Posts by Lakshmi Chaudhry

Lakshmi Chaudhry is a senior editor at In These Times, and the former senior editor of AlterNet. You can write to her at lakshmi@alternet.org.

So long, farewell
Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry on January 9, 2006 at 5:29 AM.

This always happens. That temporary break turns into a permanent separation, and before you know it, you're saying lame things like, "It's not the blog, it's me."

It is me. I decided to shut down this blog to fulfill a promise I made to myself last June when I quit my job as editor at AlterNet. After three eventful years that included a war and a presidential election, I was pretty much burned out on online journalism. It was time to wean myself off the pressure of daily, many times hourly deadlines; the need to say important things about the way too many important things; the constant fear of missing out, falling behind that drives the internet news cycle; the need to surf that information tsunami ...

No wonder then that the first thing I did after quitting is start my own blog. My name is Lakshmi. And I am an information addict.

So I need to stop doing this to myself, at least for now.

While I surely will be posting stuff on occasion on other blogs, it won't, however, compensate for the bit about this blogging business that I'll really miss: i.e. you, dear reader. Despite all those jokes about my traffic numbers, I've been continually amazed by all people who've taken the time to read this blog, and those who've made the added effort to respond to it and me. My days will be a little more lonelier without you.

In any case, this is not a goodbye but more of an au revoir to blogging. To quote that awful man, I will indeed be baack -- on AlterNet, In These Times or perhaps with a small blog of my own.

Let me know if you want to be notified of my return to the blogosphere. I promise not to sell your email address to support my crack habit -- though I don't quite understand why folks get so worked up about spam. I personally find it quite touching that so many people are this worried about the size of my penis.

Now that I've reminded you of all the reasons why you're going to miss this blog ... Time to stop. Now.

Happy holidays
Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry on December 16, 2005 at 3:38 PM.

I really did want to blog more today, but ended spending hours on the phone doing interviews for an article on blogs instead. Ah, the irony -- not really.

This is my last entry for 2005. I'm going to spend much of next week wrapping up my writing commitments so that I can treat myself to a real, computer-free holiday this year.

So in the spirit of this season, I leave you this image sent in by Stephen O'Melveny of the famous baby hippo who was adopted by a 100-plus year old tortoise in the wake of the tsunami on the Kenyan coast [Details and more pictures here]. Yes, one last chance to be sappy before the steady flow of political vitriol resumes in the new year.

Jimmy Carter goes X-Files
Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry on December 16, 2005 at 11:30 AM.

I love Jimmy Carter, but think he needs to stop strolling down memory lane quite so much:

"We had a plane go down in the Central African Republic. A twin-engine plane. Small plane. And we couldn't find it," the 81-year-old 39th President reveals to GQ magazine's Wil S. Hylton. "So we oriented satellites that were going around the Earth every 90 minutes to fly over that spot where we thought it might be and take photographs. We couldn't find it."

Carter continues: "The director of the CIA came and told me that he had contacted a woman in California who claimed to have supernatural capabilities. And she went into a trance and she wrote down latitudes and longitudes, and we sent our satellite over that latitude and longitude, and there was the plane." [NYDN via Gawker]

There's more about spotting a UFO that I'll leave you to investigate.

How not to catch a terrorist
Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry on December 16, 2005 at 10:35 AM.

Oops:

Iraqi security forces caught the most wanted man in the country last year, but released him because they didn't know who he was, the Iraqi deputy minister of interior said Thursday.

Hussain Kamal confirmed that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- the al Qaeda in Iraq leader who has a $25 million bounty on his head -- was in custody at some point last year, but he wouldn't provide further details.

A U.S. official couldn't confirm the report, but said he wouldn't dismiss it. "It is plausible," he said. [CNN via Daily Kos]

It's nice to see that the Bush administration is indeed successfully training Iraqis to be every bit as incompetent as their own. Don't worry, we'll make a Michael Brown out of each one of you.

George Clooney hearts Hillary ... Not!
Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry on December 15, 2005 at 6:13 PM.

Being dissed by a Hollywood hottie is just no fun:

The "Syriana" star says he is "frustrated and disappointed" that Clinton and many other Democrats were "scared" to oppose the war on Iraq, and "now they are paying the price."

"I hate it when smart men and women are saying, 'Well, if I knew then what I know now,'" Clooney told the Sunday Times of London. "The fact is: I knew it then and I don’t have national security clearance. . . . Basically, the Democrat leadership was scared [of criticizing Bush] and it’s too bad, because it’s come back to haunt them."

Clooney’s choice for president: Barak Obama. "Of course he doesn’t want to right now; he just wants to be senator for Illinois," Clooney told the paper. "But he could attract the two groups who rarely show up to vote -- young people and blacks. He’s the guy to get behind."

Well, at least he called her "smart."

The future of blogs
Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry on December 15, 2005 at 2:39 PM.

Daniel Solove, a George Washington U professor, points to a potential threat to the future of blogs: copyright laws:

I think that it is a fair generalization to say that the use of copyrighted material is much more liberal in the blogosphere than in regular print publications. If I were writing something in print, for example, I would be much more cautious about the extent to which I’m quoting and using images. But I feel more emboldened on the Internet. Why?

The reason is that the blogosphere has developed a set of copyright norms in an area where there is very little enforcement. These norms about the use of copyrighted material are probably at odds with existing copyright law. The mainstream media and other websites have not been going after bloggers for copyright violations all that much. Although the music and movie industries have been on the copyright offensive, beyond them, the enforcement of copyright on the Internet has been rather laid back. [Concurring Opinions via Boing Boing]

Solove points out that this rather liberal interpretation of "fair use" is not borne out by past court rulings. And stock photography companies like Getty Images Inc. and Corbis Corp are already planning to crack down on offenders who 'borrow' their images.

So is a wave of lawsuits looming on the horizon? His conclusion: Yes, if blogging becomes too powerful and more importantly highly profitable.

Monkey love
Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry on December 15, 2005 at 1:09 PM.

Joshua Bearman has an entertaining and provocative piece on the real King Kong in L.A. Weekly. He points to the latest research that points to what human imagination has always suspected: that gorillas are not that different than human beings, making the prospect of monkey love a la King Kong not all that outlandish.

Either way, it’s now clear that we’re all much closer cousins than the Victorians could have imagined. Perhaps even kissing cousins. Cooper and Schoedsack weren’t entirely off their rockers when they cast Kong and Fay Wray in a “great romance.” Humans share enough DNA and chromosomal similarity with both gorillas and chimpanzees — we’re 99 percent genotypically congruent with chimps — that offspring might be possible, were biologists unscrupulous enough to try it. There’s always suspicion they may have already; for some reason, Japan often gets fingered as the place that has secretly developed primate crossbreeds. And then there was the case of Oliver, a circus chimpanzee who seemed so human — he lived with a family in South Africa, where he liked to feed the dogs and sip whiskey while watching TV — that he was tested for human parentage. He came up negative, but in the end Oliver had to be sold because he developed an overpowering sexual interest in his female owner and woman visitors. [L.A. Weekly]

Mercifully, the vast majority of gorillas show no such interest in this form of inter-species communication. Okay, so Koko has a bit of a "nipple fetish."

To all this I say, let's stick to sign language.

Ford reverses ad policy
Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry on December 15, 2005 at 9:43 AM.

Finally some good news:

Advertisements featuring Ford Motor Co.'s eight vehicle brands will run in gay publications, the automaker said Wednesday, acting after gay rights groups complained when Jaguar and Land Rover pulled their spots.

Ford is not ordering those luxury brands to resume their specific ads. Rather, the company's ads in the publications will promote all of its lines, which also include Ford, Lincoln, Mazda, Mercury, Volvo and Aston Martin. ...

Ford pledged to run corporate ads in the publications that will include the entire Ford lineup.

"It is my hope that this will remove any ambiguity about Ford's desire to advertise to all important audiences and put this particular issue to rest," wrote Joe Laymon, Ford's group vice president for corporate human resources. [AP via CNN]

At the very least, this victory suggests that being a bigot -- or at least being perceived as one -- is bad for business. And the corporate concern about the bottomline will in the end trump their fear of alienating the Christian right.

Starbucks new PR stunt
Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry on December 14, 2005 at 12:16 PM.

Gawker highlights the latest publicity stunt from Starbucks:

This is not someone who has innocently and accidentally left her coffee cup on top of her car. This is someone who is being paid to drive around the city with a coffee cup affixed to the top of her car, so that when people start shouting from the sidewalk, or honking from alongside, to let her know she has coffee on her roof, she can yell back, "Yeah, I know. Happy holidays from Starbucks!" [Gawker; photo courtesy Bucky Turco]

Like we need another excuse for road rage during this time of the year.

Say What? The John Harris edition
Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry on December 14, 2005 at 10:26 AM.

If you're not already up to speed on the Froomkin saga -- for a saga it has undeniably become -- the details and links are here.

The latest development falls in the realm of pure comedy as political editor John Harris -- the man most unhappy with Froomkin for tainting the Post's White House reporters with his ugly partisanship -- tries to justify his claim that Froomkin's column suffers from a liberal bias. In his interview with Rosen yesterday, Harris couldn't come up with a single shred of evidence of Froomkin's liberal bias other than citing a "conservative blogger" named Patrick Ruffini.

Turns out Ruffini isn't just any old rightwing blogger but the E-campaign director for the RNC. Here's Brad deLong asking Harris to clarify his statement:

Q: Can you give any examples--other than Republican National Committee eCampaign Director Patrick Ruffini --of people who are seriously confused about Dan Froomkin's role at WPNI?

A: I cannot comment for the record because I've promised I won't comment on this.

Q: Did you, when you sent your answers to Jay Rosen yesterday, know that your "grassroots conservative weblogger" Patrickk Ruffini had been a Republican campaign operative in 2004?

A: I cannot comment for the record because I've promised that I won't comment on this.

Q: Did you, when you sent your answers to Jay Rosen yesterday, know that your "grassroots conservative weblogger" Patrick Ruffini was now eCampaign Director for the Republican National Committee?

A: I cannot comment for the record because I've promised that I won't comment on this. [Brad DeLong]

Somewhere in the White House, Scott Mclellan is laughing very, very hard.

Brad has his own theories about Harris' tap-dancing here.

Cowboys in Love
Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry on December 14, 2005 at 9:43 AM.

Here's a quick web column I penned over the weekend on Brokeback Mountain. My thesis: The movie is an epic love story in the most traditional sense of the word. Think Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Iseult. For love is only as immense as the barriers it overcomes:

For straight folks, those barriers have long been eroded in the name of progress. The 20th century democratized marriage, tossing aside considerations of class, race, family affiliations. It also tore down the centuries-old separation of love and marriage, making wedlock the natural and desired objective of heterosexual passion. ... The same custodians of social order who once tore asunder young men and women in love now nag them to “find someone and settle down." [In These Times]

So in a sense, only a "gay cowboy movie" set in Wyoming can meet the literary requirements of grand passion in 21st century America.

Just don't call me a White House reporter
Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry on December 13, 2005 at 10:16 PM.

The war over Dan Froomkin's column "White House Briefing" on Washingtonpost.com -- not to be confused with the newspaper -- is turning into a bizarre public brawl. On one side are the paper's editorial staff, including political editor John Harris, Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., and assorted unnamed reporters, all arrayed against Washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady, Froomkin, a number of bloggers, and hundreds of readers.

The firestorm was sparked by a column penned by ombudsman Deborah Howell:

Political reporters at The Post don't like WPNI columnist Dan Froomkin's "White House Briefing," which is highly opinionated and liberal. They're afraid that some readers think that Froomkin is a Post White House reporter.

John Harris, national political editor at the print Post, said, "The title invites confusion. It dilutes our only asset -- our credibility" as objective news reporters. Froomkin writes the kind of column "that we would never allow a White House reporter to write. I wish it could be done with a different title and display."

Harris is right; some readers do think Froomkin is a White House reporter. But Froomkin works only for the Web site and is very popular -- and Brady is not going to fool with that, though he is considering changing the column title and supplementing it with a conservative blogger.

No doubt some of these reporters are the same who also told Howell they "don't appreciate that links are put on the Web site to what bloggers are saying about this or that story -- especially when the bloggers are highly negative."

Back in the dark ages, the entire story would have ended right there. The editors would have deigned to publish a couple of letters from unhappy readers, along with some positive ones for the sake of "balance." Not so in the age of technology. Readers posted more than six hundred comments in Froomkin's support and soon the leading progressive bloggers jumped in the fray.

All of which led Leo Downie to offer this defense of his newspaper staff's asinine behavior: "We want to make sure people in the [Bush] administration know that our news coverage by White House reporters is separate from what appears in Froomkin's column because it contains opinion ... And that readers of the Web site understand that, too." [E&P]

Harris made it all better by labeling Froomkin over and again as a "liberal" without offering proof in this interview with Jay Rosen. When pressed by Rosen to offer specific examples, he cited a nasty attack on Froomkin by a conservative blogger named Patrick Ruffini, who -- according to Jane Hamsher -- was the webmaster for Bush/Cheney '04.

In any case, now the likes of Harris are hiding behind the claim that their only problem is with the title of the column, which is supposedly so direly misleading as to compromise the credibility of their entire White House contingent.

Whatever the merit of the complaint against the name of Froomkin's column, it seems odd that the Howell column -- the first shot that started this war -- chose to air it in such an ugly and arbitrary way, tucked inside a column about the differences between the website and the newspaper. Then there's the fact that the damn column has been running for two years. So why has its title suddenly become a problem? Not just a problem but a cause for such public name-calling?

The irony is that this entire performance -- supposedly staged in defense of media ethics -- is unlikely to improve the readers' already lagging confidence in the nation's leading newspapers. Who can trust a newspaper run by people who seem to be unable to treat their peers with even a modicum of respect?

Global warming violates Inuit human rights
Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry on December 13, 2005 at 1:22 PM.

An interesting piece that marks a new trend in environmental activism:

People living in the Arctic have filed a legal petition against the US government, saying its climate change policies violate human rights.

The Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC) claims the US is failing to control emissions of greenhouse gases, damaging livelihoods in the Arctic. Its petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights demands that the US limits its emissions. [BBC]

Now here's a great way to bring back Christmas: stop killing Santa Claus.

My so-called photo
Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry on December 13, 2005 at 1:10 PM.

This post on my Anderson Cooper entry is just the latest in a string of responses I've received about the photo on this blog -- more specifically on my angled head, expression in my eyes etc. Some are flattering, others are not, as in this case:

Your comment makes it open season on contrived pictures of posers. I've often found your articles poignant, but at other times rather pissy. This may be good for the edgy needs of writing online, but doesn't do much for journalism.

Let's take a glance at your picture.

A cocked head showing consideration, a slight squinting to stress a keen perceptual faculty, and almost a smile, but for it being held firmly back... and nothing says self absorbed as much as a face consuming an entire frame.

- In your face

I think this is a good time to share the rest of the photo, out of which my face has been carefully cropped so as to exclude both the dog and my rather picturesque bathroom. My request to post a less-excised version of the photo -- taken specially for the blog so as to include my furry bundle of joy -- was rightly dismissed as a case of maternal love gone mad.

So what my pose/expression really says is: one: my knees are hurting; two: Gauss better be looking at the camera; three, shit, I forgot about the towel in the background.

My apologies for disappointing those with more profound theories about this photo, both flattering and otherwise.

P.S: This is also a good time to point out that blogs are not journalism -- except in the narrowest sense of "opinion journalism." Those coming to this blog in search of journalism in any traditional sense of the word will be sorely disappointed. I would use that word only for the articles I've written over the years for AlterNet, In These Times, Village Voice, Wired News etc. This is a blog that points you to the work of other journalists -- hopefully with humor, passion, and more rarely, insight.

Her luscious water beds
Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry on December 13, 2005 at 12:47 PM.

Everything I don't want to know about Angelina Jolie's sex life, I learned from her ex-lover Jenny Shimizu:

"She is beautiful. Her mouth is amazing. I've never kissed anyone with a bigger mouth than Angelina. It's like two water beds - it's like this big kind of warm, mushy, beautiful thing." ...

But she says, "Whenever [Angelina] calls me up I visit her. It's not always the case that we have sex. Sometimes we go to her property in Cambodia and explore the jungle." [NYDN]

Then again, nothing makes camping as much fun as a water bed -- or two.

There's more, but you get the picture.