Politics
Entries related to things political.
An Open Letter to Corporate Communications at JetBlue
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 07/20/2007 - 16:42Over the past couple of days there has been considerable attention to whether or not JetBlue is remaining a sponsor of the YearlyKos convention in Chicago.
The site DailyKos has an entry up entitled, "JetBlue caved" which says "Okay, so JetBlue, after deciding to resist Bill O'Reilly's pressure last night, just decided to back down." It goes on to add an update, "JetBlue wants me to note that they didn't pull the tickets they donated to the event. So the sponsorship remains, but they are too afraid to let anyone know that they donated those tickets."
Over on MyDD is an entry posting a letter attributed to Dave Barger which states "JetBlue will have no presence at the conference or any other involvement with the YearlyKos event."
Does JetBlue consider itself and wish to be considered as a sponsor of YearlyKos?
The letter goes on to say that "I personally have never condoned and abhor anything hateful towards anyone and am fully confident that JetBlue's crewmembers share this view."
Does Mr. Barber or JetBlue consider Hillary Clinton 'hateful' for her petition asking people to tell Bill O'Reilly to stop smearing Grassroots Progressives?
Does Mr. Barber or JetBlue consider Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, John Edwards, Barack Obama, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, Sen. Jon Tester, Reps. Rahm Emanuel, Paul Hodes, Lynn Woolsey, Mike Panetta, Tim Walz, Steve Kagen and Gen. Wesley Clark 'hateful'?
Does Mr. Barber or JetBlue consider the Democratic Party to be 'hateful'?
Many people consider Fox News to be hateful. Will JetBlue be consistent and pull all its advertising from Fox News?
Clarifications about JetBlue's view would be greatly appreciated.
Helping students find their voices, or not
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 07/20/2007 - 12:08Chris Powell’s editorial in the Manchester Journal Inquirer last Wednesday was entitled Forget Sheff: Take up the real city problem.
It starts off:
Some state legislators have noticed that the settlement of the Hartford school integration lawsuit is a sham. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent building and operating "magnet" schools and busing students around the Hartford area but the city's schools are less integrated than they were when the settlement was reached four years ago, and the performance of city students is no better either.
It raises interesting questions. How effectively is money being spent on education in our state? What are the real problems?
Stephen Wilmarth run the The Center for 21st Century Skills. The Center is “a semi-autonomous organizational unit of Education Connection to enhance and expand upon the efforts and collaborations of existing Education Connection staff and their work in the area of 21st Century Career and Technical Education.” Ultimately, I believe, some of the funding from legislation that came out of the Sheff v. O’Neill decision supports Steve’s efforts.
I sent him an email to ask for his opinion about the editorial. I expected Steve to talk about how our educational system needs major revamping, particularly in the areas of curriculum development to meet the needs of a 21st century workforce. Instead, he focused on economic disparity:
I think you're going to see some real issues and social unrest over the next several years, because the problem can not be contained in the long term by a policy of building schools and cutting ribbons for show. The problem is…a problem of economic disparity. And it is a problem that is creeping out of the cities and into what we might have called "middle class communities" like Seymour, Naugatuck, Middletown, and others. Either Westport and Greenwich accept Bridgeport's students in their schools, or work their political power to change the rules of the game and insure that every CT student have an opportunity to be educated in a manner that enables them to be productive members of society in this century. It's not a hopeless challenge, but it will take courage and commitment.
So, what are the issues that our schools are trying to address today? First, there is the case of “Voice in Conflict”, a play put together by a theatre class at Wilton High School. This was the play that was judged to be too inflammatory by the school’s superintendent to be put on in the $10 million auditorium, so instead the students were invited to perform the play in venues around the country.
Now, a new case has emerged. Lauren Doninger has filed a suit on behalf of her daughter Avery who had been class secretary for three years at Lewis S. Mills High School because she wrote a blog post calling the superintendent a “douchbag” for canceling a concert at the school.
What does any of this have to do with Chris Powell’s editorial about Sheff v. O’Neill? What we need is better education in our state, education that helps all people find their voices. By helping all students find their voices, we can engage in dialogs that truly bridge the racial and socio-economic gaps that plague us. Unfortunately, school administrations in Connecticut seem more concerned about making sure that students do not find a voice, especially if that voice criticizes the administration or presents opinions that not everyone agrees with.
Insider/Outsider Politics in Connecticut
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/19/2007 - 15:31Over on MyLeftNutmeg, there is a post about an upcoming gathering of Young Democrats in Stamford. The attendees include several notable political figures from the area and my good friend Sal observed that it looked like a lot of insiders there.
This spawned a lengthy discussion about how easy it is to become an insider in blogs and in Democratic politics in Connecticut. It was noted that Sal is the State Coordinator for a Presidential campaign and is in many ways very much of an insider himself.
To me, it felt that some of the people who had crashed the gate and become insiders were defensive about their role on the inside and dismissive of those who remained outsiders. There was talk about the insider/outsider dichotomy as being divisive. This is unfortunate. There is nothing wrong with being an insider or an outsider and ideally we should embrace the insider and outsider aspects that we all have.
I am very much an insider. I am helping with the technology for Jim Himes’ campaign. I was Ned Lamont’s technology coordinator. I was John DeStefano’s blogmaster. I was campaign manager for my wife’s campaign when she was one of the first Dean Dozen candidates in the country. I was a very active volunteer with the Dean campaign and have been ask to write chapters for various books about the Dean campaign. I was credentialed to cover the Libby Trial in Washington this year, the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004, and numerous other events. Yeah, I’m very much the insider these days. I’m proud of what I’ve done and hope to continue doing it.
At the same time, I feel a tad uncomfortable. You see, I’ve always been an outsider, the outcast, pariah. I wasn’t one of the popular kids in high school or college. I never intended, nor particularly wanted to be an insider. It happened by accident. At the same time, even today there are special gatherings of bloggers that I am not invited to. There are ‘true insiders’ that I feel uncomfortable around and would say that I’m not a ‘real insider’. They dismiss whatever I say as self-aggrandizing.
I guess it is a good thing. I think it helps me keep my edge, my perspective. You see, I believe the most significant political moments have occurred when the outsiders and the insiders meet. What matters is the moment of crashing the gate and the mixing of ideas and energy that happens in the moment. Political groups often talk about their insider/outside strategies, and I think we need recognize the importance of these strategies.
Yes, it is very easy to become an insider here in Connecticut and within blogging. We need to keep it that way. We need to be aware of barriers we put up, intentionally or unintentionally which keep out people who feel like outsiders.
This is some of the reason I like to focus on non-political blogs. I like to visit, get into discussions and get ideas from people who are much further outside the political process then some of the self-professed outsiders in political blogs.
The Internet has broken down many barriers to communication, but many more barriers exist within each one of us and our interactions with those around us. Let’s take our gate crashing seriously, not to get inside, but to make it easier for everyone to get inside.
Come, Let us Reason Together
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/19/2007 - 10:11People have asked why I link to conservative blogs here. On a mailing list I’m on there is a big discussion about whether or not they should link to conservative blogs. I find these comments in profound contrast to a discussion I was part of Monday night about the book Extreme Democracy. In that discussion, there was talk about including more people in a deliberative process. In other discussions, people have talked about how compromise, which was once a key part of the legislative process, is now considered bad. Politics, itself, is also considered bad and an extended debate is derogatorily called ‘political theatre’.
President Johnson often used the phrase, “Come, let us reason together”. It was a call to deliberation and compromise. If he were alive today, it would be a call to cross-linking. It is a call that we desperately need to heed. Some of you will raise the objection about not compromising with those who are unwilling to yield on their side. That is true. That would not be compromise, it would be appeasement or capitulation. Instead, we should seek those on all sides of the political spectrum that are willing to engage in meaningful dialog.
The phrase that President Johnson used came from the first chapter of Isaiah where the prophet speaks out against a nation that has rebelled against God. The second half of the verse goes on to say, "Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.”
Reasoning together, meaningful dialog and, yes, cross-linking to conservatives are part of the reconciliation process that we need here in America. It is part of a process that we need to model to the people of Iraq if we want to see Iraq avoid further violence.
So, I will link to conservatives. I will even link to people that say things that I consider inappropriate and hateful if by doing so, I can help bring about a dialog to heal our country and our world. More importantly, I will go out into the marketplace. I will link to mommy bloggers, pet bloggers, sports bloggers, even SEO bloggers to the extent that I can get new people to join into the dialog about how to address the issues we face. I wish more of my progressive political bloggers would join me in this.
Come, let us reason together.
Managing online identities
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/16/2007 - 15:52I’ve had some interesting discussions recently about online identities and how we manage them or fail to manage them. An example of this is that a friend of mine was taking a train home from work. He fired up his laptop and logged into Facebook. The young woman next to him said, “I can’t believe your on Facebook”. I suggested that he should have told her, “Yeah, a lot of us check out Facebook and MySpace profiles before we interview anyone.
Even people who think a lot about the searchability of persistent online data can be surprised what can be done with online data. During Gov. Dean’s campaign they explored using Friend of a Friend (FOAF) as a means of connecting supporters. People were surprised to find detailed information showing up about them in unexpected places, through the power of FOAF crawlers exploring the web.
Today, I spoke on the phone with another friend who was interested in promoting the use of open source social networks for political purposes. I walked him through some of the tools that are out there. We started at my Facebook profile. (You probably have to be a friend of mine to see much of anything there.) In it, I’ve added a social networks application that connects up with UpScoop.
UpScoop is a pretty amazing tool where you can upload your mailing list and search to see who on your mailing list is on which networks. It is very slick and amazingly powerful. Looking at my profile on UpScoop, it showed sixteen different networks I was on, including links to my profile on almost all of them.
As I explored this with my friend on the phone, we decided to follow the link to one network that was listed that I didn’t remember joining, RapLeaf. It turns out that RapLeaf is the underlying engine for UpScoop and that their goal is to provide reputation information, based on email addresses tied into various social networks. In particular they focus experiences other people have had with you as a buyer or seller on sites like eBay or CraigsList.
It looks like it will be a very powerful tool and helps drive home the importance of managing your online identity.
All that said, I have a lot of recommendations of things that I would like to see RapLeaf do. First, it would be great if they could add OpenId. There is already OpenID support in Ruby on Rails, so it should be easy to add to their site. RapLeaf is based on email identities and ties it into profiles on social networking sites. OpenID is based on website pages. The two are closely related and ideally should be linked.
Beyond that, it would be great if they could support XHTML Friends Networks (XNF). It would be a pretty simple change to add. All of the links in the social networks section of the page could simply have the rel=”me” tag and the friends at the bottom could have a rel=”friend” tag. This would facilitate tools that explore XFN.
Ideally, it would be great if the could search out blogging systems as well. For blogging systems that will reveal user information based on email address, they should be able to do this simply. However, most systems want to keep email addresses private.
To get around this many systems, including RapLeaf use an SHA1 hash as a method of checking email addresses without ever showing the email address. If systems like Drupal, Scoop, Soapblox and others would allow people to look up people by the SHA1 hash of their email address, these sites could be searched as well. Maybe I’ll add the ability to search for users by the SHA1 hash of their email address on Orient Lodge. It would be great if people added it to some other blogging systems.
There are plenty of other ways in which this could be used in politics. Anyone who is interested in this aspect should contact me offline.
