Saturday, July 31, 2004

Brian Buck has been through hell, but he's still alive. Whew. He posted in May that his cancer took a turn for the worse, he was going back on chemo, and then, no updates. Every so often I wondered what became of him. Then this evening, an update!  

Saw The Manchurian Candidate this afternoon. "This is rich people funding bad science to..." I liked it but I'm not sure how it ended. Really. If you saw it and know what the ending is, please let me know.  

Ed, the Congressional Dems are all over blogs. That's probably why we were there. The local press doesn't cover their races. So they are doing what Scoop Nisker advises. "If you don't like the news go out and make some of your own." This is a very clever phrase because it captures the duality, making news is something news makers do, of course, but it's also something news reporters do. If the pros only want to cover the Presidential race, no problemmo, we can do it ourselves. To paraphrase a famous American patriot, The blogs are coming, the blogs are coming. They get it, they're excited, and we are too. 

Longfellow: "Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere," 

John Perry Barlow: Revolution with a Smile.  

New Republic: "The national press corps spent the better part of 1999 and 2000 insisting that George W. Bush was a centrist, because he kept repeating slogans that suggested as much. Reporters could have avoided this misinterpretation had they spent less time following Bush around the country and more time sitting at their desks doing Nexis searches, where they could have unearthed old Bush quotes like this one from 1996: 'The Republican Party must put a compassionate face on a conservative philosophy.' Surely that would have told them more about how Bush was actually planning to govern than the number of times he described himself as 'compassionate' or was filmed with black or Hispanic children." 

Goddard on Reagan on Bush. 

Here's the interview I did with The Gillmor Gang on Thursday. 

NY Times: "Political conventions are like 19th-century novels; they benefit from an omniscient narrator." 

Here's a site we will certainly add to the rotation at the Republican version of Convention Blogers, coming soon to a browser near you.  

The Campaign Institute trains people to be paid campaign staffers. They're doing trainings in Cambridge in August.  

Tim Jarrett is doing a cross-country road trip from Seattle to Delaware.