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Swipe for Darfur
I saw this set-up in the Harvard Law School cafeteria building last week. Students can run their Crimson Cash cards through the machine on the table and make an instant donation right to the Genocide Intervention Fund.
ILaw: The Future History of Media
They just showed this video of what our digital future will look like. Funny.
Bloggers Be Everywhere
I'm in a Harvard Law Classroom at the Berkman Center's Internet Law Cambridge program -- learning at the feat of some of the greatest minds in the world exploring some of the most complex and compelling issues of our time. And what is eminent Yale Law professor Yochai Benkler talking about right now? How Jerome, Kos, John Aravosis, and others brought down Sinclair.
Just How Dumb Is Don't Ask Don't Tell
Robert Stout, Purple Heart winner and gay man, was up here on the Hill today to talk about Don't Ask Don't Tell. I know the cost-based arguments for why the gay ban is bad policy -- and they're all very good ones -- but the thing that I can't get past is just how deeply morally wrong a thing it is. I mean, we're taking high school dropouts and criminals now. But we tell a guy like this that he isn't fit to be cannon fodder. There are so very many ways for a gay person to know that they are expected to consider themselves less than fully human and less than fully American. Yay. Here's one more.
Washington's Revolving Door: Philip Cooney
Behold the breathtaking efficiency of the Washington revolving door:
In: White House advisor on climate change;
out: executive at Exxon Mobil
Developing a Statement of Values
I don't always agree with Kos but he does some damn fine work. I speak of his recent posts on developing a "coherent, unified, statement of values" for the Democratic party (part I here, part II here, part III here.) Doing what he suggests should be the primary focus of those of us who really want to build a sustainable progressive way of doing things. Kos says this:
They [voters] don't care so much about the issues, but how you arrive at decisions about the issues.
He's absolutely right. The way that the party works now assumes that we have to get people to agree with us on our collection issues in order to get their votes. Bad strategy on a lot of levels but particularly when so someone otherwise sympathetic to voting Democrat disagree on something we've made a big deal of. We're screwed, then. If there's no obvious value or principle backing up the position, what, exactly, are we giving them to justify their vote?
Take for example, abortion. I'll use this as an opportunity to quote something somewhat-related that Garance Franke-Ruta said on this once:
I expect that male politicians and pundits are not always cognizant of the way that men who are vehemently pro-choice can come across as creepy and irresponsible to some women.
It's a great point. There are Democratic women, of whom I'm one, who find abortion distasteful. I'm sympathetic to what Hillary Clinton has been saying lately about how abortion is not a good, rah-rah, sort of thing that we ought to be cheerleading on every corner. But yet these same women will, like me, fight to the death to protect the right to make that choice. Why? There's a salient principle behind the issue. But I can't articulate what it is. Kos puts it under privacy and that's a good start. For the sake of winning elections, there's really nothing more important work that we could be doing than figuring out exactly what it is that we stand for and, more importantly, especially on tough issues like abortion, why we stand it is that we stand for it. Should be job one.
Related Howard Dean story after the jump.
There's
more...
Just Don't Know Why Kottke Would Do This
 Jason
Kottke is sort of the granddaddy of clean, clear, minimalist web design
and my fondness for his design sensibilities is such that it was from him that
I stole much of the initial look of this site. That is why I can't figure out
why he would go and do something like this -- turn a perfectly good text block
into an image. It's the sort of thing we stopped doing when CSS made it
so that one can pretty much control the look of fonts without resorting to this.
Interesting choice, is all I'm saying.
Crisis of Imagination on Family Values
Matthew Yglesias and Amy Sullivan and Garance Franke-Ruta have been having a somewhat heated discussion about popular culture and Democrats. In brief, Amy started it by citing a Dan Gerstein op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (paying customers only) that criticizes Democrats' dismissiveness of concerns about the media bath that kids find themselves in today and then Matt said that he sees no policy response to such concerns and thus finds attentiveness to these concerns to be just political pandering and then Garance cited such dismissiveness as one reason that Democrats have failed to connect to married parents.
I started thinking about all this at an event yesterday on low frequency FM radio when Jan Schakowsky described how she was more concerned about her children having freedom of speech than she is about them seeing Janet Jackson's nipple.
As am I.
There's
more...
The Death of Political Persuasion
Matt Miller asks whether political persuasion is dead. I'd say it's very dead and I'd find it hard to argue that it was anywhere near not dead. One of the root causes is something I like to harp on -- the remarkably consistent insistence of our would-be persuaders, politicos and bloggers and the like, to act like we're absolutely right about absolutely everything. And the flip side -- that those on the other side are so bloody wrong on each issue every single time.
That goes for big things (like Social Security, but we're right on that one) and little things (like what to make of some ambiguous data point in a news story.) The way things are now, we take stands on just about everything with the confidence of an infallibility heretofore possessed only by the Pope. That doesn't ring true with those of us who have neighbors and bosses and especially parents with whom we agree sometimes and disagree other times and still think that they are decent people with whom we can get along with all right. Which I have to think is most of us.
And this hurts Democrats more than it does Republicans because credibility is a lot of what we run on.
Primary Calendar
Senator Levin gave a speech at the most recent DNC meeting on the primary process
that I thought was just excellent. He makes the point that giving preference
to New Hampshire and Iowa every damn election cycle runs counter to what the
Democratic party is supposed to stand for -- opportunity for all, not preference
for some based on tradition. As the process stands now, the vast majority of
Democrats are so far distanced from the process of picking out a nominee that
we end up with somebody that may be appealing to the Democratic voters of New
Hampshire and Iowa but who potentially lacks the momentum to go anywhere from there.
LEVIN: Our voters, our Democrats, want to be relevant, and they want
to be heard. They want an equal shot at this process, and that is all
inspiring. ... What's at stake here is nothing less than a struggle for
political equality and for political relevance. That's what the issue
is here, whether or not this party is going to be open enough so that
we can tell the public out there, tell the potential voters and current
voters that we hear what you want, which is to be relevant, to be heard,
and not to be irrelevant and not to be ignored. And this party can make
a major contribution to winning elections as well as to responding to
that voter's need and that citizen's need to be relevant. We can't do
it under the present system.
The present system simply does not respond to that need to give the American
people a chance to be involved, to be heard on an equal basis. This is
an egalitarian party. This is a party which is supposed to treat people
equally, treat states equally, to treat voters equally and not to give
disproportionate power to any person or any particular state. That's what
we're all about. We call the Republicans the party of privilege. We're
the party of the people. We've got to end the privilege which exists that
two states have if we're going to live up, number one, to who we are as
a party but also if we're going to open up this process to new voters,
to people who feel left out and who can be attracted to the political
process if they feel it's open, that it's reaching out, that it's not
closed, that it doesn't give a preference to certain states or to certain
individuals.
Rock on, Carl. More here.
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