Change in blog address

I just wanted to let you all know that I'm re-locating blog address's so I can use wordpress software to snazz up my blog and take advantage of some of their neat features that blogger unfortunately lacks. Check me out and bookmark me at http://elainemeyer.wordpress.com/.

The line blurs even more

Hillary Clinton's takeoff on the "Sopranos" finale, with special guest Bill and special reference to Chelsea is just about the blurriest that the line has been drawn between celebrity and politics--at least since Ronald Reagan got elected into public office. Just watching it, I felt like the Clintons were a television family that I had grown up with more than public officials. The jab at Bill's eating habits just puts it over the top.

Is it bad that,
(1) This stunt makes me like Hillary a little better?
(2) I've started to enjoy the Journey song after this and the Sopranos finale?

Yes, I think it is.

Boost for journalism school

I'm two years late on unearthing this, but for my purposes, it's okay:

The leaders of five of the nation's most prominent journalism programs are joining in a three-year, $6 million effort to try to elevate the standing of journalism in academia and find ways to prepare journalists better.

The unusual collaboration, which has been developing for three years, involves Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University; Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley; Loren Ghiglione, dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University; Geoffrey Cowan, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California; and Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

Journalism school may be more useful than in the past, according to Berekley's dean:

While journalists have long debated the value of journalism schools, Mr. Schell, who did not attend journalism school, said he now thought such institutions were more vital than they might have been in the past.

"Things have changed substantially since we came up the journalistic food chain," he said. "As news cycles have gotten faster and more bottom-line driven, there has been less inclination and capacity in media outlets to train, mentor and guide upcoming generations."

I'll keep posting about my own investigation into journalism school. My first j-school visit is planned for the weekend of July 27th to Medill at Northwestern, my alma mater.

For the love of a non-scandal

Why oh why are blogs and news outlets implying that Barack Obama is guilty of something for which there is no evidence? In the next wave of "air of scandal" reporting that enjoyed such a following during the Clinton administration, Obama is being unfairly linked to a guy under federal investigation. Wonkette today links to Wizbang politics, which does this very thing, quoting a New York Times article which itself offers no evidence of wrongdoing on Obama's part but makes something out of Obama's connection with this guy Rezko anyway:

Mr. Obama says he never did any favors for Mr. Rezko, who raised about $150,000 for his campaigns over the years and was once one of the most powerful men in Illinois. There is no sign that Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed for this article, did anything improper.

Wizbang argues that "this presents a problem for Obama" because "[a]nything which clouds his pure-as-the-driven-snow image can damage his campaign, since he doesn't have a resume of experience to tout and depends upon that image." They are wrong. Rezko only presents a problem for Obama if blogs like Wizbang decide to talk it up. Obama has been proven guilty of nothing. It seems, as I have said before, that people love to knock down those who they see as perfect, or as Wizbang puts it "fresh face[d]." If Obama were an unabashed wheeler and dealer, I'm sure he wouldn't be getting this treatment. George W. Bush never did.

The Silenced Majority

I know I often conjecture about the disparity of concerns between the media and the American people, often without any evidence save the nagging sense that the D.C. media's preoccupation with reporting on the trivialities of political strategy has indirectly contributed to the series of giant pickles we now find ourselves facing as a nation. The Andrea Mitchells and Chris Matthews are the Neros of our time, fiddling as the world--in some cases literally--burns.

There was a great article in a Times blog about the disconnect between the Washington media and the general populace and it manifests itself every time a public figure is badgered to explain himself after criticizing Bush and his administration. As this Times piece points out, the recent upbraidal of Jimmy Carter seemed to be a case of D.C. media imposing cocktail party decorum:

Something seems a little out of whack between the mainstream media and the American people. Take the arguments of the past few days over former President Jimmy Carter's remarks about the Bush administration and the consequences of its particular brand of foreign policy. Carter didn't attack President Bush personally, but said that "as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," which can't really be too far out of line with what many Americans think.
In coverage typical of much of the media, however, NBC Nightly News asked whether Carter had broken "an unwritten rule when commenting on the current president," and portrayed Carter's words - unfairly it seems- as a personal attack on President Bush. Fox News called it "unprecedented." Yet as an article in this newspaper <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/washington/22carter.html> on Tuesday pointed out, "presidential scholars roll their eyes at the notion that former presidents do not speak ill of current ones."

This guy is absolutely right. I'm no presidential scholar, but I seem to recall reading many times of Teddy Roosevelt's vocieferous criticism of William Howard Taft's leadership. Anyway, getting in a tizzy over whether an ex-president criticizes a sitting president sanctions the office as a regal post where all former officeholders are loyal to the myth of the office, which runs counter to the fundmanetal tenets of this lower-case republican nation.

The recent acceding of the Democrats to the timetable-free Bush war funding bill is a prime example of the party being influenced by the popular though incorrect wisdom that their original war funding bill would be viewed as taking resources away from frontline troops. The writer offers a plausible exegis on the source of the Democrats dissonance and the resulting contrition it provokes on their part to the supremely unpopular Bush administration.

I wonder whether this media distortion also persists because it doesn't meet with enough criticism, and if that's partially because many Americans think that what they see in the major political media reflects what most other Americans really think - when actually it often doesn't.

Psychologists coined the term "pluralistic ignorance" in the 1930s to refer to this type of misperception - more a social than an individual phenomenon - to which even smart people might fall victim.
[...]
In pluralistic ignorance, as described by researchers Hubert O'Gorman and Stephen Garry in a 1976 paper published in Public Opinion Quarterly, "moral principles with relatively little popular support may exert considerable influence because they are mistakenly thought to represent the views of the majority, while normative imperatives actually favored by the majority may carry less weight because they are erroneously attributed to a minority." What is especially disturbing about the process is that it lends itself to control by the noisiest and most visible.
[...]
Think of the proposal to put a timetable on the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, supported, the latest poll says, by 60 percent of Americans <http://pewresearch.org/pubs/473/closeness-to-troops-boosts-support-for-war-but-not-by-much> , but dropped Tuesday from the latest war funding bill <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/washington/23cong.html> .

As the title suggests, there is as much a silent majority today as there was back when Nixon first uttered the powerful phrase at the height of the Vietnam War, but this majority is even more silenced by the D.C. media's insistence upon what concerns the "average American." If you've listened to members of the mainstream media over the years, the average American has not been too concerned with the Downing Street Memo, the Abramoff scandal, the Libby conviction, the U.S. Attorneys firings, ad infinitum. Using this logic, some members of the media fail to report on any of these incidents in a meaningful way and instead analyze the culpabilty of the players as a question of how well they spin their innocence. As a result, the media has shirked its duty to bring attention to the plagues to a democratic society--venality and autocracy--by claiming unjustifiably that the American people are too stupid to care.

Piling on Obama

Though there are those grumblers who claim the media reports on Barack Obama with obsequious adulation, I have always sensed that what little bit of a honeymoon Obama might enjoy would end as soon as the Heglian contrarianism of the talking heads set in. At last, Obama would be subject to the typical Washington D.C. establishment pettiness that plagues so much of political commentary today, where you are damned if you do, damned if you don't. Damned if you're a "Washington insider," damned if you're a "rookie." Damned if you're a consensus-builder, damned if you're a maverick (unless you're John McCain and not actually a maverick).

John Dickerson's analysis in Slate of a recent health care forum that Obama moderated in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, displays all of the typical pettiness of a gotcha journalist and none of the concern for getting to the substance of the forum. At the event, Dickerson says, Obama heard "one depressing story after another from people who had no insurance, bills that had bankrupted them, sudden losses of coverage, or only enough money to pay for the thinnest catastrophic policy." Welcome to our health care system, John Dickerson. It's pretty depressing, and yet such stories are all too common.

Less concerned with the hallowed substance of Obama's response, Dickerson instead goes on to concoct a thesis that if Obama puts on an informative demeanor, he runs the risk of appearing professorial. According to Dickerson, "we're not electing a president to run a seminar." This to me seems about as petty as it gets: Obama is merely listening to people, providing answers to them, and expressing general knowledge about health care issues. Dickerson continues, "That Obama has to hold [forums] to show he's serious only reminds voters that he doesn't have a lot of national political experience." Don't most presidential candidates hold these? I thought townhalls and their ilk were run-of-the-mill events for campaigners and public officals.

The article goes on to make some riveting conclusions, like that Obama's contributors must like him a whole bunch. Slate, here's an idea: take a day or three off from pop political reporting and try to provide your readers with a better picture of our failing health care system and what reforms are currently on the table to address it.

The Beltway Machine

In an article last week on Salon, Glen Greenwald criticizes the media reaction to Barack Obama's partially-formed health care policy. As Greenwald says, the Democratic primaries are a year away, the general election a year and a half. There's no reason a candidate should be expected to have formed a health care policy yet. Worst of all, if a candidate is to aspire to the media's idea of "substance," s/he could easily forget that many people in the country more than anything yearn for a candidate who is not afraid to address our systemic and cultural problems and that it is those problems that have so driven our country down this bumpy treacherous path we find ourselves on today. Even Obama, who is able to take a step back from the conventional candidate playbook to articulate a broader message about the political culture has only scratched the surface of the systemic and cultural "corrosion," as Greenwald calls it. Obama's frequent rhetoric about D.C.'s noxious partisanship touches on a symptom of a culture of crassness, of 24-hour cable, of rapid response opposition research, and, let's face it, of the Republican effort over the last 25 years or so to intensely politicize governance, but it does not get to the heart of the issue.

Greenwald goes on to identify the true culprit behind a political dialogue that has often devolved in pettiness: the Washington or Beltway machine, which in fact some Democrats are as much a part of as some Republicans. At a certain point, job security, comfort, and status quo breed complicity in a broken system, one that holds public relations in higher regard than public service, and this is what I believe we are seeing in many of these Beltway veterans. As Greenwald puts it about Hillary Clinton, who is the most blatant Beltway Democrat running for president:

The people who are attached to the Clinton campaign and who will be swept back into power with her -- the Terry McAuliffes and Mike McCurrys and Howard Wolfsons and Chris Lehanes and James Carvilles -- are pure embodiments of the whole corrupt and principle-less and worthless edifice. They're the people who, both when they were in power and throughout the Bush presidency, sleazily fed at the trough and they believe in nothing. Cheap and deceitful cynicism is the nourishment which sustains them and, most of all, they love the Beltway power system and can't wait to resume their place in it -- fully preserved and unchanged.

Though I think the criticism heaped on Clinton regarding her seeming insincerity has been unfair in that it lends the impression that her rudderless pandering makes her unique, she is still the worst option among the Democrats because she is so heavily relying upon a machine that is no longer equipped--if it ever was--to solving the dire problems our country faces. Yet, this group, consisting of many of the people fluidly move between government and the private sector, taking top lobbying jobs after stints in public service, seek mainly to devise myths about "electability" ultimately exacting of their candidate adherence to the questionable wisdom of not sounding threatening or shrill.

In this vain, the New Yorker recently featured an excellent piece by David Owen about former Democratic party operatives who are working to manage the public image of Wal-Mart. As employees of one of the nation's top public relations firm, Edelman, these veterans of public service and political campaigns are now making it their agenda to promote the virtues of Wal-Mart. It's not surprising that the people profiled in this article, such as Greg St. Claire, a former Republican congressional staffer, and Fred Baldassaro, a former aide for the Democratic National Committee, are ideal employees to a public relations firm, especially on a project that has so many implications for policy making. Their connections and familiarity with the PR apparatus in D.C. are valuable to an ambitious PR operation like that of Wal-Mart.

The nonchalance of this partnership should not obscure its insidiousness, though. The Edelman campaign has no regard for grassroots efforts. Indeed, most despicable about the Walmart campaign is its reliance on "Astoturf" techniques, such as the sham organization, Working Families for Wal-Mart, actually a project of St. Claire's, the former Republican staffer. Rather than trying to actually shape Wal-Mart into the benevolent organization that Edelman claims it to be, they are merely spinning Wal-Mart's virtues as an employer. Take the case of Working Families for Wal-Mart:

Working Families for Wal-Mart, which paid for [St. Claire's] sister, Laura St. Claire, to travel across America in a recreational vehicle and keep a blog about visits with Wal-Mart employees. Everyone she talked to was delighted with Wal-Mart. At about the time that the trip came to an end, Business Week revealed that Wal-Mart had financed the journey.

It is amazing to me--and yet so emblematic of corporate values today--that Wal-Mart would rather shell out for an orchestrated PR campaign than use that money to actually improve the notoriously unpleasant working conditions and to raise the low wages of their employees, but such is the PR culture of today. The Beltway machine about which Greenwald laments--whether Democratic or Republican--is perfectly happy with the spin-to-win tactics of the executives the serve, whether these execs be private CEOS or public officials. If the last eight years has taught us anything, though, it is that accountability must be sought and that Herculean efforts to change the spin cycle rather than address serious problems have been to the detriment of effective government.

The Politico, a review

I subjected D.C.'s newest periodical to a harsh criticism a couple of weeks ago, though I heldout the possibility that my scorn was undeserved. Don't worry, it pretty much wasn't. The Politico is the typical, out-of-touch, superfluous D.C. rag that I've become used to. Why we need another one, I don't know, but The Politco's columns include a representative sampling of all of the usual pundit pet causes and analyses: wouldn't it be great to see a bipartisan presidential ticket in '08? (never going to happen, shouldn't happen, and Joe Lieberman and John McCain is hardly bipartisan), a fruitless debate between some guy from the CATO Institute and someone else about whether the West is becoming more libertarian or more liberal, and a fluff piece about 2008 potential candidates' websites.

Politico isn't a lost cause. If nothing else, their inside Congress reporting is useful, because it brings up practical considerations about members of Congress that aren't often raised. An article about the aged Congress ,which looks at the variety of age-related health problems of our elected officials, raises the question of whether a person with chronic health issues can adequately serve:

[S]uggestions that an enfeebled senator consider retirement haven't been broached, even considering the distressing example of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., who spent the final year of his term, at age 100, in and out of Walter Reed Army Medical Center here.

Politico's coverage of lobbyists is also useful, because, as much as we might like to forget it, they are an integral and yet relatively little-publicized part of the policy process. The local beat is the natural terrain of a magazine like Politico, and it should stick to that rather than engage in the type of useless speculation that permeates like oxygen throughout this city.

Bard Pun

Washington has officially ushered in the Shakespeare Festival, a six month long tribute to the playright who gave us the complex character (as opposed to the simple one dominated by humors). Just like Paris on the Potomac, Shakespeare's works and influence will permeate events all over the city, both large and small, expensive and cheap. It should be cool. However, one thing we must all brace ourselves for is the bad puns that periodicals love to employ, in particular those playing upon the word "bard," an epithet that refers commonly to Shakespeare and means a poet, playright or other scholar in Medieval and early Modern Great Britain. Many blogs and papers are keeping track of the events of Shakespeare Fest; meanwhile I am here to keep track of the bad, excessive puns written about Shakespeare Fest. So far, we have:

"Bard Times" The Washington Post, 1/5/07

As an aside, I'm really sad I missed last night's reading of Twelfth Night at the Kennedy Center, because Balki, i.e. Bronson Pinchot (who will forever be known as Balki) took part. Damn me.

Politico-Really necessary?

Exiting the Courthouse Metro station today, I came face to face with an alluring ad for The Politico. Upon arriving home, I navigated to the website to find out what the authoritative ad was promoting. Apparently, a couple of Washington Post veterans left their positions to get involed with The Politico, which looks to be a new, multi-platform reporting venture that will cover Capital Hill, the presidential race, and lobbying and issue advocacy "with enterprise, style, and impact." I have no idea what they mean by that, but I have to ask, is a project like The Politico really necessary? Doesn't D.C. already have The Hill, Congressional Quarterly, and Roll Call, not to mention The Washington Post, The Washington Examiner, and, even...ugh...The Washington Times? Does Washington really need another outlet for the chattering class to bloviate*--to make uninformed speculations about whether the country is ready for a black man or a woman as president and whether Nancy Pelosi is allowing some Rep into her inner circle? Is such reporting at all useful? It definitely is not at all original. If The Politico is what I think it is--the self-satisfied trailer that flashes all sorts of recognizeable faces doesn't look promising--it embodies the primary problem of political reporting, which covers too much on the subjects of tactics and political posturing and too little on translating what on earth our elected officials actually do each day, what legislation they are proposing and passing, and who exactly their legislation is serving.

Such journalism embodies the problem with this town in general, which is that some folks get so into the idea that they are mixing with the Illuminati, the "powerful" people, that they report on the goings on as if they were in a cafeteria surveying the social dynamics between cliques. Little do any of them realize that such a paltry minority of people know or care who most of Washington is. I enjoy a clever dig at politicians or a little Washington gossip every once in awhile, but I turn to the totally unserious Wonkette for this, not a legitimate paper, and there is a glut of entities that fulfill this need already. If I'm wrong about The Politico, and it is a serious, useful periodical, I'll be the first to admit it. If I am right, I look ever forward to reading another article about whether the nation can elect a Mormon for president or whether Giuliani can win over social conservatives.

*When looking up the word bloviate to make sure I was spelling it right--it is unlisted in my computer's dictionary--I found this very appropriate example of its usage on Dictionary.com: Anyone who has ever spent an idle morning watching the Washington talk shows has probably wondered: how did these people become entitled to earn six-figure salaries bloviating about the week's headlines?
-- Robert Worth, "Quick! The Index!", New York Times, June 3, 2001.

I love contradictions

Today, the Federal Trade Commission (my place of work)'s huge civil action against four diet pill companies was the subject of a "Today Show" feature! Yes! The FTC Chairman even had an interview with Matt Lauer. Score! It was a winning day for the American consumer, and a winning day for the oft-drowned out message that the way to maintain a healthy weight is to eat controlled portions and get physical activity (the latter, I could stand to do a little more). Short-term solutions like diet pills don't do it, and they eat up a lot of money and encourage psychological hang-ups about food in the process. Just like anything else, if a fix seems too easy, it is. If a celebrity like Anna Nicole Smith is hawking a product, stay away. It's to the "Today Show"'s credit that they are airing this message.

Oh, except, the next segement to come on the video viewer is an awkward breakfast shake recipe demo care of Mariel Hemingway, whose new book is going to help you lose weight and maintain a healthy lifestyle. She makes a pitiful smoothie with a bunch of powder and some blueberries. She advises not to totally restrict anything, which is fine advice, but I don't need Mariel Hemingway to tell me that. Plus, I don't need to ever go on a diet that would have me drink that weird looking smoothie. Blech.

So, thanks "Today Show," for exposing the diet industry for what it is, if only for five glorious minutes.

Bad Analogy, Chicago Tribune

I think it took living in D.C. for a couple months to solidify for me just how sensational the Chicago Tribune has gotten. It is still no New York Post or Chicago Sun Times, but it is no Washington Post or New York Times, either. It's no wonder too, given that the Tribune's parent company, the Tribune Company's main priorities seem to be in downsizing the staff as opposed to upgrading the news quality. Although the editorial page is not necessarily an indicator of bad journalism--just look at the disparity between the well-reported news in the Wall Street Journal and its more shrill and often mendacious editorial page, as one example--a look at the Tribune's editorial page may put some perspective on how some of its sensational reporting gets past the bosses.

Take today's endorsement of Tony Peraica for Cook County Board President: the Tribune indicts the "sorry" Cook County government for having a budget of 3.1 billion, saying that it is "bigger than those of many states." This comment is extremely misleading considering that Cook County, with a population of 5,303,683, is in fact bigger than many states. The massive County includes not only the city of Chicago but many of Chicago's suburbs (including my hometown and my university's town). There are 31 states (32, including Puerto Rico) with a population less than Cook County's. Granted, I agree with the Tribune that Todd Stroger appears to be relying on alarmist tactics to beat Tony Peraica, but the paper's editorial page negates its own reliability in analyzing Cook County politics if it cannot avoid such a blatantly simplistic and misleading analogy.

Stephen Colbert: making news in spite of the MSM

By suggestion, I am writing about Stephen Colbert's bit at the White House correspondents dinner. The way everything has played out--Colbert's great routine, the chilly reception on the part of the dinner attendees, the lack of print accorded to what was certainly the most newsworthy moment at a usually unexciting event, and the subsequent outcry by bloggers and many in the alternate media--point to the mainstream media (or MSM)'s decreasing relevancy.

Of course, they still have the largest megaphone, so to speak, which is free use of our nation's airwaves and mass-circulating, well-recognized newspapers, but as this group continuously clams up when faced with giving attention to events like the Colbert routine (not to mention a lot of troubling societal problems like stagnant wages, decreased social mobility, etc.), others are stepping in. The MSM is unsurprisingly treating them as crazy, unrelenting, out of the mainstream, and so on. They've been trying to write off bloggers forever, but in so doing, they're writing off the actions of average citizens. I don't know what's more elitist than that.

Take for instance how PBS's News Hour reported an instance in January when the ombudsman of the Washington Post shut down the comments page on the paper's website after posters wrote her that she had misrepresented the nature of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff's donations:

The Jack Abramoff scandal is one of the most explosive stories in politics these days but when Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell recently wrote about the paper's coverage of this story, little did she know that she was setting off a firestorm of her own.
...She was then deluged with close to 1,000 comments, most critical of her suggestion that both parties were complicit in the scandal.
...But the online onslaught didn't stop. [Emphasis added].

Note the words used to describe the commenters and their actions. They're not treated as concerned citizens who would like to see a large newspaper rectify its mis-reporting but rather are treated as a "deluge."

So back to Colbert. Again, the MSM reveals how uninterested--or perhaps just scared--they are to report strong criticisms of the Bush Administration, even if these criticisms are cloaked in humor. Again, the MSM demonstrates their irrelevancy. As a Time magazine television critic said recently, "What anyone fails to get who said Colbert bombed because he didn't win over the room is: the room no longer matters. Not the way it used to." Furthermore, "Colbert's roasting of the president this weekend got nearly 70,000 posts on blogs according to the blog-tracking Web site Technorati -- the most of any subject Thursday" according to an NBC correspondent. As a result, the MSM has had to acknowledge that this is a story.

Now, the talking point among the MSM has become that Colbert's skit was "not funny," which is not only blatantly wrong, but it also doesn't make the event any less newsworthy. (If the news got reported on based on their funiness, the D.C. press corps would be out of jobs). As Consortiumnews.com points out about the "not funny" line:

Milbank’s assessment was shared by many journalists at the dinner, a reaction that can partly be explained by the pressure Washington reporters have long felt from well-organized right-wing media-attack groups to give Bush and other conservatives the benefit of every doubt. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Bush Rule of Journalism" or Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]

Consortium continues:

Even before the Colbert controversy, the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner and similar press-politician hobnobbing have been cringing examples of unethical journalistic behavior.

The American people count on the news media to act as their eyes and ears, as watchdogs on the government, not lap dogs wagging tails and licking the faces of administration officials. Whatever value these dinners might once have had – as an opportunity for reporters to get to know government sources in a more casual atmosphere – has long passed.

Since the mid-1980s, the dinners have become competitions among the news organizations to attract the biggest Hollywood celebrities or infamous characters from the latest national scandal. Combined with lavish parties sponsored by free-spending outlets like Vanity Fair or Bloomberg News, the dinners have become all about the buzz.

Plus, while these self-indulgent affairs might seem fairly harmless in normal political times, they are more objectionable when American troops are dying overseas and the Executive Branch is asserting its right to trample constitutional rights, including First Amendment protections for journalists.

Remember Bush's supposedly comic routine from a couple of years ago where he was searching under his desk for WMDs? The sight of an insulated White House press corps sitting in that banquet room watching and laughing a skit that basically trivialized our military's presence in Iraq was pretty sickening. Colbert is just tugging the veil off of a discomfiting relationship between the MSM and the current president, and it's not surprising that they're both mad at him for it.

I've had it with these snakes!

Some of you may have heard of the movie Snakes on a Plane starring Samuel L. Jackson, set to be released in August of this year. I would detail the plot, but is it really that important? All I care about is the fact that there are snakes on a plane and Samuel L. Jackson is going to show them who's boss. For a long time, Snakes on a Plane was the reject of New Line Cinema, constantly two snips away from the cutting room floor.

It was shot with little fanfare, and I think I can safely say that five years ago or so, Snakes on a Plane would have lived out this dreadful fate. In 2006, however, with the wonders of the world wide web and all of its communication powers, Snakes on a Plane has become an internet legend, eagerly anticipated by all who understand the sheer beauty of what it represents as a film that carries out perfectly the equation for formulaic Hollywood movie: cramped space+terrorist threat+swearing mofo actor+funny fat guy who is really scared (played by Keenan Thompson)=summer movie, but with the ridiculous twist of the insidious enemy being snakes. Yes, snakes!

I've had it with these snakes!

Samuel L. Jackson's attitude towards the movie has been just delightful and can be summed up with these choice quotes:

That's the only reason I took the job: I read the title.

-on the unthinkable near-change of the film's official title

So people who have a fear of flying and people who have a fear of snakes are going to have a double whammy.

It's kind of going to be great.

If you want more info, check out snakesonablog.com.

An historical moment: the rise of political blogs

I am thoroughly enjoying Bill McKibben's review of Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics by bloggers Jerome Armstrong (of My DD) and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (of the Daily Kos). McKibben's review provides an historic overview of the internet's affect on politics in the United States, which must by any measures be understood as monumental. Take as an example the Democratic Senatorial primary challenge in Connecticut that is being waged by Ned Lamont. Not only have blogs like The Daily Kos consistently drummed up support and financial contributions for Lamont (I myself made a small donation to the campaign), but these blogs also began the drumbeat for change in Connecticut in view of current-Senator Joseph Lieberman's unbelievable unwillingness to challenge George W. Bush or to change his position on supporting Bush's Iraq War.

According to McKibben, such blogger-driven influence emerged when the Presidential campaign of Vermont governor Howard Dean coincided with and picked up on the voices of regular Americans in 2003, a movement that, as McKibben says, "rose in the shadows of the Bush ascendancy in the years following September 11, when very few people—certainly not presidential candidates with an eye to getting elected—were willing to challenge the White House directly." These voices were coming especially from the web, where Americans were logging on to connect with their fellow citizens who shared similar sentiments but were scattered across the country. The internet bridged this geographic divide and therefore created a new, people-powered movement. As McKibben says:

the Dean campaign also launched the Internet era in American politics. Previously, even if people became excited about a candidate in the primaries, there wasn't all that much they could do to help. They might find a mailing address and send a check, or wait for the primary campaign to reach their state so they could take part in the campaign and then vote. But Dean's young campaign staff opened a new channel through their Web site Deanforamerica.com, which featured the then still fresh idea of a blog.
...Most important of all, they pioneered on-line money-raising. Every time something unusual happened (when some pundit would disparage the "kiddie corps" running the Dean show, say) the Web site staffers would "put up a bat" on the home page—a picture of a baseball bat, empty like a United Way thermometer in front of a town hall, which they would fill with red as the contributions would come in from people taking a few minutes to read the blog from their home or office computers. The supporters of the Dean campaign easily raised more money than their opponents in the early primaries and caucuses, and for the first time in recent political history, they did it largely with $20 and $50 and $75 contributions from across a large base of his ardent fans.

Such influence was acknowledged in an April 2 article in the New York Times about the internet's influence on politics and campaigning. Most encouraging, perhaps is the threat that web use brings to the television campaign ad, what has morphed into one of the most deplorable and methods of vote-getting because of how wellthe television medium facilitates half-truths and fear-mongering:

Analysts say the campaign television advertisement, already diminishing in influence with the proliferation of cable stations, faces new challenges as campaigns experiment with technology that allows direct messaging to more specific audiences, and through unconventional means.

Of course, the internet has brought with it certain ills too, from shadowy kiddie porn rings to well shadowy bestiality rings, but the success of blogs like those of Jerome Armstrong's and Markos Moulitsas's is encouraging when one thinks back to the helpless and depressed state many of us were in six years ago after a bunch of cronies essentially decided the president of the United States instead of looking to the votes of the American people.

De-Ported

A state-owned company based in the emirate of Dubai has dropped its bid to run six U.S. ports after concern expressed by the Congress along with a strong resolution against the deal. One thing that bothered me has been the interpretation of this decision. The Chicago Tribune said this deal signified the Democrats first chance to look stronger on national defense and they took it. This therefore becomes a cynical attempt by the Democrats to capitalize on Americans' negative associations of the Middle East. Lest we forget, however, that it is the media that has done so much to promote the myth that Republicans are stronger on national defense. Read most any article analyzing Democratic and Republican strengths, and it is suggested that national security is firmly in the Republican corner, notwithstanding that Osama Bin Laden remains at large, the U.S.'s port security still doesn't inspect almost all of the cargo passing through, various assessments indicate the U.S. is still very susceptible to a terrorist attack, and the security situation in Iraq is disastorous. So if media outlets like the Tribune are going to accuse Democrats of cynically exploiting the ports issue (which I must disagree with because Congressional Republicans were as vocal as Dems on the issue and Democrats were most worried about why the UAE-based company didn't get the usual background check before approval, which is a reasonable expectation), then they should stop promoting the equally cynical myth that Republicans are stronger on national security because they yell louder about our enemies.

There have been many excellent responses to the sickening article I referenced yesterday by Henry Bowles the III, but I wanted to excerpt this one because it is the most humorous:

Traditionally, I am a fan of editorials that challenge conventional beliefs. That being said, Henry M Bowles III is far and away the worst columnist I have ever had the misfortune of reading.
It's reached the point that I no longer blame Bowles for his misguided, non-sensical rants. Rather, I blame myself for reading any article situated under the profile-picture of Bowles and his Barry Melrose mullet.
Henry M. Bowles III or "The Trifecta", has an admirable willingness to address hot topics. The problem is that his stance on said topics is always wrong. Completely wrong. How can one be wrong on an issue with no right answer? Simple: They can be shitty Henry M. Bowles "The Third." He's more of a bitch than a bitch.

Anti-Semitism in various guises

The past few weeks have been disappointing for those of us at Northwestern University who had hoped that Arthur Butz's most recent opportunistic attempt to get his Holocaust denial publicized would be largely ignored. To be honest, when I wrote this about three weeks ago, I was not anticipating that Butz would have such staying power in the campus news.

Why has Butz had such power? First, Northwestern's main newspaper, The Daily Northwestern made the absurd decision to solicit and publish an article by Butz. The Daily and a few students who wrote letters to the editor have been operating under the hopeless naivite that a man like Butz is equally as honest as actual Holocaust historians and that revisionistsof his stripe are unfairly persecuted for unpalatable views. On the contrary, as historian Deborah E. Lipstadt of Emerson University accounts in a column from yesterday's Daily, it has been Holocaust revisionists who have tried to persecute others for their views:

I say this with over six years of legal experience defending myself against David Irving, once the world’s leading Holocaust denier. He sued me for libel for calling him a Holocaust denier in one of my books. He waited until the book appeared in the United Kingdom where the burden of proof is on the defendant.

The Daily's decision to publish Butz seemed premised on the belief that Butz's methods for supporting his views are within the paramaters of intellectual honesty. As Professor Lipstadt explained so well, revisionists like Butz do not operate within such parameters. Witness her legal struggle with revisionist David Irving:

Rather than face any legal obstacles, Irving freely repeated his — and by extension Butz’s — arguments in court. The world press reported on them daily. No one faced any legal obstacles. No one was hauled into court except me.

I was able to mount an aggressive defense thanks to a defense fund which raised $1.75 million dollars. We hired a “Dream Team” of historians to closely examine Irving’s claims about the Holocaust. They found his work to be a “tissue of lies.”

By the end of my ten-week trial Irving was left looking like the Court Jester. He had called the judge “Mein Fuhrer,” a telling slip. When asked by Richard Rampton, my barrister, how he could say Herman Goring “goggled” at a certain exchange, when there was absolutely no evidence that Goring was even at this meeting, Irving declared: “author’s license.”

Butz is guilty of this same dishonesty:

Butz, in his column, engages in linguistic tricks. He claims that Timothy Ryback wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “there is little forensic evidence proving homicidal intent” in the ruins of Auschwitz. Butz ignores another portion of Ryback’s comment regarding Auschwitz: “these heaps of dynamited concrete and twisted steel are not only historic artifacts but among the few remnants of untainted, forensic evidence of the Holocaust.”

Why do we not enter further into “debate” with him? Because debating people who deliberately mislead is like trying to nail a blob of jelly to the wall. There is no end to the matter. If they have no fidelity to the truth how can you debate them? They just make things up as it suits them.

Professor Lipstadt's words should be heeded. Unfortunately, in today's Daily, a student columnist has picked up where Butz left off--constructing an uninformed argument that reveals this student's latent belief in age-old anti-Semitic conspiracies of Jewish cabalism and. There's no need to explicate the article itself: the main point is the deeply troubling sanctioning of anti-Semitic views by a student newspaper with a misguided understanding of free expression.

Suggestion on a Democratic win in '06: A series.

The New York Times has an article today about how Democrats may not be seizing the opportunity to campaign against Republicans leading up to this year's midterm elections. Notwithstanding that the elections are 10 months away, I have a few suggestions for any Democrats who are too busy wringing their hands to realize that there are a bevvy or organizations and ideas devoted to getting Republicans out of office while at the same time presenting a strong Democratic party platform with a few important themes. I will present my suggestions in a series of blog posts. Here is the first one:

• Unite the party: Lately there has been a lot of criticism leveled at the structure of the Democratic party establishment along the lines of its aloofness to the power of grassroots and "netroots" organizations. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong's new book Crashing the Gates is the most recent of these criticisms. Members of the party establishment in turn have often been reluctant to reach out to the grassroots/netroots. There must be communication within the party. How can this happen?
  
• Convene a conference which features the establishment players and those who represent the netroots and grasroots. It should include members of Congress, Governors, and State representatives who would like to be party leaders. Such a summitt should also have representation from party organizations in each state of the Union, as well as prominent progressive voices on policy, like the Center for American Progress, the Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN), on media, such as Air America Radio and Media Matters and prominent blogs like Daily Kos and MyDD. It should also include representation from key interest groups in the Democratic Party. It should be hosted by the Democratic National Committee.
• This conference would invite representatives of states to submit their concerns about their party's organization and the most pressing issues facing their state.
  
• It would give national party leaders an idea of what their constituents are invovled in and believe in at the netroots, grassroots, state, and local level (none of those being mutually exclusive). Too often lately, the party establishment is getting their impression of their own party's grassroots from unreliable and detached media sources and pundits who are well-insulated in the Beltway.
• Those in the grassroots/netroots would get a chance to understand our political leaders' perspectives and considerations in a respectful environment.
  

The Democratic Party's cognitive dissonance regarding the media

About a month and a half ago, I went to an event where Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer was appearing to promote her recently released novel, A Time to Run. Boxer opened the event by talking about her novel and its influences and then opened the floor to questions, either about her book or about politics in general. Most of the questions to the Senator--including mine--focused on the latter. Paraphrased, my question was this: "Why do you think the media was so quick to assign scandal to Bill Clinton when he was president, even though all alleged wrongdoing regarding Whitewater were proven false, where the much more serious charges against Bush have not galvanized the media to assign scandal to him and his administration (or even vaulably investigate it)?" Boxer's response surprised me greatly: she was thoroughly stupified by the suggestion that the media had some sort of reporting bias in favor of Bush. She pointed out that recent reports of Republican wrongdoing were coming out in the mainstream media. However, she didn't seem to understand the point that where impeachment was immediately brought up when it was revealed that Clinton may have had an affair with Monica Lewinsky, no comparable level of outrage accompanied any of the much more grave revelations about the Bush administration--secret meetings with oil execs to construct White House energy policy, lying about going into Iraq, no-bid contracts by Halliburton, leaking of the identity of a CIA Agent etc. The current illegal wiretapping revelation is of course another serious offense.

Boxer's stupification at my suggestion was not my imagination. In a great article today, Salon's Peter Daou analyzes the Democratic Party's true problem the mainstream media:

THE TRIANGLE: Matthews, Moore, Murtha, and the Media: What's the common thread running through the past half-decade of Bush's presidency? What's the nexus between the Swift-boating of Kerry, the Swift-boating of Murtha, and the guilt-by-association between Democrats and terrorists? Why has a seemingly endless string of administration scandals faded into oblivion? Why do Democrats keep losing elections? It's this: the traditional media, the trusted media, the "neutral" media, have become the chief delivery mechanism of potent anti-Democratic and pro-Bush storylines. And the Democratic establishment appears to be either ignorant of this political quandary or unwilling to fight it.

There's a critical distinction to be made here: individual reporters may lean left, isolated news stories may be slanted against the administration. What I'm describing is the wholesale peddling by the "neutral" press of deep-seated narratives, memes, and soundbites: simple, targeted talking points that paint a picture of reality for the American public that favors the right and tarnishes the left.

...It’s simple: if your core values and beliefs and positions, no matter how reasonable, how mainstream, how correct, how ethical, are filtered to the public through the lens of a media that has inoculated the public against your message, and if the media is the public’s primary source of information, then NOTHING you say is going to break through and change that dynamic. Which explains, in large measure, the Dems’ sorry electoral failures. [bold words indicate my emphasis]

I beg you to read the whole thing. It's an important article.