Brilliant. (Via Ethanz)

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From the Berkman Center:

The Herdict team is looking for help testing the hypothesis that the Wisconsin Capitol building guest wireless blocks Websense’s “advocacy” category. (Background here, and see the various links in those posts).

If you have friends/family/contacts/colleagues who might be in a position to help Herdict with this testing, please share the links above or point them to Herdict’s “am I blocked or not?” testing queue for the US — Many thanks!

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Joyce Appleby makes the case for returning fillibusters to their old role as a moral trump card played when a matter of real principle was at stake. The Senate was not intended to require a 60-vote majority, and conservatives ought to join with liberals in honoring the Constitution. (The “Coffee Party” has a link that’ll get you your Senator’s contact info.)

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When my wife and I spent a year in Portland Oregon in 1979 or so, we went house to house for Ron Wyden, who was running for his first term as a Congressional Representative. This was so early in his career that when my wife first called his headquarters to get his position on some issues (that’s what you did before the Internet, children), Wyden himself called back that evening and talked with her for half and hour.

So, now Senator Ron Wyden has put the kibosh on the awful bill that would have let the government censor the internet.

I understand that if I had stayed home instead of knocking on doors for a few afternoons, Wyden would still have won and history would have unfolded in exactly the same way. A volunteer could not do much less than I did for the Wyden campaign.

Nevertheless, I have three observations:

First, I have felt attached to Wyden (who obviously wouldn’t remember me) ever since pitching in three decades ago. Silly, but there you have it.

Second, a relative handful of people — there were maybe dozens of volunteers? scores? — did make some difference to the campaign, and those little actions have unrolled to much larger consequences. One might even say that history consists of disproportionate effects.

Put the first and second observations together and you get the fact that even though your individual action may have no decisive effect, it can contribute to a tiny nudge that ends up making a difference, and, in any case, you can feel connected to a cause and a narrative.

Third, thank you, Senator Wyden!

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Now for the de-sensationalizing of that headline.

Lawrence Lessig is indeed finding common cause with the Tea Party, but only with one part of its agenda: fighting earmarks — a position that has put the Tea Party at odds with many members of the Republican Congressional delegation.

If any of the Tea Partiers want to back the end of gerrymandering, I’d be happy to tip my liberal hat at them.

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Here’s a short article (and semi-puff piece) about James Kloppenberg’s new book Reading Obama, that situates Obama within America’s intellectual history. Kloppenberg says (according to the article) that Obama’s two books lay out quite clearly how he thinks and how he approaches problems.

Kloppenberg says in the interview that Obama’s “commitment to bipartisanship is rooted, not just in a desire to be strategic, but instead in what I see as a really sophisticated and robust conception of deliberation — that you cannot have at the beginning of a process of debate the same understandings that you have at the end of that process.” And, says Kloppenberg, his books show that he is a pragmatic problem solver.

Exactly. Read Obama’s books and tell me why you’re surprised at how he has behaved in office.

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Election Day + 1, 2010

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