July 26, 2004

Summer with Saddam

Saddam Hussein is spending his time in solitary confinement writing poetry, gardening, reading the Qur'an and snacking on American muffins and cookies. One of his poems is about his arch-enemy George Bush. So says Iraq's human rights minister, Bakhtiar Amin, who visited the imprisoned dictator on Saturday, and talked about it with the London newspaper, The Guardian. Despite decent quarters – an air-conditioned 10-by-13-foot cell – and three squares a day, Saddam is said to be a bit melancholic and has high blood pressure and prostate problems. "He is looking after a few bushes and shrubs and has even placed a circle of white stones around a small palm tree," Amin says in The Guardian account. "His apparent care for his surroundings is ironic when you think he was responsible for one of the biggest ecocides when he drained the southern marshes." Yeah, well, there were people in the marshes. I'd like to see his Bush poem, though. You can bet there'll be a few psychology term papers on that some day.

Posted by tbrown at 12:48 PM

Blogging the Dems

This year's political conventions will be the first extensively covered by bloggers. How much zest they'll add to what real news that escapes from these choreographed exercises we'll soon see. But if you want to tune in, here's a pretty good list of participating bloggers. Seattlelites should note that Natasha Celine, who writes at the group blog Pacific Views, also will be blogging for the King County Democratic Central Committee. Democratic Girl doesn’t have much content yet, but looks like it'll provide some Flash diversion in the (likely) event of not much news. Jay Rosen, the NYU thinker of pear-shaped thoughts at PressThink, will be there and is already he's trying to make convention cynics like me wake up to the fact that there must be news there somewhere. Otherwise, how come 15,000 newsies are there? It's certainly true that every convention produces something we didn't know before. Most newspeople dislike the conventions of the last 25 years or so because they no longer are actually contests of candidates. Those are all decided long before the delegates meet. Still, for political junkies, there'll be plenty of fodder, and Rosen thinks bloggers will be able to bring something new to the circus: "I think the bloggers have something to add: "They don't know in advance that what they are doing is meaningless; if they did, they wouldn't do it. "They don't assume that a ritual is an empty ritual simply because it obeys a script, since this is the very essence of ritual, as any Boy Scout or churchgoer can tell you. "Although we're told that 'bloggers wear their politics on their sleeves,' and things like that, politics is a personal matter for most of them -- not a professional interest. Their communication style is citizen-to-citizen, rather than expert-to-layman or media to 'mass.' "Journalists are sent by their editors and bosses to cover the convention. Bloggers are 'sent,' in effect, by the people who read their accounts and find use for them. Some bloggers heading to Boston have been asking their users, 'What do you want to know about when I get there?' How many reporters do that?"

Posted by tbrown at 12:47 PM

Tsk, tsk

GOP veep Dick Cheney tells a U.S. senator to "go ^&@# yourself." Now Teresa Heinz Kerry tells a newsman to "shove it." The shovee, Colin McNickle, is the editorial page editor of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, funded by conservative moneybags Richard Mellon Scaife. If this keeps up, we won't be able to publish a family blog anymore.

Posted by tbrown at 12:43 PM

Maybe, professor …

… but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Posted by tbrown at 12:41 PM