Why This Woman of Color Doesn’t Carry Water for Right Wing Women

So the candidate for senator from Delaware says she is a chaste “virgin” who believes in abstinence and purity, yet went carousing and noodling with a young man who caught her fancy. She’s a hypocrite.

She’s also a die-hard, career right-wing woman who has made a living (such as it is) as a “professional conservative.” She’s been paid to publicly espouse her religiously-based views on chastity, homophobia, and abstinence as if it were a real form of birth control, while trying to run for office and therefore shape public policy with her votes in accord with those views.

The Jezebel/Feministe argument is that humiliating details about a woman (who is also a political candidate) and her sexual past is ‘slut-shaming.’ I agree. I’m of the unusual position that there’s altogether TMI these days. Everywhere. I’d really like to know a little less about many people, including Snooki. I don’t even watch tv and yet her deeply tanned self has seeped into my consciousness.

What I also agree with is that this TMI scrutiny has also applied to male philanderers/hypocrites where they reveal extreme dissonance between their professed beliefs and real-life actions. And yet–is anyone more grateful than I am that John Edwards’ seedy affair was exposed to the public BEFORE he could get anywhere near the Democratic nomination and do damage to us all with a scandal before or while he was in office? HUGE bullet dodged. I don’t enjoy the pain this must have inflicted on the family, but at the same time that is something John Edwards should’ve thought more carefully about before dragging his family through the mud and frankly, I’m not entirely convinced Elizabeth was all that well-served by reliving it in a book she published.

Is anyone more annoyed that according to some Republican Biblical teflon double-standard, Senator Mark Sanford, equally sleazy, is still in office? Why hasn’t he been hounded from his job as public servant with ample evidence of his hypocrisy?

Waiting For Superman: A Review Essay

It’s a question that parents keep echoing as they search for the right school for their children: Why can’t every school be good? Why isn’t this as easy as sending my kid to the neighborhood school?

I could read it achingly vividly in the parents’ faces in Waiting for Superman. It was painfully clear in their hopeful optimism as the families of five likeable children underwent a lottery to enable their kids to attend various charter schools, and in the faces of weeping kids who didn’t get into a school that could help them fulfill their dreams.

And here’s the biggest trouble I have with in-demand charters, especially ones that have a high rate of success in helping kids from poor backgrounds: how do you get rid of the lottery when the scarcity of a good “free” school is what undergirds the free-market demand for the scarce resource (a successful school)? A wait-list means desirability/demand, and a wait-list ensures that the public charter school won’t “go out of business,” so to speak. Despite the immense good that’s done by these schools, inequality is baked into the selection process in a way that it’s not for public schools, which must accept all within its district borders. Why can’t the successful charters take what they’ve learned and convert back to or import it back to public schools, where all are accepted? Do you see the logic of what I’m saying?

My Hippie Education, Or, Somehow I Survived My Gen X Childhood

Education is a hot topic currently, coinciding with the fact that we have an over-achieving president (of whom I’m proud). I am convinced he’s secretly Asian American despite an outer bearing that’s African American in appearance.

It’s also a topic of huge interest to me now that Hiro Protagonist is officially a first-grader.

Recently I’ve had to come to grips (somewhat reluctantly) that my son has a strong sense of numeracy. When he was about 3 years old, he asked me what odd and even numbers were. I showed him with my tented fingers how ‘odd’ means one left over from a double, and ‘even’ means a double. He had a period at four years old where he was enchanted with the idea of ‘googolplex.’ One time he asked me to draw out all the zeroes in googolplex, and we got pretty far before I had to quit and say it was time to go to bed. Then, just to make my life harder, I showed him what googolplex was written as an exponent.

This is for you

If you come home from several weeks away for work where you dined out at decent San Francisco restaurants on a company credit card while I grappled with a refrigerator full of slowly decaying leftovers from a stupid fucking party that was too big and too long (sandwich fixings that I dislike and never eat of my own volition but feel too guilty to throw away), wrangled a feverish kid for two consecutive weekends by myself while you were gone AND did my work AND participated in a wonderful opportunity to further MY career with all the “extra” time I don’t really have and the first thing you do when home is barely suppress sighs of displeasure at how disorderly the house is while you clean it up, neglecting the whole time to recognize or even notice how I cleaned the toilets (which you’ve done maybe twice that I can remember) and the tubs, swept the cat-fur ridden floors, mopped the kitchen floor that was so dirty it had a grey cast, emptied the putrid compost, and otherwise did the best I could…and then you act like a self-
righteous asshole when I say to your sighs, “I said nothing when you decided to take a nap instead of putting the Halloween decorations away the last time you were home. That was a choice *you* made,” BECAUSE OH I FORGOT, YOU ARE NEVER WRONG,

Then FUCK. YOU.

And the leather jacket you had time to buy for yourself in San Francisco, and the horse you rode in on.

Because you know what? As stressed and busy as you are, I AM ALSO STRESSED AND BUSY–too fucking busy and tired to go around passive- fucking-aggressively SIGHING at you.

Excuse the iPhone autofill typos

Nestle-Free Zone Week: October 26-November 1

Baby Milk Action, a UK-based organization that has consistently kept up the pressure for Nestle to practice ethical marketing of its products–most notably infant formula–is promoting a Nestle-Free Zone October 26-November 1, 2009.

If you aren’t aware of the reasons why the boycott of Nestle’s marketing of powdered infant formula has been going on for more than 30 years, with a slight gap in between of a few years before resuming again, go here or here.

(The company’s chocolate-making division, as well as its bottled-water division, have come in for great scrutiny of unethical, and in some cases outright abusive or morally repulsive, practices.)

Bloggers, Corporations, and Plausible Deniability in the Age of Google

This has been on my mind for quite some time, ever since I wrote that I was a “Free Range Mama.” It’s only weighed more on me since adding a Blog With Integrity button to my sidebar, which is a reaction many of us had to the controversy over the heightened presence of sponsorships/commercial interests competing for the attention of bloggers at Blogher ’09. There, the murky and emergent ethics of blogging for pay or in exchange for “gifts”, along with anxiety over a pecking order of blogger desirability, found expression in heated discussions of swag.

In my “Free Range Mama” post I said I’d made peace with not ever being a “WalMart Mom” or having certain corporate advertising, sponsorship or other commercial interests affiliated with my blog. But even after crossing off several companies that to my eyes have sketchy ethical practices or support political organizations I don’t agree with, there’s still a large gray zone that’s left. I mentioned that I patronize JC Penney stores, until recently I shopped (stopping when its CEO made stupid remarks about health insurance reform) at Whole Foods, and I like Target a bit too much relative to some probable unsavory labor practices that I haven’t Googled yet. And what’s complicating is that the grey zone quickly gets subjective.

The Kindergarten Chronicles: That *Other* School, Chinese School–or a Soft Gentle Kick in the Pants

We were lucky that our son took to kindergarten like a duck to water. He literally skipped home from school with me after the first day, and said, “Mama, that was the funnest day ever!” Day two yielded the comment, “That was the second funnest day ever!” Etc. (I was pleased but also a little skeptical….I wanted to say, “Pace yourself, kid, you’ve got a minimum of 12 and probably 16 more years to go.” But hey, take your little victories where you can get them, right?)

(Also, can I confess that we’ve had unbelievably smooth sailing with regard to homework, getting up in the morning, and so forth? I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. He loves his reading homework–it’s usually the first thing we do when he comes home. I’m embarrassed to say it, but he’s asked me for more math homework. We’re doing simple addition and subtraction now, whenever he asks me for it, often two or three times a week. And we live a five minute walk from his school, so he can literally roll out of bed, get dressed, and have breakfast and be out the door. What a change from last year and the 60-75 minute long drive to get to his preschool. I tell you, we are just out of this world lucky.)

Hiro Protagonist making flashcards

It was the other school I was worried about. Those of you who send your kids to Hebrew school or Ukrainian school, and so on, will know what I’m talking about.

Brandwashing Right Wing Memes Through Hyperlocal News: The New Fox News of the Blogosphere?

Hyperlocal news blogging as the new sexy source of revenue has gotten some press lately. NBC/Outside.in has launched a hybrid Twitter/Yelp/Blogs/Flickr feed site as part of its NYC portal. The hyperlocal Blog Network Association seeks to fill a gap left by the demise of daily print reporting and that wasn’t ever truly adequately covered by local tv news. AOL bought Patch.com, which started with what sounds like Gov2.0/Journ2.0 leanings as voiced by its Google-employed founder; it’s unclear whether this orientation survived the corporate acquisition.

Apparently, if national ad buys are shrinking for old media and national ad buys on portals/heavily trafficked sites are only slowly gaining ground, the local ad market looks lucrative ($32bn as estimated by KelseyGroup, a new media industry analysis group). Or at least that’s the pitch.

The Washington Post looks at a case study of what happened to their affiliated hyperlocal blog in Loudoun County. Local ad sales weren’t enough to sustain the WaPo’s efforts. Paradoxically, population growth was not paralleled by an increase in media sources for information, but resulted in its opposite–a reduction in news outlets:

Robert DuPree, the School Board chairman who moved to Loudoun more than 25 years ago, said the media’s problems were, for better or worse, a reflection of the county’s growth. “We were at 65,000 residents then, and now we’re at 280,000,” he said. “We lost a radio station, and we lost one of our papers. We used to have a local cable news show. In some respects, we’ve gone backwards.”

The WaPo article includes two very interesting facts that I think are worth contemplating if we’re to understand hyperlocal news blogging as a potentially important extension of the Fourth Estate.

1. (private) homeowner’s associations have highly-trafficked blogs for residents that make public information of concern to the people who belong to that gated community/private neighborhood.
2. From the article: “Amy Burns, 40, publisher of the Loudoun Independent, newly purchased by technology magnate and Republican fundraiser Bill Dean, is fighting to get her weekly out of bankruptcy.” [emphasis mine]

So on the one hand we have little quasi-towns in the form of homeowner’s associations who publish their own news. On the other hand, we have various corporations buying into this space, and in fact many of the new media owners are not Fortune 500 moguls but affluent Republican/conservative businesspeople who have some sort of geographic tie to the media they own. Much like Bill Dean, who lives in DC and invests in the Virginia exurban paper mentioned above in Loudoun County, where his company MC Dean is headquartered and many employees live and work. More about Dean and his company here, here (pdf), and here.

This is a big concern to me. Conservatives have been very active in mobilizing on the local level–school boards, city councils, secretary of state seats, elected offices of sheriffs/judges/city attorneys general–the list goes on. I’m convinced that the bi-level schizophrenia that California experiences (Blue in national elections, Red very often in gerrymandered local/state elections and referenda) is often affected by a distinct lack of Democratic Party candidates in those same races. Also lacking, perhaps, is the organizational muscle to sustain these campaigns. (If this is true, shame on us.)

Fox News satisfies all the right-wing’s propaganda needs at the national and international level. But the same can’t be said for the blogosphere. Oh sure, there’s RedState and Drudge Report and FreeRepublic and others. But here’s my thought: clearly the right won’t be happy til they infiltrate all news-oriented hyperlocal blogging everywhere, masking conservative opinions and framing conservative views as “truth” and “reporting” under the guise of “news and information.”

Take, for example, a look at Philip Anschutz‘s purchase of Examiner.com (which absorbed NowPublic.com), a hyperlocal national blogging site. It pays citizen journalist contributors to blog in a variety of fields. It touts access to traditional media sources as a way for bloggers to make a reputation as citizen journalists, offering credibility and/or a media clip for one’s reel, should one have ambitions to tv punditry. In turn, Examiner.com gets user-generated content, traffic, and a sort of “citizen journalism” grassrootsy credibility. For the more partisan practitioners who are “examiners,” they get a bully pulpit with which to blast stories using conservative sources, subject matter, or framing offered in a seemingly non-partisan environment. Many conservative bloggers are labeled exactly that. But many others don’t label themselves, or in self-identifying, they choose “libertarian,” “independent,” or even “non-partisan” (which can still be partisan). Other labels, such as “So-and-so Gun Rights Examiner” belie a certain perspective even though conventional left-right labeling isn’t in the picture.

It’s instructive to look at the tiny link to “The Foundation for a Better Life” at the bottom right corner of the Examiner.com web page. When you click, you’re brought to Values.com, which is an airbrushed, sepia-toned, less abrasive, less hard-edged version of many of the ideas to be found at the Values Voters Summit.

When you’re on FreeRepublic, you know it. The air seethes with partisanship. I appreciate the transparency.

But I don’t appreciate stories about the recent spate of “undercover sting” operations conducted on ACORN by conservative activists armed with video cameras which are then repackaged wholesale and offered as “citizen journalism.” One example may not make a trend, but I wonder if what’s happening here is a sort of ‘brandwashing’: if you Google ‘Acorn’ and ‘Examiner’, you can see the extent to which the story was a mainstay for many individual Examiner.com bloggers (approximately 210,000 pages of results), and how the ‘Examiner’ brand seems to have laundered some of the taint off what would otherwise be a story more naturally suited to extremist fringe sites like WorldNetDaily (approximately 884,000 pages of results when ‘WorldNetDaily’ and ‘Acorn’ are googled).

I lack the quantitative skills to really piece together data on this, but it may be worth both 1) tracking overtly conservative ownership of hyperlocal sites and 2) figuring out how to measure adoption statistics in mainstream media of hard-right stories pushed using seemingly “nonpartisan” means like Examiner.com.

I speculate that moves to domesticate, buff, and otherwise soften extremist hard-right memes will be taking place in earnest over the course of the next 18 months. Maybe Examiner.com plays a role in that civilizing veneer. Some Rovean operative somewhere may be planning out the calendar now: Perhaps after “softening the beach” with a pounding from shrill advance troops, we’ll have a kinder, gentler Tea Party right about February in time for 2010 Congressional races to heat up. But by then we’ll all be so relieved we no longer have the strident political discourse of the fall of 2009 we won’t notice we’ll have been moved, however imperceptibly, by the shocking/upsetting Overton windows of the fall– we’ll be grateful for the relative sanity of spring 2010.

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Updated to add: I think hyperlocal beat reporting is useful and genuinely grassroots. I simply think that partisan bias should be identified up front. I also think it might be worthwhile to cultivate a place for hyperlocal blogging to live so that it becomes part of our information infrastructure.

I think NPR and PBS already cover some of this ground, although not with the kind of on-the-ground detail several dedicated vbloggers/bloggers could. Ideally, funding more of NPR/CPB/PBS to cover the salaries of hyperlocal beat reporters would be a welcome addition to the local, state, and national news we already get from these sources or from corporate media.

Why CPB/NPR/PBS? Because they have an explicit public affairs mission that they pretty much carry out. (I appreciate my local NPR station and at the same I don’t think they’re the end-all, be-all news source.)

They have an infrastructure–from funding to administration to hiring–that already exists. Very often they partner with community colleges, colleges, or universities for facilities. Podcasts, tweets, vlogging, hyperlocal blogging are all areas they could easily move into in partnership with existing political bloggers. Why not scale up the audience by scaling down the tools of production to near-free blogging and other necessary equipment?

Most importantly, why leave hyperlocal blogging to the free market to fulfill? I’ve already indicated that maybe more than a few conservatives are eager to jump into the space to extend the reach of their partisan frames.

Think of the function NPR/PBS/CPB fills as analogous to health insurance reform–it’s the public option that keeps corporate media honest in a bottom-line environment when it makes not-so-good-for you, ratings-driven product.

UPDATED on 10/2/09 to add: It looks like NPR is doing exactly this–hiring local bloggers and citizen journalists in several pilot programs at about a dozen stations around the country. This is exciting–but I don’t think $3m is nearly enough.

The American University Center for Social Media has more on collaborative public media, with reports on a few specific initiatives that have already launched. They also have an excellent white paper, “Public Media 2.0, Dynamic, Engaged Publics” that thoroughly examines the subject and introduces innovative paradigms for understanding the new information economy. See also the Knight Foundation report, “Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age.”

I’m hopeful that hyperlocal news gathering can galvanize citizens. Preliminary information seems to indicate that locally well-informed people are also more politically engaged at that level. Take a look at data from Seattle, which shows a neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdown of hyperlocal news blogs that served each neighborhood and corresponding high participation in local government projects.