Politics
Entries related to things political.
A conference call with Sen. Edwards
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 03/15/2007 - 12:43This morning, as Senator Edwards heads to his major policy speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, he took time for a conference call with the media. I had received a media alert about the conference call and asked if I, as a blogger, could participate. Sen. Edwards press secretary responded “We are blogger friendly”
As you come to expect with political candidates, the call started a little late. Sen. Edwards started off outlining the speech that he should be giving as I write up this blog post.
He said the speech is focused on the fundamental transformational changes needed here in the States and in the across the world such as dealing with poverty, health care, global warming, a new energy economy, and improvements to education. He went on to say that he would be talking a lot about global issues which would be the newest part to people in the press corps.
Thinking about grassroots organization
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 03/13/2007 - 10:26Over on MyDD, there is an interesting discussion about the latest straw poll. PsiFighter37 comments about the organizational structures:
The interesting dynamic to observe between the two would be the interaction between the campaigns and the netroots. Edwards' grassroots outreach appears to be largely organized in a top-down fashion. …
Many … seem to be put off by the Obama's lack of active interaction within the netroots. Nevertheless, if one takes a look at Obama's website, it is a highly decentralized, bottom-up organization.
I comment that while I prefer Edwards positions, my preference for a bottom-up type organization. Psi agrees and goes on to say
that the bottom-up directive works well mainly in the initial stages of boosting a campaign's base of supporters and volunteers. When it comes time to hit the streets and knock on doors, there definitely needs to be instructions from the top.
Twidget
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 03/10/2007 - 02:49This morning, Steve Rubel noted that John Edwards was one of his followers on Twitter. Sure enough, Sen. Edwards has over 500 friends and followers on Twitter and he’s also following me. I figured it was time to get a little more involved with Twitter.
Returning from Iraq
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 03/09/2007 - 10:03On Monday, I participated in a conference call that Rep. Steve Rothman had with bloggers upon his return from a trip to Iraq, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and Kuwait. It was a good conference call. We need more Congressmen doing more conference calls with bloggers. Yet we also need to think more about how we support our servicemen and women when they return.
Rep. Rothman described what he saw over there, admitting that it was all presented the eyes of the military, so it needs to be viewed with some skepticism. He said that it appears that various factions are coming to recognize that what they’ve been doing hasn’t been working and things need to change. The Kurds cannot expect to have their own country anytime soon. Such a development would most like start a major regional war, and the Kurds would end up worse off then they are now.
The Sunnis are recognizing that they are a minority and that regaining a majority position in the government just isn’t in the cards. Shiites are coming to understand that vengeance is a two handed sword.
Because of this, the various factions are trying to find ways to cooperate, and concrete results are happening, such as progress on an oil revenue sharing solution.
F2C Day 1 Part 2: What do we do with all this bandwidth?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 03/06/2007 - 15:48Yochai Benkler started off the information overload of what we could be doing with all the bandwidth we ought to have. I must admit, I’ve not read any of Benkler’s work yet, but the starting point is his article Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm, which appeared in the Yale Law Journal. He has also written a book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.
It felt like he was trying to compress his paper, his book, and a million other thoughts on the subject into his 45-minute time slot. Because of this, I probably only captured about 10% of what he was saying. Of course this was compounded by being at home and dealing with interruptions.
So instead of an exhaustive recounting of what he said, I’ll simply suggest that people read Coase’s Penquin, The Wealth of Networks. He spoke a lot about peer production of content and included an Anime Music Video and a political piece as examples. In particular, Dueling Videos: Under Ice and a mashup, “The Legendary K.O. George Bush Doesn’t Care about Black People” from The Black Lantern and The Legendary K.O.
