To my Republican friends: take heart

WRITTEN BY

I know how many of you feel this morning. I felt something similar in 2004. You should take some comfort from Obama’s victory speech yesterday. Instead of talking about a mandate, as a certain President did, this is what he talked about:

Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions. Each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions as a country, it necessarily stirs passions, stirs up controversy.

That won’t change after tonight, and it shouldn’t. These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty. We can never forget that as we speak people in distant nations are risking their lives right now just for a chance to argue about the issues that matter, the chance to cast their ballots like we did today.

…

Now, we will disagree, sometimes fiercely, about how to get there. As it has for more than two centuries, progress will come in fits and starts. It’s not always a straight line. It’s not always a smooth path.

By itself, the recognition that we have common hopes and dreams won’t end all the gridlock or solve all our problems or substitute for the painstaking work of building consensus and making the difficult compromises needed to move this country forward. But that common bond is where we must begin. Our economy is recovering. A decade of war is ending. A long campaign is now over.

And whether I earned your vote or not, I have listened to you, I have learned from you, and you’ve made me a better president. And with your stories and your struggles, I return to the White House more determined and more inspired than ever about the work there is to do and the future that lies ahead.

Hold him accountable. But hold him accountable for the things he is and his actions, not the things you imagine him to be.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’d love to talk more with you about your ideas about policy and politics. If you’re interested, let me know. (Democratic friends, you’re welcome, too, of course!)

You can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

Tomorrow, Go Vote. And then make a promise.

WRITTEN BY

Please remember to get out and vote, and if you have relatives who are sometimes reluctant voters, please remember to call them and encourage them to get to the polls.

I have, on occasion, taken the time to endorse a candidate here. I’ve refrained this year. Most of you know who I’m voting for, but more importantly, at this point I know I won’t change your mind. Just go vote.

Instead of explaining my vote, I want to make sure you see what’s happening in Florida:

Chaos reigned in South Florida, where Republican Gov. Rick Scott has refused to extend a reduced early voting period despite lines lasting as long as eight or nine hours, and an emergency lawsuit from state Democrats. His GOP predecessors Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist both extended early voting hours by executive order, and on Sunday Crist called Scott’s refusal to follow suit “indefensible” and “unconscionable.”

As you go to vote tomorrow, watch what’s happening around the country. Regardless of the outcome, these events in Florida or the lines and procedural hurdles in Ohio are unconscionable. We talk about how important it is to vote and how much blood and tears have been spilled to secure the right to vote but then we make ballot access, at worst, a partisan issue, or at best unnecessarily difficult. For example:

Early voting is crucially important to working people, many of whom cannot take time off from work on a Tuesday to wait in line and cast a ballot at the polling place. Many black churches also use the Sunday before Election Day to take their congregations to the polls to vote early, a practice that is especially important to parishioners lacking transportation.

If we really care about the right, and value it, we should make it easier for everyone to find a time to vote. It seems like something we should all be able to agree on. It’s time to recognize how people work in the 21st century.

Either way, getting out to vote tomorrow is important. But it’s also only the least you can do as a citizen. As important as it is, it’s just dipping your toe into the water of our great democracy.

So, I’d like to ask you to make a promise to yourself and to your community: Engage your neighbors in conversation about issues. Find friends & neighbors who voted for “the other guy” and talk to them about why. Be respectful. Try to understand their reasons and ask what outcomes they want.

We talk about politics as if it’s a team sport. “I’m a Republican, I’m an independent, I’m a Democrat.” But politics isn’t a team sport. It’s ultimately about making policy. Policy is choosing, choosing involves tradeoffs, and people legitimately can disagree about what tradeoffs are important. That’s the basis of political differences. It’s not our identity but our choices.

It’s taken me years to understand this. We need to talk with each other more and leave the team identity stuff to the paid partisans on TV. That’s my promise to you for this space going forward. I hope you hold me accountable.

Get out and vote tomorrow!

Support a local non-profit preschool by eating some burritos

WRITTEN BY

For folks that live in the Hartford area, my son’s daycare/preschool has set up a nice fundraiser with Moe’s Southwest Grill in Blue Back Square in West Hartford. Here are the details:

On Wednesday, November 7th, print out & bring the fundraiser flyer to Moe’s between 4-8PM and a portion of your order supports the Knight Hall School. It’s that simple. Enjoy some Moe’s and support our school.

The toughest thing about this one is printing out the flyer, so if you forget, we’ll have folks in Blue Back Square with more on hand. Just text me if you forget.

We’re[1] doing another fundraiser that week at Toy Chest in West Hartford center. I’ll post more when I have all the details.

Update: Here’s the flyer for the Toy Chest fundraiser. Same drill, print it out and bring it to the store to support the school. The fundraiser is this week through Friday, 11/9.

We’re also have a 15% coupon for Modell’s Sporting Goods. The coupon is good through 11/29 in the New England region. A portion of whatever you buy supports the school. You can download the coupon here.

Let me know if you have any questions.

 
1. I’m on the board for the school. It’s a non-profit, private preschool that’s been open since 1927. Heidi & I love the school and the teachers, and our son really loves it there, too. If you’re in the area and looking for a preschool or toddler daycare, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Finding quality journalism, news, and information

WRITTEN BY

Election season can be frustrating. Endless commercials, constant spin, and very little real information about policy proposals by our candidates. Most political coverage is too focused on horse race coverage and inside baseball to help people understand anything. Friends ask me all the time how anyone is supposed to make sense of all the claims, “plans”, and policy proposals.

I don’t have a great answer, but I know that watching cable news or reading most newspapers isn’t going to work. They’re good for understanding what a broad swath of Americans are seeing, but they don’t do a good job cutting through the spin and noise of election season. That requires writing about sometimes boring and complicated details, things that don’t necessarily create sexy headlines and viral pageviews.

I’m a policy wonk wannabe, so I crave that detail. It’s really hard to find. The rise of the “fact check” has helped a little, providing a space where candidate plans get some analysis. Unfortunately, fact checks are too focused on producing a scorecard (“Half true!” “Pants on fire!”) rather than understanding.

That’s because understanding isn’t all facts and figures. Political choices are inherently subjective. Take any issue. Each possible policy choice will bring with it different tradeoffs. Two people can reasonably agree on the facts but still disagree on how to rank those tradeoffs.

Good journalism, then, needs to highlight those tradeoffs, explain why one might choose one over the others, and then connect that to candidates’ positions. It’s unsexy, but critical. It’s also not well suited for a daily news org trying to crank out issues.

The good thing is that we’re living in a really amazing time for journalism.  There are a lot of new business models for journalism under development now. Free but ad supported isn’t the only way. In some cases, you may have to pay a little, but, as the saying goes, if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product getting sold.[1]

So, to bring this back, my answer to how I make sense of this stuff is simple: I’ve been paying for some journalism, some new, some old. If you want to keep abreast of issues in a fairly even-handed way, maybe some of these things will be worth it to you, too. I’ve got a full list at the end of this post, including some of the free stuff I read.

The great thing about many of these sites and publications is that they’re really tech aware or tech friendly.  What I mean is that I can use them with things like IFTTT to read articles wherever I want. It also makes it easier to track things that only publish one or two articles a day. For example, I have articles from NSFWCorp pushed to email so I don’t miss any.[2]

I’ll do my best to keep this list up-to-date as my mix of sources changes.

News products I use & pay for

  • The Economist: Easily the gold standard for a news magazine, the first three pages are required reading to get caught up on the news every week. They’re also generally ideologically consistent.
  • NSFW Corp: longer form commentary and reporting laced with a strong dose of attitude and interpretation.
  • Newsblur: An interesting news aggregator. The popular blur blog is worth the signup alone. (has a free option, too)
  • TPM Prime: not yet launched, but it looks good. I use TPM’s PollTracker and follow a few of their writers on Twitter, so have high expectations.
  • The Magazine: Brand new, but from someone I trust, I subscribed on day one. Looking forward to seeing how this evolves. Probably will be mostly tech oriented, but thought I’d mention it as a model to keep an eye on.

Free News products I use.

  • Evening Edition: excellent daily news summary.
  • Wonkblog: A good column that gets into the weeds on issues.
  • Daniel Larison at TAC: One of the conservative blogs I enjoy reading, even if I don’t always agree.
  • ProPublica: Decidedly non-partisan, they focus on investigative journalism about some of the biggest issues of the day. Great organization.
  • The Morning News: I just started reading this last week, but it’s a good mix of stuff to know.
  • Twitter: Yes, it’s not a news site specifically, but it’s a great news source. Find the reporters you like reading/watching and follow them directly. They’ll usually promote their best stuff.
  • DecodeDC: I’ve backed this on Kickstarter (thanks to Catie for reminding me of this one). From Andrea Seabrook, a veteran NPR reporter, DecodeDC is trying to provide the kind of post-red/blue analysis I’m talking about. The first few episodes are worth a listen. They’re on the blog, available for free.

A note about local, etc.

The sources I covered above are for national news. I do similar things for local news. I would pay for it if I found something worth paying for, but everyone locally is doubling down on the free+ads model, or going non-profit. Locally in CT (for Hartford & West Hartford), I’ve found excellent coverage from our local Patch site (especially their email newsletter), The West Hartford News, Real Hartford, and a comprehensive array of local news folks on Twitter.

There are excellent blogs and new media experiments starting up everywhere. I am more familiar than I probably ought to be with a lot of these because of my time working on Storyline, so ask me if you want pointers. Some good work getting done out there.

One last note

I’m lucky to have a number of conservative or libertarian-ish friends who are respectful of me and thoughtful about their positions. Any time I need an echo chamber check, I know I can hit them up and make sure I’m not missing some aspect to a story or inadvertently tuning out some important, but inconvenient, information.

I can’t overstate the importance of that connection enough. Nothing is more helpful than a good conversation with someone that you respect. Finding good news sources is just the first step.

 
1. From Metafilter. The worst part of the ad driven model is that it forces the business to get the biggest reach possible. This dumbs down the news in order to appeal to the broadest audience. ↩
 
2. Another bit of advice: find ways to get the news in front of you where it’s easy for you. If you take your kindle everywhere, for example, try and get the news sent there. There are free options for that. ↩

A modest debate proposal

WRITTEN BY

Here are a few things I would love to see.

1. Fact checks during the debate

I would love a half-time or a post-debate rebuttal time where the candidates could interact with fact checkers on details in their debate comments. The candidates would remain on stage and someone would go through the fact check scorecard.  If you’ve ever seen ESPN’s excellent PTI show, I’m thinking something like Stat Boy at the end of each show [1] . We’re watching, get us the information right there. I suspect it would cut down on the more aggressive lies or spin and keep the candidates more honest.

My goal is to simply allow a neutral voice into the debates. The point of the debates isn’t to see who wins, but to draw out comparisons and details from the candidates. If 90 minutes of air time results in little information and a “winner” on style points, we’re wasting a precious opportunity IMHO.

2. No debate time limit

As someone pointed out on Twitter:

I have no idea why the debate simply can’t go on as long as necessary so the moderator doesn’t have to cut out a “pod” (as Lehrer called it last night).[2] We’re all watching. Let’s get as much out of it as we can as a nation.

Those two things would make a huge difference IMHO.

Of course, the campaigns negotiate every little detail of these things to neutralize any sort of adversity for their candidates, so these things will never happen. After all, the Commission on Presidential Debates is a racket.

 
1. h/t to @KenTremendous via @joehribar on Twitter for that analogy. ↩
 
2. I’m guessing it’s because the debate is ad free air time. Does anyone know how this air time is scheduled and what, if any, compensation the individual stations get? IMHO, yet another great argument in favor of a halftime or fact check epilogue segment. ↩

Obligatory Debate Post

WRITTEN BY

No doubt, Romney “won” this debate by nearly any measure. He told a better story, he had the right balance of facts and vagueness, and he did a good job attacking constantly even while seeming “nice.”

Obama was too polite, almost tentative to interrupt the moderator, and got too focused in the nitty gritty of policy points. He also seemed taken aback by Romney’s brazen unveiling of yet another tax plan (sorry, tax principles) to start the debate. That move by Romney will probably come under the most criticism by post-debate fact checkers, but as a debate tactic, it was well-near brilliant. It took one of Obama’s key talking points (“Arithmetic!”) away by simply removing numbers from the conversation.

As you all know, I’m an Obama supporter. So, here’s how I would advise him for the next debate:

Arrange the points you bring up to tell a story. Debates can be effective when the points you raise draw an arc about your opponent. The story I would keep coming back to is that Romney will tell the voters whatever they want to hear in order to get their vote. Like any good salesman, he never will tell them the catch. That’s why he doesn’t have any numbers, that’s why he doesn’t want the conversation to be about numbers, and that’s why the American people should demand them.

There’s no need to get into a point-by-point explanation of each of Romney’s flawed assumptions or incomplete proposals. Let the post-debate fact checkers do that. Simply point out that Romney flips and flops based on whatever audience he’s talking to. That new tax plan he unveiled on stage today is simply the latest flip because he knew his old plans weren’t selling.

It kills me to say that, of course, because I’m an Obama supporter in large part because I care about those point-by-point details and care that the arithmetic works on these proposals. Unfortunately, a debate is simply not the place to get into that level of detail, especially one as poorly moderated as this one. There’s just not enough time in 2 minute answers. (This is such a ridiculous format.)

Arithmetic!

WRITTEN BY

It’s really no surprise that it took President Clinton, a guy who might be the best political orator of our time, to boil it down to one word every answer to every policy question I’ve answered for friends or family.

Arithmetic.

Bill Clinton rocked the DNC tonight. Sure, he might’ve gone on a little long, but for someone like me, starving for a little more policy and a little less sloganeering, it was awesome. I normally wait until the next day to watch speeches (often reading them first) but I’m glad I watched this one live. A prime time speech where someone explained policy for 45 minutes is better than learning about the lovely personal histories of our presidential candidates every single time.

I just care about the arithmetic.

Great speech. If you are interested in politics, whatever your ideological or political affiliation, you should watch this. It’s textbook.

FM Notes

WRITTEN BY

Just a quick post that I’ve set up a link blog on Tumblr called FM Notes for things I want to share or excerpt without blogging more about them. Think Marco.org or DaringFireball style links. I’m keeping them separate for now, but maybe some day I’ll fold them back into FatMixx proper.

DecodeDC

WRITTEN BY

Andrea Seabrook covered Congress while working for NPR for over a decade. She quit after getting tired of getting “lied to” daily by Congressmen. She’s launching a new project called DecodeDC to help cut through some of the spin. In one of her intro blog posts about the project, she shared some of her appearance on Talk of the Nation. Worth reading as we approach yet another major election:

“Americans, real people, have bought this line that we are on two teams in this country. There is a red team, and there is a blue team.”

“We vote for people who are going in there to fight red or blue instead of put that stuff down at the end of the election cycle and work on real problems that need to be solved.”

“When we’ve gotten to the point where your partisan stripe comes before your American citizenship, our shared culture, our shared values in this country, then we have a real problem at the federal level.”

Twitter’s New Rules

WRITTEN BY

A few thoughts on the rule changes Twitter announced for developers using their third party applications. Even if you’re not a developer, you’ll probably be affected by these changes. A good reading list if you want background:

These guys (and nearly every tech blogger/writter/pundit/dev-with-a-blog) have already covered the crap out of this, and we’re unlikely to get more insight without either action or communication from Twitter itself.

That being said, I had a few thoughts which I wanted to share. Specifically, these two questions popped into my head:

  • What is a Tweet? Is it the text you submitted to Twitter? Or is it the reply from the Twitter API? Seriously, it’s not defined in the “developer rules of the road”.
  • Who owns the content of a tweet?

The Terms of Service (sec. 5) say the user owns their tweets. How does this interact with their display guidelines? The API made the rights they granted in Sec. 5 real and tangible. I had the ability to get the data out to do what I wanted to with my tweets. It’s unclear to me what these rights mean in this new world, especially in the extreme interpretation where I can’t even quote my tweet without using the official Twitter embed.

One other, recurring yet unfinished thought: Social networks benefit from network effects, too. In other words, the apps I use the most facilitate the most connectivity to other social networks even though they are social networks themselves. For example, Instagram is my hub for photo sharing – Flickr, Twitter, Facebook are merely spokes from that hub. I stopped using TwitPic, YFrog, etc. because they locked down my photos. [1]

So, now Twitter wants to lock down my tweets. We’ll see how they end up enforcing these rules, but I don’t have a good feeling. They’re too focused on monetizing the reading of tweets, ignoring that the value of their entire network is driven by the people writing. My sense is that the people most likely to use third party apps and services are the folks that post the most.  

Will be interesting to see how these things shake out. [2]

 
1. This still drives me nuts about Path, btw. I want my photos on Flickr. It’s why I rarely upload photos to it directly. Actually, for Twitter, the first client to offer easy Flickr integration got me to switch. ↩

 
2. Any bets on which moderate or high profile app will be the first to get their API key revoked under the new terms? Also counts if they kill their own app after a dispute w/ Twitter. You can’t say LinkedIn, since that already happened.