Linkatharsis: she's got the terrible Tuesdays

What's going on in this photograph?


a) Clap Your Hands Say Yeah tickets on sale
b) Genocide
c) America catches soccer fever!
d) Henrico County (Va) school system sells 1,000 iBooks for $50 each (more pics of the iBook riot in the link)

Hey, remember that "terrorist" they shot in London, you know that guy who wore "a heavy winter Jacket" and "ran into the subway station"? Well, about that guy...

After the news of the commercial release of Fiona's Extraordinary Machine, Coolfer puts his foot on the collective necks of journalists (and probably bloggers too) and rubs their faces in the mud.

Kids, you might want to hold off on that heroin. Let a responsible adult examine your stash first.

After getting in a couple of jabs in his beef against Rob Schneider, Ebert lands a haymaker:

But Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, Goldstein is not qualified to complain that Columbia financed 'Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo' while passing on the opportunity to participate in 'Million Dollar Baby,' 'Ray,' 'The Aviator,' 'Sideways' and 'Finding Neverland.' As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.

It looks like Bomani had basically the same reaction as I did to the Bob Dole Op-Ed in the Times. Yeah, it's great that Dole was sticking up for the press. But it's really clear he understands neither the severity of outing a CIA agent for petty politics nor how a journalistic shield law operates.

A shield law protects the confidentiality of a source who talks to the press about a crime - i.e. the police can't compel a reporter to release the identity of an anonymous drug dealer. It does not protect a source who isn't talking about a crime, but rather, committing a crime by talking.

For example, the California shield law didn't protect an Apple rumor site and its source at Apple because, California's trade secret law was violated when the anonymous source released the information to the site and the site published the information. Likewise in the Plame case, the crime was in releasing the information, and Judith Miller was, depending on how you look at it, an accessory or an enabler of the crime.

NPR's On The Media had a pretty informative segment on this very issue a few weeks back and made the distinction a lot clearer than I just did. You can listen or read here.