Liminal states

Constitution Day has arrived without major statements from Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain on the need to restore this country’s commitment to the rule of law.

— John Nichols, Constitution in Crisis, Candidates in Denial, The Nation

At the risk of showing my age, I grew up with the impression that the Constitution was supposed to guide us 365 days a year … ah well.  Times change.

In Get FISA Right: on the air in St. Paul I lamented the lack of discussion of Constitutional issues in the election campaign.  Turns out that Dahlia Lithwick and I weren’t the only ones who are disturbed by this:

• The Institute for America’s Future is featuring these issues prominently in their “give us a debate worthy of a nation in trouble” series that they kicked off earlier this week with a full-page New York Times ad.*
• The ACLU’s launching a “constitution voter” drive, asking Congresspeople to stop “failing freedom”, and running an excellent blog post from Russ Feingold (who held a Senate hearing yesterday on restoring the rule of law); they’re also involved with local events, like Freedom to Speak! at Seattle-area libraries.
• Common Cause is focusing on the role of media and having a rally at the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia.
• The American Freedom Campaign and World Resources Institute are leading a group of 30+ organizations (including Get FISA Right as well as Human Rights Watch, Campaign for American Progress, the Bill of Rights Defense Fund, and the American Conservative Defense Alliance) who are asking the Presidential candidates and media to dedicate today to discussing constituational issues.

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Update, September 18: $46,000 raised in 3 days!  Bitch lives!  See the comment for more …

via Jessica on Feministing:

Bitch magazine, the wonderful feminist publication, is in dire need of help. The past issue it put out may be its last if the mag doesn’t raise $40,000 by October 15.

That’s a lot of money – but with all the kick-ass feminists out there who know and love bitch, I’m betting it’s possible.

So please take a moment to watch this video of Debbie Rasmussen and Andi Zeisler explaining what’s going on, and consider donating here. I know I will be.

Me too … in fact, I already have. I’ve been a fan of their “feminist response to pop culture” for years, and we need to keep voices like that around.

Debbie’s post on Bitch’s blog gives more details …

And here’s the video:

During the past 8 years, the Bush administration listened to Americans’ phone calls and read their emails without a warrant. If elected President, John McCain would do the same.*

– Get FISA Right ad, scheduled to air on Fox News in St. Paul today

Update: check out Nick Juliano’s Anti-FISA group targets GOP delegates in St. Paul on The Raw Story

We’ve got at least 9 Get FISA Right ads scheduled to air on the cable news networks during the Republican National Convention. With the live documentation of journalists in handcuffs and demonstrators teargassed and pepper-sprayed in St. Paul, a prime time Fox News ad defending the Constitution for only $123 feels like money very well spent — a great chance to reach all the media looking for convention stories to cover as well as the personal satisfaction of bringing up an issue I know none of the speakers will touch. I know it’s been said a lot recently, but SaysMe.tv’s ability to let individuals air cable ads is really a game-changer.

It’s been a really difficult 8 years for civil libertarians, and although there’s a sense of change in the air and I’m increasingly confident that we’ll win when the FISA battle resumes early next year, nobody at last week’s Democratic National Convention seemed to want to talk about the damage that’s been done to the Constitution. Is it really possible that issues like the Fourth Amendment, the rule of law, and the underlying Nixonian Article II/”unitary executive” theory aren’t going to be on the table this election? It’s appalling on at least a couple of levels. As an American, I really feel like we should get to vote on whether or not we continue a slide into fascism. And as an Obama supporter, how can an otherwise-intelligent campaign throw away such a huge potential advantage?**

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The new ad stars the Constitution as the main player, with the visual featuring a pan over founding documents. One version of the ad takes aim at the Republican Senators, who voted unanimously to extend the powers of government to listen to Americans’ phone calls and read their emails without a warrant; another highlights John McCain’s strong endorsement of the Bush Administration’s wiretapping policies over the last eight years.

— from Get FISA Right Directs Fire at McCain, GOP

Even though I push back on the media’s framing of civil liberties as a partisan issue — libertarians, greens, and “classic” conservatives value the Constitution just as highly as progressives — there’s no denying the Republican party’s party-line vote on FISA and McCain’s enthusiastic support for the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping efforts. With the conventions signalling a shift into high gear in the campaign, it seemed like a great time for Get FISA Right to complement our earlier non-partisan Don’t let our Constitution die ad.

As the discussion threads on the wiki page show, there were a lot of different ideas for what we might do. There was a tight deadline in order to get things ready to air by the RNC, so we wound up going with a very simple visual; and after some discussion, chose a couple of different voiceovers. We got the usual stellar help from saysme.tv, and I’m really happy with how the ads came out. Here’s one of them:

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Even without corporate sponsorships or prime-time coverage, the One Million Strong for Barack Facebook group’s online convention this week is a fascinating complement to the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Denver.

Nobody’s quite sure how many of One Million Strong‘s 625,000 members are currently active, probably a few thousand. Unlike a lot of Facebook groups, there’s very active discussion: links to news, dissection of media and bias, and great real-time commentary during debates and speeches. There’s also plenty of socializing, off-topic Olympic threads, occasional trolling and rickrolling, and the longest-running group orgy I’ve ever been a part of — 2122 posts and counting!

The group’s main purpose, though, is action. During the primary campaign, the group focused on phonebanking, getting out the vote, and “know your rights” work. One of our most dramatic successes was during the confusing Texas primary/caucus where Monte got a call from somebody on the floor telling us how the information we had forwarded had saved the day. Another was when the group encouraged Matt, a 23-year-old, in a successful effort to become a delegate to the DNC, defeating a long-time party insider in the county caucuses.

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Written jointly with Ronit Aviva Dancis

“Evan Bayh for Democratic VP Nominee” on Intrade Prediction Market

The last time we heard from Senator Evan Bayh was early July when he voted with the Republicans against all three amendments to strip telecom immunity from the FISA legislation. A month later, here was Max Bernstein’s Can Progressives Derail Evan Bayh’s VP Train via Facebook? kicking things off on Max and the Marginalized (“a band and a blog”):

At about 2am last night after a gig in Austin, we launched 100,000 Strong Against Evan Bayh for VP on Facebook. We have about 99,000 to go but we are growing at the rate of about 100 names per hour now.

FISA isn’t Bayh’s only issue in progressives’ eyes, of course; there’s also a few other minor matters, like him having co-sponsored the Iraq War Resolution, and the way his nomination would clash with Obama’s message of “change” (a point Mike Lux makes well in Opposing Bayh for VP) . So Max’ call struck a chord.

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Draft posted August 14. Substantially revised August 17.

The second of a two-part series on the Black Hat USA 2008 security conference.

Back when we lived in San Francisco in the 1990s, we were huge fans of Fuji TV’s Iron Chef, then shown with subtitles on a local cable station. When local chef Ron Siegel repeated his winning “lobster confront” menu at Charles Nob Hill, word got leaked to the Iron Chef mailing list and we managed to get seats … wow! And I’ll never forget the time that Bobby Flay in his exuberance jumped on the sushi board; so of course when I was at Caesar’s I had to have lunch at his Mesa Grill.

Iron Chef is also a good lens to looking at Black Hat from the perspective of the consulting I’m doing for San Francisco-based startup Coverity. This gives a completely different picture of the conference than the political and front-page-news of Vegas Baby! Black Hat, glitter, and pwnies. It’s just as interesting though, thanks in no small part to Fortify’s Iron Chef Black Hat.

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The first of a two-part series on the Black Hat USA 2008 security conference.

Vegas, baby!

Continuing my tradition, I was in Las Vegas for Black Hat but didn’t attend the conference proper. My brother was able to come up from LA to meet me, so I decided to hang out with him instead — Vegas, baby!

This meant my Black Hat “attendance” was mostly networking at a couple of parties. Which certainly gives an interesting perspective on the conference ... in these more social settings, discussions are wide-ranging and informal, and there are opportunities for all kinds of different connections. Sites like Infoworld, Wired’sThreat Level , and Microsoft’s Ecostrat blog have great coverage of what happened during the sessions at Black Hat and Defcon, and are well worth checking out. Here’s my idiosyncratic view.

Kevin McLaughlin’s Learn From Lincoln, Says U.S. Cyber Chief on ChannelWeb is a particularly interesting lens for Black Hat, describing a talk by Rod Beckstrom (Director of the National Cyber Security Center in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security).

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DRAFT!  Work in progress

Originally written August 2

Most recently revised September 22

Originally written as a response to Chris Bowers OpenLeft post The Myth Of The Non-Diverse Netroots; please see the quantitative debate there.   There are a lot of additional observations and references in my Gender, race, age, and power in online discussions, chapter n

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DRAFT!

Revised version posted at Pam’s House Blend and (under a different title, and minus the introduction ) Open Left.

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DRAFT! Still under revision!

First draft July 26; substantial revisions August 2.

Originally written as a three-part conclusion to

Gender, race, age, and power in online discussions, chapter n

Introduction

The “mutual guest-blogging” project I’ve been leading on OpenLeft has been taking place in the context of a surprising amount of coverage of diversity issues in the blogosphere in the mainstream media recently. Articles like Amy Alexander’s The Color Line Online: Minority Bloggers Fight Inequality in The Nation and Karen Jesella’s Blogging’s Glass Ceiling in the New York Times (nicely analyzed by PhysioProf in Teh Laydeez Are So Cute When They Try To Blog on Feministe) are the highest-profile treatments I’ve seen of this topic since Jose Antonio Vargas’ A Diversity of Opinion, if not of Opinionators in the Washington Post a year ago.

It’s also come up in a broader context in stories like Jose’s Liberal Bloggers Brace for Victory in the Washington Post, and Kirsten Powers’ Net-roots Ninnies: Dem’s Left Dum Bam Slams in the New York Post.* As Kirsten, who’s also a Fox News reporter, says:

Newsflash to the netroots and the media (which seems perpetually confused on this issue): The netroots are not the base of the Democratic Party.

Overwhelmingly white, male and highly educated, they’re a loud anomaly in a party that’s wholly dependent on the votes of African Americans, women and working-class whites.

Not everybody sees it that way. Chris Bowers’ OpenLeft post The Myth Of The Non-Diverse Netroots, for example, presents a different perspective.  (See Is netroots non-diversity a myth?, as well as my responses in Chris’ thread, for my opinion.)   In the aftermath of the nastiness with race and gender we’ve seen so far this election year, with the McCain campaign and New Yorker throwing gasoline on the fire on the race and gender front and a lot of Democrats doing their best to get equally nasty about the age dimension, it’s certainly a good discussion to be having.

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DRAFT! Please see the revised version on OpenLeft.

“We’ve got more than a million volunteers on my.barackobama.com. They’ve planned more than 70,000 offline events through the system, made millions of phone calls from home, and formed thousands of grassroots advocacy groups, including one you might have heard about recently.”

— Barack Obama, Netroots Nation video

Hey! That’s us! 🙂

There’s a lot of energy in the Get FISA Right group these days. The getFISAright.net website is the best jumping-off place to find out what’s going on, and the Strategy page on the wiki gives a big-picture overview. It’s all interesting, it’s all timely … and I’m going to ignore most of it in this post and focus on the “Don’t let our Constitution die” video.

A day or two before the July 9 Senate vote, some folks from LA-based startup SaysMe.tv approached us with an intriguing suggestion: would we be interested in working with them to get ads about FISA on cable TV? SaysMe’s community-funded ad model, where people can pay for a single placement of ads in various markets, seems a great match for our grassroots style. And the timing’s perfect — it’s a great chance to spread the word that while we’ve lost a battle, the fight to roll back government surveillance and restore the rule of law isn’t over yet.

The video came together remarkably quickly; we revised the script collaboratively on the wiki and message board and email and IM, getting input from over 20 people. Cognitive diversity in action: we had lawyers, journalists, techies, ad execs, marketing people, a professional comedian, and plenty of “just plain folks”, and virtually every piece of input was valuable.

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