Thursday, July 14, 2005

Limbaugh disgusted by RNC chair's apology for racially divisive politics. 7:17:57 PM   permalink   comment []

Doc Searls still misses Piedmont. So does Greensboro. Related. 7:11:49 PM   permalink   comment []

Mr. Sun makes a good point about the Truth and Rec Commission: "If the Commission were fanatical about balance, they would be looking into the root causes of the southern white alienation that gave birth to the Klan for valid underlying concerns. That is clearly being done as it relates to worker's rights and the CWPA." Doing either, or both, seems highly ambitious, given the timeframe and the resources of the Commission. The question of how groups of people are pitted against each other by politics and economics is fascinating and well worth examing, but the further one gets from the concrete events of Nov 3 '79 and its aftermath -- the further into history and economics and sociology -- the further from common ground (reconciliation) one may be. Context is critical, but there are limits to what this process can do. (For what it's worth, I think Chewie is right to question the emphasis of the N&R story, and Sun provides some useful pushback.) 6:59:29 PM   permalink   comment []

John Edwards seems to be recruiting ground troops in Iowa. And we know he's interested in web campaigning. Both strategies make sense if he wants to pursue a populist, grass roots run for the White House. I can't really tell, though, if he's working the two together -- if he's building a local web network in Iowa. He should. The local web could be very important in 2008. The Edwards organization has this nice, if bland national site...but I'd want to be finding and linking to the blogging local politicos, journalists, and independents, and working to get my supporters on the ground to be supporters online, too. Pics and videos of Edwards in Iowa, shaking Iowa hands and kissing Iowa babies and talking Iowa problems, that would seem like a good idea to get onto the web. Building web communities can take time, and smart campaigns won't wait too long to start building their local networks. There are ways to jumpstart that process. Getting people together in physical space to talk about the web can be very useful. One thing that helped awaken our local blogging community in Greensboro to a state of self-consciousness was the Piedmont Blog Conference, which I cannot believe was just 11 months ago. The teach-in was productive, too. The birth of a local aggregator a few months after the conference was another critical step. To the extent that all politics is local, blogging should be, too. UPDATE: The Corzine campaign in NJ seems to get it, in terms of reaching out to local bloggers. 5:06:18 PM   permalink   comment []

Two years ago at this site: A few kind words about the French on Bastille Day. 3:46:37 PM   permalink   comment []

The upcoming Truth and Reconciliation hearings will be recorded and made available for download and released as podcasts at the News & Record site, sayeth Lex. 3:36:29 PM   permalink   comment []

This would seem to be the creme-de-la-blogosphere brief for Rove -- an erudite writer at a smart site, linked by Instapundit (whose paucity of posts on Rove in recent days speaks volumes about the deepness of the doo-doo in which the White House is mired) and heavily sourced to Power Line and the WSJ edit page. And even here, amid the blasting of Wilson and the eye-rolling at the liberal press, are sentences like this: "But it appears probable, though not certain, that Plame was a covert agent." And this: "But that doesn’t let either Rove or Bush off the hook entirely." And this: "Bush must deal with his promise to fire the leaker." This thing might just be unspinnable. 10:19:19 AM   permalink   comment []

Mickey McLean: "I find this to be a sad way to make a buck." 10:06:59 AM   permalink   comment []

Big bridge abuilding. 10:02:23 AM   permalink   comment []

Truth and Rec hearings, Friday and Saturday. Klan members expected to attend. 7:42:43 AM   permalink   comment []

Harry Potter books contain "subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul," says the Pope. I'm starting to miss JPII. 7:37:54 AM   permalink   comment []

I spoke to an AARP meeting last night at Mahi's -- the crowd was informed, that's the newspaper-reading demographic, and the food was quite good. 7:35:33 AM   permalink   comment []

Business Week's Heather Green looks at open web experiments in Greensboro and LA and wonders if "there something inherent about an open forum blog that leads to this downward spiral. Or is it only the open forums at newspapers attract these kinds of trolls? And is there anything to do about it?" 7:32:19 AM   permalink   comment []