I am feeling somewhat better now. Last week, I was suffering from “election depression. On the night of the election, we turned the TV off at 10pm. In the morning, neither my wife nor I wanted to turn the TV on, but we did, and the first words we see are “TRUMP WINS”. Ugh. As I thought about the the past four years, and why did the election end up with a Trump win, the phrase “necessary but not sufficient” came to mind. It was necessary to update the Electoral Count Act, and it was necessary to take actions to have hundreds of lawyers ready to fight frivolous election fraud claims, and it was necessary to build up the elections offices across the US to ensure a free and fair election. But, those things, in and of themselves, were not sufficient to guarantee victory for Kamala Harris. Another phrase that comes to mind is “preparing to fight the last war“. Again, preparations were made to avoid another violent takeover like January 6th, but preparations were not made (or actions taken) to help ensure that Donald Trump would lose the election (fair and square). I am not the person to say what should have been done, or how the Democratic Party should have approached the 2024 election, but the fact that Trump won the popular vote and the Electoral College vote shows that (1) more people wanted Trump than Harris, and (2) all of the weird things that Trump did, all the things he did, the civil and criminal cases against him, did not sway his supporters to vote for Harris.
Nine days after the election, Trump has picked up the rest of the swing states, and Republicans will be in control of the House and Senate – the trifecta. Trump’s cabinet picks so far look like a “clown car from the circus”. His strategy – selecting people who will be totally loyal to him.
For myself, I need a little rest from the election. My wife and I have cut way back on our news consumption. I think our short term plan will be “watch and listen” or “wait and see”.
With Election Day in the US come and gone, I have completed updates to the Kamala Campaign Timeline website. This site covered the day-by day events of the Harris-Walz campaign from Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race through Election Day. Each daily entry contains a link to the CNN daily blog for that day, links to other press coverage of the campaign, and links to videos of campaign events.
Having covered topical events before (see my Portland Protest News site), I was familiar with tracking down stories and links. The CNN daily blog was very helpful as a starting point for finding other coverage. During the development of the site, CNN began to restrict the number of page views to their site, and to reserve content for subscribers. Whenever this happened, I looked for other coverage.
As with the Portland Protest News site, I found it difficult to make time everyday for site updates. Since I was using a static site generator, I was able to catch up and still keep the consecutive date timeline. I have seen some recent comments about creating news streams. I have created a few streams myself, but aggregating feeds still depends on someone creating those feeds. Kamala Campaign Timeline was such a site (although the template did not support generation of a RSS feed – darn!). To me, the best site of this kind is Political Wire. However, it takes time to sift through the news, pick out the stories of note, and post cogent summaries/quotes, and to do it day in and day out. The DailyKos site is probably the best known Democratic/Progressive news site, and they have a staff supporting their efforts. Similarly, keeping the @kamalahq Threads account going took some effort, and someone, somewhere was paying for that. So, my opinion is that it is a tough job for a single person to carry that kind of load, but maybe there is someone out there who can handle it, or organize it (like Election Law Blog has a set of guest editors).
Anyway, I enjoyed having another shot at creating a daily news site, and hope that this serves as a historical record of a unique campaign. I’m just sorry that Harris and Walz didn’t win.
I have finished updating KamalaCampaignTimeline.com with the latest campaign news through September 1st – check it out!
Politico: ‘It was horrifying’: Chutkan warns against complacency about Jan. 6 – The judge in Trump’s federal election subversion case used a Friday sentencing in a relatively routine Jan. 6 case to issue the warning. (via Election Law Blog)
Joe Biden has sent a letter to Democrats in Congress (article, PDF) that he is staying in the race – let’s get on with it!
I just finished listening to the two podcasts by Dave Winer on what we need from Biden, and his conversation with Jeff Jarvis on how to work around the brokenness of the mainstream media in the 2024 election. This was an excellent conversation. I have several comments on the Jeff Jarvis podcast, and will cover them in this post, and there is a separate podcast at the end of this post.
Jeff Jarvis brought up two points based on prior writing/conversations with Dave Winer. One was “the power of the link”, and the other was that people should uses their own personal spaces to respond to someone else’s post or story. I agree that if you are going to talk about someone, or something that they wrote, you should link to it. However, recently Dave Winer wrote a post critical about the people and work of the Podcasting 2.0 effort (how they reimplemented rssCloud), but he did not link to the thing he was complaining about (I had to track it down). How does this square with what was discussed in this podcast? I think it is inconsistent at a minimum, and perhaps bordering on hypocrisy.
Another topic was people commenting on social media posts, and how a lot of these comments were “spam”, in that people were not responding to what was posted, but were posting to try to take advantage of the “flow” of the original poster (in this case, I am assuming it was Dave Winer – it could also happen to Jeff Jarvis, but it was Dave Winer who brought it up). This is a tricky topic. Both Dave Winer and Jeff Jarvis said they want to encourage conversation (well, maybe it was Jeff more than Dave). However, if you want to have conversation, you have to give people the chance to say something. If the response to comments is deleting comments, or blocking people because they disagree or are critical, this discourages people from commenting. If I write a post commenting on another post (either compliments or criticism), how should I inform the person or site I am are writing about? Both Dave Winer and Jeff Jarvis said people should be “respectful”. That sounds good, until the conversation gets blocked. I do not have any solutions to offer here, but if someone wants to have a conversation, it has to be two-way/bidirectional. In the case of social media apps, part of the design of the apps, in my opinion, is to encourage conversation. Blocking people and deleting comments in a thread do not give the impression that someone wants to have a conversation.
The next topic I would like to address is providing an alternative to the mainstream media. Dave Winer talked at some point about individuals creating stories (covering events (like reporters, I suppose)) and creating/editing a flow of stories (again I assume this is mainstream media stories, which is a lot of what get commented about on blogs). I will address the “flow of stories” idea first. During the 2020 George Floyd protests, I started a site to curate the mainstream media and social media coverage of the protests in Portland, Oregon. The site was called Portland Protest News, and I updated it daily for a month and a half before I had to stop due to an illness. I set up news flows from mainstream media (primarily using RSS feeds), reviewed those feeds on a daily basis, selected stories to post, created a post with links to those stories, and also created a newsletter with the same content. At best, I was able to do this in an hour. Most of the time, it was 1.5 hours, and sometimes two hours. It was difficult to do this and work a regular 8 hour day. To me, the curated flow that Dave Winer talked about in the podcast with Jeff Jarvis would take at least this much time. Someone would have to put in that time to create a dynamic site with daily posts.
Next, I would like to discuss the topic of people covering events. I thought the idea of protesting the New York Times was interesting, and the idea of others news organizations covering that protest might occur. However, in a recent post of mine commenting on an essay by Anne Applebaum on protests in Poland, Applebaum stated that protests, if not carefully targeted, achieve little. I do not think there would be a clear enough goal to make protesting the New York Times effective. I think that the idea of independent writers/bloggers attending events and publishing accounts of this events is worthwhile, but I think there are several issues as well. Finding out about events takes work, attending events takes time, and writing about the events takes time and effort. Who will do these things? Who will coordinate this work? How will the posts/stories be distributed so that others can find out about them? The story “The Little Red Hen” comes to my mind, where one animal does all the work to produce a loaf of bread. Where are the “little red hens” to do this work?
There are some independent news organizations covering state legislatures (States Newsroom) and voting issues (Votebeat). There are small news startups trying to cover local news (Salem Reporter in Salem, Oregon as an example). There is even a online newspaper in Washington state (the Sammamish Independent) that is produced by volunteers. These are all current examples of independent coverage. Some of them have some funding, but many are dependent on subscriptions or donations. Doc Searls, in his work at the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, has written a series of stories about “The News Commons“, and experiments in the Bloomington Indiana area. So, I point to these examples of “little red hens”, each with a focus, but providing inspiration and food for thought to others.
I welcomed this podcast, as it shared many ideas and food for thought. I hope my analysis has done the same, and I welcome any and all feedback. No one will be blocked or deleted, I assure you!
I recently posted a quote from Hannah Arendt: “We are free to change the world and start something new in it” . I would like to point to a recent post by Ken Smith about how to solve the problem of Donald Trump. He organized his post as a series of problems to be addressed. I think the structure of this post could be implemented as a website in a fairly straightforward manner. I will try to create something in the next week that could serve as a model. Maybe I can even get Ken Smith or someone to collaborate with me on this project. Any assistance would be welcomed!
Yes, I watched the CNN debate on Thursday with Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Yes, I thought Joe Biden’s “performance” at the debate was poor, compared to the confidence of Trump’s presentation. However, Biden answered the questions set by the moderators and generally answered those questions truthfully, while Trump repeatedly refused to answer the questions in the debate, even after being pressed several times for some of those questions. Trump told so many lies that it took CNN’s Daniel Dale several minutes just to list all the lies that Trump spewed out over the course of the debate (also see text of fact checking). As Joe Biden mentioned afterwards, “It’s hard to debate a liar.”.
While Biden’s performance is rightly being criticized, it was the debate moderators who allowed Donald to steamroll the truth with an incessant stream of increasingly bizarre and dangerous lies — that he, not President Biden instituted a cap on insulin, that blue states allow women and their doctors to commit infanticide, and that Nancy Pelosi was somehow responsible for January 6th — while refusing to answer the questions asked of him. Why Jake Tapper and Dana Bash chose to abdicate their journalistic responsibility in service to a man who is an enemy of American democracy and a free press only they know, but that abdication should be a much bigger story, I know who Joe Biden really is. And I know who my uncle really is. And I’ll take the decent guy with the sore throat who believes in democracy over the rapist insurrectionist monster every single time.
Biden will not step away from the 2024 election cycle because it would hand the presidency, beyond any doubt, to a confirmed rapist, serial sexual assailant, active insurrectionist, convicted felon, pathological liar, malignant narcissistic sociopath, gleeful adulterer, career criminal, unrepentant con man, traitorous would-be U.S. dictator, misogynist, antisemite, racist, homophobe, transphobe, Islamophobe, and budding war criminal.
Tonight was the first debate between President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and by far the most striking thing about the debate was the overwhelming focus among pundits immediately afterward about Biden’s appearance and soft, hoarse voice as he rattled off statistics and events. Virtually unmentioned was the fact that Trump lied and rambled incoherently, ignored questions to say whatever he wanted; refused to acknowledge the events of January 6, 2021; and refused to commit to accepting the result of the 2024 presidential election, finally saying he would accept it only if it met his standards for fairness.
The American people have a choice between a convicted felon and liar, and a man who has fought to preserve democracy and improve our way of life. I am going with the second one.
How many people does it take to change the world? This BBC article summarizes research by Erica Chenowith, finding that non-violent protests engaging 3.5% of a population have never failed to bring about change. For the US, this would be 11,721,000 per this Wikipedia article. Let’s get started!
Via an email newsletter from Eileen Flanagan, I found out about an interactive web site/story called “What If Trump Wins?”. The site presents the reader with an initial choice – does Trump or Biden win the 2024 US presidential election? Based on what result the reader selects, a set of other choices is presented along with a narrative to fit the initial choice. From the main site page, there are 25 different ways that the story ends. The site was created by the advocacy group Choose Democracy, which conducted trainings back in the 2020 election to prepare for a coup or possible electoral mischief. I “played” the story both ways (first selecting Trump and following the suggested actions, then selecting Biden and following different actions). I thought it was an excellent “thought exercise” which provided insight in how a Trump presidency might unfold. Check it out – it might make you want to get involved in the election!
