ARTS & FARCES internet

I haven’t followed major party political conventions for more than 30 years, although I’m watching the watchers fairly closely this cycle because I’m editing the stories of two journalists on the ground in Boston for my day job.

David Weinberger had the best snapshot of the convention I’ve seen, when he described what it was like to view the opening proceedings from seven stories up in the Fleet Center:

At 4 o’clock, when the Convention is gaveled to order by Terry MacAuliffe—a man so clean and well groomed that you want to take him home and dress his anatomically incorrect body in lots of fun outfits—the hall is more empty than full.

The second best observation goes to my wife who’s a C-SPAN junkie:

Fox News must not have a lot of fans among Democratic Convention delegates. When the network’s delegate wrangler repeated her requests to turn and face a particular camera “for Fox News,” the delegates responded with resounding “boos.”

I’m really glad to see Jerry Michalski regularly writing online again. Even his throw-away stuff is full of valuable insight.

In “Again: what’s so difficult about abundance?” he makes the fine point that sustainable businesses can be created around abundance rather than the artificial scarcity taught in business schools.

It drives me nuts that scarcity is seen as such a fundamental requirement for creating a business. Sure, there are plenty of businesses built around scarce resources, and sure, Dave’s time and my time are scarce, but that’s no proof that businesses can’t cruise along profitably creating voluntary loyalty by knowing their customers better, never betraying them, always being available and fixing problems, responding more quickly than others…. you get the picture. But go to business school and what they teach you is how to create artificial scarcity. That’s the kind of thinking that got us into the present mess.

One of the things that impresses me deeply about working at Utne is that everyone—the business side, the editorial side, everyone—goes out of their way to help our readers whenever we can.

Unlike almost all publications, Utne‘s editorial product is based on abundance. We wouldn’t exist without the alternative, non-corporate media and we revel in that, never forgetting it. And we spend a lot of time nurturing that seedbed where we can (we’ll start discussing our nominees for this year’s Utne Independent Press Awards next week).

Proving yet again that protecting the profiteers is the prime directive of his administration, President Bush’s Justice Department has begun going to court to block patient lawsuits stemming from faulty prescription drugs and medical devices. Patients, according to the Bush administration, cannot recover damages for injuries caused by products that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The administration’s doublespeak is highlighted in Robert Pear’s article in this morning’s New York Times:

Allowing consumers to sue manufacturers would “undermine public health” and interfere with federal regulation of drugs and devices, by encouraging “lay judges and juries to second-guess” experts at the F.D.A., the government said in siding with the maker of a heart pump sued by the widow of a Pennsylvania man. Moreover, it said, if such lawsuits succeed, some good products may be removed from the market, depriving patients of beneficial treatments.

Nevermind that even the logic of this latest move is faulty. The hyenas with which Bush surrounds himself are constantly howling about the benefits of a government small enough to drown in the bathtub, yet one would presume that the FDA would grow alarmingly large in this scenario. That presumption would be wrong, cowboy. Bush will block patient lawsuits with one hand and shrink the FDA right along with the other federal agencies with the other. It’s lunacy and it concerns me greatly that the citizenry fails to see through this.

More than ever, actions like this underscore the immediate need for a patients’ bill of rights that includes the right to sue. This is clearly a play by the Bush administration to protect the profits of drug companies and medical device manufacturers at the expense of patients.

A revolution every 20 years. That’s what Thomas Jefferson recommended for a healthy republic, and we’re way past due here in America. Here’s more proof:

In a Newsweek exclusive rehash of a two-week old story filed by an Associated Press reporter, Michael Isikoff warns that counterterrorism officials are reviewing a proposal to postpone the upcoming presidential election as a sort of premptive move against an unsubstantiated Al Qaeda strike.

Timing is everything in politics, and this sham is no different and typical of the Bush White House. The Senate intelligence committee—led by a Bush-supporting Republican (Pat Roberts; R-Kansas)—issues a scathing report on the total and utter failure of accurately assessing the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and the Bush administration issues yet another unsubstantiated Chicken Little threat assessment to deflect attention.

Here’s the key bit from Isikoff’s piece: “[Homeland Security Secretary Tom] Ridge and other counterterrorism officials concede they have no intel about any specific plots.”

UPDATE Sunday, 11 July 2004 03:05PM CDT: True to corporate media form, Isikoff’s Newsweek piece is neither exclusive nor timely. As indicated in the edits above, Erica Werner filed the story for the Associated Press more than two weeks ago.

“It never got weird enough for me” is the running theme of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson‘s life although I’m betting it came close last month. The good doctor was asked to ride in—not drive in—John Kerry’s motorcade (scroll to the bottom grafs) and sign three copies of Campaign Trail. Ten dollars says Thompson had a vicious flashback to his 1970 Freak Power campaign for Pitkin County sheriff missing by that much and scaring the bejesus out of him.

I haven’t been writing much lately because things are just too weird for me to comprehend. Consider this one….

Eric Eldred—yeah, the Eric Eldred who filed a lawsuit against John Ashcroft to keep some scrap of the public domain, well, public—got threatened with arrest at Walden Pond for giving away copies of Thoreau’s Walden.