more hrc rovean tactics

? trying to suppress caucus results? nice.

YouTube - How we bring about the change we seek

YouTube - How we bring about the change we seek

Did Ex-Alabama Governor Get A Raw Deal?, 60 Minutes Reports On Bribery Conviction Of Don Siegelman In A Case Criticized by Democrats And Republicans -

Did Ex-Alabama Governor Get A Raw Deal?, 60 Minutes Reports On Bribery Conviction Of Don Siegelman In A Case Criticized by Democrats And Republicans - CBS News

Obama Substance

Obsidian Wings
by hilzoy

I, too, endorse Obama for President, to no one's surprise. Since Katherine has already written a lot of what I would have wanted to say about his rhetoric, and since I've already talked about one of my most important reasons for supporting him, namely the fact that he got Iraq right from the outset, I'll say something about the peculiar idea that Barack Obama is all style and no substance.

I came to Obama by an unusual route: as I explained here, I follow some issues pretty closely, and over and over again, Barack Obama kept popping up, doing really good substantive things. There he was, working for nuclear non-proliferation and securing loose stockpiles of conventional weapons, like shoulder-fired missiles. There he was again, passing what the Washington Post called "the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet" -- though not as strong as Obama would have liked. Look -- he's over there, passing a bill that created a searchable database of recipients of federal contracts and grants, proposing legislation on avian flu back when most people hadn't even heard of it, working to make sure that soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were screened for traumatic brain injury and to prevent homelessness among veterans, successfully fighting a proposal by the VA to reexamine all PTSD cases in which full benefits had been awarded, working to ban no-bid contracts in Katrina reconstruction, and introducing legislation to criminalize deceptive political tactics and voter intimidation. And there he was again, introducing a tech plan of which Lawrence Lessig wrote:

"Obama has committed himself to a technology policy for government that could radically change how government works. The small part of that is simple efficiency -- the appointment with broad power of a CTO for the government, making the insanely backwards technology systems of government actually work.

But the big part of this is a commitment to making data about the government (as well as government data) publicly available in standard machine readable formats. The promise isn't just the naive promise that government websites will work better and reveal more. It is the really powerful promise to feed the data necessary for the Sunlights and the Maplights of the world to make government work better. Atomize (or RSS-ify) government data (votes, contributions, Members of Congress's calendars) and you enable the rest of us to make clear the economy of influence that is Washington.

After the debacle that is the last 7 years, the duty is upon the Democrats to be something different. I've been wildly critical of their sameness (remember "Dems to the Net: Go to hell" which earned me lots of friends in the Democratic party). I would give my left arm to be able to celebrate their difference. This man, Mr. Obama, would be that difference. He has as much support as I can give."

Imagine my surprise, then, when I heard people saying that Obama wasn't "substantive". It was exactly like my experience in 2004 when, after hearing Wes Clark for the first time, I went and looked up his positions on a whole host of issues of concern to me, and only then started reading media accounts of him in which I "learned" that no one knew what his positions were.

As some of my students would say: I was like, wtf?

I was also surprised ...

... by the number of people who said: well, all this bipartisanship stuff sounds very nice, but how do we know it actually works? Isn't this just happy talk that will evaporate in the face of reality? Or, alternately: doesn't this sort of thing involve selling our souls to our supposed partners in compromise? Curiously, Obama has an actual legislative record, and so it is possible for us to see both how he approaches bipartisan cooperation and what results it yields. And it turns out that Obama does achieve results by working with Republicans, and doesn't tend to compromise on core principles.

Last year, I considered some of his bipartisan initiatives in the Senate -- notably on nonproliferation and ethics reform -- and concluded that what Obama actually does has nothing to do with the sort of bipartisanship that people rightly object to:

"According to me, bad bipartisanship is the kind practiced by Joe Lieberman. Bad bipartisans are so eager to establish credentials for moderation and reasonableness that they go out of their way to criticize their (supposed) ideological allies and praise their (supposed) opponents. They also compromise on principle, and when their opponents don't reciprocate, they compromise some more, until over time their positions become indistinguishable from those on the other side.

This isn't what Obama does. Obama tries to find people, both Democrats and Republicans, who actually care about a particular issue enough to try to get the policy right, and then he works with them. This does not involve compromising on principle. It does, however, involve preferring getting legislation passed to having a spectacular battle. (This is especially true when one is in the minority party, especially in this Senate: the chances that Obama's bills will actually become law increase dramatically when he has Republican co-sponsors.)"

Consider a different example:

"Consider a bill into which Obama clearly put his heart and soul. The problem he wanted to address was that too many confessions, rather than being voluntary, were coerced -- by beating the daylights out of the accused.

Obama proposed requiring that interrogations and confessions be videotaped.

This seemed likely to stop the beatings, but the bill itself aroused immediate opposition. There were Republicans who were automatically tough on crime and Democrats who feared being thought soft on crime. There were death penalty abolitionists, some of whom worried that Obama's bill, by preventing the execution of innocents, would deprive them of their best argument. Vigorous opposition came from the police, too many of whom had become accustomed to using muscle to "solve" crimes. And the incoming governor, Rod Blagojevich, announced that he was against it.

Obama had his work cut out for him.

He responded with an all-out campaign of cajolery. It had not been easy for a Harvard man to become a regular guy to his colleagues. Obama had managed to do so by playing basketball and poker with them and, most of all, by listening to their concerns. Even Republicans came to respect him. One Republican state senator, Kirk Dillard, has said that "Barack had a way both intellectually and in demeanor that defused skeptics."

The police proved to be Obama's toughest opponent. Legislators tend to quail when cops say things like, "This means we won't be able to protect your children." The police tried to limit the videotaping to confessions, but Obama, knowing that the beatings were most likely to occur during questioning, fought -- successfully -- to keep interrogations included in the required videotaping.

By showing officers that he shared many of their concerns, even going so far as to help pass other legislation they wanted, he was able to quiet the fears of many.

Obama proved persuasive enough that the bill passed both houses of the legislature, the Senate by an incredible 35 to 0. Then he talked Blagojevich into signing the bill, making Illinois the first state to require such videotaping."

Getting legislation like this passed is a real achievement. Getting it passed unanimously is nothing short of astonishing. Mark Kleiman, who knows this stuff extremely well, put it best:

"1. Obama was completely right, and on an issue directly relevant to the more recent debates about torture. Taping interrogations is an issue that really only has one legitimate side, since there's no reason to think it prevents any true confessions, while it certainly prevents false confessions (over and above the legal and moral reasons for disapproving of police use of "enhanced interrogation methods").

2. Pursuing it had very little political payoff, as evidenced by the fact that Obama has not (as far as I know) so much as mentioned this on the campaign. Standing up for the rights of accused criminals in a contemporary American legislature requires brass balls.

3. Getting it through required both courage and skill. The notion that Obama is "too nice" to get things done can hardly survive this story: he won't face tougher or less scrupulous political opponents than the self-proclaimed forces of law and order. Yes, in this case the change was helpful to the cause of crime control, since every innocent person imprisoned displaces a guilty person. But that didn't make the politics of it any easier."

***

Similarly, people often wonder whether Obama's call for a new kind of politics is just empty words. Here again, I think he has a real record to point to. He has consistently worked for ethics reform. In Illinois, where he helped pass what the WaPo called "the most ambitious campaign reform in nearly 25 years, making Illinois one of the best in the nation on campaign finance disclosure." In the US Senate, he was the Democrats' point man on ethics, and was deeply involved in the ethics legislation passed this year. He didn't get all he wanted -- for instance, he and Russ Feingold couldn't get a bill establishing an Office of Public Integrity to deal with Congressional scandals. But he accomplished a lot, and wants to accomplish more.

Moreover, he is very interested in open government. The searchable database of government grant and contract recipients that I mentioned above is part of that. But Obama's proposals (pdf) go further. For instance, consider these proposals:

* Centralize Ethics and Lobbying Information for Voters: Obama will create a centralized Internet database of lobbying reports, ethics records, and campaign finance filings in a searchable, sortable and downloadable format.

* Create a Public “Contracts and Influence” Database: As president, Obama will create a "contracts and influence" database that will disclose how much federal contractors spend on lobbying, and what contracts they are getting and how well they complete them.

* Expose Special Interest Tax Breaks to Public Scrutiny: Barack Obama will ensure that any tax breaks for corporate recipients — or tax earmarks — are also publicly available on the Internet in an easily searchable format.

* End Abuse of No-Bid Contracts: Barack Obama will end abuse of no-bid contracts by requiring that nearly all contract orders over $25,000 be competitively awarded.

* Sunlight Before Signing: Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them. As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.

* Make White House Communications Public: Obama will amend executive orders to ensure that communications about regulatory policymaking between persons outside government and all White House staff are disclosed to the public.

* Conduct Regulatory Agency Business in Public: Obama will require his appointees who lead the executive branch departments and rulemaking agencies to conduct the significant business of the agency in public, so that any citizen can see in person or watch on the Internet these debates.

These are all proposals designed to allow public scrutiny of the business of government. As I read it, one of Obama's goals in introducing them is to permanently alter the incentives politicians have. As long as legislators did not have to disclose their earmarks, there was no way of finding out that the person who stuck a favor for an obscure casino in one state into an appropriations bill was from another state entirely. There was therefore no way for that person's constituents to wonder why s/he was expending political capital on people outside the district, and no way for reporters to see just who was doing that casino favors. Once legislators have to own up to their earmarks, however, that changes. It won't make abuse go away, of course, but it does make it a lot easier for people to notice and object to the fact that their representatives are doing inexplicable favors for people they have no obvious reason for caring about.

Likewise, if all bills had to be posted to the internet five days before they were voted on signed (oops), it would be much, much more difficult for Congress to sneak some appalling provision through in the dead of night. If all contracts over $25,000 had to be competitively bid, certain sorts of corruption would be a lot more difficult to carry out. And if there were a database of tax breaks and tax earmarks, not to mention a database of lobbyists, it would, again, be much, much easier to track who was doing favors for whom, and why. (And I haven't even started on Obama's proposals (pdf, p. 5) to strengthen FOIA: "Barack Obama would restore the tradition of free information by issuing an Executive Order that information should be released unless an agency reasonably foresees harm to a protected interest.")

I think of these proposals, collectively, as a means of empowering journalists, bloggers, and random citizens to discover corruption and the abuse of power, and to bring the power of shame to bear on politicians who practice it. This clearly isn't all that Obama means when he talks about changing the way politics is practiced in this country. But it's part of it. And I think it's pretty powerful.

***

I sometimes wonder why, exactly, people go on saying all this stuff about Obama lacking substance. Sometimes, I suspect it's just laziness, as in the case of this dKos story in which mcjoan, who is usually much better than this, lists a whole lot of questions she wishes the candidates would answer, apparently unaware that Obama (and, for all I know, Clinton), has already answered most of them. I suspect, though, that part of it might be the assumption that idealism is necessarily woolly and misty-eyed and all about singing Kumbaya, while realism is necessarily cynical and disillusioned.

I have never believed this. There are certainly hard-bitten, cynical people who don't think particularly clearly about the world (Dick Cheney leaps to mind.) More to the point, I can't see any reason why there shouldn't also be people who are both genuinely idealistic and hardheaded at the same time. I suspect Obama is one of them. I do not for a moment imagine that he is perfect. (Cough, clean coal technology, cough cough.) But I do think that he's one of the best candidates I can remember, and that's good enough for me.

Posted by hilzoy at 10:48 PM in Politics | Permalink

Attytood: A landmark day for bloggers -- and the future of journalism

Attytood: A landmark day for bloggers -- and the future of journalism


The George Polk Awards are kind of like the Golden Globes of American journalism . Not as well known as those Oscars of the news business, the Pulitzer Prize, the Polk Awards are nevertheless probably a close second in terms of prestige, and this year I am especially blown away by the quality of the work they honor.

I want to highlight one Polk Award that shows there are emerging models for using the very tool at the root of the turmoil of the news business -- the Internet -- as a newfangled way to re-invent investigative reporting -- by using new techniques that emphasize collaboration over competition and by working with readers and through collective weight of many news sources to expose government misconduct.

It would have seemed incredible a couple of years ago, but a George Polk Award was given this morning to a blogger.

Not just any blogger, of course. Josh Marshall (top, with his son Sam) of Talking Points Memo may have started back in 2000 as a kind of blogging stereotype, posting late at night from his small D.C. apartment and from the corner Starbucks and -- in just two years -- shining a light on the remarks that cost Sen. Trent Lott his GOP Senate leadership post, but he's turned his operation into much, much more.

Since 2002 Marshall has moved to New York and -- thanks to increasing ad revenue -- made Talking Points Memo into a new kind of journalistic enterprise for the 21st Century, hiring a staff of a half dozen talented young journalists and rewriting the rules with a mix of commentary and original muckraking while highlighting the work of other to focus like a laser on the big political questions.

Here's how and why Marshall and Talking Points Memo won a Polk Award today:

"His site, www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led the news media coverage of the politically motivated dismissals of United States attorneys across the country. Noting a similarity between firings in Arkansas and California, Marshall (with staff reporter-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood) connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush Administration's bidding."

Hopefully, this acknowledgment of what one savvy blogger and his team have accomplished is a milestone that will speed the day when mainstream journalists realize that the best kind of blogger like Marshall is truly one of our own kind, using new tools and a new way of thinking to break a news story that otherwise might have not been discovered.

How did Josh and his cohorts do it? Here's something I wrote last year during my media-reform period (kind of like Picasso's "Blue period," except much less impressive) that tells some of the story of how Talking Points Memo exposed the scandal -- the journalism they were honored for this morning. It's very long and is a little targeted toward the news geeks among us, so it comes after the jump:

One major accomplishment kicked off on Jan. 12, 2007, when a TPM blogger, Justin Rood, wrote of a surprising story in that day’s San Diego newspaper: The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California, Carol Lam, had been asked to step down. Rood knew, from TPM’s heavy coverage previously of the scandalous bribery case of Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, that Lam had prosecuted that case. Wrote Rood: “According to this morning's San Diego Union-Tribune, the White House's reason for giving her the axe is that she ‘failed to make smuggling and gun cases a top priority.’ But most folks the paper talked to -- supporters and detractors -- said that sounded like a load of hooey.”

In the pre-Internet era, such a story might well have died in the recycling bins of San Diego. But because of TPM’s background knowledge in the Cunningham case and its skeptical stance, it was more aggressive in questioning whether there was a connection between Lam’s ouster and her probe of powerful Republicans – and their friends in the defense contracting industry. So TPM did something that the San Diego paper wouldn’t be much inclined to do -- Rood, Marshall and their readers scanned the Internet to see if any other U.S. attorneys had been fired lately, and conducted research to find out if mid-term firings of U.S. attorneys were common. (They weren’t).

Within days, Rood had identified seven U.S. attorneys who were suddenly out of a job, “many under unusual circumstances.” Like the Lam case, each ouster had been the subject of an isolated story in a local newspaper; Rood was the first one to connect the dots. That same day, Jan. 16, Sen. Diane Feinstein gave a speech on the Senate floor raising the same questions that first appeared on the blog. Paul Kiel, another TPM blogger, seized on a comment made by Feinstein and produced a bona fide scoop: Republicans had snuck a provision into the supposedly anti-terror USA Patriot Act to bypass the Senate on new U.S. attorney appointments. It seemed suspicious – prosecutors being fired for cracking down on Republican corruption, and provisions being slipped into a bill to bypass a Democrat-controlled Senate confirmation process. Soon the story snowballed, leading to congressional hearings, the resignation of a top official in the Justice Department, and calls for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to follow suit.

Of course, as we all know, Gonzales is now gone, and the scandal remains the focus of investigation. What does the Talking Points model tell us for the future of journalism? Here's a couple of key points:

No pride of ownership. When the Washington Post reported, in February 2007, on the shameful care that returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan were getting at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the investigative series forced the White House and the Defense Department to respond to the national scandal. But its scooped rival, The New York Times, didn’t report a word about the story for a whole week. Meanwhile, most Americans were getting all the news that was fit to print about the scandal -- on blogs.

Such is the “competitive” nature of the mainstream media -- it is limited by the unwillingness to credit or even acknowledge important news reported in other newspapers. The truth is that newspaper reporters sometimes waste some of our increasingly valuable time, in our new downsized world, making a phone call simply to re-confirm what’s already been confirmed and printed somewhere else. Conversely, information that a reader would find interesting or informative is kept out of the paper -- just so a rival newspaper or TV station doesn’t have to be credited.

Newspapers, victims to decades of tradition, operate under the delusion that readers out there are making choices about which paper to buy based upon silly stuff -- “Wow, I’m going to start buying the Sun Times because they tracked down the accident victim’s sister who said she was really sad about her brother’s death, and the Tribune couldn’t find her.” Newspapers are too often self-absorbed – losing sight of their larger role of reporting news so we have an informed citizenry.

Blogs have no such hang-ups. In fact, the U.S. attorney’s scandal story was the result of a blog’s willingness to use and give full credit to a number of newspapers -- all of which had picked up one piece of a coast-to-coast puzzle. TalkingPointsMemo took the excellent, yet narrowly focused, work of daily papers like the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Albuquerque Journal, and -- augmented with its own digging -- fashioned it into a compelling story for its readers. TPM did that because it is driven by a desire to nail down the story by any means necessary, not by institutional loyalty.

220 heads are better than one. Jay Rosen, a press critic and a journalism professor at New York University (NYU), famously called the passionate blog readers “the people formerly known as the audience.” That’s because they are not just passive readers – they react, they mobilize, they comment and write “diaries,” and they make their voices heard. Sometimes they help do the research and reporting. For weeks, coverage of the U.S. attorney firings on TPM was propelled by tips from readers, some of them emailed to the bloggers and some posted as comments on TPM sites.

That came to a head in the darkness of a wintery Monday night, March 19, when the Justice Department sent over 3,000 pages to Congress – of emails, internal memos and other documents related to the dismissal of the U.S. attorneys. It was the kind of information that, in the pre-Internet days, a handful of newspaper reporters might have either skimmed for a quick headline or examined in-depth for a week, leading up to a long Sunday article.

Instead, the Marshall-founded TPMMuckraker blog went to work, asking readers for help in scrutinizing the PDF files of the documents that were being scanned onto the Internet in 50-page batches all through the night. Here’s what TPM blogger Paul Kiel posted at 12:51 AM that night:

Josh and I were just discussing how in the world we are ever going to make our way through 3,000 pages when it hit us: we don't have to. Our readers can help.

So here's what we're going to do. This comment thread will be our HQ for sorting through tonight's document dump. So pick a pdf, any pdf, and give it a look. If you find something interesting (or damning), then tell us about it in the comment thread below.

Please begin your comment with the pdf number and please provide the page number of the pdf.

As later recounted by Josh Gerstein in the New York Sun, by 4:30 AM, some 220 people had made observations. Most of the citizen postings went to the core of investigative journalism. These interested readers pulled out some good new detail about one of the other attorney firings, involving ex-prosecutor Margaret Chiara of Grand Rapids, Mich., and found other emails that pointed to much greater involvement by President Bush’s top political advisor, Karl Rove, than had previously been known.

Say what you will about the utility of experienced and highly trained professional journalists, but it would have taken one -- and that’s all that most newspapers would free up for such a story, if that many -- several days to achieve the same result.

Passion and drive. The Internet hasn’t improved everything but it sure has done wonders for the cause of investigative reporting. Good muckraking, after all, is driven by the thing that is missing from so much of today’s “fair and balanced” objective newspapers, and that is passion -- the passion of people who can reach more readers more quickly and more cheaply on the Web, the passion that is fueled by interaction with readers, and the passion of journalists or bloggers who want to work harder and faster because there are readers gobbling up their reporting as fast as they can dish it out.

That means that both the bloggers and their audience can revisit the issue throughout the day. I have worked the investigative beat at a big-city daily, and I know that a breaking scandal story can have a lot of incremental developments, when small nuggets of information slip out in a new document or in public testimony. These don’t lend themselves easily to newspaper articles -- sometimes they only merit a few paragraphs. But nuggets are ideal for a blog, which is the perfect format for a steady flow of information 24/7, so to speak.

In following and then becoming a part of the blogosphere over the last four years, I’ve seen this passion expressed in a lot of different ways -- for blatantly partisan motives such as electing more Democrats or Republicans, or for ideas, or simply for an un-objective kind of truth. But at newspapers, the only kind of passion usually found is driven by winning journalism awards – or maybe wanting one’s story placed on the front page and not Page 23. Unlike blogging, journalism is by and large a solo enterprise.

The beautiful thing about investigative reporting on blogs is narrowcasting, because a site like TalkingPointsMemo isn’t expected to be all-inclusive like the Washington Post or Time magazine. In the spring of 2007, Josh Marshall and Justin Rood and Paul Kiel and David Kurtz weren’t under any kind of moral obligation to cover all the news that’s fit to print about the French elections, the Virginia Tech massacre or even the mounting death toll in Iraq. Such issues were mentioned in short posts on occasion, but the bloggers knew that their readers -- and, frankly, the public record and ensuing debates -- were better served by running with the U.S. attorney’s scandal 24 hours a day. And why not? In a world of search engines and infinite cyberspace, any interested Web surfer can find the latest news from Paris or Blacksburg or Ramadi within a matter of seconds.

And now, some of the leading traditional journalists in America have acknowledged this. That's why it's a landmark day -- not just for bloggers, but for the news business.

cultus

tpm café

by David Headman

I'm a grad student studying Philosophy of Religion, and I had to write about the "cult" meme which is bouncing around lately.

This meme, started largely by Paul Krugman suggests that Obama's movement is a cult. There may be a grain of truth to this, but its a gross distortion. What Obama's huge crowds represent is not a cult, but a group of people engaging in the practice of cultus.

"Cult" in our current parlance, is used to refer to groups like the Branch Davidians, the Heaven's Gate folks, and Scientology, in which members are manipulated, controlled, and intimidated by an individual or small group of individuals. Cultus by contrast, is a term used in the study of religion to denote those ritual practices in which a community comes together to establish a collective picture of the world, themselves, and their place in it.

What ritual practice achieves is not, as some would have, a blind submission to authority or adherence to rigid and inflexible dogma. Rather, it is a collaborative process in which the community re-affirms the cultural values and ideals that they hold and the foundational narratives which help them to understand who they are as people. More importantly, ritual praxis involves creatively adapting those ideals to new circumstances and re-telling the narratives in such a way that they remain relevant. And perhaps most crucially, it is a process in which even apparently passive observers are crucial participants.

Ritualization is something all of us do in large and small ways, every day, whether we are religious or not, because it is the mechanism by which human beings inherently make sense of the world - It is a form of reason which functions differently to abstract rationality, but is no less adaptive and constructive.

Certainly, there are geniuses who have a unique talent for re-telling the American story in such a way that it can captivate and enthrall the nation. JFK was one. Regan, unfortunately, was another - and each is still practically deified within their party. These individuals often do aquire an almost religious following - because what they are doing is functioning as the high-priests of American Civic religion. But there is nothing irrational about that. People respond to them not merely because of their personality; rather, people voluntarily participate in the ritual and theater of the political process because they make the rational (if sometimes unconscious) judgment that the narrative which these leaders construct is uniquely fitting to the needs of the historical moment, and because it helps people to answer the fundamental existential question of who we are as a people, and what that means for how we conduct ourselves as a nation.

Presidents like that achieve with the bully pulpit what would be impossible for managers whose influence derives solely from having a steady hand on the levers of power in the bureaucracy. They re-frame the national dialog and re-shape the electorate.

Yes We Can -- Music Video by will.i.am

crooks & liars

Microsoft can't speak straight any more - Joel on Software

Microsoft can't speak straight any more - Joel on Software

Here's how Microsoft says, “SQL Server 2008 will be late:”

“We want to provide clarification on the roadmap for SQL Server 2008. Over the coming months, customers and partners can look forward to significant product milestones for SQL Server. Microsoft is excited to deliver a feature complete CTP during the Heroes Happen Here launch wave and a release candidate (RC) in Q2 calendar year 2008, with final Release to manufacturing (RTM) of SQL Server 2008 expected in Q3. Our goal is to deliver the highest quality product possible and we simply want to use the time to meet the high bar that you, our customers, expect.”

What? Can you understand that? “A feature complete CTP during the Heroes Happen Here launch wave?” What on earth does that mean?

The guy who wrote this, Francois Ajenstat, ought to be ashamed of himself. Have some guts. Just say it's late. We really don't care that much. SQL Server 2005 is fine. As Judge Judy says, “Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.”

Phil Factor explains:

Microsoft Boy announces his School Homework

Published Sunday, January 27, 2008 5:21 PM

Continuing in our series of attempts to imagine how Microsoft Marketing people relate to their fellow men outside work, we give you a glimpse of Microsoft Boy at school, before the start of his splendid career at Redmond.

Scene: The History lesson in school. The teacher wearily calls Microsoft Boy to his desk to try to discover where his homework is.
_______________________________________________

Teacher:

"Well, young William, (looks over his glasses severely) where is your homework? It should have been handed in today, I'm afraid."

Microsoft Boy:

(with a smug ingratiating smile redolent of sincerity) "The past week has been an amazing time for the me as I geared up to announce the delivery of my essay. The response to my announcement from friends and parents has been overwhelmingly positive – in fact, even my aunt Edith wants to read it. What is catching users' eyes? Legibility, correctness, conciseness….the list goes on and on. Simply put, this history essay is a significant release for me – one that builds on all of the great things that I was able to deliver last year in the Lower fifth. I see it as a critical step forward for my academic life here, and the foundation of the broader vision for my school career. Based on what we are hearing from people who have seen the current version of my essay, it seems that everyone agrees."

Teacher

(impatiently) "Well, that may be the case, but you haven't actually handed your work in. Where is it for heavens sake? The others have managed to hand their work in!"

Microsoft Boy:

(earnestly) Not surprisingly, one of the top areas of focus for me is always to deliver high quality homework, and in a very predictable manner. This is vital for my dazzling school career – which is why I've frequently discussed my goal of releasing my history essay within three months of the last one. I am on track to reach this goal. (folds his arms with a smile of achievement)

Teacher: (whilst rustling about, searching on his desk)

"I don’t see it, I really can't find your essay on my desk. It was supposed to have been handed in today."

Microsoft Boy: (sensing something not quite right in his relationship)

"To continue in this spirit of open communication between us, I want to provide clarification on the roadmap for my essay. Over the coming months, you, and the other teaching staff here can look forward to significant milestones in the delivery of my homework. I am excited to deliver a release candidate of the essay in a month's time, at Scout Camp, with final Release of the entire homework expected in another couple of months. My goal is to deliver the highest quality History essay possible and I simply want to use the time to reach the high bar that you, my teacher, has set."

Teacher: (Head in hands, dispairingly)

"I really don't understand. Have you handed in your homework or not?"

Microsoft Boy

"I have not, in any way, changed my plans for launching the essay today. What I have done today is to announce to you the delivery of my essay, and I'm proud to have met this target. Please keep the great feedback coming and thank you again for your ongoing support of my 'best-in-class' academic work!" (Proudly walks out of the classroom)

by Phil Factor

YouTube - Democratic Debate in Los Angeles 31st January

YouTube - Democratic Debate in Los Angeles 31st January