The Enlightened Redneck

Posted on 03.11.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 1:37 pm

In my new role as the editorial director of Digital Society, I’ve been focused like a laser on high-speed Internet the past few weeks. The FCC will be releasing its national broadband plan in six days, so leaders of the commission have been making the rounds on the speaking circuit to promote pieces of the plan.

The central message of the plan is that all Americans need broadband access — Commissioner Michael Copps this week even joined the chorus of people proclaiming it as a “right” — so the government must take steps to ensure that the poor, minorities, the elderly and, yes, rednecks in rural areas are enlightened by the Internet.

The FCC is so committed to selling its plan that Chairman Julius Genachowski spoke to the Country Music Association’s board of directors at its meeting in Washington yesterday.

Of course, country bumpkins are way too backward to understand the high-tech lingo of the FCC, so Genachowski’s staff translated his speech into “Nashvillese” that features country music titles:

When I think of those “Country Roads” and “Wide Open Spaces” without broadband, I “Fall to Pieces” and say that’s “Crazy.” We need to address these “Unanswered Prayers.”

As FCC chairman, I have friends in high places and “Friends in Low Places,” and I’m pulled to and fro on policy issues, but “I Walk the Line.” That’s because telecom politics is like a “Ring of Fire.” First I have Senator Rockefeller telling me about a “Coal Miner’s Daughter” who can’t get wireless service in some “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” Next, “I’m on the Road Again” to where “The Grass is Blue” and “A Boy Named Sue” stops me and says we need super-duper fast broadband all the way from “Boulder to Birmingham”” — and beyond, to “Galveston” and “El Paso.” He complains that his slow dial-up service can’t get to “Amarillo by Morning” and laments that America has gone round and round for years without a National Broadband Plan and plaintively asks, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”

I explain — to the “Boy Named Sue” — that this issue is “Always on my Mind” and the lack of a plan should not make him “Hurt” or a “Man of Constant Sorrow” with his “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” Instead, I tell him to “Take it Easy” — “Don’t Rock the Jukebox” … just try to “Keep on the Sunny Side” and dream “Sweet Dreams” — because A National Broadband Plan is coming. Next week.”

Don’t you feel so much more enlightened about broadband now?

The Blog Bash At FreedomWorks

Posted on 02.19.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 9:47 am

Conservatives are the talk of the town in Washington this week because of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that started yesterday, and FreedomWorks joined the festivities by hosting a “blog bash” at its headquarters last night. My wife and I were there.

Hot Air has the proof in picture. By sheer luck, we happened to be chatting with James Joyner of Outside the Beltway when FreedomWorks honored Ed Morrissey of Hot Air as its “Blogger of the Year.” My hot wife, Kimberly, is in the hot pink blouse in the right of the photo, and I’m the dude next to her having a really bad hair night. (I really need a haircut!)

Kudos to my friend Ed for the much-deserved honor. He also will be honored as CPAC’s “Blogger of the Year” today. Ed was one of the first bloggers I met after starting Beltway Blogroll for National Journal in 2005, and he is among the most thoughtful and fair-minded bloggers on the Web. If you don’t already read Hot Air, now under new management, then you should.

I blog there occasionally myself in Hot Air’s Greenroom. I just posted an entry there this morning in my new role as the editorial director of the free-market think tank Digital Society. The topic is the left’s spooky vision for media reform. Here’s an excerpt:

It took 90 minutes but Tuesday evening’s panel discussion about the future of news ultimately devolved into a predictable attack by media “reformers” on commercial media and communications companies that see the Internet as their “plaything.”

The panelists — Robert McChesney and John Nichols of Free Press, Jane Hamsher of the blog Firedoglake, and Ivan Roman of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists — all said their ideas for media reform depend first and foremost upon winning a fight for control of the Internet. Their idea of victory is government oversight and massive federal spending. …

McChesney accused phone and cable companies of having a business model aimed at “buying off politicians.” He called them monopolists who want “to take over and effectively privatize the Internet, make it their private plaything.”

McChesney’s rant against an imagined “rip off” perpetrated by “commercial media” is consistent with his oft-stated (but under-reported) “ultimate goal” of dismantling the capitalist system in general and getting rid of the “media capitalists” in particular. His perverted vision of a “free” press features a government that has regulatory and financial influence over both the infrastructure underpinning journalism and the people producing it.

Read the whole thing, and stay tuned to Digital Society for analysis of technology policy and how it can help or hurt America’s burgeoning digital culture and commerce.

Filed under: Blogging and Family and Government and Media and News & Politics and People and Technology
Comments: None

Two Cents On The Rubio-Crist Race

Posted on 01.12.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 12:35 pm

The battle for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Florida also has become a battle for the soul of the GOP. It pits grassroots conservatives who support underdog former state House Speaker Marco Rubio against establishment Republicans, including the campaign arm of Senate Republicans, who are backing “Republican in name only” Gov. Charlie Crist.

One of those grassroots conservatives literally shared his two cents with the National Republican Senatorial Committee when it asked him for money. The picture of his protest is priceless:

Michelle Malkin regularly posts images of such “rejected solicitations.” Political activists surely have protested in similar fashion for decades, but their messages are reaching broader audiences thanks to the Internet. Instead of one secretary seeing the protest and tossing it in the trash, thousands of readers are hearing stories that the intended recipients don’t want told.

Hopefully the bad press will awaken organizations to the reality that they had better represent the interests of their donors.

Filed under: News & Politics and People and Photography and Technology
Comments: None

Read The Capitol Hill Tweet Watch Report

Posted on 01.04.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 5:35 pm

It’s time for a bit of self-promotion: “Danny Glover is the new editor of the Capitol Hill Tweet Watch Report.”

That’s the big announcement in today’s edition of the aforementioned daily newsletter, which tracks all things policy and politics on Twitter for the Beltway crowd.

My friend and new media maven David All launched Capitol Hill Tweet Watch Report last month, and I eagerly accepted his invitation to start the new year as its editor. Here’s a snippet from the blurb about my new gig:

The year 2009 marked the emergence of Twitter as a valuable news barometer on Capitol Hill, and with more lawmakers, congressional aides, policy experts and journalists embracing the medium, 2010 promises to be a milestone year in the Twitterverse. I’m thrilled to be starting the year as the new editor of Capitol Hill Tweet Watch Report to help chronicle the news for you.

Serving as your editor is a natural outgrowth of my tenure as the author of Beltway Blogroll for National Journal from mid-2005 to early 2008. Just as the blogosphere was an unfamiliar world in official Washington back then, Twitter is now. But Twitter will quickly become just as important and influential in policy and political circles this decade as the blogosphere did in the 2000s. I’m here to try to help you make sense of it all.

If you want to push a policy message, bolster a political brand, float a trial balloon or just comment on the news of the day, you should be doing it on Twitter. But even if you haven’t figured out just how to use the tool yet, you need to be aware of how others inside the Beltway are using it to accomplish their goals. That’s why Capitol Hill Tweet Watch Report is here.

While the publication is geared toward people inside the Beltway who don’t necessarily use Twitter themselves, it’s also a useful publication for anyone who wants to keep tabs on the policy and political news in the Twitterverse. If that includes you, please subscribe to the daily e-mail, follow @tweetwatch on Twitter, and spread the word about the publication.

Filed under: Blogging and Government and Media and News & Politics and Technology
Comments: None

Chris Needham Is A Bigot

Posted on 12.24.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 9:44 pm

Save for the name, I used the headline above back in April for a post about actress Janeane Garofalo, but sometimes simplicity, and redundancy, make a point. And Chris Needham of NBC Washington — like Garofalo and others who arrogantly trash rednecks and hillbillies and West Virginians and people in “flyover country” — is a bigot, plain and simple.

Needham typically covers sports but apparently thought it would be a fun journalistic change of pace to cover a completely foreign topic, e-government in West Virginia, and in the process insult an entire group of people — my people.

“West Virginia Discovers the Internet,” he mocked in the headline. He then derided the Mountain State as “our yokel neighbors to the West” and told lies about her people living in “tar-paper shacks,” lacking electricity and “pooping in the backyard.” (Note to Needham: The word “West” isn’t capitalized when it’s a directional reference rather than a reference to the states in the West. We yokels learned that in journalism school at West Virginia University.)

NBC quickly yanked the article, but thankfully, West Virginia native (born and raised just a few miles from my home town, Paden City) and fellow journalist Jacque Jo Bland posted the screen capture linked above on her blog, Girl of Words, for posterity. She also smacked down Needham quite effectively, and considering that Bland and I followed similar paths to where we are today, all I have to say is, “What she said!”:

Someone as poor, disadvantaged, backwards and well, stupid, as me got to the same city you did. Ouch. You didn’t think a place like D.C. hired toothless, cousin-molesting inbreeders from West Virginia, did you?

Oh, and Chris? I’m not the only one. Several of your colleagues in this city are native West Virginians. None of us are too pleased with you right now.
(more…)

Filed under: Culture and Hatin' On Rednecks and Media and People and Technology and West Virginia
Comments: 2 Comments

Oreos For The Heart

Posted on 12.16.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 9:02 pm

I awoke at 6 a.m. Sunday with an excruciating pain in the left side of my torso. It radiated from back to front and worsened as time passed.

I almost had my wife take me to the emergency room for fear of a heart attack, but the pain suddenly stopped after about three minutes. I decided to wait a day and call my cardiologist’s office for an opinion on what to do next. The nurse practitioner, who only a few weeks earlier had given me a thumbs-up at my annual check-up, didn’t seem worried because I didn’t have any shortness of breath or other symptoms, but she scheduled a precautionary nuclear stress test today.

I had a stress test once before, so I was surprised to learn I couldn’t eat anything after midnight the night before. When I got to the office, I learned why — a nuclear stress test is different from the standard treadmill stress test.

The doctor’s aide shot radioactive blood into my veins, which then traveled to my heart so they could get pictures of it. After the first set of pictures, I had to run on the treadmill until I felt like I was going to collapse (it didn’t take long for an out-of-shape, work-at-home journalist). Then I got to eat a snack before one more round of radioactive photography.

That brings me to the Oreos I mentioned in the headline. When I returned to the waiting room to get the aforementioned snack, I was surprised to see snack-sized packages of Oreos as an option.

I woke up Sunday morning thinking I was having a heart attack, and three days later, my cardiologist offered me fat- and sugar-laden cookies as a snack. Tell me how that makes sense.

I ate Cheez-Its instead. They aren’t much healthier, but it just felt wrong to this enlightened redneck to eat Oreos at a heart-checking station.

As for my heart, the aging kicker appears to be in good shape. I’ll have a follow-up appointment with my cardiologist next week, but I was told a doctor would be reviewing my heart snapshots today, and if anything required immediate attention, I would get a call. I never did.

Filed under: Family and Food and Technology
Comments: None

Climate Alarmists: We’re Melting!

Posted on 12.14.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 2:33 pm

As I noted early this year, the information age has transformed photography and graphics in amazing ways. There are abundantly creative ways to capture the fascination of readers and viewers.

I see images almost daily that wow me with their ability to tell a story in a snapshot. I’m especially fond of graphical satire — and I love it when people find ways to use an image created for one purpose to illustrate a story that makes a competing point.

If pictures have that impact on me, I figure all of you other enlightened rednecks might appreciate them as well. That’s why I started the feature Photoshop Stop, but it has been a while since I’ve posted any content there. The drought ends today, with the image at your right.

Filed under: News & Politics and Photoshop Stop and Technology
Comments: None

Mark Cuban Is An Enlightened Redneck

Posted on 12.05.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 4:18 pm

That’s the only explanation for the what-will-I-think-when-I’m-90 test that the technology industry entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner applies to decisions he faces in life:

Before I do any of the many things that I get asked to do, and that I think might be fun, I have one simple question I ask myself. When I hopefully turn 90 and look back at my life, would I regret having done it, or not having done it?

Only an enlightened man would think something so profound rather than acting impulsively. But only a redneck billionaire would accept an invitation to appear on World Wrestling Entertainment’s RAW after deep thought about the opportunity.

Cuban has been a guest character in WWE events before. His lifetime resume also includes his own short-lived reality show, “The Benefactor,” and an appearance on the reality show “Dancing With The Stars.”

(Hat tip to Outside the Beltway)

Filed under: Business and Entertainment and People and Rednecks and Sports and Technology
Comments: None

Mike Huckabee: Unfit To Be President

Posted on 12.05.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 12:00 pm

Outrage and insights in a 140 characters or less (most of the time). This is a weekly recap of topics that capture my fancy. To get your fill of my rants on a daily basis, follow The Enlightened Redneck on Twitter.

Much to the chagrin of many fellow conservatives, I supported Mike Huckabee for president in the 2008 Republican presidential primary.

The news this week that he granted clemency to a man who years killed four police officers in Washington state, and Huckabee’s comments after the news broke, made me change my tune. I still like Huckabee, but I don’t believe he has the judgment to be president.

Here is what I had to say about the matter over a series of tweets: “Mike Huckabee freed a man now suspected of killing four cops. He no longer looks as presidential to me. … Huckabee dodges responsibility, blames “Arkansas” (and Washington) for freeing a man suspected of kiing four cops. What a cowardly statement from Huckabee. I expected better of him. He made a huge mistake and should own up to it. … ”

And here are some redneck rants on other topics:

Leave it to the perverts in Hollywood to pervert a classic children’s Christmas cartoon, “Frosty, The Snowman.”

“Crashing a White House state dinner, and then bragging about it on Facebook, is really, really dumb.” Jail time?

Fact of the day, just heard on the news: Tiger Woods makes more in 60 seconds than he had to pay as a fine for his car accident.

Joy Behar thought Black Friday was racist until her black co-host, Whoopi Goldberg, enlightened her — for real. That reminds me of the “pot calling the kettle black” episode with Omarosa Manigault Stallworth on “The Apprentice.”

The U.N.’s alarmist-in-chief flew at least 443,243 miles in 19 months to decry global warming. Can you say “hypocrisy”?

At least 22.6 million reasons why ClimateGate matters to taxpayers (via @donsurber). I suspect there are many more.

Wanna run for Congress? Join the roster of candidates in non-existent districts. Only dead people vote there!

Deer own this country. America needs more hunters.

Twitter is the top word of 2009, beating Obama. Stimulus is No. 4. Obama-mania is No. 2 phrase; Obama is top name.

Today, ignorant people are afraid of Twitter; in the Civl War Era, they were afraid of telegrams.

Today’s media market in brief: Detroit got a new newspaper last week; it suspended publication this week.

I’m wondering whether the FTC news workshop is going to be a forum for media dinosaurs to bash bloggers for two days. Paul Steiger of ProPublica, the first speaker, took multiple jabs at bloggers in his opening statement. … The current panel is a portrait of what’s wrong with journalism — media dinosaurs who resisted new media until it was too late.

Filed under: Entertainment and Government and Human Interest and Hunting & Guns and Media and News & Politics and People and Redneck Rants and Sports and Technology and Wildlife
Comments: None

The Path To Media Failure

Posted on 12.04.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 12:59 am

Newsrooms all across America are celebrating this holiday season just like they did last year’s — by handing pink slips to loyal employees. Layoff news has become so common that it’s a wonder there is anyone left to report the actual news.

Sadly, the people who run the media show still seem clueless about how they arrived at this depressing point in journalism history. Given every opportunity to embrace emerging technologies to improve the news product, they not only resisted change but scoffed at bloggers and others who led the way. Now they are firing the very people within their own organizations who could help them right the media ship.

Here is one telling report from Chris Gray Faust, a long-time journalist who had the foresight to learn new skills but was still shown the door:

[W]hat bothers me the most is what my firing represented. See, I’ve been learning all the tricks that a modern multi-platform journalist is supposed to know. In the past 22 months, I’ve blogged, tweeted, shot photos and videos, and handled speaking engagements. I edited my section, managed my high-personality staff and then in my spare time, I wrote cover stories — something that very few other editors at USA Today do. I hustled and I cajoled, and I ended up out on my a** anyway.

I’d like to think her story is the exception to the rule, but it’s not. Looking for places to cut, The New York Times is rethinking its commitment to blogs, which is strong evidence that the Old Gray Lady was never all that committed to them from the start.

Why would a struggling news organization lay off the innovators best prepared to help them transition into a technological world they clearly don’t understand? Or as MediaJobsDaily put it, “We don’t know why you’d take resources away from online, in the year 2009, but that’s the report.”

Faust at least appears to have learned her lesson. She’s going to invest her energy and talents in herself rather than a news industry determined to fail and destined to make more foolish mistakes, like running to the government for a bailout or implementing “business/news integration” that puts sales managers in charge of editors.

“These freelancers-slash-entrepreneurs are smart. They are nimble,” Faust said. “And now they are my role models, as I join their ranks. So to the managers who made this decision, in less than 140 characters I tell you: Good luck steering the Titanic. And thanks for the head start. Now I’m really going to run.’”

CORRECTION: As Faust noted in the comments, she’s a she. My apologies for the gender error, which I have fixed in the entry.

Filed under: Advertising and Blogging and Business and Media and Technology
Comments: 3 Comments

The Facebook Marriage

Posted on 12.03.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 11:40 pm

If my wife and I were getting married today rather than 15 years ago come Jan. 15, I would so do this:

We had a wacky redneck wedding anyway, with our friends wearing animal noses and all, so updating our Facebook status before the kiss to seal the deal would have been great fun.

Filed under: Culture and Family and Human Interest and Just For Laughs and Redneck Humor and Technology and Video
Comments: None

The Cumbersome IPod

Posted on 11.27.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 6:28 pm

You whipper-snappers who jog with iPods in tow don’t know squat when it comes to “cumbersome” technology, so let comedian Tim Hawkins enlighten you to life during the era of the Walkman and portable CD players:

Filed under: Entertainment and Just For Laughs and Music and Technology and Video
Comments: None

The United States Of Stimulus Lies

Posted on 11.16.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 2:27 pm

Soon after taking office, President Obama successfully pushed a stimulus plan through Congress in part based on the promise that it would “save or create” 3.5 million jobs.

The nation’s unemployment rate (at 10.2 percent in October) has continued to climb since then, but the Obama administration has repeatedly insisted that the stimulus plan is working. Last month, the government issued a report that showed the plan has saved or created 650,000 jobs, putting it on target to fulfill Obama’s lofty promise.

But news reports about the actual funding have exposed the report as a series of exaggerations and flat-out lies. Many of the “jobs” are nothing of the sort. The claims are so lame that a press corps partial to the president no longer can resist the urge to report the truth.

The stories about stimulus lies across America are so numerous that the Washington Examiner had the brilliant idea of creating an interactive map to track all of the money and the stories behind them. The lies include claims of saving or creating:

Fifty jobs from purchasing a single lawnmower.
Nine jobs at a shoe store for $889.60. The money actually was used to buy nine pairs of shoes for the Army Corps of Engineers.
One job for purchasing $3,500 worth of paint.
More than 100 jobs in a town police department whose staff totals 23 officers.
And 4,300 jobs at a tech company that employed 3,000 of those people for only one month.

The Examiner puts the total number of bogus job claims at more than 75,000. Click on the image below to see the map and the complete recap of lies at Examiner.com.

[Cross-posted at Accuracy In Media]

Filed under: Government and Media and News & Politics and Technology
Comments: None

High-Tech Crash In The Hudson

Posted on 11.14.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 1:11 am

I love technology. It can give us such amazing perspectives on our world that were never available in previous eras. This high-tech video re-enactment of Flight 1549 crash-landing safely into the Hudson River back in February is a perfect example:

See more videos and snapshots here.

Filed under: Human Interest and Technology and Video
Comments: None

Copy Editors: Unsung Newsroom Heroes

Posted on 11.05.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 9:05 pm

There are many reasons to love the Internet as a news medium — the immediacy, the global reach, the interactivity and the transparency. But clean copy is not one of them.

That is especially true of blogs like this one. Most of us bloggers post our copy online without a second glance, in part because of our rush to be first with the news and in part because copy editing can be a tedious chore. The end result is copy that often is grammatically incorrect, stylistically weak and plagued by typos.

We bloggers need good copy editors — or we need to be our own copy editors.

Alas, the way of the blog appears to be the way of print media in the information age, too. From Editors Weblog:

Media analysts and publishers alike have long debated the role of copy editors in today’s struggling industry. … Various models have been implemented, reducing the traditional three-step article writing process to just two, and thus doing away with [copy editors] entirely. Whilst the financial benefits are apparent, it does beggar the question … as to the effects of such a move on the actual quality of journalism — which, coupled with increasingly tighter deadlines, surely makes for a significant double threat … and something’s got to give.

That commentary came at the end of a piece about copy errors so abundant in a Washington Post sports story that some readers demanded a full refund for the day’s paper. “There is no excuse for such a shoddy product,” one reader wrote. “It’s completely unprofessional.”

Indeed it is.

The Internet has helped improve the quality of reporting in many cases and certainly has added perspective to today’s journalism that has been sorely lacking in news outlets dominated by liberals. But at the same time the Web has hurt the quality of writing.

Readers, many of whom long ago stopped caring about good grammar in their personal communications, want the news now and care less whether the copy is clean. And reporters, long a grammatically challenged bunch, are happy to deliver substance inside a flawed package.

Reader, writer and publisher alike seem to have decided that because you can’t judge a book by its cover, it’s OK to just slap a crappy cover on the book.

That’s a shame. Copy editors are the unsung heroes of America’s newsrooms. They are master craftsmen of the written word, and they have saved many a writer (including this one) from embarrassing moments.

Copy editing is one aspect of old media that needs to be a carryover in this new media era.

Filed under: Grammar and Media and Technology
Comments: None

Blogs I Read

Enlightened Reads

My Other Blogs

Redneck Reads

Video Stops