WCCO to viewer: White people support Obama, too

A drawback to soliciting "Good Questions" from viewers, as WCCO news in Minneapolis does, is that some, well... aren't. Or, as the station's Jason DeRusha puts it, some are "unbelievably idiotic," like the two he highlights today. One viewer, Gary, asked:

Where does Obamas [sic] campaign money come from, most black people are not that rich or is it coming from the middle eastern forces which are very anonymous? Also why is the media so scraced [sic] to say anything bad about him? He cannot be a perfect person.

DeRusha replied, saying the question "is so ridiculous I don't even know where to begin." But a good place to start was a list of Obama donors, many of whom, he adds, are white.

And about those "middle eastern forces"? DeRusha won't even touch it: "Bizarre."

Anatomy of Street Art

A dedicated gallery of anatomical street art compiled by medical illustrator/designer Vanessa Ruiz.

Obama continues to connect with creatives

Whether through calculated efforts by his campaign or grassroots channels (like NotCot.org's user-submitted entry system), Barack Obama seems to be the biggest beneficiary of the work of street artists, programmers and graphic designers: following Shepard Fairey's Obama posters, new pieces have come out by Munk One, Date Farmers and Sam Flores. For artists, the project can generate funds for the candidate they support -- like Fairey, the three artists listed above auctioned off prints to support Obama's campaign -- while raising awareness about their work. Obama, in this case, gets a credibility boost by having influential artists who are known mainly to an insider community give their stamp of approval.

Other efforts for candidates are yielding more mixed results: Obama and Clinton finger puppets (cue "sock puppet" trolls), a hip-hop ode to Hillary (most cringeworthy line: "say, little sweetie, gonna write it in graffiti: Vote for Hill-a-ree") and an Obama logo generator that lets users do their own artful hacks/tributes on the O-rising-over-field/flag icon (oddly, against the spirit of such social-media projects, the user-created logos that are catalogued on Flickr, like the one above, are copyrighted with an "all rights reserved" notice).

SMS SOL at MSP RNC?

If the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York -- or just about any other major coordinated protest effort -- is any barometer, demonstrators in St. Paul this fall will surely be using cellphones and text-messaging to plan their protests. But a battle going on in New York now might have implications on whether those visitors to St. Paul will have an expectation that the communications they transmit will remain personal.

In February, the New York City Law Department subpoenaed Tad Hirsch, an M.I.T. doctoral candidate who wrote the code for TxtMob, an SMS application used by many, including reporters -- and, possibly, police -- during RNC04. Lawyers representing 62 people arrested during the protests are seeking to reveal the contents -- including senders and recipients -- of a (virtual) mountain of text messages. Hirsch says he won't comply -- and that he no longer has the nearly four-year-old-data. His lawyer says the request is "overbroad" and a violation of the First Amendment, while Hirsch offered assurances to TxtMob users on his website "that I take their privacy seriously, and that I am taking what actions I can to protect their civil liberties."

Katrin Verclas, urging readers of the Personal Democracy Forum to donate to Hirsch's legal fund, calls the move "a blow to privacy and a chilling development to activists."

Local tech blogger Ed Kohler agrees that the subpoena, if complied with, could chill dissent here, but adds that since Hirsch's software is open-source and available as a free download, activists could easily create an anonymized version, hosted elsewhere. "I'm sure they could find someone in the world who'd be out of the reach of the St. Paul Police Department," he told me. (Or, as a commenter at Slashdot suggested, "They cannot subpoena logs that you don't keep.")

And he sees no problem with that: Hirsch created a tool for communication and shouldn't be punished for how it is used. "It's no different than creating the phone system," Kohler said. "He's just providing a platform that people are using in a variety of ways, mainly, from the looks of it, just to keep in touch with each other. It's like creating a private-label Twitter network."

Military considered hiring bloggers to "pass the U.S. message"

The propaganda potential of blogs -- noted by former Bush adviser Dan Bartlett, who said many conservative sites "regurgitate exactly" what the administration tells them -- isn't lost on the U.S. government: in 2006, the military's Joint Special Operations University explored the possibility of covertly paying prominent bloggers or training and promoting new bloggers to "pass the U.S. message."

Cowritten by James Kinniburgh and Dorothy Denning, the report "Blogs and Military Information Strategy" [revealed by the website Cryptome and available as a pdf], parses the benefits and notes the many drawbacks of enlisting bloggers, both here and abroad, in information campaigns. "Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering," it states.

The military says the paper was just an academic exercise, and co-author Denning emailed Wired magazine: "I got some positive feedback from people who read the article, but I don't know if it led to anything." Yet given some of the tactics described -- "pass[ing] false or erroneous information through the media... in support of military deception activities," for example -- it seems unlikely the Pentagon would be open were it impementing the plan.

While the document doesn't specifically name friendly blogs it could seek to channel its message, it does note the roles of conservative blogs like The Drudge Report, Little Green Footballs, Townhall.com and Free Republic forums, without listing any centrist or left-leaning blogs.

We shouldn't be surprised that the Bush administration considered paying bloggers to tout its messages, writes Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report. After all, we've seen its propaganda attempts again and again and again.

New at Signifier, Signed: Daniel Johnston

Self-taught artist and Austin music legend Daniel Johnston just mailed back his reply to my Signifier, Signed project, penning my autograph... sort of. And C. Vreeland offers that stance that "ordinary people" can sign too.

"Freedom" buttons for the Beijing Olympics

The World Association of Newspapers and World Editors Forum are calling on the president of the International Olympic Committee to confront China over its lack of press freedoms. In a letter to Jacques Rogge, the organizations referred to the "30 journalists and 50 cyber-dissidents [who] are currently held in Chinese prisons for peacefully expressing their views," and asked the committee to urge China to respect press freedoms for reporters covering the Games. Meanwhile, Reporters without Borders has produced buttons -- in five colors to represent each of the Olympic rings -- bearing the Chinese word for "Freedom" and asks athletes, journalists and members of the public to wear them leading up to and during the Olympics in protest of China's poor record in human rights and press freedom.

Finally, the Olympic torch was handed over to Chinese organizers on Sunday amid protests, but it made it there without the help of Narisa Charabongse. One of six Thai torch bearers, the founder of the Green World Foundation bowed out in protest, citing "the severe violation of human rights in Tibet." (I'm so proud of my country-in-law!)

War anniversary sweater

To commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war and 4,000th US military death, Dan Haugen made a Google map of lives lost by Minnesota military personnel, two dozen students at the University of Minnesota were arrested for blocking the entrance to a Guard recruiting office, and "revolutionary knitter" Lisa Anne Auerbach knitted a sweater.

Circuit Court overturns Mumia's death sentence

Journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal's conviction for the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner stands, but the Third US Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned his death sentence and called for a new sentencing hearing.

Conservative author: Obama's the best candidate for conservatives

Barack Obama is a "conventional liberal" whose "habit of spouting internationalist bromides suggests little affinity for serious realism," yet he's the best presidential candidate conservatives have got, according to Andrew J. Bacevich in The American Conservative.

An author, Boston University international relations professor and self-described "Catholic conservative," Bacevich (pictured) writes that the "Republican Party does not represent conservative principles" and states that "certain faux conservatives -- especially those in the service of Big Business and Big Empire -- have prospered," while "conservatism as such has not." He cites a Bush-era national debt that's ballooned from $5.7 to $9.4 trillion and post-9/11 foreign policy leadership that "validated conspicuous consumption as the core function of 21st-century citizenship" and foreign policy decisions in which "ideology supplanted statecraft."

But his main argument for an Obama presidency? Obama would end the United States' combat role in Iraq.

Bacevich, it should be noted, lost a son, a 27-year-old also named Andrew, in Iraq, but his opposition to the war preceded that May 2007 event by several years. Also, he's long been critical of the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies on several counts, a trend he continues in this piece:

Above all, conservatives who think that a McCain presidency would restore a sense of realism and prudence to U.S. foreign policy are setting themselves up for disappointment. On this score, we should take the senator at his word: his commitment to continuing the most disastrous of President Bush's misadventures is irrevocable. McCain is determined to remain in Iraq as long as it takes. He is the candidate of the War Party. The election of John McCain would provide a new lease on life to American militarism, while perpetuating the U.S. penchant for global interventionism marketed under the guise of liberation.

In Obama Bacevich sees "a sliver of hope" for a conservative revival, brought on not by any deep conservative values the Illinois senator carries, but in the meaning behind a nationwide embrace of a candidate pledged to end U.S. involvement in Iraq.

"Acknowledging failure [in Iraq] just might open the door to self-reflection," he writes, and such soul-searching, while officially presided over by a Democrat, just might end up benefitting conservatives whose values are not, as Bacevich writes, in growing Empire, using expansive military budgets to shape the world to our wishes and undermining the Constitution.

Google Street View spots a drug deal?

Apparently.

Update: Google has pulled the image... or make that images. Gawker has gathered about a dozen shots of the interaction, which does look a lot like a drug deal, on the south side of Chicago, and posts 'em all.

Hillary's "audacity of hopelessness"

David Brooks on why Hillary Clinton plods on with maybe a 5% chance (according to some pundits) of beating Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination:

Why does she go on like this? Does Clinton privately believe that Obama is so incompetent that only she can deliver the policies they both support? Is she simply selfish, and willing to put her party through agony for the sake of her slender chance? Are leading Democrats so narcissistic that they would create bitter stagnation even if they were granted one-party rule?

The better answer is that Clinton’s long rear-guard action is the logical extension of her relentlessly political life.

Read it.

McCain = 4 more years of Bush?

According to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 76 percent of voters want a president who'll take a different path than the one set forth by George W. Bush. Today, Crooks & Liars links to an animation suggesting which candidate doesn't fit that definition.

¡Cambio! Date Farmers' new Obama edition

A 30o-piece edition of new artwork by the Date Farmers (Armando Lerma and Carlos Ramirez) is apparently being sold at $200 apiece at SF's Upper Playground, with proceeds going to the Obama campagin.

Via Curate.

4,000.

Four thousand American military men and women have been killed in Iraq -- approximately the same number of people currently living in Cannon Falls, MN -- and 97 percent of them died after George W. Bush appeared under a "Mission Accomplished" banner and declared that "major combat operations" in Iraq were over.

Hacking the Olympic logo

China's crackdown on dissent in Tibet -- and, well, everywhere else within its borders -- makes Beijing an odd choice as host city for an international gathering dedicated to competition in the "spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play." So it's no surprise that the Beijing Olympics logo is getting a few enhancements by culture-jammers.

The original at right, and some interpretations below.

Via Copy and Paste It.

Poster by Michael Parisi and Rebecca Cadman, via Mediation and notcot.

Update: Lest this seem like a mere graphic-design exercise or visual gag, the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy has grisly evidence of Chinese retribution.

Another iconic image making a comeback is the shot of a lone Chinese man blocking a line of tanks with his body in Tiananmen Square, 1989 (video):
Via Beau Bo D'Or.
Via Flickr user H@r@ald.

Errol Morris' "nonfiction horror movie"

Documentarian Errol Morris calls his new film a "nonfiction horror movie." And from the sounds of it, Standard Operating Procedure doesn't fail to deliver on gore: A chronicle of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, it focuses on the 270 photos turned over to army investigators and tells its story, as only Morris can, through interviews with guards, contractors and a few military higher-ups.

The film, which premieres at the Walker Art Center on April 15 (followed by a post-screening discussion with Morris) and begins its theatrical run at Minneapolis' Lagoon Cinema on May 23, takes a familiar topic and tries to offer context. Key to its story, says Morris, is what happens outside the photographic frame -- chiefly, how do the low-ranking Lynndie Englands of the military tell us more about those up the chain of command who consider humiliating prisoners "standard operating procedure" (as one government expert testifies)?

Debuted at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, where it took home a Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, the movie has already been receiving accolades, but The Hollywood Reporter wonders if it's treading on too-familiar turf (covered well by last year's HBO film "The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib" by Rory Kennedy) and focusing too narrowly. Citing Morris' "near-pornographic obsession" with the photos, Kirk Honeycutt writes, "The wider context of the war on terrorism, the Bush administration's complicity in prisoner abuse, the moral and legal implications and the damage the scandal did to U.S. prestige worldwide is not even mentioned."

Whether it offers new facts, the film's strength, if it's anything like Morris' past documentaries Mr. Death and The Fog of War, will likely be how he conjures intimate and surprising tales from his subjects. Morris famously uses his invention the Interrotron, a device that allows interviewees to see Morris' face at the end of a camera lens, as well as extremely long interview sessions to get moving material. (In this week's New Yorker, an excerpt from Morris' forthcoming book of the same name, co-written by Philip Gourevitch, introduces us to one of Abu Ghraib photo-taker, Spec. Sabrina Harman, whose morbid fascination with corpses -- interested in forensic science, she once filmed the severed head of a cat, leftover from her autopsy of it, balanced on a Fanta can -- adds context to shots she took of soldiers posing near the ice-packed body of a detainee beaten to death.)

One aspect of the film, re-enactments of humiliations inflicted by American guards at the prison, has generated some controversy. In reply to a reporter at a Berlin press conference who questioned the practice of injecting fictional clips into a documentary, he answered, "With due respect I think this is nonsense talk. There's this idea... that if I run around with a handheld camera and I shoot with available light that is somehow more truthful. Truth is a quest... something that I have never lost sight of and never will."

More: View videos and slideshows on the film.

Read this:

The Fourteen Precepts of Engaged Buddhism by Thich Nhat Hanh.

Barack: Think Different.

Found (but not getting much traction) on Reddit.

Chiang Mai Stencil

I love this mix of institutional and unsanctioned stenciling, spotted by our friend Dani Brasil in Chiang Mai, Thailand, during our recent trip.