Blogpulse news

: I've been playing with Blogpulse, comparing references in blogs -- not in media but in blogs -- to swift boats (or swiftvets or swift) in blue, vs. Cambodia in yellow, vs. health in green. Note how much blog users -- thank goodness -- care about health issues over the nonissues of the Swifties.

By the way, here's Bush (in blue, for variety's sake) vs. Kerry (in yellow, make no inferences) vs. Nader (in green, how appropriate):

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The hostage we know

: Tristan Louis, a blogger, knows the latest hostage in Iraq, Micah Garen, and worked with him at Earthweb. See Tristan's post here and Doc's post here.

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Lemmings to the fryer

: Went to the new Jersey City Fatburger for lunch today. Ridiculous line. Didn't move. I left. It's just a burger, folks.

: UPDATE: Could New York be the death of Fatburger?

Ken Layne reports in the comments:

Fatburger is slooooooow. It's not fast food. (And it's not my favorite California burger, but it is very tasty and very substantial. More like a burger you'd get in a decent steakhouse.)

Even with nobody in line -- say, at 2:30 a.m. -- it takes forever. I will admit to falling "asleep" in my car at the drive-thru window. More than once.

Wait a week or two for the novelty to pass, then make your order, go out for a newspaper or whatever, and then you will have a happy lunch.

New Yorkers aren't patient like Californians; I learned that first-hand when I lived out there. I'd go psycho waiting for a table while all around me were drugged. New Yorkers have places to go, people to see, things to do. New Yorkers have lives.

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Reporting for duty

: Gizmodo reports on a high-tech cup that will test the motility, fertility, motivation, eagerness of your sperm.

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News TiVo

: Microsoft's Newsbot is trying to serve you personalized news based on other news you looked at, very TiVolike and Amazonlike. Interesting idea. Execution so far is iffy: If I look at "general news" I get more "general news." But I like that I can look at my history and delete stories from it.

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McGreevey dominoes

: Ya gotta love Jersey politics: a surprise every day. Pick up today's Jersey Journal right here in Jersey City and see this:

I'M GAY, AND MAD
Freeholder says governor is using sexuality to deflect criticism

Hudson County Freeholder Ray Velazquez is so offended by the governor's handling of his legal troubles and so worried that the gay community will be hurt by the scandal that he is publicly acknowledging that he, too, is a gay elected official.

Most troubling, he said, is the allegation that Gov. James E. McGreevey put his lover on the public payroll.

"It's not enough to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm a gay man,' to cover up those things," Velazquez said this week at his Downtown law office....

A relative newcomer to county politics, Velazquez was selected by the Hudson County Democratic Organization in July 2003 to fill the seat of Nidia Davila-Colon, who resigned after being convicted a month earlier of corruption charges.

: Meanwhile, the latest on the guy who claimed he was Golan Cipel's gay lover... in the pages of the NY Post and News. The Star-Ledger (which did not run the original story) reports today that he was arrested:

But in addition to his sex claims, police reports reviewed by The Star-Ledger yesterday show Michael David Miller has falsely told police he is a CIA operative and that the satellite dish on his house is used for CIA communication. In a series of phone calls to police and Essex County courts, the doctor has told a bizarre tale of an Iranian tenant he claimed would blow up the Essex County Courthouse in Newark.

Essex County Sheriff Armando Fontoura said Miller "has a serious problem with reality," and sheriff's officers, along with officers from the Essex County Prosecutor's Office, arrested the doctor last night.

Miller was taken into custody about 11:30 p.m. at his home on a warrant charging him with impersonating an FBI officer and causing false public alarm, the sheriff said.

Anybody can hold a press conference and end up in the News.

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At the front

: Reporters are either a brave or stupid lot but they do risk their lives to try to bring us the news. See Christian Science Monitor reporter Scott Baldauf's account of a caravan of journalists who dared to go to ground zero in Najaf.

On the horizon we could see the gold dome of the shrine.

If anyone was going to turn back, now was the time. Eighteen cars suddenly dwindled to eight.

We moved past one more US checkpoint, and then into a no man's land. To our right was the old cemetery, site of what US officials have called the heaviest hand-to-hand fighting US forces have seen since Vietnam. Ahead of us, we could see Mahdi Army fighters moving around into firing position. We waved our white flag and proceeded slowly.

[via Lost Remote]

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Infantile politics

: Fell asleep on the couch last night before I had a chance to recommend Dahlia Lithwick's guest column in The Times on the backfiring attempts to infantalize Bush as a campaign tactic of his opponents.

The tactic backfires because when you call Bush an idiot you also, by necessary extension, risk calling anyone who ever voted for him or considered voting for him or even supported him as President an idiot, and you also ignore the power of the people around him, who are not idiots. It's a rather idiotic strategy, for it turns off the people you are hoping to win over.

That is the same problem I have with all the Swifties' spittle-sputtering I can so conveniently follow in daily detail over at Instaphnom. As I said in a comment below when I dared mention the conservakerfluffle here, I'm looking at this as a voter and as a voter, I do not care about this nonstory -- just as I did not care about the nonstory of Bush's alleged military vacation -- and the more you screech about it, the more I turn off as a voter. I know I am not alone.

I actually have two problems with this:

First, it drags the political debate and campaign into the septic tank. Weren't we supposed to be better than that in this new medium? Weren't we supposed to be smart and talk about issues and what mattered in voters' lives and avoid the shallow, useless, mean-spirited example of attack journalism. Weren't we, huh?

Second, this all distracts from the real debate that should be occurring -- over health care, troop pullouts, Iraq, homeland security, the economy....

I'm equal-opportunity on this. I dismissed the attacks on Bush and the National Guard. I dismissed and attacked Michael Moore for his hatchet job on Bush in Fahrenheit 9/11. And I dismiss these attacks-for-attacks'-sake on Kerry. Shut up already. Stop wasting my time. Stop sputtering. Stop yelling at me to care about something I don't care about. Stop treating me like I'm some sort of lying pondscum if I consider voting for one of the two candidates for President -- either of them. I'm a voter, not an accomplice.

So now see how Lithwick goes after liberals in a liberal newspaper for the way they are going after conservative Bush:

It cannot have escaped anyone's notice that much of the current Bush-bashing aims to infantilize him. The most devastating segment in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," for instance, features the president - just after he learned of the second attack on the World Trade Center - perched on a chair in a Florida classroom, looking glazed and confused as he listens to a reading of "The Pet Goat." Mr. Bush's aide might well have whispered the news to one of the assembled students to greater effect, and the implication is inescapable: for seven long minutes, the president was Not a Man....

What's wrong with continuing efforts to characterize Mr. Bush as a not-particularly-smart third grader? For one thing, it plays to every stereotype of liberals as snotty know-it-alls who think everyone in a red state is anti-intellectual or simple-minded. It answers name-calling from the right with name-calling from the left.

These assertions also insult anyone who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000. Rather than offering an argument for Mr. Kerry, they merely disparage swing voters, who may be tempted to defect to the Democrats over the war or the economy, by sneering that they voted for a kid - and a dumb kid at that.

One of the most enduring memories from the Bush-Gore debates in 2000 was Al Gore, all sighs and eye-rolls, trapped in what must have felt like the middle-school playground fight from hell instead of a presidential debate. Everything about Mr. Gore's demeanor signaled that he felt he was giving a punk kid a much-needed scolding. Which missed the point: a lot of very smart people voted for Mr. Bush in 2000 because to them, he represented a return to honesty and morality. Dismissing him as a stupid child, and these voters as stupid-children-by-association, is no way to win them back.

Furthermore, the campaign to cast Mr. Bush as a bumbling child ignores the very grown-up machine that stands behind him. Infantilizing the president shifts the focus away from the Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Ashcrofts and Wolfowitzes....

Read the rest, please.

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Is this blog on the final?

: The New York Times writes about blogs in the classroom and a pioneer in the field, New Jersey's own Will Richardson, gets some well-deserved attention.

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Blog bday

: The Chicago Tribune's Eric Zorn has been blogging for a year and he writes a column reflecting on this change in life.

He asked me to blather in email. Always a mistake. Click more if you want to see what I sent him. I'm being quite repetitive with things I've said here already; that's how one hunts for the perfect sound bite....

MORE...

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Over the line

: Rafat Ali alerts us to a new blog advertising option that, unfortunately, gets it wrong.

Blogversations wants marketers to sponsor blogs. So far, so good. The wise marketer, as Chris Locke said in Gonzo Marketing, will see that by underwriting a blogger who shares the same passion, marketers will tell that blogger's auidience that they, too, share the passion; we're all in this together.

Blogversations, however, gets it backward. It wants marketers to actively tell a blogger what to discuss and then they will sponsor that discussion. Oh, I'm sure they'll say they won't tell the blogger what to say, only the topic. But in my judgment, this goes over the line: It calls into question the blogger's credibility (would she be talking about this if she weren't paid to talk about this?). And it is contrary to the essence and appeal of blogs: I talk about what I want to talk about. Love it or leave it, read it or not, sponsor it or not, that's what we bloggers do.

The truth is that any marketer can probably find just the discussions they want to sponsor without having to artificially inseminate the body blog.

I have the same problem every night when I hear on NPR that so-and-so foundation underwrote not the news on NPR in NPR's own independent judgment but instead underwrote some specific area of coverage. Would NPR have chosen to cover that area, in its best judgment, if it weren't being paid to cover it? This puts NPR's judgment in question. I'm not saying NPR necessarily did anything wrong or anything differently from how it would operate normally; the issue now is that we don't know.

I'm all for sponsorship and underwriting of blogs. I simply counsel that we have to be careful to maintain our blog integrity, our own voices and views, for that is the real value of this new medium: It's by real people about real people.

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Weirder and weirder

: The McGreevey story is, of course, getting weirder and weirder; these stories always do. Earlier this week, there were rumors of a New Jersey professor who would come out as alleged gubernatorial misterstress Golan Cipel's gay lover, wrecking his claim that he's straight. Then, today, the Daily News printed a story about this professor. But it is riddled with so many clues that the guy's missing a few coffee beans in the grinder that it's more scandalous that the News printed the story at all. For example:

In a manic, disjointed interview, Miller said that Cipel had made a pillow-talk confession: He still carries a torch for McGreevey....

Miller also claimed to reporters that he is a CIA operative who takes pills doled out by the intelligence agency to make his skin darker so he can infiltrate unnamed groups....

Miller - who insisted on speaking Spanish because, he said, he hates the United States...

"Despite his problems, I'm going to go visit him," said Miller, shirtless and wearing purple shorts....

The doctor said he was a happily married man with two children, when, at age 38, he acknowledged he was gay.

"One hundred thousand dollars worth of therapy later and I still don't understand," Miller said.

And from the Post:

Last night, with his house surrounded by reporters, Miller spoke to the throng in only blue shorts and white socks, his hair disheveled.

At times cursing and erratic, he alternatively told scribes he would talk to them in Hungarian, Spanish or Hebrew.

"He's a little scattered," a relative member said.

But I guess he's news.

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. . .

Is there a Republican Kos?

: A reporter well-known to all of us asked whether there is a Republican Kos that is "creating his own targeted House and Senate races and getting money" them with Kos-like visitiblity. Can you name any?

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Janet Jackson in Abu Ghraib

: The Independent does quite a pundit's two-step to tie Janet Jackson's nipple to Iraq:

It has been impossible to ponder the issue of public morality in America these past few months without wondering whether we aren't living in weird parallel universes. In the first, 2004 has been the year in which the United States was caught torturing prisoners in Iraq, was accused of lying about weapons of mass destruction, and was deemed to be violating the US constitution and international law by holding so-called "enemy combatants" indefinitely without trial.

In the second universe, none of these matters one jot: not as moral issues, anyway. In this universe - the province of cable television, talk radio and the strangely hermetic corridors of power in Washington - there has been only one noteworthy moral outrage in 2004, one thing to offend the consciences of decent citizens and make them despair of the nation's moral fibre.

We are talking, of course, of Janet Jackson's prime-time breast exposure...

Wow, what a stretch.

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Caf competition

: Went to lunch with a friend of a friend yesterday at the Time Inc. cafeteria. Hadn't been back there for a dozen years, since storming out of the place. Hasn't changed in all that time -- which means it's looking pretty ratty these days. You'd think our Conde caf would have caused a little competition. Come on, Time Inc., time to update. The rest of the company moves uptown to a damned palace and you're still stuck in the '90s.

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Not so swift

: I don't give a hoot about the Swift thing but I will be curious to see today whether all the Swifties out there link to this.

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Iran and Israel: Not what you think

: Iranian blogger Hoder connects some dots and finds that young Iranians do not have the view of Israel you'd assume: Many are appalled at Iran's horrid, hateful policy that led to its judo competitor refusing to compete against Israel's at the Olympics.

: Meanwhile, the mullahs warn that they'd make preemptive strikes against Israel.

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Blogger on caffeine

: Jim Romenesko, the media world's premier blogger, has a new blog about Starbucks:

A former Starbucks employee tells your STARBUCKS GOSSIP webmaster in an e-mail: "Did you know that a store manager gets a bonus for running a store with only a handful of people on benefits? As that one writer told you [in a comments posting], they give you benefits for 20 hours, and they may do that for one period...."

[via Steve Rubel]

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A gold medal in blogging

: NJ.com blogger Scott Goldblatt and Olympic swimmer is part of the team that won the gold medal in Athens.

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DesignThis

: When I started working in online 10 years ago this month (I'd been online for another 10 or more years before that) the one argument I had to keep beating down from old print editors, designers, publishers, and advertisers was about design control.

They all wanted to control the design of content -- which sounded reasonable -- and HTML thwarted them, especially back then, when browser pagess were all battleship-gray and pixels were the size of baseballs and colors were few and fonts were fewer. They all took to turning everything into an image so they could control the look. The fact that images delayed the download over slow dial-up lines didn't bother them. Their ego -- their control over content -- was more important than the audience they were trying to serve. What broke them of that bad habit was the audience clicking away from any slow page; substance -- and time -- mattered a helluva lot more than style.

Things are better all around today -- HTML, screens, fonts, colors, speed have all improved -- but still, the most beautiful web page isn't half as pretty as the prettiest print page. But we've learned that's OK.

The battle is almost -- but not completely -- over. Some folks still want control, so they produce PDFs. And the public still rejects them. See Vin Crosbie's roundup of the sales of electronic versions of print newspapers here. See also the considerable kvetching about the use of PDF's at ChangeThis.

I was going to lay off the site for a bit, because I already took my potshot and because I like ChangeThis creator Seth Godin and don't want to seem to be harping.

But then I saw this on Godin's blog and I couldn't help but react. Seth, to his credit, quotes some of the messages complaining about his PDFetish but then digs in his heels and says:

I refuse to enter the "is PDF bad" debate, but the one thing we all have to agree on is this: OF COURSE it matters what it looks like.

We judge books and blogs and tv shows and even people "by their covers" every single day.

Acknowledging that makes it easier to spread your ideas, and it alerts you to the fact that you might be embracing some ideas (like who to vote for) based on cues that have nothing to do with logical, rational reality. Abe Lincoln would come in fourth in a three way election if it were held today.

A few responses:

First, these are supposed to be manifestos, aren't they? Not tablecloths. Not lingerie. Manifestos. And in a manifesto, isn't it the ideas, the arguments, the facts, the words that matter?

They could have printed the Declaration of Independence with elderberry juice on cowhide and it wouldn't have looked as elegant but it would have been every bit as powerful.

Second, I think the design of some of these PDFs actually distracts from and hurts the message: They picked a serendipitous, happy-go-lucky font for the pullquotes and it doesn't fit so well with the topic of executing children; it's downright tasteless.

Third, if you really believe that about Abe Lincoln, then you don't think much of The People and I don't understand why you're even bothering to change their minds with manifestos. That's both insulting to the citizenry and cynical about society. Whether it is a president or a position paper or a product, I do believe that The People have both the good sense and the good taste to know the difference between the two and to know what matters.

Besides, other than John Kennedy, name one handsome president. I can name lots of handsome losers.

: Now I can't rant on about design in this space without acknowledging its own butt-ugliness. I would like to pretend that's purposeful, but it's not. I grabbed an old Blogger template, made a few adjustments, and left it alone because I am too lazy and too frightened of code and change to bother with it. I do plan to get a clean new design. But whenever I say that, inevitably, someone tells me not to; those folks say they're tired of slickness and don't want it to get in the way of what is being said. More design is not always a good thing. I learned that the very, very hard way at the launch of Entertainment Weekly. We had a great design ... six weeks before launch. But the head designer kept futzing every day until launch and I didn't have the experience to know how to stop him and when we came out, we had -- I will now confess -- a confused mess. We got deserved raspberries and underwent the fastest redesign in magazine history. Too much design is always a bad thing.

: UPDATE: Ken Layne adds in the comments:

PDFs are sort of like the microfiche of the Web. Yes, if you absolutely have to get the information, you'll use it. But who would crouch over a microfiche machine for reading pleasure?

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With cheese, please

: Fatburger is coming to New Jersey today! Jersey City, in fact. I'll be dining there soon.

Now to hell with this blogging thing. How about an In-N-Out franchise?

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A beautiful view

: Every time I come through the World Trade Center and look at 7 World Trade rising again, I smile.

Today, Lockhart Steele at Curbed puts up a beautiful photo of the sight.

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Big news: Iraqi bloggers run for office!

: This is wonderful news: Two Iraqi bloggers -- brothers Ali Fadhil and Mohammed Fadhil of IraqTheModel.com -- announced today that they are running for the Iraqi National Assembly.

How's that for democratizing? Two citizens who had no voice in their nation a little over a year ago came to blogging and now have a voice that matters -- they are quoted often in many major papers -- and are using that platform to gain a voice in their government.

Tom Villars has helped them set up a web site in English and Arabic -- where you can go and contribute to their campaign. Here is their announcement:

Baghdad, IRAQ August 18th, 2004 -- Two popular Iraqi webloggers, Ali Fadhil and Mohammed Fadhil, today announced their candidacies for the Iraqi National Assembly.

The bloggers, who are brothers, have been writing their popular weblog www.IraqTheModel.com since November of 2003. Their weblog has been quoted in major world media, including the BBC, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, National Review, Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Bulletin, Dallas Morning, and New York Post.

We believe that we represent an important segment of the Iraqi people that was never organized before under any category as a result of the oppression of the past regime. Now this segment has come to see the necessity to contribute to the building of a new Iraq in a way that is entirely different from the old ways that are still dominant in the Middle East and that are governed by religious fanaticism and pan-Arab nationalism.

We see that remaining silent is not an option in our battle towards democracy and freedom and that everyone who seeks a better future should take part in this battle.

علي فاضل (Ali Fadhil)

Through our writings in our weblog and communication with different opinions and view points we find ourselves committed to reconsider the way in which we can serve our nation.

We also saw that our somewhat daring opinions were accepted by many people whether westerners or Iraqis and we see that we have the capability to clarify our vision about Iraq's future through talking to Iraqis directly.

Our work on the weblog opened our minds more, made us bolder and encouraged us to communicate with our fellow citizens as they're the ones who can make the change and they're the ones we started to write for their sake.

محمد فاضل (Mohammed Fadhil)

The bloggers are running under the banner of the Iraqi Pro-Democracy Party. Elections will be held after December 2004. For the complete list of party candidates and more information on the party's history and its platform, please visit our website www.iraqdemparty.org.

The brothers add on their blog:

For sometime we thought that we can help by doing our jobs and by posting our opinions here on the blog, and while we still think it does help, the battle against tyranny and fanaticism in our country demands more than that. It demands that each one of us put all the effort he/she can make and take an active stand regardless of how difficult or dangerous it may seem. We simply cannot just stand and watch and we hope that we will encourage others also to do their best in order to achieve our freedom and establish democracy in a country that suffered more than enough from wars, dictators, terrorists and fanatics.
We believe that democracy is the only cure to all those diseases and the only answers to all threats. As hard the battle seems now and as far victory may look, we believe in our people and we believe in our friends and we know we will win.

: One of the fuzziest cliches of American politics is that one person can make a difference. But look over to Iraq -- and Iran -- and you begin to believe that one person can make a difference. In Iran, Hoder was the Johnny Appleseed who brought blogging to his nation and it is changing the culture and the country. In Iraq, Zeyad got his friends Ali and Mohammed to blog and they got more friends to blog and now they are running for posts in a new government in a new nation. Scrape the scales of political and media cynicism from your eyes and see what these brave people are doing now that they have the chance to do it: They love freedom of speech and democracy so much they are risking even their lives to work for it.

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Perp humor

: Many mornings when I drive into Jersey City, I end up behind paddywagons perpmobiles as the county sheriff and various local police departments drive their apprehended alleged aholes to the county courts. This morning, I was behind a delivery from Union City and saw incongruous florid blue script painted on the back. Got closer to see what it said: "Bad Boys: We told you we'd come for you."
Gotta love a guy with a gun and a sense of humor.

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It's not sex. It's a Mossad plot. Well, of course.

: A certain well-known columnist joked in email to me the other day that he was convinced Jim McGreevey's alleged misteress Golan Cipel was actually an Israeli Mossad agent. I chortled and told the famous columnist that if only he had a blog, I'd be linking to him. Of course, I'd add: Heh!

Well, Aljazeera is on the case and they say it was, yup, a Mossad secret plot: Well, naturally. Everything is Israel's fault, isn't it?

And here Foreign Policy/Intelligence Columnist Andy Martin uncovers some secrets to this regards, and asserts that McGreevey sex scandal was an Israeli Intelligence operation.

"People have been confused by the McGreevey sex scandal," says Martin. "But McGreevey's dilemma is not a gay sex scandal. It is an Israeli intelligence operation gone sour. This is not a scandal about 'sex.' It is a scandal about 'secrets', Martin says.

"McGreevey said he had sex. He did. Golan Cipel says he is not gay. He's not. They are both right. Mr. Cipel was a junior Mossad case officer, originally posted to New York under official cover. The Mossad is well known for using human sex toys. McGreevey was lured into a relationship that was intended to penetrate New Jersey's homeland defenses.

"Since 9/11 there has been barely suppressed anger at the fact Israeli intelligence knew about the hijackers and said nothing. Israelis have found themselves under suspicion and restricted by some intelligence channels. The state homeland security position was seen as a back door way of spying on anti-terror preparations in the New York-New Jersey area, and possibly nationally.

This supposed expert works for a site we've never heard of. But that, of course, doesn't bother Aljazeera.

This is a new one on me: We'd heard that Jews were warned to leave the towers (just blood libel, of course) and now we're told they knew and didn't tell. And so this story insists that they happened to find a neighboring in-the-closet gay gov and seduced him to get valuable Jersey intelligence. Clever, those Jews.

: The Israeli connection gets weirder in a Haaretz story. First, they libel Jersey:

Long before Tony Soprano, New Jersey had a bad name, the seemingly negative mirror image of glittering cross-river New York City. It was the place from where Frank Sinatra launched his success, never to return again. Even though it does not lack wealthy suburbs and elegant estates, in the popular imagination New Jersey symbolizes corruption and sleaze. "North Louisiana," gloated the Wall Street Journal, which hopes to see the Democrats - who claim to struggle for the oppressed and against the fat cats - involved in scandals no less than the Republicans.

Believe me, this is no Louisiana.

And then Haaretz goes off on its own theory regarding the Israeli connection:

Maybe there are some who scoff at the idea of a war between New Jersey and Israel - which is often described as being "about the size of New Jersey" to give Americans an indication of Israel's size - but there should be no scoffing at how deep the feverish charges of dual loyalty of Israel and Jews can go. Nobody would say that the Greek background of former CIA director George Tenet made him tilt toward the land of his forefathers, neither against Washington nor in the old quarrel between Athens and Ankara. Nobody would suspect the Portuguese backgrounds of Terese Heinz Kerry or Dina Matos McGrevey had them plotting on behalf of Lisbon....

The difference, in one word, is Pollard, and in three words, "I deserve it." Nearly 19 years after Jonathan Pollard was arrested - a Jew, and in intelligence, and in the navy, and for pay - he continues to symbolize Israeli arrogance. Everyone spies, French on America and vice versa, but only Israel, when it is caught, behaves as if America is the one that should be ashamed because it did not give Israel what Israel deserved to have and forced it to steal....

New Jersey will survive. Jim and Golan might even patch up their relationship. Israel will continue to carry the millstone of double loyalty. When he came out of the closet, McGrevey chose to declare "I am a gay American," meaning, "I cheated on my wife, the institution of family, myself - but not my country."

: Meanwhile, the Village Voice sees a Republican conspiracy, of course. Michael Musto clicks:

I'm not buying into theories that the guy (who's straight, by the way) must be some kind of soigné Mossad spy, but I am still amazed by Golan's heights of nerve. His accusations, seemingly right out of Gore Vidal's dirty-politics drama The Best Man, couldn't come at a better time for Republicans, who, led by gaydar-activating Christie Todd Whitman herself, are demanding that McGreevey step down immediately, presumably so one of their own illustrious, sexually unconfused ranks can get voted into the job.

: The Trentonian reports that former FBI Director Louis Freh offered to take the NJ terrorism job for free. Instead, McGreevey appointed an Israeli with no experience and no security clearance.

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. . .

What a nice beard

: John Shabe, NJ.com blogger, shows us alleged NJ gubernatorial himstress Golan Cipel's alleged girlfriend, "who just happens to be a blonde in a tank top and low-rise jeans who isn't shy about showing off her large sunglasses." Go see for yourself

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. . .

If you read just one blog post this year....

: Go read this post by Ken (We're Glad He's Back) Layne, who in a drunken stupor of brilliant imagination, tells Blair (who sounds like an imaginary friend, a gigantic invisible kangaroo, perhaps -- but isn't) how the Bushies are getting Kerry elected thanks to Vietnam:

"Look at you people with this Vietnam boat nonsense. Every day, you're pounding home the fact that Kerry fought in Vietnam. You idiots started this stuff so early -- with the "Oh he protested the war" and the Jane Fonda photoshops -- that the Kerry people turned the whole Democratic convention into celebration of the Vietnam War. Nobody even remembers being against Vietnam anymore. The next Vietnam movie will be a buddy comedy starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, and all they're going to do is kill Charlie and win medals and dance with beautiful girls. It'll make $300 million on the opening weekend. They're going to tear down that bummer memorial in Washington and put up a 1,000-foot statue of a smiling American soldier proudly standing on a stack of golden skulls. You morons have made Vietnam the Democrats' favorite memory and greatest victory. Then you scream hooray when a gang of addled old Nixon bagmen show up in a teevee commercial to bitch about Kerry fighting in Vietnam, and once again the normal people with lives only remember, again, that Kerry fought in Vietnam and the Bush campaign is upset about it."

"But," Tim sputtered, "He clearly claimed he was in Cambodia several days before he was in Cambodia. It was seared--"

"Stop that," I said, poking his neck with the corkscrew worm. "Listen to yourself. What are you doing, again? That's right, you're reminding people that the other guy fought in Vietnam. Have you become so brain dead that you think this helps your girly boy Bush? Do you honestly believe the coward boy can beat the War Monster?"

And that's just the beginning; the rest is brilliant. Go read the rest now. That's a friggin' order, soldier! Now!

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And W will do anything to get an Instalanche

: Dan Froomkin reports in the Washington Post that the White House site is going to get bloggier.

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And in the role of President...

: Jon Margolis (a long-ago colleague) writes in today's Times that movies -- and radio and the internet -- won't swing the election:

With talk radio, the 24-hour cable news networks, the Internet and blogging, technology and popular culture have all been offered up as vehicles for revolutionizing presidential politics. This election cycle, the Internet was a useful fund-raising and organizing tool for Howard Dean. Useful but insufficient; even a good tool cannot rescue a poor candidate. Talk radio and cable news are not inconsequential; if nothing else, they help explain the overall decline in the quality of American journalism. But they have not elected anyone.

Neither will "Fahrenheit 9/11"....

Campaigns are won or lost depending on what is happening in the world and how effectively the candidates campaign. Popular culture is just a postmodern term for entertainment, which is a lot more fun than politics, but totally different.

Right. We're smarter than that. We can tell a comedy act -- whether Moore or Coulter -- from a candidate, even if the comics think they're serious and the candidates don't know they're comical.

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The pretty American

: An exasperated correspondent gets to the sports section of The Times, expecting a respite from politican spin, and gets this in a report by Selena Roberts:

A cyclist revealed what it's like to perform without feeling the burden of the Bush administration's policy on Iraq, without thinking about hostility by political association, without checking the preset limits on her freedom to express herself.

The cyclist didn't censor her emotions at the end of Saturday's women's road race. She simply flashed an obscene gesture as she crossed the finish line.

And yet, she did not elicit worldwide glowering, morph into a microcosm of her country's arrogance or become an example on the United States Olympic Committee's most-wanted list of behavior miscreants.

That's because she was not an ugly American. Judith Arndt was a German - no qualifiers attached.....

Not to despair, though. Track and field is still to come, and Maurice Greene is on the way. If there is a man unburdened by Bush politics, undisturbed by worldwide detractors, uncontrolled by the U.S.O.C. nannies, it's Greene.

Says our sputtering correspondent:

Get it? Roberts makes a thinly veiled case that it's George Bush's fault if America's Olympic team underperforms, reasoning (1) Americans can't win and be good sports at the same time (good sportsmanship dulls the "edge"); (2) Bush's foreign policy is creating pressure on American athletes to act like good sports; (3) therefore, Bush is hurting our athletes' chances to bring home Olympic gold....

Shots at Bush coming and going. On the freakin' sports page.

Yeah, the Olympics aren't political. And neither is The Times. And I am Mark Spitz.

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No blogging the honeymoon, now!

: Blogger Terry Heaton's getting linked.

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Who needs a scorecard for these players?

: Rob Glaser and Real are gunning for Steve Jobs and Apple, trying to portray Apple as the big, bad corporate monster trying to mess with consumers' freedom.

Tough sell, Rob.

The problem is that Real has messed with its consumers since the beginning. Your software sucks. You make it impossible to find your free product and trick people into buying the product they don't want to and then you try to make it even more impossible to cancel that product. Your buggy software completely messed up my Treo and I'm not going to risk you messing up my iPod. Rob, your credibility with consumers is swiss-cheesey.

Apple, meanwhile, is the first company to make digital music work. Apple did what you couldn't do, Rob.

But having failed to come off as Prince Charming against Dark Prince Bill Gates, Glaser is trying the same poor-pitiful-me shtick against Jobs. He has an ad campaign out today. He started a blog (amusingly, with a new spelling of "blogisphere," not that I'm here to defend that word) and the promise of a weekly Q&A; with Glaser called "Rock on[,] Rob." He's also trying to undercut the entire industry with 49-cent songs, admitting that he's losing money on every sale. Good for those who get cheap songs. But spite does not a product -- or a business plan -- make.

: UPDATE: Rafat Ali reports that Real took down comments from the Real blog. The comments reportedly weren't flattering.

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Exploding TV

: A key issue for media -- news and entertainment -- is being able serve consumers where, how, and when they want to be served. It's an issue not just for TV fun; it's an issue for any form of information and media. But we're seeing the issue start to bubble and boil in TV. See this from EDN.com (via Rafat Ali):

As broadband gets faster, storage gets cheaper, and home-networking products get smarter and more capable, video via the Internet will morph from a clumsy PC-based process into a painless remote-control operation. Video files might accumulate in a cache according to your predefined preferences, or improved compression might make an on-demand streaming approach more palatable. A PC might orchestrate the process, or you might buy a video server of some kind. You might sign up for programming subscriptions or choose programs one by one.

The details don't really matter. The point is that video will flow into your home at your command, and your network will deliver it when and where you want to consume it. We're a long way from that ideal today, but the trends are undeniable....

So to the content owners out there, please realize that exclusive deals no longer make business sense. It's shortsighted to limit the market for your high-value programming to the population served by a single delivery mechanism. Along with a few hundred million of my closest friends, I'm willing to pay a fair price for your product, so please focus on making it available to me through whatever medium I prefer.

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When did we Saudis stop beating your American wives?

: It had to be the oddest advertising meeting since the intro of New Coke: Saudi Arabia starts a campaign of radio ads in America to convince us they didn't help attack us. Not officially, anyway.

Stung by criticism about its role in fighting terrorism, Saudi Arabia has launched a radio advertising campaign in 19 U.S. cities citing the Sept. 11 commission report as proof that it has been a loyal ally in the fight against al-Qaida....

The ads don't address commission criticism of Saudi Arabia, which the report called "a problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism." It said Saudi-funded Islamic schools have been exploited by extremists and, while Saudi cooperation against terrorism improved after the Sept. 11 attacks, "significant problems remained."

Here's the Saudi press release. Here's the text of the ads.

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Stop the presses! Another blogging panel!

: During the RNC, P.S. 122 is holding... drum roll, please.... yeah, what the hell, cue the band, too.... a blogging panel. I'm on it. Don't let that keep you away. Details here.

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Change ChangeThis

: Fred Wilson says I made a potshot at the launch of ChangeThis. Uh-huh.

I said that I don't much like the concept. I don't like the name -- valuing change for change's sake (why not ImproveThis?). I don't like the attitude ("People are making emotional, knee-jerk decisions, then standing by them, sometimes fighting to the death to defend their position" -- well, speak for yourself, people). I don' t like the technology (PDFs are not interactive; they avoid conversation). I scanned the topics this morning and was unimpressed.

Now I've read the "manifestos" and I'm even more unimpressed:

: The Art of the Start is not a manifesto written for ChangeThis; it is an excerpt of Guy Kawasaki's new book. It's promotion. OK, that's cool.

This is the kind of business book that makes high-altitude generalizations treating business as religion, or at least a cult:

There really is only one question you should ask yourself before starting any new venture: Do I want to make meaning?
Meaning is not about money, power, or prestige. It's not even about creating a fun place to work. Among the meanings of “meaning” are to
• Make the world a better place.
• Increase the quality of life.
• Right a terrible wrong.
• Prevent the end of something good.
Goals such as these are a tremendous advantage as you travel down the difficult path ahead.

How self-important can we get? Oh, I do believe that many companies and many founders -- and employees and customers -- seek and reach greater meaning than just making money. Fine. But I do not believe this is true of every company; building a better burger does not right any wrongs. And I also believe it is more important -- to customers, employees, investors, and yourself -- to first ask whether you have a product customers need and a competitive plan and the necessary experience to pull it off. The hubris of "meaning" has lead to ventures such as ChangeThis and many a bubbleco I could name, which try to change the world from on top. The humility of "conversation" (pick up Cluetrain) leads to companies that help their customers change the world where it matters, from the bottom (see Blogger and eBay).

: The Customer Evangelist Manifesto retreads the postmostern business magazine theme I've read a dozen times now: How to help your customers sell your product for you. Well, that's how any successful internet product works. And I've seen better, more imaginative and visionary expressions of this view of marketing at Hugh MacLeod's blog.

: Stop Child Executions doesn't have an author; it's by Amnesty International. I can't disagree with a thing in this; I would stop all executions. I suspect most readers of this site would agree. So it's not what I would call a brave and provocative start. (The cutesy font choice the ChangeThis PDFs preserves does not serve this topic well.)

: For Richer, For Poorer argues that marriage -- including same-sex marriage -- is a human right. I can't disagree with that one, either. But I can't say that this advances the argument in new and compelling ways.

: The next one is entitled Kill Your Children. No, it's not about executions. It's not about drugs. It's not about smoking or pollution or drunk driving. It's about the evils and ills and dastardly plot that is Coke. It's sugar paranoia. Tin-foil-hat diet. Seen it before. Only thing is, I drank Coke all my life. I'm not fat. And I'm 50. Nya nya nya.

: The worst of all, though, is How to be a Boor, a guide to email etiquette for the utterly clueless, which is to say a guide that insults all of us.

My RSS reader today has one helluva lot more to read: more intelligent, more informed, more up-to-date, more provocative, more conversational.

[By the way, I was about to sputter that I couldn't quote from these manifestos because they made it practically impossible to actually "download" them (as they put it) and use Adobe Acrobat's functionality to cut-and-paste text. That does nothing to start a conversation. That's all about lecturing an audience from a pulpit. PDFs are not conversational and ChangeThis' implementation is even less so. But I did find that if you hit escape to "exit," as they put it, you can get the regular Acrobat functionality within the browser to cut-and-paste text (though beware that it will come with lots of inconvenient and unattractive line-enders).]

Finally, let me say that it's ChangeThis I don't like, not its apparent creator, Seth Godin. I like some of what Seth does, don't like some. This falls into the latter bucket.

: UPDATE: Timothy Lang says in the comments regarding the technology:

It's like taking Og's stone out of his hand and giving him a hefty, steel claw hammer, and Og throwing the hammer away shouting "Og like stone!"

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Gawked

: Jessica Coen had a good first day on the job at Gawker. But Denton failed us: No good pictures.

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And Fisk represents all journalists

: The Independent paints Ann Coulter as all too representative of America:

There's no one like her in Britain, I say, not even on the crazy fringes of the Tory party. "I know," she agrees, "it's horrifying what the Conservatives are in England. You make clear that I'm not one of them."

Is Ann Coulter a nutcase? If she is, she's one listened to and approved of by a frightening number of Americans. Surely, I say, hoping she will concede that she sometimes provokes to amuse, she doesn't believe everything she comes out with. "This is the shocking thing for your readers," she replies. "I believe everything I say."

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And while we're at it, weblog is one word

: At long-last, Wired News decides to uncapitalize internet, web, and net because they're just media now (well, Doc says it's not media "but rather a place, an environment, a collection of locations. Like a marketplace, or a commons").

And, by the way, TV should never be written T.V.; it doesn't stand for two words starting with T and V.

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If Craig were an editor

: Patrick Phillips of IWantMedia asks Criag Newmark of Craig's List one question:

Q: Is Craigslist a threat to newspapers?
A: Craigslist founder Craig Newmark: "Sure, by providing free classifieds, we deprive newspapers of some revenue. But in context, we're not a significant threat. The real problem is decreasing audience and circulation for mass media, which I think results from decreasing credibility. For example, we rarely see reporters asking tough questions of authority -- the best case being the White House press corps. To be fair, Helen Thomas and Jon Stewart are notable exceptions. Maybe this is the time for a call to action, since I know most reporters want to report these matters. I don't mean to be critical, but compared to this, Craigslist is pretty penny-ante."

Helen Thomas? Helen Thomas? She has been loopy for decades now. Just because press secretaries don't like her, that doesn't mean she's H.L. Mencken.

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Leading the way

: Iranian blogging pioneer Hossein Derakshan lists what he's working on.

He plans to get mid-70s diaries of Iranians online so today's generation can see that back then, Iranians had social freedom and economic well-being. Today, he says, "they have low expectations and as a result no will or effort to change the status quo, and thus, the political apathy."

He wants to cross-translate American and Persian blogs to show how much we do have in common. I'm so eager to see this happen.

He wants to start an Iranian/Israeli project: "In an article in Persian, a few months ago, I explained why in the long-run Iran and Israel could -- and perhaps should -- be the best allies in the Arab-dominated region of middle east. Now to back it up, Given the total lack of information that the two side have about one another -- especially Iranians about Israelis, I'll to try to find some Iranian-Israelis who can blog in Persian from Israel about their ordinary lives and observations."

He is putting together wiki-powered textbooks for Iranian high school students: "Those books can later be printed and used by parents, who do not agree with the content of the official ministry of education textbooks, as alternatives in a couple of sensitive subjects such as History, Social Studies, etc."

And he wants to offer blogging awards to encourage the best of Iranian blogging and also promote photo blogs.

This is a man who brought weblogs to his country and they are helping to change his country. It's just a beginning.

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Your tax dollars

: Took the family to the local Post Office to get their passports Saturday (a new service at more Post Offices lets you hand in the docs there for a fee). As a result, we went behind the door into the bowels of the place and what do we find but damned nice furniture in the postmaster's large office: leather chairs and couches all around, dark wood desk and table, and dorky inspirational poster. Why the hell does a Post Office have leather and solid-wood office furniture?

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Good morning, fellow commuters

: So this morning I dash down to the PATH platform to rush into New York and I debate whether to take the midtown or the World Trade Center train; I prefer the latter but have been taking it less lately, since the newest terror warnings about financial buildings, there being lots of those downtown. And I glance up at the TV screen that gives us advertising all day and see a mug shot for Amer El-Maati and an appeal from the FBI to look for the guy. Says Mugshots.com:

This is Amer El-Maati, another one of the Al-Qaeda operatives wanted for questioning by the FBI for the possible terrorist attacks on the U.S. in the summer or fall of 2004. This guy's a Kuwaiti by birth, and wears coke-bottle glasses. He's also got a bunch of aliases, so if you know where he is, drop a dime on him and let the Feds know so they can pick him up.

Oh, joy. Other commuters in the world have to worry about dumb drivers. We have to worry about terrorists.

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Change what?

: So the much hyped ChangeThis collection of uninteractive PDF essays launches. And what do they want to change?
: Don't kill children with sugar in drinks.
: Don't execute children (I sense a theme here).
: Email etiquette (a fresh topic!).
: Marriage as a basic human right.
: Customer evangelism.
: Guy Kawasaki on start-ups.
Haven't read them yet. Would have liked to have browsed them this morning but you can't browse PDFs.

: Meanwhile, note that MoveOn has named its anti-Bush music tour the Vote for Change tour.

Change is the word of the day these days.

But change what? Change why? Change how? Change for the sake of change is meaningless and even destructive. The communists made change for change's sake a political philosphy and see where that got them. Change on its own is an empty word and that's just why these folks use it: They want you to fill this empty vessel of a word with whatever you have in mind.

I'd rather vote for someone than for change.

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McGreevey PR

: Howard Stern says this morning that McGreevey's staff called the show last week to try to get him on the air to talk about stem-cell research (McGreevey was going to say that he'd use state funds for research). But they got a call at the last minute saying they'd have to reschedule; McGreevey's daughter was coming into town; he had a family thing to do. He was supposed to be on Thursday morning.

: Is it cynical to wonder whether this was a straight strategy? Rather than coming out as a "Gay American," what if McGreevey had tried to tough it out with Golan Cipel? Wouldn't appearing on Stern talking babes and boobs have given him a few straight points?

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