Monday Mashup (9/6/10)

As I read this recent New York Times column by Sheryl Gay Stolberg on Michelle Obama, I kept remembering all of the columns from that paper’s former Public Editor Clark Hoyt about how the Times’ reporters aren’t supposed to use anonymous sourcing (hint: what Stolberg concocted is full of “Drudge bait”)…

WASHINGTON — After 18 months of careful image-making and bipartisanship, Michelle Obama is shifting course as first lady, stepping up her policy agenda and dipping into election-year politics to campaign and raise money for Democrats.

Despite stinging criticism of her summer vacation to Spain with daughter Sasha — aides warned her not to go, and the backlash was fiercer than they had imagined — Mrs. Obama is the most popular member of her husband’s administration.

Stolberg might as well be criticizing Michelle Obama’s “optics” for her trip to Spain here, and in response, Media Matters tells us the following here…

Right. And how were the “optics” when First Lady Laura Bush got a $700 haircut for the 2005 Inauguration? Or when Laura Bush went on vacation with her girlfriends along with an entourage of 25 in tow? And how were the “optics” when the taxpayers spent more than $20 million flying the Bushes back and forth to their vacation retreat in Crawford, Texas?

How were those “optics”? They were just fine because nobody in the Beltway press corps ever cared about Laura Bush’s “optics.” Instead, for eight years she was, without question, deemed off-limits to any sort of sustained scrutiny. First Lady Bush was off-limits in a way that her Democratic predecessor, Hillary Clinton, was not. And she was off-limits in a way that her current Democratic successor most certainly is not.

Oh, and here are more Laura Bush “optics” (and please, spare me the explanation that she was on a trip on behalf of fighting AIDS and malaria or something – I’m sure the safari was all about combating disease…riiiight).

Continuing…

…it is Mrs. Obama’s decision to campaign that poses the biggest risk for the first lady, who arrived at the White House as the self-described “mom-in-chief” and has pursued, until now, a relatively risk-free path.

…

…Mrs. Obama has confounded professional women and scholars who thought that with her Harvard law degree and background in hospital management she might take a more aggressive stance.

Sooo…after Stolberg tells us everything Michelle Obama has done “behind the scenes,” she then says she could be blamed both for “taking a risk” and pursuing “a relatively risk-free path” and for not taking “a more aggressive stance” in making appearances as First Lady until now.

Please.

Anyway, here’s more…

With her husband’s poll numbers sliding, and many Democrats distancing themselves from him, Mrs. Obama, political analysts say, is the White House’s best hope for exciting the party’s lethargic base.

As you may have guessed if you’ve read any of my most recent posts, the “lethargic base” thing is definitely a sore point for me. But whoever these “many Democrats” are who think that Michelle Obama will get these people off sitting on their hands…well, they must be living on another planet (or they’re spending too much time inside the Beltway).

Oh, and here's something for the "lethargic base" to check out, along with this (no, the man and his policies aren't perfect, but do you honestly believe the Repugs would be an improvement??!!).



And it gets better (well, worse actually), believe it or not…

…as Mrs. Obama discovered in Spain, she is not immune to criticism. Aides say privately that they warned her there would be a cost to the trip, but she overruled them, insisting it was a rare chance to spend time with Sasha and with a friend whose father had died. But the intensity of the uproar — including accusations that she was a “modern-day Marie Antoinette” — caught the White House and Mrs. Obama off guard.

I’m sure it did “catch the White House off guard” because such suggestions are so patently stoo-pid (and more fool Stolberg for repeating them ad nauseum – again, Media Matters has more here).

And actually, I take back what I said earlier about the problem with anonymous sourcing; the main fault with this dookey from Stolberg is the fact that she was too lazy to cite them at all.

Next, I need to get something straight, OK?

The Delaware Republican Party is ganging up on Christine O’Donnell, the newest darling of the teabaggers who is challenging incumbent Republican House Rep Mike Castle; he is running for that party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate seat soon to be vacated by Dem Ted Kaufman (here). And one of the charges against O’Donnell is some of her financial problems (noted in this post - third item).

However, we have Carly Fiorina running for the U.S. Senate in California, another professed admirer of the teabaggers, who was forced out of her job as Hewlett Packard CEO for poor performance, yet received a severance package of $42 million; still, we hear nary a word about her own financially related issues (here).

Sounds to me like we have more than a little bit of a double standard going on here.

Finally, I have to admit that I was a bit shocked by this Times column ostensibly on Net Neutrality by Joe Nocera (unpleasantly, I should note)…

Net neutrality, of course, is the principle that Internet service providers should not be allowed to favor some Internet content over other content by delivering it faster.

Really, who could be against such a thing? President Obama came out for net neutrality during his presidential campaign. Julius Genachowski, his former law review colleague and basketball buddy, who helped him arrive at that campaign position, is now the chairman of the Federal Communication Commission.

Right-thinking public interest groups, like Public Knowledge (“Fighting for your digital rights in Washington”) are fierce, unyielding proponents of net neutrality, viewing its goodness as obvious. Google professes to be a champion of net neutrality. So does Skype. Even the Internet service providers say they favor it.

…

Data networks, after all, have to be managed. The engineering is complex. The capacity is limited. Inevitably, some form of prioritization is bound to take place. Rules also have to be created that will give companies the incentive they need to spend the billions upon billions of dollars necessary to extend broadband’s reach and improve its speed, so we can catch up to, say, South Korea.

As noted here, South Korea has relied on a public/private partnership, overseen by that country’s Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC), that has increased Internet literacy in that country, and the delegation of services to basically six ISPs controlling market share, to the point where “Korea now has the highest penetration of broadband in the world.”

And meanwhile, in this country, we are still wrangling in court between our ISPs and the FCC as to who can regulate broadband and implement principles of Net Neutrality.

Even though Nocera then tells us the following (actually, without snark for a change)…

Thus, the public interest view that all data traffic on the Internet should be treated the same is unrealistic.

Really? I suppose Nocera, then, has no issue whatsoever with the ISPs deciding however many tiers of content should exist whereby wireless would have a priority in terms of bandwidth and transmission speed, thus hogging up whatever Internet capacity can exist for humble blogger types such as yours truly to do their thing.

This whole scenario reminds me of what happened before the mergers of communications companies in the 90s (AOL,Time Warner, GE, Disney, etc.), which led to a greater consolidation of the corporate voice than ever before. If, somehow, “Net Neutrality” rules emerge that differentiate between wireless and other broadband media, with the ISPs prioritizing content into “tiers,” you can basically kiss goodbye to about three-quarters of the blogs out there (including this one, I’m sure) since it will be impossible for anyone to read them due to connectivity issues.

And I love Nocera's overall dismissive tone of the Bit Torrent issue, in which Comcast interfered with their downloads, because his "kids" use to get movies for free, or something (that’s not all that is available through Bit Torrent, it should be noted, based on this). He also says that we already have Net Neutrality now, utterly ignoring the fact that the battle is over the future (and his argument that ISPs should be able to tier Internet content because cable TV can tier its service is absurd).

Also, I wonder if Nocera is aware that the FCC's Net Neutrality plan, the subject of the lawsuit by Comcast which led to a Federal Appeals Court opposing it, would permit the Bit Torrent blocking that started all the wrangling to begin with (here)? Now, though, the issue is the ISPs fighting with the FCC to determine who will decide whether we will have a level online playing field or not.

Nocera concludes that this is “much ado about very little.”

Spoken like someone who enjoys the protection of one of the largest and most formidable online news and editorial presences in the world (would that we were all so lucky).