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Wednesday, November 3, 2004
Extend a excluding hand 
| | Exactly when they need to reach out, Air America is taking what ought to be free and open Web services — "searchable audio archives, daily highlights," etc. — and making them part of their "upcoming premium services." I just signed up, opting out of newsletters and such. Veeerrry slloooww. Signing up, which required checking off a very long list of usage terms, gave me the right to log in to The Al Franken "Blog." Feh. |
| | By the way, the network still hasn't fixed the Find A Station link, which has been down for what, a month? Longer? |
| | You want to win minds and votes, guys? Open your "premium" blogs, turn on RSS feeds and podcast all your shows. |
One of everybody's own
| | The morning papers ran a pretty gruesome picture of Theo van Gogh right after he was shot repeatedly and stabbed with 2 knives (including a slit throat) in a ritual killing by an extremist muslim. A note, supposedly containing Koran scripture was pinned to his chest by one of the blades. |
Left field
| | I turned on Air America for a few minutes this morning, where hosts and callers were blaming coast-to-coast cheating for Kerry's loss. |
| | Kerry's loss, by 3+ million votes, in an election that featured a huge turnout — especially (and unexpectedly) for Bush — is a gift. There was no hanging chad to blame this time. No well-connected Secretaries of State. No well-placed relatives. The people spoke. On the Left, it's hard to improve on the silence. |
| | Leave today for disappointment. Tomorrow, think over which of these various groups and organizations you think has made the best start toward what I've described above, go to their website, and give money or volunteer. After that, okay sure, take a few more days for disappointment, maybe a few more weeks. But this takes time. And you shouldn't lose heart. The same division in the country remains, the same stalemate. The other side just got the the ball a yard or two into our side of the field rather than the reverse. And we have to deal with the serious consequences of that. Tomorrow's the day to start. |
Singing in the Reign
| | If I had a podcast, I'd play Jackson Browne's Before the Deluge, for all the good folks who worked so hard on the all the campaigns lost this past year. And to those abroad who can hardly believe what just happened. |
| | Let the music keep our spirits high. |
Back to back
Back to tech
| | On the near horizon, cell phones will have enough processing power, programability and network connectivity to enable a syncronous podcast of images and sound from our daily lives. The simple fact is that there is no reason why you have to push the buttons on your phone to have it snap JPEGs, video or audio. These things can all be done via software control, potentially from a location 100s of miles away. |
| | I hereby request a RSS feed coming straight from your new phone over some suitably exotic wireless connection, detailing current GPS, links to real-time images and/or video and/or audio and some nice text tag descriptions for Google's sake. |
| | There is a place for businesses to provide a back-end here. The essential interface between the phone and the rest of the Internet. |
The right thing
| | At this writing (2am Eastern), CNN is talking about the Kerry campaign's legal recourses in Ohio, where Kerry still trails (Fox has called it for Bush). Given the huge difference in popular vote across the country (Bush still leads 51-48%, and 3+ million votes), Kerry should call off the lawyers and put on a DNR bracelet like near-terminal patients wear. DNR is hospital jive for Do Not Resuscitate. If Kerry takes every state left after Ohio, resulting in the 269-269 tie Kos predicted a couple hours ago, the House will break the tie in favor of the Prez anyway. |
Leftover blues
| | The Left did the best it could do. Huge kudos for getting many more people involved in politics, caring about democracy, and working to make a difference. Good work, but not good enough. For this challenge, anyway. |
| | There was also, let's face it, a problem with the candidate. John Kerry was the best the Dems could come up with this time around, and he just wasn't good enough. |
| | If Joe Trippi had latched onto John Edwards instead of Howard Dean, the story might have been different. Peter Jennings just quoted an anonymous black voter: John Kerry isn't Bill Clinton. This is true. Kerry vs. Bush was a contest between two rich guys, one of whom has always done a great job of faking an aw-shucks background. The other came off as a human yacht. Edwards would have been a much more exciting candidate. But ... we'll never know. Edwards is a footnote now. Kerry is the new Gore. Daschle appears to be toast (though he might still survive, damaged). The new Democratic leader is Barak Obama. And tonight he's barely senatorial, much less presidential. |
| | The real story was, and remains, connected democracy. The tough lesson for those of us on the Left is learning that those of us on the Right were no less connected — just a lot less obvious about it. |
| | I don't know what difference conservative Christians made in this election, but I believe it wasn't small. Evangelical churches (and not just Landover Baptist) have done an admirable job of understanding, and using, the Internet, just as they did deploying almost countless "translator" transmitters all over the FM band, all over the country — except in major metropolitain areas where they might get more noticed. (Hit SCAN on a car radio in Phoenix and you'll hear up to six religious FM signals before you get to 91 on the dial.) Safe from the media mainstream (including the parts of it here in the blogosphere), their strength has gone unnoticed. It's there, and it matters. A lot. |
| | Meanwhile, the job for techies is to leverage the best of the Libertarian agenda. That is, if we want to Save the Net. |
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