Tom Watson

I'll Be Your Mirror

The targeting on Facebook advertising is starting to annoy me. Then again, I have only myself to blame. After all, the basic value of the Facebook experience is simple: you tell them everything you can  bear to about yourself and create a list of your "friends." Then you read about what those friends are doing. How can you be surprised when the advertising widgety gurus in the Facebook lab create an algorithm that spits back a version of you - the improved if you buy our products you.

Hence, the hideous targeted advertisement to the left. Which hit me flat in the, er, gut today at about 3:37 just as I perused the 30 or so friend requests I can't make heads or tails of in my Facebook queue.

Honestly, you don't enter your height or weight in the little Facebook query form, so how did they guess? I joined no Forty-something and Flabby groups. My photo is discreet. Was it all those Big Bill Broonzy songs in my iTunes playlist?

Or were they just playing the odds of date of birth, 1962.

As I've long argued, the privacy debate is over - has been since the 90s or before. Everything we purchase is tracked or logged or dumped into a database; swipe cards - from bank cards to EZ-pass - track our movements. Cell phone bills show our migratory patterns. And just wait till the new GPS numbers. There are security cameras is every building in midtown, a camera on every corner, every stop-light. Our web surfing tracks are rubbed in digital brass. Email is forever. And as we know, the telecom companies will turn over the records to any tinhorn who happens to ask, Federal warrants be damned. Hell, even the Democratic nominee for president, a man seeking to undo the horrors of the Bush years, agrees with it.

So I long ago decided to try and embrace this public stance, to give up on digital privacy and enjoy the increased communications and the new relationships that social networks can provide. But now, this targeted ad for green tea and a flat belly and has riled me. I have no beefcake aspirations, Facebook. Turn off your evil machine and keep your "abs" to yourself.

Nor Was I Aware of Any Coveting...

“I’m aware that there is killing in the game. I wasn’t aware of the stealing.”

- Brenda Stanhouse, in testimony during a lawsuit involving hidden sex scenes in the hit video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which she bought for her 15-year-old son.

New York Times Right-Wing Sex Columnist Maureen Dowd Is Censured

Last November, I wrote to the public editor of The New York Times about the sickening behavior of one its star op-ed columnists, Maureen Dowd:

Mr. Hoyt,

I am well aware that opinion columnists in The Times are granted  more leeway in their writing than reporters. Even so, tomorrow's Maureen Dowd column on the sexual roles of the major Democratic candidates for President is well beyond the pale for a family newspaper, and for any paper of national repute that claims to be a major voice of the republic.

Her explicit and wholly imagined "account" of the sexual motivation behind how the candidates behaved in a televised debate brings nothing but shame to the Times, and betrays the newspaper's long-held responsibility for public discourse. Her two-bit "analysis" of a specific sexual fetish as the reason for the candidates' lively give-and-take during the CNN debate coarsened that discourse and the reputation of The New York Times.

How can a paper like The Times continue to run these strange sexual imaginings week after week and refer to them as political coverage? What a disgrace.

Sincerely,

Tom Watson
Mount Vernon, NY

I got no response - until Sunday. As Greg Sargent at TMP said, "it was pretty gratifying to see that Times public editor Clark Hoyt weighed in yesterday with a piece aggressively attacking Dowd's coverage of the Dem primary." Hoyt's attack on Dowd was tough, to the point, and stingingly effective - how can her letter of resignation not be on editor Andrew Rosenthal's desk this morning, after the thorough ethical knee-capping her own paper delivered?

Dowd's columns about Clinton's campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that Times article on sexism, right along with the comments of Chris Matthews, Mike Barnicle, Tucker Carlson or, for that matter, Kristol, who made the Hall of Shame for a comment on Fox News, not for his Times work.

"I've been twisting gender stereotypes around for 24 years," Dowd responded. She said nobody had objected to her use of similar images about men over seven presidential campaigns. She often refers to Barack Obama as "Obambi" and has said he has a "feminine"management style. But the relentless nature of her gender-laden assault on Clinton - in 28 of 44 columns since Jan. 1 - left many readers with the strong feeling that an impermissible line had been crossed, even though, as Dowd noted, she is a columnist who is paid not to be objective.  

Over the course of the campaign, I received complaints that Times coverage of Clinton included too much emphasis on her appearance, too many stereotypical words that appeared to put her down and dismiss a woman's potential for leadership and too many snide references to her as cold or unlikable. When I pressed for details, the subject often boiled down to Dowd.

[snip]

Politically correct is never a term one would apply to Dowd’s commentary. Her columns this year said Clinton’s “message is unapologetically emasculating,” and that she “needed to prove her masculinity” but in the end “had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim.” In one column Dowd wrote, “She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.”

“From the time I began writing about politics,” Dowd said, “I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.” Now, she said, “you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I’ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves.”

Aulisio, the reader who wanted a review of Times coverage, asked if a man could have gotten away with writing what Dowd wrote. Rosenthal said that if the man had written everything Dowd had written over the years and established himself as a sardonic commentator on the sexes, “I’d say the answer is yes.”

Of course, there is no such man, and I do not think another one could have used Dowd’s language. Even she, I think, by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top this election season.

That folks, is utter editorial slaughter - the destruction of the columnist's reputation within the halls of the very newspaper she writes for (and it did no good for editor Rosenthal's rep, either). But, as Digby said so well, Dowd had it coming - and for a long, long time:

...the question isn't whether she should have treated Clinton any differently. It's that her entire worldview is toxic, both culturally and politically. She uses explicitly sexist and homophobic imagery that favors traditional authoritarian leadership to explain politics. She gets away with it because she has a rapier wit and is a physically beautiful person, thus insulating herself from the kind of criticism others would receive for writing this crud. But in truth she's a walking anachronism, more like a character in Mad Men than a modern sophisticate.

She is considered by many to be the top political columnist in the country (and her columns are often the most emailed articles in the Times.) Certainly she is Village Royalty. And that is undoubtedly one reason why people like Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson felt that it was perfectly acceptable to say the things they said during this campaign. She's their misogymuse.

It's long past time Dowd was called on this by someone other than filthy bloggers like me. This is a decent start, but until people realize that her "twisting of gender" is anything but benign good fun, we're going to be stuck battling this nonsense back no matter what kind of appendages our candidates might (or might not) be sporting.

This is a welcome development in the nation's leading political newspaper. As long-time commenter Bruce B. says, Dowd's behavior toward Senator Clinton was "despicable."

UPDATE: As Bob Somerby notes, Hoyt gets results. But what a take down!

E Pluribus Obama

Owl-eyed Clarence Page nailed his line in a single take on this morning's gabfest of aging Georgetown media machers - paraphrasing roughly (I'm a mug short of my Sunday caffeine subscription) the resolutely unobjectionable talking head opined on the McLaughlin Group that the only thing that may lay Barack Obama low is "overconfidence." Now, Page  - who wears the word "mild" like a hand-tailored suit - would never advance as far as "hubris" in describing the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, but damned if that intemperate word wasn't on the lips of so many Democrats I spoke to this week.

Some were shocked - shocked!- to see Obama tack right in supporting the so-called "compromise" legislation that absolved telecoms from any culpability in routinely engaging in warrantless eavesdropping on telephone and computer lines in the United States. Everyone with even the slightest political pulse knew Senator Obama would fly to the center the second his nomination was assured; that is to say, expect no Senatorial oratory that will please the left on security issues. No, the FISA vote wasn't even a small surprise - nor was the lefty blogosphere's schizophrenic reaction to it - disgust from the tough Glenn Greenwald wing and semi-apologies with the mildest of tsks elsewhere.

Then there was the change of direction on public financing - a decision met with cheers from bloggers, who, after all, really want to win. I confess some sympathy with that point of view, and it does warm a Democrat's heart to support a candidate so singularly focused on winning, damn the torpedoes - and I'm lucky to be supporting my second such electoral killer this cycle! Hell, it's a been a few years since we ran one of these types, never mind two. So when David Brooks expresses mock surprise at discovering that Senator Obama is a tough-minded Chicago politician not averse to a little bare-knuckle work around the political heavy bag, he thinks he's exposing some kind of downside to our man. To that I say, "ha!" I was a Clinton supporter, remember - I already knew Obama had an old-school machine pol's streak of very effective bad humor - a willingness to drop the hammer on anyone in his way - indeed, I love it when he lands a good one. (And by the by, who among us didn't love Michelle Obama's George Jefferson line - brilliant).

No, Page's mild warning today stirred one image - and one image only - from this past week: the Great Seal of Obama. Whatever agency geek employed by the relentlessly corporate Obama image-makers came up with that loon-ball idea should be sent packing, account under review as they say. The Great Seal of Obama looks like one of those semi-patriotic T-shirts the folks at Warner Brothers put out from time to time featuring Bugs and Daffy as furring founding fathers. It's not offensive really - well, maybe over at The Corner, but who cares? But it is sorta goofy - or rather Goofy, a weird, blue-shaded Disneyland version of the real Presidential seal. To see it is to laugh at it: the urge to mock your own side rises of its own accord to the throat. This is not a good thing for very serious presidential candidate. And it makes you wonder. Perhaps the DNC should consider staging a genuine facsimile inauguration ceremony in Denver, followed by a parade past Coors Field and a series of not-inaugural balls in the better taverns in town? Better yet, let's repaint the Obama campaign plane in ersatz Air Force One livery.

OK, the Great Seal's really funny and Barack Obama is running well ahead of Senator McCain. And clearly, Obama can afford a silly moment or two of laughable hubris. I happen to think there's no way McCain beats him even if names Eliot Spitzer to his ticket - none at all. Obama is a much better candidate, this is a Democratic year. Change abounds.

Then again, I thought the same thing in 2000. And in 2004.

UPDATE: No more yucks. Marc Ambinder reports that Team Obama is dropping the Great Seal: "Some Obama aides are enraptured by the idea of an Obama brand that transcends politics; others, including most of those who are actually close to the candidate, are much, much more concerned with the type of hubris that all the talk of an Obama brand actually encourages." We'll take that latter group of advisers, please.

Not the Jackie Robinson Way

The New York Mets are building a grand monument to National League baseball next to the 7 Train in Queens, replete with a soaring entry rotunda along along Roosevelt Avenue. The rotunda is to be named for Jackie Robinson, that timeless New York baseball presence, and a moral leader even 35 years after his death. The Wilpon family can go ahead with their ceremonies honoring Robinson, with their statues and their plaques as they open the terribly named "CitiField" next spring - but as they made clear about about 3 am this morning they don't know very much about Jackie Robinson and how he lived his life.

Firing Willie Randolph, a proud son of New York, the city's first black manager, a great player on the field and gentleman off the field is bad thing indeed. But firing him in the dead of night by cowardly communique after making him fly across the country to manage one last game, after allowing him to dangle in public for weeks, after showing him no respect for his accomplishments or station or persona at all...well...that's a baseball obscenity, in my book.

Look, Randolph may not have been a brilliant manager, but he was a good one; he did hold the second best record in Mets history after Davey Johnson. Randolph was stoic and taciturn, a Gil Hodges rather than a Billy Martin, and his city roots in the housing projects of Brooklyn and the infield of the Bronx should not be dismissed. At 53, he was trying to turn the Mets around after their 2007 collapse, just  a season removed from their heart-breaking NLCS playoff loss - and he was ticketed to coach for the National League at next month's All Star game at Yankee Stadium, a fitting career moment for a man like Randolph.

This was a moment of disgrace for the Mets franchise, for the discredited and cowardly Omar Minaya, and for the Wilpon family, owners in stock certificates but not in spirit. As a lifelong Mets fan who was born the day the first pitchers and catchers reported for spring training, this is second in karmic catastrophe only to the dumping of Tom Seaver in June, 1997.

This is an old Mets lineup aside from Reyes, Wright and Beltran and thin in starting pitching; it's slow, below average in the field, and doesn't hit in the clutch. Outside of Santana, the starters are either old and injured or youngish and erratic. It's the talent, it's the roster. And it's the upper management of this pathetic franchise - here's ESPN's Buster Olney, one of my favorite baseball scribes:

Even the writers of "The Sopranos" could not have invented a more recklessly handled hit. The process really started after last season's collapse, when Minaya -- who came to the Mets having been promised full autonomy and, for more than a year, has had all the power of a marionette -- first regressed into lawyer-speak. "Willie is the manager," Minaya said over and over, as if repeating the phrase would somehow give the crafted but flimsy words backbone and fool anyone into thinking that Randolph wasn't one really bad day away from being fired.

He's exactly right. And then there's Bill Madden of the Daily News, a hard-boiled throwback, who said that "in the history of New York baseball, there has not been a more cowardly, indecent, undignified or ill-conceived firing of a manager."

Yeah, the Mets will dedicate their new Jackie Robinson Rotunda next spring with soaring words about character and courage. But last night, the owners and executives who will utter those words defiled the memory of the very man they will try to honor - and if Jackie Robinson were still with us, he'd reject the Mets and their fancy new "Citi" field.

UPDATE: I love this post from Jason over at the aptly-named Faith and Fear in Flushing blog, so here's a healthy dose - but go read the whole thing, which hammers the middle-in fastball on the screws:

The people who run the team to which we give an unhealthy portion of our lives are stupid, brutal cowards.

[snip] 

I've thought for a while that Willie Randolph's tenure as manager of the Mets should be over. But I've thought so reluctantly, mindful of a good man who's seemed every bit as tormented by the last 10 months as we are. And it never occurred to me that the Mets would handle his dismissal in a way that a kind person would call jaw-droppingly incompetent and a less-kind person might call deliberately low and vicious. The just-hired entry-level guy at a downsizing firm -- the one who gets the news from the HR harpies instead of from the boss -- got more consideration and kindness than the Brooklyn native who managed the Mets to within one gapper of the 2006 World Series.

It's embarrassing to be a Met fan today. Embarrassing, humiliating and infuriating. That's not a unfamiliar feeling as a Met fan -- I've seen Tom Seaver exiled to the Midwest, de Roulet era crowds that barely broke four figures, Vince Coleman throwing explosives at children...

Leaving the Scene Too Soon

My office political buddy - the one who helped me get through Florida '00 - called me with the news even before it broke this afternoon. "You won't believe it, Tim Russert died," she said. Russert's sudden death at only 58 is a tragedy for his family and friends, and it also marks the passing of perhaps the signature personality of the era of what Jim Wolcott affectionately termed the "attack poodles" of talking head TV. The man quite literally was the rock upon which the modern television punditocracy of political insiders was constructed. We all loved to bash Russert, of course. Hell, I did it just a month ago when he declared the Democratic primary race over. But he did define his era, the latter stages of the long and vital period when television dominated national politics. Its hold has begun to slip as online voices rise, but you'd have certainly wished Tim Russert another 20 years or so of tough questions, Sunday morning roundtables, and that little chalk board. The timing is so damned difficult as well - certainly for a well-known family man who wrote so popularly about fatherhood. But for the rest of us, there's this crazy election. Russert's absence creates a huge void at the center of mainstream political media. And come November, who'll tell us who won?

UPDATE: Joe Gandelman has one of his patented wrap-ups along with his take on Russert's importance. Blue Girl offers an amusing personal story. Jane Hamsher has the essence.

About That Book...

You may remember a post back in late January where I let slip that your host was embarked upon his first book - that posts in these parts would be rather thin for a period of months. Well, that didn't work out. The titanic primary race intervened and I felt compelled to follow its course in public. Nevertheless - he begins with a triumphant pause - the writing proceeded in frenzied weekend bursts, hour upon long hour, and so this week, I turned in the first draft of my manuscript for CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World, to be published this fall by John Wiley & Sons. Despite the short time frame, I'm moderately pleased with it, although with a topic like this one, the reporting is never done; the online social activism sector advances every day. I have also restarted the book's blog over at CauseWired.com and  urge you to add it your various feed readers, blog rolls, email subscriptions, and online touring schedules. And, if you feel so inclined, you can pre-order a copy right now - this very moment! - from the comfort of our keyboard. Note: Clinton supporters get a 34% discount. Obamacans should buy two.

McCain's Supremes Defeated, Habeas Corpus Becomes Law Again

Asked about his model Supreme Court justices during one of the four dozen Republican debates held under a model of Ronald Reagan's plane suspended from the ceiling in Simi Valley's RonnieLand Park, Senator John McCain easily barked the names Roberts and Alito as ideals of the robed upper classes. Well, today McCain's models of right-wing judicial intervention bit the dust - along with the clownish knee-jerk automatics Scalia and Thomas - as the U.S. Supreme Court returned habeas corpus to precedence. In the matter of defendants held without charge or representation in Guantanamo Bay, the Court declared Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 unconstitutional.

Mark ye well those Democrats among us who would reach angrily for the McCain lever because of some all-too-real slights and trickery in the primary past by the DNC and others. Remember that John Paul Stevens is 88 and let spite not guide your voting hand. Hear Glenn Greenwald:

In upholding the right of habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees, the Court found that the "Combatant Status Review Tribunals" process ("CSRT") offered to Guantanamo detainees -- mandated by the John-McCain-sponsored Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 -- does not constitute a constitutionally adequate substitute for habeas corpus. To the contrary, the Court found that such procedures -- which have long been criticized as sham hearings due to the fact that defendants cannot have a lawyer present, government evidence is presumptively valid, and defendants are prevented from challenging (and sometimes even knowing about) much of the evidence against them -- "fall well short of the procedures and adversarial mechanisms that would eliminate the need for habeas corpus review."

The stain of Gitmo has tainted our national colors long enough. Remember what's at stake in this election. Senator Clinton certainly does.

My Alma Mater Is Sold...

My degree is postmarked Morningside Heights, but I really went to school in the Bronx. As the greenest of rookie reporters, I found myself at a gun metal desk next to a chain-smoking managing editor one warm day in the summer of 1984, supplied by the proprietors of The Riverdale Press with a notebook, a telephone and a typewriter - and a small stipend they creatively labeled a salary. In truth, I could have paid them to work at The Press and still remained ahead in the bargain, for it would be difficult to find a better education in the practice and ethics of journalism than to toil as a youngster in that smoke-filled room, and on the streets of Riverdale and Kingsbridge and Marble Hill in the northwest Bronx.

But more even than journalism and its practice, that education stamped me with the permanent ink of experience in the whirling struggle of  real people, from mayors and prosecutors and party bosses to teachers and cops and business owners. After a year or two in the newsroom of The Riverdale Press, nothing in life was sociological theory ever again. Everything was real. And that was the great lesson: as a journalist, you were playing with real people's lives - and those lives, by and large, were a struggle, whether they lived in a mansion overlooking the Hudson River in the landmark district or in a drab apartment off a graffiti-stained hallway stinking of stale urine in the housing projects.

Lord, the times we had! As my friends know, I sometimes sound like Scrooge recalling Old Fezziwig's when I start in on those Bronx years - but could there have been a better place to report politics in the late 1980s than New York's only mainland borough? It was a world of picaresque venality and larger-than-life personality. And that was just the politicians: our crew at the paper had some cherished characters as well. And I recalled some of my friends from an earlier age when I read this week that The Press has been sold, particularly Ceil Stein, who founded the paper with her husband David in 1950 and passed it to her sons. I remember Ceil, who worked at the paper till she as 90, standing in front of the charred offices that terrible day in 1989 when the newspaper was firebombed by terrorists into smoldering ruin. Offices destroyed, computers melted, morgue a smoking cinder. And we didn't miss an issue. I always chalked that up to Ceil Stein's evident willpower.

Buddy Stein won a Pulitzer for his editorials a decade ago, and he and his brother Richard have always kept the paper to the highest standards of community journalism - and it was they who provided that education to this green-gilled amateur a score and some years ago. So when I read about The Press being sold to Richner Communications, a fine outfit based in Garden City also run by two brothers who carried on their parents' tradition, it was like the last notes of a long song finally fading into the dusk. But what a song.

Reminder: It's Movie Night

Don't forget tonight's kick-off edition of Lance Mannion's Wednesday Night at the Movies, Lance's virtual film fest over at newcritics tonight. We kick off at 10 pm EDT in the comments section of Lance's upcoming post on the first of five Oscar-nominated films from 1967, The Graduate. Watch the flick - or some portions on YouTube (the Cliff Notes of virtual film fests) or just plumb the depths of your movie-going memory. And ask yourself that age-old question: who's the older-looking "college student," Dustin Hoffman or Leo Gorcey in Hold That Line?  Rack up the Simon & Garfunkel platters on the turntable and check on the your plastics futures - but by all means, be there.