Jon Stahl’s Journal

Well put, Gail Collins: Imagine what would happen if a new beetle infested the Iowa corn crop during the first year of a McCain administration. On Monday, we spray. On Tuesday, we firebomb. On Wednesday, the president marches barefoot through the prairie in a show of support for Iowa farmers. On Thursday, the White House reveals that Wiley Flum, [...]

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I don’t have a degree in psychiatry, but it occurred to me the other day that Sarah Palin represents the right wing’s subconscious longing for collective suicide. I’m just sayin’.

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Received via email.  Kudos and amen to its anonymous creator.

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Zephyr Teachout waxes eloquent about May Day: May Day is not about people in the streets. I like streets as much as the next person, but streets, like the internet, are only tools–in 1890 they were powerful tools, and the right tools to use, but if you confuse the image with the action, you can spend [...]

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[18:00] I’m liveblogging from the event ONE/Northwest is hosting tonight, titled “Political Campaigns and Technology.” We’ve got about 50 people in our office here in Seattle, gathered together for a fast-paced peer-to-peer learning session in which we’re going to explore the various ways that political campaigns are using technology to build and sustain relationships, [...]

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We’re tired of your self-aggrandizing posturing. We have an election to win.  We don’t need your pathetic sideshow (again). Respectfully, America

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I listened to a good chunk of Paul Krugman’s recent talk at the Commonwealth Club on the radio tonight. Damn, he’s good. History will judge him well as someone who spoke truth in the face of power.

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Zack rants, Marty riffs. Most the people talking to you (especially nonprofits) think of the web/internet as a tactical support for the rest of the operations. They want the “web� guy to support our restoration initiative, the web team to support fundraising, the web team to support field, the web to support membership. Web is a tactic [...]

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NPR’s recent hour-long special The Partisans of Ali is an concise and engaging historical overview of the long sectarian divide between Sunni and Shia Muslims.  Well worth a listen if you want to understand the deeper long term conflicts that we’ve gotten uncomfortably close to these past few years.

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Matt Stoller lets ExxonMobil VP Ken Cohen have it: The politics of ExxonMobil are interesting, though expected. Cohen is not only the VP of Public Affairs, but the head of ExxonMobil’s PAC, and the head of the ExxonMobil Foundation that distributes charitable grants. That’s a lot of hats for a PR guy. I [...]

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So says a new poll from the Energy Policy Institute, which found that 70% of Idahoans believe that global warming is being caused by human activity, and that 54% said Idaho should reduce greenhouse gas emissions.On the other hand, this means that 30% of Idahoans still don’t accept established scientific fact.  

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My colleagues and I from ONE/Northwest recently signed onto the Integration Proclamation, a first step towards encouraging funders, software developers and those of us who work with them to invest resources in making tools that play together better.If you agree that social change activists need tools that assume they’re part of a larger picture, not [...]

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Alex Steffen of WorldChanging covered Eben Moglen’s Plone Conference talk.  Bruce Sterling comments skeptically.It’s great to see this speech getting out there. I’m really glad we invested in taping the Plone Conference so extensively.  You never know when something amazing is going to happen.

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Thanks to Jeff, Eben Moglen’s keynote talk about free software, politics, social justice and more from Plone Conference 2006 got slashdotted this morning. If you haven’t watched or listened to it yet, do yourself a favor. Jeff even wrote a far better summary of it than I ever could have. Update: Also on Metafilter [...]

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Ethan Zuckerman (who probably doesn’t remember me following along two years behind him at Williams) has a nice review of Cass Sunstein’s new book “Infotopia.”  I’m adding it to my reading list. Sunstein is still concerned with the formation of ideological cocoons. In his new book, Infotopia, he’s become a cyber-enthusiast to an extent that would [...]

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Eben Moglen’s keynote address at Plone Conference 2006, “Software and Community in the Early 21st Century” was hands-down the most inspiring speech I’ve ever heard in my life. In just over an hour, he traced the connections between the free software movement, the One Laptop Per Child project, and the past three hundred years of modern [...]

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Me, I’m feeling pretty darn good this morning.  I slept really well last night.  Maybe it was the new pillow.  Or maybe it was something else. Then, I awoke to a glorious sunrise here in Seattle, with great election news all across the map.  All in all, a “morning in America” kind of feeling.How about [...]

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Atrios is like, funny and stuff. “I feel so warm and fuzzy, seeing the Four Republicans of the Apocalypse show up for the signing of the “Torture Bill”.Let’s see there’s Famine, War, Pestilence and Cheney.” (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)

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Why would the CEO of an explicitly progressive political tech consulting firm out himself as a “supporter” of McCain?  And then take a “leave of absence” from said firm?  Odd.  Disturbing. I don’t know what to make of this.  There must be more going on here than meets the eye.

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As is so often the case these days, the commenters are smarter than the columnists. Which is too bad when the columnists are very powerful Big Green executives.

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