XM and Sirius merge, and the result is . . .
November 16, 2008
Confusion.
Last week, I checked out the “Best of Sirius” and passed (don’t need Howard Stern, thanks), and figured that was all the combining for now. Boy, was I wrong. Like everyone else I woke up last Thursday to the “new lineup” foisted on us with no notice. Some channels gone, others “replaced.”
There’s lots of teeth gnashing by XM subscribers at places like here and here .
Anyone paying attention (and yes, I guess that should have included me) should have noticed that duplicate channels — or at least those perceived to be — were going to be gone . But the real loss is that less commercially oriented music offerings on XM were pared down in favor of more mainstream fare on Sirius. (To be fair, we did get new channels from Sirius, such as the marvelous “E Street Radio.”)
I’ve had XM from its start, and loved “X Country” (now former XM 12). It played deep into alternative country, zydeco, and so on. Steve Earle, sure, but also Townes Van Zandt. Cross Canadian Ragweed (not a fan) but also the V-Roys. It’s where I first heard the Drive-By Truckers and Jon Dee Graham. I’d chatted with their program director months before they even got underway. In this restructuring, the channel’s gone and “replaced” by Sirius’ “Outlaw Country.” From its artist lineup, it looks like there will be a lot more yee-haw, a lot less No Depression. Man, am I bummed.
Well, at least it was good to hear I’m not the only one. I feel the pain of those who mourn the loss of Fred and Lucy (XM’s ’80s and 90s alternative offerings), which were way better than the pap that replaces them. And XMU? “Sirius XM U,” which “replaced” it, is no adventurous college radio station.
I’m not likely to cancel (the news offerings alone justify a subscription), but with tons of alternatives to satellite radio out there, it’s extremely disappointing to see Sirius-XM veer toward the commercial mainstream. Last.fm will now get more and more of my music time.
Wifi in Beijing
November 16, 2008
Trying to find out how much there is.
An endeavor somewhere between “discover the secrets of the Forbidden City” and “unlock the iPhone.”
Inscrutable, to say the least. Is there . . .
a) Widespread wifi, but only really in restaurants and cafes that cater to laowai ;
b) Citywide wifi within the Third Ring Road that sprung up for the Olympics (and now requires some sort of payment); or
c) Illusory promises of the same that will devolve in practice to one bar of signal everywhere?
Stay tuned.
Obama and the “Team of Rivals”
November 15, 2008
I love the Hillary Clinton/”Team of Rivals” stuff. One of my favorite books, writ large on the public stage.
Let’s go the extra mile. I was asked “who’d be Chase?,” so I thought I would try my hand at filling out the entire team of rivals. Here goes:
Obama — Lincoln, natch. Not the first choice of his party at the start of the nominating process (that would be Seward, and how juicy is it that the “obvious choice” now is the one who may wind up filling the Seward role?) but the guy who was victorious at the end.
Clinton — Seward. But will she hang in the Prez’s digs with him in the evenings, sipping brandy and smoking cigars? Hmmm, doubt it.
Bates — I figure Joe Lieberman for this. Bates was the older, so-called “moderate” who really wasn’t a Republican and whose politics would have destroyed the party.
Chase — Al Gore, hands down. Brains, but with a brainy and not politically or socially adept view of the election borne in large part from being above/beyond the fray. But he still comes out OK with an important job (Supreme Court Justice), as I imagine Al Gore will, even if maybe it’s not this job. Not sure who’d play his charming first-lady-in-waiting daughter Kate. Evidence is not necessarily to the contrary , just not convincing that his daughters could run the country.
Yes, I know I am being historically inaccurate, as Lincoln’s rivals contended for the same nomination as him, but I hope you all will give me some license.
Stanton — McCain? I guess we’ll see on Monday.
Sounds “reasonable” to me!
November 9, 2008
The Google Generation
November 6, 2008
Barack Obama and I are the same age, and both of us graduated from top law schools. The similarity ends there. He is a gifted political orator, I am not. He is about to take puppy and kids to the White House. I remain in the ivory tower.
Obama was elected President by a wide array of voters young and old. Latinos, men and women, Democrats and independents, Jews, Christians, and African Americans turned out in record numbers to turn out the Republicans. Still, I am especially heartened by the fact that Obama won by 10 points among college-educated white voters, and I think that was no accident.
In places like Virginia and Colorado, young, educated members of the professional class are flooding into the suburbs and exurbs. This “Google Generation” of knowledge workers makes its living with a computer and smartphone. They are not beholden to any political party or ideology, and that has led some think of them as apolitical. But so many of them participated in this movement that this simply is no longer true. Is it any wonder that Google’s CEO starred in the Obama infomercial? Yeah, thought not.
In Barack Obama, this generation saw one of their own, who inspired him with his rhetoric but also spoke their language and adopted methods of reaching them that were exquisitely tailored to them: Facebook, e-mail, and so on. On Election Day alone I received half a dozen e-mail messages and several videos imploring me to vote. On the eve of the election, we roared over the viral video that “blamed” a single voter for not turning out to support Obama. You shared it with your friends, and then by inserting their e-mail addresses, it was their turn to cringe and laugh. It was a technological marvel with high production values, and apparently very effective, as 12 million people shared the “blame.”
Among them is the first person to alert me to the candidacy of the senator from Illinois with the funny name. Rick Klau is a graduate of our law school who forsook law practice for the techie world, which surprised no one who was paying attention when he was the driving force behind the creation at Richmond of the nation’s first online law journal devoted to technology issues.
Rick deserves credit for introducing me to Twitter, Talkingpointsmemo, the finer points of RSS (his company Feedburner is now part of the Google world), iGoogle, and, most importantly, the Obama campaign and its vast presence on the Internet. Not a bad list, no? He was on board the Obama train and cheering long before anyone else I know. Heck, he’d had the guy in his living room (he now proudly says he’s 1 for 1 with candidates with that status). And he convinced me, singlehandedly, to get on board with Obama, whom I had only known previously from his electrifying speech in 2004.
The nation has handed over the car keys to someone my age. Not to baby boomers still reliving Vietnam, not to the Democrats’ traditional constituencies, but to this new creative class, the Google Generation. How often were the words “disciplined” and “professional” used to describe Obama’s great campaign, the one whose methods will be studied in political science classes for decades to come? That is the ethos of this cohort, and the real break from the past that Obama represents. It’s time for the group that created Google and Facebook to turn that creativity to make headway in the federal government, which is sorely in need of change.
In this new era, government has a continuing and important role to play. While the Google Generation has not been part of the traditional framework of government-building, and it may not have the expected views about government’s purpose, its perspective is not a libertarian disbelief. Nor is it comfortable with the social conservatives’ pettiness and nannyism. The multi-racial, multi-ethnic, more tolerant society that pundits discovered on Election Day has been in place in Edge Cities for quite some time.
When you invest the new technocrats with power, you may also find that they have no truck for traditional ways of lobbying, back-slapping and deal-making. Instead, government may well be a much more disciplined (there’s that word again!) force to simply get things done. So if you want a glimpse of the kind of person whom Obama should and will bring in to run things, I suggest you bypass asking John Kerry and his ilk, and instead go straight to Rick Klau.
Sarah Palin mangles the Constitution — but why?
November 1, 2008
I have a simple creed for politics, based largely on Occam’s Razor. Among my core beliefs: everything a politician does is political.
With that in mind, let’s contemplate the widely reported stylings of Sarah Palin on the Constitution, including this and this.
The first of these was repeated not once, but four times in various fora, as so helpfully pointed out.
So what’s to make of this? I have heard others say they would like their candidates for President and Vice President have encyclopedic knowledge of the Constitution they swear to defend. But that is a bit hyperbolic: when was the last time you heard anyone hold forth on the Third Amendment? Thought so.
Most observers think Palin is, oh, say, stupid, less well-informed than a third-grader, deserving of ridicule, or, perhaps in the case of the first gaffe, repeating the Cheney talking point of aggrandizing political power to oneself without a whit of concern for whether others would find that extra-Constitutional.
Suppose there is another possibility. I know, it’s hard to imagine. No, not that one — she is no Constitutional scholar, so it is really stretching it to imagine that she gets the finer points of First Amendment law (of which there are many — have a look here if you really want to) and is consciously trying to twist it to her advantage. For that matter, she would have a tough time doing so.
She reminds me more of a certain archetypal first-year law student who faces the twin hurdles of unfamiliar material and an intimidating classroom setting that requires speaking in front of one’s peers. This student constructs answers to professors’ questions by continuing to speak — and speak, and speak, and speak — in a hyperverbal string, thinking that somewhere in their stream of consciousness will be some nugget of truth. And, perhaps, this is thought to demonstrate an affability that increases the chance of the prof liking the student. To the contrary, a prof who prizes brevity and taut answers won’t be impressed, but it does often make this student more popular with her peers in several respects. First, it gobbles up class time and reduces the likelihood that others will be called upon. Second, as most other students themselves are just learning the virtue of concise answers, they might not object if an adequate answer was somewhere in the speech, if buried. Finally, there is an obvious adversarial dynamic at work, and any student who can compose an answer, no matter how tortured, is perceived to be doing intellectual battle with The Man.
Remember, everything politicians do is political. So perhaps there is a simple calculus at work in Palin’s statements that is not appreciably different from that of my hypothetical law student. As she starts to answer, she believes she might be right — at some point, at least. Sure, she runs the risk that experts contradict her. But after all, they are no different from professors (of course, sometimes they are law professors), that is, not part of a demographic she cares about politically. Your fans will not care that you are slightly, even wildly wrong. You are holding forth on the Constitution and that’s more than they do in their daily lives. If cornered, you would spin, as Palin’s spokesperson did, that your words were taken out of context. By that time the media have moved on to the campaign issue du jour.
There is an obvious alternative course of action, one my better law students take when face with a question they cannot answer effectively. They say, “I don’t know.” It is often one of the best answers a student can give, particularly when uttered with some humility. What prevents Palin from doing this is the same Tracy Flick-like sureness that motivates the over-verbing law student: a deliberate, hard-wired confidence that little to no harm will befall you with your targeted political constituents even if you turn out to be wrong. Not a quality I admire in the people I support for national office.
