Behind the scenes with the Obamas:

[Tags: obama politics ]

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Here’s Obama’s response to McCain’s mortgage buy-back proposal:

Senator McCain and I had a chance to talk about this the other night in Nashville. Some of you may have seen it. In that debate, he offered what he said was a new idea to help deal with the financial crisis, and that was to have the government – meaning taxpayers – buy up bad mortgages in America.

Well, the idea wasn’t particularly new. The authority for the Secretary of Treasury to buy and renegotiate bad mortgages is part of the financial rescue plan we just passed. In fact, I proposed it myself because, if it’s properly done and limited in scope, such buybacks can be one tool to help innocent homeowners stay in their homes on terms they can afford.

But I also said at the time that this should not be a vehicle to reward banks and lending institutions that recklessly wrote bad loans. It should not be a bailout for the high-rolling real estate speculators who took those loans to make a quick buck.

We have to act to fix our broken economy and restore the credit markets. But taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to pick up the tab for the very folks who helped create this crisis.

And that’s the problem with Senator McCain’s risky idea. On Tuesday night, his campaign said that he would ask the banks to absorb some of the cost by selling the bad mortgages to the government at a discount. Then, by Wednesday morning, he’d changed his mind and was proposing to bail out banks and lenders with taxpayer money.

Senator McCain actually wants the government to pay the full face value of mortgages on the books, even though they’re not worth that much anymore. It’s a plan that would guarantee that American taxpayers lose by handing over $300 billion to underwrite the kind of greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street that got us into this mess.

But it’s not just that the McCain bailout rewards irresponsible lenders, it’s that his bailout would make it more likely that those lenders keep up their bad behavior. Just yesterday, Countrywide, one of the nation’s largest lenders, reached an agreement to help homeowners refinance their mortgages. Under Senator McCain’s plan, lenders like Countrywide wouldn’t have any incentive to come forward and help homeowners – because they could just wait for the government to bail them out.

Now, this is just the latest in a series of shifting positions that Senator McCain has taken on this issue. His first response to this crisis in March was that homeowners shouldn’t get any help at all. Then, a few weeks ago, he put out a plan that basically ignored homeowners. And now, in the course of 12 hours, he’s ended up with a plan that punishes taxpayers, rewards banks, and won’t solve our housing crisis.

Well, I don’t think we can afford that kind of erratic and uncertain leadership in these uncertain times.

The whole thing will be up here in a few days, I assume. [Tags: obama mccain mortgage ]

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Thanks to prompting from the ever-more-amazing Sunlight Foundation, the US Congress’ site will provide legislative documents with permanent URLs. That means you can link to them and have some confidence that the links will work tomorrow, which means discussion can more easily more forward. Unique IDs accrete meaning.

[Tags: democracy congress everything_is_miscellaneous sunlight_foundation ]

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If you love the Internet, you ought to vote for Obama.

Yes, I know I’ve shocked you with that opinion. You can find more shocks of this sort at Tech for Obama.

[Tags: politics obama ]

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It’s only going to continue to go downhill. McCain’s going to get more distracted and muddled. Palin’s just going to get nastier and nastier.

From here to November, the McCain campaign’s got nothing left except personal attacks. It’s bad for our democracy. We know everything we need to know to make up our minds. Let’s just vote now.

[Tags: politics obama mccain ]

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Joi Ito is giving a talk at a Copenhagen media conference. He says that he wants to show us the world the way it looks to an “Internet geek.” [Note: I'm live-blogging, and poorly. Full of mistakes and omissions.]

Way back when, it was difficult to connect computers. Then we got Ethernet, then TCP/IP, and then HTTP (the Web). These new layers allow participation without permission. The cost of sending information and the cost of innovation have gone down (because the cost of failure has gone down). Now we’re getting another layer: Creative Commons. “By standardizing and simplifying the legal layer … I think we will lower the costs and create another explosion of innovation.”

Most innovation on the Net comes about through small projects with lots of connections. E.g., Google could start up for a few thousands dollars without having to get bilateral agreements with countries, etc. Europe is getting more innovative because it’s easier to pull together the pieces and easier to participate in the worldwide conversation. Now we have to figure out how to let amateur innovation into the system.

Distribution used to be the biggest problem. Experts went into distribution. Now we’re in danger of losing that expertise. Bloggers can’t fly into distant places to do a story, and can’t protect themselves from libel suits. We need to stop fighting with one another and find a way for these professionals to survive.

Joi gives a subset of Larry Lessig’s copyright talk. We’ve gone from a mostly unregulated zone for books to a mostly regulated one, for every digital use requires making copies. The digital realm also enables more control. Creative Commons aims at the middle between all rights reserved and no rights reserved. CC wants to make it easier to negotiate rights. It’s a “user interface for copyright” so people can be clear about how they are willing to have their stuff used. Four major properties: Attribution, modification, commercial use, share-alike. 130M works use CC. “Star Wreck” is 100% collaborative, 8M downloads. Instead of distribution, it’s about discovery, and links help with this. And giving stuff away helps gets links. He points to Nine Inch Nails giving away an album, as well as selling collectors’ version of physical media.

CC is becoming part of the media infrastructure, he says.

In response to a question, he says that amateurs who reuse his photos generally give him credit, but professional media folks tend not to, because the latter assume money is the currency. We need to teach them that respect is, he says.

Q: Could CC be used in the real world?
A: Yes, it already is. There is a “materials transfer agreement” that lowers the friction for using, say, a mouse from another lab in an experiment. [Tags: joi_ito copyright copyleft creative_commons ]

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It must be puzzling to McCain supporters why Obamites have seized on McCain’s statement, ‘”You know who voted for it? You might never know! That one.” I’m not sure why it strikes me as particularly revelatory. But it does.

It was the epitome of finger-pointing, of course. But it also seemed to express McCain’s peevishness that his accusations aren’t sticking. “I’ve been telling you over and over that this guy is no good, but no one is listening. People keep attacking me, but he’s the one, not me.”

And, of course, we Obamacists heard it in the context of McCain’s unwillingness to look Obama in the eye. Last night, he couldn’t say his name. I can only assume that McCain is genuinely dismayed that someone with so little experience may deprive him of the narrative he’s been yearning to complete: POW to Senator who embodies the lessons he learned (love democracy, recognize who your real enemies are, treat everyone else with respect) to President. But fate has put an unworthy opponent across from him. In my unsupported view, McCain honestly thought that in choosing Palin, he was choosing the equivalent of Obama: Young, fresh, inexperienced, likable, glamorous. And McCain can’t stand it. He can’t look at the charming poser lest he himself fall under his spell, and he can’t even say his name. It’s not simple contempt for Obama. It’s fury that his narrative his been interrupted…and, one must conclude, contempt for the country of fools who prefer the celebrity pretender to the grizzled warrior, maverick, and man of honor.

Of course, I am 100% making this up.

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Roberto Polillo has scanned and posted stunning black and white photos of jazz greats he took in the early to mid 1960s. (Disclosure: I had dinner at his home last night. Thanks, Roberto!)

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I’ve given a few interviews in Milan where I’ve been for the past two days — what a beautiful city! — and almost every time, someone has asked what Web 3.0 will be. As if I’d know!

If Web 2.0 is about how easy it’s become for people to participate, how easy it has become to mash together disparate applications, and how the “network effect” brings about emergent results, then Web 2.0 is all about making the Net radically unpredictable.

So, the only answer to the question “What will Web 3.0 be?” has to be not only that we don’t know, but that we can’t know.

Web 2.0 also makes it less likely that a single change will sweep the entire Net, for Web 2.0 makes it easier to diversify the Web’s offerings. So Web 2.0 may also spell the end of giving the Web point revision numbers.

In short, if there is a Web 3.0, then Web 2.0 didn’t do its job.

[Tags: web_2.0 web_3.0 ]

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Often, on the back of a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign is a ‘Make Up My Room Now’ message of some sort. But, now matter how they phrase it, isn’t it the same as an “I’m Out, So This Would Be a Good to Rob Me, Especially If You Are Squeamish about Violence” sign?

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Last night I went to the second performance of CodiceInternet, a one-person show by Marco Montemagno in Teatro dell’Arte in Milan. Granting that it was in Italian (which I do not speak) and that Marco is a friend, I still thought it was pretty great. (I understand a little Italian, and the context was familiar enoughthat I only had to turn to an Italian friend next to me a few times to roughly follow what was going on. Or so I have deluded myself. I am reminded of the old Woody Allen line: “I spead-read War and Peace in 30 minutes. It’s about Russia, right?”)

CodiceInternet (the Internet Code) is a project that’s been going on all month in Milan, including daily street interviews in the popular (and beautiful) Galleria. The events, the show, and the DVD that will come out of it are all intended to encourage Italians to accept the Internet in all its open glory. The percentage of Italians using the Internet is the lowest in Europe. Milan only has 100 hot spots. Net access is expensive and difficult. I’m writing this from a Net cafe, where the law requires all users to provide a passport or similar ID document to prevent terrorists from using the Net, because, as we all know, terrorists are too stupid to ever use codes.) According to Marco, the general view of the Internet in Italy is that it’s good for email or maybe looking something up, but othewise it’s a den of iniquity and a distraction from what matters. And that it is very hard to use.

So, Marco and the CodiceInternet group are trying to tell people that the Internet is not just a few tools in an ocean of porn. It is where people meet, connect, and build new things together. The Internet is for everyone. His stage show is entertaining, funny, and someetimes moving. (Marco is an incredibly engaging performer, as well as a Net entrepreneur and host of a Sky TV show about the Internet.)

CodiceInternet will continue, moving from city to city and building an online social network that already has 2,000 Italian bloggers on it. (Yesterday I got to hang out with a handful of those bloggers, which was great fun, of course.) The energy and goodwill of CoediceInternet is encouraging. Too bad it’s needed.

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The Velveteen Rabbi points to Glenna Gordon’s post about celebrating the Jewish new year in Uganda.

[Tags: judaism uganda rosh_hashonah ]

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GooseGrade lets readers of a blog highlight mistakes of the copy-edit sort so that the blogger can fix them. It stops spammers by grading each copy-editor based on whether her suggested changes are accepted by the blogger. Here’s a C-NET article about it.

I’d try it at this blog, because I do occasionally (= constantly) make mistakes, but I’m on the road and can’t easily update my template…

[Tags: goosegrade copyedit crowdsourcing everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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[Tags: politics election register ]

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I’m in Berlin, so I’d have to get up at 3AM to watch the debate tonight, which I’m unlikely to do since tomorrow is a work day. But, I expect Palin will do better than expected, although not better than we’re expecting to expect her to do. And the media will seize on some stumbles by Biden so they can avoid the appearance of piling on Palin. In fact, we’re already seeing some gaffe inflation.

A gaffe used to be not just a mistake but one that really hurts a candidate’s standing. Biden’s thinking that FDR presided over the 1929 crash and that folks had TVs back then is a little bit of dumbness about history, but not a true gaffe because it doesn’t reveal a reason to give up your vote for him. McCain talking about the Iraq-Pakistan border is more of one, but since no one believes McCain is that ill-informed, we instead chalk it up to a mere momentary slip of the brain. No, a true gaffe is genuinely not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is or being able to name only a single Supreme Court case you disagree with.

Watch CBS Videos Online

But, because the media are afraid that they look like they’re going after Palin — AKA Doing Their Job — I expect any small error or misstep made by Biden tonight to be elevated to full gaffe level.

Too bad. It used to be a useful term. I hate to lose it just because the media want to appear balanced in an unbalanced contest.

[Tags: politics biden palin gaffes ]

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At 7:30 tonight, before the Vice Presidential debate, the Ig Nobel ceremonies will be live webcast.

[Tags: ig_nobels humor science ]

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In honor of its tenth anniversary, Google has brought back its index from 2001.

It’s so cute!

[Tags: google ]

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New from Bestiario, the creators of the spectacular graphical user interface for Berkman@10, is this spiral visualization of data.

Since I cannot read road maps — I swear I have stood on street corners with a map in one hand and a freaking compass in the other and still gone the wrong way — I am the wrong person to evaluate the spiralizer. But it sure looks pretty

[Tags: bestiario graphical_display spirals ]

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Sounds at the end like the room may be laughing at the reporter…

[Tags: politics media obama mccain fox_news ]

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Academia.edu lets you add yourself to its gigantic Tree of University Departments. It’s a slick, slidey, Ajaxy UI, and there seem to be only benefits to adding your name to it, even though it will forever be incomplete.

The question is whether it’s easier and more beneficial to count on participants to centralize their contact info at Academia.edu or to hope that universities somehow might agree on a metadata standard — a microformat — for how they list faculty members on their own sites. Since the latter isn’t happening, the former becomes appealing. (Thanks to John Palfrey for the link.)

[Tags: academics universities taxonomy folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I’m a little confused by Sarah Palin’s joshing that she’s been listening to Biden’s speeches in the Senate since she was in second grade, especially with John “26 Years in the Senate” McCain standing right next to her.

What’s next, comb-over jokes?

[Tags: politics sarah_palin mccain biden ]

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From Greg Mankiw’s blog:

From a freshman physics quiz given at Princeton a few days ago:

Problem 1. A famous thought experiment in economics involves dealing with a financial crisis by dropping money from a helicopter.

Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman and former Princeton Economics Professor, decides to try this out over his old hometown. With his helicopter flying 1.0×10^1 m above the center of Fine Tower and in the direction of Nassau Hall, Ben gently releases a briefcase containing $1 million. Using the information that (i) Fine Tower is 6.0 × 10^1 m high, (ii) Nassau Hall is 1.5 × 10^1 m high and (iii) the centers of the two buildings are 3.0 × 10^2 m apart, and ignoring air resistance as you normally would:

a. [2 pts] How fast should Ben’s helicopter fly so that the briefcase lands in the center of the roof of Nassau Hall?

b. [1 pt] How long is the briefcase in the air?

c. [1 pt] How fast is the briefcase moving when it hits the roof of Nassau Hall?

d. [1 pt] How much faster would the financial relief have reached Nassau Hall if the briefcase had contained $2 million instead?

Thanks to Princeton Professor Shivaji Sondhi for sending this along.

Greg is an economics professor at Harvard.

[Tags: bailout physics economics humor ]

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Matt Pasiewicz at Educause has created a word cloud out of 1,000 university home pages. Nothing too surprising, but interesting nonetheless.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous education tags word_cloud folksonomy ]

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Here’s a contest idea from my brother Andy. Submit your entries as comments. Prize: Nothing at all.

Top Ten Reasons Sarah Palin Cancels the VP Debate

Suspicious Russian tourists spotted across the Bering strait in Dezhnevo

Wrasslin’ a bear

Learns Tina Fey will be watching

When taken on tour of White House by McCain handlers, is “inadvertently” locked in Cheney’s man-sized safe

Schedule for memorizing state capitals thrown off by need for new schedule to memorize states

Speechless after finally looking up what “MILF” stands for

On deadline to finish her book, “Namin’ Your Baby the Alaskan Way”

Not yet confident how to work in those hilarious hair-plug zingers

No matter how hard she scrubs, she can’t get Kissinger’s moral stank off of her

Stuck in traffic on the Bridge to Nowhere

[Tags: politics sarah_palin debates humor ]

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Ethan Zuckerman is doing his usual raise-the-bar conference blogging, this time from Picnic in Amsterdam. See his roundup of the “Surprising Africa” day at Picnic. And that’s preceded by a post about an African architect, Francis Kéké, Ethan has long admired. Ethan is always an eye-opener.

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman africa picnic08 francis_keke global_voices ]

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[Tags: rachel_maddow jon_stewart ]

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Here are the eight winners of the New Scientist visualization/photography contest. Beautiful.

[Tags: photos science ]

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The Washington Post has a nice set of interactive features for “decoding” the debates.

You know what would be even better? The open access Larry Lessig and a left-right coalition is calling for.

[Tags: debates e-democracy politics everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I hope every independent voter watches the ad the McCain campaign released even before the last radio waves of the debate escaped earth orbit:

So, McCain believes in crossing partisan lines, but when his opponent agrees with him, he takes it as a sign of weakness. Wow.

Obama could not be more clear or explicit about what he thinks leadership is and the way forward for this country: Find common ground, discuss the differences.

McCain couldn’t even look at Obama, much less acknowledge the values they share as Americans.

My hat is off to Jim Lehrer. Well done!

[Tags: politics mccain obama debate ]

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Mmmm.

[Tags: visual_display_of_information pie_chart humor ]

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So, as far as I can tell, the story so far is:

McCain sees an opportunity to look presidential and experienced. He announces he’s suspending his campaign so he can rush to DC, although he in fact takes 22 hours to get there and manages to squeeze in some interviews, a speech at Pres. Clinton’s event, and a nice dinner. Plus, his surrogates stay out on the trail bashing Obama, and McCain continues his ad campaign. Other than that, the campaign is completely suspended.

Then, to show that he is not a marginalized Senator on the fringes of economic discussion, he encourages conservative Republicans to back out of the deal the two parties had brokered in a genuine spirit of bi-partisanship so that McCain can spearhead some alternate proposal. Why? Well, since McCain’s original comments — in which he tacitly accepted Obama’s statement of principles — seemed to go along with the deal the two sides had worked out, I can only conclude that McCain would have disrupted any agreement so that he can be perceived as coming up with the new one.

The Democrats are pretty much boxed in. If they make any concessions at all to McCain’s new proposal, McCain will trumpet that he’s the one who saved the economy by wringing changes from the Dems (while ignoring that the original deal before McCain stepped in to “save” us had been bi-partisan).

So, clever move by McCain. Too bad it’s a clever move motivated by McCain’s ambitions rather than by what’s best for the country. For example, today’s economic slide is directly due to McCain’s self-centered disruption of the process.

Nice, John. See you at the debate.

Or not.

[Tags: mccain obama politics economy ]

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On Friday at 9pm EDT (-5 GMT), if you want to talk, cheer, and snark together about the debate, feel free to join irc.freenode.net/#debatejoho. We had lively and enjoyable chat sessions during the Democratic convention, so maybe we will again.

Note that this is an old fashioned IRC chat, requiring some type of chat client. (I use chatzilla, a Firefox add-in.)

[Tags: politics obama mccain debate ]

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Voices without Votes continues to give interesting international perspective on our American vote-fest. Sometimes the similarity of perspective is as interesting as the differences.

[Tags: politics globalvoices ]

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Whatever happens with the budget agreement, I can’t imagine that McCain’s going to agree to debate on Friday after taking himself out of three days of debate prep.

Well, we’ll see.

And if McCain is a no-show, don’t we hope and assume that Obama will take questions from the audience (at home and in the venue) for the full span of the debate?[Tags: politics mccain obama debate ]

That Friday: I was wrong. I didn’t think McCain would so blatantly change his conditions. Foolish me.

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McCain’s suspending of his campaign is so very odd that I find myself looking for psychological, and not just political, explanations. So, try on this armchair psychoanalysis, keeping in mind that I’m just making this stuff up:

First, assume that McCain is desperate. When Fox puts you at 39%, desperation becomes reality-based thinking. Second — and this is the unpleasant part — imagine that McCain has had the thought that many of us had had: A terrorist attack in October would shake up the entire electoral chessboard, and might well favor the Republicans. (Yeah, yeah, I don’t think it should it, either.)

Now, no one wants a terrorist attack (except, um, the terrorists), including John McCain, of course. But we’re talking psychology here. So, could it be that McCain is reacting to the financial meltdown as if it were a large-scale terrorist attack because deep within him, he’s waiting for the crisis that saves him, the crisis that lets the aging warrior put on his flight suit one more time?

After all, the subtext of his “putting country first” trope isn’t patriotism but heroism. Heroes need crises. McCain’s brand of heroism consists of sacrifice: He gave up 5 years of his life in North Vietnam, and now he’s willing to give up campaigning.

McCain’s political problem is that in this case, his self-sacrifice seems unnecessary and can be taken as panic or cowardice. It seems like sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake. He thus runs the risk of voters turning away from the hero-without-a-cause to the leader who has one.

[Tags: mccain politics obama ]