A legislative rumble is shaping up in the sunshine state. The cause? An anatomically correct dog statue. No, it’s not ‘real’ issues like immigration, Iraq or the environment, but canine gonads that get people going in Sacramento.

The furor concerns a service dog tribute statue in a public park. The statue is an accurate representation of a living dog, including a faithful representation of the standard netherbits. And for some Californians, this will simply not stand. Apparently, the doggy groin sends the wrong message about the need to spay or neuter your pet. Said local moonbat Dan Nender:

“This is the will of the people… and don’t ask me which people, and we’re going to carry it out.  If this guy doesn’t want to do the work himself, we’ll sneak in there at night and use a Saws-All on it. We cannot have intact testicles on government property.  As California government officials, at least the ones on our side, will attest to, Sacramento is a testicle-free zone.”

Jesus. A tecticle-free zone? This may comes as news to, oh, I don’t know, every male that lives in Sacramento. On the upside, a no-testicle policy may help prevent Nender from passing his genes.

I am constantly amazed at the human capacity for ignoring actual problems and fixate on totally inane issues. Memo to Mr. Nender: read a newspaper. Take a look around. Your country is well down the road to economic, social and environmental collapse. The removal of testicles from a statue will not solve these problems. You are a waste of time and human potential. 

Oh, those wily ad execs. When a national media regulator closes a door, they force open a digital window.

Several junk peddlers, including McDonald’s, Starburst, Haribo and Skittles have turned to the Internet to reach their pint-sized consumers after the UK’s media regulator, Ofcom, made it difficult to advertise on television. Starting this year, ads for high fat, salt or sugar brands have been banned from children’s TV. Right now, the ban is for programming aimed at 4-9 year-olds, although it will be extended to teenagers in January 2008. The new regulations were implemented after UK citizens realized their national enthusiasm for deep-frying may have some drawbacks.

Skittles reportedly paid a six-figure sum to social networking site Bebo for it’s very own page. The site has received over 50,000 visits, and sports 3,500 friends. This strikes me as odd: I have never been friends, or even particularly friendly, with candy. Kind of makes me want to set up a Bebo of Myspace page for something really abstract, like ‘time’ or maybe ’stupidity’, and see how many friends they get.

No surprises here- kids are aggressively hunted by advertisers, eager to exploit new technology to boost the bottom line. But when those advertisers are hocking products with serious health implications, it’s time to get worried. Too bad the social networking sites are also in thrall to the almighty profit motive, making it all but certain Kidvertising on line will only get worse. I’m not one to advocate for blanket regulation of the Internet, but some targeted policy interventions are needed to protect its most vulnerable users.

Heathrow Airport is seeking an injunction to prevent anyone involved with the Camp for Climate Change from participating in a peaceful protest in three weeks.

Heathrow has a carbon footprint roughly equivalent to a small country. No fooling.

The injunction seeks to prevent ” “all persons acting as members, participants or supporters” of anti-aviation group Plane Stupid, anti-noise group HACAN and AirportWatch from setting foot on Heathrow property, or even using any of the ‘arterial infrastructure’ that leads to the airport. This includes tube services, British Rail, and sections of the M25 and M4 motorways. So, basically most of west London.

Here’s the thing: Airportwatch is actually an umbrella organization that includes the National Trust, the RSPB, the Woodland Trust, the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, Transport 2000, and Friends of the Earth. Prince Charles is the president of the National Trust, and QEII is the parton for the RSPB and CPRE. Whoops.  

Hysterical over-reaction, profound stupidity or draconian strategy? Hard to say. But here’s Greenpeace‘s take:

When we got the news, after sitting around open-mouthed for a bit, we suspected that BAA didn’t know who or what AirportWatch was; they’d panicked, we thought. Hadn’t done their research.

But ‘a source’ who’s spoken to BAA has just told us that BAA is deliberately making the ban as broad as possible, and leaving it up to the police to apply it with common sense. Which means, if BAA wins, the police will have the right to stop you, me or Her Maj from, say, getting on “all railway trains and carriages operating upon the Piccadilly line”…

A lesson learned for the fight against climate change: the battle carries to unexpected places, has way more on the line than you could ever imagine, and leads to the most bizarre reactions.

Let it never be said the Republican Party doesn’t know how to take care of its base.

The Manchester, NH Republican Council will hold a fundraiser where for the low, low price of $25, you can fire a range of combat weapons. Want to shoot an Uzi? Pop off a few hundred rounds through an M-60? The Republicans are here for you.

Said Organizer Jerry Thibodeau:

“It’s a fun day. It’s a family day. It’s quite exciting.”

A family day? Awesome! Come on down, junior! Fire a machine gun! Get your first taste of the weapon that, thanks to the Republican Party, you’ll be firing at Iraqi insurgents in 10 years.

The Times has a list of the top 50 best movie robots.

A pretty comprehensive list, except Optimus Prime is only #30. C’mon now. He deserves at least top 10.

The spectacularly controversial academic was turfed out of his tenured position in an 8-1 vote by the University’s Board of Regents. Churchill has ten days to appeal the decision, but has already indicated he will challenge his termination in court.

Churchill, professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, garnered international attention when he referred to 9/11 victims as ‘technocrats’ and ‘little Eichmanns‘ in the essay Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. The furor over these terrorist-victims-as-nazis remarks led to the cancellation of several speaking engagements, widespread media attention, and made Churchill a cause celebre of the hysterical right, including everyone’s favourite media jackass, Bill O’Reilly.

The University of Colorado initially supported Churchill’s right to free speech, but subsequently launched an investigation into his scholarly work. A special investigatory committee allegedly found numerous examples of ‘research misconduct’- bad citation, plagiarism, etc.- in his scholarship. The university maintains his termination is based on his academic record, not his controversial statements.

This, of course, is slightly suspect. A few weeks ago I posted on Norman Finkelstein, another academic denied tenure apparently for the controversial and confrontational style of his scholarship. I made the basic point that academia suffers when free debate and comment are stifled by controversy-adverse university administrators. Now, there are a few differences between Churchill and Finkelstein. Finkelstein was denied tenure, whereas Churchill was removed from a tenured position. The revocation of tenure is unquestionably a more extreme penalty.

But the big difference is this: Churchill is an idiot, and Finkelstein is not. Anybody, anywhere, who suggests that the victims of 9/11 deserved to die in retribution for the USA’s numerous atrocities is interested only in perpetuating a cycle of violence and justifying the murder of innocent civilians. His comparison of the twin tower victims to Adolph Eichmann demonstrates either a baffling misapprehension of history or an inexcusable distortion of fact to make a crass political point. Worst of all, Churchill’s aspersions give fodder to right-wing groups like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and David Horowitz’s Freedom Center in their continued putsch of left-wing views from academia. These groups erroneously take extreme cases as typical, and as an extreme case, Churchill is a godsend.

Despite all this (and as ‘all this’ lists go, this one is substantial), any attempt to silence political speech within a university is damaging to basic freedom of expression. Churchill may say idiotic things and couch his arguments in unecessarily inflammatory rhetoric, but his right to criticize is sacrosanct. And the case against Churchill’s scholarly record is problematic. Numerous colleagues have criticized UC Boulder’s assessment of Churchill’s scholarship. Cornell Professor Eric Cheyfitz claims the investigatory committee did not include expert’s in Churchill’s field and relied to heavily on his scholarly opponents for input. Moreover, what the committee labelled misconduct are examples of the deep controversey surrounding Churchill’s primary research interest, the history of aboriginal North Americans.  Said Cheyfitz:

“What they’ve done is turn an academic debate into an indictment of one side of that debate.”

The timing of UC Boulder’s investigation is also suspect. Said Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education:

“Given that this [investigation] was initially launched because of his public opinions, he’s going to have an argument that this was all pretextual…by launching the investigation initially because people were angry about what he had said, not because of these pre-existing claims of academic misconduct.”

Dahlia Lithwick brilliantly distills the problem with firing Churchill in her Slate article, Stupidity as a Firing Offense (I’ve edited the following sections for brevity):

If academic tenure means anything at all, it means professors must be allowed to say and write what they choose without fearing removal by popular referendum….Churchill’s silly notions have been in the public domain for years. Firing him only now suggests that Bill O’Reilly, as opposed to his faculty peers, gets the deciding vote on who is allowed to teach our young people.

Churchill’s 9/11 comments were patently offensive. But they were not hate speech, they were not treason, and they were not in any sense a call to imminent violence on the part of his listeners. Read in context, his words are the purest form of political speech. Does that mean students have to take his classes? No. Does it mean any university needs to invite him to speak or even hire him in the first place? No. But does it mean that the governor or the board of regents are entitled to remove him now, simply because some “taxpayer money” goes to pay his salary? No. That would make virtually every professorship in the land subject to a heckler’s veto….

….Virtually everyone who has called for Churchill’s removal makes the same argument: “What if it was your son/husband/mother killed in the towers?” But that is not an argument for suppressing speech—particularly on college campuses and particularly at a forum ostensibly testing the “limits of dissent.” It’s an argument for making all political discourse conform to the sensibilities of the most fragile victim. It’s an argument for banning any discussions of the American Revolution in history classes because some student may have burnt her tongue on a mug of tea once.

Lithwick also points to a quote by John Stuart Mill:

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Universities and university faculties are engines of debate. If popular opinion, or worse still, the opinion of right-wing blowhards, is allowed to determine the limits of political discourse, then the quality of that discussion will be compromised. Let Churchill’s scholarship and opinions stand on their own merit. Mill has the right idea: the collision of error and truth inevitably strengthens the truth. If we silence Churchill, it is no victory for knowledge or propriety. It truncates debate, and compromises the legitimacy of opposing views. Freedom is a messy thing. To use a peanut butter analogy, you’ve got to take the crunchy with the smooth.

I’ll admit it’s a pretty interesting idea. Ask Americans to upload questions to YouTube, and have a bunch of Democratic presidential hopefuls respond in a debate format. But there was an undercurrent of smugness to the whole affair- a kind of self-congratulatory “look how hip and with-it we are”. A message that rings a little hollow when it comes from eight well-heeled members of the political establishment.

The New York Times was also annoyed, observing that while the technology may have changed, the candidates remain largely the same. The Washington Post was more positive, saying the event allowed for a greater diversity of questions and questioners than in a typical debate. With topics ranging from gay marriage, health care, Iraq and global warming (asked by a guy dressed as a snowman), the point is well taken. The WP also coins the phrase ‘The YouTube Effect’,  a term destined to join the ‘CNN Effect’ in the pantheon of big ideas that didn’t amount to much.

There are several good reasons why the ‘YouTube Effect’ is another empty-calorie political fad. Behind the hijinx and techno-optimism, there’s a serious problem that undermines any hope of revitalizing democracy through the Internet. The problem is access. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, only 47 per cent of Americans have a broadband connection at home. The disparities also increase across demographic lines:

• Only 31 per cent of rural Americans have broadband, compared to 52 per cent of urban individuals;
• Only 40 per cent of African Americans have high-speed Internet, compared to 48 per cent of white individuals;
• A whopping 70 per cent of college-educated individuals have broadband, compared to only 34 per cent of high school graduates (and 21 per cent of individuals who failed to complete high school); and
• 76 per cent individuals with an income of over $75K use broadband internet, while only 36 per cent of low-income earners have high speed access.

Based on this data, it is clear the majority of Americans lack the technological tools to participate in a ‘YouTube’ democracy. Any talk of the ‘inclusive’ and ‘participatory’ political Internet is therefore premature. On a balance of probabilities, the citizens who participated in the YouTube Democratic debate were likely middle class, educated, white and urban. In other words, the individuals most politically active in the offline world anyway. The NYT was right to observe that that new debate format couldn’t escape the same old candidates. But they missed the fact it also brought out the same old voters. The Internet may be a useful tool for engaging the engaged, but it is far from a silver bullet solution to the crisis of political participation in the United States.

The Internet is a stunningly effective medium for information exchange. But without widespread Internet access, all that knowledge won’t revolutionize political systems (especially when YouTube owner and debate sponsor Google helps autocratic regimes censor the Internet). True, the gaps in broadband access are steadily closing. But even if the United States had totally equitable Internet access, there’s no guarantee every citizen would use their computer to engage with the democratic system. There’s a lot of porn on the Internet. And for every thoughtful political question on YouTube, there’s 50,000 videos of somebody shooting a bottle rocket into their groin.

So, what to make of the YouTube debate? An interesting experiment, a footnote to the 2008 presidential election? Perhaps. It was certainly not a revolution in political communication, or a radical step in democratic politics. It was the same old pony, with a few new ribbons. Greater political participation depends crucially on education, adequate information, a desire to engage, and- dare I say it- the responsiveness of the political system to citizen input. These criteria are variously weak or entirely absent from the political systems of the West. The United States is everyone’s favourite democratic under-achiever, but Canada and the UK aren’t far behind. As citizens, we need to focus on the immense social and political task of buidling a better political culture. I can’t help but think YouTube debates are little more than flashy distractions on a long and grinding road.