December 2009 archive

Markos is a hater!  Responding to a fund-raising email from Obama kos says, in part:

Obama spent all year enabling Max Baucus and Olympia Snowe, and he thinks we’re supposed to get excited about whatever end result we’re about to get, so much so that we’re going to fork over money? Well, it might work with some of you guys, but I’m certainly not biting. In fact, this is insulting, betraying a lack of understanding of just how pissed the base is at this so-called reform. The administration may be happy to declare victory with a mandate that enriches insurance companies, yet creates little incentive to control costs or change the very business practices that have screwed so many people. But I’ll pass.

I am no genius when it comes to a complete understanding of the details of this legislation.  But I know what a monopoly is and I know you can’t regulate a monopoly no matter how many laws you pass or how many goodies you hand out to mask the fact we are about to give billions of dollars to … a monopoly.

Without a public option, there is no counter to this monopoly.  Insurance companies win.  The rest of us lose.

I don’t even open the “from Barack Obama” emails anymore.  They make me want to lay down and take a nap.  kos, on the other hand, opens his:

   We will not back down

   From: President Barack Obama to Markos

   Markos —

   As we head into the final stretch on health reform, big insurance company lobbyists and their partisan allies hope that their relentless attacks and millions of dollars can intimidate us into accepting the status quo.

   So I have a message for them, from all of us: Not this time. We have come too far. We will not turn back. We will not back down.

   But do not doubt — the opponents of reform will not rest. So I need you to fight alongside me.

   We must continue to build out our campaign — to spread the facts on the air and on the ground, and to bring in more volunteers and train them to join the fight. I urgently need your help to keep this 50-state movement for reform going strong.

   Please donate $5 or whatever you can afford today:

   http://my.democrats.org/…

   Let’s win this together,

   President Barack Obama

kos’s response: gold!

This is so freakin’ obnoxious I can hardly stand it. We are about to get a turd of a “reform” package, potentially worse than the status quo. We have the insurance industry declaring victory, Republicans cackling with glee, and the administration is using that piece of shit to raise money?

~snip~

Democrats are demoralized, and have little incentive to turn out next year. The teabaggers will turn out. If this is how the Obama camp thinks we can energize the base — by promising them a health care pony for $5 to the same Democratic Party that is home to the likes of Baucus, Nelson, Lincoln, Lieberman, and the rest of the obstructionist gang — then we’re in for a world of hurt in 2010.

less after the jump…

Time Magazine, or at least its online edition, seeks to understand why Google seems to love highlighting a particular “news source” in its search results.  The very subtle, but nonetheless evident message implanted within the article is that search engine algorithms might have the same biases and favoritism embedded into them as any other corporation who owns or has partnership with other media companies.  I know that by monitoring IP addresses that visit my site by use of a tracker I frequently notice when Google bot sweeps periodically come through to make a note of and reference recently posted columns I have written.   It isn’t very long after that before I notice that traffic has been directed to my site as a result.   However, let me say that I do make a concerted effort to write something unique and meaningful, qualities which are in short supply when effort is not rewarded by much in the way of money.

If you type the name of a celebrity – say, Angelina Jolie – into Google News, chances are somewhere in the top five results you’ll get a story from Examiner.com. This is particularly true if the celebrity is in the news that day. For early December that means searches for Tiger Woods, Sandra Bullock and Weezer on Google News consistently brought up Examiner.com stories in the topmost results. And in those stories, by the way, there was very little actual news.

Absolutely.   The only currently existing model available to those who blog for pay is centered around advertising revenue as the most important variable of all.   Instead of providing a unique perspective on the news, instead one gets a bare minimum of original content and a whole e-farm’s worth of hyper-linking and search engine keyword baiting.   It needs to be noted, of course, that Examiner.com is not the only site out there using a similar strategy to press a similar agenda.   But in that regard, it is not much different to any kind of freelance work which promises sporadic assignments, minimal pay, few benefits, and no real job security.   The signer of the paychecks or distributor of funds to the PayPal account still holds most of the cards at the table.   In a field where so many are fighting to be heard and where competition is fierce and often cutthroat, employers get utterly inundated with prospective writers and many of them have the ego and the swagger but none of the talent to back it up.   Proceeding directly for the easy sell and the low hanging fruit has padded profits but has rarely advanced a civic discourse or issue evolution.    

They also have very little news value. Generally, an Examiner.com news story is a compendium of tidbits culled from other websites, neither advancing the story nor bringing any insight (a description, it should be noted, that can be just as fairly applied to many offerings of more mainstream media). Most Examiners are not journalists, and their prose is not edited. CEO Rick Blair, who helped launch AOL’s Digital Cities, an earlier attempt at a local-news network, calls them “pro-am” – more professional than bloggers, but more amateur than most reporters. You might also call them traffic hounds: because their remuneration is set by, among other things, the number of people who click on their stories, Examiners will often piggyback on hot news, or oft-searched people. The Angelina Jolie story, from a celebrity-fitness and -health Examiner, discussed Jolie and husband Brad Pitt’s recent night out at a movie premiere and assessed their health by their appearance.

Put this way, here is a decent enough description of most collaborative blogs.   However, before one buys into this description hook, line, and sinker without taking into account the underlying intent it must be added that Daily Kos was described by Time as one of its “Most Overrated Blogs of 2009” in very searing language.

It wrote,

Markos Moulitsas – alias “Kos” – created Daily Kos in 2002, a time he describes as “dark days when an oppressive and war-crazed administration suppressed all dissent as unpatriotic and treasonous.” Be careful what you wish for. With the Bush years now just a memory, Kos’s blog has lost its mission, and its increasingly rudderless posts read like talking points from the Democratic National Committee.

Easy for you to say, Time.   Dear pot, kindly meet kettle.

Returning to my original point, at the beginning of this post, I referenced an article written to encourage a spirit of full disclosure, no matter how stealthy proposed.   I would be similarly remiss if I did not state that I, too, am a reporter for Examiner.com.   Yet, I note, however, that in nearly a month of writing for it I have made under $20 for my efforts, even though my pieces usually attract a respectable audience that frequently exceeds the average number of hits which typify the typical DC Politics Examiner.  I don’t run away from controversy in that which I write, but neither do I seek to provoke without backing up my points, buttressing my argument, and taking into account the inevitable counter-arguments of my opponents.   Still, one simply can’t keep up with those who dispense romance advice, bicycle repair, child rearing tricks, and pet psychic services.   Nor can I keep up with the barrage of ultimately meaningless drivel that might be the opiate of the masses but tends to put me into an opium-based sleep.   I do not expect to make much out of any of what I do but I will say that I seek to strategically position and my postings to get maximum exposure.   I am no different from many of you reading this, I daresay.  

So why does Examiner.com’s fairly superficial posts on the big stories of the day end up so often near the front of Google’s news queue? “It’s not a trick,” says Blair. “We have almost 25,000 writers posting 3,000 original articles per day.” Examiners take seminars on writing headlines, writing in the third person and making full use of social media, all of which are Google manna. But Blair thinks it’s mostly the scale of the operation that makes Examiner.com articles so attractive to search engines, from which more than half of the site’s traffic comes. That is, by stocking the lake with so many fish every day Examiner.com increases the chances the Google trawlers will haul one of theirs up.

And here we have a perfect example of why an unholy combination of made up celebrities, made up drama, and manufactured crises for the sake of readership threaten to choke out everything wholly decent.   Weeds are on the verge of taking over the garden.   Or, as Howard Beale would say, “And woe is us! We’re in a lot of trouble!”   Speak softly, though, because to some extent we’ve already been handcuffed by the almighty dollar and may always be.   Some realities go well beyond our poor power to add or detract.

In a coy final note, the Time article concludes,

The goal of all these companies, eventually, is to snare local advertising, a $141 billion market that, according to Blair, has been left largely untapped by the Internet.  Examiner.com will start rolling out ad packages in the next few months, and will hit up its network for leads.

In the meantime, these pro-am armies are giving the big media companies plenty to worry about. The mainstream media’s news-harvesting machines are no match for a swarm of local locusts buzzing over the same crop. And Big Media is starting to take notice. CNN, which already uses a lot of crowdsourced material with its ireport arm, just invested in another local outfit, outside.in. Perhaps the news giant figures that if everybody’s going to be a reporter, they might as well work for CNN.

The note is winking and coy because Time is, after all, owned by CNN.   I, too, have been an iReporter for CNN, for the same reasons I write at Examiner.com.   I don’t make a dime out of it, but I do get my name out in the hope that someone, somewhere, is listening, reading, and contemplating.   My hope, of course, is that at least with my post there will be an alternative, thought-provoking voice in the middle of all the fluff and unsubstantial content.   Perhaps that is what we all wish for when we put our fingers to our keyboards and begin typing or begin synching up our digital cameras.  We want to be better than that which we just finished reading or want to be provide a better analysis than a pundit who makes thousands upon thousands of dollars a year to sound supremely ignorant.   Yet, we might also need to contemplate our current realities before we get caught up on our own narratives.  Recall Network once more.

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.  

Wednesday Morning Science Supplement is an Open Thread

35 Story Final.

1 Developing nations furious over Danish climate text

AFP

1 hr 49 mins ago

[An old friend of mine, Nick Unger, has been working on the AFL-CIO’s campaign to win National Health Care. He gave me permission to post this talk that…but let him tell it:

I was asked to confront the lack of energy and even negativity at the annual meeting of the Illinois Campaign For Better Health Care. Packed room — ~150+. Very diverse. Here is the result. They taped and transcribed it. I cleaned it up a bit.

This is a pep talk. Nick always gives great pep talk, and this one is brilliant. My own work in recent years has mainly been in the anti-war movement, so I can certainly relate to lack of energy and battle fatigue. But I am not posting it because of that. I am posting it because it makes the most passionate argument I’ve seen that “the Obama moment” was not a mirage or a con-job, nor was it a window that is now already closed. I’m not sure I buy it, but I think it’s an argument worth considering.]

Edited transcript of remarks at the November 19, 2009 Annual Meeting of the Illinois Campaign for Better Health Care by Nick Unger, AFL-CIO Health Care Campaign Training Director



Every once in a while, a country gets to have a conversation about what kind of people we are, who we are as a country. Sometimes it’s in an election, most of the time it isn’t. An election might start the conversation but Election Day usually ends it and you haven’t quite finished.

And most elections don’t even start the conversation, they just keep business as usual going. The 2008 election began a conversation as to what kind of country we are, but I don’t believe it finished it. I think it just opened it up, and that conversation continues.

There are those out there who act like they want a recount on the 2008 election, that Obama is not their president and you–we–can’t have “their country.” And they say it with vigor and with passion, and with earned and unearned media, in that they own TV stations and TV networks. Their view of earned media is that they get to say what they want, whatever they want, and echo it over and over, and control the national conversation from above.

But they don’t control the national conversation from below. The 2008 election showed that. People were wrestling with who we are. Actually it was mainly about who we’re not. That election seemed more of a rejection of what was wrong than a climbing onto what was right. That means we didn’t finish the conversation.

We did say that the country is going wrong. And there was a deep sense of it, of pain and suffering. The presence of my brother Rev. Sal Alvarez being here the faith community reminds me that the word compassion means shared suffering. It doesn’t mean feeling for somebody else, it means suffering with somebody else.

So last year people got a sense that the country ain’t doing it right, and we can’t go down that road anymore. But we haven’t picked the road that we’re going to be on yet. We haven’t turned the corner yet.

But I would offer to you that we are at the corner. And when you’re at a corner, you best turn, because we don’t know when the next one comes up. From a political analytical point of view, the last time America turned the corner was 1980, and we sure turned wrong.  And we are living with the price of it now.  We are at a corner now. If we miss this one, I don’t know if I will ever get a shot at another one.

The battle to turn that corner is on health care.  Health care doesn’t “deserve” to be the battle. It’s not that health care is more important than any other issue. It could have been fought over jobs. It could have been fought over education because education’s real important. I’m not going to say health care’s more important than education. It turned out that the two armies have met on the battlefield of health care. It could have happened some other way, but this is what it is.

My wife and I went to Gettysburg this past summer–anybody here been to Gettysburg? To a New Yorker, Gettysburg is a one stoplight town. In 1863, when they had the battle there it was a one-horse town.

They weren’t fighting for Gettysburg. The battle was not about Gettysburg. They were fighting for what kind of country America was going to be. Two armies met in one little town in Pennsylvania, and right there, in Gettysburg, America decided what kind of country it was going to be. At the end of the battle, one army was beaten and one army was marching ahead, and America found its soul, on Little Round Top in Gettysburg, PA.

If you go to Gettysburg the ghosts of that battle speak to you. The field is empty, but you can hear the battle. One monument stands out, the Pennsylvania Monument. t lists the names of all the Pennsylvanians who fought and died there.  A hundred years before the Vietnam Wall, they just listed the names, and every one of those names talks to you.

We are in a battle for the soul of America today, right now. It is being fought over health care. Six weeks, tops eight weeks from now, one army marches ahead and the other one is on the side of the road with their banner in the dust.

On one side you have Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, the insurance companies, the Chamber of Commerce, Goldman Sachs all saying, “If health care reform fails, that’s good for us and our team.” All of them lined up on that side saying to us, “You are not going to decide the future of America your way and we will take you down over health care.”

So where are we today? There are a thousand things wrong with that bill and the process of getting to it was a pain in the ass. Each day you say: “We lost this, we gave up this, we conceded this, what about this, this isn’t in it, they don’t have enough here.”..I mean, no part of it is quite right.

And yet today, November 19, we are closer to defining the soul of America properly than we have been in decades, in your lifetime for most of you. The metaphor I would use is we are falling uphill. We keep falling down. But turn around. You will see we are so much further ahead. Each time we fall and get up we are getting closer to where we’ve got to be.

We have pushed this process so far that America can say eight weeks from now, maybe six weeks from now, we are going to establish a new public good with government and the public in it, a public health care structure, and we’re going to say that everybody in America should have health care. This is the first time America will say it, and it comes after two generations of attacks on these kinds of ideas.

And we’re going to tax the rich to pay for a public good after two generations of saying taxes are bad and the rich can have all the money–all of my money and all of your money. Man, that is heavy!

And we are going to say to the insurance industry, you can’t write all the rules. You can write some of them, but not all the rules, and this is after thirty years of telling corporations, do whatever you want cause that’s the way the world should work.

We are six weeks from doing that as a people. We are six weeks from setting America in a direction where We the People act like we, instead of every man for himself. We are six weeks from turning the corner, making history, and somehow here today we don’t feel the energy of it.

And so when Reverend Sal Alvarez says it’s a moral issue and when Dr. Jonathan Arend says it’s a medical issue, and when the woman who said she can make $60,000 but can’t afford health care says it’s an economic issue, they are all right.

And each of you is the center of a universe of people to talk to  You are not just the Illinois Campaign For Better Health Care. You are much more than that. If the only people you talk to are in this room, I have some advice for you: You should get out more.

You come from churches and neighborhoods and groups and mosques and all sorts of things, and you have to talk to your friends about the history that is being made right now, and what kind of country we are going to be, so that 75 years from now, they read your names the way I read the names on the Pennsylvania memorial:  These are the people who made the country that I live in be the way I wanted it to be.

And 75 years from now, people will look at the fall of 2009 the way I look at the summer of 1863. They’ll say, “America had a chance to become who we should be, and we took it. And these individuals fought to make that happen.” That’s where we are today.

For many of us, this is the first time in our lifetime that we have had this chance. Some of us were around in the Civil Rights Movement. This moment feels like that was for those of us who were around then. This is the moment that you get to turn around the entire future, and it’s over health care. And if you didn’t stand up strong over it…you will always regret it.

There are better organizers than me who throughout their whole life were getting kicked in the face, fighting a defensive battle, getting smacked around, and they were better–they worked harder, they were more straightforward, they cursed less…and they never once had a chance to be on the offensive to make the world the way it should be because it was their dumb luck to start their work when the world was going wrong and retire before it got right.

And you should think about the people whose shoulders you stand on today, because we’ve got six or eight weeks to decide what kind of country we are, to decide which army wins.  This is our opportunity, and if you get lost in the weeds of that bill, then some friend of yours better stand you up and say, “We are making history and I am writing my name down on the memorial that people are going to visit 75 years from now and if you miss it, shame on you!”

There should be anger and energy and elation and glee…because we get a chance to make this country right.

In 1964, in Alabama, an old civil rights worker said to a young reverend–the old civil rights worker was my age, and the young reverend was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr–and he said to him, “How long, how long do we have to wait for justice?”  And Dr. King replied, “The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.”

But he knew it doesn’t bend by itself–you bend it. You reach up, you grab it and you bend it. And when enough of us grab the moral arc of the universe, it bends towards justice, and in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed.

So the person who just asked “How long do we have to wait for health care justice?” is repeating the history of our movement. That’s the same question they asked Dr King in 1963. And the answer: when enough of us put our hands on the arc, it bends towards justice.

Right in front of our eyes, the moral arc of the universe is about to decide which way it bends, in six weeks. You can’t ask for anything better than that. You are blessed with this opportunity. How long? You decide.

Thank you.

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.