USAToday today runs an interview with President Bush. It prefaces the transcript with:

Excerpts from USA TODAY’s interview Thursday with President Bush, edited for length and clarity.

Edited for CLARITY? Since when is a newspaper supposed to be fixing up a politician’s garbled language? That’s what we have PR flacks for.

USAToday owes it to us to publish the full, unedited interview on its Web site. I couldn’t find it there.

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Note: Still on the road. Back tomorrow.

The speaker before me at the Hospitality Design conference was Peter Yesowitch (spelling?) who reported on trends in the “hospitality industry” — in quotes because the two words just don’t go well together.. His company does research, so he was able to give the attendees actual information, unlikely some of us. Among the items that caught my attention: While 40% of hotel decisions are affected by the Internet, only 8% of reservations are made on line. So, I ask myself, what are we doing in the delta between 40 and 8? We’re talking. We’re complaining about the hotel that forgot to leave a chocolate on the pillow and were gushing about the one where the staff was nice to our kids.

The hotel the conference was at, the Fairmont in Sonoma, was lapfully luxurious. But I felt bad for it. When I checked in, I asked about broadband in the bedroom. Yes, it had just been installed three days earlier. Oy, I wanted to shout. You should have gone wifi! Wifi is going to rock the hotel boat, so to speak, because not only will it make connectivity available everywhere on the grounds, but we’ll flock into groups if given half a chance. “Room service is running slow tonight!” “How much should I tip the shoe shine person?” “Anyone going into town tonight and want a ride?” Hotels are conversations, as Doc might say.

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From Mark Dionne comes this Buzzflash “news analysis”:

Ari Gets Laughed Out of the White House Briefing Room

BuzzFlash Note: Although we didn’t see this occur, we have received three separate reader accounts indicating that the White House press corps finally laughed at the absurdity of Ari Fleischer’s lies, at least once. The following is the account from one of our BuzzFlash e-mail reporters about the White House news briefing on Tuesday, February 25:

---

ON CSPAN — WH press conference with Ari ended just now. It’s grim. Not much new but a reiteration of the “Saddam must disarm” and some hints that Saddam and other top Iraqi leaders might be assassinated if GW gives the executive decree.

Then one tidbit floated up. A reporter asked about a French report that says Bush is offering a bundle of concessions (and I think she actually said ‘buying votes’) to Mexico and Colombia, granting worker amnesty and so on. Ari tap-danced. Then she (the reporter) started to press the issue by saying “they (the French) are quoting two US State Dept. Diplomats that Bush intends to give work permits to Colombia and Mexico.”

…. Ari just drew himself up with imperious indignation and said something like “you’re implying that the President is buying the votes of other nations and that’s just not a consideration” or words to that effect. And guess what happened? The whole press corps, normally sheep, broke out in laughter… sweet, derisive laughter. They kept on laughing as Ari turned on his heels and strode out. Sheesh.

Go down to White House Press Briefing (02/25/2003) and click on the video. After it buffers, play from about 28 minutes forward for context, 30 minutes forward to watch Press laugh at Ari’s BIG FAT GOP LIE.

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The Theseus Institute in the south of France (swim out of the Mediterranean, towel off in Nice, and go north a few miles) is hosting its annual conference, which this year is on “Digital Personae and Prviacy: the business, technological and social implications”:

The 2003 TIMIA conference will be led by Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, and will be joined by a number of other leading experts and business representatives.

This is not just a one day conference but rather a month long opportunity to interact, explore and reflect on this important topic culminating in the face to face exchange on 4th April in Sophia Antipolis.

In contrast to most conferences, and in keeping with Theseus alumni’s entrepreneurial heritage, 2003 TIMIA Conference will commence before the physical meeting of delegates and speakers. Starting in March, using an interactive software tool, developed by the University of Toronto registered delegates will be able to interact with Dr. Derrick de Kerchove, other speakers and each other, by posting questions, comments and related content ahead of the event.

Nope, I’m not going. But I can dream, can’t I?

The Theseus Institute is a remarkable business/management school, and not just because it’s on the Riviera, although that sure don’t hurt. It’s quite progressive in its attitude toward the nature of business and success. Here is part of its mission statement:

…Many commentators and most educational institutions still tend to look upon the changes happening as being the result of the acceleration of transactions of various sorts due to computers and the internet. Their basic stand is that once we adjust for the speed of things, the underlying dynamics are pretty much the same, to be treated with pretty much the same tools, and to be understood pretty much with the same mental habits and methods.

We take issue with this stand.

The “information revolution” is bringing about a fundamental change in where and how value is created along the “value web” and, even more critically, who will be able extract and lay claim to the value being so created. This is not a marginal change along the edges of our understanding of management; it requires a fundamental rethink and re-conceptualization…

Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that there are no more football scholarships available for the upcoming year.

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That last item about the kickbacks was a joke. Really.

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I’m on a road trip, giving a keynote to Hospitality Design on Thursday in Sonoma about “hyperlinked organizations” and leading workshops on “The Web from Your Members’ Point of View” for an association of associations (yes, a meta-association) in Orlando on Friday.

Yes, I tell you this not only to explain why my blogging will be lighter than usual but to hint that I’m available as a speaker and consultant. And I’ll give you one rock solid reason to prefer me to my colleages and competitors: I give kickbacks.

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Gary Lawrence Murphy actually put a “You First” pledge button on the Teledyn site. “You First” is intended to encourage vendors to respect our right to maximum anonymity when dealing with them, even as the existence of digital IDs tempts them to demand we tell them more about ourselves than we want to.

It’s nice to see it on the Teledyn site. And it actually feels pretty good to press the button and read the pledge. Thanks, Gary.
One vendor site down, 5,433,22 to go!

[Note: All numbers in JOHO are guaranteed to have been made up.]

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For reasons we may never fully understand, I published a new issue of my newsletter yesterday, just days after publishing a gigormous one. Much of its contents comes from this blog, but the first article - the one where I make an idiot of myself more thoroughly than usual - is all new.

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John Perry Barlow has written a surprisingly even-handed message to Farber’s list that says: “With the possible exception of Bill Gates, Dick Cheney is the smartest man I’ve ever met.” So, he asks, what’s going through Cheney’s head? How can the world’s only super-power protect its global interests and stabilize the world? Answer: By acting like “the Mother of All Rogue States, run by mad thugs in possession of 15,000 nuclear warheads they are willing to use…By these terrible means, they will create a world where war conducted by any country but the United States will seem simply too risky and the Great American Peace will begin.”

Yes, that Cheney is brilliant! And the plan can’t fail … so long as the people we’re subjugating can’t get their hands on any box cutters.

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From Mark Federman comes a link to a press release from the Los Alamos Study Group (a “non-profit, research-oriented, nuclear disarmament organization…”) that describes the recently-released minutes of a meeting of “thirty-two senior nuclear weapons managers from U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, the uniformed military, the National Nuclear Stewardship Administration (NNSA), and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.” The meeting was set up to plan an August meeting about how to build nuclear weapons that can be used on the battlefield, not merely for deterrence. It seems as if we’re about to build a whole new round of nukes.

Feel safer?

Says the press release:

It is impossible to overstate the challenge these plans pose to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the existing nuclear test moratorium, and U.S. compliance with Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1970 and is now binding law in the United States. 

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I loaded the 3DNA demo off a gaming magazine CD just for the heck of it. It replaces your desktop with a 3D environment you can navigate to find your files and applications. This appeals to me because lo these many years ago (i.e., around 1992), for comic relief at a users conference I hacked together a demo of what the Interleaf desktop might look like someday. I replaced Wolfenstein 3D’s bitmaps with my own document management ones so you could stroll down a corridor, enter rooms that were the equivalent of file folders, visit the poor saps stuck in the FrameMaker jail cell, and at the end get shot by a Nazi representing the Secure Computing Environment. Hmm, maybe I can sell the idea to Microsoft.

Anyway, 3DNA is just about completely unappealing to me, and since I can’t find a lot specifically wrong with itI guess it’s the 3D-ness of it that bothers me. There are certainly some nice touches: your Web favorites list becomes a wall of TVs, each showing what’s up on the site. But moving through space rather than “teleporting” via mouse seems like a lot of work with no particular pay-off. It’s a bad way to traverse lots of information.

There’s a free version and one without ads and some additional features for $30.00.

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John Luke, reading my ramblings about selves, recommends Robert Kegan’s work: The Evolving Self and In over Our Heads. But I ask: Why read people who have thought deeply about this topic and have developed ideas based on observation and research when I can make up whatever I want? I mean, really!

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From Risk Digest, via a mailing list:

ATM vulnerabilities and citibank’s gag attempt

Ross Anderson
Thu, 20 Feb 2003 09:58:47 +0000

Citibank is trying to get an order in the High Court today gagging public disclosure of crypto vulnerabilities:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/citibank_gag.pdf

I have written to the judge opposing the order:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/citibank_response.pdf

The background is that my student Mike Bond has discovered some really horrendous vulnerabilities in the cryptographic equipment commonly used to protect the PINs used to identify customers to cash machines:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/TechReports/UCAM-CL-TR-560.pdf

These vulnerabilities mean that bank insiders can almost trivially find out the PINs of any or all customers. The discoveries happened while Mike and I were working as expert witnesses on a `phantom withdrawal’ case.

The vulnerabilities are also scientifically interesting: http://cryptome.org/pacc.htm

Source URL: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/go/risks/22/58/6

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Scott Rosenberg, editor of Salon, reports that the ‘zine isn’t about to fold. It will if it can’t come up with any new sources of funds.

One of those sources is you. If you’re already a subscriber, you can give a one year gift subscription for a mere $20, 33% off the usual. You can sign up a pal here.

(You can read here Scott’s comments about how the Online Journalism Review got the story wrong. One lesson: Don’t trust a source who refers to himself as “Bay Aryan” and to Scott as “Rosenkike.” The discussion thread is lively. )

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Before approaching me in the real world, please certify that you have read Jonathan Rauch’s “Caring for Your Introvert.” It’ll save us both a lot of heartache and misunderstanding.

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David Spector, on a mailing list, points us to some parodies of the inadvertently absurd Homeland of Office Security site, Ready.gov.

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I just spent some pain-in-the-butt time updating my list of recent publications. Conclusion: My ratio of ideas to output is currently running about 1:6. Yes, we’re upgrading to an Orange Alert status.

Well, I’d like to chat more about this, but I have a column at Darwin Mag due.

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Anyone with a grain of sense is at least conflicted by Halley’s Alpha Male series. If you hate what it says, I’m not going to argue with you, although I will tell you that Halley isn’t writing it because she’s anti-feminist. Hah! I know Halley. Something much more interesting is going on.

Read the latest. Two memories vividly recounted, connected by the outwardness of day trips and the inwardness of casual love. Told through details. Personal and specific yet illuminating beyond its subject. Risky in Halley’s exposure of herself. Risky even in its style. It’s brave writing. If nothing else, give Halley that.

And then read today’s entry about how and why she writes.

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Too bad Happy Tutor’s reappropriation of the Cluetrain Manifesto (see below) didn’t take the opportunity to fix #74, the most obviously wrong thesis in the batch:

We are immune to advertising. Just forget it. [original]

We are immune to advertising, whether corporate or political. Just forget it. [Tutor]

If only. Yesterday the guy behind the desk at the auto repair store complained lightly, “People think I’m the Shell Answer Man.” It has to be at least 20 years since the Shell Answer Man ads were on TV, but there he is, still stuck in our heads. Marketing shrapnel. And when my wife and I went to buy a new washing machine, I entered the process sure that Maytag is a reliable brand.

No, we’re not immune. But the Internet does give us a way to check whether we’re thinking clearly or it’s just the shrapnel talking.

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The Happy Tutor has posted a remix of the Cluetrain Manifesto, applying it to democracy in corporate America. Democracy is a conversation and — just as important — corporations aren’t citizens. (And if they were, we’d hate them.)

The Tutor’s rendition tends towards the hyperbolic — unlike the staid and measured tones of the original. He doesn’t think corporations are capable of reform, and thus he replaces the chiding tone of the original with a call for heads on pikes. And the truth is that the four authors of the original varied on whether “the end of business as usual” (the book’s subtitle) meant reform or revolution. (I personally didn’t think, and still don’t think, that we’re going to see the collapse of the large corporation as a form of business life, but I’ve never been right about anything.) Ultimately, I think the theses ended up calling for corporate change and not corporate dismemberment mainly for rhetorical reasons, although I’m not sure I’m speaking for my co-authors on this: the manifesto tried to express some thoughts latent in the Web body politic about what was going on, and you don’t get to explain yourself to someone if you’re also screaming “Die, you bastard!” at him.

Anyway, take a look at what the Tutor hath wrought.

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I find something moving about this collection of photos of peace rallies around the world.

Thanks, David I.

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The Happy Tutor has started a blog focusing on “Philanthropy, Democracy and Weblogs.” In it, he’s his normal brilliant, incisive and archly funny self. (See, for example, his “Rationale for Extreme Wealth.”) The site in fact has an objective, expressed in its subtitle: “Notes towards a Summit of Key Players.”

Here’s one way blogging maybe could help: I’d love to read blogs by people who are doing the work of helping — someone scooping rice from a sack, someone scratching innoculations into a long queue of people, someone getting a water purification system up and running. You know, the actual heroes.

Anyway, I’m glad the Tutor’s new site is around. Thanks.

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Paul Musgrove writes passionately as a writer of history about the limitations of writing history. His lead example of historiography-gone-wrong is a conference where the gender of the Industrial Revolution was discussed:

What I want you to understand is the mindset in which “The Industrial Revolution was a masculine event” is a statement which makes sense. It is a mindset which has lost touch with reality.

I’m in no position to decide about this particular debate. But I do want to defend the utility of abstractions of this and other sorts.

Paul worries that the very act of abstraction — for example, talking about The Industrial Revolution as if it were an actual event rather than a way of referring to a wide range of acts, ideas and feelings — does violence to the very real people who were directly affected by it. For example:

The more I write, and the more I read others’ writing, the more I detach myself from the pain and joy of daily life that lies behind “agricultural depression” or “bank failure,” or the pettiness and granduer wrapped up in “Congress” or “American hegemony.” As I use written language, that is, history becomes a set of arbitrary symbols, rather than a quest to understand the events and choices that confronted people with thoughts and feelings as real as mine.

But he holds out some hope:

Words, when used to communicate well, can push us in the direction of truth. The same attention to detail which serves the best poets and novelists would serve a historian no less well. And our best historians—William Manchester, Robert Caro, and—yes—even Steven Ambrose—comprehend the relationship between the telling detail and understanding. That’s why their books are readable and informative, and books exploring the gender of the Industrial Revolution aren’t.

I’m a sucker for readable histories. And I also like books, like Manchester’s “A World Lit Only by Fire,” that abjure trends and theories in favor of descriptions of what daily life was like. I like historical fiction for the same reason. But that doesn’t mean that historical accounts that are not about the quotidian are therefore false. One might as well say that the theory of natural selection is untrue because it passes over in a phrase (”nature red in tooth and claw”) the very real pain of the short-necked giraffe curled up as it starves on an over-populated plain of Africa, yada yada.

Here’s what I think: Truth doesn’t apply only to the details, and the details aren’t all that’s real. Communities are real. Generations are real. Wars are real. Peace is real. Poverty is real. Even fashion trends are real. They are real in different ways, and truth — IMO — consists in (1) revealing each in ways appropriate to it, and (2) remembering that there isn’t only one type of revelation. If you do 1 but not 2, you become a narrowly focused partisan who sneers at history’s stories as sentimentalism or sneers at history’s hypotheses as mere academic flatulence…but either way you end up sneering. If you do 2 but not 1, you end up without beliefs or understanding.

So bring on the abstract theories! But remember that they’re doing the work of abstraction, which is not the only work we need done.

As Paul concludes:

The problems of historiography, alas, are not hard to solve; the solutions are simply difficult to implement.

By the way, don’t miss the discussion of Paul’s ideas following the blog entry itself.

What I’ve said about truth comes mainly from what I learned from Heidegger. He talks about truth as an uncovering. This in opposition to the standard view of truth as the correspondence of a statement with a state of affairs. Seems real right to me.

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Dan Gillmor explains the latest FCC “compromise” that actually is a near-total victory for the incumbent telcos. Want to guess who the big losers are? Got a mirror handy?

Writes Dan:

Spinning this as a victory for any party but the regional Bell monopolies is a big mistake. Competition for tomorrow’s data access just took an enormous hit.

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I don’t like hearing from collection agencies. They scare me because they get to write bad things about you on the permanent record your high school principal warned you about. So, when I received a letter from a collection agency today, it made me nervous. It seems I owe AT&T Worldnet the mighty sum of $16.95.

The nice guy I spoke with at the collection agency cut me off in mid-outrage as I said that I’d never received the original bill. It turns out that the $16.95 was the final charge for a Worldnet account I cancelled a year ago. AT&T had sent the bill to my worldnet email account…yes, to the account that I’d cancelled.

“I get this all day long,” the collection guy said.

It looks like AT&T has earned yet one more Golden D’oh.

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Yesterday I heard two presentations that might have been arranged one after another on purpose. The first was an endless walkthrough of all of Microsoft Project’s features. “We looked at how teams actually work together,” the presenter said, and then apparently they decided to see how much of the humanity well-designed software could squeeze out of the process. Endless grids, timelines, pie charts, warning flags and drill downs that together constituted informational white noise.

The next presenter talked about how the Pentagon rebuilt itself after 9/11. A “slab to ceiling” renovation was already underway, but the team dedicated itself to restoring the hole in their lives within a year of the attack. Contractors and architects worked together, rather than positioning each other to take the blame for overruns in time and budget as is the usual custom. The “ends” were empowered and given incentives to succeed. Spirits were high. And Walker Evey, the ex-NASA guy who headed the project, showed true leadership.

Now, I have every confidence that the Pentagon restoration project used plenty of Gannt charts, timelines, pie charts and grids to coordinate the activities. For all I know, it used Microsoft Project. But it succeeded because of leadership and dedication…and because its managers didn’t made the common business mistake of confusing the measurement with the measured.

[Note: Please don't bother writing on the discussion board that you don't like the Pentagon or what it stands for. Neither do I. But if you can't appreciate either the suffering the attack inflicted or the admirable aspects of the restoration project, then, well, you might want to do some yoga to try to get the kink out of your self-righteousness.]

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In its monthly list of “Wired, Tired and Expired,” the new issue of Wired lists “loosely joined” as tired. (”Evolved” is wired and “tightly coupled” is expired.)

I believe that according to the terms of the Geneva Convention on Lost Luggage, I am therefore entitled to claim that “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” must have been at some point implicitly wired. Right?

Woohoo [by implication]!

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I’m on my way to Kansas City so this concludes the JOHO broadcast day. Cue the grainy images of America and the scratchy rendition of the national anthem…

I’ll be back late tonight.

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Demonstrating a remarkable lack of irony, the Republican Team Leader site that was caught astroturfing letters to the editor (write a letter and get GOPoints redeemable for attractive GOP logo-wear) is now urging members to astroturf the Boston Globe in response to the Globe’s editorial against the Team Leader site’s astroturfing. (Yes, that sentence does make sense.)

And, quite wonderfully, the pre-composed letter you can click and send is in fact the original letter about President Bush “demonstrating genuine leadership.”

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From Betsy Devine’s blog comes a link to Linda Kim Davies‘ home page. It’s a Flash site and my first reaction was impatience and annoyance. Images and words fade in, leaving me feeling like Bob (or was it Ray?) in the Bob and Ray interview with the president of the Slow Talkers of America Society. Likewise, her essays appear one slow-fading paragraph at a time. “What right does she have to take my time this way?” I thought.

And then I realized how stupid I was being. Or how webby. I’m acting as if I’ve been made the Lord of Time, that I have an inalienable right to control the pace and editing of what I experience. The sequential, non-random arts demand we trust them with our time, a non-recoverable, non-fungible chunk of our lives. When they squander it, we feel robbed. But when they do more with that time than we could have imagined, not just our ideas and feelings but our lives ourselves have been made more valuable.

On the other hand, I wish Linda Kim Davies would put in a list of links to her photos because I have a lot to do today.

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From Adina:

There’s a discussion on the Well, in the publicly visible Inkwell.vue area, about Thom Hartmann’s recent book: Equal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

In our current legal system, corporations are considered persons, with the civil rights due people, like free speech, and freedom from search and seizure. Hartmann argues that these rights contribute to corporate abuses, and argues in favor of restricting corporate personhood.

If you read only one message there, make it #5 from Hartmann. But why stick with just one?

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I’m doing a commentary on wifi on the syndicated NPR show “Here and Now” today, probably around 12:20. (SPOILER: I’m in favor of wifi.)

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Here’s a balanced article on the impact of Palladium on colleges and on Fair Use and the enforcement of the UCITA

Thanks to Seth Johnson for the link.

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Dear Sir,

My name is Andy Hudson.

I’m an online marketer, and am currently searching for like minded individuals and web site owners to network with, and to explore potential opportunities that can bring mutual benefit to both of us.

I just visited your site, and would like to congratulate you on a nice clean, crisp site - it’s very professional.

Oh yeah, this is a guy who’s looked at my site. If ever there were three words to describe it, I think we’d have to go with “clean,” “crisp” and “professional.” Hah!

So, by the time I got to the line in the spam that said:

“No false promises, but I think this could be the start of an excellent win/win relationship.. “

I was already thinking “Gotta blog this!” But then it got even better. Here are the closing lines from this Seasoned Internet Marketing Professional:

Many thanks.

Your name.

Andy Hudson

Yo, Andy baby: It’s ok not to realize that “Your name” is placeholder text in the spam generator you’re using, but it is most definitely not ok to spray your spam around without even mailing it to yourself first to test it.

So, when I say “Shove your spam up your integrated marketing portal, Andy Hudson,” I hope you understand that I mean this only in the most clear, crisp and professional sense.

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Kevin Marks takes a look at the data Clay uses in his application of power laws to blogs, concluding that “Clay’s paper is correct as far as it goes, but it makes a couple of classic mistakes.”

Kevin’s article is all math-like, with graphs and numbers with six digits to the right of the decimal point, so I was disqualified from understanding it well before the lightning round. But both Kevin and Clay are waaaay smart, so if you’re in their league, you might want to mosey on over.

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Now we see what Google is made of.

Google got to be the #1 brand name world-wide, beating Coke and Osama not by out-spending them or by having a catchier jingle. No, they did it the way (frankly) Cluetrain said: by having value and values.

Marketing was invented to solve a distribution problem: How do we let potential buyers know about what we have to offer? The answer was to buy distribution channels that, by their nature, reached a mass audience with a one-way communication, AKA “a message.” With thirty seconds to make their case (or, in the print world, with the time it takes to flip a page), companies treated their messages like dumdum bullets: hollowed them of content hoping for maximum impact. Marketing, which should be about communication and conversation, became a cynical numbers game, the apotheosis of which is spam.

But the Internet has solved the distribution problem. Everyone is connected to everyone. We fill the Net with talk about everything we care about, including the products we buy, bought, or will never buy again.

In this environment, a company like Google succeeds by offering something of value and by acting with values that let us trust it. So far — despite some fear-mongering recently — Google seems to have earned our trust. It’s one of the best examples of a company adopting the “End-to-End” principles I talked about in the lead article in Friday’s issue of my newsletter.

But Blogger offers such a temptation to go wrong. What, after all, is Google’s business case for the purchase? For example, the purchase of Deja.com gave Google content that drew more users and, more important, gave them more pages on which to sell ads. Google’s ad policy maintains its value and its values: the ads are unobtrusive and are listed in order of their utility to users (based on clicks). But with Blogger, there are two tempting ways Google could violate the trust they’ve earned: They could start charging for all Blogger accounts, and they could weight searches towards Blogger blogs.

Weighting searches would clearly violate the principle that has built Google’s presence: rankings that try to reflect the Web’s own preferences. Charging for all Blogger accounts would violate the implicit bond that has made Google not only known and used but loved, for it would make the Web a worse place overall. Google’s record so far has been great: Whatever the business reasons for rescuing Deja, the purchase also preserved the UseNet archives, making the Net a better place. And, of course, the superiority of Google’s searching ability has made the Web a far better place than it was before.

Many companies get stupid when they get big. So far, Google has bucked the trend. Let’s hope it doesn’t give into the temptation to get stupid now.

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For your West Wing enhanced entertainment experience, here’s a site for true junkies.

And this is from Joe Conason’s preview of an Esquire article (which should have come out by now) on life in the White House. It quotes John DiIulio, former director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives:

“I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis … Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking: discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera …”

Mike Muegel points to the Esquire article in question. Thanks, Mike!

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Why has the hardback edition of Cluetrain been ranked in the 600s for weeks on Amazon? The paperback edition, ranked at #18,671, has been out for years. It’s available free online here. Don’t you people have anything better to do than buy hardback copies of an aging barbaric yawp?

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See them all here.

Thanks to Gary Stock for the link.