Monday, January 05, 2004

A long profile of Howard Dean in The New Yorker, by Mark Singer. No big advance of the Internet angle, but it's given its due and put in context: (W)ith the Internet as catalyst, a dazzling sequence of fund-raising and message-disseminating tactics was about to be set in motion, and the campaign was about to quicken in a fashion unprecedented in American politics. What was most remarkable about the synchrony of these events—the bullet-in-the-foot Iraq-invasion votes by Kerry et al.; the deepening revulsion toward Bush among Democrats; and the ripening of the Internet as a political-gospel-spreading and fund-raising medium—was the swiftness and precision with which they delivered Dean, their semi-accidental beneficiary, where he needed to be. [Our New Yorker doesn't come til later in the week; thanks to my Uncle Terry, an actual New Yorker, for the pointer.] 8:12:12 PM    comment []

Jay Rosen singes a couple of big-name reporters for their political coverage, and calls on bloggers and professional writers to change the game: "I hope other journalists will ask themselves: must this go on indefinitely?" Meanwhile, the N&R's Eric Dyer has a long piece on the Edwards campaign, in which he credits Dean, who "aggressively used the Internet to raise money and attract people -- many of them young adults -- who previously had been turned off by politics." But Dyer does not talk at all about Edwards' online strategy -- and more important, the way it reflects his overall, opposite-of-grassroots campaign strategy. 12:41:15 PM    comment []

Eric Muller picks up on a dumb quote from Congressman-for-life Howard Coble, to the effect that his odious remarks about the merits of locking up Japanese Americans during WWII were a problem because of "political correctness." No, Howard, what you said was wrong -- historically inaccurate, as Muller shows, and morally repugnant to boot. 12:21:42 PM    comment []

Baseline editorial assistant/budding rock god Alec Farrell has made a disturbing discovery: his mother, a Greensboro native, babysat for me years ago. 12:11:08 PM    comment []

63 degrees out at 6:49 AM. Feels more like April than January. Elijah and I wore shorts to play golf on Saturday. It's disorienting, but nice -- maybe that's why I had this song in my head this morning. 11:21:07 AM    comment []

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert continues his evisceration of the North Carolina justice system re the Darryl Hunt case, giving due credit to the Winston-Salem Journal's work on the story. He cites "the relentlessly bad behavior of the law enforcement authorities — the use of unreliable witnesses, the illegal withholding of exculpatory material, the refusal to acknowledge clear evidence of innocence." Meanwhile, this morning's News & Record manages this limp headline over some wire copy on page B4: "Mistakes kept Hunt in prison for Sykes murder." Worse: the headline softens the AP story, which says "mistakes and decisions" (emphasis added) kept the innocent Hunt in jail for almost 20 years. 10:49:15 AM    comment []

Happy Birthday to my mom, who turns 70 today. My mom rocks (to Puccini, but still). 10:36:30 AM    comment []