Dana Blankenhorn

Enabling Violence

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 40 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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When violent rhetoric escalates, and it's not put down, the end result is violence.

Speech is free, but free speech carries responsibilities.

I know whereof I speak. I have an ADD temper. My son has an ADD temper. To the right is what he did to the living room, moments ago, because I dared disagree with him.

Politics works the same way. And its patterns run in waves, similar to Elliot Waves. There are short-term waves based on issues, and longer-term waves based on assumptions. The biggest waves come when a generation's assumptions are not just challenged, but overthrown. This happened in last year's election, which was the first time since 1964 a liberal candidate won a clear mandate from the American people.

This fact has driven conservatives loopy. Their loopiness was indulged, even used as a weapon, during the Bush years. It is still indulged by the nation's media out of habit. A single election won't change the knee-jerk media assumption that "America is a center-right nation."

We had this kind of violent rhetoric and acting-out before, in my living memory. It came in 1969-70, it came from the left, and it was finally confronted, first in the words of Spiro Agnew, finally in the killings at Kent State and Jackson State.

These actions scarred the left, and still scar it. Young activists dropped out of activism, becoming yuppies, religious nuts, Reaganites, and now senior citizens. Leftists learned there were limits, not just in what they could do, but what they could say. Liberals learned that they were no longer the majority, they were the minority, and eventually comported themselves accordingly.

For nearly 40 years our politics have been an abusive relationships, with conservatives as the wife beaters and liberals as the wives. Conservatives know that by contriving anger, by throwing fits, by constantly attacking, by never backing down, and eventually by threatening violence they will force liberals to back down.

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.

Identifying the Crazy

Frank Rich did us all a favor by providing some historical perspective to the hysterical ramblings of Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck, it seems, is playing the 1897 Game.

Much of what passes for the Right today is a reversed version of 1969. Haties are hippies, born followers of the previous thesis who, in the wake of a crisis for which they had no answers, are just taking their ideas to extremes.

Beck's nonsense has deeper historical roots. While we think of Populism in terms of William J. Bryan, even assigning it some liberal values because it opposed Wall Street and led to such innovations as the Income Tax and Federal Reserve, it was in fact a cross-partisan festival of hatred against "the other."

This is reflected best perhaps at the Georgia State Capitol. You won't find a statue of Jimmy Carter or Martin Luther King Jr. there. Instead you'll see this man, the Populist Thomas E. Watson.

Watson actually got a sniff of national power as a potential vice president to Bryan in 1896. His statue stands where it does, however, thanks to his later proclamations of racism and anti-semitism, which culminated in the lynching of Leo Frank and the second rising of the KKK. The statue's legend reads, "A champion of the right who never faltered in the cause."

Beck's nonsense is cut from the same cloth. Unlike Fox' other nutcases, Beck is virulently anti-Wall Street. He is also overtly religious, adding to its bigotry a hatred of black and brown people, all wrapped up in a "caring" attitude for The Little Guy.

That's Watson all over.

Keith Olbermann calls the result "Lonesome Rhodes," after the character Andy Griffith played in 1957's "A Face in the Crowd." Griffith's Rhodes was a bigoted, profane force of nature, an Arkansas con man whose act won him money, fame and power until he took himself too seriously.

Beck isn't as good an actor as Griffith. He's not as  self-aware as Rhodes was. It's important that Watson did not become the man on the pedestal until his national flame had dimmed, when he became a hurricane for regional injustice, until his followers actually committed murder for him.

Beck''s probably not that strong, either.

Stopping the Haties

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 38 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The most urgent political task before America today is to remove the Haties from our political discussions, to exile them, to set boundaries on the right which politicians and the media dare not cross for fear of being marginalized.

Nixon and Agnew's great success, that is to say William Safire's and Pat Buchanan's great success, was to set such boundaries for the left.

Ever since 1969 the work of conservatism has been to push these boundaries inward. That's part of what a political thesis does. It channels what is legitimate and exiles those who cross the border to the margins of political life. It falls when this becomes bad policy, irrelevant to the times, and when it makes this obvious to the people, as conservatism did in the floods of Katrina.

This was pretty easy for Buchanan, for Safire, and for Nixon. The hippies of the late 1960s were never a serious threat. Their ideology was faintly foreign. They were, even then, just a fringe of the Democratic Party. George McGovern would never have gotten close to a Presidential nomination but for "the horrors" of Watergate that destroyed everyone to his right.

Unfortunately the Haties are buried deep within the Republican Party center. You can say they are its center. Until recently they were our rulers -- even when Haties have rejected George W. Bush as a person they have embraced his policies, including their excesses.

Before Katrina, I would argue, the Haties were the mainstream and the non-Haties were the exiled. The success of writing the Dixie Chicks out of our public life, of transforming Howard Dean into a screaming meamie, and of intimidating the media into printing the lies about Iraq without question, all attest to this fact.

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.

The Sound of Michelle

One more piece about President Obama's speech the other night, because it hasn't been mentioned anywhere.

Near the end, he changed his speaking style. Obama has always been great for the big occasions, noble stentorian tones inspiring millions. But in a small room he's not the best speaker in the world. Not even best in his own bed.

When he spoke of Ted Kennedy, the President adopted the speaking style of his wife, Michelle. I have only seen her speak a few times, during the campaign, and she is great in a small room. She is intimate, she is passionate. If I were on trial for my life I'd want her defending me, not her husband, because she can sway a jury.

An important talent for a great writer, a great comic, a great athlete or a great politician is to steal someone else's moves. Michael Jordan did that. By the end of his career he was doing Karl Malone's leaning-back jumper better than Malone did it, and more effectively.

So in using his wife's voice, Barack Obama paid her a great compliment. She's just as good a lawyer as he is, just as well trained and well educated, yet she has deliberately kept herself in the role of First Lady. It's not beneath her, she tells us by that. And she's great at it.

Bring on the Crazy

Hours after Joe Wilson heckled the President (I'm sure he would have wanted to  jail anyone who did that to George W. Bush) I got an e-mail from a group called ALIPAC defending him.

ALIPAC stands for Americans for Legal Immigration PAC. Their e-mail said categorically Wilson was not wrong, that everyone in the Congress should have joined him. Here's why.

The evidence this is a lie is found in countless major news reports indicating that President Obama and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) intend to try and pass Comprehensive Immigration Reform Amnesty legislation soon, that would legalize millions of illegal immigrants and qualify them for all taxpayer benefits and jobs in America.

Got that? There's a secret plot to make all the illegals legal, so Obama does want to give health care to illegals. Never mind that comprehensive immigration reform is a separate issue, and they're misrepresenting the President's position on it. But if what they say were true, wouldn't those people then be legal?

This is just one example of the kind of crazy I'm seeing whenever I write about health care policy over at ZDNet. Let me go through my comment threads for more.

• ObamaCare is fascist. This from the head of a "group" called Doctors on strike for freedom in medicine.
• Medicare and Medicaid are unconstitutional under the 10th Amendment.
• You're trying to socialize Medicare. Anyone who supports reforming the market is a socialist.
• Anyone who tells you different from what I'm telling you lies. The media is a conspiracy.
• Let's remember the USSR. It failed. So health reform is Communist.
• Obama represents "Chicago thugs and crooks."

That's just two discussion threads. Just in the last few days.

The inmates are out of the asylum.

Setting Boundaries

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 37 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The most important job of a President is to set boundaries for political debate.

No President can succeed unless they are able to do this. The President is our only nationally-elected political official. If he (or she) can't set boundaries they will be run over.

By that standard, George W. Bush began as a very successful President, undone only by events. The fact he set those events in motion -- Iraq, Katrina, the financial casino, the politicization of everything -- damns him before history. But at this first task, he succeeded.

Tonight, Barack Obama has to do this in the generations' old debate over health care. Success depends first on answering the question -- why did his predecessors fail?

Except for Lyndon Johnson, under whom we got Medicare and Medicaid, past Democratic Presidents were unable to turn their successful outside games -- their rhetoric and personal political success -- into a winning inside game in the form of legislation.

So two types of boundaries must be set.

• The outside boundaries define the ideas the media will hold to be legitimate, and those that will be illegitimate.
• The inside boundaries define the Congressional debate, and lead to a bill's passage.

The President's problem is that he has, so far, failed at defining outside boundaries. His opponents appear free to call him any names they wish, and those in Congress never pay a political price for repeating the slander.

Setting those boundaries is his primary task tonight.

Agnew Time

The "nattering nabobs" speech of Spiro Agnew, delivered on November 13, 1969, may be the most misunderstood speech in the history of American rhetoric.

It is taken by liberal historians to be a speech putting them down, a speech against free speech. Its purpose, however, was vital to a proper understanding our own time. Its purpose was to set limits on debate, and to read extreme rhetoric outside those limits.

That's what we need now, badly. We need an adult to set limits on how far rhetoric can go. You can have free speech, but past this line you're inciting a riot, and must henceforth be called out of bounds by thinking adults.

What conservatives have been doing, what the haties have been doing for months, is demonizing the President, demonizing his causes, demonizing his followers in the most violent way. It is the fault of the President that they have been allowed to do this unchallenged for months. 

Violent rhetoric leads to actual violence. We have already seen some of it. We are going to see more. And the only way to prevent further violence is to push away the incitement leading to 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.