Child On Board with Bush

A Republican lobbying group spending $20 million to help President Bush derail Social Security is sending a nine-year-old child around the country to stump for the effort.

"What I want to tell people about Social Security is to not be afraid of the new plan. It may be a change, but it's a good change." -- Noah McCullough, a fourth-grader from Katy, Texas.

I don't shock easily where politics is concerned, but trotting this kid around the country to explicitly endorse policy -- an idea hatched by a former aide to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay -- manages the feat of being cynical, exploitive, and transparently desperate at the same time.

The effort comes as many Republican Congress members, especially here in retiree-packed Florida, are ducking town meetings. They can't face withering public scrutiny of the Bush plan, but they'll send a child of nine to front for it.

McCullough has made several TV appearances by virtue of a precocious and obsessive interest in presidential trivia, which began at age 5 and has led to his accumulation of a 3,000-book library on the topic.

One Daily Kos participant suggests that he may have Asperger's syndrome, and his level of interest is certainly reminiscent of Darius McCollum, the New Yorker fixated since age 11 on the city's transit system.

I try to view politics with an eye towards how I would feel if the other party did it, since the real divide in this country isn't between Democrats and Republicans or liberals and conservatives, but between real people and shrill partisan tools.

This child abuse would be revolting even if McCullough was being taught to parrot Nancy Pelosi. Flying him around the country to shill privatization reminds me of nothing so much as The Children's Story by James Clavell:

Because the New Teacher was disappointed, the children were very disappointed. Then she said, "perhaps we're using the wrong name."

She thought a moment and then said, "instead of saying 'God,' let's say 'Our Leader.' Let's pray to Our Leader for candy. Let's pray very hard and don't open your eyes till I say."

So the children shut their eyes tightly and prayed very hard, and as they prayed, the New Teacher took out some candy from her pocket and quietly put a piece on each child's desk.

Politics · 2005/02/28 · Comment · Link

Don't Tune in Tomorrow

On March 31, SoapCity is cancelling a great TV subscription service: commercial-free program downloads.

The service, which required Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player, offered shows from the last four weeks for download over the Web, charging $9.95 a month or $1.99 per episode. Digital-rights management expired the files after four weeks.

Considering the popularity of TV show DVDs and illegally traded episodes on file-sharing services, it seems like a no-brainer to milk a few more dollars from viewers over the Web. No reason is provided for the shutdown.

I thought that the Internet had freed me from years of television addiction, but wasn't prepared when TV followed me here. After experimenting with SoapCity a few times solely to judge its technical merits, I became hooked on As the World Turns and Sarah Brown.

I hope she can beat those drug charges back in El Paso and keep sleeping her way across Oakdale until she finds a suitable father for JJ.

Television · Soaps · 2005/02/25 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Et Tu, Rafe Colburn?

Rafe Colburn has an interesting confession regarding the Web nerd cage match we're having over Google Toolbar and other content-manipulation tools:

I have a Firefox extension installed called Adblock. All it does is prevent the browser from downloading resources containing the patterns that I specify. I installed it for one reason, to keep my browser from downloading any content from BlogAds.

I make money with BlogAds on two sites, so I could write an impassioned essay about how Colburn is robbing me of a chance to put food on my family. The loss isn't theoretical, unlike Google Toolbar as presently implemented, which I could easily circumvent on book ISBNs.

Although I don't use blockers myself, I've always regarded them as part of the cost of doing business on the Web. People who are strongly motivated to avoid your ads aren't likely to click, so the lack of their eyeballs may be a net good.

Publishing · 2005/02/24 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

I received a certified letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield today straight out of the film Brazil. The contents: one piece of paper cancelling my policy, a 3/4" inch square styrofoam cube, and this note explaining the presence of the cube:

Attention

The styrofoam cube enclosed in this envelope is being included by the sender to meet a United States Postal Service regulation. This regulation requires the letter or package to be 3/4 of an inch thick at its thickest point. The cube has no other purpose and may be disposed of upon opening this correspondence.

2005/02/23 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Prying Into the Google Crowbar

I'm studying the technical implementation of the Google Toolbar to find a JavaScript technique a Web publisher could use to detect and defeat autolinking.

I wouldn't use it on Workbench, but if I were Barnes & Noble or another online bookseller, I wouldn't have much patience for software that adds links to my competitors on my pages.

I thought I might be able to compare document.fileSize to the size of the page in document.body.innerHTML.length, but these values don't match and don't change after AutoLink is pressed.

I found some good and bad things about the implementation.

The good: the current beta enables a user to choose a map provider, which can be Google Maps, MapQuest, or Yahoo Maps. (Click Options, AutoLink Settings to choose one.)

The bad: You can't use View Source to learn what the Google Toolbar has done to a page after autolinking.

When you try, Internet Explorer shows the source code of the original page. To my knowledge, this is the first time I have ever viewed a Web page where I couldn't examine the exact HTML, JavaScript, and CSS formatting used to create it.

Publishing · 2005/02/22 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

Google Wants to Play Tag

I see it as an issue of 'Who owns the content being displayed?' Google does not own the content, and when it uses the content of others to make money, it often will be violating the intellectual property laws.

-- Attorney Terence Ross on the Google Toolbar's new autolink feature

I can understand the appeal of the argument that anything that exists on your computer is yours to edit, archive, or transform as you see fit. Roger Benningfield sums it up nicely: "My house, my rules."

But we don't seem to be living in that world with our software, and I'd like to see the legal foundation of the belief that we're living there with Web pages and other electronic documents.

Autolink edits Web pages, making subtle inline changes to text while presenting them at their original URLs, which implies the original author created the transformed work.

Even if you accept the legality of these edits, there should be more regard for the notion that something presented under your name is actually your work.

Software that manipulates digital content in transit should not present it as if no changes were made.

Publishing · 2005/02/21 · 13 COMMENTS · Link

Mark Evanier:

... many years ago, around the time I started edging into the TV business, I attended a lecture by a very accomplished, successful producer ... a man with many prestigious credits. He told us that we had to recognize and avoid what he called "The Marley Ideas" -- notions so dreadful that they were dead from the moment of conception. As an example, he told us that one TV network was then considering an idea so terrible, so guaranteed to fail, that everyone involved with it should be immediately fired for programming malpractice. And the way he described it, it sure sounded like you'd be an idiot to think that they could make a weekly series out of the movie, M*A*S*H.

Television · 2005/02/20 · Comment · Link

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