Blog Entries
Blog entries, here and from elsewhere.
Watching the Convention
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/27/2004 - 20:37(Originally posted to Greater Democracy
This afternoon, I received an email from Brad Johnson about the Critical Mass bicycle ride this evening. He wrote,
The Critical Mass bicycle ride tonight will be the first real demonstration of NYPD tactics during the RNC. Critical Mass was going to have a post-ride party, but the cops and the Coast Guard intimidated the owners of the space into cancelling it.
Furthermore, the police hand-delivered a lovely letter threatening the riders with mass arrests -- for a ride that has gone on every month for the last 10 years without incident.
If you to be involved or monitor the proceedings, you should head over to the Time's Up space at 49 East Houston Street (btw Mott and Mulberry) during the day or go to Union Square at 7 pm.
The letter: http://www.times-up.org/images/nypd-to-ta-re-cm.jpg
Posts on this: http://the-cunctator.dailykos.com/story/2004/8/27/121244/624
http://nyc.indymedia.org/feature/display/103268/index.php
Senatorial Blogs
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/27/2004 - 14:59(Originally posted at Greater Democracy)
The other day, I participated in a conference call put together by Mathew Gross for bloggers interested in the Erskine Bowles campaign. I was very interested in this because it was the first conference call I know of by a senatorial campaign aimed at the blogging community. It follows nicely on the blogging of political conventions.
There was a bit of talk about polls and strategy, but the conference call just didn’t get me excited. Bowles has a blog, which is pretty good. There are nearly sixties entries in the blog. Nearly half of them have no comments and only two had more then ten comments, one had 15 and one had 24. It is worth noting that the two entries that had the most comments were primarily about issues. The most commented on entry was about a new ad Bowles is running on health care. The second most commented entry was about an editorial discussion Bowles plan for Homeland Security.
Quite a few of the entries were written by ‘Staff Writer’. Posts which don’t reveal the author always bother me. In some cases, it did reveal the writer in the post. On the upside, six of the posts were identified as being written by Bowles.
Imagine New York
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/27/2004 - 14:50(Originally posted at Greater Democracy)
In 1983, I spent eight months traveling around the United States and Europe. It was a wonderful experience and I learned a lot about myself, my country, and the world through these experiences. I wish more people could spend time traveling like this.
I had been living in New York with a couple struggling actors and seen my share of off-off-Broadway plays. One of my roommates traveled with a company to perform in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, so I made sure to pass through Edinburgh during the festival.
In spite of having access to lots of wonderful theatre in New York, Edinburgh blew me away. There was so much to see all packed into an incredibly tight schedule. I got my schedule and tried to figure out which plays to see and when to see them. I read the reviews in the Scotsman, and posted on the walls around Edinburgh. I saw five or six plays a day, and stumbled through my nightly pubcrawls, my mind spinning with many new thoughts.
I went back to Edinburgh several years in a row after that, and only stopped going when children made travel more difficult. How I have longed for such an overwhelming smorgasbord of artistic stimulation.
Now, living outside of New York City, and having covered the Democratic National Convention as a credentialed blogger, I have been trying to figure out what I want to do. As I noted in a previous entry, I’m particularly interested in the Progressive Tourist Bureau happening at The Tank, which will also be my home base for blogging when I’m in the city.
Have you left no sense of decency?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/25/2004 - 12:58(Originally posted at Greater Democracy)
As I have spoken about before, I like the sense a narrative in politics. I like tying in stories that people remember and that resonates with them.
Popular stories include the emperor’s new clothes, the boy who cried wolf, and perhaps Pinocchio. However, there is another story that I like to talk about, which I don’t think is getting enough attention.
On June 9th, 1954, Joseph Welch confronted Senator Joseph McCarthy, asking him, “Have you left no sense of decency?”. As an aside, for a transcript, and a wonderful recording of the interchange, please check out: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html
The recent advertisements by Swift Boats for Bush raise some interesting questions. To what extent were the activities illegally coordinated? What role should 527s have in the political process? However, the most important question to ask of Swift Boats for Bush is, “Have you left no sense of decency?”
Multiply?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/23/2004 - 21:22On Aug 12th, I received an email from a friend asking me to join Multiply.com. I joined and checked to see whom else I knew that had joined already. There were three or so other people and I linked up to them. On the 16th, I used their tool to invite people from Orkut, and sent out quite a few invitations. About a dozen and a half more people joined my network there.
