Wednesday, March 10, 2010

I knew it was coming

When you hook in through Facebook Connect, it shows you profile picture, too.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

New fightin’ words that might not work

Are you keeping your ears tuned, Luntz-like, for phrases that frame the political debate? The possible upcoming battle to pass parts of healthcare reform through the Senate’s budget reconciliation process is going to be characterized as “ramming it through”—as an arrogant move.

Arianna Huffington on This Week told George Will she hoped it would be rammed through, helping to blunt the negative intent.

If it’s arrogant to be the party in power and push through what you want, then hasn’t that pretty much been happening in democracy all along, certainly during the Bush years, and probably back to the Greeks?

Also, given the public’s contempt for congressional dillydallying, only the most dug-in naysayers are going to disparage a little healthy muscle. The rest of us are going to say “About time, you wienies.”  Really, Dems, it’s FINE to want what you want, don’t let them tell you it’s not. Don’t let them fake you back into the wimperers corner. [but… but… cloture… but elections… afraid…]

Sunday, February 14, 2010

My Capital Rewards

I’ve been on a mission to get clean: paid off my overdraft protection last year and just last month paid off both credit cards. It felt great. And Capital One even granted a reward!

To itself.

On the next statement following the $0 balance they raised my interest rate by 8%. They thought they’d squeeze me a little before Feb. 22 when the new law goes into effect. I called to cancel. The customer service rep asked me why. I explained. She sighed: big breath exhalation. I’m guessing her sigh meant she had heard customers tell the same tale more than once already today.

Meanwhile, Capital One seems to be on a mission of its own—to discover whether there really is a need for small business loans. I don’t mean the kind where you take your hat in hand and sit down with a banker to go over your balance sheet and pay an interest rate a few points above the bank’s cost. I’m talking about the modern kind where they intice your small business to sign up for a credit card to get by and hopefully you fall behind on payments.

Last month I got three promos for such a card in one day, all addressed to a business name I haven’t used for 15 years.  They’re wasting a lot of marketing funds on dumb mailings like that. Wonder how they’re working out. It probably works with desperate little businesses.

Soon all they will have left is desperate business customers to go along with their desperate consumer customers. That doesn’t bode well for anybody, not even Captial One and its investors, not in the long term.

Ask your members of congress where they stand on the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Common sense is in the air, everywhere

President Obama said “Let’s try common sense” in the State of the Union speech Wednesday night.

Here’s the Twitter reaction. Obama fans like the idea. The Right scoffs. (If you see this seven days from now, the search link will lead to an empty results page; Twitter doesn’t keep historical searches.)

Bonus: I found this in my searches this morning—a November 2009 accounting of Governor Palin’s fondness for the phrase by Chris Kelly, a writer for Bill Maher’s show who blogs at Huffington Post.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

‘Common sense’ catch phrase is catching: #TCOT crowd adores saying it

On Saturday I pointed out the newest conservative catch phrase, “common sense,” and suggested libs should just ... take it.

I’ve been listening. It seems to be used more by politicians on the far right. More interesting, talking points aren’t just for politicians anymore. When pols speak the tested words there’s an echo on the internet. Check out this feed of tweets mentioning “common sense” by users who employ the “TCOT” (top conservatives on Twitter) hashtag to filter their remarks.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

A framing proposal: appropriate the term ‘common sense’ for the left

Listening to John Boehner’s weekly address response today confirmed an earlier suspicion that “common sense” must be shaping up to be the newest GOP canned buzz phrase. Maybe it’s been around and it just hasn’t pricked my ears up, but when Sarah Palin and Boehner are both currently pounding the phrase into our consciousness, you have to think it’s been tested and it’s working.

Here’s what I wonder: if the left couldn’t just appropriate it. We’re for common sense, too!

Part of the Republicans’  message must be a dog whistle thing: the lunch pail crowd likes to to believe that intellectuals necessarily don’t have common sense, it’s one or the other. You’re an egghead or you have street smarts, never both. It can’t be both or the blue collar class loses a cherished mode of self-appreciation. “Well, that boss of mine might have a diploma on his wall but he don’t have a lick of common sense [like me].” That’s why you also hear “Ivy League” sprinkled into raps about policy—a sure way to send shivers of defensive disgust up the spines of Real Americans.

I think we could disarm a lot of these culture war weapons by just using them ourselves. It would neutralize the sting, but would be entirely fair. For instance, who says I can’t tout my own sort of “family values” just because I’m very liberal?

We can be angry and populist with the best of them, too. Why cede all those lovely, universally human terms and stances?

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

What good is fear without some nervous window time, and what good is window time if you don’t know which one to peer from? Here’s a public service for shaky citizens who worry about the Guantanamo Bay detainees coming to Illinois.

Map their route to you.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

When the real world fails you, there’s always fantasy

Are you feeling let down because you’re not seeing the change you hoped for? Me too. You can stay aware that you painted your own scene on Obama’s blank canvas, but it doesn’t help.

I have a prescription: rewatch The West Wing. It still holds up, and it’s still relevant. Let yourself retreat to fantasy for a few weeks, then rejoin the fray.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Weekly presidential address pre-buttal from September

But… but… but… Governor Palin says too much regulation caused the 2008 financial meltdown. And I think I need to believe her story, because… she’s just like me, and… socialism… and take our guns… and ivy league elitism… and… and… freedom!

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Sarah as Geraldine: The devil made me buy that designer suit

She’s Lina Lamont. No wait, she’s Geraldine, too.

“Palin has devoted a dismayingly prominent chunk of her book to scapegoating communications aide Nicolle Wallace for supposedly forcing her to wear designer clothes.” Nov. 17, 2009, Boston Globe editorial.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Throwing in with the cultural nemesis

Salon’s editor, Joan Walsh, put this headline on her opinion piece yesterday: ”I have Palin fatigue already.” Me too. No, not really.

Here’s Walsh’s thought, way down at the end, that prompted me to awaken from blog hibernation.

So while I’m not worried about President Palin, I remain worried about President Obama. I’m particularly concerned that his increasingly triangulating, anti-deficit administration will do the wrong thing, morally and politically, and move to the right, without understanding that some right-wing rage could be rechanneled by acknowledging its roots: That the economic system seems rigged for the have-a-lots v. the have-a-littles, and despite their promises, the Democrats haven’t done enough to change that. Palin can’t change any of that, but Obama can. There’s still time for him to do so, but the clock is ticking.

I agree that populist sentiment on the right could be rechanneled, but I wouldn’t leave it up to the president or the Democrats in Congress to take charge of the effort.

Liberal citizens could do more. We could not only rechannel populist mojo but reclaim it. What if progressives started showing up at the next round of town halls to agree with bits of the anger at the way things are going, but suggest other means to change it? To decry Wall Street dominance of the halls of power right along with our louder neighbors, but point to other ways out?

Cultural and ideological gulfs are so hard to bring oneself to bridge. Reminds me of a Therapy Sisters song. The Austin, TX-based female folk ensemble sings about how easy it is for feminists to claim identification with the suffering of third-world women, but not so easy to throw in with the bow heads (sorority members) across campus.

Sunday, October 04, 2009

You know you should listen to Leo, right?

Leo Laporte’s talk about his mainstream-to-internet media story at the Online News Association conference is well worth your 40 minutes.

So many of the ideas he talks about—and has proven to be true—seem so basic that it’s hard to conceive of any opposing viewpoint. You just have to think that the newspaper and TV folks who make counterarguments are blinded by something other than reason—pining for the fjords, clinging to the past, incapable of seeing the world from more than one perspective.

Here is the silly Dev Null character he talks about playing on MSNBC’s The Site program 12 years ago.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Twitter search: ephemera for ordinary users so it can be something more for business intelligence?

ephemera: items designed to be useful or important for only a short time, esp. pamphlets, notices, tickets, etc.

I have been thinking for a while (and I’m not alone) that Twitter search has been consciously crippled for a good reason. That is, it’s good for Twitter, still publicly in search of a business model, but obviously trying models on for size. It’s not so good for users.

Here’s an example. I was interested in the inflated attendance counts for the 9/12 events and did a search on “ABC million” for Saturday and Sunday. (A FreedomWorks speaker pulled the figure of 2 million from someair, falsely or erroneously attributed it to ABC News, and word spread across Twitter like a swarm of gnats.)

So, the search proves useful, for the moment, and though the moment is what drives Twitter, you might want a record of the reaction, and your desire would be thwarted. Twitter search results go back only a week and a half at best and developers reserve the right to further limits based on traffic.

You could grab a feed of the search results, but it’s limited to the last 30 tweets. You can let the items pile up in your aggregator, but only starting at the point when you realize it’s a trend. History is important.

The ability to specify dates for a search is nice, but if it only goes back X days the utility is limited. Searching for a range of hours would be a great help, but it’s not available to users either. How would it help? Well, since Twitter is so “of the moment” the narrower the time span the more results you’ll get for a fuzzy query. Let’s say Rachel Maddow says something provocative and I’m not ambitious enough to construct a complicated query of a string of “Or’s.” If I could specify that I only want tweets tweeted from 9 until 10 p.m., most every tweet containing “Rachel” would be in reference to the show, and I’d gain the added benefit of seeing mostly viewers who are tweeting while watching.

So why don’t users have these superpowers? It could be because Twitter needs to curb features to keep from crashing, but it might be that we aren’t given the value-add precisely because it is so valuable.

Can’t you see the charts in the marketing reports? “Since the introduction of the X campaign, mentions of Product Y are up 23% over the previous month and up 67% over this month last year.” Historical trends are gold. Twitter has to be selling the data that could produce them, or they’re holding it back from us while they think about how they could sell it.

Am I an anti-business socialist? Not really, but this sort of behavior on Twitter’s part does bring to mind the traditional labor phrase, “on the backs of the workers.” Twitter users and the words we type are the Twitter product. We’re stakeholders, so if our aggregated facts, sentiments and opinions are on the block, we should get something back—not money, just utility.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Sarah Palin is Lina Lamont

So, sue me. I’m fascinated with Sarah Palin. The idea of her intrigues me in a jaw-dropping, can’t-believe-what-I’m-hearing, stun-me-again way.

As the Vanity Fair article and the resignation announcement played out and the critics weighed in, I let it all wash over me (OK, OK, I sought it out). Commentary on her debate prep was the stuff my imagination is made of. I can picture the grueling sessions now, with the aid of Todd Purdum’s nice descriptive gifts. Then up pops Mark McKinnon on the tube. He supported Obama, so he coached Palin on style points but not on policy.

So I construct this even more vivid picture of desperate, futile coaching and it feels like something I’ve seen before but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Then, finally, just now it hit me. She’s Lina Lamont, in Singin’ in the Rain, who will not achieve round tones in this lifetime, or at least not within a reasonable enough period of time to endure further coaching. 

As Purdum describes in the article, the campaign team members “worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be.”

The “might never be” part is what spooked Lina’s handlers in the movie. Having little time to bring out the Dancing Cavalier as a talkie with Lina’s annoying voice, they bailed on the voice, dubbing in the competent speaking and singing voice of the Debbie Reynolds character.

I caiiiiiint staiiiyiin ‘er.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Thanks, Daddy

I’m so lucky my Dad is still around and getting ready to mark his 80th birthday next month.

Let me tell you just a couple of things about him.

He worked in the same bank from a time before I was born until after I became a parent, but I think he’d rather have been a woodworker. He’s so careful with his carpentry projects that you’d think he was making each piece for royalty, and sometimes it’s just a house for a sparrow family. I think he loves every second of the process while he’s working; he doesn’t just love the satisfaction of having made something.

He can make anything. When I was eight or nine he made me a tiny kite of balsa wood and tissue paper, not bigger than an index card. We had to fly it with thread instead of string, and I remember him explaining to me that the tail had to be made of quarter-inch strips of cloth, everything in scale. The idea of balance among parts of a thing really struck me, and stuck with me. It was beautiful. It flew in almost no wind.

Daddy’s always reading, always had a great library. I read Huxley’s The Doors of Perception as a teenager, and Jane Eyre as a pre-teen because they were in his library. I was able to take the Pygmalion script to My Fair Lady when I was 10 because it was on the shelf at home. I’ve liked literary adaptations ever since.

He’s funny, and a horrible tease.

He’s realistic, and I think he tried to teach me to be. I’m not sure it worked. When I was maybe six or seven I asked him if a family could be so hungry that one person would start to chew a piece of meat, then pass it along to another family member while there was still some flavor in it. Daddy informed me that if the first chewer were that hungry, there would be no passing along.

Happy Fathers Day, Daddy. Many more.