The conscience of the race

An excerpt from The moment that put John Edwards back in the game:

Last night, while Barack Obama was going Wal-Mart on Hillary Clinton, and while Hillary was going Rezko on Obama, and while they were both looking for more ammunition to use in yet another personal attack, John Edwards did something extraordinary.

John Edwards stepped up and showed some leadership. He reminded his opponents that this campaign isn’t about their personal lives; it’s about the future of our country, and what we should do to make it a better place.

Edwards talked about the issues, and in the process he took a debate that was descending into meaninglessness and made it meaningful.

[…]

At the very least, voting for Edwards will help him stay in the race, not only keeping the race focused on issues, but also earning enough delegates to exert considerable sway over the the nomination process and allowing him to keep progressive issues at the center of the debate.

At best, he could win the nomination. Just because the pundits say it’s impossible doesn’t mean it can’t happen. There are still 47 states left to go.

You be the judge: who is exhibiting leadership? Watch:

If you build it, I will come

I have been commuting between Marin County and Silicon Valley for more than six years now, at least an hour each way. To make the time pass, lots of good listening material is essential. The local radio stations served for a while, but they weren’t up to the task for the long haul (especially as the Bush administration wore on and I became less and less able to tolerate NPR and its constant reporting and commentary on depressing developments). I realized long ago an ordinary CD player wouldn’t do the job either. An ordinary CD can hold only ten or twenty songs and only a fraction of an audiobook. I needed something that could play CD-ROM’s with 200 MP3’s apiece.

I experimented with a portable MP3-CD player connected to a tiny FM transmitter for receiving and playing my songs on my car’s stereo, but the batteries in the transmitter needed changing every couple of days and there was no one frequency that was empty enough for me to use all the way from one end of my drive to the other, so I was constantly fiddling with the tuning on the transmitter and on my in-dash receiver.

Eventually I discovered a Sony-made in-dash MP3-CD player and bought it. It was great! But burning new CD-ROM’s every week or two started to become a drag. Then I found a JVC model that had a USB socket on the front panel where I could plug in a thumb drive full of music. It was really great! But it was stolen. I replaced it and am now on my third MP3-capable in-dash receiver (another Sony).

None of them has been perfect. If you build one that has none of the following flaws (each found in one or more of my previous players), I will immediately buy it:

  • Cannot navigate 1,000+ songs other than “nexting” through them one at a time
  • Cannot simultaneously display title, album, and artist
  • Display unreadable in direct sunlight
  • No clock display when switched off
  • Control buttons smaller than those on a smartphone
  • Clock display fails to update while a song is playing
  • Cannot display folder or filename of the current song
  • Forgets position in song/folder/playlist when car is turned off
  • Cannot adjust volume without disrupting the momentary display of some song details
  • Cannot disable the annoying “you forgot to detach the detachable faceplate” beep when turning off the car

Whose election is it anyway?

If I hadn’t already canceled my cable TV subscription, learning about the media shenanigans described below would make me do it in a heartbeat. (And you should consider it too. Do these assholes deserve hundreds of your dollars every year? Believe me, after a short couple of weeks of withdrawal symptoms you’ll never want to go back.)

Also, if I weren’t already going to vote for John Edwards, the way corporate America is trying to shape my opinion would make me vote for him just for spite.

Please contribute whatever you can to the Edwards campaign on Friday, January 18th, when we’ll be trying to raise a record-breaking $7 million in one day.

Mainstream Media Continues Blackout of John Edwards

John Edwards was the Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee in 2004, a former United States Senator, an accomplished businessman, a great father and husband, and a very well credentialed candidate for President on paper. […]

But despite the apparent three way horserace, the Washington Corporate Media Cocktail Party Elitists has deliberately removed John Edwards from your TV screen for many months. And it happened again today when right wing CNN and ultra right wing Faux Noise showed clips of speeches from Clinton and Obama while not showing clips of speeches from Edwards. […]

Why would the corporate media knowingly freeze out a candidate from national coverage when on paper, the candidate is credentialed, credible, and clearly one of the top three nominees of a major political party?

The answer I believe is as follows: John Edwards is 100% dead serious about destroying the corrupt corporate power structure that has been destroying the American middle class for decades. It’s a structure that is killing the American middle class’s wallets and pocketbooks, schools, health care, ability to own a home, etc… And who owns the Washington Post, the New York Times, 90% of talk radio, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN […]

Voters in Democratic primaries could give a big middle finger to the national media if they make John Edwards the Democratic nominee for President. An Edwards nomination would be a punch in the gut to the Broders, Russerts, Courics, and other talking head shills in the corporate media. It could be the start of rendering these people utterly powerless.

These corporate shills think they have the power to decide who voters in both parties can select and not select.

U.S. corporate elite fear candidate Edwards

Ask corporate lobbyists which presidential contender is most feared by their clients and the answer is almost always the same — Democrat John Edwards. […]

Open attacks on the business elite are seldom heard from mainstream White House candidates in America, despite skyrocketing CEO pay, rising income inequality, and a torrent of scandals in corporate boardrooms and on Wall Street. […]

“I think Hillary is approachable. She knows where a lot of her funding has come from, to be blunt,” said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Stanford Group Co., a market and policy analysis group.

Unbelievable! CNN narrows the Field of Candidates!

Once again in the Corporate Media makes an “Executive Decision” about who America should see as their Viable Choices:

Hillary Clinton
Barack Obama
John McCain
Rudy Giuliani
Mike Huckabee
Mitt Romney

Only these Candidates were the Focus of the latest CNN Poll

Where is John Edwards in this Poll?

(for that matter where is Ron Paul?)

[Edwards has done better than Giuliani, by a long shot!]

[…]

Could it be that CNN did not quite like the Results, when Edwards was included in their last Poll?

The mainstream media blackout of John Edwards: Some metrics

[T]he MSM is actively excluding Edwards from the national dialog […]

Of all the multi-candidate headlines on Google News, Edwards appears in just 8%, compared to 97% for Obama and 95% for Clinton.

In other words, out of 2,901 multi-candidate headlines, Edwards appeared in only 228. Obama appeared in 2,813. Hillary, 2,761.

This, my friends, is a f**king blackout.

Survey USA Drops Edwards Based on “Judgment”

I was perplexed by a recent poll done by Survey USA in conjunction with local Oregon news affiliate KATU News, where Edwards was left out of the polling. In case you didn’t know, Edwards has deep support here in Oregon. Oregonians gave more money to Edwards than they have to Clinton or Obama. […]

I asked the representative at Survey USA why they did not include John Edwards in their recent general election polling. He said that they included him in the primary polls, but when it comes to general election polling they make a judgment call on how viable a candidate is. I told him that didn’t make sense because they included Rudy Giuliani and he has less delegates than Edwards and is less viable as of right now. He said that they make a judgment based on how likely that candidate is to make it to the general election, and if a candidate is less viable they drop them, and if they’re more viable they include them. I reiterated that it still didn’t make sense, and that if that is how they did things, they shouldn’t include Giuliani, and if they did, they should include Edwards since he is more viable.

Corporate media and the Edwards unelectability myth

One of the biggest myths spread by the corporate media and corporate Democrats about the 2008 election is that John Edwards’ populist platform makes him the least electable Democrat. They claim that Edwards’ rhetoric is a fiery, divisive brand of class warfare, and that Americans want a uniter like Barack Obama, or an experienced insider like Hillary Clinton — not an “angry” outsider who will fight against the system.

This myth couldn’t be more false. […]

Since July 1, 2007, there have been ten public polls testing Edwards and McCain in a general election match-up. Edwards wins 7 of these, losing once and tying twice. His average margin of victory is 5.5 points.

No Democrat does better.

John Edwards defeated an incumbent Republican U.S. Senator in a red state.

Neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton has ever faced a tough Republican opponent. Ever.

[…]

CNN has stopped including John Edwards in its general election polls. In CNN’s most recent poll that actually included Edwards, Edwards beat McCain by by eight points. In that same poll, McCain beat Clinton by two points, and tied Obama.

Fox News has never once — not once, not a single time — done a general election poll featuring John Edwards, despite doing several with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

By now it should be obvious to you that the corporate media doesn’t want you or your neighbor to vote for John Edwards.

Are you going to follow their instructions?

The Polls You Won’t Hear Much About

[F]or all the hubbub over the New Hampshire pre-primary polls and how accurate or inaccurate they were, it’s rather interesting that some polls that may have more import have got comparatively minimal coverage.

I speak of the CNN and Rasmussen polls that provide national head-to-head match-ups of presidential candidates. […]

McCain is by far the GOP’s strongest candidate in the general election. […]

John Edwards is by far the Democrats’ strongest candidate in the general election. He is the only one who is not beaten outright by any Republican candidate […]

Hillary Clinton is the weakest Democratic candidate in the general election. She loses to every single Republican except Fred Thompson and Ron Paul […]

Barack Obama is in between Edwards and Hillary Clinton in strength in the general election.

Cheering For The Narrative More Than The Candidate

If Edwards wins, the narrative will be about progressivism and populism rising. If Obama wins, the narrative will be about partisanship and ideology declining. If Clinton wins, the narrative will probably be about political skill, or something. Whether or not these narratives are either fair or even accurate matters little right now, since there is precious little time to change them. As such, the apparent truth is that an Edwards victory […] will result in much better press for progressives than either a Clinton or Obama victory. Also, beyond the Democratic nomination narrative, consider the rhetoric Clinton, Edwards and Obama would choose in the general elections. As TocqueDeville has pointed out, if Edwards were to become the nominee, we can expect nine months of populist, anti-corporate, anti-elites rhetoric. For my money, that is far preferable to hearing nine months of rhetoric about experience and getting things done, or nine months of rhetoric about the start of a post-partisan, post-ideological age.

Just Imagine Hearing This on Your TV for the Next Year

“How long are we going to allow drug companies and insurance companies to run America? America doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to us.”

“For 25 years corporate greed has gotten its way in Washington, destroying American jobs and the middle class, while the establishment did nothing.”

“Corporate greed won’t be stopped without a president who fights for you. Saving the middle class will be an epic battle.”

“It’s time to tell the truth. These big corporations, and their greed, they are stealing your children’s future. We will never change this country unless we are willing to take these people on.”

When is the last time you heard “corporate greed” on your television? I can’t say it doesn’t happen. But when guests say such things on talk shows, they don’t get invited back.

The corporate controlled media has an unwritten rule – don’t bite the hand that feeds. So it’s incredibly rare that the much needed discussion about corporate power over our government is allowed to occur. This despite the fact that corporate power, and its instruments of control over our democracy, is the central issue of our time. […]

I really like Barack Obama. But as brilliant as Obama is, his message of some kind of undefined change, based on a new “tone”, is abstract and unconvincing.

It is as though Obama wants to usher in a new era of “change” without making any enemies. Do you really believe that you can get serious healthcare reform, which must inevitably cost insurance companies billions, without making them your enemy? People have killed for much less.

Do you really believe that the people who run Halliburton, and CIGNA, and Monsanto Inc. are otherwise good people who just haven’t been properly invited under the happy tent? Do you really think a new tone of bipartisanship is what we are missing?

Ok you Edwards supporters

I have had it with you guys.
I didn’t like your candidate.
I hate his vote on the war.
And you NEVER shut up about him. EVER.
Edwards this and EENR that.
In fact…..

Because of you…..

I am taking a second look at him.
Your positive diaries and upbeat outlook, more than anything else, has persuaded me.
So I am looking at his policies and looking beyond his war vote.

I am looking at who he is now. […]

I have gone back and listened to his speeches.
I watched him in the last debate.
I find myself agreeing with him more and more.

Edwards Campaign: The Race Has Just Begun and the Path to Victory

a new strategy memo from the Edwards campaign […]

Ultimately we expect the race to narrow to one of the celebrity candidates and us. And when that happens, we are confident that the remaining contests will break in our direction as voters are finally offered a choice the national media has ignored all year — the most progressive, most electable candidate in the race, John Edwards.

While the media has annointed two celebrity candidates, both are flawed. Senator Clinton has electability issues and stands squarely for the status quo. As for Senator Obama, we saw his weakness in New Hampshire. If he was thrown off by Senator Clinton’s attacks, think what will happen when the Republicans throw all they got at him. If Obama is too weak to stand up to the Republicans, and Clinton too corporate, then Democrats will look to another who both stands for change and is willing to fight for it. That one is John Edwards. […]

Facing two $100 million candidates, Edwards is only 7 delegates behind. Heavily outspent and out mediaed, he is right in the fight. […]

It is so early. 98% of voters have not been heard from.

John Edwards: $7 Million Dollars In One Day – Make It Happen

There’s been a lot of talk in these parts about how the media is shutting John Edwards out of the race. He has been excluded from polling. His campaign events have not been covered. Other candidates with less to show for themselves receive more attention. Etc.

All of the these things are true. And all of the solutions I’ve seen have merit. We definitely need to put pressure on the media to cover this election fairly. But the media is probably not going to alter course and suddenly exhibit a journalistic integrity that they haven’t even thought about since their freshman year of college. They need to be given a reason to change course; a reason that fits their definition of news.

So either Edwards could engage in a high speed police chase with Britney’s kids on his lap and a missing white girl in the trunk, or he could raise $7 million dollars in one day. […]

Ron Paul has managed to stir up respectable levels of exposure despite his low standings in most polls. […] Paul had validated himself in terms the media can understand — fund raising. Having drawn in a record $6 million dollars in one day went a long ways toward forcing the press to pay attention.

What I want to know is this: If Paul can do it, why can’t Edwards? Edwards has far more support than Paul and he ought to be able to mobilize his supporters to attempt to set a new fund raising record. […]

So I propose that we do so. I would like to suggest Friday, January 18, as the day to shatter both the record and the media’s tinted glass ceiling on coverage.

Announcing the I Can Do It Better blog-a-thon!

I’ve participated in enough blog-a-thons by now that it’s time I gave something back to the blog-a-thon world. Mine’s called I Can Do It Better and will take place on February 28th through March 2nd.

At first I was going to confine this blog-a-thon to screenwriting. “Write about a movie whose script was good but not great, and explain how you would improve it” were the original instructions. Then I thought, why not extend it to all creative endeavors? And so I shall.

Instructions

  1. Please choose a well-known movie, book, painting, sculpture, speech, song, performance, or other manifestation of human artistic expression.
  2. Describe how it fails to attain perfection.
  3. Describe your remedy.
  4. Publish the article on your blog between February 28th and March 2nd. Be sure to state that you’re participating in this blog-a-thon and include a link to this page.
  5. [Updated] Return to this page during those days and you’ll find a form you can fill out send e-mail to <icdib@emphatic.com> to let me know about your post and where it is.
  6. I’ll then list it at the main blog-a-thon page to be posted on February 28th.

No easy targets please; I don’t want to hear how Meatballs III could have benefited from the addition of some talking animals. Of course it could have benefited from the addition of some talking animals. Any change would have been an improvement. (Except for casting someone other than Patrick Dempsey in the lead role, now that he’s all hot and stuff.)

Also, no mere technical problems please. It’s not very interesting to hear that you would take better care to keep the boom mike out of the shot, or aim the camera away from the shadow of the helicopter it’s in. And don’t simply catalog the faults of an otherwise good work of art (as I have done on this blog from time to time). Anyone can criticize; only a few can correct.

No, please stick to movies (et al.) that are already pretty good and require only some creative input from you to realize their full potential.

For example:

One day many years ago I turned on the TV in the middle of a World War II spy thriller, 36 Hours, starring James Garner and Rod Taylor. (Spoilers follow.) James Garner wakes up in an American army hospital five years after the war; he’s been in a coma. He’s delighted to hear that the Allies won. The D-Day invasion, which was still in the planning stages when his coma began, was a big success. His doctors and nurses chat him up on the subject, testing his memory.

In fact the hospital and its staff, the newspaper showing the date to be 1950, even James Garner’s greying temples, are all an elaborate ruse by the Germans. The war is still on. James Garner had been drugged and abducted and is being tricked into revealing secrets about the Normandy invasion, which the Germans know is imminent. We learn this about twenty minutes or so from the point where I started watching. James Garner realizes it himself soon after — and then must continue to play dumb and plant misinformation to counter the secrets that (he realizes with horror) he’s spilled. Very suspenseful.

Those of you who know the film can predict what’s coming. Years later I saw it again, this time from the beginning, and I saw nearly a full half hour of setup and exposition I hadn’t seen before — absolutely none of which was needed to appreciate the remainder of the film. In that first half hour we see that James Garner is a dedicated Army intelligence officer. We see him come by the D-Day knowledge that will later be of such interest to his interlocutors. We see him get a seemingly inconsequential paper cut which is what tips him off later to the fact that not so much time has passed. And then we see him abducted and the German ruse put into effect.

In my first creative writing class in high school, my teacher, Mr. San, taught that after writing a story, we should throw away the first act, because it will only ever contain plodding exposition that the reader would prefer to find out along the way anyway. That should have been done with 36 Hours. There’s nothing in the first half hour that we can’t infer from the rest of the film; and the abduction of an Army intelligence officer is a much smaller first-act dramatic development than the whopping revelation that everything we’ve seen so far has been a lie.

U.S. Department of Mwa Ha Ha

From time to time in the popular science press I see something about generating electricity by placing enormous solar collectors in space and beaming the power as microwaves to special receivers on earth.

One such article, “‘Drilling Up’ — Some Look to Space for Energy,” appeared recently from the Associated Press. It describes a joint effort between the U.S. Department of Defense and the island nation of Palau to demonstrate the feasibility of receiving power from an orbiting satellite. The satellite will collect solar energy during its ninety-minute orbit, storing it up in order to beam it down to a receiver on Palau as it passes overhead. It will send a million watts of power during a five-minute window.

The article touts it as a forward-thinking alternative-energy project that will benefit at first the citizens of Palau and later the world. But nowhere in the article, or indeed in other articles of this ilk, are any red flags raised about placing in the Pentagon’s hands a solar death ray that can incinerate targets from orbit.

Now I don’t wish to impugn the Pentagon’s motives. I am sure their ambitions have everything to do with altruistically improving the standard of living for every person on earth and nothing to do with a lust for high-tech war toys. But if you or I built something that could store up three hundred million joules of energy and then deliver it all in a five-minute burst to any spot on earth, you could forgive the people of the world harboring a little concern.

You’d think that science writers could follow the technological implications of the things they write about. Hell, for this story all they need to do is watch some James Bond.


From Die Another Day

Credits report

[This post is participating in Continuity’s Opening Credits Blog-a-thon.]

I remember some national magazine or other publishing a humorous “interview” with Yoda in the summer of 1980, when The Empire Strikes Back was new and so was Yoda. Yoda answered questions on the topics of the day in his cockeyed syntax. (I remember the piece closing with Yoda asking, “Any more questions, have you?” and the interviewer responding, “Yes: who shot J.R.?“) Among the subjects covered in the interview was Superman the Movie — specifically, its opening credits, in which spectacularly animated names whoosh though interstellar space. Yoda said something like, “Oh yes, flying letter storms. Get them all the time on Dagobah, we do.”

That the article should touch on the opening credits — the credits — of another, unrelated movie more than a year and a half old, at a time when Empire was eclipsing everything else in the pop culture landscape, should give you some idea of the impression that Superman‘s credits made. They nearly upstaged the entire movie that followed, and decades later it’s those credits, set to John Williams’ unabashedly rousing march, that hold up better than most of the rest of the film.


That was almost all I had on the subject of opening credits until I mentioned to my wife Andrea that I would be participating in this blog-a-thon. Andrea, who routinely professes ignorance of and disinterest in film lore, proceeded to rattle off a series of terrific suggestions that I am embarrassed not to have come up with myself. So herewith, a few words on a few more memorable opening credits.


No discussion of memorable opening credits would be complete without mentioning the James Bond series. (Not that I’m aiming for anything like completeness.) The first film, Dr. No, doesn’t count, but it’s interesting in the way it doesn’t count: its credits are jazzy and abstract, which might have set the tone for the whole series if it had begun in the late 50’s rather than in the early 60’s. But Camelot and the Playboy era rode up alongside the James Bond series and the tone became somewhat different. The opening credits for the next film, From Russia With Love, created the template for the rest of the films: an imperfectly seen, mostly unclad beauty writhing athletically on screen. Later films, most of them with their title sequences designed by Maurice Binder (who had done the first two too) had variations on this theme: female silhouettes dancing and multiplying across the screen. When handguns appeared, the formula was complete. The pinnacle must have been The Spy Who Loved Me: Roger Moore and some nude women in silhouette, performing gymnastics on the silhouettes of handguns.

Maurice Binder is long gone, alas, but the latest Bond credits, for Casino Royale, are superb: paying homage to the old formula while modernizing with some (non-obnoxious) computer graphics and a considerably more serious tone emphasizing the consequences of violence (as silhouettes battling Bond disintegrate into heart, diamond, spade, and club symbols) rather than the glamour of girls and guns.


The Pink Panther (1963) had an opening credits sequence so memorable it spawned its own cartoon series — even though the film itself was a live-action farce about a diamond heist, not about an animated, rose-hued feline.


Robert Altman’s The Player opens with credits over a long, complex tracking shot — a single take several minutes long, shot with a single camera following several characters and actions in various locations around a complex set. During this sequence, one character mentions the brilliant tracking shot that opens Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, making it a self-referential joke with plenty of inside-Hollywood references, which is exactly what the rest of the film delivers, too.


But no opening credits capture in microcosm both the psychology and the structure of the film to follow better than those in Memento. A Polaroid of a dead man fades to white. The movie is running in reverse and the Polaroid is un-developing. As the credits end, the blank film disappears into a camera, the flash bulb pops, a bullet flies back into a gun, and the dead man comes back to life.

The Polaroid has been taken as a memento of a violent deed committed by Leonard Shelby who, because of a head injury, lacks the ability to form new memories. Like the Polaroid-in-reverse, his experiences fade in just a few minutes. His life is defined by Polaroids like these, which he snaps and organizes to keep track of people, places, and events that he can’t remember on his own. The story is told in two tracks: one whose scenes are in black and white and appear in chronological order; and another, intercut with the first, whose scenes are in color and, like the fading Polaroid, appear in reverse.

Numerology, 2008 edition

This is the year 2008. The number 2008 has four prime factors: 2×2×2×251. Last year had three (3×3×223) as does next year (7×7×41).

The year 2000 had 7 prime factors (2×2×2×2×5×5×5), which was the most since 1984, which also had 7 (2×2×2×2×2×2×31). 1944 had 8 (2×2×2×3×3×3×3×3), which we won’t see again until 2016 (2×2×2×2×2×3×3×7). 1920 had 9! (2×2×2×2×2×2×2×3×5.)

Those of us who can make it until 2048 will get to see an 11-factor year (2×2×2×2×2×2×2×2×2×2×2) and the first year since 1024 that’s a power of two, which is a big deal to computer nerds like me.

The most recent prime-number year was 2003 and the next is 2011. The most recent twin-prime years were 1997 and 1999, and the next are 2027 and 2029.

What is the significance of all this? Not a damn thing. But you read it all with interest, didn’t you?

Happy birthday Dad!

Today is my dad’s birthday! In honor of it, here is a reproduction of a web page I created for him on Father’s Day, 2001.


Life With Dad

There once was a man

His name was Daddy.

He had a son

(And sometime caddy).

He helped him to grow

And have fun on the way

That’s why the son

Is a man today.

The son hopes that he

Can be like his dad

So that someday his own kids

Will have one like he had.

Don’t let the door hit you

Goodbye, 2007. I can’t say I’ll be sorry to see you go.

I was prepared to like you, but almost at once you caused my mom a lot of trouble and discomfort and finally took her from me. Then you took my dog. Meanwhile you kept busy breaking my rib, crashing my car, infecting my lungs, and dismantling my democracy. For good measure you effected the departure of some of my favorite co-workers. It’s almost as if you had a personal vendetta against me.

Well as M told James Bond in Goldfinger, and as someone should have told you twelve months ago,

This isn’t a personal vendetta, [2]007. It’s an assignment like any other. And if you can’t treat it as such, coldly and objectively, [2]008 can replace you.

Of course it wasn’t all bad. You did manage to keep my wife and children safe and sound, and we did enjoy some modest prosperity. Still, I look forward to your replacement.