Morning Tweets

By John Ballard

I'm aware of a change in how I surf the Web. It started when I opened a Twitter account (despite the fact that I remain a Luddite regarding cell phones, being one of the few people left without one). I realized at once that I will never "follow" anyone (with a few exceptions) who tweets incessantly simply because it forces me to read without stopping. If someone in leadership tweets constantly that's okay. Communication and nuanced interpretations are part of that job description. But tweeting for most people is not very different from streams of adolescent angst that occupy the younger generation. (See a more serious link below, btw.) My Dad had a name for people like that: blowhards.

My old aggregator, Bloglines, is closing shop at the end of this month, a casualty, they said, of changes in the way people use the Web. Social network sites (Facebook and Twitter) are making the aggregator mission obsolete so they are redirecting development energies to Ask.com, another product of the same outfit attracting a lot more traffic (and probably an easier place from wshich to sell ad space). After paying actual money for another aggregator I find it's like my new camera, offering about a thousand more features than I will ever need in my lifetime. Stripping it down to a manageable size made me feel guilty. It's as though I got a new Rolls which stays in the driveway and is only used to go grocery shopping twice a week.

I blog mostly in the morning when my mind works better. After checking the home page for new posts, I go to comments, email and traffic before moving to the meat of the day: moring reading. I used to glance first at Facebook and Twitter then go to the aggregator for serious digging. But over the last few months I get stuck at Twitter so often I never get to the rest of the news. I attribute this to two causes. First, I only "follow" a handful of people who are mostly not blowhards, and lately Twitter has quietly put in place a great feature which automatically uploads "older posts" as I get to the end of the scroll. No longer forced to pause for a page-load I sometime notice I'm reading tweets from the day before!

Hey! Twenty-four hours is fresh enough news for me. And there is so much good stuff out there it never hurts to see what somebody noticed several days or a week ago, especially if it is someone you respect enough to "follow" on Facebook or Twitter. (I have noticed that Facebook has a different technique for handling surplus information. Every time I reload Facebook I get another splash of information, some of which is still new but often stuff I looked at earlier. But Facebook is a different story.)

That said, I don't think blogging is anywhere near obsolescence. Some ideas are easy enough to express in 140 characters or less, but most good tweets are links to bigger strings. Although there are exceptions (Palin word salads come to mind) paragraphs typically carry more information than sound bites. In the words of a famous poet

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Now to a handful of blushing flowers picked from this morning's Twitter surfing...

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?Does hate breed violence? Does Charlie Daniels play a mean fiddle? [Updated 10.11.10]  Peter Daou impresses me more every time I read something he puts up. He has the intelligence, patience and insights of Dave Neiwert (whom he quotes), carefully crafting every line in a way that only an idiot might miss the meaning. Regular Newshoggers readers are already in the choir, but it's always good to hear a good sermon.

David Neiwert, a veteran journalist who has covered violent right-wing groups for years, calls the worldview that informs this twisted sense of moral purpose �eliminationism.� It�s the belief that one�s political opponents are not just wrongheaded, misinformed or even acting in bad faith. Eliminationism holds that they are a cancer on the body politic that must be excised � either by separation from the public at large, through censorship or by outright extermination � in order to protect the purity of the nation.

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�I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn�t for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.� � Byron

Williams Byron Williams, a 45-year-old ex-felon, exploded onto the national stage in the early morning hours of July 18.

According to a police investigation, Williams opened fire on California Highway Patrol officers who had stopped him on an Oakland freeway for driving erratically. For 12 frantic minutes, Williams traded shots with the police, employing three firearms and a small arsenal of ammunition, including armor-piercing rounds fired from a .308-caliber rifle.

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Anyone who listens to the relentless liberal-bashing on rightwing radio will quickly realize that the level of vitriol and derision directed at the left will inevitably provoke a few individuals to act out. And they do. Often with deadly consequences.

?Offering Donors Secrecy, and Going on Attack  By Jim Rutenberg, Don Van Natta Jr. and Mike McIntire This article from yesterday's NY Times starts peeling the onion which is now funding the elections in America. (See George Carlin.) Everybody knows where the deep pockets are on the Left but the people pulling the strings on the Right are less forthcoming. This is pretty good muckraking considering how crippled investigative journalism has become with the demise of printed newspapers.

Through interviews with top Republican contributors and strategists, as well as a review of public records, some contours of this financing effort � including how donors are lured with the promise of anonymity � are starting to come into view.

In part, political operatives have reconstituted the vanguard of reliable Republican contributors who helped elect George W. Bush and support Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked the Vietnam record of his opponent in 2004, Senator John Kerry. But as with the American Future Fund, the effort also appears to include business interests focused on specific races.

Bradley A. Blakeman, a longtime Republican operative and a senior aide in the Bush White House, said, �Donors are the usual suspects that have helped Bush, as well as some fresh faces.�

Hold your nose and go read.

?Barack Obama and the Limits of Prudence by Thomas Meaney and Stephen Wertheim.
This short commentary in Dissent points to the most recent  Rolling Stone Interview with Barack Obama, the current cover story, cherry-picking the coda.

IF YOU have waited to see Barack Obama lose his cool, your moment has come. After the president finished giving the interview published in the October 15 issue of Rolling Stone, he charged back into the room to deliver a parting salvo. Stabbing at the air, Obama berated Democrats for �sitting on their hands complaining.� He even questioned their motives. �If people now want to take their ball and go home,� he said, �that tells me folks weren�t serious in the first place.�

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No doubt the public should learn to appreciate, even admire, the prudence that looks like Obama�s cardinal virtue. But the public�s taste for principle will not go away simply because Obama lauds compromise.

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A politician who ranks prudence as the highest of all virtues lacks a vocation for politics. �Better than the alternatives� is a hollow mantra and worse slogan. It might give reason to vote for Democrats over Republicans, but it inspires little more. For Obama�s next two years, even prudence calls for principle. It�s time to present a vision for America and lead.

Short, intelligent, even valid criticism. But I suggest reading Obama in Command: The Rolling Stone Interview in its entirety as well. This little commentary is thin gruel by comparison. No president in my lifetime (including Clinton) can extemporaneously reel out paragraphs like those, coherent and filled with meaningful content.  

?The Morality Disconnect by Allison Kilkenny is not from the top-tier of journalism or blogging, but this short essay is worth reprints, tweets and flyers. Read the entirety and try to remember the name of Allison Kilkenny. I know I will. She's one killer freelance journalist.

...hypocrisy aside, the GOP, and the elite in general, have genuine disdain for the underclass. The truly sad part is that they�ve brainwashed poor Republicans into going along with their scheme to permanently quarantine the undesirables. That�s when you get elderly people showing up at healthcare reform town hall meetings, screaming that they want the government to keep its hands off their Medicare. Sigh.

Senator Orrin Hatch proposed an amendment that would demand mandatory drug tests for welfare and unemployment beneficiaries because, as we all know, the only people out of work these days are worthless drug addicts. Sharron Angle implied unemployment benefits make people lazy, and that there are lots of jobs out there, but workers just refuse to buckle down and find them, and Rand Paul told them to quit being cry babies and go flip fries at McDonald�s so they can feed their children.

Tea Party favorite Carl Paladino expressed his desire to transform some New York prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients where they would receive lessons in �personal hygiene� because, obviously, poor people are poor because they don�t know how to use a loofah. Let�s not forget South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, who ran for the Republican nomination for governor (and lost,) and compared giving people government assistance to �feeding stray animals.�

Meanwhile, Rep. Eric Cantor told an uninsured woman with growing tumors that she should seek �existing government programs� or find charity instead of hoping for healthcare reform. And this summer, we saw some shameless class-bashing when Congress dangled unemployment benefits in front of jobless Americans� faces before nixing aid for over 1 million laid-off workers.To the rich elite, there is no real suffering.

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To average Americans, the strain (and the fear) are all too real. To the GOP elite, and their centrist Democrat facilitators, taxpayers can always sacrifice a little more. After all, they skipped that vacation to the Hamptons, which is on par with skipping a meal. Everyone sacrifices in their own way.

?Oklahoma Teen Commits Suicide After Homophobic Meeting, by Anna North at Jezebel
Yet another one.
And most people think it's something new.
Which it's not.

According to Andrew Knittle of the Norman Transcript, 19-year-old Harrington attended a Sept. 28 meeting at City Hall in his hometown of Norman, Oklahoma, the purpose of which was to discuss a proposal to designate October as Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender History Month in Norman. The council ended up voting for the measure, but lots of the meeting's attendees were against it. Knittle writes,

>One man said he moved to Norman because he thought it was the kind of place that would never accept the GLBT community with open arms. A woman, who described herself as "bi-racial," said she was tired of the GLBT plight being compared to Civil Rights.

>Some of those who opposed the proclamation claimed that members of the GLBT community would use it to infiltrate the public school system, essentially allowing the "gay lifestyle" to become a part of the curriculum.

>Others claimed that council recognizing October as GLBT History Month was a waste of their time. Some members of the audience even suggested that any council members voting in favor of the proclamation may have trouble getting reelected.

Harrington's family thinks the meeting may have triggered his suicide. His sister Nikki says, "When he was sitting there, I'm sure he was internalizing everything and analyzing everything � that's the kind of person he was. I'm sure he took it personally." Harrington also apparently faced a homophobic environment growing up � his father says he "feared for his safety on many occasions" in high school, and his sister, who is older and went to the same school, says, "There was one gay guy in my high school at the time, and he was made fun of all the time. It was a pretty much non-stop thing at school."

The tragically long list of suicides by LGBT youth in recent weeks can seem like a pattern, but at least one expert says it's just a matter of increased visibility. Last week, Dave Reynolds of The Trevor Project told Towleroad,

 

• From what we know and can tell, there has not been an increase in suicide completions among lesbian, gay, bisexual transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) youth over the past few weeks. Sadly, there are likely this many deaths every week, but the media and the general populace are just starting to realize the depth of this public health and social justice issue.