Scripting News

Obama's race speech

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:01:16 GMT

Presidential candidate Barack Obama gave a speech today about race.

Here's an MP3 of Obama's speech.

Video of the speech.

Links for 03/18/2008

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 04:15:37 GMT

NYT: Mr. Obama’s Profile in Courage.

Today's Clinton conference call

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:37:07 GMT

http://sundaygang.com/clinton/2008/03/18/call1.mp3

Today's Obama conf call MP3

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:14:17 GMT

http://sundaygang.com/obama/2008/03/17/call1.mp3

Today's Clinton conf call MP3

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:25:38 GMT

http://sundaygang.com/clinton/2008/03/17/call1.mp3

Race in 2008

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:05:21 GMT

Last week race became the issue in the election of 2008.

Of course some people would say, and they're probably right, that it was always the issue, but it came to the surface last week. I won't try to speak for them, I'll just speak for myself.

I am white, male, 52 years old, and like everyone else (sorry) I feel that people always find a way to push me to the side, to objectify me, to react to my body as opposed to my ideas, and to use me as a screen to project their fears and doubts on.

I went into yesterday's podcast thinking we'd have an interesting discussion on race, that I was prepared for whatever would happen, but I was not prepared. You can hear that in the 50 minutes. You should listen all the way to the end before you form a judgment. And also watch your own responses and reactions and see how your racism works.

In the US, it seems no one is without it. If you think you are, perhaps it's because you've kept it tucked away, and don't challenge it, so it's invisible to you. But you have no trouble seeing it in others.

For example, there's no missing Geraldine Ferraro's racism, I don't know if she sees it or not. But it's clearly untrue that her nomination for VP in 1984 is comparable to Obama's leadership in the Democratic nomination process in 2008. She was chosen because of her gender. But that does not imply that Obama is leading because of his race. There is no correlation.

I understand her point of view because it's familiar to me, people close to me see it the same way as Ferraro. I don't think they can or will or want to change, they will always believe that Obama had an advantage.

In the comments in response to yesterday's podcast, Herb, a black man tells a story of attending a conference as a speaker, and having other participants treat him as if he were a waiter. I honestly had no idea that that happens. I knew that stuff like that happened in New Orleans when I was a student there in the early 70s.

I think blacks are racist too, btw. I've experienced it this way. According to them, all my experiences are invalid. They tend to talk about white males the same way Republicans talk about liberals, as if we're silly, naive, trivial people. Can you imagine I don't like that any more than the speaker who was asked to fetch a Coke. We're always lectured, no matter how old we are, no matter how much life experience we have, no matter how curious, or intelligent we are, the same way, as if we need an education. Black people actually put it that way. No not all. But remember, not all white people asked for the Coke, either.

BTW, that also comes with age. As you get older a curious thing happens. In some contexts you're assumed to be smarter, but in most you're that trivial, naive and silly stereotype I described above. It happens more frequently as my beard gets more gray and my hairline recedes.

I listened to Face The Nation on my walk yesterday, and heard Bob Schieffer ask Deval Patrick if black people are going to be angry if Obama is denied the nomination by superdelegates even though he has a majority of the elected delegates, and a majority of the votes. Wait a minute, what about non-black people who support Obama? Doesn't our opinion matter? Apparently not. What just slipped out there? Schieffer seems like a good guy, high integrity.

Then this raises another question for me. Okay there's a lot of unprocessed anger over race in the US, and a lot of it will come out in the next few months, but what if Obama is elected? This is where my head starts spinning. I tried to raise the question in yesterday's podcast -- will blacks look at the world differently now that a black man is President? I think he said no. I can't believe that. Something will have to give. But haven't they thought about that at all? (I'm very sure something will shift because, being around Silicon Valley for so long, I've seen lots of people achieve wealth very quickly. This usually causes an eruption of huge emotion as the normal feeling of worthlessness is contradicted by the new worth in the person's bank account. People often get very depressed when this happens.)

Then the question comes up -- will there be retribution? I couldn't believe I was thinking about this, but the Jeremiah Wright speeches that came out last week put it front and center. There was a time that I remember when blacks talked about taking power in the US in ways designed at least in part to scare white people. Obama is the perfect black candidate for not raising the fears of whites, unlike Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. I'm still supporting him, but now I have new questions, that I probably would eventually have had even if Wright's speeches hadn't become an issue.

Yeah, I'm a middle-aged white male, and my opinion matters not one bit. I've heard that so many times. But of course I don't buy it.

I want to believe what Obama says, because I know that what he says is what we have to do. I want to find people whose politics are as far from mine as possible and find the bond that connects us as Americans. I think if we all do that we can hold on to our beliefs, and not worry about convincing others that we have it worst (that's not going to happen) but rather look for ways we can give each other what we want. That's why I want to know what people want, not the kind of victory wartime presidents say they want. Sometimes you can define victory, but most times there is no victory. We just get to do more with our lives with less suffering, and after all that's pretty good.

PS: I'm not voting for Clinton, under any circumstances. I would be happy to vote for a woman for President, but send us someone better than Hillary, who doesn't deceive so much, who actually has the experience that she is claiming. And even if she doesn't agree with Ferraro, she tried to use it, and that's inexcusable.

Update: This piece is cross-posted at Huffington.

Links for 03/17/2008

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:10:06 GMT

Negative review of iPhone dev program.

Sunday Gang #3 -- Race in 2008

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 17:37:42 GMT

This has got to be the heaviest podcast I've ever done. It almost melted down, but it had a happy ending.

http://sundaygang.com/003.mp3

Our guest this week is Chris Rabb, a blogger from Philadelphia. It was a three-way conversation with Nicco Mele in the middle, the real fireworks are between Chris and myself.

The lesson from this election cycle imho, is that race, which has always been everywhere in US politics, is so close to the surface this time that we get a chance to hash out our differences, and if we want, find what we have in common. As always, when change happens, no pain no gain. But in the end, you hope it comes out the way this 50-minute podcast did, with an agreement to continue the conversation.

Interview with Marshall Kirkpatrick

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 19:02:09 GMT

I did a 20-minute interview this morning with ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick about FriendFeed and related tools.

http://sundaygang.com/dave/kirkpatrickInterview.mp3

You can receive these MP3s in your podcatcher by subscribing to the RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures for this weblog.

Update: Bret Taylor, a founder of FriendFeed, checks in.

Must-read piece

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 18:50:34 GMT

Orlando Lima: "[Geraldine Ferraro] theorized that a self-made black guy with a Muslim name has a political advantage over a white woman who is the wife of a two-term President."

I was reading along until I came to this bit.

"When liberals need black votes they come into our communities and act like they're down."

Okay, that may be prejudice, not racism, but no matter what it isn't cool.

I am a liberal, and I feel disempowered too, and I feel that the pols come around and ask for my vote and money and that's the end of that. Even Obama has yet to prove he's any different.

We desperately need to look for things we have in common, and we all have barriers inside ourselves that we can't see. I'll listen when you say I have a barrier, but you have to do the same.

If you make being a liberal equivalent with being shallow and silly, you're buying into a Republican frame of reference, and you make it impossible for us to be powerful. And that's not something I'm going to support.

The lesson of Reverend Wright is that blacks have bad racial attitudes that balance those held by whites. Yes the whites started it, but that isn't going to help anyone (my ancestors were in Eastern Europe while that was hapening). There were reasons we were scared of blacks when I was growing up in NYC, they may not have had anything to do with reality, or maybe there was some reality to it. Remember there were riots then, and the cities were burning. MLK and Malcolm X were assassinated, but so were some white people. (To be fair, white people did most of the assassinating.)

Obama is definitely a leader in league with MLK, I watched him yesterday on TV carefully explaining what was happening, but not using words that would give the press guys any new issues to hang on him. What he's doing is hard, and great. Without Obama we wouldn't have had a reason to listen to Orlando Lima's story, above, and he probably wouldn't have had a reason to tell it.

If Obama wins, we'll be going through a lot more of it, but going through it is a lot better than living with it. At some point we're going to have to get the racism out in the open and deal with it, all of us, it's just one of many items on our national to-do list that we have been so totally neglecting.

MP3 of Sun-Times meeting with Obama

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 06:20:38 GMT

Obama had a "extensive 80-minute interview" with the Chicago Sun-Times (I think earlier today) to answer all their questions about his relationship with Tony Rezko. Following is an MP3 of the meeting, provided by the Sun-Times.

http://www.suntimes.com/images/cds/MP3/031408obama.mp3

You can receive these MP3s in your podcatcher by subscribing to the RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures for this weblog.

PS: He did a similar interview with the Chicago Tribune.

Northeast-style racism

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:23:00 GMT

I grew up in the northeast, not far from where Geraldine Ferraro lives, and I recognize the racism of the northeast, where people nod knowingly that blacks who are competing with whites have been given some kind of advantage that makes it possible for an inferior person to compete with a superior one.

It's easy to trigger this kind of logic in a northeastern white supremicist, just say that a black guy wouldn't be there if he weren't black.

You can say "It's True," in a tone that says that disagreement is naive. "Of course," you are supposed to say.

I've seen Jews and Catholics do this, two types of people who have themselves been victimized by stereotypes.

But it's all lunacy, and definitely not true when you're talking about the leader for the Democratic Party nomination for President.

It's lunacy but it's lunacy that works. All around the northeast, esp in Pennsylvania, people are talking around the kitchen table, saying of course he wouldn't be there if he weren't black, and identifying with Hillary Clinton, a white person who's about to lose her job (one she was never elected to) to a black person, unfairly.

Someday America will grow out of this lunacy, and will stop judging people based on their race. That Obama is a very serious candidate for President says a lot about him, but it says even more about us, that the racism of Ferraro and the northeasterners who reason as she does, is falling into the background.

How Internet news should work

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:06:38 GMT

By the mid-90s I became accustomed to reading news on the web. So much so that I cancelled subscriptions to the NY Times and Wall Street Journal because most days I'd never take the papers out of the plastic bags they were delivered in.

Getting news on the web was so much more efficient. I'd read the TImes and local papers and News.com, Infoworld, MacWeek, and a bunch of other industry publications. This was before blogging, before RSS.

How I'd do it -- I'd go to a site, News.com for example, and scan for articles that interested me. I'd do this every hour or so, I'd rely on memory and link color to determine if an article was new or not. Being a software developer, every time I thought of better ways to do this, if only...

Then in 1999 something great happened, a bunch of tech industry publications, working with Netscape, started publishing titles, descriptions and links to stories in RSS. I immediately put together a web application that scanned these "feeds" periodically, and put the new stories at the top of the page, pushing down the older ones. Then, to do my hourly news trawl, I'd just have to start at the top of the page, and read down until I came to something I had seen before. I thought of this as "automated web surfing." It took the labor out of the hunting and pecking I had been doing before.

This is, imho, the way news should work on the Internet. I've had this argument many times with people at the NY Times and other big news organizations who feel that part of what they do is to prioritize and organize the news into a front page backed by sections. They feel the Internet versions of their news should work this way, as their print versions do.

But you see them break out of this model sometimes when news happens in the middle of the day. When William F Buckley died last week, there was an item at the top of the home page, in red letters, with the news of Buckley's death. What if two or three big events had happened that day? What would they do then?

We've already seen news organizations when the rush of news is too great, adopt the blogging style of news -- the New Orleans Times-Picayune didn't allow tradition to get in the way of reporting Katrina, they turned their news flow into a blog.

I think every newspaper on the web should at least offer the reader a choice of a reverse-chronological view of the news. I think they would find most readers would use this view, most editors would too.

I was inspired to write this today because Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has come to basically the same conclusion. I think we may finally be coming to the tipping point for news publishing on the web. I hope so.

Links for 03/14/2008

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:50:05 GMT

Apple's iPhone developer rejection letter.

Obama is live on Countdown tonight.

Candidate MP3s progress

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:28:36 GMT

Progress to report on the MP3s of candidate conference calls.

The Washington bureau of McClatchy has produced an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures for some of the calls.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/250/index.xml

We still need a feed with all the calls. We're missing some of the most important ones. But we're making progress, and thanks to the folks at McClatchy for pitching in.

Now bloggers have a chance to listen to the campaign spinners in their own words, without interpretation.

Update: USA Today posts 2 minutes of a Clinton conference call today saying: "we want to make sure you get the full context." No. Wrong. Incorrect. To get the context we'd need the MP3 of the full conference call. Come on guys, let's get over this gatekeeping. We'll all do better if thousands of bloggers can listen to these calls.

McClatchy has the full conference call.

2/20/08: "Where can I get MP3s of all the conference calls, the day they happen, in full, not spun through the reporters."

2/21/08: "Four years from now we'll look back at this in amazement that there was a day when campaigns hid their words and ideas behind the filters of the press."

FriendFeed gets interesting

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:22:09 GMT

After opening to the public a week ago, a lot more people are showing up on FriendFeed, and it's got features the others don't have. The others? Yeah -- it's competitive with things like: Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku and Pownce. And it's simple and minimalist like Twitter, yet it fully embraces everything else out there that has a feed. Can you post to FF? Yes, and you won't see those posts on Twitter. Not sure about the other places.

http://friendfeed.com/davew

Network apps are getting really interesting, and it's all different variants on the River of News aggregator and RSS, going back to My.UserLand in 1999, almost 10 years ago.

I love to see this stuff finally take root so virally.

Now I gotta get Kawasaki to see the light on RofN.

Obama for President

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:23:42 GMT

Bluetooth headset for Mac?

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:51:39 GMT

I've been doing my interviews with a new USB headset I bought on Saturday at Fry's. It's pretty good, except there's a hum, and the volume is pretty low, so the person I'm interviewing comes through louder than I do.

I'd like to nail the quality issue, so I've been looking into other choices for USB headsets.

Then I wondered if the Bluetooth headsets for cell phones work with Macs?

I read some of the product descriptions on Amazon, and it's not clear. They say they work with Skype, so that must mean they work with laptops and desktops, right?

So the question -- is anyone using a Bluetooth headset with a Mac? If you use a USB headset is there one you recommend or don't?

Update #1: Based on advice from early commenters I ordered a Sennheiser USB headset from Amazon. I figure if any of them are high quality this one is, I'm definitely going to buy a Bluetooth headset, I've never owned one, I figure I should try it out, they're not very expensive. I do have Bluetooth headphones from Motorola, courtesy of Sprint. So I'll try those out with the Mac now that I know they're supposed to work.

Update #2: Here's the Bluetooth headset I'm getting.

Update #3: Chuck Shotton got the Bluetooth headset I'm getting.

TWiT follow-up

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:05:15 GMT

I was a guest on Leo LaPorte's TWiT a couple of Sundays ago. It was fun, we had an interesting discussion about a lot of things, including the ideal podcast player device.

I've gotten a bunch of email from people who use Nokia cell phones and their N800 and N810, and say they do what I was asking about.

Could be so.

I bought a N800 but never got it working in any meaningful way. I think it's a really poorly designed product. Does it have a podcatcher? Never found it. Never even got it to connect to my wifi reliably. After putting in a bunch of hours I gave up -- I wasn't getting anywhere. The Nokia guys told me they were going to send me a phone with a podcatcher built-in but they never did. It's a little too expensive for me to buy one just to find out what the software does. And as I said the N800 was a real bad experience. And I'm not going to shell out $400-plus just to find out if the N810 is more usable than the N800. If they want to send a review unit I'll try it out (I've already told this to their rep).

To their credit, Nokia actually does coordinate with bloggers, almost none of the other device and hardware manufacturers do, so my ability to review stuff is limited by what I'd pay money for. Not a bad limit btw, there's an implied endorsement of products I had to pay for to review.

Olbermann special comment

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 01:58:30 GMT

Fantastic 10-minute essay by Countdown's Keith Olbermann about the racism of Geraldine Ferraro and how it reflects on Clinton and her supporters. Here's the audio.

http://sundaygang.com/misc/olbermann.mp3

He hits all the major points, clearly, powerfully and leaves HRC a way to regain the respect of Americans for whom racial politics are unacceptable.

I would never stand by and say nothing when people tried to keep an African-American in his or her place, as the Clintons have repeatedly tried to do with Obama. It was over exactly this issue that I went with Obama, after comments made by President Clinton during the race for South Carolina.

1/24/08: "There are good reasons why the first lady (or first spouse) isn't actively involved in running the government, so we don't have to understand how good their marriage is, and they get a tiny bit of privacy."

I can't imagine any American, no matter what party they belong to, supporting the racial arrogance of Ferraro. But I go further than Olbermann, I think Clinton should return the money that Ferraro has raised, and not accept any further funds. It's not enough to reject and denounce racism, you also must not profit from it.