Category: News

ABC News: Dutch Filmmaker Theo Van Gogh Murdered

ABC News: Dutch Filmmaker Theo Van Gogh Murdered.

He was Vincent Van Gogh’s grandson. He had just produced a very controversial film about domestic violence against women in Islamic culture. It pissed off a lot of Dutch Muslims.

Ironically he had just produced a documentary about the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, also famous/infamous for criticizing sexual injustices of Islam. (According to Adam Curry, Fortuyn has been portrayed in the American media as a racist ideologue along the lines of Jacques Le Pen, but this is not true; he was openly gay and a critic of the sexual intolerance of Muslim culture.)

Deputy tackles, arrests journalist for photographing voters

Deputy tackles, arrests journalist for photographing voters

When Deputy Al Cinque tried to grab Henry’s camera, Henry ran about 100 feet across the pavement on the side of the elections office before he was tackled by the deputy.

Cinque yelled at Henry, “Hold still, stop moving,” after he pinned Henry on the pavement, punched him in the back and grabbed Henry’s left arm to put a handcuff on his wrist.

Cinque then jerked Henry, 54, to his feet by his left arm and slammed his body against a parked car, where the deputy punched him again as Henry tried to hand him identification cards that were later found on the pavement.

Documenting the way that democracy works under Jeb Bush will get you a beating by the cops. Nice. Appalling, yes. Surprising, no.

Andy Tannenbaum, the Votemaster!

Electoral-vote.com is slashdotted or being DOS’ed (six of one…) but today its mysterious maintainer revealed his identity — it’s Andy Tannenbaum, author of Minix, after which Linux was modeled! Tannenbaum’s been in the news a bit of late because some Microsoft shills have been trying hard to make him say that Linux is a ripoff of Minix, which annoys him, because he thinks (with some justification) that Minix is much better designed than Linux and the idea that Linux is a close imitation of Minix insults him.

Anyway, hats off to Professor Tanenbaum.

Smells Like Karl Rove

Jim’s Brain Online: Dirty Robocalls? reports a fake campaign call that’s going around Michigan (I’ve heard about it from one other friend today) calling people up and asking them to vote John Kerry so he will “protect our right to gay marriage.” Jim goes into a lot of detail as to why the call is transparently fake. It was pointed out by another friend on a mailing list where this was being discussed that this is a classic Karl Rove style attack, comparable to the “push polling” that was done in the primary that helped Bush defeat McCain in South Carolina, by falsely insinuating that he had fathered a child on a black woman out of marriage. (In actual fact, he had adopted a daughter with somewhat dark skin; the fake push polls were playing off that fact.)

You know, I was just about going to vote Bush this year, but thanks to this I’m gonna change my mind and vote a straight Democratic ticket.

BTW, if you do vote a straight democratic ticket, double check your results, mm-kay?

UPDATE: Made abcnews.com. The ABC article includes rumors provided by the Michigan GOP of bogus pro-Bush calls, in order to be “fair and balanced.” Of course, the bogus Kerry calls are so widespread that two people I know happen to have received them and they’re documented in a large number of Michigan cities, while I haven’t heard of anybody actually receiving the bogus pro-Bush calls; they’re just rumored to exist by the GOP. It’s one of those “hey, both sides are using dirty tricks!” things, where one side can get away with anything, no matter how egregious, because they point to something done by somebody on the other side and insist it’s equivalent. Classic media logic.