Hard News, Inc.

Alone again, naturally...

There is a valid reason that I have been posting here very infrequently the last month or so. 

I quit my day job.  My last day was Friday.

As of this morning, I am working fulltime for myself and the mighty Hard News, Inc.  I will be doing multimedia consulting, freelance writing and continuing to move forward direction, shooting, producing and editing my own (streaming) video projects.

This move is one that is both exciting and terrifying for me, but I keep singing to my self the siren song of the New Age-y types, you know, the one that goes "there is no growth without a little pain" yada yada blah blah. As with most cliches, it is a cliche because it contains a core or truth. I have learned all that I could learn from the day job at the law firm (although the front-row seat on the police misconduct melodramas was constantly amusing), and now it is time to throw myself into an arena where I will be challenged and forced to grow & learn more.

My first big gig is a contract with the U.S. State Department to go to Santiago and Concepcion, Chile, to deliver a series of presentations on the changing nature of the internet, convergence, new media and the art of fostering conversations and innovation.  I will be giving these speeches in Spanish (which already makes me sweat - I am fluent, but rusty, shall we say), and the schedule is pretty relentless.  I will be talking to a roomful of newspaper publishers, editors and executives, an auditorium full of university students, and a roundtable of new media/website managers. 

Watch this space for further news & updates.

An Explanation of Trackback Spam (abbreviated)

This post is being used as a means to demonstrate what a legitimate trackback looks like, and how it should be used.  The site it's pinging is Dave Mitchell's "Sparsely, Sage..." blog about West Marin County - a freshly hatched blog that is already building up some impressive traffic stats.

Usually a trackback is a comment that someone is making on something you wrote that is hosted on their site.

Let me explain.

Say you write something about the Bolinas Water Board.  Someone from the board reads it and wants to respond.  This person also has a blog (or website).

Only their response won't fit into the small space alloted for comments.

So what they do is write a long response with charts, graphs and photos, all in support of your brilliant proposition that the Bolinas Board should just hook up the sewage outflow pipes to the water inflow pipes to create the perfect closed system.

The Board member then publishes this article on their blog and in the little space that says "Trackback" - they put in the web address for your article.

Now the real fun begins.  The Board member's site sends a "ping" (like in the old submarine movies) to your site saying in effect "Hey, there's this article here that says that it's related to what you wrote. Here's the first paragraph and a link to the article."

Then, in your comments section, a little comment appears that starts out with the first 200 or so characters of whatever the Board member wrote, usually something like "I was reading Dave Mitchell's brilliant blog the other day, and his innovative (albeit stinky) solution to the Bolinas Water problems sparked a thought ..." (click here for more)

Readers of your blog then can click the link to find out what it is that the Board member has to say. It's a nifty little bit of technology that bloggers use to engage in backscratching, logrolling, one-hand-washing-the-otherism.

One of the things that it does is to help bloggers boost each other's rankings on Google and Technorati. These search engines look to see how important a blogger/website is by checking to see how many people are linking to its content.  If you have a lot of original content, a lot of people will link to you, saying "Hey, I read this really original bit of news the other day..."

Thus, Google, Technorati, Blogpulse, et al., all figure that you are someone that is actually putting in work, coming up with interesting, original content, and that as such, you should be rewarded for that.

Now then. (Cue ominous music) The unscrupulous scam artists on the web have figured out that using trackbacks is a really great way to boost themselves up in the Google et al. rankings.  Long enough, at least, for them to be able to sell whatever it is that they're selling ("Fix your credit report!" "Get a 500 free porno movies" "Win at online poker!") before people figure out that they're scam artists/thieves/stealing credit card numbers for their white slavery ring in Belarus.

Thus, once a website/blog starts getting to a certain level, the spammers start sending trackback spam. Because if there's a link to a highly-ranked website, it tricks Google et al. into ranking their scam site a bit higher. In effect, the spammers start trading in on your good name and reputation to boost their own criminal enterprise.

The print equivalent would be someone sneaking into your printing press and stuffing a one-page snake-oil ad into the Light before it gets distributed.  Actually, that's comment spam - which is somewhat self-explanatory.

I guess trackback spam would be analogous to someone dressing up like a Point Reyes Light paper deliveryman and going around the West Marin neighborhoods and delivering the paper by knocking on the front door and distracting the housewife - whilst a confederate sneaks around the back, jimmys the kitchen door and makes off with Grandma's silver and the Franklin Mint Commemorative Elvis Presley dinnerplate collection.

This is why you get notifications as to when someone posts comments or trackbacks to your site.  That way, you can see if it's from a legitimate commenter with something to say - or if it's a guy in a black-and-white striped shirt with a Zorro mask tied around his eyes, wanting to borrow your delivery van for a few hours "to run some errands."

Moving on.

In your case, from what I can see, the comments are not from an outside source or scammer. It appears that for whatever reason, when you posted the new table of contents, with links to all your stories, what that did was trigger the technological "trackback" widget, which took the first few grafs of your post and then put it into your comment section, and sent you the notification to say "Whadday think about this guy, boss? Should we let him take the van? He says his granny is real sick and needs her medicine."

In this case, the guy asking for the van ... is you.

Second Life + Politics - This Should Be Fun To Watch

Dem. Congressman holds press conference in Second Life

The techno-optimists will condemn this as another example of the messy real world intruding on their utopian cyber-reality (although damn few people still subscribe to this Pollyannaish view of the web as a place where we all sing the Smurf Tra-la-la-la song and skip happily through fields of sunlit daisies).  

The hype merchants will seize this meme and use it to scam some more startup cash from gullible angel investors - "Yeahhhhh ... see, it's all comin' together now! If wanna do business in Washington these days - and who doesn't, right? - then you wanna get them where they are. Which is on the web. You can't take the congressmen on junkets no more - in the real world - but there's nothing in the law that says you can't take them on a virtual private plane and golf junket, right? You wanna get in on the ground floor of this one, trust me pally ... "

[Note from Dave: In retrospect, that's as good a scam as I've heard recently. Damn, I'm good! Someone get me an appointment with IdeaCrib and GrowThink! (C) 2007 Hard News Inc., all rights reserved.]

And the snarksters amongst us will wonder how many Congressmen are already trolling the notoriously kinky demimonde of Second Life et al., getting their Mark Foley on... 

As jubilant Democrats in Washington celebrated their newfound control of the U.S. Congress on Thursday, Rep. George Miller was doing the same thing in a more unusual place: Second Life.

Miller appears to be the first member of Congress to hold something akin to a press conference in this virtual world, which is operated by Linden Lab and boasts its own currency and a population of more than 2 million "residents."

The event, which lasted about half an hour, took place in a virtual adaptation of the Capitol building on an island in Second Life. Instead of a neo-classical dome, the virtual equivalent featured an open-air amphitheater, mammoth video screens and an orange sky above.

There's a massive "gold rush" fever going on right now, amongst marketers and advertising firms, still trying to wrap their expense-account fattened noodles around how to use Web 2.0 to hawk their shite. Hey - I'm not complaining.  it's keeping a lot of arrogant shit-for-brains in Beemers and Upper West Side 2+2s ... and away from the rest of us bitgrunts.  This event took place through the ausipices of the Clear Ink marketing firm, which set up the virtu-cast and tried to round up a Second Life crowd for something other than being tied up in stocks and spanked by a Rhinemaiden-type. (BTW - I have a grudging respect for Clear Ink - you gotta love anyplace that whimsically names one of its apps "Banana Slug" - shout out to the grads of Uncle Charlie's Summer Camp, eh?)

The results for this little exercise are decidedly mixed - one the one hand, they got sweet coverage on CNet, and it fits in with the Democratic party strategy/belief that the future of the party lies with the cyber-connected Gen-X, Y & Zers - who are responding to the way that the Dems are reaching out to them on blogs and the net. The netroots, despite being derided by the entrenched Old Bull power structure as the "nutroots" were instrumental in the last election - and the news flash that they ain't going away, but are going to come back in two years even harder seems to be penetrating even through the fabled Foggy Bottom reality-denial filters.

Thus, the Dems are moving aggressively to build their party's presence in cyberspace, because they know that how you are perceived on the net winds up in the meatspace media.

But on the other hand, the anarchic nature of the net intruded even here (although at least they weren't assaulted by swarms of flying penises - see earlier post in these regards) as a leather submissive-type wrapped himself around the podium during the conference.  Not something you'd expect to see on C-Span. Although, once again, if the GOP had gotten another coupla few years, we might've tuned in to see Hastert wearing a leather cowl half-unzipped over the mouth and brandishing a flogger, while Ted Stevens sodomizes a tranquilized polar bear while arguing for more oil drilling in the ANWAR.

Was that over the top? Really? You think so? Ok, check it out - as more of our national discourse moves to the web, you are all going to find that the griefers out there are going to create surreal scenes of mass absurdity.  Which, on some level, I find rather gratifying.  Viz:

the elements of Second Life that make it attractive to users make it a highly volatile place to work in. You can deal with nasty comments on your corporate blog much more easily than you can handle someone with in-world superpowers deciding that your press conference would be a great venue to unveil his exploding chicken bombs that shower your island with porn.

"Take someone and deprive them of any sort of 'real' social contact. Give them the ability to script any program, animate any action, or build any object through intuitive processes. Allow them to own their creations, and to sell them to the highest bidder. ...Now make the person in question the psychotic neighborhood kid who slashes holes in the back of the schoolbus with his Swiss Army knife, and you will begin to realize the Lovecraftian horror of Second Life. "

-- Chris "Petey" Peterson, Second Life Safari (Not Safe For Work, unless you work for a marketing agency and are reading it for research. Ahem.)

If nothing else, as we work out how to toss a rope around this bucking bronco of Web 2.0, it's going to make for some interesting viewing...

Spam 2.0: The Bad Guys Get Trickier

I was wondering WTF was up with all the goddam spam lately. I had chalked it up as just being symptomatic of the Christmas season, when retailers, online and off, all hawk their wares. Apparently, not.

The big problem these days is that the spammers have enlisted an army of robot zombie computers to do their evil bidding.  Which, in a Beavis/Butthead kind of way is a cool concept. If only they were doing it to accomplish world domination or get rid of sucky hair bands, then that's be OK.

Unfortunately, the spam these days is all in the "Hi, it's Frieda" subject line, with an image of the text about some shitty pump'n'dump stock or cheap-ass imitation Viagra.

The use of botnets to send spam would not matter as much if e-mail
filters could still make effective use of the second spam-fighting
strategy: analyzing the content of an incoming message. Traditional
antispam software examines the words in a text message and, using
statistical techniques, determines if the words are more likely to make
up a legitimate message or a piece of spam.

The explosion of
image spam this year has largely thwarted that approach. Spammers have
used images in their messages for years, in most cases to offer a peek
at a pornographic Web site, or to illustrate the effectiveness of their
miracle drugs. But as more of their text-based messages started being
blocked, spammers searched for new methods and realized that putting
their words inside the image could frustrate text filtering. The use of
other people’s computers to send their bandwidth-hogging e-mail made
the tactic practical.

It is amazing the techiques that spammers have adopted - apparently, the software that stopped spam relied on finding the same words in the same messages - that is, if you send out a million messages all saying "Eat at Joe's," the servers would recognize that message and kill your spam.  The spammers got around that by programming code that would take random snippets of text and stick that in the message beneath their sleazy come-on. 

Now that it's images that are being sent, the bots change AS LITTLE AS ONE PIXEL in a picture, or put in noise and scratches so the OCR software can't zero in on the craptastic ad. 

Why do the spammers continue to bother?  Well, it pays off.  Sadly, the average netuser is still an utter and complete dunderhead.

Though the scam sounds obvious, a joint study by researchers at Purdue University and Oxford University
this summer found that spam stock cons work. Enough recipients buy the
stock that spammers can make a 5 percent to 6 percent return in two
days, the study concluded.

This is really depressing. The fact that there are still people out there dumb enough to click on an attached image in a mail message obviously not meant for them, and to go "Hmm.  Wowee, Myrtle, lookee here, there's a stock that is just about to go ballistic. We gotta get in on the ground floor o' that!"

The adage about suckers should be updated to "A sucker and his money were lucky to get together in the first place."


Technorati Tags: spam, spam2.0, web, advertising, filters, junk mail, Can-Spam, hype

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The Newspaper Industry's Sleighride to Hell

You gotta love any article about the incredible shrinking newspaper audience that includes this graf:

If you agree with me that the newspaper business has been on a slow,
unstoppable train ride to hell for many decades and that the Web has
only accelerated its descent, then you'll enjoy another article in
yesterday's Wall Street Journal.

Y'see, over at Slate, they're pretty much hanging on the rim over the woes over on the dead-tree side of the information distribution biz. Apparently, more than 30 years ago, back in the mid-70s, which was about the time that I was getting interested in the news biz

Tiresome aside: my earliest job in the industry was delivering free weekly shoppers to the doorsteps of the surly alcoholics in Altoona, Wis.  I got paid about a penny per paper stuck in the rusty screen doors of various houses, shacks and trailers. I was so thrilled with the job that I took the heavy canvas bag full of papers on my shoulder and dumped most of them down the storm drain.

Even then, a media critic.

But back to our storyline. Back in the 70s, I say, the newspapers were starting to realize that All Was Not Well.  At the moment of their greatest triumph - bringing down Tricky Dick and his minions - they looked around to see that the numbers, they were whispering dire things.  Like Alexander the Great, weeping into the Indian Ocean because he had run out of world to conquer... or something. Maybe that metaphorical image doesn't fit. Maybe more like: a carnival barker selling tickets to the hoochie-kootchie dance who realizes that the local rubes aren't lining up to see sweaty, floppy Marge and Ida anymore, because the local Walgreen's has started stocking Playboy...

Better? Or more disturbing?

Meanwhile, back at the storyline, the papers did then what they are doing now - they hired people to look at the industry and tell them what to do.

The solutions proposed by Preserving the Press and Shaw's
article read like the standard prescriptions written today: Make an
attempt to "reconnect" with readers, who feel alienated from
newspapers. Make coverage more local. Hook kids when they're young. Let
readers "sound off" about issues on special pages of the paper. Connect
with and hire minorities. Expand the weather report. Introduce or
expand op-ed pages. Spice up the design and print more color. Run more
lifestyle, consumer, and personal-finance articles. Chase potential
readers—and advertisers—into the deep suburbs.

Is there a metropolitan newspaper that hasn't taken all of this medicine? Is there
one that isn't taking maintenance doses of these meds today? And yet
newspaper circulation continues to dribble down.

Ah, plus ca change, eh? And these days, it's not the ephemeral nature of the population, the sprawl from urban to suburban to exurban that's doing it.  It's them damn internets, ain't it!

The solutions are as varied as the writers.  But like a bad horror movie, the authorities know that there's a (circulation) killer on the loose, and Something Has To Be Done!

Over at Andy Kessler's deep thinking and scribbled napkin brain-a-torium, he's devoting even more candlepower to illuminating the "Whither the media" question. He's got some interesting what-ifs about what's going to take YouTube (and Cingular, Sprint et al. as well, incidentally) out:

• Newspaper and TV journalists had a long run as the trust voice
  of news. Now distributed bloggers can take turns scooping
  professionals. It's not only that distributed news gathering is
  cheaper, its the zero marginal cost of distribution. Post it to a blog,
  get picked up by other blogs and search engines. Bask in glory. Rinse.
  Repeat.

In each of these examples, because of marginal costs approaching
zero, it is increasingly a better business to provide technology to
millions, even billions of folks rather than try to protect the control
of a pipe to a few. The right answer is to GO WIDE. It's time
to get horizontal. Newspapers should have licensed Craigslist's (or
eBay's) technology years ago. Telcos should have embraced or emulated
Skype. Drop CDs and distribute all your music (and everyone else's)
online at a price that doesn't protect retail, but destroys it

The problem is one that is going to dog us more and more in the years to come: with the margins going thinner than angstrom-edged razor blades because of piracy and the fatpipe replacing distribution, howinhell are we going to get our big expensive spectacles funded when they can't make back their budget?  Worse, in the cacophony of craptastic Mentos-TV, how do you find the interesting indie Sex, Lies & Videotape jewel that you would love?

Kessler doesn't have an answer, so he punts it over to his BFF, Mark Cuban, who does. Surprise! Cuban sees the future as belonging to, well, to people like him. 

Uh-huh. Yeah, funny how that works out, ain't it?

Viz:

Mashups, hyperlinks? We have seen it all before in the music
business. Anyone can produce and distribute any song they want. We have seen
some artists and songs emerge, but very, very few. And that is in an
environment where there truly are no digital barriers to entry. Yet the moguls
are still the moguls. Not as strong, but still in control. I don't see them
going away. Why? Because in a long tail universe, the cost to crawl up the tail
to the rat's ass is more expensive than the production. Which means only the
people with the money can make the investment, which brings you back to the
moguls.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, media, web, web2.0, blogs

•  
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I wanna go on the Ferris Wheel...

Blogcarnival? Isn't that like a flea circus?

I'm not sure if this is smart, or smacks of flopsweat desperation.  Which probably means that I'll try it while being somewhat revulsed with myself for trying it.

To be charitable, a Blogcarnival is an attempt to boost the signal-to-noise ration inherent to the "everybody yapping at the top of their lungs alla time" ethos of the blogosphere.  As I posted earlier, if all shall talk, then who shall listen?  And as a tool to syndicate your content and increase page traffic if you're actually producing something worth reading, it ain't bad.  I think.

From the Blog Carnival FAQ:

A Blog Carnival is a particular kind of blog community. There are
many kinds of blogs, and they contain articles on many kinds of topics.
Blog Carnivals typically collect together links pointing to blog
articles on a particular topic.
A Blog Carnival is like a magazine. It has a title, a topic, editors,
contributors,
and an audience. Editions of the carnival typically
come out on a regular basis (e.g. every monday, or on the first of the
month). Each edition is a special blog article that consists
of links to all the contributions that have been submitted, often with
the editors opinions or remarks.

There is so much stuff in the blog-o-sphere, just finding
interesting stuff is hard.
If there is a carnival for a topic you are interested in, following
that carnival is a great way to learn what bloggers
are saying about that topic. If you are blogging on that topic, the
carnival is the place to share your work with like-minded bloggers.

Blog Carnival is
the place to come to find carnivals you are interested in, to submit
your blog articles to carnivals where they belong, and to organize and
maintain carnivals.

In theory, this is a really decent selfless act. Which of course makes me really, really suspicious.  Because if there's one thing that even a little bit of websurfing will teach you, it is that that which seems to be too good to be true ... ALWAYS IS.  You never get the free Playstation 3.  Hot chicks DO NOT want to bone you (and probably don't live in your neighborhood anyway). There is no Nigerian prince with $10 million in an Amsterdam bank account, begging for your help.  And drunken Germans on Malibu beach don't have a secret carburetor that will boost you car's mileage to 75 city and 133 highway. (that last one is probably just mine, but bear with me...)

If this is a honeypot, I can only surmise that the rationale behind it would be to draw a whole bunch of links and traffic in and out of the Blogcarnival site, whereup they would make coin off the referrals or Google AdSense words?

I guess I'll let y'all know.








Technorati Tags: blogs, blogcarnival, webtraffic, blogging, web2.0

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Click Fraud and the Vanishing $150 Billion

...the small stones are rattling down the mountainside ...

As I've said before, the combination of money to be made on-line with the lure of anonymity, is making the webscape turn, in the words of Wired magazine, from the Wild West into 1920s Chicago with Al Capone and Frank Nitti running the joint and launchin DDoS attacks on all those who dare to oppose their lucrative scam empires. 

In 2004, botnets attacked dozens of online gambling sites. The
bookmakers were told to pay between $10,000 and $50,000 to get their
sites back online. Sometimes a DDoS assault aims not at extortion but
at taking out a business rival. Last summer, a 19-year-old Net
entrepreneur was sentenced to 30 months in prison for directing attacks
against competitors of his company, which sold athletic jerseys.

It's simple - businesses and dewy-eyed n00bs pay for Google ads, lured by the promise of a well-heeled global audience. The bad guys pick out the juicy words, set up whack-a-mole sites and blogs, strew them with the keywords, and set up bots to go click-click-click and on through the night... and the cash rolls in, without any actual consumer actually seeing the "ad" or any sales taking place.

A week or so ago, at the EFF speech at USC, I asked if we could still afford the anonymity of the web. Because anonymity equals non-accountability.  Read the harrowing tale of how a hackscammer in Russia outmuscled and drove into the ground even a strong security company, backed by some pretty well-equipped ISPs ... including Six Apart, the company that (currently, at least) hosts this blog.

Now, the trail is starting to lead towards the suspiciously large amount of market capitalization attached to Google and Yahoo, etc., through the online advertising. Viz this, from The Economist:

the big internet firms seem to have been worryingly complacent.
Small-business owners, to whom click-fraud is most apparent, grumble
that Google and Yahoo! have tried to play down the scale of the
problem. Eric Schmidt, the boss of Google, caused a storm earlier this
year when he seemed to suggest at a conference that one solution to
click fraud would be to “let it happen”, since advertisers would not be
prepared to pay as much for bad clicks, so reducing commissions and
hence the incentive for fraud. He also joked that Google's engineers
were having “great fun” trying to keep ahead of the fraudsters. And
Yahoo! concedes that click fraud has been a problem for years.

If that doesn't send an arctic blast up the skirts of big online biz, then maybe this phrase from the Economist, which is the emerging conventional wisdom of all those investment bankers, CEOs and market analysts that have been waving the pom-pons for Google these last few years, will get their attention:

if the internet giants don't deliver what the advertisers want,
advertisers will find other ways to market themselves. And if the
advertisements evaporate, so will that remarkable $150 billion
valuation.

That is a shot right directly across the bow.  There had damn well better be alarm bells ringing and engineers sweating the night through on this issue. This meme is out there, and unless there are SIGNIFICANT changes to the whole online revenue structure, so as to plug up the obvious leaks, within about a year, the stories coming out of the biz mags are going to be of the "Emperor Has No Clothes" variety. 

Can't happen? Google is too big to fall?

In the summer of '01, the best place to have your money was in Enron. The dot-com implosion had eaten up trillions, but this energy company was causing rolling blackouts in California and scarfing up billions.  Within a year, the stock was drillbit category  while the board of directors was getting ready to put on the dreaded orange jumpsuits and grab their ankles.

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Bloggers Can't Be Sued

...thus breaking the heart of just about every self-important jackass in government these days...

The legal definition of what constituted a journalist and how much said journalist has to abide by the rules, is one that is going to be wrestled with for decades to come.  The internet has let the masses rush to take over the printing presses, and early returns show they're a surly bunch, and not likely to give up their new-found freedom, even if The Establishment offers them all sorts of enticing (sounding) goodies.

The crux of this case was the responsibility of bloggers for what is said on their (our?) message boards.  Which, if it were to have gone the other way (man, the subjunctive tense is cumbersome in English), would have been burdensome beyond belief ... check out the HuffPo message boards ... or, if you've got the stomach, the message boards at Yahoo news.  Yecch!

Here's the bullet:

In deciding a case closely watched by free speech groups, the court said a federal law gives immunity from libel suits not only to Internet service providers, like AOL, but also to bloggers and other users of their services.

"Subjecting Internet service providers and users to defamation liability would tend to chill online speech," today's unanimous ruling said.

Yah, yah, yah. I know the jackbooted fascists up on the SCOTUS are going to be far less sympathetic to freedom of speech than the wild-haired commies on the California Supreme Court.

The case involved a lawsuit against Ilena
Rosenthal, a women's health activist, who created an e-mail list and a
newsgroup (alt.support.breast-implant) to discuss issues related to
breast implants.  Six years ago, she posted a letter written by a man
who was highly critical of the efforts of a doctor to discredit
advocates of alternative health treatments.

In
the letter, the doctor, Terry Polevoy, was accused of trying to get an
alternative medicine radio program canceled by using "scare tactics,
stalking, and intimidation techniques" against the program's producer. 
Polevy, who maintained a website himself to expose what he called
"health fraud and quackery" sued Rosenthal for libel.

Now, I am not unaware that this issue is, at best, a doubledged sword.  Anyone who surfaces into public prominence thus becomes subject to all manner of calumny and vituperation (I love how those two words always go together) without recourse.  The court ruling basically says that until the law gets hammered into shape by Congress (and don't hope to see that - they've got far, far bigger problems to deal with - there might be a gay couple getting married somewhere, after all), the only way to stop someone from lying and abusing you on-line is to track down the original (anonymous? - probably) author of whatever shitty statements are being tossed around about you.

Which means that services that offer ways to track down the original posters of defamatory comments are going to be doing land-office business in the forseeable future...

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Lexi.net Conference

I am off to the Lexi.net Conference in beautiful downtown Calgary. The subject: online identity.  Which is an issue that is growing in scope, complexity and urgency.

The EFF conversation at the Annenberg Center on Tuesday that we attended (pics and video still pending to be posted) touched on this subject in many ways - mainly from the perspective of those seeking to keep the gummint's grubby mitts off our personal information.  Janine is going to be speaking - along with the ever-provocative Gina Lynn. 

Podcasts of the various talks should/might be up early next week.

Even Rummy Has His Defenders

...although they are a strange and alarming bunch...

Douglas Feith, widely derided as one of the key reasons that Iraq descended into the Pit of Hell ... a neocon Defender of the Faith venal and small-minded enough that Gen. Tommy Franks called him "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth."

Yeah, Feith is banging the drum for dear departed Rummy, saying that if we only understood Rummy, the scales would fall from our eyes, and the full glory would just suffuse us like God's love. Viz:

Those of us in his inner circle heard him say, over and over again: Our intelligence, in all senses of the term, is limited. We cannot predict the future. We must continually question our preconceptions and theories. If events contradict them, don’t suppress the bad news; rather, change your preconceptions and theories.

To quote Darkman: Oh, you gotta be shittin' me.

If there is one constant of the Bush administration, it has been their commitment to denial.  No mistakes were made.  Things are going fine.  Free people do bad things.  The insurgency is in its last throes.  Move along. Nothing to see here.  Hey - the world changed on 9/11.  Code Orange.  Be afraid. 

When all four branches of the armed services combined to call for Rumsfeld's ouster, however, the jig was up.  The Repub/neocon totem object of worship is anyone in the uniform of the armed services (well, as long as they don't speak out against the war or anyone in authority, that is).  If the military were to turn outright and openly against the Bushies (as is apparently happening, as many soldiers are starting to wake up to the conclusion that they and their friends are all dying for a hatful of hollow), then the Repubs and neocons would experience a total psychological breakdown.  Up would be down, right would be wrong, and the whole political philosophy would ...

would ...

Would actually begin to resemble the surrealistic neo-zen exchanges of a Rumsfeld press conference.

And I just had to grab this last comment on the story from Sadly, No - this is hilarious. And disturbing. Disturbingly hilarious? Hilariously disturbing? Someone has been dwelling too long on the utterances of Rumsfeld, and I believe it hath made them mad...

Rumsfeld is a bundle of paradoxes, like a fascinating character in a work of epic literature.

Rumsfeld is a pile of dirty clothes, the ones that you think might
be clean enough to wear around the house, but not out on a date. And
then you have to go to the store. Should you wear the
suspiciously-smelling Rumsfeld? It is a fascinating mystery.

Rumsfeld is an apple strudel that someone has bitten into, and you
don’t know whether they decided to leave the rest because it was
unpleasant to taste, or they realized it wasn’t their apple strudel in
the first place.

Rumsfeld is an erect penis, existing percariously between relaxation
and ejaculation, easily coaxed into orgasm but ready to subside if
neglected. Do not use your mouth to further inflame Rumsfeld. He hates
that.

Rumsfeld is a stray booger that has landed on a work of great art.
One cannot wipe him away without risking a streak on the canvas, so one
must consider him to be part of the painting itself. He is multi-hued
green and will dry, in time. Be patient.

Rumsfeld is the midnight sun and the moon of the afternoon, a cancer
cell that may be a viable mutation, the breath of a newborn infant with
colic. He is life itself, with the sting of death ever-resting in his
tail. He does not actually have a tail, however. He enjoys cheese, not
for the purpose of consumption, but simply because it exists. It is
cheese, he is Donald Rumsfeld, all things have their proper place in
the world. He is content. Do not call him “Rummy”. He will become
cranky.

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