Rahm Emanuel And David Axelrod Have Become The Sum Of All Media Crapulence

This piece by the HuffPo’s Jason Linkins perfectly skewers a political press which, frankly, has been asking for it for a long time.

I too have become frustrated with the way the Times, the Post and others have been obsessing over how Obama cronies like David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel are portrayed in the media, how they are using the media, how they are failed by the media, disappointed in the media, etc., etc.

Coverage of the administration has become coverage of how insiders are handling the media. Writes Linkin:

Rahm Emanuel! Suddenly, he is Ground Zero for so much media crapulence. Suddenly, he is the protagonist of the most fevered “who’s up/who’s down” narratives. Slowly, and then all at once, the media has become filled with the tales of Rahm’s agonies and ecstasies. Good lord, even Eric Massa is cashing in on the zeitgeist, casting Emanuel as a bit player in his ongoing operatic nonsense. And the best part is that he gets the nude scene! This raises many questions, not the least of which is: does Rahm perceive his ability to persuade to be related to his nudity?

It’s all down to perception of coverage and coverage of perception. What about the HCR bill? The actual people in America who need jobs?

Again, Linkins says it best:

And, uhm, David Axelrod? What is going on with him? The New York Times says that nobody “has taken the perceived failings of the administration more personally or shown the strain as plainly as” him. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are out of work. They’ll let David Axelrod know when they have the time to tend to the hard strain of soft perception.

Read the rest here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/09/rahm-emanuel-and-david-ax_n_492358.html

NatUrbanLeague Be Empowered! Go to www.iamempowered.com today! http://bit.ly/cLB7un 22 hours ago reply

Good use of a profile and dashboard, and concrete steps up the ladder of engagement. But is anyone actually participating?

The ramifications of today’s Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC are breathtaking – opening the floodgates of political money such as we have never seen before.  If you thought Congress was ‘for sale’ to the highest bidder, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of how our campaign finance laws is demanded as a result of today’s decision.

But one thing becomes immediately clear: Transparency about the flow of campaign cash – online and in real time – became more important. While we do not think that transparency is a panacea for the horrific consequences of today’s decision, it is critically important as the shredded system is rebuilt.

The Citizen’s United decision is awful news. It will allow corporate cash to flood into politics like never before.

But Ellen Miller finds a sliver of hope in the idea of real-time disclosure of spending, which in theory could make this influx more transparent.

The Net as a medium is not for anything in particular — not for making calls, sending videos, etc. It also works at every scale, from one to one to many to many. This makes it highly unusual as a medium. In fact, we generally don’t treat it as a medium but as a world, rich with connections, persistent, and social. Because everything we encounter in this world is something that we as humans made (albeit sometimes indirectly), it feels like it’s ours. Obviously it’s not ours in the property sense. Rather, it’s ours in the way that our government is ours and our culture is ours. There aren’t too many other things that are ours in that way.

This is one of the best explanations of the open Internet, and open culture, I’ve read in a long time. Maybe ever.

The FCC website was launched in June 1995 and redesigned in June 1999. The most recent  redesign, initiated in March 2000 and completed in September 2001, achieved a common look-and-feel across all static pages of the site by introducing a standard agency-wide template supported internally by a style guide, design standards, posting policies and other web resources.

The FCC has done a nice job of redesigning a portion of its site, modeling a new design for the rest. One (un)surprising detail: The last redesign was completed in September 2001!