EdCone.com

David Hoggard is pissed off that he didn't get an endorsement from the Simkins PAC in his race for City Council, and he's blogging about it: 

Perhaps the PAC has determined that it is in their best interest to recommend candidates who have chosen to live and raise their families in highly segregated areas of our community as opposed to those who have chosen to actually embrace and promote de-segregation through the way they live their lives, not just the words they speak.

Did the Simkins PAC truly identify for the African American community all of the candidates which "have your best interest at heart"?  Absolutley not.

The endorsements were announced in an ad in this morning's Peacemaker.

78 degrees on Halloween. I'm dressing up as a middle-aged man in a t-shirt and shorts.

Less than a day after the possibility of a North Carolina weblog conference was raised, plans are already being made...

John Edwards will visit Lawrence Lessig's weblog on Monday at 1:00 EST. Here's how one reader felt about a previous visit to the site by Howard Dean.

Also, the Edwards campaign blog has added RSS and RDF feeds to allow syndication and newsfeeds.

Michael Kinsley: "More puzzling is whether the politicians and their advisers who build these alternative realities don't yet realize that there's this thing called the Internet, or whether they realize it and don't care. It is the work of minutes to Google Lefkowitz's storyline into shreds."

Al Hunt makes the most of his weekly token liberal slot on the WSJ op-ed page with a blistering column (not posted--c'mon, Taranto, share the wealth...er, maybe that's the wrong thing to say to the WSJ...but you know what I mean).

Anyway, says Hunt:

"The Iraq war is going badly...The press should cease referring to this as the post-war stage."

"American policy continues to be riddled with confusion and contradictions."

Hunt cites the Washington Post, saying we are devoting too many resources to finding those elusive weapons of mass destruction, and thus starving ourselves of more useful terror-fighting assets.

I don't know if Hunt is more a Cassandra or Chicken Little. But a lot of what he says sounds plausible, and that's alarming as hell. 

John Edwards is using his campaign blog to rally opposition to Bush judicial nominees, posting a petition against them:

"The Senate must reject the nominations of President Bush's anti-civil rights judges, especially Charles Pickering, Priscilla Owen and Carolyn Kuhl. President Bush is turning the judiciary over to the very far right wing of his party, which will mean an era of extreme conservative judicial activism. If President Bush continues to remake the federal courts in the direction he is heading, rights all Americans cherish will be gutted."

As with his vote against the Iraq aid package, the power of Edwards the Senator lends some heft to Edwards the candidate. He's not just saying what he would do as President, he's saying what he is doing as a Senator. The campaign blog is thus doing double duty as a Senator's blog, which is interesting in itself.

Fair and balanced and scripted from above: Fox News vet tells all. "If, on any given day, you notice that the Fox anchors seem to be trying to drive a particular point home, you can bet The Memo is behind it."

Dave Winer: "Dean was a good first step. Clark clearly has missed some opportunities. Edwards is doing some things right. What we haven't done is define what over-the-top would be. What do we want?"

Dave wants to take a road-show version of BloggerCon to San Francisco and maybe New York. Great idea, but I hate to see the rest of the country left on the other side of a digital divide. There's only one Dave, but there are a lot of us who have learned from him and with him, and we should be doing the same thing wherever we are.

My UNCG continuing education classes are set for March and April. All bloggers are invited to help me teach these sessions. I'm thinking of actually setting up a blog in the first half hour of the class and going from there.

I'd be happy to go to Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Charlotte if people there want to get something going. Blogging is a real-world expression of the bumper sticker that says think globally/act locally. So we should act locally.

Stuff you couldn't make up: a great-great-grandson of one of the original Siamese twins -- that is, one of the conjoined brothers from Siam who became famous touring with P.T. Barnum in the 19th century -- has been freed after serving time for killing his own twin brother.

Chang and Eng Bunker married sisters from North Carolina and fathered 21 kids between them. Hundreds of people in Surry County are descended from the slave-owning circus stars, inlcuding Brian Bunker, who killed his twin brother Brad with a shotgun this summer.

"(I)n the 1850 census, after four years in America, Cone was still living in a boarding house, owned no real estate, and little of personal value."

Fortunately, things picked up after a while for my great-great-grandfather, as documented by Ned Irwin of East Tennessee State University in latest edition of The Journal of East Tennessee History. Irwin's article (not posted) about the family business in Jonesborough, TN won an award as the best work in the 2002 Journal.

The John Kerry blog is holding a live chat with Ambassador Joe Wilson (Mr. Valerie Plame; debunker of the Niger-uranium story) this morning at 11:00.

"Bush in 30 seconds: Create a TV ad that tells the truth about George W. Bush."

 

"All eligible submissions will be posted on this web site and rated by visitors. The top rated ads will then be voted on by our panel of esteemed judges, including Michael Moore, Donna Brazile, Jack Black, Janeane Garofalo, and Gus Van Sant. The winning ad idea will be broadcast on television during the week of Bush's 2004 State of the Union address, and the winner will receive a recording of the ad as broadcast."

 

(via Monkeytime, who rails against "the absurdly vague and tepid loser commercials we're seeing from the mainstream ad folks now advising the Democratic field.")

 

"I was thankful to have a guide to get me to the hotel. I'd thought, looking at the map in my guidebook, that the hotel might be a short walk down the street, but it became pretty clear looking at this place at night that would have been Not A Good Idea."

 

Dave Carr is in Sierra Leone, on his way to Liberia, working on an article about UN peacekeeping forces for Baseline.

Newspapers aren't going away in the weblog world, they're going to get better.

 

Take this example of blog-driven reporting: The N&R runs a business section front-pager saying that Cherokee Investment Properties is still considering the purchase and renovation of the old Wachovia building in downtown Greensboro.

 

It's a useful article, in that it updates a major economic development story, but clearly it's news today only because this weblog reported last week that the deal would fall through. Which, by the way, it will -- development costs may be 40% higher than the original $20 million estimate.

 

This conversation between weblogs and the mainstream press is a good thing, all the more so in a city with one daily newspaper.

The Bush administration chose to go to war in Iraq. Whether that was a sound strategic move or not in a larger war on terrorism, the timing and conduct of the campaign were dictated by the United States. So shouldn't we have known what we were getting into? Shouldn't this occupation and reconstruction have been planned carefully, the costs and hazards honestly assessed?

Look what we're getting instead.

Washington Post: "The president, speaking after attacks on police stations and a Red Cross facility in Iraq killed at least 35 people, said such attacks should be seen as a sign of progress because they show the desperation of those who oppose the U.S.-led occupation."

Geez, who writes his stuff, Glenn Reynolds?

John McCain: "This is the first time that I have seen a parallel to Vietnam, in terms of information that the administration is putting out versus the actual situation on the ground."

Comments posted to debate-related threads at campaign weblogs (rounded #s):

Dean: 1,300

Clark: 900

Kerry: 375

Edwards: 165

Ryan Pitts is writing about reporting news via weblog, a subject so nice he covered it twice.

The News & Record's Denise Becker has a devastating article today about the ripple effect of lost manufacturing jobs. Textiles, furniture, and other regional staples are reeling, and so is the surrounding service economy.

"That the local manufacturing sector has taken a beating is old news. What's coming into focus in 2003 is what economists call a "reverse multiplier effect," one that suggests that 1 to 1.5 additional non-manufacturing jobs are lost for each manufacturing job lost."

The N&R has really been on its investigative game lately, including strong coverage of the Michael King saga and the secret hockey deal. I know almost nothing about what goes on inside the big building on East Market St., but clearly something good is happening there.

Josh Marshall is tyring to fund a trip to New Hampshire to provide weblog coverage of the run-up to the primary. I'm going to send a few bucks his way, because I know he'll be sending back some worthwhile coverage.

Halley: "There are some good things to be said for divorce, but I don't think it's easy to remember them when you are going through it."

New York Times: "And just like that, four demonstrators were dead, a fifth was dying and 10 were wounded...Hostages were taken in Iran the next day, and the Greensboro shooting fell off the front page."

So we finally got around to watching Bowling for Columbine last night. Yeah, it's a Michael Moore movie alright. He's tendentious and sometimes annoying. But to all the people who try to deny the film's importance by pointing to gaffes like the phony funding-the-Taliban stat Moore uses, I want to say: answer the freaking question Moore asks in the movie. Why do Americans kill each other so damn often with guns?

(Full disclosure: I like guns and just signed up to go on the shooting trip with Elijah's Boy Scout troop.)

The reaction to the movie reminds me of many of the critiques I read of Paul Krugman, focusing on this thing he got wrong or that rhetorical overkill in which he indulged -- those would-be Fiskings leave me wondering, yeah, OK, you don't like Krugman, you just scored a point  on him...but answer the freaking question he asks over and over again: is the US in serious trouble if we continue with our current economic policies?

(Search here for "Columbine" and "Krugman.")

Killing the messenger is what people do when they can't handle the message. Sometimes the messenger is obnoxious. But now you've put him in his place, what about the message?

This conversation tells us something about a political campaign at work, and the role of weblogs in it.

Elizabeth Edwards commented here that comments on her husband's campaign blog serve to inform him about people's real concerns. I ask for an example. She replies with a specific example about the Earned Income Tax Credit that led to Edwards refocusing on the issue:

"Scott was on top of it and let us know through the blog, and the criticism that John had expressed earlier but that had been dropped from more recent speeches has been reinserted...

"John and I actually read the blog. When there is something there he finds useful or intriguing, he picks it up. If more research is needed, it goes to Robert Gordon's policy operation. If not, it can got straight into his speech or his answers to questions."

Elizabeth Edwards: "(P)eople 'on the ground'  have the best handle on the issues that matter; when they post comments, they often let John know what their concerns are."

Comments are one of the most important measures of a campaign blog's vitality -- commenters are bloggers, says Dean blogger-in-chief Matt Gross, and comments are part of the interactivity that makes the Web something more than a new kind of TV.

Judged thusly, the Edwards blog is enjoying a surge after its redesign, sometimes breaking into triple digits on its comment counters. That still lags Clark and Dean, who routinely log hundreds of comments on given posts. Kerry's site runs hot and cold, sometimes getting lots of comments, sometimes awkwardly few -- Edwards' blog seems to have more momentum.

The Bush-Cheney blog is stuck at zero comments -- there is no comment function there.

Lieberman does not seem to have a blog at all, but his website does refer to him as "Joe" a lot, which they may think is the same thing. Gephardt appears to be blogless, too.

Nice pics from last night's downtown fire, by August Meyland III in the N&R. Too bad you can't click on them for larger images, and that they'll disappear from the site in two weeks.

I am vexed by the paper's archiving policy. When a story goes behind the paywall, the link just rots -- rather than taking you to a place to buy the story, you go to a dead end. If you make it to the archives page, you have to scroll past a menu of stuff they want to sell you to find the search function, and then you search for your article all over again. It's the opposite of user-friendly.

Overall I like the look and usability of the N&R online (compare it to the eye-glazing Charlotte Observer site, for example). But while I'm at it, I wish they'd post more articles, and quit repeating headlines as you scroll down the page. And I wish they'd solve that damn link-rot problem.

I'm going to do a class, or series of classes, on writing on the Web as part of the UNCG continuing education curriculum. Starts in February. It would be cool to include local and even regional bloggers in the conversation, so if anyone wants to come be part of the show and tell, let me know.

David Appell on quantum mechanics: "How simple and beautiful is nature?"

And on the equally simple but less beautiful Bill O'Reilly culture: "If you write or say something on Tuesday and you're upset about what people are writing or saying about you on Thursday, may I suggest that you're not nearly as intellectually serious about yourself as you ought to be."

"For crying out loud, if you're going to take off your clothes and put food all over yourself, shouldn't it be fun?"

Lex Alexander on naked sushi and upside-down rifle shooting.

"Would you rather work for George Bush or be dead?"

 

Kathy Lash is talking to Kasey, the West Highland Terrier she owns with her husband, Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi (Kasey is not Dean's own dog, as erroneously hinted at in Doonesbury).

 

Kasey lies down and plays dead.

 

It's actually a repurposed gag --  Kasey, trained by ardent Oriole fans, originally chose "death" over supporting the Yankees. But you can teach an old dog new tricks, or at least new punch lines.

No deal: The much-anticipated renovation of the old Wachovia building in downtown Greensboro is off.

Reliable sources say that developer Cherokee Investment Partners LLC of Raleigh and building owner Jefferson-Pilot Financial couldn't make the numbers work -- the costs of renovating the 16-story building for residential and retail use were millions of dollars higher than the estimated return on the deal.

See details in the Business Journal and the N&R after they read this post.

Update: Cherokee CEO Tom Darden says, "I haven't been told" that the deal has fallen through. He says he has not gotten a full report from the latest meeting. EdCone.com stands by its story.

"A White House administration official who can be blamed for leaking the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to the press remains at large, White House officials announced Monday.

"'We are doing everything in our power to see that the scapegoat is found and held accountable,' President Bush said. "We will not stop until heóor sheóis located. Believe me, nobody wants to see the blame placed squarely on the shoulders of a single person, and photos of that individual in every newspaper in the country, more than I do."

Why is the best news reporting always in The Onion?

"That's just false." William Saletan in Slate, on the description of "partial birth" abortions used repeatedly during the Senate debate, and by the President.

My personal feelings about abortion have grown more nuanced since going through two (healthy, planned) pregnancies with my wife. I'd like to move on to the post-Roe era of legislated abortion rights. But as long as this type of misinformation informs public policy, there's not much room for progress.

I'm a Doonesbury fan, and Garry Trudeau is one of the nicest, smartest people I've ever written about, and I'm grossed out by Schwarzenegger's handsy history. But I still find this week's strips depicting Arnie as a giant hand named Herr Gropenfuhrer to be, well, heavy-handed.

Ziff Davis is listing my blog address as part of my ID at the bottom of the corporate blogs column, both at Baseline and eWeek, and as part of my permanent writer ID at the Baseline site. The mad genius was willing to run the column as soon as I wrote it, instead of waiting for print.  Nice. They're getting it.

At BloggerCon we talked about journalists who work within a corporate structure. I said that if ZD doesn't own a piece of my soul, they certainly rent it. I feel that having them link to my blog puts some responsibility on me, too, or at least underscores the responsibilities I've felt all along.

My rules as a blogger with a job remain the same.

• I won't report any news about ZD or Baseline until I see it posted at Romenesko or some other outlet.
  
• I will respect my colleagues and the privacy of our workplace.
  
• I won't write much about technology here, because that's the part of me that ZD pays for, and that includes ideas and information that I might not use myself but that I pass along to my colleagues for the good of the enterprise.
  
• I say clearly on my About Me page that this is a personal site.
  
• I will try not to be a complete jerk or freak when I can possibly help it.

Microsoft gets weblogs (continued).

Robert Scoble: "We're giving our developers open access to a very recent build of Longhorn. Just days old at this point. And we want you to hate it. Openly. On your weblog. Tell us what's wrong with it. What can be improved about it."

I can't go into too much detail yet about what I saw at Dean HQ, because somebody is paying me to tell that story for them. But I will say this: it is not a campaign that discovered the Internet and decided to use it, or tacked a Web strategy on to a conventional plan. It is a campaign built around the Net from the start, and in some ways modeled on it. That's part of the reason it's working so well.

John Edwards: "I may talk about my own children too much in these blogs but I think of them all the time when Iím on the road."

 

We're so used to seeing the TV versions of the candidates, hair perfect and sleeves carefully rolled, that it's easy to forget the personal toll that campaigning takes on them, and on their families.

 

A funny thing about weblogs is that despite their essential immediacy, they gain heft from repeated use, the accretion of detail and the emergence of themes over time. As the posts roll by, the Edwards blog is breaking new ground in humanizing the candidate and his family.

Eric Muller makes the case that the Rumsfield memo was released, not leaked. Glenn Reynolds disagrees. I think Muller makes a credible argument.

 

* * *

 

IsThatLegal also opines on the imposition of tolls on North Carolina's stretch of I-95, and the related topic of using time-stamped toll tickets to figure out who's been speeding, then fining drivers who arrive too quickly at the next tollboth. Hmm. I don't like the precedent of a toll road in my fair state, although the idea of nicking a few bucks from the snowbirds headed to Florida is certainly appealing. As for time-stamp tix, that's OK as long as they raise the speed limit to 80.

Bloggin' city-council candidate David Hoggard: "Give me a friggin' break."

No beating around the bush for N&R reader Keith Peddie -- he's tired of this dumb democracy stuff and ready to bring on the theocracy:

"Democracy dictates that we should never offend other people, no matter how flatly they contradict God's Word. After all, democratically speaking, their word, their vote, is just as valid as ours. How could we ever "force" our opinion on someone else? The Bible says that we should do God's work, let the chips fall where they may. Am I alone in thinking that these two are diametrically opposed?

I am very much afraid that, without an element of compulsion, the Christian Church, although not perhaps Christianity itself, is bound to die of anemia."

Refreshing, in a way, to have someone just come out and say it.

As frequently happens I'm reminded of the immortal words of Charlie Daniels, written back when he was a long-haired country boy, not a jingoistic buffoon:

"He said Jesus walked on the water, and I know that it's true/But sometimes I think that preacher man'd like to do a little walking too."

The Dean campaign is using the Internet to democratize democracy.

The Web takes all kinds of things from the few and puts them in the hands of the many -- the power to publish, trade stocks, pose naked for an audience...you name it, the Web democratizes it.

What's going on here at Dean HQ in South Burllington is nothing less than putting presidential politics in the hands of the people -- the power to organize, to share ideas, to speak back to the candidate. It's extraordinary, and it's just getting started. And it goes way beyond weblogs.

So what if it's supposed to snow here tonight -- there is not a more exciting place in the world to be right now.

Early numbers from the race for John Edwards' Senate seat: a poll conducted by Market Research Insight for the nonprofit NCFREE shows Erskine Bowles leading Richard Burr 42%-31%. An earlier poll done for Bowles showed him with a 43%-35% advantage. But an N&O poll has Burr ahead, 43%-37%.

Cool and rainy in Burlington, Vermont -- a good day to spend inside at the Dean campaign, which is where I'll be for most of today and tomorrow.

Scoble on the Hound of Hades: "Regarding Waggener Edstrom: I appreciate them being there. There is a huge role for traditional PR and my weblog sure isn't gonna make them obsolete." He says WaggEd laughed about the nickname I gave them, and adds that he's gotten a flood of traffic from the Baseline biz-blog column, which got picked up by our Ziff Davis sister pub eWeek.

"The most powerful piece of software inside Microsoft may be the $40 application from a tiny vendor called Userland that Robert Scoble uses to write his weblog."

 

Corporate America is behind the curve on blogging. So when the mad genius asked me to start writing a column for Baseline, I knew right away what the first one would be about. 

 

The Scobleizer vs. Cerberus the Hound of Hades appears online today, and will run in our upcoming print edition.

 

Many of the ideas in the column were hashed out in Halley's great Sunday session at BloggerCon. Thanks to Halley, Doc, Dr. Weinberger, Phil Wolff, and all the others who helped frame this discussion -- drinks on me next time you're in Greensboro.

Glenn Reynolds, who's been all over the Easterbrook donnybrook, makes one of the best points I've seen about Easterbrook's sacking by ESPN -- the writer might have saved himself had he used his webblog quickly to explain and apologize for his remarks. Lawrence Lessig sees a problem of media consolidation in Easterbrook's firing by Disney-owned ESPN after criticizing Disney boss Eisner. Jay Rosen accepts Easterbrook's apology, but guest blogger Jeff Sharlet does not. And Josh Marshall reminds me of a key reason I don't live in DC or NY -- the clubby journalistic culture.

Lost in all the navel-gazing is the essential awfulness of Easterbrook's TMQ column. It's been sent down the memory hole at ESPN, but you can read the older version by searching the Slate archives. The guy does for football what George Will does for baseball.

Real bloggers read blogs. I've said before that Elizabeth Edwards is often the most interesting writer on the John Edwards weblog, and I'm happy to see her venturing out into the blogosphere, and honored to receive her comments on my blog.

Eric Muller reports on faculty discontent at UNC over the big pay package for new basketball coach Roy Williams. He's right, I'm sure, although his statement that the athletic department is about to start losing money is a misdirection, since the basketball program itself is a profit center. Anyway, it's a moot point. This is Carolina basketball we're talking about. The only way Roy gets less money is if he loses too often to Duke.