Brains, Now With Illustrations!

[elfs]

Glenn Greenwald rips the Wall Street Journal a new one for lying about Bush & Obama

Like a bad moment from 1984, the WSJ tells you about a past that didn't happen and tries to compare it to a present they do not like. First, the WSJ complains that at his press conference Barack Obama had a list of reporters that he had decided to call upon, then adds: "We doubt that President Bush, who was notorious for being parsimonious with follow-ups, would have gotten away with prescreening his interlocutors."

Greenwald then points out that Ari Fliescher did the exact same thing for George Bush, and calls bullshit on the WSJ for its irresponsible editorializing.

Analyzing a single panel of The Watchmen

A long exegesis of a single page of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, describing the interaction of text and images, the framing, centering, and perspective choices used to highlight ideas or create mood. A lot more thinking goes into the good stuff than most of us are aware of. (via jaylake)

Analyzing P.D. Eastman's Sam and the Firefly

It's hard to tell if Todd Alcott is being sardonic or not, but his three-act analysis of Sam and the Firefly, a children's book by the author of Are You My Mother, lays out an uncompromising comparison of narrative and illustration in which the key elements of protagonists' desires and the crises those can create are front and center of a children's book. Alcott makes the case that writing children's books is a heck of a lot harder than it looks.

No whistleblower protection in stimulus bill

Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) apparently stripped the provision from the bill out of fear that it would protect employees who divulged national security secrets. Rather than re-write the provision, however, it seems it was chucked altogether. Your tax dollars (not) working, folks. Talking Points memo points fingers.

Kansas legislator seeks to block netroots campaigns

Remember Sean Tevis, the guy who ran in Kansas seeking a seat, and used the Internet to raise funds at the rate of $8 a person? I even sent him eight bucks. Anyway, he lost. The incumbent, who won, is now seeking to force public disclosure on all citizens, even those who donate as little as a dollar, if the campaign successfully raises more than a $1000. Basically, he's trying to create a bookkeeping nightmare for netroots campaigners like Tevis, and wreck a funding stream that put his own under stress.

Republicans fail at "the twittering."

A few months ago, the chairman of the Republican National Convention said that "We have to get on with the facebook and the twittering," in order to reach out to young people. Since then, Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich) has twittered "Just landed in Baghdad," completely violating operational secrecy. Steve Benen now entertains us with a state-level party official letting out a secret early, giving the Democrats a chance to get a jump on their plan and avert it.

Comments

Lemme ask you something

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Did _you_ know that pre-screened lists of questioners were used in White House press conferences? I didn't. I thought the usual deal was to have a list of a few names to start off with, then just let the President wing it after that.

I was quite amazed to see Obama running down a list, and more amazed that he didn't do it well-- he didn't have any idea who the people were or where they were seated, for example, looking to the left for a reporter seated on the right, etc., which is highly unusual for any trained politician.

If Dubya was using such a list all those years, doesn't it say something about his mechanical skills that he wasn't so klutzy about it?

(I will say one other thing-- a lot of people seem to have been entertained by Obama losing his Helen Thomas cherry, but the fact was that he just blew off her second question AND rode over her attempt to ask it again, even though she had a microphone and he could clearly hear her. That was also rather inept of him.)

Also, that Watchmen analysis was merely pedantic, not insightful. It contradicts itself within the first two paragraphs. It asserts that the absence of centering in panel 4 "suggests nothing of importance is on the wall", but most of us have heard of the "rule of thirds"; centering is hardly the only way to frame an object of importance. In this case, what's important in that panel is the ruined condition of the bar and Manhattan's presence in it; Moore may have felt that the rule of thirds was the best way to convey that information. Also, putting the photo off-center (and more importantly, making it small and minimally detailed) created a sense of motion in the transition to the next panel. If panel 4 had been centered on the photo, panel 5 would have been a straight zoom, which is less interesting than a pan-and-zoom and, in fact, would have drawn attention away from the surrounding elements, suggesting that they were of reduced importance.

Anyone can go on like this about any artistic work. Perhaps some day, Elf, someone will spend a day deconstructing "A Night On Thundera," and you will learn all kinds of things about your own intentions in writing the piece... :-)

The piece on Boing Boing about the Tevis campaign is OMG painfully ignorant. I mean, seriously, he started out getting the results of the election wrong. How disconnected is that?

But the bigger problem is that he failed to grasp the key issue here. That issue is yet another thing we've learned about how the Internet relates to politics: it can help raise a lot of money from people outside the area of a local election. Since these people have no direct stake in the election, they'll be inclined toward smaller donations, which makes smaller donations more politically significant.

In fact, the Internet makes it practical, for the first time, for a single person to arrange for thousands of separate donations: thus, a new mechanism for creating political indebtedness. "Hey, winning candidate, I raised $40,000 for you from 5,000 people who don't mean squat to you individually-- you owe _me_."

If all the individual contributors can be effectively anonymous, the only name that will matter to the candidate is the name of the facilitator-- the one name that doesn't go on the record under the current rules.

And if nobody else gets to see the names of the individual contributors, they could be anyone. Or they could be just one person. This is the Internet, remember? How long would it take YOU to write a script to submit thousands of $8 donations from a single PayPal account, but each with a different name and address taken from some public database?

What this tells me is that this style of fundraising needs different disclosure laws. The Schwab bill doesn't seem to comprehend all of the key issues here, but Doctorow, as usual, can't see anything but the lining of his colon.

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