Dana Blankenhorn

Phone FUD Targets Google

It may be the first challenge to the new President's tech policy.

For the last several months advocates for the nation's phone monopolists have been ginning up a public relations campaign against Google. They claim it's a monopolist. They claim it's a threat to freedom, a violator of privacy, evil.

It's being done in clever ways, through academics and think tanks you don't usually think of as Bell shills. Privacy advocates are being taken in, even the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But it doesn't take a genius to see where all this is coming for, or where it's leading. All it takes is a little knowledge of the industry's history, a quick look at who stands to benefit, and a short Google of who's cheering from the sidelines.

Just read Scott Cleland's blog. Cleland, a notorious phone monopoly booster of long standing, has been hammering Google this year at every opportunity.

Google itself seems unable to understand the situation, or properly respond to it. CEO Eric Schmidt has tried to be personally charming. The company's other officials have sought to be transparent, and answer questions honestly.

Meanwhile, the stock market crash has hit Google hard. The company is now worth only about what Verizon is worth -- AT&T is now worth nearly twice that. And Google's stock valuation has begun tracking the phone giants. Suddenly it's no longer a growth stock.

How should Google respond? Aggressively. And it needs to understand who its opposition really is, the ruthlessness of that opposition, and the nature of the struggle.

It is a political struggle.

Hate Fuels Hate

It's easy to see how the Mumbai terrorists need to be fought, because we're over here and they're over there.

The lesson is simple, obvious, and it tastes like bile if you're being told to administer it. It's precisely what we didn't do after 9-11, and precisely what led us down the road to today.

1. Use police methods to decapitate the leaders.
2. Use media to expose the methods.
3. Use popular will to improve security.
4. Use social methods to reduce the foe.

Joy Amid the Ruins

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 48 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

There is a feeling felt by earthquake and hurricane survivors, in common with those who have made it through war or a terrifying disease.

Joy amid the ruins. (Love Among the Ruins is a painting by Edward Burns-Jones.)

We are thankful for having made it through. We have life and (hopefully) people who care about us, still. Everything narrows to that fine point. We dare not look around at the devastation all around us. We concentrate on what we have, and we pray that the storm really has passed, that the rebuilding can now begin.

Yeah, it's the election. But also the post-election. (UPDATE: Don't assume every terrorist attack is all about you.)

For a generation Americans have been playing a zero-sum game with power, even while evidence of its futility piles up around us. We have felt hopeless, cynical. We have believed that tossing out one bunch of bums merely means another bunch of bums, that all we can do is trade hates, that life is nothing but conflict, the idea of political peace an illusion.

It takes great events to jolt Americans out of their complacency, forcing us into a search for unity and renewed purpose. Each disaster in our history has provided such an opportunity. At the end of each conflict we have promised, never again. And then again happens, again.

We have spent the last decade building a bridge to the 19th century. It has been fueled by our own hatreds, one for the other, our own hubris, our own fear. This only accelerated with the end of the Cold War, the latest "last time" in our history, and I have argued it happened precisely as a result of that event.

Most Americans came here, or has ancestors who came here, due to unacceptable conditions somewhere else. Whether it was over the Bering land bridge thousands of years ago, on ships hundreds of years ago, or by plane just decades ago, you saw in America a new chance to make a new start, and to do it different this time. (And if you are descended from West African slaves, you may have been given that chance by relatives still living. Thank them.)

But the better angels of our nature are easy to vanquish. They are easily distracted -- maybe our better angels have ADD. Comfort can distract them. Theories can distract them. Religion can distract them. Desire can distract them. Every generation has had its excuse for taking its eye off what mattered, and focusing instead on threats, on the other.

Even the Greatest Generation succumbed. It was our parents who saw the value of uniting against Depression and War, who built our prosperity and who then let themselves be distracted, by harsh words and oppresion overseas, into thinking that "killing is the only thing they understand." Never mind that resolution and defense are not the same thing as war, and containment was not meant as an excuse to send young men off to die.

Shame of the South: Clayton County

When reformers condemn Georgia's pay to play government under House Speaker Glenn Richardson, they may ask how white voters tolerate it.

The answer, as any white blogger will tell you (and some racists are far from subtle about it), can be summarized in two words.

Clayton County. (To the right, former school board chair Norreese Haynes.)

While the problem of white governance is one of money and political organization, the problem of black governance is one of apathy and political opportunism. You decide which is worse for the prospect of real reform.

Clayton County went from mostly-white to mostly-black in the 1990s, then acquired one of the most dysfunctional governments anywhere. The county as a whole is in the process of going broke, despite having a ton of taxable business property within its boundaries, as well as the Atlanta Airport.

But the real story here, its true shame, is Clayton County's school board.

The Health Internet

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 47 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

In looking at health care reform I am reminded of an old New Yorker cartoon by Stanley Harris (right).

A scientist stands before a blackboard filled with equations, but with a giant gap in the middle. "Then," he has written, "a miracle occurs."

We're very much in that position regarding health care reform. Advocates across the political spectrum insist that by automating the industry we can save tens of billions of dollars. Both John McCain and Barack Obama had this in their platforms.

Yet no one in the industry believes it possible.

Over the last 13 years many, many industries have succumbed under the World Wide Web. Where we once went to travel agents we now go to airlines' Web sites, or (for complex trips) a site like Expedia.com. Where we once went to book stores and record stores we routinely go to Amazon and similar sites. Instead of the library we ask The Google.

Almost as soon as the Web was spun, the rush was on to create special tags to deal with the problems of vertical industries. That's what XML is. It's an agreement between market participants as to what customized HTML-like tags will mean, in the context of their business. So we have special XML subsets for the advertising industry and for many others.

But not for medicine.

When I went to the annual HIMSS show in Orlando last spring I felt transported back in time. It looked like a 20-year old Comdex. Each major vendor - Cerner, McKesson, Microsoft -- had the equivalent of their own operating system. Each product vendor -- and an MRI machine in this case is just a fancy printer -- required multiple sets of drivers to move files into any one of these systems. And since you could not be certain that the equipment you bought would include drivers for the computer system you might want to buy, doctors and hospitals remained in statis. Because paper worked.

To break this bottleneck requires a set of standards as universal as paper, defining all sorts of medical conditions and procedures, across all vendor systems and equipment types, so that the whole can interoperate.

Easy to say. Very, very tough to do.

There are groups that are trying to create such standards. Health Level 7 is the most prominent. They require agreement on what to call procedures, on how to define medical processes, an enormous, ever-changing schema that is flexible enough to accommodate the change we know is coming to medicine as our knowledge advances.

It is an enormous undertaking.

Acceptance of this grand scheme is at the heart of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems (there are over 200 of them) sold to professionals and Personal Health Record (PHR) systems like Google Health and Microsoft Healthvault, which patients will control.

On top of the former are layered a host of regulations like the HIPAA law, which aims mainly to protect us from abuse by our "health vendors," and it's partly in implementing laws like this that EMR vendors have created the proprietary tweaks that make it so hard to create PHRs under patient control.

Note here that HIPAA does not really provide security, just bureaucratic control. And security, or the lack of it, is both the biggest fear and the biggest impediment to computerizing. The fear is real.

Now, having described the intractability of this problem, let me offer your Clue.

The problem can be solved.

Sport Economics Bring Recession Home

My local soccer club went toes-up yesterday.

The Atlanta Silverbacks, in the minor-league USL, announced they won't play next year.

The decision was a no-brainer. Since U.S. soccer lacks the promotion-and-relegation process that lets every European team hope it can score the big bucks, there is no upside to the investment. Without an upside it's all ego. Amazing how, when things go bad, ego becomes the first casualty.

Soccer isn't the only troubled sport. Arthur Blank, who owns the Atlanta Falcons, is cutting back, both in business and in charitable giving. The Home Depot co-founder has found there is a bottom to his pocket.

Blank's cutbacks put the lie to the Silverbacks' excuse for folding, namely the chance the MLS will move a team in here. Blank was the money man behind that speculation.

All this reveals an important truth about how the economics of sport have changed in this decade, and given us a taste of things to come.

Getting in Front of a Panic

Confidence.

Today's headlines all come down to a lack of confidence.

Washington has thrown up its hands. People are in a mood to lynch the leaders of the biggest banks. So Congress spent the day telling the biggest automakers to drop dead.

Someone needs to step in. George W. Bush is chuckling his way to America's grave. He is in power for two more months, and while it didn't seem possible a few weeks ago he's still capable of enormous mischief.

It's risky, but it is time for President Barack Obama to step forward.  It's time for a road trip.

Might I suggest Omaha?

Don't Turn Roosevelt into Nixon

Movement conservatives did not like Richard Nixon. His campaign had called him "The One" but to the National Review crowd of 1968 Ronald Reagan was "The One." Maybe Bill Buckley. So Nixon's enemies list was long, and had names from both right and left, as he selected his cabinet that winter, and so the program which emerged frustrated conservatives terribly.

Having been weakened on his right flank Nixon gave in on the left. It was Richard Nixon who created the EPA, Nixon who created OSHA and Nixon who created the CPSC. Nixon became the liberal apotheosis, extending the gains of the Great Society, making many permanent, signing new regulatory protections into law. He even appointed Harry Blackmun to the Supreme Court.

Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand, was given permission by his supporters to shore up his right flank, on his own. He brought in conservative bankers like Jesse Jones, former swindlers like Joe Kennedy. This left him free to enact sweeping reforms, like Social Security, the regulatory structure the Bushies tore down (to their eternal regret), and all the rest of it.

Nixon failed. Roosevelt succeeded. So which leader are the Netroots treating Barack Obama like today?

Nixon.

Fighting the Haties

The transition is under way.

The President-elect is doing all he can to build consensus behind his policies, and his new Administration, making promises on bipartisanship we will have measured by Christmas.

But there are millions of people outside the consensus. They are outside of their own choice. Given the nature of the Nixon Thesis, which was that "the other" was illegitimate, this is no surprise. Add to that the toxic brew of race hatred plus a Republican campaign meant to cast doubt on the person of the new President, and you have potentially the most dangerous period since the Civil War.

I call this new enemy Haties. They are polar opposites of the Hippies we feared 40 years ago, but they are far more like the Hippies than they realize. They have developed their own counter-culture, a shared set of identities. They also feel a sense of abandonment by the larger society which is literally palpable. They have a host of organizations and support groups fueling their hate and fear, both online and offline, and legitimate media figures egging them on.

It does not help to make fun of such people. They deserve to be taken seriously.

There is one more ingredient, a commitment by some of our major religions to disregard the teachings of Jesus and preach fear instead. Fear of gays in the case of Mormons. Fear of women in the case of Catholics. And this is breeding a natural reaction on the left. Not everything we have to fear will come from the other side.

We are fortunate in that, over the last 40 years, we have built some important institutions focused on tracking these people, and in tracing their links to the mainstream. I am thinking of the Southern Poverty Law Center in the first case and groups like Media Matters in the second. Whenever we consider the question of political violence, we need to distinguish between what is truly dangerous on the one hand and what legitimate political action may be enabling it on the other. The latter may be monitored -- it is seeking an audience after all -- but it should not be stopped.

My point is that there is much here which is truly dangerous. We only have to recall the history of the Clinton years, events like the Oklahoma City bombing and the Atlanta Olympics bombing, to know that there is something real to fear. Multiply that by ten, at least, and perhaps square it as well.

This is as serious as a heart attack.

Shame of the South: Glenn Richardson

That white America retains its racist edge is a fact.

As Dr. Charles Franklin noted recently, even the 2008 Exit Polls show white support for Democrat Barack Obama falling off a cliff once the black population of a state hit 25%.

This defines the Deep South. Blacks vote Democratic, whites Republican. Both sides suffer as a result. Real elections are in the primaries, and all reformers are at a disadvantage as incumbent machines hint (subtly or not) that their efforts at bipartisanship are a form of racial sell-out.

Little has changed since the 1960s, except instead of all-white Democratic machines holding all power we now have two sets of machines, one white and one black. The move was gradual, down the ballot, but once the tipping point was reached in each state the move was both total and irreversible.

In 2002 the tipping point was reached in Georgia. The state's first Republican Governor since Reconstruction, Sonny Perdue, was elected. This caused the state's money power to flip entirely to the Republicans, who took over both houses of the state legislature in 2004.

And instituted their machine.

The leader of that machine, on the House side, is Glenn Richardson. Like the other leaders of the state's Republicans he lives in the Atlanta exurbs. Specifically he lives in Hiram, Georgia, which is in Paulding County, about 25 miles north-by-northwest from Atlanta proper.

Richardson, 52, lives just a few miles north of his birthplace in Douglas County. He is a highly incurious man who operates from self-interest, his own and that of people like him. He got his law degree from Georgia State in Atlanta in 1984 and almost immediately joined a politically-connected law firm for which he is now a name partner. He rose steadily along with his party, winning his legislative seat in 1996. His district is northeast of that held by the late Democratic Speaker Tom Murphy, and while his leadership style is based on the same ruthlessness and bombast, his method for gaining power is quite different.