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Riding to Win

by Paul — Wednesday, 11/4/09, 8:06 am

They snickered when Mike McGinn started off his campaign by showing up at cycling events with “MIKE BIKES” stickers. How quaint. He’s going after the funny-hats-and-clicky-shoes vote.

It was a startlingly unconventional way to build a base, campaigning in a bike helmet and blazer. But McGinn knew something that cyclists have long suspected: We’re a strong and growing political constituency, just waiting to be galvanized by a candidate who rides.

Cyclists are the statistical equivalency of the old newspaper circulation figure. Back in the day, publishers were fond of noting (especially to advertisers) how the print run was a misleading number. What was more important was that every paper that got printed was read by at least one or two other people besides the purchaser.

Cyclists are smart. They’re committed. They pay attention. They talk and IM and Twitter (and blog!). They cross over into numerous disciplines: Technology, education, graphic design, social work, non-profit organizing, entrepreneurialism and yes, even politics.

They vote. And for every vote they cast, you can count on two or three or more people they’ve influenced voting the same.

We disagree about a lot of things, because we’re fiercely independent. We have to be. You don’t risk your life competing with two-ton behemoths of glass and steel on a daily basis without having a certain self-confidence and belief in knowing what you’re doing.

But when we find out someone else is a cyclist, their stock goes way up. We have an instant bond. We are brothers and sisters in the daily combat of urban traffic. We know there’s a high chance our values will align, if not mirror, our compatriot’s.

We are the classic “cultural creative,” the description sociologist Paul Ray devised for over a quarter of the population. People who represent a commitment to sustainability, environment, health and justice. Cultural creatives also are highly individualistic: They think of themselves as a marginal minority, not a social subset. But taken together, they represent a powerful constituency.

Get them to vote together, and you have a solid numerical bloc from which to build a coalition. Mike McGinn may not yet win the mayor’s race, but he came so far so fast, from such a remote outpost of conventional political thinking, that like Barack Obama he’s shown a whole new path to campaign success.

McGinn was not the only “cycling candidate” in this election who did well. Richard Conlin, the City Council member who commutes to City Hall, and Mike O’Brien and Dow Constantine, both with strong ties to the cycling community, won decisive victories. None made two wheels quite as much of their profile as McGinn, but they are strongly in the camp of improving transportation networks with cycling in mind. And all won rousing endorsements from Seattle’s powerful Cascade Bicycle Club, whose 11,000-plus members make it the nation’s largest local cycling group and whose advocacy work is leading-edge for any membership organization.

Together, especially with McGinn at the helm, they constitute one of the nation’s leading elected cycling blocs. They promise not only to enhance Seattle’s already recognized cycling reputation (aided by Nickels), but to put Seattle at the center of cycling progress and innovation along the lines of Davis CA, Portland OR, Boulder CO and Vancouver BC.

When Cascade held its nose and endorsed Nickels in the primary, and I went off on my blog, McGinn told me he wasn’t worried. “We’re the only candidate in this space,” he said. As alacritous as it seemed at the time, he was right: For all the good work Mayor Greg Nickels did for cycling, he wasn’t one of us. Cyclists and their circle wouldn’t vote for Nickels and McGinn knew it.

We got the word out on our email lists and the blogosphere and Twitterdom. Everyone who asked me who to vote for mayor got a Full Monty of why Mike was right (and Mallahan was lame). I’ve not always agreed with McGinn and have even had run-ins with him in the past. But I know at core he stands, er, rides, in the same space I do and has the same goals.

McGinn may not win. But we think he will. The political polling system, and the vast network of bloviating analysts and pundits who somehow think they have credibility because their name gets displayed under them when they yap, have yet to figure out how to calculate the Obama Effect. They don’t know how to measure tweets. They can’t count under-40 voters on their cell phones (who don’t have land lines). They still think Downtown Business dictates elections.

When a race is close in the polls, the cultural creative has a huge advantage. His constituency is entirely unmeasured.

Funny hats and noisy shoes. McGinn was onto something.

Cross-posted on BikeIntelligencer.com

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Hockey Mama for Obama is Baraaacccckkk!

by Paul — Thursday, 7/16/09, 10:27 pm

Richard (Moose) and operatic Sandy, whose video “Hockey Mama for Obama” I wrote about for HA in “A Penny a Click,” are back on YouTube with “I Feel Quitty,” a musical tribute to Sarah Palin’s resignation. “We’re pretty positive she’s running in 2012,” they said in an email to me. I still say their act could make money, but they messaged they’re not interested; the laughter and good vibes they gave canvassers and voters were payment enough. With Tina Fey nominated for an Emmy for her Saturday Night Live spoofs, there’s obviously fertile ground for lampooning Failin’ Palin for the next, what, 3-plus years, god help us all.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_X1J4-BrIY[/youtube]

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Arrogance, Incompetence, Greed…and Corruption

by Paul — Wednesday, 3/18/09, 12:48 pm

Listening to the hackneyed incantations of House committee members this morning on the AIG (“Arrogance, Ignorance, Greed” — there ought to be a “C” for “corruption”) bailout, I kept waiting for someone to say the obvious. No one did, so here it is.

To everyone asking why all those execs got the big bucks bonuses, the answer has to do with the way the corporate world works. They had nothing to do with merit, of course. So why keep asking the question over and over about rewarding the folks who created the mess.

Let’s posit in a sudden lightning-bolt of insight that AIG had decided not to grant bonuses. Say one of their executives, or the guy at the top, decided to send the memo: No bonuses, guys. We screwed up. You don’t deserve ’em. Now get back to work.

They then have one helluva mess on their hands.

People are mad. People quit. People talk. And inevitably, one and then maybe more people blow the big effin’ whistle. They decide to leak some emails to the press. They slip their local congressman or attorney general a fat little file crammed with “interesting” docs. They don’t even have to go public. It can all be done in a way to ensure their identity is kept out of harm’s way.

Now if you’re an AIG manager, you don’t want that to happen with the people below you. And if you’re the top dog running the show, you certainly don’t want it to happen to ANYone in the company. For one thing, you guarantee you don’t get to keep YOUR bonus. Hey, you might even go to jail.

But there’s an easy way around it: You just give everyone bonuses! That way, they’re all in on the fix. They can’t exactly blow a whistle stained with their own fingerprints.

So the real reason all those bonuses got awarded is, simply, to pay everyone off.

They were hush money. The sooner the press or Andrew Cuomo or Barney Frank says this, the quicker we can get to the bottom of the mess and move forward to, in Obama’s words, ensuring that it never happens again (just like the Keating Five and Enron and…)

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Don’t Phuck with Phinney

by Paul — Tuesday, 2/24/09, 7:39 am

You could almost hear the unofficial slogan of the neighborhood — “Don’t Phuck with Phinney!” — resonate through the halls of Ballard High School last night as the Northwest Design Review Board met to discuss the Condo That Nobody Wants in the school library.

(Disclaimer: Yeah, I live on Phinney. But I wouldn’t doubt this kind of thing is coming to a corner near you soon!)

About 80 people, civil but mightily ticked off, gave the board an earful from the get-go, including a white-haired senior who told Mr. Whisper, the board chair, that nobody could hear him — to a chorus of affirmation. Mr. Whisper, who spoke so quietly that I could not begin to even hear his name, responded by raising his voice slightly while seated in the opposite direction of the audience. Deirdre Bowen, a neighbor of the proposed project, finally had to specifically ask that he rise and face the people that the board had so graciously encouraged to attend.

It was a rocky start to a rough evening.

The four-story, 19-unit, big, imposing and many would say ugly condo (correction: apparently the project is now for apartments, although it was earlier identified by the city as condominiums) apartment project is proposed for 6010 Phinney, the corner of Phinney and 61st. Existing structures that house popular neighborhood businesses — not chains, by the way — including Chef Liao, the Daily Planet, Phinney Ridge Cleaners and Roosters cafe, would be torn down. The businesses would also go away, to be supplanted by ground-floor commercial space. Maybe an office or two, perhaps yet another tanning salon or nails boutique.

Beyond its address, the project seems not to have a name (unlike the Roycroft, across the street, and Fini, north on the ave). One occurred to us: Mondo Non-Condo. It is such a mish-mash of design cacaphony, and towers so insultingly over its neighbors, crowding pedestrians on Phinney Avenue and shadowing homes all around, that you can’t help but hate the thing.

[Read more…]

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A Seattle HuffPo?

by Paul — Sunday, 2/22/09, 8:29 am

Eli Sanders at The Stranger (and Slog) is posting on what he senses may be the P-I’s online plan: a Seattle HuffPo. It’s already started, he believes, with direct linkage to the West Seattle blog.

As someone who has been pitching this concept virtually since Arianna Huffington started her site — to David Brewster for Crosscut (Brewster had not even heard of HuffPo when I first mentioned it to him), to Horsesass’ David Goldstein and friends, and to executives at my career-long employer, The Seattle Times —  I hope Sanders’ conclusion is correct. I continue to believe this is the way to go, despite the fact no one ever responded to the notion with, “Hey, that’s a great idea!” (The HuffPo model, as I’ve acknowledged, does present issues of derivativeness and compensation. It’s also not cheap to do.)

Eli is right, this represents a complete flip of the typical gatekeeping model of news providers, which I explored in one of my first blogs in 2001. So the question naturally is whether a legacy news organization can pull it off.

The key line in Eli’s post: Can the P-I “become a sticky portal through which people enter the online universe of Northwest news and opinion (in the way that Huffington Post is a sticky portal into the online world of liberal news and opinion)”?

Perhaps unintentionally, the statement poses the key hurdle for a local iteration of HuffPo. Huffington Post represents the vision of a single person — the incomparable Arianna — who does have a liberal bent, but who also has imparted a sense of cutting edge tech, social and cultural savvy to her site. She has tapped into a Web consciousness regarding what “news” is. It isn’t just linking to an outside world of bloggers and celebrities. It’s linking in a way that appeals to a Web mindset and certain cultural demographic.

This consciousness, which I call Web affinity, has never been geographically based — at least, not so far. By that I mean, people do not aggregate on the Web according to where they live. Instead, they gather according to their interests — hobbies, sports, politics, social spheres. You see this everywhere in social networks, from LinkedIn to Facebook to Ning. Even sports fans have allegiances and interests extending far beyond the home team.

I doubt there actually is an “online universe of Northwest news and opinion” that could be as compelling as Huffington Post. There are pockets of Bellevue, Tacoma and Snohomish County (to say nothing of outlying sub-regions) that are nearly the obverse of Seattle’s liberal majority. I don’t think you can aim at “Northwest.” You might be able to get by with “Seattle.”

But even then, the geography is not the connection. To make a local HuffPo work requires that powerful sense of “a new who we are” that HuffPo leveraged so well in the past election and continues to ply for the Obama era. This runs precisely counter to the long-standing legacy news approach of Olympian objectivity — where the news purveyor inscrutably represents various sides of an issue without getting into the fray. Students of news history know well that newspapers did not start out this way but rather began life as bully pulpits for ideologically passionate publishers. Gradually the fear of offending advertisers led newspapers to become averse to crusades and meaningful editorializing, though, and today taking a controversial stand is anathema.

But Web followers demand to know where one stands, and they vote with their clicks. Broadcast has already undergone the transformation, with Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart refining a “news as personality” approach to journalism. HuffPo is far from the only site to tap into Web affinity on a news basis, but it’s the model most worth emulating today.

In terms of what the P-I may be trying to do, mere aggregation is not enough. Crosscut excels at pulling together a daily overlay of “news” throughout the region. But Crosscut, alas, has little of HuffPo’s vision or magic. There’s no Oz behind the curtain, just a bunch of bots.

The problem for the P-I, or for any local HuffPo,  is finding an Oz — an individual, or core group of individuals, with enough experience, background and connections to convey a sense of what Seattle is all about via links, blogs, original reporting and whatever else might cross the transom. Just slapping stuff up won’t do it. There has to be a core vision that prioritizes and filters the cluttered static of Web discourse.

The closest this area comes to the right model is Slog. But Slog is staff-only, and while The Stranger staff is a great bunch, they can’t begin to generate the breadth and diversity needed to emulate HuffPo. Slog also has technical limitations — it’s been compared (I believe by staffer Charles Mudede) to the reading version of watching a waterfall — and is basically all over the place in content. It does have (quite astonishingly, given its resources) the best City Hall and neighborhood coverage in Seattle, and a lock on sexual dynamic, of course.

Other blogs, notably Horsesass.org and its new, still-undefined cousin, Publicola, would provide fodder for a local HuffPo. Seattle also has a rich panoply of neighborhood blogs, although most lack the resources and flair to qualify for a HuffPo.

There may indeed be a real content shortage when it comes to pulling local stuff together and feeding the monster. Career reporters tend for one reason or other not to be bloggers, and releasing them into the Web wilds (as the P-I is about to do) without a paycheck hasn’t yet proven to be much incentive (most have gone into government or PR jobs). Former P-Iers John Cook and Todd Bishop have proven an exception with Techflash, which I’ve written for (along with most of the other alternative Web pubs I’ve mentioned, in a pitiably forlorn search for digital kindred spirits). And Techflash, as I’ve written, could provide a seedbed for the tech slice of a local HuffPo, although its ownership by Puget Sound Business Journal could prove problematic. Indeed, there are thorny proprietary issues here for any P-I-sponsored umbrella, including clarifying its online relationship with The Times (as Northwest Source). One wonders if the P-I effort won’t prove merely a stalking horse for an eventual Times Web rehab, but given the paucity of a post-P-I news landscape, you have to question whether an online P-I wouldn’t wind up linking a lot to The Times.

If a HuffPo zeitgeist already resided within the halls of the P-I, one assumes it would have asserted itself by now. On the other hand, it might have met the same fate (at least, till now) of my entreaties to The Times, which clunked to the floor like a tray of lead type (The Times, incredibly enough, never even let me link from my tech column to my blog). But one thing the P-I has that is lacking in other Web forays is deep pockets. If Hearst is serious about experimenting with the new world of online journalism, it has the perfect incubator in a newly printless but link-rich P-I.

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Stupid? Or just plain greedy?

by Paul — Wednesday, 2/11/09, 8:02 am

To interpret news today, I’ve taken to substituting the word “greedy” for “stupid.” When Wall Street bankers say they acted stupidly on subprime loans, they’re lying to us and themselves. They weren’t stupid then and they aren’t now. What they were and are is greedy.

When a congressman or former statesman says he was stupid to accept a bribe, or not pay his taxes, or hire illegal workers, he’s not stupid. He’s just being greedy.

And when Alex Rodriguez excuses himself for taking steroids because he was “young and stupid,” come on. Alex is no fool. He was angling for the biggest salary in baseball.

Most of all, when a headline or article refers to all these acts as stupidity, they are not practicing honest journalism. They should call it what it is: greed.

Stupidity is an Olympic hero smoking a bong while someone takes his picture. Stupidity is trying to drive in Seattle in the snow (not necessarily because you don’t know how to drive in the snow, but because hardly anyone else does). Stupidity is missing your bus or your recycling day, or driving too fast on Aurora at the speed trap north of the bridge.

But stupidity is not a synonym for greed. With greed, you know what you’re doing. You’re trying to get away with something for the sake of more money.

We all know this, so why make a big deal of it? Because by labeling greed “stupidity,” it excuses conscious deception, fraud and criminal behavior. If you say you were stupid, it’s kind of like, well, you know, it was out of my hands. I didn’t really mean to. It could’ve happened to anyone.

It also deflects the act away from its root cause, the worship of money. The problem with greed is that it destroys our humanity. It turns us into dogs eating dogs, every man for himself, the filthy rich versus the mass of people. Stupidity is not one of the seven deadly sins. Greed and its kissing cousin gluttony are two.

Greed is not good and never was. At least Gordon Gecko called it by its right name.

Most of all: If it’s stupidity, they’re implying they wouldn’t do it all over again. And here they’re lying again. They would do it all over again, in a flash, if they thought they could get away with it. Their motto derives from Dylan: “In Jersey anything’s legal as long as you don’t get caught.” After all, if they do get caught, they can just say they were stupid and the media will back them up.

Anyway, try it the next time you hear or read the word “stupid” from someone apologizing or writing in the news. It’s remarkable how it clarifies your perspective on what’s wrong in America.

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Penny a Click (con’t)

by Paul — Tuesday, 2/10/09, 9:56 am

The discussion over how to fund newspapers continues, with Michael Kinsley weighing in today on the op-ed pages of The New York Times. Based on the failure at Slate (ancient by Internet time standards), Kinsley argues you can’t charge “by the slice” for content. I usually enjoy Kinsley’s observations for their wit and insight, but this time he missed the mark, showing little cognizance of tech and market advances since his Slate experience). Ironically, his piece came on the same day as coverage of Amazon’s new Kindle 2.0 device, which happens to charge by the slice. Michael, perhaps you could sit down with Jeff Bezos and compare business plans.

Kinsley’s piece apparently is in reaction to Walter Isaacson’s TIME endorsement of “micro-payments” for news content. (By the way, how can The New York Times or Kinsley for that matter justify not linking to a piece explicitly referred to in Kinsley’s article? I mean, just what is going on here? Arrogance? It has to be intentional, coming at a time when The Times is getting lots of attention for Web innovation.) Many other new contributions to the debate we raised here a month ago ago (really a renewal of the longstanding debate over micro-payments) are surfacing: Glenn Fleishman at Publicola has an insightful analysis of advertising realities on the Web, and Clark Humphrey comments on Glenn’s piece (neither are about micro-payments per se). Meanwhile, the most (in my opinion) thoughtful and comprehensive look comes from Steven Brill:

“All online articles will cost 10 cents each to read in full, with simple, one-step purchases powered by an iTunes-like Journalism infrastructure. (Apple, which turned my children from music pirates to music micro-buyers, could become a joint-venture participant, but that is hardly the only way to create a convenient payment engine.)”

I don’t think Brill’s multi-tiered system (he also supports a “one-day pass” for 40 cents, a month-long pass for $7.50 and annual fee of $55) is the right answer. I still back a penny a click, given the dynamics of Web commerce and critical mass. Once you start slicing and dicing, you confuse consumers. And people don’t want to pay even a day in advance for something they aren’t sure they’ll want to buy (compare RealNetworks’ music success with Apple’s). If Apple had charged $4 for a Beatles song, $1.50 for a  Starlight Mints number and 3 cents for an Eagles tune, iTunes would have kept Napster in business for years. (Brill even calls for 5 cents to forward an article. That’s just bone-headed; forwarding should be free. Let recipients decide whether they want to read the article and pay for it themselves.)

A couple of thoughts:

First, can we officially retire the term “micro-payments”? It’s been stigmatized beyond redemption. And there are so many different types that the term has lost all meaning. We can refer to pay-as-you-go systems by their specific form; e.g., subscription-based, or pay-per-view, or whatever. I prefer “penny a click.” KISS.

Second, no one seems to bring up content providers’ biggest asset: Archives. Recall that The New York Times used to charge for archived articles. It gave up because charging was such a huge disincentive versus “free.” But its mistake was charging too much: $1.50 per piece if memory serves. Not to overstate it, but a penny would prove no barrier to archival retrieval and over time represent a healthy revenue source, for any content provider, not just The Times.

However many permutations the discussion involves, at least it’s happening. And that’s good. We need to get people to think of content as something to be paid for. The exact iteration will work itself out. I vividly remember early discussions over video on the Web. Why wasn’t it happening? What would it take for someone to provide easy ways of posting all those home/hobbyist videos they were taking? The arguments back then — that it was too time-consuming, storage was too expensive, broadband was not fast enough — all disappeared virtually overnight with YouTube, because storage became cheap and broadband got faster (and more ubiquitous). All we need are a couple of technological advances to make a penny a click easy and transparent, and we’re off and rolling toward a transaction economy for the Web.

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NSA whistleblower, Part II

by Paul — Thursday, 1/22/09, 6:26 pm

Back on Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown,” for the second night with Russell Tice, former National Security Agency analyst:

Not a whole lot new and it seems Tice is bound legally from naming names. Olbermann asks about specific journalists and specific publications, which Tice apologetically dodges.

Olbermann then chats with James Risen, New York Times investigative reporter, about the implications of government wiretapping. Risen, author of State of War (about the CIA), notes the “chilling effect” of government monitoring not just on reporters but on their sources. But the real issue here is that any program of routine monitoring, if tolerated, can produce data that can be twisted, manipulated or outright doctored to incriminate journalists the government finds inconvenient or unacceptable. It simply isn’t true that if you haven’t done anything illegal or wrong, you’re home safe.

Tice’s and Risen’s revelations raise many questions, but I can’t figure out why this isn’t a bigger story in MSM (the blogosphere is another story; Jonathan Golub has a post at Slog. Also Rachel Maddow to her credit is picking up on Olbermann’s report with Shadow Factory author James Bamford, who says PBS is doing a special on February 3). Have we forgotten completely the lessons of the McCarthy era? Isn’t government monitoring targeting journalists a direct flout of the First Amendment?

One hope is that Tice’s revelations will encourage others to step forward, helping President Obama to end the program (to help make amends for his FISA vote) and stop government hounding of news sources on the illegal wiretapping.

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Microsoft’s real problem

by Paul — Thursday, 1/22/09, 10:08 am

Kind of lost in the Chicken Little coverage of today’s Microsoft announcement of 5,000 layoffs and quarterly results is the noteworthy fact that the company actually grew revs, albeit just 2 percent and $900 million short of forecasts. Microsoft isn’t tanking like the banking or auto industries, in other words. And its Windows dominance means that all that has to happen is for the global economy to turn around and start selling more new computers. As PC sales go, so will go MSFT.

Still… Microsoft has a problem. It’s reflected in the grim irony of former and to some extent present MSFT partners IBM, Apple and HP, all companies that have done surprisingly well while Microsoft wallows. Microsoft built its monopoly on the backs of these three companies. Now each is thriving partly by eating its way back into markets Microsoft owns, or at least has owned. And they’re doing so by being creative, reliable and innovative.

Microsoft’s results would be easier to dismiss if the company had anything really dramatic or promising on the horizon. We’re given Windows 7, which looks like it mainly fixes problems Microsoft itself caused with Vista, which was supposed to fix XP’s problems. Windows upgrades used to be a huge profit center for Microsoft, but more recently are simply part of the purchase of a new computer. (Once today’s results are fully analyzed they may provide some enlightenment; I’ve not seen pricing for Windows 7 either.)

Microsoft is promising some big things in search, social networking, phones and other emerging arenas. But it may not be able to apply against Google, Facebook and YouTube the embrace-and-extend tactics it used against IBM, Apple, HP and others in building its monopoly lo those many years ago.

Perhaps the folks in Redmond can take heart from the encouraging rebounds of their former partners/foes. IBM endured withering layoffs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, far worse than Microsoft’s today. Apple and HP have had their share of bad quarters. In each case, though, these companies stopped thinking of themselves as the companies they had been. They reinvented. They innovated. Hopefully steveb’s next memo will tell us what Microsoft is doing to move away from its Windows dependency and become the next Apple, IBM or HP.

(P.S. Apple’s cage-rattling over “protecting our IP” — viewed as a veiled threat against Palm for its new multi-touch Pre — might well have been aimed more at Microsoft over any anticipated interest in purchasing Palm. No one’s going to buy Palm if there’s a patent cloud hanging over the company, especially someone with MSFT’s deep pockets.)

Links:

Apple beats forecasts

IBM tops forecasts

HP’s 2009 outlook

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Breaking: Journalists were indiscriminately wiretapped…

by Paul — Wednesday, 1/21/09, 5:52 pm

Russell Tice, former National Security Agency analyst, is on Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” right now saying that the Administration wiretapped all communications of targeted journalists. He has not mentioned specific publications or individuals but did not reject Olbermann’s mention of The New York Times and Olbermann (MSNBC) himself…

This comes after Olbermann ran old video of Bush saying only individuals and groups suspected  of terrorist activities were targeted, only foreign communications, etc. etc.

Olbermann says he will have Tice on again tomorrow…

Also, Olbermann just said Caroline Kennedy has NOT withdrawn her name from consideration.

(Tice is a well-publicized whistleblower but it looks like he’s going to expand his revelations now that there’s promise of change.)

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Magic hat

by Paul — Tuesday, 1/20/09, 12:21 am

I started wearing this hat, which I got from the Not A Number shop in Wallingford, a couple of years ago. I’m of the age, style and hairline where a baseball cap is an integral part of my wardrobe, and I’ve got lots of them. But this one soon became special.

It was kind of amusing back then. People would do a double take and you could see the gears spinning while they tried to figure out what the date meant. About a third knew right off. Some guessed after a few seconds, some squinted to read the inscription. But most simply asked right off what it referred to.

Back then, of course, the concept was simply to get rid of Bush, the worst president ever and a guy I like to call history’s biggest loser of all time (redundancy deliberate for emphasis). If he didn’t completely exterminate all life on earth by then, January 20, 2009 represented blessed merciful relief. The goal was the absence of an individual. And his associates. And hopefully all they represented.

Nothing could be worse than Bush, so I didn’t give much thought to 01.21.09. Anything, literally and absolutely, would be better.

Then came Obama. Sometime last winter, after Super Tuesday fizzled for Hillary and it became apparent Edwards was not going to make the cut (thank God for that one!), the easygoing guy who at first seemed too young, shallow and inexperienced began to ignite the slightest spark, a brief flicker really, of inspiration. Things I’d not seen in him before began to stand out: His ability to turn a joke with Hillary (“I’m looking forward to having you advise me”), to smile at the least expected moment, to disarm a potential Swiftboat with an I-can-relate-to-that quip (“Of course I inhaled; that was the point”), to not only attempt (with cameras running and the world watching) but drop that incredible 3-pointer. Most of all, to be authentic, someone you felt like you could strike up a conversation with in a grocery line or go jogging with. Someone who not only was who he appeared to be, but who became smarter the longer you listened to him. Someone who finally made sense.

About that time, late winter or early spring, the hat took on a whole different meaning. January 20 became a day for more than relief. It was a day to actually look forward to. A day of redemption. To anticipate. To hope for. Deleting a negative was replaced by positing an affirmative. By summer it was the only hat I would wear, dingy and threadbare as it was becoming.

Once Nov. 4 happened, there were no more quizzical looks or questions about what the date referred to. Then, wherever I went, it was, “Hey, like the hat.” It started countless conversations, all with the same theme: Can’t wait. None too soon. It’s a new day coming.

After today I’m retiring the hat. Its job is done. For me it will always signify the power of belief, the hackneyed but resilient American credo that somehow if you just keep the faith and hang in there, bad will eventually turn to good. It may be only a hat, but it helped pull me through the darkest, most depraved desolation my country has experienced in my lifetime. One could hardly ask more from a piece of apparel.

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Dr. Strangelove dons wheelchair for Inauguration

by Paul — Monday, 1/19/09, 7:14 pm

How fitting…

Mein Fuhrer! I can valk!

Mein Fuhrer! I can valk!

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A penny a click

by Paul — Thursday, 1/15/09, 8:18 am

My favorite video from the 2008 presidential campaign did not come from a network or cable broadcast or a Web news site. It came from YouTube and was a musical ditty called "Hockey Mama for Obama" — a spoof on Sarah Palin sung to the tune of "Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina." Don’t speak for me, Sarah Palin, the chorus went. "My son plays hockey and I’m his mama/But I am voting Barack Obama."

YouTube displays the number of views of a video. When I first saw Mama for Obama, views were in the tens of thousands. The next time I clicked, they were in the high six figures. Within a few days the views had exceeded 1 million. The count slowed after the Nov. 4 election, but as of this writing it’s at almost 1.5 million.

The video was an amateur production — two people in their living room. But as it turned out, the piano accompanist and the singer were professional musicians. They were a cut above, in other words. The more I clicked (I probably watched the thing 30 times) and linked (to family, friends and email lists), the more it occurred to me how unfortunate it was that I couldn’t pay them for giving me and my circle so much enjoyment. As a content professional myself, I like to pay for the good stuff, partly in hope that pay-to-play karma will somehow infiltrate written material on the Web.

The first issue, of course, was the right sum. I may want to go beyond free, but at a buck a pop like iTunes, I’d run out of money pretty fast.

Then it hit me: A penny a click. [Read more…]

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The Un-news

by Paul — Tuesday, 1/13/09, 9:42 am

In the early 1990s I had a disturbing conversation with Nathan Myhrvold, then Microsoft’s chief futurist. Myhrvold was talking about how online technology would “disintermediate” commerce. When it comes to media, the term by its very definition suggests the breakdown of mass media. Newspapers, Myhrvold surmised, would be one of disintermediation’s biggest casualties.

What Myhrvold meant by disintermediation was the removal of gatekeeping functionality, or middle men, between purveyor and consumer. The interactivity of online meant users could select for themselves what to read. They didn’t need reporters and editors deciding what was important for them. A company or official didn’t need newspapers either; they could reach their constituents or customers directly (e.g. MyObama and iGoogle). Most of all, readers had no need for a physical product delivered to their doorstep.

Myhrvold, one of the smartest guys at what was then one of the smartest companies, made it sound as if the death of newspapers was right around the corner. But change is always further off than one initially imagines. It’s also true that change, when it happens, seems to do so all at once. The forces leading to a change, ignored for so long, are forgotten; we’re left feeling blind-sided even if we saw it coming and warned of it for years. This helps explain why someone like Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen could say with perfect honesty that he was “shocked” by the P-I’s announcement of sale and probably shutdown. Sure he was shocked. We all were. But were we surprised? (Today Myhrvold hunts dinosaur bones and was featured in a recent New Yorker profile by Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell. He probably has forgotten all about disintermediation.)

For all Myhrvold’s foresight and my own trepidations over the years, I was shocked as well. As a lifelong journalist (I started at The Seattle Times in 1967), I hate to see the P-I go — not just for its own sake but for its implications for The Times, Seattle, and an informed society. The P-I is just the first shoe to drop. Even the most casual reading of any newspaper, containing page after page of adless or ad-shy layout, reveals an unsustainable business proposition. I’m very worried about The New York Times, which I still get delivered to my doorstep and prefer reading over breakfast with my wife. It’s a vital ritual for us; we have our best conversations reading the paper, a process that reaffirms why we love each other and how much our intellectual lives revolve around knowledge of the day. (Admittedly I also notice how we’re calling out to each other more and more from our laptops, “Hey, did you see this on HuffPo?”) I know that it’s costing The New York Times a whole lot more to get its paper to me than I’m paying for the privilege; I just heard the paper is considering going to three deliveries a week instead of daily.

Although I sensed Myhrvold was right, for years I figured newspapers could transition to online if they just did a few things right. Now I’m not sure anything would have worked. Not only are newspapers dying, the type of “news” they purvey — uninterpreted, blandly regurgitated, pre-spun information supplied and shaped by a stakeholder with the intent of policy manipulation — has lost its relevance as well. Just look where the growth in news is — Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart, Huffington Post — and you get the idea. Journalism today is a process of un-newsing the news.

[Read more…]

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The 5-Minute Caucus

by Paul — Sunday, 2/10/08, 10:41 am

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