Full disclosure: I am not a lawyer. I never trained as a lawyer, never studied the law, and, in fact, know practically nothing about the law except what I have picked up on street corners and back alleyways. (That last statement could be pressed into service about just about any and all subjects under the sun, about which I know practically little or nothing at all.) So, it's all IMHO and YMMMV and PDNTTAH and so on and so forth.
Under our legal system, we have extended to several groups specific privileges to be exempted from some of the normal workings of the law, and we do this not because the people or professions involved are peculiar in their importance, nor to make the lives and work of the people involved easier, but because we recognize in each of these privileges a definite and specific benefit to society as a whole.
We speculate that society is benefitted by not forcing spouses to testify against each other, because stable families are one of the basic building blocks of a stable civil society, and allowing the state to pit one spouse against another would undermine that institution.
We believe that the overall health of our society is improved if individuals can speak franky and forthrightly to their doctors without fear that their conversations will be revealed, and that our mental health is supported by a similar privilege for psychologists, psychiatrists and other therapists.
Similarly, we extend the same privilege to spiritual advisors and clerics, on the assumption that our collective spiritual well-being is served by protecting some of their specific conversations.
With journalists, the theory is, I believe, that our civic health depends to some extent on having an open and transparent society in which information that is important to all citizens is not suppressed or destroyed by those in positions of power, whether inside our various governments, or in the corporations that control so many aspects of our lives. The journalistic privilege, incomplete and patchy as it is, is in place not to make the lives of journalists easier, or to help them honor promises to their sources (because those promises may or may not be serving the public interest), but to help maximize the flow of information from inside organizations and bureaucracies that tend to want to be closed.
In short, a journalist should have the privilege of protecting his or her source of information, when that information is coming from a whistleblower and serves to provide greater transparency for the groups that rule our lives.
It's quite a different matter when the information being leaked is coming not from whistleblowers who hope to facilitate the uncovering of wrong-doing, but from those people who actually sit at or very near the apex of power, and its release is not promoting openness and transparency, but being used as a cudgel to punish whistleblowers by discrediting them or wrecking their lives. This is even more the case when the leakage of information is, in and of itself, a crime, an act of wrongdoing serving a selfish and insular purpose.
In those circumstances, journalists should most definitely not be extended any privilege to withhold their sources from official investigations of wrongdoing, because doing so does not in any well benefit society at large. Journalists who refuse to reveal those sources, once the true nature and purpose of the leak is clear, are not acting honorably or as good citizens, because by doing so they become pawns for the bad guys and facilitators of their despicable acts.
If journalists invoke such a privilege under those circumstances without knowing that they are helping those involved in wrongdoing, they are simply tools, useful idiots, but if they know, and go ahead and stand on "principle" anyway, they are plainly nothing but prostitutes.
absolutist
aggresive
anti-Constitutional
anti-intellectual
arrogant
authoritarian
blame-placers
blameworthy
blinkered
buckpassers
calculating
class warriors
clueless
compassionless
con artists
conniving
conscienceless
conspiratorial
corrupt
craven
criminal
crooked
culpable
damaging
dangerous
deadly
debased
deceitful
delusional
despotic
destructive
devious
disconnected
dishonorable
dishonest
disingenuous
disrespectful
dogmatic
doomed
fanatical
fantasists
felonious
hateful
heinous
hostile to science
hypocritical
ideologues
ignorant
immoral
incompetent
indifferent
inflexible
insensitive
insincere
irrational
isolated
kleptocratic
lacking in empathy
lacking in public spirit
liars
mendacious
misleading
mistrustful
non-rational
not candid
not "reality-based"
not trustworthy
oblivious
oligarchic
opportunistic
out of control
pernicious
perverse
philistine
plutocratic
prevaricating
propagandists
rapacious
relentless
reprehensible
rigid
scandalous
schemers
selfish
secretive
shameless
sleazy
tricky
unAmerican
uncaring
uncivil
uncompromising
unconstitutional
undemocratic
unethical
unpopular
unprincipled
unrealistic
unreliable
unrepresentative
unscientific
unscrupulous
unsympathetic
venal
vile
virtueless
warmongers
wicked
without integrity
wrong-headed
Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
recently seen
i've got a little list...
Elliott Abrams
Steven Abrams (Kansas BofE)
David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
Pat Buchanan
Bill Buckingham (Dover BofE)
George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
Bruce Chapman (DI)
Dick Cheney
Lynne Cheney
Richard Cohen
The Coors Family
Ann Coulter
Michael Crichton
Lanny Davis
Tom DeLay
William A. Dembski
James Dobson
Leonard Downie (WaPo)
Dinesh D’Souza
Gregg Easterbrook
Jerry Falwell
Douglas Feith
Arthur Finkelstein
Bill Frist
George Gilder
Newt Gingrich
John Gibson (FNC)
Alberto Gonzalez
Rudolph Giuliani
Sean Hannity
Katherine Harris
Fred Hiatt (WaPo)
Christopher Hitchens
David Horowitz
Don Imus
James F. Inhofe
Jesse Jackson
Philip E. Johnson
Daryn Kagan
Joe Klein
Phil Kline
Ron Klink
William Kristol
Ken Lay
Joe Lieberman
Rush Limbaugh
Trent Lott
Frank Luntz
"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)
Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
Al Sharpton
Ron Silver
John Solomon (WaPo)
Margaret Spellings
Kenneth Starr
Randall Terry
Clarence Thomas
Richard Thompson (TMLC)
Donald Trump
Richard Viguere
Donald Wildmon
Paul Wolfowitz
Bob Woodward (WaPo)
John Yoo
guest-blogging
All the fine sites I've
guest-blogged for:
Be sure to visit them all!!
recent listening
influences
John Adams
Laurie Anderson
Aphex Twin
Isaac Asimov
Fred Astaire
J.G. Ballard
The Beatles
Busby Berkeley
John Cage
"Catch-22"
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke
Elvis Costello
Richard Dawkins
Daniel C. Dennett
Philip K. Dick
Kevin Drum
Brian Eno
Fela
Firesign Theatre
Eliot Gelwan
William Gibson
Philip Glass
David Gordon
Stephen Jay Gould
Dashiell Hammett
"The Harder They Come"
Robert Heinlein
Joseph Heller
Frank Herbert
Douglas Hofstadter
Bill James
Gene Kelly
Stanley Kubrick
Jefferson Airplane
Ursula K. LeGuin
The Marx Brothers
John McPhee
Harry Partch
Michael C. Penta
Monty Python
Orbital
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
"The Prisoner"
"The Red Shoes"
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Oliver Sacks
Erik Satie
"Singin' in the Rain"
Stephen Sondheim
The Specials
Morton Subotnick
Talking Heads/David Byrne
Tangerine Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.
I am the sole judge of which of these qualities pertains.
E-mail
All e-mail received is subject to being published on unfutz without identifying names or addresses.
Corrections
I correct typos and other simple errors of grammar, syntax, style and presentation in my posts after the fact without necessarily posting notification of the change.
Substantive textual changes, especially reversals or major corrections, will be noted in an "Update" or a footnote.
Also, illustrations may be added to entries after their initial publication.
the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.
If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.
(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)
Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.
