Edublog Suspended: Politics Around the Web 10/18/2008
Saturday, 18 October 2008 Clay Burell 
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The full comedy speeches given by McCain (who comes off so much more natural and likeable here than he has in the debates, which is a curious thing, and makes me wonder why) and Obama (also gracious and funny).
It’s about 20 minutes, and a great tonic for the toxins of the last several weeks.
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WFB Would Be Proud – washingtonpost.com
Great point about how ALL movements are started by “radicals” – including conservatism. Some very good writing in this.
And it’s refreshing to read conservatives admitting to the rise of sheer ignorance and proud stupidity in a Party that once valued the intellect.
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What does it mean that the right cannot politely entertain dissenting opinions within its ranks? What, if anything, does it portend that Buckley The Younger has bolted from the right, even resigning (with enthusiastic editorial approval) from the family flagship?
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True believers of whatever stripe too often forget that the men and women who create movements are first and foremost radicals. Great movements are not the result of relaxing afternoons musing along the Seine but emerge from flames of passion ignited by injustice.
When WFB created the modern conservative movement, he didn’t call a neighborhood meeting and whisper, “Come along now.” He stood athwart history and yelled, “Stop!”
His son, though he customarily takes the more circuitous route to the revolution via satire, is now merely answering WFB’s original call to political activism. Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, the younger Buckley said: “I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.”
In 1955, when WFB announced his new magazine and explained the reasons for it, he described conservatives as “non-licensed nonconformists”:
“Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.”
Fast-forward half a century, and the old is the new.
Radical conservatives are still having an interesting time of it, though these days they are being mutilated by fellow “conservatives.” The well-fed Right now cultivates ignorance as a political strategy and humiliates itself when its brightest sons seek sanctuary in the solitude of personal honor.
The truth few wish to utter is that the GOP has abandoned many conservatives, who mostly nurse their angst in private. Those chickens we keep hearing about have indeed come home to roost. Years of pandering to the extreme wing — the “kooks” the senior Buckley tried to separate from the right — have created a party no longer attentive to its principles.
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Instead, as Christopher Buckley pointed out in a blog post on thedailybeast.com explaining his departure from National Review, eight years of “conservatism” have brought us “a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance.”
Republicans are not short on brainpower — or pride — but they have strayed off course. They do not, in fact, deserve to win this time, and someone had to remind them why.
Christopher Buckley, ever the swashbuckling heir to his father’s defiant spirit, walked the plank so that the sinking mother ship might right itself.
No doubt his seafaring father is cheering from heaven: “Ahoy there, Christo! Well done, my son.”
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Art Brodsky: YouTube Gives McCain Campaign A Rare Reality Check
Interesting how the McCain/YouTube flap has raised the profile of DMCA and corporate control of re-mixes, and how powerful McCain gets a taste of the experience of the less powerful UGC producer.
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At the end of their letter to McCain, YouTube put the issue more bluntly: “On a final note, we hope that as a content loader, you have gained a sense of some of the challenges we face every day in operating YouTube.” The company said it looks forward to working with McCain, in whatever capacity, in helping to fix the abuse of the DMCA process, including strengthening fair use.
That wasn’t what the campaign wanted to hear, no doubt, but it was the right thing for YouTube to say on any number of levels. Legally, the campaign was right in that the videos taken down probably were legitimately fair use. But practically, Congress created a law in which all the advantages, benefits and assumptions lie with the big media companies, fair use and rights of consumers be damned. Viacom alone sent YouTube 100,000 takedown notices, which is a fraction of what YouTube receives. In one day, YouTube got 4,000 complaints last month from the Church of Scientology. It can’t afford to play favorites, even for a presidential campaign.
The DMCA cries out for reform. And there’s no better way to do it than to have a politician experience the short end of the stick that most people experience when running into a process designed by, and for, those more powerful. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does the lesson should be a learned. Someone used to taking on the big special interests should relish a fight like this.
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Murray Waas » Blog Archive » The McCain campaign responds to my Timmons story… sorta.
McCain hires a Saddam Hussein lobbyist as his transition guide into the presidency. And his campaign simply denies it.
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Yesterday, Murray Waas revealed that the head of Sen. John McCain’s transition team, power lobbyist William Timmons, was involved in a lobbying effort on behalf of Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s “to ease international sanctions against his regime.”
Today, MSNBC’s David Schuster asked McCain spokesperson Ben Porritt about the revelations. Porrit claimed that the campaign has had no associations with lobbyists, quickly changing the subject to Bill Ayers:
I’m actually not too familiar with his history, but what I do know is that throughout our campaign, we’ve talked about this a lot, we’ve had no associations with any lobbyists on our campaign, and I think there’s questionable associations with Barack Obama that needs to be addressed before we even get into talking about the transition:
“You have no associations with Charlie Black?” asked Schuster incredulously. “I mean, he’s a lobbyist.” Watch it:
Timmons is the chairman emeritus of Timmons and Company, an influential lobbying firm in Washington. In addition to helping Saddam avoid sanctions and trying to profit off Iraqi oil, Timmons has also lobbied for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the American Petroleum Institute. Time Magazine called Timmons “a Washington institution.”
It is absurd to claim McCain has “had no associations with any lobbyists.” He has at least 164 former lobbyists running his campaign, fundraising, and setting his policy agenda — including Charlie Black, Rick Davis, and Randy Scheunemann.
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Wikis in Education « Technology Tidbit Blog
On the Wikispaces webinar.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
- Edublog Suspended: Politics Around the Web 10/15/2008
- Edublog Suspended: Politics (and Publishing) Around the Web 10/16/2008
- Edublog Suspended: Politics Around the Web 10/13/2008
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