Jay Rosen:

Know your history,
especially what happened to the first regime in convention coverage, why it
yielded to television and how it became a degraded media event. Don’t join
up with the second regime, whose story went dead a long time ago. Pick up
from where Koppel walked out in ’96, and find a reason to be there. If you
have your reason, but you’re in doubt on what to write about, ask yourself
who sent you and your laptop to Beantown. Post an account for them.

Report backwards to whatever place you came from– including the opinions
you came from, the political place. Feed the user’s advice forward into
your choices during the three days of whirling events…

Lots more great stuff about conventions and the media over at Jay’s. [I updated the quote slightly after Jay did.]

Good advice. I have no interest in reporting the events for “the record” because there are 15,000 Professional Journalists there who’ll do that far better than I could. I’m going as a citizen who – thanks to blogs – happens to have a (theoretically) global platform. I guess I’m viewing this as being like writing a travelogue for the folks back home, except as a citizen, I’m a partisan with a stake in what happens.

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From the NY Times:

When a questioner noted that Mr. Edwards had been described as charming and a “nimble campaigner” and asked Mr. Bush to compare the one-term senator to Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Bush snapped: “Dick Cheney can be president. Next?”

I understand the argument that Edwards isn’t experienced enough to be president – although he’s got more experience than W had in 2000 – but does the Bush campaign really want us to dwell on the testicle-shriveling possibility of President Cheney?

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The San Francisco Chronical aggregates the Edwards jokes from the late-night TV shows.

I thought maybe one of the jokes was funny. Maybe you had to be there.

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I just received a letter (paper and everything) saying that I’ve been credentiaed to blog from the Democratic Convention. Woohoo!

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The right-wing National Review is already telling itself that Edwards is bad news for the Kerry ticket. Since I’ve never been right with a single political prediction (All hail presidents Dukakis and Dean!), it doesn’t matter that I think Byron York’s article is wrong, but I do.

York’s reasoning is that Edwards made his national bones with his “Two Americas” stump speech that said nothing about terrorism. Edwards polls just ahead of Kucinich on the issue, according to York. And this is election is going to be about terrorism. Hence, Edwards hurts the ticket.

IMO, the Democratic ticket can’t afford the Bush-Cheney ’04 gambit of putting an affable, detached values-guy at the top with the reassurance that there’s a hard-ass grownup to guide in him in the #2 spot. Kerry will win this election by being a candidate Americans trust to run the government he’s leading. If we think Kerry isn’t credible on terrorism, then it doesn’t matter if he appoints Thor as his vice president, he’s going to lose. (But, Kerry is credible on terrorism – I feel safer just having him run than I do with the Bush crowd of gasoline-tossers running the show.)

Appointing a war vice president would have played into the Republican strategy of defining this election as being only about who is harder on the bad guys. The Edwards selection says that terrorism is not the only issue we need to confront. Nor can we afford to confront it in isolation from the rest of what’s going on in our country and in the world.

I think it’s a great selection. I look forward to eight years of Kerry followed by eight years of Edwards.

Go Kerry!

Halley puts well one reason I like Edwards: “Edwards knew when to be quiet and not trash his opponents. He knew it during the torturous campaigning last fall and winter and he ended his campaign with his dignity in tact — no small thing in that contentious free-for-all.”

And then there’s what Jeneane wrote way back in January about Edwards’ truth-telling, blogging wife: 1 2.

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I used to enjoy getting Slate’s daily round-up of the newspapers stuffed into my inbox every day. But I somehow fell off the list, so I went to re-subscribe. It’s free, but…

…to sign up, Microsoft, the owner of Slate, requires you to set up a Microsoft Passport account. There’s no reason why we actually need a Passport account in order to have the stinking newsletter sent to us. It’s just Microsoft’s velvet-gloved strong-arm tactics.

This is how options become requirements. The “free” market tells us that we are free not to sign up for a digital ID scheme or a Digital Restrictions Management scheme, so long as we’re willing to cut ourselves off further and further from the cultural mainstream. Sure, DRM is voluntary…unless you want to listen to a hit song or see a hit movie on your computer.

What is optional in theory, in the reality of a market dominated by huge economic forces becomes a cultural necessity.

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Steve Johnson has a terrific review of F9/11. It’s about 3 stars short of a rave.

Steve reduces the movie to a silly conspiracy theory and an unreeling of images that we need to see if we are to be morally accountable. I agree that the movie is both those things, but I think it’s also more than that. Moore blurts out conspiracy theories with alarming frequency, and I agree with Steve that they generally don’t stick. (I do want to read the book about the Bushes’ relationships with the Saudis, though.)

But I didn’t read the intellectual content of the movie as being about those theories. Rather, they are there to help make the case that we got into this war under false pretenses. These guys lied to us. So, if we didn’t invade Iraq to fight the war on terrorism and to keep us safe from those WMD’s, then what was it for? Moore doesn’t give us a good answer to that question, and I agree with Steve that Moore skips one of the most important ones: neocons are idealists – chickenhawk idealists. Moore sloppily throws at the screen every bad reason he can think of. But his aim is, I believe, first and foremost to tell us that our administration lied and then lied again. Then they lied through their teeth, and then they forced Colin Powell to lie through his.

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I wrote in my review of Fahrenheit 9/11 that a mother’s grief for a dead soldier isn’t an argument against a particular war although it may be an argument against all wars. Likewise for grisly photos of the war dead and injured. That there will be horrendous suffering is intrinsic to war, so that doesn’t tell you that a particular war is right or wrong; justified and unjustified wars iinevitably produce griving mothers and horrendous suffering.

But Britt Blaser speaks with a gravity I cannot. I know Britt through the Dean campaign and came quickly to trust and respect him, as well as to enjoy his company. Now he blogs vividly about one particularly bad day in Vietnam. It is a reminder that wars are not to be entered into casually…a reminder the way a punch in the stomach can remind you to mind your manners.

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Jacob Shwirz, formerly of gazm.org (an interesting experiment in social commenting sorta), is back blogging about things social:

Well, after spending 6 months getting settled into a new life in Israel I’d like to get back into talking about the fascinating topic of the Internet as a social medium and its potential to bring people (friends and strangers) together. My interest in this area has never waned but now I’d like to be more proactive and not have this blog be just about my immigration to Israel.

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No news hook and no earth-shaking points, but I found this article about the two preeminent birdwatchers of India to be charming and evocative.

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