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If you knew you needed 100 affiliate partners to create a successful book launch campaign how eager would you be to get started? If you knew it would take doing 100 radio shows to complete that part of your marketing plan, would you jump out of bed ready to take it on? Not me!
Book marketing and promotion involves a lot of steps, tools and strategies. The thought of tackling them all at once makes me tired. Launching your book (even writing it for that matter) is a marathon, not a sprint. It may be tempting to block out hours of one day to work on promotion and then go for days on end without thinking about it. My advice is you should not fall into this trap of inconsistent effort. It will be far too easy to skip or even shortcut a step because you do not have a steady plan of action.
Think about all of the healthy lifestyle messages you hear. You can’t possibly go to the gym for three hours on one day and then put it off for a week and expect great results. That philosophy is what makes 10-minute abs and the 20-minute workout such an appealing concept. A consistent effort is essential for your success.
The same philosophy is true for book and brand promotion. Every day I plan out the five things I can do to move my book sales forward. Sometimes I set out to learn something new, but quite often my five consists of a phone call or an email or a Facebook post that brings visibility or asks for support.
Reach out to people you could partner with
Contact media people who can interview you
Find and connect with people you can cross-promote with who are writing in your genre – you email blast for them and they blast for you
Ask questions that lead back to your book on Facebook or Twitter
Write an article to place in various locations online
Create blogs, newsletters, guest blog, comment on other people’s blogs
Make a good old-fashioned call to someone and ask them how you can “play” together
At least twice a year go to a big conference where you can network with other authors
There is no shortage of things you can do. The key is to continue to add ideas to your list and then take care of 5 of them each day.
For instance I have already started looking for partners for my January 4th, 5th and 6th launch of the paperback edition of The Soulmate Secret*. Every day I am looking for five more, so on a daily basis I might talk to about 30 people and each time I do I ask them if they have an email list and would they be willing to announce my book to their list or do they know someone who might. For instance a newspaper guy called me the other day looking for information that I could provide and when we were done I asked him if he would like to see a copy of my book and he was delighted.
It’s easy to spread the word if you make it a simple, consistent habit. Without any real, discernible effort (I am not stressing over it – I am just working it into my day) I already have 40 people that will partner with me and I have not worked hard, just smart. My intention is to do five things every day towards the promotion of the January launch. If I had thought in terms of I must get 40 partners today, or all at once, I wouldn’t even want to start. Five is doable. Five is easy. Five adds up quickly!
*If you are interested in being an affiliate partner for my January launch of my paperback edition of The Soulmate Secret please DM (direct message) me on my Twitter account. www.twitter.com/arielleford
About Arielle Ford
Arielle Ford has launched the careers of many NY Times bestselling authors including Deepak Chopra, Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Neale Donald Walsch & Debbie Ford. She is a former book publicist, literary agent and the author of seven books. To learn how to get started writing a book please visit: www.HowToWriteMyBook.com

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

On his China Beat blog this week, Chinese culture scholar and my friend Jeffrey Wasserstrom strongly condemns California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plans to host a World Expo in San Francisco’s Bay Area in 2020. I agree with Jeff’s particular gripes about Schwarzenegger’s motives and his (lack of) experience necessary for hosting the 2020 World Expo.
I don’t agree with Jeff that a World Expo can’t take place simply because, per the cliche, “California is broke.” The economic malaise affecting California is serious, but the state still looks and feels a hell of a lot more energetic than most parts of the USA; and the setback is momentary while the California economy reorganizes. There is probably more money sloshing around in California, albeit much of it in private coffers, than ever before. And by 2020, the Chinese and Indians, like the Japanese before them, will have invested big-time. One of the candidates for California governor is spending $200 million to get elected, when all the ancillary contributions are added in. The state and its economy must be worth something.
San Francisco’s Pan American Exposition, 1901
The real problem with the Bay Area — or any US region — hosting the World Expo is Schwarzenegger’s blustery assumption that the rest of the world will be all over the USA to become its 2020 World Expo host. After our abysmal performance in Shanghai this year, we haven’t the moral authority. Mismanagement, misrepresentation, and corruption were the order of the day. If most Americans don’t know about that — hell, they don’t even know where Shanghai is or what an Expo’s about, so why should that matter? — the foreign-affairs ministries of the nations represented in Shanghai certainly do.
Even as the Expo winds down, I’m still digging into the slag heap that was the “USA Pavilion”: a completely private, law-evading, tax-exempt gift to wealthy corporations, a private company posing as a public institution representing the American people with the complicity of two Administrations. As a top-notch reporter once observed, to a determined investigator, the melange of conflicted interests wrapped up in the “USA Pavilion” ribbon is a gift that keeps on giving. When Shanghai Expo 2010, Inc., is finally compelled to open its books, we are going to be amazed.
Oh, and that little scrap of “Action Plan” written about elsewhere, that set the stage for America’s first wholly privatized public diplomacy initiative? It wasn’t a casual afterthought written on the back of a napkin; it’s written into the law. The State Department officially planned for a bogus private tax-exempt company to run the “USA Pavilion” — they even stole our nation’s name — to collect corporate contributions. Is that company, Shanghai Expo 2010, Inc., using this money for nefarious purposes? I suspect so. Is its partner the Shanghai AmCham laundering money and passing it back to the US Chamber of Commerce to elect candidates? Could be. And did the Shanghai Consulate aid and abet violations of the Foreign Service Act to keep this chewing-gum effort intact and functioning or these purposes? One might very well think so. I, of course, couldn’t possibly say.
No one’s seen Shanghai Expo 2010, Inc.’s books, nor (according to the IRS) has it filed a required tax return in almost three years. Will we before the perps leave the scene? Only the Feds can say.
Once we get that little detail settled, of course the Bay Area, still one of America’s richest regions, can pull it off. It’s true as Jeff has written, the cash doesn’t trickle down much to Irvine anymore, but that’s because OC has been written off by the powers that be as a bastion of white privilege falling to the hordes of immigrants and children of immigrants (and if it weren’t for the naval retirees, so would SD, too). The Bay Area, on the other hand, has long embraced diversity and has always relied on organic growth — and lo and behold, it’s still vigorous. It works, somehow!
However, a secret sauce is required for the Bay Area to succeed, if a truly 21st-Century Expo is to be born in the USA. I’m saving that for a proposal being discussed among proponents of a US World Expo in 2020. A website to move the US World Expo forward has been created by Bay Area designer Urso Chappell, proprietor of the Expo Museum online and a champion of a US 2020 World Expo. It has links to the many websites and Facebook Pages set up by US World Expo proponents in Minneapolis, Houston, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Diego, and elsewhere.
With regard to our hosting an Expo in 2020, Americans at the moment need to be less reactive and more reflective — honestly so, not just when its convenient. The mediocrity that passed for US “participation” in the Shanghai Expo should have no bearing on American planning for a US World Expo, except that it should be recorded, quarantined, and sent to Nevada for storage in a salt mine. The “USA Pavilion” wasn’t even a real national pavilion; it was a corporate pavilion, and the sooner we come to terms with it, the sooner other nations will take us seriously again. Or we can live with our lies and be ignored.
Nor should the conduct of the Chinese and the operations of the Shanghai Expo have much bearing on whether or not the US hosts a World Expo ten years hence. The Chinese had potential to break new ground but instead ended up giving the world a stupendously super-sized version of Expos past that to all appearances contravenes the very theme that portended to make this Expo special, “Better City, Better LIfe.” Drexel historian Scott Knowles has summed up this conclusion brilliantly in his blog posting, “Phantom of the Fair.” The Shanghai Expo was largely about bending the knee to China, not about China reaching out to the rest of the world. Shades of the Yuan Dynasty.
The first real 21st-Century Expo has yet to be fully conceived, let alone realized. Milan 2015 may take us part way there, but from what I’ve seen, this epoch’s World Expo is still a tabula rasa. There for the taking, but not for long. We no longer have the lock on ingenuity and power that was our reward for winning WWII and later besting the Soviets in terms of who was willing to subsidize their military-industrial complex the longest. I wouldn’t be surprised if a terminally divided America, gave it up. Cleaved by a raging class war between the very rich and the rest of America (disguised as tax and budget policies), a war fueled by the Supreme Court’s license to moneyed interests to discount the franchise, we are being rendered big, puffy, and impotent. Without any moral authority.
Smaller and warmer-blooded nations able to work harmoniously and more responsively in a radically changing world might pull of a truly edifying World Expo in 2020, one that the muscle-bound giants will never imagine, let alone create.

Follow Bob Jacobson on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/Robert_Jacobson

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Dear HuffPost Sanity Rider,
Cisco has generously donated 200 Flipcams to help document Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity — and the HuffPost bus trip to and from it.
To decide which of our Sanity Riders gets one of the cameras (and it’s, of course, theirs to keep after the rally), we’re having a contest (only those who have reconfirmed a seat on the HuffPost bus are eligible to enter).
Simply tell us what you think is the single best way to restore sanity to America — in 140 characters or less!
You can enter in a number of ways:
1) Click the Twitter button below and direct your tweet to @AriannaHuff.
Tweet
2) Post a response on Facebook, putting @AriannaHuffington in your message.
3) Send an email to sanitybus@huffingtonpost.com (making sure to include your real name).
4) Leave a comment on this entry (keep in mind, you’ll have to include your real name in the posting).
The top 200 responses get a Flipcam. So submit your answer today (submissions must be posted by 5 pm ET on Friday, October 22 — read full contest rules here).
And since the ultimate goal is restoring sanity to America, even if you aren’t coming on the bus (and don’t qualify for a Flipcam), you can still send us — and tweet/Facebook your friends — the one thing you would do to restore sanity to our country. We’ll post our favorite solutions on HuffPost before we head to the rally.
Just another way HuffPost is driving you sane. Good luck…

Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/ariannahuff

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

On Sept. 28, 2010, the Yale Political Union debated “Resolved: Wikileaks should not have published classified documents” at Yale University. This post contains speeches made by members of the YPU.
Speeches on the Affirmative:
1st Affirmative Speech, by Rek LeCounte, a senior in the Independent Party.
This is not a question about rights. I do not know and, frankly, do not care whether WikiLeaks had the right to publish the Afghan war documents they received. The question before us is normative: ought Assange and his team to have published those classified documents? The answer is a resounding no.
There are three simple reasons why WikiLeaks was morally wrong in their decision: 1) they hampered the war effort, 2) they put countless lives at risk, and 3) insofar as they were determined to release these documents, these problems were inevitable.
To the first point, the war effort is not just about bombing places and people, taking territory, and raising flags, as was usually the case in more traditional wars. This project is about counterinsurgency–what the more cynical among you might call “nation-building lite”. For our soldiers to succeed in helping the Afghans build some semblance of stability, we need to have them cooperate with us in fighting the Taliban, building infrastructure, and restoring the rule of law. This cooperation is premised in our ability to safeguard their identities and secure them against Taliban retaliation. It is remarkably more difficult to guarantee such protections when self-aggrandizing punks on the run in Australia are publishing documents revealing the names, families, tribes, and coordinates of these crucial informants.
This bring us to the second point, Assange and his ilk are almost certainly directly responsible for Afghan civilian and American deaths. The Taliban explicitly stated that they would comb through the documents to find useful information on those collaborating with the U.S. If those on the left who harp on about justice and those on the right who wax didactic about liberty earnestly stand behind their professed beliefs, it is difficult to see how they can support a random rogue hacker enabling countless deaths in the name of some abstract appreciation for “freedom of information”.
If you actually care about the Afghan civilians who only want to live their lives and flourish like anyone else, or our fighting men and women who are risking their lives at the behest of politicians enabled by our votes and tax dollars, then you cannot condone Assange’s wanton disregard for their lives. It is one thing to be condemned by the relevant national governments for leaking their military secrets. It is quite another to be condemned by five different human rights groups, including Amnesty International, along with the international press watchdog organization Reporters Without Borders. Assange is a punk, not a journalist or hero.
And finally we come to my third point: this fiasco was inevitable from the moment WikiLeaks was determined to release the documents. WikiLeaks is not a reputable news source and has no idea how to deal with sensitive, classified information. In response to the intense criticism, Assange said he should have been more careful in redacting names and coordinates and that they were working to prevent a reoccurrence of such an egregious mistake. The problem remains that they made the mistake in the first place and will probably do so again because they have no experience whatsoever in dealing with such things. Assange and his ilk haven’t the foggiest idea what might or might not endanger Allied troops, Afghan civilians, or anyone else. A reputable news source–even from the “new media”, like HuffPo or Politico–would have never made so a mistake because they know what they’re doing.
To conclude, it’s all well and good to praise government transparency and encourage responsible people to debunk critical lies in the public sphere, and I fully support an imminent end to U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. However, it is never acceptable to sacrifice real human beings for abstract concepts. Very little, if anything, was gained (by the good guys) by posting the Afghan War Diary. But many lives were lost and will likely continue to be lost, and so many resources have been needlessly squandered. It is essential that we place our faith in people accountable to us who are responsible and experienced enough to deal with the subject matter appropriately. Assange is not such a person and WikiLeaks is not such an organization.
For all the lives lost as a result of his disastrously didactic ego and unabashedly narcissistic drive to see his name in lights, I hope Assange and his cohorts rot in hell. I urge you to affirm this resolution.
Speeches on the Negative:
2nd Negative Speech, by Stephen Marsh, a sophomore in the Party of the Left.
Thank you, MR. SPEAKER.
I never thought I’d be on this floor following Mr. Weltmer after hearing him praise the value, power, and foresight of government – this is a new. Anyways, this is why Mr. Weltmer is wrong: in so saying that we can inherently trust people to filter and disseminate information that we “can handle”, he ignores the fact that everything has a political bias. This is no different for his lone editor or disseminator or government than it is for any of us in this room. So then, what we’re doing is handing the ability to determine truth to people that are already powerful; in a way, we’re practicing a bizarre kind of epistemological relativism wherein the people with the most money and the most guns get to decide what’s true.
This situation – where the powerful in society give an incomplete picture of events as they unfold to the people necessary for that power’s continued support – is exactly the type of thing Wikileaks is attempting to stop. Only by hearing the stories from those on the margins of our discourse, from those decentralized places that have neither interest nor duty in upholding the existing status quo, can we as the moral supporters of our government actually figure out whether we can and should support the things our government and our corporations do at home and abroad. Using Mr. Weltmer’s language, this comes down to transparency, and why it’s good for all of our sakes – because it means we can see all of the consequences that the moral and political choices that we as a people make.
Let me explain. The material on Wikileaks is targeted to a very specific audience. It’s not the terrorists; they don’t have much less of a habit for killing civilians than we do, and regardless of what a bunch of people posting classified documents do, they’re not going to be more or less likely to kill American soldiers, because in joining a terrorist group, they’ve already made the choice to do that. It’s not the Afghanis; most of Afghanistan (because of continued military occupation and rampant poverty) doesn’t have internet access and rates of computer ownership in Afghanistan is among the lowest in the world, besides that, they don’t need to read internal documents to know that US soldiers shot an innocent deaf and blind man down the street three years ago. Those documents on Wikileaks are intended for us, the privileged people sitting at home in America who make the arguments that “we don’t kill civilians”, or “Pakistan is our ally in the region”, or that counterinsurgency is “working”, or that the war is “difficult but necessary”. Here’s what those documents do: they paint a cultural picture – one where what we’ve heard from the administration and military leadership about the progress of this war seems at best misrepresented and at worst an outright lie. Insofar as the release of these documents can change how we think about the war and our compulsion to support it, their release is a good thing.
But even further, the fact that Wikileaks is disseminating information that those with the greatest interest in maintaining and perpetuating the war saw fit to keep secret – the military and parts of the United States government – gives us the opportunity to see that perhaps the dominant narrative in our political discourse is not a given, and maybe even that the emperor in fact has no clothes. When we lose the opportunity to see information for ourselves, as Mr. Weltmer wants to see happen, and instead what we see are the same repeated analyses and moral judgments made over and over again, we tend to lose sight of how big this war really is, or that perhaps we don’t have any solid footing on which to stand in supporting it. What Julian Assange and Wikileaks did was actually raise the war as an issue to be discussed, even if only for a very brief time, instead of something lost in the background and dismissed as a necessary technical detail of our foreign policy. When we see video of soldiers in planes cracking jokes while shooting groups of people with precision bombs, or when we hear about the extent to which we have unmanned drones blanketing the skies above Afghanistan and Pakistan, it becomes very hard to just look away and dismiss all of that. Mr. Weltmer bemoaned the lack of sanitization of the scenes of war from coverage earlier. But, if images of piles of skulls filling ditches or corpses strewn across a field are the consequences of war – and they are – shouldn’t we know about and see those things when we make the choice to continue waging wars? To some extent, we can change and modify our first principles and the things we support by being confronted frankly and honestly with the consequences of what we believe: this sort of discourse happens every day between members of this body. If we’re really comfortable as a people with letting loose the dogs of war and continuing to feed them for eight years on, then we should be able to look through our computer screens into the dead eyes of a young Afghani child killed in battle crossfire and say “I accept this cost.” If we do anything less, we’re neither being honest with ourselves nor paying fair tribute to the horrors we cause, and Wikileaks will continue to have a role to fill. I think that’s enough to vote in the Negative tonight.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The October issue of Conde Nast Traveller celebrates “A World of Style” with shopping articles from fashionable cities in such lust worthy destinations as Italy, Morroco and India, and I was inspired to share my stylish stories from my time in India here. From the wilds of Rajasthan to the majesty of the Himalayas, there was a bevy of beautiful and interesting things on offer at every stop I made.
The state of Rajasthan is known for it’s dusty landscapes and vibrantly dressed women, shining silver accoutrements and rainbow colored jems; my first stop in Ranthambore, made famous by the magnificent tigers roaming Ranthambore National Park, brought me to a small craft cooperative teeming with brightly printed fabrics stamped and sewn on site.
The Dastkari Kendra Craft Community Centre at Ranthambore was founded nearly 20 years ago to help the village craftspeople generate income in a sustainable way and to help improve the lives of women in the area through the production of beautiful crafts that could be sold at markets and in the Dastkari store. I was amazed at the beautiful kurtas for sale in an impressive array of colors, necklines sparkling with sequins and beadwork, and picked up half a dozen in light weight material to wear during my journey throughout northern India this past spring, when summer was already on it’s way and temperatures were high. Although I was tempted to buy bed linens, blankets and tablecloths printed and sewn with charming images of Ranthambore tigers, I didn’t think I had the room to pack them and it’s a decision I still regret as they would have made fantastic gifts for friends and family (and been worth buying an extra suitcase for.) Great big scarves tie-dyed in bright colors and hand-stiched with tiny mirrors did come home with me however; the happy yellow one is now draped across my couch and never fails to cheer me up. Shopping at Dastkari Kendra helps support local craftspeople learn new skills, save necessary funds and forge relationships along castes and religions – and everything is beautiful and made with care!
Learn more about Dastkar and the Dastkari Kendra here.
Click to see my video of the Dastkari Kendra Craft Community Centre at Ranthambore.
I spent the rest of the day in an open jeep touring The Old City near Ranthambore, where dozens of teeny shops in the main thoroughfare boast silversmiths, cobblers, food sellers and other specialty vendors. Whether you buy anything or not, this bustling area is a certainly a sight worth seeing (but no doubt something will catch your eye!) Eager to buy bangles from a local stand instead of a commercial store, I stopped at a shop that seemed to have the prettiest ones, flashing every color in the sun. I chose big, burgundy bangles encrusted with silver and colored pieces of glass but wasn’t able to comfortably slips them over my western-sized hands. With a wink the shop owner told me to come back a little later and when I did, she had had them enlarged just for me! For only a few hundred rupees I had my own bespoke Indian bangles and I was thrilled.
The next day I was up before the sun, ready for a safari in Ranthambore Park in an outfit that would be comfortable for the jeep ride and in shades that wouldn’t stand out in the forest. I wore relaxed jeans, a dark khaki linen shirt, a great big leopard-print scarf to keep me warm until the sun rose and a brown leather bag to store my camera and camcorder. It was a bit of a bumpy ride and alas, no tiger sighting, but it was still a gorgeous morning spent driving through the national park sighting a variety of deer, birds, stunning peacocks and precocious monkeys. Round-frame Gandhi-style sunglasses in tortoiseshell completed the look and I wore the same outfit for a peaceful hike up Ranthambore Fort later on, which offers breathtaking views of the Park from the top.
While I only had a couple days to spend in and around Ranthambore I fortunately managed to experience so many wonderful adventures and thankfully, unwind with a heavenly massage at my incredible luxury tented hotel. Read all about it on my blog WWW.MARISSABRONFMAN.COM/BLOG and see dozens of beautiful pictures.
Coming up next? What to wear in Alwar for Holi, India’s incredible festival of colors!

Follow Marissa Bronfman on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/marissabronfman

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

To be sure, Hugo Chvez may boast of many political and social accomplishments, but his foreign policy utterances are fast making a mockery of Venezuela. The latest erratic salvo from seor presidente came a few days ago, when Chvez decried the awarding of a Nobel peace prize to Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese political dissident who is currently serving out a harsh 11-year prison sentence for inciting subversion. A courageous literary critic, poet, scholar and political essayist, the 54-year old Liu has long been an unstinting advocate for peaceful change.
In recent years, Chvez has sought to build up key, strategic relationships with powerful countries which may serve as a counterbalance to the United States. While his desire to create a so-called “multi-polar” world is understandable, Chvez has failed to exercise any discrimination or restraint. Pushing an aggressive foreign policy, Venezuela has allied itself to such throwbacks as Russia, China, and even Iran. These alliances have made a muddle out of Chvez’s politics and led the Venezuelan leader into taking morally objectionable stands.
Though some may be surprised by Chvez’s moves to back up Beijing and its horrible human rights record, it’s not the first time the Venezuelan leader has taken such a retrograde position. In advance of the Olympic Games in China, Chvez backed Beijing’s nasty crackdown in Tibet.
Ridiculing attempts to protest the games, Chvez said that Venezuela was strongly behind Beijing and Tibet was an integral part of China. The Venezuelan leader added that the protests against the Olympic Torch were an example of the U.S. “empire” “going against China” and trying to divide the Asian powerhouse. “America is the main force behind whatever is happening in Tibet,” Chvez said, “and its motive is to create problems in the Olympic Games.”
Venezuela, which seeks to increase oil exports to the China, could have stayed silent on the issue of Liu and his Nobel Prize. Chvez, however, has gone way out on a limb, remarking that Liu was a “counter-revolutionary” who was surely serving out a jail sentence “for violating Chinese laws.” Dropping to a new low, Chvez said the prize should not have been awarded to Liu, and that moreover members of Venezuela’s opposition were “lackeys” of the west for supporting the Chinese dissident.
To be sure, the Venezuelan opposition has held many questionable views and positions, but on China it is right and Chvez is wrong. In many ways, Liu represents a promising future for China. In 1989, during the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square, he staged a hunger strike. As soldiers stood by with their rifles drawn, it was Liu who negotiated a peaceful retreat involving the student demonstrators. As a result of Liu’s diplomacy, thousands of students were allowed to safely exit the square.
In the wake of the massacre at Tiananmen, the authorities repeatedly harassed and detained the brave Liu. On a personal and professional level, the writer paid a stiff price for his political activism: Chinese officials sentenced him to 18 months in jail for his role at Tiananmen, and Liu was banned from teaching. Later, in 1995, he was sentenced to three years of “re-education through labor” for writing essays which criticized the authorities.
What was Liu’s most recent “crime”? That would be co-authoring “Charter 08,” a manifesto calling for human rights and equality. Liu also urged an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, direct elections, free speech, judicial independence and religious freedom. Clamping down hard, the authorities sentenced Liu to one of the most severe sentences in recent memory: a full 11 years in prison.
Most Chinese are not aware of Liu’s plight in prison and haven’t heard of his Nobel Prize. That is because the authorities have conducted a massive news blackout, with only the Global Times, an English-language newspaper published by the Chinese government, carrying a stinging attack of the Nobel Committee in its Saturday edition. Those Chinese who sought to get more information about Liu must have been sorely disappointed: typing in the human rights defender’s name or even “Nobel Peace Prize” in computer search engines elicited either blank screens or error messages reading “research results do not fit the relevant regulations and provisions.”
Human rights activists, however, heard the news in Beijing and were emboldened by Liu’s award. In the long run, Liu’s lawyer says, the Nobel will encourage others to strive for greater freedoms. In the short run, however, the humiliated government might lash out in anger and even arrest more activists. For said reason, international leaders must keep up the pressure on Chinese authorities so that human rights workers may continue to work.
Chvez, on the other hand, has thrown the engine into reverse by validating Beijing. “Our greetings and solidarity go to the government of the People’s Republic of China,” he said recently. “Viva China! And its sovereignty, its independence and its greatness,” the Venezuelan added. No, seor presidente: long live Liu and his valiant struggle against political oppression and one party rule.
Nikolas Kozloff is the author of Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (Palgrave, 2008). Visit his website, www.nikolaskozloff.com

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Rod Penner hardly stands out in Marble Falls, Texas, a town of about 5,000 residents, 40 miles northwest of Austin. “I’m somewhat of a recluse,” the artist comments. Generally speaking, Penner likes it that way. Since Marble Falls is mainly known for hunting, fishing, and drag boat racing, it isn’t too hard for an artist to stay under the radar.
In New York, it is a different story. When his exhibition of “minis” — six inch square hyper-realist paintings — opens at OK Harris Works of Art in New York on October 23rd, Penner will be the center of attention, a situation he finds vaguely uncomfortable. Fortunately, his paintings are the real attention getters. His six inch square vignettes of small town Texas command a retail price of $8,500 each.
Rod Penner, “Clayton Dry Cleaners,” Acrylic on Panel, 6 x 6 inches, 2010
Rod Penner, “Bait Shop,” Acrylic on Panel, 6 x 6 inches, 2010
To put it another way, Penner’s retail price is $34,000 per square foot. That is more than the median household income in Marble Falls, which is $30,800. Remarkably, what sells so well in New York is precisely the fact that Penner has captured “melancholy and warmth, desolation and serenity,” in a way that many of his collectors feel characterized the small towns where they started out.
Penner, who jokingly refers to himself as “America’s favorite Mennonite Photo-realist” grew up in a tight-knit family Vancouver, British Columbia. His father, uncles, brothers and cousins all worked or still work in the construction trade. His parents, who noticed that he liked to draw were supportive of his developing interest in art, and his father bought him art supplies. He met his wife Debbie, a native Texan, in his late teens, and they married in 1986 when Rod was 21 and briefly moved to Canada.
Building on methods he had learned in college, Rod began to experiment with Hyper-realist painting techniques. Not entirely satisfied by Photo-realist paintings that he had seen in person — they looked much rougher than they had in art magazines — Penner tried to take his technique further, in an even more exacting direction.
In 1988 the Penners moved to Richmond, Texas. Penner’s first images of Texas reflect the sense of isolation and strangeness he experienced there. “When I first moved to Texas it was like another planet,” says Penner. It was “alien, the weather, the landscape: I didn’t know what to make of it.” Still, he was determined to find his subject matter close by: neighboring towns like Sealy and Clifton gave him austere, characteristically American images to work from.
For an artist tremendously interested in texture and detail, the dilapidated state of the buildings he photographed and then painted gave him his poetry and his visual interest. Peeling paint, cracked asphalt and weeds breaking through pavement interest Penner the way that light reflected on water interested Monet. “I could never paint new buildings,” he comments.
The somber, elegiac tone of his early Texas paintings reflects a number of things: his wife’s grief over the loss of a brother, the “Last Picture Show” vibe of small town Texas, and Penner’s own sober view of life. Then, in 1991, the same year that Penner signed on to show his work at OK Harris, his youngest brother died in a plane crash. Two deaths — that of his brother-in-law and his brother — made indelible impacts that Penner feels affect his world view, and his work, to this day.
Rod Penner, “Pink House with Big Wheels,” Acrylic on Canvas, 36 x 54 inches, 1992
People don’t appear in his paintings, but their parked pickup trucks and their children’s big wheels scattered on the front lawn remind us that they are missing. With fierce objectivity, Penner paints portraits of Texas small town life without ever showing us a single human face.
Penner’s work ethic is very strong: it has to be, as he is the sole supporter for his wife a homemaker, and for five children. He is up most mornings by 4:30 for some early painting, and perhaps a walk. After breakfast he is usually back in the studio until 5.
His method of painting is methodical and systematic. Working from photos that have often been adjusted in photoshop, he paints a small, defined area each day. When working on his “minis,” which are six inches square, he typically needs 7 to 10 days, which means that he is painting at the rate of a few square inches each day. Larger paintings can take up to four months to complete.
He rarely goes back and corrects his previous day’s work. Penner, in this respect, is a little like an Italian fresco artist of the Renaissance who covered a single square of plaster each day, calling it his “giornata” or day’s work.
The ingredients for his paintings are shockingly simple: acrylic paint and water, applied on small panels, or on wet-sanded canvas for larger works.
Penner doesn’t mind being called a “Photo-realist” but comments that if anything his works are “Photo-realism in HD.” People familiar with his paintings note that he goes beyond his subject matter, and manages to infuse very strong feelings into his work.
“He is a master technician, “says painter Leonard Koscianski, ” but he is more than that. His paintings are actually quite expressive. There is a significant difference between his photos and the paintings he creates from them.”
Penner’s dealer, Ethan Karp admires the revelatory aspect of Penner’s images, noting that “They encourage the viewer to look at painting, landscape and subject with a sense of objective discovery, and deliver a revelatory moment of clarity and startled awareness.”
Rod Penner, “Snoball,” Acrylic on Panel, 6 x 6 inches, 2010
Penner’s recent art seems a bit more optimistic than it did 20 years ago. Pictures like “Snoball,” which portrays a snow-cone shack with a yellow topped cone is softened by his gentle sense of humor: it is almost a “Pop” painting. The gentle rivulets of water in front of the shack suggest something melting, a wry comment.
It turns out that Texas is a great place to raise a family, and the hill country landscape around Marble Falls, where the Penners have lived since 2002, is actually quite beautiful. Life at the moment is very good for the Penner family, and his online photo album is full of snaps of Arkansas river rafting, fishing trips, and football games. Austin is less than an hour away when big city pleasures are in order.
Rod and Debbie Penner have begun to collect some modest School of Hudson River School paintings, and Rod is building a new studio. Both are luxuries they could have hardly imagined when they started their lives together. “We are blessed,” Penner acknowledges.
When New York collectors pay big money for one of Penner’s painting they are getting a piece of Americana. Hard working, and dead on honest, Penner and his paintings take us back to places and values that somehow look more and more attractive and endearing over time. Penner’s paintings don’t just tell us about desolation and melancholy. They also have some things to say about grit, candor and endurance: American virtues.
Penner’s choice of style is also looking prescient, as the art world is paying more attention to photo-realist and hyper-realist art. “There appears to currently be a growing awareness and appreciation of hyper-realist painting as a substantial and acquirable art form,” says Ethan Karp.
According to Wikipedia, Marble Falls has produced three “notable” citizens: a rancher, a 2nd place winner on “Nashville Star,” and an Olympic sprinter. Another listing needs to be added:
Rod Penner: A Hyper-realist artist known for his painstakingly honest depictions of small Texas towns.
Below: A slideshow of paintings by Rod Penner
Pink House with Big Wheels
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Acrylic on Canvas
36 x 54 inches
1992
Image Courtesy of the artist and OK Harris Works of Art
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In Step 5 of this series we suggested that President Barack Obama challenge House Minority Leader John Boehner to a debate about the only issue on voters’ minds, jobs. Several readers suggested this would be a “Hail Mary” pass. It was not then but with many national polls holding steady or moving in the wrong direction Democrats need to shake things up between now and Election Day, November 2nd in order to hold the House of Representatives. A high stakes Obama v. Boehner debate would garner a lot of attention, and give Democrats an opportunity to reach independent voters and address their economic insecurity.
We do not know whether Obama will actually issue a challenge to Boehner or not, time is running out, but in states and congressional districts from coast to coast Democrats and Republicans are debating and the economy is the single issue where the persuadable voters are paying the closest attention. What Republicans seem to understand learn is that the winner of the debate is not necessarily the candidate with the best set of answers to policy questions. If this were so we would be doing a lot better. To win Democrats need to do more than win the policy debate, they have to win voters’ trust when they look with apprehension toward our economic future.
Exactly how to do this is the topic of Step 6 in this series.
Steps 1-3 are here. Steps 4 is here. Step 5 is here.
Our basic take on the Democrats’ economic message is here.
Step 6: Connect With Voters Economic Anxiety to Earn their TrustRight now the Republicans are waging, and perhaps winning a contest on purely emotional grounds pointing to the unemployment numbers, and asking the simple question, “Where are the jobs?” Their description of the economy may be one-sided and the statistics may be exaggerated but it connects with voters’ frustrations even though the Republicans don’t have any new answers for what to do about it on the policy level. However, on the emotional plane their argument is strong.
Voters have seen their incomes and job prospects decline and they are upset and worried, and Republicans are feeding the fears. Economic statistics may show improvement but current opinion surveys are finding consumer sentiment going not up but down as we head into this election.
For Democrats, the natural instinct is to point out the bright side of the economic picture to balance the Republicans’ overly harsh portrayal and calm people’s fears, but everyone knows this would only make things worse. Economically stressed voters will never trust a politician who doesn’t even know how bad things are in the economy. To gain voters’ trust, Democrats have to connect on a deeper level and as Bill Clinton said when he was running for president during an economic downturn “feel their pain.”
When discussing politics, either in a formal political debate, political ads, or even an informal doorstep discussion while canvassing, Democrats should remember the most important thing is to connect:
Connect with women. Most of the available votes Democrats can still win over between now and Election Day are politically independent economically stressed women. A recent survey dubs this group “Walmart Moms” and even though the survey was sponsored by, you guessed it, Walmart, it zeros in on women’s frustrations and stresses. By a margin of roughly two-to-one the top issue for all women is job creation and economic growth, followed by health care, and the deficit and government spending, but for the Walmart Moms, the economy and jobs is mentioned three times more than the next concern. The survey finds strong majorities of Walmart Moms are worried about losing their job but as many worry about retirement security, their savings and debt, the cost of health care, and being able to afford necessities like gasoline and groceries. To connect with economically stressed women it is important to communicate that you understand how numerous, and how basic their economic worries are these days.
Connect with feelings and emotions. In her 1990 book, “You Just Don’t Understand, Women and Men in Conversation” linguist, Deborah Tannen points out how the importance to women of bonding through communication, which eludes most men. When someone has a problem, women try to understand, share, and bond, while most men go into problem solving mode. Politicians are even worse in that they immediately mention a piece of legislation they supported and try to score a point against their opposition. When politicians respond this way, the problem and the person, start to become invisible. What’s needed is a gender balanced approach that involves listening, communicating and offering advice that shows one has listened and understood.
In other words, to really connect with people, it is important to pause for a while and stay in the reality of their lives before turning to your reality and the policies you support. Listen more and talk less, and then respond with emotions as well as specifics. Acknowledge the fear, anxiety, and pain of having lost the sense that we can offer our children security and the expectation that their lives will be easier than ours. Voters are more likely to trust someone who understands the current state of their lives before moving into problem solving mode. Then the solution needs to match the perception of the problem.
Democrats have a lot of specific policies that have appeal for swing voters, especially women:
The Paycheck Fairness Act is a winning bipartisan issue with huge appeal to independent voters. Getting paid fairly for one’s work is an important component of economic security – affecting the ability to afford the mortgage, the gas, put food on the table, afford health care for one’s family.
There are parts of the Affordable Care Act that provide economic security. Stories of women and men who have maintained their economic security in the face of life threatening illness could create that sense of trust.
Connect with the middle class’s economic insecurity. Much as we love Austan Goolsbee’s chart the White House and other Democrats will have a better chance of winning middle class votes by demonstrating an understanding of what middle class and working class voters are going through. However compelling the logic and the graphic presentation of the difference between the Republican and Democratic tax plans, voters are not going to leave their warm homes, go to the polls and pull the Democratic lever because they prefer our tax policy. Democrats do not win elections by talking about taxes. Democrats win elections by connecting with people.
Middle class, working class, and struggling class Americans are crying out right now to be understood and respected. They have seen their incomes and purchasing power decline for decades. Foreclosures are at an all time high. Their children are graduating from school and facing a job market that is forcing them to postpone their dreams and take whatever job they can get. They are seeing family member lose jobs in their 50s wondering if they will ever work again. It is important to connect with this reality to earn their trust before pivoting to our differences with Republicans when it comes to strengthening rather than privatizing and cutting Social Security, raising the minimum wage, implementing health insurance reforms, and cutting business taxes to generate good jobs. Retirement security is an issue that appeals strongly to independent voters. It is specific to people’s lives, what they worry about in a way that large policy agendas aren’t.
Democrats who can connect with voters on this level will find them more receptive to the larger policy discussion that we need to have. Then you can start asking the question that still has the potential to deliver votes on Election Day. Which party do you think offers the greatest chance of getting the economy going in the next two years — the party that broke the economy and has no new ideas to fix it so they just try to exploit your fear and anger — or the party that is working every day to get people working and the economy growing?
Steps 1-3 are here. Steps 4 is here. Step 5 is here.
Our basic take on the Democrats’ economic message is here.

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For almost three decades I’ve been studying nudibranchs in the tropical Indian and Pacific Oceans. Nudibranchs are beautiful and brightly colored sea slugs that thrive on healthy coral reefs. While that has been exhilarating, it is the changes that I’ve seen on these reefs that make me sit upright in bed in the middle of the night. Climate change is seriously endangering these richest reservoirs of marine biodiversity. Here is my story of some of these alarming changes.
My journey began in Cosmoledo (map), a remote atoll in the western Indian Ocean, 200 miles northwest of Madagascar and 600 miles west of the African continent. I first visited there in 1986 as part of a Smithsonian Institution expedition. I remember the reefs were teeming with lush coral growth and there was an amazing display of colorful reef fish. When I went back in 1999, the land looked very much the same, a beautiful white sand beach, palm trees swaying, and Tournefortia and Scaevola bushes embracing the shoreline. What an idyllic setting. It was great to be back, or so I thought. Then I donned my mask, snorkel, and fins to plunge into the warm waters. This time something was very different. The fish were there in abundance but the corals were all dead. There were a few isolated coral heads that had just begun to recover, but 95% of the reef was dead. The fish swam around looking for something to eat and for their old habitat. It reminded me of people returning to find their homes in ruins after a wildfire had roared through a forest. I was shocked at what I saw.
Here we were on one of the most remote atolls in the Indian Ocean, where only the occasional turtle hunter or fisherman ventures. There is no permanent habitation, only a few huts where people sleep when they are fishing or gathering coconuts. There is no pollution, virtually no resident human impact, and no local explanation for this profound decimation of a once-healthy reef.
This is when I had my first “aha” moment about climate change. For me it was real and catastrophic in what had happened to the reefs in the western Indian Ocean. From that day forward, I became convinced that the world’s richest oceanic habitats, the coral reefs, are seriously threatened.
However, I didn’t see more evidence of coral death in the parts of the Indian and Pacific Oceans where I was spending a couple of months each year studying the diversity of nudibranchs. Meanwhile, my colleagues in the Caribbean continued to report serious problems on their coral reefs. At the International Coral Reef Congress held in Okinawa in 2004, reef biologists reported that the changes in the dominant coral species in the Caribbean had not been replicated in the geologic core samples they made in the reef that went back through 4000 years of history. At this moment, I remember turning to one of my colleagues and saying, “this is incontrovertible evidence that something unprecedented has changed, and nobody can possibly doubt that this represents human-induced climate change.”
More trouble in the Indian Ocean
My next visit to a coral reef in trouble came in October 2005. Three of my colleagues and I had travelled from the California Academy of Sciences to the remote Radama Islands (map) off the northwest coast of Madagascar to join a team of Malagasy scientists and staff from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Our mission was to survey the unique biota of the islands, which had just received official conservation status from the Malagasy government. This was a major accomplishment and one that gave all of us hope that the reefs of Madagascar were beginning to receive the necessary protection they so badly needed. Our colleagues at the WCS were working closely with local community leaders to ease the fishing pressures in these protected areas and find new, more sustainable methods of fishing, and setting aside no-take zones that would function as nurseries to replenish areas where sustainable harvesting could take place. The local residents were embracing this concept.
We were all excited to see how the newly adopted conservation practices were paying off in this biologically rich area. Our first dive in the islands was on a remote pinnacle several miles offshore. The water was teeming with marine life. Our attention was focused on the nudibranchs, soft corals, and barnacles that we individually study. After the first dive we all focused on the new discoveries we had made. My colleague Shireen Fahey and I found two new species of nudibranchs that had never before been seen by scientists. Bob Van Syoc was confident he had found new barnacle species, and Gary Williams had found soft corals that he had never seen previously. We were off to a great start. This was just the ammunition that the WCS needed to reinforce the uniqueness of the area and why it must be protected.
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New species, Radama Islands, Madagascar, October 2005
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All photographs in the slideshow are by Dr. Terry Gosliner unless otherwise mentioned and obtained with permission from Dr. Terry Gosliner and the California Academy of Sciences. The slide show was curated by Subhankar Banerjee.
Subsequent dives were equally spectacular in the wealth of new species. After the second or third dive, our conversations at the surface between dives began to shift. We were still finding exciting new animals, but we were also noticing that more and more of the coral was being overgrown by a light brownish green slime. In some cases, it was clearly covering, smothering, and killing whole coral colonies. Gary had the insight to collect a small sample to take back to San Francisco for further study. After examination we recognized this was a blue-green bacterium, also known as cyanobacteria, which are abundant in habitats that are severely stressed or have too many nutrients.
This was happening independently of local human activity. The culprit, however, was human activity worlds away in the industrialized nations that contributed to global warming and consequently caused stress to the temperature-sensitive corals. Despite adopting more sustainable fishing practices, the reefs surrounding the Radama islanders were slowly dying from suffocating slime. This realization put a damper on our excitement of the wonderful new species we had discovered and brought the backdrop concern to the forefront as the dominant feeling about the trip. It just did not seem fair that subsistence fisherfolks who were adopting conservation-minded practices were still facing the impacts of their fellow humans in the developed countries half a world away.
Trauma in Thailand
Fast forward to July 18, 2010. I had just landed in Phuket, Thailand (map) to attend the World Congress of Malacology. Researchers who study mollusks gather every three years to exchange latest research findings in this conference. Everyone was excited to see what new discoveries had been made, what new students were coming along, and to meet and reconnect with colleagues to develop new ideas for collaborative projects. I ran into one of my closest colleagues from Spain, Marta Pola. She had spent one and a half years working with me in San Francisco and I had also co-supervised her doctoral research at the University of Madrid. Six months earlier she had returned to Spain to accept a faculty position at the University of Madrid. She was at a reception with many of my other Spanish colleagues that we affectionately call the Spanish Mafia. They were all going to go snorkeling the next morning on some offshore islands and there was room for me to join them.
The reefs of Phuket are renowned for their beauty and I had heard they were recovering nicely from the damage wrought by the deadly Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. Our destination was a little islet appropriately called Coral Island. A twenty-minute boat ride brought us to a sheltered cove with a couple of dozen tourists on the beach. As we approached the shallows I could see scattered patches of white. As we got even closer to the beach, I saw that the white spots were coral heads and they looked like snow-capped peaks rather than the golden browns and greens of healthy coral colonies. The rich colors are caused by the presence of minute algae called zooxanthellae that live symbiotically in the coral tissues. The sugars produced by the zooxanthellae can provide more than half the nutrition of the corals. When corals are stressed, they expel their zooxanthellae and they appear white. This is called coral bleaching and is a sign that something is seriously wrong.
When I put on my mask and slipped into the water, I saw what the white patches were all about. Almost all the corals were dead or severely bleached. I’ve seen coral bleaching before in the Philippines and a few other places. Its usually a coral head here, a coral head there. While alarming, it is isolated and not commonly encountered. On Coral Island, 90% of the corals were dead or bleached. We were all shocked. None of us had seen anything like this. When we got back to the hotel, I Googled “coral bleaching, Phuket” and found several articles in Thai newpapers describing how the water temperature had gotten up to 91-93 degrees Fahrenheit in early May. By May 10, divers started noticing coral bleaching. Now, two months later, the ultimate nightmare was unfolding.
I ran into my Thai academic sibling, Suchana Chavanich, who had studied at the University of New Hampshire with my Ph.D advisor Larry Harris. She has become one of the experts of coral reefs in Thailand. I asked her about the coral bleaching and she explained to me that almost all of the reefs in Thailand on both sides of the Malay Peninsula were suffering from severe bleaching. Later that afternoon, I was talking to a couple of Malaysian colleagues at the conference and they reported that the same intensity of bleaching had also been observed to the south on Malaysian reefs. In the following weeks reports of bleaching kept coming in from the Maldives, then Aceh in Indonesia, and then Java. It was clear that we were witnessing a major bleaching event that was very widespread.
Following the El Nio of 1998, widespread bleaching was observed throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Most reefs have begun recovering from that catastrophe. This present event appears to be almost as serious and may prove to be equally or more devastating to western Pacific reefs by the time it is over. There are several aspects of what we are seeing that are especially disturbing. While El Nios have been observed historically, they are becoming more severe and far more frequent than they have been in historical record. Another concern is that reefs that are already stressed from other human insults such as dynamite fishing, pollution, and sedimentation are less resilient to more frequent bleaching events.
Promise in the Philippines
Most of my search for new nudibranch species over the last two decades has focused on the reefs of the Philippines (map). This area has been shown to have more species of reef fish, soft corals, and nudibranchs than any other place in the world. Here we continue to find new species of nudibranchs at the average rate of one new species per dive. During these 18 years, the reefs of Balayan Bay at the southern end of Luzon have seen many changes.
On my first trip to this area in 1992, I remember vividly the loud, concussive explosion of dynamite when I was underwater. One time it was so close and intense, I thought my eardrums had been blown out. Next to me were quivering, dying reef fish. I immediately came to the surface to ask our boatman if there was another boat nearby. There was nothing visible as far as we could tell. Often the fatal shock wave from a dynamite blast can carry a mile or more. It is not a selective or predictable method of fishing, and blasted coral and dead fish can be found far away. It is also profoundly destructive in that the living coral substrate is also blasted to hell and there is no longer adequate habitat for fish to re-colonize the depleted reef.
Since then, a transformation has begun to take place. Marine protected areas have been set up and are being strictly enforced. Recreational divers are charged a modest fee for diving on reefs and those funds are supporting conservation efforts within the municipality of Mabini. Community groups work together to make informed decisions on how to administer funds and enforce regulations. Often their regulations are stricter than national regulations. Within some areas, such as Tingloy, community groups are taking the initiative themselves. The reef of Red Palm (Pulangbuli) was made a marine sanctuary largely through the efforts of a community leader, Princess Aldovino. These regulations have forbidden any fishing or diving on the reef for more than 6 years. Despite threats from irate fishermen, Princess and other local conservation leaders have firmly held their ground.
When we dove on this reef 10 years ago it was decimated with dead coral rubble and hardly any fish. In late September I returned there as part of a joint Philippine Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources and California Academy of Sciences expedition. Several of us were granted the privilege of being the first divers to observe the reef after 6 years of complete protection. This once dead reef has made a remarkable comeback and young coral heads and healthy populations of diverse reef fishes now abound. Thanks to the heroic efforts of enlightened local people who understand that short-term sacrifice is worth the long-term benefit of conserving resources for future generations, many Philippine reefs are now healthier than when I first started working there.
However, within the last couple of weeks we had received the first disturbing news that significant coral bleaching was beginning to appear in Balayan Bay. While I had seen a few photos from the area, I still didn’t have a good sense of how severe and widespread the bleaching was. I am now in Manila to help plan for a large expedition of Academy and Filipino scientists and educators to document biodiversity in the Philippines in 2011 and help promote conservation. This will also provide us with an opportunity to see firsthand, the condition of the reefs we know so well. I decided to carve out a couple of days in my schedule to visit the reefs that I have been observing for two decades, to see for myself how widespread the bleaching had become. I had been here just a few months earlier in May and had a vivid memory of what it looked like then.
Our first dive was right off the beach from Club Ocellaris, where we were based. Immediately, I saw a few bleached corals and the more we looked the more we saw. Overall, 5-10% of the corals were pale and discolored. It wasn’t nearly as bad as what I had seen in Thailand, but here it was in my own backyard and it felt personal. Dives at our other key sites revealed the same pattern.
At a site called Bethlehem, I was especially curious to see how one massive coral colony was doing. This colony is about twenty feet high and spans a length of 100 feet and is probably hundreds of years old. When I saw it, I could not believe it. Instead of a uniform gray-brown colony, there were patches of white everywhere. It reminded me of a dusting of light snow in an early fall storm. I looked carefully and the coral polyps were still alive, just devoid of their symbiotic algae. On another site, Koala, it wasn’t just the hard corals that were bleached but also soft corals and sea anemones. It was patchy but some of the patches of bleached corals were very extensive. The sea anemones were especially poignant as their clown fish residents look like little nemos living in a glass house.
I am optimistic that most of the bleaching will be temporary and that the majority of corals will recover rather than die. They probably dodged the bullet this time, but what will the future decades of impacted reefs and climate change look like? My colleague Charlie Veron, the world’s foremost coral taxonomist, has suggested that we may be the last generation to have seen healthy reefs. I hope this is not the future, but we are seriously concerned. The threat is immediate and real. To me the saddest part of what I saw is that even when local communities make every effort to conserve their reefs, what the developed world is doing a world away now impacts Princess’ reef and every other reef in the region. Global climate change means more bleaching, more dead reefs, and more ocean acidification that will severely inhibit growth of the coral skeletons that build reefs. Reefs are dying and people’s ability to sustainably use coral reefs is being seriously compromised.
There is great urgency to move to a non-carbon producing energy economy, yet disturbingly little is happening to make the changes we require, that life on our planet desperately needs. The U.S. Congress is failing to muster the leadership and political courage to make the necessary changes to successfully ameliorate the situation. The American people are not sufficiently scientifically literate enough to make informed decisions and chose to ignore the facts about the severity of our present planetary disequilibrium. Short-term greed seemingly trumps implementation of long-term solutions. It truly is business as usual. In Tingloy, Princess and members of her community have figured out that short-term sacrifice is the path to a future for the next generations. Why can’t the citizens of one of the richest and best-educated nations do the same?
Crossposted with ClimateStoryTellers.org

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

As the music most associated with Portuguese culture, Fado is dark, passionate and as the name indicates, it is concerned with fate. The form has regained its popularity in Portugal and the rest of the world due in great part to a new crop of divas who, while acknowledging the influence of the great Amalia Rodriguez, have personalized the genre, each in their own way. While a discussion of Fado is important to understand where they are coming from, the Lisbon-based Deolinda is not a Fado band. The influence of the music is very much there, but the tone is utterly different. It is whimsical and playful and even when it gets serious, it never gets quite as brooding as Fado. Ana Bacalhau’s vocals resonate with its phrasing and emotion, but never descend to it’s stoicism about life and death. Instead, the repertoire deals with social interactions and human frailties using a poetic wit.
Fun with Fado? Deolinda Plays Joe’s Pub from Michal Shapiro on Vimeo.
For example the sprightly “No Tenho Mais Razes” is a comment on people who need to complain, even when there’s nothing particularly bad happening. Instead of going to the doctor because she is ill, the subject of the song goes to the doctor hoping he will find something wrong for her to moan about; she cannot feel normal otherwise.
I have covered Deolinda before, when they performed at WOMEX 2009. I was impressed with how much the band did with the instrumentation of two guitars and a bass. The approach is so flexible that at times it feels if if one is listening to a piano! And of course I was also impressed with the nuanced vocal timbre of Ms. Bacalhau.
Joe’s Pub in NYC was an excellent intimate venue for the band, and the mostly Portuguese audience was in heaven. But I think this music has a broad appeal, and I suspect that this is not the last of Deolinda’s visits.

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Today’s guest post is from Cuban writer, photographer and blogger, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo.
Our Vargas Llosa who art in Nobel…
by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
I came to Mario Vargas Llosa late in life, thanks to a mention of him in a short story written by Senal Paz, which Paz later adapted for the script of the Cuban film Strawberry and Chocolate.
Dramaturgically, even within the script, all the chatter about Cuban censorship always seemed ridiculous to me, a sign of more of ignorance than intolerance. Not on the part of Senal Paz, of course, but by our nationalized cultural establishment. A system that at the turning of the new century, and new millennium, is still atoning for its sins of the ’70s.
I am referring not only to the narrative of Vargas Llosa, which would be perfectly digestible for local publishers (a narrative that goes from brilliant to conservative without ever taking on the tone of a pamphlet), but his thoughtful prose; this exquisite essayist, more than mortified at the Marxist idiots of the island proletariat, could never be branded a “reactionary” and much less a “rightest” (not forgetting that the reactionary right, in addition to the disasters it shares with the “left” and its “revolutionaries,” has also played many worthy roles in contemporary history).
The important thing is that Mario Vargas Llosa survived the powerful prejudices against his “eternal candidacy” at the Academy in Stockholm, until now when he was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. Hallelujah for the man from Arequipa! Those of us who are going to read you again, salute you…
Beyond the Peruvian presidential episode (just another part of the latin soap opera, or perhaps the Ladino American one); setting aside the jealous punch in the face dealt to Gabriel Garcia Marquez in February 1976; discounting his island illusions of one or another slogan within the Cuban Revolution (smart intellectuals are converted by definition); Varga Llosa has been a gallant gladiator. An inveterate polemicist against all odds. A humanist heretic against the fires the ideological inquisition. A light in the times of the blackouts. A committed writer, save with the idiotic notion of the “committed writer.” An incorruptible comrade, despite other complicit comrades. An old-fashioned liberal, despite the neoliberals. A man of rebel rhetoric who one day said No.
And this is not a note of praise commissioned by the editorial board. This is not a note of praise.
The conceptual wasteland uninhabited by Cuban writers today, leave us, paradoxically, in a crazy and talkative freedom. In the middle of the desert, we drink from any source, faithful or contaminated; our relativism makes us hedonistic and ahistorical, a perfect pasture for plurality. In the middle of the barbed wire fence of impertinent permissions even to shut up, we soon discover that we are alone, abandoned by our own stinginess, like the guild that shouldn’t bite the ministerial hand that feeds it (Oedipal complex). In the midst of paralyzing fear that exhausts even the crime genre, here and now we can speak by writing, each with his true or implausible voice.
We could, and knew when and how to, kick with words, but simply did not want to play the star. So the Nobel Prize in Literature for a compatriot was cut forever in 1980 with that phone call from Sweden, that bumped into Alejo Carpentier, already a cadaver (novelistically he had died two diplomatic decades earlier).
So, despite the opinion of a surprised Mario Vargas Llosa, personally I hope that he has not been given this maximum laurel only for his literary work, but also for his political views put into black and white with a startling clarity, with ethical and aesthetic reasoning, without concessions to any dense Utopia nor atrocious tyranny of the market, narrated in the sea for the sake of a vision of the end of the world which, however, did not yield to defeatism, much less despotism. Latin America owes a great deal to Varga Llosa, like the fiction of an encircling range of States never altogether modern: at times from strongman rule to cretinism, at times from the barbarous to the ludicrous (Cuba as a canon of all things). And this Peruvian, citizen not of Spain but of the planet, has been critically understanding with a sparse reality that breathes with more vitality within his work than outside of it.
Moreover, the Nobel Prize, like all civilized activity, is and should be, also, political (though not politicized). Literature is too important to be left in the hands of the literati.
Finally, I beg pardon in my own name for the Paleolithic perversions that have been published about Mario Vargas Llosa by the imprisoned press in my country. If I do not propose to start a petition against such newspapers, it is only so as not to expose the prevailing lack of solidarity among the intelligentsia, and also because every time the professional press touches anything in this country there’s one less piece of the pie to go around.
But the rest of the world copies loud and clear (to use the martial vocabulary of our functionaries or, better yet, of Vargas Llosa’s own character, Pantaleon), that this Nobel is as much ours as was the Cuban “boom” sparked by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jose Saramago. Mario Vargas Llosa resisted and eventually his carefully chosen words have become much more significant and longer lasting than the flood of verbiage that spills from our island stage.
Yoani’s blog, Generation Y, can be read here in English translation.
Translating Cuba is a new compilation blog with Yoani and other Cuban bloggers in English.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

All praise from here for President Obama’s courageous decision Friday to proceed with an investigation of China’s opportunistic and illegal trade practices in the clean energy sector. Those of us dedicated to supporting U.S. workers, U.S. jobs and U.S. manufacturing owe him an enormous debt of gratitude.
The Administration deserves a tremendous amount of credit for considering this case on its merits, rather than letting some overarching philosophy dictate the outcome. Demonstrating a willingness to challenge China’s cheating could make a huge difference for American workers and businesses in the clean energy manufacturing sector. And if the Administration’s efforts with China are successful, the ultimate result will be more American jobs.
Friday’s decision, announced by United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk, was in response to a United Steelworkers (USW) Section 301 unfair trade complaint against China. In his announcement, Kirk said, “We take the USW’s claims very seriously, and we are vigorously investigating them.” He said his office would use the next 90 days – the time period called for under World Trade Organization (WTO) laws – to investigate the practices detailed in the USW petition.
The Steelworkers – one of our stakeholders – stepped up to the plate while many others have been reluctant to do so in the face of Chinese pressure. Here was the union’s reaction Friday.
This week’s trade numbers sure helped drive home the fact of the absurdity of our trading relationship with China: a record-breaking $28 billion trade deficit with China driving a total August deficit of $46.3 billion.
China did not get to this superior position by playing on a level playing field, and the USW’s petition, a 5,800 page report, details the more than 80 Chinese laws, regulations and practices that are designed to crush clean energy manufacturing and other green technology in the U.S. As the August numbers help show, China’s plan is working. China has set prices to undercut the U.S. and other competitors, set discriminatory technology laws and regulations, demanded that foreign companies transfer valuable technology, and has provided massive subsidies to Chinese companies, causing serious damage to U.S. interests.
The numbers also help put in perspective how futile U.S. clean energy plans and proposals will be unless China adheres to international trade laws.
The Brookings Institution, American Enterprise Institute and the Breakthrough Institute issued a joint report this week calling on the government to invest $25 billion a year in “military procurement, R&D, and a new network of university-private sector innovation hubs to create an energy revolution.”
That’s all fine, but just comparing the numbers – a trade deficit of $28 billion a month versus a proposed U.S. investment of $25 billion a year – shows the futility of the effort until the U.S. regains balance in its trading relationship with China.
As I wrote in November 2009, “American voters have a visceral response to jobs shipped overseas, a trend that Obama said he would address as a candidate. Less than a year out from the mid-term elections, this looms as a major political problem, as well as an economic one.”
That mid-term election is a lot closer now and until today the fundamentals had not changed. The president’s decision to stand up against China’s highly aggressive and illegal trade practices is a huge win for American workers, and he deserves our hearty thanks.
# # #

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Believe it or not, reporters would probably find it as scary to be in your mind as you would to be in theirs. The catch is that they’re paid to be in yours and will do their best to get there.
Traditional journalists may, in fact, come into interviews with a bias — personal, based on their own experiences and belief system, or “employer-based,” reflecting their media outlet’s political leanings, attitude towards certain types of organizations, etc.. However, with rare exception, they are not usually out to “get you.” They’re merely doing their job and trying to receive as much recognition for it as possible. Just like you, right?
Citizen reporters — e.g., bloggers without editorial control — are another story, for another time.
A reporter wants a story that’s newsworthy, that appeals to his/her editor and audience. There is a journalistic code of ethics, but it allows for behaviors you may or may not deem acceptable while in pursuit of a story. And journalists probably don’t review that code very often. Still, as I reported on HuffPost in the past, it can be a formidable weapon used to defend yourself against ethical abuses.
Your job is to tell your side of the story. You are in conversation; you have to know to whom you’re speaking. The reporter is asking you questions he/she thinks the audience will want answered. That means you must speak to your stakeholders through the interviewer, giving your stakeholders what you want them to know in terms that will be meaningful to them.
By being media-trained, you will improve your ability to balance a story — but remember that “balanced” does not equate to “the story came out the way it would have come out if you had written it.” It means you got a fair shake, even if people who completely disagreed with you also were treated fairly. By definition, a totally balanced article is still only half “your side” of the story. And true balance is as rare as honest politicians.
You may find this surprising coming from the author of a media training manual, but as a crisis management professional I advise clients that the traditional media is not your most important stakeholder group, because it is the least reliable means of accurately communicating information. However, media outlets are an important stakeholder group and one gateway to those who matter most to you – typically your employees, customers, investors, community leaders, the general public, etc. In some specific situations, such as natural disasters, the traditional media can be a particularly important method of getting your messages out. And it’s true that whether you cooperate or not, reporters will write their stories — so why not do your best to optimize the results?
[The preceding was excerpted and adapted from Keeping the Wolves at Bay - Media Training]

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

How wrong is the criticism that says President Obama prefers to explain his policies from a great height or to answer requests for assurance from humble citizens and TV hosts? A middle layer of explanation has certainly been lacking from the start: the effort of persuasion that is neither inspirational nor tactical, where a leader tries to convert people to his side. This is the level at which one must articulate the reasons for a policy, along with the understanding of the public good from which the policy has issued and the historical context that makes it necessary and desirable.
That the administration fell short of that standard of persuasion in the passage of health care is now well known. But if the accounts recently published by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker and by Peter Baker in tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine can be believed, the stock-taking at the White House has hardly begun. President Obama continues to think himself a victim of circumstance; and whether the Republicans win a small or a large victory in November, he expects they will come into the new congress more willing to deal with him than ever before:
The “optimism” expressed here borders on a sheer opacity of denial.
Meanwhile, in the midterm campaign, the administration has kept up the format of persuasion that works down from sloganeering to local tactics without ever passing through a phase of accessible explanation. Consider the attack on the Chamber of Commerce now being carried forward by the president and his spokesmen. The Chamber of Commerce is an organization for which — partly because its name, perhaps, and partly because of its history — many American cherish a vague and half-informed affection. You can attack it, but if you do the reason ought to be interesting and affecting. The administration has accused the Chamber of Commerce of channeling large amounts of money from foreign investors into Republican campaigns for the House and Senate. They offer no proofs, but are sufficiently confident to repeat the accusations.
The tactic on the face of it looks very strange. It becomes intelligible only when one learns the underlying concern. Financiers from other countries have an active interest in the Republicans winning the election because they know that the party will use its power to leverage tax breaks, regulative policy, and anti-union politics in a way that eases the exit of big companies from America. Foreign corporate dollars are being used to take American jobs away from Americans. It sounds a little different when you put it that way. The drain will be good for American owners — those not inhibited by sentimental patriotic feelings — and bad for American workers. The Republican party and rich Americans who don’t care how they get richer will thus acquire a new power and, with it, a dangerous detachment from American life. What is at stake then, in the talk about the Chamber of Commerce, is not only the future of the Democratic party but the fate of American workers. In this case their interests happen to coincide.
If that is what President Obama is thinking, he should say so. And having neglected the point till now, he should say so now. Without the explanation, the tactic savors of a more than usually transparent cynicism. Rightly explained, it could win some votes and would at least command respect. Chris Matthews (hardly a slack or obtuse observer) brought up the challenge last night: Why don’t you say it? It is possible of course that the president, here as on other issues, wants to give the appearance of standing his ground without saying exactly what his ground is. The attack on the Chamber looks like minding the intrusion of “special interests,” whereas to raise the threat of jobs departing the United States, en masse, would be seen as a demagogic appeal to panic and class war. Well, but if you think the war is real, say so. If you prefer to go half way and no further, it would be better not say nothing. An attack on the Chamber without proof or a process of reasoning to back it has an air of opportunism.
The same tendency to justify from the surface and not trust the public to understand the depth has been visible in President Obama’s partial explanations of Afghanistan. A reader of Obama’s Wars may learn from its first 50 pages that a major cause of American troubles in Afghanistan is the support of the Taliban by Pakistan. One learns also that a large cause of Pakistan’s support for the Taliban is its fear of India. Most Americans know about Afghanistan. Readers who follow the news may know about the Pakistan link to the Taliban. But only those who take the trouble to follow the news in some detail, and from several sources, can know that the conflict really goes back to India/Pakistan. That is why President Obama thinks that U.S. troops cannot leave the region immediately, and why he is convinced success in Afghanistan means nothing if confined to Afghanistan.
Why has he told none of this to the American public? Why has he practiced as undemocratic an economy of truth as Bush in omitting the word India from most of his comments on the war and never once daring to utter the word Kashmir?
Again as with the Chamber of Commerce, a difficult choice, wrong maybe but defensible, is made to look opportunistic or impenetrable by the omission of all explanation at the middle level. The administration chooses, rather, to deal purely in broad slogans (“our war against al-Qaeda”) and local expedients (“zero tolerance for corruption”).
If the Obama administration hopes to sponsor further reforms and to defend the policies it chooses, it cannot afford to think its failures the result of “a problem of communication.” They are, in some measure, effects of an inability to explain. And the problem starts at the top. Barack Obama has often said that he studies with care the words of Abraham Lincoln; and there is evidence that he has attended closely to some of Lincoln’s words. Yet Obama’s taste runs to the inspirational moments, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, speeches that speak of the victories Lincoln presided over and won at great cost. Obama would like to give those speeches; but as president he has not yet won victories that would make such speeches plausible or fitting. A more appropriate guide at present may be the Speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854): a work of persuasion that explains intelligibly a policy of reform whose effects lie in the future.
Lincoln, in that great speech, explained his policy against the expansion of slavery at just the middle level that tells most: between the broad slogan and the executive detail. He gave a well-defended view of the constitutional context, and a historical survey of the developments that led to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The result has the virtues of patience, simplicity, and honesty. It pays its listener the compliment of treating him as an equal. The possibility of such an act of civic persuasion seems to have vanished from American politics in the past 30 years. One had hoped President Obama even while arguing for his own policies would assist in a revival of the art of political explanation. Thus far, with the exception of the Cairo speech which had no upshot in practice, he is only the most recent casualty of a distrust of political argument that comes alike from the bottom of our culture and from the top.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

What’s in a word? When the word is “whore,” quite a lot. And yet, when it comes to the reality of California politics, not so much.
Pushed along by bad reporting and outright journalistic promotion of a campaign stunt, the story of the voicemail recording of Jerry Brown discussing with advisors billionaire Meg Whitman’s backing away from her supposed public pension reform imperatives in pursuit of a police union endorsement got a lot of attention. Not because it showed the supposed labor patsy Brown hanging tough with unions, but because an unnamed advisor wondered if they ought to type Whitman as a “whore.” Which frankly, considering the serious implications of the massive hypocrisy involved, is an insult to sex workers.
Oddly, no one reported that it was actually a woman who said it until I did, first on my blog, New West Notes, then here on the Huffington Post. Now the rest of the press accepts and reports that the reference was made by a female, which obviously puts an entirely different spin on the matter than if it were Brown himself or another man. Even the state president of the National Organization for Women, which backs Brown, calls Whitman a “political whore.”
Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown had some very tough exchanges in their 1992 battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. Now they’re campaigning together.
And what is the upshot after days of hyperventilation? Not much. Brown was ahead of Whitman before and he’s ahead of her now. Three very good private polls over the last few days give Brown a seven or eight point lead. Even the Republican Rasmussen poll, notorious for skewing conservative, put Brown in the lead on Friday, 50% to 44%.
Naturally, Whitman chief strategist Mike Murphy claims that he has not one but two private polls showing Whitman ahead by four points. Talk about doubling down on nonsense. This is the same truth-free behavior he displayed in the 2005 California special election which nearly destroyed his then client Arnold Schwarzenegger’s governorship.
“Whoregate,” as some of the dimmer media bulbs typed it, was a bust, the latest distraction attempt from Whitman’s highly-paid mercenary crew.
Of course, they promoted the teapot tempest, disseminating a bogus transcript identifying Brown as the speaker in question when it was perfectly obvious to anyone with ears that it was not only not Brown himself, it was a woman.
They got a very bad story and headline published in the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper which is a far cry from what it was in the 1990s, then promoted that in the national media echo chamber, with a particular boost from Time magazine pundit Mark Halperin, who’s been a constant conduit for Whitman. Even after I revealed that it was a woman who had said “whore,” Halperin put a Whitman press release at the top of his blog for the better part of a day. That’s right, a press release. He didn’t even bother to rewrite its spin — which was that it was probably Brown himself who said it, which is an outright lie — or add any other “value” he brings.
But in the end, aside from a distraction that may have prevented Brown from extending his lead, it’s amounted to not much, just more shallow media churn.
There is speculation about which woman working with Brown made the shorthand suggestion. I’m good with voices and I have a very firm opinion about that. Here it is: Her identity should remain private. She didn’t agree to have her conversation recorded, which is required under California law. The only reason the folks who produced and disseminated the recording aren’t in legal trouble is because that would keep the story alive.
“Let’s all take a deep breath. Relax.”
Good advice. It’s what Brown said Friday night at a big rally at UCLA. He and former President Bill Clinton, his bitter 1992 presidential rival, appeared together before 6,000 screaming students and other youngish folks. They were joined by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who both tried to run against Brown in the Democratic primary but dropped out. Newsom is the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor.
Former Governor-turned-Attorney General Jerry Brown introduced former President Bill Clinton Friday night at UCLA.
Brown and Clinton also appeared together at Beverly Hilton fundraiser Friday night, and will do another big rally together Sunday night in Silicon Valley at San Jose State University.
The two one-time rivals, whom many mistakenly reported had a blood feud, embraced on stage and praised one another to the skies.
After some joking around — “One thing you can count on: I’m not writing any damn memoir. Because if I said all the interesting stuff, I couldn’t keep running for office.” — Brown was particularly upbeat.
“California’s a state of imagination, of creativity, just like this university,” he said to screams from the crowd. “And that’s what I see in the next four years, a creative, dynamic place.”
“You know, we’re not poor. People say, gee, things are tough. Yeah they’re tough. I know we got a lot of problems, got people out of work, we got foreclosures, it’s a tragedy any time somebody loses their job or their house.
“But remember, California last year generated $1.8 trillion of new wealth. Okay, this year, it’ll even be more. This is one of the richest places in the whole world.
“We have enough wealth to continue to have a great university and get every kid in this school that can qualify. And when I say every young man or young woman, I mean everyone, whether they’re documented or not. If they went to school, they oughta be here.
“I feel good about this. We got some problems. I know things are screwed up, but lemme tell ya this. At some point, the breakdown prepares the way for a breakthrough. And that’s why I’m running for governor. We’re gonna have a breakthrough. I’m confident of that.
“When I went to UC I got my degree in Latin and Greek. So I may not know how to count too well, but I know about Latins and Greeks. I know about a lot of obscure stuff.
“If you want to read Meg Whitman’s economic plan, you have to be able to get into some pretty obscure stuff. Because it’s not there. It’s smoke and mirrors.”
“Meg, own up, how much are you going to make out of your own tax breaks?” he demanded before adding: “By the way, don’t worry. I don’t think she’s going to get a chance to get that tax break.”
Billionaire Meg Whitman’s thoroughly dishonest ad featuring footage of Bill Clinton — touted last month as the best TV ad of the entire election cycle by Time pundit Mark Halperin — looks dumb now.
Finally he was ready to introduce Clinton, who finally defeated Brown in the 1992 Democratic presidential primaries, leaving the former governor as the runner-up for the nomination.
“Let me tell you about President Clinton. I don’t need to say much. Not only was he great in office, but he has been great after he left office,” Brown said. “He didn’t retire to Palm Springs to play golf, he’s out there doing stuff. He’s helping people in Haiti. He’s fighting AIDS. He’s a guy who’s mobilizing the highest spirit, the angels of our better spirits.”
Clinton was equally effusive. “I’ve known Jerry Brown for almost 35 years. When we were governors together, we strongly supported the push for green energy. He knew it was good economics when most people thought it was a fool’s errand.”
“He’s the only politician in America I’ve heard say this except me. As horrible as the recession has been when, we come out of it, if we learn right lessons from it, we will be stronger for it.”
“It will matter enormously who the leaders of California are. You have more potential than any place on earth.”
What else happened in this fascinating race over the past few days?
After holding a Thursday press conference at a Los Angeles school, where he warned of further budget cuts that would be caused by Whitman’s tax cuts for the rich and challenged her again to reveal how much she would make personally by eliminating the capital gains tax, Brown hit Soho in LA for a big Hollywood fundraiser.
The DreamWorks gang, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen served as chairs of the event, which looks to raise a million dollars. A number of notables were co-chairs including George Lucas, J.J. Abrams, Annette Bening, and Warren Beatty.
Meanwhile, Whitman did the woman-of-the-people bit, riding her green campaign bus through Bakersfield and the Central Valley. She’s apparently going to be on the bus a lot, trying to dispel the already entrenched image of her as, well, a detached billionaire. Look for the bus to hit business sites owned by staunch Republicans.
While Whitman herself experimented with her new mode as populist, her campaign launched yet another attack ad against Brown, this one a 15-second spot claiming he’s soft on crime. Though that’s not much time to say anything, the campaign did manage to wildly distort Brown’s record. Yes, he personally opposes the death penalty. But he’s also prosecuted hundreds of death penalty cases and cleared the way for executions to begin again.
Brown’s campaign immediately punched back by releasing an ad detailing Whitman’s record of lying. I don’t know how much air time that’s going to get, however, since the campaign just launched a good new ad based on all the newspaper endorsements Brown is racking up over Whitman, with an emphasis on Whitman’s hometown paper expressing its deep disappointment in her.
Jay Leno had fun this week with Whitman’s incessant advertising and her illegal immigrant housekeeper problem.
Looking on from London, where he met Thursday with new British Prime Minister David Cameron and reviewed British troops back from the fighting in Afghanistan, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger checked in with his nearly two million followers on Twitter and managed to weigh in on the fading “whore” controversy.
First Schwarzenegger excoriated any politician “who catered to unions by trying to block public employee pension reform.”
Then he was asked by a Twitter follower what he thought about Whitman’s involvement with the LA police union whose official produced the recording, and which endorsed her after she modified her position on the issue.
“It’s appalling when anyone sells out,” said Schwarzenegger. He also, naturally, deemed the offending word “unacceptable.”
Also on Thursday, an intriguing new independent expenditure committee called Concerned Educators for Jerry Brown for Governor launched a big TV ad campaign.
Millions will be spent on this. What’s intriguing about it is that the funding is coming from the California Teachers Association and Netflix founder Reed Hastings, frequent antagonists on education issues.
CTA, of course, is one of the dominant labor powers. Hastings, in contrast, is a reformist figure who was president of the California Board of Education, appointed first by Democratic Governor Gray Davis and then by Republican Governor Schwarzenegger.
Under pressure from the left, the state Senate refused to confirm Hastings.
Incidentally, one of the women featured in this ad was also featured in advertising overseen in 2005 by CTA political consultant Gale Kaufman when she won the national campaign manager of the year award from the American Association of Political Consultants for defeating all four of Schwarzenegger’s special election initiatives. The campaign for those initiatives was run by Whitman’s now chief strategist, Mike Murphy.
When I spoke with Kaufman Wednesday night about all this, she was particularly tickled by the continuity.
Frequent antagonists joined together to fund this big new TV ad campaign boosting Brown on education.
Here’s the script:
Our kids can’t afford another four years of crippling cuts to public schools.
Class sizes are too big – and all this standardized testing just isn’t working.
So classroom teachers looked closely at the plans of both candidates for Governor…
…and we’re supporting Jerry Brown
Brown’s plan focuses on a well rounded education
With History, Science and the Arts as well as English and Math
Schools where teachers and parents work together
And that’s why we urge you to vote for Jerry Brown — a leader we can trust to make our public schools a priority again.
There were also major developments earlier in the week, including the third and final debate between Brown and Whitman.
Clinton debunked local press reports of a feud with Brown last month.
Whitman submerged the real big news coming out of Tuesday; namely, that she put another $20 million from her personal fortune into her trailing campaign for governor of California. This puts her official self-funding total at $141.5 million. As I’ve already reported, the true figure is at least $2 million more, taking into account the acknowledged $1 million-plus that Whitman gave chief strategist Mike Murphy for his credit-free Hollywood production company two days after he cut ties with her primary rival Steve Poizner, and undeclared early spending on consultants, research, and travel.
Whitman was already the biggest self-funded candidate in American history, at any level, including presidential. But will another $20 million do what the $150 million she’s already spent has failed to achieve? At a time in which Jerry Brown has well over $20 million to spend of his own, after spending little more than $10 million in all his campaign prior to this month?
To ask is to answer.
As to Tuesday night’s debate in San Rafael, Brown again had the edge, as he did in the first two debates. Whitman, looking very grim, especially in reaction shots, in which she frequently glowers or gives a curious laugh, was much more aggressive than in her first two debates.
She knows she is behind Brown, not to mention far off her original plan. But her greater aggressiveness did little to add to her positive appeal. And playing the victim card on the private “whore” comment didn’t help much, especially when Whitman — like the press and much of the public — understands that the person who said it is a woman. And especially when it highlights her willingness to sell out her supposedly tough position on public pensions to try to pick up a few law enforcement endorsements to buttress her non-existent record. Camp Whitman benefited from bad early reporting on the controversy, at least enough to distract from her deep crisis on illegal immigration, but that’s over.
Brown’s new ad, playing up newspaper endorsements around the state, emphasizes Whitman’s hometown newspaper’s deep disappointment in her performance as a candidate.
Brown clearly got the better of it on her budget-busting plan to eliminate the capital gains tax, which she amusingly touts as a job creation program even as she refuses to answer Brown’s question about how much she would personally make off the policy, as well as on his support and her opposition for California’s landmark climate change/renewable energy program.
Whitman scored on education, but even there her message is essentially negative. Attacking the teachers union is hardly uplifting. Nor is it all that smart politics, as they are likely to reinforce their already strong efforts against her. As in fact they did, two days later.
At best, Whitman achieved what I call the furball effect, in which the event is seen as a blur of charges and counter-charges.
The coverage reflected this, with nothing even approaching a potential breakthrough moment for Whitman.
On Wednesay, Brown launched a new TV ad highlighting the big newspaper endorsments he’s picking up around the state, including an extraordinary one from Whitman’s Silicon Valley home San Jose Mercury News, which strongly praised Brown and derided Whitman as unqualified and nonsensical.
It’s one of his better TV spots — the ads definitely have their critics — a well-done comparative that balances criticism of Whitman with praise for Brown, all from credible third party validators.
What’s next in this rollicking race? Stay tuned. One thing is for sure: President Barack Obama is coming to California.
On October 22nd, he does a big rally in Las Vegas to goose Democratic enthusiasm and turnout for that key Senate race between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Tea Party fave rave Sharron Angle. Then he comes over to Los Angeles for a big rally at USC, where Senator Barbara Boxer will be on hand as well as Brown.
Boxer is actually in a tighter race now than Brown. But Boxer, now beset by nearly $5 million in outside Republican advertising in her lower profile race against ex-Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, still has a slight edge.
More about that next time.
You can check things during the day on my site, New West Notes … www.newwestnotes.com.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Malcolm Gladwell’s recent piece in the New Yorker, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Won’t Be Tweeted”, has started a discussion about whether online social ties — because they lack depth in relationship — build movements or not.
Among those of us practicing movement building and creating deep change, the more immediate question is how both weak and strong ties are being used on the front lines of social change action today. Many readers of Gladwell’s piece object to the false choice between offline and online. So let’s not choose. Let’s talk about efforts and organizations that are using both offline and online tools to build an unprecedented movement in this unprecedented moment.
We study and practice movement building and are part of a wider community of practice. Below, we share four stories that illustrate what we’re seeing on the ground and talking about in our network. Regardless of the tools we use, what connects and inspires people are stories. Social media platforms offer new ways of engaging and sharing each other’s stories, with organizational stories, with national or global stories — yet they’re no substitute for face-to-face deep community building. Our hope is that these stories and tools are of use to those committed to the deep and high-risk social change that Gladwell rightly calls for. We welcome your comments and encourage you to let us know about other stories, experience and ideas.
Context: From Big Email Lists to Communities of Care
Whenever we talk about change, we are also talking about community. Large-scale change only happens when networked communities of people move together. Strong ties and relationships are built-in and maintained by the network of community.
Today we are living in a time where economic, cultural and communications shifts have undermined communities, promoted isolation and social fragmentation, and weakened our ability to develop personal and community ties. In a two-decade study that looked at who people talk to, the number of people that individuals said they felt they could talk to went from three to zero.
As movement builders today, our work to build deep social change must include the building of community ties that are not just political in nature. We need to encourage people to do the things churches did for the civil rights movement — being there as babies are born, people are sick, and for life’s big and small moments. In other words: to take care of each other while creating change. We need to do this personally and systemically — from bringing each other soup to creating real systems of daycare.
Gladwell is correct that people with deeper social ties and trust will do more for each other on the ground. Yet too many of our organizations have become predominantly transactional places. We must move beyond the time where membership is only defined by signing an online petition or building lists and donations through picking out a horror from the Fox news cycle.
Certainly this is time of massive shift. We are moving from a time where the ability to share information and build collective action across time and space has changed. We are also moving from a time of centralized control to one that is more distributed and decentralized. Both aspects of this shift have been discussed by Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody) and Ori Brafman and Todd Beckstrom (The Starfish and The Spider, a favorite of Tea Party leaders and progressive organizers alike). At the same time, there has also been an overestimation of what “click activism” can do. Andrew Blau, a thinker about networks, puts it this way: “People sometimes confuse the information revolution — the incredible exchange of ideas, the ability to create together online — with the ability to push real levers of power. ”
The social change community is beginning to see a profound new way to shift power, and that is a hybrid between centralized efforts and decentralized networks and online and offline connections. Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Church model is a hybrid (and the book is another widely read text among organizers today), blending small circles with a clear over-arching purpose. Obama ’08 was a hybrid blend and some of the best of what we are seeing on the ground merges these two models even further.
What we call “broadcast organizing” — big email lists or large networks who push one message out and ask people to click and change — is evolving. While some people are content to click, more and more people are increasingly wanting to co-create, and ultimately to lead, from a local level. Local organizing and people who are not part of the digital divide are also evolving. Local efforts in Arizona to build barrios (neighborhood) groups are also using text messaging. Local efforts are looking to create systemic change by aggregating together. But what is working of these hybrid models? And what are the tools that are being identified by organizers as making a difference in movement building today?
Stories
We live by stories, by narratives that define and can shift our view of who we are alone to who we are together. Obama ’08 used many strategies, but narrative story — incorporated into Obama Camp training materials by Marshall Ganz and others — was the key to field leaders feeling that their story was tied to a bigger movement. It is a tool that many of us are studying, using, and replicating, and one that has been around a long time.
Anyone who visited Obama’s Chicago headquarters could not have missed the new media team. They worked around the clock to engage folks in hundreds of online networks from Facebook to Black Planet, giving them new places to share and listen to stories. The social media team used online tools to measure every click on every email and respond as the story evolved. They pounded the pavement to capture local and national videos telling and reflecting the story of an historic election. They used iPhone applications and text messaging in brilliant new ways that are still redefining community and GOTV outreach. What would ’08 have been without either online or offline? And what would either have been without the human capacity to listen and share stories?
The first story: 350.org Co-creativity Versus Levers of Power
In October 2009, 350.org decided to create a simple action before the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Through Facebook, email, and Twitter, they asked people to get off the internet and create photos of themselves with the number 350, the upper limit scientists consider to be an acceptable ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. With participants in 181 countries, it was touted as “the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet’s history.” From two people in Antarctica holding a sign saying “350″ on top of ice to a large group of students in the Philippines using their bodies to spell out “350″ over 5200 actions took place. (Photos here)
It was a day that exemplified what was possible through network organizing and using the new tools. Not everyone involved in the day of action had deep ties to others, but many did and took action as part of a community. What did well was to give these individual groups of weak and strong social ties two important movement building tools: a sense of co-creativity and the power of collective reflection.
Yet while 350.org broke the mold around what was possible, it ultimately did not achieve its goal of moving world leaders to action. In fact, many said the most important thing to come out of Copenhagen was that the Global Justice community — those impacted by global warming the most — got to meet and grow a network more deeply with each other. Another question began to emerge: How could an analysis of the levers of power have moved this effort from a demonstration of creativity to the desired action?
In 2010, 350.org’s day of action — on October 10th — grew to include 188 countries and over 7,000 actions. Top leadership in the Global Justice community — particularly from the student efforts and those studying the Marshall Ganz model — are looking more deeply at local leadership and bringing their lessons of story and new strategy to conversations, building the next phase of this movement.
A second story: Bayard Rustin and New Media versus Old Media
Before four college students sat down at a counter in Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina on February 1, 1960, they had two tools that were critical to movement building: a commitment to the transformational practice of non-violence and a strong alliance of groups standing together with them.
Although there are many people who were leaders in creating the civil rights movement, certainly one of the most under-reported on is Bayard Rustin. Rustin was a leader of one of the first freedom rides, the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947. He and seven other men set out to take direct action in states where traveling on public transportation was still segregated. The were looking to push and test states who refused to comply with the recent Supreme Court decision, Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1946), which said racial discrimination could no longer happen in interstate travel. Using non-violent tactics, the team of eight riders traveled through Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee. They were arrested several times and Rustin served on a chain gang for a little under a month in North Carolina.
Undeterred, Rustin went to India and studied Gandhi’s tactics. Rustin’s internal commitment to non-violence and his ability to work in alliance led him to do two critical pieces of organizing. First, he became Dr. King’s advisor on non-violence in 1956 and second, he and Dr. King helped form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the alliance of organizations and community groups that trained and prepared students and community members for the local actions of lunch counter sit-ins and bus-riding boycotts.
The civil rights movement had an important third tool as those young men sat down at the counters — a larger social network that was engaged. This network was made up of those who watched the images on TV of official violence being exacted on children and communities engaged in non-violent protest. They were not part of the direct organizing efforts but they helped create change by shifting their hearts and minds. The civil rights movement needed television to help reach enough of the population to turn the country against the policies of segregation.
In this same way, deep movements today need new media to reach many people, especially at a time when mainstream broadcast media (which already gave limited coverage of the progressive movement) is in decline and less able to reach a critical mass of the public.
Bayard Rustin was also successful because of his work to build alliances between groups. (And he did this as a Gay Black man who was out about his sexuality). Alliance building where local leaders on the ground are deeply supported is still one of the most important movement building tools we have today. Our next story delves deeper into combining alliance building with new media tools.
A third story: Expanding the Movement for Empowerment and Reproductive Justice (EMERJ), or How Impacted Communities Can Lead
A group of women who work on the front lines of reproductive issues are often left out of policy debates, access to funding, and a sense of their collective power. They believe in the idea of “reproductive justice,” a term that came into organizing in the 1990s but has roots older than that.
In 2005, Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (ACRJ) put out a “clarion call” to those working on the front lines. They published “A New Vision for Advancing our Movement for Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Justice”, made 1000 copies, and launched it at a national meeting.
But then ACRJ added new media tools to the mix and put the report out through their social networks on the web. Because of new media, within a short period of time, 50,000 people read the paper and wanted to be engaged. ACRJ added deep leadership and formed the EMERJ Strategy Team, which includes leaders from Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, Center for Young Women’s Development, Choice USA, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, Rebecca Project for Human Rights, and Western States Center.
This alliance works to build the network and strategize together. What this means is that organizations traditionally on the front lines at the local level were now being heard as legislation was being passed. It means that smaller groups formerly separated are now an alliance able to build together.
The success of the EMERJ alliance is part of the new organizing: taking local efforts, creating a national anchor team and alliance, and building a base that is truly connected to the grassroots through deep social, cultural, and community ties. It is helped by the shift that is happening, the ability to move information online and to reach out to more communities and individuals.
The Alliance is the new driver of the movement because it brings together national leadership with deep local connection. The power of hierarchical organizing is no longer maximized in single NGO’s but in teams of community-based groups and state-wide efforts forming national alliances that are based on authentic commitments, agreements and committed social ties. (And please don’t mix it up with a “coalition” a group of loose organizations working towards one short term goal without long-term commitments). New media assists and supports the Alliance. The strength is found in the hybrid of national (hierarchical) and local (distributive), as well as the hybrid of new media/online organizing with traditional, “high-touch” face-to-face organizing.
A final story (really a tool disguised as a story): How We Move People from Loose Social Ties to Movement Leaders, or The Engagement Ladder
People move along a continuum. From potential audience to community, to member to committed to core leader. We call this an engagement ladder and many organizations use a form of this today when moving people from an email list to a movement leader.
Here’s an example of an engagement ladder:
POTENTIAL AUDIENCE–COMMUNITY–MEMBER–COMMITTED–LEADER
The most effective way to build and understand an engagement ladder is through a story of a leader (or group) whose path exemplifies our goal of keeping folks engaged in social change for the long term:
A single mother, Sung E Bai, becomes concerned with how she as a single mom can create nutritious meals while running out the door to work, and the kind of food being served at her daughter’s school. These concerns put her into a potential audience for the food movement. She does some research online and joins a Facebook group of a national food advocacy organization and begins to read up on the issue. These loose social ties move her from potential audience to community. She writes a check to that national organization and becomes a member, moving up yet another level.
It is at this moment where the rubber meets the road: if there is an ability or action in place that moves her from member to someone who is committed, it generally won’t happen online. For her to be a committed, she will need in-person connection and ways to reach out to others in her community. And for her to move from committed to leader, she will need training and a clear pathway that builds her up as a leader. For her to become a leader, she will need time and experience within the movement.
The good news is that Sung E Bai is a real person who is part of SlowFood USA; and she came to the organization with a lot of skill from her years as a committed community organizer in New York. Yet, Sung E’s task is to be part of a team that builds more people like her, to not just have people join an email list but to have clear and meaningful ways for people to move from audience to core and join the food justice movement.
Will all the people on SlowFood’s email list join her? No. Our research says that somewhere between one and ten percent of that list will become core leaders. These leaders will create the deep change that we will remember. All along the engagement ladder, there needs to be a sense of what people can do to support these bolder efforts. Part of the success of the lunch counter sit-in was the ability of the movement to create a national story and reflection that others could take action within — from sending money, to talking to friends and family, to voting, to joining freedom rides, to giving their lives.
The local food movement, one of the fastest growing local, national and international movements today is growing so fast, in part because of the diversity of its network. The question now is how unified it can be in building alliances, deepening local leadership, and creating tools that allow everyday citizens to participate.
It won’t be SlowFood alone who will build the local food movement. Sung E’s ties with lead organizers in similar but distinct movements – including social ties with leaders like Makani Themba Nixon of Praxis Project, and Navina Khanna who is building a youth of color network for food justice — will make the difference between a food movement that is stuck in silos and one that has an alliance that Bayard Rustin would be proud of.
Writing A New Story
When we when all stood crying and hugging each other as we elected Obama, we weren’t ready to change the story from how to elect Obama to the story of how we practice change. In creating one hero, first time voters and citizens (and yes, even some of us who got swept up in it) were not prepared for the journey beyond the election or for the long-term effort that change would require. Now, as electoral organizers are reaching out to those who worked on the ’08 campaign, they are finding a lot is missing. The campaign decided to carry on the campaign rather than build a true community. But we can turn that around.
Small groups of local organizers from across the nation are coming together, sharing tactics about building neighborhood groups, and how to empower everyday people to resist and transform racist laws, food systems, or any other issues impacting their communities. These organizers are coming together in networks, against the large single broadcast model. In these efforts, they are using food and song, meetings in churches and text messaging–all as tools to create more community, deeper ties, and stronger alliances. Even the movement to bring song, art, and culture back to organizing is building a network under Anasa Troutman of Art Is Change and others.
Of course, as we write about these efforts, new tools and alliances are emerging. Text messaging and geolocation are breaking new ground in online to offline efforts. Meet-Up has recently initiated a new tool that allows organizations to do small groups more effectively. Yet, as Gladwell and Shirky have both pointed out, social change happens on the ground with each other. What is critical is that while studying tools and building alliances, we remain deeply committed to our practice of understanding and loving each other in community.
Here is a brief list of resources and reports on movement building and engagement pathways and tools online and offline. We encourage people to post more examples and groups in the comments.
- Movement Strategy Center: Out of the Spiritual Closet: Organizers Transforming the Practice of Social Justice, the first in a series on Transformative Movement Building.
- Organizing using and evolving the Marshall Ganz model: The New Organizing Institute.
- Scott Goodstein: Forget the internet:Think Mobile from Huffington Post
- Clay Shirky at PDF10
- Scott Heiferman, Meet Up talk at PDF10
- Michael Silberman of EchoDitto on the need to stop pretending click activism changes things. (His blog on Coppenhagen)
- Clicktivism is Ruining Left Activism.
Books: The Starfish & The Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Networks by Rod Beckstrom and Ori Brafman; Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky; Purpose Driven Church By Rick Warren
Taj James is a founder of the Movement Strategy Center, an organization that works to build alliances and movement strategies within the progressive community. Marianne Manilov is a co-founder of The Engage Network, an organization that works to build distributive networks and engagement pathways that was born out of MSC. James and Manilov work collaboratively in a community of people and organizations who helped to birth and practice these ideas.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

If there’s any justice in the world, Jeff Malmberg’s stunning debut documentary Marwencol will be nominated for the best documentary Oscar, having already won numerous awards including the Grand Jury Award at SXSW, the Cinematic Vision award at SilverDocs, and even Best Film at Comic-Con. It’s the kind of film that makes you thankful that documentaries — and movies in general — exist at all, giving viewers the chance to go deep within the life and mind of a singularly fascinating individual.
Marwencol tells the story of Mark Hogancamp, who was attacked by five men outside a bar in New York state on April 8, 2000, who literally beat him within an inch of his life. Hogancamp’s brain was so severely damaged that his memory was erased to the point that he had to relearn how to walk, write and feed himself. His physical and mental therapy had begun to show progress — that is, it did until America’s “best-in-the-world” healthcare system abandoned him when he could no longer pay for his treatment. So Hogancamp invented his own therapy by creating a 1/6th-scale World War II-era Belgian town in his backyard called Marwencol, and populated it with dolls representing himself, friends and family.
Watch my ReThink Review of Marwencol on the Young Turks below, along with a discussion about how the mentally ill often end up homeless or in jail.
As I mentioned on the Young Turks, Hogancamp was incredibly lucky to find a method of therapy that worked once he was dropped from America’s healthcare system, since the future that awaits most mentally ill people in the US is shamefully bleak. Despite the fact that our understanding of mental illness has greatly advanced over the decades, the US has returned to the bad old days of treating the mentally ill as criminals instead of the victims of disease. From Psychiatric News:
Numbers like that are a disgrace, especially when you consider that putting a mentally ill person in prison would only make their condition worse, requiring more incarceration and more care. In my research, I came upon this powerful segment on Al Jazeera English about the mentally ill in our nation’s prisons.
Part 1 of “Fault Lines: Mental Illness in US Prisons”.
Part 2
To find out more about Marwencol, go to Marwencol.com.
For more ReThink Reviews, visit ReThinkReviews.net
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The latest jobs bill coming out of Washington isn’t really a bill at all. It’s the Fed’s attempt to keep long-term interest rates low by pumping even more money into the economy (“quantitative easing” in Fed-speak).
The idea is to buy up lots of Treasury bills and other long-term debt to reduce long-term interest rates. It’s assumed that low long-term rates will push more businesses to expand capacity and hire workers; push the dollar downward and make American exports more competitive and therefore generate more jobs; and allow more Americans to refinance their homes at low rates, thereby giving them more cash to spend and thereby stimulate more jobs.
Problem is, it won’t work. Businesses won’t expand capacity and jobs because there aren’t enough consumers to buy additional goods and services.
The dollar’s drop won’t spur more exports. It will fuel more competitive devaluations by other nations determined not to lose export shares to the US and thereby drive up their own unemployment.
And middle-class and working-class Americans won’t be able to refinance their homes at low rates because banks are now under strict lending standards. They won’t lend to families whose overall incomes have dropped, whose debts have risen, or who owe more on their homes than the homes are worth — that is, most families.
So where will the easy money go? Into another stock-market bubble.
It’s already started. Stocks are up even though the rest of the economy is still down because of money is already so cheap. Bondholders (who can’t get much of any return from their loans) are shifting their portfolios into stocks. Companies are buying back more shares of their own stock. And Wall Street is making more bets in the stock market with money it can borrow at almost zero percent interest.
When our elected representatives can’t and won’t come up with a real jobs program, the Fed feels pressed to come up with a fake one that blows another financial bubble. And we know what happens when financial bubbles get too big.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

I won my Wednesday Best Bet on Central Florida (posted on the Huffington Post) and I also won my Thursday night Best Bet on Kansas State, who won 59-7. I’m now 20-9-1 on my College Best Bets for the season and I have 12 Best Bets on Saturday. You can get information about my weekly Best Bets at drbobsports.com. I also have free analysis on 36 College games and 10 NFL games (NFL free analysis is an incredible 38-12-1 so far this year) in my Free Analysis Section.
Here’s one of my Best Bets for later in the day.
***Iowa State (+23 ) 26 OKLAHOMA 38
Oklahoma may be undefeated and ranked 6th in the nation but the Sooners simply aren’t a dominant team this season. Oklahoma has only played one really impressive game, their 47-17 win over Florida State, and they’ve escaped with close wins against Utah State (31-24), Air Force (27-24), Cincinnati (31-29) and against an overrated Texas team (28-20) in a game in which they were out-played 4.3 yards per play to 5.9 yppl and won because of a +2 turnover margin. For the season the Sooners are averaging just 5.1 yards per play against teams that would allow 5.1 yppl to an average team and their defense is actually worse than average in allowing 5.9 yppl to teams that would combine to average 5.5 yppl against an average team. Despite worse than average yppl stats, the Sooners are actually a better than average team because they average 83 plays per game while allowing 70 plays and they have good special teams, but they are certainly not a top-10 team and I wouldn’t even rank them in my top-20. Iowa State just lost 27-68 at home to a very good Utah team, but the Cyclones beat up on Texas Tech 52-38 the week before that and they are certainly not bad enough to merit a line above 21 points. In fact, Iowa State’s decent offensive attack (5.2 yppl against teams that would allow 5.3 yppl to an average team) should move the ball pretty well against Oklahoma’s sub-par defense and the Cyclones haven’t been too bad on defense this season, allowing 6.1 yppl to teams that would combine to average 5.8 yppl against an average defensive team. That’s actually just 0.3 yppl worse than Oklahoma’s mediocre offensive rating. Iowa State will likely be without RB Alexander Robinson this week, but Robinson’s 5.1 ypr on 88 carries looks like it can be adequately replaced by Shontrelle Johnson and Jeff Woody, who combine to average 5.9 ypr on their 55 runs this season (5.3 ypr if I take out their yards against Utah’s second string defense last week, which of course I do). My math model projects Oklahoma with 15 more plays than Iowa State and a 548 yards at 6.3 yppl to 391 yards at 5.5 yppl advantage, but that’s not enough to justify such a high line even after accounting for Oklahoma’s advantage in projected turnovers and a slight edge in special teams. In fact, my math favors Oklahoma by just 17 points in this game and Iowa State’s blowout loss last week sets the Cyclones up in a very good 24-0 ATS subset of a 75-16 ATS bounce-back situation that plays on big road dogs after getting embarrassed in their previous game. I’ll take Iowa State in a solid 3-Star Best Bet at +21 points or more.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

One of our top stories this week was Glee’s de-gaying of Rocky Horror Picture Show in their upcoming episode, but we also reported that the musical’s writer, Richard O’Brien, is transgender. He played the part of Riff Raff in the movie. What else did we bring you that you might have missed? Great posts like these:
Sunday
What Would You Tell a Frustrated Gay Voter? Filed by: Don Davis
The Entire HRC Dinner (in under four minutes!) Filed by: Mark S. King
Monday
City councilor: Coming Out Day is like an Aryan Nations march Filed by: Alex Blaze
Matthew Shepard, National Coming Out Day, and Marriage Equality Looking Back Filed by: Davina Kotulski
Tuesday
Florida’s Anti-Gay Adoption Law Ends Today Filed by: Nadine Smith
A Quick Breakdown on Today’s Injunction on DADT Discharges Filed by: Jarrod Chlapowski
Wednesday
Log Cabin Republicans R Us Filed by: Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer
Anti-Gay Christians: Do They Still Embrace the Bible As Justification for Slavery Too? Filed by: Michael Hamar
Thursday
Trans Woman Sues LPGA Filed by: Dr. Jillian T. Weiss
21 Senators Urge Obama’s Justice Department Not to Appeal DADT Injunction Filed by: Karen Ocamb
Friday
Facebook and GLAAD Team Up to Stop Hate Speech and Anti-Gay Bullying Filed by: Leone Kraus
Just when you thought the gay agenda was complicated Filed by: Bil Browning
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

If you are the press secretary to the President of the United States, the main thing to avoid is becoming the story yourself. You are a “spokesman.” A mouthpiece. And as such, it’s best to keep your size elevens out of your mouth.
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs — immortalized as “Gibbsy” on the Teleprompter of the U.S. blog — has stepped in it big time. He dismissed President Obama’s interview — soon to be published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. “Not that many people read the New York Times Magazine,” Gibbs said in an off-handed way.
What? I’m reminded of baseball manager Casey Stengel’s plaintive cry as he looked down the bench in the New York Mets’ dugout: “Doesn’t anybody here know how to play this game?” How in the world can the spokesman for a liberal administration so diss the New York Times?
Now, in fairness, we conservatives don’t genuflect when someone invokes the Gray Lady as the ultimate authority in all matters temporal and spiritual. It has been a long time since the Times was considered the indispensable source, the newspaper of record for the United States. We know that the bias of the Times is impervious to facts.
We remember the jokes about how Fidel Castro said “I got my job through the New York Times.” We also remember the not-so-funny fact that the Times’ Man-in-Moscow, Walter Duranty, managed to overlook the deaths of five million Ukrainians as a direct result of Stalin’s enforced famine in the 1930s. Duranty still holds his Pulitzer Prize for history’s most heinous cover-up.
But for Robert Gibbs, speaking in the White House for the most liberal administration since the days of FDR to casually give the back of his hand to the Times’ readership is unbelievably unprofessional.
John F. Kennedy had his own problems with the press. Privately, he threw an issue of the old New York Herald Tribune across the Oval Office in disgust. That paper was considered the voice of the Republican Establishment in those days.
On the campaign stump, however, Kennedy was careful in how he talked about the press. He even tweaked his 1960 opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, when the very influential Wall Street Journal criticized the economic arguments of the GOP nominee.
“That’s like L’Osservotore Romano criticizing the Pope,” Kennedy merrily jabbed.
In that year Kennedy’s Catholic faith was a major issue in the presidential campaign. For Kennedy to cheekily needle Nixon was typical of his special wit and style. But when he poked a little bit of fun at the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper — a house organ that would never criticize a Pope — he disarmed many of his own critics. It’s a major reason why Kennedy overcame biases and won that hotly contested election.
Now, fifty years after JFK, we have the White House minimizing the importance of the New York Times’ readership. It’s as if the Pope were to criticize L’Osservatore Romano!
Just a note to the Press Secretary: The Times readership is surely not what it once was, but it remains the go-to source for tens of thousands of the aging lords of liberalism. These are the people you need if you have any hope of avoiding an “avalanche” next month. These people are the wealthiest and most powerful people in your own base.
The President can give all the interviews he wants to Rolling Stone and other drug-friendly outlets. But if he wants people to open their checkbooks instead of their rolling papers, you’d better not knock your hometown newspaper.
It’s certainly been interesting the past few weeks to see key members of the President’s economic and national security teams go over the side. I have some friendly advice for Press Secretary Robert Gibbs: Freshen up your resume. Leave out the puff profile on yourself from the December, 2008, New York Times, and make a quick exit for the Democratic National Committee. Your gaffes will never be noticed there.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Who could have thought that homosexuality, of all things, would tear this country apart?
For two decades now I have watched how opposition to gay relationships has come to define American values. While fifty percent of straight couples divorce, while America sinks ever deeper into an eddy of materialism and greed, and while purpose and happiness remain so elusive that our country consumes three-quarters of the earth’s anti-depressants, for our religious leaders, politicians, and the media it’s still all-gays-all-the-time.
Why the obsession? People of faith insist that homosexuality is the sin because the bible calls it an abomination. Little do these ignoramuses realize that the word appears approximately 122 times in the Bible. Eating non-kosher food is an abomination (Deut.14:3). A woman returning to her first husband after being married in the interim is an abomination (Deut. 24:4). And bringing a blemished sacrifice on G-d’s altar is an abomination (Deut. 17:1.). Proverbs goes so far as to label things like envy, lying, and gossip as that which ‘the Lord hates and are an abomination to Him’ (3:32, 16:22).
As an orthodox Rabbi who reveres the Bible I do not deny the Biblical prohibition on male same-sex relationships. Rather, I simply place it in context. There are 613 commandments in the Torah. One is to refrain from gay sex. Another is for men and women to marry and have children. So when Jewish gay couples come to me for counselling and tell me they have never been attracted to members of the opposite sex in their entire lives and are desperately alone, I tell them, “You have 611 commandments left. That should keep you busy. Now, go create a kosher home with a mezuzah scroll on the door. Turn off the TV on the Sabbath and share your challah with many guests. Pray to G-d the prescribed three times a day for you are His beloved children. He desires you and seeks you out.”
Once, I said to my friend Pat Robertson, whom I have always found engaging and open in our conversations, “Why can’t you simply announce to all gay men and women, ‘Come to Church. Whatever relationship you’re in, G-d wants you to pray. He wants you to give charity. He wants you to lead a G-dly life.” He answered to the effect that homosexuality is too important to overlook. Other evangelical leaders have told me the same. Homosexuality is the single greatest threat to marriage and the family.
Really? With one out of two heterosexual marriages failing, with seventy percent of the internet dedicated to the degradation of women through pornography, and with a culture that is materially insatiable even as it is all-too spiritually content, can we straight people say with a straight face that gays are ruining our families? We’ve done a mighty fine job of it ourselves, thank you very much.
But the extreme homophobia that is unfortunately to be found among many of my religious brothers and sisters — in many Arab countries being gay is basically a death sentence — stems from an even more fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of sin. The Ten Commandments were given on two tablets to connote two different kinds of transgression, religious and moral sin. The first tablet discusses transgressions between G-d and man such as the prohibitions of idolatry, blasphemy, and desecrating the Sabbath. The second tablets contains sins between man and his fellow man, like adultery, theft, and murder.
The mistake of so many well-meaning people of faith is to believe that homosexuality is a moral rather than a religious sin. A moral sin involves injury to an innocent party. But who is being harmed when two, unattached, consenting adults are in a relationship? Rather, homosexuality is akin to the prohibition of lighting fire on the Sabbath or eating bread during Passover. There is nothing immoral about it, but it violates the divine will.
For the record, I am in favor of gay civil unions rather than marriage because I am against redefining marriage. But I hardly believe that gay marriage is the end of Western civilization. For me the real killer is the tsunami of divorce and the untold disruption to children as they become yo-yos going from house to house on weekends.
I have countless gay friends whose greatest fear, like so many straight people, is to end up alone. Should we merely throw the book at these people? Does not the same Bible also say, “It is not good for man to be alone?” And all I’m asking from my religious brethren is this: even as you oppose gay relationships because of your beliefs, please, for the love of G-d, be tortured by your opposition. Understand that when our most deeply held beliefs conflicts with our basic humanity, we should feel the tragedy of the conflict, rather than simply find convenient scapegoats upon whom to blame all of America’s ills.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Baby Boomers aren’t remotely ready to stop working, and we resent the endless calls for us to do so. Day by day, the resistance movement is growing, and our slogan may well be the one many of us once used to protest the war in Vietnam: “Hell no, we won’t go!”
Loyal readers will know that I’m writing a new book called RIPE, which will help boomers answer the question that’s on our minds: “What’s next?”
In last week’s column, I said that the simple answer would be “work.” Research backs this up. Four out of five baby boomers will continue to work. McKinsey Global Institute surveyed 5,100 American households to better understand boomers’ current attitude toward work. “Our research shows that boomers want to continue working — as much as 85 percent say ‘likely’ and 40 percent say ‘extremely likely.’”
When I started connecting the dots of this emerging trend, I had a sense that it was about more than simply continuing to work. After all, my generation was now talking about looking for stimulating new work and more satisfying ways of working.
I went back and looked at the notes from the interviews I’d done with my peers. Reading through the transcripts, some stories suddenly stood out from the rest. There was the management consultant who went back to school to earn a Ph.D. in marine biology, the publisher who became a playwright, the serial entrepreneur who returned to revitalize his first company, and the academic who discovered a rich, new vein of research.
I realized that something unprecedented is happening. We are approaching this new phase of our careers with the confidence of professionals and the zest of beginners — and, in the process, reaping enormous rewards.
We are becoming what I call “ripe.”
***
Next Saturday, I’ll begin to share stories of people who have ripened. In the meantime, please keep writing about what’s going on in your life. Comments are welcome! And you can always contact me through my website. I look forward to being part of a lively conversation.
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

When I first began developing the idea for Baking for Good, I figured the path to building my startup was simple. I’d quit my job, wrap myself in a little cocoon for a few months, toiling away and eating salad, and then emerge as a beautiful entrepreneurial butterfly, delivering brownies and cookies to friends and family in times of sadness or celebration. But that’s not how it worked out in the end.
Early on, I ignored the advice of some older, wiser people who encouraged me to speak with as many people as I could. Instead, I dove in and started to develop the concept in relative isolation. I drafted business plans, sketched website frameworks, and edited recipes while planted in my seat on a 5-hour flight or alone at a hotel room desk late at night (at the time, I was traveling to Seattle every week for my consulting firm.)
All of the decisions I made, I made independently. I decided it would be quickest and most cost- effective to outsource the web development to a firm in India. Ten minutes later, I submitted a request for proposals on the online freelancing website Elance.com and chose the lowest bidder ($400! To build my whole website! In 3 months!). I was a master at PowerPoint; all I had to do was set up the pages of the website in a PowerPoint template and email them to Partho, my friendly developer, who would then give the pages online functionality and even throw in his own design expertise.
But it turned out Partho’s design expertise wasn’t exactly in line with the look I was going for. I tried to explain the concept of a bake sale to him. I even emailed him a link to Wikipedia’s entry on it. To this day, I have not shared with a single person the initial designs he came up with. The look was all wrong: lime green and bright purple with a giant grinning Barney-like dinosaur mascot.
I wasn’t ready to give up on Partho just yet, and when he submitted a request for another $400 because the project was bigger than he had anticipated, I readily gave it to him. Much to my dismay, once the transaction cleared, I never heard from him again.
In truth, Partho’s abandonment of my project was a blessing in disguise. Around this time I met with a friend who gave me the advice that you only get one shot to launch your website, and it’s worth making it look professional on the first go. I took this to heart, deactivated my Elance account, and started calling up designers and developers in NYC. My meetings were both invigorating and terrifying. Promises of awesome, beautiful websites and great support contrasted with price tags of tens of thousands of dollars and timelines of several months. So much for a $400, 3-month investment.
I ultimately began working with Paperwhite Studios to brand the site and Crush + Lovely to develop it. Now I had a team that shared my vision of an online bake sale and had the skills to bring it to life. Not only that, but I could actually meet with them, stopping by for impromptu brainstorming sessions or picking up the phone to share a new thought. Each step took many more days or weeks than I wanted it to, and I had to adjust to letting others do some of the thought work. But the site was so much better for it, the business cards so much prettier for it. I was proud to show it off and get the input of others, whereas previously I had wanted to keep it all to myself until it was “ready.”
There are downsides to talking to as many people as you can. Everyone’s got their opinions on what’s best for you, what changes you should make, what really awesome feature would make the site so sweet. I had to learn to take every comment as a suggestion, to use what I could and keep everything else in the back of my mind. Crush + Lovely helped me put this all in perspective. They encouraged me to keep things simple: make sure initial site visitors can grasp the whole concept easily, and build from there. This was not only the sensible solution, it was also a much more cost-effective one than building in all the possible functionality in the beginning (and then having to fix or tear things down if they didn’t work out).
In September 2009 we launched a simple but elegant website. It was my company, but I didn’t go at it alone. Nor was I right to think that I could.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com