Tom Watson

Have You Ever Seen a Hangman Tie a Hangknot?

If there's one blog post you take the time to read today, it should be this one by Ezekiel Edwards on the DMIblog. Here's how it begins, but please read the whole thing. It's a stunner.

I am going to tell a brief story. Tell me whether you think it takes place in 1957 or 2007.

There is a small town of under 3,000 people. There is a high school in the town. There is a tree at the school known as the "white tree", because only white kids sit under it.

A black student asks school officials for permission to sit under the "white tree".  The student receives permission.

A group of black students then sit under the "white tree."

The next day, three nooses, in school colors, are hanging from the "white tree."

Read it all.

It's Grand to be Tom Watson

Oh, not me. Well it is actually, at times. Much of the time. Certainly when I'm with friends and family. Or behind a good book. Or in front of a decent ballgame. But not for the purposes of this post.

No, I meant this fellow. And this fellow as well.

The first Tom, who hails from Kansas City, showed his continued mastery of major golf tournaments in Britain, by winning his third senior British Open championship at age 58 yesterday. With his five regular tour Opens, that makes eight major titles in the British Isles for Tom Watson, my favorite golfer.

The other Tom, who hails from Britain, is a Member of Parliament, specifically a party whip for new PM Gordon Brown, he of the competent, Iraq-stand-down wing of the party. His political team easily swatted aside an over-hyped play for a by-election seat by the slick Tory leader David Cameron, and drove conservative UK bloggers nearly crazy in the process.

Well done, lads.

The Slumbering Mets

The sun and humidity broiled us in the bleachers at Shea Stadium yesterday, just as the hot summer is slowing a sluggish but talented Mets team this season. When Lastings Milledge and Ruben Gotay are carrying a team with Beltran, Delgado, Wright and Reyes on the roster, you know there's a cylinder or two not firing cleanly even while the Mets continue to cling to first place in the National League East.

Yesterday, it was Milledge and Gotay again - with the journeyman second-baseman getting the big hit to bring El Duque home a winner in the noon-time start. We got a great view of Milledge from the friendly bleacher nabe, in the shadow of the rapidly-rising Citi Field; he started in place of the injured (and frustrating) Carlos Beltran, a great player on his good days, but on the whole, a talented but desultory failure for the balance of his career, given his talent.

And really, these Mets mirror the strange and brilliant Beltran - sometimes, he embraces the big contract, the leadership role, the historic mold of a great New York centerfielder. But much of the time, he takes too many pitches, hits poorly with runners on base, and seems to want to blend in - to let others carry the load. And then there are those others, led by the would-be homegrown superstars Wright and Reyes, both of whom received that label before they'd earned it.

When the Mets held a contest to pick David Wright's "walk-up" song this year at Shea, I knew it was a case of too much, too soon. The kid has a $50 million long-term deal, endless marketing tie-ins, his own charitable foundation, and the role of matinee idol. Too bad he's not ugly - maybe he'd have the MVP  numbers to go with the hype. Not that he's bad - .295, 18 homers, 63 runs batted in - but that's Ty Wiggington territory, nowhere near Schmidt or A-Rod in the pantheon of slugging third-sackers.

Reyes is my favorite player. I love the enthusiasm and the talent, the clear love for the game. But like his mate on the left side of the infield, he's been more style than substance over the past month or so. His average has slipped under .300. He's getting thrown out on the bases. And he hits way too many fly balls, big-ass cans of  corn that have driven down his production relentlessly since May.

Delgado is on the down side, no longer a clean-up hitter and frankly, an easy out versus lefties.He's hitting .254, with 17 homers and 54 RBI. Shane Spencer territory, and not much defense. At 35, he's a number seven hitter or a part-time DH. Likewise, Paul LoDuca is showing a big drop-off from last season - .270, 5 HR, 31 RBI. Frankly, Ramon Castro is better.

The Mets are in first place because of their starting pitching, which has been very solid all year. Duque, when healthy, has been terrific (7-4, 3.02); yesterday at Shea, I enjoyed watching him set up the Nationals hitters, and talking with my kids about his guile and baseball smarts. He remains one of the best pitchers to watch in the game. Tom Glavine (in what is almost certainly his last year) has been better than serviceable (9-4, 4.51). The real story has been the rise of John Maine (11-5, 3.04) and the resurgence of Oliver Perez (9-7, 2.84) - two young guys who are now leading the staff. Add a healthy Pedro Martinez on Labor Day, and you can super-charge the rotation. The bullpen's been fine - not brilliant, but well above the average bunch of leaden arms and gopher ball servers that passes for a major league pen these days.

In today's Daily News, John Harper interviews Keith Hernandez, who nails the slumbering Mets. Sums up Harper:

Just when you think the Mets are shifting into a higher gear for the stretch run, they lose three out of four to the Pirates and Nationals, the dregs of the National League. August is only a couple of days away now and you wonder if it is ever going to feel quite like it did last year at Shea.

The pitching is fine, for the most part, but what is supposed to separate the Mets from the other contenders in this league is their ability to murder the ball like an American League powerhouse.

Which they're not doing. After taking the early afternoon game from Washington, the Mets stalled in the night-cap and lost. They seem incapable of building real momentum. And while they're still in first, the only relentless drive I can see in Flushing is on the part of the construction teams on the new stadium.

Jason Calacanis Has Fallen (And He Can't Get Up)

Jason Calacanis reminds me of those television actors who suddenly find their lives as popular series regulars too confining, too empty, too common. You know, like when Henry Winkler found Fonzie to be limiting his artistic brilliance, and lit out for the big screen.

My old Silicon Alley friend (and yes, we tangled, but that was long ago) throws up his hands today and bashes Facebook, Web 2.0 applications, friend requests, blog comments, and blogs in general. He basically says blogging is over. This from the man who made his fortune launching a successful series of niche blogs that AOL found compelling enough to fork over their millions for.

"Feels like the blog format is lost and adrift," he complains today on his own blog, where he's switched off comments and ended his years-long conversation with the common man. Jason's really steamed about comment spam, impolite posters and most of all, the insane number of requests for everything imaginable that he gets on Facebook.

I don't blame him, and I did notice from his Twitter stream that he's been bed-ridden with some hideous ague. That can make a blogging mogul cranky, fer sure. And comment spam is insidious and horrid. Facebook is in its learning phase as a platform; it is hard to take it all in.

Yet, who better to try than Jason Calacanis, a former New Yorker who went west and made his fortune; once a little guy himself from Brooklyn handing out xeroxed fanzines, an occasionally demented promoter who never took no for an answer. Now that gutty, driven guy (who beat the hell of out me a time or two) is too big for blog comments? Facebook requests annoy him? Geez man, let the antibiotic work before you go on a misanthropic posting jag, will you?

What really ticked me off about Jason's posts, though, was his utter dismissal from poolside about the possibilities of what I call "Facebook philanthropy" - which has tremendous promise in linking the net natives to real and compelling causes. I've written about it here and here. Quoth Jason:

Also, I've got my own causes that I don't have enough time for, so no, I really don't need the guilt trip of telling you I don't want to be in your group that's going to stop the suffering of [INSERT THE NAME OF YET ANOTHER GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO ARE SUFFERING TOO MUCH]. It's brutal. No one human can solve the problems of all humans but based on social networking I'm going to be presented with just such a challenge. What?!?!?! You are not going to join my group to clean the water, support free culture, stop the killing of INSERTSPECIESHERE, etc.

What a cold, rotten rant. I know for a fact, because I'm watching it happen, that people connecting other people (and generally, they're much younger and certainly more idealistic than either Jason or myself) is driving support to world-changing causes.

C'mon Mr. Calacanis. I know you really do believe in philanthropy and the power of the great networks to change the world. Don't make us ask what's Hawaiian for "cold-hearted miser?" A wiser man than either of us once wrote:

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Programming Note: Live Tonight at Newcritics

For your TV blogging pleasure, we'll be running a live-blogging bash over at newcritics tonight for AMC's fascinating new series on the advertising industry in New York circa 1960 - Mad Men. The first episode last week - all cigarette smoke and nyloned gams - was enough of a sweet period piece (and male fantasy, let's face it) to deserve more scrutiny. So tune your televisions to AMC at 10 pm EDT (check your local listings, as they say) and your blog machine to newcritics - links and witty banter are promised, but only if you're there.

Inside the Frozen Zone

Things have returned to near normal here in Manhattan after last week's fatal steam pipe explosion on 41st Street, a block and a half from my office. And yet yesterday, I was once again propelled into the frozen zone by a massive infrastructure failure.

Well, at least it wasn't a block away - it was 3,000 miles away in San Francisco, where a transformer explosion took out power to a good swath of downtown, including the data center 365 Main - which just happens to be the "home" of this blog. No data center, no Typepad, no blog. (Okay, you can save the snark about this author's summer doldrums and his rather occasional posting of late).

The outage occasioned a good post by the always-incisive Om Malik, once he was freed from the gloom of a stranded elevator car.

Whatever the reasons behind the failure might be, yesterday was a rude reminder of how fragile our digital lives are.

The seemingly invincible web services (not to mention the notional wealth they signify) vanish within a blink of the eye. It was also a reminder, that all the hoopla around web services is just noise - for in the end the hardware, the plumbing, the pipes and more importantly, the power grid is the real show.

Malik points out  - as Lindsay Beyerstein has here in New York to any bloggers who care to listen - that the nation's aging infrastructure is a decided competitive disadvantage, and one that the politicians never seem to  focus on (who can forget Mayor Bloomberg's sigh of relief at the podium that last week's paralyzing and fear-inducing in midtown was only our pesky infrastructure again).

Blackout veterans in New York know well the relative age of our power grid, but it's the same story across the country, even in the high-tech mecca of the wired universe. Yet, as Malik says:

...we continue to bet our future on this creaky house of cards. That’s like building a Taj Mahal on quick sand. And that is one sinking feeling - the same one I got in the 100 odd seconds I found myself stuck in the elevator to nowhere this afternoon.

Which clever Presidential candidate will propose an Eisenhower-like public works super-project to modernize the power grid (and improve its environmental standards) while protecting the American position in high-level Internet development and business creation?

That Old Familiar Feeling

We heard the rumble and thought it was thunder. Then it went on for a while and I said to Phil Li: "Wow, I hope that's thunder." The we looked out onto Second Avenue and saw people running ... very clearly running away from something big and bad and rumbling to the west. Then we all ran, just as the alarms began to go off.

Down seven flights, out onto Second Avenue, down to 41st where we looked west and saw a massive rolling plume of smoke and steam just two blocks away, blotting out the public library. And the never-ending thunder rattled off the limestone facades and glass curtain walls.

So we went east through Tudor City, took a breath, and I suggested the plaza at 43rd and First across from the UN - I knew from my lunchtime walks that it was a full story below where we stood and was encased in a sheath of concrete and granite. "Let's stay together," said Susan. So we hustled over there, not quite as panicked as before. I was thinking about that rolling plume, and I as pretty sure it was going up and not out. A transformer, or a big pipe.

Con Ed and not al Qaeda. Pretty sure. Like 80 percent sure. But we waited a while just to be sure. The rumble quieted, the cell phones began to work again, and news drifted in. An underground fire, an explosion, a huge steam pipe. Injuries and closed streets.

Now 99 percent sure, we walked back to work through the crowds and flashing lights and barricades and put on the television. A hell of an explosion. A miracle that no one was killed at rush hour.

The subway is closed but the trains are running. I'm sitting in an air-conditioned car right now in Grand Central, waiting to head home. Cool and calm. But also reminded, quite clearly, of what went on before.

You could feel the panic; it was an instantaneously communicable disease that swept the stairwells and streets. We sucked it in like air. People screamed. "It's coming! Run! Oh my God!" There were tears and prayers and then some embarrassment after - better that, better a few laughs really.

The city felt brittle in a flash-frozen instant. Very brittle.

UPDATE: One dead, 11 hurt. And I'm realizing listening to the passengers around me that if you were close enough to feel that roar, to link it to the sound of collapsing buildings and that rolling, boiling cloud, you were scared. You were one of thousands who fled, either in panic or some form of semi-controlled flight. Farther away, you were just concerned. It works like that.

Mind The Gap

So the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 14,000 today and across zillions of flat screens came the breaking news. Was there ever a bulletin so devoid of meaning? The asset class with asset classes already knows up to the minute or so what its money is doing. And for the rest of the nation, fourteen thousand doesn't carry much zing. The Dow is an indicator of one group of investments - the stock of thirty large public companies - but it's not an indicator of economic wealth.

Tonight on Hardball, Chris Matthews asked Democratic candidate John Edwards a good question:  "Can you get an audience for poverty or are people too obsessed with the Dow Jones going up?"

Edwards said yes, and pointed to the rare instance in our public consciousness when Americans did face up to the fact that in history's richest country, many still live in real, gut-clutching poverty. He referred to New Orleans, of course, where nearly three years ago now government abdicated its responsibility and where entire neighborhoods continue to lie in ruin and decay. Edwards is trying to broaden the attention paid to American poverty with his eight-state anti-poverty tour - and to zap his flat-lined poll numbers in the process.

Good for him. One of the little-reported stories in this country is "the gap." Working poverty in our culture is like cancer and not just because it's spreading - because everyone knows someone who's living in it. Perhaps it's a poor relation, or an employee, or the guy running the little store down the block who works 15-hour days and has no savings. Or it's you.

As Edwards said today in Cleveland: "Poverty has many faces. It's everywhere."

I've been thinking about this a lot, especially this summer, as people who can move to take their ease.  The other day, I was having a beer with a Jed Emerson, a brilliant guy who coined the term "blended value" to measure investments where the return isn't just monetary (sometimes this is referred to as the double bottom line and it's a driving force behind the social ventures movement). We were discussing all the innovations in American philanthropy, the large-scale commitments, and some of the hurdles that remain before putting money to work for a better society becomes a more widespread notion. He asked me what I worry about and I hesitated a bit - but I had to mention the gap between rich and poor in the United States. All the best-funded social movements will founder if it continues to expand, and public attitudes will harden and yes, react.

As Edwards said on his tour: "People who are working and trying to do everything they can to support their families are living at or near the poverty level. And that's not right."

I've seen this in some of the research conducted by the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a progressive think tank where I sit on the board. DMI frames its policy reports around the middle class broadly defined, with a strong focus on the working man and woman. It's not a socialist or anti-capitalist notion to worry about the distribution of wealth and its current lack of balance. James Webb, one of the more conservative Democrats in the Senate, answered George Bush's state of the union address this year by arguing that the "measure the health of our society not at its apex, but at its base. Not with the numbers that come out of Wall Street, but with the living conditions that exist on Main Street."

No less of a sturdy capitalist than the country's richest man explicitly agrees. Giving the Harvard commencement address last month, Bill Gates argued that "humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity.  Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement." His godfather in wealth accumulation (and bridge strategy), Warren Buffett, has repeatedly called for keeping the American tax on inheritance to redistribute wealth and encourage meritocracy; doing otherwise, he argued, would be like "choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in the 2000 Olympics."

David Mixner, whose blog is a wonderful read (if just for the Walden-like wildlife tales), sees trouble brewing on our social commons and I'm inclined to agree. Mixner fingers the stingy minimum wage as major policy culprit, and makes a strong point:

Most Americans desire the dignity of work and are desperate to improve the lives of their children. They work long hours and still are unable to find shelter or feed their children...The fact is that some of the poorest people in America are its ‘working poor’. These are Americans working for the minimum wage, with no insurance and no daycare for their children.

Ah, insurance. That's where the growing restlessness out there among Americans who realize they've been voting against their own economic interest, those many millions who feel left out of the glitzy new Gilded Age chronicled so brilliantly in Robert Frank's Richistan, may well hang the noose over the heads of politicians. John Edwards is right to call attention to the poverty in America that's hardly lurking in the edges, but lives in plain site. As Edward Wolff, a New York University professor and expert on the wealth gap, told USA Today last fall: "If you don't counteract the extreme inequality trends, I see some social upheaval coming. That's my worst fear."

Wolff is far from alone, and closest safety valve is health care, which devastates the uninsured and burdens a fraying system ill-prepared - even with a boom in philanthropy - to overcome. My not-so-bold prediction here is that some of the biggest, wealthiest names will reach for that steam-lever in this election cycle to avoid societal blowback. The wealth gap is putting universal health care back on the table, and don't be surprised if it gathers steam well before next fall - with some very prominent and successful capitalists behind it.

Reclaiming the Left

As befits a Presidential campaign that's being run within a percentage point or two of perfect (though it's early and the bunker-busters have yet to be launched from the self-hating right), the people coordinating Hillary Clinton's outreach to the progressive blogworld are personally low-key. There are no grandiose schemes, no complicated maneuvers, no gee-whiz applets, no daily release of Facebook numbers and MySpace metrics.

Call it the Dao of Daou.

The candidate speaks for herself; the platform is powerful but invisible. The strategy is so simple, it's transparent, there for all to see. I'm amazed at how well Clinton is doing with the netroots crowd - a wonderful roiling mob I can claim tangential membership in - and how her campaign has moved the needle on the left. That's Peter Daou I refer to, as insiders know, the former Salon.com blogger and online coordinator in '04 for Kerry-Edwards. So far, Daou and his team have had a fairly singular mission - reclaim goodwill on the left for Hillary Clinton and blunt the phony right-wing talking point that had unfortunately infected many a groovy progressive (that HRC isn't electable).

It's working. Today I joined a conference call of lefty bloggers organized by Peter to announce a super-secret, mystery endorsement of Senator Clinton. So I hopped on like a good lad, and soon heard the Hardball-tested tones of Ambassador Joe Wilson describing why he - adored symbol of the angry, blogging left  - was a Clinton man, through and through. I swear some poor soul forgot to mute and her  "wow!" slipped through.

Now, the average American could care less about a July endorsement from some peripheral figure in the long history of the scandalous disaster known as the Bush Administration. Niger, Schmiger. Then again, the average American doesn't yet know there's an election on next year. No, that doesn't matter. What matters is that Wilson was direct in why he loves Hillary: he believes she's the Democrat most likely to effectively bring the troops home from Iraq.

Dig it. The Clinton campaign in a single call for a bunch of lefty bloggers went directly at the toughest single criticism lobbed by my lefty friends (some of who are to the right of me, by the way) at the Senator. They went right at it. A small chapter overall, but in the blogworld, it was basically the equivalent of George Brett pulling 98-mph Gossage heat into the upper deck (I was at that game, so I know). Via press release, it was just another endorsement. Via exclusive blogger call, it was a moonshot.

From the faux Sopranos "campaign song" video (note that we haven't heard the Celine Dion dreck since it was chosen by lurking Republicans) to the decision to speak at YearlyKos, Clinton hasn't wilted under the glare of the antiwar, angry left. She's gone at it, talked through it. Not the perfect candidate perhaps (but I'm an 80-percenter anyway, entirely jaded, ready to settle for the least disastrous choice) but the near-perfect campaign.

I didn't have time to write this up earlier, which is fine because I've had the chance to see the reaction. Taylor Marsh, for instance, has clashed with Dauo. But here's what she said today:

Clinton has come a long way in understand the blogosphere even in the face   of huge criticism and sometimes out and out bias on the blogs...The '08 selection season is not over by a long shot and I am staying neutral in the primary. But the endorsement of Clinton by Joseph Wilson is a big step for her campaign. That Clinton offered the scoop to a group of bloggers shows just how far she's come and how far she's willing to engage a community, which on the whole is very critical of her on all fronts.

I have noticed some change out there. The rhetoric at DailyKos has lightened (especially in comments) and FireDogLake is positively pro-Clinton. Greg Sargent at TPMCafe analyzes the Wilson endorsement:

A few quick points about this. The Hillary campaign, which rolled out the Wilson news on a conference call with liberal bloggers, clearly hopes the Wilson endorsement serves at least the partial goal of winning over liberal activists and netroots types who might still be unhappy with Hillary for all the reasons you've heard repeatedly by now. Wilson carries great cache among such folks, who were energized by his speaking out against the administration and everything else that happened as a result of his protracted fight with the White House.

It's interesting, then, to note that the primary reason Wilson cited for backing Hillary is her view of what should happen after the war -- her awareness, as he sees it, of the need to end the war "in a way that preserves some shred of our strategic position in the region." This, of course, touches on the whole residual force debate, which ironically is something Hillary has taken heat for from bloggers and others whom the Wilson endorsement is most likely to impress.

More from Dave Johnson, Tom Burka, Steve Clemons, and Jeralyn Merritt.

The Event of the Summer

Springfield TW, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

No, it's not Harry Potter (though Lance argues otherwise, quite eloquently) - it's the arrival on the big screen of television's greatest franchise. I decided to join the crowd at Moe's a little early. (Hint: you can too).