Daily Archives: February 2, 2004

Cheney Says

This entry was posted in cheney on by

Mad Kane published an interview with Dick Cheney earlier today. Here is a sample:

CHENEY: I deny everything.
MADKANE: Everything?
CHENEY: Everything.
MADKANE: Do you deny that you went duck hunting with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia?
CHENEY: Absolutely.
MADKANE: But Mr. Vice President, even Justice Scalia admits that you two went duck hunting together.
CHENEY: Never heard of the man.

Sounds about right.

Rejections, more Rejections

This entry was posted in Writing on by

For you writers and writer wannabees here are some first hand experiences to help you through your formative submissions. For example:

Thank you for sending your essay “Catching Up.” I apologize for the long delay in responding. As much as I enjoyed it, I’m afraid I don’t have any room right now to buy a first-person essay. We are chuck-full, and turning away even pieces we like.

Yep, I like that ‘turning away even pieces we like.’
More importantly, though, is this post from Theresa Nielson-Haydon where she applies her professional experience to helping us understand the context of rejection letters:

A major portion of it is devoted to writers anonymously posting rejections they�ve received, and commenting on how it made them feel. I do understand their need to vent, and some of their lamentations made me feel genuinely sympathetic. Others didn�t have that effect.
What would I know about it? Simple. I�m one of those evil SOBs who rejects their manuscripts.

As usual she does into great and entertaining detail.
What do you think rejected ones? Or, for that matter, accepted ones?
Via Boing Boing.

Food for Thought

This entry was posted in dean Democrats Election 2004 Internet on by

One possible reason Dean looked so good and then fell so hard in Iowa and New Hampshire:

Given the relentless hammering he took from the media, Dean was lucky to get 26% of the New Hampshire vote. Even so, Dean may be done for. Or, more to the point, done in. Some will say that he strung his own rope, but it looked more like a media lynching to me. Assuming I’m right about this, why did television want to hang Howard Dean?
I may have an answer. It may be that, once again, we have met the enemy and he is us. By pre-announcing the possibility that this might be The Internet Election, we issued fair warning both to the traditional media and the big money politicos that a threat was at hand.
If Dean could actually raise enough money online to match in aggregate the much larger and fewer donations Bush has bought from the plutocrats with his tax cuts, it would shake the system to its rotten core. Worse, if information from the Web and the Blogosphere were to start defining enough personal realities to contest the great mass of tube-zombies at the polls, the gazillions presently spent on television campaign ads would start to wither. An enormous amount of power and money might be at stake.

Of course, anything this short must be out of context, or incomplete, if it was written by Barlow. So, read the rest.
The Barlow link is via David Isen who is concerned about the implications of Dean’s new campaign manager:

Howard Dean, the erstwhile “Internet candidate,” urgently needs to explain to his core Nethead constituency why Joe “Nethead” Trippi is out and Roy “Bellhead” Neel is in. Neel was president of the US Telecom Association (USTA) in the late 1990s….
But now, unless the Dean campaign does something immediate and heroic to shore up its Nethead core, it is time to “Move On.”

I think that it is pretty clear that a candidate who tries to rely only on ‘netheads’ will not be viable. ‘Netheads’ do not encompass a large enough part of the voting population yet. But watch 2012 and beyond.
The Isen link is via Lawrence Lessig.