OOP(s)? Out Of Print No Longer

In the 10th year of Our Google, the Mountain View, CA information octopus is about to become the world's largest publisher. With approximately a half-million super-computers/servers around the world, Google is poised to become the world's largest publisher of a universal library, thanks to its digital scanning machines. Google has struck "deals with the libraries of the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford and many others" to bring their book-holdings to the Web. In return, Google will publish-on-demand any book in its electronic trove that is OOP — out of print. If this is (fair & balanced) literary resurrection, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
How To Publish Without Perishing
By James Gleick

The gloom that has fallen over the book publishing industry is different from the mood in, say, home building. At least people know we’ll always need houses.

And now comes the news, as book sales plummet amid the onslaught of digital media, that authors, publishers and Google have reached a historic agreement to allow the scanning and digitizing of something very much like All the World’s Books. So here is the long dreamed-of universal library, its contents available (more or less) to every computer screen anywhere. Are you happy now? Maybe not, if your business has been the marketing, distributing or archiving of books.

One could imagine the book, venerable as it is, just vanishing into the ether. It melts into all the other information species searchable through Google’s most democratic of engines: the Web pages, the blogs, the organs of printed and broadcast news, the general chatter. (Thanks for everything, Gutenberg, and now goodbye.)

But I don’t see it that way. I think, on the contrary, we’ve reached a shining moment for this ancient technology. Publishers may or may not figure out how to make money again (it was never a good way to get rich), but their product has a chance for new life: as a physical object, and as an idea, and as a set of literary forms.

As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars.

Of course, plenty of other stuff is destined for obsolescence. For more than a century the phonograph record was almost the only practical means of reproducing sound — and thus the basis of a multibillion-dollar industry. Now it’s just an oddity. Hardly anyone in the music business is sanguine about the prospects for CDs, either.

Now, at this point one expects to hear a certain type of sentimental plea for the old-fashioned book — how you like the feel of the thing resting in your hand, the smell of the pages, the faint cracking of the spine when you open a new book — and one may envision an aesthete who bakes his own bread and also professes to prefer the sound of vinyl. That’s not my argument. I do love the heft of a book in my hand, but I spend most of my waking hours looking at — which mainly means reading from — a computer screen. I’m just saying that the book is technology that works.

Phonograph records and CDs and telegraphs and film cameras were all about storing and delivering bits — information, in its manifold variety — and if we’ve learned anything, we’ve learned that bits are fungible. Bit-storing technologies have been arbitrary, or constrained by available materials, and thus easy to replace when the next thing comes along. Words, too, can be converted into bits, but there’s something peculiar, something particularly direct, about the path from the page to the brain.

It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.

There’s reading and then there’s reading. There is the gleaning or browsing or cherry-picking of information, and then there is the deep immersion in constructed textual worlds: novels and biographies and the various forms of narrative nonfiction — genres that could not be born until someone invented the codex, the book as we know it, pages inscribed on both sides and bound together. These are the books that possess one and the books one wants to possess.

For some kinds of books, the writing is on the wall. Encyclopedias are finished. All encyclopedias combined, including the redoubtable Britannica, have already been surpassed by the exercise in groupthink known as Wikipedia. Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the Oxford English Dictionary, has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever. And those hefty objects called “telephone books”? As antiquated as typewriters. The book has had a long life as the world’s pre-eminent device for the storage and retrieval of knowledge, but that may be ending, where the physical object is concerned.

Which brings us to the settlement agreement, pending court approval, in the class action suit Authors Guild v. Google. The suit was filed in September 2005 when Google embarked on an audacious program of copying onto its servers every book it could get its hands on. This was a lot of books, because the Internet giant struck deals with the libraries of the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford and many others. On its face this looked like a brazen assault on copyright, but Google argued that it should be protected as a new kind of “fair use” and went on scanning during two and a half years of secret negotiations (I was involved on the authors’ side).

By now the company has digitized at least seven million titles. Many are old enough to be in the public domain — no issue there — and many are new enough to be available in bookstores, but the vast majority, four million to five million, are books that had fallen into a kind of limbo: protected by copyright but out of print. Their publishers had given up on them. They existed at libraries and used booksellers but otherwise had left the playing field.

As a way through the impasse, the authors persuaded Google to do more than just scan the books for purposes of searching, but go further, by bringing them back to commercial life. Under the agreement these millions of out-of-print books return from limbo. Any money made from advertising or licensing fees will go partly to Google and mostly to the rights-holders. The agreement is nonexclusive: If competitors to Google want to get into the business, they can.

This means a new beginning — a vast trove of books restored to the marketplace. It also means that much of the book world is being upended before our eyes: the business of publishing, selling and distributing books; the role of libraries and bookstores; all uses of books for research, consultation, information storage; everything, in fact, but the plain act of reading a book from start to finish.

In bookstores, the trend for a decade or more has been toward shorter shelf life. Books have had to sell fast or move aside. Now even modest titles have been granted a gift of unlimited longevity.

What should an old-fashioned book publisher do with this gift? Forget about cost-cutting and the mass market. Don’t aim for instant blockbuster successes. You won’t win on quick distribution, and you won’t win on price. Cyberspace has that covered.

Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it.

[James Gleick, the author, most recently, of Isaac Newton, is on the board of the Authors Guild. He is a science and technology reporter for the New York Times. His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, an international best-seller, chronicled the development of chaos theory and made the "Butterfly Effect" a household word. Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

Today's Vlog: Tom Lehrer Rips Nazi Rocket Scientists, Pollution, & Vatican II

Tom Lehrer was a Harvard prodigy (BA in mathematics at age 18) who tried to combine graduate study in mathematics with a coffeehouse/caberet career as a parodist who accompanied himself on the piano (or, as he called it, an 88-string guitar). In the contest for his time between Harvard mathematics and show biz, the mathematics career came in second. Lehrer left Harvard sans PhD, but taught at MIT and, later, the University of California at Santa Cruz. Tom Lehrer's biggest hit came in 1965 with an album entitled, "That Was The Year That Was." This album proved to be Lehrer's farewell piece. In it, he skewered the former Nazi rocket scientist who moved from Germany to the U.S. after WWII. Lehrer also pointed to the environmental problem long before there was an Earth Day. In one of the more controversial songs on the album, the parodist turned his gaze upon the Roman Catholic Church and its attempt to reform (and popularize) itself in the Second Vatican Council. If this is (fair & balanced) savage wit, so be it.

[Vannevar Bush Hyperlink — Bracketed Numbers — Directory]
[1] "Wehrner von Braun"
[2] "Pollution"
[3] "The Vatican Rag"

[x YouTube/Tom Lehrer Wisdom-Comedy Channel (6funswede)]

[1]—Back To Directory
"Wehrner von Braun"

[2]—Back To Directory
"Pollution"


[3]—Back To Directory
"The Vatican Rag"


Copyright © 2008 Tom Lehrer

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

Internet English? Gt Rel!

Uh, oh! This blogger has enough trouble communicating and now, a futurist-humanist proclaims that English, as we know it, is a dying language. Gt reddy, dood. If this is a (fair & balanced) dystopic vision, so be it.

[x Utne Reader]
English Die Soon
By Annalee Newitz

By the time English truly is a dominant language on the planet, it will no longer be English. Instead, say a group of linguists interviewed in New Scientist (March 29, 2008), the language will fragment into many mutually unintelligible dialects.

Still, some underlying documents will supply the grammatical glue for these diverse Englishes, the way Koranic Arabic does for the world’s diverse Arabic spin-off tongues. En­glish speakers of the future will be united in their understanding of a standard English supplied by technical manuals and Internet media.

People like me, native English speakers, are heading to the ashcan of history. By 2010, estimates language researcher David Graddol, 2 billion people on the planet will be communicating in English—but only 350 million will be native speakers. By 2020, native speakers will have diminished to 300 million. My American English, which I grew up speaking in an accent that matched what I heard on National Public Radio and "60 Minutes," is already difficult for many English speakers to understand.

Hence the rise of Internet English. This is the simple English of technical manuals and message boards, full of slang and technical terminology, but surprisingly free of strange idioms. It’s usually also free of the more cumbersome aspects of English grammar.

For example, a future speaker of English would be unlikely to understand the peculiar way in which I express the past tense: “I walked to the store.” Adding a couple of letters (–ed) to the end of a verb to say that I did something in the past? Weird. Hard to hear; hard to say. It’s much more comprehensible to say “I walk to the store yesterday.” And indeed, that’s how many nonnative speakers already say it. It’s also the way many popular languages like the several dialects of Chinese express tense. The whole practice of changing the meaning of a word by adding barely audible extra letters—well, that’s just not going to last.

When I read about the way English is changing and fragmenting, it has the opposite effect on me from what you might expect.

Although I am the daughter and granddaughter of English teachers and spent many years in an English department earning a Ph.D., I relish the prospect of my language changing and becoming incomprehensible to me. Maybe that’s because I spent a year learning to read Old English, the dominant form of English spoken 1,000 years ago, and I realize how much my language has already changed.

My glee in the destruction of my own spoken language isn’t entirely inspired by knowing language history, though. It’s because I want English to reflect the lives of the people who speak it. I want English to be a communications tool—like the Internet, a thing that isn’t an end in itself but a means to one. Once we all acknowledge that there are many correct En­glishes, and not just the Queen’s English or Terry Gross’ English, things will be a lot better for everybody.

I’ll admit that sometimes I feel a little sad when my pal from Japan doesn’t get my double entendres or idiomatic jokes. I like to play with language, and it’s hard to be quite so ludic when language is a tool and nothing more.

But that loss of English play is more than made up for by the cross-cultural play that becomes possible in its stead, jokes about kaiju and nonnative snipes at native customs. (My favorite: My Japanese pal is bemused by American Christianity and one day exclaimed in frustration, “God, Godder, Goddest!”)

For those of us who spend most of our days communicating via the Internet, using language as the top layer in a technological infrastructure that unites many cultures, the Englishes of the future are already here. In some ways they make a once-uniform language less intelligible. In other ways, they make us all more intelligible to one another.

[Annalee Newitz edits the science fiction blog—io9.com. Newitz graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a Ph.D. in English and American Studies. She has written two books: White Trash: Race and Class in America and The Bad Subjects Anthology.]

Copyright © 2008 Ogden Publications, Inc.

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

What Shall We Do?

Howard Zinn speaks truth to power. He explodes the mythology of our noble past by examining massacres in our history. If this is (fair & balanced) power to the people, so be it.

[x Utne Reader]
Can We Handle the Truth?
By Howard Zinn

I was recently invited to participate in a symposium on the Boston Massacre. I said I would speak, but only if I could also speak about other massacres in American history.

The Boston Massacre, which took place on March 5, 1770, when British troops killed five colonists, is a much-remembered—indeed, overremembered—event. Even the word massacre is a bit of an exaggeration; Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary says the word denotes "wholesale slaughter."

Still, there is no denying the ugliness of a militia firing into a crowd, using as its rationale the traditional claim of trigger-happy police—that the crowd was 'unruly' (as it undoubtedly was). John Adams, who was a defense lawyer for the nine accused British soldiers and secured acquittals for seven of them, described the crowd as "a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattos, Irish teagues, and outlandish jack tarrs."

Adams could hardly have expressed more clearly the fact that the race and class of the victims made their lives less precious. This was one of many instances in which the Founding Fathers registered their desire to keep revolutionary fervor under the control of the more prosperous classes.

Ten thousand Bostonians (out of a total population of 16,000) marched in the funeral procession for the massacre victims. And the British, hoping not to provoke more anger, pulled their troops out of Boston. Undoubtedly, the incident helped build sentiment for independence.

Still, I wanted to discuss other massacres because concentrating attention on the Boston Massacre would be a painless exercise in patriotic fervor. There is no surer way to obscure the deep divisions of race and class in American history than by uniting us in support of the American Revolution and all its symbols-like Paul Revere's stark etching of the soldiers shooting into the crowd.

I suggested to the symposium audience that there were other massacres, forgotten or dimly remembered, that deserved to be recalled. These ignored episodes can tell us much about racial hysteria and class struggle, about shameful moments in our continental and overseas expansion, so that we can see ourselves more clearly and honestly.

Why, for instance, was there not a symposium on what we might call the Taino Massacre, in which Columbus and his fellow conquistadors annihilated the native population of Hispaniola, the island that is now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic? Before the conquistadors arrived, there were several million people living on the island. By 1550, perhaps only 50,000 were left.

Why not organize a public forum on the Pequot Massacre of 1636, when our Puritan ancestors, in an expedition led by Captain John Mason, set fire to a village of Pequot Indians on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound? Here's how William Bradford, an early settler, described the attack in his History of Plymouth Plantation:

Those that scaped the fire, were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others run through with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400.

"It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day," wrote the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather, an expert on the destination of souls.

The massacres of American Indians by the armies of the United States—in Colorado in 1864, in Montana in 1870, in South Dakota in 1890, to cite just a few-were massacres in the most literal sense: that is, wholesale slaughter of hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children. The number of those events cannot be counted, and should by that fact be a subject for intense scrutiny.

The results of such an investigation would be as sobering to young Americans as the story of the Boston Massacre is inspiring. And sobriety about our national sins might be instructive at a time when we need to consider what role we will play in the world during the coming century.

Atrocities against African Americans took place either by official acts or by white mobs with the collaboration of government officials. In 1917, an article called "The Massacre of East St. Louis" appeared in the NAACP publication The Crisis, written by W.E.B. Du Bois and Martha Gruening. When African Americans were hired to replace whites, hysteria took hold and a white mob attacked the black section of East St. Louis, leaving 6,000 blacks homeless and perhaps 200 dead. Mangled bodies were found floating in the Mississippi River. Josephine Baker, the St. Louis-born entertainer who decided she could not live in this country, said at the time: "The very idea of America makes me shake and tremble and gives me nightmares."

The killing of workers by police and militia is given little notice in our history books. I thought I knew about many of these events, but I keep learning about more, such as the Bay View Massacre in Milwaukee, which took place May 5, 1886 (the day after the Haymarket bombing in Chicago). On that day, striking steelworkers marched toward a mill in Milwaukee and were intercepted by a squad of militia who fired point-blank into the strikers, killing seven.

In 1897, there was a coal strike in Pennsylvania. Immigrant Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, and Germans were brought in to break the strike. The strikebreakers themselves soon organized and went on strike. Marching toward the Lattimer mine, they refused to disperse. The sheriff and his deputies opened fire and killed 19 people, most of them shot in the back.

In 1919, a mob attack in Elaine, Arkansas, left perhaps 100 or more African Americans dead. In 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, planes dropped nitroglycerin on a 35-block black business district, destroying hundreds of businesses, more than a thousand homes, 20 churches, a hospital, libraries, and schools. The number of black people killed was estimated by some in the hundreds, by others in the thousands, with bodies put into mass graves, stuffed into mine shafts, or thrown into the river.

Better known, but still absent from mainstream history books, is the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. Two companies of National Guardsmen, their pay underwritten by the Rockefeller interests that owned the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, launched a military attack on the miners' tent colony, where 1,000 men, women, and children lived. The Guardsmen poured machine-gun fire into the tents, then burned them. Eleven children and two women died.

One of the many strikes of the Depression years was against Republic Steel in Chicago in 1937. Police fired into a picket line, killing 10 in what came to be known as the Memorial Day Massacre.

Even less likely to enter the history books are the atrocities the United States commits overseas. High school and college texts usually deal at length with the three-month Spanish-American War, portraying the United States as liberating Cuba from Spain and admiring Theodore Roosevelt's exploits with the "Rough Riders." They rarely pay attention to the eight-year war to conquer the Philippines, a bloody affair that in many ways resembled the war in Vietnam. The United States killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos in the war, but U.S. casualties were under 5,000. In 1906, an American military detachment attacked a village of Filipino Muslims ("Moros") on one of the southern islands, killing 600 men, women, and children. This was the Moro Massacre, which drew an angry response from Mark Twain and other Americans.

In his capacity as vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League, Twain wrote:

We have pacified thousands of the islanders and buried them, destroyed their fields, burned their villages, turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors, furnished heartbreak by exile to dozens of disagreeable patriots, and subjugated the remaining ten million by Benevolent Assimilation.

Those of us who were of age during the Vietnam War remember the My Lai Massacre of 1968, in which a company of American soldiers fired into groups of unarmed villagers, killing perhaps 500 people, many of them women and children. When I spoke recently to a group of a hundred high school honors students in history and asked who knew about the My Lai Massacre, no one raised a hand.

My Lai was not a unique event. A U.S. Army colonel charged with covering up the My Lai incident told reporters: "Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace."

And if the word massacre means indiscriminate mass slaughter of innocent people, is it not reasonable to call the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki massacres, as well as the firebombing of Tokyo and the destruction of Dresden and other German cities?

In Ignazio Silone's novel Fontamara, about peasants living under Italian fascism, an underground resistance movement produces leaflets in order to disseminate information that had been suppressed and then simply to ask:

"Che fare?—What shall we do?" ("They have killed Berardo Viola. What shall we do? They have taken away our water. What shall we do? They violate our women in the name of the law. What shall we do?")

When our government, our media, and our institutions of higher learning select certain events for remembering and ignore others, we have the responsibility to supply the missing information. Just telling untold truths has a powerful effect, for people with ordinary common sense may then begin asking themselves and others: What shall we do?

[Howard Zinn is a acholar/teacher and activist, best known for his 1980 book A People's History of the United States. Zinn attended New York University and received his bachelor's degree in 1951. He did graduate work in political science at Columbia University, completing his masters degree in 1952 and his Ph.D. in 1958. Zinn taught at Boston University from 1964-1988.]

Copyright © 2008 Ogden Publications, Inc.

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

Thank You!

Today's (as well as yesterday's) NY Fishwrap ran an Op-Ed piece by Kenneth C. Davis offering a revisionist version of Thanksgiving. Davis, called a popular historian in a supreme understatement, has grown his bibliography from 1990's Don't Know Much About History to Don't Know Much About Anything in 2007. Davis' just-published latest book, from which the Op-Ed piece was derived, is America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation. Sam Cooke had no idea how his lyric, "Don't know much about history," would inspire more than two-dozen "Don't Know Much" books. This blogger wants a reader to know much, much more about Thanksgiving Day. If this is (fair & balanced) gratitude, so be it.

[x About.com American History]
Creating A National Thanksgiving Holiday
By Martin Kelly

In America today, Thanksgiving is generally seen as a time to get together with loved ones, eat a ridiculously large amount of food, watch some football, and of course give thanks for all the blessings in our lives. Many homes will be decorated with horns of plenty, dried corn, and other 'symbols' of Thanksgiving. Schoolchildren across America will 'reenact' Thanksgiving by dressing as either pilgrims or Wampanoag Indians and sharing a meal of some sort. All of this is wonderful for helping create a sense of family, national identity, and of course remembering to say thanks at least once a year. However, as with many other holidays and events in American History, many of these commonly believed traditions about the origins and celebration of this holiday are based more on myth than fact. Let's look at the truth behind our celebration of Thanksgiving.

Origins of Thanksgiving

The first interesting thing to point out is that the feast shared with the Wampanoag Indians and the first mention of Thanksgiving are really not the same event. During the first winter in 1621, 46 of the 102 pilgrims died. Thankfully, the following year resulted in a plentiful harvest. The pilgrims decided to celebrate with a feast that would include 90 natives who helped the pilgrims survive during that first winter. One of the most celebrated of those natives was a Wampanoag who the settlers called Squanto. He taught the pilgrims where to fish and hunt and where to plant New World crops like corn and squash. He also helped negotiate a treaty between the pilgrims and chief Massasoit.

This first feast included many fowl, though it is not certain that it included turkey, along with venison, corn, and pumpkin. This was all prepared by the four women settlers and two teenage girls. This idea of holding a harvest feast was not something new to the pilgrims. Many cultures throughout history had held feasts and banquets honoring their individual deities or simply being thankful for the bounty. Many in England celebrated the British Harvest Home tradition.

The First Thanksgiving

The first actual mention of the word thanksgiving in early colonial history was not associated with the first feast described above. The first time this term was associated with a a feast or celebration was in 1623. That year the pilgrims were living through a terrible drought that continued from May through July. The pilgrims decided to spend an entire day in July fasting and praying for rain. The next day, a light rain occurred. Further, additional settlers and supplies arrived from the Netherlands. At that point, Governor Bradford proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving to offer prayers and thanks to God. However, this was by no means a yearly occurrence.

The next recorded day of Thanksgiving occurred in 1631 when a ship full of supplies that was feared to be lost at sea actually pulled into Boston Harbor. Governor Bradford again ordered a day of Thanksgiving and prayer.

Was the Pilgrim Thanksgiving the First?

While most Americans think of the Pilgrims as celebrating the first Thanksgiving in America, there are some claims that others in the New World should be recognized as first. For example, in Texas there is a marker that says, "Feast of the First Thanksgiving – 1541." Further, other states and territories had their own traditions about their first thanksgiving. The truth is that many times when a group was delivered from drought or hardship, a day of prayer and thanksgiving might be proclaimed.

Beginning of the Yearly Tradition

During the mid-1600s, Thanksgiving as we know it today began to take shape. In Connecticut valley towns, incomplete records show proclamations of Thanksgiving for September 18, 1639, as well as 1644, and after 1649. Instead of just celebrating special harvests or events, these were set aside as an annual holiday. One of the first recorded celebrations commemorating the 1621 feast in Plymouth colony occurred in Connecticut in 1665.

Growing Thanksgiving Traditions

Over the next hundred years, each colony had different traditions and dates for celebrations. Some were not annual though Massachusetts and Connecticut both celebrated Thanksgiving annually on November 20 and Vermont and New Hampshire observed it on December 4. On December 18, 1775, the Continental Congress declared December 18 to be a national day of Thanksgiving for the win at Saratoga. Over the next nine years, they declared six more Thanksgivings with one Thursday set aside each fall as a day of prayer.

George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving Proclamation by a President of the United States on November 26, 1789. Interestingly, some of the future presidents such as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson would not agree to resolutions for a national day of Thanksgiving because they felt it was not within their constitutional power. Over these years, Thanksgiving was still being celebrated in many states, but often on different dates. Most states, however, celebrated it sometime in November.

Sarah Josepha Hale and Thanksgiving

Sarah Josepha Hale is an important figure in gaining a national holiday for Thanksgiving. Hale wrote the novel Northwood; or Life North and South in 1827 which argued for the virtue of the North against the evil slave owners of the South. One of the chapters in her book discussed the importance of Thanksgiving as a national holiday. She became the editor of the Ladies' Magazine in Boston. This would eventually become the Lady's Book and Magazine, also known as Godey's Lady's Book, the most widely distributed magazine in the country during the 1840s and 50s. Beginning in 1846, Hale began her campaign to make the last Thursday in November a Thanksgiving national holiday. She wrote an editorial for the magazine about this each year and wrote letters to governors in every state and territory. On September 28, 1863 during the Civil War, Hale wrote a letter to President Abraham Lincoln “as Editress[sic] of the 'Lady's Book' to have the day of annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival." Then on October 3, 1863, Lincoln, in a proclamation written by Secretary of State William Seward, proclaimed a nationwide Thanksgiving Day as the last Thursday of November.

The New Deal Thanksgiving

After 1869, each year the president proclaimed the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day. However, there was some contention over the actual date. Each year individuals tried to change the date of the holiday for various reasons. Some wanted to combine it with Armistice Day, November 11 commemorating the day when the armistice was signed between the allies and Germany to end World War I. However, the real argument for a date change came about in 1933 during the depths of the Great Depression. The National Dry Retail Goods Association asked President Franklin Roosevelt to move the date of Thanksgiving that year since it would fall on November 30. Since the traditional shopping season for Christmas then as now started with Thanksgiving, this would leave a short shopping season reducing possible sales for the retailers. Roosevelt refused. However, when Thanksgiving would again fall on November 30, 1939, Roosevelt then agreed. Even though Roosevelt's proclamation only set the actual date of Thanksgiving as the 23rd for the District of Columbia, this changed caused a furor. Many people felt that the president was messing with tradition for the sake of the economy. Each state decided for itself with 23 states choosing to celebrate on the New Deal date of November 23 and 23 staying with the traditional date. Texas and Colorado decided to celebrate Thanksgiving twice!

The confusion of the date for Thanksgiving continued through 1940 and 1941. Due to the confusion, Roosevelt announced that the traditional date of the last Thursday in November would return in 1942. However, many individuals wanted to insure that the date would not be changed again. Therefore, a bill was introduced that Roosevelt signed into law on November 26, 1941 establishing the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day. This has been followed by every state in the union since 1956.

[Martin H. Kelly taught for eight years as a Secondary School Social Studies teacher. He is currently the Director of Curriculum for the Florida Virtual School and developed the AP American History Course for the school. He also authored the Everything American Presidents book and Colonial America: Government. Kelly holds a Bachelor's in History with a Classics Minor and a Master's in Instruction and Curriculum from the University of Florida.]

Copyright © 2008 About.com, a part of The New York Times Company

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

myPod Story

Earlier in the fall of '08, this blogger faced heavy-duty dental work. A new dentist prescribed a crown on a tooth with deteriorating fillings. Lovely. Past experience with the installation of a dental crown featured the noise of the grinding as the original tooth was reduced to a stump upon which the crown was seated. Since this wasn't the blogger's first rodeo with a power tool in his mouth, a noise supressor was needed. This blogger immediately thought of a CD-player with ear phones; the sound of the blogger's favorite music would block out the sound of the dental grinding. A trip to the nearest big-box electronics store found this blogger strolling out with a Classic iPod. A combination of the CD player on the laptop plus iTunes software enabled the transfer of more than 100 CDs to the iPod. Amazing. Welcome to the 21^st century. This blogger blocked the sound of grinding with a medley of tunes through the iPod earphones. If this is (fair & balanced) technological progress, so be it.

[x Wikipedia]
iPod

iPod is a brand of portable media players designed and marketed by Apple Inc. and launched on October 23, 2001. The product line-up includes the hard drive-based iPod Classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, the video-capable iPod Nano, the screenless iPod Shuffle and the iPhone. Former products include the compact iPod Mini and the spin-off iPod Photo (since reintegrated into the main iPod Classic line). iPod Classic models store media on an internal hard drive, while all other models use flash memory to enable their smaller size (the discontinued Mini used a Microdrive miniature hard drive). As with many other digital music players, iPods, excluding the iPod Touch, can also serve as external data storage devices. Storage capacity varies by model.

Apple's iTunes software can be used to transfer music to the devices from computers using certain versions of Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems. For users who choose not to use Apple's software or whose computers cannot run iTunes software, several open source alternatives to iTunes are also available. iTunes and its alternatives may also transfer photos, videos, games, contact information, e-mail settings, Web bookmarks, and calendars to iPod models supporting those features. Apple focused its development on the iPod line's unique user interface and its ease of use, rather than on technical capability. As of September 2007, more than 150 million iPods had been sold worldwide, making it the best-selling digital audio player series in history.

The name iPod was proposed by Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter, who (with others) was called by Apple to figure out how to introduce the new player to the public. After Chieco saw a prototype, he thought of the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the phrase "Open the pod bay door, Hal!", which refers to the white EVA Pods of the Discovery One spaceship. Apple researched the trademark and found that it was already in use. Joseph N. Grasso of New Jersey had originally listed an "iPod" trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in July 2000 for Internet kiosks. The first iPod kiosks had been demonstrated to the public in New Jersey in March 1998, and commercial use began in January 2000, but had apparently been discontinued by 2001. The trademark was registered by the USPTO in November 2003, and Grasso assigned it to Apple Computer, Inc. in 2005.

Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

They Became What They Didn't Understand

The Flatster provides a bleak benediction for this holiday season: "...For the next few years we’re all going to be working harder for less money and fewer government services — if we’re lucky." The root of his bleak view of the future rests with the Masters of the Universe who had no idea what they were selling to investors. Click on this link for the story on the Wisconsin school boards who got caught up in a global Ponzi scheme. The key to the story is an investment advisor who didn't know what he was selling to the Wisconsin school boards. If this is a (fair & balanced) tale of greed beyond the dreams of avarice, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
All Fall Down
By Thomas L. Friedman

I spent Sunday afternoon brooding over a great piece of Times reporting by Eric Dash and Julie Creswell about Citigroup. Maybe brooding isn’t the right word. The front-page article, entitled “Citigroup Pays for a Rush to Risk,” actually left me totally disgusted.

Why? Because in searing detail it exposed — using Citigroup as Exhibit A — how some of our country’s best-paid bankers were overrated dopes who had no idea what they were selling, or greedy cynics who did know and turned a blind eye. But it wasn’t only the bankers. This financial meltdown involved a broad national breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics.

So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made a fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so.

Citigroup was involved in, and made money from, almost every link in that chain. And the bank’s executives, including, sad to see, the former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, were clueless about the reckless financial instruments they were creating, or were so ensnared by the cronyism between the bank’s risk managers and risk takers (and so bought off by their bonuses) that they had no interest in stopping it.

These are the people whom taxpayers bailed out on Monday to the tune of what could be more than $300 billion. We probably had no choice. Just letting Citigroup melt down could have been catastrophic. But when the government throws together a bailout that could end up being hundreds of billions of dollars in 48 hours, you can bet there will be unintended consequences — many, many, many.

Also check out Michael Lewis’s superb essay, “The End of Wall Street’s Boom,” on Portfolio.com. Lewis, who first chronicled Wall Street’s excesses in Liar’s Poker, profiles some of the decent people on Wall Street who tried to expose the credit binge — including Meredith Whitney, a little known banking analyst who declared, over a year ago, that “Citigroup had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust,” wrote Lewis.

“This woman wasn’t saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt,” he added. “She was saying they were stupid. Her message was clear. If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets they bought with huge sums of borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale... For better than a year now, Whitney has responded to the claims by bankers and brokers that they had put their problems behind them with this write-down or that capital raise with a claim of her own: You’re wrong. You’re still not facing up to how badly you have mismanaged your business.”

Lewis also tracked down Steve Eisman, the hedge fund investor who early on saw through the subprime mortgages and shorted the companies engaged in them, like Long Beach Financial, owned by Washington Mutual.

“Long Beach Financial,” wrote Lewis, “was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking homeowners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, Calif., a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.”

Lewis continued: Eisman knew that subprime lenders could be disreputable. “What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism... ‘We always asked the same question,’ says Eisman. ‘Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.’ He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S.& P. couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. ‘They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,’ Eisman says.”

That’s how we got here — a near total breakdown of responsibility at every link in our financial chain, and now we either bail out the people who brought us here or risk a total systemic crash. These are the wages of our sins. I used to say our kids will pay dearly for this. But actually, it’s our problem. For the next few years we’re all going to be working harder for less money and fewer government services — if we’re lucky.

[Thomas L. Friedman became The New York Times' foreign-affairs columnist in 1995. He won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, his third (The earlier Prizes were awarded in 1983 and 1988.) Pulitzer for this paper. Friedman's latest book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, (2005) won the inaugural Goldman Sachs/Financial Times Business Book of the Year award. Friedman received a B.A. degree in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University in 1975. In 1978 he received a Master of Philosophy degree in Modern Middle East studies from Oxford.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

Charlie McCarthyism?

One of the great scams in entertainment history was perpetrated by Edgar Bergen who took his ventriloquist act to the non-visual medium of radio. From December 17, 1937 to July 1, 1956, Bergen's weekly radio show featured the ventriloquist (as straight man), a cast of puppets (Charlie McCarthy, Mortimer Snerd, and Effie Klinker), and a celebrity guest each week. The incredible irony of Edgar Bergen's radio show is that ventriloquism depends on the non-movement of the speaker's lips so that it appears that the puppet is speaking. On the radio, no one knew if Bergen's lips were moving. 'Tis a pity that Edgar Bergen never discovered Williamson County here in Texas because there are plenty of dummies living there. If this is (fair & balanced) voice projection, so be it.

[x Mother Goose & Grimm]
By Mike Peters

A Confederacy Of Dunces:
Charlie McCarthy, Howdy Doodie, and Pinnochio

[Mike Peters is an cartoonist who draws the popular comic strip "Mother Goose and Grimm," as well as syndicated editorial cartoons that appear in papers all over the United States. He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1981. His home paper is the Dayton Daily News in Dayton, Ohio.

As a joke, he once stood on the building ledge outside the Daily News building for thirty minutes wearing a Superman costume so that he could make an entrance to a meeting through the window in the manner of TV actor George Reeves entering Perry White's office on "The Adventures of Superman."]

Copyright © 2008 Mike Peters

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

Say Or Press "One" For A LOL Experience

One of the great delights of modern life is the automated call system which greets a caller with "Please listen carefully as this menu has changed." This is the 21st century equivalent of "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." Seth Freeman isn't Dante, but his humorous piece on the automated call system is divine. If this is (fair & balanced) technology gone amuck, so be it.

[x NY Fiswrap]
On A Ring And A Prayer
By Seth Freeman

Please listen carefully as this menu has changed.

For English press or say “One.” Para español oprima o diga “Dos.” For all other languages press or say “Three.”

One.

Thank you for your interest in our service. If this is a true spiritual emergency, please hang up and dial the number on the upper left-hand corner of the mailing label of your last solicitation. Otherwise, please stay on the line and your prayers will be answered in the order in which they were received.

All right, let’s get started. For prayers of repentance press or say “Two.” For prayers of supplication press or say “Three.” For prayers of forgiveness press or say “Four.” For prayers of serenity press or say “Five.” For all other prayers press or say “Six.”

I guess...Er...Supplic — three. Three. [3]

I think you said, “Two.” Is this correct?

No.

I think you said, “No.” Is this correct?

Yes.

O.K., let’s try that again. For prayers of repentance press or say “Two.” For prayers of supplication press or say “Three.” For prayers —

Three.

— of forgiveness —

Three! [3] [3]

— say “Four.” For prayers of serenity press or say “Five.” For all other prayers press or say “Six.”

Three.

I think you said, “Three.” Is this correct?

Yes. Correct. Yes.

All right, let me see if I can help you. Please say the category for which you are supplicating. For example, if you are praying for help with a personal life problem, say “Problem.” If you are praying for a material object like a new Lexus, say “Car.”

Uh.

I’m sorry. I didn’t understand your answer. Please repeat your answer slowly and clearly.

It’s hard to describe. Things no longer make ... sense ...

I think you said, “Vengeance.” Is this correct?

No.

Good, because Vengeance is mine. Please repeat your answer slowly and clearly.

Prob. Lem.

I think you said, “Problem.” Is this correct?

Yes. Correct.

Thank you. Let me connect you to that department.

[Hold music: Pachelbel, “Canon in D” — tenor sax version (Kenny G)]

Please stay on the line. Your prayer is important to us. Your wait time is approximately seven minutes.

[Hold music]

We’re sorry you are still on hold. We appreciate your patience and look forward to being of service.

[Hold music]

Thank you for holding. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please state the problem for which you would like help. For example, if you would like help healing someone who is sick, you could say, “Illness.” If you would like help in making a woman who barely knows that you exist become interested in you romantically, you could say, “Wingman.”

No more menus.

I’m sorry. I didn’t understand your answer. Please state the problem for which you would like help.

I want help without having to go through six levels of options.

I think you said you would like help with sexual dysfunction. Is this correct?

No.

I think you said, “No.” Is this correct?

Yes.

O.K, please restate your problem. Speak slowly and clearly —

I’m sick of these menus.

I think you said you would like help curing a sickness. Is this correct?

No, no, these menus are driving me crazy.

I think you said you would like help dealing with a mental illness. Is this correct?

No. No, no!

I’m having difficulty understanding the problem for which you are seeking help. Please state your problem slowly and clearly.

My problem is ... I ... forgot why I called.

I think you said you no longer recall your problem. Is this correct?

I guess. I don’t know. Yes.

Excellent. We are pleased to have been of service. How else can we provide you with a wonderful day?

[Seth Freeman has been a writer for eight different television shows, including "Lou Grant" and "The Waltons." Freeman received a Bachelor of Music from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. In 1979, Freeman received an Emmy for "Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series" (a "Lou Grant" episode).]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

The Dark Side Of Tomorrow

Last week, BBC's "World Have Your Say" spent a week in my backyard. The first remote broadcast took place on the Williamson County Square, about 30 miles north of where this blogger slaves over a hot keyboard. Williamson County is one of the reddest of the Red Counties in the Lone Star State and has been a Dumbo stronghold since the late 1960s. The Brit moderator of the international call-in show, Ros Atkins, spoke with passersby on the Courthouse Square and asked both men and women about the results of the '08 election. Atkins asked, "How do you feel after the election?" The universal response from the mostly Dumbo residents was that they felt "very afraid." During this blogger's 3-year sojourn in Williamson County in Geezer City, he felt very afraid of the Birchers and the True Republican Women. The Green Zone in Baghdad is an oasis of calm and rationality compared to Williamson County. Today's 'toon by Tom Tomorrow taps into that Dumbo "fear." If this is (fair & balanced) fear & loathing of Dumbos, so be it.

[x Salon]
This Modern World
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

Click on image to enlarge.

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow". His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Salon and Working for Change. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly.

Perkins, a long time resident of Brooklyn, New York, currently lives in Connecticut. He received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002.

When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political weblog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001.]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

Scoop! Angelina Jolie Named Labor Secretary By Obama

The real scoop here is that Doris Kearns Goodwin makes money from Amazon.com with every mention of "team of rivals." If this is (fair & balanced) cyber-hype, so be it.

[x HuffPost]
Obama Names Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston To "Team of Rivals"
By Andy Borowitz

Continuing in his quest to assemble a so-called "team of rivals," President-elect Barack Obama today announced that he would name Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston to key Cabinet positions.

The two actresses, who have been perennial tabloid fodder as a result of their longstanding feud over actor Brad Pitt, were surprise choices for Mr. Obama's Cabinet, since neither of them has been a government official or even portrayed one in a movie.

But in his weekly Internet address, the President-elect explained his rationale for choosing the sworn enemies to his Cabinet: "I chose Jennifer and Angelina for the same reason I have chosen every other Cabinet member: they clearly despise each other with a passion."

While Mr. Obama was vague about which Cabinet positions the two actresses would ultimately hold, insiders said that Ms. Jolie was a shoo-in for Secretary of Labor.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, historian and author of the book Team of Rivals, said that she was "thrilled" by the selection of the two actresses to Mr. Obama's Cabinet.

"Every time someone says 'team of rivals,' I sell another book on Amazon," she said. "Team of rivals, team of rivals, team of rivals."

[Andy Borowitz is the creator the Borowitz Report, a Web site that is a lot funnier than the stuff posted by Matt Drudge and his ilk. Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears regularly in The New Yorker. He is the first winner of the National Press Club's humor award and has won seven Dot-Comedy Awards for his web site. He is the author of five humor books, including The Borowitz Report: The Big Book of Shockers, a 2005 finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. His most recent book is The Republican Playbook. Borowitz is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, Class of 1980.]

Copyright © 2008 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

Mea Culpa, Hillster (And A Pardon For Eric Holder)

It is time to put aside all of the old grudges. The Senate must confirm The Hillster to take her place in "The Uncertain Tradition" (coined by Norman Graebner as the title for his excellent collection of biographical essays on several Secretaries of State). The Hillster is an intelligent public servant who will rise to the challenge in the Foggy Bottom. In the same spirit, the Senate must confirm Eric Holder as Attorney General. The pardon of Marc Rich was over and done in 2001 when Eric Holder was the key Justice Department attorney who offered a lukewarm opinion on the Rich pardon to then-President Slickster. Eric Holder is a capable Justice Department veteran who made one questionable call in an otherwise exemplary career in the Clintonian Department of Justice. The time has come to forget the old politics and embrace change. Yes, we can! If this is (fair & balanced) amnesty, so be it.

[x Salon]
Get Over It, Clinton Haters
By Joe Conason

For a broad array of editorialists, pundits and kibitzers, as well as anybody else still obsessed with old resentments against the Clintons, the weeks since Election Day have inflicted a profound sensation of cognitive dissonance, as Barack Obama kept naming the friends and allies of his former rival to run his transition and his government. Now with reports that Hillary Rodham Clinton will indeed be appointed secretary of state, those feelings may even induce a stroke here or there.

Wasn't Obama the One who would exorcise the Clintonite demons from our midst and cleanse the capital of their sins?

Whatever the merits of any of the president-elect's particular personnel choices, he has hardly betrayed the faith of his supporters -- and in fact has displayed the very character and maturity that they always attributed to him. To say the least, he has showed that he cannot be swayed from exercising his own judgment by the petty backbiting of Washington at its worst.

During the process that led up to this moment, Obama no doubt understood that he would be courting disappointment or worse among those whose measure of him depended on his supposed distance from the Clintons. Having encouraged those assumptions as a matter of political necessity, he must have realized within days of his election that if he made selections based on merit, he would inevitably recruit many of the best and brightest of the last Democratic administration.

In the appointment of Hillary Clinton, he has proved as well that he is a supple thinker, capable of changing his views according to experience. To elevate the junior senator from New York into his Cabinet, Obama had to set aside the criticisms of her that he and his surrogates had voiced during the campaign.

If her experience in national security and foreign policy were as shallow as advertised back then, after all, on what basis could he offer her the position of top diplomat? If her judgment were as poor as charged by him and others over the past two years, then why would he place such heavy responsibilities on her shoulders? If her honesty were as questionable as his campaign sometimes claimed, then how can he trust her now?

The answer is not necessarily that his campaign rhetoric was false or insincere, but that he developed respect for her over the difficult months of that harsh contest — and came to believe that she would be as formidable at his side as she was in his face.

The same contrast between then and now applies to Clinton as well, of course. To be willing to sacrifice her Senate seat — and an apparent offer to join the Democratic leadership — she must have come to a very different view of Obama's potential than the skepticism expressed by her and her supporters in the heat of the primary. In accepting this appointment, she will fully endorse his fitness to lead and the soundness of his worldview, without reservation. That acknowledgment goes far beyond the speeches of the general election campaign, which she delivered over and over on his behalf.

Whether Obama's appointments make sense can only be judged when those he has chosen have an opportunity to perform — a caveat that applies to Clinton along with all the others, from Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff to Eric Holder as attorney general. But it should now be clear that the president-elect does not share the jaundiced view of the Clinton administration — or the Clintons — held so insistently by some of his own supporters.

For one thing, it should be plain that the exhaustive "vetting" process brought to bear on Bill and Hillary Clinton, and especially on his foundation and his business dealings, must have revealed nothing of grave concern to the Obama transition officials assigned to examine him. If it is true, as reported, that he will no longer accept certain speaking engagements that might pose an appearance of conflict with his wife's position, that would be appropriate. It is equally likely, however, that the good work of his foundation will continue, since the Obama administration could scarcely wish to deprive a million or more impoverished people of the medicine and care that the former president has brought to them.

It will be interesting to see whether those who have raised the darkest suspicions about the former president will accept the benign assessment conferred on him by Obama.

Then again, perhaps this momentous transition will offer a chance to reopen the discussion of various canards about the Clinton years. Insinuations abound, as always, in such matters as the Holder nomination and his role in the pardon of Marc Rich, to take one example. But has anybody noticed that almost eight years later, the infamous financier has yet to set foot in the United States — or to ask why? When Holder's name comes up for confirmation in the Senate, will anyone examine the real reasons that Clinton gave clemency to Rich — and who asked him to do so? We shall see.

Meanwhile, the president-elect in his wisdom has repudiated the Clinton-bashing mythology of the '90s. Perhaps that is what he meant when he promised to say goodbye to all the partisan poison of the past.

[Joe Conason writes a weekly column for Salon and the New York Observer. Conason received a B.A. in History from Brandeis University in 1975. He then worked at two Boston-based newspapers, East Boston Community News and The Real Paper. From 1978 to 1990, he worked as a columnist and staff writer at The Village Voice. From 1990 to 1992, Conason was "editor-at-large" for Details magazine. In 1992, he became a columnist for the New York Observer, a position he still holds. Conason has written a number of books, including Big Lies (2003), which addresses what he says are myths spread about liberals by conservatives. His new book is It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush.]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

A 2-Gun Farewell Salute To The Dubster

This blog has given The Dubster more whacks than a rental piñata. ¡Basta ya! This farewell to The Dubster is inspired by a pair of essays that contemplate different aspects of the transition out of the White House on January 20, 2009. Goodbye Dubster, we hardly knew ye (and we're rotten glad of that). If this is (fair & balanced) good riddance, so be it.

[Vannevar Bush Hyperlink — Bracketed Numbers — Directory]
[1] The Faux Redneck: The Naming Dilemma
[2] The Pitts: Sympathy For The Dubster? Not!

[1]—Back To Directory
[x Austin Fishwrap]
Want To Name Something After Bush? How 'Bout My Plummeting 401(k)?
By John Kelso

A story in the newspaper the other day about how President George W. Bush won't have doodley named after him reminded me of the yarn about the guy who goes up and knocks on the White House door in 2009.

"Is George W. Bush here?" the guy asks. "George W. Bush is no longer here," the man who answers the White House door says. "Thanks," the guy says, turning on his heels and leaving.

The next day, same thing. The same guy knocks and the same guy answers.

"Is George W. Bush here?" the knocker asks. "Look," says the doorman. "I told you yesterday that George W. Bush is no longer here. Don't you understand?"

"Oh yeah, I understand," the guy says. "I just like hearing it."

So is it any wonder that the smart money says George W. Bush won't get major buildings or much of anything else named after him? Hoover got the vacuum cleaner. Grant's got the lock on the tomb thing. I think it's Kinky Friedman who jokes about "taking a Nixon." Even Stalin and Lenin got stuff named after them, though not around these parts.

George W. Bush may not be so lucky. When a proposal to name a sewage plant after Bush got on the ballot in California , voters even turned that down. You know you're not running real popular when you can't get your name on a poop processor.

I think Austin should step in here and lead the charge to get something named after Bush. Oh, there are institutions we could rename that aren't necessarily local, like the George W. Bush Guantanamo Bay House of Corrections . Or, instead of Wall Street, how 'bout Bush Boulevard? Don't drive there though because there's a crash every day.

But I think we need to name something around these parts after the man — although I don't think he deserves his name on a school, a jogging trail, a creek, a baggage carousel out at the airport or even a toll road rest stop.

That's why I'm proposing to name my 401(k) after him.

Why? Consider the similarities between Bush and my 401(k). They're both leaving. Just thinking about both of them keeps me awake at night. And they're both hard to look at without screaming.

It's not that I hold Bush personally responsible for the disappearance of my retirement stash. But it might have been better for Americans if he'd paid attention to business. You know a guy who didn't notice when gas went up to $4 a gallon ain't exactly minding the store.

So from now on, I'm no longer going to check on my 401(k). Instead, I'm going to check my George W. Bush Memorial 401(k). As long as there's something left to check.

I'll order the plaque.

[Downeaster (Maine-native) John Kelso has worked for the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman as a humor columnist since 1977. Before coming to Austin, Kelso worked at several newspapers: The Manchester (N.H.) Union-Leader; The Boonville (Mo.) Daily News; The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post, and the Racine (Wis.) Journal Times. Kelso has been a general assignment reporter, a copy editor, a sports editor, and an outdoor writer. As a pretend-redneck, Kelso is all gimme cap and no double-wide. His redneck-shtik appears thrice weekly: Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays in the Austin Fishwrap.]

Copyright © 2008 The Austin American-Statesman
________________________________________________________
[2]—Back To Directory
[x Miami Fishwrap]
"Novel Take" On Tenure Of President Bush
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

We should be ashamed of how poorly we have treated President George W. Bush.
That, believe it or not, is the thesis of a bizarre opinion published the day after the election in The Wall Street Journal by one Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, described as an investigative reporter, a lawyer and a former intern for, of all people, John Kerry. It's one of two rather eye-opening Journal pieces, actually; the second, following just days later, was by a former presidential aide named Jim Towey. Under the headline Why I'll Miss President Bush, he sang hosannas to the decency and compassion of W., even going so far as to invoke Mother Teresa.

Which is, shall we say, a rather novel take. But it is Shapiro's piece that will give you whiplash. In his view, Bush has struggled manfully in the service of an ungrateful nation, reached out in a spirit of true bipartisanship and received for his efforts nothing but "crushing resistance" and constant scorn.

Shapiro writes: "The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time."

And reading that, you wonder... well, you wonder a few things.

• First, you wonder how old Shapiro is. Because he sounds very young. I'm talking smudge-of-acne-cream-on-the-cheek, fake-ID-at-the-club young. Which, presumably, he is not, given his pedigree.

• Then you wonder — fear, might be the better word — if this is but the vanguard of a new wave of revisionism, a preemptive strike against history, if you will, to impose a sunnier, more forgiving view on the last eight years than the facts will support. If so, we should gird for a very long rest of our lives.

• Finally, you wonder, wearily, if it is really necessary to tally yet again the sins of this president. If Bush's approval ratings sink any lower, they will emerge in China. That's not accidental. And when his reign of error ends on Jan. 20, it will come eight years too late and not a millisecond too soon.

For my money, of all the things he has done that have damaged this nation — we're talking lies and alibis, torture, the loss of American prestige, watching passively as New Orleans drowned, censoring science, politicizing the Justice Department, a ruinous war of choice in Iraq, spending with all the discipline of an 8-year-old in a candy store — arguably the most damaging legacy this president leaves is that he has undermined truth itself. After eight years of Bush/Rove politics, we live now in a nation where fact doesn't mean a whole lot, where it is OK to believe the "truth" that serves your political ends and jettison any that does not.

Because these days, truth comes in two flavors. We have red truth and blue truth, but we are fresh out of the truth, the facts, unimpeachable and inarguable. Instead, Bush has overseen a government of legendary intellectual incoherence, where ideology is valued above competence, accountability is valued not at all and one is daily dared to believe the evidence of one's lying eyes. Bush seems to agree with Stephen Colbert: Reality has a liberal bias.

Now, we are offered one last single-digit salute to our collective intelligence in the form of this grotesque suggestion that we should be ashamed of how we have treated Bush. If anyone should feel shame, it is Bush and the cadre of sycophants that has enabled him for eight long years.

Of course, as young Mr. Shapiro so vividly reminds us, they don't know the meaning of the word.

[Leonard Pitts Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2004. He is the author of Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood. His column runs every Sunday and Wednesday in the Miami Fishwrap. Pitts graduated from the University of Southern California with a BA, summa cum laude, in English.]

Copyright © 2008 Miami Herald Media Company

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

We're #26!

Michael Kinsley supplies a link to Time magazine's first-ever listing of the Top 25 Blogs in the World within his rant about blog-glut. Since this wasn't a (fair & balanced) ranking, the 26^th spot is claimed by default. If this is a (fair & balanced) delusion, so be it.

[x Time]
How Many Blogs Does The World Need?
By Michael Kinsley

People had been predicting it for years, and in 2008, it finally happened. This was the first presidential election dominated by the Internet. Those ancient debates about whether the Internet lowers journalistic standards and drags the Mainstream Media into the slime have become irrelevant. For a large chunk of the electorate—the young chunk—the Internet has become the major source of information.

But while the chin pullers can hold their symposiums about the quality of that information, it's the quantity that's truly remarkable--and oppressive. Way back in 2004, when we last held an election, no one was complaining that there wasn't enough to see or read on the Internet. And that was before YouTube, Politico, Huffington Post, Twitter and Facebook became daily or hourly necessities for millions. In 2004 newspaper websites were still mostly "shovelware"—the paper edition reproduced. They weren't bloated with blogs and video and interviews with the reporters who wrote the story. But now everyone has a blog. The opportunity for us all to express an opinion is wonderful. Having to read all those opinions isn't. In 2004 there were probably still more people reading blogs than writing them. Not so now, or so it seems. And even if most blogs are skippable, there are one or two or maybe two dozen worth checking out a couple of times—or maybe three or four times—a day just to be sure you're not missing anything. (See the Top 25 blogs.)

Then there are the sites that are supposed to help you sort the wheat from the chaff on all the other sites. They filter out the stories you can ignore, and they aggregate the ones they think you should read. Some have computer algorithms to do their sorting, while others induce readers themselves to do the heavy lifting. Sixty-three percent of those who enjoyed a story about cannibalism in suburban Paris, it turns out, recommend another story about werewolves in Rio de Janeiro. Hey, better check it out.

Fine. But aggregation has become a hall of mirrors. "Did you see Romenesko this morning? Yeah, very interesting. He's got a link to a piece in LA Observed that links to a column on the London Times website where this guy says that a Russian blogger is saying that Obama will make Sarah Palin Secretary of State."

"Wow. Sounds true. Where did the Russian guy get it?"

"He says it was in Romenesko."

And if readers are suffering from information overload, imagine the new life of political writers. First, they have to be totally up to speed to make sure that some blogger or newspaper competitor hasn't already made the point or reported the factlet that they intend to write about. Second, they have to be fast, fast, fast to beat that other fellow to the punch. This has always been true in journalism and used to be considered part of the fun. But it's less fun when half the people in the world could now be that other fellow.

Third, while an article a day used to be a typical reporter's quota (or in the leisurely precincts of newsmagazines, an article a week), reporters are now expected to blog 24/7 as well. Not only that, they must perpetually update their stories, as in the old days of multiple newspaper editions. And they may well be handed a voice recorder and/or webcam and told to file audio and video too. Meanwhile, they are glancing over their shoulder and awaiting the Grim Reaper from HR with word of the latest round of layoffs.

How many blogs does the world need? There is already blog gridlock. When the Washington Post editorial page started a blog before this year's conventions, participants (I was one) were told: Don't forget that the Post political staff also has a complete set of blogs. It wasn't clear what we were supposed to do about this, but the implication was that there are only so many aperçus to go around, so don't be greedy.

The great thing about blogs, in my view, is that they share the voice of e-mail. It's a genuinely new literary form, which, at its best, combines the immediacy of talking with the reflectiveness of writing. But many readers may be reaching the point with blogs and websites that I reached long ago with the Sunday New York Times Magazine—actively hoping there isn't anything interesting in there because then I'll have to take the time to read it.

[Michael Kinsley is a political journalist, commentator television host, and liberal pundit. Primarily active in print media as both a writer and editor, he also became known to television audiences as a co-host on CNN's "Crossfire." Kinsley has been a notable participant in the mainstream media's development of online content; Kinsley was the founding editor of Slate. Currently, Kinsley is a columnist for Time magazine. Michael Kinsley graduated from Harvard University in 1972. At Harvard, Kinsley served as vice president of the University's daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, then returned to Harvard for law school. While still a third-year law student, he began working at The New Republic and finished his Juris Doctor degree in the evening program at The George Washington University Law School.]

Copyright © 2008 Time Inc.

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

Dubster: It's Time To Go! (And Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out!)

The Krait calls for The Dubster to resign (Yesterday wouldn't be soon enough.) The scheme would end this unending nightmare of inaction and indecision during a national emergency. Key to the plan would be joint resignations by The Dubster and The Dickster (in an undisclosed location) to allow the presidential succession of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The new POTUS (until January 20, 2009) would move the Obama Transition Team to a new role as the National Emergency Management Team. The key to gaining the resignations of The Dubster and The Dickster would be pardons for crimes they committed while in office. The criminals would avoid the slammer, but they would be marked forever as pardoned criminals. Best of all, our long national nightmare would be over. If this is a (fair & balanced) solution to a national crisis, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Time for Him to Go
By Gail Collins

Thanksgiving is next week, and President Bush could make it a really special holiday by resigning.

Seriously. We have an economy that’s crashing and a vacuum at the top. Bush — who is currently on a trip to Peru to meet with Asian leaders who no longer care what he thinks — hasn’t got the clout, or possibly even the energy, to do anything useful. His most recent contribution to resolving the fiscal crisis was lecturing representatives of the world’s most important economies on the glories of free-market capitalism.

Putting Barack Obama in charge immediately isn’t impossible. Dick Cheney, obviously, would have to quit as well as Bush. In fact, just to be on the safe side, the vice president ought to turn in his resignation first. (We’re desperate, but not crazy.) Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would become president until Jan. 20. Obviously, she’d defer to her party’s incoming chief executive, and Barack Obama could begin governing.

As a bonus, the Pelosi presidency would put a woman in the White House this year after all. On the downside, a few right-wing talk-show hosts might succumb to apoplexy. That would, of course, be terrible, but I’m afraid we might have to take the risk in the name of a greater good.

Can I see a show of hands? How many people want George W. out and Barack in?

A great many Americans have been counting the days all year on their 2008 George W. Bush Out of Office Countdown calendars. I know a lot of this has been going on because so many people congratulated me when the Feb. 1 Bush quote turned out to be from one of my old columns. (“I think we need not only to eliminate the tollbooth from the middle class, I think we should knock down the tollbooth.”)

This was not nearly as good as Feb. 5 (“We ought to make the pie higher”) or Feb. 21 (“I understand small business growth. I was one.”) But we do what we can.

In the past, presidents have not taken well to suggestions that they hand over the reins before the last possible minute. Senator J. William Fulbright suggested a plan along those lines when Harry Truman was coming to the end of a term in a state of deep unpopularity, and Truman called him “Halfbright” for the rest of his life. Bush might not love the idea of quitting before he has a chance to light the Christmas tree or commute the execution of one last presidential turkey. After all, he still has a couple more trips planned. And last-minute regulations to issue. (So many national parks to despoil, so many endangered species to exterminate ... .) And then there’s all the packing.

On the other hand, he might want to consider his legacy, such as it is.

In happier days, Bush may have nurtured hopes of making it into the list of America’s mediocre presidents, but somewhere between Iraq and Katrina, that goal became a mountain too high. However, he might still have a chance to avoid the absolute bottom of the barrel, a spot currently occupied by James Buchanan, at least in my opinion. Buchanan nailed down The Worst President title in the days between Abraham Lincoln’s election and inauguration, when the Southern states began seceding and Buchanan, after a little flailing about, did absolutely nothing. “Doing nothing is almost the worst thing a president can do,” said the historian Michael Beschloss.

If Bush gives up doing nothing by giving up his job, it’s possible that someday history might elevate him to the ranks of the below average. Better than Franklin Pierce! Smarter than Warren Harding! And healthier than William Henry Harrison!

The person who would like this plan least probably would be Barack Obama. Who would want to be saddled with the auto industry’s problems ahead of schedule? The heads of America’s great carmaking corporations are so dim that they couldn’t even survive hearings run by members of Congress who actually wanted to help them. Really, when somebody asks you exactly how much money you need, the answer should not be something along the line of “a whole bunch.”

An instantaneous takeover would also ruin the Obama team’s plan to have the tidiest, best-organized presidential transition in history. Cutting it short and leaping into governing would turn their measured march toward power into a mad scramble. A lot of their Cabinet picks are still working on those 62-page questionnaires.

But while there’s been no drama with Obama, we’ve been living a Technicolor version of “The Perils of Pauline.” Detroit is tied to the railroad tracks and the train is coming! California’s state government is falling into the sea! The way we’re going now, by the time the inauguration rolls around, unemployment will be at 10 percent and the Dow will be at 10.

Time for a change.

[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. Collins returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007. Besides America's Women, which was published in 2003, Ms. Collins is the author of Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics, and The Millennium Book, which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins. Her new book is about American women since 1960. Collins has a degree in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.]

Copyright — 2008 The New York Times Company

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

A Standing O For The "O"

The most elegant of the magazine covers for the '08 election was provided, ironically, by The New Yorker magazine with its November 17, 2008 issue. The luminous "O" in the masthead shining down on the Lincoln Memorial in the evening was an elegant version of the most recognizable political symbol in more than a generation. The memory of The New Yorker's earlier cover in the summer that portrayed the Obamas as terrorists was gone in the blink of an eye. The graphic style writer for the NY Fishwrap interviewed the lead designer of the Obama "O." If this is (fair & balanced) visual communication, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The “O” In Obama
By Steven Heller


Clockwise from left: Aaron Daye/The Gainesville Sun; Monica Almeida/The New York Times; Monica Almeida/The New York Times; Zach Boyden-Holmes/The New York Times

At the end of 2006, Mode, a motion design studio in Chicago, approached Sol Sender, a graphic designer, to create a logo for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The resulting “O” became one of the most recognizable political logos in recent history. I spoke with Mr. Sender a few days after the election to discuss the evolution of his design.

Steven Heller: How did you get the job of designing the Obama logo?

Sol Sender: We got the job through Mode. Steve Juras, a classmate of mine from graduate school is the creative director there. They have a long-standing relationship with AKP&D Message and Media, a campaign consulting firm led by David Axelrod and David Plouffe among others.

Q: Have you done other political logos in the past?

A: No, we had not.

Q: I have to ask, since many agencies that do political campaigns are simply “doing a job,” did you have strong feelings one way or the other for the Obama candidacy?

A: We were excited to work on the logo and energized by the prospect of Mr. Obama’s campaign. However, we didn’t pursue or develop the work because we were motivated exclusively by ideology. It was an opportunity to do breakthrough work at the right time in what’s become a predictable graphic landscape.

Q: How many iterations did you go through before deciding on this “O”? Was it your first idea?

A: We actually presented seven or eight options in the first round, and the one that was ultimately chosen was among these. In terms of our internal process, though, I believe the logo — as we now know it — came out of a second round of design explorations. At any rate, it happened quite quickly, all things considered. The entire undertaking took less than two weeks.

Q: How did David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, respond to your initial presentation?

A: Mode handled that. My sense was that there was a lot of enthusiasm about the options we developed. I was part of a presentation with Mode and Mr. Axelrod to evaluate the final two or three options. There was a general sense that they were all good, but we felt strongly that the chosen logo was the most powerful one.

Q: Did Barack Obama have any input into the symbol at all?

A: None that was directly communicated to us. I believe he looked at the final two or three options, but I wouldn’t be able to accurately portray his reaction.

Q: What were you thinking when you conceived this idea?

A: When we received the assignment, we immediately read both of Senator Obama’s books. We were struck by the ideas of hope, change and a new perspective on red and blue (not red and blue states, but one country). There was also a strong sense, from the start, that his campaign represented something entirely new in American politics — “a new day,” so to speak.

Q: Were you responsible or cognizant of how many variations and applications were possible when you first introduced the “O”?

A: Honestly, we initially saw the mark through the lens of our work on more traditional consumer or corporate identity systems, and were concerned about it being misused. In retrospect, I think that was a narrow viewpoint. But this anxiety came before the campaign built such a strong internal design team.

Various vendors needed to reproduce the mark on signs, banners, and they needed some rules. So our initial concern was compliance and consistency. Having said that, we did think it was a strong mark — strong marks have the potential for broad successful application and viral growth — and we were cognizant of its possibilities. We saw (and visualized as part of the creative process) buttons, billboards, ads, Web banners, T-shirts and hats. We did not foresee the scope of the variations and the personal “ownership” that emerged, though.

We handed the logo and design assets off to the campaign in the summer of 2007. From that point on, everything that you’ve seen was done by the campaign, including the “demographic” variations of the logo. They also evolved the typography to uppercase, incorporated Joe Biden’s name and added a white line around the mark.

Q: Did you have any qualms about this symbol? Did you ever think it was too “branded” and “slick”?

A: We didn’t, though there were certainly instances where we sensed a need to be careful about its application. We never saw the candidate as being “branded,” in the sense of having an identity superficially imposed on the campaign. The identity was for the campaign, not just for the candidate. And to the degree that the campaign spoke to millions of people, it may have become a symbol for something broader — some have termed it a movement, a symbol of hope.

Q: Do you think the “O” had any major contribution in this outcome?

A: The design development was singularly inspired by the candidate’s message. Like any mark, the meaning and impact really come from what people bring to it.

Q: Now that Mr. Obama is President-elect Obama, do you see the “O” as having another or extended life?

A: Well, the “O” was the identity for the Obama ’08 campaign and the campaign is over. That doesn’t mean that the mark will be forgotten; I think the memorabilia from this campaign will have a long shelf life and will stand as a visible symbol of pride for people who supported the candidate and for those who see it as a representation of a watershed moment for our country. As far as having another life, I can’t say. Perhaps the 2012 campaign will hark back to it in some way.

[Steven Heller is the co-chairman of the MFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts. He writes the “Visuals” column in the New York Times Book Review. He is the author of the forthcoming Iron Fists: Branding the Totalitarian State.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.