Carolyn Maloney for U.S. Senate

July 2, 2009 at 10:23 pm (politics)
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Carolyn Maloney for U.S. Senate

Rep. Carolyn Maloney camp confirms Daily News report: She’s running against Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand

The absurdity of the situation in this contest is obvious. There is no way that President Obama can credibly range himself against Carolyn Maloney. Carolyn Maloney would be a winner as a Senator. a winner in a statewide election and a winner in Washington in the compromised environment of the Senate.

2010 will not be so tight that a spirited primary among two women with differing qualities and records would not be something that a partisan of democracy with a small d would welcome. Those who think differently will be faced down by the independent-minded voters of New York State.

If there is any sustained effort to cold-shoulder Maloney, then President Obama and the machine led by the questionable Senior Senator from New York will become the issue in the primary. And New Yorkers will have the chance to vote overwhelmingly for an outsider and, by so doing, to show the whole farce up.

Why is Schumer questionable? In my view, because of the way he deals with and attacks his opponents. including witnesses in Senate hearings. I have concluded that badgering is the least of his sins. I do not like a person who behaves that way. I wish it was he that Maloney was opposing in the primary.

Well, if I were consulting Carolyn, I would advise her to say exactly how she is a better Obama Supporter than her opponent. And never to mention her opponent by name.

I would also advise her to challenge the Obama-Schumer camp on the basis of their lack of confidence … in themselves … in the people … in the process.

In other words, if they believe that a primary would be bad because they think 2010 will be close, they are not reading things that well.

We want to win in 2010 and our opponents will be anyone who messed with the Obama agenda. We are going to advance, not retreat.

Carolyn Maloney will win the primary the same way Barack Obama won Iowa, not as the faux sure thing but as the outsider who stands for hope and change. These are not things the current Junior Senator has ever really embraced.

I think this is a challenge that the President should accept and approve of. He is about to discover the limits of bipartisanship and the discovery can only make him willing to support true allies and not those with Blue Dog leanings.

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Twitter Tip: New Twitter Following/Follower Page Changes

July 2, 2009 at 7:25 am (twitter)
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Twitter Tip: New Twitter Following/Follower Page Changes

It is too early to assess the changes that Twitter has made on its following and follower pages.

Here are some initial thoughts.

On your Following page (folk you have chosen to follow) you have three or four options in the drop down menu on the right. You can mention that person in a @ reply message that will be displayed on your profile page and broadcast to all your followers. You can unfollow that person. And you can block that person.

If the person is following you back a fourth option appears — you can also Drect Message that person.

The uncollapsed page shows the following information about those you are following.

Their username and screen name. Their location. And their latest Tweet with the time it was posted.

Here is the writing on the wall I currently take from these changes.

1. Think before you invite someone. If you are mass inviting you will end up with a long process to rid your list of folk you do not want to be following long term.

2. It is much slower now to unfollow someone. Instead of whipping down the page and unfollowing, you have to do it by opening the drop down and clicking the unfollow option. This triples the time involved.

(I have no idea if these changes will work to defeat or otherwise hamper the mass unfollow software scripts out there. If so, I approve. All this does is underline the need for care in inviting people in the first place.)

3. What this “forces” me to do, if I want to build my follower list, is to selectively follow those on the lists of persons I follow with care, hoping they will follow me back. The reward is a potentially much more responsive following.

4. On your follower list (those who follow you), there are four options on the right hand drop down menu. @ mention, direct message, follow/unfollow and block. There is an additional button enabling you to click to follow someone who is following you.

My own opinion is that Twitter should consider entirely eliminating the Direct Message option. I doubt many read direct messages as they are automated in most cases and either pro forma or pitching something.

This leaves the @ mention or reply function as the most likely to get through to someone else. I have used it very selectively recently to mention someone I am following. I wonder if the Follow Friday mode will now become a daily follow fest.

All told, I think the newly refurbished follow and follower pages will force a more thoughtful approach to following. Whether it will also open up new forms of abuse remains to be seen.

The only abuse I have seen recently is the use of @ replies to spam users including me. My response is to block those who do this.

By making the block function more prominent, I think Twitter is upping the ante in the fight against spam.

<A HREF=”http://twitter.com/stephencrose” TARGET=”_blank”>My Twitter Profile</A> | <A HREF=”http://stephencrose.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/my-twitter-philosophy/” TARGET=”_blank”>My Twitter Philosophy</A> | <A HREF=”http://en.wordpress.com/tag/twitter-tip/” TARGET=”_blank”>More Twitter Tips</A>

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Let’s See What These Folk Do on Health Care

July 1, 2009 at 6:57 pm (politics)
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A List of Senators and Congress Members and Their Receipts from Health Care Interests

I found the following list. I have looked for such a list for a while. I assume its accuracy. I found it here. The link was to here.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ): $7,504,867
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA): $7,341,399
Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA): $2,149,503
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT): $1,795,949
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY): $1,743,835
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT): $1,685,890
Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC): $1,350,454
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX): $1,346,574
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ): $1,321,457
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA): $1,160,826
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH): $1,081,378
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC): $ 999,611
Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN): $ 994,699
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT): $ 980,417
Sen. Thomas Harkin (D-IA): $ 935,711
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA): $ 919,793
Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR): $ 896,067
Sen. Debbie Ann Stabenow (D-MI): $ 827,294
Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-MD): $ 797,185
Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT): $ 788,650

Rep. Tom Price (R-GA, 6th): $2,090,127
Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ, 6th): $1,627,024
Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX, 6th): $1,518,285
Rep. John Gingrey (R-GA, 11th): $1,392,343
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY, 15th): $1,304,569
Rep. John Dingell (D-MI, 15th): $1,148,060
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA, 7th): $1,136,519
Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO, 7th): $1,102,468
Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA, 7th): $1,058,786
Rep. Nathan Deal (R-GA, 9th): $1,046,519

I would like to see this list enlarged if anyone has sourced information. The second link above is to a piece in the Huffington Post which is trying to create some standards for claiming that they are operating on a competent journalistic basis.

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Pooping Where You Sleep: Bad for the Economy

July 1, 2009 at 2:20 pm (pattern language, politics)
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Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Well let’s see.

Detached matrosprawl houses are uneconomic and degrade the environment. The market is taking care of that problem by their becoming unaffordable.

The private automobile, if you add the roads needed to make them viable and the fuel needed to run them are also uneconomic not even counting ancillary costs such as deaths, law enforcement, real estate and so forth. And they degrade like bandits.

The market is taking care of this also by forcing down what can be charged for them.

It is almost enough to make one a free market conservative.

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Continuing The Struggle: Contribute To Get OUR Messages Out

June 30, 2009 at 7:10 pm (politics)
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Continuing The Struggle: Contribute To Get OUR Messages Out

This is from Mitch Stewart who runs Organizing for America. I wish I had millions reading this and that a million blogs would share this. Help spread the word and give if you can. This is exactly what I have been talking about. The Obama counterpunch looking to July 4 and beyond.

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Did you see Vice President Biden’s email last week, sharing personal health care stories from supporters across the country? Well, the stories have been read millions of times, and the reaction is an overwhelming, “Wow — we’ve got to get to work.”

It’s not surprising — these stories show the human face of the health care debate and inspire us all to act.

So here’s our latest idea: Putting our supporters in coast-to-coast television and online ads, telling their own stories, in their own voice. It could be a breakthrough moment in this debate, when millions of Americans realize how urgent reform really is.

But recording and nationally broadcasting these stories won’t be cheap. We can only go forward if you’re ready to chip in. So what do you say — should we do it?

Yes. I think this is a great idea, and I’m ready to contribute so it can happen.

No, I’m not ready to contribute to this plan.

How big could this be? Many experts believe health care reform was defeated in the early 90’s by the infamous “Harry and Louise” ads. They featured actors sitting around a fake kitchen table, pretending to be a family that was frightened by reform.

So just imagine if this time around, the debate is shaped by real people, looking us in the eye, telling their actual story, and asking for our help to fix this broken system.

Phony stories helped defeat health care reform in the past. But this time, real stories could be the reason we win.

If enough Organizing for America supporters say yes and then donate the resources we need to pull it off, we’ll start filming and distribution right away. So what do you say?

Yes, let’s get these real stories on the airwaves. I’m ready to contribute:

https://donate.barackobama.com/hcstoryad

No, I don’t think this is a good idea or I can’t contribute at this time:

http://my.barackobama.com/hcstoryno

We’ll keep you posted with the results and what happens next.

Thanks, as always, for making it all possible.

Mitch

Mitch Stewart
Director
Organizing for America

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President Obama Said It Straight Out

June 30, 2009 at 1:14 pm (politics)
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I see lots of bile being spread around about President Obama’s efforts to get a green economy bill through. Congress has passed a green bill. It’s the Senate’s turn.

Today I want to flag a statement by the President that I saw on TV so I do not have the exact language.

In essence he said, A green economy will put us in the lead in the 21st century and failure will leave us a declining nation.

This was the argument of this site before I went whole hog for Obama in Iowa. It is absolutely true.

Our recession has everything to do with the need to shift gears to green. Not just laws. Lifestyle. Spending less for junk and more for quality.We are being forced to build a new and more sustainable world.

There are prophets of this movement and I do not mean the obvious environmentalists. I mean writers like Robert Pirsig who elevated the word quality into the lexicon of politics and thinkers like Thorstein Veblen who dissected the consumer society before it became an obnoxious stain on the surface of the globe.

Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysic of Quality (MOQ) Relates to Nietzsche’s Revaluation of Values Project

Thorstein Veblen on the Web

President Obama is faced now with a huge choice. But happily it has already been made. He cares enough about his commitment to green and its value to the country to go with Democrats alone if he would otherwise have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

David Brooks says the energy bill in the House version is a quilt of special interest concessions rather than a clean executive procedural bill.

I am sure the President wants the strongest of bills and if he has to muscle Republicans and Blue Dogs to get it, he will. And if, God forbid, these retrograde folk should succeed in watering down green, we will go at it incrementally with replacements at the polls for the Senators and Representatives who did not cotton to the Obama agenda.

The energy bill is important but similar things could be said about health care. Watch for a July 4 peaking of the Obama counterpunch on this issue. The President is just as adept at being President as he was at being a candidate. And the MO has not changed. Nor for that matter has media obtuseness in failing to recognize it.

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Things I have thoughts on but refuse to blog about:

Bernie Madoff
Sarah Palin and Family
Governor Sanford
Michael Jackson

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Twitter Tip: A Radical Approach to Spam Follows

June 30, 2009 at 6:15 am (Hillary Clinton, barack obama, clinton, mccain, obama, twitter)
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Twitter Tip: A Radical Approach to Spam Follows

If you invite someone by following them, you are ALREADY following them, whether or not they reply with a “following you” email.

This means you do NOT need to fear deleting ALL your “following you” email. Acceptance emails complete the loop. The rest of your “following you” email is spam or prospecting for followers.

If you want to go completely radical on this and pare your list of followers down, then post something like the following as needed.

SPAM follows. I now delete all following email.If I miss you, send me a @ reply with FOLLOW. I will check these. Thanks. S

To rephrase this, I believe if someone you want to follow gets missed, he or she should be invited to send you a @ reply with FOLLOW as the message. This means I can check the profile again and follow the person.

Naturally if you get mail from someone you follow and recognize it, you can and should keep it. But if you are getting tens and even hundreds of spam and prospecting follows each day,an approach like this may help.

My Twitter Profile | My Twitter Philosophy | More Twitter Tips

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John Kerry on Outrageous Attacks on Obama

June 29, 2009 at 10:43 am (politics)
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John Kerry on Outrageous Attacks on Obama

From John kerry — heed:

*** Deadline Midnight tomorrow – Only $97,484 to go. CONTRIBUTE NOW. ***

Steve –

The attacks on President Obama started before he even took office, and they’ve only gotten worse. Republicans, their ideas discredited, their policies responsible for the incredible challenges we face, have stepped up their attacks, spreading misinformation about policy proposals, and even criticizing the President’s date with his wife.

We can’t afford to let up at all. It’s tough, hard fighting in Congress to make progress on getting new jobs, real reform of our health care system, and a new energy economy, and we need everyone to know that Democrats are not going to let up until we get the job done.

I’ve seen first hand how the far right reacts when they see their failed policies challenged. Rush Limbaugh calls for failure, and Republican House leaders back him up. When their attacks start flying, we need to hit them hard.

Stand with President Obama

June 30th marks a critical FEC deadline where both Republicans and Democrats must report how much money they have in the bank. The political pundits, media and the GOP will use these totals as a referendum on support for President Obama, and they’ve already started running ridiculous stories about a GOP “comeback.” We need your help to raise $1 million before June 30th to show the world how committed we are to standing with President Obama and against those who are rooting for him – and America – to fail.

Make your voice heard: Contribute $5, $10 or more by Midnight on June 30th. Congressional Democrats will match every dollar you give with two of their own.*

From our economic recovery, to health care reform, to meeting the climate crisis, to restoring our moral leadership in the world, there is far too much at stake. The amount we raise will be used to judge how committed we are to standing with President Obama and his agenda for change, or whether these Republican attacks are actually starting to work.

That’s why it’s so critical that we make a strong show of support for President Obama before June 30th.

Contribute $5, $10 or more by Midnight on June 30th. Congressional Democrats will match every dollar you give with two of their own to show the world how strongly we support President Obama.*

The power to stand strong against these attacks is in your hands.

Please help us before Midnight on June 30th.

Thanks.

Senator John Kerry

P.S. If there was ever a doubt that the far right intends to go after President Obama with the same dishonorable attacks they used on me, just listen to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich rooting for our President to fail. Contribute by Midnight on June 30th to help us fight back on behalf of President Obama. Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats will match every dollar you give with two of their own.*

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Twitter Tip: Paring Down Your Following List

June 28, 2009 at 6:51 am (twitter)
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Twitter Tip: Paring Down Your Following List

Your Twitter following list is people YOU follow. Twitter suggests 2000 is a good ceiling. This is YOUR community. This list is only for YOU.

You have two relations in Twitter. Those you follow — your base community — and those who follow you — the community you serve.

There is NO LIMIT to the number of followers you can have. That is based on what you bring to the mix.

I have received messages suggesting that following 200 or 500 is more reasonable than following 2000. Pare down to a group you can reasonably keep track of. The point is simple. Following is selective. Like choosing a team.

I am now paring a list that was once more than 10,000. I do not use a mass unfollow program. I do it by hand. Here’s how.

Go to your profile. Click the left-hand “Following” link. Click “next” at the bottom of the page. Look at your address bar.

http://twitter.com/yoursusername/friends?page=2

Change the 2 to whatever page you want to go to.

Example: http://twitter.com/yoursusername/friends?page=45

Look at profiles. Open them in a new window.

Do you want to read them every day? Are their tweets interesting to you? If not, close the profile and click the REMOVE link on the right.

It’s like knitting. Do it watching a ball game or listening to music. You’ll end up with a group you are really excited about.

Now the big kahuna for many is reciprocity. Why follow someone who is not following you? The only reason is if they have something you want. When you apply that, you have no problem following someone who is not following you. If you think that they should follow you back, send them a @ reply and tell them why. But do not expect a reply if you are not on their wavelength.

The other big kahuna is the use of following to build huge lists. All this does ls leave you with a huge following list that you cannot possibly read.

I intend to keep inviting followers but first I am going to pare things down so I have a core of a few hundred. That will give me the capacity to invite plenty of people if I wish. But with a clear understanding. If they want what I am offering that is great. My contribution is the offering. It is not necessarily following back. Either way, there can be positive communication via discussion, retweeting and so forth.

To get the most out of Twitter go for a list of modest size tailored to your precise interests. If your aim is to have a large following, make your presence worth the interest of thousands of Twitterfolk.

My Twitter Profile | My Twitter Philosophy | More Twitter Tips

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White House Denies Indefinite Detention Order

June 28, 2009 at 5:34 am (politics)
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White House Denies Indefinite Detention Order

The Washington Post was in error when it recently stated that the President has an executive order in the hopper that will make the detention of Guantanamo detainees indefinite — read permanent.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE AFP “CORRECTION” OF THE WASHINGTON POST’S ERRONEOUS ARTICLE

This is the sticky aspect of the entire mess created by Bush torture policies. There are up to 90 detainees who are deemed a danger. Presumably because we used illegal tactics to elicit information (aka torture) these people cannot be tried without invalidating decent evidence due to the poisoned process.

So it is a conundrum and there may indeed be an eventual need for an executive order if Congress and the President cannot agree on a plan. The President intends to meet with Congress in July to advance the process.

No one said this would be easy and there is no way to reverse the damage done by the Bush illegalities. My own sense is that if the confession of a detainee was obtained under duress, making a trial impossible, there needs to be some process which brings a case to closure. Two wrongs do not make a right. But indefinite detention without trial is a wrong that rivals or even exceeds torture. It is unacceptable.

There is one other possibility. Congress might pass legislation that explicitly renders evidence obtained under duress inadmissable, forcing a process that would in essence try these 90 hard cases de novo. I am sure legal heads can arrive as some solution that is better than indefinite detention.

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