Fahrenheit 9/11, A Review

I finally got away and went to see a matinee showing of Michael Moore's new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11. Even at 4:00 PM on a weekday, the suburbia theatre I went to was half full of people. About 40% of the attendees were older people of retired age and the rest were college students, though I spotted a few people playing hookey from work.

This film, I believe has the potential to energize those Americans who have never before participated in politics. Despite the obvious partisan hubris and damning words and images that smash the Bush administration's illusion of Iraq (fed to Americans through their TVs) this movie rips open the business relationships between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family and asks the questions that the mass media has ignored. After seeing this movie, how can any truly democratic American ever trust George W. Bush or anyone in his administration again?

Like most of the other reviews I have read, I left the theatre with a lot of the same complaints and praises. The first being that Moore feeds you so much information that there is no time to process it before you're inundated with another shocking fact or image. More time needed to be spent on the motives of why Bush took us to war in Iraq and why American soldiers are dying for a false cause. It would have been nice to see an explanation of how the mass media was used to sell the American public on the manufactured connections between 9/11 and Hussein. My second complaint is the choppiness of the movie. There's very little to tie one set of images to another and the viewer often gets confused because the movie does not even follow a structured timeline. My last complaint is that there was no time spent on examining how the Iraqi people are responding to the American military presence. Other than seeing dead babies in the back of a pickup and lots of war carnage, there were no interviews with the Iraqi people. The imagery seemed to be thrown in for shock value alone -- which is useful, but not as useful as educating the viewer by showing multiple perspectives of the same issue.

As a political tool, this movie is very powerful but as an informative documentary, it fails to educate properly and requires more than one viewing to take in all the information and process it. I'm glad that Moore made this film because we'd be worse off without it. It should be required viewing for all Americans who get their news and information from TV.

Following the movie, I attended a MoveOn house party of about 30 people, where Moore did a nationwide telephone call asking people to help with MoveOn's voter regiatration drive.

Now, I need to figure out what day this week I can go back and see Fahrenheit 9/11 a second time to pick up all the information I missed in the first viewing.

Unraveling the Mysteries of the Bush Administration

I just read this fascinating, well-researched article that clearly outlines the motives and interests of the Bush Administration in the Middle East. It dissects the Valerie Plame affair, and suggests that the CIA is engineering a coup d'etat against the Bush Administration. It also says that we should expect indictments for both Bush and Cheney soon which could result in the collapse of the Bush Administration.

Now, I realize that a lot of this article is speculation but the author does bring up a number of surprising points and links a lot of the information together in ways that the mainstream media has not.

My gut feeling on the Plame affair is that Karl Rove is behind the whole mess. He's not above outing a valuable CIA operative because the operative's husband made the Bush Administration look ridiculous. Rove is the man behind the curtain, manufacturing the illusions of the Bush Administration and manipulating the media.

Minute Maid Cherry LimeAid

In my quest to drink fewer carbonated beverages, I've switched to drinking more juice. At the store this evening I found a new (to me) juice blend from Minute Maid: Cherry-LimeAid. I had no idea what to expect, but yum yum yum! I hope I can find this yummy drink in more stores. It's a great alternative to drinking Coke and Pepsi.

I'm also reminded of the containers fresh Blood Orange juice I was able to buy when I took a vacation to Malta a few years ago. I couldn't get enough of this delicacy. I know blood oranges are common in Europe, especially around the Mediterranean countries, but I haven't seen them very often in the United States.

Draft Bruce

A few weeks ago I was asked by Josh Lerner and Andrew Rasiej to design a one-page web site to be used as the basis of an online petition to draft Bruce Springsteen to play a benefit concert at Giants Stadium in New Jersey on September 1, 2004 - the same day George Bush accepts the RNC nomination in New York City.

I threw a design together and passed it to Josh, who implemented the form and set up the web server. The site launched this morning and the Democratic activist community has embraced the idea, linking to the petition from their web sites and blogs.

No one knows if this draft idea will work but it's common knowledge that Bruce Springsteen does not like George Bush and recently complained to the Bush campaign about them using his 1984 "Born in the U.S.A." song as one of their campaign theme songs. (Not coincidentally, I based the site design on this album cover, where Bruce is standing in front of a flag.)

Check it out: http://www.draftbruce.com/

Fahrenheit 9/11 Discussion Community

I spent most of the past week building out a discussion forum community for Michael Moore's new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, which hits theatres on June 25.

http://www.fh911.com/

Why did I build this? For a variety of reasons:

1. Other than the popular Rotten Tomatoes and IMdb forums, I found very few discussion forums dedicated to a single cause, like Moore's new movie
2. I realized that this movie is going to be HUGE and I wanted there to be a place online for fans (and critics) to talk about this movie on equal terms.
3. Moore's Internet people never emailed me back - even after several attempts - so I can only assume they have no plans for building an online community into fahrenheit911.com
4. I wanted to see how easy it would be to add/modify a Forums module to the Content Management Framework I'm learning
5. I wanted a showpiece community site for my new company, BlogLabs, Inc.

Feel free to use the site, but assume that over the next day or two that small things on the site will change as I iron out any more bugs I find. For instance, I haven't tested the site completely in IE/Windows. Any bugs can be reported in the comments for this entry or sent to me through my contact form.

Fahrenheit 9/11

I've been watching the buzz build for Michael Moore's new movie for several weeks. One of the most fascinating indicators so far has been the IMdb movie ratings, which interestingly enough reflect the polarization of politics in this country.

Ever since this movie was added to the IMdb database, it has been receiving a 70% to 30% split in people rating it 10 vs 1. A very very small percentage of people are rating it anything between. This clearly shows the hard-line partisanship of political activists trying to use IMdb as an early indicator to the rest of the world about how to react to the movie, which doesn't even hit theatres until June 25. Fascinating...

For a better understanding of what's going on here, read some of the user comments. Remember, probably less than a few hundred people worldwide have seen this movie to-date.

The message boards are full of threads (like this one) from activists saying they're creating multiple fake IMdb user accounts just so they can vote 1 on this movie. Seems a little pathetic.

CamWorld Turns Seven

Seven Years! Every year on this day I write about how my blog is turning another year older. Part of me thinks it is completely silly that we mentally celebrate the aging of a blog, but I think it's a testament to how personal they are and the importance they play in our lives. Yet without blogs we'd still be building personal home pages full of pictures of kittens and links to the Big Red Button That Doesn't Do Anything.

Blog Pioneer: I'm proud to be among the small group of people that pioneered this space back in the late 1990s. I know I don't keep CamWorld updated as frequently as I used to but that doesn't mean that I'm not keeping busy. On the contrary, look for a bunch of new projects from my corner launching within the next few weeks.

The importance of blogs in the history of the Internet is a hotly-contested fact, yet without blogs where would we be? The blog format has given us a natural structure. Blogs have given us a voice. In short, blogs are the the natural iteration of the personal home page.

Political Campaigns: I also am going to start writing my post-mortem of the Clark campaign, giving the world an insider's perspective of what it was like to work there, what I learned, the mistakes we made and how campaigns in the future can avoid them. I will also include some anecdotes from the time I spent consulting the Kerry campaign on online community. I'm not free to speak publicly about some of the things I learned there, but I will write what I can. Look for this sometime between late summer and the few weeks leading up to the election in November. It might even be long enough to be published elsewhere (dead-tree media agents take note).

BlogLabs, Inc. I will also be soon launching a company I started last summer a few weeks before I ran off to Arkansas to join the Clark campaign and try to change the world. I put this company on hold while I got sucked into the world of politics, but am now putting my time and energy back into it and am on track to making it happen.

Good News, Bad News

Good News: I'm catching up on my email overload.
Bad News: I'm up to approximately 8000 pieces of spam a day.

Good News: My remote office location moved from Starbucks to B&N cafe's.
Bad News: Cometa Network (who B&N uses) is closing their Hotspots on June 18, so it's back to Starbucks.

Good News: I'm getting plenty of extra sleep.
Bad News: My Ecco sandals have developed a really bad case of sandal rot, stinking up my bedroom.

Good News: I'm on track to getting back on track.
Bad News: I don't yet have a solid plan for my immediate future.

Lawful Harassment

I just read this amazing report from a Russian-born British journalist who is married to an American about the apparently lawful harassment of foreign journalists coming into the United States. This kind of incident makes me wonder how many more stories like this are going to crop up in late July when thousands of foreign journalists descend on Boston to cover the Democratic National Convention. But more importantly, I worry that this kind of thing just makes America look even worse in the eyes of foreign travelers. At what point does the U.S. tourism industry start suffering because foreign tourists decide to go somewhere else because they do not want to deal with the ridiculous process our U.S. Homeland Security department puts them through?

This incident reminds me of the craziness I had to deal with at Domodedovo airport in March of 2003 when I was flying from Moscow to Malta. I said goodbye to my friend Elena and attempted to go through customs. The Russian security agent asked me how much U.S. cash I had on me. I knew it was less than the $10,000 legal limit, so I opened my wallet and showed him that I was carrying $143 in U.S. cash. He looked at my declaration form where I had failed to specify it. He then tried to consficate my money, even though I knew it was way under the limit imposed to catch money launderers trying to smuggle cash out of Russia. I argued with him for about 10 minutes and refused to give up the money. He then tried to let me bribe him with $50 so that I could get through customs and catch my plane. I refused and then turned around and went back to the terminal where my friend Elena was catching a flight to her city in Siberia. I found her, explained to her what was going on and we returned to my gate where she explained to the gate security guy in Russian that I knew the law and there was no way I was going to give up my $143 in cash just because he was an authority figure and I was a foreign tourist who had to catch a flight. He looked pised but knew that I was motivated to not let him rip me off so he waived me through without any more trouble.

This story illustrates how rigid laws in a country where laws are not enforced are easily broken by people in a position of authority. I wonder what would have happened had I demanded to see his supervisor. Would I have found myself in Russian airport jail bent over with glove-clad agents inspecting my ass for hidden money? Probably not, but what if I were a foreign journalist trying to enter the U.S. to do my job? At some point, laws become too rigid and ridiculous and if authority figures are not held accountable for their irresponsible actions, then we've got a lot of work to do to repair our reputation as a free and open country that welcomes international travelers.

Announcing TodaysPapers.com

Last week, a developer named Joe Stump and I built out my latest idea involving community, personal news management and online discussion. It is called Today's Papers: http://www.todayspapers.com

Simply put, Today's Papers is a news aggregator (like Google News) that provides a discussion thread for every article that comes through a subscribed feed. This means that you can now talk about news articles with other people even if the originating source does not have a discussion area on their site. Additionally, each news article gets it own unique ID which allows us to provide a Trackback service for it.

We're only subscribed to 110 feeds right now, and that number will certainly go up as we fine-tune the best combination of sources so that the right kind of information comes through to the site. We'll also remove feeds that are underperforming or are pushing news that our community shows no interest in.

We're working on expanding the features of Today's Papers, and your advice and opinions are welcome. Let us know what you want out of a automated news aggregator and a centralized discussion community for the daily news.

Political Rumors

If you are interested in how rumors start and spread in the political world, then this story by Alexandra Polier is a must-read. Since I am mentioned by name in this story I must clarify a few things and make sure the record is clear. When the "Kerry Intern" story broke on WatchBlog on February 6, I was still employed by the Clark campaign and was not involved in the editorial management of WatchBlog (in fact, I had shed my involvement in WatchBlog the previous October because I saw it as a potential conflict of interest). I found out about this story when a British journalist called my cell phone on February 13 and asked me if I wanted to comment. Since I had no idea what he was talking about I asked him to call back in a few hours while I did some research and educated myself.

In short order I discovered the WatchBlog story, saw that Drudge had escalated the rumor to the world and was finding lots of conspiracy theories online saying that Chris Lehane and I were in cahoots together to bring John Kerry down and save the Clark campaign. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is complete coincidence that the story was broken on WatchBlog by an anonymous editor who wanted to make a name for himself.

As soon as I realized what this rumor meant, I tracked down a friend I trusted at the Clark campaign and asked for his advice. He said I should go talk to Vanessa Weaver, one of the Clark campaign's executives. Since Wes had already announced his withdrawal from the race I was mostly interested in saving my reputation and making sure that the people running the Clark campaign knew the truth of the matter.

At this point I knew that the story was going to be huge but I had no idea how big. Drudge never linked to the WatchBlog story or credited it, however a copycat site called the Drudge Retort did link to it and I watched the traffic spike to 80,000-100,000 users a day. WatchBlog is a mostly-text site, yet my server logs show that I was pushing about 2 GB of data a day. Thankfully, my hosting provider (Pair) allows for these kinds of things and only bills quota overages if they're sustained for a longer period of time.

So, that's my side of the story and how I unwittingly became part of a political sex scandal, purely through a couple of coincidences, a lot of speculation and way too much jumping to conclusions. It's not something I ever want to go through again.