There are some great, vigorous discussions going on about liberal media bias and the search for Iraqi WMD. Keep those comments coming!

In the mean time, here is some more food for thought on the motivations of the antiwar crowd:

Given the choice which would you prefer:

B. George Bush is proven incorrect. No peace in Iraq. No peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Bush defeated.

Glenn Reynolds said, “The answer to that one is pathetically obvious.” I think he might be painting with an overly broad brush, at least implicitly, but there certainly are far too many antiwar folks who would prefer Option B, consciously or subconsciously.

(And no, Sean, discussing antiwar motivations is not an irrelevant ad-hominem attack. It’s a separate discussion from the one that deals with the rights and wrongs of the war, but it’s a legitimate and indeed important discussion in its own right.)

I bought a Sprint PCS Sanyo 8100 camera-phone yesterday. Above is a photo of the phone, taken by the phone. (The screen that’s visible is the “Sub LCD,” which turns on when the phone is closed. It also has a large LCD screen inside.)

Other photos taken with the camera and uploaded automatically to my blog are here and here and here!

I’m still looking for a better way to format them for upload, so that the pictures will actually appear on my homepage when I send them to the blog. For now, they only appear as links (see below), because otherwise the formatting would screw up the homepage. So, bear with me on that.

But even so, the whole thing is pretty cool.

It’s worth noting that I first discovered this camera phone nearly a month ago, while procrastinating at USC when I was supposed to be writing a paper. That same night, I also signed up for Audblog. So, see? Sometimes good things happen to those who procrastinate. Or at least, good things happen to their websites. :)

UPDATE: It’s working perfectly now!!! Thanks to the genius of Moveable Type “plugins” (and to several hours’ hard work perfecting the HTML/MT coding), I now have my blog set up so that all phone-posted images are formatted just the way I want them. In other words, they look pretty. :) The changes are retroactive, too, so even the earliest images are formatted propertly. Hooray!

My new phone, seen in the mirror.

Apparently the First Amendment does not apply in Florida, where a judge has ruled, on privacy grounds, that a former boyfriend of a former Miss Vermont cannot publish anything about her on his website — not her name, not her title, nothing. He’s even barred from linking to her website, a prohibition that a Cardozo law professor calls “kooky.”

The ruling also prohibits the ex-boyfriend, Tucker Max, from disclosing, digitally or verbally or by any other means, “any stories, facts or information, notwithstanding its truth, about any intimate or sexual acts engaged in by” himself and the ex-Miss Vermont, Katy Johnson. (emphasis added)

Yup, you read that right: a judge has ruled that this guy is not allowed to talk about his sexual history with this woman, even if what he’s saying is true. He’s been legally barred from discussing his own sex life!

The court-ordered prohibition of speech, verbal or written, before it occurs (or is published) is known, in First Amendment circles, as a “prior restraint.” Prior restraints are supposed to be virtually nonexistant in this country, reserved for only in the most extreme cases, such as news articles that would divulge the exact location of troops at war or the identities of CIA informants overseas — in other words, situations where, if the information is published, someone will surely die.

Prior restraints are not supposed to be used to protect reputation, damage to which can be repaired (or at least compensated for) through libel or invasion-of-privacy litigation after the fact.

InstaPundit’s Glenn Reynolds (himself a law professor at Tennessee) has nothing but scorn for this ruling, and I agree whole-heartedly.

Don’t get me wrong. For all I know, Tucker Max is probably a total scumbag, and although I can’t now read what he wrote about Katy Johnson — he removed it from his site in compliance with the order by the thought police, er, court — I probably would disapprove of it. But guaranteed freedoms have to apply to everyone, not just the people we approve of.

Morally, people shouldn’t deliberately hurt other people by publishing private information without their consent, unless they have some sort of very good reason to do so. But legally, this ruling is bulls**t.

There’s a nasty rumor going around that the first cinematic trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King will be released with New Line Cinema’s next movie, Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd, which comes out next Friday.

I say the rumor is “nasty” because it means I may have to actually go see the piece of crap. Oh, the humanity!

Of course, there are other options. One Tolkienphile has a strategy: “Buy a ticket for something you *want* to see that starts shortly after [Dumb & Dumberer], wander into the ‘wrong’ room until the trailers are over, slap forehead and evacuate to the ‘right’ theatre.” Heh.

(On a tangentially related note, a Google search for dumb and dumberer does turn up the official movie site (item #4), but it also produces the question: “Did you mean: dumb and dumber?” Again, heh.)

The Los Angeles Times has a liberal bias? No way!

UPDATE: But, hey, at least they have a top-level editor who is facing up to it. Contrast the New York Times, which, as Donald Luskin points out, seems more interested in ferreting out “technical journalistic transgressions, violations of rules of process” than in dealing with the paper’s “larger crimes in the domain of results — the systematic distortion of news, analysis and opinion to fit a political agenda.”

I tend to think American print journalism would actually be better off if our newspapers were like London’s newspapers, where every paper has a pretty much explicit bias of one kind or another, and everybody knows it, and the public can pick its poison.

But hypocracy is always bad; it will rot the soul of any profession, and that’s what happens to journalism when papers like the New York Times pretend to be the “newspaper of record” when really they’re blatantly liberal (or when Fox News pretends to be “fair and balanced” when really it’s blatantly conservative). If we’re going to adopt the British system, we have to be up-front about it. Rainesian sneakiness has no place in journalism.

Moreover, because virtually every American city has only one daily paper, and because large numbers of those papers are owned by the same corporate conglomerates (thanks, FCC, for making this situation even worse), Americans don’t really have a true choice among newspapers — unlike Brits, we can’t really pick our poison. For most of us, our only real choice is: a) read what they give us, or b) don’t read a daily newspaper. And that makes it essential for daily newspapers, if they want to remain relevant, to fairly present both sides of the issue, not just the side favored by the newsroom’s cultural prejudices. Otherwise, hell, everybody will just read blogs! :)

This is my 1,000th post on this blog (hooray!), and what better way to make it a memorable one than with a bit of humor? In that spirit, I give you, from a recent rerun of an early-May Late Show, the Top Ten President Bush Excuses For Not Finding Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Follow the link to read the whole thing. My personal favorite is Number 6: “Did I say Iraq has weapons of mass destruction? I meant they have goats.”

Also rather funny is Number 5: “How are we supposed to find weapons of mass destruction when we can’t even find Cheney?”

And Number 2 has a certain comic simplicity to it: “Let’s face it — I ain’t exactly a genius.”

Heh.

O Napoleon Piggywig…