The A.P. continues to come up with one dumb idea after another.

I have more on this craziness over at True/Slant.

“Today you are the media, it is your duty to report and keep the hope alive.”
- A recent Facebook status update by Mir Hossein Mousavi

Over the weekend, I touched on the significance social media is playing in this revolution, and Mashable has more details…

The status update, posted in Farsi and translated both in the Facebook comments and by CNN, reflects a radical shift in the way the media reports current events, with citizens themselves becoming the most prolific source of information on what’s happening in Iran.

The so-called “Twitter revolution” is also proving itself to be far more than that. [...] YouTube has also become a source of raw video from the ground, and Mousavi’s latest long-form statement wasn’t communicated as a release to the press: rather it was posted as a note on the candidate’s Facebook page today.

The Facebook post is a direct response to claims by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, that Ahmadinejad received nearly double the number of votes Mousavi garnered.

More as it develops…

“For those of you who didn’t realize how dire the situation was (even though I implored you to take it seriously) I hope this video will make it crystal. If our banking system failed and it set off a chain reaction around the world, our credibility would have been TOAST… Letting the market work would have literally resulted in almost a complete unraveling of our way of life. Imagine if you had woken up the next day and discovered that your debit card, your credit cards… none of them worked. It would have been catastrophic.”

I thought the story was a bit fishy at the time. Why is it that the only source was one Congressman in an obscure video clip? Where was the substantiation from… well… anyplace else? How is that anything so big and dire could take place last September, and nothing leak out about it until now? My suspicion was correct.

Kanjorski and the Money Market Funds: The Facts
“With the Kanjorski Meme still spreading (see Ben Smith, Andrew Leonard, Moldbug, and more), I think I’m finally able to squash it with some hard figures: there never was a $500 billion outflow from any asset class in the space of a couple of hours or even weeks, and the Fed never shut down or froze any money-market accounts. This is not the first time that Kanjorski has made these allegations. But first, it’s worth going through the timeline…

on September 24, Kanjorski held a hearing on Capitol Hill with Treasury secretary Hank Paulson… Kanjorski is clearly fishing here: he’s talking about anonymous newspaper reports and vague “conversations” and anonymous Wall Street “friends”, and basically asking Paulson to confirm his suspicions. Which, naturally, Paulson doesn’t do, because the suspicions weren’t actually true. That said, however, Paulson’s being-polite-to-the-Congressman answer doesn’t explicitly say that Kanjorski’s numbers are false. After that, we didn’t here much more about this meme until Kanjorski resuscitated it on C-Span, this time citing the Federal Reserve as his data source, and beefing up the numbers for good measure…

…This is all, frankly, fiction, and it’s not clear where most of it came from, although maybe Kanjorski’s “friends” on Wall Street are the same people as Michael Gray’s sources at the New York Post. Thinking back to that crazy week it’s easy to get details wrong, especially when you’re speaking off the cuff on a call-in show. But let’s stop treating it as though there’s any substance to it. Please.”

So Kanjorski “misremembered” his sources as he retells the story over time, and bad reporting from the New York Post is given new life on the Intertubes.

That was a bad week for the financial sector. But there was no retail panic in money markets, no $550B drawdown in a couple of hours and the world wide financial system was not 24 hours from collapse. Good story though. Kanjorksi enjoys telling it.

There are still questions and lessons to be learned. My question: To what extent did the Treasury Secretary and the executive branch permit misinformation and fear to be used to panic the Congress into abrogating their responsibilities to the American taxpayer and pass a very bad bill with very little consideration?

I don’t think this story is done.

A quick hello to all of the Donklephant community.

I go by the somewhat-original moniker ‘The Pajama Pundit’ and I blog daily (hourly?) at ThePajamaPundit.com. Big thanks go to Justin Gardner for giving me a shot to post here. I’ve been an avid reader and fan of Donklephant for a long time and to be given the opportunity to write for the site is quite an honor and a privilege.

I consider myself to be a political independent in that I refuse to toe-the-line (thanks Jeremy!) of any particular political party. I would describe myself as a fiscally conservative, socially progressive Centrist. When voting, I consider a candidate’s record and rhetoric rather than whether there is an ‘R’ or a ‘D’ (or an ‘I’) next to their name.

For comments or criticism (and hopefully some praise?), you can contact me here or visit my personal blog.

Some new ‘controversy‘ over Google Bombs:

It took four years for Google to address the “Google bomb” that was lobbed at former President Bush.

But it took the Internet behemoth only a few days to defuse the same attack on President Obama.

Four years versus a few days … Some Googlers are asking why.

[snip]

Google itself said the reason it took only a few days to redirect Obama’s Google bomb was that, this time, it already had the algorithm in place.

Really? You are kidding right? I guess that we should note the source here…

It says within that very article that Google developed the algorithm to correspond to “Google bombs” in 2007. So, now when Obama (or anyone else for that matter) gets ‘bombed’, they already have a response in place. It’s not that they react more quickly to Democrats, it’s that they now have the technology to react more quickly in all instances.

Look, I have no doubt that a large chunk of Google’s employees are liberals — the company is based in California after all — but to suggest that the company was somehow trashing Bush and saving face with Obama is absurd. They are a company that wants to make money, and offending people of a certain political persuasion is not a good way to make a buck.

That would simply be bad business and let’s face it — Google does not do bad business.

[cross-posted at The Pajama Pundit]

I wrote about this plan recently, but today I find out that it may not happen.

Why?

Because it’s not “free market” enough.

Good times…

The FCC has been considering auctioning 25 megahertz of spectrum in the 2155MHz to 2180MHz band. As part of the rules for using the spectrum, the FCC plans to require license holders to offer some free wireless broadband service.

The FCC sees the idea, which is based on a proposal submitted to the FCC by M2Z Networks in 2006, as a way to provide broadband Internet service to millions of Americans who either can’t afford or don’t want to pay for high-speed Internet access.

However, in a letter sent to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin on Wednesday, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez expressed the administration’s opposition to the idea, which could be voted on as early as next week, according to the report.

“The administration believes that the (airwaves) should be auctioned without price or product mandate,” Gutierrez wrote, according to the Journal’s report. “The history of FCC spectrum auctions has shown that the potential for problems increases in instances where licensing is overly prescriptive or designed around unproven business models.”

An FCC representative told the newspaper that it had received Gutierrez’s letter and was reviewing it.
“We agree that market forces should help drive competition, but we also believe that providing free basic broadband to consumers is a good thing,” the representative told the Journal.

I’d urge those FCC folks to just wait another month and a half and they’ll have a much more receptive audience.

It makes sense to at least offer a basic connection to the information superhighway. Because the new economy will never be fully realized without everybody having access.

Me, I’ll stick with my fast internet connection and gladly pay the premium.

Well, that’s been pushed by folks inside and outside of the FCC and now it seems like those who want to keep the internet free and open are set to take over.

From Wired:

The Obama-Biden transition team on Friday named two long-time net neutrality advocates to head up its Federal Communications Commission Review team.

Susan Crawford, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, and Kevin Werbach, a former FCC staffer, organizer of the annual tech conference Supernova, and a Wharton professor, will lead the Obama-Biden transition team’s review of the FCC.

Why should you love these people? Well, listen to what Crawford had to say this year…

This March at a telecom policy conference in Hollywood, for example, Crawford bluntly told Ambassador Richard Russell, the White House’ associate director on science and technology policy, that he lived in a fantasyland when he asserted that the United States’ roll-out of broadband is going well.

“I think it’s magical thinking to imagine that we’re somehow doing fine here, and I just want to make sure that we recognize that even the [International Telecommunications Union] says that between 1999 and 2006 we skipped form third to 20th place in penetration,” she noted acidly at the annual Tech Policy Summit, a gathering of top officials in the world of tech policy (of which Wired.com was a participant and sponsor.)

“We’re not doing at all well for reasons that mostly have to do with the fact that we failed to have a US industrial policy pushing forward high-speed internet access penetration, and there’s been completely inadequate competition in this country for high speed internet access,” she said.

And in a final introductory statement during her talk (that’s likely to send shivers down the spines of telecom company executives) she said that she believes internet access is a “utility.”

“This is like water, electricity, sewage systems: Something that each and all Americans need to succeed in the modern era. We’re doing very badly, and we’re in a dismal state,” she said at the time.

Basically, they’re realists and they get the fact that every other country in the world is treating the internet as if it’s a utility and if we don’t do the same, we’re screwed.

More as it develops…

Just by way of introduction, the ANP is an independent non-profit video news organization in DC. We produce pieces for the web, but offer all of our content for free to newspapers, blogs, websites, radio, and television so please feel free to embed or share our videos. We see all visitors to our website as potential partners and hope that our community will eventually help fund specific beats, send us news tips and story ideas, and join us as freelancers. Another great site to check out is http://spot.us.

We’re convinced that journalistic collaboration will be essential to the future of news, and so far it’s worked pretty well for us. We’ve worked with McClatchy, The Nation, the Washington Independent, and The Huffington Post on investigative and breaking stories and look forward to more teamwork in the future.

Recently, I’ve been covering voting infrastructural issues for the ANP and found myself in Philadelphia. During the 2008 primary, parts of Pennsylvania (particularly areas with high concentrations of poverty and people of color) experienced major delays due to machine failures, and many voters ended up waiting in line for hours or getting disenfranchised. When I spoke to Philly’s Deputy Commissioner, Fred Voigt, I was startled by a strong sense of institutional inertia, an unwillingness to admit that serious problems exist and, what’s more, that these problems could possibly be fixed with better management and funding. Furthermore, he and the commission (headed by Marge Tartaglione) seemed alarmingly unconcerned about long lines leading to disenfranchisement. We aired a story about this on Monday, featuring this disturbing interview. Since then, the NAACP and the Election Reform Network have filed a lawsuit against the state or Pennsylvania, requesting that paper ballots be made available for the voters of PA in case there are machine breakdowns. ANP’s original story was quoted in the complaint—Voigt’s comments were described as an example of a “woefully inadequate” official response to election problems.

We aired a follow-up yesterday, covering the lawsuit and presenting more of our strange interview with Fred Voigt. I asked Voigt how voters could avoid lines, and gave me another surprising answer.

We’ll continue following this case and the state of voting in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. (If you have ideas or tips, please feel free to email us at contact@newsproject.org.)

ANP: Voters Sue Pennsylvania, Election Official Scoffs

Click here to view our original story.

Click here to view the Voter Action complaint and plaintiffs’ memorandum.

There are a lot of options for this (CNN, Current, C-Span), but I’d say MSNBC’s video offering is the best by far.

However, there’s a new player in town called Hulu, and if you haven’t been to their site yet, you’re missing out. The joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. offers hundreds upon hundreds of TV shows and movies you can watch online for free.

In any event, check out their Election ‘08 Hub if you want some incredibly high quality video to watch tonight.

And remember, I’ll be “open streaming” the debate tonight, so please join me at 9pm EST.

Haha, you really can’t make stuff like this up.

From Wash Post:

“McCain Wins Debate!” declares the ad which features a headshot of a smiling McCain with an American flag background. Another ad spotted by our eagle-eyed observer featured a quote from McCain campaign manager Rick Davis declaring: “McCain won the debate– hands down.”

This campaign is seriously imploding.

In any event, if you see that ad on this site PLEASE take a screenshot of it and send it to me at justin@donklephant.com.

Thanks!

However, when Obama essentially borrows the snide tone of McCain’s recent attacks, he does himself no favors with independents and fence sitting Democrats.

Here, check it out…

Or hell, maybe he does do himself favors. After all, nothing in the ad is false and McCain has apparently scored numerous points with independent voters and fence sitting Democrats by going negative.

Yes folks, maybe I don’t have my finger on the pulse anymore (or did I ever?) and this nonsense works like a charm to swing the swing voters. Maybe they’re that gullible.

If so, how unbelievably sad that would be.

Moving on…

OK, if he were the 72-year-old guy down the block, I could cut him some slack. Whatever age you are, if you don’t have any use for the Net, if you don’t want the hassle of learning all that new stuff, fine … But if you’re running for the highest office in the land and one of the most powerful positions on earth, shouldn’t you at least know how to log on to the freakin’ Internet by yourself? [McCain said] “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon.” Have it down fairly soon? It’s a double-click, Senator. A little closer together, sir — click-click. Sheesh. Ordinary folks from 3 to 103 have picked this up in minutes, and he’ll have it down fairly soon.

Murrell goes on to say he’s bothered by McCain’s willful ignorance of the Internet not because such a thing is uncommon but because it shows an incurious streak that is not good for a leader.

I have to agree. Eight years ago it was probably still acceptable for a candidate running for president to be unengaged with the Internet. Now? Not so much. The Internet in its various applications will be the dominant mode of communication in the coming century (if it isn’t already). I don’t know if McCain’s resistance to the technology reveals an incurious side but it doesn’t speak well of how well he’ll engage and fit in to a 21st century nation. From basic communication to commercial transactions to how we’re forming our social bonds and networks, the Internet is vital. Not every American needs to log on, but the president surely needs more than a distant knowledge of how it all works.

McCain is an old man. The last thing he needs to be doing is looking out of date. For the sake of his image and campaign, I hope he figures out this Internet thing pretty quickly. Just having people read to you what’s online is not enough.

All that changed when God created the Internet. Don’t even try arguing with me about that; only God loves independents enough to create a system to make it easier for us to get together. And as a result, a genuine independent-voter movement is taking shape and gaining momentum all across the country.

Before my first online search for “independent voter” some years back, I did not know a single other independent — at least, not one who admitted it. Today I’m in contact with independents from New York to California and all those wonderful heartland states in between, all of whom I met online. The Internet has proven to be a lifeline to help us work together to bring about the political reform we believe the country needs.

One lifeline site for independents is The Hankster, a daily blog by longtime political activist Nancy Hanks, who posts brief summaries and links to news items of interest to independents. Nancy keeps us informed, while CUIP*, the organization behind the web site IndependentVoting.org, keeps us connected. Through their web site, print magazine and monthly conference calls with independent activists across the country, CUIP has done more than any other group to promote grassroots activism and cooperation among independents. Before the growth of the Internet, CUIP’s database consisted largely of former members of Ross Perot’s Reform Party and other minor parties, but today many independents whose names have never appeared on any party’s membership roster have become part of this nationwide independent movement after finding CUIP online.  

When independents begin shedding their independent ways and actually start networking with each other, that’s news. The Internet is the perfect medium for us; we can meet other independents without having to physically rub elbows with each other. It’s much easier for us to remain psychologically independent by hanging out in cyberspace, but we feel empowered at the same time. Someday we’ll have enough clout to scare the daylights out of career politicians; the last thing they want is an unruly bunch of disgruntled, anti-establishment, nonpartisan types getting together and making life miserable for them. 

These are heady times for independents. And now that we can more easily find each other, there’s no turning back. For us, the power of the Internet lies in its ability to unite us in our work toward political reform — despite our wide-ranging and diverse views on all other political issues.

* That would be the New York City-based Committee for a Unified Independent Party, which long ago gave up on the unified party idea but didn’t give up on the name. 

Marcia Ford is the author of We the Purple: Faith, Politics and the Independent Voter.

Back in Fall 2006, Joe’s website went down and his campaign blamed the rival Ned Lamont’s campaign…mostly because the netroots were backing Lamont and it was an easy accusation to make against bloggers.

Well, it turns out that not only did Lamont not have anything to do with it, but Lieberman’s people knew the real cause soon after an investigation by the FBI was conducted…back in 2006. That’s right…Lieberman knew about this back in 2006. And the information is only coming out now because a Connecticut newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

From AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Joe Lieberman’s re-election campaign caused its own Web site to crash on the eve of the August 2006 Connecticut primary, federal investigators have found — not supporters of Democratic challenger Ned Lamont, whom Lieberman implied were responsible.

“In short, the server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured,” according to an Oct. 25, 2006, e-mail included in FBI documents obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press. “There was no evidence of (an) attack.”

Once reported by the media, the accusations by Lieberman’s campaign helped overwhelm the Web site on primary day, too, the investigators said.

Fair’s fair and for Joe to sit on this for more than a year and a half says a lot about his character. This type of nonsense gives Independents a bad name, and it’s time to apologize, and soon.

If someone sends you an email, Justin, do you then tell people you “obtained” it?

Drudge never said he got an email from the Clinton staff, only that a Clinton staffer had ‘circulated’ it in email, which of course people of all persuasions would have been doing during those two highly active days on the Free Republic forums, and that he -obtained- a copy of it.

The point was also that a member of Free Republic scanned the photo that was uploaded and reposted, on Feb. 23 and much discussed and, as I said in the blog entry, obviously would have been passed around in email for the two days before Drudge reported it. Drudge was long a member of that forum and has many e-friends there.

The reason Clinton camp would not have had an interest in doing it was that her much anticipated foreign policy speech with endorsement of 32 former generals and other security heads was being made the day Drudge reported this, and the video of the occasion with her endorsement by all those guys was wiped out by the story about the photo. Today I saw for the first time a photo from that speech/event with the former generals (including Wesley Clark), and it was a speech almost not heard or seen outside the hall thanks to that photo news.

They did provide the transcript but not too many people are interested in reading transcripts.

That’s a fair point, but on a day that she was making a foreign policy speech about Islamic extremism, you don’t think some of her people would also try to attack the other candidate with an Islamic smear? One might think that this could draw even more attention to the speech, yes? And with the numerous strategic mistakes the Clinton campaign has made in message, tone and organization, it’s a completely plausible scenario.

In addition, here’s what I said in response to an earlier comment by mw in the aforementioned post, and I think it applies to what Andrys said as well…

The original Drudge story said that Clinton staffers were circulating it and that Drudge obtained it. So it’s completely plausible that these people were surfing Free Republic, saw the photo, passed around the link and then floated the link to Drudge. Otherwise, why tie it to Clinton? There’s no reason to. Drudge, who is known for pushing such stories without ANY attribution, would have just posted the photo of Obama himself.

Also, let’s not forget that no additional information came out from the Clinton campaign. Why is this? Wouldn’t they have aggressively tried to prove that they didn’t send it around?

Consider me unconvinced.

I stand by that feeling. And the reason being is that the Clinton campaign has been feeding Drudge stuff consistently for quite some time now. Like him or not, Drudge has the most popular gossip sites in the world and if something is splashed across the front page it enters the zeitgeist immediately. It’s a seductive thing for a campaign, and maybe this was a mistake by a lower level person, but again…nobody got fired.

I respect those who have a different opinion of the situation, but for anybody to say that my version isn’t as valid as theirs isn’t taking into account some well known political realities. I’ll be more than happy to say I was wrong if something else comes to light, but for now I’m sticking to my interpretation of the situation…which, again, has never been refuted by the Clinton campaign.

He’s about scoops, and gets them. But once you realize that the Clintons’ tax returns and the Olympics ceremony boycott stories came from the Clinton camp, do you still believe that photo of Obama in a turban fell off a turnip truck?

Hillary’s team has been giving Drudge “secret” exclusives on a lot of stuff, and not just recently. It’s an open secret how pushing dirt through Drudge works, and even though some here at Donklephant dismissed me for believing that Hill’s camp pushed that image, I think it’s important to remember that the campaign never followed up on who did it, nobody was ever fired as a result and nothing additional was said, like “Yeah, Drudge made this up.” And as we all know, when a campaign doesn’t say something, it can resonate just as much as when they do.

So what do you think?

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

I swear, nearly everything this guy says isn’t going to happen has happened. People would have considered him a visionary if he would have just said “will” instead of “won’t.”

Definitely read the whole thing.