Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Immediate necessity makes many things convenient which would grow into oppressions. Expedience and right are different things." -- Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Just had that "wake up because of cognitive dissonance (and/or failure of suspension-of-disbelief) in a dream" experience again. In this case I was aware that I was dreaming that I was reading that enjoyable book because a) I had not one lick of trouble reading the Greek and Latin parts, and b) I'm pretty sure the author would not have included allusions to and paraphrases from someone who lived centuries later. That is, I don't think Homer would have parodied Coleridge in a style one might expect from Plautus or possibly Benny Hill.

Tuesday's quote-of-the-day was about journalism in the U.S., and juuro pointed out an inaccuracy in the statement I quoted, namely that while American journalists might not need a license to be journalists in the U.S., foreign ones do.

My guess is that LaPierre simply wasn't aware of the rule. I say this because it doesn't seem to be something most people are aware of ... the news stories I've read about it state or imply that many foreign journalists are being caught unawares by it (one article mentioned a belated attempt by the U.S. State Department to get the word out because of that), and it's not something I've seen all that many references to in my casual reading (though I did find a bunch of links when I decided to STFW for it). It had completely slipped my mind at the time I posted that QotD. I hadn't heard about it at all until a few weeks ago, IIRC (but my sense of time may be off).

Anyhow, the reason I'm posting this entry is that I'm not sure how many of my friends check back a couple of days to look for new comments to other people's entries they've already read, and I wanted to point to the collection of links to articles about this issue that I posted in a comment last night. (Because hey, if I wasn't sufficiently aware of it, maybe a bunch of other people aren't either...)

"Why should journalists be more heavily restricted than tourists in a nation that purports to honor freedom of the press?" (from the L.A. Times) The answer appears to be leftovers from McCarthyism -- gotta keep those Subversives out -- "As dissident writers seem to have disappeared from the public sphere, journalists have become the new subversives, even when they have no agenda at all." (from the International Herald Tribune).

Land of the Free... (Of course, this doesn't count because it only affects them damn furriners; if you're a citizen, and aren't a black Floridian with the same last name as a felon, and not trying to wear an anti-Bush T-shirt outside of a designated "make the protestors invisible" zone, you're still free. My bad. Oh, unless you want to ride mass transit in Boston. Or ... )