hand he sent faxes,
In each ear he wore an earpiece:
In his left ear NPR played,
In his right ear it was C-SPAN;
On his desk sat two computers,
One for input, one for output;
He was writing, at the same time,
Four new posts for rapid posting.
Bravo
The Gating factor
: I didn’t used to read Paul Krugman in the New York Times but after all the fuss that Andrew Sullivan caused around him, I just had to start. And I’m glad I did. Today, Krugman speaks on Enron and the attacks and he concludes:
Why is Enron a problem for conservatives? Even if the Bush administration turns out to be squeaky clean, which we’ll never know unless it starts to be more forthcoming, the scandal threatens perceptions that the right has spent decades creating. After all that effort to discredit concerns about the gap between haves and have-nots as obsolete “class warfare,” along comes a real-life story that reads like a leftist morality play: wealthy executives make off with millions while ordinary workers lose their jobs and their life savings. After all that effort to convince people that the private sector can police itself, the most admired company in America turns out to have been a giant Ponzi scheme ó and the most respected accounting firm turns out to have been an accomplice.
You might think that the shock of the Enron scandal ó and it is shocking, even to us hardened cynics ó would make some conservatives reconsider their beliefs. But the die- hards prefer to sling muck at liberals, hoping it will stick.
They’re both wrong trying to paint this as a political scandal, another what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it? Nixon/Reagan/Clinton scandal, a *Gate.
No, this is a business scandal, a moral scandal. And unlike all those political scandals, this is a scandal with victims: employees and stockholders and customers and suppliers and the entire U.S. economy.
This is a scandal of greed, of course, of people who thought they were big enough and smart enough to skirt rules and sense and get away with it. We’ve seen it before.
What we need our political leaders to do now is to look toward protecting us from the next one. And that is not accomplished with extreme right-v-left sniping. This isn’t about extremes. All business is not evil. All regulation is not evil. We need appropriate freedom to run a business under appropriate regulation to protect the rights of the victims in this scandal. We need moderation. It worked after Sept. 11. It can work after Enron.
Aw, shucks…
: This humble ‘log is nominated for a Bloggie! as a political site. Mom is proud. I’m amazed and flattered. Here I am, the new kid on the block, and I’m nominated alongside the amazing Andrew Sullivan (whom I do, in fact, respect and admire even if I have been tweaking him these past few days hoping he’d unplug from Enron) and the generous Little Green Footballs (note that I link to them even if they don’t link to me… I should win as Mr. Congeniality) as well as Kill Your TV and Fark. Vote early, vote often.
Porky the Rat
: Were we all amazed at how John The Rat Traitor Superdoofus Walker Lindt has porked out, based on the pictures of his shaven puss in the papers yesterday? He sure won’t be able to argue that he was tortured and starved.
Papa, can you see me?
: A small cultural difference revealed in a Guardian story about Camp Fed (they call it a Carribbean gulag, among other slaps):
“People are asking after their fathers. If they want someone to know where they’re at its their father, not their mother,” said Colonel Terry Carrico, the head of the camp’s internal security force.
Cultural mysogony runs deep.
