Communications

And a big WTF!

We know that Barack Obama is a control freak when it comes to his image (the suits just tells you all you need to know). But honey, this is getting friggin' ridonculous. I mean, they have in Latin, "Yes We Can" (Vero Possumus).

I keep reading that as "Very Possum", so that's how "too much" that seal is.

My question is, who's the semiotician in his PR and communications team.

H/T Dave Winer, via Twitter

Image Courtesy of BarackObama.com at Flickr.

HOT!

She's not going to wait for the vultures to do the talking about her. Michelle Obama gets her own war room along with a new chief of staff:

Later today, the campaign is set to announce the hiring of Stephanie Cutter, a longtime Democratic strategist who worked as Senator John Kerry’s communications director in 2004, as chief of staff to Mrs. Obama. Ms. Cutter is scheduled to begin soon, with the first task of re-crafting the image of Mrs. Obama, who has come under intense criticism by Republicans and even some Democratic rivals. She also will lead a war room to fight attacks against Mrs. Obama.

At first I found it odd that, given Kerry's slow response to the Swift Boat attacks, his former communications director is working for Ms. Obama. Maybe it makes sense because she's already "been there, done that" and won't let that happen ever again.

Hopefully that's the reason why they hired a former John Kerry staffer. Because she's indeed lived through all the republican's filth and knows now how to handle it.

Think about it, though. Michelle Obama has a war room. She's gonna get her shero on.

How HAWT is that!

Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's chief strategist has resigned from the Clinton campaign amid allegations of conflict of interest and ethical improprieties.

Penn had worked full time for the Clinton campaign even though he had not taken a sabbatical from his position as CEO of the international communications and lobbying firm Burson-Marsteller. What that meant was clear : Penn was taking meetings with political, corporate and consular clients while managing the campaign of a potential future president of the United States.

One of those clients was the government of Colombia, which had hired the firm in order to market in Capitol Hill a bilateral free-trade agreement with the United States as well as their anti-drug trafficking initiatives.

Penn vigorously defended the meeting saying he was there as CEO of Burson-Marsteller, not as campaign manager of the Senator. Yet he later retracted after it was revealed that Clinton was opposed to the trade agreement as well as her supporters with the labor movement.

[This post is for Greg Scott, who caught me in the middle of a rant about RCN over at Twitter.]

For about 4 months now I have noticed the change in service : I will get to YouTube but the pages load as slow as molasses. Other times, if I'm doing a search in Google, the page will take forever to load.

Today though, it's pretty obvious what's happening : I can't get into Google from my home connection. No Google. No Gmail. No YouTube. So I pinged people on Twitter and asked if anybody was having problems getting into Google.

Erica G replied from Boston :

I'm on RCN in Boston and having trouble connecting to Yahoo and tinyurl this evening. # [...] And actually, thinking of it, for the past several weeks I haven't been able to load YouTube videos properly, either. #

Melanie Notkin, who is also in NYC, reported the same issue. Maria Niles is on Comcast California, but she has had similar choppy access to YouTube in the past several weeks, making her wonder if she's living in China.

Why is this so important to blog and not dismiss as a possible "blip" or outage? Well, if we take into consideration all the services Google provides, the search company may indeed be the largest and most trafficked network of websites in the world. YouTube alone would make Google the largest video broadcaster at least in the United States.

Are you going to tell me RCN just happened to degrade service to the biggest web network and web services provider in the United States? As Seinfeld would say ... I. Don't. Think. So.

And those cojones are carried by non other than Gary Hart :

It will come as a surprise to many people that there are rules in politics. Most of those rules are unwritten and are based on common understandings, acceptable practices, and the best interest of the political party a candidate seeks to lead. One of those rules is this: Do not provide ammunition to the opposition party that can be used to destroy your party's nominee. This is a hyper-truth where the presidential contest is concerned.

By saying that only she and John McCain are qualified to lead the country, particularly in times of crisis, Hillary Clinton has broken that rule, severely damaged the Democratic candidate who may well be the party's nominee, and, perhaps most ominously, revealed the unlimited lengths to which she will go to achieve power. She has essentially said that the Democratic party deserves to lose unless it nominates her.

As Andrew Sullivan deservedly says, "it's a start" but not enough because it would be too high a price to pay if McCain wins in November :

This is a generational struggle - although plenty of older folks get it completely. As such, it usually does take more than one insurrection to move past the past. Usually, we might wait for the forces of reaction and inertia and cynicism to fade away. The trouble is: we cannot afford more Rove-Morris politics given the enormous dangers we now face at home and abroad. And if you give the Clintons any power, we know they will use it to destroy - not just limit - any threat to them. They know the threat Obama and his politics present to them and their machine. They will never forgive his presumption. And you cannot assume they will at some point allow him to take over. The battle really is now.

There really was nothing else for her to do than to resign after becoming a liability to the Obama campaign :

Samantha Power, an unpaid foreign policy adviser and Harvard professor, announced her resignation in a statement provided by the Obama campaign in which she expressed "deep regret."

"Last Monday, I made inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor, and purpose of the Obama campaign," she said. "And I extend my deepest apologies to Senator Clinton, Senator Obama and the remarkable team I have worked with over these long 14 months."

Previously : "She's A Monster".

This is the kind of PR fiasco nobody wants.

Samantha Powers, Barack Obama's foreign policy advisor, was on a book tour in London. This is what happened in the middle of a press conference :

Earlier, clearly rattled by the Ohio defeat, Ms Power told The Scotsman Mrs Clinton was stopping at nothing to try to seize the lead from her candidate.

"We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win.

"She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything," Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.

Ms Power said of the Clinton campaign: "Here, it looks like desperation. I hope it looks like desperation there, too.

"You just look at her and think, 'Ergh'. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive."

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Of course, Clinton's shills in the campaign and the blogosphere are screaming for the woman's head in a silver platter.

If I were Ms. Powers, I'd resign from the campaign. This is a terrible gaffe --she tried to throw the comment as "off the record" in the middle of a press conference. It's just not the thing you do, especially after your candidate has lost an important election and the media is smelling blood.

ACCESS WASHINGTON: TRACKING THE ANTI-IMMIGRANT MOVEMENT
FROM GRASSROOTS TO ONLINE

WHAT: New America Media conference call with Washington experts to track immigration legislation. This week’s call will look at how anti-immigrant movement has been organizing online as well as the grassroots and how they have been accessing media. From national organizations like FAIR to blogsphere how effective has the anti-immigrant been using new media and getting their message across? What are they doing to put immigration in the hot seat ahead of the caucuses in Iowa? Which are the best-known blogs? Are immigrant rights organizations able to fight back? Who's who in the anti-immigrant movement?

WHO: Participants will include

Henry Fernandez, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
Mark Potok, Southern Poverty Law Center
Liza Sabater, Blogpreneur, CultureKitchen and The DailyGotham
Devin Burghart, Director of Building Democracy, Center for New Community

WHEN: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 10:30 AM PST (1:30PM EST)

RSVP: All ethnic media are invited to participate in the call though space on the call is limited. The call-in number is 1- (866) 244-4629 . The conference ID is 1180231 . For any questions or further information please contact Sandip Roy at sroy@newamericamedia.org or 415-503-4170.

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: NAM offers this service to ethnic media across the country. The fee to subscribe is your agreement to send us clippings or links to any articles you produce based on the call. Your stories help NAM sustain the program through foundation support. Please send clippings or links to Sandip Roy at sroy@newamericamedia.org or 415-503-4170.

All the members and associates of the Feminist Bloggers Network should pat themselves on the back for the work we were able to accomplish yesterday.

We did it. We won

We were able to pool our networks and resources to avert the disaster that would have been the firing of Amanda and Melissa from the John Edwards campaign.

Take a bow and pat yourselves on the back. All two million of you.

When Jill posted Two Million Strong, quoting me as estimating our combined constituency, it created shockwaves through the backrooms of power. I had not only sent this missive to my fellow feminists through our mailing list, but in my attempt to get straight answers from the campaign, I flexed my networking muscles yesterday and reached out to people in my networks in a manner I had not done before.

I didn't do this just for Amanda and Melissa, I did it for all of us. Honestly, this incident was bigger than their jobs. This was about nipping from the bud an increasingly virulent trend in the United States of using the internet and every technology running through it as a means to suspend our constitutionally protected civil rights.

The twisting of language is one of the most fundamental traits of George Bush's policy legacy. His notoriety for being a bad orator is what has made him the perfect neo-con President because he's the perfect mouthpiece for their rhetoric.

This Bush administration trait became too obvious while watching Robert Gates and Condoleeza Rice's morning press conference. I failed to transcribe their speeches, because I found myself lost on sound-bites that seemed too Machiavellian to take at face value.

So here's a list of some of those memes :

• the forces are going to be phased in
• national reconciliation process
• violence spills
• destabilizing forces
• a little time
• lessening of violence
• reconstruction from the grassroots up
• national oil laws
• Iraqis in the lead
• an Iraqi iniative
• long war against terrorism
• world-wide war against terrorism
• the consequences of failure

Of course, my favorite line for deconstruction is "we will support their decisions but our patience is running out".

It's obvious the Bush administration wants a dummy government that makes it seem they have control over the rule of law over the whole country. This ruse makes it easier for the US oil corporations government to have one country and one "national oil law" to deal with in the future.