A new video has surfaced from shortly after 9/11, where then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani inadvertently riffs about all the services the Big Apple offers to illegal immigrants. The comments came in response to a question about immigrants seeking immunity as they visit relatives in the wake of the 9/11 disaster. While first offering safe haven to these grieving family members, Giuliani then goes on to mention how New York City gives medical services, public education, and protection from the police without reporting these illegal immigrants to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The statements are about as close to offering asylum as a metropolitan mayor can come.

The Republican front-runner, who has recently declared that “we can end illegal immigration”, has come under some scrutiny lately for his past remarks on this and other issues which are vitally important to courting Republican primary voters. Giuliani, who was vehemently critical of Senator John Kerry’s supposed flip-flopping during the 2004 Presidential Campaign, is now faced with the prospect of defending his own waffling stance on this contentious issue. Illegal immigration, however, is not Giuliani’s only problem with courting the right-wing as America’s mayor tries to explain away his three marriages; abandon his pro-gay rights stance; embrace the gun culture; and condemn a woman’s right to choose. As the hype from 9/11 continues to wither away, Giuliani is exposed for the opportunistic politician he ultimately is.

—Joe Tacopino

By Aaron McKain.

“Here’s where they stand in Iowa”: Obama: 27, Clinton: 26, Edwards: 26, Richardson: 11, Biden: 2, Kucinich: 2, Dodd: 1, Gravel: “no support registered.”

A poll is a fairly shady way to kick-off a presidential debate. But it’s a shadiness that’s become more or less standard operating procedure: we trot the candidates out on stage, they stand with aw-shucks grins, and they continue to stand and grin while the moderator reads 5/8s of them their political death rites. On this particular morning in Des Moines (August 19, 2007), it’s ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos doing the honors, alerting the audience to the percentage of surveyed Iowans—those first-line gatekeepers of the American presidency—who “if the Democratic Caucus were being held today” would throw their support behind given candidate X. Twenty-four weeks before the Iowa Caucus, the poll is a strange bit of statistical speculation. Broadcast six minutes before a televised debate, the poll may cross the line between strange and outright bumfight cruel, particularly when it forces a genuinely decent old crank like Mike Gravel to smile-squirm through the announcement of his zero percent approval rating.

But pointing out this strangeness—the polls, the debates, the news-media’s hand in either—is decidedly Stale Old News, not worth a yawn or the time it takes you to scroll down. This is the quixotic dilemma of any attempt to quote-unquote “critically analyze” presidential politics: everyone already knows that the campaign is a glorified horserace, and everyone already knows that this horserace, like anything else worth anything in this world, is a wee bit totally jury-rigged. Moreover, for any bona fide campaign junkie, anyone truly addicted to the jockeying and braying, hinting at the bunkness of our nation’s electoral ritual goes beyond banal and bumps-ass into outright betrayal. It’s like telling your six-year-old nephew that pro-wrestling is fake: it doesn’t make the kid feel any better, it doesn’t make it any easier to body slam 550lbs of pituitary anathema, and it doesn’t necessarily explain a better way of picking an Intercontinental Heavy Weight Champion. This is what my friends who can’t believe I still watch the stuff—politics, not wrestling—don’t get. And it’s why all the recent brouhaha about hypotheticals (you were wondering when I’d get to them, no?) is such a slap in the face to all of us still foolish enough to watch the contest.

For those at least smart enough to tune out the pageant during high summer, here’s the catch-up. Sometime around August, the politicos decided that going after Sen. Obama for his willingness to answer hypothetical “what if?” questions would be a capital-g Good Idea, a strategy smart enough to win over voters, including those crucial Iowa Caucus-goers. Calling bullshit on an opponent’s willingness to engage in a mode of questioning, rather than their actual answers to specific questions, is a stupendously odd (albeit ancient) rhetorical strategy. That Obama’s rivals are even trying it is a testament to the bind they’re in. The “hypothetical” stances the Senator from Illinois has carved out—he would meet with the Axis of Evil, he wouldn’t nuke Iran, he would pursue al-Qaeda in Pakistan with or without Gen. Musharraf’s support—are all popular positions for the mainstream left, and if your opponent is able to articulate popular positions whenever they open their mouth, then that’s a mouth you need to find a way to shut. Attacking hypotheticals could, hypothetically, accomplish this.

Unfortunately for Obama’a challengers, convincing voters that hypotheticals are dangerous (and thus off-limits like chokeholds and piledrivers) is a hard argument to sell in a soundbyte. On the stage in Des Moines, the candidates’ delivery of the anti-hypothetical argument is not only miserably club-footed (Clinton: “we shouldn’t use hypotheticals, words do matter”; Edwards: “as a president, I wouldn’t talk about hypotheticals”; Richardson: “this talk about hypotheticals is what’s gotten us into trouble") but it also foregrounds why the critique is counter-intuitive in the first place. As John Dickerson has pointed out in Slate, presidential campaigns are comprised of a series of hypotheticals (in the Iowa debate, what-ifs about troop pull outs, sovereign partitions, oil revenue, health care, and whether Clinton has a snowball’s chance of winning) all in the service of an over-arching hypothetical ("if I am elected…") that provides voters precisely the information they most desire (i.e., what is this ego-freak going to do once we make them the Most Powerful Person on Earth?). Hypotheticals are also on the spot gut-checks, glimpses into a would-be leader’s instincts and reasoning and gauges of whether they share our common sense of the world. To voters, hypotheticals will always feel more People’s Elbow than low blow, and it would take a lot—and a lot of specific lots—to persuade them that this populist crowd favorite needs to be kept out of the ring.

Which is not to say that hypotheticals aren’t potentially dangerous. Obama’s comments re: Iran and Pakistan referenced ongoing, nuanced (well, ongoing at least),undeniably non-hypothetical diplomatic efforts. Richardson and Clinton are half-right when they warn that in these circumstances “[w]ords do matter” because words can matter, particularly when they are that explosively magical combination of the right words and the right person saying them, an equation which becomes highly probable when the person saying those words has a fair shot at being The Next President of the United States of America. Candidate Reagan learned this lesson on the campaign trail in ’80 when he slipped-up and announced his support for Taiwan while his vice-presidential candidate George H. W. Bush was in China pimping for the opposite policy. (In political science circles, this is what is known as being taken for a ride on Space Mountain"). The Chinese, like Musharraf, were beyond displeased. But this is the cost of doing campaign business in the democratic open-air. To refuse to ever pay this price, to deny hypotheticals across the board—or even hint at such a thing in a desperate fit of political stratagem—is to turn all campaign discourse into vanilla stump speech mush.

Of course, the other entity with words and the juicy gravitas to make them matter is ABC News. And the sick spit in your eye irony—conveniently lost on everyone beating this hypothetical story into the ground—is that if candidate hypotheticals are dangerous, news/pundit hypotheticals are doubly so. The ever-present horserace question, “If the election were today, would you vote for this candidate?” is the ultimate campaign hypothetical and this speculative staple of our political diet finds its numerical, quasi-scientific legitimation in The Poll. The poll has pull, the sort of news-muscle that determines who gets to the chance to compete to be elected and thus what actually happens to Musharraf or Tehran. The poll is what gives the voters, to quote Rep. Kucinich’s sound-with-bite, a “conditioned choice,” letting ABC tell those all-important Iowans that an eight person scramble with six months to go is a really just a three-way race. (And it’s what justifies ABC’s use of debate questions that ensure the race stays that way; e.g., asking Obama to respond to Richardson responding to Biden responding to Dodd responding to Clinton responding to Biden’s statement that Obama isn’t experienced enough to be president.) The survey hypothetical is what has preserved Hilary Clinton’s frontrunner status for nearly two years, which is four times longer than JFK’s entire primary campaign. And it’s what reduces Dodd, Kucinich, Richardson, Biden, and Gravel to jobbers, punching bags thrown in the ring only to make the company favorites look good.

All of which is still State Old News, a Yawnfest ostensibly beneath comment or contempt. But candidates working the refs by crying hypothetical to the ABC oddsmakers makes this Old News a little more than this political junkie can bear; it dances too close to the flame and pretends to not feel the heat. It’s Ric Flair, all 243 shambling, greased-up pounds of him, stopping the match and turning to the cameras to say “hey, I think that punch was fake.” We already know we’re suckers for watching; don’t rub our faces in it.

—Jillian Burt

It may seem like nothing at all that Outside.in —an aggregator of local information from blogs and news organisations—has added the ability to make a general “search within the site”, but in its own quiet way Outside.in may be altering what it means to search for information on the internet in a way that will eventually have everyone else scrambling to catch up with them.

Conventional wisdom has it that in “web years” we’re in the second, adolescent, phase. The first was the invention of the internet, the second was the ability to connect, the third—web 3.0 as it’s sometimes known—is referred to, by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners Lee , as the ‘semantic’ web. With web 3.0 we’ll move from the phenomenal amount of connections (a Google search for Tim Berners Lee turns up 1,840,000 entries) to results that are dense, specific and meaningful, the adult’s lifetime of knowledge and experience distilled into wisdom. But while companies define meaning as an index, and see it as revenue enhancing, Outside.in has defined meaning as value. Information means something because it has a context, it’s not just a series of answers pruned by a human (as you’ll find on Mahalo) it’s locally tested information from neighbours.

We are pleased to announce that the exciting technology known as “search” has come to outside.in. That’s right - as of today you can actually enter a word or phrase into a search box on the home page, and see the results immediately. Amazing, huh? We know that this might not strike some of you as groundbreaking, but what makes search at outside.in so useful is what you’re searching: we have over 500,000 pages of web content, all organized by city, neighborhood and topic. We have over 30,000 pages relating to the places in your cities and towns. We have maps for local blogs in your area, and stories and comments submitted by your neighbors. We have topic pages for every neighborhood and city that show you all the recent discussion of “music” or “politics” (and many other topics) in that area. And we get bigger every day. Almost all of that information is news and commentary coming from the people who actually live in these communities: local bloggers and outside.in neighbors and local media. So if you’re looking for information about that new real estate development that’s being built down the street, or gossip about the new principal at the local public school, or the latest update about a crime that happened in the neighborhood—you should think of outside.in as the first place to look.
From an e-mail to Outside.in “neighbours” from co-founder John Geraci

The conceptual leap that Outside.in has made is that “local” is a frame-of-mind. Joseph Campbell, just before he died in 1987, said that he believed the mythology for this new century would be something that encompassed everywhere in the world, at once. The photograph of the earth from the moon’s orbit, taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968, showed us a view outside of ourselves that went deeply inside as well, showing us that we are all connected, on one earth, bound together. The computer tools and commercial tracking and mapping devices that came to market spun off from the space research and missions made possible Google earth, whose maps are Outside.in’s “glue” holding all of the information together, geotagged and pinned to a map.

(continue...)

—Jillian Burt

THE OP-ED AS A RE-BRANDING TOOL

In July Ken Silverstein of Harpers Magazine went undercover as a vaguely defined marketing figure asking lobbying companies for briefs on sprucing up the image of Turkmenistan.

I would have difficulty passing for Turkmen, I knew, so rather than approaching the firms as a representative of the government itself, I instead would be a consultant for “The Maldon Group,” a mysterious (and fictitious) firm that claimed to have a financial stake in improving Turkmenistan’s public image. We were, my story ran, a group of private investors involved in the export of natural gas from Turkmenistan to Ukrainian and other Eastern European markets. We felt it would strengthen our business position in Turkmenistan if we could convey to American policymakers and journalists just how heady were the reforms being plotted by the Berdymukhamedov government.

If flacking for Turkmenistan did not in itself trouble the lobbying firms, my description of The Maldon Group was designed to raise a number of bright red flags. Turkmenistan has vast reserves of natural gas, from which it earns about $2 billion per year in export revenues, but the whole business has been marked by flagrant corruption—as can be ascertained very quickly by anyone who cares to perform a Google search. A 2006 study by London-based Global Witness reported that Niyazov kept billions of dollars in gas revenues under his effective control in overseas accounts. “Perhaps the murkiest and most complex aspect of the Turkmen-Ukraine gas trade,” the report went on to say, is the role of the intermediary companies that have inserted themselves for more than a decade between Turkmenistan, Russia, Ukraine and Europe. These companies have often come out of nowhere, parlaying tiny amounts of start-up capital into billion-dollar deals. Their ultimate beneficial ownership has been hidden behind complex networks of trusts, holding companies and nominee directors and there is almost no public information about where their profits go.

By going undercover and creating a false identity he was attacked by members of the media in op-ed pages. An ironic twist in that one of the strategies the lobbyists mentioned was using the op-ed pages of credible news organizations to put forward a shinier, friendlier images of monstrous figures.

In addition to influencing news reports, Downen added, the firm could drum up positive op-eds in newspapers. “We can utilize some of the think-tank experts who would say, ‘On the one hand this and the other hand that,’ and we place it as a guest editorial.” Indeed, Schumacher said, APCO had someone on staff who “does nothing but that” and had succeeded in placing thousands of opinion pieces.

RE-BRANDING A NATION

The new Monocle magazine has taken the re-positioning notion a step further, in an issue devoted to how nations can change how they’re perceived. “With corporate brands more powerful than country brands, there’s a lot of work out there for agencies keen to rethink a nation’s identity. Monocle looks at the construct of countries.” For example, Monocle muses, Liguria and Monaco could merge under the new brand/nation name “Costazurra”. “A failed Italy and a Grimaldi household in shambles presents the perfect opportunity for a marriage of convenience between Liguria and Monaco in 2014. If it sounds like a storyline from our manga series, it might well be, but it also gave us a starting point to do a bit of nation branding of our own. Welcome to Costazzurra - the hub of the Mediterranean.” Monocle gives tips on how a country might make a favorable impression: having an excellent airline, a snappy visual on a flag, don’t release too many postage stamps (this annoys collectors).

LOW-RES RE-BRANDING

The communist era created powerful, visually sensational graphics and obscenely empty slogans but behind the shiny hoardings were dark secrets and deeds. In the post cold-war world it seems that Russia is trying to promote openness by being all message, no marketing. In a speech re-printed in the quaint and visually sombre (no colour, no images, no graphics, no website) INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS: A Russian Journal of World Politics, Diplomacy and International Relations.[Issue Number 3. 2007] Russian leader Vladimir Putin says, in the ‘state of the union’ like address to the people instituted by Boris Yeltsin in 1993:

“The protracted economic crisis the country has gone through has had severe consequences for our country’s intelligentsia, for the situation in the arts and literature, for our people’s culture and creativity. To be honest, these difficulties have all but led to the disappearance of many of our spiritual and moral traditions. And yet, the absence of cultural beacons of our own,a dn blindly copying foreign models, will inevitably lead to us losing our national identity. As Dmitry Likhachev wrote, “State sovereignty is also defined by cultural criteria.” Having a unique cultural and spiritual identity has never stopped anyone from building a country open to the world. Russia has made a tremendous contribution to the formation of European and world culture. Our country has historically developed as a union of many peoples and cultures and the idea of a common community, a community in which people of different nationalities and religions live together, has been at the foundation of the Russian people’s spiritual outlook for many centuries now.”

A NEW MEDIA WORLD

In its July issue, Fast Company magazine profiled Al Gore’s media company and business interests. He’s created a new model for using business and catching the incoming wave of new media trends to create the kind of stewardship usually created by figures in government.

After the 2000 election, Joel Hyatt began talking with Gore about the sorry state of television and the role that the broadcast media play in the public sphere. “The line between news and entertainment is blurred,” as Gore now puts it. “Much of TV is mind deadening. It’s a one-way conduit of knowledge.” The two men discussed what Hyatt calls “an utter lack of innovation in the media industry”—a barely disguised oligopoly, as they saw it, controlling both content and competition. “We decided that we wanted to build a new kind of media company to democratize—small d—television first and the media industry generally,” Hyatt says. They would give viewers from 18 to 34 the means to create and control what went on the air—a user-generated model now familiar thanks to the likes of YouTube and MySpace, but a shot in the dark for TV back in 2002. [This became the company Current TV.]

...Gore sees no reason to apologize for not wanting to jump into the electoral fray. As a businessman, he can speak with a candor few successful politicians can maintain. He has made an enormous amount of money and achieved positions of influence from technology to financial services to media. He and Tipper are even setting themselves up as angel investors for a few early-stage tech companies they believe in. In doing one end run after another around the status quo, he has created a new life: a perfect amalgam of environmental activism and a new type of capitalism in which there is more than one bottom line to consider, more than one master to serve.

—Jillian Burt

The media has given decidedly mixed results of General Petraeus’ much awaited testimony to the U.S. Congress. After appearing before both houses of Congress, the four-star general has given a frank, yet ultimately unsatisfying, assessment of the War in Iraq. And while the obnoxious protests from the hearing room are making the anti-war left look ineffective and downright silly, there is a prevailing sentiment among the mainstream in this country that finds this war and its prosecution unacceptable. So what’s the Fourth Estate’s role in translating this testimony into decipherable language? When is this war ending? Are we winning? Is this occupation making us safer from terrorism? So far the reporting on this matter has addressed these important questions with just about as much urgency as the general’s rambling, unspecific testimony. Let’s hope we get some more analysis in the coming days instead of the ambiguous reports coming out of the press these past two days. 

—Joe Tacopino

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