Scripting News for 2/29/2008

Fear bombs of 2008 

The first time this year I heard Lakoff talk I asked how the Republics would attack Obama. Without hesitation he said three words: Barack Hussein Obama.

From his confidence I gathered that this was like asking if the 49ers would use a passing offense when Joe Montana was the quarterback. Or that the Oakland A’s with Canseco and McGwire would depend on home run hitting. There’s a certain logic to the Republic machine, Lakoff understands it.

In 2004, when they ran the Swift Boat ads, claiming that John Kerry, a war hero, lacked integrity and courage and was disloyal (ads run on behalf of a draft dodger and recovering drug addict), the candidate and his campaign said they hated the ads too, and the loophole in campaign finance laws that allowed them should be closed. But they did nothing to stop the ads or counteract them (they could have run opposing ads, for example, saying they want a campaign on real character issues, not lies). Of course they didn’t do that because the Swift Boat ads were central to their strategy for winning.

2004 should have been a referendum on the war in Iraq, instead the focus was on the campaign itself. The swiftboat ads were run over and over, for free, on all the networks. They are so easily manipulated. You think this wasn’t in a Republic Party plan from Day 1? If you said no, you need to go back to the school of hard knocks for a refresher course.

So now we have the H-bomb, Obama’s middle name, and the Republics are starting early. Sure the candidate disavows it, even though the words were introduced at his campaign rally. No one interrupted the speaker. McCain waited to apologize until after the event was over and the audience had left (they might boo him, why take a chance). Karl Rove, meeting with Republic strategists cautions against using Obama’s middle name. The national Republic Party slaps the wrist of the Tennesee Republic Party for using Obama’s middle name in a press release. This is an exact replay of 2004.

Michelle Obama calls this the “obvious, ultimate fear bomb.”

Josh Marshall says it’s “channel conflict.”

Like 2004, the Republics must be betting that the Democrats won’t respond, because, as in 2004, their candidate is more vulnerable to this kind of mischief than Obama is. One could point out that there is a child from a Muslim country, Bangladesh, living in the McCain house, his adopted daughter. It’s true isn’t it? Obama himself would say he abhors this kind of politics, and no doubt he does. The child is Asian, but she’s pretty dark-skinned. I wonder what that means? It’s just a question. Can’t we ask questions?

What I don’t get is people who support Obama, old enough to remember swiftboating, and still willing to wait to “see what happens.” There’s no waiting. They’re using exactly the same play that worked so well in 2004.

It is early, but it is almost too late to stop the escalation.

And it seems the power to stop the escalation belongs to McCain and him alone.

Look, he’s the new leader of the Republic Party. Apologies don’t cut it. Is that how he’s going to deal with foreign leaders? Is he going to apologize at the first sign of trouble, or does he have the courage and will to solve the problem. Either he’s the Republic’s leader or he’s a wimp. There’s no inbetween. He is responsible for what his party does. No amount of double-talk will absolve him from that.

The correct answer, which he did not give, is threefold:

1. Apologize first to Obama and his family, at a personal level, for allowing his podium to be used to imply that he’s anything but a patriotic and loyal son of America. You want some extra credit, say you’re proud that he has a chance to be President, that it says to the world that the United States is diverse, and we practice our stated philosophy of being open and democratic. (There’s nothing wrong with this. Do what the Dems have been doing, say no matter what the US is going to get an excellent leader this time around. It’s time for Americans to unite as the Dems have united.)

2. Apologize to the American electorate, liberal and conservative, on behalf of some very nasty people who call themselves Republics, but don’t come close to reflecting the values of the party of Lincoln. They are free to vote for whoever they want, but your campaign, which is an American campaign, will stick to the very real differences between the candidates, not lies or implicit lies, for example, that Obama is a Muslim (he’s Christian).

3. The hardest part, but the one that really matters — Take control of your party and commit to us that it won’t happen again. Again, if you want extra credit, bring Obama on stage with you, and Hillary Clinton, and all three of you say that this isn’t the America you want, and that swiftboating will not be part of this election.

It’s rare that history presents one such an opportunity as the one being presented to McCain. He could be a rat and dishonest and might just win the election, but this way of winning is not winning at all. In the end he’ll hate himself for what he has become. I believe that McCain is a good enough human being to understand this. He’s at a crossroads now, and which way he goes has a lot to do with which way the country goes.

Update: Cross-posted on Huffington.

PS: A frequently asked question — Why do you call McCain’s party “The Republic Party?” It’s my small way to remind members of his party that the correct name of their leading opposition is the Democratic Party. That so many Republicans trash the name of their opponent, esp ones like McCain who claim to be honorable people, says that well, they have no honor. I noticed that McCain started doing it shortly after he became the presumptive nominee. I think Democrats and their supporters (like myself) have to get used to balancing this out, even though it may be embarrassing to appear so illiterate.

PPS: For political news I read Memeorandum several times every day. It’s great!

Spin 

Links for 02/29/2008 

RWW on XMPP as the foundation of collaboration. 

Clinton aides threatened lawsuit over Texas caucuses, officials say. 

Scripting News for 2/28/2008

Links for 02/28/2008 

“They threw in the obvious, ultimate fear bomb…” 

“We’re at that moment in the campaign that reminds me of a horror movie.” 

Guidelines for competing with Twitter 

Every time Twitter goes down I think of how can we create something to use when Twitter is down.

There’s a difference these days, because there’s serious talk among developers about whether or how to compete. Earlier this week at lunch with one of them, I said I didn’t know how great the opportunity was, given that Twitter has been staying up, through heavy use during the debates and primaries. Then, as if on call, it started going down. In the last 24 hours it’s been down more than up, or so it seems.

And of course that has re-kindled the back-channel.

Some guidelines for potential Twitter-competitors.

1. I don’t like names with the word “killer” in it — even in private. It’s the wrong idea. No one will kill anyone. And names you use in private have a way of leaking out in public.

2. Don’t use the term crowdsourcing — it betrays a perspective that’s arrogant and wrong. I am not part of a crowd, I am a creative important person. Most Silicon Valley companies have this attitude. It’s a good vector for competing. Our users are sentient human beings, individuals. Important not just as a collection of people.

3. Most important, any service meant to compete with Twitter must be 100 percent compatible with the Twitter API. Porting of apps that build on Twitter means making the domain an option, where you call twitter.com it must be possible to change it to mytwitterclone.com, for example.

4. It must be possible to use your clone when Twitter goes down and then switch back to Twitter when it comes back up with no loss of data. If you want smoothe entry into the market you must serve as a backup, earn your place with the users. Everyone will love you because it gives Twitter a very real concrete incentive to become more reliable.

5. To everyone, twitter.com included — this is a utility like email or IM. Reliability is key. If it’s going to be used in business (very powerful idea) then auditability is essential. To assume that users love the product is not a good idea, any emotional connection becomes a negative if you can’t keep the system up.

Scripting News for 2/27/2008

Links for 02/27/2008 

Bloomberg op-ed in tomorrow’s NY Times. 

Times they are a changing 

Last night’s debate really shifted things for me, esp after my talk on Monday with George Lakoff.

First, I’m going to help George and his thinktank, the Rockridge Institute, build their presence in the blogosphere. They’re from a different world, they write books, something I’d like to do, but it isn’t in my nature. In the same way when they look at communication they think big and longer-term. Instant communication, blogging and podcasting, is not their first impulse. But Lakoff and his associates understand politics in a way that Democrats don’t get, but Republicans really do. That is, until Barack Obama. If you really want to understand why the Obama campaign is working and the Clinton campaign is fading, Lakoff understands it, and if you press him, he’ll get out of professor mode, and tell you how it works in words anyone with a brain and an education can understand. That’s his gift.

Lakoff tells a story about Dick Wirthlin, Reagan’s chief strategist, in 1980. Lakoff met him at a conference after he had retired, and the two hit it off. He explained to George that when he started he did a poll, and found out that most people don’t agree with Reagan, but they planned to vote for him anyway. I’ve seen the same thing with Obama. In a comment thread here, Phil Windley, who I like and respect (we have a technology bond) but whose politics and mine couldn’t be more opposite, said he might vote for Obama. What! I asked why and he said that Obama seemed to him to have integrity. That’s what Wirthlin uncovered. People don’t vote on policy, they vote for leaders, for people whose values seem American to them, for people they feel they can trust.

I talked with Lakoff about how the word “liberal” had been destroyed by the right wing, and asked if that was going to be a problem for Obama. He said it wouldn’t, because Obama had figured out how to say what many of us believe, that the values people label with the L-word are actually American values. When your neighbor’s house is burning down, you don’t lecture him on how incompetent he is (though there are Americans who would do that), you get out your fire hose and do everything you can do to help. After you call 911 to get taxpayer-funded fire department to come put out the fire.

We look forward to the coming election believing that this time the “tax and spend” label won’t stick for a couple of reasons. Our candidate sees it coming this time, and understands that it’s a frame, it’s a way that Republicans get you to accept their point of view by letting them frame the discussion in their terms. Do Democrats tax and spend? Sure of course they do. So do Republicans. Nothing wrong with it. Imagine if we all had to hire our own fire departments. Instead we pool our resources and buy fire insurance, in the form of trucks and buildings, and brave men and women who protect our lives and property.

Our government provides the context, the legal system, the services, that make it possible for businesses to flourish. It’s naive to think that government doesn’t play that role, and the Republicans obviously believe it too. In the seven years Bush has been in office government spending has grown. Have taxes grown too? Maybe not, but borrowing surely has. The money to pay for the war came from somewhere. As it has for many Americans who borrowed against the equity in their homes, there must be a day of reckoning for our economy as a whole. We’ve been charging our collective lifestyle, this luxury of an occupation of Iraq which is a lousy investment for the American taxpayer (where’s the return?) but a great investment for Bush, Cheney and friends in the oil and defense industries. We won’t know how much money Bush gets after he leaves office and becomes a private citizen, but I bet he becomes a billionaire from kickbacks he gets from selling us out. This is a tax, and it’s our future they have been spending.

While the Republicans have been in office America has become much less competitive in the world economy. Those jobs we lost while Republicans ran the show aren’t coming back. And the inefficiency of our health care system, believe it or not, is an important reason industrial jobs are going across the border to Canada, where they have a no nonsense health care system that works like this — if you get sick you get health care. Geez, does that seem fairly American to you? It does to me. It’s kind of like the fire department. We all hope our houses don’t catch fire, but when they do, we’re damned happy we don’t get an argument when we call 911. Why should cancer, diabetes and heart disease be any different? I don’t get it.

All of this is part of the story Lakoff tells. You can get a taste of it starting midway through Monday’s podcast. Listen to the last half hour if you’re short on time. And I’m going to keep pestering him to do more, shorter podcasts with me, responding to current events, as they happen. We’ll apply his model to the political system, and watch how Obama openly captures the best of the Republican playbook. It should be something to watch, something marvelous.

There was a grand moment in last night’s debate; they played a clip of Hillary Clinton’s sarcastic speech about the light shining down, the heavens opening, angels singing, etc. The camera goes to Obama — he’s beaming. He says it sounds pretty good. And it does. America works when we work together. Being American is simple, but people like Bush and Rove and Cheney made it complicated. Americans get shit done, and Americans don’t argue when their neighbor’s house is on fire. We roll up our sleeves and we can do great things. For better or worse now we need to do some great things. We’re lucky that now we have the leadership we need to get started.

And there was the shift in thinking that came from last night’s debate. We already have more leadership from this man who hasn’t even won the Democratic nomination yet than we have from the actual President of the United States. Further, in the last two campaigns, I have exhorted the candidates to use the money they raise to solve important problems, and realize that Obama had done exactly that. He’s uniting us as a country. There’s nothing more important, once we remember that we’re all Americans and that that means something, we can do so much more than when we’re divided by the “wedge issues” of cynical political hacks. We always have had the option to take back our country, now we seem to be doing that.

When we put aside our differences, and I’m not talking about the heads of companies and lobbyists and government officials, but the people, they really can’t stop us. We have the means to pass laws that they have to obey and we have police and military to enforce those laws. The founders of our country believed in this, and believed in us, we’re not fools to agree with them, we’re just using our power.

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

Scripting News for 2/26/2008

IRC for tonight’s debate 

I started a chatroom for tonight’s Democratic debate.

irc://irc.freenode.net/#ohioDebate

The debate starts at 6PM Pacific.

The Wire winds down 

Warning: Spoilers follow…

The best TV show ever, imho, is The Wire on HBO.

I’m such a fan, I’ve bought all the DVDs and watched the series in its entirety three times. After the last season, the fifth one, which is winding down in the next couple of weeks, I’ll probably go through the whole series again, because now we know how it turns out for many of the characters.

Unlike The Sopranos, there are several main characters in The Wire. In the early seasons there was Avon Barksdale, Frank Slobotka, McNulty of course, Omar and dozens of supporting characters. When Entourage winds down they won’t have to kill off the main characters, but in violent shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, that is the main question. That, and who’s left standing after all the killing is over. The Sopronos punted on this question, whether Tony dies or not was not clear. Not so in The Wire. They’re killing their main characters decisively and unceremoniously, without rock classics playing in the background. One character dies with a shot to the head, which we see, no imagination needed, delivered by the most unlikely assassin (but if you were paying attention over the years, in retrospect, not so unlikely).

The big question in The Wire is who is going to be the next Marlo Stanfied, because Marlo is surely going down. And we’re getting the answer, with just two episodes to go, it looks like it’s Michael. I predict the last scene of The Wire is like the last scene of the first Godfather movie, with the door closing and a new Don holding court with the new lieutennants. Or maybe Michael is meeting with The Greek, like the closing scene in Casablanca, where Bogart says his famous line to the police captain played by Claude Raines after watching Ingrid Bergman leave on the last plane out of town.

Or maybe the final scene of The Wire will be a reprise of the first scene. McNulty chatting with one of the neighborhood kids, doing a eulogy of another kid, lying dead in the street. This image has been in the opening credits every year of The Wire. It’s practically the symbol of the show. It seems fitting somehow that the opening scene would also be the closing scene.

We’ll see, but it’s great drama, stories woven together beautifully, wonderful acting, and what appears to be an honest wrap-up, coming in two weeks. I can’t wait!

6/11/07: “In this age of blogs, podcasts, unconferences and level playing fields, it’s sometimes nice to just be in the audience. Let someone else do the work. Relax and reach deep inside our emotional being, and yank out something beautiful or horrible, and have a look.”

Scripting News for 2/25/2008

Interview with George Lakoff 

I spent an hour this afternoon talking with George Lakoff, professor at UC-Berkeley, about the 2008 campaign and language.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/cn025Feb08.mp3

I’ll write more about the interview tomorrow, but wanted to get the MP3 out right away.

Links for 02/25/2008 

Karl Rove puts his opponents in jail. 

SNL debate betw Obama and Clinton, with special appearance by The Obama Girl. 

Quinnipiac poll shows Obama gaining on Clinton in Ohio. 

Scripting News for 2/24/2008

Today’s links 

Bijan says content synching is a mess. 

How to make plants talk… with Twitter! 

Andrew Sullivan sings his goodbye song to the Clintons. 

The Dems are playing hardball with McC! Lovin it. 

New Gallup national poll, Obama 47, Clinton 46. 

More test posts coming, adding new features to my new toy. 

Just made a few changes so this is just a test. Please ignore. 

Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX) on This Week, making a lot of sense about Cuba.  

Frank Rich’s scathing postmortem of the Clinton campaign.  

What am I up to? 

I have a neat little app that runs in the OPML Editor that, every five minutes, gathers all the new twits from people I’m following, and runs them over a set of “callback” scripts, that can do whatever they want to with them. The first one I wrote looks for an exclamation point at the beginning of one of the ones I wrote and routes it to a special place on Scripting News.

This is quite visible because 4700 people follow me on Twitter, and they all see the exclams at the beginning of some of my twits, and some have asked for the script. Not much point in that, because it only works with my one-off CMS. It could be made to work with blogs that use the OPML Editor outliner, but there aren’t many of those. If someone in that community asks, I’ll upload the app, and keep it updated, that’s easy, but without support (not easy).

I may add the ability to put callbacks in a folder outside the OPML Editor, written in AppleScript, if there’s enough interest. But that’s not a promise.

I wrote this for myself — not to solve a problem for others.

I think the right way to deal with this, btw, is for the developers of WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, etc to do the polling of Twitter on behalf of their users. I think Twitter makes a decent linkblogging user interface. People with blogs are using it that way — I am. Now I don’t have to feel so guilty because the links make their way back to Scripting News, where they started.

Scripting News for 2/23/2008

Today’s links 

Where my Twits that begin with exclams end up.  

Obama lets his confidence show.  

Today’s song: El Paso by Marty Robbins.  

Scripting News for 2/22/2008

Random questions for the day 

My mind is buzzing with lots of interesting little projects/ideas.

1. I want to find a way to flow some of my Twitter updates to Scripting News, into a Today’s Links section, or Random Questions for the day (like the post you’re reading right now). Here’s an example. I’m using the exclamation point to delimit an update that I want to appear over here. Maybe that’s not the right special character. Equal sign? Slash? Backslash?

Update: Sol Young has been thinking about this too.

2. Do people use AppleScript these days? I honestly don’t know. I’m thinking of making a tool to run in the OPML Editor that calls one of your scripts when a new Twit from someone you follow comes in. The script would be in a special folder on your desktop and could be written in AppleScript. It seems to me people want to script Twitter, and I know how to make it easy. Not sure if AppleScript is the way to go in 2008.

3. Scoble is really into the BlogTalkRadio zero-config podcast tool. That’s so cool. Scoble is a useful guy to have around. Want to know what a user thinks or likes? Ask Scoble.

4. I went to see There Will Be Blood today. I had to see it cause everyone says it’s going to win a boatload of Oscars on Sunday. I liked it. Great acting. Not exactly a feel-good movie, but that’s okay. Adults like movies that aren’t necessarily feel good. (But I still think Juno is the best movie of 2007, and I’m a big fan of Michael Clayton.)

5. The talking heads on cable news don’t get the point in yesterday’s USA 2.0 post. The Dems should be aiming at running the table, taking solid majorities in both houses and a mandate-level plurality for President Obama, an LBJ-level landslide. We need a government, not more bullshit. The Republics need to move over for four to eight years so we can resume our position of leadership in the world, the new world, not the old one. The one where our workers have to compete for the business. We used to get all the business by default. That’s not the world we live in anymore folks. The Republics don’t get that.

6. Most people seem to be missing the substance in NY Times story about McCain and the lobbyist. It’s not really a scandal, what happened is that the lobbyist was going around telling people she had special access to McCain, which seemed to be substantiated because she was seen around town with McCain a lot. Whether they were having sex or not is a distraction. That his aides met with her and told her to stop saying she had access was perfectly natural and appropriate. It happens in Silicon Valley too.

Scripting News for 2/21/2008

United States 2.0 

During the debate my friend Lance Knobel wrote a post wondering if perhaps Hillary Clinton was conceding the nomination to Barack Obama.

By the end of the debate, I too thought that’s what had happened.

Maybe we can see our way to something wonderful, instead of a continued struggle. She gets to be a major figure in the US Senate supporting a Democratic President. Not bad. Maybe she’s the new Majority Leader.

Maybe the goal isn’t just to win the White House but to get a strong majority in both houses.

A woman Speaker and a woman Majority Leader.

And a black President. What a way to roll out USA 2.0.

PS: I’d like to see Obama pick Senator Jim Webb of Virginia for vice-president.

PPS: Webb gave the Democratic response to the 2007 State of the Union.

 

Campaign conference call MP3s, day 2 

Lots of leads for the MP3s of campaign conference calls after yesterday’s piece, but so far not one actual MP3 has been squeezed out of MSM or the campaigns.

I made official inquiries through the Obama and Clinton websites, no response yet. At least the Obama website seemed to understand that I wasn’t offering to stuff envelopes or drive people to the polls.

Hillary explained, in an email response, that she gets a lot of email and can’t respond to each one individually. Then she listed all the ways I could help her campaign, including giving her money. That’s a pretty incompetent way to respond to a press inquiry.

One professional reporter explained that they don’t publish press releases so why should they make the MP3s of the conference calls available. Oy. They clearly don’t understand that as voters we might have an interest in unfiltered access to the actual words of the campaign. It never occurs to them, apparently, that not every voter sees their spin as a total value-add.

Four years from now we’ll look back at this in amazement that there was a day when campaigns hid their words and ideas behind the filters of the press.

Anyway, until we have a regularly updating feed with MP3s of the campaign conference calls, I won’t stop beating the drum.

Steven Mays: “I’d love to hear these calls, raw and unedited.”

Where did the 35 years come from? 

William King asks how Hillary Clinton justifies her claim that she has 35 years experience in government.

It boggles my mind how Hillary came up with a grand total of 35 years of political experience. I know she has seven years of being a senator. Now she has never served in a political position, or a public office, prior to that. Neither has she had a high profile job in the government: she wasn’t a secretary of any department. So where has she gotten the other 28 years from? That I would truly like to know.

Good question. Looks like a real stretch.

Where did Dave go? 

Over time, I’m using Twitter more and more, and posting less to the weblog. I’m still posting lots of links, but you have to follow me on Twitter to get them. I’m looking at ways to cross-post some of them here.

I’m also considering ways to centralize communication in the FlickrFan community, which is growing nicely. I’m concerned because mail lists almost always turn into platforms for people who don’t use the product to sneer at it. So I’m looking for some way to strike a balance. I like hearing from users, but I don’t have the time to deal with others.

If you have questions about the podcatcher, for now, please post them here:

http://codecasting.org/podcatcher/00001.html

Thanks!

Scripting News for 2/20/2008

AppleScript to add a podcast 

I had dinner on Sunday night with an old friend, Andrew Grumet, who now works at PodShow. I met Andrew when we were both in Cambridge, MA. He was one of the people who showed up at Berkman when we started the bloggers group that meets every Thursday night (and still does as far as I know).

Andrew went on to lead the development of iPodder, which became Juice, the open source podcatcher written in Python that Adam Curry started. I told him about my efforts to create an AppleScript that would copy an MP3 to a (possibly new) playlist in iTunes. Andrew pointed me to the code they developed for Juice.

I had a few minutes to try it out today, it took a little clumsy tweaking and fiddling to get it to work (I don’t really “get” AppleScript), but it works! I just copied a new episode of Face The Nation to my New Podcasts playlist in iTunes.

Here’s the code.

Screen shot.

Onward!

MP3s of candidate conference calls? 

They talk about them all the time on the news shows, every day the major Presidential candidates have conference calls with reporters.

It seems much of the real action in the campaign happens here, but we (voters, taxpayers, citizens) have no access.

I listened to an MP3 of one of the calls, with the chief strategist and communications director of the Clinton campaign. It was fascinating, gave me a picture of how the press and the candidates relate that I had never seen before.

Now I want more — I want it all!

I’ve been asking around, where can I get MP3s of all the conference calls, the day they happen, in full, not spun through the reporters, and so far have come up with nothing. So I’m bringing this issue to as many people as I can think of who might either know how I can get them, or apply pressure to one or more news organizations to make them public.

I’d of course like to see them made available as an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures, so it will be accessible to everyone with a podcast client. I would help create this, even host the feed if necessary.

Anyone at a major media organization would have access to this content. I’m pretty sure it’s all on the record. Any help would be much appreciated.