Category: Uncategorized

…of this election cycle is the Internet. Suppose for a moment that we’re able to get past our sturm und drang that says that the fascist NeoCons are going to sell our republic out to the Republicans and that the pinko commie fag liberals will sell our democracy to the Democrats. What would our government look like if it were as customer-centric as Amazon?

I’ve been discussing the idea of e-democracy today with Doc Searls and Phil Windley who are having dinner in Las Vegas on the topic as I write this. (I told Phil I wish I could be a fly in his soup). Our collective assessment is that no one is thinking about e-democracy on a large enough scale.

Everybody wants smaller government except the government. Everybody wants government to have a better User Interface. Everybody wants the government to be as user-friendly as Amazon. Everybody wants transparency everywhere in government: voting auditability, legislation, cloak room deal-cutting, pork, contracting, etc. And we all want the cost of government to drop like ISP pricing.

And no one wants politicians getting in the way of governance any more. At some level, we know this is possible and inevitable. But should we have to wait a couple of decades for our overdue upgrade?

Phil observes an interesting latency factor built in to government: governments resist all management principles for 20 years after they’ve been widely accepted in private enterprise. He says that if you announce in a company that 20% of the people are going to be let go, everyone assumes that it will be someone else, thanks to their high opinion of their value to the enterprise. Apparently, though, if you make that announcement in government, everyone assumes they’ll be part of the 20%. He’s describing a culture founded on a sense of fraudulence.

I’ll bet that most of us have a similar vision of e-government. Once you describe government as a web app, the rest is mostly details. All fifteen of us could sit down and sketch it out on a couple of flip chart sheets. But to implement it, we need to cajole the bureaucrats out of their bureaus.

Phil and I are willing to stipulate a couple of points:

1. Many, maybe most of government employees could be replaced by a well-designed web app.
2. The big cost of government is not the payroll, but the programs that bureaucrats dream up to justify their job/program/department.
3. If only the bureaucrats would cooperate, an IT SWAT Team could design that web app in #1.

Here’s the secret to breaking the civil service log jam: Establish a program under which a cooperative civil servant can qualify for reasonable merit raises and retirement on the pension they’re aiming at, if they’ll just go home and stop causing trouble. First they need to cooperate with the SWAT Team to manage the paperwork they currently handle. If they can demonstrate that they really don’t do anything, they get a bonus, since it saves everyone so much trouble.

You say Republican and I say Democrat

With a proper UI and scalability, does anyone care what servers are behind the scenes at Amazon? Isn’t it the same with e-government? If the systems run properly, the party in power doesn’t matter as much. Citizens should be discussing the fine points of services and decision-making rather than Dem vs. GOP. It’s a granularity issue: the finer the grain, the more useful the design discussions.

When the citizenry is significantly involved in rating programs (think of epinions or Amazon reviews), defensive wars like Afghanistan are more likely and preemptive wars like Iraq, perhaps less. I really don’t care, as long as we all share a sense of what’s right and willing to commit wholeheartedly to, since that’s the benchmark for an effective program, whether it’s military action or AmeriCorps. I hope it’s obvious that fine-grained citizen involvement is the opposite of the citizen initiatives so popular in California. Those are not fine-grained, but rather the bumper-sticker school of governance.

Along the way, we’d discover that all of us reasoning together are a lot smarter than some of us. My sense is that smarter-than-average people of both ends of the spectrum are scared to death of a broad-based democracy.

The Internet mustn’t be simply a way to win elections but a basis for governance.

If Estonia can do this stuff, surely we can.

12:24:26 AM    

Some of the Gulf War POWs were tortured, mostly pilots. A judge awarded them damages payable from the Iraqi funds now controlled by the White House, which refuses to release the money.

On Tuesday, Veteran’s Day, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan was asked why the administration won’t permit former Gulf War POWs to receive the funds awarded them by a judge. This is a section of the official transcript, starting about halfway through the press conference. Joe Conason’s Journal provided the pointer. (I’ve bolded the operative language.)

Q Scott, there are 17 former POWs from the first Gulf War who were tortured and filed suit against the regime of Saddam Hussein. And a judge has ordered that they are entitled to substantial financial damages. What is the administration’s position on that? Is it the view of this White House that that money would be better spent rebuilding Iraq rather than going to these former POWs?

MR. McCLELLAN: I don’t know that I view it in those terms, David. I think that the United States — first of all, the United States condemns in the strongest terms the brutal torture to which these Americans were subjected. They bravely and heroically served our nation and made sacrifices during the Gulf War in 1991, and there is simply no amount of money that can truly compensate these brave men and women for the suffering that they went through at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime. That’s what our view is.

Q But, so — but isn’t it true that this White House —
Q They think they’re is an —
Q Excuse me, Helen — that this White House is standing in the way of them getting those awards, those financial awards, because it views it that money better spent on rebuilding Iraq?

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, there’s simply no amount of money that can truly compensate these brave men and women for the suffering —

Q Why won’t you spell out what your position is?

MR. McCLELLAN: I’m coming to your question. Believe me, I am. Let me finish. Let me start over again, though. No amount of money can truly compensate these brave men and women for the suffering that they went through at the hands of a very brutal regime, at the hands of Saddam Hussein. It was determined earlier this year by Congress and the administration that those assets were no longer assets of Iraq, but they were resources required for the urgent national security needs of rebuilding Iraq. But again, there is simply no amount of compensation that could ever truly compensate these brave men and women.

Q Just one more. Why would you stand in the way of at least letting them get some of that money?

MR. McCLELLAN: I disagree with the way you characterize it.

Q But if the law that Congress passed entitles them to access frozen assets of the former regime, then why isn’t that money, per a judge’s order, available to these victims?

MR. McCLELLAN: That’s why I pointed out that that was an issue that was addressed earlier this year. But make no mistake about it, we condemn in the strongest possible terms the torture that these brave individuals went through —

Q — you don’t think they should get money?

MR. McCLELLAN: — at the hands of Saddam Hussein. There is simply no amount of money that can truly compensate those men and women who heroically served —

Q That’s not the issue —

MR. McCLELLAN: — who heroically served our nation.

Q Are you opposed to them getting some of the money?

MR. McCLELLAN: And, again, I just said that that had been addressed earlier this year.

Q No, but it hasn’t been addressed. They’re entitled to the money under the law. The question is, is this administration blocking their effort to access some of that money, and why?

MR. McCLELLAN: I don’t view it that way at all. I view it the way that I stated it, that this issue was —

Q But you are opposed to them getting the money.

MR. McCLELLAN: This issue was addressed earlier this year, and we believe that there’s simply no amount of money that could truly compensate these brave men and women for what they went through and for the suffering that they went through at the hands of Saddam Hussein —

Q So no money.

MR. McCLELLAN: — and that’s my answer.

10:15:13 PM    

This English major who flew airplanes for Uncle Sam doesn’t identify with being a veteran as much as many. I’ve probably mentioned it more on this blog than in daily life because it deflects the knee-jerk reaction of those who confuse their voting records with their self-interest.

The Dean Blog has some interesting comments today, in reply to a post by Jon Zall, Colonel, USAF (Ret), who wrote,

Why should military veterans, or anyone associated with the military, consider any option other than Mr. Bush for the coming 2004 election? I’m a veteran, retired with almost 27 years of service, who no longer believes this administration has the best interests of our veterans and our military in mind. Until two months ago, I (like many veterans) wasn’t going to consider any Democrat – after all, I had voted mostly Republican for 40 years. But the weight of events and the actions of the Bush administration, especially with regard to veterans and the use of our military, including the Reserves and National Guard, caused me to change my mind.

That’s why I decided to put the Veterans for Dean Blog into play. Something inside me said that if I am needing to talk about a lot of things that really bother me about the use of our military and support of our veterans, then I suspect there may be many more of you out there. The Blog is a forum for all of you – you don’t have to be a veteran or in the military – who don’t like the direction their country is taking. And, know this for sure, the blog is NOT intended to create dissent among our troops, veterans or active duty, but to intelligently lay out and discuss ideas. This blog also links to other important Veterans-for-Dean websites and other links of interest for you to check out.

Some of the comments are even more emotional than most. I’ve added links where helpful, but not edited content:

“I amalos a veteran. Yesterday I at least emotionally participated in an important birthday – on Nov 10 1775 Capt Robert Mullin enlisted the first United States Marines.

I think the current adminstration’s treatment both of veterans and of currently serving military personnel (gerual service and activated reservs and guard) is atrocious.

David Hackworth‘s various enterprises have been showcasing the horoors for quite some time now.Stars and Stripes has printed a survey on morale.

The general press has bits and pieces, dribs and drabs, but does not put it all together.

– nationalizing the seized Irqi assets to help pay (Halliburton and Bechtel) for rebuilidingn Iraq, rather than allowing those assets to pay for formerly imprisoned American servicement who won a judgment in US courts

– making wounded and injured service personnel pay for their meals while in hospitals

– cutting the additional pay for combat service… gee, if one is shot after MAJOR combat operations is one any less shot?

– making veterans endure 6 month waits for initial medical appointments

– putting guard and reservists in vermin-infested barracks and not giving them the same access to medical care at plcaes like Ft Stewar in Georgia

– for perosnnel whose home base is in the US, providing R & R trasnportation only as afar as Baltimore, and then leaving them on their own, timewise and moeny wise, to get to see family and loved ones

I could go on and on. There are ohters on this blog who could provide far more.

This is an adminstration that reallyb did not value the combat infantry and armor divisions – after all, Rumsfeld wanted to totally reshaped the military. If we had the miltiary he ahd wnated, think how badly off we would be in Iraq today.

The mistreatment of those who ahve served and continue to serve should be reason enough for those who care about the military to reject the current administration.

Colonel, welcome to our cause, to send Bush back to Crawford.

KJB USMC serial number 2105714
Posted by ken fr arlington va at November 11, 2003 02:03 PM

__________________________________________

wonderful well written piece Colonel!!!!
Your beliefs are supported in the Des Moines Register this morning.

Des Moines, Ia Register, Metro Section Headline..
MORE VETERANS SEEK COUNTY AID

Subhead……
Living costs, job losses, age issues prompt the need for assistance

First line…..
A growing number of Iowa’s veterans are asking counties for emergency assistance with rent, utilities or other bills.

Isn’t it a sad state of affairs when the lead story is about the trouble veterans are having pay rent and utilities.

Posted by Darrell in Iowa at November 11, 2003 02:23 PM
__________________________________________

My Dad told me he was listening to a radio show the other day and heard a story that goes something like this:

There’s a gentleman who has three sons over in Iraq fighting the war. Each and every day, on his lunch break, this father goes down the street from his place of employment, and for one hour, he holds up a poster of a soldier that has died that day or that week. He blows up the pictures from the internet or newspaper.

While he was doing this, people would drive by everyday, screaming how un-American he is, people would yell anti-homosexual names at him (even though he’s straight), and say he has no faith in his country. They’d honk their horns and berate him…a man who is lending his three brave children to the service of our country.

He finally got them to stop honking…by holding up a “Honk fo
r Peace” sign alongside the picture of the fallen soldier. That, my friends, is sad, sad, sad.

To this man, who’s children are in harm’s way, to all of those who are fighting, and to all of those we have lost in defense of our flag, I am in your debt, and so is our country.

Regards,
Shane in Ohio
Posted by Shane in Ohio at November 11, 2003 02:43 PM

Wage Slaves with Rifles

Military people are the wage slaves of the industry called America. As corporations manipulate their hourly employees, so does this administration use cheap labor to express its foreign policy.

When veterans and soldiers look at their values and not their voting habits, Dean is the obvious choice.

If you’re in the military or a union or paid for doing real work with your hands, you are in the same position relative to senior management. Even if loyal to your direct boss, you’re an expense from the viewpoint of senior management.

Major corporations are the spiritual godfathers of this administration. Just as companies are cutting benefits and raising CEO bonuses, so is the Department of Defense. The Army Times has a Veteran’s Day article about active duty benefits, “An Act of Betrayal – In the midst of war, key family benefits face cuts“. The Department of Defense (DoD) has closed 19 commissaries and may close 19 more; and is considering the fate of 58 schools it runs around the country. As with so many initiatives, it seems DoD had made up its mind to study the closings prior to 9/11, and seems unaffected by later events:

The two initiatives are the latest in a string of actions by the Bush administration to cut or hold down growth in pay and benefits, including basic pay, combat pay, health-care benefits and the death gratuity paid to survivors of troops who die on active duty.

The roots of all these efforts reach back to the highest levels of the Defense Department.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has made no secret of his desire to get the military out of support activities that are not central to its core war-fighting functions, said Joseph Tafoya, director of the Department of Defense Education Activity. As soon as he arrived at the Pentagon three years ago, Tafoya said, Rumsfeld began asking: “Why am I running stores? Why am I in education?”

Schools for dependents are a big issue. Military families don’t pay local taxes so they have no voice in local districts, which don’t have room for them anyway. The military has better schools than most districts, perhaps because the peer group is families more disciplined than average. Further, the local schools are struggling already. “I would be transferring 800 students into a 600-student [public] school, and have no voting representation in the school board,” says Lt. Gen. William Lennox, superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

Community Watch

Military people live in some of the tightest-knit communities on earth. Sure, families transfer in and out, but common values, experience and challenges knit everyone together. That’s why it’s so striking that a commander would describe call these cuts a “betrayal,” not as an off-the-record slip of the lip, but as carefully as any order :

A ‘personal affront’

“Betrayal — write that down and put it in your report,” said Col. John Kidd, garrison commander of Fort Stewart, Ga., testifying at Tafoya’s forum on the need to keep military-run schools on his post. “As a commander, I will fight this tooth and nail. Folks down there are not just militant on this issue. They will march on Washington.”

Lowe, the Quantico base commander, said he never has seen his community more united than it is over the schools issue.

“The very fact that this transfer study is being conducted at this time when Marines, sailors, soldiers and airmen and their families are increasingly required to give more of themselves and to go in harm’s way is taken by many as a personal affront,” he said. “It raises serious questions about DoD’s commitment to all quality-of-life issues.”

Soldiers feel entitled. Maybe not so much in  peacetime, though they are. But when your ass is on the line and your wife can’t make ends meet, the last thing you’ll put up with is the loss of the preferential commissary (grocery store) pricing, or seeing your kids shoe-horned into an under-funded public school.

“Col. Larry Ruggley, garrison commander at Fort Campbell, Ky., showed local newspapers with headlines noting a two-week delay in the opening of civilian schools outside the gate because of budget wrangling.

Fort Campbell soldiers will continue to be deployed, Ruggley said. “We look to the stability and support of the school environment on Fort Campbell to take care of the children. It’s all about the soldier we put in harm’s way.”

Col. John Neubauer, commander of Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., said his base’s schools outperform those outside the gate. DDESS students at Maxwell consistently score in the 75th percentile nationally, he said, while “students outside the gate consistently score in the lower half.”

“We have a close relationship with the local community,” he said. “But the state of Alabama refuses to adequately fund education.”

The New York Army Times

The above links are to, respectively:

1. The San Jose Mercury News
2. The House of Representatives
3. Veterans for Common Sense
4. Gainesville, Georgia Times
5. Fox News
6. Des Moines Register
7. The Army Times

This isn’t some left-leaning paper in the heart of Gothomorrah. The administration and its sympathizers can explain away bitching N’Yawkas, but not red-blooded Americans  calling them on the treatment of our troops–the greatest symbol of righteousness for the Republicans’ entire political base.

How stupid are these people?

2:10:34 PM    

It’s easier to invent the future than predict it.
              —Alan Kay

We’re at democracy’s inflection point. Democracy is where the web was in 1993 and we can shape it any way we like. Broadcast politics seems vulnerable and the key to political power is to let go of the illusion that politicians, governments, campaigns and political parties are in charge of the voice (power) of the people (polis).

It’s the governance, stupid! But the means to effect better governance will arise only from politicians and stakeholders dissatisfied with governance as usual.

This is an outline of some obvious thoughts about specific ways that politics might be affected by Internet technologies. Historically, every campaign is an echo chamber striving to become a megaphone for its master’s voice. The Internet allows the echo chamber to expand to include millions of voices mastering the politicians.

I had not realized until recently that the voices outside an Internet-powered campaign must drown out the voices within. The Internet clue is that any campaign is assured of victory if it can inspire a smart mob to use the right tools to organize itself into a viral, loose hierarchy. Until the constituents build their own bridges and form their own hierarchies of influence, every campaign’s echo chamber is sound and fury signifying not quite enough.

Assumptions

• Politics follows money
• The 45th President will reflect and amplify the forces that elect him
• Only our preconceptions limit our ingenuity and power

Desirable outcomes

• Universal participation
• Issue-based voting
• Fact-based campaigning
• Voter-financed campaigns
• Low average contribution amounts
• Inter-campaign civility (community vs. advocacy)

Strategy: Leverage the individual campaigns’ urgency

If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done.

Like the tech industry, emergent democracy needs critical deadlines to make urgent the deliverables that we might otherwise express as theories. Primaries and elections provide those deadliness and change agents must embrace that urgency. Change needs a series of galvanizing conferences and enterprises to develop the next generation of tools to assemble broad but powerful constituencies.

We should not assume that this public-spirited activity has no ROI. As the Republicans have demonstrated, the payoff from winning is to influence the $1.7 trillion annual budget. To those without extraordinary access and influence, the elimination of special interests is as profitable as was the gaining of influence by the current holders.

• Consensus-building open source web apps
• Each nomination and election provides last minute deadlines
• Election season is development crunch time

Basics

Democracy’s essential resource is an unassailable voting system. Closed source unauditable voting can only be offset by a broad-based voter-verifiable ballot record. Until e-voting is open source and auditable, a few imperfect mechanisms might stem the rush to managed polling:

• Digital photos of voting screens
• Voter-controlled digital ID
• WiFi PollCams monitoring sensitive polling places (from 100′)
• Open vote declaration through auditable web sites

Voter Education through Fact-rich Timelines

• Issue-based event timelines
  • Documented, linked statements depicting the history of issues & events
  • Transforms arcane facts into a time-based story
  • Abundant charts & graphics
• Categories
  • Military procurement
  • Energy policy
  • Health care industry
  • Individual lobbyists and their clients & fees
  • Corporate convictions, plea bargains & individual wealth
    • SEC & court records
• The $1,000,000 Timeline Challenge
  • Prove an error, win $1,000
  • Quiz show

The Web-based Electorate

• Multiple opportunities for citizen expression
• A low level of expression may evolve through higher forms.
  • Email becomes
  • Blog comments become
  • Group blogs become
  • A personal blog
• Blogs may aggregate into a Knowledge Base
      (Might the knowledge base finally arrive?
       Perhaps through the urgency of a campaign.)
• Election Issue namespace to aggregate sentiment
• Comments can aggregate into issues compilations
  • Campaign blog comments are implicitly issue-based, begging for aggregation and indexing.
    6:28:29 PM    

The most unexpected things define our realities. We’re cut off from the truth, not because we can’t handle it, but because “journalists” won’t compromise their access to the people who are lying to them. Then RSS and blogging and Google come along and we’re surprisingly more connected to the nuances that have always been under-reported by journalists.

Secondary markets could be an equally surprising contender as the blogware of nation-building finance. “Secondary market” is the name for a capital market for investment instruments bundled into large offerings. When these instruments are sold, they yield very large amounts for whatever purpose the underlying debt serves.

Plain English:

1. You get a $10,000 student loan by signing forms that are exactly the same as a million other student loans
2. Because they conform to its student loan standard, all the loans are guaranteed by the US Government.
3. Your bank sells the right to your payments to an intermediary, which means your bank can make far more loans than it could by using its own depositors’ capital.
4. The intermediary sells shares in its $15 billion± portfolio of federally-insured student loans to investors.
5. This allows large and small investors to provide the funds that the government and the banks otherwise could not.
6. College tuition rises because there’s so much money available.
7. Many more students spend spring break in Ft. Lauderdale.

Well, the intent is good.

The Policy Engine

Government policies are expressed through money. As the Republicans have been proving lately, if you control the budget, you control policy.

Let’s deconstruct the essence of government, which fortunately turns out to be less complicated than we might think. About 700 people in Washington, working closely with about 20,000 lobbyists, create laws. (Otto Von Bismark once said, “There are two things you don’t want to see being made—sausage and legislation,” a variation of the caveat against visiting your favorite restaurant’s kitchen.) Out of that fetid swamp of special interests some imperatives arise, and so our destiny is bent to the will of the couple dozen or so people who manage the perceptions and careers of those 700 people.

Once this spending engine revs up, the spending rules are interpreted by the people in the Executive branch to mean what most excites them. This is how an appropriation is parsed into a $25 million Halliburton bridge. Cynical? You bet. Once you’ve seen sausage or laws being made, you’re likely to become a disillusioned vegetarian.

But what about the Second Superpower? As the peace-loving majority finds its voice and collective will, how might a stateless consortium of like minds exert their force to bring about what Dwight Eisenhower envisioned 40 years ago:

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

Follow the Money

It doesn’t take a government to spend money. Big government hires big companies to spend big bucks, whether needed or not. That’s why we’re spending like Americans in Iraq rather than spending like Iraqis, who know how to build bridges much less expensively than Americans. They’d probably employ more people, taking idle hands off the stocks of rifles. As I said last time, why not create web applications that are, literally, loan applications? And work reports combined with PayPal requests. All this assumes you’re interested in redevelopment and not in funneling gobs of money into select companies.

In order to hire Iraqi companies and people to do what you want them to do, you’d have to pepper Iraq with WiFi and ATMs and debit cards. With those in place, people could do useful things and be paid for it, like the list from last time:

• Credibly commit to build a $25 million Halliburton bridge for $1 million = $50,000
• Deliver engineering drawings for the bridge = $50,000
• Start, continue, finish bridge construction, etc., etc., etc.= $100,000, $100,000, $100,000
• Send a child to a non-religious school for a month = $10 (?)
• Teach in a non-religious school for a month = $500 (?)
• Guard a pipeline within view of one of the 100,000 new webcams = $25/night

Most importantly, it would let people on the street experience an actual benefit from the occupation, and to feel invested in a civil society. This is not the kind of program a traditional government would even consider.

But the Second Superpower is not a government, just a consortium of like-minded peaceniks. Even though war is very profitable for some, peace is profitable for many more, with myriad options for profiting off productivity and the capitalization to support it. A web-based rebuild Iraq portal would create agreements as standardized as student or mortgage loans. Once bundled, they constitute a debt package large enough for the capital markets to pay attention to.

And enough capital to rebuild a country without the messy inconvenience of occupying it.

2:26:58 PM    

The trolley must be off the track when Dennis Kucinich and Charles V. Pena agree that we should get out of Iraq, like, this weekend.

Kucinich sincerely understands a deep truth not accessible to most of us: our destiny is to overcome the collective illusion of war as the answer, but his methods sound too far out for the electorate. He probably doesn’t know that he’s echoing what Dwight Eisenhower said about peace 40 years ago:

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and co-operation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.

(Jim Moore doesn’t seem like an Eisenhower disciple, but this sure sounds like Jim’s Second Superpower meme.)

Charles V. Pena is the Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute: the most aggressively libertarian think tank in Washington. Presumably, his goal is the same as Cato’s: dismantle the government, starting with overseas adventures:

The United States must leave Iraq posthaste before the Iraqi mission becomes a sinkhole that swallows billions more of taxpayer dollars and all too many American lives. The best way to guarantee the safety of American troops is to bring them home.*

[Securing Iraq is] doable if they’re willing to make hard choices. But politically the administration has said there are enough troops. And they’re trying to avoid all comparisons to Vietnam,” says Pena. “But if you ramp up to almost a quarter of a million troops, suddenly Vietnam comparisons become impossible to avoid.”*

With the edges of the bell curve lobbying for a quick exit, we may get one. Let’s game this out a little. We can watch the political forces drive up the costs and casualties relentlessly over the next 3-10 years, a Viet Nam replay, or we could find a rational way to clear out fast. This will require some fancy footwork.

Recovering an out-of-control Plot Line

Our government’s like a novelist who has lost control of his characters and plot development, with the dialogue somehow taking his creation where he hadn’t imagined. That being the case, this novelist must go with this disastrous flow or come up with a deus ex machina real quick now. If there might be such a mechanism, what might it look like? We need a quick and plausible way for the Iraqi stakeholders to build consensus, capitalize development, get people working on a common vision, and we need to do it without our people present. Aha! The perfect answer: a magical web app!

“Any sufficiently advanced technology…

…is indistinguishable from magic.”
                       –Arthur C. Clarke

http://www.money.iraq.gov

I’ve got economic and political advice that Dr. Dean hasn’t asked for, and neither have his policy people (though at least I’ve met them). As the potential substitute novelist trying to wrestle this story line from disaster, Dr. Dean should have an alternate plot outline available. The best outline would be one that seems most plausible coming from the Dean camp and compelling enough to gather hope and credibility.

The Dean campaign is filled with savvy Netizens who have convinced us that they know more about this stuff than the rest of us. They could develop a web-based enterprise whereby Iraqis and their allies can complete forms, make commitments, securitize their commitments and receive electronic transfers to fund their vision, infrastructure, institutions and civility.

The funds would come as private loans, guaranteed by the $87 billion we’re about to commit but won’t need if we get out of Iraq quick. Transfers would be based on real outcomes, one of which would be documented commitments to build, for example, bridges and schools and hospitals.

Money.iraq.gov would provide so many ways for Iraqis to make money that they’d be more interested in how to use the new WiFI & ATM infrastructure than their AK-47:

• Credibly commit to build a $25 million Halliburton bridge for $1 million = $50,000
• Deliver engineering drawings for the bridge = $50,000
• Start, continue, finish bridge construction, etc., etc., etc.= $100,000, $100,000, $100,000
• Send a child to a non-religious school for a month = $10 (?)
• Teach in a non-religious school for a month = $500 (?)
• Guard a pipeline within view of one of the 100,000 new webcams = $25/night

Would it work? Who the hell knows? But it’s at least as plausible as the thinking we’ve seen so far. And unlike the current plot, there’s no prequel proving that the plan can’t work. The current plan was so flawed from the outset that even a Vermont physician knew it would fail.

I bet Bezos would put the whole program together for a dollar a year. Now that Amazon’s book scanning project is finished, he’s probably got enough untapped processing power to host it. (Sorry, Jeff, no patent rights)

http://www.money.iraq.gov com

In fact, does the government even need to host these services? Why not model it on the fed-insured Student Loan model, where a government guarantee has spawned an entire industry offering terrific web applications to put serious money to work for you.

Of all the answers to the Iraq mess, http://www.money.iraq.com is the only idea that might not fail.

1:21:35 PM    comment [commentCounter (226)]

(Far more than you want to read about e-voting and maybe not quite enough about burning airplanes)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the buzz developing around auditless electronic voting machines. Then this morning, in Gets my vote, Doc points to Phil Windley‘s essay, Transparency, eVoting and Copyright. He quotes:

I do not believe that we should be willing to buy or use voting systems where the source code and design is not open for public review. I think there are companies that would be willing to work in this model, particularly if the contract provided some long term commitments. This is not Britney Spears we’re talking about here — the integrity of our voting system is a fundamental component of our government.

Phil Windley is the former CIO for the state of Utah and a Republican, so his advocacy for open source (peer reviewed, really) election systems carries a lot of weight. Read it, and there are some great links.

“Copyright” in his title refers to the fact that Diebold, a leading seller of these machines, is suing people who have downloaded and published Diebold’s internal memos and specs they got off an open FTP server that Diebold operated for code updates (!). If you care to join me in a DMCA violation, you can get the 28 MB zip file or view the docs and memos.

Phil’s essay suggests the important core of the matter. If advocates believe, as he does, that the procurement standards must be questioned, they need to understand that there’s no mass conspiracy by election officials buying the machines at the state and county levels. Rather, they’re deep into a challenging procurement process requiring skills they seldom possess, surrounded by experts with a vested interest in the outcome. He suggests the kind of long-term, deliberate effort that homeowners’ associations are famous for mounting against life-shattering issues like rights to unobstructed views and height restrictions. Do you suppose we citizens will be as determined to protect our right to a fair and open vote?

I hope we can since this seems a more basic issue than the bulk of our political and procedural discussions. We’re talking about an issue that’s so close to the core of the life of our body politic that, like breath itself, we can’t afford to debate it as if it matters no more than, say redistricting. The power to count the votes is the key to the kingdom.

“It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.”
                                –attributed to Josef Stalin

“Everything that can be counted doesn’t necessarily count;
  everything that counts can’t necessarily be counted.”
                                 –attributed to Albert Einstein

Obviously some things are more important than others, and accurate voting is surely the high order bit of our society.

Mayday!

Ton Sun Nhut Airport, Saigon, Vietnam was the world’s busiest airport in 1967-68. Operating out of there was like being part of a flying circus, a landing pattern clogged with choppers, 60 mph Cessnas, 250 mph F4 Phantom fighters, civilian airliners and of course, we C-130 crews happy to be arriving in a places serving good food for a change. Trash haulers, as we called ourselves, are always looking for a decent meal to punctuate the tedium of flying into tiny strips guarded by enemy anti-aircraft fire. (not “ack-ack”, a WWII term. This blog seeks to be syntactically precise.)

One day as we were maneuvering to land, the emergency Guard frequency came awake. “Mayday! Mayday, this is Stalwart 34 declaring an emergency. I’m an F4C with one engine out, low oil pressure on no. 2 and bingo fuel. Request immediate landing!”

“Roger Stalwart 34,” came the tower’s surprisingly relaxed reply, “You’re number 3 in the Emergency Traffic Pattern.”

If you fly airplanes for a while, you learn that some issues are more vital than others. For instance, if you can’t get the landing gear down at the same time you need to make a radio report to headquarters, you deal with the gear. I know, I’ve been there.

When you have low hydraulic pressure at the same time you have an engine fire light, you pay attention to the fire and leave the hydraulic pressure for later. I know, I’ve been there.

When you can’t control the airplane at the same time you have a fire light, you first control the airplane, then deal with the fire. I know, I’ve been there.

On 25 June 1968, about 3 miles from Cambodia, our C-130 was struck by .50 cal. machine gun fire that blossomed into a real headache, forcing us to deal with a fire that took out engine no. 1, ignited the left outboard fuel tank, distorted the front wing spar so that the left wing was bending down and forward outside of the no. 1 engine, knocked out the hydraulic system we needed to put the gear down, disabled the left aileron and generally scared the living shit out of five 25-year-old aviators.

The flight lasted only eight minutes and 20 miles but it occupies a larger partition in my brain than many of the several years of my life. The things we need to attend to sometime add up faster than we’d like, with consequences more dire than we’d like.

Hierarchy of Needs

I’m reminded of aviation priorities as I read of strange things happening in the country that I fought for and for which 58,000 of my comrades-in-arms died for. I mistrust alarmism, since most alarms are premature and self-serving. False urgency is such a staple of advertising that we’re inured to it, so that all emergencies seem equally optional. In airplanes and democracies, they aren’t. I think I’m there now.

If your freedom is threatened at the same time your job is threatened, defend your freedom.

If your comfort is threatened at the same time your neighbors’ rights are threatened, forget about your comfort and defend others’ rights as energetically as your own, since they’re identical.

If you can’t be sure your vote will count, at the same time your personal freedom is threatened, make sure your vote is guaranteed to be counted.

There is a statistical trend in politics that only a Polyanna would ignore. Elections that everyone knew were in the bag have improbably gone to the underdog, even though the pre-polling, exit polling and historic voting patterns contradict the reported vote.

Southern Hemisfear

I don’t know why I trust New Zealanders. They just seem to be upstanding, steady folk, outnumbered by sheep, and more co
nservative than we. They don’t seem likely to embrace change for its own sake. So I’m inclined to take seriously a report from a couple of weeks ago, regarding odd results from the Georgia mid-term elections a year ago tonight. These excerpts capture the raw numbers from a long 3-page New Zealand Herald article:

Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in the US state of Georgia last November.
On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between 9 and 11 points.

In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss.

Those figures were more or less what political experts would have expected in Georgia, a state with a long tradition of electing Democrats to statewide office.

But then the results came in, and all of Georgia appeared to have been turned upside down.

Barnes lost the governorship to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing of as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls.

Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points.
Red-faced opinion pollsters suddenly had a lot of explaining to do and launched internal investigations.

…There were also big, puzzling swings in partisan loyalties in different parts of the state.
In 58 counties, the vote was broadly in line with the primary election.

…In 27 counties in Republican-dominated north Georgia, however, Max Cleland unaccountably scored 14 percentage points higher than he had in the primaries.

And in 74 counties in the Democrat-leaning south, Saxby Chambliss garnered a whopping 22 points more for the Republicans than the party as a whole had won less than three months earlier.

Now, weird things like this do occasionally occur in elections, and the figures, on their own, are not proof of anything except statistical anomalies worthy of further study.

But in Georgia there was an extra reason to be suspicious.

Last November, the state became the first in the country to conduct an election entirely with touchscreen voting machines, after lavishing US$54 million on a new system that promised to deliver the securest, most up-to-date, most voter-friendly election in the history of the republic.

The machines, however, turned out to be anything but reliable.

With academic studies showing the Georgia touchscreens to be poorly programmed, full of security holes and prone to tampering, and with thousands of similar machines from different companies being introduced at high speed across the country, computer voting may, in fact, be US democracy’s own 21st century nightmare.

In many Georgia counties last November, the machines froze up, causing long delays as technicians tried to reboot them. In heavily Democratic Fulton County, in downtown Atlanta, 67 memory cards from the voting machines went missing, delaying certification of the results there for 10 days.

In neighbouring DeKalb County, 10 memory cards were unaccounted for; they were later recovered from terminals that had supposedly broken down and been taken out of service. It is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards were tabulated, or if they were counted at all.

And we will probably never know, for a highly disturbing reason.

The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal — on pain of stiff criminal penalties — for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly.

There was not even a paper trail to follow up. The machines were fitted with thermal printing devices that could theoretically provide a written record of voters’ choices,
but these were not activated. Consequently, recounts were impossible.

Georgia was not the only state last November to see big last-minute swings in voting patterns. There were others in Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois and New Hampshire — all in races that had been flagged as key partisan battlegrounds, and all eventually won by the Republican Party.

What, then, is one to make of the fact that the owners of the three major computer voting machines are all prominent Republican Party donors?

Or of a recent political fund-raising letter written to Ohio Republicans by Walden O’Dell, Diebold’s chief executive, in which he said he was “committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president next year” – even as his company was bidding for the contract on the state’s new voting machinery?

…In Dallas, during early voting before last November’s election, people found that no matter how often they tried to press a Democrat button, the Republican candidate’s name would light up.

After a court hearing, Diebold agreed to take down 18 machines with apparent misalignment problems.
“And those were the ones where you could visually spot a problem,” Dr Mercuri said. “What about what you don’t see? Just because your vote shows up on the screen for the Democrats, how do you know it is registering inside the machine for the Democrats?”

Other problems have shown up periodically: machines that register zero votes, or machines that indicate voters coming to the polling station but not voting, even when a single race with just two candidates was on the ballot.

It is not just touchscreens that are at risk from error or malicious intrusion. Any computer system used to tabulate votes is vulnerable.

An optical scan of ballots in Scurry County, Texas last November erroneously declared a landslide victory for the Republican candidate for county commissioner; a subsequent hand recount showed that the Democrat had in fact won.

In Comal County, Texas, a computerised optical scan found that three different candidates had won their races with exactly 18,181 votes. There was no recount or investigation, even though the coincidence, with those recurring 1s and 8s, looked highly suspicious.

In heavily Democrat Broward County, Florida — which had switched to touchscreens in the wake of the hanging chad furore — more than 100,000 votes were found to have gone “missing” on election day.

The votes were reinstated, but the glitch was never adequately explained. One local official blamed it on a “minor software thing”.

Most suspect of all was the governor’s race in Alabama, where the incumbent Democrat, Don Siegelman, was initially declared the winner.

Sometime after midnight, when polling station observers and most staff had gone home, the probate judge responsible for elections in rural Baldwin County suddenly “discovered” that Mr Siegelman had been awarded 7000 votes too many. In a tight election, the change was enough to hand victory to his Republican challenger, Bob Riley.

County officials talked vaguely of computer tabulation error, or a lightning strike messing up the machines, but the real reason was never ascertained because the state’s attorney general (a Republican) refused to authorise a recount or any independent ballot inspection.

Is this just an alarmist reaction? Should we take more than a passing interest in the known but unpublicized catalyst of the year 2000 turmoil? A well-documented tally revision caused the TV networks to reverse their original call
that Gore had won Florida and to give it to Bush instead, prompting Gore’s premature concession call to Bush, later retracted.

The “glitch” was the revision of the Volusia County vote when someone used card ID 3 to overwrite the “master” card ID 0 with a new Gore tally of minus 16,200 votes and plus 4,000 to the Bush total. When discovered, card 0 was re-inserted in the master machine and the tally revised. (The pun’s too tempting: Master card ID 0, $.48; Premature concession, Priceless.).

There’s a lot of buzz surrounding e-voting story. Perhaps we’ll soon be sated with its novelty and with the complexities we must master to glimpse the whole picture. Certainly the press will tire of it and probably already has. Perhaps only the bloggers will have the persistence to keep this story above the fold.

To me though, it feels like molten aluminum dripping off the left wing. There is no larger story.

The ANZAC Treatise

Voting machine irregularities reported by the Kiwis and a solution from the Aussies? It’s enough to make a southern hemisphere junkie weep with joy. Just yesterday, Wired published Aussies Do it Right: E-Voting. It describes eVACS, a program developed by Software Improvements, a down-under open-source solution that might satisfy Mr. Windley:

“While critics in the United States grow more concerned each day about the insecurity of electronic voting machines, Australians designed a system two years ago that addressed and eased most of those concerns: They chose to make the software running their system completely open to public scrutiny.

Although a private Australian company designed the system, it was based on specifications set by independent election officials, who posted the code on the Internet for all to see and evaluate. What’s more, it was accomplished from concept to product in six months. It went through a trial run in a state election in 2001.

Phillip Green, electoral commissioner for the Australian Capital Territory, said that going the open-source route was an obvious choice.

“We’d been watching what had happened in America (in 2000), and we were wary of using proprietary software that no one was allowed to see,” he said. “We were very keen for the whole process to be transparent so that everyone — particularly the political parties and the candidates, but also the world at large — could be satisfied that the software was actually doing what it was meant to be doing.”

It raises an interesting question. If the Australian Capital Territory knew about our voting machine problems 3 years ago, why don’t we?

Master of my Domains

My small contribution to the effort is to snag a couple of domains, seemyvote.com and digivotereally.com. I imagine them as a way to allow our voting to be so transparent that we collectively overwhelm centralized record-keeping. A couple of other ideas:

1. Work with manufacturers to place disposable digital camera booths near polling places so millions can capture their voting screen before it disappears.
2. Establish WiFi web cams viewing the activity around the most suspect polling places.
   (Mitch Ratcliffe and Howard Greenstein have organized correspondences.org as a bona fide press organization with feeds appearing in Google news searches. They might arrange for Press credentials for webcam operators. Is that so, guys?)

The seemyvote.com vision:

Politicians who need our votes are acting like they don’t. They’re behaving like the RIAA, pretending they can treat their customers like thieves. Why do we spend so much time worrying about the RIAA and so little time directly managing our elected toadies?

SeeMyVote would be based on our right to enforce full, fair and equal representation, establishing a protocol for translating individual hot issues into votes with teeth.

SeeMyVote would be a database of real people who have abdicated their secret ballot to advertise their real-time responses to current issues and current outrages. The database would match issues and outrage with politicians and their current actions. Voters would link their next vote with their current values and beliefs so that, for instance, a politician’s cynical work against choice would publicly guarantee my wife’s vote against him. Combined with other uppity women, some politicians would see that this particular form of political cynicism is foolish, at least in his district. (Cynical because few politicians give a rat’s ass about right-to-life. They do care about the votes of people who care about abortion).

This is the kind of data which allows politicians to explain to each other why they can’t support each others’ favorite pork barrel. They all know they’re in government in order to stay in government.

Sample SeeMyVote Report:

“The Fleemer amendment to HR 419 has caused a plurality of Mr. Fleemer’s voting constituents to commit to vote him out of office in November. Based on commitment data from 73% of registered voters, It appears that Rep. Fleemer will lose his seat by a 9% margin unless his amendment is withdrawn.

Those voter commitments have been communicated to Mr. Fleemer’s staff, other Republican and Democratic National Committees and major media outlets. The data are presented in detail at http://www.electoralcollage.com/fleemer."

11:23:30 PM    

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart: the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…

…And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
                              –The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats, 1921

To a patriarchist*, the Dean campaign could mean the end of the world as it should be. While wishful thinking will prompt denial and grief anger, a more disciplined assessment would cause any elitist to quake at the possibility, slight, thank Gawd, but still too frightening to consider, that the proletariat might now have the means to sink the patriarchal world into anarchy.

*I’m trying out “patriarchist” where one might normally use the term “conservative.” And I fancy “explorer” where “progressive” has been the norm. This is consistent with the teaching of my mentor Howard Bloom, who says that every population consists of conformity enforcers and diversity generators.

Sir, There may be a vulnerability…”

W. B. Yeats and Joseph Campbell and George Lucas and now Joe Trippi teach that Breakdown Leads to Breakthrough. The Internet has the scaling potential to mediate the voices of us all, like a central nervous system, so that each of us (We the Cells) have a voice weighted in reasonable proportion to our contribution to the Rest of Us. Anyone with a passion for the Internet and a reasonably well developed sense of adventure should be irrevocably committed to this possibility.

There are terrorists among us. For patriarchist leaders, democracy is a form of anarchy, as Lance Knobel points out today. Patriachist Americans also feel that society might be endangered by a President untethered from the hierarchy of large organizations so beloved by the politicians. Some feel terror at the thought of a non-Bush president, even though Dubya is the only President who’s ever had a major terrorist attack happen on his watch.

It makes you wonder if we might be safer with a President who knows first-hand how a self-organizing smart mob works.

Disruptive Terrorists

Clue 1 Valdis Krebs depicts hidden data in novel ways. Here’s part of a visualization from Uncloaking Terrorist Networks to make sense of the terrorist network surrounding the 9/11 flights:

Krebs used public knowledge to uncloak obscure relationships:

“The best solution for network disruption may be to discover possible suspects and then, via snowball sampling, map their individual personal networks – see whom else they lead to, and where they overlap. To find these suspects it appears that the best method is for diverse intelligence agencies to aggregate their individual information into a larger emergent map. By sharing information and knowledge, a more complete picture of possible danger can be drawn. In my data search I came across many news accounts where one agency, or country, had data that another would have found very useful. To win this fight against terrorism it appears that the good guys have to build a better information and knowledge sharing network than the bad guys (Ronfeldt and Arquilla, 2001).

Clue 2 Gary Wolf is writing a story for Wired about Howard Dean’s Internet campaign, trying to figure out how the smart mob that is the campaign functions, and whether or not it actually can be managed. Wolf finds this to be such a challenge that he’s asked his own smart mob–his readers–to help him write the story.

“I’m used to stories having an innate structure that allows you to start anywhere in the vicinity of the key actors and find your way in. You just follow the trails…But the Dean campaign is different. Yes, it is centered on a single man – the candidate. But its activities are widely dispersed, control is decentralized, and many of the “happenings,” for lack of a better word, seem to have equal weight…

So, I’ve naturally decided to do what the campaign itself has done – that is, I’m making the network work for me.

To catalyze his network, Wolf has posted a “retroactive manifesto.” He’s asking us to imagine that the Dean campaign as we now see it had sprung out of a manifesto. By laying down the design criteria which might produce the campaign, he hopes we all can better understand it. And then he’ll take our collective work and put it under his byline. Following Dan Gillmor‘s example, Gary Wolf implies that he can learn more from his readers than we learn from him:

“Here, I’ve offered a Retroactive Manifesto of the Dean Campaign. These are the rules that might have been posted on the wall of campaign manager Joe Trippi’s office, if there were such a list of rules. I am looking for examples and counter-examples – confirmation and correction. Are these really the principles that underlay the architecture of the campaign? Are there concrete examples you can suggest? Is something here plainly wrong? Hack away.

When you look at both stories–Krebs’ search for network connectors and Wolf’s use of one network to understand another–you get it that Al Qaeda and the Dean campaign are both self-organizing, disruptive networks. Further, both have been catalyzed by a strong leader but neither depends on the leader for specific direction. In fact, each network is more a response to the strict hierarchy it opposes than the result of a purpose-built hierarchical organization.

The Smartest Network Wins…

…is how David Weinberger puts it. We can now see that our nation’s hierarchical security model is as vulnerable to the network model as circuit-switching phone companies are to packet-switching guerilla protocols. In military terms, we look like the Red Coats marching down a road while the Green Mountain Boys pick them off from the woods.

What if the Dean campaign prevails over the many hierarchies that want him to fail? If so, it will be because there’s something intrinsically superior in the nature of his accidental organization vs. everyone else’s explicit organizing. Howard Bloom would suggest that the Dean campaign is a Darwinist experiment by the American superorganism to find a way to defend itself from a previously unknown threat. It’s safe to say that a Dean administration will seek novel ways to combine information and make connections that our current hierarchy chooses to ignore, provably to our peril. Who knows? Maybe even Glenn will learn to embrace the only Internet candidate.

To Catch a Thief…

The patriarchists among us fear the Dean terrorist network as much as Al Qaeda, perhaps more. They’ve forgotten that the 13 colonies were a self-organizing network that overthrew a loathsome hierarchy. They should take comfort knowing that it takes one to know one.

1:46:54 AM    

Every red-blooded American male lives and dies with his favorite team. As a rite of passage, he masters the lineups, statistics and intricate details of strategy, tactics, player strengths and weaknesses. Put two fans in a room, and they’ll launch into a debate as passionate and subtle as anything you’ll hear at the UN.

While other teams are attacked, each fan saves his greatest resentment for his own team’s foul-ups. As they break his heart, he’ll boo their errors, misses, whiffs, boners, blunders and failure to appreciate the infinite subtleties of the game–details fans master without prompting. Just as hitting a fastball is arguably the hardest act in sports (here come the arguments!), so is mastery of any sport’s arcana one of the great feats of human intelligence.

These are obvious truths that even George Bush understands and embraces. He probably understands why Red Sox management fired Manager Grady Little yesterday, just for the hope that things could get even better. Based on the Sox’ love affair with the stats, it was a responsible decision, loyalty notwithstanding. When you’re running an enterprise as important as a baseball club, there’s no room for fuzzy thinking.

Such clear-headedness is clearly unwelcome at the national level. Bush feels that, unlike Grady Little, his contract should be renewed even though every stat that the Republicans have ever embraced is in the toilet. And traditional principles? We can only remember with nostalgia the good old days when our team seemed to do all the right things every time they stepped on the field. Wouldn’t it be great to sit in the stands with Dad again, and look at our national team through his eyes?

The only reason the voters could conceivably retain the country’s current management would be some vague gut feeling like the one that caused Little to hang in there with Pedro Martinez in the seventh game of the AL championship.

And isn’t this game a bigger one than baseball, too important for sentimentality? When you put a gun or fighting vehicle in a person’s hands, it’s time to pay attention to the larger game. The game of life and death.

Rational society is in a life and death battle with religious fundamentalism. Rationality–Enlightenment, literally–is the great thought behind our nation’s founding, inspired by a movement that grew out of their great technical communications breakthrough, local newspaper publishing and the technical mastery of its user interface (literacy). We have fuzzy-headed thinkers all around the world, basing their livelihoods on the eyeballs and anger of people who prefer a simple wrong answer to a a more nuanced correct one. This demagoguery is the root of “evil” in the mid east and here in the US.

It’s the Entertainment, Stupid!

To feed our partisan passion, most of us have lined up behind one of the two dominant political sports teams. We attack each others’ party and position with a passion and incivility that divides families and makes us dumb ourselves down to meaningless chat at Thanksgiving.

We do it for the same reasons that we argue about teams–entertainment. We’d rather argue politics with someone close enough to attack than to reason together in support of the larger team called America. The cost to our society and progress is immeasurable. It’s not because the issues, statistics and concepts are too difficult to master, they’re nothing compared to sports stats. The problem is the superstition that you’re a bad fan of your country if you criticize its management.

10:42:56 AM    

I’ve been at Dean Headquarters this week. This is the second time I’ve come up here intending to blog several color stories on what it’s like. Again, I’ve been so busy doing real work that the blogging suffers. And we had the first snow flurries of the year this morning.

Ed Cone was here on Tuesday and Wednesday.

West Wind for the West Wing

The news is out. Zephyr Teachout and Ryan Davis are taking an eight week trip across the country in a 27 foot reconditioned Airstream. Since zephyr derives from Greek for west wind, the Airstream seems a suitable conveyance.

Ryan’s Express

Not to be out-publicized, Ryan just told me that Ryan is Gaelic for Little Prince. Here he is early this morning contacting California Deaniacs to set up visits–one of his contacts called him back at 2:45 am.

Theirs is no odyssey for the faint-hearted. 64 cities in 8 weeks. 64 meetups. 64 chances to nourish the grass roots:

The first week’s itinerary includes:

• October 27: Los Angeles Kickoff
• October 28: Santa Barbara
• October 29: Salinas, San Jose, and Oakland
• October 30: Sacramento
• October 31: Davis and San Francisco

Later tour stops will include Reno, Las Vegas, Flagstaff, Phoenix, Tucson, Las Cruces, Albuquerque, Roswell, Austin, Houston, Dallas, Crawford, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, Jackson (Miss.), Atlanta, Orlando, Raleigh, Richmond, Washington, D.C., Baltimore and dozens of other cities and towns. The tour will conclude in Philadelphia, the nation’s cradle of liberty, in mid-December.

Of the, By the, and For the…

The message to the grass roots? The campaign has been so successful that it has driven Joe Trippi’s doctrine of letting go to its logical outcome. The grass roots is now in charge of energizing itself. Literally, the “official” campaign cannot even pretend to directly manage the great conversation that is the campaign. So the next step is to empower the most active Dean supporters (“Deaniacs”) to engage and support the next most active Deaners, and so on.

Just as the best schools are those whose parents cultivate each other’s interests, exhorting them to greater involvement and support, so too will the Dean campaign now be in the hands of the people whom the campaign was organized to cultivate.
3:55:21 PM