Monday, February 18, 2008

Charles Barkley Supports Obama, Gay Marriage

Andy @ Towleroad:

Former pro basketball star Charles Barkley appeared on CNN’s The Situation Room on Friday and talked about why he’s voting for Obama. He also excoriated members of the GOP who use the bigotry and hate of the religious right to move their agenda forward, calling them “fake” Christians. It’s not the first time Barkley has spoken out about gay marriage. He gave an interview in August 2006 to Chris Meyers on FOX sports in which he said, “I think if they want to get married, God bless them. Gay marriage is probably 1 percent of the population, so it’s not like it’s going to be an epidemic. Hey, trust me, I’m never going to kiss you and say, ‘Chris, you’re sexy.’”

Andy’s got the transcript & video.

Don’t Ask, They’ll Tell

DownWithTyrany looks at a piece in the March issue of Out Magazine on the “service” men for anti-gay Republican closet cases who have managed to trade in escort agencies for PR agencies.

Invited to White House press conferences, Ann Coulter cocktail parties, and guest host on Fox, Jeff Gannon, Matt Sanchez, and Mike Jones are male prostitutes whose momentary mainstream media fame comes from having sex with closeted Republicans.

[Be forewarned: Don’t click, they’ll show]

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Kevin Drum’s Research on the Web tips

Wonderfully concise and right on the money! I wholeheartedly endorse them:

1. If you use Google (and who doesn’t?) don’t use the default page.  Use the Advanced Search page instead:

http://www.google.com/advanced_search

Sure, the Advanced Search page is sort of a crutch for people who haven’t memorized Google’s set of Boolean operators.  But that’s most of us, right?  And since any advanced search you use is better than any advanced search you don’t, you’re better off with the crutch than with nothing.  So bookmark the Advanced Search page and use it.

While you’re at it, you should also free yourself from the tyranny of getting only ten results per page.  The best hits aren’t always in the top ten, and you’re more likely to see them if you just have to scroll down a single page rather than going back and forth between different result pages.  So go to http://www.google.com/preferences and set your default to 50 results per page.

2. Whenever you read something by someone you don’t know, Google ‘em.  Find out what axe they have to grind.  Are they liberal or conservative?  Do they work for a think tank?  Do they have a history of being obsessed by weird stuff?  What expertise do they have?  The web allows you to root out this stuff in less than a minute or two for most people.  Take advantage of it.

3. If you’re writing about a specific topic that you’re not that familiar with, take a minute and find an article that provides a quick outline of the general subject area.  Even a modest 60-second familiarity with the lay of the land can save you a lot of grief and keep you from making an idiot of yourself.

4. Speaking of which, use Wikipedia. No, it’s not 100% reliable.  And given the nature of the internet community, it’s better on some topics than others.  You’re more likely to get a useful description of the binomial theorem than you are of the objective correlative in Heart of Darkness.

But all reference works have limitations, and virtually all popular references should be taken as starting points, not final authorities.  And that’s how you should use Wikipedia: as a starting point.  The scope of Wikipedia is vast; it’s extremely useful for recent events; it frequently does a decent job of summarizing a topic; and most articles come with a lot of highly useful links.  Sure, you have to be careful with Wikipedia, but you should always be careful anyway.

5. And while we’re on the subject, always click the link.  The web makes checking sources so easy that there’s no excuse for failing to at least skim the primary links in an article.  Click, click, click!

Bravo, Kevin!

I’m totally gay for the US of A!

It’s The Love Song for Uncle Sam. Sing it loud and proud…

RELATED: Indiana rejects gay marriage ban.

Why are so many African Americans in prison?

Among the points made by Richard Thompson Ford in today’s WaPo:

Many of our nation’s cities are as racially segregated as they were in the era of Jim Crow, many minority neighborhoods are crime-plagued and bereft of opportunities for gainful employment, and one in three black men between 20 and 29 is in prison, on parole or on probation.

I hasten to remind folks of the work of Thomas J. Sugrue, Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. From the podcast of his lecture, Jim Crow`s Last Stand: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Suburban North, I learned both that he has an important book book coming out in the fall, and that today 23 of the 25 most segregated metropolitan areas in the United States are in the Northeast. (And that the states with the highest degree of educational segregation by race are also disproportionately in the Northeast and the Midwest.)

But I live in the rural South and in my town we have six prisons. Six prisons. America has grown more and more retributive and punishing—more so even than anyplace else in the modern world—as the crime rate has fallen to historical lows.

Glenn C. Loury asked last summer in The Boston Review, Why Are We Locking Up So Many Americans:

[I]mprisonment rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t), not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a collective decision to increase the rate of punishment.

One simple measure of punitiveness is the likelihood that a person who is arrested will be subsequently incarcerated. Between 1980 and 2001, there was no real change in the chances of being arrested in response to a complaint: the rate was just under 50 percent. But the likelihood that an arrest would result in imprisonment more than doubled, from 13 to 28 percent. And because the amount of time served and the rate of prison admission both increased, the incarceration rate for violent crime almost tripled, despite the decline in the level of violence. The incarceration rate for nonviolent and drug offenses increased at an even faster pace: between 1980 and 1997 the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent offenses tripled, and the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses increased by a factor of 11. Indeed, the criminal-justice researcher Alfred Blumstein has argued that none of the growth in incarceration between 1980 and 1996 can be attributed to more crime.

But with those rates of black imprisonment, with the raw numbers of African American males who are jailed and broken and not trained and not schooled and not given a first much less a second chance, one really truly has to wonder if our prison system isn’t a descendant of slavery, if it isn’t its modern relative.

Loury continues:

Slavery ended a long time ago, but the institution of chattel slavery and the ideology of racial subordination that accompanied it have cast a long shadow. I speak here of the history of lynching throughout the country; the racially biased policing and judging in the South under Jim Crow and in the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West to which blacks migrated after the First and Second World Wars; and the history of racial apartheid that ended only as a matter of law with the civil-rights movement. It should come as no surprise that in the post–civil rights era, race, far from being peripheral, has been central to the evolution of American social policy.

The political scientist Vesla Mae Weaver, in a recently completed dissertation, examines policy history, public opinion, and media processes in an attempt to understand the role of race in this historic transformation of criminal justice. She argues-persuasively, I think-that the punitive turn represented a political response to the success of the civil-rights movement. Weaver describes a process of “frontlash” in which opponents of the civil-rights revolution sought to regain the upper hand by shifting to a new issue. Rather than reacting directly to civil-rights developments, and thus continuing to fight a battle they had lost, those opponents-consider George Wallace’s campaigns for the presidency, which drew so much support in states like Michigan and Wisconsin-shifted attention to a seemingly race-neutral concern over crime:

Once the clutch of Jim Crow had loosened, opponents of civil rights shifted the “locus of attack” by injecting crime onto the agenda. Through the process of frontlash, rivals of civil rights progress defined racial discord as criminal and argued that crime legislation would be a panacea to racial unrest. This strategy both imbued crime with race and depoliticized racial struggle, a formula which foreclosed earlier “root causes” alternatives. Fusing anxiety about crime to anxiety over racial change and riots, civil rights and racial disorder-initially defined as a problem of minority disenfranchisement-were defined as a crime problem, which helped shift debate from social reform to punishment.

Of course, this argument (for which Weaver adduces considerable circumstantial evidence) is speculative. But something interesting seems to have been going on in the late 1960s regarding the relationship between attitudes on race and social policy.

We are, these days, swept up in the hope of a new generation of leadership. I hope, too, that a new day is dawning. But I fear that these are big powerful forces we are up against.

I believe that our two powerful Democratic candidates are going to reconcile their differences. Both will lead and we will win the presidential election this year. I only hope that united we can begin to chip away at these challenges.

From great challenges come great solutions. We sure need a great solution for this one.

Democracy is not mob rule

As far as I’m concerned, we really don’t get it. Democracy is simply not synonymous with majority rule. It is peaceful self-rule.

At its best, it’s the institutional means to find the most appropriate solutions to social problems, to mediate and reconcile differences, to settle disputes in ways that don’t inspire rancorous violence. It is inclusive; it is fair and equitable; it is just and open.

But that we have come to see democracy as nothing more than majority rule is a very bad thing. Majority rule is mob rule by a better name.

The founding fathers, too, have come to be cartoon characters we use to back-up whatever point we’re looking to make. That’s too bad. My point would be that the worry then was precisely that we would not be able to do it, we would not be able to achieve successful self-rule, so the founding fathers put in place all kinds of admittedly clumsy—some even embarrassing—safeguards to prevent mob rule.

As with the 2000 election, the problem is we don’t do well with breaking a tie. Right now we have a tie. An embarrassment of riches! Two gorgeous Democratic candidates! We should remember that. And going forward maybe we should try to address what to do in a tie.

So I have no problem with the whole super-delegate thing. And I expect the pompous rhetorical declarations of democratic discontent (I love you Chris but that was over the top—and will not happen!) will be forgotten when the deal is brokered, though my high regard for both Hillary & Barack suggests they may settle this on their own.

Pond Scum & The Flip Side of The Race Card

Richard Thompson Ford says in today’s WaPo that modern racism isn’t like the water in a well. It’s more like the scum in a pond:

It might settle to the bottom if left alone, but it can also be whipped up into a froth. And that’s what Bendixen was really doing.

The Bendixen he’s referring to is Hillary Clinton’s Hispanic pollster Sergio Bendixen. Thompson Ford says Bendixen was pond scum playing the race card when he told a reporter last month that Latino voters haven’t generally “shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.”

Thompson Ford continues:

...by insisting that Hispanics are anti-black bigots and insinuating that black politicians won’t serve the interests of Hispanic constituents, Bendixen may well have helped inspire the racial tensions he purported to describe. African Americans have had their worst fears of anti-black racism confirmed by a supposed expert on Latino opinion; Latinos, told that their community rejects black candidates, may well assume that this must be so for a good reason—such as African American prejudice against them.

He’s “insisting that Hispanics are anti-black bigots???” That is word-smithing worthy only of a master politician. Where is this insistence? Oh, it’s coded? Who’s doing the inflaming now?

I’m telling you, Richard, I agree with you and understand this concept is complex, but you are an academic and where is the academic rigor in that statement? There are all kinds of qualifiers in your argument—no one called Hispanics anti-black bigots! You are committing the same reductionist slight you’d like to stop!

A lot of contemporary racial antagonism isn’t based on hatred and animus, but rather on mutual suspicion and mistrust. Overt racism is rare, but racial inequalities remain widespread and subtle. As a result, we often have to guess whether or not our neighbors are secretly prejudiced. People of color wonder whether their white neighbors and co-workers secretly hold them in contempt because of their race; whites worry that people of color secretly resent them for the color of their skin. And the increasingly complex relationships among black, Latino and Asian groups present similar anxieties, as well as their own unique vexations. An insidious suggestion from an influential person can trigger these suspicions and set off a dismal spiral of mistrust, reaction and recrimination.

It’s ironic that, as politicians play the race card for personal advantage, pervasive racial injustices go unaddressed. None of the presidential candidates has proposed a policy response to the real racial problems facing our society: Many of our nation’s cities are as racially segregated as they were in the era of Jim Crow, many minority neighborhoods are crime-plagued and bereft of opportunities for gainful employment, and one in three black men between 20 and 29 is in prison, on parole or on probation.

Looking for coded racism is tricky business; kind of like Bush’s war on terrorism—once we start looking we can find it anywhere. We ought to be careful.

I need to read the book to learn the nuance of the argument. I’ve seen the interview, read the first chapter and reviews and easily agree with what I understand of its central thesis. But it occurs to me that the Race Card can be flipped. We might reasonably ask why is Obama not addressing these very same racial issues you describe in your piece.

Yes, I agree, no candidate “has proposed a policy response to the real racial problems facing our society.” By your very same logic, shouldn’t it be Obama? Not solely because he is the black candidate—though he is—but because he has that absolutely terrific record in Illinois.

Even better, we know from his writings where he stands on so much of this. If he won’t tackle these issues in the relative safety of a primary fight, can we expect him to do it in the general election? And after he is elected, will he do it when hope turns to gritty Washington reality?

Why, in this vitally important presidential primary race, are we talking about the race card and not about issues of racial justice?

Just asking.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Kennedy Brewer & willful malicious prosecution

Just a bit more on Kennedy Brewer:

Brewer was convicted in 1995 of the rape and murder three years earlier of Christine Jackson, the child of his girlfriend. In 2002, he was freed from Death Row after DNA tests on semen on her body revealed a DNA profile that was not his, but he was held in jail several additional years as prosecutors decided whether to retry him.

Neufeld said the DNA in the case linked another man, Justin Albert Johnson, 51, to the girl’s murder. Concerned that local authorities would not handle the case fairly, the Innocence Project asked the state attorney general’s office to undertake a new investigation.

Huh??? The DNA showed he didn’t do it but he was held in jail several additional years as prosecutors decided whether to retry him.

And all bullshit happy talk anchors can ask is if he’s angry for being wrongfully imprisoned for 15 years??? How about asking about willfully malicious prosecution???

Richard Moran, a professor of sociology and criminology at Mount Holyoke College, finds that it’s real and it happens:

My recently completed study of the 124 exonerations of death row inmates in America from 1973 to 2007 indicated that 80, or about two-thirds, of their so-called wrongful convictions resulted not from good-faith mistakes or errors but from intentional, willful, malicious prosecutions by criminal justice personnel. (There were four cases in which a determination could not be made one way or another.)

Yet too often this behavior is not singled out and identified for what it is. When a prosecutor puts a witness on the stand whom he knows to be lying, or fails to turn over evidence favorable to the defense, or when a police officer manufactures or destroys evidence to further the likelihood of a conviction, then it is deceptive to term these conscious violations of the law - all of which I found in my research - as merely mistakes or errors.

Mistakes are good-faith errors — like taking the wrong exit off the highway, or dialing the wrong telephone number. There is no malice behind them. However, when officers of the court conspire to convict a defendant of first-degree murder and send him to death row, they are doing much more than making an innocent mistake or error. They are breaking the law.  [...]

Even if we limit death sentences to cases in which there is “conclusive scientific evidence” of guilt, as Mitt Romney, the presidential candidate and former governor of Massachusetts has proposed, we will still not eliminate the problem of wrongful convictions. The best trained and most honest forensic scientists can only examine the evidence presented to them; they cannot be expected to determine if that evidence has been planted, switched or withheld from the defense.

The cause of malicious unlawful convictions doesn’t rest solely in the imperfect workings of our criminal justice system — if it did we might be able to remedy most of it. A crucial part of the problem rests in the hearts and souls of those whose job it is to uphold the law. That’s why even the most careful strictures on death penalty cases could fail to prevent the execution of innocent people - and why we would do well to be more vigilant and specific in articulating the causes for overturning an unlawful conviction.

If only the Left could turn “malicious prosecutors” into the kind of demon buzzword the Right has made the term “activist judges.” Those prosecutors need to be reigned in.

Kennedy Brewer: I’m mad as hell!

From The Today Show this morning:

JENNA WOLFE, anchor: And finally, an emotional day in a Mississippi courtroom as a man once sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of a three-year-old girl is now free. Kennedy Brewer was freed Friday, more than a week after another man confessed to the crime. That man is already doing time for murdering another child in the same community. Brewer has been in prison since 1992 and he talked about how he got through that time in prison.

Mr. KENNEDY BREWER: You have to find the strength to make it like that. You have to find strength. And I found strength through God. Through the word of God I found strength. And by my family sticking by me, that was my strength.

WOLFE: An emotional Brewer says he is not angry, he just wants to spend time now with his family.

That’s the news. Now back to Lester, Amy and Chris.

I am sick to death at this kind of story being casually reported by happy-talk reporters. Specifically, that these stories routinely include that the victims of these horrible institutional injustices are “not angry.” And that’s the best these reporters can do, ask is the guy angry after 15 years of a life that cannot be recovered. Reduced to a happy ending story for their crappy little news segment!

A search of my 130 blog feeds finds no one—not one post—mentioning Brewer. A Google News search finds more, but not nearly enough. How in God’s name can this not be news???

LATER: For this I have added Talk Left to my reader.

The perfet laptop. (Hint: It’s not from Apple)

Apple builds a slick machine and I love my MacBook Pro but I’m telling you it is overrated and overpriced. Mine cost $3,000 and the one on my buy list comes in at $4,000 but every single day Safari crashes many, many, many times (in the crash reports I dutifully send to Apple I write, “Safari sucks!!!!").

To those of you who suggest I use Firefox instead my answer is, I do. And it crashes too. (I don’t send the same missive in the Firefox crash reports.)

Parallels will not run—I have the wrong version, a license issue.

Shrook crashes.

Keynote crashes.

Notes crashes.

Everything in the Adobe Design Premium package crashes.

Mail crashes.

Preview will not save changes to pdf documents.

I could go on. And on. And on. I’ll spare you.

The students tell me I’m a power user. I’m not. I’m a heavy user and my machine should be able to stand up to that.

I like my Mac and am scheduled to buy another. They’re masterful marketers at Apple and I’m subject to it. That’s the world I live in. But I am no fan of many Apple practices and my world may change.

Lenovo is the Chinese company that bought IBM’s PC business. BusinessWeek reports on their effort to build the perfect laptop:

“Phyllis! Get me one of those interoffice mail envelopes!”

It was just after lunchtime on Jan. 15, and Peter Hortensius was storming through the cubicles at Lenovo Group’s offices in Morrisville, N.C., shouting for his secretary. Hortensius, senior vice-president in charge of laptops, had just heard that Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs had unveiled the supersvelte, aluminum-clad MacBook Air by declaring it the “world’s thinnest notebook” and dramatically pulling it out of an interoffice envelope. Lenovo’s ThinkPad X300 notebook was due out in February, after a year and a half in development, and Hortensius was alarmed that it could be upstaged before it even made its debut.

His secretary, Phyllis Arrington-McGee, ransacked filing cabinets until she found one of the envelopes. She handed it to Hortensius, who gingerly slipped the X300 inside. “It fits! It fits!” he shouted.

Perhaps no one was more relieved than David Hill, Lenovo’s chief designer, who stopped by Hortensius’ office right after the envelope experiment. It had been his idea to create the superthin X300, which was originally code-named Kodachi. Hill shared a laugh about the test with Hortensius and later couldn’t resist a poke at Jobs’ latest creation. “I’m a bit tired of looking at silver computers,” said Hill. “I’d never wear a silver business suit.”

The X300 will be officially unveiled on February 26. It is a full-featured, high-end, ultra-thin laptop I’m unlikely to buy (but I may suggest it for my boss). Their goal is a “halo” product to positively reinforce the corporate brand. Walt Mossberg’s got a sneak peak:

[U]nlike the Apple, Lenovo’s new skinny ThinkPad comes with a hefty complement of ports and features, some of the very things critics complained Apple left out. It has a built-in DVD drive, removable battery, three USB ports, and a wired Ethernet networking jack. Inside, in addition to Wi-Fi, it can be ordered with a built-in cellphone modem and even GPS. It comes with either Windows Vista or Windows XP.

Sporting the traditional ThinkPad black slab design, the X300 isn’t as skinny or sexy as the Apple, but it’s still very slender and attractive, at under an inch thick. Also, unlike the Apple, most of the ThinkPad’s configurations are a bit heavier than the 3-pound weight that traditionally denotes a subnotebook. But it still feels very light to carry around, at 3.12 pounds with the standard battery and DVD drive.

The biggest downsides to the new ThinkPad X300 are price and limited storage capacity. Unlike the Apple, which can be ordered with a higher-capacity, lower-priced hard disk, the new ThinkPad will only be available with the expensive, limited capacity solid-state drive. So it will start at between $2,500 and $2,800–up to $1,000 more than the Apple’s base price–and will be limited to a paltry 64 gigabytes of storage.

The BusinessWeek Cover Story podcast adds that sexier colors may be expected in the future. Endgadget’s got a specsheet, a chart comparing it to the Macbook Air, and the X300 splayed in detail.

Friday, February 15, 2008

Repression Roundup

Andy at Towleroad brings us the first three:

A minister and former Christian college instructor in Canada was found guilty of sexually assaulting a young man who came to him for ‘therapy’: “In earlier testimony, the alleged victim, now 29, told court he started meeting Lewis for counselling sessions in early 2000 after his parents caught him viewing gay pornography on the family computer. Lewis — a family friend and minister - confided he had his own sexual identity issues and the two embarked on weekly counselling sessions designed to ‘assist me to be straight and to live a straight life,’ the man said. The man said Lewis started a program of ‘touch therapy,’ which included the two kissing and fondling each other and engaging in sexual roleplaying. ‘He said I was to tell no one about it because no one would understand,’ the man testified.”

And in Texas a Catholic priest accused of sexually molesting children in two states is HIV-positive, officials say: “Last week, a leader in the Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth heard someone mention that the Rev. Philip A. Magaldi has the virus that causes AIDS, said diocese spokesman Pat Svacina. The diocese leader then got verbal confirmation from Magaldi as well as a letter from his doctor who said he has HIV, Svacina said. Church officials said they believe he has been HIV positive since 2003. The diocese then alerted the alleged victims - at least five minors in two states - and the parishes where Magaldi served for nearly four decades, Svacina said.”

A Methodist Church in DC has been criticized for recognizing committed gay relationships: “If they’re not violating the letter, they’re certainly violating the spirit of United Methodist standards...Ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions shall not be conducted by our ministers and shall not be conducted in our churches.”

That Texas priest had also embezzled a couple hundred thousand bucks. Good Catholic!

This last is a twofer—Republican and an officer in his church:

Robert A. McKee, a long-serving Republican delegate from Western Maryland, announced his resignation yesterday after authorities, who say they are conducting a child pornography investigation, seized two computers, videotapes and printed materials from his Hagerstown home.

First elected to the House of Delegates in 1994, McKee was chairman of the Western Maryland delegation and sponsored legislation to protect minors from sexual predators. McKee, 58, also resigned yesterday from his post as executive director of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Washington County, a child mentorship program where he has worked for 29 years.[...]

McKee, who is considered a political moderate, has sponsored bills this year dealing with minors, including the Child Protection From Predators Act and a proposal to collect DNA samples from sexual predators. McKee has sponsored several other sexual offender and child abduction bills in previous years.

For decades, McKee has been involved in youth athletics and children’s groups, according to his General Assembly biography. He has served in officer positions in two Little League groups and as secretary of a parent and child center advisory committee.

During the 1970s, McKee was a reservist in the U.S. Navy. He is a former chaplain for the Hagerstown Jaycees and is a trustee and community services chairman at First Christian Church.

John Lewis & The Tipping Point

The Lewis switch has lots of people talking tipping points again.

“The willingness of a high-profile politician not simply to endorse one candidate but to switch from one to another (at least in terms of who he believes he’ll vote for as a super delegate) is a powerful sign that a tipping point is at hand,” says Josh Marshall.

“He gives permission - even encouragement - for other Clinton super-delegates to move to prevent a bruising and bitter fight through the spring. It’s a tipping point,” says Andrew Sullivan.

The term “tipping point” became fashionable with the publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 book which defines “tipping points” as the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable. Significantly, the book sought to explain how ideas, trends and products are moved to the tipping point.

Gladwell asserts that ideas spread like viruses and credits “Connectors”—people who “link us up with the world ... people with a special gift for bringing the world together”—for moving those viruses to the Tipping Point. The suggestion implicit in the statements of Marshall and Sullivan, then, is that Lewis is a Connector who will act as an agent to move us to the Obama Tipping Point.

Journalists reporting on endorsements typically point out that endorsements rarely translate into actual votes from voters. Bloggers are under no such obligation. And even Gladwell was not proposing a one-to-one direct correlation. Rather, he was describing a dynamic, a sociological occurrence.

But as it happens, in February’s Fast Company Magazine writer Clive Thompson asks, Is The Tipping Point Toast? He looks at the work of network theorist Duncan Watts, now working at Yahoo!, and finds that it shoots down Gladwell’s idea of influencers. Thompson says Gladwell’s book was built on shaky science from an old and imperfect study.

And Watts’ work might help explain why endorsements don’t always translate into votes:

[T]here are a lot of ways an Influential could convert the masses. Merely talking to a friend once could infect her with an idea. Or it might take several conversations. Or maybe Influentials are so persuasive they’re like trend vampires, and each victim they bite becomes hyperpersuasive too. Depending on how you define the specific mechanics of influence, you’d get totally different types of epidemics--or maybe none at all. But gurus of the Influentials theory never directly clarify these mechanics.

“All they’ll ever say,” Watts insists, is that a) there are people who are more influential than others, and b) they are disproportionately important in getting a trend going.

That may be oversimplifying it a bit, but last year, Watts decided to put the whole idea to the test by building another Sims-like computer simulation. ... The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

Why didn’t the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn’t they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend--not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone’s odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.

“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”

It sounds to me like society is ready to embrace the Obama trend. And Lewis is along for the ride.

How can Nutter sidestep Obama?

So asks Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Annette John-Hall today:

While the Obama Express is rolling this way fast, change and hope already have unpacked in Philly.

Our own Mayor Nutter, known for his bold style, straight talk, and coalition-building, like Obama, got some national face time on ABC World News Tonight this week. He was introduced by anchor Charles Gibson as the mayor who is “making a lot of changes and a lot of friends.”

It feels refreshing, this young, new kind of African American politicians - Nutter, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty - leaders who don’t make race their only talking points.

Both Booker and Fenty have endorsed Obama, not surprising since he’s almost a mirror image of them.

But the man who probably draws the most comparisons to him - from his inclusive politics to his Ivy League training to his ability to transcend race - isn’t supporting Obama.

You can hear Nutter now. Hillary, it’s a new day. [...]

“No,” he replied. “I’ve met Sen. Obama and admire him. My choice was based on who I thought would be the best for Philly, and I think Sen. Clinton is that person.”

It feels like we’ve all been down this road before. It will be interesting to see how long his support will last.

Here’s the ABC News segment on Nutter.

Lingering blog issues

I’m aware that there are ongoing residual problems that remain as a result of last week’s crash of this blog. There are some display issues, but the biggest issue is that you cannot leave comments. I am trying to get these problems resolved. I am also trying to rebuild the archive and develop a long-term strategy for moving forward. 

I hate that my blog is hobbling along. Through it all I have considered quitting, but I have also come to understand how much this blog means to me. I’m totally swept up in my ability to follow and interact with the news, those who report the news, and the newsmakers. I like that from right here in rural Georgia I can be part of the process and the ecosystem that is media at the start of the 21st century.

Significantly, though, I’m learning through this experience that along with the empowerment comes some complicated responsibilities to negotiate. My blog host is in Hong Kong. My designer in Wisconsin. The software from somewhere in the cloud. Much of what is going on with my blog right now is out of my control.

Because I host it myself, you’d think I would have that control. I have a tech team I can draw on; you’d think I could direct them. For a number of reasons, I cannot. I’ve thought, then, that maybe I should take this opportunity to move to a hosted blog option. After all, there’s power in numbers.

danah boyd tells a Google horror story that puts the kibosh to that:

Earlier this week, Bob received a notice that there was a spam problem in his Orkut community. The message was in English and it looked legitimate and so he clicked on it. He didn’t realize that he’d fallen into a phisher’s net until it was too late. His account was hijacked for god-knows-what-purposes until his account was blocked and deleted. He contacted Google’s customer service and their response basically boiled down to “that sucks, we can’t restore anything, sign up for a new account.” Boom! No more email, no more calendar, no more Orkut, no more gChat history, no more Blogger, no more anything connected to his Google account.

::gasp:: My heart threatens to attack my throat at the mere idea of losing four years worth of email. ::shudder:: Or what if this blog disappeared? Like, OMG. {insert horror film music here}

Bob’s story has a happy ending, because Bob is well connected. But what if he were me? I’m not well-connected so I’d have no protection.

The bottom line is: please bear with me. I hope to have comments back soon!

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Lewis leaves Clinton

A sad loss:

Representative John Lewis, an elder statesman from the civil rights era and one of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s most prominent black supporters, said Thursday night that he planned to cast his vote as a superdelegate for Senator Barack Obama in hopes of preventing a fight at the Democratic convention.

“In recent days, there is a sense of movement and a sense of spirit,” said Mr. Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who endorsed Mrs. Clinton last fall. “Something is happening in America, and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap.”

He’ll decide on whether to endorse in the next couple days. Georgia Representative David Scott also defected.

Things are not looking good for Hillary.

LATER: I don’t disagree with Andrew:

If Lewis’s original endorsement of the Clintons was a huge blow to Obama, then his reversal is an even bigger blow to the Clintons. The Obama campaign has now not only built a rival machine to the Clintons’, it is poaching loyalists. A figure like Lewis also brings, for good reason, a vast moral credibility with him. He gives permission - even encouragement - for other Clinton super-delegates to move to prevent a bruising and bitter fight through the spring. It’s a tipping point. I predict others will follow. And what both Clinton and Obama have to avoid is a polarizing racial divide.

I’m quite confident Clinton will do that.

Free

Chris Anderson updates us:

[First, a news flash! My book will be previewed as the cover story in Wired this month. Out in about ten days. Link then. I think you’ll like it ]

• Kevin Kelly has been on tear of great writing/thinking about free, including this delightful rhapsody on eight new scarcities created by free (remember: every abundance creates a new scarcity), and this, on how technology “wants to be free”.
• Another great thinker/writer about free is Techdirt’s Mike Masnick. If you haven’t subscribed to his feed, you should. Start here.
• Tim O’Reilly’s TOC conference, now underway, has spurred the book industry to announce some modest experiments in free, such as limited versions of free online books and selling books by the chapter. Harper Collins is taking the lead, including free books by Paulo Coelho and Neil Gaiman. The idea is that these are “samplers” that will drive sales of older books. This is all good, but it’s just a start...
• Q: Does Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo stem from the company’s fear that Office is competing with free? (A: No. But I appreciate the suggestion that free productivity software in now a mainstream idea anyway...)
• Whoops! Glenn Fleishman reminds me that the biggest free news of the day is actually Starbucks switching to free WiFi for people who use the Starbucks cards. [My excuse for the miss: I’m an Verizon Evdo junkie, even though it’s anything but free, and I don’t use WiFi in public spaces anymore]

SEE ALSO: Computing in the Cloud.

Republicans scold Craig for bathroom arrest

Oh those tough on crime Republicans:

The Senate Ethics Committee released a ‘Public Letter of Admonition’ today to Idaho Senator Larry Craig with regard to Craig’s conduct following his arrest last June in a men’s room at the Minneapolis airport.

The letter scolds Craig for his statement to the arresting officer regarding his position in the Senate (Craig told asked the arresting officer, “What do you think about that?") and also for his attempt to withdraw his guilty plea, about which it says this: “Your claims to the court, through counsel, to the effect that your guilty plea resulted from improper pressure or coercion, or that you did not, as a legal matter, know what you were doing when you pled guilty, do not appear credible.”

Georgia’s own Johnny Isakson signed the letter. Let’s just say it’s the least he could do.

Let me remind you that it’s not gay men we’re finding in rest stops and bathrooms these days. Gay people are busy fighting for marriage rights and the right to serve in the military and to worship along side other Americans.

As Craig’s rebuke makes its way through the media, let’s remember that this recent “gay” sex sting which netted 20 arrests but NOT ONE gay person is not unusual:

Of the twenty men arrested, all were married except for the priest. They’ve been charged with crimes ranging from loitering and public lewdness to trespassing. All are scheduled to be in court on Thursday.

PATHETIC!!!

Colbert plays The Race Card

Reviews here and here; excerpts here, here and here; first chapter here; purchase it here.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Edwards testing the endorsement waters?

I was with the conventional wisdom in thinking that the natural choice for Edwards would be Obama; I even thought that a good choice for Obama would be Edwards. So I’m really not quite sure how to read this:

In deciding between his one-time rivals, Edwards appears deeply divided. Several former advisers likened his thought process to a heart-versus-head split - with his heart favoring Sen. Barack Obama’s strong message of change, and his head attracted to Clinton’s tested nature and commitment to tough fights.

Though he sometimes aligned himself with Obama - and against Clinton - as a candidate, several Edwards campaign insiders say the former senator began to sour on Obama toward the end of his own campaign, and ultimately left the race questioning whether Obama had the toughness needed to prevail in a presidential race.

Uh, well that is Hillary’s line. But more cynically:

[F]ormer campaign aides who have stayed in contact with Edwards say he is eager to play a major role in the race, and is mindful that his backing would only carry weight if it comes relatively quickly - before the March 4 primaries in Texas and Ohio, which could effectively settle the nomination fight.

He also appears to realize that endorsing Clinton would likely carry the most weight, since it would be more unexpected and would provide a jolt of energy to a campaign that is suffering a rough patch, particularly in the wake of Tuesday’s election results, which saw Obama sweep Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Of course, he could pull a Gore and remain neutral. That would still leave one big question, what will Elizabeth do?

Hillary Clinton’s got grit

I’m still as big a Hillary supporter as ever—though with posts like this one from yesterday you’d be forgiven for thinking I’d given up.

It bugs me to see people site that poll comparing Hillary and Obama vs. McCain. As if such a poll tells us anything at all. Remember Giuliani’s numbers??? And look what happened to him!!! Speaking of which, imagine Giuliani or Romney in her situation right now? Seriously, imagine it. They got no grit!

This woman’s not only got grit, she wears it with great style. And right now is precisely the test. Let’s watch how this plays out. I certainly think she’s got a shot. If she wins it she’s earned it fair and square. No matter what the loser’s supporters will inevitably say. She’s been called things before. Obama’s taking the high road but not all of his supporters are. I know from experience.

So how Could she do it? How could she go on to win this? Democratic consultant Tad Devine on The Newshour tonight suggests:

She’s got to define herself, and I think she needs a big contest on big ideas. There are big ideas and big issues on the table, the economy, who’s best to get us out of Iraq, health care and other domestic concerns. If she can have a contest of ideas with Senator Obama, that’s a better contest for her… for example, going to a place like the University of Texas or Ohio State and having a big speech, a long speech, where you discuss in some detail your differences on the economy, how you’re best to get us out of Iraq, not just some aspects of your health care plan, but details of it.

And I think that speech then becomes the debate. And I think the debate becomes a slogan and a sound bite.

And, ultimately, if you can capture that and explain those differences—and they’re not personal differences. There’s nothing mean or nasty here. They are substantive differences in policy. And if she can lay those out clearly, I think she’s got a chance to push him back.

The silence of the yams

I was glad to hear Michael Pollan do a commentary on Marketplace last night:

[T]he more processed the food, the less nutritious it typically is. Yet it’s the processed food makers who have the marketing budgets to do the research to support the health claims and then shout them from the rooftops. That’s not the same as actually being healthy. A scientist can find a crucial nutrient in any edible he or she is paid to study. And there isn’t a plant under the sun that doesn’t contain an antioxidant or two.

But here’s the thing. As everybody knows—or used to know before the proliferation of health claims confused us all—the hands-down healthiest foods in the supermarket are the unprocessed vegetables and fruits and whole grains. These foods sit silently in the produce section or the bulk-food bins. They don’t utter a word about their antioxidants or heart-healthiness, while just a few aisles over the sugary cereals scream about their heart-healthy “whole grain goodness.”

So next time you’re in the produce aisle, don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing important to say about your health. They do. They just don’t have the money needed to say it.

I’m looking forward to reading his new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. The book is based on a NYTimes Magazine piece he did a year ago, Unhappy Meals.

Mass Hysteria

With the strike over, we can embed Comedy Central videos again! This one was repeated recently and is dedicated to Marla Spivak…

Writers vote to end strike

On day 100:

Of 3,775 writers who cast ballots, 92.5 percent voted in favor of ending the strike. Officials of the Writers Guild of America West and the Writers Guild of America East disclosed results of the tally here an hour after voting closed at 6 p.m.

“The strike is over. Our membership has voted, and writers can go back to work,” Patric M. Verrone, president of the West Coast guild, said in a statement.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

38 & HS student spars with Rove

Think Progress is always worth reading, but a couple important posts today include…

38:

Number of women who have contacted gang-rape victim Jamie Leigh Jones and said that they too had suffered sexual assault while working for Halliburton/KBR in Iraq. Jones, who testified to Congress today, says that many of the women “cannot speak publicly due to arbitration agreements in their employment contracts.”

And a high school student asked Karl Rove “to explain how giving gay people the right to marry would endanger other people.” Rove answered that the issue “should be resolved by a legislature or a referendum, not a court.”

[The student, Choate senior Marla] Spivack kept pressing. “You never actually answered, how does it threaten anyone?” she asked.

Rove asked, what’s the compelling reason to throw out 5,000 years of understanding the institution of marriage as between a man and a woman?

What, Spivack countered, was the compelling reason for society to allow interracial relationships when they had once been outlawed.

Then Rove invoked the Declaration of Independence before Spivak interjected that its reference to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” seemed to support her claims.

He was speaking at New England Choate Rosemary Hall prep school last night after the school decided to cancel his address at its commencement ceremony this year.

Baptist Day not so fertile at the Capitol

Hundreds and hundreds of Southern Baptists descended on the state Capitol today. Political Insider explains why:

The top priority of Southern Baptist Day was to free a specific piece of legislation trapped in the House — H.R. 536, a proposed constitutional amendment that would establish the state’s interest in a human embryo at the moment of fertilization.

House Republican leadership has been hesitant to move the bill, which would require two-thirds approval for passage, because it would expose moderate GOP members in an election year.

Objections to the measure, intended to challenge Roe. v. Wade, include worries that it might threaten commonly used forms of contraception. And suburban women are a key ‘08 voting demographic.

The state’s largest Christian denomination got behind the proposed amendment last November - DVDs and literature were sent to every member church - and have quickly learned that campaign blandishments don’t always translate into results at the Capitol.

“You can’t treat us as a voting bloc during the campaign and ignore us when you get into office,” said a frustrated Bucky Kennedy, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Vidalia and president of the Georgia Baptist Convention. “We’ve been used. We’d just like to see a little action.”

Yes and the kind of action they want could just bring about the kind of Democratic resurgence we want in Georgia.