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

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…]

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Holocaust Museum shooting this week made me think about pretending from a different angle—from the vantage point of conservatives who deny the evidence of systemic failures all around us. A thread runs through the thinking of a lot of political conservatives:

- The angry lone nut shooter isn’t influenced by the angry right mob
- Bernie Madoff is a bad apple; there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with Wall Street
- Abu Ghraib minders were just bad apples

Systems failure is way too scary to contemplate. If patterns seem to emerge, the safest course of action is to look away so you can pretend it isn’t there. 

The Tea Partiers aren’t revolutionaries. Everything is just fine, or it would be if we could cycle back to 80s Reagan ideas, and deal with those pesky bad apples one on one.

We knew healthcare reform would face fierce opposition—and it’s begun. As we speak, the same people behind the notorious “swiftboat” ads of 2004 are already pumping millions of dollars into deceptive television ads. Their plan is simple: torpedo healthcare reform before it sees the light of day by scaring the public and distorting the President’s approach.

He doesn’t come right out and name the “same people”, though, and it reminds me of something I’ve been wanting to explore. Public discourse of special interests usually is very vague. Politicians are chickenshits about it—all but the most liberal. So are the media—all but the most liberal.

As an example of a media outlet that won’t come right out and say who’s working behind the scenes, take MSNBC. It’s playing to the current leftward mood in the air, and making some interesting choices for new programs, ramping up the rhetoric as the clock approaches midnight, like a pop radio station that rocks harder after 7 p.m. But you know what MSNBC could never afford to do? My pet pipedream format for telling what forces are really operating in the public sphere.

I see it as a TV news program, but it could be a blog or a magazine or a comic book or an on- or offline radio program. It’s organized around issues and interests and it tells the truth about businesses and other organizations who lobby for issues on all sides (sometimes there are more than two sides, contrary to all popular wisdom).

The format is really simple: This is the issue; these lobbies are for it because x; these lobbies are against it because y; these groups are silent because z. I think such a structure would tend to tease out truth.

It would be so refreshing. When have you ever known an interviewer to ask “Who’s lobbying you for this, and why do they say they want it, and why do you think they really want it?” Never happens. Is there a gentleman’s agreement that it would be just too gauche? I think there must be. You didn’t see Dick Durbin getting complimented on his courage when he said banking interests own the Senate. Rather the opposite; I sensed commentators looking the other way, nervously, as though Durbin had a tail of toilet paper spilling out from the back of his pants.

If the issue is energy, the oil companies don’t get to come on or send their surrogates to tell about their commitment to wind power, because they’re not very committed to it. That’s why MSNBC would never make this show. The network depends on energy and pharma advertisers with their messages calculated to persuade me how much they care about saving the planet and about people who can’t afford their prescriptions.

Instead of a format like my pipedream, we get vagueness all around. We’re fed an illusion of the inside story with tales of the maneuvers of elected officials and their staffs, but rarely hear details about the influence of special interests, only amorphous generalities. I’m hungry for some blunt talk. I’d watch or read, and so would others who’d like to know what actually happens in Washington and other centers of power.

(I wonder if many Obama supporters are still responding to donation pleas. I was moved to give my little bits during the campaign, but feel slightly put off by the appeals now.)

I listened to the interviews about it on the Democracy Now podcast during a morning commute this week. (Don’t you just love taking in your news on podcasts? You can stop them and let certain bits sink in, form your own thoughts, and dip back in for more.)

Two impressions formed as I was barreling up I-355:

• First, why in hell isn’t this all over the place? It’s got everything: an already-disgraced bailout recipient; wounded personnel from Iraq, the contractors’ corollary to the Walter Reed scandal; a real human-lives consequence of the healthcare crisis. Heck, the contracting company, KBR, is even a former subsidiary of Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s old firm. Why isn’t this one of the handful of stories cable news is running over and over?
• Second, I was interested in the provenance of the investigative journalism. There’s been a partnership between the website ProPublica and ABC’s 20/20 program to cover the story.

It could be that I’m uninformed or naive—always a very real possibility with me —but I couldn’t recall another such partnership. Pairing public interest internet outlets with mainstream media on certain big stories could be one answer to the big whining question that always arises out of discussions about the decline of newspapers: “Who’s going to do the important, time-consuming investigative legwork? [snort!] Bloggers?”

Well, yeah. Maybe. Remember that Talking Points Memo took the lead on the story of the U.S. attorneys who were fired for their politics. One of TPM’s sites is even named ”Muckraker.”

Doesn’t it make sense? A public interest blog has the will to dig, while a partnering MSM outlet lends its credibility imprimatur. A grassroots outfit can mobilize its volunteer following to paw through government documents, saving on expense, and it has a unique ability to whip up a fuss to make things happen.

You don’t always need a big budget or lawyers to make things happen. I’ve heard Carol Marin, a local Chicago TV journalist, argue in a couple different forums that only big media have been able to afford the lawyers it takes to shepherd through FOIA requests. She uses it as a counterargument against future reliance on internet journalism. I don’t buy it. Everything in news is going to change when newspapers go down; it’s already starting. We’ll find ways to get government documents for free—probably by raising a huge squawk about it—just as easily as we can now do live video remotes for free.

Maybe I’ll propose that Dave Winer and Jay Rosen kick this around on their Rebooting the News podcast. (By the way, happy birthday, Dave. Welcome to fiftyfourhood. Fiftyfournia? Fiftyfouratopia?)

I’m so full of admiration for Simon’s missions and his skill at storytelling that I feel a little sheepish for blurting earlier on Twitter that he’s a print guy ‘til the death. During the Moyers interview he refined my understanding of where he stands on what brought newspapers to their present condition.

A former Baltimore Sun reporter, he tells about taking the paper’s third buyout some years ago, and puts some context around the current debate about charging for internet content. He explains how constant budget cuts in the service of bigger profits devalued the newspaper product to the point where, when the internet threat finally did come along, the online product wasn’t worth enough to charge for it. 

The larger share of the interview concerns systemic failures in all kinds of institutions—what The Wire was all about. He’s right, you know, that just electing the right guy isn’t going to yank this empire out of its self-imolation. Barack Obama knows that, too. At least that’s what he kept telling us in the campaign, when he talked about change being everybody’s business.

Still, now that Obama’s in office, he’s more centrist than some of us pretended he might be, and he spins a narrative, because that’s the way things work. When Moyers and Simon talked about “juking the stats” as a common thread that runs through the trouble with various institutions like education and law enforcement, I was thinking the real problem is something related to spinning the stats, but broader than that.

Ayn Rand talked a lot about pretending in her novels, especially in Atlas Shrugged. That’s the theme that makes me return to her, despite some of her uglier and now old-fashioned ideas. (I guess you take what you like and leave the rest from any thinker—from Rand with her female characters who thrive on contemptuous treatment, or from Simon and his apparent dismissal of the idea that decent reporting can be published in most any mode. The internet isn’t inherently fluffy and derivative.)

But about pretending. Don’t you think it’s the root of many evils? We delude ourselves personally, all the time. Our leaders and institutions seem to spend a whole lot more effort on framing what they’ve done or will do than they spend in the actual doing. Then we help them. It starts dawning on Dagney Taggart, the railroad exec in Atlas Shrugged, that she’s been enabling the behavior she despises, and she finally comes right out and says “I’m not going to help you pretend.”

Time to be blunt. That was the beauty of The Wire. Raw truth. Can we take it?

I can’t wait for Simon’s new series about post-Katrina New Orleans.

mp3

The jingle is funny, and outrageous in the sense that it’s silly it even exists, and I like it. I like the weekly show, too, and generally listen to it.

Sometimes, though, the show is overall just a little cute and bouncy, so I’m glad we also have Bob McChesney‘s Media Matters. It’s produced from AM station WILL, an NPR affiliate owned by the University of Illinois, and there’s a podcast. McChesney has a frankly liberal agenda, and so do his guests, who take calls when the Sunday show is done live. The newest podcast usually doesn’t show up until Tuesday.

Check out Dave Winer’s and Jay Rosen’s fairly regular Sunday media talks, too. Both bloggers, Dave is an internet pioneer, while Jay is an NYU prof, so their take on the future of journalism is pretty unique.

The key uses: Internet consumption. The virtual keyboard will make data entry a pain other than for entering credentials, quick searches and maybe light emails. This machine isn’t for data entry. But it is for reading emails and the news, watching videos on Hulu, YouTube, etc., listening to streaming music on MySpace Music and imeem, and doing video chat via tokbox.

Music on MySpace? Not very enterprising. OK, he’s managing expectations. That’s cool.

Actually, a device like the CrunchPad could accomplish data entry in a really rudimentary way. Think checklists.

Vendors of business software for mobile devices try to protect their turf and warn prospects that the only workable solution for data input is a complicated Blackberry app that syncs with the corporate datastore; wifi isn’t available, they say—and you sure as hell can’t trust it. I don’t know. I’m not sure syncing will be the default in a few years and in a lot of cases it’s not required now.

I love the idea of the pad and have been following its development, even dreaming up scenarios in which my employer could marry its safety inspection checklists with the pad hardware as a bundled product. Enable the chucking of clipboards in an economical way, all online. 

Thinking the Kia hamster commercial was very cute—especially the cool passenger’s crisp little inverse nod of recognition to another hamster at a stop light—I took to Twitter to see if others reacted as I did. The Twitterati likes it mostly.

Strikes me it’s an incredibly objective view. If you’re a marketer, you reach out to consumers with a phone survey or recruit them for a focus group and you’ve attached a lot of importance to wanting to know. You look at blogs for a sense of the pulse and you have to figure the bloggers have attached a certain measure of importance to the act of writing about your product, or may even have some agenda. It takes some effort to publish a blog post. But a twitterer doesn’t make a big investment of time in blurting out a tweet. A collection of opinions tossed out in this way seems very real, honest.

Not a lot of controls, but it is very easy to make and publish. Not that the publishing part is anywhere near as populist as YouTube. Click on “Soapbox” in the embed. You go to an MSN video page that’s dominated by MSNBC videos. Soapbox user videos, the thing you thought you were clicking to see, are relatively hidden away behind a little link on the top nav. That seems to be changing with the new MSN video site. (See preview.) But the change doesn’t favor the creations of everyday folks; it seems to tilt from an emphasis on news to an emphasis on TV shows.

I guess they’re feeling their way. Microsoft is getting quite live and webby—in some quarters of that big place. Pretty soon now you won’t even see dialog boxes when you install stuff, like “You may now disconnect from the Internet.”

Couple days ago Sharepoint Designer was freed. First thing some IT folks thought about? Lock it down in enterprises. Can’t have that now. Everybody publishing? Shudder.

I’m sure it must be hard for Microsoft to balance all the interests. They can’t diss the protectionist IT cops who are their customers for servers and Office, but at the same time they have to listen to the reality out there.

Control vs. contribute. I haven’t looked at it lately but there used to be a similarly interesting balancing act performed by Adobe in marketing Contribute on their site. As I recall it, there was practically no summary of the product on the microsite home. You forked immediately to pages for IT or publisher and each audience got a different story. Editors were told they could do anything! IT guys were assured they didn’t have to let anybody do anything. 

It’s nice. No surprise there, as it’s been adapted by Andrew Davies (newest Bleak House, Middlemarch, 1995 Pride and Prejudice).

Good time for it, too, with its threads of ruinous debt and government bureaucracy, all packaged up to satisfy a need to find amusement in despair. 

It’s undergone I-don’t-know-how-many redesigns since my day, but I never mind. Time moves on and I’m sure I’d hate the looks of my 1997 idea of cool if I had a look at it now. In fact, I don’t even want to check the wayback machine for fear of a cringe attack.

I did spot one little bit of my snarky copy that was either preserved or overlooked on the license plate lobbying page:

Funny to think about web development back then. If anything interactive was needed for the site, I was all about CGI/Perl, and flat text files were the only databases I thought I needed. And we got by; it was fine for the time.

While I’m loathe to visit a newsstand anymore I almost did pick up the new issue for a little better reading experience of Matt Taibbi’s The Big Takeover. A skim shows it would be worth the effort for a more energetic person. A tidbit: he reveals that AIG, by forming a savings and loan, was able to choose to be regulated by a laisse-faire regulatory agency in no way able to watch over it. If we’re going to focus on a narrow piece of the story, like the bonuses, why not that piece instead? It seems pretty important.

But I can’t get with reading long articles online. I tried to print it out but was short on ink.^* I want it read to me like an audio book. RS, why don’t you give it a try as a podcast? Not every story, maybe not every feature. Just a selection of nice long meaty articles that people like me might want to luxuriate in.

Would I pay? Maybe. A little.

He also mentioned in passing that each service would use its own chat tool, and that’s what got me wondering about something. If the chat is going to be further fragmented anyway, I wonder if Leo would mind if a few grownups gathered in its own chatroom to watch some of the shows.

I’d like to be able to watch the Gillmor Gang while chatting with a more mature group like the old NewsGang. In such a room, we could be as profane as the panelists if we wanted to be. It’s less offensive to me to see the occasional naughty word than it is to swim in a stream of whining “advice” for Steve on getting a decent mic or learning about lighting or shutting up about Twitter or shutting up about the Beatles. We could post links, too. Not all links are self-serving spam. Used by grownups, they probably would provide background on the topic under discussion.

My mother’s intuition tells me the snark comes from very young men—a sort of Digg, YouTube commenting crowd. I’m glad for Leo that he enjoys such a following; that crowd is necessary to achieve a really decent-sized tech audience. Their conversation just isn’t to my taste. Also I’m not so sure it’s his advertisers’ most desirable audience. Maybe he could even get a sponsor for a different sort of room, or make it into a premium service by serving it up with one of the video streams on special page.

Update (April 6): Christian Burns suggested a Friendfeed room would be good for this purpose. Today it happened in Friendfeed, in the beta interface and it didn’t even need a room.

I love their stuff. Check out the design essentials and fun stuff galleries.

But why oh why oh why oh why oh why do stock business pictures always always always feature nothing but gleaming smiles—people just delighted to distraction over the piece of paper they’re reviewing together. You can’t use photos like that without screaming “This is a con.”

This is a problem near the end of winter in Chicago, permapiles of black snow dotting the parking lots and the hope of spring not quite evident. Start watching a depressing (though wonderful) collection of stories and you can get caught up. It gets embedded in your brain, in your whole way of thinking.

It’s easy for me to slip into the world, since I operated on the periphery of one a lot like it 30 years ago as one of those dreaded community organizers in St. Louis, a city very like Baltimore: old, a little southern, beaten-down. I was a community involvement coordinator for the St. Louis Public Schools working in the voluntary desegregation program, part of a consent decree that preceded court-ordered busing in 1980. The Magnet School District office was located in an old elementary school at Pendleton and Enright, something like the cast-off digs of the major case squad on the show.

I had to do an intervention on myself on Sunday after a 12-hour streak. I made myself get up, and I ran through some of the things I should be doing around the house. Talking to myself, I said, “OK, I need to take the clothes out of the washer. Then I gotta dry that shit up.”

Later: The next day it came out it was Chris Matthews. Gotta say he voiced my own thought on the staging.

The talkers and politicians pretend to know; you can tell how hard they are trying to sound schooled and certain by the way they thrust out their chins. TV talkers have to sound confident if they want to be invited back to the show. Politicians have to sound confident if they hope to take advantage of the crisis so they can trot out longheld political ideologies and try to get them implemented. Both parties are doing this.

Few are admitting we’re through the looking glass now, and I’d like to see a little more of what the philosphers union was calling for in Hitchhikers: some admission that there are broad areas of doubt and uncertainty. I’d trust them all more.

The president and the treasury secretary are allowed one measure of over-confidence each, because it’s actually part of their job descriptions to boost consumer confidence—“only thing we have to fear is fear…” and all that rot.

Think about it. Even the real experts have to question whether it’s possible to predict the outcome of any given countermeasure when there’s no exact case study to draw from.

I picture the policymakers as engineers seated before a giant economy console. The main big fader in the center is the Federal Reserve interest rate control and it’s already been slid all the way to zero. They might as well just snap the knob off so they can concentrate on blindly fiddling with the other controls, see if one of them has some interesting effect one way or another. 

I think that’s what’s happening, and I’d actually feel a little more confident if the experts would admit it. As for the cock-sure amateurs, I’ve resolved to chalk them up as trolls, especially those still holding on to deregulation after all that’s happened.

Afterthought: Jay Rosen said something on Bill Moyers’ show two weeks ago about how the media prides itself above all on savviness. Knowing the score is the currency of pundits and politicians, too, especially if it’s predictive. Watching everybody claiming to know What Will Work when it comes to the economy reminds me of everybody knowing for sure What Would Work concerning the surge in Iraq, too. Nobody really knew that either.

After that: Robert Reich doesn’t think anybody knows what to do either.

The Wall Street Journal columnist Steven Pearlstein tears into Wall Street, saying it refuses to be pleased until the government sends tractor trailers full of cash to their loading docks.

I think it is about time to stop watching the ticker as politicians are talking. We’re relying on it, thinking of it as that CNN audience pulsometer shown during campaign debates and it won’t do.

Full clip at MSNBC.com (If your patience will hold out past the 30-second ad. Why don’t advertisers see that the difference between a 10-second and a 30-second pre-roll is an eternity to an online video viewer?)

The rug is still there, as are the presidential portraits Mr. Bush selected—one of Washington, one of Lincoln—and a collection of decorative green and white plates. During a meeting last week with retired military officials, before he signed an executive order shutting down the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Mr. Obama surveyed his new environs with a critical eye.

“He looked around,” said one of his guests, retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, “and said, ‘I’ve got to do something about these plates. I’m not really a plates kind of guy.’ ”

I do occasional maintenance on this widget because it has a couple hundred installs, so I should. Its value decreases when it doesn’t include enough timely searches.

(Click on “Search this” to refresh the widget and try another search.)

The rotating content leans heavily to Twitter Search because I think it’s such a fascinating way to get something of a handle on the pulse of opinion. To update it I add searches, and I also check the current searches to see if the results still show recent activity. (See the archive of currently rotating searches as well as retired searches. Note to Expression Engine heads: that archive page shows open entries for the active searches and closed entries for the retired ones—so easy.)

I’m getting to it now; thank you for your patience, just had to set it up. I’ve been surprised that interest in certain search terms has not waned as much as I would have expected. For example, “auto industry” and “iphone+storm” are not in the news as much as they were a few weeks ago when I added them, but they persist in racking up a lot of current results.

A slightly different sort of custom tool that tracks persistence of interest could be useful for research conducted by media outlets, and maybe other types of businesses, but I’m more tuned in to media and think of it first. Examples:

- Mainstream media, like monthly print magazines, having longer lead times, to see what people are still interested in.

- Even for more instant media, like TV or blogs, it could be handy for planning more-produced, better-researched features. If there’s no longevity to public interest in a given topic, it might not be worth the investment.

Of course this assumes there is a spot of value in the idea of enduring interest, and not just in the latest thing. Sometimes I despair of our “newest is all there is” way of looking at news and everything else.

If you wanted to go all radical, you might even say that sustained public interest in a topic maps to its importance and consequence. Nah…

What would be wrong with placing random unscheduled phone calls to some of the Wall Street bankers once in a while? Start off with “So, tell me a little about how you’re spending our tax money.” Use the silence. Let them spin, but follow up with specific questions. Depose them in a pleasant way. (Depose in the verbal examination sense—not remove them from office!)

Convention says you “can’t” do this, but we’ve come to expect that you’ll pull off some unconventional and unexpected feats. In fact we’re counting on it.

Update: Excellent! On Monday Citigroup was stonewalling on the planned purchase of a $47 million corporate jet using some of my money. Then a U.S. treasury official ”reached out” to the bank. Now Citgroup says it won’t take delivery. Nice one.

Then I tried to put myself in the shoes and mindset of a typical Fox News watcher listening to the comment and realized that this big-picture way of operating and thinking breeds suspicion and fear among that set. I imagine they’ve been conditioned to reason that if foreigners think it’s a good thing, Americans need to be wary. Isn’t that a rotten shame? God forbid we should look at things from anybody else’s point of view.

The good news is that reason defeated the narrowminded crowd this time; about time. Can the factions get closer on this score? I’m not sure. I mean, it’s not a thing you can compromise about—either you operate in a spirit of being open to possibilities or you don’t. Would we wish for this smart cool new president to meet the closedminded halfway? Maybe the best we can wish for is that, in a new political climate, rigid neo-con views gradually will be viewed by moderates as out of touch and old-fashioned.

I think that’s already happening. When you hear GOP leadership hopefuls talk in generalities about the future, it’s all about opening up, not about closing ranks. What I hear between the lines is “Not what Sarah Palin represents—if your only solid base is the white south, that’s not enough to be a national party.” 

As you might know, I’ve been obsessed with widgetmaking. The inauguration countdown widget that I put in the wild back in December 2007—when the idea of tomorrow’s transfer of power to Obama was wishful thinking—has been converted to a countup widget celebrating a new day. I love seeing it displayed with pride on African-American social networks and on blogs like Sicily Scene written by a woman from Wales living in Sicily.

Hey world, we’ve returned to the international community. It feels good to be back. Want to grab a cup of coffee?

You should read Matt Taibbi‘s The Great Derangement. I thought the account of his infiltration of John Hagee’s church would be the part I’d relish most, but it’s all really good. How is it related to this blunt assessment of Cheney’s credibility? Taibbi, after meeting with 9/11 truthers, after ridiculing them in print, comes to a conclusion that it’s only natural after being spun so often and so violently that we’re falling-on-the-floor dizzy. We start making up our own truth.

Bonus link: Taibbi on Sarah Palin.

I’ve been doodling around with a widget that rotates a number of what I think are interesting timely searches, mostly on Twitter search, but including some others.

Early last week the web was abuzz with rumors about a $99 iPhone offered by Wal-Mart, so I make it one of the widget’s searches. Each day there was more spam in the stream. I tried my best to filter it with minus switches, and finally had to give up.

I expect I’ll have to abandon the gas+price search soon for the same reason. I added another three switches today, but I have a feeling it’s just a matter of time before I won’t be able to manage it that way.

Craftier developers will know better ways to filter out certain users based on their tweet patterns and put them in 3rd party apps or in Twitter search itself. On the other hand, not putting the controls in Twitter’s public search might be a way to create value for a corporate product. But that would be scarcity thinking.

Play it again, Big.

Then, check out:

- Blog posts on the topic.

- Twitter search on Motrin.

Mommy bloggers, who tend to hang out on Twitter, were offended by the video’s copy, and the tone of the narration, which implies that wearing a baby in a sling or other carrying apparatus amounts to an affectation. It offended me, too, even though I wasn’t a baby wearer as a young mom. (I tried it, and it didn’t suit me, but not for any lifestyle reason—I just never felt I had the proper purchase on my baby; I liked belonging to the constant contact species, and carried my kids around a lot.)

Telling the folks you’re trying to persuade that their preferences are an affectation is the dumbest aspect. Think about it. It’s like trying to sell Visine to iPhone users by helpfully informing them they only bought their phone to look cool, but there’s help for you dumbasses. Visine can save you from yourselves, save you from the eyestrain you were dimwitted, vain and phony enough to inflict on yourselves.

A few commenters—looks like mostly guys and controversy trolls—are eyerolling or belittling the outrage. In which camp are the people at Johnson & Johnson’s agency who cooked this thing up? I do think there are culture camps here, and it’s because babywearing is still seen as a ”hippie thing”—not so much now as it was 20-30 years ago, but the perception lingers.

So, when the voiceover talent seems to curl her lip in derision at women who want to look like good moms, I gotta tell you, coming off the culture wars fought during the election campaign, it feels to me like Sarah Palin or Ann Coulter is talking to me in that video. And she’s saying “I’m so sick of your hippie shit—your latte-drinking, hybrid-driving, baby-slinging ways. Why don’t you go live on a commune and stop influencing normal heartland moms to adopt your godless ways.”

Sound like a stretch? Maybe, but you really can’t argue with perceptions, and that’s how the read struck me. Which is why, as so many bloggers have pointed out, J&J should have tested the tone with the target audience. Who approved that voiceover anyway? That’s who I’d blame, and send the agency’s creative staff to tonedeaf school.

Wired Obama supporters have been thinking a lot about how the power of his online communities might be harnessed to do some good beyond getting him elected.

What would you think about bringing public hearings into the online world? It wouldn’t have to be exactly like Capitol Hill hearings. Hearings have taken to the road for a long time, but they tend to keep to the same formal rules.

A different kind of supplementary input might be put in place so that testimony could be given via one of the live video services, in shorter chunks, and by a different class of witnesses—more ordinary citizens, more front-line experts, fewer heads of agencies and heads of interest groups. (The higher you climb on the title ladder, the less you learn about what’s happening and the more you learn about what the establishment wants you to think is happening.) It would be less formal than hearings held in Washington, but more official than a town hall.

Live commentary on the testimony could be mined not just for reaction to the testimony but also for ideas. It could shape the direction of the hearings in real time.

I don’t believe anybody thinks Joe citizen should vote to decide things like how to fix the economy. But swarms do one thing very well: they ferret out the important, consequential bits of an issue, situation or conversation. When this happens in real time, we’re saying “Yes, more of that, please. Now.” We’re like players in a game of hide the thimble, telling the hunter if she’s hot or cold, closer or further away from the prize, or the essence of a thing.

If our representatives in government take the trouble to listen, and if they are canny about it, they’ll use that power to navigate the issue terrain.

Later: Brian Solis pens a good roundup of Obama’s use of social media during the campaign and and floats ideas for using it for governing. The stat that popped out at me:

YouTube also swayed towards Obama with a network of 358,000 to 191,000, with the Obama camp posting over 1,800 videos compared to McCain’s 330. These videos accounted for 110 million views.

I’ve been thinking for a long time that TV shows should do this when there’s still an audience, but maybe not a big enough audience to justify Hollywood production. I don’t know if comic books would be my medium of choice, but I think I’d consume more of some stories in just about any form.

It’s especially cruel to fans, don’t you think, to lop off a series in mid-story like both of David Milch’s HBO series—Deadwood and John From Cincinnati. Give me a podcast or an animated movie, a novelization, shoot, a blog. Just tell me what you had in mind to wind the thing up. You know? And, OK, because I pay for HBO, I think I feel a little more used when I don’t get my conclusion.

They’ve saved up all the gossipy behind-the-scenes stories they had promised not to reveal until after the election. NewsGang Live junkies should savor this tidbit about discussions around choosing Hillary as VP. @stevegillmor was always convinced that Obama’s staff bore a grudge, that it colored their advice, but that Obama himself might not have been so set against the pick. I always agreed.

Obama was never inclined to choose Sen. Hillary Clinton as his running mate, not so much because she had been his sometime bitter rival on the campaign trail, but because of her husband. Still, as Hillary’s name came up in veep discussions, and Obama’s advisers gave all the reasons why she should be kept off the ticket, Obama would stop and ask, “Are we sure?” He needed to be convinced one more time that the Clintons would do more harm than good. McCain, on the other hand, was relieved to face Sen. Joe Biden as the veep choice, and not Hillary Clinton, whom the McCain camp had truly feared.

This is one of those once-every-several-weeks occasions when I’m moved to print out a long article so I can cuddle up with it and relish it. I keep thinking I should play around with an alternate CSS stylesheet that makes the presentation of things like this more book-like.

Separately from the Newsweek roundup, it comes out that Sarah Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent. She thought it was a country. I don’t know about you, but I’m not done with her. I say pile on the ridicule if it helps keep that horrid woman off the national stage. I’m totally in Steve’s camp on that score, too.

Newsweek’s piece is supposed to cover the uptick in threats against Obama in September and early October when she was busiest “energizing” her base with the associations game. That person, for all her Christian professions, has an ugly ugly soul. I’ve never seen any other politician bask in boos the way others soak up cheers.

About Nina Simone | Versions of Feeling Good

You can make your own predictions on the NPR site. It would have been nice if you could save your map, and if they somehow could have integrated the predictions with the reality.

After thinking about heading downtown, I’ve decided to stay in for the evening and watch TV and the swarm—trading being there for knowing what’s happening, and watching the finale in the same way I’ve watched the whole process.

All day I kept trying to remind myself that I might regret not going, that being in Grant Park might give me a memory like being at the band shell in Central Park in December 1980 for John Lennon’s memorial. I’ve always been glad I didn’t give into the urge to blow off attending it because the crowd would be a hassle. I suppose it might boil down to getting old.

The spot, made by Progressive Future, is airing on MSNBC and CNN this weekend. Quite a contrast from the other side’s 527 efforts.