Dana Blankenhorn

Protection Racket

My PC is very slow.

(This is actually a drum mat, sold in the UK.)

I checked it out with my malware and anti-viral. The malware detector didn't find anything serious. The anti-viral found almost 2,000 copies of a file called sgregister.

I looked it up. Sounded dangerous. I checked message boards for advice. They suggested a "free" product. Click a link, download it, load it, let it run -- waste a few hours. Then my fear is confirmed -- you have 743 serious errors.

But my "Free" software won't fix any more than a half-dozen of those errors. If I want them fixed, I have to register and buy it. I have to pay.

The Stupak Opportunity

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 45 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The Stupak Amendment, which analysts are calling the worst thing ever for the women's movement -- it prohibits coverage for abortions even in private contracts written on the health exchange -- may in fact be an enormous opportunity.

And that opportunity holds big lessons for other political movements as well.

First, want to know why the AARP is  so powerful? Cash flow. 

Thanks to a deal with UnitedHealth, AARP draws millions of dollars per year in insurance kickbacks from its members. Thus it's not just an interest group, but an institution. The AARP's endorsement of the House measure went a long way toward assuring its passage last night.

Planned Parenthood, by contrast, is financially weak. It has been burdened with the call of "choice" for a generation, against the stronger frame of "life." It is constantly on the defensive, where if it looked at history and changed its frame to working "against slavery" (a woman's independent life can today be ended by any guy's sperm, and even a rapist's baby brought to the world at the point of a gun, according to the other side) things can be turned around.

But this post is not just about politics. It's about money.

The Extended Warranty

The distrust of our economy and our high-tech lives from the media is unrelenting.

This Halloween, a little Christmas. A bit of good news you probably haven't noticed before.

Turn on your TV. Chances are you're going to see adds from outfits like Mogi, Carchex, EasyCare, or  StopRepairBills. 

The ads are basic. Customers getting new transmissions who aren't troubled because the bills are covered. Customers moaning over the cost of a needed repair. Customers on both sides of the divide sitting side-by-side.

I'm not telling you to buy this stuff. Just notice how such companies have suddenly become a big feature in your broadcast day. And ask why.

The reason is, of course, that it's good for the companies offering this service. They may claim it's insurance. But it's really an extended warranty.

Where are the jobs?

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 42 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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It's the question every journalist is asking. Where are the jobs?

By this point in the economic cycle unemployment should be falling, not rising. People who have jobs, like my dear wife, are incredibly productive and highly profitable. Many are being pressed to the limit, forced into free overtime for fear they will join the ranks of the unemployed.

But put yourself in an employer's place a moment. You want to hire someone. How much will it cost?

Right now you don't know. The salary is not at issue here. The question is what will you have to pay for health care?

Until there is visibility on health care costs, which is not a question of how much you pay but knowing what that how much is, it's impossible to justify a new hire. Once a health care bill passes (or fails) you will know and be able to make a decision. Until then, no. 

The good news is that the economy is on the mend, thanks to the radical interventions of the last year. Sure, those interventions have increased the deficit, but look at it, again, from an employer's perspective.

The business is failing, and a new machine might increase production and productivity, but it will take debt to buy. If you don't buy you fail, but if you do buy you take a risk. So you buy. You're incorporated and thus protected from the personal consequences of failure to an extent. 

Fox Jr.

One neat trick the Right perfected over the last generation has been the manipulation of the media.

A founding principle of the Nixon Thesis is  "the liberal media." Any criticism, on anything from any quarter gets this immediate response from the conservative grassroots. "You're part of the liberal media," followed by a prompt dismissal of the critic.

It's a great dodge, this victim game. It means you never need answer a critic. They're biased. They're the enemy. And you can spread this word among your acolytes, so they too are inoculated.

Once inoculated in this way people become sheep. Nothing that contradicts you can ever get to them.

To this has been added the control and ownership of the media. The best know conservative media baron is Rupert Murdoch, who now has immense sway over the politics of Australia, Britain and the U.S. through his ownership of newspapers, magazines, TV and cable, and Web sites. A better example might be Silvio Berlusconi, who used his control of Italy's media to make himself ruler of all Italy.

To these conservatives the equation is pretty simple. Own the media and you control the people. Grab them by the clickers and their hearts and minds will follow. Politics is not a contest of ideas. It is a contest of wills, and money. With enough of both you can make people believe anything you want.

Liberals have never really gotten their heads around this. It's one thing to deal with a media that is owned by people who vote conservative. It's another thing entirely to face a conservative media, a media where no voices other than conservatives ones get a hearing, where no facts other than those conservatives approve of can be known.

Murdoch is not alone. Pat Robertson controls a large hunk of the media. Sun Myung Moon controls another hunk. There have long been regional conservative barons in various parts of the country -- Freedom Newspapers in California, Morris Communications in Georgia. The dominance of these companies within their markets mean liberal causes, liberal politicians, and liberal organizations start off with an immense disadvantage.

But at least these organizations pretend to exist in the market.

Valuing Clicks

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 39 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Let's go back to Internet Commerce a moment or two. That's what A-Clue.Com was created to cover in 1997.

A click's value is easy to state but very hard to calculate.

It's worth what you can get for it.

The corollary is also true.

It costs what it costs.

In absolute terms this means a page view is worth the advertising (or commerce revenue) you can generate from it, less the cost of getting the page view and serving the page.

V= A - C

These values vary tremendously by site, and ignorance of the underlying equation leads to ferocious misunderstanding wherever e-commerce is discussed.

Why reporters should be heroes

I was brought up to believe that being a reporter is a pretty cool thing.

One important lesson of my career is that most people don't think so. The assumption of a reporter as hero is, generally, an American assumption.

In much of the world, especially Asia, a reporter is either a stenographer or a threat to civil order. This may be why nominal democracies there don't act the way they do here. That is, it takes an enormous effort to dump a government because the truth-telling role of journalists is assumed not to exist.

I got an unexpected taste of this at CompuTex. The Taiwanese authorities (above) held a press conference on the third day of the show. The four bureaucrats sat at their table, they read their statements, they asked for questions.

Except for me, there was silence. I asked a question, got an answer. Waited a while and asked another. I thought I was being polite. These people had gone to great trouble to speak with us. They laid out coffee, cakes, and lunch. The least I could do, I thought, was to take what they said seriously, to ask some serious questions, and follow up.

Not true. A Europe-based reporter clued me in. They were shocked to be asked real questions, he said. They expected that reporters would repeat what they said, verbatim, and leave it at that.

Self-censorship is a bad habit, but that's the habit of most reporters around the world. At least most of those who get paid for it.

Blogging for Money

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 36 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Hard as it is for me to believe I have now been blogging professionally (not here) for five years.

During that time I have brought in well over $100,000, writing blog posts.

I have learned a lot about the market in that time, and I have developed a winning process for writing blog posts that sometimes draw a large crowd and sometimes draw a small one.

So this week we're going back to the original A-Clue.Com beat, Internet Commerce. Here's how you might make good money in the wonderful world of blogging.

If the newspaper business is gonna drown put a hose in their mouth

Newspapers have reached the desperate stage of their death spiral, the point where they're looking for government bail-outs.

In the case of the financial industry there was a case to be made that letting AIG and Citigroup fail would cost more than propping them up. In the case of the auto industry there's a case to be made that we'll at least get the money back.

There is no such case to be made for newspapers.

What they're looking for is a "tweak" to the copyright laws that would bar linking to copyrighted material without consent.  What they're seeking is the destruction of the Internet.

The same argument holds for the idea that content should be exclusive to its source for 24 hours. If you can't link to it, content does not exist. I'm amazed people like Connie Schultz manage to breathe they're so stupid.  

The Internet is based on links. Content you can't Google does not exist. We have learned this before with the news industry when it tried to hide its content behind paid firewalls and registration systems. 

It didn't work.

The industry now knows it needs links. It just wants to extract monopoly rents  for them. Hey, I want a pony. 

Any Senator or Congressman who stands up for this nonsense needs to be slapped down, hard. Can you imagine the cost of this to schools, to libraries, to universities? Can you imagine the bureaucratic cost of tracking this free money? And I guarantee it will go only to a few politically-connected news barons, people like Rupert Murdoch and Carlos Slim. 

The Lies of the Peachtree Road Race

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 27 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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One of the most interesting aspects of running the Peachtree Road Race is the politics.

Traditionally these are conservative politics. You have your preachers by the side of the road, one this year with a big sign reading "God Loves -- God Hates." You have your "pro-life" shirts. And this year I even saw one woman with an Obama hat.

But mainly it's anti-government stuff. "Government is taxing us to death," was the message of one onlooker in Buckhead. "Government or freedom" was the message of another.

These are assumptions deeply ingrained in Southern history. They have resonated since before the Civil War. They are the majority view throughout the region.

And they are wrong. Dead wrong.