Chris Boese's Weblog

About 2,000 people celebrating in my neighborhood

My neighbor Dave was out surfing the crowd that centered around Madiba restaurant in Fort Greene (about a block or two from my house) and flowed through the street and down to Fort Greene Park. I was already in my jammies and couldn't drag myself away from the TV coverage of the big party in Chicago at Grant Park. A VERY emotional night, and now, a whole new world to walk around in! What an amazing time to be alive!

Photos by David Malouf

 

Found: Some old Sarah Palin pics

I shared these in my friend network on Facebook, but figured a couple from the Region III basketball program and yearbook shots were also safe to put up here:

This first one is when Palin (#22) was a sophomore:

This one is from when she was a junior (again, #22, note, standing on tiptoe in the back row):

Easter egg extra, at the Continue link...

National Election: Something sobering to think about before we get ready to vote again

An older article from 2006, but extremely relevant now. Here's hoping legions of bipartisan poll watchers are out in force to police this distributed effort that had to be coordinated at an extremely granular level. One granular, distributed effort must be met by an equal and opposite granular Army of Watchers!

Link: Was the 2004 Election Stolen? : Rolling Stone.

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.Posted Jun 01, 2006 5:02 PM

[...]

Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn’t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

[...]

Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.''

I. The Exit Polls
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)

But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)

''The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,'' says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ''They were really screwed up -- the old models just don't work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.''

In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations -- running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -- retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll, Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) -- approximately six times larger than those normally used in national polls(26) -- driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.(27)

On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)

As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ''Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32)

But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)

[...]

In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)

Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''(36)

[...]

The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)

Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.''(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ''No rigorous statistical explanation'' can explain the ''completely nonrandom'' disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ''completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote shifting.''

[...]

Go back and read the whole article! It will blow your mind!

Link: Was the 2004 Election Stolen? : Rolling Stone.

Watching in Wasilla - My brother makes it into the NYTimes

Link: Watching in Wasilla - The New York Times > U.S. > Slide Show > Slide 5 of 10.

My brother was working the Sarah Palin speech in a Wasilla bar, Tailgaters... along with representatives of all the media of the Western World. (He's the guy in silhouette in the window, see the video camera?)

Residents of tiny Wasilla weren't the only ones who watched Governor Palin's speech. According to Nielsen Media Research, about 37 million viewers tuned in on Wednesday.

Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times

He also contributed to this AP video while shooting that day (just documenting this for family posterity).

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080904.wvalaskareac_palin0904/VideoStory/VideoLineup/News

Response to Tristan's comment about Sarah Palin

[Note: this is also posted as a comment in the thread on the previous post, but I wanted to bring it up here as well. Also, to Tristan, yes, it is a serious question, which is why I gave it a serious reply. Thank you so much for posting it.]

Tristan wrote:

I'm not trying to start a flame war here, this is a serious question.

I understand that you know her, but how can you think that she'd make a good president? She's been governor for 2 years and before that a mayor of 9,000 people. That just seems like a mistake by the republican party. I'm voting for Obama, but I just don't get how anyone can vote for McCain now seeing as he'll probably die before his term is up and the country would be left in the hands of a 44 year old who has no background in politics.

Just a quick reply:

You raise good points, and I am hoping for Sarah's sake she does all right in the debate with Biden.

But she ain't no Dan Quayle, I can tell you that. Just because she's been tucked up in Alaska (as many talented people are, hiding away up there, by choice), doesn't mean she won't study her playbook and be quick with decent replies.

Here's where I give her points: you gotta understand what it means to stand up to the oil companies in Alaska. Before she did it, it was inconceivable to me that ANY Alaskan politician could do it. These are companies who rule the world, who dictate terms, pay off whomever they want in whatever countries they want, and have corrupted Alaska politics long before I ever moved up there in 1976.

But like Oklahoma, they are the only game in town for Alaska. Without oil, the state has no economy to speak of.

So what do I give Sarah credit for? Her political resume IS as lite as Obama's, and while she's one year younger than I, Obama is one year older than I am. Obama's lite resume (community organizing? Fancy word for what Sarah was doing in Alaska in her school board and as mayor, if you ask me) includes Harvard Law, but any Alaskan resume includes the deep foundational credo: "We don't give a damn how they do things Outside" (meaning Lower 48). To my mind, that unorthodoxy, surgically implanted into your backbone, leads many supremely qualified people, multi-generational families, to essentially give the Eastern establishment the finger, and to make their religion the common sense logic of Huck Finn, who "lights out for the territory" to be able to start with a cleaner slate than any given establishment will allow. That same motivation also led a lot of Northern Europeans to settle in a so-called "New World," and legions of immigrant waves to follow in succeeding years.

But the main thing I give Sarah Palin credit for is integrity, and lord knows, the GOP needs a MASSIVE dose of that. And truly? What kind of a woman does the GOP pick? They got Elizabeth Dole, and they picked Sarah. Sexist GOP piggies THINK they got a pretty prop that they can trot out when they need her, then go off into smoke-filled rooms to take their orders from Karl Rove  and Cheney.

I mean, look at what they did to Christine Todd Whitman. Republicans favor women politicians as quiet props who keep in their place.

I bet you Frank Murkowski is STILL wishing Sarah were that kind of a woman. And I can't stop grinning, because she isn't, and she is walking into Rove's world with her eyes open and integrity in place. They are betting they can corrupt her with politics as usual. I am betting that she could take down more ethically-challenged Republicans from the INSIDE than Woodward and Bernstein ever did!

Think of it. What would Donna Haraway's "feminist cyborg guerrilla" come from, if she were set up to subvert from inside the belly of the GOP beast?

Chris

Sarah Barracuda!!!!

Link: Poynter Online - Al's Morning Meeting.

The governor has roots in local government, serving two terms on the Wasilla City Council and two terms as the mayor/manager of tiny Wasilla, Alaska, a town of 6,700 people whose average family income is $53,000.

[...]

RealClear Politics gives this background for the Alaska Governor:

When she was leading her underdog Wasilla high school basketball team to the state championship in 1982, her teammates called her "Sarah Barracuda" because of her fierce competitiveness.

Holy Crap!

Sarah Heath Palin has just been named Sen. John McCain's running mate for the highest office in the country!

I know I'm strongly backing Barack Obama now that Hillary is out, but I just HAVE to note this. I mean, it isn't every day somebody you know from high school has a chance to be a heartbeat away from the presidency of the single remaining global super-power nation (as opposed to global super-power corporations, for instance, which are more powerful than many nations).

Oh Sarah, I wish I could vote for you, but I am SO pumped that you got named for this. Wow. What an amazing life and career you are having!

Link: McCain taps Alaska Gov. Palin as vice president pick - CNN.com.

[...]

Palin, 44, is a first-term governor who unseated incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski in the Republican primary in 2006 and went on to defeat former Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat, in the general election.

She will be the first woman to be nominated for vice president as a Republican and only the second to run for vice president on a major party ticket, after Democrat Geraldine Ferraro in 1984.

Palin also will be the first Alaskan to be on the ticket for either party.

[...]

Yeah, people in Alaska woke up to a pretty big surprise today. My mom called, cuz her sister called from Wisconsin to wake her up and tell her. I was on the road, and I stop to type this in a truck stop restroom, after listening to the announcement on the radio.

I'm just trying to imagine how she'll do in the debate with Sen. Joe Biden. It's hard for me to wrap my head around. I mean, this is somebody with the same college degree as I got (journalism), whom it was my duty to guard as a point guard for many years, as cross-town rivals. And yes, she generally fouled out more than I did. I attended a basketball camp where her dad coached one summer.

I'm also pretty sure I covered at least one beauty pageant she was in, when I was a photog for the local paper in the mid-80s. That was my beat the summer of '85, and it was thrilling, let me tell you.

My mom is just freaked out that their little Wasilla mayor is up for vice president!   

McCain apparently is making a concerted effort to reach out to former supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton who may be unhappy with the choice of Sen. Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee.  Reacting to the choice of Palin, Ferraro said, "I believe that people will look back and assess how Hillary was treated by the media during the campaign primaries. And it remains to be seen whether or not the ugly head of sexism -- in the media -- will raise its head again."

[...]

Sarah is an unorthodox political original, I'll give her that. If anybody tries that sexist crap with her, she'll find a way to knock them back on their asses. I've been knocked on my ass a few times by her, and I can vouch for that.

My friends have wondered how I reconcile my enthusiasm for Sarah's political fortunes with my own politics, which are quite different from hers. I really don't have a good answer, because, from growing up in Alaska, I was never that bothered around people with political views widely divergent from my own. That's just normal up there! Nobody in Alaska marches in lockstep. If you went around breaking with people you disagreed with on X or Y, you'd have no friends left. It is a state of extremes, and that's why people go there, live there, love it there. 

I don't think McCain will be the best president, and I'm now completely on board with Obama/Biden.

When I was a kid, I dreamed about going to law school, or going into politics. In high school I applied for and desperately coveted the internship with the now-notorious Sen. Ted Stevens. Then along the way, I sort of lost my dream. It didn't come for kids like me, I was told. My dad was a construction worker, my mom an elementary teacher. I didn't get into the elite schools. I have student loans up the ass. I took classes that talked about how hard it was to break into those rare air spaces. I just figured, for me, it wasn't in the cards. I wrote it off as a door that only opens to people of great privilege.

I never dreamed I'd end up working in Arkansas as a journalist, where I met this guy, the governor, and his wife, and later taught at their school for high school gifted kids. And NEVER in a MILLION YEARS would I have guessed that I'd been running up and down the basketball court in high school with a future vice presidential candidate.

(Nor would I have guessed I'd be typing out this blog post on free wifi inside a stinky truck stop rest room in PA, the laptop balanced on top of an overflowing wastebasket! LOL!)

But Sarah, you GO GIRL! I know what theme song they'll play for you! Heart: Barracuda!

Rachel Maddow goes prime time cable on MSNBC

Link: Maddow Gets Her Own MSNBC Show | The Trail | washingtonpost.com.

Maddow, who leavens her barbs with humor, is something of a heroine on the left. New York magazine recently ran an item headlined "Why We're Gay for Rachel Maddow," and a Nation article said:

"Maddow didn't get here by bluster and bravado but with a combination of crisp thinking and galumphing good cheer. Remarkably, this season's discovery isn't a glossy matinee idol or a smooth-talking partisan hack but a Ph.D. Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist."

Congratulations Rachel!

It couldn't happen to a smarter woman, and the cable news bloviation airwaves are just a tad more intelligent when your voice cuts through the shit!

I haven't been able to get Air America in a while now, but I stuck with Keith Olbermann even as he piled on Hillary, just to catch Rachel and Pat Buchanon juicing things up with something other than the standard, tired old spin-meisters.

So Rachel, do something original! They'll probably make you salt your show with all the standard paid-for-hire talking heads (like you used to be, in your election drag, which was hot in its own way, but not like your non-drag shots--found this one at right on Facebook--hey, it works for me!).

Don't let network management types push you around too much! Standard cable programming wisdom is utter bullshit!

Here's some of my fav bits from an article in The Nation and around the web:

Link: The Nation: Rachel Maddow's Life and Career.

Mad for Rachel Maddow

By Rebecca Traister

This article appeared in the August 18, 2008 edition of The Nation.

July 30, 2008

VIRGINIA SHERWOOD/NBC NEWSWIRE VIA AP IMAGES Rachel Maddow reports from the MSNBC newsroom in New York City, January 3.

In a year bursting with memorable moments in televised political punditry, the first may have come on January 8, when MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow explained one of the quick-spreading theories behind Hillary Clinton's victory in New Hampshire, a surprise win that had knocked many of Maddow's on-air colleagues on their asses.

"You want to know who they're blaming for women voters breaking for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama?" a delighted Maddow asked co-panelist Pat Buchanan and host Chris Matthews, her eyes flashing. "They're blaming Chris Matthews! People are citing specifically Chris...not only for his own views but also as a symbol of what the mainstream media has done to Hillary Clinton."

Matthews sputtered dismissively, but Maddow wasn't done yet. "People feel the media is piling on Hillary Clinton," she said, "and they're coming to her defense with their votes."

[Happily, I was watching this particular show live, and relived this moment reading it here! But at the time I was clapping and cheering, doing my usual "Go Rachel, Go Rachel!" Guess I wasn't the only one!]

For Matthews, who'd been enjoying near rapturous pleasure over the presumptive early-season thumping of his personal hobgoblin, there could not have been worse news than that his own commentary might have paved the way for Clinton's triumph. Yet here was just this headline, delivered by Maddow, looking like Sylvester the Cat, practically licking yellow feathers from the corners of her mouth.

"I didn't mean it in a mean way at all," says Maddow over breakfast on a summer day many months and many MSNBC promotions away from that indelible January night. "But I knew that it was just going to blow his mind."

Matthews is far from the first talking head to get this treatment. Long before this primary season, clips of Maddow, an Air America host often invited on cable news shows as a ballsy gremlin of the left, zipped around the Internet. Her specialty was making Tucker Carlson's head explode, or getting under Buchanan's skin until all he could do was gibber at her about socialism. But presidential election cycles provide the hot klieg lights under which character actors mature into media leading ladies, and at 35, with fewer than five years of national broadcast experience under her belt, Rachel Maddow is the explosive star of the season.

[YES! I been saying it and saying it.]

She's gone from being a popular guest analyst on MSNBC to an exclusive commentator to a regular guest host for the network's prize pig, Countdown With Keith Olbermann. Now there is increasing clang and clamor over the possibility that she will get her own show on MSNBC.

[As of Sept 9, which Rachel notes is her 93-year-old grandmother's birthday. I'll be visiting my 95-year-old grandmother at the time. Maybe we can watch the first show together.]

What's remarkable about Maddow's ascension is not its velocity--Hurricane Katrina made Anderson Cooper in less than a week...

[For the record, I called that out here on this blog as well, and got tons of hits that week.]

--but the shifts in media it may demarcate. Maddow is one of the few left-liberal women to bust open the world of TV punditry, which has made icons of right-wing commentators like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. Unlike her beautiful, bilious conservative female counterparts or the cocksure boys-on-the-bus analysts, however, Maddow didn't get here by bluster and bravado but with a combination of crisp thinking and galumphing good cheer. Remarkably, this season's discovery isn't a glossy matinee idol or a smooth-talking partisan hack but a PhD Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist.

[Yeah, and by being a hell of a lot smarter on her feet than the average bloviating bear. I wonder what her astrological sign is? I'm guessing Sagittarius, with those truth-arrows she likes to shoot with deadly accuracy.]

All of which raises a crucial question: does Maddow's unlikely success, reliant on her ability to defy cliché and categorization at every turn, signal a move in punditry away from the thuggish and the angry and toward the lucid and sophisticated? Or has her powerful charisma and canny career management allowed her to break the rules--without actually breaking a mold?

[That's the $64,000 question! On Air America, she called herself "Amy Goodman with animal sounds"]

When we meet, Maddow is halfway through an eight-night stand filling in for a vacationing Olbermann on Countdown, and she is vibrating with energy from the previous evening. She believes she has three distinct responsibilities when subbing: not messing anything up for the show's permanent stewards, keeping Olbermann's ratings high and just being Rachel Maddow. "Trying to do it as if I'm Keith isn't the best way to go," she explains.

Maddow fulfilled all three responsibilities in her July stint, showcasing her obvious facility with the medium while putting her own stamp on the program.

[Without trying, that week I managed to catch every program. Go figure. Not since Xena: Warrior Princess have I watched any program so faithfully. I try with Battlestar Galactica, but life too often intervenes.]

Nonetheless, she still dwells on her anxieties about the mechanics of hosting--when to look at the camera, when to turn to the script--which she says Olbermann has tutored her on. "It's like rocket science, honestly," she says. "And I feel like I've got a learning curve that's like the Matterhorn! Holy mackerel!"

Of course, Olbermann recently told the Kansas City Star that his protégée mastered the technical stuff in about ten minutes, and that on the first night she stepped in for him, she didn't make a single teleprompter mistake, while he averages four or five a night. But Maddow's signature mixture of self-deprecation and gusto, her holy mackerel-ness, is as good a place as any to start thinking about her singular success. Everything about her radiates competence and a deft, bright careerism. She wants to succeed, makes no bones about campaigning for her own television show and yet evinces a regular-person charm and self-doubt that ensures you'll never mistake her ambition for bloodthirst or bullying.

Unlike her Air America founding classmates Janeane Garofalo and Al Franken, Maddow is not a professional comedian. Still, it's clear that she finds many of the characters lumbering across the tableau of American politics a total hoot. She finds her own story pretty hilarious, too. Asked if her television career is the culmination of a plotted path, Maddow laughs. "You mean when I started working on AIDS in prisons, was this where I thought it would end up? Yeah. This is pretty much it. Phase forty-seven of my master plan."

Maddow grew up in the Bay Area; she came out just before college in 1990 and became an AIDS activist at the epicenter of the epidemic. She earned a degree in public policy from Stanford before beginning work with ACT UP and the AIDS Legal Referral Panel. But Maddow had trouble breaking into treatment activism, which was then the rock-star world of AIDS policy. "It was boys' land," she says. "I knew like two women total who were doing treatment activism. And I didn't totally get it. I'm not like Barbie--'Math is hard!'--but it was a techie world, and I didn't feel like I could be all that helpful."

What she discovered instead was the nexus of the radical prison reform movement of the '70s and modern AIDS activism. It was an area where Maddow felt progress--like allowing secure hospices to take dying prisoners--was possible. "Dying behind bars?" she says fourteen years later. "Wicked expensive. And wicked stupid. And also mean. So let's make the hospices get what they want and also do the right thing!"

In 1995 Maddow traveled as a Rhodes scholar to Oxford, where she began a doctorate in political science, focusing on the intersection of the AIDS and prison movements. She moved back to the United States to finish her dissertation, crashing with friends in Western Massachusetts. "I wanted to live somewhere where I'd be unhappy," she explains. "And I have no interest in New England, hate winter, don't like the country, not fond of animals." More than a decade later, Maddow still divides her time between her home in Northampton, Massachusetts, and an apartment in Greenwich Village, both of which she shares with her girlfriend, artist Susan Mikula. The couple have been together for almost ten years, and Maddow calls their relationship "my proudest accomplishment."

[No way I could complain that much about Northampton, for most of the obvious reasons. I'd take a teaching job at Smith in a heartbeat, but the real lure? Living a stone's throw from Emily Dickinson's grave! I happened to be working on my doctorate during this same times, and making pilgrimages to that area fairly regularly, but mostly before 1996. Sorry if I missed you, Rachel. As in, damn, I am sorry.]

After defending her dissertation, Maddow picked up work on AIDS in prison again, as well as a series of odd jobs, from cleaning buckets at a coffee bean factory to being a handyman who didn't know how to fix anything. As part of her patchwork career, she attended an open audition to replace the "news girl" at the local radio station. She got the job and took a shine to the airwaves. When Air America launched in 2004, Maddow lobbied the network to bring her aboard. It did, hiring her to co-host Unfiltered with Chuck D and Lizz Winstead. When the show was canceled a year later, Maddow got her own two-hour weekday slot. "They had no business hiring me," Maddow says of the flier Air America took on her. "As it turned out, it worked out for them. I mean, I hope it did. I hope they're happy!"

[2005 in Missoula, Montana was, oddly, when I got totally hooked on my daily Air America Rachel Maddow fix. And then, mysteriously, I couldn't find it anywhere I was living again, until she turned up on Olbermann.]

Maddow is one of the only original Air Americans to be left standing after the company's rocky four-and-a-half-year history, and her mainstream success is an unqualified victory for the network. If she got plucked away by grabby television hands, it would be a tough loss. "We view her as a homegrown talent," says Air America chairman Charles Kireker, who has run the network since February. "We hope and expect to have her continue hosting a radio show on Air America for a long time."

In an e-mail, Maddow confirms her desire to host both a TV and a radio program: "If O'Reilly, Hannity and Beck can do that, so can I." Still, Kireker has reason to be nervous. Calling from the Netroots convention in Austin, he'd just come from a panel during which mention of a still-imaginary Maddow TV show prompted an eruption of applause. "We've seen the potential for greatness in Rachel for years," says Kireker. "What's so remarkable is that now it's coming so quickly. This election cycle has propelled it forward in a meteoric fashion."

No kidding. Love is too weak a word to describe how some people feel about Rachel Maddow. They lurve her, loave her, luff her.

[Heh. Hey, I resemble that remark!]

New York magazine's online Intelligencer column recently ran an item headlined Why We're Gay for Rachel Maddow, and the blogosphere is dotted with posts like "I'm totally gay for Rachel Maddow." The "gay for Rachel" meme appears to transcend gender and sexuality. Women, men, straight and not straight: they're all gay for her. In a year in which we have decided to become postracial and postgender, Maddow may embody a media in which adoring fandom is postgay.

That's appropriate, since part of the hypnotic hold Maddow has on her audience is that while she is one of the first fully forged stars of the "liberal media," her commentary is, in a funny way, also postpartisan. During an incendiary primary season, Maddow maintained an almost maddening equilibrium, expressing dismay and appreciation for just about every candidate. She was very hard on Clinton; her face still hardens when she talks about the 3 am red phone ad, which she calls "an abomination," and Clinton's war vote, which she says is "unforgivable." But Maddow also finds herself "frequently underwhelmed" by Obama. "He got it right in opposing the war," she says, "but his war policy stuff now is bullshit. It's total bullshit, and I've never been impressed by it. One or two brigades a month? You want your son to be in the last brigade?"

Contrary to widely held opinion, Maddow did not endorse a candidate in the primary. "I have never and still don't think of myself as an Obama supporter, either professionally or actually," says Maddow, adding that she feels "liberated by having a professional role in which it's probably better for me not to take sides."

"She is a civics geek," says Vanessa Silverton-Peel, executive producer of The Rachel Maddow Show. "She wants to talk about AIDS in prison and the Constitution and the war in Iraq. Policy is her main focus. Not winning elections."

[OK, so I want to marry Bill Moyers, but have Rachel Maddow's love child. Or marry Rachel Maddow and have Bill Moyer's love child. Think their spouses would mind?]

On radio, Maddow starts every day with war news. She focuses hard on policy and on the politics of the absurd. "I'm fascinated by the evil child actor twins that run Poland," she says, as well as inflation in Zimbabwe ("How many bails of hundred-dollar bills does it take to buy bread today in Zimbabwe?"). She's obsessed with the Iraqi national soccer team, librarians and cocktail mixology; she once said that she'd like to "professionally bully people about what they drink." Then there are her specialties: foreign policy, the GI Bill, veterans groups. "That's the most satisfying thing about being able to do my own story selection," she says. "You get to pick that stuff. And whoever is President or in control in Congress is not going to affect that."

It's ironic that Maddow, perhaps Air America's most successful product, has traveled through the looking glass of partisan journalism and come out the other side an electoral agnostic, a liberal in the purest, almost mineral sense of the word. She loves the country, loves the Constitution and loves what is moving about politics. A worldview shaped by these concerns, one that maintains a well-manicured distance from electoral Sturm und Drang, could be a powerful asset for Maddow and the rest of the left-leaning media, an inoculation against future tune-out should they get their wish--an Obama administration that could rob them of their fury-fueled audiences.

Maddow, who has not owned a TV since 1990, tries to limit her exposure to online and print criticism of herself.

[Whew! That means there's no chance she'll stumble on my silly gushing!]

If and when she lands her own berth, and with it a nightly viewership unused to seeing a brainy lesbian with rock-solid expertise on military policy or the IAVA, that will become more difficult. She already bristles slightly when talking about how she gets all the girl questions. "I love the idea that I am the voice of woman," she says, gesturing at her T-shirt, baggy jeans and Red Sox cap. "Look at me. It's like: really? The one woman in the room is really mannish." In real life, as advertised on her website, Maddow dresses "like a first-grader" and hypothesizes that her mild androgyny might have greased her infiltration of boyworld punditry. "I look like a dude," she says.

[No, that isn't what that "D" on your forehead stands for. I'm talking from one to another here.]

Of course, for her television gigs, Maddow gets coiffed and painted and dressed up in what she calls "lady clothes" to fit a more traditional bill, a process she says she used to "resist and get angsty about," but to which she has now surrendered.

[I'll never forget the first day I caught Rachel in her "Primary Coverage" drag. She looked great, but that's when I knew she was in the running to move into the big leagues, or rather, the bigger leagues of fringe rant cable. Heh. Hey, I did my dissertation on Xena, while lived on the cable fringes as well. I'm not putting it down. I worked for 5 years at CNN. Fringe cable and the nutball Internet. That's my life! At least no one will ever go to see Rachel years later at Sci-Fi Cons. The Spinsterhaven Old Age Home that will take the place of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, maybe.]

When I ask whether some of her signature habits--the fascination with the evil twin Polish dictators, the obsession with the nuts and bolts of foreign policy--will go the way of her chunky glasses and naked lips, she balks. "The only reason I get these opportunities is because of my sensibility," she says. "I'm not being invited to do these things because of my looks or my facility with language. What they're after is the thing you're saying I have to trade off."

She continues, "My instinct sometimes is to trade it off. Like, 'Oh, I'm in the big leagues now so I better dial it back. But they don't want it dialed back. They are booking me or asking me to host because they like what they see."

PRIDE! Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama stand poised on the edge of a historic opportunity

Link: Ending Her Bid, Clinton Backs Obama - NYTimes.com.

Link: Op-Ed Columnist - Bob Herbert - Savor the Moment for a Historic Campaign - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.

Link: Op-Ed Columnist - Gail Collins - What Hillary Clinton Won - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.

As the TV blowhards blather on about general mindless crap they scat with after political speeches, I just have to pause for a moment and savor Senator Hillary Clinton's concession speech today, as she suspends her campaign (wording there is very important) and unequivocally throws her support to Senator Barack Obama.

It was a historic speech, and one that had me clapping in my living room more times than those fake manufactured applause moments in the usual State of the Union presidential speeches.

So am I one of those "wounded feminists burning up the Internet," as Gail Collins called us above? The passions of the feminist movement are as much with me as they ever were, and they are the reason I watched every word of Hillary's concession speech today with my heart in my throat, and the memory of every glass ceiling I've ever banged into as fresh in my mind as ever.

I LOVE that the feminists emerged from out of the 30 years of history they'd been relegated to by the media and culture, as if they were as dead as the suffragists. And more important, I LOVE that many of those original women who won their right to vote in the early 20th century returned to the front lines again.

Oh, I've been in love with those wonderful League of Women Voters ladies for years, and I sit and talk with them at the polls whenever I find one of their often elderly poll-watchers.

Those crappy pundits say her "celebratory tone" in this terrific speech was an audition to be Obama's Vice President, which is about all they can see. Not surprising, most of them are men, and that is all they can see because that is all their sexist blinders let them see.

This speech was a celebration for women, and for all the other traditional and populist constituencies that haven't seen the light of day for so long, from people without health care, to the vanishing middle class and the threat of deep poverty that a looming recession brings for all of us, just one twist of fate away.

Yeah, I know as well as anyone that the Clintons always brought a mixed bag, doing whatever they could within the frame of politics as the art of the possible. I remember the awful disappointment, after that empowering and massive March on Washington in 1993, when the Clinton administration turned on the gays and lesbians who supported them so strongly, because GA DEMOCRAT Sen. Sam Nunn decided to single-handedly strong-arm  "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" into place in the military. It was a slap in the face, but unlike others at the time, I knew the politics of the situation well enough to know that if I were on the receiving end of Nunn's threats, I may have had to capitulate to them as well. Ironically, the Clinton Administration did better standing up to Newt Gingrich's Congressional strong-arming than it did to more Machiavellian Democrats in Congress (damn, I miss Paul Wellstone too! I miss him all the time).

I don't care about that mixed bag. Hillary Clinton will have my support whenever she wants it. She became, in the course of this campaign, one of the most courageous and strong human beings I've ever seen. I love that she stayed in the campaign as long as she did in the face of unfair media coverage and unprecedented chauvinistic media activism, and I'd have loved a brokered convention even more.

I love that she was smart like a fox "suspending" her campaign, so her delegates remain hers, for the history books, as a bargaining chip. All those MALE pundits seemed to demand she just capitulate without a word, with a sense of male entitlement that made me gag. I feel that such a demand that would have never been made of a man, and was never demanded of other male presidential candidates who went all the way to the convention with a much smaller and less historic percentages of the popular vote.

But what I really want right now is to find a transcript of this speech, so I can pull my favorite parts out of it.  I titled this post PRIDE because there is NO OTHER WORD for what I feel about this historic campaign by this historic woman.

That I met her 30 years ago in Arkansas gives it more poignancy for me personally, just as Bill Clinton's election in 1992 moved me strongly as well. (Arkansans never expect to win in the end... long conditioning of a small and often-overlooked state, because as much as we love the Razorbacks, they do have a tendency to often fall short in the big game. So when we win one, the celebration is bigger,  because the fight is as underdogs, with no real expectation of winning. Hillary's relentless focus on the White House without considering the possibility of defeat is a part of Arkansas she carries with her, because defeat is such a more likely norm, you always operate with that subtext, and fight like a wild boar--Go Hogs!-- anyway, no matter what anyone says about you.)

So PRIDE! Hillary won! This was not defeat, because Hillary won what needed to be won for us, as Obama wins what also needs to be won for us. This presidential race (and the GOP hasn't gotten the word yet, but they will, because there have been GOP populists before, real ones, not Rovian manipulators of Joe Sixpack demographic categories) for the first time in my memory is about candidates as true symbols for a movement of real people, not candidates as candidates, They are candidates WE, not candidates Me, I. This was brought out on Bill Moyers last night. Other presidential candidates in the past have had to go in search of a movement, but these candidates have found their movement, and for the first time in my memory, the movement is more important than the point person who gets designated to give the movement a voice.

Obama still isn't fully my cup of tea. Too young, too cultivated, too close to the machine (Hillary is cultivated and close to the machine as well, but we have seen examples of how she acts in a position of power in those circumstances, and we have no similar examples with Obama). But that's not enough to offend me. I do love what he's doing, and the symbol he is painting himself to be.

I just wish he'd drop the fake Southern accent word-endings in speeches, the eh- sound of the genteel plantation South (not rough hill country Ozark South), mixed with self-consciously-used preacher cadences. I understand why he is doing it, and what he wants to evoke, and I don't deny it does what he wants it to do. I also know Martin Luther King Jr. was criticized for some for having an "academic" voice and a "preacher" voice, and for being an adept code-switcher. I don't even have anything against that. MLK actually WAS from Atlanta, tho, and his preacher voice didn't sound so much like an affectation, since he actually WAS a preacher, and that's the part that bugs me about Obama's use of it. Blah.

But I will back Obama as fiercely as I back Hillary, not because of either one of them, but because I sense potential in the populist movement they given a reason to arise. That's the magic part, isn't it?

I mean, think about it. The feminists didn't go away by the mid-80s. They were still kicking around, even as attention went elsewhere with the failure of the E.R.A. Many built empires in academia, where they embraced post-modernism and acted as if all the activists had fought so hard for was automatically achieved, so all they had left to do was gaze endlessly into relativistic cultural navels, because everything had "always already" happened (the freaky post-conservatism conservatism of postmodernism), instead of fighting for deeply oppressed women globally, those multi-cultural women the pomos had theories for, yet whom they rarely actually encountered, except on Fulbright exchange programs (Fulbright--see? everything comes back to Arkansas!).

Hillary Clinton was still out there duking it out tho, going to the World Conference on Women in China in 1995 (to be fair, some academic feminists I know were involved with this conference as well).

But what is bringing U.S. feminists back out of the woodwork, out of the closet, out of the lowered expectations the revenge of the glass ceiling has brought them? The Chauvinist Piggies came out in force, and by god, that was OFFENSIVE. We'd already been putting up with a lot, but when the Piggies got up on TeeVee and went all oink oink, that was just too much. Suddenly Hillary wasn't just Hillary any more. She became all of US who had ever been oinked at by a Piggie. Just WHO did they think they WERE?!

That was probably what killed E.R.A., you know? A different time, but there had been enough of a reduction in general piggie-ness that nobody really had a bee in their bonnet about it. Nobody had their panties in a twist. It just lost steam.

Think too about the civil rights struggles of African Americans in the U.S.  It has a history of ups and downs since the time of Lincoln, but most tellingly, the civil rights MOVEMENT needed something to get outraged over, something to make them turn out in numbers. Jim Crow provided that public dose of bigotry in several different forms, from segregated schools, bathrooms, drinking fountains, lunch counters, buses and trains. The courts also "helped," as did George Wallace and Orval Faubus.

It is crass movement politics to seek out, create, or exploit such moments or incidents.  Yet Rosa Parks was chosen for her role to be a symbol, as did others in test cases created to push the courts to overcome or show their bigotry.

In this case, tho, this LONG primary campaign was the exigence, the bully pulpit that brought the Piggies and the Bigots out of the woodwork and trotted out by the unconsciously right-wing media, with all the irony that entails (yes, I was embarrassed by the racists in Southern states Hillary unfortunately had to embrace, because they are working class Democrats and do deserve a voice about real working class issues, but oh, I just had to hold my nose).

Do we want to abandon those folks to the GOP who will vote to chop the tops off their mountains and fill in valleys with slag? Do we want to blow off the real health issues the terrible pollution in these coal-mining areas are bringing to these people's children, just because they happen to have a cultural tradition of racism? Or do we want to keep them in the Dem tent, and plan programs that might lead to greater cross-cultural and class and race-based understanding and solidarity?

And no, I do not think the Clintons "chose" to play any race card whatsoever, or to adopt a Nixon-esque "Southern strategy." That is utter horseshit, and was manufactured by Obama campaign handlers or Rovian dirty-tricksters or god knows what, I but I know the Clintons and how they feel about African Americans, and there is not a racist bone in either of them, as I saw in things they did in Arkansas, with no national spotlight on them. There was a truly odd tone among some Obama supporters, who tried to use a rhetorical frame that anyone who would oppose Obama's historic campaign must be racist, by the very act of opposing it, and Hillary as his primary opponent must therefore be racist because of it. Besides being an absurd false dilemma fallacy, it is also a bizarre attempt to manipulate the dominant stupidity of tape recorder journalism, which has no problem repeating false dilemma fallacies unchecked and ad nauseum.

Difficulties will arise with trying to unify and deal with the cultural differences between African Americans and Hispanics in the U.S., and that may be a bigger challenge for the Dems than racist bigots. Dems will have a challenge healing that divide by bringing all into one tent, united for civil rights for all, especially the poorest of us. But is the alternative leaving the more conservative Catholic Hispanics to join with the GOP and be exploited and blown off, imprisoned and deported, abused and kept as a permanent invisible underclass living in semi-legal slave-like conditions?

That is an exciting opportunity for Senator Clinton and Senator Obama to approach head on, if they can unite their constituencies as a single MOVEMENT and a united ticket. I believe a united ticket is an IMPERATIVE to ride this movement to its natural next populist step.

Yes, Obama MAY be able to be elected to president without Hillary on the ticket, but what price must he pay to do so? He will not have the votes to lay claim to a full-on movement. But Hillary and Obama together can be the less important figureheads to something more important, the actual populist movement behind them, to which they both have made noises to the desire to give it voice.

Noises, but are the noises the real thing, or political opportunism, a motive that simply disappears once the goal has been reached? Hillary's speech today (and her actions of the past 40 years) lead me to believe her noises are the real thing. Obama's community organizing and superior campaign organization do give me hope that for him too the movement is more important than personal glory. He possibly could gain office without it (as most presidential candidates have done in modern history, running for the office as a man, not a voice for a movement. Not since RFK, I don't think, has a candidate run as a voice for a movement. Even his own brother did not. Jesse Jackson may have tried, but his own personality overshadowed the aborted attempt at a movement, the Rainbow Coalition).

But if they chose to lead the movement (and the movement must necessarily direct them, not the other way around, that is the mark of real movement leadership, that the leader is a wise servant of a populist moment), they could do something far more historic than just the amazing list of "firsts" that they've already compiled and will continue to compile. That would be the hope Obama would like to invoke in his "Yes We Can" chant for "change."

I had more hope from Hillary's track record than Obama's speech-making wind that she could deliver, but together, maybe they could keep the focus in the right place.

It is most historic, I think, more so than the first woman or first African American, as an emblem, to run for an office, to see a movement rise up around the exigence of that agon, the campaign struggle, a populist movement that needed the outrages of the Bush years to get their dander and gumption up, to be their "Jim Crow," to be their "Iron My Shirt!" moment, to make their voices heard.

That's the real reason my overwhelming emotion at this moment is Pride.   

Teach your children well...

Link: Our Boob Jobs, Ourselves: My Beautiful Mommy Teaches Kids Why Mommy's Face Is Suddenly "Prettier".

File this one under "How we raise kids today..."

Or under the "Child-bearing as disease" model of pregnancy.

Or just under "Neo-Gilded Age people still can't find enough to do with their excess wealth."

I love the headline the Jezebel site put on it, tho, and so I must quote it. I love how they invoke the feminist women's health classic, Our Bodies, Our Selves (I wish I still had that early edition of it. I wonder if it will ever be reprinted, for posterity? If the Boston Women's Health Collective is listening, please take note!)

Our Boob Jobs, Ourselves

, plastic surgery, top, tummy tucks, boob jobs, mommy makeover, nose jobs

My Beautiful Mommy Teaches Kids Why Mommy's Face Is Suddenly "Prettier"

Here's the perfect Mother's Day gift for your favorite surgically-enhanced breeder: My Beautiful Mommy, a picture book explaining plastic surgery to the under-8 set. Mommy is by Dr. Michael Salzhauer, a Florida plastic surgeon who tells Newsweek he was inspired to write the book when he saw parents coming into his office with their kids, who would become confused and upset when they saw their mothers in bandages. "Parents generally tend to go into this denial thing. They just try to ignore the kids' questions completely...With the tummy tucks, [the mothers] can't lift anything. They're in bed. The kids have questions." The hero of the book is named "Dr. Michael" and he looks like the dad in the Incredibles, all solid muscle and square jaw.

[...]

Newsweek ... gives stats about plastic surgery, including the fact that, last year, 348,000 women had boob jobs and 148,000 had tummy tucks, but what I'm wondering is who are these people?

There are so many articles about plastic surgery — women dying from Botox,  women getting boob jobs for their weddings — but I barely know anyone who's had surgery at all. Sure, a smattering of post-grad nose jobs have occurred, but it doesn't seem to be this all-out country-wide body reconstruction/ self-loathing that the sheer amount of press makes it seem like. Is it because celebrities get so much surgery that it makes it seem like the norm? Or do I live in a fantasy land where women spend their money on new books, not new breasts?

Mommy 2.0 [Newsweek]
My Beautiful Mommy

Is Amazon trying to monopolize the empowering "citizen media" Publish-On-Demand market?

UPDATE 3/30/08: A commenter below (A.F. Stewart) has left a link for an online petition against Amazon's new policy, and I wanted to make it live and promote it also up here at the top of the post:

Buy buttons have now been disabled, (PublishAmerica and Whiskey Press) and Amazon's policy is to do it to all who don't fall into line.

Voice your protest, sign the petition.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/protectPOD

Thanks for the link, A.F.!

Link: Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else....

http://writersweekly.com/the_latest_from_angelahoycom/004597_03272008.html

I am republishing this courageous post from Writer's Weekly in its entirety, in order to help spread the word. That Amazon.com (normally quite supportive of key aspects of the Citizen Media Movement and its most democratizing elements) would attempt such a thing just leaves me speechless.

I hope I'm wrong, and I hope that the negative PR from such a heavy-handed move by a key gatekeeper rebounds badly and forces Amazon to allow the POD books the same rights and privileges as ANY published book with its own ISBN number.

Could you imagine Amazon dictating such a policy to any small university or literary press? What about selected political publishing houses devoted to giving voice to the Thomas Paines of our day?

Amazon made its name by becoming an online equivalent of our Library of Record. Google has now entered that arena, and the competition was necessary, but we can't expect the Barnes & Noble to take up that mantle, and I don't think it could; its interface is too weak and its devoted user base too also-ran. Many of the affected writers are turning to B&N as an alternative, and that could be a good move, if for nothing else, it could help B&N become a better true competitor to Amazon, but B&N has a long way to go.

Could it really be that Amazon is trying to bite the Long Tail that feeds it?

The Internet can be a truly open space only so long as our searches remain honest. Both Amazon and Google have an obligation to citizens of cyberculture not to go all border collie on us and use their power as gate-keepers at their leveraged choke-points of power as oppressive agents of social control against more democratizing forces online.

I hope to follow this issue more in the future, as I learn more about what's happening here, and Amazon's reaction to a public backlash. I should note that key groups particularly affected by this development are FANWRITERS, a massive constituency of fan fiction writers online who develop their skills and corpus of works in specific fandom communities. I have analyzed this social citizen media phenomena in my dissertation, and in the years since, have followed the careers of many successful writers who have "graduated" from fandom audiences to POD, often bringing their own quite sizable audience of fans with them. The effects of this move by Amazon below on the vast worlds of specific fandoms is just chilling.

The good news, which Amazon may not have realized, is that online fandoms are not simply intensely-focused affinity groups. As I also found in my dissertation, they are highly-organized activist organizations. While charities (on the positive side) cable television production houses and networks (on both the positive and negative side) are most often the targets of their organized activism (other sectors of politics and business should take note!), these fandom groups can easily turn on a dime and activate their bases against any target.

If Amazon should step back from this oppressive policy and I somehow miss it, please let me know, so I can also note the change here, when it happens. I have no interest in sharing this outrage in error, nor do I want to lose my faith in Amazon.

Say it ain't so! Please!

Link: Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else....

http://writersweekly.com/the_latest_from_angelahoycom/004597_03272008.html

March 27, 2008

Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else...

BREAKING DEVELOPMENT: We were notified by a PublishAmerica author that her book was available for purchase through Amazon on Tuesday but today the "buy" button for her book on Amazon is gone. We researched some other PublishAmerica books and it appears the "buy" button on Amazon has indeed been removed from the vast majority of their book pages.

PublishAmerica issued a press release today that states, "PublishAmerica will not comply with Amazon's ultimatum, and will not allow that company to dictate who will print PublishAmerica's books, and at what conditions."

~~~~~

Some Print on Demand (POD) publishers are privately screaming "Monopoly!" while others are seething with rage over startling phone conversations they're having with Amazon/BookSurge representatives. Why isn't anybody talking about it openly? Because they're afraid - very, very afraid.

Amazon.com purchased BookSurge, a small POD publisher/printer back in 2005. Amazon also lists and sells titles for the largest POD printer, Lightning Source, which is owned by Ingram (the large book distributor). According to their website, Lightning Source serves more than 4,300 publisher clients and has more than 400,000 titles in their system.

You'd think Amazon's purchase of BookSurge might have made things a bit uncomfortable between the two companies. However, they continued to work together, getting books on demand to Amazon.com's loyal customers. Things appeared to be cruising along just fine, but perhaps not anymore.

Reports have been trickling in from the POD underground that Amazon/BookSurge representatives have been approaching some Lightning Source customers, first by email introduction and then by phone (nobody at BookSurge seems to want to put anything in writing). When Lightning Source customers speak with the BookSurge representative, the reports say, they are basically told they can either have BookSurge start printing their books or the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages will be "turned off."

The book information would remain on Amazon, and people could still order the book from resellers (companies that list new and used books in Amazon's Marketplace section), but customers would not be able to buy the book from Amazon directly, nor qualify for the coveted "free shipping" that Amazon offers.

Don't believe it? I didn't believe it either. I am Angela Hoy, the co-owner of POD services company BookLocker.com and publisher of WritersWeekly.com. I am well-known in the industry for my activism performed through WritersWeekly Whispers and Warnings. Over the years, we have helped writers recover tens of thousands of dollars in fees from deadbeat editors and publishers, helped them negotiate better contract terms, assisted writers in obtaining payment after their copyrights have been violated, and even assisted police in collecting evidence to prosecute criminals who have preyed on writers. I am also the author of 11 non-fiction books.

Still doubting the reports could really be true, I emailed an Amazon/BookSurge representative who's been trying to get us to talk to him by phone. John Clifford of Amazon/BookSurge called me at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 26, 2008.

My first comment was to tell him we heard a rumor that POD publishers who didn't use BookSurge would have the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages turned off.

He said, "What? Who told you that? That's not true!"

I told him I'd heard some rumors from the "POD underground."

He said he'd previously tried to talk to my husband, Richard Hoy, the President and CEO of BookLocker. I explained that we had a very bad experience with BookSurge in the past and that he was, naturally, hesitant to do business with them again. (Google the words BookSurge complaint without any quotes to see other customers' comments about them as well.)

He claimed the people who worked for BookSurge back then are probably all gone (but that didn't explain the more recent complaints). He made his sales pitch, talking about percentages and such, and said many POD publishers are resisting their attempts to convert to BookSurge. Mr. Clifford also said BookSurge's aim was to help Amazon customers get their books faster.

What he didn't say was that Lightning Source not only packages books for Amazon customers in boxes that feature an Amazon.com return address label, but also drop-ships those orders directly to Amazon customers at Amazon's request. Hmm...

He stated several times that books not converted to BookSurge's system would be "taken down." Since that wasn't exactly what we'd heard, I asked about books that perhaps weren't selling well, that aren't good candidates for converting to BookSurge (books that would remain for sale through Lightning Source, but would never be converted to BookSurge due to the time/expense involved).

Contrary to what he stated at the very beginning of our conversation, Mr. Clifford finally admitted that books not converted to BookSurge would have the "buy" button turned off on Amazon.com, just as we'd heard from several other POD publishers who had similar conversations with Amazon/BookSurge representatives.

Mr. Clifford said authors of those books could participate in the Amazon.com Advantage Program, meaning they would have to pay Amazon $29.95 per year PLUS 55% of the list price of their book, as well as buy and then send those books to Amazon directly for them to warehouse and ship to customers.

I explained to him that we had more than 1500 books in print and that it would take quite awhile to convert all of those over to BookSurge's system. He said as long as the relationship was "moving forward" that the "buy" button would remain active on our authors' books that had not yet been switched.

Another comment Mr. Clifford made was that their eventual desire is to have no books from other POD publishers available on Amazon.com.

WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?!

I have to wonder if Jeff Bezos is even aware of what is going on within his organization. Here is Amazon's Vision Statement, taken directly from their website:

"Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online."

What it doesn't say is, "Our customers can buy any print on demand book they might want online...as long as we also get paid to print it."

Nobody likes being backed into a corner, and saying "do this or else" naturally breeds angry rejection and hostility. If we did agree to sign the contract, pulling and transferring files to Amazon/Booksurge would take an enormous amount of time and money. From the POD publishers we've talked to, and from our own experience at BookLocker, we could all be looking at a dire and immediate threat of revenue cuts if we refuse to sign the Amazon/BookSurge contract. Most importantly, there could be an outcry from and potential financial hardship on the authors, who are completely innocent in all of this.

In BookLocker's opinion, and the opinion of all the fellow Lightning Source customers we talked to, the Amazon/BookSurge proposal does not appear attractive at all (yes, we obtained the contract and the file submission specifications). Amazon/BookSurge would make money two ways on Amazon.com sales - first the fee for printing the books, and then 48% of the list price of each sale through Amazon.com. Lightning Source allows its customers to set their own discount rate for Amazon and other retail sales, and does not force POD publishers or authors to pay "48%."

Furthermore, it could take the larger POD publishers months to submit their book files to Amazon/BookSurge, at a considerable cost and number of man-hours. This makes the deal even less attractive. Finally, while the initial list of books submitted by POD publishers could be submitted to Amazon/BookSurge for free, the contract states future books would cost $50 each to process. The cost for individual authors to publish through BookSurge is considerably more, with an average publishing package cost of more than $1,000.

Since Amazon/BookSurge does not offer Ingram distribution (Ingram distribution is considered imperative in the industry for bookstore sales), any company that accepts the Amazon/BookSurge deal, who desires to keep offering Ingram distribution, may need to maintain two copies of the book files. Since the Amazon/BookSurge current specs don't match the Lightning Source specs, future book files, both interior and cover, may need to be formatted separately. So, they would have to pay double the setup fees and might have to do double the formatting work as well...or pay designers to do double the formatting work.

Likewise, self-published authors who believe they must have Ingram Distribution AND an active "buy" button on Amazon to be successful may need to pay double the setup fees (to a POD publisher AND Amazon/BookSurge), and also may need to create two separate sets of formatted files.

In the event where two versions of a book might be available, Mr. Clifford said the Amazon/BookSurge version of the POD book would trump (override) the version offered by Lightning Source on Amazon.com.

AMAZON WAS BUILT BY BOOKS....That Were Written By AUTHORS

When authors get wind of this, we believe they are going to be livid. Authors are also readers. They love books. We suspect they buy from Amazon in droves. I, myself, have been an Amazon junkie for years, not only heavily promoting Amazon.com in my non-fiction books for writers and on our very popular website, WritersWeekly.com, but also listing my own books for sale there, ordering other authors' books, DVDs and numerous other products as well. I pulled up our Amazon customer account and looked at our receipts. We've spent $1508.81 at Amazon.com in the past six months. Multiply that by the number of authors this will affect...authors who, like me, have a multitude of websites to choose from when doing their shopping online.

In addition, authors participate in the Amazon experience, via blogs on the website, by posting reviews about other books, and more, activities that help to continually make Amazon bigger and better. Authors are a loyal bunch! For years, they've been faithfully sending their readers to Amazon.com, again and again, even when they earned lower royalties for doing so.

It's not inconceivable to think that this group, if shoved against a wall like this, won't simply pledge their allegiance elsewhere. Let's face it, BarnesandNoble.com offers free shipping on orders of $25 or more, too. Authors can change the links to their book pages on their websites, in their ezines and press releases, and even in their email signatures to their book's page at BarnesandNoble.com. Authors can spend their own money elsewhere as well (as I plan to do). I imagine BarnesandNoble.com will be very happy to process the extra book sales that could result from all of this.

Amazon.com might also upset countless companies that have Amazon Affiliate bookstores on their websites (many authors have these, too!). If Amazon/BookSurge were to follow through with turning off the "buy" buttons for thousands of POD titles, customers following those links from other websites could be confused and annoyed. After clicking on a link, they would find no easy way to purchase the book directly from Amazon, and no way to obtain free shipping on that book, even if they're willing to buy more products to meet the $25 free shipping threshold. One would think Amazon must know the free shipping strategy works to upsell customers on additional products. That's why they offer it. Without it, these customers could have no incentive to buy more products because the product they surfed in to buy does not qualify.

One has to wonder if traditional publishers will be next? Will Amazon eventually require all books sold through Amazon.com to be printed by BookSurge?

Let's all hope and pray this situation is one huge, misguided idea from some mid-level management person and not corporate policy being dictated from the office of Jeff Bezos.

What can you do? Let Amazon know what you think about this "offer" by Amazon/BookSurge.

The names of their Officers and Directors are here: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-govManage

Amazon's Investor Relations Team email address appears near the bottom of this page: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-faq

Their address is:

Amazon.com, Inc.
P.O. Box 81226
Seattle, WA 98108-1226

Next, tell your author friends, your book buyers, your website visitors, your ezine subscribers and everyone else about this situation. Amazon.com was built on books. Books are written by authors. Unfortunately, it appears authors may ultimately be the innocent pawns in this power struggle.

~~~~~

[...]

Angela Hoy is the publisher of WritersWeekly.com, which offers free job listings and paying markets for freelance writers every Wednesday. Subscribe at WritersWeekly.com. She is also the publisher at BookLocker, which offers full-service, affordable print on demand publishing and free ebook publishing.

~~PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT TO AUTHORS FROM ANGELA~~

There is no reason to panic. We are not aware of any cases yet where the "buy" button has been removed. It is possible, after recognizing everyone's concerns, that Amazon might change its mind.

If they do turn off the "buy" buttons, though, not having an active "buy" button on Amazon.com is not the end of the world.

After selling books for eight years, it has been our experience that "chance purchases" of self-published books on Amazon.com are not the norm. Authors slap books up on Amazon.com all the time, don't market them, and sell zero copies. For most self-published authors, sales are almost always author-driven, meaning the bookstore link you use in your marketing efforts is what's driving your sales, not just simply having your book listed on Amazon.com.

We know from experience that the customer is going to buy your book from where you tell them to buy your book. If you want your customers to qualify for free shipping, you can send them to BarnesandNoble.com, and tell them their order might qualify for free shipping (many people don't know BarnesandNoble.com offers free shipping!).