I have to say I’m a little peeved at Current. For a news organization that is supposedly a groundbreaking alternative to the MSM, Current has been remarkably silent on the detainment, trial, conviction and sentencing of journalists Euna Lee, Laura Ling. Although Current chief Al Gore is reportedly in the running to head up the negotiations. The two Current journalists were reporting in North Korea at the time of their detainment and are essentially being held as bargaining chips by the North Korean government. I mean, even the flaccid San Francisco Chronicle weighed in on this one. Where’s Current with its sensitive, passionate reporting?
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It wasn’t a big surprise to anyone that the California Supreme Court ruled today that Proposition 8 was indeed a legal amendment to the California Constitution. The Court ruled that Prop 8 does not alter the constitution’s fundamental framework as the challengers contended. In fact, the voter-approved amendment establishes the denomination of marriage as exclusively for heterosexual couples and doesn’t do much else. Gays still have domestic partnerships which are similar to marriage in everything but name.
So why so much fuss about the denomination? It’s the simple argument that the exclusion of gay couples from marriage under the California Constituion institutionalizes inequality. The Court ruled that because all of the rights remain the same, there is no inequality at all.
So what’s next? ROUND FOUR! I got a major education on this from KQED today.
Gay marriage proponents have vowed to bring the gay rights initiative back to the voters. Statistically, this will eventually work. Young voters tend to support equal marriage rights for gay couples while older voters tend to oppose these rights. To paraphrase a commentator’s euphemism, there’s reason to believe that in a few years, many older voters may not be able to get to the ballot box.
The only question is when to put the initiative on the ballot: 2010, or 2012. Strategists suggest that waiting a few more years for the next presidential election in 2012 would be the best strategy because California’s overwhelmingly democratic turnout in Presidential elections would likely benefit the proposition. On the other hand, all of the democratic front runners for California Governor in 2010 are outspoken supporters of Prop 8 so the issue would be directly tied to other highly funded campaigns. The downside, of course, is that if the new pro-marriage prop fails in 2010, then the movement for marriage equality loses a lot of steam.
Why not take this to the Federal Supreme Court? Because it doesn’t have a chance. Federal equal protection jurisprudence hasn’t progressed to the point where marriage proponents think they have a good case.
A final note: Have you ever checked out Class A homophobe Peter LaBarbera’s group, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality? It’s a riot.
]]>And don’t forget Colbert’s legendary speech a couple years ago:
]]>Who they Are, What’s Being Done to them, by Whom:
Matt Smith from SF Weekly, Called an “unfair, unbalanced, malfeasant journalist,” by a variety of San Francisco publications but most eloquently by SFAppeal
We expect our local reporters to have opinions; that’s what makes them flavorful. And to see Smith write another yawn-worthy anti-Kink, anti-porn, anti-BDSM article about Kink just lumps him in with the rest of the unremarkable lot of mainstream media’s lie of unbiased reporting when it comes to porn, and sex for that matter. Within that, it’s not a shocker that Smith couldn’t be bothered to get comments* from both sides of the unchallenged “women as victims” accusations, such as the articulate Kink performers (and writers, speakers and activists) Madison Young, Lorelei Lee or Princess Donna. That would be presenting a balanced picture of Kink’s product, and we know that’s really too much to ask of most mainstream media, and now disappointingly, the SF Weekly.
Jesse B. Watters from Fox News, “Ambushing Bill O’Reilly’s Ambusher,” by Gawker
Watters, as you may have read, likes to sneak up on people without warning and ask them questions so that O’Reilly can air video of his enemies looking aggrieved and flustered…
… If we find him, we’ll post the video as soon as we can. If we don’t, we’ll keep trying, and for that we’ll need your help. What do you know about Jesse Watters? Did you go to college with him? Do you ride the train with him? Do you work at the Starbucks where he buys his coffee? Let us know.
What: Semi-practical applications of interactive technology that may have larger implications for humanity
What they did:
“Just Nuke it, A Google Mapplet that lets you Map Ground Zero” Via Laughing Squid:
From Carlos Labs comes a fun little applet that gives you Godlike power to nuke anywhere on earth, like the Marina for example, and see the blast radius. You can choose from a 15kt “Little Boy” all the way up to a asteroid impact. Makes me want to grab my cowboy hat a ride into oblivion!
“Brain-Twitter Project offers Hope to Paralyzed Patients” Via CNN
What: The Atlantic Monthly Business Channel On Journalism
What they said:
“Finnancial Journalism Shut Out of Pulitzers“ by Megan McArdle
Two sex scandals (Spitzer and Kilpatrick), wildfires, immigration enforcement, OSHA violations . . . but I guess no one was writing anything interesting about finance. Oh, hell, I have to concede, it was a quiet year for those of us on the finance and economics beat, with no big stories to grab a Pulitzer Committee’s eye. But I feel like they might have thrown us something.
“Blogging for Big Bucks” by Megan McArdle
Like basically every other blogger whose seen it, I think this article from the Wall Street Journal on how hundreds of thousands of bloggers are making solid incomes is addled.
The estimates of professional bloggers seem wildly inflated–if you help update the company blog once a week as part of your marketing internship, you are not a paid professional blogger. And the numbers they themselves link to tell a much different tale from the article: most blogs bring in pitiful amounts of money for their owners.
“Is it Time to Charge for Content?” by Derek Thompson
]]>Via Matt Yglesias, I found this list of five tips for charging for content, from Alan Murray, the online editor of the Wall Street Journal. It’s sort of prescriptive, but it’s also essentially a list of “things I do as the online editor of the Wall Street Journal.” But I’m most interested in the Yglesias’ idea that the key to charging for content is finding information that “nobody cares about.”
What People Are Saying:
“Putting Torture Memos to Music” Via Mother Jones
David Limbaugh, Via Townhall.com
The ultimate outrage is the administration’s green light to Congress to prosecute Bush administration officials for these policies, which manifestly prevented terrorist attacks and saved American lives.
Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post
The way we respond — or fail to respond — to the revelations about the Bush administration’s use of torture will delineate — for ourselves and for the world — the kind of country we are.
It is a test of our courage and our convictions. A test of whether we are indeed a nation of laws — or a nation that pays lip service to the notion of being a nation of laws.
Paul Krugman, The New York Times
We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.
And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.
“Loosening of Associations” by Flickr User Night Heron
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
The memos dispassionately describe the use of tactics such as waterboarding, holding prisoners in small dark boxes, exploiting prisoners’ fears of insects, forced nudity, and shackling and depriving them of sleep for as many as eleven days. They also include extensive legal arguments as to why these tactics do not amount to torture under US and international law.
I took this photo of California AG Jerry Brown and Former SF Mayor Willie Brown talking this morning after the AG’s presser announcing a law suit against Wells Fargo. A political move?
W. Brown was no doubt there covering the story for his current gig “Willie’s World” at the Chronicle. Please note how much better dressed W. Brown is than J. Brown.
So what are they talking about? Probably about the AG’s gubernatorial campaign. J. Brown could really use the help from the popular ex-SF Mayor now that current SF Mayor Gavin Newsom has officially thrown his hat into the crowded Democratic field.
Did I forget to mention that current SF Mayor Gavin Newsom officially announced his candidacy for governor this week via Twitter? According to his Twitter account (and probably with it’s aid) Mayor Newsom managed to raise $28,000 on his first day in the race.
Hurray for him.
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I went to Interior Secretary Salazar’s San Francisco hearing on offshore drilling to cover the protest outside. From the SFBG:
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar was welcomed to San Francisco last Thursday by a host of activists dressed as marine creatures, including a few diehards in head-to-toe polar bear costumes who were probably becoming endangered species themselves by standing out in the sun. At a public hearing called to solicit comments about a federal plan for new offshore-oil development, environmentalists and elected officials demanded that the new interior secretary reject new leases for oil drilling off the California coast.
One of the “die hards” in dressed in a six-foot- tall polar bear costume was Brian Nowicki, a policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
There’s lots of folks here saying no drilling, clean safe energy now, however, at the same time, we are in the middle of that period where the deadline where Secretary Salazar can restore endangered species protections to the polar bear and species threatened by global warming.
The occasion of the offshore drilling hearing drew more than 30 environmental groups under the slogan “Not the Answer.” Offshore drilling is a rallying point because, as Nowicki points out, drilling is a symbollic battle for a myriad of interconnected environmental issues.
Offshore Drilling is a double barreled threat for the polar bear and species threatened by global warming. On the first hand you have off shore oil rigs development potentially going right into the offshore habitat for the polar bear. On the other side you have the greenhouse gas emissions coming from the burning of those fossil fuels that contributes very directly to the global warming that is the primary threat to polar bears and the species threatened by global warming.
More photos after the jump…
See the whole album on Flickr.
In the last couple of posts I’ve been discussing how recent popularity of Twitter shows some of the benefits and pitfalls of the rising tide/juggernaut that is social networking. I thought I’d take a small case study to look at how this is all playing out in real time at the tips of our fingers.
The perpetual battle between San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and the uber-lefty San Francisco Bay Guardian has officially gone digital 2.0. Newspapers across the country are struggling and all are working on the inevitable migrations to “new media “ in some form or another… Some better than others.
At the same time, many politicians are taking a cue from Barack Obama’s successful use of text messaging, Facebook and other less traditional forms of outreach in his presidential campaign. Even our favorite computer illiterate politician John McCain Twitters.
My question is: Will the political battles of the future be staged on social media? If I’m right and social media has the power to motivate real world action on the part of users, then we could see a drastically new approach to politics that involves direct outreach to constituencies rather than having it consciously mediated by third party media outlets like cable news. It could be great. It could also be a disaster.
Twitter Fools
Last week SFBG City Editor Steven T. Jones ominously announced via Twitter that something was amiss at the Guardian. The local blogosphere went ape shit only to realize that the worst we could hope for was an April Fools endorsement of Mayor Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign. In anycase, I made sure to pick up a Guardian last week… Maybe Twitter actually does work.
If you recall, in a totally infantile act, the Mayor recently blocked Mr. Jones on Twitter.
Newsom 2.0
Mayor Newsom thinks he is going to get himself elected Governor of California using the organizing power of social media… It’s a smart move given that he’s a Bay Area Mayor. The Mayor posts his activity on Twitter, but unfortunately his posts lack the inspirational quality of the President Obama’s calls to action on Facebook. A week ago, I would have said Mayor Newsom’s slippery personality pervades even the most benign of posts on Twitter. He has gotten better at providing links…. I also have to admit he’s got an impressive following of nearly 200,000 users.
I’m sure he’ll get it town by the primaries.
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Popping Mad: Legendary Pop Music Producer’s second murder trial ended last week. According to the LA Times, he may have to wait a long time for his verdict. While he waits, someone can let him know that looking like a homicidal maniac doesn’t help your case.
Oakland Cops: Ok, the Oscar Grant murder on New Years Day was bullshit, but I was deeply saddened by the murder of four Oakland police officers last week. No matter how you feel about the cops, these guys were just just doing their jobs, and four families lost fathers thanks to the inexcusable actions of a criminal.
Always the opportunists, Ella Baker Center won’t lay off their (pedantic?) grind even for a respectful minute. they’ve taken this tragic event as an opportunity to point out the many failures of the criminal justice system. They didn’t post it on their website, they sent it in an email. Smooth and sneaky, I like it. Tasteless? You decide. If you are interested, I’ll post the whole letter After the Jump.
Young, Hapless Criminals: Speaking of the criminal justice system, I enjoyed [sic] this article in the Chicago Tribune about Jessie Rankins and Tykese Johnson. 15 years ago, the two young men were the youngest innmates in the country: convicted of murder and at the ages of 10 and 11 respectively for dropiing 5-year-old Eric Morse out a window. The story is a follow up piece that points out some of the flaws of in the “justice” system.
Profit-Oriented: My current intern-masters and local NPR affiliate KQED Public Radio is back in the news again thanks to complaints about CEO Jeff Clarke’s very high salery. The bottom line? Turns out that relative to other CEOs of similarly sized Bay-Area non-profits… not so big. It’s still sad and quiet around the newsroom though.
Nation Rules: I love the Nation. They did some great reporting in last weeks issue about how great reporting is going to go out the window if someone doesn’t do something about the flailing newspaper industry soon.
NRA S-U-X: As a DC Native, I’ve been closely following the DC Voting Rights Ammendment that was derailed by the NRA’s underhanded tactics. It’s absolutely ridiculous. The AP has taken a closer look at the NRA’s legislative “scoring” system and how it gives them so much clout in moderate congressional ditrcts. It’s a very disturibing undermining of democracy… But everyone’s always known that about lobbyists.
John “hash pipe” Stossel: American Libratarianism’s favorite cheerleader pulled his head out his ass just long enough to make some good points on the foolishness of United States drug policy. This comes on the heels of President Obama’s move to stop prosecuting state-sanctioned medical dispenseries.
Twitter @Newsom: It seems San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is being very selective about who can see his tweets. Blocking the media he doesn’t like doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me… but what do I know? Bug Newsom at his Twitter right here.
Email from Jakada Imani at Ella Baker Center:
]]>At the Ella Baker Center, we’re stunned and deeply saddened by the tragic events that unfolded here in Oakland last Saturday.
Here’s what we know: a deeply troubled Lovelle Mixon shot and killed four police officers before he was killed in a firefight. As more information about Mixon has come to light, the extent of his alleged crimes has shifted the focus from how and why this tragedy occurred — and how it might have been prevented — to judgment about Mixon’s character.
Make no mistake — Lovelle Mixon alone was responsible for the choices he made. But we’re asking people to resist the urge to shrug off Mixon as a “monster” and use his actions as justification for ratcheting up arrests on our streets. What happened on Saturday was the culmination of countless missed opportunities within a terribly flawed “justice” system, and it was almost certainly predictable — and thus preventable. What happened here in Oakland could happen anywhere, and it could happen again.
Just as our community must work to hold individuals responsible for their actions, we must also work to eliminate the root causes of violence: isolation, fear, sub-standard education, poverty, nagging hopelessness and despair. Only then can we end the violence that has claimed the lives of far too many in our cities, including these four officers.
We must not allow the deaths of so many members of our community to be in vain. There’s something to be learned here, and we can’t afford to miss this opportunity to re-evaluate the city’s approach to community safety.
Many of us are struggling — in the same way that you might be struggling — with how to move forward in a way that makes sense and honors the many different voices of Oakland. We want to be real about what we’re hearing out on the streets. Many people are afraid… afraid of the cops, afraid of the kids on the corner, afraid of what the added tension will bring. Some feel like they’ve been abused by the police department, and that the shooting of these four officers was vindicated in the wake of Oscar Grant’s death on New Year’s Day. Others have wondered why the nation doesn’t seem to care when scores of young people of color are killed, but the spotlight comes out when it’s the police who suffer a loss. Most of us are confused. One common theme has emerged, however: everyone wants the killing to stop.
It’s going to take a lot of work to reconcile the swirling emotions about this tragedy, and we don’t know yet what the best next steps are. But we do know that we have to work together to solve the problems of our community.
To do that, we’d like to hear from you. It’s time to take the risk and speak up, then respect your neighbors for doing the same. The truth is complicated, but it’s worth knowing. We all have a stake in this, and we must honor the experiences of everyone who is proud to call Oakland home.
What do you think can be done to bring peace to Oakland? What’s being done right, and what’s being done wrong? Click here to tell us:
http://www.ellabakercenter.org/?p=hope_in_oaklandWe’ll compile your responses and share them sometime in the weeks or months ahead — we’re not quite sure what that’s going to look like, but we know that listening to each other is the right thing to do right now.
Oakland has faced a challenging start to the year, but we believe that by putting our heads together, we’ll find a way to create a community that is safe for ALL of us, from police officers to inner-city youth. Thank you for your insight, your honesty, and your openness.
Forward ever,
Jakada Imani
Executive Director
The Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle has found an unlikely (totally self-righteous) ally in the San Francisco Guardian. In short, Guardian editors feel the the pain of struggling newspapers, but also suggest that the Chronicle and Hearst could do a better job. Instead of throwing up their arms Hearst might try improving the paper instead of “trying to save” the paper by cutting costs (staff). This posture doesn’t solve the biggest weakness of the Chronicle: It’s growing irrelevancy to a progressive, well-educated, and prosperous audience.
We realize the newspaper business is rough right now, but we’re not convinced that running a daily paper in San Francisco is a doomed proposition. This is one of the wealthiest, best-educated markets in the world — and the fact that Hearst can’t sell enough newspapers and ads to float its operation is in significant part a sign of how miserable the paper’s management has failed. It tried to be a regional paper, which flopped. It’s become so politically conservative that progressives, particularly young progressives who make up the future of its demographic base, see little reason to subscribe.
A few weeks ago the Managing Editor of the Chronicle Tim Redmond offered his own words of condemnatory support. He outlined a series of “hints” for Chronicle/ Hearst big wigs, including firing C.W. Nevius. According to Redmond, The Chronicle needs to abandon it’s ambitions of becoming a national paper and invest in local investigative reporting and progressive commentary.
Become a San Francisco paper. Nobody reads the Chron for national news any more. You can get The New York Times delivered or read it on the Web and get far better coverage than anything the Chron offers. So give it up. Go local. And by local I don’t mean Walnut Creek and Orinda; forget the suburban readers and try to convince people in your central circulation area that you have something worth reading every day.
I agree that the Chronicle is a weak paper, but I’m not sure the smug advice of the Guardian is going to change anyone’s mind.
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