I wrote a letter to the Cleveland Plain Dealer to tell why Pro-Life people should be for Obama, but they changed it.

I work for one of this country's largest employers.  Huffington Post was banned this week, ostensibly for its daily boobs and ass show.  Will DKOS be next?

Jim Jewell, chief operating officer of a small evangelical advocacy organization, mailed a letter to supporters earlier this year. "As I walked the aisles of the National Religious Broadcasters convention," he began, "I found that it was easy to sign up for luxury accommodations in Jamaica or a tour of Israel.... What I knew I wouldn’t find was information on how we as Christians could be faithful in obeying God’s call to care for His creation, or material on environmental stewardship."

Jewell knew this information would not be available because his organization, the Evangelical Environmental Network, had been denied permission to set up a booth in the National Religious Broadcaster’s exhibit hall. NRB is a trade association representing more than 1,400 evangelical broadcasters and related organizations. The "Statement of Faith" to which all NRB members must ascribe makes no mention of politics—their credo is biblical infallibility, the divinity of Jesus, and salvation through the Holy Spirit. But EEN’s account of its rejection by NRB suggests that NRB uses its influence to perpetuate a narrow conservative evangelical agenda that many Christians are beginning to reconsider.

I will first reveal my bias, I do not like censorship. I am a fervent believer in free speech, the freedom to offend, and the freedom to provoke. If you can't survive an open debate then I don't think your arguments are up to snuff. Those who need to hide behind a wall of officialdom for credibility should stay in print media, and avoid giving out there email address.

Huffington Post is a moderated blog, also known as a censorship by rules. Censorship itself is not always an impediment to the free exchange of ideas. By removing foul language a person should be able to make more or less the same point they would have otherwise, while enhancing the argument past the realm of the emotional response. By removing spam and repeated postings, and keeping users on topic you insure the people are not forced to read pages of unrelated useless material or a single persons opinion blanketing a site.

The problem comes when you start to censor thoughts and attitudes regardless of the language or relevance to the topic.

Stuff that bothered me, but other people posted better responses, text or video:

My point is not raise cain or empower anyone here to be offended, but I being new to your site, do not claim to be any genius or master in the arts some have profected here and at other discussion boards.

We can claim only a few words either for or against, but we can also be willing to accept other comments which might not always agree with the status quo..  DKos has a mountain of thoughts and power on the internet.

Yet I am surprise to see that you maintain a censorship of opposing view, labeling these folks as Trolls and other projections of the lesser being in some cases.

Granted your site... Your rules.. either play by the rules or get labeled or get lost..removed...  Fair game to maintain the controls of the state.

With that said, DKos is a state..

Tonight will be "China's night", won't it? If all goes according to the meticulously scripted plan, the entire world will see just how far China has come under the austere guidance of the Communist Party. The party and the corporate sponsors especially, have been spending orchestrating the ceremony to insure that it goes off without a hitch.

However, cracks are turning into chasms and the real story of the Chinese human rights situation has begun to seep out.

I'll try to delve into that further as a means of showing you why tonight's pomp and circumstance is a hollow guise designed to distract the world from the actual truth.

In honor of the death of the great patriot for freedom, I wanted to tell the story of the time I tried to smuggle his book The First Circle into the former Soviet Union.  

It should frighten you out of your wits
To learn what was done to those tits
The Great Berluscosa,
Who does nothing sub-rosa,
Had them touched up with clothing that fits.

Degenerate art? Degenerate audience? Degenerate past? Past as prelude?

As some may know, the media treatment of images from Iraq (or lack of) has been a pet issue of mine for over five years, and is featured in my book.  Last week, I covered The New York Times' probe of this matter.    The news hook was the recent dis-embedding from the U.S. military of freelance photographer Zoriah Miller for allegedly breaking a kind of ban on such photos. He denies this (I also covered that here).

In presenting the story in print and on the Web, the Times published one of Miller's fatal photos.

In his column today, the paper's public editor, Clark Hoyt, notes that this was the first photo of that type the Times had published in at least the past year, and reviews some of the controversies in this area it has navigated in years' past.

The western press is all worked up over Beijing's limitation on website access for those who are covering the Olympics.

Maybe there's something wrong with me, but I can't see a lot of difference between Beijing's up-front censorship and western censorship, which is more subtle but just as effective.

Beijing's limitations on visiting journalists apparently do not affect savvy Chinese internet users, while the self-censorship that western, and especially American journalists have to exercise, affects what the public gets to know on a broad range of vital issues, from the war in Iraq to the amount of vacation other developed countries grant their workers.

Via LiveJournal:

Today, I discovered that RealClimate is blocked. Exactly how is a climatology site objectionable? Of course, the propaganda information sites they do allow are equally interesting. There has never been a day that drug abuser Rush Limbaugh or felon G Gordon Liddy has been blocked, to my knowledge. Comedian Al Franken’s Senate campaign site - blocked. Air America was blocked, then allowed, then blocked, and now it’s allowed again I believe. For the longest time, Little Green Footballs was allowed, while DailyKos was blocked. Now, they’re both blocked.  I can get behind that - neither of those sites is official use, I’d wager. Drudge Report and WorldNutDaily - always accessible.  Slate’s Video News - blocked. Go figure.

Seriously, RealClimate? Frack.

I can't speak to the veracity of this specific claim. No doubt there may be concerns with certain sites loading on local networks that have nothing to do with political content. But the general problem outlined, and more importantly, the political bend of the lucky sites that seem to effortlessly escape notice of sysadmin time and time again, is surely familiar to all. It's time to compare notes. Are you on a government or government related network? What sites are blocked and which are allowed? Who makes those decisions at the local and national level?

This is a short diary.  MSNBC is reporting that the Chinese government is blocking internet access by the media covering the Olympic Games to a variety of websites deemed sensitive or embarassing to the Beijing regime, and that the International Olympic Committee had apparently cut a deal to allow the Chinese to do so.

A short while ago an IOC spokesman admitted such a deal was cut, despite the Chinese having previously promised to give journalists covering the Games the same freedom to report on the Games as was enjoyed by them at previous Olympics.  IOC Press Chief Kevan Gospar admitted, "Some IOC officials negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked on the basis they were not considered Games related."

More below the fold.

The NY Times busts the myth and opens the door that has kept the American public sheltered from the realities of War. The horrors of death and grievous wounds suffered by our combat troops and the civilian populace.

If the conflict in Vietnam was notable for open access given to journalists — too much, many critics said, as the war played out nightly in bloody newscasts — the Iraq war may mark an opposite extreme: after five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers.

I get a diary like the one on Obama, and in various places there are gray squares.

Is this a form of censorship?

What are they?

The original source for this story is an article from Inside Higher Ed.

The University of San Diego recently rescinded an invitation for a prominent Catholic theologian to assume a year-long endowed chair position in 2009-10.  The theologian in question is Rosemary Radford Ruether, who wrote the seminal work on Christian feminist theology in 1983, Sexism and God-talk.  Southern California's proud, online, rabidly-conservative Catholic daily rag, the California Catholic Daily, railed against her appointment in an article last week, and national Catholic echo chamber LifeSiteNews.com picked it up as well. (Links here and here if you can stomach it.)  Last Friday, USD issued a statement indicating that Dr. Ruether's appointment was being rescinded and the conservative blogs rejoiced.

So Sue Me!

The great minds at the Republican National Committee are once again demonstrating their transcendent grasp of marketing, finance, and public relations.

In an action so preposterously witless as to scramble the common cranium, the GOP has sent a "cease and desist" letter to CafePress citing trademark infringement on the part of sellers using the term "GOP" or the elephant logo.

Brought to you by...
News Corpse, The Internet's Chronicle Of Media Decay.

About to catch a plane for Austin, but:  About ten days ago I wrote about a  freelance war photographer who committed the sin of taking war photographs -- and not hiding the graphic ones --  and then lost  his embed status in Iraq and getting send packing to Baghdad.  Now I've learned that he is back in the U.S.A.  

Zoriah Miller,  32,  the U.S. photog who goes by the name "Zoriah," was kicked out of his embed after he published on his blog a photo of a dead U.S. Marine, among other strong images. The military says this violated embed rules. Miller says he took every step possible to guarantee that the Marine could not be identified in any way, and that left him within the rules.    The photo was placed with others from a suicide bombing that occurred June 26 in the town of Karmah, near Fallujah.

"I just feel this war has become so sanitized that it was important to show," said Zoriah then. (That angle is a big part of my new book.) He posted warnings on his online blog, Zoriah.net, about the graphic content of the photo.