Author Archives: DaveMaxfield

Conservatives Win Pyrrhic Victory in Facebook War

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Facebook has caved in to conservative demands that it revamp its Trending Topics feed. Brian Fung describes how the algorithm works:

To be considered for a place in the Trending Topics portion of the site, a topic must generally be mentioned 80 times per hour or more. Facebook takes steps to exclude repeated events that don’t constitute news, such as the hashtag “lunch,” which usually produces more activity during lunchtime, the company said in its letter.

I’m glad to see that Facebook is on top of this. However, I suspect that conservatives are going to be disappointed in the results. Facebook has agreed to stop using external news sites to help it decide which topics are truly trending, and this is likely to have two effects: It will make the Trending Topics feed (a) stupider and (b) more liberal. After all, if you rely entirely on Facebook users, you’re relying on an audience that skews young and college educated. How likely is it that this will favor stories about Agenda 21 and Benghazi?

Visit site: 

Conservatives Win Pyrrhic Victory in Facebook War

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Conservatives Win Pyrrhic Victory in Facebook War

Flint Mayor Ordered Staffer to Divert Charitable Donations to Her Campaign Fund, Lawsuit Claims

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In November, Flint residents elected a new mayor, Karen Weaver, who promised to help solve the city’s lead crisis and hold local authorities accountable. Now, she’s mired in a controversy of her own.

On Monday, former City Administrator Natasha Henderson filed a lawsuit in US District Court against Weaver and the city of Flint, claiming she was wrongfully fired after raising concerns that Weaver was steering donations for Flint families into a campaign fund. According to the complaint, Henderson was approached in February by a tearful city employee, Maxine Murray, who told Henderson “she feared going to jail.” The mayor, the suit claims, had instructed Murray and a volunteer to direct donations from Safe Water Safe Homes, a fund created to repair antiquated plumbing in Flint homes, to a campaign account called Karenabout Flint, and give them “step-by-step” instructions on how to make a donation.

As CNN notes, “Karenabout Flint” is not a state-registered PAC, though “Karen About Flint” was the mayor’s campaign slogan, Twitter handle, and campaign website. According to the lawsuit, Henderson, the city’s top unelected official, reported the matter to Flint’s chief legal council in February and requested an investigation. Three days later, she was terminated on the account that there was no room in the city budget to fund her position—though Henderson noted that her position was funded by the state. The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read the full complaint below.

DV.load(“https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2828814-Henderson-vs-Weaver.js”,
width: 630,
height: 500,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-2828814-Henderson-vs-Weaver”
);

Henderson vs Flint and Weaver (PDF)

Henderson vs Flint and Weaver (Text)

Link to article – 

Flint Mayor Ordered Staffer to Divert Charitable Donations to Her Campaign Fund, Lawsuit Claims

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, solar power, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Flint Mayor Ordered Staffer to Divert Charitable Donations to Her Campaign Fund, Lawsuit Claims

Why Hillary Clinton Needs Martin O’Malley to Run for President

Mother Jones

One Democratic source tells me that Hillary Clinton’s camp has sent a clear message to former Gov. Martin O’Malley (D-Md.): Challenge her for the Democratic presidential nomination and you’re dead to us. Another source says that the Clinton crew has sent a different clear message to O’Malley: Feel free to take her on in the primaries; she could use the competition. I don’t know which source is correct. Perhaps both are, for Hillaryland may well be populated by advisers and strategists with different takes on this question. But it does seem clear that Clinton, who finally jumped into the 2016 race with a tweet and video splash on Sunday, could benefit if she is challenged in her party’s primaries by O’Malley or someone else.

There’s about nine months to come before the first voting occurs in the Iowa caucuses—and 19 months until the general election. That’s a long time. Clinton, who is hardly a fresh face, will find it tough not to appear stale to some voters during that stretch. She is already at a super-saturation level of media coverage. There are endless tweets, blog posts, and articles about every aspect of her campaign. All her moves—her logo!—receive inordinate press attention. Though she and her aides insist this race is not about her—it’s about everyday Americans and how to improve their lot—the campaign is likely to be much ado about Clinton: how she campaigns, what she says, what’s her vision, where she goes, how she’s performing, what’s her strategy, what’s up with her husband, her connection with voters, her trustworthiness, her likability, and so on. Her every utterance and move will be dissected everywhere—again and again. (And the various dissections will be dissected.) On the Republican side, all the 2016 wannabes will be directing attention at her, as they each angle to be seen as the candidate best able to obliterate Clinton. Sure, the GOPers will eventually form a circular firing squad—they won’t be able to resist the urge to attack one another—but they will direct many shots at Clinton. The around-the-clock Hillary Bashathon will never end.

It would be tough for any candidate to withstand this degree of hyperscrutiny for such an extended period. Might voters become bored with Clinton, through no fault of her own, before any voting starts? Might her message, whatever its merits, seem tired and worn out by then? If the Democratic half of the 2016 primary story is only about Clinton going through elections and caucuses with preordained results and being compared solely to herself, that will likely not engage undecided voters. What’s exciting or interesting about a cakewalk and no substantial debates over political qualifications and important policy matters?

Clinton needs a foil in the Democratic primaries—someone she can joust with, someone who will expand the narrative, and someone she can beat. Waltzing through one election after another will not boost her commander-in-chief credentials. A fight or, at least, a tussle—even a lopsided one—will give her campaign more of a story to tell, and, presuming she wins the primaries, will position her as, well, a winner, not a candidate who is skating toward the general election on the easy ice of entitlement and inevitability. Barack Obama’s ability to dispatch Clinton in 2008 demonstrated his moxie and his mettle. His glow intensified with each victory. Everyone likes a winner, right? And these battles were great training for the match-up to come against Republican John McCain. Clinton will not face as formidable a primary foe as Obama did. But a face-off against any opponent of consequence is better than a breezy promenade toward the main event.

O’Malley, who’s considering a presidential bid, would make a good sparring partner. He’s a smart guy with sass, but he’s not a slasher who could inflict long-lasting political damage. In fact, the clichéd conventional wisdom about tough primary contests pulling candidates too far toward an ideological extreme and hurting nominees in the general election may not hold true. In 2012, Mitt Romney did veer far to the right to capture the Republican nomination, and McCain also sucked up to conservatives in 2008—and both men were harshly assailed by their party rivals during the nomination phase—but each still had a fighting chance in the general election that came next. Both were undone by errors made in the postprimary period rather than decisions and dustups of the primaries. General election voters have short memories—or don’t bother to pay a lot of attention to the nomination battles. If O’Malley manages to score some points against Clinton, they would probably matter little after the convention.

Clinton’s rival need not be O’Malley. But the choices for this spot are limited. James Webb? Lincoln Chaffee? Bernie Sanders (who’s not a Democrat)? It may be tougher for any of them to engage her in a serious fight. O’Malley, too, is not likely to threaten her path toward that glass ceiling. But at the moment he seems the possible contender with the most oomph.

A primary battle—even a limited one—introduces risk into the equation. It’s not hard to imagine Clinton and her strategists yearning for less uncertainty than more. (What if O’Malleymentum takes off?) And the Clintonites may not have a say in whether O’Malley enters the ring. Yet a primary fight that makes Clinton earn—not inherit—the nomination would cast her in a different role. She’d be a fighter, not a dynastic queen. The press and the public would have something to ponder beyond just Clinton herself. And all politics are relative; candidates usually look better when compared to another candidate rather than to a nonexistent ideal or even themselves. So perhaps Team Hillary should welcome the upstart Marylander into the contest. A slam dunk is more impressive when waged against a competitor, and even the Harlem Globetrotters needed the Washington Generals.

This article is from: 

Why Hillary Clinton Needs Martin O’Malley to Run for President

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Hillary Clinton Needs Martin O’Malley to Run for President

It May Finally Be Time for an Independent Kurdistan

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Iraq’s civil war may be a humanitarian crisis for most Iraqis, but for the Kurds in northern Iraq it represents an opportunity:

By every measure, the Sunni militants’ lightning advance through Mosul and on south toward Baghdad has been a disaster for Iraq. But it raises possibilities, many of them good ones, for the Kurds, who already have a great deal of autonomy in the north. If they can defend their borders and not get dragged into a bloody stalemate between the Iraqi Army, along with its Shiite militia allies, and the Sunni militants, the Kurds could emerge empowered, even, perhaps, with their centuries-old dream of their own state fulfilled.

As the Sunni militants seek to erase the border between Iraq and Syria that the colonial powers drew after World War I, the Kurds want to draw a new one, around a stretch of territory across northern Iraq. The ultimate goal is even more ambitious: to unite the Kurdish minorities from four countries — Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran.

Jonathan Dworkin, an infectious diseases doctor who has written about Kurdistan for me at the Washington Monthly blog in 2006 and then again here at MoJo in 2011, believes that the dream of a multi-ethnic Iraq is at the root of our failure there:

A more creative American policy would acknowledge the reality of what the Kurds have built, which is a prosperous and peaceful nation state in the mountains of Northern Iraq. It’s a nation whose soldiers and diplomats worked amicably alongside Americans through all the darkest episodes of the Iraq wars. It’s a nation where not a single American soldier died during ten years of bloody military involvement in Iraq, despite occasional terrorist attacks.

….The usual criticism of the view that Iraqis would be better off apart is that the regional neighbors would never allow it. In the case of the Kurds, that basically means Turkey. But the situation between Kurds and Turks has changed a lot in recent years. Last year a pipeline was completed that will allow Kurds to export oil directly to Turkey, bypassing Baghdad and greatly enhancing their economic independence. As one Turkish official involved in the oil deal recently put it in a Washington Post article on the topic, when it comes to Kurdish independence, Turkey “has bought that option.” No doubt many in Turkey would prefer the status quo to an independent Kurdistan, but the economic boom in Sulaimania and Erbil is evidence itself that money is trumping ideology in Turkey.

There are practical benefits as well to an independent Kurdish state. Kurdistan would provide America with one good ally, rather than a series of fake ones. The Kurds already field a tough and self-motivated defense force to counter terrorist threats from neighboring parts of Iraq, and unlike our allies in the Persian Gulf, they have been a consistent enemy of Al Qaeda in all its varied permutations. Their government would provide useful intelligence and a quiet diplomatic channel to Iran. Importantly, they would free us from the absurdity of supporting yet another Arab dictatorship. Maliki would become Iran’s problem, which is appropriate, as he is largely their creation.

Back in the day, Joe Biden was a proponent of creating a loosely federal Iraq, with Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite states that had considerable freedom from central control in Baghdad. There were, and still are, a lot of problems with that idea, but an independent Kurdistan would be the easiest first step. For all practical purposes, Kurdistan has been operating independently for years; it’s stable and prosperous; it has a working army; and it’s strongly pro-American. Figuring out the borders would be a challenge, but not an impossible one. If it’s really true that Turkey wouldn’t go ballistic over the prospect (out of fear that it would cause internal problems with its own Kurdish population), it’s a prospect worth considering. And Karl Vick of Time reports that it really is true:

The transformation of Turkey from enemy to key ally of Iraqi Kurdistan is almost complete, removing a key obstacle to the dismemberment of Iraq as Sunni Muslim extremists gain territory in a nation ruled by a sectarian Shiite Muslim government.

“It’s a fact that the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq is the best ally of Turkey in the Middle East,” says Dogu Ergil, a political science professor at Istanbul’s Fatih University who specializes in what Turks call “the Kurdish question.” “Once it was a formidable potential enemy, because Turkey feared a basically independent Iraqi Kurdistan would be an attraction center for the Kurds of Turkey. But it proved that it’s not so, and Iraqi Kurds could be the best economic partners of Turkey.”

Perhaps an independent Kurdistan is a more realistic possibility than most of us think.

View original: 

It May Finally Be Time for an Independent Kurdistan

Posted in alo, ATTRA, Casio, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on It May Finally Be Time for an Independent Kurdistan