Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
Edition
Exclusive: Palin Cabinet Member Speaks Palin Polls
Out
By Mark Impomeni (Political
Machine)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 5:15:00 AM
Filed under: Republicans, John McCain,
Featured Stories, Republican Convention,
Floor Fight Annette Kreitzer,
Commissioner of the Department of
Administration for the State of Alaska
since January 2007, shared some exclusive
thoughts and impressions of Alaska
Governor Sarah Palin. Kreitzer has known
Gov. Palin for about ten years through
Republican Party circles in the state, and
has been impressed with her integrity and
political skill.
PM: What will Gov. Palin bring to the
Republican ticket?
Kreitzer: I think she'll bring that
enthusiasm that Alaskans have seen. She
just is a very caring person about those
around her and about how, in her position,
she can help make their situation better. I
think Gov. Palin is going to do absolutely
great. She's just a straight shooter.
PM: What would you say is her greatest
political strength?
Kreitzer: Tenaciousness. She is just very
tenacious. As an incoming Governor, she
had a big and difficult task in getting her
initiatives through, and she did it.
Commissioner Kreitzer also commented
on the investigation into the firing of the
Commissioner of Public Safety, Walt
Monegon, over his refusal to dismiss a
state trooper. Kreitzer said that, to her
knowledge, Gov. Plain pressured no one
and said that it was Monegon who was
pressuring his colleagues on behalf of the
trooper's union.
PM: Can you confirm that the trooper
involved is the Governor's ex-brother-in-
law and that the Governor wanted him
fired in part because he was abusive to the
Governor's sister?
Kreitzer: I don't know whether the
governor wanted [the trooper] fired or not.
I have never had a conversation with her
about it. He's behaved badly, drank in the
patrol car, shot a moose without a
[license], tasered his step son.
PM: Monegon says that you pressured
him on the governor's behalf to fire the
trooper. Can you comment on that?
Kreitzer: I never had a conversation with
the Governor about that. Monegon was
14/08/08 - 01/09/08
trying to put the trooper's union first and
policy second. He pressured me to pay for
the union boss to do union business on
state time and I told him no, twice. During
the contract negotiation Walt pressured me
about things he wanted to see in the
contract. I work for the Governor. I do
what the Governor tells me.
PM: What was Governor Palin's
philosophy during the contract
negotiation?
Kreitzer: Governor Palin wants to
constrain the growth of government and
takes that very seriously. I take that very
seriously. At the same time the governor is
a big supporter of public safety. It's
unfortunate that Walt Monegon has tried to
paint her as anti-law enforcement.
PM: Will the investigation fizzle out or
will it last through the election?
Kreitzer: I think that it will fizzle away. I
think the Governor has the right to be
concerned about the safety of her family. I
think that those conversations the
Governor had with Monegon were entirely
appropriate.
Kreitzer said that Governor Palin is the
real deal and is beloved by the people of
her state. She said that the Alaska
delegation is simply thrilled that she has
been chosen to be Sen. McCain's running
mate. That enthusiasm that Alaskans feel
for the Governor is exactly what the
McCain campaign is counting on Gov.
Plain providing the campaign on the
stump.
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LibertyNewsprint.com U.S.
By Dave (Political Machine)
Submitted at 8/30/2008 6:17:00 PM
Filed under: John McCain, Breaking
News, 2008 President, Polls, Veepstakes
We have some early polls now from
Rasmussen and others. Rasmussen gives us
some good detail:
...a new Rasmussen Reports telephone
survey finds that 53% now have a
favorable opinion of Palin while just 26%
offer a less flattering assessment.
...By way of comparison, on the day he
was selected as Barack Obama's running
mate, Delaware Senator Joseph Biden was
viewed favorably by 43% of voters.
Sounds like she's getting off to a right
start.
As for voters not affiliated with either
major party, 37% are more likely to vote
for McCain and 28% less likely to do so.
Those numbers are a bit more positive than
initial reaction to Biden.
That sounds even better.
When Biden was selected, just over half
(52%) of Democrats believed he was the
right choice. Sixty-three percent (63%) of
Republicans say McCain picked the right
running mate in Palin, and 40% of
unaffiliated voters agree. A week ago, 31%
of unaffiliateds said the same about
Obama's selection.
Now this is a little surprising, but it
appears that McCain has really unified his
party around Palin. Rasmussen goes on to
say that the Democrats vehemently
disagree.
Now the bad news:
Just 29% of voters say Palin is ready to
be president if necessary, ten points below
the 39% who said the same a week ago
about Biden, the chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee and a 36-
year member of the Senate. Fifty-one
percent (51%) of Republican voters say
she is ready along with 32% of unaffiliated
voters and 11% of Democrats.
So the task at hand in the upcoming
week is to fix the experience issue and
introduce Sarah Palin and her record to the
American public. As they did with Joe
Biden, her numbers will rise.
One thing that is clear from this, even
allowing for argument is that this pick is
certainly no worse, apart from experience,
than Obama's pick of Joe Biden, and could
be significantly better.
Equally clear is that Palin will make very
little headway with Disaffected Clinton
supporters. Although Rasmussen
disagrees, I don't think that's the strategy
here. My prediction is that this pick signals
a significant shift from arguing on
experience to reform. Palin was a reform
candidate in Alaska, and McCain has run
his entire career on being the reformer. I
think they are out to wrest the change and
outsider label away from Obama's hands
and go at his strongest point, that of being
a Washington outsider. Palin very much
reinforces that attack.
I could be wrong, but we'll know soon.
Gallup is out and have somewhat similar
numbers but worse for Palin especially on
the experience numbers. Unlike
Rasmussen, they used registered and not
likely voters. Zogby is also out but uses
their infamous online system. Which is
why I stuck with Rasmussen, but checkout
the Gallup and Zogby numbers if you are
interested.
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2 Politico*
Who Loves Hillary?
By Tommy Christopher (Political
Machine)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 3:36:00 PM
Filed under: Hillary Clinton, Republicans,
John McCain, Featured Stories, 2008
President, Veepstakes I was at breakfast
with some other journalists when I heard
about the Sarah Palin pick Friday morning,
and the conversations we had quickly
encompassed the media narratives that we
will soon be seeing, and already are. You
can read my from-a-distance take here.
Even though I didn't do a story on
PUMAs, they were on the lips of every
journalist I ran into, as news of my surreal
experiences with them, and their antics,
spread by word of mouth.
The first thing I said, though, was that
this pick would separate the true Hillary
PUMAs from the GOP shills and pure,
unadulterated Obama-haters.
It wasn't long before I got several text
messages from people telling me that
Darragh Murphy was on Hardball talking
Palin up. You can see the video here.
I called Will Bower yesterday to get his
take, and to ask him about reports from
well-placed sources within PUMAPAC
that they had paid for his travel to Denver.
Here's the audio from that call, followed
by my commentary and a great summation
by one of our readers.
When I interviewed Will in Denver, I
was surprised, and a little impressed, with
his thoughts on electoral reform, but it
seems like this PUMA thing is a stepladder
for him. He has attached himself to the
hood of a movement that has little to do
with electoral reform, and everything to do
with electing John McCain.
You can see in the way that he speaks
about ideas when it comes to the
Democratic Primary, but then switches to
cold political jousting about Palin. The
ends, in his mind, justify the means.
Of course, publicizing his ideas on
caucus and primary reform, and himself,
doesn't fully explain his wholly
contradictory stance on Sarah Palin, or
those of others like him. What is it that
they hate/fear/loathe so much about Barack
Obama?
It isn't the perceived lack of experience,
we can see that now. It isn't the trumped-
up "associations" arguments that ping-
pong around the Flowbie-sphere, because
politically knowledgeable people like
Bower know the difference between a
news story and a wingnut smear. (That
difference is best illustrated by the fact that
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
Will and the political pros in New Agenda
are able to take fair criticism of their
efforts, as long as those efforts are
portrayed accurately.)
So what's left? If Obama's policies line
up, and his resume eclipses by orders of
magnitude that of his 72 year old rival's co
-pilot, what else is there? What else would
make a self-proclaimed feminist and
lifelong Democrat vote for a heinous
misogynist and his barely-there stand-in
for Hillary Clinton? Does he even know?
Here's Who Loves Hillary
Diana, one of our most loyal readers, is a
staunch Hillary Clinton supporter and a
lifelong Democrat. She has the card to
prove it, having served on the Erie County
Democratic Committee. She breaks down
the Palin pick the way you would expect a
card-carrying, Hillary-loving Democrat to.
Bravo.
I just find it sad and such a shame that
Gov. Palin has to be the one female
candidate on a Presidential ticket this
election season, and not Hillary. It was
almost comical how Ms. Palin praised (and
compared herself with) her groundbreaking
female predecessors, Hillary Clinton and
Geraldine Ferraro, in true pandering
fashion, not realizing that it only served to
further highlight and contrast with her own
relative lack of experience and stature
(read: gravitas). She so aptly sounded like
that enthusiastic soccer or hockey Mom at
the press conference, as well. Almost like a
little kid in a candy store. Not to knock her
enthusiasm or nervousness, and she seems
like a nice person, but come on! Many are
WHO page 3
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
WHO
continued from page 2
describing this move by McCain as akin to
a "Hail Mary pass", using yet another
sports analogy, but others as simply
brilliant (I admit the timing of the
announcement certainly was). I believe it
is the former and smells of desperation.
I'd be glad to break down the respective
resumes of the two VP candidates, as that
is the only fair comparison to make, but if I
took the bait, Barack Obama would also
easily win that challenge. One and a half
years as Governor and about the same as a
Mayor against 6 years in the Illinois State
legislature, followed by 3 years in the
United States Senate (not to mention all of
his years of community advocacy and the
political savvy and acumen acquired from
being a player on the national political
scene). Does anyone remember the last
time a long-shot, lightweight running mate
was selected? It was Dan Quayle back in
1988, another pretty face in an empty
pantsuit. Look how well that worked out.
Yes, they did indeed win the election, but
would we really have wanted Mr. PotatoE
Head to step up to the plate in the event of
DIY IKEA Headphone Stand [DIY]
By Adam Pash (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 9:30:00 AM
All-things-IKEA weblog IKEA Hacker
details how to make an attractive
headphone stand for your desk—complete
with cable-wrapping posts for cord
management—using roughly $15 worth of
returned parts from IKEA. The outcome,
which you can check out at IKEA Hacker
Sights and Sounds of St. Paul
By Mark Impomeni (Political
Machine)
Submitted at 8/30/2008 6:45:00 PM
Filed under: Republicans, 2008 President,
Republican Convention, Floor Fight
Republicans have a recent history of
picking convention sites in unwinnable
Democratic states, and St. Paul,
Minnesota, appears to be no exception.
Minnesota has voted for the Democratic
candidate in nine of the last ten
H.W.'s untimely demise? I think not. This
is serious stuff here, not just a matter of
playing dress up. After all, just consider all
of the dozens of women worthier of this
selection, but, very tellingly, most of them
just happen to be Democrats. Being a
woman in the GOP Party certainly limits
the job pool, doesn't it? That's the best he
could do on such short notice, I guess.
I just heard Doris Kearns-Goodwin
saying that 9 out of the past 44 Vice
Presidents have ultimately become
President because of either death or
resignation, so this is a scary proposition
when you're dealing with a 72 year old
with the health issues that he has. This is
the first major decision a Presidential
candidate has to make, so it is arguably a
window into their character and
temperament. What does this say about
McCain's?
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or in the many larger pics at the original
forum post, is really impressive. The
headphone stand seems like a perfect
addition to any desk, particularly if you do
any sort of editing or you just like zoning
out with headphones when you're working.
A quality headphone stand for
cheap[IKEA Hacker via Lifehacker
Australia]
presidential elections and was the only
state to vote for former Vice-President and
favorite son Walter Mondale in 1984.
Republicans apparently gave up on
winning the Land of 10,000 Lakes when
Sen. John McCain passed over Minnesota
Governor Tim Pawlenty to choose Alaska
Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.
But before they can win the state,
Republicans first must win over the
residents of the city that is hosting their
convention. On the streets of St. Paul
Gustav Forcing Convention
Changes
By Mark Impomeni (Political
Machine)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 8:45:00 AM
Filed under: Republicans, John McCain,
Republican Convention, Floor Fight The
White House announced today that
President Bush and Vice-President Cheney
will not attend the Republican National
Convention here in St., Paul, Minnesota as
planned. Instead, the President will travel
to Texas tomorrow to be as close as
possible to the hurricane zone without
impeding rescue and recovery efforts. The
White House said that the president may
still address the convention by video from
the disaster area. Vice-President Cheney
still plans to address the convention
remotely as well.
Meanwhile, Republicans are discussing
drastic changes to the convention. Sen.
John McCain, whose nomination by the
party is to be made official this week,
directed convention staff to change the
focus of this week's activities.
"I pledge that tomorrow night, and if
necessary throughout our convention, we
will act as Americans and not as
Republicans because America needs us
now.
We must redirect our efforts from the
really celebratory event of the nomination
of the president and vice president of our
party to acting as all Americans."
Earlier today, the McCain campaign
chartered a plane for the Mississippi and
Louisiana delegation so that they could
today, within two blocks of the Xcel
Energy Center, two Obama t-shirts were
return home in advance of the storm to
make preparations and assist in relief
efforts. Sen. McCain paid a visit to
Mississippi today to get a look at hurricane
preparations. Meanwhile, in St. Paul,
Republican officials are discussing options
for getting the formal business of McCain's
nomination completed, while making
changes to the convention's program in
deference to the impending storm.
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spotted. One local resident asked if Obama
was a Democrat and McCain a Republican.
And a local bus rider was overheard to say
that Sen. McCain was "afraid" to debate
Sen. Obama.
It is an axiom of politics that the
campaigns do not begin until after Labor
Day. But in this most intense election
cycle, which has been dominating news
coverage for over 18 months and featured
record participation in the primaries,
almost all Americans have heard
Politico* Tech Tips* 3
Bush and Cheney to Skip
GOP Convention
By David Knowles (Political
Machine)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 4:16:00 AM
Filed under: Breaking News, Republican
Convention Breaking on CNN. With
Gustav approaching, they're steering clear
of St. Paul. Can you say, "split-screen
convention"?
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Make Faux Stained Glass
with Plexiglas, Paint and a
Glue Gun [Weekend
Project]
By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 10:30:00 AM
Stained glass adds a hard-to-replicate
ambiance to any room, but the stuff sure
isn't cheap. One Instructables user has
detailed a method for making faux stained
glass with a hot glue gun, acrylic glass
(also known by its trademark Plexiglas),
and whatever paint colors you plan to use.
As the commenters at Instructables have
noted, it's not a perfect simulation, but the
faux stuff can serve as a stand-in for
frames missing some glass, or for trying
out rough sketches (or goofier ideas) to see
how they look as stained glass. While
you're at the store, consider adding your
own$16 DIY privacy frosting. Faux
Stained Glass[Instructables]
something about the candidates and the
parties. This week, in St. Paul, the
Republican Party will attempt to get its
message out to a national audience. But it
most likely will not be heard by the local
audience.
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4 Politico* Business*
South Carolina GOP on
Fowler Foul
By Caleb Howe (Political Machine)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 5:05:00 AM
Filed under: Democrats, Republicans,
Republican Convention
SC GOP Chairman Katon Dawson:"The
outrageous behavior of two of the Obama
campaign's highest profile supporters in
the south is despicable, a cynical
politicization of life and death. I call on
Barack Obama to immediately denounce
Fowler and Spratt and demand sincere
apologies from these members of the
Democratic leadership."
The video showing Former Chairman of
the DNC Don Fowler laughing at Gustav
has stirred a strong reaction here at the
Republican convention. The idea that such
a prominent Democrat would callously
view a hurricane headed for New Orleans
as a boon to his party says a lot. The
chuckling South Carolina Congressman
Microsoft's browser upgrade: Bad for ads?
By Steven Mallas (BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 10:00:00 AM
Filed under: Internet, Google (GOOG),
Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO),
Marketing and advertising, Walt Disney
(DIS), Viacom (VIA), News Corp'B'
(NWS), Technology
According to this article, advertisers who
use the Internet to get their message across
may not like Microsoft's (NASDAQ:
MSFT) Internet Explorer 8 beta. That's
because the software giant is incorporating
technology into the browser that will make
it harder for data collection that could be
used to target ads. In addition, the browser
will be able to block some ads entirely, as
well as block content from another website
from appearing on the current site a user is
viewing. The rationale for the latter is that
the outside website could be capturing data
on the user's habits.
All this adds up, in my mind, to a
with him, and the appreciative entourage
of listeners and hangers-on likewise are
disturbing.
Michael Moore made basically the same
observation, that God was blessing
Democrats with the hurricane. So let's stop
hearing about how Moore is outside the
party mainstream, shall we? The only
difference between his take and the very
prominent and mainstream Fowler is
Moore was dumb enough to promote his
take himself, whereas Fowler had to be
exposed. It cannot but make one wonder
how many more were thinking the same
thing. Having heard the foul and abusive
language of the protesters last week,
saying things like "USA Off The Planet," I
suspect the number isn't small.
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legitimate fear for advertisers. Look, I'm
like anyone else. I don't want a lot of data
collection going on. But, there are
basically only two ways for companies like
Yahoo!(NASDAQ: YHOO) and
Google(NASDAQ: GOOG) to make
money off web content: engage a
subscription model, or utilize ad platforms
to monetize eyeballs. The Internet has
proven to be very resistant to subscription
models. Sure, some do work to great
success. For the most part, however,
surfers don't want to have to throw a credit
-card number into a form to be able to see
content. It just doesn't work. They want
unfettered access to sites. If this is to be the
case going forward, then highly-targeted
ads are going to play an increasing role in
the solution to monetization challenges.
Web sites aren't like cable channels, which
have the dual revenue streams of
subscriber fees and ad sales.
And, keep in mind that the companies
A Chicken in Every Pot, A Bun
in Every Oven
By Mo Rocca (Political Machine)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 2:00:00 AM
Filed under: Republicans, John McCain,
2008 President, Republican Convention
Okay, I've had twelve hours to process the
selection of Sarah Palin, the 44 year-old
ball-busting bible-toting beauty queen
mother of five. That's at least 4 news
cycles. Granted I was asleep for two of
them. Still, tempus fugit, tempus fugit.
We've got to come up with a slogan for
this spitfire. Here are the ones I'm toying
with:
• Sarah Palin: Eight is Enough, My Ass!
• Sarah Palin: She'll Melt Your Igloo!
• Sarah Palin: More experience than
Geena Davis when she became
Commander-in-Chief!
mentioned above aren't the only ones who
rely on targeted ads. How about
Disney(NYSE: DIS)? News Corp.(NYSE:
NWS)? Viacom(NYSE: VIA)? They all
have major Internet strategies that utilize
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
• Sarah Palin: I Don't Believe in Same-
Sex Running Mates!
• Sarah Palin: A Hockey Mom who will
beat the crap out of Soccer Moms!
• Sarah Palin: An Evangelical Erin
Brockovich!
• Sarah Palin: If Tina Fey Played Bobbi
McCaughey in a production of Annie Get
Your Gun!
• Sarah Palin: Who Let the Dog Sled
Out?!
What's your vote? Or do you have your
own suggestion? Keep 'em short and pithy,
gang. (All cut-and-pasted rants will be
deleted. If you want to discuss Palin, that
post is here.)
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ad revenues. And let's not forget the
incredible irony here. Mr. Softy has its
own Internet strategy that needs ads to
survive. I guess it's a tough position to be
in: the designers want to enhance the
attractiveness of Internet Explorer to users
by helping them avoid the very thing that
powers, in part, shareholder value for the
maker of Internet Explorer. A conundrum,
to be sure. I personally hope a solution can
be found that will allow advertisers to
continue selling their wares. I don't find
advertising to be evil. I think it's a great
industry that serves an important function
in the economy. Microsoft had better
consider that.
Disclosure: I own Disney; positions can
change at any time. Read| Permalink|
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Alternative Energy
Holdings looks worse
suing for defamation
By Carol Vinzant (BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 7:30:00 AM
Last week the company that hopes to
build a nuclear power plant in Idaho,
Alternative Energy Holdings Inc. ( PINK:
AEGC), announced it would sue the
environmental group Snake River Alliance
for calling them "scammers" in a TV
interview -- a local TV interview.
The company explained that they had to
hold this environmental group responsible
because the " world wide reach of KTVB
and KTVB.COM" was causing them
"substantial damage." Calling the company
"scammers" on KTVB was "aimed at
harming the company's stock and defaming
company officials bringing down the stock
price," according to this Associated Press
report in the Idaho Statesman.
I'm sure the company and locals have got
into a fiery battle and that the local
activists say lots of inflammatory things.
But KTVB still doesn't have the power to
sully Alternative Energy's name around the
globe. But, do you know what does? An
Associated Press story on this lawsuit.
No matter what the suit's outcome people
will start wondering about the company.
Waste News, the influential trade
magazine of the waste disposal and energy
industries, picked up the story. Idaho
blogger Dan Yurman predicts the suit will
just lead to more donations to Snake River
Alliance and more scrutiny for the
company.
You know what else could really hurt the
stock price? A story like this one this
month in TradingMarkets.com, which says
"Last week, New York-based auditors
Rotenberg & Co. reported the company
had lost so much money that it raised
"significant" doubt about its ability to
continue. Company officials said nearly $5
million in losses would not stop it from
moving forward." Wouldn't a story like
that hurt the stock price more than the local
Idaho TV news? Permalink| Email this|
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Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
Some old financial habits
experience a comeback
By Joseph Lazzaro
(BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 8:30:00 AM
Filed under: Housing, Recession The real
estate research firm Zillow.com released a
sobering statistic, and it took some by
surprise: more than one-third of
homeowners who bought in the past five
years have negative equity in their homes.
Negative equity is owing more on your
mortgage than the market value of your
home. On the heels of the United States'
greatest residential real estate boom in the
modern era, how did the above occur?
Two factors, so says economist Peter
Dawson.
First, many regions of the U.S.,
particularly the west, experienced
abnormal gains during the 2003-2007 real
estate boom. "Total appreciation rates over
300% were not unusual during the period.
It was an amazing run, fueled by adequate
national GDP growth, and low mortgage
rates," Dawson said. "But as we've seen,
ultimately the appreciation rates proved to
be unsustainable, everywhere they
occurred."
Dawson says a 7-9% annual increase in
the U.S. median home price is normal, and
his models label a 10% annual increase or
higher as "outsized" -- a deviation from the
mean that calls for a correction at some
point in time. "But during the boom, it was
not uncommon to see 30%, 40%, 50%
annual increases over multiple years,"
Banks booze up on InBev debt
By Tom Taulli (BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 8:00:00 AM
Filed under: JPMorgan Chase (JPM),
Anheuser-Busch Cos (BUD) A friend of
mine was part of the team that worked on
an acquisition for InBev, which is the
mega Belgian beer company. He was
impressed with the company's merger
skills and had little doubt the transaction
would work.
Well, global investors are impressed too
Dawson said. "Clearly unsustainable.
Downright frothy. But these conclusions
were largely ignored during the boom, on
the fallacy of 'what has occurred will
continue.' "
Second, a financial habit shifted, Dawson
said. Way, way back in the twentieth
century, Dawson recalled, the biggest
stigma when he grew up in a typical
neighborhood in White Plains, N.Y., a
suburb about an hour north of New York
City, was... Not gaining acceptance at a
good college? No. Not getting the hottest
date for the high school senior prom? No.
"We learned that the Smith's [not their real
name] down the street had to take out...a
second mortgage," Dawson said.
Continue reading Some old financial
habits experience a comeback Permalink|
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(which is no easy feat in this tough global
economic environment). In fact, according
to a piece in the Wall Street
Journal(subscription required), it looks like
InBev is effectively managing the $45
billion in debt financing for the acquisition
of Anheuser-Busch(NYSE: BUD).
No doubt, this is a complicated process.
After all, InBev has organized a syndicate
of top banks, which include Deutsche
Bank, JP Morgan(NYSE: JPM), Barclays
Capital, Royal Bank of Scotland, ING
Do bailouts pay?
By Peter Cohan (BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 12:40:00 PM
Filed under: General Motors (GM),
Interviews, Federal Natl Mtge (FNM),
Economic data, Politics
Our government has been doing its share
of bailouts in the last year. It put $29
billion of taxpayer money at risk to finance
the takeover of Bear Stearns. It stands
ready to use$800 billion to bailout Fannie
Mae(NYSE: FNM) and Freddie
Mac(NYSE: FRE). And now General
Motors(NYSE: GM) wants$50 billion in
government guarantees to finance fuel
efficient cars. I have been looking into the
bailout issue and whether it is beneficial or
a misuse of funds - and there is a lot of
debate about this issue. These bailouts may
make political sense but are they in the
long-term economic interests of the
country?
A colleague of mine who was a Budget
and Cost Analyst for a top government
agency has been thinking about the
political aspect of bailouts and shared his
thoughts with me. As he wrote, "It is a sure
thing that either party could get votes from
a bailout, but they might loose some as
well. Where a party could really improve
its position would be to support a bailout,
but lose."
He suggests that this outcome would pay
off in the short-run but could damage long-
term economic outcomes. As he suggested,
If the party supported a bailout but lost, "it
Bank, Banco Santander, BNP Paribas,
Fortis, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi and
Mizuho Corporate Bank.
For the most part, the senior management
team at InBev understands the global
financial world (keep in mind that there is
a deep bench of former investment
bankers). Besides, the company has been
diligent with maintaining a strong credit
rating, which helps to minimize the
financing risk.
In other words, to get a big deal
could claim that it was trying to support
the victims, but had been frustrated by the
other party. And this could be used to
promote the party for many years in efforts
to get votes. While maneuvers of this sort
may get short run votes, over the long term
they might be hurtful of sound economic
growth and performance."
Continue reading Do bailouts pay?
Permalink| Email this| Comments
completed nowadays, the quality needs to
be top-notch. And, for the most part, InBev
fits the bill.
Tom Taulli is the author of various
books, including The Complete M&A
Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to
Decoding Financial Statements. He also
operates MergerBook.com. Permalink|
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Business* 5
Yet another bank
fails, total could
become huge
By Douglas McIntyre
(BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 6:00:00 AM
Filed under: Forecasts, Industry,
Economic data
A tenth US bank failed and there are
some estimates that the total could hit a
hundred. The problem with that is that the
FDIC does not have the capital to cover all
of those deposits. The money will have to
be borrowed, probably from the Treasury.
That means the taxpayers.
According to The New York Times, "
Integrity Bank of Alpharetta, Ga., on
Friday became the 10th United States bank
to fail so far this year, hurt by the very
business it was built on - real estate
lending." The FDIC will have to cover the
value of as much as $350 million in assets.
Pessimists, who may become realists if
the recession gets deeper, believe the
mortgage-backed securities problems, real
estate loans, and credit card defaults could
drive bank failures into the hundreds. The
FDIC would have to bring in billions of
extra dollars.
The US taxpayer is already burdened
with the costs of higher gas and food prices
and tight credit. Now, he will be asked to
pay for the excesses of the banking
industry. That may not be fair, but his
taxes are the money pit of last resort.
Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at
247wallst.com. Read| Permalink| Email
this| Comments
6 Business* Biz Buzz Tech*
As global economy slows, Overstock loses lawsuit, but
visions of $80 oil grow doesn't mention it
By Joseph Lazzaro
(BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 9:30:00 AM
Filed under: Forecasts, Good news,
Commodities, Oil An oil price of $80 per
barrel in 2009?
It's possible, so says a hedge fund firm
founder, if the right factors line up.
Renee Haugerud, founder of the $2.5
billion commodities hedge fund firm
Galtere Ltd. told Bloomberg News oil may
fall to $80 per barrel as supplies of
alternative energy sources increase.
Further, Haugerud said the surge in oil
has been overdone by investors seeking
holdings in raw materials through the
Standard & Poor's GSCI Index, a
commodity gauge weighted toward energy,
Bloomberg News reported. Oil closed
Friday down 11 cents to $115.46 per
barrel.
Economist Glen Langan told
BloggingStocks a further decline in oil to
below $100 is consistent with the recent
slowdown in global economic growth, but
he'll await further international GDP data
before arguing for an oil dip to the $80
range.
"The key here, again, as with the uptrend
in the previous four years, is China. If oil
consumption growth slows in China, oil
will experience a large sell-off, as
institutional investors and traders sense
that the great bull run in commodities is at
Dumping Fannie
(Portfolio.com: News and Markets)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 5:00:00 AM
Shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
have been riding a wave of optimism in the
last week. Several analysts have estimated
that the mortgage giants have sufficient
capital for the year, and a management
shakeup at Fannie has helped bolster
investors' confidence.
Indeed, since last week, shares of Fannie
have risen 60 percent.
Yet while stock investors in the United
least pausing," Langan said. "China is
likely to register GDP growth of about
10% in Q3, and if it's below 9% or 8.5%,
investors will take that as a sign that a
slowdown is ahead, which is bearish for
commodity prices." China's economy grew
10.2% in Q2 and 10.4% in 1H 2008.
Continue reading As global economy
slows, visions of $80 oil grow Permalink|
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States may be more optimistic, some
important debt investors are not.
The Bank of China, one of China's four
big commercial banks, has cut its holdings
of Fannie and Freddie securities by more
than a quarter, from nearly $11 billion at
the end of June, report Saskia Scholtes and
James Politi of the Financial Times.
It's just one institution, to be sure, but it
is a dangerous sign. Foreign institutions, in
particular Asian central banks and state-
run banks like the Bank of China, have
been the main customers for Fannie and
By Zac Bissonnette
(BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 9:00:00 AM
Filed under: Law, Scandals In the past,
I ' v e w r i t t e n a b o u t
Overstock.com's(NASDAQ: OSTK) habit
of issuing press releases to announce minor
procedural victories in the deluge of
lawsuits the company is a party to.
Apparently that only applies to victories.
Last Tuesday, Online Media Daily
reported that " Utah's highest state court
has tossed a lawsuit accusing
SmartBargains of engaging in unfair
competition by displaying pop-up ads to
Overstock.com visitors."
The Utah Supreme Court stated
that"Overstock failed to show that
SmartBargains' pop-ups, labeled with the
SmartBargains' logo and appearing in a
separate window on the top of Overstock's
website, are deceptive, infringe a
trademark, pass off SmartBargains' goods
as those of Overstock's goods, or are likely
to cause confusion."
Here's my question for Overstock and its
controversial (to put it politely) CEO
Patrick Byrne: why did Overstock issue a
press release when it was dismissed from
Freddie debt and securities. That flood of
foreign cash helped lubricate the boom in
housing and credit that has since become a
bust.
Even amid the credit storm of the last
year, foreign investors have largely hung
on to Fannie and Freddie paper. But fears
of a Treasury Department bailout of the
two government-sponsored corporations
may have proved too ominous to keep the
faith. Bloomberg News has noted that
Japanese investors have been big sellers of
Fannie and Freddie securities.
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
an antitrust lawsuit, but didn't make a
similar announcement when a lawsuit it
filed was dismissed. Even more
hypocritical, Overstock issued a press
release when it first filed the lawsuit back
in 2004. If the filing of the lawsuit was
material, isn't the dismissal equally
material? It seems like a classic case of
selective disclosure -- not illegal, just
scummy. Read| Permalink| Email this|
Comments
New blood and the hope of new capital
are apparently not enough to stop a
growing squeamish in Beijing, Tokyo,
Singapore, and elsewhere over U.S.
mortgage debt. And that will make
Fannie's and Freddie's efforts to roll over
some $223 billion of securities by the end
of next month that much more difficult.
Citing Federal Reserve data, the
Financial Times says that it appears that
foreign investors are buying Treasury
securities at the same time they are
trimming their holdings of Fannie, Freddie,
Yet Another
Company Sues Over
Being Called Adware
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 2:21:00 AM
We've seen a few such cases in the past --
and they usually end with a judge telling
the suing company to shove off, but here
we have yet another company upset that its
being labeled as an adware/spyware
provider. In this case, it's a company called
7Search, which is suing McAfee. 7Search
is claiming that McAfee's warning about
"downloads" from its site having been
"credibly" called adware or spyware are
false and defamatory because 7Search no
longer offers software for download off its
site (though it apparently did in the past).
As Eric Goldman notes in the link above,
just bringing these types of lawsuits tends
to backfire. As we noted above, they
rarely, if ever, win, and simply filing the
lawsuit draws much more attention to the
company -- often including reports from
users about why they do think the software
in question is adware or spyware. In the
meantime, if 7Search no longer offers
downloads, then it's not clear what it's
upset about either, since it's not like the
McAfee warning is going to stop people
from downloading its software -- since,
apparently, there's no software to
download.
Permalink| Comments| Email This Story
and government agency debt.
The Calculated Risk blog speculates that
this selling may explain "why the spread
between Fannie and Freddie debt yields
and Treasury debt is so high."
Or perhaps investors have just seen this
video.
Related Links
Fannie's Fatalities
Cue the Optimists
When Bill Met Freddie
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
Life, Death and New Drugs
(Portfolio.com: News and Markets)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 7:30:00 AM
Amylin's recent woes with its new
diabetes drug, Byetta—six people have
died, possibly as a result of taking the
drug—raises a crucial question that has
long vexed companies and patients about
the medications we take for what ails us.
What is an acceptable trade-off between
drugs that help millions of people living
with chronic conditions such as
diabetes—or pain or heart disease—but
hurt or kill a few?
It's the pharmaceutical industry's version
of the old moral dilemma of whether it is
acceptable to sacrifice a few to save many.
It's akin to what a person would do if he
saw a crowd of people about to be hit by a
speeding train. It's too late to warn them
off the tracks, but he could throw a switch
and divert the train to a siding—where a
single person is standing and would almost
certainly be killed.
What would you do?
In the case of Byetta, the millions of
people who use it won't die if they don't
take it, and there are alternatives. Yet for
many patients with non-insulin-dependent
diabetes (type 2 diabetes), other medicines
don't control their glucose levels as well as
Byetta; that can lead to declining health.
Should they be denied this treatment to
save a handful of people who contracted
severe pancreatitis, an inflammation of the
pancreas that is sometimes fatal?
A more spectacular recent case is the
painkiller Vioxx, which was blamed in the
heart-attack deaths of thousands of people
with heart disease. Merck, its maker,
voluntarily withdrew Vioxx from the
market, even though millions of people
had taken the drug safely and benefited
from it.
Another example is cerivastatin, a
cholesterol-lowering drug that Bayer
introduced in the late 1990s to compete
with Pfizer's Lipitor. Bayer voluntarily
pulled the drug in 2001 after it was linked
to 52 deaths due to renal failure and to
other, nonlethal complications. This was
after the Food and Drug Administration
had ordered warnings issued to patients
and physicians, warnings that failed to
stem the fatalities.
Regulators took similar steps with
Byetta. In 2007, the F.D.A. ordered
Amylin to place information about the
dangers of pancreatitis in the drug's insert.
It warned that patients should immediately
tell their doctors if they experience
abdominal pain while taking the drug. This
step was in reaction to a small number of
people getting sick before anyone had
died.
In the wake of the deaths, the F.D.A.
says it wants the warning strengthened.
The agency says it will monitor the drug
closely over the next few months, looking
for further deaths.
Amylin and its partner, Eli Lilly, insist
that there is no direct proof the patients
died because of Byetta. Diabetics have a
three-times-greater risk of pancreatitis than
nondiabetics.
Investors were spooked nonetheless.
Amylin's share price dropped nearly 23
percent when news of the deaths was
released. Byetta accounts for 80 percent of
the company's revenues.
Drug-company scientists and executives
complain that when balancing risks and
rewards, the bar is often too high for drugs
that are effective for many people but toxic
for a few.
One executive, an expert in vaccines,
once told me that scientists had come up
with a way to inoculate people against
H.I.V. but have declined to go public
because the vaccines will kill five percent
of those who take it.
"Is this worth it to the other 95 percent?"
he asked, adding that he wasn't sure how
he felt about such an equation. "What if it
was one percent?" he mused.
Vaccines already in use cause a
relatively small number of deaths each
year; that is considered an acceptable risk
given the alternative of widespread viral
illness.
Other familiar drugs cause deaths now
and then as well, including even aspirin if
susceptible people take too much. Yet no
one talks about removing aspirin from
shelves.
Society also accepts much larger
numbers of fatalities and injuries while
using other products, such as automobiles,
which annually kill more than 40,000
people.
Yet for those whose loved ones die
because of a drug, any risk of death is too
great, of course.
One way to improve drug outcomes is to
better define who is susceptible to harm.
This is one of the issues with Vioxx, which
apparently was safe for many people to use
that didn't have a heart condition.
There is evidence Merck was aware of
the danger its drug posed to a subset of
those taking it; in any case, the company
did not follow through on that information,
which might have shrunk its market—and
profits.
In the wake of the Vioxx fiasco, the
dilemma of what risk is too much
prompted Congress to require that the
F.D.A. more closely monitor drugs after
approval. Some believe a fear of repeating
that mistake is one reason that regulators
are approving so few drugs. Last year, the
F.D.A. approved only 17 new drugs, a near
-record low.
So we will wait to see which way Byetta
goes. Will these six deaths in three years
be anomalies, or will others succumb?
Have there already been too many deaths
for a drug that may be better than others
for some, but not dramatically? Or is the
trade-off so far worth it? Related Links
HPV Vaccine Inspires Yellow Health
Journalism
Mounting Troubles for Big Pharma
Diabetes Deal for Medco
Bad Luck or Bad
Management?
(Portfolio.com: News and Markets)
Submitted at 8/27/2008 9:00:00 AM
What a mess. But at least it's a familiar
mess.
Hundreds of airline passengers were
stranded in dozens of airports throughout
the eastern United States Tuesday, after a
Federal Aviation Administration computer
system in Atlanta abruptly failed.
Travelers in some of the nation's largest
hubs, including Atlanta and Chicago
airports, were hit hardest. Some planes
were delayed several hours after the
National Airspace Data Interchange
Network—or Nadin, which manages and
coordinates flight plans in and out of U.S.
airports—suffered a software glitch around
1:30 p.m. E.ST. The F.A.A. said bad
weather triggered the problem.
All of the flight plans normally handled
in Atlanta, the F.A.A. said, were rerouted
to a backup Nadin system in Salt Lake
City. But pilots and dispatch centers kept
"repeatedly refiling" flight-plan data into
the F.A.A.'s system, overloading the Salt
Lake facility, said Diane Spitalieri, an
F.A.A. spokeswoman.
"This was a failure mode we've not seen
before," said Hank Krakowski, chief
operating officer of the F.A.A.'s Air
Traffic Organization division. "It looks
like an internal software processing failure.
But we're going to have to do some
forensics on it to figure out exactly what
the failure mode was."
Tough luck, you might say. Except it
echoes a long history of tech mishaps at
the F.A.A. Indeed, a similar snafu
happened just last Thursday.
An F.A.A. bulletin distributed to
employees said "a Nadin failure last
evening caused more than 100 delays after
flight plans were rejected. The legacy
Nadin in Atlanta crashed. Salt Lake City
took over but had problems with the high
queue level."
Even worse, the same dynamic happened
14 months ago, leaving plenty of time for
forensics. The Atlanta computer system
went down in June 2007, and before the
sister facility in Salt Lake could pick up
the slack, it was overwhelmed. Six months
later, the F.A.A. still had no clue what hit
Biz Buzz 7
it.
With twenty-twenty hindsight, the
F.A.A. should be able to respond quickly,
right?
"They didn't even acknowledge to us
there was an outage today," said Doug
Church, communications director of the
National Air Traffic Controllers
Association. "They were still telling our
controllers everything was fine today,
when we knew it wasn't."
On the hotline that the F.A.A. set up for
reporters, officials tried to explain what
was happening and how it was responding.
One claimed that delays in Atlanta were
running as long as 90 minutes Tuesday
afternoon, while the agency's own website
showed it was more than two hours.
Asked whether the software failure in
Atlanta, or the subsequent failure of the
Salt Lake facility to take on all of the
rerouted flight plans, was due to the
software programming of an outside
vendor, a server problem, or even human
error, F.A.A. spokeswoman Laura Brown
would only say that the agency would be
looking into the situation.
Brown said that the software snafu
happened while the F.A.A. was upgrading
Nadin. Its mission-critical system appears
to rely on Microsoft Windows, and who of
us has never suffered a computer outage
while upgrading to a new version
Windows?
"This is an agency that is pretty much out
of control right now," said Church.
"They've failed on big stuff like H.R.
staffing, so how can they handle stuff like
informing controllers what's going on?"
For its part, the F.A.A. was clear about
which employees were bearing the brunt of
the burden of the delayed planes. One
reporter asked: "How many people were
getting skewered by all this?"
The F.A.A.'s Brown responded wryly, "I
think it's primarily public affairs." Related
Links
Google Extends Web Search Lead
What if Software Could Tell You the
CFO is Hiding Something on the Earnings
Conference Call?
Microsoft Getting Tetchy About Vista
Bashing
8 Biz Buzz Tech*
White-Collar Cringe
(Portfolio.com: News and Markets)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 5:30:00 AM
The Justice Department has announced
the death of the Thompson memo, the
guidelines of tactics used by prosecutors to
combat white-collar crime since 2003.
The real question is: Why now?
The Justice Department is in a lame-duck
period. Washington is in an election-year
transition, as one party wraps up its
convention and the other prepares to begin
its own.
As William Burroughs once wrote: There
are no coincidences.
Consider what happened on Thursday.
First, the United States Court of Appeals
for the Second Circuit affirmed a
controversial opinion by a Manhattan
federal judge who dismissed the
indictments of defendants in the KPMG
tax-shelter case because he found that a
prosecution tactic sanctioned by the
Thompson memorandum—giving
preference to companies that halt legal fees
t o e m p l o y e e s u n d e r
investigation—violated the employee's
constitutional right to representation by
counsel.
Not long afterward, the Justice
Department held a news
conference—fittingly, at the New York
Stock Exchange, which is why federal
prosecutors in Manhattan get the lion's
share of corporate-crime
cases—announcing changes to its methods.
The revised guidelines outline how
prosecutors will credit—or not
credit—corporations and individuals who
Cartographers Against Google Maps
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 9:42:00 AM
Apparently, the head of the British
Cartographic Society is no fan of Google
Maps. She's complaining that Google
Maps doesn't include the additional
geographic information that makes maps
so great, claiming:"We're in real danger of
losing what makes maps so unique, giving
us a feel for a place even if we've never
been there." Except, that's not quite true.
After all, Google Maps allows all sorts of
chose to cooperate with their criminal
investigations. (The tactic cited in the
KPMG case had already been abandoned
by Justice.)
The most significant of the new changes
is credit for cooperation will not, in the
future, depend on the corporation's waiver
of the attorney-client privilege—meaning
that the advice of a lawyer is now
sacrosanct, once again, as it always should
have been.
"Of course, I find it absolutely amazing
that it comes out on exactly the same day,
says Ellen Podgor, a professor at Stetson
University College of Law and author of
the White Collar Crime Prof Blog. "I think
it's kind of sad that they waited until this
case was coming out."
The 68-page opinion in the KPMG case
is damning in its iteration of how lawyers
from Skadden Arps Slate Meagher &
Flom—highly paid and not otherwise
known as marshmallows—became the
"agents" of the government prosecutors.
Representing the accounting firm
KPMG, itself under threat of indictment,
the Skadden lawyers "assumed a supine
position," according to the opinion.
When none other than Robert Bennett,
the Washington powerhouse lawyer,
informed the prosecutors of the firm's
tentative decision to cap the legal fees of
its employees, the prosecutors were
"disappointed," and KPMG sent out a form
to employees, based on the government's
language, that they should feel free to
cooperate with prosecutors without the
assistance of counsel.
Over the following year, prosecutors
overlays and additional info. With Google
Maps you can also get the satellite view,
which is likely to give you a much greater
feel for a place than a map. And, of course,
many areas have the "Street View" feature
as well -- again, providing a much greater
feel for a place you've never been. As for
certain landmarks and such not being
added to Google Maps, more seem to be
added every day, and with Google letting
people add their own information to maps
as well, it's only going to get better and
better.
informed Skadden whenever a KPMG
employee refused to cooperate fully.
Yep, supine sounds like the right word
At the Justice Deparment's news
conference, Deputy Attorney General
Mark R. Filip said the new rules, which
will be placed into the United States
Attorneys' manual, rather than just a
memo, have the force of "binding law" and
"binding fact."
Well, professor Podgor disagrees. While
she says it is "significant" that the new
rules will be put into the manual handed to
every new federal prosecutor—a book that
Filip called the "bible" for the Justice
Department troops— Podgor pointed out:
"It's strictly guidance." In fact, she said, the
manual "explicitly states" that the rules in
it are "not enforceable as law and not to be
used by third parties."
So much for change. For Podgor, and
many other criminal-defense advocates,
the only change that will come is with
legislation putting into federal law the right
to these privileges during a criminal
investigation.
But don't count on Justice's support.
Several times during the press conference,
Filip reiterated the Justice Department's
opposition to such legislation.
But there may be change coming in
another way. It is an election year.
Related Links
Tax-Shelter Case Torn Down
Tearing Down a Tax Shelter
The "It's Your Fault I Was Wrong"
Defense
If anything, it seems like this guy is
complaining not because Google Maps
isn't useful, but because she's afraid that
the need for traditional cartographers may
not be as strong (which I doubt will
actually be the case). Besides, if she's so
worried that certain information isn't
included on Google Maps, why not create
a mashup overlaying all the info she feels
has been left out -- because that's rather
easy to do with Google Maps.
Permalink| Comments| Email This Story
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Cuomo's Witch Hunt
(Portfolio.com: News and Markets)
Submitted at 8/27/2008 12:30:00 PM
N ew York attorney general Andrew
Cuomo is drumming up a lot of attention
for his ongoing investigation into the
auction-rate securities business. This time,
he wants to know if Fidelity had incentives
to sell its clients the bonds that were
underwritten by Goldman Sachs.
Forgive us, but we fail to find what the
big deal is here.
Goldman, which was the fifth-largest
underwriter of the bonds that saw their
market freeze up earlier this year, has so
far avoided the multibillion-dollar
settlements its Wall Street brethren have
ponied up to make individual investors
whole again. Goldman agreed to buy back
$1 billion of the securities from its own
clients, but it has so far not agreed to
reimburse clients who bought their
securities through third-party brokerages
like Fidelity.
Cuomo apparently became interested in
Fidelity's relationship with Goldman when
his office discovered that most of the
A.R.S. held by Fidelity clients were
underwritten by Goldman. State regulators
in Massachusetts, where Fidelity is based,
want Goldman to pay those clients back.
So does Fidelity.
We don't know many details about what
kinds of incentives might have been
involved. A source told the Wall Street
Journal that possible incentives include
"underwriting of private offerings that
Fidelity develops for "accredited," or
wealthy, investors, and financial-
counseling services that Goldman's Ayco
unit provides to Fidelity executives."
But there's another detail worth noting
before anybody starts calling for a perp
walk. A Fidelity spokesperson told the
Journal that the bonds were held in just
600 of the brokerage's accounts.
Now, Fidelity is huge. It manages $1.6
trillion in assets. In addition to its self-
directed brokerage and retirement-account
services, Fidelity has an army of registered
investment advisers who cater to just the
kind of investor who might listen to a sales
pitch on auction-rate securities. It counts
4,000 clients in this unit alone.
So 600 Fidelity accounts have them?
Whatever "incentives" Goldman may have
offered Fidelity, they didn't work very
well. The A.R.S. ended up just 15 percent
of Fidelity's entire wealth management
group. Considering that over 100,000
investors held these securities when the
market dried up, the fact that only 600 of
them were at Fidelity makes it seem more
like their brokers failed at marketing the
products well.
Goldman should just pay them off and
get Cuomo off its back.
The report says that Fidelity may have
pushed the Goldman products because the
brokerage used other services from
Goldman Sachs. Again, what exactly is
unusual about this? Hasn't everybody
learned by now that if your broker is
pushing something on you, there's
probably a good reason why?
The privately held Fidelity is a colossus
in an industry that's rife with so many
conflicts of interest and hidden fees that
regulators can't keep up. It's hardly
shocking that Goldman might have struck
a deal to sell its products through Fidelity
and that Fidelity uses Goldman for other
services.
Retail investors holding the bag on the
failed auction-rate securities deserve to be
paid back, regardless of who sold them to
them. The third-party brokerages and the
investment-banking underwriters should
come to terms on how to handle those
settlements and move on. If Cuomo can
force that to happen, then so be it.
And if Cuomo really wants to find it,
there's probably plenty of dirt to unearth at
Fidelity and the rest of the 401(k) industry.
But 600 accounts with Goldman-
underwritten auction-rate securities isn't
the place to start.
Related Links
Money-Market Datapoint of the Day
No Security in Securities
The Abstract: Jackson Hole Symposium
Papers
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
Jockeying for a Sale
(Portfolio.com: News and Markets)
Submitted at 8/27/2008 5:30:00 AM
Hedge funds are sometimes described in
the media as if they were the modern
equivalents of speakeasies: secretive,
exclusive clubs where something shady
must be going on inside.
So it is appropriate that two hedge funds
are going after the owner of the most
famous former speakeasy, the "21" Club in
Manhattan.
Two funds run by Steven Cohen and
David Shaw are pushing the Orient-
Express Hotels, which also owns luxury
hotels, restaurants, and river-cruise tours,
to change its share structure to make it
easier for a potential sale, reports Zachery
Kouwe in the New York Post.
The hedge funds, which own about 14.3
percent of Orient-Express, have called for
a special meeting of shareholders to vote
on the funds' proposal to do away with the
company's Class B shares that give voting
control to founder James Sherwood and
several others, Kouwe says.
Shaw has said that it has "never seen a
more unresponsive corporate-governance
Toyota Taps on the Brakes
(Portfolio.com: News and Markets)
Submitted at 8/28/2008 5:00:00 AM
It's not just Detroit.
For years, Toyota Motor has been
gaining at the expense of the Big Three
automakers, but the economic downturn in
the United States and Europe is now taking
its toll.
Toyota has announced that it is cutting
its 2009 sales forecast by nearly 7 percent,
to 9.7 million vehicles. On the road to
overtaking General Motors as the world's
biggest auto manufacturer, Toyota had
earlier this year forecast a nearly 6 percent
gain in sales, to 10.4 million.
More important, today's announcement
confirms that the global automotive
structure" than that at Orient-Express.
Shares of luxury-hotel chains have
slumped this year, as the segment has
shown it is not immune from a broad
economic slowdown.
Nearly a year ago, Orient-Express turned
down a buyout offer of $60 per share from
Dubai Holding. Its shares haven't come
close to that level since, closing on
Tuesday at $34.57, and the prospects of
another offer are dim.
If the hedge funds are ultimately
successful in getting Orient-Express sold,
they may want to celebrate at the "21"
Club. After all, it is where Gordon Gekko
takes Bud Fox in Wall Street to educate
him on the ways of the new money.
But the hedgies will have to leave their
khakis and sweaters at the office. Jackets
are still required at "21."
Related Links
Hedge Fund Managers Not Earning
Their Keep
Why Hedge Fund Fees Make Sense
The Million Dollar Active vs Passive
Wager
industry is making a significant transition
toward smaller, more fuel-efficient cars.
G.M. and Ford have announced similar
shifts, but coming from the industry leader,
it is clear it not just a knee-jerk reaction to
$4 gasoline.
"We are looking at the current shift
towards fuel-efficient cars (in the United
States) as a structural change in demand,"
the president of Toyota, Katsuaki
Watanabe, told a news conference, the
BBC reported.
Toyota says it will seek to accelerate
production of gasoline-electric hybrid
vehicles.
The lowered sales forecast means that
Toyota has "put its dreams of becoming
the world's first automaker to sell more
Tiffany Net Works
(Portfolio.com: News and Markets)
Submitted at 8/28/2008 5:30:00 AM
The rich are different than you and me.
For one, many of them are in Asia.
And that's a good thing for Tiffany &
Co. The luxury jeweler has reported
quarterly earnings and sales that sharply
exceeded forecasts.
The gain came on the back of strong
sales growth overseas—in Europe but
especially in Asia. Net sales in that part of
the world jumped 17 percent to $214.2
million in the quarter, even amid
weakness.
Even sales growth in the United States
reflected foreign demand in part. Its
flagship Manhattan store, which accounts
for 10 percent of its total sales had sales
growth of 5 percent in the quarter
"reflecting increased spending by non-U.S.
visitors," the company said.
Total revenue grew 11 percent in the
quarter, to $732.4 million.
The company increased its profit forecast
for the year based on expectations for
continued strong growth from Asia
than 10 million vehicles per year on hold,"
the Wall Street Journal notes.
And Douglas McIntyre on 24/7 Wall St.
suggests that it will be a long time before
Toyota can reach that goal.
The global auto industry may start to
recover next year or in 2010, helped by
sales in China, India, and Latin America.
But that demand, he says, "is unlikely to
offset the trend of fewer and fewer sales in
Europe, North America, and Japan."
Related Links
Big Green Machines
"No More Excuses"
Gas Prices Don't Deter Car Buyers
Biz Buzz Tech* Tech Tips*
(outside of Japan) and Europe.
"While we acknowledge that challenging
economic and consumer conditions exist in
the U.S., as they have for several quarters,
our first-half results and the most recent
worldwide trends keep us on track to meet
our full-year sales and earnings growth
expectations," said Michael Kowalski,
Tiffany's chief executive.
Yet there are signs that the slowdown in
the United States is finally having more of
an impact on other economies, as Peter S.
Goodman of the New York Times detailed
on Saturday. Even the red-hot economies
of China and India are cooling a bit.
A greater impact for Tiffany may be felt
if the dollar continues its recent rally,
keeping tourists away from the Manhattan
store and eroding the company's margins
on overseas sales.
Even the wealthy have their price points.
Related Links
Bright Big Blue
Russian Guessing
Summer's Swoon Is Back
David Levy on Having
No Time to Think
[Weekend Watching]
By Gina Trapani (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 7:30:00 AM
The whole reason why you spend time
streamlining, automating, and speeding up
your workflow isn't to work more—it's to
make time for important things computers
can't do, like thinking. Professor David
Levy argues, however, that our fast-paced
world doesn't allow for time to think
deeply, the time when we come up with
our best ideas and most important insights.
Levy's talk at Google last year is a cannot-
miss for any lifehacker; at almost an hour
in length, you might want to load it up on
your media center in the living room or on
your iPod for the gym. No Time to
Think[YouTube]
9
NBC's Crippled Online
Olympics Coverage
Attracts Small Audience
By Timothy Lee (Techdirt)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 11:03:00 AM
NBC apparently got about 72 million
video streams during this Olympics season,
and is touting this as a great success. It's
true that this is a lot more than any
previous Olympics, but I don't think NBC
has anything to crow about. Remember,
this is the most famous sporting event in
the world, and it got non-stop media
coverage for close to a month. Yet in a
country with 300 million people, they only
got a total of 72 million streams? That's
less than one stream for every 4
Americans. And as Ben Worthen points
out, YouTube streamed 4.2 billion
videos—60 times as many—in the month
of May. So people are clearly watching a
lot of videos. Most of them just aren't
NBC's Olympics videos.
Amazingly, NBC is "using the Olympics
to assert that TV is the preferred medium
of consumers," with 93 percent of all
viewing. I think this says less about
consumers than about NBC's own
marketing decisions. The problem is that
despite its protests to the contrary, NBC
wasn't serious about web-based coverage
of the Olympics. They held back the most
popular coverage for television audiences,
forcing online viewers to wait until later
(sometimes much later due to a desire for
tape delays) to watch the stuff they were
really interested in. It looks like they also
forced anyone who wanted to watch the
video to download and install Microsoft's
Silverlight plugin. And of course they've
gone out of their way to make embedding
impossible, cutting off one of the most
popular ways of expanding the reach of
content. Not surprisingly, when NBC
makes the Internet a second-class medium
for Olympics coverage, most people watch
TV instead.
Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt
Insight Community. To get insight and
analysis from Timothy Lee and other
experts on challenges your company faces,
click here.
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10 Tech*
Google’s Strategy In Japan: Avoid Yahoo And Take
Over The Mobile Web First
By Serkan Toto (TechCrunch)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 1:35:23 PM
Google may be the leader in the
worldwide search engine market, but in
Nippon, it has some catching up to do: In
2007, Yahoo Japan saw a whopping 76%
of the nearly 350 billion search engine and
portal-related pageviews registered in the
country, clearly outperforming
Google(second with 5.4%, according to
Nielsen Japan). More recently, ComScore
shows that in July, Yahoo Japan had ten
times as many monthly pageviews (21.9
billion versus 2.2 billion for Google) and
nearly twice as many monthly unique
Japanese visitors (46 million versus 26
million).
The Japanese web market is just too big
to be shrugged off: The country boasts one
of the highest Internet penetrations
worldwide (74%, compared to 70% in the
USA), a $5.7 billion online advertising
market (out if one estimated to be worth
$45 billion globally) and is ranked No. 3 in
terms of total web population ( 94 million,
about as many as Germany and the UK
combined).
So how does Google challenge Yahoo’s
position as the hub of the Japanese
Internet?
In the West, the popularity of Internet
portals has waned in the past years, but not
in Japan, where seven sites in Alexa
Japan’s Top 25 are of this kind. That
forced Google to change its simplistic
design for the local market: Similar to
Google China, for example, the Japanese
version now contains tab links to other
Google properties. It also features a
keyword suggestion function in the
Elevator Pitch Friday: Challenge Your Fellow Man
By Henry Work (TechCrunch)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 7:11:36 PM
After a few weeks, Elevator Pitch Friday
is back with a vengeance. This week’s
featured video comes to us from a self-
funded, young male-oriented, yet-to-
launch startup called
BeTheBetterMan.com, with the pitch
searchbox.
Nippon-only initiatives include allowing
users of Mixi( Japan’s biggest social
network) to embed Google Maps on their
blogs, partnering up with web company
Hatena(which operates Japan’s most
popular social bookmarking service) and
launching“One Green Project”, a microsite
dedicated to prevent global warming.
But these measures are just of the
cosmetic kind. In fact, Google Japan keeps
localization of its fixed Internet site at a
relatively low level(it doesn’t transform
into a Yahoo-like portal site, for example).
Instead, the company aims at taking over
the Japanese market with a double-staged
approach: Avoid Yahoo and take over the
(bigger) mobile web market first to win the
fixed Internet later.
Mash-up Strategy of Collaboration,
Experimentation and Circumvention
Japanese cell phone carriers can regulate
which search engine their Internet service
subscribers use by default. A good spot on
the official, pre-installed starting menus is
crucial to winning the mass market.
That’s why in January this year, Google
Japan inked a deal with the country’s
leading telecom company NTT Docomo,
following a partnership with the country’s
No. 2 carrier KDDI au that started in 2006
(both mobile partners also were among the
first to join the Open Handset Alliance but
have been rather close-mouthed about
Android development ever since).
Google’s mobile strategy—in Japan and
possibly elsewhere—depends on whether
the 74 million Docomo and KDDI au
Internet subscribers will embrace the
Googlization of their mobile web life.
(Compare that number to the 15 million
delivered by founder Eric Mayville.
The video’s a bit dark, but it’s
enthusiastically delivered and straight-
forward. Here’s the pitch:
As Eric describes further in the
comments of the pitch:
…the options for challenges are endless
as they can be user created or supplied by
someone like the staff at Be The Better
subscribers that the No. 3 carrier, Yahoo
partner SoftBank, serves in this country)
Both NT Docomo and KDDi au
incorporated Google’s search engine
directly into their default start menus,
synthesizing content from both mobile and
PC web sites (including the display of
contextual text ads). Users can also easily
access Google Calendar, Youtube and
other Google services. Some Docomo
handsets now come with pre-installed
Google Maps Mobile. In addition, Google
gets access to a massive amount of
behavioral data in the world’s most
advanced mobile web market. So it’s no
wonder Google Japan says its partnerships
have had “a huge impact” on business and
traffic (although it refuses to disclose
specific details).
The company additionally uses insular,
cell phone-enamored Japan as an isolated
testbed for unique mobile web applications
and services to be deployed worldwide at a
later stage.
It’s not only about search and ads: KDDI
au, for example, started to offer a
rebranded, Japan-only version of mobile
Gmail (“au one mail”). The service is free
of charge and can also be accessed through
PCs, doubling as a Trojan horse for Google
to attack Yahoo Mail’s premier position in
Nippon’s email arena. Japan is also the
world’s first country where users can
integrate animated picture characters into
Man, some examples would include who
can do the best Christopher Walken
impression? Do you have the most bad ass
beerpong table? What is the best song for
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
their mobile Gmails (very important in
Nippon) and use Google Mobile to get
extra-fast info after earthquakes strike.
The holistic strategy the company
pursues not only avoids a losing, long-term
confrontation with Yahoo Japan but also
strengthens the brand among Japanese web
users and the mobile industry in general.
The company also gains insights on how to
improve and adjust its search technology
for the Japanese and international markets.
One examplary finding John Lagerling,
head of Google’s Wireless Business in the
region, publicly shares: Contrary to
popular belief, traffic on mobile Google
doesn’t get a big bump in the morning
(when millions of Japanese commute to
work and school) but peaks from 6pm
through bed-time at 1am. Lagerling
expects usage trends like this to be
repeated outside of Japan once flat-rate
data plans and browser-enabled handsets
prevail on a global level.
Google’s multilayered strategy certainly
makes sense strategically: Japanese people
usually demonstrate unwavering loyalty in
established, popular uber-brands like
Yahoo. Google still needs to prove a) its
now beneficial partnerships will sustain, b)
it can really take over Yahoo’s place
through the backdoor, c) what role
Android will play in the future and d) how
much Google’s Japan-specific experiences
can shape the mobile web on a global
level.
CrunchBase Information Google Japan
Information provided by CrunchBase
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the summer?
Now a Christopher Walken impersonator
contest — that’s something I’d like the
internet to do right. When they launch this
fall, BeTheBetterMan.com faces some
tough competition in their space, including
the star-backed iBeatYou and video-
focused Strutta.
Let us know what you think of this pitch
Plenty Of Broadband
Providers Pretending
They're Offering Fiber To
The Home
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 6:44:00 AM
Earlier this year, we wrote about Verizon
suing Time Warner Cable over a
misleading advertisement, where Time
Warner Cable claims that Verizon is
"catching up" to Time Warner Cable in
offering fiber optics. This is misleading, at
best. Verizon is installing fiber to the home
with its FiOS service, providing
significantly faster connections. What
Time Warner Cable is claiming is that it
uses fiber in its network, not to the home.
It's true that TWC and plenty of other
broadband providers have used hybrid
fiber solutions at the network level for
many years, but that's totally different than
connecting all the way to the home with a
fiber optic connection.
Now it turns out that TWC is hardly the
only broadband provider doing this.
Apparently lots of broadband providers are
now running ads against Verizon where
they claim that they've offered fiber for
longer than Verizon. That's totally
misleading. Having fiber somewhere in the
network is not at all an equal comparison
to running fiber all the way to the home.
As Broadband Reports asks, it's difficult to
see how these claims from others isn't false
advertising. They're clearly implying that
their fiber is the same thing as FiOS when
that's not true at all.
Permalink| Comments| Email This Story
in the comments. CrunchBase Information
BeTheBetterMan.com ibeatyou Strutta
Information provided by CrunchBase
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because
it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
MySpace Cofounder Tom Anderson Was A Real Life
“WarGames” Hacker in 1980s
By Michael Arrington (TechCrunch)
Submitted at 8/30/2008 4:30:49 AM
Late last year we discovered that
MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson,
arguably the most popular individual on
the Internet with 240+ million MySpace
friends (he is added by default to every
MySpace account) was actually 37 years
old, not the 32 that he continues to claim
on his MySpace page.
Now we’ve learned a much more
colorful part of Anderson’s history: In
1985, when he was fourteen and in high
school in Escondido, California, Anderson
was subject to one of the largest FBI raids
in California history after hacking into a
Chase Manhattan Bank computer system
and subsequently showing his friends how
to do it. He was never arrested because he
was a minor, but the FBI confiscated all of
his computer equipment and some
newspaper accounts of the incident stated
incorrectly (see image below from a 1986
LA Times story) that he was“convicted in
federal court of computer hacking and
placed on probation”(the statements were
corrected in subsequent articles). Anderson
used the hacker name “Lord Flathead.”
MySpace and Anderson would not
comment on this post. But most of the
information is now available online as
news articles from the 1980s (and earlier)
have been added to Google and other
search engines. We came across an initial
article accidentally and started
investigating from there. Some of the
information in this post has been obtained
by a source close to Anderson, including
the connection between Anderson and his
hacker name.
Lord Flathead Goes Too Far
Update On The TechCrunch Tablet: Prototype A
By Michael Arrington (TechCrunch)
Submitted at 8/30/2008 11:06:36 PM
Update on the TechCrunch Tablet: A
humble (and messy) beginning. Prototype
A has been built. It’s in a temporary
aluminum case that a local sheet metal
shop put together for us that’s at least
Anderson, using the name Lord Flathead,
was a computer hacker at least since he
was 13 years old, which is just about the
time the movie WarGames came out in
theaters. Like David Lightman in
WarGames (played by Mathew Broderick),
Anderson was able to hack into computer
systems by simply figuring out the right
phone number (this was called “war
dialing” and was done with the help of a
simple computer program that dialed
sequential phone numbers until it received
a modem response, signaling a computer
system on the other end, usually a UNIX
mainframe that often had a default
password or no password at all). Once you
were past the password security, you often
had deep access to whatever system you
had called.
According to a New York Times article
in October 1985, “Lord Flathead,” was the
leader of an early black-hat hacker group
when he was 14 years old. In July and
August 1985, between his freshman and
sophomore years, Anderson hacked into a
Chase Manhattan Bank DEC VAX
computer system (like the one in the image
below) that handled“much of Chase’s data
processing and record keeping, including
records of home mortgages
and…portfolios of major customers such
as pension funds.” He subsequently
showed up to 40 of his friends how to do
it.
Anderson obtained or guessed the
passwords necessary to get through the
first level of security and, once connected,
changed at least two passwords to prevent
bank officials from accessing the system.
According to the New York Times article
the group also created fictitious accounts,
and Anderson, using the Lord Flathead
twice as thick as it needs to be, but the
hardware has been defined and is nearing
lockdown. We booted the machine in the
case for the first time today, accessed the
Wifi network and were able to navigate a
web page via the touch screen.
Most of the work is transitioning to
software and UI, and real industrial design
name, left a message saying that unless he
was given free use of the system he would
destroy records.
The bank notified the FBI and they set
up an“electronic trap in the computer
system that traced the calls to at least 23
homes in the San Diego area.” Fifty FBI
agents then raided the homes of Anderson
and his friends and seized 25 personal
computers. The raids were conducted
simultaneously at 7 pm to prevent anyone
from notifying the other hackers and
giving them a chance to destroy evidence.
This was one of the largest FBI raids in
California history. Our source says the FBI
was expecting a serious criminal
conspiracy ring of hardcore hackers, not a
group of teens led by Anderson, a high
school freshman.
Tom was hacking for quite a while
before the raid, says our source. Tom, a
minor at the time, agreed to stop
committing computer crimes and was put
on probation. His computer was never
returned.
One of the reasons Anderson would hack
into living room sized mainframe systems
was to get access to computers that could
run a C compiler to learn programming.
work on the case is beginning.
We are still far from having beta units
There were no open source or free C
compilers at the time, and personal
computers had very limited memory and
processing power, so hackers would try to
access them on other systems.
As far as we can tell Anderson never
attempted to destroy records or transfer
funds. We can’t find any records of
prosecutions being made against any of the
people raided.
Supporting documents are here. The LA
Times article linked above and the
Newsweek article talk about a friend of
Anderson, a hacker named Bill Landreth, a
published author for Microsoft Press on
computer security issues. At Bill’s
suggestion Anderson spoke with a literary
agent and published books about computer
security as well (we are trying to track
them down).
Landreth was living with Anderson’s
family and disappeared in September 1986
after leaving a suicide note. We haven’t
been able to determine Landreth’s fate,
although based on this article from 1991 he
or someone with his name became a
government agent investigating security
crimes.
Frankly, my opinion of Tom Anderson
just rose significantly. This was pretty hard
core stuff in the 80s. Twenty years later he
would go on to cofound what would
become the largest site on the Internet.
Thanks to TechCrunch intern Cameron
Christoffers for assistance in researching
this post.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile
Gadgets and Applications, Delivered
Daily.
but there is now a team working on the
project, and an incredible group of people
and companies have reached out to us to
help. We’ve learned a lot about building a
hardware device over the last few weeks,
and it’s clear that it is quite possible to
build a high performance web tablet in the
price range we anticipated.
Tech* 11
Professor Slams European
Commission For Ignoring
The Evidence On Copyright
Extension
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 5:16:00 AM
We were pretty surprised a few weeks
back when the European Commission
endorsed a plan for copyright extension,
despite ample evidence that retroactive
copyright extension is a bad idea. Soon
after that announcement, a group of
European academics sent a letter warning
that such extension would harm
innovation. The academics keep piling on,
as Professor Bernt Hugenholtz, the director
of the University of Amsterdam's Institute
for Information Law (IViR) has sent an
open letter to the Commission blasting
them for ignoring all of the research
showing that copyright extension is bad.
Specifically, Hugenholtz is amazed that the
Commission relied only on reports
prepared by industry, and willfully ignored
research prepared by independent
academics, such as his own group,
claiming that by ignoring such studies, the
Commission has a clear intention to
mislead the rest of the EU by hiding the
research that shows why copyright
extension is a bad idea.
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A teaser picture:
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12 Tech* Tech Tips*
Computers Don't Have Good Faith
Beliefs
By Timothy Lee (Techdirt)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 8:15:00 AM
My soon-to-be colleague David Robinson
has a great post about the recent dancing
toddler copyright story, in which he tries to
puzzle out the DMCA's implications for
automated takedown programs. The
DMCA provides copyright holders with a
remedy for online materials they believe to
be infringing: they may send a notice to a
relevant ISP demanding that the materials
be removed. ISPs have a strong incentive
to comply with such requests, because
doing so gives them immunity from
liability for the copyright-infringing
activities of their customers. Hollywood
has used this process aggressively, sending
thousands of takedown notices to
companies like YouTube. To prevent
abuse of the takedown power, the DMCA
also provides that anyone who "knowingly
materially misrepresents" the copyright
status of a work is liable to the target for
damages and attorney's fees.
One interesting question is whether the
DMCA allows fully automated takedown
requests, or whether the law requires that a
human being review each takedown notice
before it is sent. The law requires
copyright holders to state that "the
complaining party has a good faith belief
that use of the material in the manner
complained of is not authorized by the
CrunchGear is Live at Penny Arcade Expo This Weekend
By John Biggs (TechCrunch)
Submitted at 8/30/2008 1:42:25 AM
They weren’t allowed to bring their real
swords. Note: This is not the CrunchGear
Ten Words to Clinch Scrabble Victory [Fun]
By Adam Pash (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 7:00:00 AM
Weblog mental_floss rounds up 10 short
copyright owner, its agent, or the law."
The key phrase here is "good faith belief."
In order to state that one has a good-faith
belief, one presumably has to form a good-
faith belief in the first place. And
obviously, an automated script is incapable
of forming a good-faith belief about
anything, so any takedown sent by an
automated script would be a lie.
David suggests that copyright holders
could form "good faith beliefs" in a
statistical sense—that if their script were
accurate enough, they could form a "good
faith belief" that the vast majority of
materials identified by the script was
infringing, even if they hadn't identified
each one individually. But I don't think this
line of reasoning works. As EFF's Fred
Von Lohmann notes in the comments, the
liability provision isn't an aggregate
inquiry. It asks, for each takedown,
whether the copyright holder had
misrepresented the copyright status of the
work in question. If a copyright holder
sends an erroneous takedown notice, it is
of no comfort to the recipient—and of no
relevance to the law—that the copyright
holder also sent a number of valid
takedown notices the same day. For each
mistaken takedown notice, the question the
courts must ask is whether the
misrepresentation was "knowing" and
"material."
One plausible interpretation of this
Team.
It’s no burning man, but CrunchGear is
live at the Penny Arcade Expo where
we’re playing RPGs, engaging in cosplay,
and decreasing our chances of perhaps, one
and sweet words for getting rid of your
tough-to-unload but point-heavy letters at
your rousing weekend game of Scrabble.
We're talking words like Aa, Qat, Zax,
language would be that since no human
being reviewed the takedown notice, the
mistake couldn't have been "knowing," and
therefore the sender of an automated
takedown could never be liable. This,
however, would make a mockery of the
purpose of the statute, which was to deter
reckless or malicious use of the takedown
power. If failing to examine material at all
before issuing a takedown were sufficient
to confer immunity, that would totally
undermine the purpose of the statute. For
this reason, I think the test put forward by
EFF in the dancing toddler case—whether
a copyright holder exercising reasonable
care should have known the material was
not infringing—makes more sense. And on
this reading, companies would likely be
free to issue automated takedowns, but
they would be liable for any takedowns
that were clearly erroneous. As Fred points
out, this gets the incentives right, because
it gives Hollywood a strong incentive to
use automated takedown scripts
judiciously.
Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt
Insight Community. To get insight and
analysis from Timothy Lee and other
experts on challenges your company faces,
click here.
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day, losing our virginity. Pop by
Cwm, Xu, and five others that are short
enough to fit anywhere and will hold up to
a dictionary inquest. Got your own
favorites? Expand our vocabulary in the
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You Don't Beat Pirates By
Doing Something More
Annoying
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 12:33:00 PM
Earlier this summer, a musician named
Indiana Gregg made the mistake of
demanding The Pirate Bay stop allowing
people to find her music. The Pirate Bay
responds publicly to such letters and
doesn't take down the torrent links, so it
tends to not do anything good to send such
a letter. Gregg made things worse by
arguing with the folks at The Pirate Bay,
showing little command for the subject
matter. Later, she wrote a long, rambling
post for TorrentFreak warning people that
"the police were coming" to the "wild
west" of the internet, and basically
dismissing out of hand any new business
model that turns any kind of "piracy" into
an advantage, claiming that its the users,
not the musicians, who need to change
how they deal with music.
You can certainly understand where she's
coming from, as a musician who's
traditional business model is under threat.
However, contrary to the opinion of some,
it's the consumers who eventually
determine how a market works -- and
treating consumers as criminals tends to
backfire in a big way -- especially when
other artists are figuring out ways to create
business models that work without treating
fans as criminals.
The good news is that Gregg seems to be
willing to try out new ideas. Her and her
producer (who's also her husband) are
CrunchGear for more news and photos.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because
it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
comments. Photo by allyrose18. Quick 10:
10 Words That Will Help You Win at
Scrabble[mental_floss]
apparently planning to launch an ad
supported music site that will allow
musicians to upload their music and
receive a cut of any advertising revenue
associated with each stream or download.
The details aren't entirely clear, but I don't
think this plan is going to work all that
well. While it is good that she's trying out
new models that end up being free to the
end user, ad-supported revenue models are
going to be tough -- and it seems a bit
extreme to claim, as Gregg has, that this is
a way to "beat piracy."
Ad-supported websites are already
having enough trouble making enough
money to survive online, so Gregg's going
to quickly discover that the ad money
won't flow as quickly as she expects. Is she
going to claim that the police are coming
after the folks using ad-blockers as well?
Also, given the convenience of other sites
where music is available, expecting them
to go to a different site to get their music
may not be very convincing. The problem
with an ad-supported music site is that it
doesn't add any value to the end user. Trent
Reznor's business model worked by
providing more value to the end-user. Jill
Sobule's business model worked by
providing more value to the end-user.
Gregg's solution doesn't add more value to
the end user, and for that reason is going to
have a difficult time succeeding, let alone
"beating" piracy.
Permalink| Comments| Email This Story
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
The Net Neutrality Debate All On One Page
By Erick Schonfeld (TechCrunch)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 5:00:47 AM
Are you confused about Net Neutrality?
Who isn’t? Some people argue it is
necessary for continued innovation on the
Internet, and point to Comcast’s bandwidth
metering as a sign of things to come.
Others claim that it is unnecessary
regulation that will create unintended
consequences in its wake. Opposing
Views, the debate site that pits experts
against each other to argue the pros and
cons of the big questions of the day (read
our launch review), last night put up a page
on Net Neutrality. The page lays out the
arguments pro and con for Net Neutrality,
and then links to fuller arguments.
Marshaling the arguments for Net
Neutrality are the Save The Internet
Coalition, the Open Internet Coalition, and
Public Knowledge. (It’s a freedom of
speech issue, the ISPs are quasi-
monopolies that cannot be trusted,
innovation on the Web is at stake).
Arguing against are the Cato Institute and
Hands Off The Internet (it’s a technical
issue best left to engineers, the cost of Net
Neutrality will be passed onto consumers,
regulation will backfire). Readers are then
encouraged to vote on who is winning the
argument, an add their own points of view,
which can be elevated to the main
discussion page.
Here’s a sample of some of the back-and
-forth. The Open Internet Coalition argues
that it is a fundamental principle:
Too often, the discussion of why we
need to protect the open Internet
degenerates into a stale debate about
regulation versus the free market. In fact,
And What If Tangible Goods Become More Abundant?
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 3:55:00 AM
Over the years, I've written plenty about
the economics of infinite vs. scarce goods.
Too often (and I do this on occasion as
well) people default into thinking of
"tangible" goods as being the scarce ones,
and digital goods or information goods as
being the infinite ones. But the definitions
can certainly expand beyond that -- and
there's also the possibility that material,
it’s impossible for innovation to continue
apace without some basic rules of the road
to protect that innovation.
The open Internet was the principle
leading the development of the Internet as
the first open global communications
network. And it helped drive the
development of a host of Internet
applications like Facebook, YouTube, and
Skype. There would have been no
motivation for the developers of these
applications to have expended time, effort,
and in some cases, their own financial
security, in pursuit of their vision if they
weren’t guaranteed their inventions would
have been able to work over any Internet
connection.
The Cato Institute warns of the difficulty
tangible goods could one day lose much of
their scarcity. Economist Arnold Kling,
riffing on a post by Will Wilkinson about
why energy isn't really scarce points out
that, if energy isn't scarce, matter isn't
scarce either.
In theory, as you solve "the energy
problem" and figure out how to create
energy cheaply, then you can make any
material you want as it's needed cheaply as
well. Then you're in a bit of the Star Trek
replicator universe where even tangible
of enforcing fuzzy concepts:
it’s important to remember that network
neutrality is fundamentally a technical
principle. Like any technical principle, it is
fuzzy at the edges.
. . . Leading network neutrality proposals
contain numerous ambiguities that would
create uncertainty for everyone in the
Internet industry. Here’s just one example:
the most prominent network neutrality
proposal of the 2006 congressional session,
known as Snowe-Dorgan, defined a
“broadband service provider” as “a person
or entity that controls, operates, or resells
and controls any facility used to provide
broadband service to the public, whether
provided for a fee or for free.” Does this
mean that the owner of a coffee shop with
products become much more abundant.
We're still a ways off from that point, but
it's worth thinking about as a thought
experiment (especially as 3D printer
technology improves rapidly). Indeed,
Chris Anderson is also thinking along
these lines, noting that technology is likely
to solve both of the big "shortage"
problems we're facing these days: energy
and food -- if only government regulations
would let them.
For those who think that copyright
a WiFi connection would be subject to
FCC regulation of its firewall
configuration? One would hope not, but
that’s what the language seems to suggest.
The same point can be made with respect
to hotels, Internet cafes, airports, and even
individuals who choose to make their
home WiFi connection available to their
neighbors.
Where do you stand on Net Neutrality?
Go debate.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile
Gadgets and Applications, Delivered
Daily.
holders should try to artificially maintain
scarcity, this may be a scary situation.
After all, then the same "problem" facing
copyright holders, will also face makers of
tangible goods. But the truth is even if you
switch tangible goods from scarce to
abundant, it doesn't mean that you run out
of scarcities to sell. Music is more
abundant thanks to digital technologies,
and there are still plenty of scarcities to sell
for the music industry. There are always
scarcities -- it's just that they're no longer
Tech* Gadgets* 13
Life with
PlayStation delayed,
destined to be free
By Darren Murph (Engadget)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 10:22:00 AM
Filed under: Gaming
You know how it goes with Sony and
PS3-related peripherals. A big
introduction, followed by a slight delay,
followed by a longer delay, followed by a
little something to take the sting off. Here
we have word from Noam Rimon, senior
development manager at SCEA R&D, that
the news-blasting (and uncomfortably
named) Life with PlayStation will once
again be delayed. According to Noam,
Sony is "still pushing some paperwork" on
the service, though he gave no expected
time frame for the actual launch.
Nevertheless, he softened the blow by
announcing once and for all that it will
indeed be free (and accessible directly
from the XMB) whenever it finally goes
live. Gotta take the good with the bad, we
guess. Read| Permalink| Email this|
Comments
tangible goods. Instead, business models
will start to revolve around those non-
tangible scarcities as well, such as time,
attention and reputation. But these changes
could create a rather radical shift in how
economies function. So, even if it's pretty
far out, it's worth considering the
possibilities already.
Permalink| Comments| Email This Story
14 Tech* Gadgets* Food* Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper

Utagoe Live 100 Is FriendFeed for Video Streams

By Serkan Toto (TechCrunch)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 11:36:03 AM
If FriendFeed displayed only video, it
might look like Utagoe Live 100. The
service lets you track live video streams
from all of your friends on one screen.
Tokyo-based Utagoe just launched it as a
hub for broadcasting and watching
multiple, free live video streams
simultaneously (from sites like Qik,
Ustream, Justin.tv etc.), video-based
chatting and conferencing. Aiming mainly
at the U.S. and European markets, the
service is available in English.
Utagoe Live 100 is browser-based and,
as its main selling point, requires just a 400
kbps Internet connection to display around
100 different live streams on one screen
(settings can be individually adjusted). The
underlying technology, dubbed “traffic
controller”, is self-developed.
The Flash-based site has an uncluttered
structure and features a very
straightforward UI. Users can change the
size and order of every window and also
customize the entire grid of videos. The
Govtweets: Election Coverage One
RSS function allows users to add live
streams from friends and other sources to
their “My page” with two clicks (Utagoe
calls this “importing”). Like FriendFeed
and Twitter, friends can follow each
other’s status. It’s possible to communicate
with friends by typing text messages (via
speech balloons overlaying the video
stream).
I tried out the application, which is in
public beta, and it worked flawlessly, even
with my mediocre PC and Internet
connection. What Utagoe Live 100 needs
in future versions to appeal to more users
is an automatic pre-categorization of video
sources and topics, an opt-in solution for
adult-oriented streams and a ranking
function for members wanting to cut the
noise. But with streaming picking up speed
as a mass phenomenon, Utagoe might well
find its place in a lucrative niche.
As a next step, Utagoe plans an
expansion to the iPhone and other mobile
devices. The site will be monetized with
video ads and an ad system the company
developed that automatically displays
affiliate links matching the text chat
messages that users type. (Who’s watching
who?)
Vaguely similar services can be found A functional Meizu M8
mainly in the TV realm, and include sites
like Inner Live or TVChannelsFree. But UI, CEO Jack Wong
Utagoe lets you watch your friends. (In
that sense, it’s more like multi-person finally caught on video
video-chat service PalTalk) By Joshua Topolsky (Engadget)
Here is a demo video (without sound):
Submitted at 8/31/2008 12:14:00 PM
Utagoe Live100 demo from utagoe on
Vimeo. CrunchBase Information Utagoe Filed under: Cellphones
Information provided by CrunchBase
After what feels like centuries of
` waiting(and suffering through that painful
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile
CeBIT demo), we finally get to see the
Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Meizu M8's OS in action... and it's not as
Daily.
bad as you think. Sure, the interface is
totally derivative of the iPhone, and there
is that pesky cursor floating around, but all
-in-all it looks like the company has
managed to knock out a decent -- if
incredibly familiar -- UI for its long-
delayed phone. Still, there's some low rent

Random Thought At A Time hilarity in this video. Our favorites? The

By Erick Schonfeld (TechCrunch)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 5:05:03 AM
It’s not enough that you watch the
political party conventions on TV, read the
political coverage in newspapers, and the
reactions in blogs. Some people are not
reacting on blogs, they are reacting on
Twitter. But how do you follow all of that
raw political discourse, and do you even
want to?
Stephen Taylor, a Canadian blogger and
political analyst, has hacked together
govtweets, a site that constantly updates
with the latest Tweets that mention any of
the political candidates (McCain, Obama,
Palin, and Biden). He also created a
Facebook app. The Tweets automatically
update and scroll down the page. There is
no way to search for past Tweets, and once
a Tweet scrolls off the page there is no
way to find it again. So Govtweets is
nothing more than a snapshot of the
national conversation, but it is still
fascinating to watch it unfold.
Here are some recent Govtweets (newly
announced Republican VP candidate Sarah
Palin seems to be dominating the
conversation):
An Alaskan’s Perspective on Sarah
Palin: A down-to-earth description of
Sarah Palin’s time as Alaska’s Gover..
http://tinyurl.com/6h7h69
August 31st - 4:52:47 am PST
GOP Alaska State Senator: Palin Not
Ready to Be Gov/VP: “She’s not prepared
to be governor. How can she be p..
http://tinyurl.com/5gp6mk
August 31st - 4:52:43 am PST
Who scrubbed Wikipedia’s entry for
Sarah Palin just before nom
announcement? http://tinyurl.com/6n9dnk
August 31st - 4:51:41 am PST
Interesting watching the Obama meme
evolve: http://tinyurl.com/6nyehp Worth
seeing all three pages.
August 31st - 4:51:21 am PST
An Alaskan’s Perspective on Sarah
Palin: A down-to-earth description of
Sarah Palin’s time as Alaska’s G..
http://tinyurl.com/6h7h69
August 31st - 4:51:02 am PST
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over
the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Mom's Warm Potato
Salad
By Elise
Submitted at 8/23/2008 12:53:16 AM
I don't know about you, but summer
around here has us making potato salads
more often than in other seasons. This is
the latest one my mother put together; my
father has made her make it several times
since, and my brothers have devoured it
with raves for mom. No mayo, just a
simple rice vinegar olive oil dressing.
Continue reading "Mom's Warm Potato
Salad" »
smattering of soft porn pictures and video,
and Meizu CEO and all-around bon vivant
Jack Wong revealed in a reflection...
wearing a face mask! Check the clip after
the break (and freeze frame of Mr. Wong).
Update: Despite our excitement about
Jack Wong in a face mask, some readers
have pointed out (and we agree) that it's
actually the camera he's using to film the
video.
[Thanks, Patrick P.]
Continue reading A functional Meizu M8
UI, CEO Jack Wong finally caught on
video Read| Permalink| Email this|
Comments
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
Dell replacing XPS touchpad
with touchscreen... or someone,
somewhere owns Photoshop
By Paul Miller (Engadget)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 2:42:00 PM
Filed under: Laptops
There are two kinds of Dell rumors: sure
things, and ones that aren't sure things.
This one falls in the latter camp, so
proceed with caution. We've got a tipster
who says a friend of his from Dell handed
him this shot of what is purportedly a new
XPS M1330 / M1530 design. As you can
see, pretty much the same old fare... but
what's this? A large glossy touchpad?
Here's our hunch: Dell is tired of drawing
inspiration from Apple after the fact, and
decided to turn the tables by capitalizing
on one of the most persistent (and
outlandish) Apple rumors in existence. A
good capacitive touchscreen for the
trackpad on a laptop would undoubtedly be
a blast if it was done right, with the right
software support, and at least seems like a
good gimmick. Or maybe it'd just be lame.
We won't go further than that, this could
just as easily be a Photoshop, but we will
be keeping an eye out.
Update: False alarm, turns out this is just
a still from an NVIDIA Tegra demo on
YouTube. Thanks, shiv, for pointing this
out in comments. Boo, tipster, boo.
Permalink| Email this| Comments
CTL releasing Atom-powered 2go
nettop for $149
By Darren Murph (Engadget)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 8:25:00 AM
Filed under: Desktops CTL, the same cats
who brought us the 2go PC laptop, are
apparently working up an equally cheap
and not-exactly-flashy nettop PC. The 2go
PC Nettop will reportedly range in price
from $149 to $299 depending on
specifications, and the baseline model will
feature Intel's DG945GCLF motherboard,
Intel's Atom 230 processor, 1GB of
Kingston DDR2 RAM, a GMA 950
graphics accelerator, support for one HDD
and one optical drive, six USB 2.0 ports
and an Ethernet jack. The Essential Plus
Edition ($199) adds in Ubuntu and an
80GB 7,200RPM hard drive (while
slashing RAM to 512MB); the $299
Essential Performance Edition comes with
Windows XP Home, a 160GB hard drive
Leaked Sprint roadmap reveals Touch
Pro, Touch Diamond dates and pricing
By Joshua Topolsky (Engadget)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 6:31:00 AM
Filed under: Cellphones
From the looks of it, Sprint has gone and
gotten a decent chunk of its playbook
leaked all over the interblogs, and it's
chock-full of titillating information.
Thanks to slippery fingers and loose lips,
we already knew that the Touch Diamond
and Touch Pro were headed to the carrier,
but now we have some solid dates(mid-
and 1GB of memory. There's no word just
yet on when the 4.5-pound boxes will be
released, but we'd expect 'em to surface
pretty quietly.
[Thanks, Nate] Permalink| Email this|
Comments
September for the Diamond, October 19th
for the Pro), and pricing ($549.99 and
$579.99 unsubsidized, $249.99 and $320
with contract). Of course, this is all
according to the above document, which
admittedly could be the work of an
extremely bored Photoshopper -- but this
jibes pretty tightly with a lot of other
chatter we've been hearing.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments
Gadgets* 15
Belkin JoyPod render
surfaces: your App
Store gaming controller
By Darren Murph (Engadget)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 7:54:00 AM
Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming,
Peripherals
For better or worse, it looks like the so-
called iControlPad is edging closer to
reality -- or at least something really
similar. According to a new image (and
our limited Spanish translation skills),
Belkin is actually looking to produce an
App Store gaming controller, though we're
still not entirely convinced that what we're
seeing is legitimate. Whatever the case, the
JoyPod would somehow, someway provide
users who purchased Super Monkey Ball
to play it using a bona fide game pad,
though we can't figure out if the iPod touch
/ iPhone slips in behind the controller or if
it just morphs to fit the JoyPod's space
constraints. Guess we'll see (or not) soon
enough.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments
Panasonic's HDC-
SD100 HD camcorder
does the review thing
Filed under: Digital Cameras
BySurely
DarrenyouMurph (Engadget)
remember
PANASONIC'S Panny's
page 16 new duo
Submitted at 8/31/2008 5:18:00 AM
of camcorders that featured the so-called
16 Gadgets* Web 2.0 TV*
Microsoft job listing hints at App Store-
like 'Skymarket' for Windows Mobile
By Darren Murph (Engadget)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 4:03:00 PM
Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds
While Apple's App Store was far from
being the first of its kind, we're now seeing
a job posting over in the Redmond area
that suggests that Microsoft is looking to
produce something similar for its Windows
Mobile platform. The news comes hot on
the heels of Google's own Android Market
announcement, and if the Product Manager
Is The US Becoming A Part Of The Internet Backwater?
By Steven Hodson (Mashable!)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 4:12:13 PM
For most of the life of the Internet the
United States has played the biggest role in
the development and managing of it. At
one point all the data that flowed on the
Internet went through the US and US
companies. I don’t there are very many
companies involved with the Internet
infrastructure ever imagined a day would
come where this wasn’t the case. That day
however may very soon be upon us; if it
already hasn’t started happening.
In the past week we have heard that
Comcast is going to be introducing
download caps which follows on the heels
of Time Warner announcing trial runs of
the same idea. Not that long ago
universities in Canada were seriously
considering moving the US based servers
they were using for research for more
localized options.
position writeup is to be believed, said
platform will be christened Skymarket.
Described as a "marketplace service for
Windows Mobile," Skymarket could
seemingly be a critical part of WinMo 7.
But don't take our word for it, the proof is
the pudding -- or in the read link, in this
instance.
[Via The Raw Feed] Read| Permalink|
Email this| Comments
Their concerns revolved around the US
Patriot Act and the immense powers for
surveillance of activity within the US
Internet infrastructure. It was also
suggested that if this became more of a
trend than just a couple of Canadian
universities could the Patriot Act end up
hurting business like Google.
Then today we have John Markoff from
the New York Times writing a post about
how Internet traffic is starting to bypass
the US. It is his point that companies are
more interested in their profit margins
instead of creating technological advances
regarding the Internet.
While companies like Comcast or Time
Warner are trying to boost their bottom
lines by any means possible without
improving or advancing Internet
connectivity the US is; quite rapidly in
some cases, being surpassed by foreign
countries. As John points out in his post:
Internet technologists say that the global
PANASONIC'S
continued from page 15
3MOS technology. No? At any rate,
Panasonic's HDC-SD100 has just been
reviewed by the cool cats over at
TrustedReviews, and while we're not sure
if all that MOS was the reason for its
success, critics were generally pleased with
the performance (at least in good lighting).
They noted that point-and-shoot fans
would likely be thrilled, but the
professionals in the crowd will probably
What's On Tonight: U.S. Open, Primeval, Naruto
By Bob Sassone (TV Squad)
Submitted at 8/30/2008 9:06:00 AM
Filed under: Programming, What To
Watch Tonight, Reality-Free
• At 7, USA has coverage of The U.S.
Open.
• At 8, ABC has College Football,
Alabama vs. Clemson.
• Disney has a new Disney Channel
Games 2008 at 8, then a new Cory in the
House.
• TCM has Woman of the Year at 8,
data network that was once a competitive
advantage for the United States is now
increasingly outside the control of
American companies. They decided not to
invest in lower-cost optical fiber lines,
which have rapidly become a commodity
business.
He also ties in the fact that other
countries are beginning to realize that the
Internet is an integral part of their
economic development. This means that
they are wanting to start gaining control of
how the Internet enters and leaves their
countries.
Along with that there are growing
concerns outside of the US about how it’s
intelligence agencies believe that they need
to have access to all the data that flows
through the Internet. This doesn’t sit well
with a lot of countries and as a result we
are beginning to see a lot of the Internet
traffic being routed around the US
Ms. Claffy said that the shift away from
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
wish for a few more manual controls. Still,
at the end of the day, reviewers proclaimed
that if you've been "holding out for an
AVCHD camcorder with the full gamut of
professional features, this could be your
dream come true at last." You hear that?
Dream come true, son. Read| Permalink|
Email this| Comments
followed by The African Queen.
• At 8:30, HGTV has a new Deserving
Design, followed by new episodes of Color
the United States was not limited to
developing countries. The Japanese “are on
a rampage to build out across India and
China so they have alternative routes and
so they don’t have to route through the
U.S.”
Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the
University of Minnesota who tracks the
growth of the global Internet, added, “We
discovered the Internet, but we couldn’t
keep it a secret.” While the United States
carried 70 percent of the world’s Internet
traffic a decade ago, he estimates that
portion has fallen to about 25 percent.
This has to lead one to wonder what is
going to happen to the US in the large
global Internet scheme of things. When
you consider that it is being run by
companies who don’t appear to be
interested in advancing the technology
anymore and you have countries going
around them for various reasons it doesn’t
bode well for the country. More
Splash, and Divine Design.
• At 9, FOX has a new America's Most
Wanted.
• CNBC has a new Suze Orman Show at
9.
• There's a new Primeval on BBC
America at 9.
• Hallmark has the movie For the Love of
Grace at 9.
• Cartoon Network has two new episodes
of Naruto at 9.
Check your local TV listings for more.
Permalink| Email this| | Comments
importantly where does this leave the US
people as the Internet is obviously starting
to leave them behind.
---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The
Social Networking Blog:
Tioti - Tape it Off the Internet!
eMusic Launches 10 Internet Radio
Mashups
Google Still Against Microsoft-Yahoo
Deal
Sony Adds 8 Channels to Bravia Internet
TV
eBay Exec Warns Against Internet Taxes
comScore Releases Video Streaming
Study
Internet Brands Looking for $45M with
IPO
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
Election 2008: A Dozen Sites Open for Political Debate
By Paul Glazowski (Mashable!)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 11:38:40 AM
As has been made very clear by the
media, the presidential candidates chosen
to represent the two major parties of the
United States for the election this
November will be spending precious
primetime airspace sparring over issues
which pollsters of America deem most
important to the nation’s people. Those
who dislike watching the matches will of
course stray to different stations. But
millions of others will remain transfixed.
And given the social componentry now
available to Web users, a large swath of
the population - democrats, republicans
and independents alike - will undoubtedly
continue to toss one-liners and Google-
searched investigative research every
which way in any and all Internet channels
available.
In light of this reality, we figure it is only
fitting that we bring to your attention
several moderately well-known as well as
some relatively obscure websites that focus
on all vocal aspects of the political process,
from sound bytes to speech in long form
and the commentary which accompanies
the rhetoric. Sure, you could visit RedState
or HuffPost or CNN or Fox News. But
there are some places less about the pomp
and more about the circumstance worth a
mention all the same.
CreateDebate is one example. If offers a
quick voting mechanism as well as one for
commentary. Many users publish quite
detailed summaries of their views on
particular topics, which makes for
engaging reading and naturally sparks
responses from more users as a result.
Want to engage a forum that follows
politicians’ one-liners with more extensive
commentary to the affirmative or the
negative (or perhaps neutral standing)?
CreateDebate is well worth the cost of
entry: free. We wrote about the website
back in April, and gave it considerable
praise then. It turns out the review was
warranted.
Another service, whereIstand, offers a
similarly polished experience as that of
CreateDebate, albeit with a different
format. Navigation might take some
getting used to, but it’s reasonably well-
featured to accommodate opinionmaking
among the membership. Just to note, it’s
football season in the collegiate and
professional leagues, so there are quite a
few opinions sitting among the
frontrunners which focus on the game. But
the floor is open to all, as they say, so
express yourself if you wish - for whatever
reason.
At first MyGuesstimate may not strike
you as a world-class forum. And that’s
because it isn’t. We first reviewed the joint
exactly one week ago, and while it has
grown a bit, it hasn’t flourished. Still, the
structure of it allows for a good amount of
discussion. Post questions with answers,
and see where the community takes it.
Comments are allow, too, so talk doesn’t
end with the click of a button. Its
simplicity and user networking aspects are
what I enjoy most.
Disregard for a moment my initial bout
of sarcasm when mentioning the pollster
establishment. This next one, appropriately
enough, is called Pollster.com. It
essentially provides an interactive map
displaying the 50 American states with a
rough gauge on the consensus view on
both major presidential candidates, Barack
Obama (D) and John McCain (R). The
utility of this service is limited, as you’ll
see. But perhaps a weekly or bi-weekly
visit couldn’t hurt. The latest poll results
fall around the last few weeks of August,
so the numbers are fairly current. If you’re
one to take regional, state-by-state, or
national polls into consideration when
writing your ballot red, white, or blue, this
is one place to bookmark.
Meanwhile, if you’re an all-around
political junkie, RealClearPolitics covers
the news, the numbers, and a fair amount
of public discourse as well. Want a
resource that scopes virtually every
relevant and semi-relevant vantage in the
quadrennial chess game currently
underway? You can do far worse than
RealClearPolitics.
I should say that I trawled the Web for
quite some time before arriving at We Op-
Ed. And I’m not sorry I did. Well-design
and equally accommodating of both
original thought and user commentary,
with videos debates and a fairly active
community holding it all together, We Op-
Ed should be far more busy in the way of
conversation than it is today. It is arguably
one of the best destinations among those
listed here. If the mainstream media isn’t
doing it for you, We Op-Ed probably will.
Perhaps you’re interested in a quick view
of the top candidates’ political leanings.
Their voting records, their statements. All
that fun stuff. If you need to keep informed
to keep your online conversations teeming
with data, ProCon.org is a kind of one-stop
shop. You won’t find everything, of
course. But you’ll likely find enough
fodder to trigger posts on forums
elsewhere.
Analysts of the election underway have
made it very clear that youth involvement
is the highest it’s been in years. That is
especially true for those of voting age, but
even citizens that will be below the 18-
year threshold come November have
places to dish their positions. Youth Noise
is one interesting venue. It covers multiple
topics outside of politics, but has also
reserved a spot for those watching the race.
For those in the academic world, there
are also sites like Debate Central and
iDebate to serve as information centers for
student debaters. As the fall semester
commences in the next couple of weeks in
many parts of the country, these
destinations will likely be visited with
great frequency. Get better prepared to
play warring parties in front of your
classmates.
ForandAgainst.com takes us back to
original debate site premise given to this
collection, but its topics are hugely diverse.
That is to its benefit, but not for politicos.
Miscellany reigns supreme. You can of
course present political discourse if you
like, but it’s open to question whether such
material will rise to the fore. Science and
philosophy share a spot at the top of the
ladder, it seems.
Now, in the event that none of the sites
presented here make the grade, or don’t
offer a enough of a fly-on-the-wall take on
odd political jibber-jabber, there is a
wildcard that may well grab your eye. A
Twitter-Google Maps mashup, developed
by a Mr. Michael Geary, involves Twitter,
Twittervision, and the ever industrious
Google Maps API. Of course, watching it
go can get tiresome. The blogging can get
very redundant very fast. Nonetheless, the
choice to be an observer with a bird’s-eye
view is entirely yours.
Finally, how about a look at the Google
Books upload of the Lincoln-Douglas
Debates of 1858. A total 423 pages, front
to back. Something to inspire? Stir that
nostalgia? Maybe rehash some of the
matters at hand back in the day?
---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The
Social Networking Blog:
Why the YouTube Presidential Debate
Affects Politicians and Media
Gather Wants You to Create Debate for
the Next President
The Economist’s Open Online Debate on
Education & Technology
LIN TV Launches State Sites for
Political Coverage
YouTube and UStream Go Political
CBS Wants in on Politics Web 2.0.
Partners with Digg.
YouTube-CNN Republican Debate
Coming November 28
Web 2.0 Web Apps* 17
Design new clothes
in Flash with the
hoodie-o-matic
By Josh Lowensohn
(Webware.com)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 3:32:00 PM
New York based Neighborhoodies has a
cool new tool for people who are all about
customization called the "hoodie-o-matic."
Like services that let you custom design
clothing to sell to others, you can create an
entire garment in your browser and see the
results in real time as you toggle various
options.
The results aren't actually a new service
offering. In fact, the previous system
would let you do the same thing, although
it was a series of drop-down menus, the
result of which you'd only see once you
received the garment. The new system
takes away that element of surprise, and
also cuts down on some of the manpower
needed to transfer over those design orders
for printing.
I had great fun creating the one pictured
below, although as you can see from the
price tag these designs don't come cheap.
Each additional design element costs a
little extra on top of the base price,
although you can stack on as many as you
want.
For now the tool only works with hooded
sweatshirts (hence the name), but
considering the large volume of t-shirts the
company sells, there could be a version for
t-shirts or another articles later on down
the line.
The Hoodie-o-matic lets you design
hoodies with all sorts of custom touches.
They don't come cheap though.(Credit:
CNET Networks)
18 Web 2.0
Android Challenge Pt. I: Balancing the
Expected with the Experimental
By Paul Glazowski (Mashable!)
Submitted at 8/30/2008 4:11:34 PM
This week the first round of the Android
Challenge drew to a close. And if it hasn’t
already done so, Google will be
distributing over half of the $10 million
cash prize pool promised among Challenge
I and Challenge II finalists/winners. Judges
of Challenge I settled on 50 finalists, all of
whom were granted $50,000 applications.
Additionally, 10 were given $100,000
awards each, while another 10 received
$275,000 each. Challenge II takes place
subsequent the release of the first
handset(s) arriving with Android software.
Over the last couple of days I’ve casually
observed what has achieved placement on
the Android Challenge leaderboard. Many
- if not most - applications are devoted
very much to location-aware activities.
Some are interesting gaming
developments. But of course what drew
my interest most from titles of the winners
and almost-winners displayed are those
that will cater social services to users.
Sure, the social apps are but a segment of
what will be available come the launch of
Android and the Android Market. The
finalist labeled PedNav and GWalk, to
name two examples, are likely to be useful
for city residents or visitors aiming to get
the most efficient use of pedestrian
infrastructure. Not to mention that City
Slikkers could very well be a gamer’s
delight if enough first adopters make an
effort to partake in the virtual-plus-reality
play. We all recognize the popularity
bestowed on games within Apple’s own
big-selling storefront. Nonetheless, I
imagine that the social options will be
among those that rank among the most
popular for opening day and the weeks that
follow.
Maverick, for instance, is a local client
that allows for the communication of text,
location and media (audio, photos, and
“scribbles”) through Google Talk. It also
allows Blogger users to publish content to
the Web and for Gmail users to get
notifications about messages in their
inboxes. Granted, it sounds very Googley,
and it is, but to deliver something so
multifunctional, if done right, will I think
be very appealing. PebbleBox,
alternatively, is central to one’s location.
Learn about events, restaurants, and hotels
in a given area, and, if you wish, write geo-
tagged blogs to share with fellow users. A
rough parallel to Loopt on the iPhone, you
might say, but a bit more general-purpose
perhaps. Just to note, both Maverick and
Pebblebox were awarded $100,000 prizes.
Dropping down into the broader pool of
finalists, there is Marvin, which according
to creator Laurent Pontier will allow users
to post “geo-localized rich messages” to
one’s friends and/or the wider network.
Marvin taps the powers of the Android
OpenGL API, Google Maps, and Google
StreetView to give the user a virtual 3D
representation of the so-called social
graph, from Google Earth-like outer space
view to one at road level. Visually, it must
impress. Whether it’s truly utilitarian,
we’ll see.
LifeAware is one more location-sharing
service that automates your interaction
with those you know (and maybe those
you would like to). There are many similar
services already put into play over the past
couple of years that exhibit virtually the
same capability, but this pick may
nonetheless be something proves popular.
An application called SocialMonster also
draws from your phonebook to keep you
and the people in your life in sync.
Again, it is hard to escape the location-
smart dimension of many of Google’s
picks, which of course falls well into line
with some of the items we’ve seen arrive
in the iTunes App Store marketplace. And
that seems the right direction to take the
Android Challenge - at least the first round
of it. With more phones equipped with
GPS devices or with software capable of
gathering rough coordinates from cellular
towers in a given area, where you are will
determine what you want to do. Which is
sensible. Planning outings with friends will
not be so tedious.
No mass phone call campaigns or SMS
relays. The act of getting together or
simply staying in touch will be much less
cumbersome. And wonderfully enough,
Google has made it a point to incentivize
independent developers and small
developer teams. Much as the iPhone App
Store shows on its own adjoining software
platform, the finalists in this event seem to
take a very experimental approach. Some
of course are quite ordinary. But some
stretch one’s curiosity muscle a good
amount. Which is unquestionably
necessary if progress is to be made. If
Google ensures the openness of Android,
all the better. The experience may not
always be as polished as that of the iPhone.
But as with anything in the business, it is
the software that makes the star. Android’s
star power will be seen in short order.
As for Round 2, there’s still $4.75
million to be distributed. If T-Mobile
releases its Android-based device in the
fall, as many now assume, the Challenge
will continue on schedule. Google offers a
rough estimate of “second half of 2008.”
(Image credit: iMobile.tw)
---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The
Social Networking Blog:
Google Android SDK is Live
Google Reveals Top 50 Entries For
Android Developer Challenge
First Complete Software Suite to Operate
on Google Android Surfaces
New Facebook for iPhone Teaser Shows
Why Touchscreens Kick Butt
The Daily Poll: The Impact of Google’s
New Mobile Platform
Is “What’s Open” the First Android
Application?
Mashable Sponsors Spigit’s Entrepreneur
Challenge
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
Facebook Needs to Get
More Atypical With its Ad
Play
By Paul Glazowski (Mashable!)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 7:38:48 AM
I touched briefly yesterday on the topic of
advertisements and marketing in social
networks - business-to-business
advertisements in particular - and what I
consider to be the likely outcome of the
Facebook versus LinkedIn race for more
growth in the professional aspect.
Facebook, it seems to me, is in a better
position to influence the sector more
broadly, particularly as more online
networkers of young adult age make their
way into the workforce.
Interestingly enough, Facebook
watchdog Nick O’Neill, of the website All
Facebook, postulated another scenario,
similarly ad-specific, in which he considers
the network’s search feature as a potential
monetary opportunity. In short, he
envisions sponsored results would help pad
the pockets of Zuckerberg and company,
presumably because the process has
worked in favor of most any large Web
service that arranges its own pages in such
a fashion. (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live,
Ask, etc.)
Now, they would surely make money.
It’s really all a matter of chance. Heavy
traffic makes interaction with Facebook
search results, sponsored or not, inevitable.
Facebook might show a little less in the
way of phenomena insofar as search trends
go. It’ll never be a Google, no. But it’ll be
something. The question to ask is, can that
something be of the caliber that warrants a
serious push for implementation? I hesitate
to say yes. At this point I feel better saying
no.
It’s just that I imagine Facebook users
don’t expect the experience that a
traditional search engine delivers. Sure, the
network has displayed considerable
ambition to become something of a social
operating system for Web users all over
the globe. So you can say, why not make
search look a bit more like [insert big-
name search engine here]? And frankly,
Facebook’s deal with Microsoft to
implement Live Search into the network
shows that Facebook is doing something
that I don’t think it necessarily should.
Yet, search isn’t everything. At least not
in the traditional sense. It is a proven
moneymaker, absolutely. But there must
be a way to give Facebook users a more
unique way to find who or what they’re
looking for within the network.
Advertisements are a given. Still, how and
where those advertisements are displayed
is what will drive Facebook from a break-
even or slightly profitable enterprise into a
name that carries weight behind its $5-15
billion valuation. The last few years have
shown this. The plain old ads-atop-search-
results design won’t make that happen.
What do you think?
(Image credit: All Facebook)
---
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YouTube’s Gideon Yu
Facebook JavaScript Now Live
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Stupid Rumor: Microsoft Buying
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Unveiled!
Facebook Planning More New Features
(Not Microsoft Related!)
Zuckerberg Refutes Facebook IPO
Rumors
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
Get Ready for Some COLLEGE
Football!
By Paul Glazowski (Mashable!)
Submitted at 8/30/2008 1:06:39 PM
Some say what happens on an NCAA
football field beats NFL play in excitement
and intensity. Heisman versus Lombardi?
What’s your take? Well, whatever your
position on the matter, the season of
college tail, toss and tackle is now here in
force, and so it is only customary that we
prep you for the months of memorable
footage to come. Everything from video to
news and commentary to stat trackers and
social apps. So grab your beer, nachos,
burritos, salsa and crispy tacos and huddle
‘round.
As you well know, there’s really no set
process for consuming sports content. If
you’re not watching games on the big
screen, you can read line by line what went
on between schools. Converse with your
friends on Twitter. Watch what others are
saying on Twitter Search. Or the reverse
order, if you wish.
That said, if you’re yearning for video
coverage, ESPN has some clips at its
College Football website. For live
gameplay, there is ESPN 360.
Unfortunately, not all broadband users in
the US can enjoy what ESPN 360 has to
offer. Verizon and AT&T subscribers may
do so because those companies have paid
ESPN for exclusive use of the interactive
service. Still, those who gain entry will
likely enjoy the convenience. If multiple
games are occurring at once, viewers can
cycle through them on demand, in
Wimbledon- or NBCOlympics-like style.
Moving past video, want some news?
Again, ESPN is has quite a bit. Same with
FoxSports and NCAA Football. Sites like
Yahoo Sports’s Rivals.com, Scout’s
What's On Tonight: Hurl, Mad Men, Tim and Eric's Awesome Show
By Bob Sassone (TV Squad)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 9:04:00 AM
Filed under: Programming, What To
Watch Tonight, Reality-Free
• Hallmark Channel has a Murder, She
Wrote marathon all night.
• At 7, CBS has a new 60 Minutes.
CollegeFootballNews, the Elite Football
Network, and Gameday Network, offer
thorough coverage as well. At first glance
they may all seem very much alike, but
one will grow on you more than others
soon enough. Options are options. Take
your pick. Are you also fond of polls?
College Football Poll is heavy on the stuff.
The navigational aspects could take some
getting used to, but it’s certainly not
starving for material. Among the bunch, I
must say I found Elite Football Network
and ESPN appeal particularly strongly.
The first is a decent resource of
background information, while the latter is
just overstuffed with content. In a good
way, of course.
In the social networking realm, there are
many options for college sports fans. For
instance, Facebook and Myspace both
offer among their third-party sourced
applications general statistics for the
season now underway in applications like
NCAA College Football(Facebook),
• USA has more of the U.S. Open at 7.
• G4 has a new Hurl! at 7.
• At 8, CBS has a new Big Brother.
• TV Land has the series finale of
M*A*S*H at 8.
• Also at 8: Cartoon Network has a new
Ben 10 Action Force.
• At 9, various stations have The Jerry
College Football Game Center(Facebook),
Pickoff(Facebook), and College Football
Picks(MySpace).
Clearly Facebook users have more
choice in software and services that canvas
the league, but both networks’ databases
also happen to show lots of individual
school picks. If you’re taking classes or
listed as an alumnus, or simply prefer one
name over all others, these can be nice
additions to your favorite installations. The
options are far too many to count, but do a
quick search for “NCAA” or “football” on
either network and you might find your
team.
If all of the above still doesn’t satisfy,
perhaps some fantasy action will suit your
taste. We assembled a litany of some 30+
links, comprising college, professional,
and youth designations to get you to your
desired roster. That one is definitely worth
a look.
---
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ESPN Founder Gets Cash for College
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Veoh Teams with NCAA for Branded
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Leaderboard for High School Football
Yahoo Buying Rivals.com - Up to
$100M
30+ Tools for a Winning Fantasy
Football Season
NBC Launches Sunday Night Football
Promo Site
Lewis MDA Telethon(check local
New Facebook for iPhone
Teaser Shows Why
Touchscreens Kick Butt
By Paul Glazowski (Mashable!)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 2:40:26 PM
As an iPhone owner, this pleases me. But
more basically, as a owner of a
touchscreen-enhanced device, this pleases
me especially so. Truly custom tagging of
photos, just as one would through an
typical Web browser, is yet one more of
those small, relatively insignificant options
that prove just how useful something of the
iPhone’s design can be.
There’s really no question that the
iPhone is the software benchmark in the
mobile market. The platform itself has
something to do with Facebook’s ability to
built this next iteration of the iPhone
software. But the fact that the application’s
engineers have design the upcoming
edition this way - it’s safe to assume, as
does Nick O’Neill of All Facebook, that
this clues us in on what’s next to arrive in
the App Store - shows just what one can do
given the freedom of that pocket-sized
canvas. There are occasionally rumblings
about the lack of complete openness for
third-party software development. Which
is true. There isn’t. But if something such
as this manages to pique the interest of the
desired audience, well, objective achieved,
no? If you can’t have everything, is a lot
enough? Maybe so.
As numerous Android Challenge finalists
and winners have similarly shown, a
touchscreen is very much the necessary
listings).
• PBS has a new Masterpiece at 9.
• History Channel has a new Ice Road
Truckers at 9.
• At 10, AMC has a new Mad Men.
• There's a new Skins on BBC America at
10.
• At 10:30, E! has a new Sunset Tan.
Web 2.0 TV* 19
means to achieve all possible ends. There’s
no getting around it. Yes, you can create
outstanding mobile software which
functions exclusively via a keypad. But
media-rich applications which require user
interaction to the detail shown in the video
posted are clearly done best in a world of
touch. You get less hassle on the user side,
and there’s a good bit of comfort on the
developer end as well.
Furthermore, seeing as how Android
users and developers get the benefit of
“open,” it may not be too much to think of
touchscreen devices as the kill-switch for
the buttoned, non-touch, plebeian masses.
For the time being, the iPhone remains the
stellar dream machine, giving software
makers the ability to bring the unmatched
intuitiveness of the hardware into the
employ of their applications and services.
---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The
Social Networking Blog:
STUNNING: Facebook on the iPhone
World’s Simplest iPhone App
Multiply Launches iPhone Edition
AWESOME: Meebo on the iPhone
Social Networks Optimized For The
iPhone
Palm Users Get Their Own Optimized
Facebook App
Track What’s Hot at the iPhone App
Store with Medialets
• At midnight, Cartoon Network has a
new Metalocalypse.
• At 12:30am, Cartoon Network has a
new Tim and Eric's Awesome Show, Great
Job.
Check your local TV listings for more.
Permalink| Email this| | Comments
20 Web 2.0 TV*
It’s Time to Give the Best of Twitter
Some Pulitzers.
By Paul Glazowski (Mashable!)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 1:07:16 PM
Matt Richtel of The New York Times
added to Valleywag’s presumed
embarrassment today by letting readers of
the world-renowned rag in on his secret.
Evidently the salacious gossip artists at the
other VW weren’t privy to a Twitter novel
- or a Twitter thriller, a so-called
“Twiller,” to be precise - under production
by Richtel. I myself learned of its
evolution near the start. How about you?
No matter. The reason I touch on the
subject is to expand on the commentary a
bit.
The Twittersphere, after all, is full not
only of these kilobit- or megabit-sized
novels. Comedians wax to varying degrees
of hilarity via the medium at all hours. 140
-character-long jokes can be punchy,
woeful, and plenty of things in between, it
turns out. Just like your half-hour stand-up
routine. Indeed, if you follow a real talent
for an extended period of time, well, you
begin to get exceedingly dependent on the
feed I know I do. ( Merlin Mann, I bid you
much thanks. Shall your run of the funnies
never end.)
People celebrate the art of the haiku, as
well. Too many people, arguably. So I ask,
is there a limit? Nevermind the faults and
the failures behind the stage, many - if not
all - of which seem to have disappeared
completely. Does the service’s message
structure determine what is and what is not
possible? Does it maintain a sort of fun and
casual gimmicky quality because you’re
required to stay within set bounds? If the
answer these questions is a resounding no,
could there then be a moment when
Twitter members are honored with awards
for creativity? Awards you can handle, too.
With your hands!
Twitter itself, as we know, has won
Gossip Girl season 2 -- an early look - VIDEO
By Isabelle Carreau (TV Squad)
Submitted at 8/30/2008 9:22:00 AM
Filed under: OpEd, Video, Early Looks,
Reality-Free, Gossip Girl
Hello Upper Eastsiders and friends! Get
ample praise. It received the SXSW Blog
Award for being so beautifully basic. Well,
I say it’s time to weed the membership for
some serious recognition. Or at least begin
to consider the possibility of a trophy. Or
two. Or more. What say you?(Poll after the
jump.)
A quick Web search will bring an event
dubbed “ the twitties.” The byline is “
awards for the most interesting twists on
140 characters!” Visitors to the site submit
favorite URLs for particular messages
published and vote to nominate that which
they believe to be the best. But that
premise seems limiting to me. I’d like
consistency to be honored. Serials. The
best delivery of on-the-ground journalism,
too. How about a head-to-head comedy
competition? The categories can be many.
Yes, it is far fetched to think a Twitter
user somewhere will rank as some sort of
Hemingway 2.0. But if the players in the
field today have shown anything
worthwhile, it is sheer inventiveness.
Twitter, against some major odds given the
technical issues it has had to contend with,
ready for another year of backstabbing,
fights, evil plans, some more backstabbing,
friendships put to the test, lies, breakups,
hooking ups, seduction, sex, some more
backstabbing and, of course, loads of
gossip thanks to the queen of gossip:
is now being used just as often by people
broadcasting cocktail recipes as
organizations campaigning for the next so-
called leader of the free world. Peculiar,
absolutely. But incredibly intriguing as
well. And I tell you it’s time to take it to
the next level. Agreed?
How does the Best of Twitter sound to
you?
( surveys)
---
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Twitter Mobile Interface
Quick Fix For Twitter Troubles
The Webby Awards to Hold First
Ceremony for Online Film and Video
Gossip Girl.
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
Microsoft Tells Apple and
Google to Wait Up; Hints
at Skymarket
By Paul Glazowski (Mashable!)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 3:12:26 PM
So Microsoft saw Apple and the iPhone
3G and adjoining App Store pass its stoop
slapping fives with its oh-so-cool friends,
and executives in the Windows Mobile
division perhaps thought it best to come up
something with their own. Then, just last
week, Google unveiled plans to introduce
something called Android Market to
complement its mobile software platform
when it arrives sometime in the next few
months. Now Microsoft is letting slip its
own message about third-party unity. The
company’s buzzword: Skymarket.
There isn’t much detail as to what
Skymarket will be. One can venture a
guess, though. Something in the vein of
those other two labels up in that first
paragraph there. What we can confirm is
that, according to job listings discovered
by istartedsomething, Microsoft is seeking
both a “senior product manager” and
“product manager - commercial
integration.” Both would be tasked with
pushing “ the launch of a v1 marketplace
service for Windows Mobile.”
After having had the chance to watch the
first three episodes of the season I can tell
you that The CW's Gossip Girl is back in
full swing. The storylines are as twisted as
ever and, more importantly, Chuck is, well,
Chuck!
This is admittedly good news, as it’s
better for progress to be made in the
industry within as many major mobile
platforms as possible. But as Long Zheng
writes, the Windows Mobile world has for
a long while been living a heavily scattered
existence, and only now has Microsoft
seemed pressed to coalesce its personal
universe. A universe purported to claim
18,000 applications, much of which is
presumably best described as anti-matter.
Or dark matter. Or just no-good matter.
Which says quite a bit. An adventurous
biggie, it is not.
---
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Microsoft To Buy 24/7 Real Media Ad
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Apple Tops $200 Per Share
Google News Now Looks Beautiful On
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Apple Movie Rentals On its Way?
Google Apps Updates for Businesses,
Schools and Orgs
Slight spoilers follow!
Continue reading Gossip Girl season 2 --
an early look - VIDEO
Permalink| Email this| | Comments
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
Earn your bandwidth black belt
By Seth Rosenblatt (Webware.com)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 4:10:00 PM
Comcast has thrown down the bandwidth
gauntlet. Starting in October, Comcast
broadband users will be restricted to
250GB worth of downloads per month.
When asked whether the cable company
was planning on offering a bandwidth
meter to customers, a Comcast
representative stated that it hopes to,
eventually, but until then Google would be
a nice place to find one.
So, I've come up with a list of free
bandwidth monitoring software for
Windows and Mac that should tide you
over until Verizon brings some Fios action
to your hood.
BitMeter offers a Web interface for
tracking your traffic through a
browser.(Credit: CNET Networks)
First off, let's look at BitMeter. When
running, it lives in your Windows Taskbar,
so the features are accessible only through
the context menu. Halfway down the
lengthy list is the knockout punch: ISP
Restrictions. This lets you set a limit that
can be based on downloads only, or total
traffic. It also offers notification based on
the percentage of your quota that has been
downloaded, and the start date of the
quota.
It's more than a one-hit wonder, offering
a live graph of upload and download
usage, a usage calculator that can work
based on transfer time or file size, and
hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly
statistics. This data can also be exported
and saved. However, BitMeter lacks polish
in the interface. The main screen is a live
usage graph. All features are hidden in the
context menu, so it's not going to win any
design contests soon.
BitMeter's ISP Restrictions
window.(Credit: CNET Networks)
Despite the promising name, I found
Bandwidth Monitor Lite to be a
disappointment as far as monthly quotas
were concerned. Similar to BitMeter in
layout, although the look of its graph is
slicker, the actual tools that the Lite
version offered were slim. You can track
the amount of data downloaded and set a
day of the month to start counting, but
there was no way to set the quota or
configure an alert.
The persistent emphasis on themes and
skins was irritating, since the features that
they were meant to put on display were
less than stellar. The upgrade version does
offer a lot more, but paying for a
bandwidth tracker strikes me as a bit
insulting, since we're already throwing
cash at Comcast that we might not have
had we known there would be a post-
contract download cap.
Two other promising tools that I looked
at were Axence NetTools and FreeMeter.
Axence was the more advanced one by far,
with a well-organized and professional-
looking layout, but neither has bandwidth-
monitoring capabilities that Comcast users
will be looking for. Axence does have a
"bandwidth monitor," but it can only check
on user-specified connections, not overall
up/down traffic.
For Macs users, iStat Menus and
MenuMeters both sounded promising.
Neither offer the robust bandwidth
management tools that this Comcast
problem is calling for, though.
I did that find a little-known app called
SurplusMeter does precisely what we need
it to do. Like BitMeter for Windows, it
gives users the ability to set a bandwidth
limit, a start day of the month, and the
connection type--PPP Modem or Network
Card, for example.
SurplusMeter offers Mac users a clean
and simple traffic tracker.(Credit: CNET
Networks)
SurplusMeter also calculates a daily
allowance, and reconfigures that
depending on how much you've actually
used for the month. It lacks the not-quite-
fancy graphs that I encountered in its PC
counterparts, but SurplusMeter also lacked
something they had: an alarm or
notification that would tell you when you
were approaching your limit.
Fortunately, the interface is dead simple.
All the options are presented in an
uncluttered layout--you'll get exactly what
you need from this app with a minimum of
hassle. Handy progress bars give a slight
visual flair to the days left in the month,
the download megabyte count, and the
total downloaded and uploaded.
Clearly, there's no killer app for either
operating system, but there's at least one
for each out there that most users should be
able to get by on. It's an imperfect stop-gap
to a problem that has the potential for wide
-ranging consequences far beyond mere
file sharing.
Web Apps* 21
Yahoo Mash
gets smashed,
bashed, quashed
By Caroline McCarthy
(Webware.com)
Submitted at 8/28/2008 10:03:00 PM
My Yahoo Mash profile, soon to get
euthanized.(Credit: Yahoo)
File this one under the "ouch" category.
Yahoo is shutting down its social-
networking experiment, Yahoo Mash, after
only a year in business.
An e-mail to Mash members from Yahoo
community manager Matt Warburton read,
"Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta
service. We hope you had fun with it.
Please note that we will shut down Mash
on September 29, 2008. As a result, your
current profile on Mash will no longer be
available."
Mash didn't really offer anything new,
other than the fact that instead of inviting
friends you created profiles for them and
then invited them to customize and change
them. You could also add "modules," a
sort of rudimentary version of social-
network apps. It was designed as a quirky,
cute step up from Yahoo 360, the social
network that Yahoo had based off its
millions of pre-existing user accounts; if
Yahoo 360 was analogous to AOL
profiles, Mash was more like Facebook.
But Mash never caught on, and its parent
company has now deemed it worth closing.
This is not the first time that Yahoo has
launched an experimental social network
only to yank it. Last year, Yahoo shut
down a Dodgeball- or Brightkite-like
mobile social site called "Mixd" that had
only been in operation for a few months.
22 Web Apps*
More tidbits on the new Comcast cap
(updated)
By Josh Lowensohn
(Webware.com)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 10:11:00 AM
Thursday's news about the upcoming 250
GB monthly cap for Comcast data
subscribers left some questions
unanswered. I shot a few of my own, as
well as some from readers over to Comcast
to get them answered. These are mostly
items that did not appear in both the post
about the amendment, or the otherwise
comprehensive FAQ page.
Update at 5:05 p.m. PDT: In a bizarre
twist, the previous answers to my
questions were answered by someone
named Bill G., who Comcast says is not an
authorized spokesperson for the company,
despite answering my e-mail sent through
the company's press contacts page. Charlie
Douglas, who is Director of Corporate
Communications for Comcast's Online &
Voice Services, wrote me back to let me
know the "correct" answers to these
questions. I've highlighted where the
previous unofficial answers differed for the
sake of continuity, although the only major
differentiation from the unofficial contact
is the mention of Comcast developing its
own bandwidth monitoring and
notification service for its customers,
which is apparently not happening. Q: Will
people who go over for the second time be
able to challenge the account suspension,
Napster won't rule out a sale
By Caroline McCarthy
(Webware.com)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 7:06:00 AM
Beleaguered online-music pioneer
Napster announced to shareholders in a
letter Friday that it's still employing
investment bank UBS and may be
positioning itself for "strategic
alternatives" to keeping the company
public--i.e. a sale.
or is the two strikes and you're out policy
the standard?
Charlie Douglas: If a customer receives a
call that he/she has exceeded 250 GB in a
month, then we ask them to please
moderate their usage. The vast majority of
customers do so voluntarily. During that
first call, however, we also explain that,
per our Acceptable Use Policy, if they are
among our heaviest users for a second time
in the following six months, that we
reserve the right to suspend their account
for 12 months. Again, this is an extremely
small number of customers--far less than 1
percent--and is a policy that does not affect
more than 99 percent of our customers.
Will there be a usage meter available on
Comcast subscriber's online account
information?
Douglas: There are numerous free or fee-
based meters that are widely available on
the Internet to anyone who wants one.
(Editor's note: This differs from our
unofficial contact who said "Comcast is
developing a meter to track your
bandwidth." We've got a write-up of ways
to do this using various software tools.)
Will you be offering larger bandwidth
The letter was sent on behalf of Napster's
board in order to urge shareholders to not
vote for three activist candidates for the
board. "The press release recently filed by
the dissident group appears to imply that
your board is not willing to consider a sale
of the company," the letter read. "This is
not true."
The board additionally recommended
that in place of the dissident candidates,
shareholders re-elect existing board
packages for home businesses or
"excessive users?"
Douglas: Our excessive use policy is
only for residential service customers. As
of today, this policy does not apply to our
commercial services customers.
How does this factor in with users of
your Digital Voice service? On average
how much bandwidth does that service
take up?
Douglas: Comcast Digital Voice is a
completely separate service and is not a
factor.
We've also had some questions about the
bandwidth averages cited on this page. 2-3
GB median monthly bandwidth seems
incredibly low, as does the figure for how
large an e-mail is (0.05KB/e-mail). Most
messages in my inbox hover between 10-
50k. Was it a typo for 0.05MB?
Douglas: 2 to 3 GB/month is the median
monthly amount used by our residential
high-speed Internet customers. The
examples we provided at
www.comcast.net/networkmanagement are
illustrative of how much activity would be
required to reach 250GB in a month. More
than 99 percent of our customers do not
come close to using more than that
amount.
Got any other questions you feel are
unanswered? Leave them in the comments
and we can send out a second round.
members Richard Royko, Philip
Holthouse, and Robert Rodin.
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
Comcast to cap monthly
consumer broadband
By Josh Lowensohn
(Webware.com)
Submitted at 8/28/2008 3:32:00 PM
Starting October 1 customers of
Comcast's residential data services will
have an invisible barrier on their monthly
data usage. Under the new guidelines of
Comcast's Acceptable Use Policy
announced Thursday, that cap will be set at
250 gigabytes per month, per account.
Users who go over the limit will get a
courtesy call from Comcast's customer
service for the first instance. However,
under the new policy a second-time
offense means the service is immediately
suspended for an entire calendar year.
Surprisingly the company is not
providing any tools to help users monitor
their current usage. An FAQ on Comcast's
support site simply suggests that customers
do a "Web search" for bandwidth metering
software that will track this amount for
them. Going forward there may be plans to
set up alerts over certain thresholds, or
bundle some official tool as part of the
company's starter software.
Comcast notes that the median usage for
most residential customers falls
somewhere between 2GB and 3GB, a
number that is regularly broken within a
matter of hours and sometimes minutes by
customers taking advantage of streaming
HD video and online backup services. The
company breaks down basic usage
numbers similar to what's seen on the
Napster was the original name in digital
music, and a notorious one at that. The free
peer-to-peer service was silenced after a
high-profile court battle. Its attempts to
resurface as a legitimate subscription-
based music service just haven't gotten it
back on top, and the addition of 6 million
DRM-free MP3s would've been more
impressive, if Amazon MP3 weren't doing
the same.
Napster's letter to shareholders insisted
marketing materials on a consumer hard
drive:
* Send 50 million e-mails (at 0.05KB/e-
mail)
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4MB/song)
* Download 125 standard-definition
movies (at 2GB/movie)
* Upload 25,000 high-resolution digital
photos (at 10MB/photo)
A far greater problem may be the
slighting of cloud storage services that
offer file transfer and backup. Services like
Carbonite and Mozy let you back up and
transfer the entirety of your computer's
storage several times per month, which on
many standard consumer machines can be
in the hundreds of gigabytes.
Apple, too, is just at the beginning stages
of MobileMe, a service that offers sync
and file backup to multiple devices.
Additionally, the rumored all-you-can-eat
iTunes could drastically change how much
downloading users are doing on a monthly
basis.
So what do you think about this new
limit? Let us know in the comments and
the poll below. What do you think of the
new 250GB/month Comcast cap?
( polls)
that the proposed new board members
would lead the company in a wrong
direction. "The dissident group's nominees
have no relevant experience in the digital-
music industry, have no public-company
board experience, and the dissident group
has not put forth any substantive plan for
how their nominees will enhance value for
our stockholders, if elected to the board,"
the letter read.
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
Facebook's Live Feed
challenges FriendFeed,
Twitter
By Harrison Hoffman
(Webware.com)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 11:19:00 AM
Facebook has recently launched a new
feature that takes aim at life-streaming
sites FriendFeed and Twitter. Facebook's
Live Feed is an evolved version of its
hugely popular News Feed feature.
Facebook's new Live Feed allows you to
view all of your friends' updates in real-
time.
Found via a tab on the Facebook
homepage, Live Feed loads up all of the
stories from your friends and updates the
list in real-time. The feed is available in
Log Mode (seen above) or the more
traditional Full Stories. When one of your
friends does something, Live Feed slides
everything down, making room for the
new story, which fades in. The stream is
very cool to watch roll down the screen
and makes good use of the classic Web 2.0
AJAXy feel.
It's no secret that Facebook has been
pushing its microblogging and life-
streaming features to the forefront of the
site recently. Facebook's "What are you
doing right now?" feature is extremely
similar to Twitter and its commenting
system for news items is very reminiscent
of FriendFeed. Facebook's implementation
of Live Feed makes it a lot easier to watch
what all of your friends are doing.
FriendFeed and Twitter are both very
good at what they do, but have yet to gain
the mainstream appeal that Facebook
enjoys. Facebook is adding another feature
that FriendFeed has long had and that has
very similar functionality to Summize
(now Twitter Search), so maybe it's time
for them to start getting worried. By
exposing its large user base to these
features that FriendFeed and Twitter have
perfected, Facebook poses a real threat.
With 'followers,' Blogger
gets--surprise!--more social
By Caroline McCarthy
(Webware.com)
Submitted at 8/29/2008 6:31:00 AM
Follow that blog!(Credit: Google)
With blog platforms Movable Type and
WordPress adding social-networking
features to their software, it was only a
matter of time before Google's Blogger did
the same.
A post on the official Blogger blog
earlier this week announced that users
would soon be able to display their
"followers"--other Blogger members who
have subscribed to them.
The optional feature--along with a
notification on blog owners' "dashboards"
of how many people have subscribed to
their blogs through Blogger--will be rolled
out in the next few weeks. A new tab on
the dashboard, called "Blogs I'm
Following," lets Blogger users keep track
of updates to the blogs on their
subscription list.
The problem with these sorts of features
is that they're inherently limited to readers
whose "following" is directly tied to the
Blogger software and its members, so it
will reflect only a slice of readers. A
follower widget (or gadget, as Google calls
The Daily Show: August 29, 2008 - VIDEOS
By Annie Wu (TV Squad)
Submitted at 8/30/2008 5:24:00 AM
Filed under: OpEd, Video, The Daily
Show, Episode Reviews, Reality-Free
"The Heart of Hopeness": Barack Obama
delivered his acceptance speech the other
night, to a stadium full of insanely excited
Democrats. John Oliver filed a report live
from the site of Obama's speech. Man,
John has really been putting himself on the
line this week, being incredibly annoying
in front of so many overexcited people. I
mean, chanting "Osama!" at a massive
crowd of Obama lovers is almost a sure to
bring about a beating, but he totally lucked
Web Apps* TV* Tech Tips*
them) claiming 21 followers only refers to
Blogger members, not to the overall
number of people reading the blog, which
could make the owners of smaller blogs
get a bit image-conscious.
But with its Google ownership, Blogger
is tying the new following feature into
some of its other properties, like Google
Reader and the forthcoming Google Friend
Connect. The "Blogs I'm Following" tab,
for example, can be imported into Google
Reader.
out with some relatively mild verbal
confrontation. Other great moments
included dancing to Jeremiah Wright's
"white friends" song and making his move
on hot strangers. As we would see later in
the episode, it seems like the Democratic
National Convention brought out the
23
Direct Line Takes You
Straight to an Operator
[Featured IPhone
Download]
By Adam Pash (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 9:00:00 AM
iPhone only: Inventive iPhone app Direct
Line navigates automated phone systems
to get you directly to an operator without
having to sift through menu options
yourself. To use it, just launch the app, tell
it who you want to call (it supports
hundreds of searchable companies), and let
it take care of the rest. You can simply turn
on your speakerphone and let Direct Line
do its work. When the operator answers,
you're ready to go. A lot of the time it
appears to just stick with the old hit-zero-
until-it-goes-to-a-human trick, but in most
of my tests it worked really well. Aside
from the convenience of going straight to
the operator, it's also just a nice repository
of phone numbers for your utilities. The
biggest downside: Direct Line will set you
back $.99 from the App Store—so it's not
free, but it is definitely cool. Don't have an
iPhone but still want to get to an operator
with minimal effort? Try previously
mentioned Dial a Human. Direct Line[via
TechCrunch]
friskiness in the correspondents.
Continue reading The Daily Show:
August 29, 2008 - VIDEOS
Permalink| Email this| | Comments
24 TV* Food*
Flight of the Conchords to end after
second season
By Annie Wu (TV Squad)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 2:03:00 AM
Filed under: Other Comedy Shows,
OpEd, Celebrities, Reality-Free Bad news,
Flight of the Conchords fans. It looks like
the upcoming season of their HBO show
will be the end. The boys, Bret McKenzie
and Jemaine Clement, have confirmed that
they've been having trouble making the
second season, struggling with making
new music and sitting around with a lot of
half-songs, "an album's worth of
beginnings of songs." Sure, sure, they
deserve to take it easy, especially after
bringing us twelve episodes of goodness,
but can fans really help but feel
brokenhearted? Commence full body-
Big Brother 10: Live feeds report -
August 31
By Jackie Schnoop (TV Squad)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 12:00:00 PM
Filed under: OpEd, Big Brother (US)
After a flurry of activity in the Big Brother
10 house, we're in the doldrums right now.
Another Head of Household comp, new
nominations, another Power of Veto comp
-- we're really talking a flurry, right? But
today is Sunday and it will be a day of rest.
Oh, that doesn't mean there's nothing
happening in the house. There is always
backstabbing, scheming, lying, and
trashtalking going on!
Read on past the jump for extreme show
spoilers-- both Sunday and Tuesday
Bread and Butter Pickles
By Elise
Submitted at 8/24/2008 12:29:18 AM
Boxes filled with cucumbers from the
farmers market, scores of mason jars, big
pots, lots of activity in the kitchen, fresh
homemade pickles. These are some of my
memories from summers growing up. My
grandmother (dad's mother) and my
parents used to pickle a lot when I was a
kid. My dad's favorite was spicy carrot and
cauliflower pickles (I'm still waiting for the
recipe); my favorite was sweet watermelon
shaking sobbing.
Continue reading Flight of the
Conchords to end after second season
Permalink| Email this| | Comments
episodes. You've been warned.
Continue reading Big Brother 10: Live
feeds report - August 31
Permalink| Email this| | Comments
rind pickles (can't find watermelons with
thick enough rinds to make these
anymore). Sweet pickles like these bread
and butter pickles (who came up with that
name?) never lasted that long around here;
we kids gobbled them up.
Bread and butter pickles are easy to
make, and if you are planning to make
them as refrigerator pickles (storing them
in the cold fridge, to be eaten within
weeks), you can skip a lot of the canning
steps. This is a basic recipe which we
happen to love, cobbled together from
Big Brother 10: Live feeds report - August
30
By Jackie Schnoop (TV Squad)
Submitted at 8/30/2008 4:04:00 PM
Filed under: OpEd, Big Brother (US)
Well, we thought that Thursday night's Big
Brother 10 episode was a whirlwind of
activity. Since the live double eviction
show, there has been another Head of
Household competition and nominations as
well as a veto comp. It's enough to make a
young upstart like Dan collapse and hold
his head.
I know you want to know. Read on past
the jump for extreme show spoilers for
What to expect in season two of Gossip Girl
By Isabelle Carreau (TV Squad)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 3:24:00 AM
Filed under: Spoilers Anonymous,
Reality-Free, Gossip Girl Gossip Girl here,
ready to bring you the latest news from the
Upper East Side and The Hamptons. Want
to know if S and D are back together?
What bad deeds C is up to? Who are B's
new enemies? Want to learn if J got herself
in more trouble? Answers after the jump!
XOXO
Gossip Girl
various editions of the Joy of Cooking plus
some online research. The ice helps keep
the cucumbers crispy, as does cooking
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
both Sunday and Tuesday episodes!
Continue reading Big Brother 10: Live
feeds report - August 30
Permalink| Email this| | Comments
Beware: Spoilers ahead!
Continue reading What to expect in
season two of Gossip Girl
Permalink| Email this| | Comments
them just a short time. You can experiment
with the pickling spices, and the pickling
vegetables for that matter. A friend
recently told me about an idea for bread
and butter jalapeño pickles that sound too
good not to try to make. Do you have a
favorite bread and butter pickle recipe? If
so, please tell us about it in the comments.
Continue reading "Bread and Butter
Pickles" »
Shrimp Fried
Rice
By Jaden Hair
Submitted at 8/21/2008 3:41:13 AM
Please welcome guest author Jaden Hair
of Steamy Kitchen who is doing a series of
Chinese American food recipes for us here
on Simply Recipes. ~Elise
The first time I attempted to cook fried
rice on my own, I was 15 and my parents
and little brother were in Europe on
vacation. I stayed home to attend summer
school and to enjoy a little freedom living
on my own for a couple of weeks.
Since my Mom was the queen in the
kitchen, I didnt really cook too much back
then. My job was just to eat and enjoy her
wonderful home cooked meals. But that
week, after 3 days of instant ramen, I was
longing for something a little more
substantial. Too lazy to bike to the market,
I decided on fried rice. I steamed a batch of
rice and found enough bits of vegetables to
make the dish.
It was a total disaster. Mushy, soggy and
goopy. Back to Top Ramen for another 10
days.
When the family returned, I told Mom
about my fried rice misfortune and she
laughed, You better start learning from me
before you go off to college or youll
starve! And a crash course in fried rice
followed the next day.
So here I am to teach you what I learned
from my Mom. These are her secrets to
light, fluffy and flavorful fried rice, no
matter what ingredients you use.
Continue reading "Shrimp Fried Rice" »
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
Get the Most Out of Your New Town [Ungeek To Live]
By Kelly Abbott (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 8:00:00 AM
Editor's Note: Welcome my San Diego-
based pal Kelly Abbott, founder of
Dandelife and all-around good guy. His
new weekend post series, Ungeek to Live,
will highlight the ways you can get things
done without always involving a computer
or gadget.
Not all things analog can go digital, and
let's face it, most things worth a hill of
beans in this world are analog through and
through. Life is all about people, places
and things. The best life hacks should be as
much about getting the most from what we
can smell, touch, and taste as the things we
see and hear. Today, I kick off a guest-
column "Ungeek to Live" as the new kid
on the block here at Lifehacker. In that
vein I've got a few pointers on making the
most out of one's new surroundings.
Whether it's a move to a new city for a
new job, a sacrifice for an old squeeze, or
retirement for better surf, what we need are
strategies for getting snug and staying long
in our new digs. Photo by Old Yankee.
Buy Local
When you move to a new place, you
need to tend to the usual matters. Move in.
Check. Get a driver's license. Check.
Register to vote. Check. Now what? There
are a couple of things you want to do that
make all the difference when establishing
yourself in a new city.
First, get a local phone number. There's a
tendency to ignore the importance of
appearing to be from the city you're now
living in. That's a bad move. I can
understand the reluctance to spend money
on a home land line just for the sake of
appearances. Also who wants to change
numbers? It's a hassle. But you don't need
Chicken Enchiladas Verdes
By Elise
Submitted at 8/29/2008 5:48:06 PM
The tomatillos in my garden are all
ripening at once. Have you ever cooked
with tomatillos? They look like little
lanterns, with their green papery husks.
Sometimes people mistake them for green
tomatoes (doesn't help that their Spanish
to do that anymore. Get a Grandcentral
number. Point it to your mobile. Now
everyone you meet doesn't think you're
here today and gone back home tomorrow.
Photo by doviende
Second: subscribe to your local
newspaper. I'm not kidding. Forget the
web. Get the print edition. Fine, Sunday's
only. If you have any intention of being a
part of the fabric of your new locale, this is
indispensable. It's amazing how in-tune
your the daily rag really is. Bonus: for
house guests it's a quaint sign that you're
up early with coffee on the weekends and
thus beyond suspicion. Get a Map
You know, the kind that folds. Tape it to
the wall next to your door. Every time you
leave for the day, you'll have a look at it.
Over time places will be remembered. And
in idle moments serves as a reminder that
there's a whole city waiting for you. Buy
Lunch
Photo by moriza
Everyone needs to eat. Please, please,
please don't eat at your desk. One of the
most difficult things to do when you get to
town is not just meet people but meet the
right people. For example, you've done
your research on LinkedIn and you know
who you need to add to your professional
network. Great. You've contacted them
directly, but you have nothing to offer
because you're the new kid in town. What
do you do? Buy lunch. Do this once a
week and soon people will be taking you to
lunch. Play Hard
Photo by marvinkuo
Because you'll be gaining weight from
all those lunches, you'll need to have good
places to be social AND work out at the
same time. The gym is not such a place.
First of all, it stinks. Second, working out
is not usually a team effort. In the gym,
name is "tomate verde"); they are related to
tomatoes (same family, different genus),
but the taste is quite different. They are
used to make the distinctive Mexican salsa
verde or green salsa. In this chicken
enchiladas recipe, the sauce is made with
boiled tomatillos (you could also roast
them), serrano chile peppers, and sour
cream. The filling is made with shredded
your iPod is your best friend and force
field against unsolicited come-ons. If your
aim is to be social, join a softball league.
Play soccer. Kickball, dodgeball, frisbee
golf. Join a team. Form a team and get new
people to join. The point being, the people
you see week after week will soon become
your crew for BBQ's and beer. Here are
two resources.
Sportsvite- Covers the major markets but
as yet not as comprehensive as it could be.
FanFinder- Find fellow sports fans who
live where you do and come from where
you do. Go to a local sports bar and catch
the game together. Jesus and Wine
I love Meetup.com's tagline: "Use the
Internet to get off the Internet!"
Meetup has all kinds of wonderful
categories for finding meaningful
connections with others. Be it beer or
wine; darts, dirt or dreams; Mormons,
Wiccans or atheists; or whether you're a
Republican, Democrat, independent or
Libertarian, there's little more than booze,
religion and politics that can help you feel
right at home again.
If you're looking for more traditional
fare, try these directories for churches,
temples and mosques.
Mosques
• Mosque Directory( iPhone-ready
Mosque search
• iPhone-ready Halal food search
Churches
• Church-Finder at Beliefnet
• MyChurch.org
Temples, Synagogues and Chabad
Centers
• Synagogues
• Chabad Centers
Coffee, Tea, Me
I love working out of the house. It's good
on many levels. It gets your creative juices
meat from chicken thighs; the deeper
flavor of the dark meat holds up much
flowing. It also satisfies the desire we have
to just be around people. If you work in
public enough you will inevitably catch
someone's eye. Vice versa. Coffee shops
are great for lingering. If you want a
tighter group, find a co-working space
locally and get a desk. Get Involved
Nothing will get you deeper in a
community than volunteering. My best
business contacts and most loyal friends
are those whom I've met on the soccer
field but who've thought enough of me to
respond to my calls asking for donations.
By being a dedicated volunteer in a local
non-profit, you're doing the right thing all
around. In addition to helping your new
community directly, you're also giving
yourself a shot in the arm with good cheer.
Being the new kid in town can be tough
and you'll need all the karma you can
corral.
Try these sites for finding the right
charity to dedicate yourself to:
• Charity Navigator- Animals, Arts,
Culture, Humanities, Education,
Environment, Human Services, Public
Benefit
• Network For Good if you want to
donate OR volunteer - Volunteer Match- (a
service of Network for Good)
Tip: don't just volunteer. Ask to join the
board or be the head of a committee. Ask
to help with IT or their web site. Charities
have regular everyday needs, but they have
other needs that you might be a better fit
for if you dig deeper. Alternatively: How
to Disappear Completely
How did you make the most of your new
surroundings last time you moved? Tell us
in the comments.
better to the chile and tomatillo sauce than
chicken breasts. I made these for dinner
tonight and even the kid, my young
nephew, went for seconds. Not a smidgen
of sauce was left on any of our plates.
Continue reading "Chicken Enchiladas
Verdes" »
Tech Tips* Food* 25
Sloppy Joes
By Elise
Submitted at 8/27/2008 7:20:45 AM
Just hearing the words "sloppy joe" from
my mother used to send us kids into a
tizzy. There was something wonderfully
fun about getting to eat a burger/sandwich
that was messy by design. I've been
waiting to make this when my nephew was
in town because sloppy joes really are a
quintessential kid food. Well the kid is
here, and after he explained to me that he
didn't like tomatoes with his hamburger
and he wanted his onions on top, and I
explained to him that sloppy joes are made
with the onions mixed in with the beef, and
he eats spaghetti so what's wrong with
tomatoes, anyway?, he relented. And when
called to dinner he ate the whole thing
(with high praise), even though he had
been making and eating s'mores all day.
(Wouldn't touch the coleslaw though. Kids.
Lest you think we are the ones feeding him
s'mores, he knows how to make them
himself and sneaks into the kitchen when
we aren't looking.)
Continue reading "Sloppy Joes" »
August 2008's
Most Popular Posts
[[this Is Good]]
(Lifehacker)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 10:00:00 AM
Before you dive headfirst into September
tomorrow, make sure you didn't miss the
best posts in August:
• Top 10 How To Videos"Your crafty
older relatives used to have to mail-order
AUGUST page 26
26 Tech Tips* Food*
AUGUST
continued from page 25
their video tutorials or wait for "This Old
House" reruns to get their DIY on, but the
age of streaming video has been good to
those who like to tinker and try out neat
tricks."
• Forget the iPhone—The iPod Touch is
Good Enough"Back in June 2007, I
couldn't convince my wife that checking
my email in grocery lines was worth
$1,320—the cost of an original iPhone and
one year of the cheapest plan."
• Debunking Common Windows
Performance Tweaking Myths"One of my
biggest pet peeves is the plethora of bad
advice littered across almost every web site
dedicated to system tweaking. Besides the
tweaks that simply don't work, some of
them will actually cause your computer to
run even slower—or worse."
• Hack Your Wii for Homebrew Apps
and DVD Playback"Despite the fact that it
ships with a DVD drive, for whatever
godforsaken reason, the Nintendo Wii
doesn't support DVD playback—until last
week, that is, when a homebrew hacker
Lifehacker's Guide to Nabbing the Job
You Want [Job Search]
By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 8/31/2008 11:00:00 AM
Labor Day weekend is the time to say an
unofficial goodbye to summer, to
consistent warm weather, to lighter
clothes—and maybe to the job that's
holding you back. If you're looking to
make the leap into a new gig or an entirely
new career this fall, there are several
online tools and power tips for every stage
of the job-seeking journey. When you hit
your desk on Tuesday morning and quietly
decide to find your escape hatch from your
current position, we've got you covered.
Here's a compilation of our tips and
techniques for finding a job, putting your
best face forward to it, and sticking with a
long-haul job hunt. Photo by Here in Van
Nuys.
Let RSS and email find the job for you
New jobs would be much easier to find if
you didn't have those eight or so hours a
day you spend doing your current job.
Give yourself a break and set up RSS feeds
released a tool that enables DVD playback
on your Wii."
• Mozilla Crowns Best Firefox 3
Extensions"Mozilla Labs announces the
winners of their official Extend Firefox 3
Contest, and they're an impressive crop of
new and updated extensions for your
favorite browser."
• Get Free Airport Wi-Fi with a Simple
URL Hack"Blogger Felix Geisendorfer
points out a clever URL hack that scored
him free Wi-Fi at the Atlanta airport."
• Top 10 YouTube Hacks"Summer's
ending, and with it goes a certain sense of
taking it easier, relaxing a bit at the
office—you know, caching up on all that
YouTube browsing you skip when there's
real work to be done."
• Top 10 Conversation Hacks"A whole
lot more than just words passes between
people who are talking, so a few simple
conversational skills can help you
recognize what's really being said and help
you lead the discussion your way."
• iPhone 2.0 Jailbreak Apps You Can't
for any job list site, and get those feeds
emailed to you before or after work with
our how-to guide.
Shoot for the right salary
Use one or a combination of the popular
salary estimating sites, each of which has
its strengths and quirks, to shape your
answer to the inevitable salary question.
Our commenters generally believe you
can't stonewall an interviewer if they ask,
but you can still see if the employer will
throw the first pitch—if you don't mind a
small stand-off.
Rebuild your resume
Write down everything you're capable of
and then prune it. Avoid the words you've
heard other people use on their resumes.
Keep it one page, even if it's not, or skip it
entirely. There's a lot of advice about a
single sheet of paper out there, and for
good reason. Check out our compilation of
the best tips you didn't already know.
Ace the interview
A true geek doesn't like to show up for
things unprepared, and a job interview is a
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
Find in the iTunes Store"The iTunes' App
Store offers iPhone and iPod touch users
hundreds of applications to install on their
devices, but power users who want
functionality above and beyond what
Apple's SDK allows still want to jailbreak
their device."
• Battle of the Must-Have Firefox
Extensions"Mozilla Labs crowned their
picks of best new and updated Firefox 3
extensions in a recent contest, but what
about best extensions of all time?"
• Five Best To-Do List Managers"If all
the methodology of the best GTD
applications loses you in the productivity
shuffle, there's nothing like a classic,
simple to-do list to keep you on track. "
• Free Replacements for Paid
Tools"There might be no such thing as
truly free beer, but in the world of
computers and software, you can often
brew your own substitutes to premium paid
software and service with just a few double
-clicks and some know-how." Peach Cobbler
By Elise Peaches, nectarines, and all manner of
stone fruit are glorious in summer. Here is
Submitted at 8/19/2008 1:46:22 AM
Updated, from the recipe archive.
My friends know me well. They know if
a simple and delicious peach cobbler
recipe that we've used for several years.
Feel free to experiment with the ratios and
they invite me over and I see that they
have bushels of fresh-picked peaches just
waiting for a home that I will offer my
the fruit. You can easily add in some
blueberries or nectarines. If your peaches
aren't perfectly sweet to begin with, you
great chance to put some of those hacker- own kitchen counter space to take some of may need to add more sugar to the filling.
style skills to use. Social networks, subtle those gorgeous peaches off their hands. Continue reading "Peach Cobbler" »
hypnosis, 100-day plans—there are many Such sacrifice, yes, I know. ;-) (Thanks
more ways to leave a good impression than Suzanne!)
knowing what your greatest weakness is.
Restart a stalled search
As Bruce Wayne's father once said, we
fall so that we can learn to pick ourselves
back up again—geeky reference, but
totally applicable to round two of your
resume packets. After you're done feeling
discouraged, get yourself an expensive-
looking suit on the cheap, work your
current contacts for better leads, and start
writing online about the topics you want to
work in. That and more tips in our guide to
getting back on your feet.
What job-hunting topics did we skip over
entirely? What tech tools or techniques got
you hired that don't fall into any common
advice categories? Give us your elevator
pitch in the comments.
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
Neglecting Palin’s faith, mostly
By Mark Stricherz
Submitted at 8/30/2008 10:30:52 PM
The major news magazines’ coverage of
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s religiosity was
more like that found in newspapers than,
well, magazines. It contained a few facts
but no explanations. While there were a
couple of exceptions to this trend, those
exceptions are instructive.
Time magazine provided the least
information about Palin’s Christianity and
how it shapes her political views. Reporter
Michael Sherer wrote about Palin’s impact
on the female vote this November without
mentioning a) Palin’s faith and b) female
voters tend to be more religious than male
voters.
When Palin’s faith and political views
were mentioned, the reporter did so in a
less than sophisticated way. Take this
passage from Claire Suddath’s story:
She is Christian and pro-life, but also a
supporter of birth control: she’s a member
of Feminists For Life (FFL), an anti-
abortion, pro-contraception organization.
In 2002, she wrote a letter to FFL stating
that she had “adamantly supported our
cause since I first understood, as a child,
the atrocity of abortion.
Perhaps Suddath’s editor removed the
context or explanation of Palin’s faith and
politics. I hope so, because her story would
have been better served had she mentioned
the relationship between her Christian faith
and anti-abortion convictions. As GR
contributors have written, a person need
not be religious to be pro-life, although
religious tradtionalists are more likely to
hold that view.
Newsweek reporters did little better. In
their brief profile of Palin, Evan Thomas
and Karen Breslau mentioned the
governor’s faith only in the context of her
tentative support for teaching creationism
alongside evolution in public schools. The
reporters described her position this way:
Palin said during her run that creationism
should be taught alongside evolution in
Zucchini Bread
By Elise
Submitted at 8/14/2008 8:38:49 PM
I still remember the first time I
encountered zucchini bread as a teenager. I
schools. She was baptized in an Assembly
of God church, a Pentecostal denomination
that believes God created the world at
every step. Maria Comella, a
spokeswoman for the McCain-Palin
campaign, said Palin attends different
churches and does not consider herself
Pentecostal.
This description is better than Suddath’s
above; at least it notes the theology of the
Assemblies of God. Yet the passage does
not quote Palin’s explanation for her view.
And Palin no longer identifies exclusively
as a Pentecostal. So this passage leaves as
many questions as answers.
The two exceptions to this poor to
middling coverage were not magazine
stories. AP reporter Eric Gorski wrote a
characteristically informative religious
profile of Palin that appears on
Newsweeks’ Web site. While most of the
story was of the go-through-the-rolodex-of
-Christian-leaders variety, Gorski deserves
praises for starting to dig beneath the
surface, quoting from Palin’s previous
pastor:
The 44-year-old mother of five, who led
her high school chapter of the Fellowship
of Christian Athletes, was baptized as a
teenager at the Wasilla Assembly of God
Church, where she and her family were
very active, according to her then-pastor,
Paul Riley.
She now sometimes worships at the
Juneau Christian Center, which is also part
of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God, said
Brad Kesler, business administrator of the
denomination’s Alaska District. But her
home church is The Church on the Rock,
an independent congregation, Riley said.
“The church was kind of a foundation for
her,” said Riley, who said he gave the
invocation at Palin’s inauguration and had
her address students at the church last
month.
The other exception was Time reporter
Jay Newton-Small’s interview with Palin.
Rather than being a strict journalism story,
it had a question-and-answer format.
had a hard time getting my mind around
the concept. At the time, zucchini was
something my mom made me eat, and not
anything you would bake into something
sweet. Fortunately, the pathway into my
Small’s questions were interesting, as were
Palin’s answers. One example is this
exchange:
What’s your religion?
Christian.
Any particular. . .?
No. Bible-believing Christian.
What church do you attend?
A non-denominational Bible church. I
was baptized Catholic as a newborn and
then my family started going to non-
denominational churches throughout our
life.
Another example was the previous Q &
naturally resistant-to-new-foods teenage
A in the piece:
Where do you see yourself going?
Staying on in Alaska. Washington?
You know, I don’t know. I knew early on
that the smartest thing for me to do was to
work hard, do the best that I can, make
wise decisions based on good information
in front of me. And then put my life, get
myself on a path that could be dedicated to
God and ask Him what I should next. That
will be the position I will be in as long as
I’m on earth — that is, seeking the right
path that God would have laid out for me.
Give credit to Newton-Small and her
mind had already been cut with carrot
cake. Heck, if you could get something
that good out of carrots, why not zucchini?
After one bite, I was sold forever. Grated
zucchini, mixed into the batter, brings
Religion* Food* 27
employer for interviewing Palin before she
was chosen as McCain’s running mate. By
hedging her bets, Newton-Small told her
readers a lot about Palin’s faith and
religious outlook.
However, I must fault the magazine
reporters for not exploring why Palin
decided to give birth to a son with Down
Syndrome. As Mollie noted, 90 percent of
mothers whose embryo or fetus has Down
Syndrome decide to have the unborn infant
killed. Did Palin’s faith play a role in her
decision? It sounds logical considering her
answer above to Newton-Small. Was it her
non-religious pro-life principles or some
other factor?
Palin’s decision to carry her son to term
is not simply a personal story. It will have
political ramifications. Take this post by
anti-abortion activist Jill Stanek about the
birth of Palin’s fifth child:
But Palin told the Anchorage Daily
News in April, “We knew through early
testing he would face special challenges,
and we feel privileged that God would
entrust us with this gift and allow us
unspeakable joy as he entered our lives.
We have faith that every baby is created
for good purpose and has potential to make
this world a better place. We are truly
blessed.”
Meanwhile, Barack Obama, actively
opposed legislation as IL state senator to
protect little babies with Down syndrome
who had survived their abortions but were
being shelved in a hospital soiled utility
room to die. . ..
Conservative-leaning writer Michael
Barone agrees that Republicans will
contrast Palin’s decision with Obama’s
vote. I expect that more magazine reporters
will dig into Palin’s faith and religious
outlook. But if they don’t and it ends up
affecting the election this November, don’t
say Get Religion did not warn you.
Bookmark to:
moisture and tender texture to what is
essentially a spice cake.
Continue reading "Zucchini Bread" »
28 Religion* Food*
One, two, three — find faith (updated)
By tmatt
Submitted at 8/29/2008 2:38:03 PM
To tell you the truth, I don’t have much to
say about the press coverage of the religion
elements of Sen. Barack Obama’s speech
from the mountaintop (of course, Denver is
located on the high plains, but you know
what I mean). I don’t have much to say
because the mainstream press doesn’t have
much to say about the topic.
Let’s see. Let’s study holy writ, by
calling up the New York Times lead story
on the speech— “Obama Takes Aim at
Bush and McCain With a Forceful Call to
Change America” — and run a few
searches.
“Faith” — Not found.
“Repent” — Not found.
“Prayer” — Not found.
“Christian” — Not found.
OK, I’ll try it. “Muslim” — Not found.
OK, how about “abortion” or “gay”? Not
found.
OK, let’s try the sidebar about the speech
itself. That’s not very inspiring, either.
Now, remember that we’re talking about
the Times coverage of the speech — not
the speech itself.
The author of a book analyzing the “ I
Have A Dream Speech” by the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr., once told me that
the great preacher carried a political speech
to the podium, that day, but ended up
throwing it aside and giving a sermon.
Based on the coverage, reporters half
expected the old Obama to speak,
delivering a soaring civil-religion sermon
based on his attempts to reconcile his
liberal Protestantism with an appeal to
traditional Catholics and Protestants.
Instead, it appears that most think he —
Welcome Jaden!
By Elise
Submitted at 8/20/2008 3:50:22 PM
The first time I stumbled upon Jaden
Hair's Steamy Kitchen food blog I had
major blog envy. Who was this hilarious
and irreverent woman? And how was it
that she could make food look that good? I
was hooked, an early convert to Jaden's
humor, playfulness, and drop-dead
metaphorically speaking — threw away
the sermon and decided to give a political
speech that included a few inspirational
flourishes ( The Politico kind of agrees). In
other words, if you read the coverage, it
appears that Obama went old school, when
it comes to speaking to Democrats. This
was not the new prophet of post-partisan
America.
Now, if you are interested in the actual
religious content of the speech, you need to
head over to the weblog at Christianity
Today, where Ted Olsen, Sarah Pulliam
and Co. have quite a bit of interesting
material for you to read. As always, the
progressive side of the evangelical world
remains very, very interested in all things
Obama. Amen.
This short note from Collin Hansen is
especially interesting:
I doubt any commentators will accuse
Sen. Barack Obama of using religious code
language in his acceptance speech. Yet two
famous New Testament passages made an
appearance. As is typical of civil religion
today, God was replaced by the “American
promise.”
“Instead, it is that American spirit — that
American promise — that pushes us
forward even when the path is uncertain;
that binds us together in spite of our
differences; that makes us fix our eye not
on what is seen, but what is unseen, that
better place around the bend,” Obama said,
borrowing from 2 Corinthians 4:18.
Obama then concluded his remarks this
way: “Let us keep that promise — that
American promise — and in the words of
Scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to
the hope that we confess.”
This statement comes from Hebrews
10:23. But the context of this passage
delicious Asian food. (Actually, not only
Asian food, take a look at this post on
cooking steak, and her fresh ginger tips.)
explains something far more beautiful than
the American promise. “Therefore,
brothers, since we have confidence to enter
the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus,
by a new and living way opened for us
through the curtain, that is, his body, and
since we have a great priest over the house
of God, let us draw near to God with a
sincere heart in full assurance of faith,
having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us
from a guilty conscience and having our
bodies washed with pure water” (Heb.
10:19-22).
The omnipresent Ted Olsen also
analyzed the“traditional values” piece of
the speech, which tried to reassure people
in red pews, while drawing cheers from
people in blue pews. It is crucial to note
that he did not take a position one way or
the other on same-sex marriage and, yes,
note that the goal is to reduce unwanted
pregnancies, not reduce the number of
abortions.
Thus, Obama offered the following:
We may not agree on abortion, but surely
we can agree on reducing the number of
unwanted pregnancies in this country. The
reality of gun ownership may be different
for hunters in rural Ohio than for those
plagued by gang-violence in Cleveland,
but don’t tell me we can’t uphold the
Second Amendment while keeping AK-
47s out of the hands of criminals. I know
there are differences on same-sex
marriage, but surely we can agree that our
gay and lesbian brothers and sisters
deserve to visit the person they love in the
hospital and to live lives free of
discrimination.
Did I miss it? Was there any kind of
reference to his call for an expanded faith-
based initiative, his outreach to faith-based
Well, with the eyes of the world on
Beijing this week, I'm delighted to let you
know that Jaden will be guest authoring a
series on Simply Recipes, focusing on
classic Chinese American food recipes. In
her first post Jaden shares her mom's
secrets to perfect fried rice. Welcome to
Simply Recipes, Jaden!
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
groups that are willing to surrender their
right to hire staff members who share their
doctrines and beliefs? That is an interesting
point of silence, in the press and in the
speech.
However, I was especially interested in
CT’s highly detailed coverage of the
origins (he talked to Billy Graham) and
text of the Rev. Joel Hunter’s prayer, since
he was the only Republican evangelical
that I am aware of he spoke last night and,
well, he had the last word.
And what was the most telling part of
this prayer? Hunter attempted free speech.
Now I interrupt this prayer for a closing
instruction. I want to personalize this. I
want this to be a participatory prayer. And
so therefore, because we are in a country
that is still welcoming all faiths, I would
like all of us to close this prayer in the way
your faith tradition would close your
prayer. So on the count of three, I want all
of you to end this prayer, your prayer, the
way you usually end prayer. You ready?
One, two, three.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Please let me know if you see solid
mainstream coverage of the faith elements
of the speech, such as the context of
Obama’s scriptural references. I will, of
course, keep reading.
UPDATE: The ties that bind! Rod
“friend of this blog” Dreher has a giant
post up online showing the strong ties of
this Obama speech to the acceptance
speeches of Sen. John Kerry and Vice
President Al Gore. Old-guard political
speeches for a political night.
Bookmark to:
Mild case of Christian-
versus-Hindu violence
By tmatt
Submitted at 8/30/2008 4:41:26 PM
Please read the following section of a
report from the Catholic News Service,
which includes material from a hospirtal
bed interview with Father Thomas Chellen,
the 55-year-old director of the Catholic
pastoral center at Konjamendi in the Indian
state of Orissa:
Following the Aug. 23 murder of a
Hindu leader, Swami Laxmanananda
Saraswati, by Maoist extremists, Father
Chellen said Hindu mobs started attacking
Christian centers in Kandhamal, the district
where the slain leader was based.. . .
“They began our crucifixion parade,” said
Father Chellen. The gang of about 50
armed Hindus “beat us up and led us like
culprits along the road” to the burned
pastoral center. “There they tore my shirt
and started pulling off the clothes of the
nun. When I protested, they beat me hard
with iron rods. Later, they took the sister
inside (and) raped her while they went on
kicking and teasing me, forcing (me) to say
vulgar words,” said the priest who has
cuts, bruises and swollen tissue all over his
body and stitches on his face.
“Later both of us, half-naked, were taken
to the street, and they ordered me to have
sex with the nun in public, saying nuns and
priests do it. As I refused, they went on
beating me and dragged us to the nearby
government office. Sadly, a dozen
policemen were watching all this,” he said.
Angry at his plea to the police for help,
the mob beat the bleeding priest again.
This situation is totally out of control and
you can find more reports on the violence
at this weblog — Orissa Burning.
Or you can go read a very, very low-key
MILD page 31
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
The barracuda is a believer
By Mollie
Submitted at 8/29/2008 6:07:52 PM
I’m still in Denver recovering from the
awesome experience of covering the
Democratic National Convention. I have
no idea how reporters can work this hard
and with these long hours and then turn
around and do it all again next week in St.
Paul.
But before the dew even dried this
morning, there was the surprise
announcement that Alaska Governor Sarah
Palin (nickname: Barracuda) had been
chosen to round out the Republican ticket.
Immediately I had reporters asking me if I
knew anything about her religious
background. If former Massachusetts
governor Mitt Romney or Connecticut Sen.
Joe Lieberman — two names on Sen. John
McCain’s short list — had been picked,
there would have been plenty of ink spilled
already on their religious views. But Palin
is a complete dark horse.
She is known for being both personally
and politically pro-life. While currently 90
percent of children with Down Syndrome
are aborted, Palin gave birth to her fifth
child — a son with Down Syndrome —
earlier this year. And she’s both culturally
and economically conservative.
I found a lengthy Alaska Daily News
profile from 2006 that has some
information:
Palin’s parents say they are not political
and don’t know how she decided to turn
her ambition and work ethic toward
politics. Her Christian faith, they say, came
from her mother, who took her children to
area Bible churches as they were growing
up (Sarah is the third of four siblings).
They say her faith has been steady since
high school, when she led the Fellowship
of Christian Athletes, and grew stronger as
she sought out believers in her college
years. Palin doesn’t brandish her religion
on the campaign trail, but that doesn’t
prevent others from doing so.
There was also this:
A significant part of Palin’s base of
support lies among social and Christian
conservatives. Her positions on social
issues emerged slowly during the
campaign: on abortion (should be banned
for anything other than saving the life of
the mother), stem cell research (opposed),
physician-assisted suicide (opposed),
creationism (should be discussed in
schools), state health benefits for same-sex
partners (opposed, and supports a
constitutional amendment to bar them).
Queerty(motto: “Free of an agenda,
except that gay one”) reports that she’s “
relatively good on gay issues”:
While she opposes gay marriage - as all
the national contenders do - Palin’s
frequently come out in support of her gay
friends and insists she’s open to
discussions on discrimination legislation.
Palin told an Alaska newspaper that she’s
Religion* 29
“not out to judge” gay people. She went on
to say that she believes “that honoring the
family structure is that important,” and
would thus oppose a gay marriage
measure. She previously supported a 1998
bill to ban gay marriage.
Despite her opposition to same-sex
nuptials, Palin helped move Alaska toward
a more inclusive frontier in 2006 when she
blocked a bill that would have prohibited
gay benefits in the state.
As the media get acquainted with this
fishing, mooseburger-eating former beauty
contestant, there will be lots of discussion
over her faith and values. The Boston
Globe is gathering information already.
How will everyone else handle it?
This early Bloomberg report hinted at
some of the issues:
Palin should also ease the worries of the
Republican Party’s social conservative
base. Abortion foes have been skittish
about McCain, who supports stem-cell
research and has said he wants to broaden
the party’s plank on abortion to include
exceptions in cases of rape and when the
life of the mother is at risk.
Palin has a strong anti-abortion record.
She is a member of Feminists for Life, a
group that works to make health-care and
child-care resources available to “pregnant
or parenting students,” according to the
group’s Web site.
The story went on to quote social
conservatives calling the pick a “grand
slam.” Whether or not that’s true, this will
certainly have implications in decisions
religious voters will be making. We’ll
watch for coverage of that angle.
Bookmark to:
30 Religion*
What did Bob Casey say?
By Mark Stricherz
Submitted at 8/28/2008 9:52:58 PM
A few weeks ago, I criticized a New York
Times story about Sen. Bob Casey, Jr.’s
expected speech at the Democratic
convention partly on the grounds that the
story failed to specify its nature. Would
Casey address his opposition to legal
abortion or some other topic, such as the
economy or Barack Obama’s skills on the
basketball court? The story never said.
Today I criticize an Associated Press
story for a related fault. See if you can
catch it. Reporter Kimberly Hefling began
her story this way:
Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey invoked
his late father’s name Tuesday night and
referred to his own opposition to abortion
rights from the podium of the Democratic
convention—16 years after his father was
denied the same privilege.
While he spoke only briefly during the
speech on the issue of abortion, it was
intended to send a message: Sen. Barack
Obama supports abortion rights, but
accepts those like Casey who oppose
abortion rights.
In 1992, Casey’s father, the late
Pennsylvania Gov. Robert P. Casey, was
denied a prime-time slot to speak in
opposition to abortion rights, which
created a rift within the party.
“Barack Obama and I have an honest
disagreement on the issue of abortion,”
Casey said. “But the fact that I’m speaking
here tonight is testament to Barack’s
ability to show respect for the views of
people who may disagree with him.”
That description might sound
unobjectionable, but read closer. It is more
conclusory than factual.
Hefling asserts that Casey “referred” to
his pro-life views. No, he did not. Casey
alluded to them. There is a difference.
Casey did not say that he is pro life or an
abortion foe; he said that he and Obama
differ on the issue of abortion. The nature
of that difference was not mentioned.
By failing to characterize Casey’s
remarks accurately, Hefling’s story gives
the false impression of unity between pro-
life and pro-choice Democrats. Had she
been more careful about describing
Casey’s speech, she would have avoided
this misimpression.
A reporter who got the story right was
James O’Toole of the Pittsburgh Post-
Gazette. Instead of jumping to conclusions,
O’Toole let his subject speak. Consider his
description of Casey’s remarks Tuesday
night:
A generation after his father was barred
from the podium of the Democratic
National Convention, Sen. Bob Casey Jr.
invoked his name as he depicted Sen.
Barack Obama as a force for tolerance on
an issue that continues to divide
Democrats.
“I’m honored to stand before you as Gov.
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Bob Casey’s son,” the senator said as he
took the stage of the Pepsi Center. Later,
he urged the delegates to rally to the
candidate he had endorsed before the
Pennsylvania primary, calling him, “a
leader who, as Lincoln said, appeals to ‘the
better angels of our nature.’ “
“Barack Obama and I have an honest
disagreement on the issue of abortion,”
said the lawmaker, who is an abortion foe.
“But the fact that I’m speaking here
tonight is a testament to Barack’s ability to
show respect for the views of people who
disagree with him.”
Even better, O’Toole let his subject
speak again, this time via an interview with
Casey. Casey’s comments were more than
revealing; they contradicted Hefling’s
implication that pro-choice Democrats had
welcomed pro-lifers back into the
presidential wing of the party’s tent:
When asked about the relative lack of
intra-party unrest over the fact that Mr.
Obama was reported to have at least
considered several anti-abortion
Democrats as running mates, however, Mr.
Casey said, “Let’s be candid. I don’t think
we’re at the point where our party could
nominate someone who is pro-life. . .
maybe even at the vice presidential level.”
It would be unfair to criticize Hefling
unduly. Her job at the AP is to get the
story right and right away. At a nominating
convention, that is a tall order. But
uncovering the truth demands being up to
the task.
(Photo by Chad Briggs used under a
Creative Commons license.)
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Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
It’s a doctrine, not a choice
By Mollie
Submitted at 8/28/2008 5:12:15 PM
Since Daniel noted Nancy Pelosi’s
attempt at a Roman Catholic theological
defense of abortion, bishops throughout the
country have given her a bit of a beatdown.
With so many prominent Catholics in
this country articulating ideas not shared
by the Catholic Church — or willfully
disobeying Catholic teaching — bishops
have been known to respond publicly. Tim
Townsend wrote all about this all the time
in his beat covering Archbishop Burke —
a notable combatant of what is termed
scandal.
This intersection of religion and politics
is like catnip for the press. TMatt looked at
some of the major coverage through
yesterday.
But one story in particular deserves
praise. Religion reporter Rachel Zoll’s
piece for the Associated Press is, as it
should be, heavier on theology than
politics. Here’s how she sets it up:
Politics can be treacherous. But House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi walked on even
riskier ground in a recent TV interview
when she attempted a theological defense
of her support for abortion rights.
Roman Catholic bishops consider her
arguments on St. Augustine and free will
so far out of line with church teaching that
they have issued a steady stream of
statements to correct her.
Zoll sums up the week of rebuke from
various church leaders, including cardinals
and archbishops from Washington,
Philadelphia, New York and Denver. The
latest came from Pittsburgh Bishop David
Zubik and her hometown Archbishop
George Niderauer of San Francisco has
announced he’ll be taking up the issue in
his next newsletter. Zoll also describes
Pelosi’s Catholic credentials and self-
proclaimed love for her church. She notes,
as has been previously reported, Pelosi’s
defense of her remarks despite the
criticism. Here’s where it gets juicy:
But whether or not parishioners choose
to accept it, the theology on the procedure
is clear. From its earliest days, Christianity
has considered abortion evil.
“This teaching has remained unchanged
and remains unchangeable,” according to
the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
“Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion
willed either as an end or a means, is
gravely contrary to the moral law.”
It is true that Christians were well known
for their unpopular opposition to abortion
and infanticide in their earliest days. In
recent decades, some Protestant church
bodies have defended the practice. So
what’s going on with Pelosi’s invocation
of Augustine? Zoll provides some helpful
context:
The Rev. Douglas Milewski, a Seton
Hall University theologian who specializes
in Augustine, said Pelosi seems to be
confusing church teaching on abortion
with the theological debate over when a
fetus receives a soul.
“Saint Augustine wondered about the
stages of human development before birth,
how this related to the question of
ensoulment and what it meant for life in
the Kingdom of God,” Milewski said.
The article goes on to explain that,
according to the Catholic Bishops,
ensoulment was an important issue for
determining church penalties for procuring
abortions not for deciding whether
abortion is ever permissible.
The article also explains that parishioners
are not permitted to choose what to believe
about Catholic teaching. That includes this
helpful angle about how church teaching
should affect voting:
Catholic theologians today
overwhelmingly consider debate over the
morality of abortion settled. Thinkers and
activists who attempt to challenge the
theology are often considered on the
fringes of church life.
However, there is a rigorous debate over
how the teaching should guide voters and
public officials. Are Catholics required to
choose the candidate who opposes
abortion? Or can they back a politician
based on his or her policies on reducing,
not outlawing, the procedure?
You’ll have to read the rest of the piece
to get the answers the questions. This
Pelosi story has needed such thoughtful
and comprehensive treatment and it’s nice
to see that done in the mainstream media
and not just the Catholic press.
Bookmark to:
MILD
continued from page 28
New York Times report that skated right
by me in the online version of the
newspaper. Perhaps it was that strong,
passionate headline: “ Faiths Clash,
Displacing Thousands in East India.”
There we read the following. Now tell
me if you think the Times buried the lede
on this one.
At least 3,000 people, most of them
Christians, are living in government-run
relief camps after days of Christian-versus-
Hindu violence in eastern India,
government officials said.
The government said that many people
were also living in the jungle without any
shelter or security because of the tensions,
which erupted in violence after a Hindu
leader was killed Saturday. At least 10
people, most of them Christians, have been
killed since.
Christian community leaders say that at
least 1,000 homes of Christians have been
set on fire since Monday, rendering more
than 5,000 people homeless. Many of those
living in the jungle were without food or
water, said the Rev. Dibakar Parichha, a
priest at the Roman Catholic church in
Phulbani, a town in Orissa State. Father
Parichha said that about 90 places of
worship, including small churches and
prayer halls, had been burned down. Local
officials said the figure was about 20.
The violence has occurred in
Kandhamal, a district in Orissa State that
has a history of communal and ethnic
clashes. The latest conflict started Saturday
night, when unidentified armed men
stormed a Hindu school in Kandhamal and
killed the Hindu leader Laxmanananda
Saraswati and four of his followers.
The police suspected that Maoist rebels
were responsible. But Hindus blamed
Christians.
Now, if you read that this was “Christian
-versus-Hindu violence” and then you read
that the riots began with the death of a
Hindu leader, what would you assume?
Let’s see, that would be Christians
attacking Hindus and a Hindu leader was
killed, thus leading to violence in which
Hindus responded to the violence against
them.
Read the above passage again. Way, way
later we find out that the Hindu leader was,
Religion* 31
apparently, killed by “Maoist rebels.” The
world does not contain many Catholic nuns
and priests who are “Maoist rebels.” The
Times reports that “police suspected” that
Maoists did the deed. Catholic News
Service reports this murder as fact.
Instead of offering a hat tip to Rod
“friend of this blog” Dreher on this one, let
me share a piece of his post on this — in
my opinion — bizarre little story in our
culture’s newspaper of record.
Ah, yes, “faiths clash;” what’s next for
the Times, reporting a gang rape by saying,
“Sexes clash”? I’ve noticed this over the
years when the MSM reports on violence
members of other religions inflict on a
Christian minority in a faraway land: they
tend to present it as Just One of Those
Things — that is, as if there really were no
victims, only clashing parties. I noticed it
six years ago, when Baptist medical
missionaries serving the poor in Shia-
controlled Lebanon were murdered by
Muslims. The reporting I read framed it as
a “faiths clash” deal. You know, Muslims
and Christians are fighting, who can say
who’s right, yadda yadda. . .
In a way, I think the opening of the
Times story is worse than that — it
suggests the exact opposite of what
appears to be happening. Again, the story
says this is a case of “Christian-versus-
Hindu violence.”
I will try to keep an eye on this one,
seeking reporting that documents the role
of the Maoists in triggering this. If there
has been violence by Christians, in
response, it would be good to see that
documented, too.
However, I will end with a final quote
from the Catholic News Service report:
Asked about the how the nun coped with
the trauma, Father Chellen said: “We had
no option and were simply following their
commands. We resisted as much as we
could. This is like being tortured for
Christ.”
Photo: From the World Prout Assembly
website, a photo from earlier riots in the
region.
Bookmark to:
32 Religion*
“She’s a witch, she’s a mother . . .”
By Mollie
Submitted at 8/31/2008 10:07:14 PM
Well, I think it’s safe to say that the
mainstream media are struggling with Sen.
John McCain’s pick for vice president. He
clearly threw a curveball and they are
working overtime to report more on Gov.
Sarah Palin of Alaska. Writing about
someone who hasn’t attended Washington
cocktail parties or has never even appeared
a single time on “Meet the Press” can be
difficult. Sometimes we see some
mistakes.
Far and away my favorite one was found
on The New Republic’s site in an essay
written by the very respectable Alan
Wolfe. The essay is really interesting and
discusses what the Palin pick means for the
supposedly in-play “evangelical” vote:
Sarah Palin named two of her children
after witches, once took drugs, and refused
to sign a bill forbidding domestic benefits
for gay couples. Any one of
these—especially the first—would raise
suspicion in the eyes of a traditional
Southern Baptist. But for the governor of a
Western state, these are not only the kinds
of things a conservative can do, they are
also the kinds of things an evangelical can
do. Palin, the gun-toting mom, has a
libertarian streak in politics and a
libertarian streak in religion. In neither
case are they fully consistent; she seems to
have a soft spot for creationism, for
example, and no doubt she will profess
support for the highly punitive Republican
Party platform. But it is already clear that
her style of evangelicalism is one shaped
by the region of the country in which she
lives.
NEWSWEEK
continued from page 32
Sept. 11. Would Meacham have been so
silent about Falwell’s controversial views?
I doubt it. As Mollie noted, too many
reporters have one standard for old
Mainline churches such as the UCC and
another standard for evangelical churches.
Newsweek’s story overall was well
reported and informative. But this one flub
Will any of this prevent Southern
Baptists from voting for her? My guess is
probably not, so long as she panders to
them. But while Palin may be quickly
endorsed by men speaking in Southern
accents, she is neither a Billy Graham nor
a Jimmy Carter. American evangelicalism,
like John McCain, has many mansions.
Sarah Palin inhabits only one of them.
The essay makes several good points
(with inexplicably hostile language, but
leaves you wondering whether the story
really got religion.
(Photo of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright,
Jr. by talkradionews.com used under at
Creative Commons license.)
Bookmark to:
Daily -Click and Print- Newspaper
whatever) and I’m glad, as a libertarian,
that someone is noticing Palin’s libertarian
streak. But read that first part again. Did
she really name two of her children after
witches? Hunh?
Apparently that “fact” came from
someone you should be careful taking
seriously: the once-interesting Andrew
Sullivan. He alleged that the children were
named after television show witches based
on, um, reader email. Never mind that the
dates don’t match up.
Leave it to a gossip magazine —
People— to resort to old-style reporting
tactics and simply ask the Palins why they
named their children the way they did:
Where do your children’s names come
from?
TODD: Sarah’s parents were coaches
and the whole family was involved in track
and I was an athlete in high school, so with
our first-born, I was, like, ‘Track!’ Bristol
is named after Bristol Bay. That’s where I
grew up, that’s where we commercial fish.
Willow is a community there in Alaska.
And then Piper, you know, there’s just not
too many Pipers out there and it’s a cool
name. And Trig is a Norse name for
“strength.”
Newsweek apologia for
So, not witches. Before this meme gets
too carried away, it would be good for
reporters to remember to get their facts
Pastor Wright
By Mark Stricherz church lobby and the kente cloth that
straight. Alan Wolfe makes some drapes its altar. But Wright’s ideas about
interesting points in the type of piece that Submitted at 8/30/2008 12:28:32 AM
Africa were more than decorative. Wright
adds context to the race, but he undercuts Newsweek published an interesting but taught that African- Americans should be
them by playing fast and loose with the uneven cover story about Barack Obama’s proud of their African heritage, of the
facts. relationship with his father and father stories of slavery and freedom handed
Bookmark to: figures. down by their grandparents and great-
The story was interesting because it grandparents. He also preached that people
contained plenty of good journalism about should feel a financial and social
Obama’s personal relationships, such as a responsibility to their brothers and sisters
quote from Obama about his faith and the
perspective of the teacher whose classroom
in Africa, especially those without food
and water, those with chronic or incurable
Obama Sr. met his son for the first time. disease, those without any education.
But it was uneven because it also He also preached. . . well, you can fill in
contained little more than an apologia for the blank ( here and here). See what I
the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright. mean? Meacham did not describe Wright
Toward the end of the story, Newsweek as a journalist would, characterizing the
editor and resident civil theologian Jon man’s theology in full. He described him
Meacham got around to explaining why as an apologist would, characterizing his
Obama joined Trinity United Church of theology in the most anodyne and positive
Christ in Chicago. In the course of his terms.
explanation, Meacham described Wright’s Imagine if Obama had joined the church
theology this way: of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, he of the
Much has been written about the famous quote about the true origins of
“Africentrism” of Trinity: the African-
American Last Supper that hangs in the NEWSWEEK page 32