I think that's about right - even for Tennessee, where our current governor is avoiding tax increases and using spending cuts to balance the budget. But Tennesseans are still saddled with last year's tax increase, which will cost them more than $1 billion a year every year. And the new administration's effective use of spending reductions to balance the budget is merely proving to Tennesseans that, had the prior governor done the same thing for the past four years, last year's tax increase would have been unnecessary. And, the fact is, had the weak TEL in Tennessee's constitution been adhered to over the past 20 years, Tennessee today would have a multi-billion-dollar revenue surplus. For more on that, see my "white paper" on the Taxpayers Bill of Rights, available by clicking here.

Also, here's another article by Michael New on TELs.

Corruption in the Capital?

It looks unethical and you'd think it is criminal, but state Sen. Jerry Cooper apparently broke no laws when he abused his position of power to put hundreds of thousands of dollars in his pocket at taxpayers' expense. Cooper should resign. He won't.

Are Weblogs Journalism?

Yes, says Dave Winer, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, and publisher of Scripting News, a weblog about online publishing.

Web logs are journalism. Have they had a big impact? Absolutely. When a big story hits, I don 't necessarily trust the professional journalists to tell me what's going on. If I can get the Web logs from the people who were actually involved, I'll take that. A really remarkable thing came out from the BBC, where they asked amateur photographers to send them pictures. So they're jumping onto the trend that's going to grow and grow and grow. With the Columbia disaster, where did the pictures come from? Not from professional journalists. The typical news article consists of quotes from interviews and a little bit of connective stuff and some facts, or whatever. Mostly it's quotes from people. If I can get the quotes with no middleman in between - what exactly did CNN add to all the pictures? Maybe they earned their salaries a little bit, but web logs have become journalism, and it's much richer. Journalism is a high calling, but it's really no more than points of view on what's taking place. I think the pros are going to use this tech, and they are doing it more and more.

Freelance journalist Glenn Fleishman has some thoughts on the question. So does journalist and blogger Jeff Walsh. Also, the topic comes up from time to time at Corante.com's blog on blogging.

For more on this, read yesterday's post, On Journalism.

February 24, 2003

He Needs Killin'

Who cares if Osama bin Laden is still alive, says Greg Buete. The top dangerous man in al Qaeda is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed:

In addition to Sept. 11, Mohammed helped plan the 1996 bombing of a U.S. military facility in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 African embassy bombings, the April 2002 Tunisian synagogue blast, and the recent bombing of a Bali nightclub that killed 200 people. He is believed to have 60 aliases and scores of passports. And, of course, Mohammed personally trained three of the four pilots for Sept. 11 - the Hamburg cell - and controlled the operation's funding.

He's in every relevant event - one senior U.S. intelligence official calls him the "Forrest Gump" of terrorism. Former CIA agent Bob Baer told the UPI that Khalid Mohammed was personally behind the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl; Baer and Pearl were working together to find Mohammed. Unfortunately, Pearl found him - but not the warm and friendly version that Fouda met.

As the main contact point between al Qaeda and Southeast Asian terror groups Mohammed has his hands in every aspect of al Qaeda operations including being a personal contact to Jemaah Islamiah's operational leader, Riduan Isamuddin (Hanbali). As the capture of Binalshibh was essential to learn the habits of Khalid Mohammed, the capture of Mohammed could uncover the whole bin Laden network including its SE Asian links.

We better hurry. From the Fouda interview there is indication that Mohammed is planning an attack worse than Sept. 11. The attacks on Washington D.C. and New York City were the realization of years of planning and improving the failed Bojinka plot. Mohammed learned from Bojinka's failure to detail every aspect of a major attack, patiently mulling it over a long time.

In the interview Mohammed told Fouda that the al Qaeda military committee had initially targeted nuclear plants for Sept. 11 but that the idea was dropped because the attack might "get out of hand." Fouda says that Mohammed made it clear to him that al Qaeda would target nuclear stations in the future. Perhaps too much time has been spent wondering which capital building al Qaeda will hit next. Perhaps Mohammed has broadcast the next target loud and clear.

Economic Health Debate

So, SKB thinks there's a housing bubble. Funny, because Alan Greenspan doesn’t.

Many economists see healthy demand and rising incomes underpinning the housing boom, and reject predictions of a housing bubble on the national level. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said last week in congressional testimony that housing construction is in balance with demand. "We're effectively not building up a glut of excess housing," he said.

My take on the economy is it is not as bad as portrayed by some, but needs improvement. But mostly what it needs is for people to stop whining and stop worrying. I see reports that business is "worried" about war with Iraq. Why? Their troops are no match for ours, and the people of Iraq or widely reported as secretly ready to welcome the U.S. as liberators. There is no quagmire ahead. If I was a businessman, I'd be worried if we don't go to war and remove Saddam Hussein from power - worried that he'll soon give the makings of a dirty bomb to his friends in al Qaeda, and the resulting death in New York or Baltimore or DC would make the post-September 11 economic slide look like irrational exuberance.

On Journalism

What makes a journalist? Donald Sensing explores that question in this worthwhile piece of commentary today, in response to an exchange between Sensing and two Nashville radio hosts over weblogging and journalistic "accountability." I wholeheartedly agree with every word Rev. Sensing writes.

Here's a few of them:

Karlen was very bothered that (heaven forfend!) non-journalists are able to go onto the internet and write whatever they want to with no accountability! Please pass the smelling salts, I might faint. Personally, I remember this thing called the First Amendment, which I don't think applies only to journalists. When other people exercise it, it doesn't offend me.

There are at least two pertinent facts here: Journalism is a job, not a profession. In fact, I have extensive formal journalism training, and I can tell you that there is no particular skill to it that is particularly difficult or unobtainable by average people. There is no "accountability" of journalists in any meaningful sense. There is no equivalent of a bar exam for journalists. There is no licensing procedure for journalists. There is no minimum education level required, nor any particular special kind of training at all. Fill out an employment application, get hired at minimum wage or better, and presto, you're a journalist. Or just take a pad and pencil, call some folks on the phone and do some interviews, and you're a journalist, too. Think not? Read on.

No one expects "Connie Chung Tonight" to be canceled or to change much any time soon. But executives say they are not dismissing questions about its future. Ms. Chung's predicament symbolizes a shift, even in the last month, in the network's thinking about its direction in a cable news world dominated by Fox News Channel, which is owned by the News Corporation. Generally, executives are coming to accept, if reluctantly, CNN's status as the No. 2 channel and are focusing on how to attract educated, more affluent viewers who attract premium advertisers.

It's not surprising they don't get it. Most mainstream journalists don't - and I say that as one who holds a journalism degree, and has spent more than 15 years doing journalism in various forms - newspapers, magazines and online. We're still early in this journalistic revolution, folks. You can't expect most radio, TV or print journalists who have spent their entire career learning, doing and perfecting top-down journalism to grasp the nature of the new grassroots journalism. Even a radio show like the one Sensing was on doesn't feature the voices of the common man - just an endless parade of elites from politics, business, government and religion. Weblogs provide a journalistic outlet for anyone. Don't like what you read in The Daily Fishwrapper or heard on the local radio talkathon? Start a blog and say so, then email the link to some well-trafficked blogs and hope someone refers traffic to you. Soon, you might be talking to a thousand people. Or 100,000. This naturally scares the bejeebers out of the "professionals" who like being in control of the "free flow" of ideas.

I practice the craft of journalism on a daily basis, in a variety of forms. Ever since November 2001, I've spent a lot of time learning and doing weblog-based journalism. I started this blog Nov. 30, 2001, as a companion to a weekly newspaper column I wrote for a small start-up traditional daily . The idea was to provide readers of that column with an online page of links to source material related to my columns, but it soon evolved into much more. I stopped writing the column almost a year ago. Today, the blog generates far more reader reaction and comment than the newspaper column ever did. I've had guest columns published in major newspapers - The Tennessean, and the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, with circulations well above 100,000, yet it is the weblog, not those columns, which have generated the most emails.

No media tool allows for more accountability and more-rapid correcting of error than weblogs. None. And blog articles - which, incidentally, tend to be commentary rather than straight news - are often better referenced than anything you'll read in your local daily. Bloggers won't just tell you what they think about something - they'll provide you links to the relevant source materials, and even links to other blogs that take a different point of view. Rev. Sensing quotes the SPJ "Code of Ethics" in its entirety - and links to it. What are the chances he would deliberately misquote it? Zero. He linked to it - you can read it for yourself. The Internet makes it easy to fact-check bloggers - which creates more pressure on bloggers to get their facts right.

Blogs most certainly correct errors faster than radio shows. Think about it - blogs by their very nature of linking to other blogs and being linked to by other blogs, have a form of built-in peer review. If Sensing's essay today stated something as a "fact" which was not, he'll be corrected on another blog. And he’ll probably note the correction on his site – or link to it. Good bloggers tend to point to other blogs that DISAGREE with them on some fact or analysis. There's a degree of openness to the exchange of ideas that enhances both the depth of the information and its credibility.

Compare that to a radio show - even a high-minded two-hour radio show dedicated to discussion of public issues. Once that radio show is in the can, it's permanent and unchangeable. Radio shows enshrine their errors and lack of knowledge forever on tape. Sure, sometimes a caller calls in and corrects an error, but not all callers get on the air, and not all errors are corrected. And on the show Sensing describes, they don't take calls - only emails and faxes, and then only some of those. I listen to the show almost every day and not a day goes by in which the show ends with some factual error made by a host or guest left uncorrected. That's not criticism - humans are imperfect beings, errors happen, and not all of them get corrected. But I haven't heard radio shows taking call-ins from other radio shows in order to dispute some fact or opinion. Blogs do that, in real-time, with extensive hyperlinks to other articles, documents and source materials they cite.

When's the last time you saw a footnote in a newspaper? When's the last time you were listening to talk radio and another talk radio host from a different show called in to correct an error? Never and never. Blogs do both.

Now, do as Sensing says: read on.

February 20, 2003

The Future of Journalism

You have probably seen those Sprint commercials that describe the new Sprint cellphones that allow the user to take a digital photo and email it? Now an Irish company has developed software that will allow people to post text, images and sound files to their weblogs via wireless devices and short-message-service email. This is going to change journalism.

February 18, 2003

The Second Front

Why is North Korea threatening to abandon the truce agreement that ended hostilities in the Korean War? Imagine, if you will, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, North Korea's Kim Jong Il., and China's Jiang Zemin - three unelected dictators who all view the U.S. as an adversary - devising strategy. Farfetched? No. China was North Korea's ally in the Korean War. China rebuilt Iraq's military telecommunications infrastructure after the Gulf War, installing a difficult-to-destroy underground fiber optic network. And Chinese weaponry and even some dead Chinese who fought alongside the Taliban were found in Afghanistan after the battle of Tora Bora. It's not hard to see China as the go-between helping Iraq by encouraging North Korea to ratchet up the nuclear threat, rattle sabers and make a resumption of the Korean War seem almost inevitable. Such posturing serves three strategic purposes.

1. It causes some politicians in the West - both in the U.S. and Europe - to suggest that focusing on Iraq is misguided and the North Korea is the real threat, leading to a weakened diplomatic response and the ongoing inability of the U.N. to put a little backbone into its resolutions. 2. It causes the always weak-kneed French - who have a veto on the U.N. Security Council - to become even more spineless. 3. It presents the U.S. president and the U.S. military with the need to divert some attention and resources away from Iraq in order to deter North Korea.

Michael Ledeen and others have written often about how a U.S. invasion of Iraq may well be met by a counterattack by Hezbollah - which is backed by the regimes in Syria and Iran, the latter of which has close ties to China. In that scenario, Hezbollah would attack Israel and, perhaps, U.S. forces in western Iraq. Iran may get involved too - they've recently tested ballistic missiles they secured from (drum roll please) North Korea. Things may get very dicey very fast. But, then, that' s what you'd expect if you confront the Axis of Evil and its accomplices. The alternative, to do nothing, would simply invite more aggression, more threat, more danger - and a wider, tougher, bloodier war a few years down the road. The world learned that in the 1930s when it allowed Hitler to re-militarize the Rhineland, in violation of treaty agreements. Western Europe could have strangled Hitler in his crib then, but chose instead to accept his promises of peace.

The War on Terror is a global battle, we were told not long after Sept. 11. Indeed it is, and we can fight it now. Or later.

February 17, 2003

Online Sales Tax: No Big Deal

For years, you've heard that a major factor in Tennessee's budget crisis is the state's inability to collect taxes on purchases made over the Internet. Well, now some of the largest retailers in the nation are voluntarily collecting those sales taxes for Tennessee and every other state that has sales taxes. And guess what: it's going to amount to mere pennies, fiscally speaking. Here it is in the New York Times:

Analysts say the online sales taxes from the recent new retail converts are likely to yield little more than $30 million in new online sales tax revenue this year — which would not amount to much as it is split up among the nation's 7,500 or so state and local tax jurisdictions.

The largest portion of the $51 billion total online sales that Jupiter is forecasting is expected to go to big Internet-only retailers that have shown little inclination to collect sales taxes. Holdouts like Amazon resist collecting sales taxes because they say it would be too burdensome to collect and dispense them on behalf of so many different jurisdictions. And they currently have federal law on their side. The Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that a company selling only online, or through catalogs or by telephone, is not obliged to collect local sales taxes from customers, except in states where the merchants actually have a physical presence, like a warehouse or a call center. In taxation parlance, such physical presences establishes a "nexus" between the retailer and those states.

A TABOR Wildfire?

John Hood, president of the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina and publisher of the Carolina Journal, reports that legislators there are introducing some smart proposals to prevent or lessen future budget crises in that state.

Sen. Fern Shubert of Union County, newly installed as the Republican Whip in that chamber, filed legislation this week to change the way the governor and legislature fashion North Carolina’s state budget. Given that we are about to head into a fourth-straight year of “unforeseen” budget deficits, it would be hard to argue that the process doesn’t need fixing. In her bill, Shubert is resurrecting the old and praiseworthy idea of ditching revenue forecasting in favor of spending only as much revenue as has already come in the previous year.

By itself, this bill would eliminate the fiscal guesswork and reduce the ability of big-spenders to use budget-gap years to force tax increases on us, but it would not necessarily rein in those big-spending proclivities. After all, there are fiscal years in which state revenues can grow 7, 8, 9, or as much as 10 percent. In order to keep lawmakers from misinterpreting Shubert’s reform as an excuse to spend whatever is in the kitty, North Carolina also needs a constitutional cap on the annual growth of state spending.

States such as Colorado with similar policies have grown modestly, avoided massive deficits, and cut taxes. Fortunately, this week saw the introduction of such a spending cap by Rep. John Blust, a Greensboro Republican. It would limit annual growth to inflation plus population – in effect holding the real cost of state government per person constant.

Also, here’s a link to a Locke Foundation report on the real cause of North Carolina’s budget crisis: overspending.

Thanks to Ben Cunningham for bringing Hood's article to my attention.

February 10, 2003

Balance

The Tennessean says anti-war protestors will great President Bush today. No mention in the story of whether the paper bothered to try to determine if Bush will also be greeted by demonstrators in favor of his Iraq policies. Last time the president was here, he was also greated by Iraqi nationals like these:

P. Casey Daley/Tennessean staff
Hoping to see President Bush, Safaa Albadran, 4, stands outside the downtown convention center under a banner held by her father, Karim, left, proclaiming "Saddam: Out - Democracy In."

February 1, 2003

Ignoring Facts, Constitution

Online shopping makes up less than 1.5 percent of total retail shopping. It is miniscule. But The Tennessean is hot to have it taxed. Their editorial on the subject is a mishmash of half-truths and shouldn't be taken seriously. For one, the main problem with taxing online sales is the Commerce Clause of the federal constitution, and Congress can't legislate around that. The Commerce Clause forbids states from levying taxes outside their borders. Under that clause, Tennessee may not force a merchant in Kentucky to collect Tennessee's sales tax if the Kentucky merchant does not have a physical presence in the state of Tennessee at the time of the transaction. Online merchants in other states that do not have a warehouse or other physical presence in Tennessee can not be required to collect the Tennessee sales tax when they sell something to a Tennessee resident and ship it to them. (They would have to charge the tax if they delivered the item.)

A company that has no physical presence in Tennessee does not charge sales taxes. This is fair - the company puts absolutely zero strain on any Tennessee government-provided service.

More later.