Recently in General Category

BatesLine is five years old today. Although that doesn't come close to Dustbury's longevity, five years of fairly consistent and continuous blogging is pretty impressive in a world where blogs start and end at an alarming rate, if I do say so myself.

Here is the Wayback Machine's first snapshot (in August of 2003) of my first month of posts.

Blogging has been a wonderful thing for me. It has given me an outlet to express my interests and opinion and to connect with other people -- here in Tulsa and around the world -- who share those concerns.

The whole thing really started out as, "SInce we're switching from dialup to DSL, maybe I should buy a domain so we can keep our e-mail addresses if we change ISPs." One of the best prices for domain hosting was a company called BlogHosts (RIP), which came with Movable Type 2.6.3 pre-installed, so why not give this blogging thing a try?

I had the good timing to start blogging just as Vision 2025 was gaining public attention. I had plenty of local politics to write about, although it wasn't my original vision for BatesLine that it should be dominated by local issues.

My blogging caught the attention of KFAQ's Michael DelGiorno, and right after the Vision 2025 election, Michael and his co-host Gwen Freeman took me to St. Michael's Alley (RIP) to pitch the idea of a weekly follow-up on Vision 2025. That broadened over time to cover the full scope of local politics. At some point we switched from Monday to Tuesday, and if I missed any weeks through the four and a half years, it was only one or two. Serving as a guest analyst on election night 2004, participating in election post-mortem roundtables, and filling in with Gwen when Michael was off are among some of the highlights.

(Although the regular weekly guest slot on KFAQ is no more, you may be hearing me on the radio again before too long.)

Being on the air every week caught the attention of Urban Tulsa Weekly reporter George Shultz, who wrote a profile of me in July 2005. Through that, Keith Skrzypczak brought me on to write a column for the paper. That began in September 2005. To bring things full circle, the column's tight focus on local politics allowed me to restore a broader focus to BatesLine. The linkblog allowed me to pass along links of interest -- blogging in its fundamental form -- with a minimum of fuss.

I'll stop there for now, but later today look for some highlights from the past five years, and an appreciation of the many wonderful blog-pals I've made.

Thanks for reading and celebrating this milestone with me.

UPDATE: Thanks for all the lovely well wishes. I'm sorry, but I didn't get anything more added today. I did attend a wonderful event: The Holocaust remembrance at Temple Israel. There was an overflow crowd. (Well over a thousand, I would say.) My son sang with the Tulsa Boy Singers. The featured speakers were Dr. Leon Bass, an American World War II veteran who was one of the liberators of Buchenwald, and Robbie Waisman, a survivor of Buchenwald. There was an emphasis on honoring those who had fought against fascism and had liberated the camps. Seven World War II veterans were given the honor of lighting remembrance candles at the end of the service. My son knew the basic facts of the Holocaust, but hearing these speakers tell their personal stories brought it home to him. Mr. Waisman was about the age my son is now when his secure and loving home was torn apart by the Nazis. Only he and a sister survived; five brothers and both parents were put to death.

I'm very pleased to welcome a new advertiser to BatesLine. Nils the Mac Man is a member of the Apple Consultants Network, with four certifications from Apple in hardware and software. Nils handles repairs, upgrades, troubleshooting, and one-on-one tutoring to help you get the most out of your Mac.

I got to know Nils a few years ago, when he was a producer on KFAQ. Often the show would feature clips from city meetings which he had gleaned from TGOV. I was impressed that he was using his computer to capture video from cable and then extracting and editing the audio for use on the air.

That same initiative and Macintosh savvy is now available to answer your questions and solve your problems. Just click through to NilsTheMacMan.com or call Nils at 918-794-2645.

My wife, who handles the prayer chain e-mail list for our church, just became aware of an online way for friends and family of someone who is undergoing a medical crisis to stay in touch and informed and to provide support and encouragement.

It's called CaringBridge, and it's a free service funded by a non-profit. In a few short steps, you can set up a website for a patient -- yourself or someone close to you. You can create journal entries and upload photographs. You can choose whether the site should be open to anyone who knows its name or whether visitors will also need a password. (User sites are blocked from search engine indexing, so someone can't google their way into it.) Visitors to the site can leave messages of support and encouragement on the guestbook, and they can sign up to receive an e-mail alert when new information is posted.

It's a bit like a blog or a MySpace page, but it's geared for the specific purpose of allowing a patient or the loved one of a patient to keep friends and family up to date without the hassle of managing e-mail lists. A single e-mail pointing people to the webpage is all it takes.

My already torpid blogging pace is going to slow even further this weekend, as I have some end-of-year tasks to get done.

I will likely be adding to the linkblog as I come across items of interest, and you'll always find new material on the blogroll headlines page and op-ed page.

Since Tuesday is a holiday, I'll be on 1170 KFAQ with Gwen Freeman and Chris Medlock on Monday morning instead, reviewing the year's top local stories and looking ahead to 2008.

While Gwen Freeman takes a day off, I'll be sitting in with Chris Medlock on 1170 KFAQ tomorrow morning (Monday) for the whole show from 5:30 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. We'll be talking about all the latest news, including the first signs of a PR push for a taxpayer-funded downtown stadium for the Tulsa Drillers, and I'm sure we'll be talking about several of the national stories I've got linked in the linkblog, over in the left sidebar.

If you can't pick up 1170 over the airwaves, you can click this link and launch Windows Media Player with a live feed or, later in the day, you can click this link to download separate MP3 podcasts of each hour of the show.

The lack of posting the last few days is the result of business busyness, lousy access to WiFi at my hotel, and, most recently, the apparent failure of my laptop hard drive. (Can anyone suggest a good data recovery service? I had a fairly recent backup, but not recent enough.)

UPDATE: The drive (a Seagate 40 GB drive) seems to be OK, but not the laptop. I put the drive in a USB enclosure and was able to power it up, connect it to another computer, and copy critical data off of it. When I tried to reinstall it in my ancient (5 year old) Dell Inspiron 4000, the BIOS still couldn't see it. The BIOS had also stopped seeing the aftermarket DVD+RW I bought a while back.

Here's what I think happened: Thursday during a break at the convention I was attending, I headed over to the WiFi hotspot to check e-mail. I had the laptop set up to standby when the lid is shut and restart when the lid is open. I put it back in the backpack, thinking I had the lid shut all the way. It must have bounced open just enough in my laptop backpack to restart, and surrounded by all that nice padding, it overheated and something fried. When I pulled it out to use it during a session, it was already restarted when I opened it, and there was an I/O error dialog box in the middle of the screen. The laptop was non-responsive to my inputs. When I reset it, it refused to recognize the DVD+RW. So I popped that out and tried again, and it refused to recognize the hard drive. The BIOS init process seemed to hang at about 95% on the progress bar.

This laptop, which I bought for $700 second hand in June 2002, has had a new video cable, a new and bigger hard drive, new and more memory, a new motherboard, a new DVD drive, and a new keyboard installed at one time or another. Plus I bought a WiFi card and a USB-2/Firewire combo card to make up for the absence of those features. In other words, I've spent as much keeping it running as I paid for it in the first place. Still, it's been a good machine, it's been with me all over the country and across the pond, and it's been cheaper to pay the incremental costs over time than to buy a new machine in one fell swoop. Plus, I haven't yet faced the problem of reinstalling everything.

So if I do buy a new laptop, should it be another Dell? And should I stick with XP, go with Vista, or chuck it all and make this one a Linux machine?

There are at least a few of you who make faithful use of my BatesLine blogroll headlines page, also known as the NewsGator page, because it uses the NewsGator feed aggregator to collect headlines from the 100 most recent posts from about 160 blogs that I've handpicked as some of the most interesting on the web.

Until today, I included on that page feeds from several sources of op-ed columns and other paid, long-form opinion journalism: American Spectator, National Review, TownHall, and OpinionJournal.com. You'll find a prolific daily output of well-reasoned and informed opinions on those sites.

And that was the problem. While an individual blogger posts on an irregular schedule, these corporate-owned, employee-staffed sites typically post the new day's collection of a dozen or so columns in the wee hours. That means that each morning there might be 50 new op-ed pieces on my NewsGator page, pushing the previous night's output of ordinary, one-or-two-posts-a-day bloggers further down or all the way off the page.

So I've created a second headlines page: The BatesLine op-ed headlines page. Visit there for your daily dose of intelligent opinions and commentary.

By the way, the old NewsGator URL that ended in .php is now obsolescent, so change your bookmark to the link above. I've purged all PHP from my site, because PHP, dynamic content, and my shared hosting provider don't get along. With MT 4.0, I was able to provide a statically-built linkblog and spotlight using the new built-in MultiBlog capability.

There are still several things on my blog to do list:

• Import entries from my old hand-rolled linkblog into my new MT-driven linkblog
• Use Apache mod-rewrite and RewriteMap to direct links to my old numerically named archive entries to the new named versions
• Read Wild Bill's Passionate Blogger blog every day for constructive tips on how to be a better blogger with a better blog
• Reinstate full-text RSS and Atom feeds

As always, your suggestions for improvement are welcome.

Back in June I announced the Blog Reader Project, a way to collect information on who reads BatesLine that might be of interest to potential advertisers.

As an incentive to participate, I offered a chance to win a $10 Amazon gift certificate to one participant out of those who supplied their e-mail address as part of the survey. Because of the number of respondents I decided to award two certificates, which I sent out earlier today to the two lucky winners, selected with the help of the truly random integer generator at random.org. Congratulations to Nik Majdan and Steve Arnold! And to the rest of you, thanks for taking the time to participate.

You can look at aggregate numbers for all participating blogs at the Blog Reader Project website. You can view select results from BatesLine readers here.

One of the most interesting stats, albeit not surprising, is that 85% of the participants have a zip code beginning with "74" and 89% have an Oklahoma zip code. I imagine that the survey is mainly representative of people who come to the site via the homepage, as opposed to those who find the site through search engines.

As I mentioned when I introduced the Blog Reader Project, there is some cost involved in keeping this site running and in keeping myself informed so that I can share what I learn with you. If you appreciate the information and analysis that I provide, you can express that appreciation by means of the PayPal tip jar in the sidebar to the right.

You can also gain some exposure for your business while supporting this site by advertising on BatesLine. $15 buys a standard-sized blogad, which will appear at the top of the right hand column on every page of this blog for one week. That works out to about a tenth of a cent ($0.001) per ad impression. The longer the ad period, the better the deal gets: $100 gets an ad for three months at about five-hundredths of a cent ($0.0005) per ad impression. Hi-rise (more expensive) and mini (less expensive) ads are also available.

(If you run into trouble with posting an ad or using the PayPal donate button, please let me know by dropping me an e-mail at blog at batesline dot com.)

You may have already noticed that the linkblog is back, in the left sidebar. Instead of using my old homegrown system (involving PHP and MySQL), I'm using the multi-blog features of Movable Type 4.0. There's now a separate linkblog blog, and I'm displaying the five most recent entries on the home page and Newsgator page of BatesLine proper. When I add a new linkblog entry, the index pages for BatesLine are rebuilt.

Because this is a separate MT blog, these linkblog entries have the same attributes as normal blog entries, including permalinks, trackbacks, and comments. If you click on the date and time stamp, it will take you to the individual entry archive page, where you can leave or read comments. Eventually there will be categories, and I'll be importing the old linkblog entries. I'll be trying to work out the same kind of interface that I had with the old linkblog that made it quick and painless to post something.

The biggest advantage the new way has over the old method is that this version builds files once, rather than dynamically generating them with a database query. The old system would issue a DB query every time the home page was loaded, which made my hosting provider unhappy, and resulted in the CPU Exceeded errors people would see from time to time.

Testing, testing, sibilants, sibilants.

UPDATE: Finally found the problem with comments. When I cut and pasted the code from the Javascript template in a brand new MT 4.0 test blog to the corresponding template in BatesLine, MT insisted on throwing in a bunch of extra line feeds. Another ctrl-c ctrl-v attempt succeeded in copying the text with no additional line feeds. Saving and publishing the template took care of it.

I will still need to rebuild the rest of the entries. There's still an issue with the queuing mechanism. I have mods I want to make to the entry template (include Technorati tags and categories, for example). And I want to import the old linkblog entries into a new MT 4.0 blog and then cross-link that with the homepage for BatesLine. And of course, I want to replace the banner image with something more representative of Tulsa.

Upgrading to the latest version of Movable Type. Expect breakage.

UPDATE: We seem to be back up. Someone post a comment, and let's see if it works.

UPDATE: Comments are broken, but I can post. Thanks to those who tested comments. I tried to reconfigure comments and rebuild the site, but rebuilding consistently causes a Bluehost CPU overage, which is why I'll be looking for a new hosting provider as soon as I can. I can't find a way to rebuild a few entries at a time to avoid getting dinged.on CPU.

At the end of a blog entry recounting angry letters to the editor in response to a couple of sentences in a recent column praising homeschooling and private schools, Rod Dreher explained why only the angry letters showed up in the paper:

Dallas readers will wonder why the paper only published negative responses to my column, and will perhaps see media bias in the letters selection. Not true. I work in this same department, and let me tell you, all the people who liked the column and took the trouble to write wrote me personally. The ones who hated it wrote letters to the editor -- which is why they got printed.

So if you like something you read in the paper, by all means let the writer know, but cc the letters column, and let everyone else know, too.

Totality from 4:52 a.m. to 6:22 a.m., CDT. Tyson Wynn has details.

Alas, I didn't have a sitter, so I had to miss out on Tuesday night's Absolute Best of Tulsa (ABoT) party at the Petroleum Club. I didn't find out until tonight, when I finally had a chance to pick up a copy of the latest issue, but I won an Urby this year. Urban Tulsa Weekly readers have named me Best Blogger in the 2007 Absolute Best of Tulsa awards. Thanks to everyone who voted for me.

For the record, I didn't vote for myself. I voted for Mee.

MORE: Here's a link to a PDF of the 2007 Absolute Best of Tulsa special section.

Just a brief note: I should be back to posting daily starting tomorrow.

As I write this, this week's Urban Tulsa Weekly isn't online yet, but it should be soon. My column this week is on the Greenwood Gap Theory -- the widely-believed notion that nothing happened in Tulsa's historic African-American commercial district between the riot that destroyed it in 1921 and the construction of OSU-Tulsa in the late '80s, a notion that avoids confronting the devastation of urban renewal.

On the left, Michael D. Bates, columnist for Urban Tulsa Weekly and proprietor of batesline.com.

On the right, Michael W. Bates, former Member of Parliament and Paymaster General, now director of the Northern Board of the Conservative Party.

In the background, Durham Cathedral on a brilliant June day.

I had the pleasure of spending a lovely but all-too-brief hour and a half in the company of Michael and his son Matthew, strolling along the Wear, having a light lunch in the cathedral's Undercroft Restaurant, and talking about British and American politics and the remarkable story of the Emmanuel College in Gateshead and how high expectations can transform an underprivileged area.

Note to friends, family, and colleagues: The next week or so will have me busy from sunup to sunset -- and the sun goes down late in June. Getting in touch with me will not be easy. The best way to reach me will be at the blog atsign batesline dot com address, but don't expect an immediate response. If it's really urgent, call my home phone number.

Just a programming note: Because of the holiday and because of transporting my son downtown for the Tulsa Boy Singers appearance on KOTV Tuesday morning, my weekly conversation with Gwen Freeman and Chris Medlock was postponed until Wednesday morning. I'll be on at 7:40, and there will be all sorts of local issues to discuss, including the Council's vote on immigration policy and the failure to land the Big 12 basketball tournament until 2013 at the earliest.

Remember the living as well as the dead, writes Paul Greenberg:

There is nothing we can do for the dead now, but there is much we can do for the living. We can ask where they are, and how they fare, and see that they, and their families, are cared for. And when they are stacked in hospitals like so much cordwood, put out of sight like something indecent, we can demand more than a few showy dismissals of those who were supposed to be in charge.

We can ask, we can demand to know, what is being done for them and theirs. Now. For people do not live in some abstract realm - like the past or in politicians' speeches or on the television screen - but in the here and very now. In waiting rooms. In hospital wards. In veterans' homes.

Let this be a memorial day for the living, too. And let us live it, too. For today is also a day for family picnics and block parties, for good times as well as solemn rituals, a day to make the most of.

Today's mix of joy and sorrow, the quick and the dead, the grief and pride - it is all as it should be. Life is to be celebrated even as we remember the dead.

It is a day for laughter. Laughter is a better memorial than tears. It is the ordinary sounds - of children at play, of families uniting, of old stories retold - that are the best memorial. For it is the ordinary joys of freedom, not the grandiloquent ideals, that generations sacrificed to assure. So that Americans can walk the way we do - openly, freely, unafraid, even blessedly unaware. So that we can look one another in the eye and say what we think. So that any man can look his boss in the eye and tell him to go to hell. And any woman do the same. So we can strike roots where we are or light out for the territories. For this is a big country, and all of it is still the land of opportunity. This is the land where freedom grows. This is its native soil, its natural habitat. It thrives here. But not, as this day reminds, without sacrifice.

It's been a very busy weekend, and I'm fighting a cold and deadlines, thus the lack of updates. Go check out Mike McCarville's blog -- Mike has the outcome of Saturday's Republican state convention and a note about Friday's breakthrough in the dismantling of the web of intrigue which centers on former State Sen. Gene Stipe and has links to State Auditor Jeff McMahan, Governor Brad Henry, and a number of Democratic state legislators. Former State Rep. (and former State Democratic Chairman) Mike Mass pleaded guilty to Federal mail fraud charges and is singing like a canary. Here's McCarville's archive on the Stipe story.

One more thing: My wife, son, and I had a wonderful time at Friday's inaugural gala for the National Fiddler Hall of Fame. Many thanks to Jim and Alice Rodgers of Cain's Ballroom for their hospitality. More about that special evening later.

We've been fighting the 24-hour stomach bug at our house since Friday night. The girl got it then, Mom and older son got it late Saturday afternoon, and it hit me around noon today. I managed to get in a last minute shopping trip for supplies (club crackers, Sprite, Gatorade, Pepto Bismol) before the bug laid me low. Happily, my wife was on the upswing by then, so we didn't have to live through both grownups being sick at the same time.

The baby, praise God, is unaffected so far. I remember a frightening episode when my daughter was six months old -- she had a fever and a cold and refused to drink anything. We had to take her to the ER for dehydration. We're praying that the baby escapes the crud.

I'm feeling better, but not well enough to be coherent. Hopefully that will change by tomorrow morning.

I have a fan! His name is P. R. Hensley, and he took time out of his busy day to go over to this thread on the TulsaNow forum, about my Urban Tulsa Weekly article on the history of Arkansas River plans, to post the following comment:

I never read anything Bates writes. It's all the same recycled old stuff.

I can't tell you how much it warms my heart that Mr. Hensley would devote his valuable time to seeking out articles by me or about me -- that he would be so interested in expressing his lack of interest in my writing. He even went to the online version of my article to post this:

Who cares what Michael Bates thinks? He's just in love with himself.

Charles G. Hill has a list of testimonials on the sidebar of dustbury.com. If I ever add a similar feature to this site, I think I'll kick it off with one of those two quotes.

Too tired to blog tonight, because I was up early this morning for my weekly update on 1170 KFAQ. Here's a link to the podcast of the 6-7 hour this morning. (And here's a link to the archive of podcasts.)

Anna Falling from Cornerstone Assistance Network was in studio to talk about Turkeys for Tulsans. For $15 you can provide a turkey Christmas dinner for a needy family. Click here to donate or to learn more.

In our roundup of news here and elsewhere, we discussed suspended City Attorney Alan Jackere's plan to retire, Mayor Kathy Taylor's Sunday op-ed about "the Mighty Arkansas River," potential challengers to Sen. Jim Inhofe in 2008, and Barack Obama's chances for President against Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I'm not sure what's going on, but it appears that the hosting provider for BatesLine is doing some sort of upgrade on its mail software. If you sent something to a batesline.com address since midnight or thereabouts, assume that it didn't and may not ever get to us. When all is straightened out, I'll post a new notice here.

Things are going to look funny for a while. I upgraded to MT 3.33 (a security-critical update), and there has been a significant change in the template layout structure from my previous version (3.14). Expect it to be a few days before all the content is back in its usual places.

An installation note: When I uploaded the files to my server, I forgot to move the new static files to the old static file directory location, outside of the cgi-bin directory. I also needed to change the StaticWebPath variable from a relative path to a full URL. Without doing that, the new automated upgrade process doesn't work (it appears to stall after telling you the process has begun), nor does the new Style Catcher. Since I have customized the names of my comments, trackbacks, and search scripts, I needed to change those file names to match those in my config file.

I am still recovering from bronchitis, which has been dogging me since the end of last week. The antibiotic seemed to keep me tossing and turning. (I'm sure reading the side effects didn't help -- "tendon rupture"?) I was back at work today, but I'm still behind on responsibilities at home and at work.

In the meantime, check out the latest entries to the linkblog (top of the page). Or read the latest headlines from other Tulsa bloggers.

Bobby has audio of last Friday's meeting of the Citizens' Commission on City Government, including my presentation, a presentation by TU Law Professor Gary Allison, and remarks by Chris Medlock. Was the Tulsa Whirled there to get the story? No, but Tulsa Topics was there.

(Urban Tulsa Weekly was there, too. You can read my take on the meeting in the issue that hits the streets in the morning.)

Bobby also keeps a linkblog, and one of his recent finds is this piece in the Muncie, Indiana, Star-Press, an interview with Brookside neighborhood leader Herb Beattie about how to deal with AEP's tree-trimming program.

Chris Medlock has a new entry about Vision 2025 eminent domain in Sand Springs, and some salient facts that the Tulsa Whirled omits.

From the blogroll:

Julie R. Neidlinger has a hilarious Mother's Day video and links to more work by Barats and Bereta. Julie also has some music recommendations: Philip Glass and Samuel Barber.

Marsupial Mom breaks her self-described "blog-slump" with a tale of her most embarassing moment ever.

Wanna buy some movie theatres in western Oklahoma? One is a twin drive-in, another has three screens and a luxury apartment. Okiedoke found the listings on eBay.

I've got a lot in my backblog, but I also have a cold, so I won't be writing any more tonight. Here's what I hope to get to in days to come:

• A tribute to songwriter Cindy Walker, who died in late March;
• A tribute to urban critic Jane Jacobs, who died a week or so ago;
• A personal response to a recent flurry of articles about Christianity and contraception, including one about a Protestant couple (Sam and Bethany Torode) who rejected contraception, wrote a book about it (Open Embrace), but now have become Orthodox and have rethought their earlier rethinking of the issue;
• Recent changes to the Tulsa Whirled's web policy;
• Sen. Tom Coburn's brave and relentless battle against pork-barrel spending;
• Family news, including my daughter's wonderful school program last Friday and a cousin's wedding at Woolaroc;

and much, much more, particularly on the national and international scene, which I've neglected of late.

Freshly relocated to the new hosting provider, my domain didn't have Spam Assassin turned on at first, and the spammers didn't seem to have any problem tracking my domain to its new home. I activated Spam Assassin around noon Saturday. In the ensuing 12 hours, I received over 1350 spam e-mails. Spam Assassin caught over 1250, with no false positives; the remaining messages fell below the threshold.

What the spammers are doing now borders on a distributed denial-of-service attack. Since people are being more careful about putting full e-mail addresses where the spambots can harvest them, spammers are now taking known domain names and matching them with a long list of possible usernames, hoping to hit a working mailbox. While it's good to see Spam Assassin's accuracy and effectiveness, it's disturbing to think how often the SMTP server is getting hit and to think how that may be interfering with the delivery of legitimate mail and the overall performance of the server. However good my spam filters are, the mail server has to handle every single message just to find out i it's legitimate.

For the first two years or so of batesline.com's life, I took advantage of the "catchall" e-mail account. If I had to give an e-mail address to register for a website, I'd make up a username, but wouldn't create a POP3 account for it, knowing that any e-mail -- mainly periodic ads -- to that address would wind up in the catchall mailbox. Now these legitimate e-mails are swallowed up and almost unnoticeable in the volume of spam I receive. The "catchall" account is almost useless, and I've had to create a forwarder to redirect e-mail to each of those registration addresses to a mailbox.

If I had been keeping up with the latest news at the Spam Huntress' blog, I would have known that it was time to give up on catchall e-mail. I see intriguing mentions of a way to reject spam before it even reaches the mail server....

...you're seeing BatesLine on its new server.

It may take a while for mail servers to catch up with the move, so don't be surprised if any e-mail sent to me today goes missing.

I'm switching over to a new hosting provider later tonight, so you may experience some outages and weirdness as it takes DNS some time to catch up with the new location.

We had a late little league game tonight. Our boys won, beating a previously undefeated team by a huge margin. My boy struck out in his one at bat, but he handled his one defensive opportunity just as he should have and prevented a run from scoring. Good game, and nice weather for it, too. Back to springtime after several days of dry, dusty, windy, 90-degree-plus weather.

Between baseball, my wife's birthday, getting the taxes filed, getting my column written, and celebrating Easter Sunday at church and with family, it has been a busy several days. Tonight I had planned to relax -- sort and fold laundry and watch Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which I checked out of the library today.

I haven't seen it in years, but I've been thinking about that movie ever since reading this intriguing blog entry, which brought to mind General Ripper's concern about precious bodily fluids: "I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence." I have been following that entry and its several followups, extensive comment threads, and rebuttals on other blogs, and hope to post some thoughts of my own Real Soon Now from a perspective that hasn't yet been heard from. But not tonight, dear; I have a headache. Rest assured that any of my emissions on the subject (likely nocturnal; I don't usually blog during the day) will be properly deposited here and not wasted elsewhere.

Anyway, I got a phone call right at 10, and it completely changed the direction of my evening. So this is all you're getting tonight, except I did update the link to my latest Urban Tulsa Weekly column, which is about what I would do if I were Tulsa's zoning czar.

Meanwhile, if you're a Tulsan, go visit Chris Medlock's blog -- several new entries, all worth reading, including this funny anecdote from his last day at City Hall.

If you're not a Tulsan, or if you are but don't feel like reading about Tulsa, visit Julie R. Neidlinger's Lone Prairie Blog for some pointed, witty takedowns of modern fads in evangelical church growth circles. Her latest has to do with churches that marginalize children, and it's called First Church of the Millstone.

Good night.

I had the pleasure of being Gwen Freeman's sidekick this morning on 1170 KFAQ.

Michael DelGiorno was at home, part of a reality TV segment that will run on NBC's Today later this month -- his pregnant wife is being pampered at a hotel, while Michael wears a pregnancy prosthesis and takes care of his toddler twin girls alone. (There are some photos of Michael in the fat suit on the KFAQ website.) We talked by phone to Michael and to his wife Andrea. He sounded helpless and beleaguered.

This morning we talked about the city budget crisis and the new mayor's staff.

We also talked to Congressman John Sullivan and national and local representatives of the "fair tax" movement, the effort to replace the federal income tax with a tax on new retail goods and service. The idea has a lot of appeal; click that link to learn all about it.

Valeska Littlefield, head of Life Network of Green Country, came in to help us celebrate the impending departure of Bernest Cain, a Christian-hating State Senator, who has been, as Chairman of the Senate Human Services Committee, the single biggest roadblock to pro-life legislation. Cain's ability to be that roadblock is thanks to existence of a Democratic majority in the State Senate.

The show will be repeated online all weekend. Here's a direct link to the KFAQ audio feed that works with Windows Media Player.

UPDATE (4/21/2006): There has been some reaction (see comments below) about the excerpt of Cain's 2003 comments, which are linked above -- specifically, that my characterization of Bernest Cain as anti-Christian or a Christian-hater is unfair. Here is a report from OCPA that gives more of the context of Cain's 2003 speech. I'm putting it here in its entirety just in case it disappears from the web. The full transcript of Cain's remarks and Charles Ford's reply was on the KFAQ website in May 2003, when I first saw them, but they don't appear to be on the site any longer.

Liberal Tolerance Watch
by Brandon Dutcher

Intolerance and Prejudice at the State Capitol

Living in the Bible Belt, and working as I do in the public policy arena, I see it all too often. People, often with good intentions, try to use the political process to impose their views on everyone else. They are intolerant of other viewpoints, they try to stifle diversity, and sometimes they can be downright bigoted.

I’m telling you, the left is really bad about this.

Consider, for example, the issue of school choice. As Cato Institute scholars Marie Gryphon and Emily A. Meyer pointed out in a recent study, America has a grand tradition of educational freedom. In fact, it’s a tradition that predates and is longer than our current tradition of delivering education through a government-owned-and-run monopoly. Many people today are trying to regain a measure of that freedom, mainly through policies which empower parents to choose the safest and best schools for their children, whether those schools are public or private.

These school-choice advocates celebrate diversity. They want parents and children to be able to choose from charter schools that emphasize core knowledge, specialty schools that focus on the arts, magnet schools that specialize in science and engineering, and more. Let a hundred flowers bloom. After all, students have unique needs and preferences.

What’s more, school-choicers celebrate religious diversity. They want to empower parents to choose Jewish day schools, which provide a rigorous faith-based education and help preserve Jewish continuity. Or classical Christian schools, which begin Latin in the third grade and logic in the eighth and equip children to love the Lord their God with all their minds. Or inner-city Catholic schools – often more racially integrated than their public counterparts – which turn at-risk kids into scholars.

The nation’s 27,000 private schools (nearly one in four U.S. schools) “by definition help fulfill the ideal of pluralism in American education,” says the Council for American Private Education. “They serve diverse populations, and are multi-ethnic and multi-cultural.”

But the left, for all its professed tolerance, cannot tolerate this sort of diversity, especially religious diversity. The defenders of the status quo prefer secular uniformity. Indeed, they insist upon it religiously. For some reason, school choice is OK for 18-year-olds (Pell Grants at Notre Dame, federal SEOG grants at Oral Roberts University) but not for 17-year-olds.

One journalist, a member of the religious left here in Oklahoma, is particularly hostile to school choice. He often puts derisive quotation marks around “Christian” when referring to Christian schools, and once lambasted a pro-school-choice governor, saying his “tortured rightwing brain” is all too “typical of brown-shirted rich kids privately educated.”

Remarkably, this ugliness goes unpunished. Indeed, the National Education Association has given its highest award to this man who calls Thomas Sowell “a disgrace to the human race,” and he is still a popular speaker at education workshops and conferences. One essay, in which he sniffs at “mantras and Hail Marys” and warns of ominous attempts to “construct new forms of theocratic education,” is featured on the welcome page of the Oklahoma Education Association’s web site.

I suppose none of this should surprise us. After all, Gryphon and Meyer remind us, it was religious prejudice – specifically, anti-Catholic prejudice fueled by an influx of immigrants in the 1830s and 1840s – which inspired the establishment of public schools in the first place. In addition, state constitutional Blaine Amendments, “adopted during the rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment in the 19th and early 20th centuries” and now enshrined in some three-fourths of state constitutions (including Oklahoma’s), prohibit tax money from flowing to “sectarian” schools. The left, apparently without embarrassment, defends these amendments heartily, as they are among the most significant barriers to school choice in the states.

The Arizona Supreme Court pronounced that state’s Blaine Amendment “a clear manifestation of religious bigotry.” Justice Clarence Thomas has opined that “hostility to aid to pervasively sectarian schools has a shameful pedigree that we do not hesitate to disavow. … This doctrine, born of bigotry, should be buried now.”

Many of our friends on the left are working tirelessly for a more just and tolerant America, one that respects diversity. They would do well to recognize that educational freedom, as Gryphon and Meyer say, is “critical to an intellectually diverse and tolerant society.”

Rhetoric Insults Thousands of Oklahomans
In last year’s legislative session, Senator Scott Pruitt (R-Broken Arrow) co-authored a tort reform bill for teachers. When the bill was being considered in the House, a Democrat attached an amendment which would require a disclaimer to be placed in all textbooks in which evolution is discussed. The disclaimer would state in part that evolution is “a controversial theory which some scientists present as scientific explanation for the origin of living things,” although “no one was present when life first appeared on earth. Therefore, any statement about life’s origins should be considered as theory, not fact.”

The amended bill passed the House by a vote of 92-9, and was being reconsidered on the Senate floor May 6. Sen. Bernest Cain (D-Oklahoma City), a Unitarian with a graduate degree in theology and a prominent member of Oklahoma’s religious left, was offended by the bill and argued against it. According to a transcript posted on the Web site of KFAQ, a talk radio station in Tulsa, Sen. Cain made the following remarks:

“I just resent people continually, every time they bring a bill out here, trying to force their religion down other people’s throats. Now, this is what this is coming from. … Because he [Senator Pruitt] believes, basically, that his religion ought to be the dominant religion and that his religion ought to say to the rest of the religions what should be in the textbooks of our public schools. … We should not continue to let this religious, far religious views, try to force their way down on us.

“I got a quote the other day that I got from Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler. And I don’t have the exact words, but here’s basically what it says. He says, in our government we are going to put Christians in key positions of responsibility because there has been too much liberal access going on out there and we are going to straighten up and make sure that the Christian culture is back in control. Now folks, they took Jewish people and they took them out and they strung them apart, they killed them, they mass murdered some of those people, and all of the ideas that were behind that were, and they were doing this while they were having Christian music going on, while they were having hymns. They killed thousands of Jews while they were doing hymns. That is what happens when you let the right wing of the Taliban come in and try to dictate to the State how we should run our business.

“We should try as much as possible to keep ourselves separate from the religious group. I am telling you, we have got this new mindset that you can be a Taliban, you can be a religious fanatic, and you can bring it to the Senate, you can bring it to the House, you can bring it to the government, it doesn’t matter, it’s all right, we just turn our heads, it’s not that bad. That’s what they did when Hitler came along. They let him come in and he brought in his ideas, he said we’re bringing Christian values back. But was it all Christian values? No, it was everything against Christian values. And that is what I am afraid of from these extreme right-wing religious fanatics who want to bring their religious viewpoints and bring them into the Senate. …

“But no, this is another one of Senator Pruitt’s bills trying to take the religious idea and force it down on the rest of us. … I say we ought to reject this thing and say it right now, we’re not going to let extreme, extreme religious groups come in here and run our government.”

Don’t you just love it when liberals engage in nuanced, responsible discourse? They’re always so careful to be tolerant of the viewpoints of others.

It’s interesting to note that the amendment was not ambitious at all. It merely said evolution should be taught as a theory. It did not mandate the teaching of intelligent-design theories or creationism.

After all, we can’t have “extreme, extreme religious groups come in here and run our government.” And certainly Sen. Cain, known for his mainstream views, can recognize an extremist when he sees one. An extremist is one of those far-out people – “the right wing of the Taliban,” if you will – who actually believes a Creator made the world. Fortunately, according to a Tulsa World-sponsored poll in 2000, this fringe element is limited to: a majority of whites, blacks, and Hispanics; a majority of people in every income level; and a majority of liberals, moderates, and conservatives. “A strong majority of the state believes in creationism,” the Tulsa World reported. “The poll showed that support for creationism was solid in almost every political and demographic subdivision.” Indeed, belief in creationism was higher among registered Democrats than registered Republicans.

Nevertheless, if you’re one of those “fanatics” whose religious convictions lead you to a particular view about abortion, or the death penalty, or the lottery, or taxation, or sex education in the classroom, don’t bother bringing your “religious viewpoints … into the Senate.” Unless you’re a member of the religious left.

How’s that for tolerance?

It occurs to me that there may be a few more readers here than normal over the next couple of days, and some new reader orientation is in order.

This blog has been around since May 1, 2003. I started it as a place to note interesting things I encountered on the World Wide Web (the textbook purpose of a weblog), comment on politics, and post the occasional family photo. Tulsa politics has become the central focus of BatesLine, but I still touch on the other topics you see listed on the title image, which was inspired by the famous map of the London Underground. Lately, I've been consumed by the election, but ordinarily you'll find entries about Western Swing music, global news, national politics, Tulsa history, theology, and whatever else strikes my fancy.

Over the course of nearly three years of blogging, I've added a lot of content and have tried to find an easily navigable way of presenting it. The masthead, just below the title, provides some convenient links. Over to the left, there's a link to a PDA-friendly version of the homepage -- excerpts from the ten most recent entries with as little ornamentation as possible. Over to the right, distinguished with a white background and red text, is my "spotlight" -- a place to link the current entry to which I most wish to draw your attention.

My blogging led, starting in the fall of '03, to a weekly appearance on Talk Radio 1170 KFAQ's Michael DelGiorno Show. (My normal slot is Tuesday mornings from 6:10 to 7:00, but I will also be on tomorrow morning from 6 to 8 as part of a panel discussing the city elections.) If my regular schedule changes, you'll see it updated on the masthead.

Last fall, I began writing a weekly column for Urban Tulsa Weekly. You'll find a link on the masthead to my latest column, a summary of all my columns with links to each, and a link to G. W. Schulz's profile of me. If you want to get an idea of who I am and what makes me tick, that's a good place to start.

Below the masthead, there's a quick link that will take you beyond the rest of the front matter directly to my latest blog entry. Below that, you'll find the titles of my most recent ten entries with links to each.

Next is the most recent ten entries of my "linkblog". I set this up last October both as an exercise in web programming and as a way to note web items I found interesting, without having to think of a clever title or add a lot of commentary. There's a link to a complete archive of linkblog entries.

Finally, we get to the blog proper. Most entries are presented on the main page in their entirety, but sometimes you have to click a "continue reading" link to read the whole thing. Comments are welcomed, but I reserve the right not to post your comment -- here's a link to the BatesLine commenting policy.

The Technorati tags under each entry give you a way to see what other blogs have been commenting on a given topic. For example, this link will take you to most recent blog entries tagged Bill+LaFortune.

Now to the sidebar: At the top, you'll find my Okie Blog award for Best Political Blog and the cover from the UTW profile (that link also leads you to the profile). Next is my e-mail address, cleverly obscured to defeat spammers. I'm a member of the Media Bloggers Association, an organization of bloggers who comment on the mainstream media. In February 2005, the group helped me deal with legal threats from the Tulsa World.

The Tulsa Bloggers button leads to a page displaying the latest articles from bloggers who write regularly about Tulsa news and politics. Below it is a link to the UTW feature story I wrote about these bloggers in January.

You can advertise on BatesLine! It's cheap -- $10 a week, $20 a month, or $45 for three months. For a mere tenner your ad gets over 10,000 views a week.

I also participate in a free ad exchange called Blog Ad Swap, the creation of Danny Carlton aka Jack Lewis.

Below that there's a tip jar -- your donations help cover hosting fees and research expenses.

The "Best Posts of 2005" button takes you to a collection of excellent blog entries compiled by Jeff Faria aka Mister Snitch. If you've never dabbled much in the realm of blogs, this would be a good place to start.

Below that, there's a button linking to information about this fall's Okie Blogger Roundup, the first-ever large scale gathering of Oklahoma-based bloggers.

The "Blog Ecosystem" section gives you an idea of how BatesLine fits into the grand scheme of things in the blogosphere. I'm a "Large Mammal", which puts BatesLine roughly in the top 1,000 blogs worldwide. Clicking that will give you a list of blogs that links to me. Technorati's "Blogs That Link Here" and "Who Links to Me?" do the same thing, but differently.

(More later.)

Today I heard from yet another reader of this site who had tried unsuccessfully to post a comment. It was a lengthy one, and after he posted it, it vanished.

This wasn't a case of a comment being post and me deciding not to approve it; the comment didn't get posted to the database, probably because a network timeout interrupted the transaction.

I occasionally hear from other readers that e-mails to me get bounced back. Based on the error messages I see, this too appears to be a problem with the network connection timing out in mid-transaction, probably because the computer which hosts BatesLine, which is shared with several other websites. My suspicion is that the server is overloaded.

Sometime soon I intend to move to a new hosting provider, but probably not until after the election. In the meantime, if you have a comment, especially if it's a long one, copy and paste the text into an e-mail message to blog at batesline dot com, so that it has two chances to get to me. And if you post a comment and you don't see a "comment pending" message, let me know that, too. It probably means there was a network timeout and the comment wasn't posted. Likewise if an e-mail message bounces back, give it another try in an hour or so, and e-mail me a copy of the bounce message. That will help me document the problem for my hosting provider, and maybe I can get it fixed without changing providers. Thanks.

Rush Limbaugh isn't the founder of the syndicated talk radio genre -- Larry King should get the credit for that -- but he has set the standard in many respects. I don't listen often any more, but I always enjoyed it when he took the time to explain why he ran the show a certain way and how his rules contributed to the success of the show.

A lot of talk show hosts focused on the callers and measured the success of the show by the number of people wanting to talk. Rush pointed out that there were far more listeners than callers, and that the show was for the listeners. Callers had no right to bore or irritate his listeners to the point of provoking them to tune out.

Rush has always made it clear that his show is about what he thinks, and the callers' role is to interact with the issues he raises. Callers who want to talk about a different topic are turned away (except on Fridays, when he allows more leeway), and callers have to be able to make their point succinctly. Dissenting views are welcome, but you're expected to be polite and engage in a conversation, not a shouting match. It's his show, his rules, and he's built a substantial audience by running it his way. Those who want to do things another way are welcome to start their own radio show and build their own audience.

I haven't done this consciously, but Rush's approach seems to have shaped my approach to running this blog. It is after all BatesLine, and it's about what I find interesting and what I think about it. This is my blog, not a bulletin board or a forum. Comments, even dissenting comments, are welcome, but try to stay on topic and keep it polite. As it's my place, I am the arbiter of what is on-topic and what is polite. Those who want to do things another way are welcome to start their own blog (much easier than starting your own syndicated radio show) and build their own audience.

I've written previously about my comment policy, and in that entry you'll get a general idea of what I will and won't approve.

In the last week I've declined to approve seven comments.

Five were from a frequent commenter here. These comments made some interesting points, and even included compliments for me, but they went way off-topic, and some were also quite lengthy. A comment like that can kill a conversational comment thread or trigger a flame war that has nothing to do with the blog entry at hand.

The other two were from someone who had never commented before, writing under the pseudonym Tommy, with the e-mail address ConcernedTulsaVoter@yahoo.com, and an IP address of 68.229.243.88, which is a Cox cable internet address. ConcernedTulsaVoter@yahoo.com later e-mailed me to ask why I hadn't posted his comments.

I referred him to my comments policy, which he misread, responding by e-mail from 65.69.103.194 (assigned to semgrouplp.com):

I see; so you don't post any dissenting opinions. Maybe you should put some kind of disclaimer on the comments form so people don't waste their time.

In fact, after I replied to his first e-mail, it occurred to me that it would be helpful to provide a link to my entry about comments. I had already added it to the template and rebuilt all the individual entries before I received that second e-mail.

Although my general rule with comments I reject is "never apologize, never explain," I think it would be useful to take a closer look at these two comments, because they illustrate how to make an interesting point in a rude way. Rush Limbaugh used to do "caller clinics" -- he'd take an unscreened call and explain the call's good and bad points to help listeners understand the screening choices he makes.

In that same spirit, then, here we go with a BatesLine "commenter clinic." Let's start with the first comment from "Tommy", posted to the entry about "planned shrinkage":

is really, really interested in BatesLine today -- 16 visits! Tell Mickey I said, "Howdy!"

We've been enjoying this evening's programming on the History Channel: "Failure Is Not an Option", two two-hour documentaries on the U. S. manned spaceflight program, as told by the men and women in Mission Control. The first program covers the beginnings through the end of Project Apollo; the second covers Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, and the Space Shuttle. They'll be repeated starting at 12 a.m. Eastern time -- just 45 minutes from now.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the loss of the Challenger. I was working afternoons at Draper Laboratory, the research lab just off the MIT campus where the Apollo Guidance Computer was developed. I remember walking in that day to find everyone in the department gathered in the conference room, watching the TV, stunned. A few of the people in the room were veterans of Project Apollo, still more had been involved in the development of the flight control and avionics systems on the Space Shuttle.

Sometimes, when you're working on some tiny piece of an engineering problem, you can lose sight of the fact that lives may depend on your getting your piece right. It's easy to get complacent; you have one success after another, it all seems routine, and then conditions come together to turn a latent defect into a fatal flaw. This anniversary, and yesterday's 39th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire, should call all engineers who develop and maintain components of safety-critical systems to remember that failure is not an option, and that failure prevention begins on the ground, on the drawing board.

I've asked you to be in prayer for blogger Mike Mansur's newborn son, Noah, who was born with a life-threatening circulatory defect. Little Noah is doing very well, beyond expectations, and is home now. Mike has moved all his posts about Noah to a new blog, Chasing Noah, and will continue to post updates and photos there. A couple of weeks ago, Mike posted a summary of all the miraculous developments that amazed the doctors in Noah's case.

Nothing new from me tonight -- sorry about that. I've been busy wrapping up Christmas shopping and working on next week's column. In the meantime, if you're a displaced Oklahoma Citian and homesick for the B. C. Clark jingle, Charles G. Hill has some good news for you. Unfortunately for you, you won't get to hear it in the same spectacular fashion that I first did -- sung by Charles, Jan, Dwayne (and his Lovely Bride), and Dan. (I think Sean had left by then, and I don't remember whether Don or John joined in.)

We were at a very entertaining Christmas program at our church tonight, a dinner theatre play called "In Bethlehem Inn," written by John Carter. The audience members are guests eating at the inn as strange things begin to happen outside. It was well written, well acted, and well directed -- with a lot of very funny moments. (The innkeeper's conniption upon realizing the star is hovering over his house is priceless. He does not regard it as a good omen.)

No time to write more tonight, but I do want to call your attention to some good blogging elsewhere.

Dan Paden is on a roll over at his badly misnamed No Blog of Significance, making a point about the Piltdown Man hoax, expressing some cynicism about LaFortune's "citizens' commission", analyzing the latest Mayoral race polls, and telling us about the subversive literature his 16-year-old reading.

Bobby's got his latest Tulsa Topics podcast up, with coverage of Friday's press conference by Tulsans Defending Democracy, the opposition to the at-large councilor petition.

Dave Schuttler of Our Tulsa World has video from recent public meetings, including a City Council discussion about the proposed 50 cent wireless phone tax, from an airport official's appearance before the Board of Adjustment. And he's keeping an eye on Cinnabar's involvement in Vision 2025.

Steve Roemerman links to some sites where you can test the permeability of your computer network's firewall.

Chris Medlock has comments on the Tulsa Beacon's opposition to the new "4 to Fix the County" sales tax.

Don't forget to mail your Christmas card to the ACLU. And don't forget to vote in the 2005 Weblog Awards. (If you're a nominee and a reader of this site, and I overlooked your blog, please let me know.)

Now up on Basil's Blog: a blog interview of me. People submitted questions to Basil, who passed them to me, along with a few of his own, and I had about a week to put together a response. Basil uses icons to represent the questioners and the interviewee; for my icon, he picked a photo of me, age 6 days. Observant readers will recognize a few other Tulsa area bloggers among the participants.

Basil does two of these each weekend. Here's the category page with all the interviews to date.

It was fun and challenging. Thanks to Basil for hosting, and thanks to all those who asked questions. (Even you, W.!)