“It’s not actually all that difficult to raise a few hundred thousand dollars, rent out an office and a phone line, call yourself the Institute for the Study of Policies I Think Are Awesome, and start blasting out press releases. Most of the policy experts in the city know something about their issue area, but not insubstantial numbers know less than they let on” – Peter Suderman. (Previously.)
National Review thinks Obama should reach across the aisle and appoint John McCain as Secretary of Defense. How’s that for a new America! I still think he’d make a great Secretary of Veterans Affairs, but better Max Cleland for that post.
One of the many wonderful ripple effects of our next president: his wife can start taking more fashion risks. We saw it in the first debate dress, and even more so Tuesday Night: Michelle Obama has an avant-garde streak and within the next four years we could see her become the inside-the-Beltway (c. 1998) Chloe Sevigny. As someone who is the same height and size as our first lady to-be, I couldn’t be more delighted. Stop the hating, fashionistas! DC has enough J. Crew-clad ladies to go around, let her embrace every weird criss-crossy, samurai sleeve, accessory-laden instinct! (By the way, the cardigan over the Narciso Rodriguez was probably a last minute touch for modesty’s sake. It’s smoking hot without it, which is probably how she wore it backstage.) Update: ok, maybe not. But it does look a lot better in these photos than it photographed on stage.
It’s a little annoying how many journalists and bloggers gave up their tv critic/oceanography/etc beats to be armchair political strategists (meanwhile, guilty!) Which is why it might be a little quiet here for the next two days as I struggle not to add too much to the din. I’m also going to try not to do what Jack Shafer predicted will happen on Wednesday: “Giving a reporter (or a pundit) too much time to think about a historic event such as VE Day, the moon landing, the fall of Communism, or the release of Nelson Mandela is like entering him into a grandiosity competition to see who can squeeze the most poetry out of his keyboard. Suddenly, everybody with a notepad and a word processor thinks he’s Norman Mailer.” I’ll save the Obama, blah, blah, Obama, blah, blah historic, change me, me, me essay for my journal. In the meantime: this is the cutest photo of a politician ever!
NM Republicans used 19-year-old’s voter registration to run credit checks
Online Social Shaming: Twitter Users Now Trolling #lift08
Last year Kim Zetter wrote several smart articles about how outrage toward Lori Drew soon turned into out-of-control social shaming, after her name was released on the internet following the suicide of her neighbor, 13 year old Megan Meier. Drew created a fake Myspace boyfriend who “broke up” with Meier over email just days before she hung herself.:
Experts say the firestorm that followed illustrates what happens when the social imperative to punish those in a community who violate social norms plays out over the internet. The impulse is human nature, say experts, and few can imagine an offense more egregious than a trusted adult preying on the emotions of a vulnerable child. Shunning wrongdoers, especially in the absence of legal redress, helps maintain order and preserve a community’s moral sense of right — think church excommunications and the Amish tradition of Meidung.
But the drive for social shaming — to right a wrong and restore social balance — can run amok and create paradoxical consequences, especially on the internet where people instigate mobs in ways they wouldn’t do offline.
“Internet shaming is done by people who want actually to enforce norms and to make people and society more orderly,” says Daniel Solove, professor of law at George Washington University and author of The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor and Privacy on the Internet. “The problem is that internet shaming actually destroys social control and makes things more anarchic, and it becomes very hard to regulate and stop it.”
Wells published only Lori Drew’s name, but her readers and other bloggers followed by finding and posting her husband’s name, the family’s address and phone number, a cellphone number, the name of the family’s advertising company, and the names and phone numbers of clients with whom they worked.
With emotions running high and the election less than two weeks away, it’s possible Ashley Todd will see the same fate. Her fabricated attack is racist, disgraceful, and will be remembered as one of the most despicable stunts in the history of United States elections. Still, a mass rush to judge outside the law could make things only worse.
While this might seem like a minor incident in politics, this is a significant event in the emerging studies of digital sociology and social media psychology. So much of the story unraveled online from her dubious Myspace page to the handwritten B so similar to that on her face, to the comments on blog posts from psychiatric professionals wondering her the carving showed “hesitation marks.”
From Reason:
This circumstancial evidence is mostly discouraging conservative bloggers who started off the evening accusing (however tongue-in-cheek) Obama of egging on the mysterious mugger. The real work is being done by local cops, who have heard multiple versions of the story from Todd (one where the mugger was outraged by her campaign button, one where he didn’t get angry until he saw her bumper sticker) and are giving her a polygraph. Still, it was the speed of bloggers that cast doubt on the story before it could even lead cable news.
Todd, as a “digital native“, has a broad Internet presence. She posted YouTube videos that seem so much like exaggerated Tracy Flick impersonations (here and here), it’s very surprising no adult supervisor intervened and suggested she take a step back, maybe sit the rest of the campaign out. It’s clear from the videos alone she is not mentally sound.
Her Twitter feed lays a whole other layer of crazy to this mess. She actually livestreamed her feigned attack. I can’t get over this. I mean, imagine Morton Downey Jr text messaging, “still scrubbing the paint off :’(” and that’s basically what happened.
It’s kinda funny to see Twitter users trolling the feed for Todd’s volunteer group lifeinthefield.com (#litf08) with comments like “Hmm, it was an okay Obama frame-job, just a few inconsistencies snagged you. Overall I’d give you a ‘B’.” streaming on the site. And there are more than a handful of LOL-able comments on the Life in the Field youtube page or on Wonkette, (Ken Layne needs to be credited as one of the first calling shenanigans on it.) But it’s only for the best if this story dies by the end of the week.
“Gunpowder paintings” by Cai Guo-Qiang
Muslim McCain Fans Confront Intolerance At Rally from the American News Project. (via.)
The photograph of Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan’s grave. It comes from a New Yorker slideshow. More about his life.
Were it not for one Ohio plumber/ soon to be FoxNews correspondant, we’d still be laughing over Sen. McCain’s bizarre line about the old vets at his rally and the hats they wear: “Whenever you get a large rally of 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 people, you’re going to have some fringe peoples. You know that… But to somehow say that group of young women who said ‘Military wives for McCain’ are somehow saying anything derogatory about you, but anything — and those veterans that wear those hats that say ‘World War II, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq,’ I’m not going to stand for people saying that the people that come to my rallies are anything but the most dedicated, patriotic men and women that are in this nation and they’re great citizens.” There is one section of people in this country who badly want John McCain elected: military families. Everyone else is thinking meh, or voting Obama. So how about appointing him Secretary of Veterans Affairs, future President Obama?
National Enquirer’s story on Vera Baker will dent the Obama campaign about as much as the Vicki Iseman and Brad Hanson stories hurt McCain/Palin… but here’s the link anyway. (Also, remember Alexandra Polier?)
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