“MattB25″ over at DailyKos has posted a thoughtful, in-depth analysis of the state-by-state election prospects. This is way, way better than the simplistic averaging-of-polls work that electoral-vote.com are doing.
Read it and be ensmarted. (And cheered.)
(Hat to Ruy Texiera for pointing this out.)
I’ve played around with a bunch of wiki tools over the past year or so, and while I love the concept, the execution has always been somewhat wanting.
And I’ve never seen a good comparative review of wiki engines.
But it’s starting to look like MediaWiki, which powers the fabulous Wikipedia is starting to really pull ahead of the pack in offering a polished, feature-rich wiki environment. (Sorry, Twiki, you’re just too clunky.)
Thoughts?
This is unbelievable, yet somehow not so. The BBC is reporting that George Bush’s official campaign website appears to be intentionally blocking oversears visitors as of Monday morning.
One less-than-perfect thing about Plone is the way its current WYSIWYG editor, Epoz, handles images.
Which got me thinking, it would be really cool if one could simply hack Talks PHP Image Manager/Image Editor in there. Sure, it’s not “pure Python” but it works pretty darn well. It just writes the images to the file system, and passes a hunk of HTML back to the editor.
Anyone wanna take it on?
A decentralized network of citizens and media activists took on the “old media” network of Sinclair Broadcasting… and won.
Josh Marshall has a solid summary:
Sinclair planned to use their hold over airwaves around the country to turn an hour of prime-time broadcast time over to an anti-Kerry informercial put together by a group that has now merged with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. My sense was always that they knew they’d take some hit but were willing to take it in part because of their ideological stance but even more because they thought they’d be made whole through (de)regulatory payback after a Bush victory.
But they got more than they bargained for. A lot more.
Thousands of individuals across the country started organizing a boycott of Sinclair’s local advertisers — the heart of their business. And the stock price commenced a rapid descent. I don’t have at my fingertips the precise numbers. But I think the company lost something like $100 million in market capitalization, or 20% of the stocks value, in little more than a week. (ed.note: please check other sources for exact amounts).
This was then compounded by a cluster of inter-related lawsuits, which would not have been possible had it not been for the predicate created by the boycott and the related stock price drop.
Eventually, Sinclair saw the writing on the wall — penciled in by major institutional shareholders, I suspect — and cried ‘uncle.’ It was all quite a feat, seeing as it mixed together the actions of policy luminaries like former FCC Chair Reed Hundt, existing activist groups like Media Matters, the absolutely invaluable work that went into the Sinclair Boycott website and mainly an army of political junkies around the country who didn’t want to see this election gamed by a gaggle of jokers in Maryland who thought they could trifle with American democracy with impunity.
What lessons does this hold for future “rapid response” campaigns? I think there are at least a few:
What do you think our take-homes should be?
This is a question I’ve pondered before, but my colleague Jon Baldivieso adds some interesting thoughts:
I think [Dean and MoveOn] worked because they gave a voice to the seething discontent (in about half of the country) that had been building since Bush came to office. While Dean and MoveOn clearly made many intelligent decisions over the course of the election season, they would have been nothing without the scope and the intensity of the anti-Bush left.
I think that’s largely missing from the environmental movement. There is enough of an infrastructure in place to give people an outlet for their environmental urges; there’s no buildup of latent, unchannelled outrage the way there were for the political scene in the last 4 years.
I’m pleased to announce that we’ve just launched Evergreen Politics, a group blog covering progressive politics in Washington State.
Evergreen Politics boasts a talented, witty and provocative group of contributors, and we’re adding fresh content ‘most every day. What with an election coming up and all, I can’t imagine a more exciting place to be!
The perceptive Matt Yglesias has some interesting things to say about the role of blogs as political community organizing tools:
Looked at demographically, though, what keeps the Democrats in play is the fact that while union families have declined as a proportion of the electorate, what you might call “postmodern” white people — Judis and Teixeira’s professionals, Zogby’s unmarrieds, Brooks’ seculars — have increased their share and come to be a larger and larger slice of the base of progressive politics. The problem with these people — people like me — is that we tend to be radically unconnected from large, formal, social networks. And not in a coincidental way, this characteristic is pretty fundamental to the essence of the sort of person we’re talking about. We’re younger, more transient, start families later, don’t go to church and are generally without strong roots in anything more substantive than an “urban tribe”.
This is all fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t work very well for the purposes of politics. Political life in all its manifestations — voting, volunteering, donating, boycotting, letter-writing, petition-signing, calling up advertisers and hassling them, etc. — is beset with collective action problems. There’s almost nothing anyone who’s not super-rich can do to influence the political process that, on its own, will make a whit of difference. All of these activities depend on the notion that if lots of people followed your lead, then something important would happen. But in order to get any of this to happen you need to get a large number of people to behave in a not-especially-rational way, hence the collective action problem. Such problems normally get solved through appeals to group solidarity, but that presupposes the existence of a group. Hence the value of a union hall, a church, or VFW outpost, a Rotary Club, or what have you. The knowledge that there’s a group of people out there you identify with and who identify with you can be a powerful force above and beyond the ways in which such groups simply aid communications.
This, I think, is one of the more important contributions blogs — particularly the amateur blogs — may make to American society in the years to come. They create a sense of virtual community. You feel that you know the people you read regularly, and the people who participate in comments threads on blogs you read. You’re aware of a wider network of people you may read occassionally, or only see on the blogrolls of others. You exchange emails with readers, writers, and commenters. And because the network is merely virtual, it’s remarkably robust and stable, staying in place as you move.
The ensuing discussion is a good read, too.
I’m not the only progressive activist out there who thinks Jon Stewart is the best political journalist going — and he’s the star of a COMEDY show.
His recent appearance on CNN”s “Crossfire” is amazing.
(You can download the video clip via BitTorrent. Great example of network meme distribution in action.) UPDATE: you can also watch it from iFilm.
Here are a couple of great bits from the transcript.
>STEWART: Here’s just what I wanted to tell you guys.
>CARLSON: Yes.
>STEWART: Stop.
>(LAUGHTER)
>STEWART: Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.
And…
> STEWART: Now, this is theater. It’s obvious. How old are you?
>(CROSSTALK)
>CARLSON: Thirty-five.
>STEWART: And you wear a bow tie.
>(LAUGHTER)
>(APPLAUSE)
>CARLSON: Yes, I do. I do.
>STEWART: So this is…
>CARLSON: I know. I know. I know. You’re a…
>(CROSSTALK)
>STEWART: So this is theater.
Just got back from seeing Primer. Made for $7000, by first-time engineer-turned-filmmaker/writer/director/actor Shane Carruth, it won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance.
Don’t spoil it for yourself by reading too much about it. But go with an open mind, pay very close attention, and prepare to be amazed and more than a bit confused.
I’m pretty sure that in the end, it all hangs together pretty well. Although I’ll need to see again to be sure.
UPDATE: You can watch a 10-minute clip online, thanks to AOL. (First time I’ve ever said that, eh?)
Tai Moses writes a great article that frames the environmental positions of Bush and Kerry in temrs of underlying values and worldview.
…one of the core values of Bush conservatives is that natural resources are there to be exploited for the good of mankind. In their view, the world – and especially nature – is a hostile place that needs to be conquered and controlled.
John Kerry, unlike Bush, talks about the environment in terms of responsibility and nurturance. Kerry recognizes that environmental issues are public health and safety issues: communities that are free of toxins are healthy, secure communities, able to care for healthy children and families.
This is the kind of values-based framing that progressives need much, much more practice at.
You’d probably get something like the Brown Brush Monitor. It’s highway mower that stealthily dispenses herbicides, too.
Vegetation managers have long valued an integrated approach to right-of-way vegetation control. Because chemical and mechanical management methods play major roles in controlling brush and weeds, the technology combining mowing and herbicide applications continues to evolve. And for good reason.
With each year that passes, more right-of-way acres are deemed “publicly sensitive,” making use of an integrated approach complicated in some cases. For this reason, right-of-way managers need a system that allows herbicide applications without:
- Public perception that herbicides are being used
- Potential for physical herbicide drift due to windy conditions
- Noticeable brownout of vegetation
Environment2004 has a line-by-line smackdown of Chimply Smirkface’s mungled answer to “the environment question” from last week’s Presidential debate.
It’s withering, but they need to work on their “instant response” time — took ‘em over a week to get this up.
Here’s a sample:
“We’ve got an aggressive brown-field program to refurbish inner-city sore spots to useful pieces of property.â€
REALITY: While a limited number of urban sites have been targeted for action, the annual pace of cleanup at hazardous waste dumps nationwide has actually fallen by over half in the first three years of the Bush administration when compared with the last three years of the Clinton administration. Today, one in four Americans live within four miles of a toxic waste site, and we are less protected from toxic and hazardous wastes than we were three short years ago.
The Bush administration announced that it would complete toxic waste cleanups at 75 sites in 2001, but finished only 47. The EPA finished only 42 site cleanups in 2002 and 40 in 2003. 2003 was the second year in a row that the EPA had too little money to clean up all the sites on the Superfund. The estimated shortfall this year is $300 million.
The White House seems to take credit for “brown-field†legislation enacted by Congress to promote an industrial cleanup program initiated by previous administrations. It helps convert waste sites into reusable land, such as commercial space, shopping malls and industrial complexes. Although it gives funds to states, it does not set federal standards for public health and environmental protection.
Our friends over at The Lands Council have claimed 20 acres right next to a posh Idaho suburb to protest the absurdity of the 1872 Mining Act, which allows mining interests to claim public land for mining at absurdly low rates, and declares mining to be the “highest and best use” of our public lands.
Other environmental groups will be filing similar claims in the coming weeks.
Nice media work, TLC!
But, why is there nothing about this when I go to their website? Where are the photos? Where’s the headline? Where’s the background? The word “mining” doesn’t even appear on their homepage!
Weak online followthrough really undercuts the value of a strong media hit.
Matt Stoller asks some insightful questions about the longer term significance of Americans Coming Together and other elements of the “new ‘progressive’ machine”….
It seems pretty clear that we are building a 21st century opposition party, one that will support a moderate Republican like John Eisenhower Reagan Kerry, but one that cannot advance a progressive agenda… . While CAP is storing the Clintonesque cabinet, ready to be dusted off once Kerry takes office, the reality of our situation is that the political tools that work were not built by the political class. They were built by people who wanted to solve problems. And so if we are to look to the future of a progressive coalition, we should not look to the tools that the political class are building, even those that are in imitation of those that work for the right.
We should look to the groups that are building tools to solve governance problems for their organizations or groups. In other words, ACT is a smart top-down organization built to get swing voters to the polls in battleground states in 2004. Who knows if it will survive beyond that, or if it should? To a greater or lesser extent, this critique applies to all organizations cited by proponents of a left-wing infrastructure. They are building organizations to do specific things that hurt the current Republican coalition at the polls, but there are no larger principles behind them, as there are for HTML, or Google, or Wiki’s. Media Matters comes closest, but for their existence they are dependent on the right-wing noise machine.
Marty Kearns, reflecting on the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, asks:
Digital cameras are going to increasingly document our collective failure of character in dramatic and powerful resolution. What are the images of your work? What are the images of your opposition’s activities they expect will never see the light of day? How is your campaign organizing the collection and distribution of powerful images?
One way that this will happen, I suspect, is with the types of emerging network tools represented by Flickr. See, for example, all fo the images that Flickr users have identified as being about Iraq.
Bush:
Brownfields = “urban… sore spots” (?!??!)
Technology = “hydrogen generated automobile” (?!?!?)
“I’m a good steward of the land.” (Clearing brush in Crawford?)
Kerry:
Calls the president on “Orwellian” bill names: “Clear Skies” “Healthy Forests.” (Good on ya.)
Bush has us “going backwards.”
“I believe in science.”
“We walked away from 10 years of work on Kyoto. That’s why people around the world don’t like us.”
Kos has organized volunteers to do distributed rapid response to the debate tonight.
Volunteers will post diaries in two question intervals. They will TIVO the questions and answers to offer an accurate transcript, post them on these diaries, and the community can do its thing.
Very cool.
David Sucher has created a fantastic, simple animated GIF image that succinctly shows the difference between archetypal “urban” and “suburban” building site plcaements. This is a great little piece of visual design, and smart-growth advocates would be wise to pick up on this and weave it into their presentations.
A larger version is available, too.
Bonus points to David for making this available under a Creative Commons license.
I was channel surfing the local news last night, and one of the stations referred to their “Mount St. Helens Magma Cam.” I almost wet my pants laughing.
