After dropping by the big opening house party last night at Charla's new studio, Marsha, Miranda and I drove to the Capitol area, found a place to park near Brackenridge Hospital, and wandered over to the Obama rally, which had already started by the time we got there. It was crisp, cold, and dark as we walked to the capitol, the moon bright in the sky but tiny, having shrunk as it rose (we had moonrise illusion glowing orange on the horizon earlier as we drove east). As we got closer, I could hear Barack's voice on the wind. When we got there, the dark was shattered by the brightest of showdog lights, really blinding. There was a massive crowd, and you could hear Obama clearly though I couldn't tell you what he said... I wasn't there for the message, I was there for the energy. Blocking the light with my hands, I could see the candidate beyond a sea of people standing, cheering as he hit his points. Mirdanda fiddled with her phone - I think she recorded part of the speech, and I shot some bad photos with the Coolpix. I was thinking how single-minded you have to be to run for president, and how difficult it is to fight the opposition for so many months, then have to heal all wounds quickly to get to the business of running the country. I mostly cringe at the thought of any politician taking the reins at this point, partly because there's such a sorry lot of 'em, but also because I've thinking about politics so long, I have a better sense what it's all about. But Obama makes me cringe less. And unlike Dean, he's had the political savvy and the toughness and character to succeed without the blessing of the traditional Democrats, who clearly support Hillary. (Nothing against Dean, he just didn't have the savvy - he's probably a lot smarter now than he was in 2004). Hillary has many strengths, and if there had been no Obama her nomination would be certain. But Obama is speaking to something that the traditional party can't quite grasp. He seems to be on a different plane, in the world but not of the world, and that's very appealing, especially after eight years of worst case governance. Following the worst president ever, competence and experience aren't quite enough. I think either Democratic candidate could win, given the mood of the country, but who can lead most effectively?
From Jasmina Tesoanovic's blog:
2.21.2008
9 a.m Morning, a big silence in the streets: even some schools will be closed because of the planned rally in the afternoon, 5 p.m.
1 p.m
Buses from all over Serbia are coming into Belgrade city. The buses and trains are free, state-organized for people to come and perform the big show with the official title "Kosovo is Serbia." This is the motto that runs constantly on national TV channels.
My friend from inner Serbia wanted to come to Belgrade in a free ride, to have a coffee with me and then go back home. But then, maybe better not to be seen around you, he said, you are a notorious Woman in Black, somebody might hurt you.
The official organizers, meaning all Serbian political parties except for the 5 percent dissidents, all claim that Belgrade has to show its real face: that of a calm dignified Serb. And what about is calm and dignified about the busted MacDonald's, burning embassies and window-broken shops with foreign names? Those are nothing compared to the loss of Kosovo, justify our high-ranked officials on almost all tv channels.
My father lives behind the Parliament, while I live next to the biggest church in the Balkans. The official rally starts in front of the Parliament where Kostunica the premier will give a public speech, and it ends with a prayer in the church. They estimate that all the streets in between will be full of people, just as crowded as Belgrade was during the toppling of Milosevic in 2000, or the Djindjic funeral in 2003. I attended those two events, it was my conscience, it was my duty. This particular rally I will omit, although I am curious and I would love to see their faces.
On the stage it will be the usual crowd, really: Serbian prominent nationalists , like the world famous film director Kusturica and the president of Bosnian Serbs Dodik maybe somewhere in the crowd. The war criminals are hiding in the massive crowds too: Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. Rumor says they are both in Belgrade now. . Before the rally began, I crossed the square in front of the Parliament. A lot of half drunk teenagers, turbofolk fans, and the sad, miserable and angry people I used to see in Milosevic rallies. It is a lovely spring day, but instead of relaxing I trembled: what if something goes wrong and massive violence bursts out? Who is responsible now for riotous damage to our lives and property? Nobody and everybody, really; Kosovo Albanian or Serbians apart, Belgrade itself is the only place at risk today.
I hear phrases on TV such as "Kosovo is the heart cut from the body of Serbia," and also lamentations about how much money was lost there, for instance in coal mines. These seem absurdly large sums for such a poor province -- who lost those investments, I wonder?
A big, nationalist, screaming speech by our prime minister. I don't remember ever hearing Kostunica so angry, loud and pathetic, like an aging rock star, this guy who hardly ever addresses his people. He is calling various world powers bad names and condemning the fake state of Kosovo, almost publicly cursing them. And extolling the Great Serbs with their pride and honor.
Now Putin is a Slavic hero. He swears oaths, uses words like life, death, Serbs, brothers, freedom, blood and all that; here in 21 century.
World famous stars are here too: Novak Djokovic the tennis player speaks like a robot on the screen, saying he will never let go of Kosovo. Emir Kusturica the film director interrupted his movie in US and came to speak live in Belgrade. The prime minister calls him a Serb -- actually Kusturica has changed his name from the rather unl-Slavic "Emir" to "Nemanja," the ancient Serbian king. The swaggering film director speaks against the local traitors and calls them "mice." The mice would be us, me, Women in Black. He says he doesn't not believe in Hollywood myth but in Kosovo myths. Why embrace myths at all?
In the meantime, on my blog, which I put up to follow the news in the city: Turkish and Croatian embassies attacked, a Nike shop looted. Where are the police? They claim this is the biggest meeting ever held in Belgrade.
Close to my home, the hooligans are in some pitched conflict with the police. Should I remove my name from my own door? No; when things really get bad in Serbia, the police arrive in company with the hooligans.
The American embassy is attacked right now, 7 00pm, no police around there; the reporter sounds really afraid as he reports the smashing and burning.
The German bank in downtown Belgrade is attacked too: gosh this is like during the NATO bombings, but in reverse.
Tonight at 2 am it will be a full moon eclipse -- Earth Moon and Sun in alignment, a perfect excuse for madness.
Right now I hear that the American embassy is broken into and burning with Molotov cocktails. The TV coverage reminds me of when people looted the parliament to topple Milosevic.
The newly elected president of Serbia is right now in Rumania. He avoided this rally in the last minute, even though his party has backed up the rally.
The country may be on the verge of a state of emergency.
CNN fired Chez Pazienza for blogging at Huffington post - not just because he broke a vague rule by blogging, but because of the content of his blog. [Link]
During my last couple of years as a television news producer, I watched the networks try to recover from a six year failure to bring truth to power (the political party in power being irrelevant incidentally; the job of the press is to maintain an adversarial relationship with the government at all times) and what's worse, to pretend that they had a backbone all along. I watched my bosses literally stand in the middle of the newsroom and ask, "What can we do to not lead with Iraq?" -- the reason being that Iraq, although an important story, wasn't always a surefire ratings draw. I was asked to complete self-evaluations which pressed me to describe the ways in which I'd "increased shareholder value." (For the record, if you're a rank-and-file member of a newsroom, you should never under any circumstances even hear the word "shareholders," let alone be reminded that you're beholden to them.) I watched the media in general do anything within reason to scare the hell out of the American public -- to convince people that they were about to be infected by the bird flu, poisoned by the food supply, or eaten by sharks. I marveled at our elevation of the death of Anna Nicole Smith to near-mythic status and our willingness to let the airwaves be taken hostage by every permutation of opportunistic degenerate from a crying judge to a Hollywood hanger-on with an emo haircut. I watched qualified, passionate people worked nearly to death while mindless talking heads were coddled. I listened to Lou Dobbs play the loud-mouthed fascist demagogue, Nancy Grace fake ratings-baiting indignation, and Glenn Beck essentially do nightly stand-up -- and that's not even taking into account the 24/7 Vaudeville act over at Fox News. I watched The Daily Show laugh not at our mistakes but at our intentional absurdity.Lessig for Congress
An idea whose time has come - help Larry decide to run for, and change, Congress.
Saturday I hung out at Obama's Austin HQ in the morning, and visited Clinton's HQ (where Bill Clinton spoke) in the evening. Doesn't matter which candidate you're tracking or supporting: we have real hope here. In the Bush 43 years, we've seen America at its worse, and we felt we were losing it - but we never quite lost hope, because we knew there would be a change, mandatory and inevitable, after eight years of - what's a tactful word? Difficulty. We can hope for repairs, and soon.
On the other hand, my friend Jasmina Tesanovic reports that "the language of war is the daily bread in Serbia. The sirens of nationalism are turned on again, as if nothing had changed in the eight years after Milosevic was toppled." Kosovo declared independence. Jasmina's hopeful, though, too:
May it be a beginning of new era; may our children never have another war with their neighbors just because they speak a different language and have a different sign on their graves. The Balkans have always been a multiethnic territory. No matter who wins the battle, nobody will be able to win a war.How Obama can win Texas
Burnt Orange Report has a very good analysis of Obama's chances in the Texas primary/caucuses. The key is to have a good turnout at the caucuses at the end of the day. [Link]
Of course, this discussion has only focused on the "primary" portion of Texas' primary/caucus system. Texas' caucuses begin at 7:15 PM after the polls close on Election Day, March 4th. Texas caucuses are an entirely separate election process for determining an entirely separate portion of national delegates. A candidate could win the primary but lose the caucuses to a better organized opponent.
Key Point: The Texas caucus system awards the candidate with the most active voters who return to vote a second time at 7:15 PM on Election Day, and there's absolutely no question that Senator Obama is absolutely dominating the caucuses.
Senator Obama could come close to Senator Clinton in the "primary" portion and dominate the "caucus" portion --- the only catch is that those 67 votes that come from the "caucus" system won't be known until June and the Texas Democratic Party Convention.
Lessig: Vote for Barack
If you're in a Super Tuesday state, planning to vote as a Democrat, and you're still ambivalent over your choices, check out Larry Lessig's reasoned consideration of the Obama candidacy, which he supports. In his video, Lessig says why he is convinced, as I am, that Obama is the right choice: he will lead, he will inspire, and he has the best position and attitude to undo the very real damage to this country, after almost sixteen years of polarizing, corrupt politics. We need more than a competent administrator - we need a true leader.
(I wrote this on January 5, but failed to publish it.)
How did Huckabee beat big spender Romney in Iowa? Valdis has a great post explaining how Huckabee sold himself into established social networks. [Link]
He found local social networks of conservative Christians, gun owners, home schoolers and tax reformers. It was in these networks that Huckabee's message caught fire and spread to other networks that intersected with these. Soon Huckabee had large clusters of interconnected supporters, all reinforcing one another -- friends talking to friends.
Meanwhile, Romney and the others where following common campaign wisdom and setting up phone banks, canvasing neighborhoods and spending money in the mass media -- strangers talking to strangers.
What was the big difference between these two approaches? Huckabee was connecting to intact networks that had a long history together, while Romney was connecting to individual voters -- one at a time. While Romney's supporters were also members of social networks, they were talked to, and influenced individually, alone. Who knows what they did when they went back into their social network? Huckabee's networks all got the same message at roughly the same time -- they probably had very fewer defections.
And here's the zinger:
Messages to people alone on the phone, alone in the car[radio], alone on the couch[TV], alone with the newspaper, alone with the computer, don't STICK the same way messages conveyed in a group of trusted others. Alone, we hear the message, forget the message, make the promise, forget the promise. In a group, we hear the message, discuss the message, internalize the meassge, make the promise to the group, keep the promise to the group. Huckabee supporters were more likely to remain in support for their candidate during the caucus process, than Romney's supporters -- who promised support when alone, but had to act in a group at the caucus.
Life is full of surprises
Clinton's campaign was revived by the New Hampshire win, and McCain is in the race after trailing along behind the likes of Giuliani, Romney, and Huckabee. The race is on... [Link] I suspect Gloria Steinem is feeling better today than yesterday
Note that the results still show a very tight Hillary/Obama race.
In 2004, Valdis Krebs analyzed patterns of political book purchases at Amazon, looking at Amazon's "also bought" data. [Link] Says Valdis, "Analyzing the patterns of directed links in the network above, we determined the most influential books in each cluster using a social network analysis metric. Broken Government is the most influential blue book, and An Inconvenient Book is the most influential red book, just beating out Power to the People."
Paul Krassner interviews RU Sirius about the Open Source Political Party. [Link]
Open Source Party is an attempt to apply some of the principles of the Open Source movement, which started out as a software movement and has evolved into a cultural sensibility, to the current and future political situation. Why are our political institutions decades or centuries (Washington B.C.) behind our technology? It's also an attempt to define a sort of alternative political agenda that seems nascent in our culture right now--this novel mix of liberalism, libertarianism, pragmatism and vision that many of us see buzzing around us.Open Source, Politics, and Governance
At Mondo Globo, I just blogged some thoughts about the character of an Open Source Political Party. Here's what I said:
Openness
Many of us who are tech-focused have come to understand the power of open approaches and open architectures. Even technologies that are't strictly "Open Source" benefit from Open APIs and exposure of operating code (kind of inherent with scripting languages like Perl and PHP). When we know how something works, we know how to work with it. And we know how to tansofrm it to meet our needs.
Government should be as open and transparent as possible. There may be some rationales for closed doors, but few - for the most part, citizens should be able to see clearly how decisons are made. That's a key component of our political platform: we want to see the actual "source code" for the decisoins that affect our lives.
Collaboration
Open Source projects are often highly collaborative and can involve many stakeholders, not just manager and coders. The Open Source Party sees this as a great way to do government. (I"m partial to charrette methodology, personally.)
Emergent Leadership
In many Open Source projects, leaders can - or must - emerge. We need to acknowledge that this is true in politics, as well. Leadrs may be appointed, assigned, or elected, but there is also room for leaders to emerge socially rather than through formal selection process. Emergent leaders aren't handed authority - they earn it. They deserve respect and acknowledgement.
Extensible and Adaptable
Open Source projects and structures are agile and malleable - they can be adapted and extended as requirements changed. Governance should have this kind of flexibility, and our system of governance in the U.S. was actually built that way. We should ensure that bureaucracies and obsolete rule sets don't undermine that flexibility.
I just thought of a good analogy or metaphor for my thinking about the Open Source Party mentioned in my last post, as I was posting a response at MondoGlobo. Here's what I posted:
In the USA, we already have a system of representative democracy (or at republic) that was created to be a source of consensus and balance. If it seems broken at the moment, that's not because the system's any more flawed than any system we might create to replace it. Rather, it's a case of "operator error" - we the people need to be better users, and that's what I really want from an "Open Source" or tech-focused political movement - better tools, better participation.Open Source Party
My pal RU Sirius is actually, well, serious about politics. He's run a couple of presidential campaigns that seemed less than, but he's politically astute and clear-headed, which is probably why he didn't have a chance of winning. Knowing my interest in in open politics and my thoughts about meeting the challenge of broader, informed participation (and skepticism about "democracy"), RU asked me to work with him on the development of an Open Source Political Party. Given my frustration with the politics du jour, I had a weak moment and agreed to help (though I hardly have time to think, breathe, or blog these days). There's nothing like being overcommitted – builds character.
We must be onto something – we're getting signups from the left and the right, and conversations are breaking out at the Ning-based MondoGlobo site.
RU wrote a pretty good first-cut proposal; we'll be building from there. C'mon over and join the Party.
So far, the House hasn't done anything to grant immunity to telecoms for allowing illegal wiretaps, as requested (okay, they saw it as a mandate) by the Bush Administration. I like what Pat Leahy said: "While I appreciate the problems facing the telecommunications companies, the retroactive immunity issue to me is not about fixing blame on the companies but about holding government accountable," Leahy said in a statement. "Passing a law to whitewash the Administration’s undermining of another law would be a disservice to the American people and to the rule of law." [Link]
"Swarming" is behavior worth studying - it might be a fundamental pattern (like scale-free networks). I use the metaphor in talking about politics - the ida of swarming legislators as a description of effective mass grassroots activism. There's a good snipped about The Rules of the Swarm at Slashdot, pointing to an article in the NY TImes. From the Times article:
By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.
Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals.
The Big Con
Check out the first chapter of Jonathan Chait's new book, The Big Con
There is something distinctly cultlike about their thinking. Their canon is presumptively infallible, and any apparent failure must instead be seen as an impetus to recommit themselves to doctrinal purity. Last spring, in an example typical of this thinking, the Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel diagnosed the Republican Party's ailments thusly: "The base is in the dumps, disenchanted with a party that has lost sight of its economic moorings." The solution? Tax cuts, and lots of them. Strassel ran through how all the leading Republican presidential candidates had pledged their fealty to the governing supply-side faith. Each of them promised to make permanent all of Bush's tax cuts, but of course this was a given. The competition was between which candidate would promise even deeper cuts in upper-bracket rates.Nuremberg revisited
As a diagnosis of what ails the Republicans today, this was, of course, insane. Bush signed a major tax cut each of the first six years of his presidency. Whatever the GOP's political liabilities may be, an insufficient commitment to tax-cutting is obviously not among them. To propose that the road to victory lies in recommitting the party to even more upper-bracket tax cuts requires a detachment from reality that would have been the envy of the Manson gang. But this is the sort of thinking that now predominates in conservative and Republican circles, and the obeisance of all the leading GOP presidential hopefuls shows just how deeply it has sunk in.
Meaningful piece by SusanG at DailyKos about Thomas Dodd's letters home, written while he was serving as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. This is especially timely:
"What a disordered period of history we live in," he writes in one letter. In another, "Wars bring changes—lasting changes for the worse. I know of nothing good from war. All that silly talk about the advance of science and such leaves me cold. Give me peace and retarded science." And as the evidence is compiled, he remarks, "It is a terrible page in the history of the human race." Frustrated at the questioning, day after day, he writes wearily to his wife: "Well—the same old song. It would be relieving to hear one of them admit some blame for something. They blame everything on the dead or missing."Vacation in Sunny Tierra Amarilla
The passages like the latter go to the heart of why his son and family felt it was time the world saw these letters. Chris Dodd explicitly draws the connection in his opening explanatory chapters between the Bush administration’s disregard for rule of law and current treatment of prisoners, and the monumental undertaking of his father’s generation to set up an international framework that would honor civilization over barbarity, and balance the understandable desire for vengeance with the painstaking weight of moral authority. "Of course we must give these defendants a fair hearing—a most fair hearing," he tells his wife, "otherwise this whole effort is a farce. No decent lawyer feels otherwise." Reading this, it’s impossible not to grieve for what has been lost for America under Gonzales and Bush.
Indeed, as his son points out:On the morning of December 13, 1945, my father presented to the court an argument that has an eerie connection to the present. He charged the Nazis, among many other heinous crimes, with "the apprehension of victims and their confinement without trial, often without charges, generally with no indication of the length of their detention."
In my last post, I mentioned my drive to Denver, then toward San Francisco as far as Utah, in the summer of '67. I set out on this trip a day or two after I graduated from high school. My brother read the post, and reminded me of a little drama I encountered along the way, on June 5, 1967. I just happened to drive through Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico as members of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes took the courthouse by force. There was gunfire as I drove through town with my head down, pedal to the m etal. As I left town I passed a long stream of National Guardsmen. Pretty exciting. Coincidentally the Six-Day War started that same day; war news was background for my whole short trip.
A few months ago, James Spader's character Alan Shore on Boston Legal have a stirring speech asking when the American people will have had enough... puppetgov.com captured the speech and put it online with a few enhancement...
Hidden HistoryRU Sirius interviews David Talbot about his book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, in which he chronicles the "the hostility that existed between the Kennedy brothers and their own military, intelligence and enforcement agencies" while JFK was president. Is there any substance to conspiracy theories about the two Kennedy assassinations? Talbot thinks so – and he suggests that there will be tension between any progressive president and the military-industrial complex. [Link]
I think they were trying to sandbag him. They knew he was young and inexperienced. According to the CIA's own internal history of the Bay of Pigs, which was released and de-classified in 2005, they knew that it would fail. They knew that their own motley brigade of Cuban exiles weren't sufficient to defeat Castro, and they thought that Kennedy's hand would be forced to send in the Marines and Air Force once these guys were pinned down on the beaches. But he didn't. He was very loath to widen the war. He knew — as the CIA itself later determined in an intelligence estimate — that if we were to do that, it would end up like what we're seeing today in Iraq. U.S. forces would have quickly swept aside Castro's military, they'd have marched on to Havana and then they would've gotten bogged down in a long and bloody occupation.
Defunding Cheney
Dick Cheney claims that the Vice President's office is not "an entity within the executive branch," so Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) will introduce an amendment to the the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill to cut funding for Cheney's office. [Link]
At a press briefing yesterday, White House Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino said that Cheney's assertion that he operates outside of the executive branch of government was "an interesting constitutional question that people can debate" and a "non-issue."
On Thursday, Emanuel suggested that if Cheney feels his office is not part of the executive branch "he should return the salary the American taxpayers have been paying him since January 2001, and move out of the home for which they are footing the bill."
Hacker Crackdown podcast
In 1994 I helped Bruce Sterling release his book The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier online as plain text "literary freeware," ultimately distributed far and wide. The book was inspired by the response to the Secret Service raid at Steve Jackson Games. Steve sued the Secret Service, won the lawsuit, and became a poster boy for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and instigator of EFF-Austin, which was originally supposed to be an EFF chapter. Bruce heard about the raid within hours, when Steve appeared on SMOF-BBS (where Mike Godwin and I also hung out) and let everybody know what little he knew at the time. His book includes an authoritative account of the raid and "offers a unique and colorful portrait of the nature of 'cyberspace' in the early 1990s, and the nature of "computer crime" at that time." (From Wikipedia.) Now Cory Doctorow's podcasting a reading of the book.
This is the herd I want to join(Thanks to David Armistead for the pointer!)
WCA: U.S. Presidential Candidates Debate BroadbandWirless Communications Association International (WCA) has created "the authoritative go-to resource for comments by – and comparisons between – top U.S. policymakers regarding the pace and benefits of broadband deployments." [Link]
Fed up with the pervasive, remarkably obvious corruption of the Bush regime and the promise of more politics-as-usual from the slate of presidential candidates offered so far by major parties, netizens are flocking to former Libertarian (and current Republican), Texas' Ron Paul. His stock rose after his recent performance in the Republican debate, where he argued that terrorism is a response to intrusive U.S. foreign policy. (A quote from the debate: "We overthrew the Iranian government in 1953 and their taking the hostages was the reaction. This dynamic persists and we ignore it at our risk. They’re not attacking us because we’re rich and free, they’re attacking us because we’re over there.") [Link] [Link to Ron Paul's Wikipedia entry] [Link to Salon article]
My friend, Serbian blogger Jasmina Tesanovic, emailed me the report below, republished here with her permission. The attach she describes has led to a protest "against the policy that turned Serbia into a society that bans the freedom of expression and a society in which each individual should fear about his own life because of his personal stance."
On April 14, at 2.50 a.m, in the center of Belgrade, two grenades exploded. They were planted in the bedroom window of prominent Serbian journalist Dejan Anastasijevic.
The first bomb burst early. The blast catapulted the second grenade into the street, into some parked cars and away from the sleeping bodies of Dejan, his wife and his fifteen-year-old daughter. This likely saved their lives.
Dejan, who writes for TIME magazine, was among the witnesses at the Hague International War Crime Tribunal against Slobodan Milosevic. As a journalist, his main line of inquiry was the connection between war crimes committed by Serbian military and police all over former Yugoslavia in the nineties. A painful issue. Recently the International War Crime Tribunal in Hague held that the regime of Slobodan Milosevic cannot be directly linked to the mass graves in Kosovo and the genocide in Srebrenica. Therefore the Serbian state is not formally guilty of genocide -- although genocide took place.
Therefore genocide was committed, not by the state, but by non-state actors. Secret armed militias in disintegrating states were novelties in the 1990s. They're not any more.
Nobody tries Al Qaeda for genocide, for they don't even pretend to be a state and even America abandons law and order to chain them in Guantanamo.
On April 10th, a verdict was issued at the special court for war crimes in Belgrade. This verdict involved the death squad called Scorpions, who were involved in the genocide in Srebrenica. In the spirit of the sentence of the Hague tribunal, the local tribunal also found the state of Serbia not guilty of genocide. Neither are the Scorpions guilty.
The Scorpion militia took the trouble to film one of their own misdeeds, so that the court witnessed the Scorpion defendants kicking bound teenage captives, jabbing them with gun barrels, denying them water, insulting them and then shooting them. Nevertheless, this does not constitute a proof of the grand-scale state-crime of genocide.
The bodies of the dead are there on film, the genocidal intent is obvious, but there is no clear legal chain of orders between any formal state apparatus and this covert squad of armed marauders. Who ordered what, when, why...? A whirlwind in the storms of a disintegrating state, says the verdict.
The whole world saw that film, that was the cause of the tribunal, so everyone knows at least that those five indicted Scorpions, in one way or other, did commit the murder of six innocent civilians merely guilty of being Moslems. The president of Serbia, Boris Tadic, declared after the sentence that such crimes deserved capital punishment.
But who in Serbia will give the order to legally kill the state's legally unsanctioned killers? The Scorpion death squad was tripped up by their urge to brag on video, but the same people who ruled Serbia during the nineties are still in power today. Milosevic is dead, Mladic is hidden, but most of their colleagues and collaborators, open and covert, walk the streets of Belgrade, blustering and threatening about Kosovo and their political opponents.
The chief prosecutor of the Scorpions is not satisfied with the sentence. The lawyers of the victims are angry. The defense lawyers of the Scorpions are triumphant. In prison or out of it, the Scorpions consider themselves moral victors; with the evidence so crushingly against them, that strategy was the best they could hope for.
They do have one other strategy: the strategy of covertly killing people. A death-squad is still a death squad, and a gangland atmosphere of lethal intimidation works as well on Serbs as on the alien Other. The death squads lash out against journalists who report them, as Dejan Anastasijevic, who knows the situation well and publicly commented on the verdict.
Did the death-squad who planted grenades in his bedroom window take the trouble to film it?
As as a few aging Scorpions shuffle off to prison for their crimes of many years ago, Serbian civil society remains imprisoned by its worst elements. Journalist Slavko Curuvija was assassinated by Milosevic secret police hit-men, back in 1999. Our late premiere Zoran Djindjic was shot by state mafia in 2003. That doesn't even count the havoc wreaked by state-mafia complex on its own death-squad soldiers, from Chief Tiger Arkan, shot in 2000, through hundreds of underworld less known bombed in cars, shot in cafes...
Dejan has many friends in the world and at home, but he and his family are profoundly unsafe, just like everyone else in a hollow state that secretly cherishes death squads while failing to keep public order. As long as Dejan writes the facts, as long as Serbia lives in organized denial, as long as the tribunals minimize the criminal issues in the name of reconciliation or realpolitik, the truth will act as a bomb in terrorist hands.
Ever since Milosevic reduced Yugoslavia to his private casino, the much battered entity called Serbia has never been a lawful state. State failure may soon become a luxury that the Balkans can no longer afford. Although I never make decisions out of fear, I confess, I am afraid.
Photo: Jasmina speaking at EFF-Austin's SXSW event in March.
Campaigns, technology, and peopleThis year's SXSW panel on net politics (featuring Republican blogger Patrick Ruffini, Mark SooHoo of the McCain campaign, Texas Rep. Mark Strama, and Clay Johnson of Blue State Digital) was very smart, but I had a queasy feeling about it. Why?
Having thought about the source of my discomfort, I realized that candidate politics creeps me out. It's exciting, and it can be lucrative for those in support roles, including developers of technologies to support political campaigns. (Blue State Digital seems to be doing well, for instance; Clay told me they're managing 70 or so campaign sites, including Obama's and Richardson's).
But at a time when we so desperately need authentic solutions, "doing well" in this sense is a problem. Candidates and their campaigns are not really about governance. They're business first, like any company, a way to raise cash and create jobs. Despite the breathless talk about technology driving democratic solutions, business comes first, even for developers of political technology who in 2004 were more idealistic about the potential for their work to make a grassroots difference.
Campaign consultants, handlers, media flaks and technologists may be affiliated with particular parties or issues, but are they really amoral opportunists who focus on specific problems or issues only insofar as they provide ways to advance the specific campaign? Their business doesn't even require them to get candidates elected - they're paid, not for winning elections, but for raising money. Why do you see so many unwinnable candidates vying for the presidency? If they have any possibility of a constituency and can engage competent handlers who know how to work the system, they create a business. It's a living.
Their positive cash flow is unfortunately related to dysfunctional aspects of politics. Working within an axis of moneyand power, it's hard to avoid the taint of corruption, however subtle. I have a friend who's a political consultant, and he does care about ethics and good government - but he puts that aspect of his personality in the cold-steel lockbox when he's working a campaign. In conversation he'll admit he has a sleazy side, but it's his job, and it pays well.
I'm pretty much a realist, so this isn't meant to be an idealistic rant about how the world should work. It is what it is. However I write this because many of you will consider working for politicians and their campaigns, and I think there's a better way.
Instead of working for candidates, you might consider building organizations and technologies that serve the interests of citizens, that connect them with the political process so that they can have audible voices in a conversation that is often completely controlled by lobbyists and larger interest groups.
I acknowledge that it's not enough to get connected. You also have to be smart about political process and the issues du jour. For instance, effective global warming activists should understand that mitigation has economic consequences, because without that nuanced understanding, it's hard to have meaningful, multidimensional input. Effective solutions emerge from deep understanding.
I.e. rather than putting our energies into electing specific candidates, we should swarm elected officials with smart mobs advocating effective solutions to specific problems. Forget ideology, focus on action and results.
I was struck by one comment in particular from the SXSW panel I mentioned earlier. The panelists agreed that their job was not to build online communities, but to drive people away from their computers and into the physical world to recruit, persuade, and get out the vote. I might disagree that you have to leave your computer to connect and persuade, but it's worthwhile to note that no social technology, however sophisticated, will change the world.
People will and do change the world, however; technology may help, but the real solutions are social.
Photo by Jon Lebkowsky: Clay Johnson, Mark SooHoo, Patrick Ruffini, and Mark Strama at SXSW Interactive.
Bush the felonHas George W. Bush committed a crime by spying without a warrant? I'm increasingly convinced that, once he's left office and we're under new management, Bush will face years of legal grief, and a Rutland Herald editorial suggests he might be thinking the same thing, and that the days of woe might be pretty close:
But with Democrats in control of Congress, it may have dawned on the Bush White House that someone may notice that violation of FISA is a felony. Bamford noted that one of the charges in the articles of impeachment drawn up against President Nixon was "illegal wiretaps." Maybe Bush's legal protectors have grown fearful that someone will conclude that a felonious offense is also an impeachable offense.David Grossman on Israel vs Palestine
A federal judge in Michigan has already ruled that the Bush administration's electronic surveillance program was illegal, and the case is now under appeal. Because Bush has agreed now to comply with FISA, Gonzalez is arguing that the case is moot. But as Bamford noted, a bank robber cannot escape responsibility for breaking the law by saying he will not do it again.
Just got an email blast from Tom Atlee that includes a link to title="The New York Review of Books: Looking at Ourselves" href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19770?email">"Looking at Ourselves," the text of a speech by author David Grossman, given at the Rabin memorial ceremony, Tel Aviv, November 4, 2006, in the presence of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. It's a powerful speech about war and the possibility of peace in the Middle East.
Go to the Palestinians, Mr. Olmert. Don't look for reasons not to talk to them. You've given up on unilateral disengagement. And that's good. But don't leave a vacuum. It will fill up immediately with violence and destruction. Talk to them. Make them an offer that their moderates can accept (there are far more of them than the media shows us). Make them an offer, so that they will have to decide whether to accept it or instead remain hostages to fanatical Islam. Go to them with the boldest, most serious plan that Israel is able to put forward. A plan that all Israelis and Palestinians with eyes in their heads will know is the limit of refusal and concession, ours and theirs. If you hesitate, we'll soon be longing for the days when Palestinian terrorism was an amateur affair. We will pound ourselves on our heads and shout, why did we not use all our flexibility, all our Israeli creativity, to extricate our enemy from the trap in which he ensnared himself?
Just as there is unavoidable war, there is also unavoidable peace. Because we no longer have any choice. We have no choice, and they have no choice. And we need to set out toward this unavoidable peace with the same determination and creativity with which we set out to an unavoidable war. Anyone who thinks there is an alternative, that time is on our side, does not grasp the profound, dangerous process that is now well underway.
Habeas corpus
From Daily Kos: an interesting exchange between Arlen Specter and Alberto Gonzales:
Specter: Now wait a minute, wait a minute. The Constitution says you can't take it away except in the case of invasion or rebellion. Doesn't that mean you have the right of habeas corpus?
Gonzales: I meant by that comment that the Constitution doesn't say that every individual in the United States or every citizen has or is assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn't say that. It simply says that the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended.
Okay, legal eagles, here's a question... is Gonzales actually correct? I ask because I checked the language of the constitution, and it says
The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
It says privilege, not right.I want it to be a considered perceived as a right, obviously; I'm just concerned about the semantics here.
... that we won't see the kind of opposition that would end the war, in a quote from Stephen Hadley explaining White House strategy. [Link]
Mr. Bush's National Security Adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said in an interview on "Meet the Press" on NBC that the White House has sufficient money under its control to deploy the troops as planned, and he suggested that once the troops are in place, Congress would be reluctant to cut off funding.
"I think once they get in harm's way, Congress's tradition is to support those troops," Mr. Hadley said.Here's how Welshman at Daily Kos interprets the quote:
Hadley is saying that the opposition of the recently elected majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate to the escalation of troop numbers in Iraq can be circumvented by using existing money, unallocated and unapproved for the purpose, to put young American women and men under fire, in "harms way", to force the continuation of such funding.
"Where's the outrage?"
Gary Kamiya at Salon asks "Where's the outrage?" about the war in Iraq, then answers his own question. Americans are dying in Iraq, but not enough of them, and they're all volunteers, there's no danger that some senator's or judge's kid will be drafted and forced to fight and die. The death toll is still only something like 5% of Vietnam, and some of the natural opponents (Democrats) don't want to appear "soft on security." So what's left to do? Poetry.
What does poetry have to do with politics? Nothing -- and everything. It is too late to stop the fatal endgame of Bush's war. But at least we can honor those who have died in that war, Iraqis and Americans alike, by refusing to look away from their deaths. Poetry, as the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz once wrote, is a witness. And if we the living highly resolve, as we must, that these dead shall not have died in vain, the only way to do so is by ensuring that we never again launch an unjustified war.Sock Mobs/Bots
On the Internet, or at least in many places online, nobody knows you've replicated (or how many times). I could create an unruly mob of respondents supporting (or even disagreeing with) my blog posts, for instance, by altering my identity from post to post. I could do that on your blog, too.
Doug Rushkoff calls this a "sock mob" phemenon, derived from "sock puppet," which Jamais Cascio defines as "a faux personage used in online debates to back up the arguments of the real person (thereby demonstrating the position to be popular)." The mob is the plural of the puppet, and I suspect they're popping up in quite a few places, especially where the subject is politics. Jamais posts that we can expect to see much more of this sort of thing. [Link]
As the scripting and construction tools for these virtual worlds get more powerful, we're likely to see virtual protesters run by real people augmented by mobs of in-game simulations and "bots," made with enough detail in both image and behavior to convincingly appear as a swarm of real players. They may have scripted replies to questions, and would be coded to appear and disappear in the same way that human-operated denizens of the virtual worlds do. It wouldn't be hard to figure out that they were bots if you pay enough attention, but as a mob -- especially if human-operated figures were dispersed throughout -- they'd be rather impressive.
Ultimately, just as rampant sock mob activities can devalue conversation and comments, sock bots will no doubt in time make it harder to engage in political activity in virtual worlds. If a political figure knew that her very appearance in a virtual world setting would trigger the appearance of dozens or even hundreds of marching, chanting protesters -- who look at least as "real" as the human-operated purple monkeys, giant phalluses with hands, flying unicorns and the like that inhabit the virtual environments -- said political figure would likely find little to gain by making that appearance.
This is why we need a netwide standard identity framework with strong and meaningful authentication. We won't necessarily get it, but people are working on it.)
Molly Ivins is back, and she's pissedMolly Ivins evidently took some time off for cancer treatment, but she's posted a new column that says that she's had it with the war in Iraq, we need to get out now. (Thanks to Marv Plettner for posting a pointer to this column on the WELL.) I've avoided posting more about screwy neocons and the possibly sociopathic, clearly incompetent President we hopefully didn't elect, figuring others were doing a decent job – and it's great to have Molly back on the case. [Link]
This war is being prosecuted in our names, with our money, with our blood, against our will. Polls consistently show that less than 30 percent of the people want to maintain current troop levels. It is obscene and wrong for the president to go against the people in this fashion. And it's doubly wrong for him to send 20,0000 more soldiers into this hellhole, as he reportedly will announce next week.The future of democracy
What happened to the nation that never tortured? The nation that wasn't supposed to start wars of choice? The nation that respected human rights and life? A nation that from the beginning was against tyranny? Where have we gone? How did we let these people take us there? How did we let them fool us?
It's a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there. Since 1215, civil authorities have been obligated to tell people with what they are charged if they're arrested. This administration has done away with rights first enshrined in the Magna Carta nearly 800 years ago, and we've let them do it.
This will be a regular feature of mine, like an old-fashioned newspaper campaign. Every column, I'll write about this war until we find some way to end it. STOP IT NOW. BAM! Every day, we will review some factor we should have gotten right.
Last Tuesday I spoke about democracy to the Central Texas Chapter of the World Future Society. There's a recording of the talk (MP3). I talked a little about the history of politics on the Internet, and the distinction between democracy and advocacy. I also talked about tools for deliberation.
Hanging out after a meeting
Last Tuesday I was in SF for a meeting with Mark Warner and several techs, including my friend Trei Brundrett, who's been working for Warner's Forward Together PAC. Trei introduced me to Scott Chacon, who's been making political technology via his Open Source Democracy Project. We seemed to be pretty well aligned in our thinking, and in the issues that interest us. Scott posted an account of our post-meeting at the 21st Amendment.
... and she wants you to register and vote.
Code-A-ThonThe League of Technical Voters' Code-A-Thon is under way. Kai Mantsch shot and edited a very cool bit of video of the first night:
I also shot a bunch of still photos, posted at Flickr.
Inside AgitatorMatt Bai in the NY Times writes a knowing piece about the real meaning of Howard Dean's campaign and his current approach to leadership of the Democratic party, which is more like creating a whole new party without support of other current Dem leaders. Dean fell into his current role by accident, having tapped into an already evolving Democratic populism that comprised of outsiders who correctly perceived that they'd been marginalized as the party organization became more of a "private political club" for wealthy urban donors. [Link]
Over the course of the campaign, Dean turned into an apostle, in politics, of the economic concept of “disintermediation” — the idea that, in the Internet age, voters could connect with candidates, and with one another, without the party acting as the conduit. In a sense, this is what his candidacy was all about. He still believed, though, that only a strong national party could mobilize voters on Election Day. At the Democratic convention in Boston, six months after he dropped out of the presidential race, he met with frustrated delegations from 18 “untargeted” states, meaning that the national party and its candidate, John Kerry, had completely ignored them. Dean was appalled. “The best window we have to talk to Democrats, the time when they pay the most attention, is in the presidential campaign,” Dean told me, “and we were just saying to the people of those 18 states, ‘We’re not interested in you.’ You cannot be a national party if you say that to anybody. Anybody.”Keith Olbermann's 9/11 message
Keith Olbermann's one of the few journalists to challenge the Bush Administration head-on, noting the emperor's profound nakedness. A few minutes ago, I heard him read a powerful 9/11 message on Countdown... read it, preferably more than once.
Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.Politics, MySpace, and YouTube
And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.
And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.
The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.
Those who did not belong to his party -- tabled that.
Those who doubted the mechanics of his election -- ignored that.
Those who wondered of his qualifications -- forgot that.
History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation's wounds, but to take political advantage.
Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.
The President -- and those around him -- did that.
Some politicians are joining "businesses, news organizations and others looking to exploit the growth in user-driven sites." [Link]
Russ Kelly, spokesman for GOP gubernatorial candidate John Binkley in Alaska, questions how these efforts will translate into votes. He recalled how Democrat Howard Dean had embraced cutting-edge Internet tools during the 2004 presidential race, but ''couldn't even get out of the primary.''
Even more relevant: the Dean campaign, despite its evident appeal to younger voters, failed to get them to the polls in Iowa. On the other hand, Dean leveraged his supporters in a successful attempt to take control of the Democratic party, so his efforts didn't exactly fail.
The real question is not whether politicians use the tools, but whether they understand the tools they're using. Most won't, because they're steeped in the culture of broadcast politics. I'm still waiting to see a politician that understands the Internet, and understands how the Internet and a new kind of society are coevolving.
Bumperactive for Crawford Peace House
Kyle Johnson notes that Bumperactive.com has produced a set of bumperstickers for the Crawford Peace House, founded in 2002 as a firm antiwar presence eight miles from George W. Bush's "Western White House." The Peace House "offers a culturally diverse environment for spiritual growth and intellectual understanding that gives hope to humanity by providing peaceful alternatives to war.... Our Vision is to make the Crawford Peace House a culturally and religiously diverse center for spiritual growth and intellectual understanding that offers hope to humanity by providing positive alternatives to the cult of war."
Shoult out to Kyle, who's kept Bumperactive, "the world's finest bumper sticker cooperative," happening over the years and built it into the source of choice for adhesive expression!
"Why Lieberman's site is down"While Joe Lieberman's minions were accusing Ned Lamont and unnamed bloggers for the collapose of the Lieberman campaign's web site, Kos and his readers found some interesting facts. Lieberman's site is hosted by a bulk hosting provider called MyHostCamp for $15 per month. The site was on a shared server with 73 other sites, and with a 10GB bandwidth limit. Other sites on the same server are working, so there clearly was no denial of service attack. Kos asks "Will the Lieberman campaign reimburse state and federal investigators wasting resources to confirm that the site went down because the campaign was too cheap to hire a quality hosting provider?" [Link]
"Why is congress considering such anti-consumer telecom bills?"Bruce Kushnick of TeleTruth, the most active of telecom activists, asks this question in an informative piece at the Nieman Watchdog. Don't just read it, Digg it.
These bill names use D.C.-Speak, a modern Orwellian vernacular. Both would give the Bells new incentives in the form of national franchises with no "build-out" requirements for states or cities to be fully wired. The cable companies currently have local franchises, where the companies have to meet specific requirements for local provisioning, such as local access channels. This new corporate “one size fits all” national franchise is not about customers but about expediency and lack of community services, as the House bill allows the new entrants (that is, the phone companies) not to worry about local, existing obligations. The House bill adds an additional 1 percent tax on the cable operators' gross revenues, and the language of the bill states that the operators can “designate that portion of a subscriber's bill attributable to such payment”, meaning that new taxes can be charged directly to the customer.Popup Politicians
The phone companies have had extensive financial incentives before, but they have never fulfilled their obligations. Rewarding them for such a record is brazen, and raises the question of whether Capitol Hill lawmakers are in cahoots with the telecoms.
Very cool little Ajax widget: you can add mini-profiles of politicians to your pages. [Link] (Thanks to Greg Elin for the pointer!)
Here's an example, my own rep. This probably won't work if you're reading this in an RSS feed or email. Otherwise, Just mouse over the sunny widget on the right of Smith's surname.
Representative Lamar Seeligson SMITH
95 Theses of Geek ActivismThis llittle manifesto is pretty good... nail it to your door and read it. I was surprised the author thought "geek activism" was something new... I was moved to post the following....
Your initial premise ("Geek activism has not taken off yet") is incorrect, I think. There was plenty of geek.activism in the 90s: EFF, of course, but also EPIC and CDT, CPSR and NetAction, GILC, the Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, 2600, Wired Mag's activist days, netizen, Jon Katz' Geek Force, my own Electronic Frontiers Forum at HotWired, etc. That said, there's good stuff in your theses... I might disagree with a few. For instance, there's no guarantee that we'll still have a public domain in the future... legislators have talked seriously about permanent copyright. Proprietary data formats can store public information as long as the information remains public and is stored in other formats that aren't proprietary (but I know what you meant). I'm not sure that spimes are a sign that things are going well... spimes have a sinister side (read Everyware).
A couple of suggestions. One is to read Extreme Democracy (http://extremedemocracy.com), a book that Mitch Ratcliffe and I edited. This may be seen as a shameless plug, but it's a pretty good anthology of geek activist writings.
The other suggestion is to consider going to the League of Technical Voters programmer lock-in October 13-15 (http://www.leagueoftechvoters.org/drupal/). That's a good way to be both geek and activist.
I left a few things out of that historical rant: FringeWare, Cypherpunks, Fight Censorship, and, of course, EFF-Austin.
"The YouTube War"Ana Marie Cox notes that, while the architects of the Iraq War and their boosters argue that media portrays the war as a downer whereas soldiers on the ground could tell you all the good things that are happening, you can see that's not the case by surfing through the videos they're sharing on sites like YouTube. [Link]
By that logic, putting cameras in the hands of those soldiers on the ground should provide enough celebration for an "Up with Iraq" musical.Time for an Oil Change?
There's music in a lot of the soldiers' videos, but precious little uplift. In "The War Tapes," one soldier/auteur complains frequently about the risks he and his comrades take to protect the property of the Halliburton subsidiary subcontracted to feed the troops: "Why the f--- am I sitting out here guarding a truck full of cheesecake?" he laments. After another guardsman supplies a Bush Administration-approved justification for their presence (freedom and democracy for the Iraqi people, stability in the Middle East), the cameraman asks, "tell me how you really feel." Deadpan, he continues: "After that happens, maybe we can buy everybody in the world a puppy."
Check out George and the Four Condis performing "Addicted to Oil" (might as well pump it!) Thanks, Gillo [Link]
Pete AshdownI've been waiting to see a clueful blogger run for office, and here he is (via Dana Blankenhorn): Pete Ashdown, who's running against Orrin Hatch in Utah. [Link] Ashdown's set up a MediaWiki-based Collaboration Wiki. He's actually asking for input on policy, which never happens (because, my pals who are political consultants tell me, you have to focus on MONEY, not POLICY, til you've won the election. I'm eager to see whether Ashdown will stay with the wiki and do something useful with the feedback.
European Parliament and online free expressionLast week the European Parliament passed a resolution on onlie free expression, criticizing Internet companies that cooperate with repressive regimes. [Link]
The resolution calls on the European Commission to establish a "voluntary code of conduct" that places limits on the activities of companies in repressive countries and urges it to take account of the need for unhindered Internet access when considering its assistance programmes to third countries. The resolution is not, however, binding on the commission, which has exclusive responsibility for implementing EU policy in this area.Campaigns Wikia
Yahoo !, Google and Microsoft are singled out for agreeing to censor themselves in China. Cisco Systems is accused of supplying Internet censorship technology. The European companies France Telecom and Telecom Italia are named because of their Internet area cooperation with Tunisia and Cuba.
Jimbo Wales has created a workspace with "the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites." [Link]
One hallmark of the blog and wiki world is that we do not wait for permission before making things happen. If something needs to be done, we do it. Well, campaigns need to sit up and take notice of the Internet, take notice of bloggers, take notice of wikis, and engage with us in a constructive way.This is resonant with a couple other projects launched recently, Silona Bonewald's League of Technical Voters and Robert Steele's Citizens' Party. Brin on Cato
The candidates who will win elections in the future will be the candidates who build genuinely participative campaigns by generating and expanding genuine communities of engaged citizens.
I am launching today a new Wikia website aimed at being a central meeting ground for people on all sides of the political spectrum who think that it is time for politics to become more participatory, and more intelligent.
David Brin writes about the "bright fools" at the Cato Institute, but what he's really writing about is the current conspiracy to use free market arguments to divert more wealth to the wealthy. [Link]
... the Cato Institute has long promoted the worst social, economic and political conflation of modern times. A delusion that Adam Smith warned against. The notion that ownership of capital is the prime correlate with wise market capitalism. A very different concept, fundamentally, than saying that markets are themselves wise at allocating, rewarding or promoting innovative goods and services.Surveillance: the slope is ever more slippery
From CNN:
Gen. Michael Hayden told his Senate confirmation hearing that the controversial National Security Agency wiretapping program he helped institute would have caught two 9/11 hijackers in San Diego, California, before they carried out their mission.This is lazy theory. In fact we know that the FBI and others had enough information, but failed to act. It's impossible to say whether wiretaps would have made a difference, just as it's hard to say whether wiretaps will be abused. Classified surveillance programs must be deployed only with great caution and sensitive oversight to prevent abuse. The Bush administration has demonstrated neither caution nor sensitivity in its pursuit of an endless "war on terror" that might ultimately be used to justify practically anything. And we have many examples in our own history, and in the recent history of countries like Germany and the Soviet Union, that suggest surveillance is readily deployed by those who would gather and abuse power. Surveillance is a slippery slope
James Sensenbrenner is proposing legislation to require ISPs to store records of user activities so that police will have access, ostensibly to assist them in tracking and catching pedophiles. Mitch Ratcliffe says the real target is "the American people's freedom to explore the Internet and ideas in privacy, because a few people in government think they know better what we should be doing." [Link]
Before the critics of anything anti-surveillance jump in, again, to point out that I suffer from a "pre-9/11 mentality" or that tracking user surfing isn't surveillance and that only the guilty have to worry, let's be clear: Recording and reporting what everyone does on the Net is surveillance. Surveillance is a function of government the United States has strictly controlled in order to minimize the government's, or an individual who gains access to surveillance data, ability to restrict individual choices or facilitate the use by a political party of data gathered by government to blackmail or intimidate citizens.Fundamental political change
For all his good intentions with regards the security of the United States, President Bush suffers from an idealism that is much more dangerous than the pre-9/11 mentality, because he apparently ignored the 20th century. He has repeatedly said that he can look into the hearts of others and determine whether they are good or evil, the same kind of niavete that led Neville Chamberlain to appease Hitler at Munich. He actually suffers from a pre-Auschwitz mentality that refuses to acknowledge the critical lesson of the 20th century, the extraordinary depths of evil man, especially when left unrestrained by law, can acheive. Hannah Arendt, in her essay Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility, wrote that "realiz[ing] of what man is capable…is the precondition for any modern political thinking."
Mitch Kapor is blogging about "a movement for fundamental political change," where he says
What's worse, there is a conventional wisdom which tells us that there are no viable alternatives to the unacceptable ones in front of us. Everyone I've ever asked who is serious about politics has told me a third party is either futile, or worse, counter-productive.I posted this comment in response:
Well, being out of tune with the conventional wisdom doesn't faze me any more now than it did at the dawn of the PC era in the late 1970's and dawn of the internet era in the early 1990's. I have seen waves of fundamental change overtake and transform common knowledge time and time again, and I believe it can happen again.
I've become completely convinced that we need to begin a process of fundamental political change in the U.S., not in the form of a new party per se as a new multi-faceted movement of ideas, organizations, and cultures, based around a vision of democracy which is fundamentally open, participatory, and decentralized.
...I'll be speaking with Zack at MeshForum in a couple of weeks, and what I thought I'd say is very close to your multi-faceted movement of ideas, organizations, and cultures. We've been discussing at Greater Democracy how the parties (especially the Democrats) aren't responsive to the national conversation, in fact avoid the potential to build real communities and sponsor real discussions. Our politicians are doing all the talking and none of the listening. It strikes me as inevitable that a different kind of political force will evolve through social networks that are supported by communication networks (i.e. the Internet).Wonkette goes mud-wrestling
The witless new Wonkette (supposedly an attorney named David Lat, and I wanna know why they didn't change the name of the blog to "Wonk") is no fun, and even worse, he (she? it?) is into posting smears, tossing mud and muck at "Red State" Democrat Mark Warner, rumored to be considering a presidential bid. Maybe the Wonk (who blogged formerly as "Article III Groupie" at Underneath Their Robes, likes to sling mud for exercise (Ana Marie says she left Wonkette because she was tired of sitting), or maybe he's partisan. It could be, though, that he's trying to clear the way for the presidential race of his dreams:
I have a weakness for dramatic, intriguing figures, and strong, powerful, brilliant women. So my favorite Bush administration official is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and my favorite senator is Hillary Rodham Clinton. If Hillary and Condi ever face each other in some race -- for example, a presidential race, as Dick Morris has fantasized about -- I will pretty much drop dead from sheer excitement.It could also be that co-Wonk Alex Pareene is the maker of mud; he says "I was pretty convinced we were degrading the discourse," though not referring to this specific puddle of mud. Demcomm
Jock Gill posted, at GreaterDemocracy.org, a brief history of the collision of politics and social software in 2004, including notes from the Demcomm group that formed to advise the Kerry campaign on the potential to build communities of supporters using online tools. (The Kerry campaign didn't take the advice). I was part of the Demcomm group, along with Howard Rheingold, Nanci Meng, Tex Coate, and several others. We created a draft plan, and
We never heard back. We could only watch as Kerry imposed a traditional, asymmetrical, industrial era Master/Slave broadcast communications organizing principal on his campaign. Kerry did not trust the voters to generally do the right thing most of the time. Thus he was basically unable to leverage cooperative gain created by the collective actions of his supporters at the edges of his campaign. Kerry only understood power as it is ceated by asymmetrical relationships. This lead him to treat his supporters as sheeple, not as citizen activists.Joe Trippi posts an interesting comment re. the Dean campaign:
There is an implied belief among many that there was tremendous agreement inside the Dean Campaign to take the Peer-to-Peer path over the Master-Slave model -- this simply was not true. It was a fight every day keep the master/slave beast at bay. In hindsight the miracle was that we held it off as long as we did given how many inside and outside the campaign relished master/slave over peer-to-peer.Trippi notes that Jock, who consulted for the Dean campaign, was "instrumental in helping to keep us on track (for as long as we stayed on track)." (Thanks to Jock for the pointer!) Community Wireless legislation: good news, for a change
Sascha Meinrath posts about two bills that are favorable to community wireless and network innovation. While your friendly neighborhood monopolistic monolithic telco's been hoping to sew up ownership of networks, ditch the concept of net neutrality, and control your access to innovation, the message seems to be sinking in with legislators - we're in a new world of digital convergence best supported by a network that is accessible to all, neutral, dumb, with intelligence (and freedom to connect) at the edges. (Via boing boing)
Interesting correlationThis won't surprise anyone who was part of the successful effort to stop Texas legislation that would have banned municipal networks last session, but the legislators who want to outlaw muni networks are those who get the most campaign money from incumbent telcos like SBC, now AT&T. [Link]
Cheney's accident95 hours after shooting his pal Harry Whittington in a hunting accident, Dick Cheney agreed to answer questions – at Fox News, questioned by Brit Hume. Note also that Cheney wouldn't talk to police until 8 hours after the shooting. This reminds me of similar behavior by a politician after a troubling accident - Ted Kennedy at Chappaquiddick..
Appropriate scope
I'm sure some headline writer at CNN is LOL. [Link]
Life during *permanent* wartimeJonathan Alter hits the head right on the nail:
...his is not about whether it's right or wrong to wiretap bad guys, though the White House hopes to frame it that way for political purposes. Any rational person wants the president to be able to hunt for Qaeda suspects wherever they lurk. The "momentous" issue (Alito's words) is whether this president, or any other, has the right to tell Congress to shove it. And even if one concedes that wartime offers the president extra powers to limit liberty, what happens if the terrorist threat looks permanent? We may be scrapping our checks and balances not just for a few years (as during the Civil War), but for good."Webcaster's Right"
There's a European concept of "broadcaster's right" that suggests TV and radio stations can control the dissemination of their broadcasts. Now the U.S. delegation to the World International Property Organization wants to extend this control to the web, and as Andy Oram says, "this is a new threat to the public domain."
What would a webcaster's right mean? It would mean you couldn't retransmit content put up by someone else on the Web without permission. The proposal tries to indicate that the restriction covers only images and sound, but it's not clear that a line can be drawn between such content and other things, including text. At any rate, the idea of extending the broadcaster's right to the Web is bizarre and fundamentally out of sync with how the Web works. The whole basis of the Web is making links; people don't normally copy and retransmit material.[Link] State of the World 2006
I take it back. Copying and retransmission happens on the Web all the time. It's call caching, and it's crucial to the efficient operation of the Web. Even if the webcasting treaty leaves a loophole to allow caching, the treaty may hamper another promising way of reducing the load on servers: chained downloads that piggyback on intermediate nodes, the basis for useful protocols such as BitTorrent.
The U.S. delegation is pushing for this strange new right under the catch-all rubric of "harmonizing" the Web with broadcasting, and, of course, that shibboleth of regulators, "technological neutrality." But because equating Web distribution with broadcasting is absurd on the face of it, one has to wonder what is really on the minds of the large portals who put so much energy into forcing this radical change on the public....
Once again, I'm leading a State of the World discussion with Bruce Sterling on the WELL. Bruce has just finished a year-long gig as Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design, and is in Austin for the holidays before setting out for Belgrade and other parts of the world.
India and China are tremendous stories. Even big pieces of Eastern Europe are getting onto the EU carousel. America's being run by corrupt Lysenkoist morons, but, debilitating as that may be for us Yankees, it also means that the remaining 94 percent of the planet has some chance at the limelight. Hey, South Korea could have been full of cloning superstars -- if they could just get over their endemic Asian urge to cook the books.
The USA right now is the buried shadow of the Confederate States of America. You can watch GONE WITH THE WIND, and it's the secret textbook of the Bush Administration. The South lost that war for a reason. The South didn't have it in them to be a major power, because they were bold, gallant, devout, crooked, dumb and full of unexamined anxieties.
The thing is, though: when a culture is "gone with the wind," it's never utterly and entirely gone. You can't make things go away by distributing them into the wind. It's just... up in the atmosphere. The emissions of the past form a smog. A breathable compost. You can't throw the past away and start over with a Year Zero. There is no "away." Tomorrow is this place, at a different time.WFMU's Greed WatchTelcos are trying to figure out how to charge companies like Google and Vonage for competing successfuly and taking away their business. They're talking about a "two tier" Internet and an end to net neutrality - the point being that the Internet and its technologies are becoming so pervasive and effective that they're killing the telcos. In the USA, of course, we should have no right to compete so effectively that we kill business models that have been flowing huge profits into various money bins, hence the various moves by telcos and others to preserve their turf via protectionist legislation. [Link]
PoliticsI'll remember 2005 as the year I'd been sucked kicking and screaming into the world of candidate politics because the current crop of politicians seemed exponentially worse than any that had gone before. Most of us read Plunkitt at some point and accept a bit of honest graft, but the current combination of crooks, bozos, and bizarre fundamentalists sorta creeped me out. I'm better now, realizing that American Democracy for all its warts and weirdness is still resilient and still supported by persons of principle like the Fitzgerald, Ronnie Earle, and the prosecutors that've shined a light on Jack Abramoff's misdealings, and Tom Delay's, and whatever others will be found to have abused power and privilege. Those of us who'd prefer to avoid candidate politics really can't afford to; I figure we have a responsibility to ourselves, our children, and our communities to do our part to keep the political process as clean, accountable, and honest as possible. I started this post thinking I was going to say I'm ready to forget politics altogether, but I've talked myself out of it. None of us has that luxury.
Senate: No patriot act today, thanks...The Senate failed to reauthorize the Patriot Act as is, though a House/Senate compromise bill may still have a chance of passage before the Act's December 31 expiration date. That bill includes safeguards that weren't part of the orignal. It appears that legislators are hearing from constituents who value liberty in the defense of liberty over surveillance in the defense of liberty. [Link]
What would Mike Wallace ask George W. Bush?Great quote from Mike Wallace, who can't get an interview with George W., and no wonder. When asked by a Boston Globe reporter what he would ask given the chance, he doesn't pull punches:
What in the world prepared you to be the commander in chief of the largest superpower in the world? In your background, Mr. President, you apparently were incurious. You didn't want to travel. You knew very little about the military. . . . The governor of Texas doesn't have the kind of power that some governors have. . . . Why do you think they nominated you? . . . Do you think that has anything to do with the fact that the country is so [expletive] up?[Link] Locked out of the USAHossein (Hoder) Derakshan, an active and insightful blogger originally from Iran but living now in Toronto, has posted his Goodbye to America. The Border Patrol googled his blog, talked to him at length, and evidently decided that he was attempting to take up residence in NYC. They won't let him come back for at least six months.
Now the result is that, apparently, I can't visit the States at least for six months and even after that I should prove I'm established enough in Canada. I also have to explain why I failed to register my departure when the bus driver didn't stop while crossing the US border to Canada....It's sad to see America is not the land of the free anymore.War according to Bruce WillisBruce Willis is feeling a bit of John Wayne patriotism, planning to make a film about the war in Iraq, about "who do what they are asked to for very little money to defend and fight for what they consider to be freedom." David Kline blogs about Willis's plan, considering it an exercise in futility a la "The Green Berets," the John Wayne film about Vietnam:
Critics at the time called it "unspeakably stupid," and not just because it substituted white men in blackface for the dreaded Vietcong, Georgia pine forests for the tropical jungles of Vietnam, and a sun setting to the east off a beach in Da Nang for the usual place where the sun sets for the rest us in the real world (i.e., the west). The script was godawful, the characters aburd, and as a piece of political propaganda it was about as effective in generating public support for the war as General Westmoreland's "light at the end of the tunnel" speech -- which is to say, not effective at all.Since the Willis film doesn't exist yet, it's hard to criticize – perhpas he'll make a film that ignores the dubious political motives behind the war and focuses on the bravery of combatants who believe they're fighting for democracy, and not for the schemes of neoconservative think tanks.
Patenting landThis looks pretty critical: congress may allow the patenting of public land. This post to a diary at Daily Kos includes a scary bit of info from the LA Times:
There are plenty of examples of how companies have used the 1872 mining law's patenting provisions to get their hands on public resources dirt cheap. In 1970, Frank Melluzzo "patented" -- bought -- public land near Phoenix for $150. Ten years later, he sold it for more than $400,000. Today, the Pointe Hilton Hotel in Phoenix sits on this mining claim. In 1983, Mark Hinton patented national forest land adjacent to the Keystone ski resort in Colorado. He later sold the parcel for more than 4,000 times what he paid for it. In 1994, American Barrick Corp. patented about 1,000 acres of public land in Nevada. That land contained more than $10 billion in gold reserves. But under the 1872 mining law, it paid only $5,000 for the land and paid not a dime in royalties to the federal Treasury.Congress banned the patenting and sale of public lands a decade ago, but a California Republican rep named Richard Pombo has attached what amounts to a "public land giveaway" to a House deficit reduction measure. More info here. Going after MurthaJohn Murtha, a Democrat and a hawk who served 37 years in the Marines, is getting the business from other congresscritters of the Republican persuasion, having spoken out in favor of a careful withdrawal from Iraq. The latest: a possible inquiry into Murtha's formerly unquestionable ethics. [Link]
Expression Under RepressionEthan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon set up an 'Expression under Repression' panel at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia, and their Tunisian hosts tried to shut the discussion down... but they ignored the cancellation and held the session anyway, to an SRO crowd. [Link]
Rebecca rejects as absurd the idea that expression under repression isnt relevant to ICT and development, as had been suggested by Tunisian authorities in reacting to our panel. She points to the spread of SARS in China as an example of the ill consequences of blocking communications between citizens. The blocking of sites that report on anti-corruption efforts probably costs real money, as politicans continue putting money in their pockets at the expense of the wider populus. But she points out that filtering occurs in the United States as well, through things like filters in libraries that prevent teenagers from finding out about reproductive health.The cost of warJust saw Republican party chairman Ken Mehlman on this morning's "Meet the Press" defending the war in Iraq, and neither Tim Russert nor Howard Dean, who was on later, addressed my issues with Mehlman's argument, which is the Republican argument. Mehlman was explaining why Bush would have invaded Iraq and taken Saddam Hussein down even if he knew there were no "weapons of mass destruction." He says terrorist bombings had gone on for years, and we would often react, but we had never taken proactive measures against terrorists. It was time to be proactive.
I have several issues with this argument.
First, it's unclear that Saddam Hussein had a significant link with terrorists. He was certainly no friend to the Taliban or Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, people with strong fundamentalist beliefs. Hussein's only religion was Hussein, and it's no way clear that he would get beyond his self-interest to work with terrorist groups, even if they were willing to work with him. (Now, if Mehlman said "we thought we needed a establish a base of operations in the Middle East and were pretty sure we could knock Saddam off and occupy Iraq," I might at least credit his honesty, but he knows, and all the Bush group know, that the American people and the rest of the world wouldn't go for invasion and long-term occupation of Iraq, even if they could argue national interest. Better to stick to the simplistic arguments, however false.
Mehlman says it was time to be proactive because of 9/11, and I should mention what most people know by now: Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. If you want to hang that one on a nation, consider that the organizer was Egyptian and his team was mostly Saudi and Egyptian. However you can't really blame those nations, or Iraq, or any other national entity for an action that was orchestrated by Al Qaeda, which is another kind of "Second Superpower," but dedicated to terrorist war rather than peace. You don't destroy Al Qaeda by taking out Saddam Hussein, though you might position yourself as a presence in the region if you want to gamble that you can bring stabilization and undermine terrorist influence. What's more likely (and we can see it in the insurgency) is that you'll feed rather than starve the beast.
Another point about asserting ourselves proactively: just to do so in Iraq is burning billions of dollars and hundreds (possibly thousands, ultimately) of American lives. Could it be that we avoided proactive measures before because the cost was unacceptable given uncertaintly about the benefit? The thinking behind the war was evidently born within the neoconservative think tank called New American Century, and I admit that I haven't read their publications, but I'm guessing the underestimated the costs of the war and occupation, and overestimated the "return on investment." I don't think it's smart to take on the monetary costs when the American economy is vulnerable. The human costs I don't even know how to address – what's the "value" of a single life? How is it measured? Suffice to say that it's a great tragedy that we've lost so many in Iraq, and we can only hope it won't be another Vietnam (where we lost 58,000 troops and gained nothing in return).
Mehlman says "you can't wait until after the fact" of attack to respond, but what of other threats? Consider the canonical example, North Korea. Kim Jong-Il is arguably worse than Saddam and probably does have WMD, yet we haven't attacked North Korea. In fact, we don't have the assets to handle both North Korea and Iraq. To me it seems disingenous to argue that our policy is to proactively take out potential threats when it's really not something we can or would do. We've done it in Iraq primarily because, through conceptual sleight of hand, the administration managed to convince Americans that our invasion was reactive, that Saddam had something to do with 9/11, and was building an arsenal to do more. Most Americans, engaged in their own lives, heard only enough bits and pieces to be convinced that they were hearing adequate moral argument for war.
Out of all this, I think the most serious omission is that of cost. We can't argue that we're going to take out all the bad guys in the world, because we can't afford to take them out. It's better to work with our allies (though we have fewer of those now than we did before this war started) and take action through coalitions working together and sharing cost. And lower cost solutions, like embargoes, make sense.
I've been trying to avoid political rants, but I couldn't leave Mehlman's simplistic Rove-driven argument to stand unchallenged, of only by some web consultant who should be working the Sunday morning instead of blogging....
UPDATE: Joshua Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo has more on Mehlman's appearance, saying "I honestly found it hard to keep up with the full number of lies and half-truths that rolled out of his mouth."
Appreciating Harry ReidMy pal Kyle Johnson appreciates Harry Reid and his "stunt." [Link]
Who knew, Senate rules allow for a single distinguished gentleman to step up to the mic and, with a solitary second-that-motion, shut the place down? Sleepy-eyed Harry knew.Murrow
So he did, banishing all the reporters and staffers and gawkers, silencing the Razrs and Blackberries, leaving only the one-hundred men and women Constitutionally charged to check unbridled Executive power to face themselves, and the fact that they let a proud nation conjure a war out of 9/11-smoke and Murdoch’s murderous mirrors.Xeni's posted some background on Edward R. Murrow and the film Good Night and Good Luck,, which I found via Wendy Seltzer. I'm old enough to remember watching Murrow, though I didn't quite know what was a stake at the time... I figured it out over the years, though, and had the deepest respect for his work and his courage. Studying and thinking about Murrow as I flirted with a career in journalism helped make me a civil libertarian and free speech advocate; not sure where we would be today if he hadn't stepped up, along with John Henry Faulk. We've seen fundamental rights threatened in the US over the past few years; studying the McCarthy era can remind us how bad it can get, and studying Murrow's work can remind us how to take a stand when basic rights are challenged.
O'Reilly's sneak attack... David Kline, who interviewed me for his latest book, Blog!, appeared on The O'Reilly Factor this week, thinking we was going to be partof a rational discussion political blogging. Instead O'Reilly used the sessions to attack and smear Media Matters. David's account is posted here. Media Matters posted about it, too, natch. David's followed up with a good analysis of the future of political blogging. I can't decide whether O'Reilly is as whacky as he seems, or playing for ratings. Able Danger and Constitutional rightsIn April 2000, a data mining and analysis project within the Army's Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) was shut down because it had "evolved into an abuse of Constitutional Rights." Recently Anthony Shaffer has said that the project, called Able Danger, uncovered data linking Mohamed Atta to Al Qaeda. William Arkin in the Washington Post suggests that the it's arguable whether Able Danger produced meaningful data (few who were involved share Shaffer's memory of data about Atta), but it's not arguable that the project, as William Dugan, Pentagon chief of intelligence oversight, said, "evolved, through mission creep, lack of clear rules, and the lack of meaningful oversight, into an abuse of … Constitutional rights…,"
Shaffer and others use words like "out-of-the-box" and "entrepreneurial" to describe the LIWA intelligence collection. The buzz words suggest, of course, that other intelligence efforts were in-the-box and boring, that only the LIWA and other compartmented workers were motivated and insightful enough to take chances, that if the lawyers and the bureaucrats and the Clintonistas and the other villains had just gotten out of the way, there would have been no 9/11. If only…(Via Politech) The elephant in the room is a herd
But in 2000, the problem was also a pretty simple one: An off-the-books intelligence effort once again abused the "force protection" justification to collect information on Americans. Military commanders, mindful of the law and regulations, shut down the operation.Starting with a critique of Lakoff's Elephant, Frances Moore Lappé, gets to an interesting point: if we focus more on communities than "nuclear families," we "grow up" and get to a different dynamic that's not so bipolar. (Thanks, Alex!) [Link]
Third is the "revolution in human dignity." We've lived so long under the spell of hierarchy – from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses – that only recently have we awakened to see not only that "regular" citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high. Besides, few of us – unless we're scared into itare prepared simply to take orders.Permission to kill the InternetJennifer Granick's started a column at Wired News with a piece about the many challenges to the concept of a free and open Internet, focusing on the Katrina PeopleFinder Project and Katrinalist.net as "tangible evidence of the beauty and power of internet technology in the hands of well-meaning citizens," which she says is "also an endangered species."
...many ISPs and some prosecutors are arguing that it's a crime to use unsecured wireless access points without the explicit permission of the owner. Antispam crusaders advocate blocking any e-mails that haven't been whitelisted first. Airlines like American and auction sites like eBay -- which want customers to visit their websites, view their ads and "join the community" -- have won court injunctions against companies that collect price information on plane fares or auctions to help consumers comparison shop.Progressive headache
Under ancient legal theories like "trespass to chattels" and ill-advised modern laws like the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and state computer crime statutes, courts are holding that if you don't have authorization, you can't access computers
And if you can't access computers, you can't collect data about airfares, auctions or evacuees.David Kline, co-author of the soon to be released book Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business, And Culture, criticizes a new study, "The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere" by Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, who argue that progressive bloggers are good guys, conservative bloggers are bad guys. David, who interviewed me for the book, asked me what I thought of his analysis. I agree that the Bowers/Stoller report is just more divisive partisan rhetoric. I hear various arguments that the right/the left (pick one) has taken control of the narrative, but I figure the real problem is that they're talking past each other and drowning out more balanced, moderate voices. Meanwhile the world's seeming pretty fragile at the moment, and in the wake of a major trauma like Hurricane Katrina, the partisan stuff feels petty and false. [Link]
But even if it's true that conservatives tie their blogging activities to offline political organizations more closely than progressive bloggers do, what's wrong with that? I mean, the point is to actually organize people to WIN elections, right? Which, in case Bowers and Stoller hadn't noticed, still take place offline, in the real world, where flesh-and-blood people actually live.Blame and accountability
The main problem with Bowers and Stoller's so-called "strategic overview of the comparative advantages of the progressive and conservative [blogosphere]" is its head-in-the-sand avoidance of the real reason why conservatives -- online and off -- have been kicking progressive butt in recent years.
I'm referring, of course, to the maddening inability of progressives in general -- and Democratic candidates like Kerry in particular -- to connect with the majority of heartland voters on the issues that they most deeply care about.Paul Krugman has more on the "blame game" and where we're headed with the current administration post-Katrina. Here's a good excerpt, but you should read the whole thing...
As Bloomberg News puts it, the agency's "upper ranks are mostly staffed with people who share two traits: loyalty to President George W. Bush and little or no background in emergency management." By now everyone knows FEMA's current head went from overseeing horse shows to overseeing the nation's response to disaster, with no obvious qualifications other than the fact that he was Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate.The Blame Game
All that's missing from the Katrina story is an expensive reconstruction effort, with lucrative deals for politically connected companies, that fails to deliver essential services. But give it time - they're working on that, too.
Why did the administration make the same mistakes twice? Because it paid no political price the first time.President Bush and his peeps don't want to play the blame game. This is Scott McClellan et al in a surreal press conference. [Link]
Q One last question. The person who says that he found out about the Convention Center seeing it on the media -- that is to say the FEMA Director -- is still in place. Is that satisfactory that somebody would have responded like that?Dithering and incompetenceMR. McCLELLAN: Again, this is getting into -- we're somewhat engaged in a blame game. We've got to --
Q It's not a blame game. That's accountability --
MR. McCLELLAN: Terry, we've got to --
Q It's accountability.
MR. McCLELLAN: Yes.
Q Is "Brownie" still doing a "heck of a job," according to the President?
MR. McCLELLAN: We've got to continue to do everything we can in support of those who are involved in the operational aspects of this response effort. And that's what we're going to do. There will be plenty of time --
Q If he fails at it, he's not going to be good at it going forward. That's what Bob is saying.
MR. McCLELLAN: There are people working round-the-clock with FEMA. The Secretary, the FEMA Director and many others who are working round-the-clock. And we've got to do everything we can in support of their efforts to make sure people are getting what they need.
Q Does the President really believe we could respond to a terrorist attack with any -- amount of weeks, months?
MR. McCLELLAN: We've actually done a lot of exercises, David, to prepare for possible attacks, but --
Q Do you think most Americans agree, based on --
MR. McCLELLAN: But the most important thing we've got to do is focus on --
Q You mean exercises for Hurricane Katrina.
MR. McCLELLAN: We've got to focus on prevention, and that's what we're doing by staying on the offensive.
Q Well, let's talk about it. Are you saying the President is -- are you saying that the President is confident that his administration is prepared to adequately, confidently secure the American people in the event of a terrorist attack of a level that we have not seen? And based on what does he have that confidence?
MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, and that's what he made clear earlier today, that obviously we want to look and learn lessons from a major catastrophe of this nature.
Q Yes, but you're telling us today there will be time for that somewhere down the road. Well, what if it happens tomorrow?
MR. McCLELLAN: We can engage in this blame-gaming going on and I think that's what you're getting --
Q No, no. That's a talking point, Scott, and I think most people who are watching this --
MR. McCLELLAN: No, that's a fact. I mean, some are wanting to engage in that, and we're going to remain focused --
Q I'm asking a direct question. Is he confident --
MR. McCLELLAN: We're going to remain focused on the people.
Q -- that he can secure the American people in the event of a major terrorist attack?
MR. McCLELLAN: We are securing the American people by staying on the offensive abroad and working to spread freedom and democracy in the Middle East.
Q That's a talking point. That's a talking point.
MR. McCLELLAN: No, that's a fact.
Go ahead.
Q No, it's not. And you think people who are watching this think that's -- from what does he derive that confidence, based on the response --
MR. McCLELLAN: David, I'm interested in the people in the region that have been affected and getting them help. We can sit here and engage in this back and forth --
Q The whole country is watching and wondering about some --
MR. McCLELLAN: The time for bickering and blame-gaming is later. The time for helping people in the region is now.
Katrina has exposed the "dithering and incompetence" of current U.S. government, according to Matt Wells, writing for BBC.
Government has been thrown into disrepute, and many Americans have realised, for the first time, that the collapsed, rotten flood defences of New Orleans are a symbol of failed infrastructure across the nation.Meanwhile Keith Olbermann has a great op-ed about the very real lack of leadership Katrina has exposed.
Blaming the state and city officials, as the president is already trying to do over Katrina, will not wash.For many of this country's citizens, the mantra has been – as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be – whether or not I voted for this President – he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to '08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government – our government – "New Orleans.""Katrina scenario did not exist"
For him, it is a shame – in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick "I'm not satisfied with my government's response." Instead of hiding behind phrases like "no one could have foreseen," had he only remembered Winston Churchill's quote from the 1930's. "The responsibility," of government, Churchill told the British Parliament "for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence."
In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage itself – it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.More Spin, mixed with a bit of historical revisionism: Michael Chertoff of Homeland Security simply denies that anyone had predicted a storm like Katrina and its impact on New Orleans. He says it was "breathtaking in its surprise," which is similar to Bush's statement that no one expected the levees would break.
When I was just a tad, I heard over and over how the evil Soviets would revise "history" regularly to fit the politics du jour, and this was considered a great sin and an indictment of communisim. Seems to be de rigueur for 21st century USA, however.
The good news is that CNN is calling bullshit on Chertoff.
New Orleans, state and federal officials have long painted a very different picture.Taking the President to task
"We certainly understood the potential impact of a Category 4 or 5 hurricane" on New Orleans, Lt. General Carl Strock, chief of engineers for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said Thursday, Cox News Service reported.
Reuters reported that in 2004, more than 40 state, local and volunteer organizations practiced a scenario in which a massive hurricane struck and levees were breached, allowing water to flood New Orleans. Under the simulation, called "Hurricane Pam," the officials "had to deal with an imaginary storm that destroyed more than half a million buildings in New Orleans and forced the evacuation of a million residents," the Reuters report said.
In 2002 the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a five-part series exploring the vulnerability of the city. The newspaper, and other news media as well, specifically addressed the possibility of massive floods drowning residents, destroying homes and releasing toxic chemicals throughout the city.
Scientists long have discussed this possibility as a sort of doomsday scenario.I got a private email yesterday from someone who said "I'm amazed that the liberals have taken the President to task for not doing something to stop the hurricane," and I replied that it's not a liberal/conservative thing at all. And it wasn't about stopping the hurricane, it's about what's happened since. From Salon:
Of course, it's unfair to blame the president for an act of nature like Katrina. And yet it's irrefutable that this administration's backward policies and politics made this disaster worse than it had to be, and its belated response will do nothing to address the problems that have suddenly been flushed out into the open. The death toll from Katrina is likely to be higher than 9/11, but most of its victims will be black and poor, and I doubt we'll wage a war on poverty and neglect to match the war on terror launched after al-Qaida struck -- and if we did, I doubt it would be any more effective. The president, who continued his vacation while Katrina raged, just the way he kept reading "My Pet Goat" on 9/11, is headed for the Gulf on Friday. I'd like him to bring some answers, but I don't expect him to.Cindy Sheehan, War, and Denial
What I'd really like is to see him head today for the Superdome, bring his dad, and Bill Clinton, and John Kerry and Howard Dean -- any Democrat or Republican who cares, really –- and go to work, feeding and comforting the refugees and finding out what they need. Then I'd like to see them put people to work, rebuilding the amazing historic city we've apparently lost.Politicos and activists working overtime were unsuccessful in penetrating national denial about the nature and causes of the war in Iraq, but a single determined mother, driven by grief and a growing sense that something's not right, seems to be having an effect, despite attempts by (I'll say this tactfully) her critics to undermine her credibility. What Christopher Hitchens refers to as dreary sentimental nonsense is interpreted differently by Sheehan's many supporters, perhaps as an awakening of American conscience. Almost 1500 Americans have died in combat since the war begin in March 2003. The war was actually an American invasion of another country, which should have been shocki