Having now capped 25,000 page views[1], and with journalistic integrity restored to the media, Big Ink will now be on hiatus for a month or so. It will probably come back as a site devoted to some adorable new internet sub-culture like cats or white people[2]. The ad revenue on this media thing is just not where I expected.

In any case, happy spring. See you soon.

[1] Nearly a thousand of which go to a quippily titled post that actually has nothing to do with “going away card(s).” Sorry, the internet!

[2] “#99 Grammar”… dammit!

Starbucks To Begin Sinister ‘Phase Two’ Of Operation

SEATTLE–After a decade of aggressive expansion throughout North America and abroad, Starbucks suddenly and unexpectedly closed its 2,870 worldwide locations Monday to prepare for what company insiders are calling “Phase Two” of the company’s long-range plan.

“Starbucks has completed the coffee-distribution and location establishment phase of its operation, and is now ready to move into Phase Two,” read a statement from Cynthia Vahlkamp, Starbucks’ chief marketing officer. “We have enjoyed furnishing you with coffee-related beverages and are excited about the important role you play in our future plans. Please pardon the inconvenience while we fortify the second wave of our corporate strategy.” …

This article is ancient (2001! Isn’t that, like, before the internet?) but remember when they closed all their stores for “training” a few weeks back? Clearly suspicious.

H/T, shady characters out of the past.

David Ignatius’s column in the Post frames Obama’s supposed unflappability as “cool,” unflinching. He seems a little flappable to me sometimes, but it’s a good political figure-ground experiment: you can read the coolness as statemanlike surety or uptight aloofness. (Guess which one the media will be going with this summer.) Ignatius captures some of this quantum fluctuation:

Obama has remained “Mr. Cool,” even when his campaign seemed to be blowing up around him. He didn’t do the politically expedient things: He didn’t wear his patriotism on his lapel with an American flag pin; he didn’t promptly disown his race-baiting former pastor, Jeremiah Wright; he didn’t apologize for comments by his wife, Michelle, that many Americans found unpatriotic. You can say what you like about the substance of these positions, but the interesting fact is that Obama didn’t flinch.

“Yes, we know what’s coming. I’m not naive,” Obama said in the North Carolina speech. “We’ve already seen it . . . pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy, in the hopes that the media will play along.”

That’s the message: Attack me; attack my pastor; attack my wife; bring it on. I’m ready.

The past several months have revealed Obama’s vulnerabilities, but they’ve also shown his ability to take a punch. Many whites are furious that he didn’t throw Wright overboard sooner, but blacks surely like him all the more for resisting the pressure. And there’s an instinctive American fondness for people who don’t rat out their friends, even when their friends are creeps. That’s why a Wright-based strategy may backfire for the Republicans, just as it did for Hillary Clinton.

Obama has a transcendent ambition: It’s part of what gives him the “man of destiny” quality. When you see him on TV or in pictures, he always seems to be looking into the middle distance — not to any person in particular but toward “the people” and the far horizon.

Cool is good, but overconfidence is dangerous. Obama’s had a delicate balancing act in the primary and I think he can be tougher on McCain (for several reasons) than he could on Hillary. But it’s not a processional to the White House; it’s a fight. How (and how much) can Barack get around the “elite” tag? Clearly, bowling didn’t work. This will be the trick of the general campaign, I think; he needs to show he understands voters’ fears and concerns, not just about “politics as usual” but about real, emotional issues. I think he does understand, and some of his rhetoric has been effective. But if he’s doing this in his campaign, he hasn’t yet figured out how to force the media to show it. He can say “it’s not about me, it’s about you,” but he’s got to show that with pictures and powerful, grounded emotional appeals. And supporters need to echo and amplify that, as well. The campaign should be producing quotes and talking points for the million volunteers that go straight to local, emotional issues. The message is not simply “Don’t you want change?” but also, “With Barack Obama in the White House and a new Democratic congressman in your district, we can finally get free medical coverage for your kids.”* How do we make that connection in our local media?

*When that’s fair to say, basing that claim on this, presumably:

• Mandatory Coverage of Children: Obama will require that all children have health care coverage. Obama will expand the number of options for young adults to get coverage, including allowing young people up to age 25 to continue coverage through their parents’ plans.
• Expansion Of Medicaid and SCHIP: Obama will expand eligibility for the Medicaid and SCHIP programs and ensure that these programs continue to serve their critical safety net function.

As the primary winds down, Erica Barnett at I’m Sick Of Your Insane Demands (which, let’s face it, you should be reading for the title alone, never mind all the amazing content), maps out some of the really nasty background chatter to this primary season. This is, in part, why I thought it was fair to push back a little on the anti-Hillary commentary I have been hearing online and in my own social circles. The way some people say, almost spitting, “I hate Hillary Clinton,” just strikes me as a little too easy. Personally, I find when you look closer a lot of the offhand criticism doesn’t actually align with what she said or did and why she said or did it. Has she done lots of rotten stuff I’d rather no politician ever did? Absolutely. Just as Barack has done and will continue to do. And he will also get this treatment, as he has already done, though so far it hasn’t been as pervasive in the mainstream media and on the left as the stuff Erica is talking about. (And it is absolutely on the left, as well.)

So I welcome the end of the primary, the end of a lot of desperate, terrible decision-making on the part of the Clinton campaign, and the end (I hope) of these great rivers of spiteful blogging. I also welcome the beginning of a period of stepping back and concentrating on the next phase. There’s lots to be angry about, rightfully, on both sides. And it will be worth remembering and addressing the issues that this primary brought out; we obviously still have a lot of entrenched animosity toward one another based on fundamental identities, and we also feel free to cultivate and perpetuate an atmosphere of vitriol and vindictiveness. That’s disappointing, for sure.

But I am eager to move on and to get into what should be a really fun and informative general campaign. We’re going to nominate a historically important and very charismatic candidate in Barack Obama, and we have the winds of reason and hope at our backs—usually we go with the one; it’ll be nice to have both. We have a ton of new voters and we have the responsibility to bring along supporters of both primary candidates. Now let’s make sure that the media, the puppet masters, the hatchet men (and hatchet women) and the Orc armies of bigotry don’t get to tear down a good campaign. Let’s go get the government we deserve.

UPDATE: Adding, I recognize that trying to be dispassionate about politics is exactly bass-ackwards to the way that most people experience it and is, in fact, the major liability of the party. But in trying to be dispassionate, I am trying to see clearly, to see more moving pieces, so that I can understand where we might be blindsided as we have been in the past. I don’t discount any emotional relationship to the political; that’s all very, very real. But I also want to see beyond the emotion, see what’s happening, and make sure that the emotional appeals we’re designing are the right ones. I’m pro-hope, I really am. But mostly I hope that we can repair a damaged party rather than simply throw it out and start over under some new brand. I suspect a lot of the Hillary supporters felt—rightly or wrongly—that Barack’s anti-Washington message is an anti-party message, and parties, for all their faults, are still important to millions of voters. Less so to younger voters, new voters, highly educated voters; that is, Barack’s constituency. But still, many people have powerful emotional ties to the party of FDR and JFK, of civil rights and long-lost protections of unionism. The difference between the delegate counts at the moment is about five percent of the total (give or take a half percent depending on whether you count superdels). That’s an amazing accomplishment by the Obama campaign, but he’s still got a huge traditional Democratic base to integrate into his message. If he simply counts on their vote, he will be missing an opportunity to consolidate his power and his party.

Barack has walked many fine lines with a great deal of skill to get to the nomination. But I would like to see an emotional appeal to all Democrats, not just those who are critical (though many of those criticism are certainly valid) and who are new to politics. He has some baggage—some people see him as Kerry-esque in a pejorative sense—and he needs to turn some of that around. He can do it if he wants to, and I really want him to want to. He’s not going to get any help from the media. So, as I’ve been trying to say since last year, everyone will be needed to win in November. We need unstealable margins. It’s time to start weaving us back together. I presume Barack wants to do it and I presume that Hillary will help. But I think he needs to offer more than just a “change” message. His change theme is urgent and appealing, but perhaps it fails to recognize the emotional, cultural and political capital that the party—a party we can and should be proud of—has fought for an earned over many decades. Is the party faultless? Are any candidates pure? Of course not. But there is heritage there and it shouldn’t be abandoned. Barack should turn his eloquence toward an appeal to the best of the historical party as well as the best of his own vision. I’m not sure what, precisely, his vision of the future is, but I know what liberals, progressives and Democrats have fought for in the past, and that’s real, too. If we bring those two emotional narratives together—and stay three steps ahead of the millionaire Swiftboaters—that will be a winning strategy. The potential is immense. If we really want to achieve a shift in the political landscape, that’s how it will be done. Building those rhetorical and intra-party bridges should be our priority starting now.

The irrepressible Dave Neiwart at Orcinus has a lengthy post about the now well-established patterns of racially charged (and otherwise duplicitous) political advertising. Well worth a couple of minutes to get a feel for just how institutionalized this is:

It’s important to understand the role that people like [Floyd] Brown [creator of the "Willie Horton" ads] play. Not only does he enable the right to feed red meat to their more extremist elements while giving them a certain “plausible deniablity” (thus the official distancing, which Brown explicitly welcomes), he plays an even greater part in transmitting ideas from the extremist right into the mainstream, thanks largely to a complaisant media willing to lend him the mantle of credibility he doesn’t deserve.

Meanwhile, John Oliver at the Daily Show did a brilliant and frankly disturbing piece on Brown and this class of political communicator (this was old-school Daily Show, too, in which people are hoisted upon petards of their own design). Take a look.

For more on why this matters—and why some of us feel we’ve seen this movie before—also check out Greenwald, succinct as ever, on the political persistence of 1988:

…just as is true now, the GOP operatives running Bush the First’s campaign — Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes — realized that they could never win the election if Americas voted on the basis of substance, policy positions and issues. They thus resolved to shift the playing field away from issues to manipulative, adolescent questions of patriotism, manliness, and personal likability. Hence: Dukakis is an effete elitist who doesn’t believe in the Pledge of Allegiance; he looks dorky bowling wearing a helmet; he proved he wasn’t a man when he failed to show primal rage when asked in a debate about his wife being hypothetically raped, etc. etc.

With the help of a media enthralled to such shallow, easy-to-chatter-about attacks, they succeeded in electing a highly unpopular figure from a scandal-plagued, discredited party. And Republicans, with their media partners, have been using that depraved playbook ever since, and will continue to do so this year. For the 1988 election, Reagan’s severe economic mismanagement, his disastrous foreign policy filled with savage covert wars, and widespread perceptions that top Reagan officials had blatantly lied about breaking the law were all just disappeared. Actual issues played virtually no role in George Bush the First’s 40-state triumph.

* * * *

In exactly the same way, John McCain’s only hope for winning is to ensure a similar disappearance of the issues which Americans continuously say are most important to them — namely, the disastrous Bush/Cheney economic policies and the need to extricate ourselves from the Iraq War. If the actual concerns of American voters are allowed to determine the election outcome — as they did in 2006 — the GOP has no chance. Thus, the only prospect for a McCain victory is to have the media flood the country with the types of childish, gossipy trash that has predominated thus far — lapel pins and Pledge of Allegiance symbolism and endless fixations on pastor sermons. That is what makes all the dark plagues which our political and media class have enabled — those images of dead Iraqi children and foreclosure signs and crushing collective debt and collapsed American credibility and a truly lawless government — blissfully disappear.

Certainly the hope (and the message) is that this year is different. Maybe Brand Barack really can outflank the political fear industry. Maybe everything will work out and voters will feel free to make political choices based on accurate information rather that disingenuous emotional appeals. (Let it be so, may it please the FSM!) To my thinking, those possibilities don’t diminish the importance of watching carefully to understand what’s going to happen and pushing back on the media.

From the WSJ:

Pastors May Defy IRS Gag Rule
Legal Group Urges Ministers to Preach About Candidates
By SUZANNE SATALINE
May 9, 2008
A conservative legal-advocacy group is enlisting ministers to use their pulpits to preach about election candidates this September, defying a tax law that bars churches from engaging in politics.

Alliance Defense Fund, a Scottsdale, Ariz., nonprofit, is hoping at least one sermon will prompt the Internal Revenue Service to investigate, sparking a court battle that could get the tax provision declared unconstitutional. Alliance lawyers represent churches in disputes with the IRS over alleged partisan activity.

The action marks the latest attempt by a conservative organization to help clergy harness their congregations to sway elections. The protest is scheduled for Sunday, Sept. 28, a little more than a month before the general election, in a year when religious concerns and preachers have been a regular part of the political debate.

It also comes as the IRS has increased its investigations of churches accused of engaging in politics. Sen. Barack Obama’s denomination, the United Church of Christ, has said it was under investigation after it allowed the Democratic presidential candidate to address 10,000 church members last year. Last summer, the tax agency said it was reviewing complaints against 44 churches for activities in the 2006 election cycle. Churches found to be in violation can be fined or lose their tax exemptions.

The section of the tax code barring nonprofits from intervening in political campaigns has long frustrated clergy. Many ministers consider the provision an inappropriate government intrusion, blocking the duty of clergy to advise congregants.

Alliance fund staff hopes 40 or 50 houses of worship will take part in the action, including clerics from liberal-leaning congregations. About 80 ministers have expressed interest, including one Catholic priest, says Erik Stanley, the Alliance’s senior legal counsel.

“The government should not be telling the church what it should or should not be saying,” says the Rev. Steve Riggle, senior pastor of Grace Community Church in Houston, who hopes to take part in the Alliance effort. Mr. Riggle says he told his congregation from the pulpit, before the Texas primary in March, that he was supporting former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee for president. “As a pastor, a private citizen, I can speak for myself. The IRS cannot quench my voice,” he says. …

The separation of church and state is not a “gag rule.” If the churches feel that strongly, they can forgo their tax exempt status and do whatever they wish. Powerful institutions seem to thrive on this victimization ideology about rules that protect society at large (this is one example, privacy is another; actually, the Constitution has a whole list of them; you could look it up). But if they’re not the ones writing the rules, it’s practically downright evil.

Stephen is impressed with the oil companies. Brill.

H/T Crooks & Liars.

Greenwald does a detailed analysis of the brazen manipulation of the media by the Pentagon’s military analysts and concludes:

But what is most extraordinary about all of this is that huge numbers of Americas who were subjected to this propaganda by their own Government still don’t know that they were, because the television networks which broadcast it to them refuse to tell them about it, opting instead to suppress the story and stonewall any efforts to find out what happened. As corrupt as the Pentagon was here, our nation’s major media outlets were at least just as bad. Their collective Pravda-like suppression now of the entire story — behavior so blatantly corrupt that even the likes of Howie Kurtz and The Politico are strongly condemning them — has become the most significant and revealing aspect of the entire scandal.

If we’re relying on Kurtz and the Politico as our stand-up guys, this really is being stuffed down the memory hole. Give the article a quick skim just to confirm that, yes, that “analysis” was complete fiction.

Time’s running out to get this war with Iran started. Fortunately, the neocons know just how to fire up the Decider. Greenwald’s got the goods. Worth a read to see just how free they feel to invent new realities.

Babbage’s Difference Engine brought to life.

I presume that on some deserted island lair, Myhrvold’s scientist hive is working on Wells’ Time Machine, too.