Al Sharpton should write the defining op-ed in the NYT, not George Clooney, who is very pretty, and a great choice to cast in movies like Up In The Air or Michael Clayton, but we don't know anything about his political judgement. He hasn't done anything to tell us who he is in that dimension. To the extent that we do know anything about him: 1. He's a prankster. 2. He has a brilliant and beautiful wife. 3. He has a huge mansion in Italy which he keeps very private. 4. He's rich. We have nothing in common. He should run for office and get in the mix. The fact that the NYT chose him, that says something about them, they don't care what people think, or they think we're really shallow and will fall for bullshit like George Clooney. He loves Biden. We didn't even know he knew Joe Biden! Why should Clooney have more of a say in this than I do? Tell me what Nancy Pelosi thinks, or Al Sharpton. Or give Michael Moore a shot. He has a lot more skin in the game than Clooney. I'd love to read an op-ed by David Frum. Liz Cheney. Elie Mystal.#

We. Need. To. Organize. Democrats should roll out new initiatives with the same skill as Apple rolls out new products. Not the same as Steve Jobs, that's asking too much. But with focus and showmanship, and a livestream, and fanbois and Al Sharpton in place of John Gruber. Focus our attention on each product (ie climate change, social security, Ukraine, etc), so the ideas don't get missed, and we can network in support of the initiative. This is all part of the idea of having a democratic.party website that we call call home for our political organizing. None of this pissing in the wind we do on twitter-like systems. Form buddy groups of people we organize with, based on locality or common interests. Organize the people as well as the billionaires are organized. This is what political parties should be in 2024 for crying out loud. We're missing the point of the mess in our politics. It's all a mess because it needs to be organized and it's not. Maybe I should take everything else off my blog now so I can use what little attention I have been able to gather here to focus on this idea. #

NYT -- put one of your readers on the op-ed page, so we can talk to your readers about you. It would be the bravest and smartest thing you ever did.#

Shownotes for today's Podcast0 episode.#

On this blog 20 years ago: "Our mission when covering the DNC is to figure out what goes on at a DNC. On the other hand, some portion of the 15,000 reporters at the DNC will be trying to figure out what we, the bloggers, are doing at the DNC. I suspect most of them will conclude that we don't belong there, in the same way most of the early articles about weblogs concluded we are not going to kill professional journalism." This turned out to be true. #

TWiT studio in Petaluma is shutting down. A lot of great stuff came out of this place. Please take a video of the studio before it closes down for good. I've learned this over and over, having shut down a few offices where great stuff was created and forgetting to do this. #

In today's Kitty Komix episode: "The very cute but also very courageous Wordle Kitty is learning how to be a surgeon. They brought a mysterious leader into the operating room and asked the Kitty to please operate on the leader and save his life so Wordle Kitty got out the textbook and read up on brain surgery, even though the patient only had a nick on his ear, which was admittedly very bloody, she operated on the patient’s brain and unfortunately the patient died. So we are looking at the scene where the dead body of the patient is on the operating table and Wordle Kitty is smoking a cigarette, relaxing and reflecting on what she learned. She’s still very cute of course."#