Conferences
#afn America’s Future Monday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/01/2009 - 15:41It is 3 PM of the first day of the America’s Future Now conference and already I am on overload. There are breakout sessions now, but instead, I’ve headed back to the Bloggers Boulevard to try and make sense out of some of my notes.
Perhaps one of the important storylines of the first day of the conference can be summed up with a comment that Gov. Dean said during a press conference. There is an old debate whenever a new President comes to Washington. Will Washington change the President or will the President change Washington. Most people pick Washington changing the President, and in most cases they are right. It is up to us to make sure that this time they are wrong.
It takes me back to a comment that Robert L. Borosage, the co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, made in his opening remarks. Are progressives with Obama, or are we pushing the President? There is one clear answer to that. Yes. Another person commented on Twitter the way progressives should approach President Obama’s policies is “Support but verify”
Ilyse Hogue, Campaign Director for MoveOn.org, had perhaps the snarkiest comment about this. She noted that the media likes “hot dem-on-dem action” for their tabloid journalism, but it is up to all of us to return the discussion back to what America wants and needs.
What America most needs right now is a public health care option, and this was the topic for a lunchtime press conference. Robert Borosage was joined by Anna Burger of Change to Win, Gov. Howard Dean, Richard Kirsch, national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now, Wade Henderson, President and CEO of Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Celinda Lake of Lake Research Partners. They spoke about their campaign to fight for health care and noted that it was an outside the beltway effort. They noted that research by Lake Research Partners showed that nationwide, non-supervisory workers are more concerned about losing their jobs and health care than other issues. They have moved away from Reaganomics to recognize that the Government can and should play an important role in protecting the American Dream.
All of this will not go on without a struggle, and Lawrence Lessig, a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society spoke about the key issue underlying whether or not we would get meaningful health care reform, any sort of meaningful reform, and perhaps ultimately what is necessary to make sure that Washington does not prevent President Obama from achieving his agenda.
He spoke about the Fair Elections Now Act, which is sponsored by Rep. Larson from Connecticut and co-sponsored by the whole Connecticut Congressional Delegation. There were many other great speakers, including Ethan Nadelmann, the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance who spoke passionately about the need to stop the prison industrial complex and bring about meaningful drug law reform, and Professor Emma Coleman Jordan of Georgetown Law who spoke brilliantly about economic justice in legal theory.
There were plenty of other great speakers, and I’m sure that there are some other great speakers at the breakout sessions that I am missing. But now, I’ve taken my first brain dump. I can walk around for a little bit, clear my brain, and prepare to hear Gov. Dean’s session in about half an hour.
Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit, #afn, #jjb, #etc
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/01/2009 - 09:15Like every month, I start off my blog posts with “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit”, based on the childhood meme that saying this would bring good luck for the month. I may need a bit of luck to get through the first few days of this month.
Currently, I am sitting on the Bloggers Boulevard at the America’s Future Now conference in Washington DC. I’ll try to get some of my other work done while I’m here, but I expect the conference will take up much of my focus. This is followed by Internet Week in NYC. There are a lot of neat events happening there as well, and I’ll miss the first few days.
As a note to people that follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, or similar sites, be prepared for a lot of tweets from me over the coming week.
Back in Connecticut, it is the final few days of the regular session of the Connecticut General Assembly. My email box is full of messages about bills which may or may not see the light of day on the floor of the house, as well as messages asking me to encourage Gov. Rell to sign one bill or another. Kim is likely to be working long hours as well as she works to shepherd her bills through the State Legislature.
Also in Connecticut this evening is the 61st annual Jefferson Jackson Bailey dinner, a fundraiser for the Connecticut Democratic Party. There is bound to be plenty of positioning, both publicly and privately for various slots on upcoming tickets.
State Representative James Spallone will be testing the waters with his exploratory committee, hoping to gather support for a run for Secretary of State. With his experience as chair of the Government Administration and Elections Committee, Co-Chair of the Municipal Ethics Task Force and Vice Chair of the Judiciary Committee, Rep. Spallone is well positioned for the run.
Others are bound to speculate whether or not Attorney General Dick Blumenthal might be in line for some sort of Federal Judgeship in the event that Judge Sotomayor gets confirmed and opens up a slot at the Second Circuit.
It will also be interesting to watch the positioning in the 2010 U.S. Senate race. While Sen. Dodd is widely respected, there are two Democratic candidates exploring a race. Merrick Alpert is busy repeating Republican talking points on Fox News and not managing to add any substance to the discussion. Roger Pearson has been quietly placing calls and visiting Democratic Town Committee meetings and seems to be more focused on a serious discussion about the issues with the incumbent Senator. We will see which, if either of these strategies gains any traction.
On Tuesday, the positioning will continue on the local level as Genevieve Salvatore is expected to announce an exploratory committee in Milford for a possible run for Mayor.
With all of this, it would be great to simply collapse next weekend and try to recover, but that isn’t likely either. The Massachusetts Democratic Party will be holding their annual convention in Springfield. I plan on covering a little bit of this, as well as speaking on a panel.
Before I know it, I will be saying “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit” to great the month of July. I’ve got plenty scheduled for that month as well, but hopefully many of the events will be much more restful. With all of that, if you don’t see me as much on some of the more social blogging sites over the coming days, I’m not leaving, I’m just swamped.
Tinkering with Students’ Lives
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 05/29/2009 - 17:49
In December 1965, a thirteen year old student wore a black armband to school to protest the Vietnam war. It was a small act, and did not lead to any immediate de-escalation of the conflict in Vietnam. She probably didn’t expect her arm band to end the war, but she also probably didn’t expect it to change her life, and the life of others that way it did.
Four years later, the Supreme Court ruled that the school violated Ms. Tinker’s First Amendment Freedom of Speech when they sent her home for wearing that armband.
Last night, she spoke at the ACLU of Connecticut’s Milton Sorokin Symposium, “Students and Schools Pushing the Limits of Free Speech”. The evening started off with Justice Richard N. Palmer presenting the 2009 First Amendment Essay Contest winners. These students had written essays on the topic, “In what circumstance should a school be able to punish students for their speech off campus?”
The evening was moderated by Laurie Perez of Fox 61 News who has written about the Doninger case and noted that this case is the most searched item on the Fox 61 News website.
Many lawyers seemed star struck to be in the presence of a plaintiff of such an important Supreme Court case. What sort of message would Ms. Tinker deliver? How had the event changed her life? What were the influences that led her to wearing the arm band on that fateful day, and what had her life turned out to be like forty years later?
Ms. Tinker spoke about her father being a Methodist minister and how she had been brought up with the exhortation to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. She spoke about moving out of one town because of her father’s involvement in the Civil Rights movement and dinner time discussions about her parents’ experiences going to register voters in the south in 1964.
She commented that “That’s the sort of person I want to be, to stand up for what is right”, and spoke about the importance of telling stories not only about Cinderella, but also about brave people who stood up for what they believed in.
Clearly, her parents’ simple acts of courage had a hand in shaping her life, as did her experiences with the famous lawsuit. She became a nurse and works mostly with trauma patients; gunshots, knifings, and accidents. She spends her free time going from one event to another, trying to help students find their voices, to stand up for themselves, and to lead the way to a better world.
She spoke as a nurse, recognizing that one of the most important things a student can do for their long term health is graduate from high school. She spoke about advocating for ‘democratic schools’ and noted that a punitive approach to education, especially regarding what happens beyond the school yard gate drives students away from schools. She talked about the problems with the school to prison pipeline.
In many ways, her talk could be summed up in the simple words she often tells students, “You are going to make history with your small actions or inactions”. As she spoke, I thought of a different quote from Robert Kennedy:
"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
Her parents sent forth a tiny ripple of hope, it crossed the ripple of hope she and her fellow students sent out, it now crosses the ripples of hope sent out by the students whose lives she has touched as she goes around the country encouraging students to speak up.
After she spoke, Patrice McCarthy, Deputy Director and General Counsel for the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education spoke. It must be following such a powerful speaker, but Ms. McCarthy held her own and her remarks and the question and answer period deserve their own post.
So, I put up my blog posts and wonder what sort of effect my small actions might make. I wonder about the actions of other bloggers I visit online. We may never see the effect of our actions the way Ms. Tinker has, but we should all keep to our little actions and our hopes for a better world.
Google Adword Trademarks: Stratton Faxon and The Coalition of Immokalee Farm Workers
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 05/27/2009 - 21:21The Connecticut Law Tribune has a current article about the law firm Stratton and Faxon suing Google over the rights to their name. A marketing firm working on behalf of Silver, Golub & Teitell, a Stamford based law firm, apparently bought the adwords. The article reports that Michael Stratton has said they are “going to sue Google and ... ask the Connecticut Bar Association for an ethics opinion.”
The article states, “The Stratton Faxon complaint against Google alleges tortious interference with a business relationship, violation of the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act, and unjust enrichment, on grounds that Google pays nothing for selling the Stratton Faxon name.”
It is an interesting approach to an ongoing legal issue. Last year, Ars Technical had an article about Rescuecom, a computer repair firm which sued Google in 2004 “for allowing competitors to purchase advertisements that would appear when a user conducted a search for the keyword ‘rescuecom.’” That case was dismissed by a Federal Judge in 2006, been appealed and is now heading towards trial.
In that case, the Electronic Freedom Foundation filed a brief of Amicus Curiae in support of Google. In their introduction, they argue:
Submit the search term “McDonald’s” to Google’s search engine and among the “sponsored links” that appear in response you may encounter a link for “The Coalition of Immokalee Farm workers,” a community-based organization that supports the rights of low-wage workers in Florida. The Coalition was recognized recently in the national news for leading a successful boycott of the restaurant chain Taco Bell that resulted in improved wage and working conditions for tomato pickers in the Taco Bell supply chain… Recently, the Coalition turned its attention to McDonald’s practices and, as part of its public campaign for working condition and wage improvements, decided to purchase sponsored links on Google to help stimulate public debate and mobilize support.
This is an example of the important free speech activity that search engines help facilitate. It is also an example of the kind of Constitutionally-protected activity that would be disrupted were this Court to adopt the arguments urged by Appellant Rescuecom.
I strongly support the position of EFF on the Rescuecom case and believe their argument applies very well in the Stratton Faxon case. In April 2006, the advertising firm Warren Kremer Paino Advertising LLC brought a law suit against Lance Dutton of the “Maine Web Report”. Mr. Dutton had been publishing a series of articles criticizing Warren Kremer and the Maine Department of Tourism.
The Citizen Media Law Project reports that “Warren Kremer voluntarily dismissed the suit after a month, after facing extensive criticism on blogs and websites.” Part of that criticism was an adwords campaign that I purchased from Google. People searching on “Warren Kremer Paino Advertising” would find a paid advertisement for my blog which I described as “Orient Lodge: Poking fun at stupid advertising firms”. I wrote about the case in a blog post entitled The way life shouldn’t be.
While many much more notable bloggers wrote much more eloquently about the case, I would like to think that my blog post and Google Adwords campaign highlighting my blog added at least a little bit to the extensive criticism on blogs and websites that led Warren Kremer to voluntarily dismiss the suit.
Should cases like the Rescuecom case, the Stratton Faxon case prevail and several others that are emerging, I believe it will be part of further eroding of free speech online.
I am not a lawyer and certainly am in no position to file a brief in any of these cases. Instead, I am a blogger, so I’ll share my ideas here and hope that saner minds prevail in the cases being considered.
(Cross-posted at Digiday:Daily.)
A Tale of Two Conferences
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 09:09Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?
In many ways, the Digital Publishing and Advertising Conference on May 12th was two different conferences. It was a conference for publishers and a conference for advertisers. It was a conference for people concerned about the decline of the economy and a conference for people that are hopeful for the prospects of digital advertising going forward. Yet perhaps the two different conferences can best be thought of as being made up of people asking why and those dreaming of something new and asking why not.
