Dana Blankenhorn

Dirty F'ing Haties

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 9 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

One of the smartest things I have written at this blog came from my daughter, Robin. In a 2006 post I compared right-wing bloggers and talk show hosts to hippies from the 1960s.

No, she said. They're haties.

She's right, but the historical comparison remains apt, and I've made it many times. The haties are in the same historical role that hippies were 40 years ago.

The key to understanding the political changes of that time was its rejection of the hippies, then all those who enabled them. It was these people Spiro Agnew was describing in his speeches about liberal elites -- he was extending the public distaste for hippies to those who found anything redeemable in them.

The historical rejection of the hippies is a key to understanding the Nixon Thesis of Conflict, the political assumptions which have dominated America since that time, and which still dominate our media discourse.

The next step, after dismissing the hippies, was to defang them, and in this their supposed supporters in the media were highly complicit.

You can see it proceed throughout the 1970s. First they were turned into cartoons -- Scooby Doo. Then they were turned into suburbanites -- the Partridge Family. By the end of the decade they were merely a laughable stance -- Mork & Mindy. And they were an historical artifact, forgotten, crushed under history's wheel.

This process is just beginning for the haties of today. I would like to urge you to join in.

Fear Itself

UPDATE: To learn what you can do about this scourge check out our latest post on the Dirty F'ing Haties.

---

Liberal bloggers are getting their undies in a bunch over the Far Right's hate campaign against their man Barack Obama.

It's a game, says Josh Marshall. People won't see through it.

There are lots of charges you can make against liberalism, and by far the worst is their assumption of defeat. They're constantly Charlie Brown before the football, absolutely convinced it's about to be pulled away, because Lucy always gets away with it. (To the right, Cincinnati bloviator Bill Cunningham, of the McCain rally. Give him one back.)

Oh, and the American people are stupid enough to fall for it, say the libs fretfully. Again and again and again. They'll never learn. They're sheep.

It's this assumption of American stupidity I find most alarming. If Americans are that stupid, then maybe democracy is a mistake, and maybe we should have government of our betters, by our betters, for our betters.

Problem is, Mr. Liberal Jackass, you think you're our better, but you're not. Our better is always the ruthless one, the man who best harnesses our base fears. It was true in Latin America for decades, true in Europe before that. True in Africa today. You're not ruthless enough or twisted enough or evil enough to be our better.

Our better is giving you the finger.

What Starbucks Can Learn from Barack Obama

I have been to several Starbucks in my travels over the last few days. (Picture from MIT's Branding Blog, which is missing the point I'm about to make.)

They've got trouble. Terrible, terrible trouble. Their merchandising is stale. The message from their all hands meeting the other night is they're happy being McCoffee.

What's worse is they think they're in the coffee business. They're not in the coffee business. They're in a host of businesses, most of which they're doing as afterthoughts. Mainly they're supposed to be in the experience business.

Their coffee equipment selection sucks -- my carafe broke today and I couldn't replace it there. Their music selection is horribly limited. Their baked goods are stale. Worse, the employees don't care -- all the chain cares about is making good coffee.

I could jazz that place up in 5 minutes. Watch me:

• Bring in musicians. Empower local stores to find them. Add their CDs to the rack. So what if each gig only brings in a half-dozen souls -- that's all the place can hold. But it starts a process of connecting to music's grassroots.
• Better doughnuts. Or brownies. Or whatever. You need your people checking out the local bakery purveyors, bringing those suggestions up the chain, and you need to empower lower-level managers to try something new. Something fresh. Something from the area.
• A Better WiFi deal. The current AT&T deal lets people with a Starbucks card get free WiFi. Why not print a daily passcode on your receipts so anyone who buys a coffee drink today gets free WiFi today?
• Better merchandise. I wanna carafe. I want better selection, which means you need better buyers who will scour the globe (as they used to claim they did) for coffee-related stuff. Start it small, buy more if it does well. Spruce things up.

Oh, the Obama headline? There's a ton Starbucks can learn from Barack Obama. But you'll have to click through to learn what it is.

Still Got It

I hope regular readers have missed me the last several days.

I’ve been reporting. I do that. I’m a journalist.

Specifically I was reporting on the HIMSS show for ZDNet. HIMSS is the big event in the health care IT world, and I hoped that by learning about the players I could improve the coverage at Healthcare.Zdnet.com, maybe come up with more readers, maybe even justify the faith they placed in me by handing out the beat in the first place.

But there was a second reason for me to drive to Orlando Monday, hustle around the convention center Tuesday and hustle back here to Atlanta on Wednesday.

I wanted to see if I could still do it.

Could I take apart a big event, something outside my comfort zone, hunt down its essential stories, and explain what was happening in clear, simple English? Could I ask the right questions, take good notes, read those notes, write on deadline, and attend the after-show party, without collapsing in a heap?

Fact is I haven’t done much hands-on reporting since the dot-bomb dropped 8 years ago now. Back in the 1990s I was traveling so often I actually had an airline medallion card. Since 2001, nothing. The last event I covered as a reporter was th 2006 Freedom2Connect conference in Washington.

I used to look down on those old-timers who would haunt their old playing fields, trying to prove themselves to themselves. This week, in a way, I was one of them.

People and their Government

My friend Tariq Mustafa wrote from Karachi this morning.

He was complaining about a New York Times editorial shedding crocodile tears over President Pervez Musharraf's open threats against a journalist.

Tariq's point was that the Times said nothing when Musharraf fired the nation's judges and attacked civil society last year. Instead, the Times (like the U.S. government) seemed more concerned with whether Pakistan would remain an ally in our own "War on Terror" than whether its society was allowed to function.

Today the ZDNet blog Threat Chaos is filled with similar condescension toward Pakistan. First, President Musharraf demanded that access to YouTube be shut, accusing it of blasphemy. Then, a local ISP trying to deal with the order cut itself off entirely from the Internet, taking the whole country with it.

Richard Steinnon concluded, with enormous condescension:

I could say: “be careful what you wish for” to those elements that object to free and open access to information and expression of ideas. But to put it in terms they might understand better: Do not anger the Internet gods or  you will suffer their wrath!

He's right, but....

Through the Looking Glass

For 75 years, since the depths of the Great Depression, American economists and policymakers have offered just one cure for economic problems.

Liquidity.

Liquidity means the injection of new money into the economy. This is done through monetary policy, cutting the cost of money directly by the Federal Reserve, or through fiscal policy, spending more than the government takes in.

Of course, there's another word for liquidity, and that word is inflation. The film above, produced in 1928, illustrates the hyper-inflation which began the rise of Hitler in Germany.

Once a nation goes through hyper-inflation its people get the message through suffering. Your life's savings disappear. You can't afford food or other necessities. The government can't really help anymore because they're using the same worthless currency you are. Pretty soon you're down to barter and the use of foreign currencies. It's happened many times, especially in Latin America, and the answer of American policymakers was to peg those currencies to the dollar. The dollar was the strong currency.

Is it?

When you're running deficits of $300 billion or more a year, you print money to make up the difference. When you cut interest rates below the rate of inflation, you're printing money. When you offer tax cuts -- to the rich, to the poor, to anyone -- or a "stimulus" package you're printing money. When you tell banks, give us your broken-down loans and we'll lend you 100 cents on the dollar on them, you're printing money.

Nearly everyone across the political spectrum, with the notable exception of Ron Paul, thinks these policies are dandy. And they offer little else in response to them. Paul, however, is a nutcase -- getting rid of the Federal Reserve and going to a Gold Standard won't solve the problem either.

The answer is to start paying down debt. The answer is to start producing more goods. The answer is to turn around our current accounts deficits, and our fiscal deficits, and start paying down our loans. This is what worked in the 1990s, and yet no one has proposed it in 2008.

Instead we get whining when lines of credit which aren't being used correctly are cut off. (Borrowing on your house to pay for pre-school is stupid.) We get nods of approval for more deficits from people like James Surowiecki, who should know better. We get predictions of doom from Nouriel Roubini, but no clear course out.

What can be done?

The Buried Lede in the McCain-Lobbyist Story

I don't care if he shtupped her. I don't care if he saw her socially. I don't care about the why concerning anything he did. (Find the lobbyist on the page where this picture came from.)

This should not be about John McCain. It should not be about The New York Times.

This should be about us, all of us. Did John McCain serve us well, or serve us poorly?

The buried lede is John McCain's record, as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, regarding telecommunications issues and media consolidation. The fact is he endorsed monopolization, every step of the way.

Why do you see no more local programming on your TeeVee? Why are all your radio stations canned and controlled in Corpus Christi? Why do you have, at most, two choices for Internet access? Why are your bills going up instead of down?

Media consolidation. And John McCain has endorsed it, enabled it, for a decade now. The why or how is really immaterial.

End of the New Nixon

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 8 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

One of the most annoying aspects of modern political coverage is this emphasis on process, tactics, and what looks like minutiae.

TeeVee talking heads keep telling us this is inevitable, as though their habits were a force of nature, like entropy. The point is made most forcefully by Chris Matthews, whose book "Life's a Campaign" paints everything as artificial.

But this is not inevitable. This is not entropy. This had a beginning and it has an ending.

The ending is the major political story of 2008.

The beginning was The New Nixon. The idea was that Richard Nixon, twice-defeated, had become tanned, rested, ready, mature, a new man. Everyone on the press bus knew this was bull, but Nixon's handlers, especially H.R. Haldeman (right), kept pushing the line, and eventually Nixon won. Tactics and image, it seemed, had triumphed over reality.

Ever since then political coverage has become all about artifice. More and more is written about less and less. Insiders care nothing for what a candidate really is, or really believes. They care only about the tactics, about how they will be portrayed, and how this portrayal can shift based entirely on how marketing people manipulate the media. They are, in other words, covering their own eternal bamboozlement, pretending that the lies of spokespeople are the only truth, and that reality has no substance beyond the never-ending ability to spin it.

We have lived a generation now with this bedrock political assumption. It is drilled into our politics as no policy is. And it's time for it to stop, if a new era is going to actually take shape.

Here's how we start.

The Unstoppable Power of Communication

The most powerful force in the world is communication.

This medium brings more of it within reach of more people than any medium has before. (Pictured, the capital of Rwanda.)

When George W. Bush was in Africa this week reporters were astounded by the number of people there who supported Barack Obama, who seemed to know all about him.

And why not? Africa is filled with Internet cafes. Africans don't have to listen hopefully for a word from the BBC anymore. They can pick up The New York Times.

Recently I mentioned the idea that Obama should go to Kenya and try to sort out the growing crisis there. Turns out he's been there, via radio. He made a statement and took questions at the end of last month. This has not yet had an impact, as the struggle has morphed into a tribe-on-tribe war over land. But he was there, and could be again, at any time.

It's not just politics where this medium is making enormous change. It's in every facet of life. The turnaround in Rwanda is being driven as much by information as anything else. The use of sympathy to reach markets, and the opening of an online stock exchange,  is enabling capital to reach all of East Africa. Trouble in Kenya can now quickly move capital to Rwanda and vice versa. Rapid capital flows can create a gigantic incentive to make peace.

What vs. Who

Here's a simple statement of fact which the TeeVee talking heads just refuse to accept.

The 2008 election is over.

We know what we want. We've decided. This is far more important than whose name goes on the White House door next winter.

Barring assassination or a military coup the next President will either by Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. Both are in general agreement on principles, and on policy. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses, and while most expect Obama could win bigger than Clinton, their victory is baked into the system.

This is not just a rejection of George W. Bush, which is what a lot of Republicans are trying to claim. This is a complete rejection of the Republican Party, the party of Nixon, Reagan, Bush and McCain, the party of Limbaugh and Dobson, of Larry Kudlow and Grover Norquist, the party of warrantless wiretaps, of Katrina, of tax cuts for the rich, of eternal war, of limitless deficits.

This is the message sent by every primary. This is the message being sent by fundraising. Democrats are going to the polls in higher numbers than Republicans almost everywhere. The exceptions are Arizona and the Deep South. That's Goldwater country, Strom Thurmond territory. That's as low as the Republican Party can really go and still claim to exist. If they win there they have a base. Lose there and they're Whigs.