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I thought the motto was "Don't be evil." Apparently, individual journalists need not apply.
 Adventures in self-publishing: Rejected from Google News!
Google, the search company that started as two guys at Stanford, openly discriminates against entrepreneurs. At least for its Google News product.Not only i
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| "A study of daily news coverage from more than 11,500 media outlets doesn't support claims that the media favors President Barack Obama. Reports reflecting negatively on Obama have outweighed positive ones 4 to 1; negative coverage of Obama dominated even during the week that Osama bin Laden was killed. Politico's Keach Hagey notes that "the top four most favorably covered candidates … were all tea party favorites" — Texas Gov. Rick Perry, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann and businessman Herman Cain." The same moneyed interests that find Obama threatening, own the media and although it's hard to determine what's covered, they have a powerful say in the emphasis and interpretation of that coverage. Liberal media is somewhere between illusion and delusion. The middle class doesn't own media outlets. The working class absolutely doesn't. |
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If you watched Charlie Rose last night,…you heard the common assumption that Microsoft is lagging because it spends too much time protecting Office and Windows. I say that's myopic. Microsoft treats developers like royalty. It nurtures 5hem from beginner to expert. Their great innovation is to turn curious people with problems into innovators or connect them with solution providers. Office and Windows aren't products. They're platforms. The Cloud will make them platforms in hyper-drive. If Google had spent half the energy nurturing Wave developers The Vista of collaboration would be evolving into its Windows 7.
The Constitution cannot enforce itself. It is, as the constitutional scholar Edwin Corwin famously observed, an “invitation to struggle” among the branches, but the founders wisely bequeathed to Congress some powerful tools for engaging in the struggle. It is no surprise that the current debate over a deeply unpopular war is arising in the context of a Congressional spending bill. That is precisely what the founders intended.
"Given how intent the president is on expanding his authority, it is startling to recall how the Constitution’s framers viewed presidential power. They were revolutionaries who detested kings, and their great concern when they established the United States was that they not accidentally create a kingdom. To guard against it, they sharply limited presidential authority, which Edmund Randolph, a Constitutional Convention delegate and the first attorney general, called “the foetus of monarchy.”
The founders were particularly wary of giving the president power over war. They were haunted by Europe’s history of conflicts started by self-aggrandizing kings. John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, noted in Federalist No. 4 that “absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal.”
Many critics of the Iraq war are reluctant to suggest that President Bush went into it in anything but good faith. But James Madison, widely known as the father of the Constitution, might have been more skeptical. “In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed,” he warned. “It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.”
When they drafted the Constitution, Madison and his colleagues wrote their skepticism into the text. In Britain, the king had the authority to declare war, and raise and support armies, among other war powers. The framers expressly rejected this model and gave these powers not to the president, but to Congress.
The Constitution does make the president “commander in chief,” a title President Bush often invokes. But it does not have the sweeping meaning he suggests. The framers took it from the British military, which used it to denote the highest-ranking official in a theater of battle. Alexander Hamilton emphasized in Federalist No. 69 that the president would be “nothing more” than “first general and admiral,” responsible for “command and direction” of military forces.
The founders would have been astonished by President Bush’s assertion that Congress should simply write him blank checks for war. They gave Congress the power of the purse so it would have leverage to force the president to execute their laws properly. Madison described Congress’s control over spending as “the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”
The framers expected Congress to keep the president on an especially short leash on military matters. The Constitution authorizes Congress to appropriate money for an army, but prohibits appropriations for longer than two years. Hamilton explained that the limitation prevented Congress from vesting “in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence.”
As opinion turns more decisively against the war, the administration is becoming ever more dismissive of Congress’s role. Last week, Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman brusquely turned away Senator Hillary Clinton’s questions about how the Pentagon intended to plan for withdrawal from Iraq. "Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq,” he wrote. Mr. Edelman’s response showed contempt not merely for Congress, but for the system of government the founders carefully created."
Since no center was built, nor plans made to hold, things have fallen apart. The gyre isn't widening, but converging into a death spiral. The dying, unfortunately, have no say. In any case, the executive, believing itself to be the state, isn't listening.
The foetus of monarchy is nearing term. It's the result of a raped constitution. The founders gave us tools to abort this monstrosity. It's time to use them
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/opinion/23mon4.html?th&emc=th#
"'The Ugly Duckling' has become the dominant story form of American popular culture, especially so-called 'reality' television shows, perhaps because the narrative fits snugly into a celebrity culture in which every person dreams of being a star. "
It turns out that, whatever their personal stories, American political figures need to establish their duckling credibility (call it "duck-cred" for short) in order to qualify for swan status in the eyes of gullible voters. In other words, Lincoln probably cursed American politics forever by being born in a log cabin.
For every build-me-up story, there is a tear-me-down narrative. It turns out that the antidote to "The Ugly Duckling" is another ancient story form, "The Emperor's New Clothes."
In the coming months, journalists will encounter competing stories about the presidential candidates. Are they swans, or are they naked? Is Rudy Giuliani America's mayor, a hero of Sept. 11, or someone, in the counter narrative, responsible for his city's vulnerability? Is John Edwards an advocate for the common person or an unscrupulous ambulance chaser?
That's the problem with ancient story forms. They have strict requirements that force us to select some details but reject others. Real life -- unlike reality television -- is not scripted and staged. In real life, the swan was pretty cute as a duckling, and the emperor may not be dressed in gold, but at least he's wearing a golf shirt and Bermuda shorts.
The main stream media will fall into both archetypes through sheer laziness.
Today's paradigm isn't stereo. It's 5-1 surround sound. This longest ever presidential campaign deserves nothing less. Somebody needs to say that we're not choosing between war and peace, but between war and chaos or peace and chaos. Pretending that there are easy answers got us into this mess. No matter what happens, someone will offer a solution that is simple straightforward and dead wrong. Boy will it be tempting.
My profound thanks to Roy Peter Clark
