Red Ink: Texas: March 2006

A Call to Protest

April 21st is San Jacinto Day. On that day, Texas won the battle that would lead to it's independence from Mexico. Yesterday, a Senate Subcommittee with Senators from Arizona, South Carolina, and Massachusetts voted to give millions of illegal invaders the keys to our country. They voted for Amnesty. Also yesterday, thousands of these very same invaders marched in protest all over this country, demanding the same rights and priveledges as citizens. We the Citizens of Texas, along with the citizens of California, New Mexico, and Arizona will be the ones that will be on the sharp end of the lance facing the coming flood of invaders. They will trample our borders, our schools, our hospitals, and our homes as they already have every other time Amnesty was granted. We the people of this great country must show our leaders that WE WILL NOT TAKE THIS ANYMORE! I am calling for a protest of our own.

Where: Outside the Houston Federal Building

When: April 21st, from 3:00pm until whenever

Who: ALL AMERICAN CITIZENS

I encourage all similarly angry citizens in other cities to do the same. Let's make this a National Protest.

WaPo finally notices the Elephant in the Room

Much has been blogged here and elsewhere about The Houston Chronicle's embrace of the blogosphere. I too congratulate Dwight Silverman and Dean Betz, and thier bosses and co-bloggers such as Eric Berger and Leigh Hopper and Loren Steffy and others, for thier bold move to embrace the new media and make it thier own. Recently they were identified in a national survey of newspapers as being THE MOST blogosphere-centric. Quite an accomplishment. The Washington Post has also dipped thier toes into the Blogosphere. They have had growing pains in doing so. Not long ago, they shut off all comments while they dealt with the problem of trolls. Clearly whoever set up the system to begin with had not done thier homework on the blogosphere because trolls are a daily hassle out here in the hinterlands of the new media. They have however re-opened comments after changing and adapting to the new landscape. Now they have gone one step closer to what The Chronicle editorialists like to call "The Ideal State™". They have brought a wolf into the fold, hoping to reach the hearts and minds of those of us in "Flyover Country". Ben Domenech, cofounder of Red State has joined WaPo in launching a new blog, Red America. The elephant in the room is a Republican.

The Houston Press tries to see just how much "front loading" they can do.

Back on March 9th, The Houston Press published an article by Josh Harkinson that appeared to be an exercize in seeing just how much Anti-Nuclear rhetoric and FUD that you could load into an article. The entire article with the exception of the title and the last sentence was nothing more than fearmongering about the dangers of allowing the Russians to design a nuclear power plant. Please take your time and let him know just how disingenuous the article was.

New Media same as the Old Media

The Houston Chronicle, along with many other media outlets with a web presence is experimenting with video clips via a Beta program with AP. AP is working with Microsoft on this project, as a result, Microsoft's old monoloplistic urges come forth yet again. In order to actually WATCH the video, you have to have IE6, Flash 7, AND Windows Media Player 10. All of this means that Mac's, people not running the latest version of Windows (XP or higher is required for Media Player 10), and people running browsers other than Microsoft's are just plain outta luck. Linux is out too. Microsoft says that support for other browsers will come later but there have been no assurances that it will support earlier versions of media player or some other portable streaming video format. You can read some of the bitching and moaning here.

UPDATE:

Now CNN is getting in on the act. Video from thier site must play in Windows Media Player V9 or above, but if you are running Firefox, it will not detect that you have Media Player. To Watch Video on thier site, you have to use Internet Explorer so that it can detect WMP.