Anderkoo

It’s not like I’ve become a WBUR fanboy or anything, but the radio station’s new media department invited its Facebook and Twitter friends to their offices this morning for a tour and informal conversation about social media. Along the way, we got to see the office at work, including Bob Oakes and an even more familiar voice, Mary Ann Nichols. Don’t know the name? Well you might if you heard her:

Yup, she’s the voice of WBUR’s underwriters. There’s no other way to pronounce “Landry and Arcari” except hers.

While the feedback I got from my earlier question about canceling our subscription to the Globe was largely negative (here’s a sample from Universal Hub: “If you enjoy reading the paper, keep your subscription. A newspaper dropped on your front stoop is a wonderful thing to wake up to each morning. That and coffee of course.” OTOH, my Facebook network was more positive: “Do it! Stop propping up dinosaurs”)

So, we’re canceling our daily subscription but keeping the Sunday paper (for now). As another Facebook friend who did the same thing put it, “I did the wimpy thing and went down to Sunday only.” Top reasons:

1. While it’s really great to feel like part of the local community by knowing what’s going on, etc., I probably spend 15 minutes per day “learning” things that really have no value to me (MP’s comment about social capital acknowledged but not, at the end of the day, enough to overcome my general feeling that I’m wasting time).
2. It really does irk me that some guy is driving around the neighborhood at 10 MPH delivering these things. And while maybe that guy will eventually lose a job if enough of us keep unsubscribing (as we seem to be), it’s not like I’m not encouraging new (and probably better-paying) jobs by doing more productive things with my time and money saved, including getting my news from other sources. (Not to mention the number of my plants this guy has beheaded over the years).
3. Plastic. Lots and lots of Boston Globe plastic.
4. Consumerism. Reading more ads — including the Globe’s own articles and product reviews — is not the way I want to spend my time, nor my money, nor the way I’d like to support local media.

On a more positive note, we continue to support WBUR as members, and I hope that as more of us defect from newspapers that public media will benefit. Why? Because I will donate money to WBUR; I won’t to the Globe. Sorry, that’s just the difference between a nonprofit and a for-profit. I’ll be getting my comics from the Houston Chronicle’s Roll-Your-Own (the only important one it lacks is Arlo & Janis).

btw I don’t do morning coffee. I listen to the news until something makes me so angry that I jolt myself out of bed.

A few days ago I came back from a rare early-morning run and noticed an old car slowly easing its way up our street, drive-by style. The man was clearly lost. He was also delivering the Boston Globe.

That’s yet another reason to cancel our subscription to the Globe: the horrible environmental impact of the delivery guys driving around town. Add that to the amount of time I waste every morning reading the paper (which is the same stuff I’d be reading online, plus all the other crap I really needn’t be reading, like the op-eds), not to mention the actual cost of subscribing.

There’s only one and a half reasons to keep subscribing:

One: I can’t think of any other way to support many of the comic strips I love so much, especially the less popular ones like Arlo & Janis.

Half: I really hate contributing to the continuing decline of the daily newspaper, even if the Globe continues to waste too much of its resources on unnecessary coverage. (The nation and world will march on if the Globe drops its national and international desks).

Suggestions???

Finding ourselves unable to install a windmill on the roof, Gene and I choose the NStar Green option today. So this means that we’ll be running our lights and laptops on wind power, right? Not quite. Our switch to green supports wind power, but apparently can’t guarantee wind sourcing. For that, we’ll be paying an extra $2-$4 a month for the 150-200 kilowatt hours that we typically use.

How do we know that premium will, indeed, support wind power and move us closer to the day when wind is a standard option - perhaps even a cheaper one - on our energy bill? Well, we’re relying on the good word of folks at the Conservation Law Foundation and Union of Concerned Scientists, both of whom collaborated with NStar to create this program.

And while we wait for our green-energy-wind-power utopia to develop here in Massachusetts, take a look at this scenario in the New Yorker. Could it happen here?

– Rachel

I’ve been of many minds about this week’s New Yorker cover — I wrote the piece below yesterday but held back from publishing it because, well, on the face of it, it’s not exactly racist, and it is satire after all. But in some ways the furor is itself worth considering, and so I put this out there in, perhaps, the same spirit as the New Yorker put out their cover:

***

On the night of Barack Obama’s primary victory in South Carolina, thousands of us who gathered at the victory rally spontaneously erupted in the chant, “Race doesn’t matter!” This wasn’t a profession of faith so much as a willing suspension of disbelief: South Carolina’s January primary also marked the place and time when race did start to matter in the Presidential campaign.

Race matters, as the conflation of “white” with “American” illustrates. But in critiquing that attitude, Barry Blitt’s cover illustration for this week’s New Yorker commits the same error of judgment that a white man who uses the N-word among black friends would commit if he spoke in the same way among strangers. It’s the kind of faux passé that the privileged have the luxury of committing, and therefore the responsibility not to.

Privilege underlies the even deeper problem of the cover, which is the way it bounces its satire off a deep contempt for Michael Moore’s “stupid white men.” Moore, at least, could profess to be of the group he mocks; not so for the New Yorker. Thus the magazine does Obama few favors, instead cementing the perception that his campaign is fueled by limousine liberalism. But it also does itself a serious disfavor, demonstrating not just disdain for but also ignorance of these other Americans. Pauline Kael didn’t know anyone who voted for Nixon; I doubt the staff of the New Yorker know anyone who thinks Obama is Muslim. Obama calls for understanding over condemnation, and I hope his supporters – especially the privileged ones – will consider what kinds of attitudinal sacrifices such a politics would entail.

Sure, the Internet has given Barack Obama’s presidential campaign an incredible fundraising edge. But smart use of technology only partially explains the breathtaking numbers (over $260M raised, over 1.5M individual donors). Obama’s online fundraising strategy is possible only because of the Federal Election Campaign Act — ironically, the very legislation that pundits claim he now threatens with his decision to opt out of federal public campaign financing.

In 1974, Congress amended FECA to limit the total amount that individuals can contribute to individual candidates. One of the goals behind this cap was to somewhat equalize citizens’ voices by muffling the wealthiest (and therefore “loudest”) individuals. In reality, the cap remained high enough ($1,000 in 1974, $2,300 today) that while the filthy-rich could no longer buy the vote outright, the merely wealthy still had an outsized impact on elections. In 2000, of donors who contributed $200 or more to any given political contribution, those who gave more than $999 made up only 44% of contributors but constituted over 86% of the total dollars taken in.

Then Howard Dean came along and upended this cozy arrangement. The progressive Netroots helped Dean raise over $30M from small (under $200) donations during the 2004 Democratic primaries — just $4.4M shy of what Gore raised for the entire 2000 race. Suddenly, small donors became a viable way to fund a major campaign. And even though Dean was far more successful than his peers that year at galvanizing small-donor support — they made up 60% of his individual fundraising — both major parties’ 2004 nominees relied far more on small contributions than in 2000 (See chart).

Law matters, because without caps on the amount of hard money any one person could give to a candidate, neither Dean’s nor Obama’s army of small donors could keep up with the astonishingly deep pockets of the American mega-rich. Technology matters too, of course, because it is the mature Internet — one that citizens trust with their credit cards — that makes small-donor fundraising efficient enough to pursue as a serious fundraising strategy. But it took 30 years before fundraising technology realized FECA’s goal of (somewhat) leveling the playing field across campaign donors.

Policy — even if it’s no policy at all — always tilts the playing-field in one direction or another. Capping campaign contributions dampens the voices of the very rich; conversely, removing them would reduce the relative power of the small donor. Banning cash contributions altogether would favor those with time rather than money to give. Our laws define fair play: we can’t ban campaign money because it’s a Constitutionally protected form of free speech, but we don’t want it to be too influential, either.

For any given policy landscape, there’s a set of technologies and tactics that best advances the players’ strategic goals. It would seem that the Obama campaign has struck one such optimal combination, fusing Dean’s Netroots with old-fashioned grassroots. But lest Democrats feel too smug about striking that sweet spot, they might do well to recognize the Howard Dean of the 2008 Republican field: Mike Huckabee muscled his way to third place with half of his contributions coming from small donors. Broad-based, Internet-enabled fundraising has no ideological bias, only a small nudge for those with wide grassroots appeal.

What got me most excited to support Hillary Clinton in her 2000 Senate race was payback for the backlash she received in Bill’s 1992 campaign. She was castigated for allegedly disrespecting homemakers with this comment,

I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.

and then forced to quell the ensuing furor by participating in Family Circle magazine’s potential First Ladies’ bake-off. A cookie bake-off: are you kidding me? No, and sadly, the magazine’s readers have correctly predicted the results of the last four elections.

No surprise then that this year, two of the three recipes submitted so far turn out to be plagiarized. Just look at the contestants’ credentials: a former President, a multimillionaire heiress, and a self-made corporate lawyer. Does anyone really expect that they bake cookies, much less have a favorite recipe? Clearly no one was surprised that the lone man, Bill, swiped his recipe, which helps explain why Mrs. McCain is getting all the heat for her purloined cookies.

what century is this again?

Oh, and aren’t we having a national obesity epidemic? Cookie recipes?????

An open letter to Hillary Clinton:

Senator Clinton, I have admired you since 1992 when I saw you stand up to bullies who believed that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, baking cookies. When you ran for the US Senate in my home state of New York I knew your time had come, someone who will proudly represent the Empire State and show us that a wife can in every way be her husband’s equal, even his superior. And so I proudly cast my ballot for you then, and I have been so proud of your Senate career ever since.

And, as we pray for Senator Kennedy’s health, it should gives us pause to remember that the Senate is the heart of our federal democracy. And I look forward to all the work that you will continue to do for all Americans and all the world from the most important representative body in our nation. May we all one day look back and speak of our true “Lioness of the Senate.” (And remember that it’s the lioness that does the hard work in a pride!)

You have been an inspiration to us all. I am proud of what you have accomplished.

I wrote this sitting on the 1pm Peter Pan bus from New York back to Boston:

I’m noticed some pretty disturbing things:

1. The bus driver has been on the phone for a good portion of the drive.
2. Greyhound / Peter Pan doesn’t post a “How’s my driving?” phone number inside the cabin.
3. Even if they did, I’d be uncomfortable making that call in earshot of the driver. If I had the temerity to do that, I’d just tell the driver to his face.

Solution? Well the bus operators themselves ought to provide an SMS number for us to silently report bad driver behavior for immediate followup. But I don’t trust voluntary participation. This is one realm where the FTA should step in.

With Greyhound’s own BoltBus funneling off the crazy bargain shoppers, Greyhound’s Boston-New York discount fare (the one you have to click “Can I get a lower price?” to get) is now up to $45. But in a victory for transparency, they’ve also dropped the “convenience fee” of $3. So, compared with a month ago, the price is now UP $2, but at least there’s no bait-and-switch pricing going on any more.

(BoltBus runs fewer trips than Greyhound — I needed something around 8pm and BoltBus only runs until 5pm. And once again I needed to be Midtown, West Side).