Why is there invariably a new terror alert right after the neocons suffer a serious setback?

Lieberman loses (and by implication, the right wing agenda suffers.) Cheney then announces antiwar sentiment helps al-Qaeda, quickly followed by news of a Hideous New Plot to blow stuff up by (it’s alleged but with no actual proof yet) that al-Qaeda may be involved.

This new Hideous Plot was still in the works, nothing has been released about those arrested, and the timing is sure suspicious.

Hey, I don’t want to be in a plane that gets blown up, so if the plot was real, then great, someone did superb police work. But the Bushies are certainly known for hyping terrorist threats as a way to stay in power, so that’s sure a possibility too. It’s not like they aren’t known for Makin’ Shit Up.

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As many as 70,000 of the 93,000 signatures turned in Monday by Carl Romanelli, Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate, are invalid, Democrats claimed yesterday.

Romanelli’s signature campaign was financed by right wing supporters of incumbent Rick Santorum. Democrats are trying to get Romanelli’s signatures invalidated.

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“Will Chavez replace Castro?” asked journalist Gwynne Dyer starting in at least Oct. 21, 2005.

Now he has another article on the same topic, and it’s getting worldwide play. He’s sees a possible Venezuela-Cuba partnership with Chavez as joint president. It gets odder. He cites Ana Faya, former member of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party who “fled to Canada in 2000″ as the first to seriously suggest such a union. She says “it wouldn’t be outrageous.”

Can any of you old Cuba hands explain what’s going on here? Hey, such a joint government might be a fine idea (assuming the citizens of both countries agreed!)  but I find it bizarre an expat who presumably is anti-Cuba thinks the idea could fly and isn’t overtly hostile to it.

[tags]Cuba,Castro,Chavez,Venezuela[/tags]

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(This is the first in a series of posts on Fair Use and blogging)

Many bloggers, including me until I researched it, assume “Fair Use” means you can quote freely from any news source on your blog without fear of copyright infringement. Sorry to pop the bubble, but this just ain’t so.

Short quotations are generally considered fair use. Adding your own thoughts and comments is “transformative”, and thus aids in having it considered fair use. So is doing a parody of the quoted text. Satire, though, isn’t treated the same as parody because it’s not transformative.

Confused? Me too. There are no clear guidelines, no absolute way to judge. The most important criteria is the effect on the market. If by copying the text you decrease its current or future market value, then it probably isn’t fair use. For example, if you extensively quote from an article that someone was paid to write, and it can be shown they lost income because no one wanted to pay to re-publish it after that, then they could have grounds to recover that income.

A few guidelines.

Keep the quotes brief.
Add your own thoughts and comments.
Always provide a link back to the original article.
Try paraphrasing, maybe you don’t need to quote.

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Dubya has offered to help Lieberman and the head of Republican Party is refusing to endorse the Connecticut Republican candidate for Senate. And this is just the day after Holy Joe crashed and burned.

We look forward to more exciting machinations and histrionics as both parties continue to ignore that thousands of innocents are dying in Lebanon.

[tags]Ned Lamont,Joe Lieberman[/tags]

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