The Future of our Nation Examined Through the Eyes of Twitter

Do you ever worry about the future of our nation?
Re-reading my Twitter/HootSuite 2015 national news threads just now, proved to be alarming for me.

1. Budget War talk started early.
2. Republicans made head-spinning claims as soon as they took over.
3. Legislating under Republicans began with the meaningless Keystone Pipeline bill.
4. My own crazy state of Texas has not disappointed in its heartlessness this year.
5. The Secret Service admitted to having problems with alcohol.

The Republican budget that has just been introduced favors the "One Percent."  It would abandon large swaths of vulnerable people.  Even though they claim credit for an improving economy, Congress will do nothing to fix the essential infrastructure needed to support and continue that healthy economy.  The Keystone Pipeline benefits the Canadian economy.  Texas turns farther towards the extreme right as each month passes.  And we cannot protect the safety of the POTUS.  These realities reinforce my worry about what is happening to the USA in early 2015 .

But there are bright spots that should not be ignored.

• The Daily Beast writes: The Right Warms Up To Climate Change.
• We are understanding more about the brain.  This is Brain Awareness Week.
• Cory Booker continues to post tweets about possibilities.
• Anthony Snowden and Glenn Greenwald are still able to get together,
• Europe remains helpful to Iranian negotiation, even if Republican legislators are not.
• The state of Oregon made voter registration automatic.

Not all Congressional Republicans are stupid or corrupt.  Science continues to prevail.  Truth continues to have its brave apologists. We can count on our centuries old friend, Europe, to have our back.  Some states in the USA are not insane.  And optimists tweet.

 
Follow me at Twitter.

Confessions Of a Collector -2013

Image via CrunchBase

Since I have become a Twitter convert, I have persisted in my old habits of collecting. I gather and keep stuff over time.  I confess that  Twitter has become one of my favorite applications. I like it because it makes it very easy to scan the news, follow links to further info, and keep up with the lives of interesting people.
The organizing platform I use for Twitter is an excellent, powerful application called HootSuite. It automatically sorts the posts of those I follow into separate groups as well as separate category pages.
Having written 2680 tweets (140 character posts) so far, I confess that I am probably addicted. Tweets/updates include "re-tweets," and my own Twitter messages. 
On Twitter, I have 357 followers (people who read my tweets); I follow 550 people myself.  My "Favorites" Twitter feed incudes others' tweets I want to keep for reference or merely for rereading pleasure.


"My Twitter Lists" are available feeds for you to try out:

• Newspapers and Magazines - First rate news sources make it easy to stay on top of most important happenings. 
• Newsletters & TV Stations - Digital and Non Print-Media sources of news
• Media Darlings - My favorites on TV or Pop Media
• Reporters and writers - Well known writers & reporters; all smart, often funny
• Bloggers and blogs - Writers and websites that do not fit into my other news categories
• Earth & Space Folks -  Maintain awareness of environmental & space news from committed people, organizations.
• Officials-government - Elected officials and government websites to follow
• Civil Libs & Activists -  Trying to make the world a better place
• Good Causes -  A way to follow good deeds in a troubled world
• Mental Health - Professionals and organizations working in the field of mental health

Below is a list of my previous posts in this "Confessions" series:

My computer is the perfect place to digitally collect STUFF.  Confessions of a Collector - Part 1,373 - 5/18/10 - To quote from my post: "I physically collect stuff: because I might need or want it some day. The bottom line is this. I don't NEED any of it. But I may WANT it. There is a big difference."

Examining my reasons for collecting - More Confessions of a Collector 4/25/08 - 
"I confess that, like most of us who are addicted to blogging, we don't need much of an excuse to celebrate. I also confess that I collect a lot of stuff to use for writing my posts. Today's post is a reprise ofthat theme.

Familiar TV away from home - Confessions of a C-Span Junkie - 5/3/07 - To quote: "All of you who are "clean and sober" would say to me, "for heaven's sake, get a life." But those of you who are also political or C-SPAN junkies can identify with my symptoms."

Handy-dandy blogging shared stuff - Collecting: new stuff - 9/8/06 was a post that focused on my favorite blogging sites, tools, new discoveries, etc. Many of these came to me as a result of another blogger's thoughtfulness.

True confessions - Confessions of a Collector - 2/17/06. In it I explored the motivations behind the collecting bug, as well as the "why" (for me) of some of my own favorite collected headlines. 

South by Southwest gets a new look.

This Blogger website has been redesigned.  

 If things look unfamiliar, it is because they are new ideas from my desktop.  I have been posting at South by Southwest for several years and got bored with the "old" look of it.  The new look has an even older image, but it is a better fit with my blog's goals.



South by Southwest began 0n March 29, 2005.  Over the years I published 1656 posts with 21,077 page views.  Some of the blog posts were great, some were adequate, and some were lazy "throw-aways."

Always interested in the design, as well as the content, I have played with the look of my blog.  Previous versions are somehow lost in the fog of time, and it is probably just as well.

Because I blog less frequently now, I have a few regular subscribers.  But no one leaves comments any more.  Life has changed for all of us who are now more drawn to the social media.

Over half of my readers (57%) used Internet Explorer, most of the rest favored Firefox (30%), and the rest used Chrome, Safari, etc.  Windows is by far the most popular OS at 94%.  The rest are Mac users (2%0, Linux (1%) and iPhone (<1%).  My readers come from all over the world.  They hail from (in order of frequency): United States, France, Germany, Indonesia, Russia, the UK, Israel, (and tied) So. Korea, Sweden and the Netherlands.  I am included in regular "Googlebot" visitors, and on rare occasions I showed up on page one of a Google search.

So, thanks for coming by.  I'll see you again, I hope.

************

My Other Blogs: My creative website is Making Good Mondays. Follow me at Twitter.
And Carol Gee - Online Universe is the home page for all my websites.

Trying Windows Live Writer

This is a new type of writing pane that would make it simple to post to any of my main blogs.

If it looks a bit odd . . .

Importation of my WordPress blog is the reason for the incomplete titles, Twitter tweets, etc.  I took in the previous year's content and merged it into Southwest Postings.  Hope you find some useful stuff that is not too dated.  This Southwest Postings site, along with Twitter and Facebook, is where you can find me on the web these days.  Have a good week!

Posted via email from Southwest Postings

On writing about books and authors --

Writing about books is not the primary focus of my blogging.  For that I recommended, in a post in October of 2009, a literary blogger who maintains the Maud Newton: Blog.  Here is one of her posts about a reading of one of her essays in a published collection titled Love Is a Four Letter Word.  Newton is a great writer and a reviewer of books of all kinds.

Since I learned to read I have consumed and cherished good books.  As a reader I joined the popular website, GoodReads.  Over the years I have written a few reviews myself, nothing to compare, of course.  And I have written about authors as well, not formal reviews, but with a focus of what they had written that interested me.  As a blogger, my posts are generally about national politics and world affairs.  In that vein the first such piece, written on July 19, 2005 was about the book, The World Is Flat, by Thomas Friedman.  Luckily ". . . cliff notes" was in the post title.  It landed my post in position #10 of 104,000 in the Google search.  I was surprised and pleased by the popularity of my post, and have been writing about good books ever since.

My first formal book review was written on November 9, 2007.  I was offered a review copy by the publisher of Stone Cold, written by David Baldacci.  (Here is Amazon's current info about the book).  I have no idea how they found me, except that I have long blogged about the Middle East, national security and national intelligence subjects.  Stone Cold is a novel touching on those themes.  Being an anxious-to-please first time reviewer, my review was timely to the date of publication and, for a few days it remained in the top 20 of a Google search.  It has since disappeared from the first few pages in a current search.

What seems to make terrorists tick has always been an area of fascination for me.  After having watched a great C-SPAN feature on the subject I wrote a whole series of posts.  I concluding it March 18, 2008, with a post on Leaderless Jihad.  Forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman was the author of the book about Middle Eastern terrorists on which he presented so brilliantly on TV.   (This is the current info from Amazon about the book). Today my post remains at #17 of 5300 in a Google search.

Nonfiction is the literary form I prefer, and I remain fascinated by political biography and autobiography.  One of my (s)heroes is the first female Secretary of State, Madelaine Albright.  She served under President Bill Clinton, another of my heroes. Her memoir is entitled Madam Secretary, and I wrote at length about her fine book in a post on January 8, 2009. (Here is Amazon's info about the book).  Today, I often refer to her memoir when I want to find out about the background of the Camp David peace negotiations that happened just before President George W. Bush's inauguration.  I started blogging in March of 2005 in an oppositional reaction to the aggressive invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration.

The author of my most recent book review written on August 31, 2010, also had a negative reaction to the war in Iraq.  Barefoot In Baghdad, was written by Minal Omar, an American Muslim woman born in Saudi Arabia who came to the U.S. at the age of 6 months. Here is more about the book, a memoir  that tells of her living and working in Iraq on behalf of women during the early years of the war. It is now #56 of 103,000 in Google search.  I highly recommend this book, by the way.  Omar has returned to the United States.  We are on the way out of Iraq and the Middle East peace process is still stalled.  According to the well-respected Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erakat, Camp David still has a bearing.  However, Erakat recently stated that President Obama's midterm election losses will not affect  the current peace process.

Image via Wikipedia

My review was another case of being sent a review copy by a publisher, who somehow found out my areas of interest and my contact information.  I seem to be on a number of types of Email lists.  I get news releases from publicists who want my readers to know about expert speakers who are out and about. I still get a significant number of offers of books to be mailed to me for review.  I do not accept any books about which I am uninterested.   And I must confess that I do not always get reviews written about the books I receive.  Some I cannot finish out of boredom, some I find to be pretty inadequate and not worth the effort to write even a negative review.  It has been an interesting side benefit of blogging and one with which I always try to operate in good faith, even if imperfectly.


[11/7/10: Post date]

My Other Blogs: Check out my Amplify blog for synopses of current news stories. My creative website is Making Good Mondays. Follow me at Twitter. And Carol Gee - Online Universe is the home page for all my websites.

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When thinking of joining a new group . . .

We always wonder whether we will find anyone with whom we are compatible. And we're not always sure how to find the ones who might be candidates. Naturally, those of us who are compliant types try to find out what rules apply. We try to fit in, to learn the "language" of others who were here ahead of us. We try either to blend in or stand out, depending on our personalities. But it will take a while to find out whether we belong or not, because."IMAGE MAKES TRUTH ELUSIVE."

Posted via email from Southwest Postings

Redirecting

Follow me at Twitter.

S/SW Redesigned

Blogger recently notified us about a few improvements to their blogging platform.  I tried out the new design tools and found them to be useful in upgrading my "old blog."  I started S/SW in 2005, so it was surely time to do something.  I started by getting reacquainted with my old friend, Zemanta, who provides illustrations and additional resources based on my content..

The contents remain essentially the same; the form is relatively different:  a new template, 3 columns instead of 2, rearranged elements, and altered heading colors.  I only "crashed it" a few times, by moving too fast, and I did not lose anything that was irreplacable.  I can report that the design platform is generally easy to use and stable.

Going paperless

Relying on having access to only digital archival information necessitates adopting a very different mindset for me.  I have been used to having the information I need stored in my file cabinets.  Yes, I have more than one, even though I am retired.  Or it is in a set of office sorting trays, or a cardboard file box, or even in a stack. There are several advantages for me to go digital. Plagued by procrastination, I seem to be much more motivated to keep my digital files cleaned out and organized so that my computer runs faster.  I also love the magic of the "search" box.  I prefer typing and editing on a computer keyboard (using ScribeFire in the Firefox browser), to composing on paper.  I do not know how I got along before I discovered cloud computing on Evernote.  My computer is even preferable for simple notes and scribbles, signified by my reliance on a nifty little application called Note Mania.  Therefore, the trick for me has been to have fun and useful tools - applications - that work better for me than the old way of writing.  But writing is not the only thing associated with retaining information.  Reading is equally important.

Giving up the local newspaper means we will not have the paper delivered to our front porch every morning.  We will not read today's headlines, articles of local interest, wedding announcements, or obituaries.  The files I am going through these days include lots of old newspaper clippings  associated with my history.  And I cannot throw some of them away.  They had value then and they have value now. How could we discard the obituaries of our forebearers?  The reason is emotional attachment, which is the core driver of hoarding, by the way.  As with preferring hardback books to reading lengthy pieces online, I still prefer reading the paper form of our local news organ.  But we cannot afford it any more.  So I get all my news from television or online like everyone else.  And I will have to figure out something else to use for mailing packing material, for protecting the floor when we paint the walls, for training the puppy or for lining the birdcage.  There are definitely some ways we cannot go paperless.  More importantly, I am fully aware that news organization reporters (predominantly print journalism) are responsible for gathering and publishing the original news items to which we bloggers so casually link.

Trashing old paper files signifies literally not being able to get your hands on a piece of information you thought important enough to save at some time in the past.  My question is always, "What if I need (or want) this in the future. I am a keeper of information, not someone who would qualify as a hoarder, though some might disagree.  And I love to read from original materials.  It is that emotional attachment thing again.  What can compare, for example, to the original halting letters and spacing of my granddaughter's first grade penmanship blue book?  She is now well into her 20's and long past blue books.  What could be more precious than a mushy yellowed 1955 telegram from my boyfriend, now my husband of 54 years?  You can begin to see my problem.  But I am making progress.  I now know that I neither need nor want 1986 United Way training handouts on how to be a manager.  I have no regrets at being retired from that kind of activity.  And those old handouts would not tell me how to manage our Corgi dog who wants to run the household.  They are now dog-eared and faded copies that should go into the recycling bin.  Recycling, by the way, has helped me more easily make trash.  Stuff is not "wasted," another of my mental barriers to going paperless.

Forgoing extra copies implies the risk of losing the original document. The rule is that if the documentation is easily available elsewhere, do not keep the original or even a copy. I must remind myself that not every piece of paper is a valuable document.  Throwing the extras away gains valuable storage space for those essential originals the IRS wants us to keep for a time, or those identity documents that mark for your heirs your passage through this life. Yes, I am at the legacy stage of life, age 73.  I have provided my fair share of original recipes for those family or local club cookbooks.  My old scribbled pencil copy can go away.  The cookbooks are now all digitized, even if they show up in spiral notebook or paperback form.  I can always order another one, such as the Junior League club cookbooks that I collected as travel souvenirs for many years.

Getting off mailing lists indicates that I could miss out on potentially important information from outside sources.  It also means accumulating less paper to throw away.  Remember the advent of the lists offering to help remove your name from junk mail lists bought and sold for the purpose.  I did that but the effort must be maintained.  Rarely is it now that merchandise is not available online.  I do still enjoy beautiful slick catalogs.  However, they are rarely free. The thrill associated with the arrival of the Sears or "Monkey Ward" catalog goes back to living in the country in Wyoming as a child and looking forward to the free Montgomery Ward Christmas catalog coming in the mail in November. These days the mailing lists from which I remove myself are those unending press releases that all proliffic bloggers receive.  Even when I am trying to live paperless, I still get junk Email I must handle/delete.  Spam filters do not work when mailers acquire your name legitimately.

Posted via email from Make Good Mondays

When Mondays start badly, reboot.

Bunches of us have been bummed in recent weeks.  BP ruined our Gulf of Mexico.  Relative and friends have been having worrying troubles.  At home, the one dish meal burns when the heat source is too high and dust bunnies are peeping out from under the bed.  One appliance or another goes on the fritz.  Out home temperature is too hot or too cold.  We run out of milk and lose one of our sneakers.

Let me tell you my Monday story, only because it has suddenly become a Good Monday tale of triumph at the keyboard. Such hyperbole is in order because I am an occasionally technology-challenged blogger.  This morning I awoke early, got on the computer and one of my favorite applications would not open.  Which one is not important.

I depend on my favorite applications to work as I have configured them.  They are to remember their places, mere tools at my disposal, not entities with their own agendas that waste my writing time.

When I became stymied I first did my magical thinking bit, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  Nothing.  Going online to the home page of the application's website, I explored the technical support section, hoping to find an already prepared simple answer.  Nothing.  Then I downloaded the application and tried to reinstall it. Nothing.  "You already have this updated version installed," it said.  Reading the latest posts in the users forum, I did not find another soul with my same problem.  Nothing there. 
Well, you're up against it I told myself.  The only thing left to do was to send an Email that would languish for days in some far off boiler room, leaving me hanging and frustrated.

Dear Sir:  Help, help.  I love your application.  It is my favorite, I promise.  I just can't get it to open.  Here's the sequence of what has happened over the past few days and what I have done so far.  Etc., etc.  SEND.

And wonder of wonders, I got an immediate response, signed with someone's name.  I was told to uninstall the offending application,  download a fresh one, reinstall it, reboot and start over.  Does that mean I will loose all the work I have done in the past using this app?  I was afraid that would happen.  I reminded myself that I probably had no choice in the matter.  Take the chance, I told myself, which I did.

Voila! Ureka! It worked, after a bit of balkiness.  All my old stuff was still there, as if by magic.  What a relief.  Thank you, thank you.

As I think about it I realize that my problem was probably a standard complaint.  It was perhaps so standard that I received an automated response.  Or perhaps the person at the help desk was very quick to reply to my entreaty.  It does not matter.  It worked and I am back in business.

I was able to make a good Monday out of a really bad Monday start.  Hope the same good fortune happens to everyone who is in the midst of a shaky start.

Posted via web from Make Good Mondays

The Reaction in review (May 3-7, 2020)

A week's reactions that deserve a second look.
 

Friday
By Creature: "Jobs" -- The king of succinct closes our week with some very good news on the U.S. economy.

By Capt. Fogg: "Audacity" --  Fogg at his finest, with one of his trademark rants, argues persuasively  that it takes a great deal of audacity for the right wing fringe to accuse liberals of the sin of hate.


By Michael J.W. Stickings: "Bigots, rent boys, and right-wing Christian hypocrisy -- update" -- Michael posted twice on the "George Rekers hypocrisy extravaganza."  See also Wednesday's good piece.



Thursday
By Michael J.W. Stickings: "Hung Parliament?" -- The Reaction's Canadian editor effectively explains what is going on with the parliamentary election in the United Kingdom.

By J. Thomas Duffy: "CSI Metropolis" -- Duffy the movie buff reports that footage has been restored to the old classic, Fritz Lang's, 'Metropolis.'
 
By Distributorcap: "May 4 Ohio" - Our newest contributor has presented an outstanding post about the killing of students at Kent State in 1970, bringing important perspective to the current polarization of the body politic.


Wednesday
By Creature: "Energy bill in doubt" -- Our associate editor figured out why: "A + B should = C, but it never seems to when $ is part of the equation.

By Capt. Fogg: "Joe the Dumber" --  The good captain exposes the outrageousness of Sen. Joe Lieberman, asking, "What does Lieberman hope to accomplish other than to give hope to the barbarian Right that we can do as we like to anyone who isn't a citizen?

By J. Thomas Duffy: "Top Ten Cloves: Reasons Dick Cheney was visiting Saudi Arabia" -- In one of his trademark special roundup features, Duffy counts down why the ex-Veep might have visited Saudi Arabia  (with good links).


Tuesday
By J. Thomas Duffy:  "Postcards from a sad edge" -- JTD's fine review of "a great Roy Cohen Op-Ed" on fascism titled, "The Banality of Good," includes interesting illustrations as well as a couple of bonus links.

By Capt. Fogg: "Heckuva Twist, Brownie" -- Fogg's wonderful capacity for irony makes this post, on the Broewnie (of Katrina fame) outrageous accusation against President Obama, a fun read.

By Michael J.W. Stickings: "Craziest Republicans of the Day:" (2 posts) Tom Emmer-MN and Ron Kirkland/Randy Smith -TN -- This day Michael noticed an awful lot of right wing Republican craziness going on regarding the Constitution and DADT.
 
By Creature: "No vote on SAFE Banking Act?" -- Quoting Simon Johnson's take that there will not be a vote on the Kaufman-Brown amendment, Creature argues that a vote  would be "a chance for preening politicians to put their constituents ahead of their big-money donors."  Creature urged phone calls to senators.


Monday
By Distributorcap: "Black is the new green" -- In his Reaction debut, the newest pony in our stable of writers, makes the very well written argument, "This massive oil spill is not a bump in the road to energy independence but rather another in a long list of somber warnings that we have to change our ways . . ."

By Michael J.W. Stickings: "Roman Polanski breaks his silence and admits nothing" -- In the latest in his series of posts on Polanski, Michael concludes, "I'd be a bit more sympathetic if he showed an iota of remorse, and if he were truly and genuinely honest both with himself and with us."  (Links to previous posts included).

Posted via web from Southwest Postings

Five years of blogging today --

Celebrating "blogiversaries"  is a tradition in the blogosphere.  This is the fifth year I have been posting at South by Southwest, a blog about politics and government.  The areas of focus were citizen activism, civil liberties, Congress, the Middle East and the space program.  I also devoted a lot of page space to the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.  I worried that the previous administration did not adhere to the rule of law.  And I have worried that the current administration was too quick to adopt some of the more questionable national security policies of their predecessors.  Overall, however I am a happy citizen these days.

Posting  at several blog sites -- I came to writing regularly on my own and others' web pages.  I began to expand first with a more personal and creative site called Making Good Mondays, as well as a round-up site called Behind the Links.  More recently I joined a couple of social networking sites, Facebook-(private) and Twitter.  Each venue had distinct advantages.  When I felt the need for a piece of nonpolitical writing, I turned to MGM.  And I came to the practice of posting to BTL the interesting links my readers who became blog buddies sent me via Email.  At present I am drawn to the social nature of Facebook.  I keep up with personal friends and family as well as friends and acquaintances I made on the internet.  Twitter turns out to be the perfect way to do a quick scan of the very latest news, as well as read some of my favorite writers who have mastered the 140 character format.

Joining blog communities -- For several years I cross-posted my original political pieces at several "big" and 'little' group websites.  The blogging communities I joined include Daily Kos, Texas Kaos, TPM Cafe, The Reaction, Sirens Chronicles, Red Gage and Political Voices of Women. Like most other people in the blogosphere, I came to favor each group for different reasons.  Kos and TPM  are cutting edge, Texas Kaos is more local.  Reaction writers are among the best progressive voices; Sirens were wonderfully edgy and occasionally outrageous.  Red Gage is a friendly community where contributors earn money for the work they post.  Political Voices of Women spans the ideological spectrum.  These days I have stopped posting on most of the group sites.  It became too time consuming. I also felt a little burned out, which made me question the caliber of my writing for these high quality group sites.

My posting frequency has changed over the years, expanding and now contracting.  During the early years, there was no lack of issues about which I was passionate.  You see, I had a discernible opponent.  I am a progressive Democrat and President George W. Bush provided me with many things about which I could rant.  I did not know I was ranting at the time because I was a "newbie."  I just knew something was wrong and that I could speak out.  And I did, almost every day.  My goal, however,  was to try to balance criticism with positive recognition, though I have not always kept that balance equal.  Since President Obama was elected and Democrats became the majorities in both houses of congress, I am much less critical of those in charge.  And somehow I have not felt as driven to write as in the past.

Five years of rather regular writing has been a wonderful challenge, which I have not always met as I would have liked.  I have often felt the pressure to produce -- something very good or something to meet a deadline.  That is possibly a recipe for burnout.  However, the writing members of these communities were unfailingly supportive, accepting and intellectually stimulating.  I am sure I have gained more than I gave at each site.  Now I am about assessing where I am and what I want to do in my writing future.  I do know for sure that I will be around.  Stay tuned.

[Post date - 3/29/10]

Blogs: My general purpose/southwest focus blog is at Southwest Progressive. My creative website is at Making Good Mondays. And Carol Gee - Online Universe is the all-in-one home page for all my websites.
Technorati tags: blogging news blogs writing

The story so far, in one picture - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

The story so far, in one picture

World industrial production in the Great Depression and now:

via krugman.blogs.nytimes.com

The pundits will say that today's elections are "the start of the Republican revolution," or that the Democrats "averted disaster," or spout other hyped over-generalizations. But the question of whether a member of the official Conservative Party wins his election in upstate New York or not, pales in importance compared to Krugman's published gift posted on this election day.

In 1929 it was industrial production in "the world," but one consisting of much more separate elements than today. The remaining question is this: Is the industrial production being done by people with real jobs or by robots?

It would be interesting to see the U.S. stats broken out in the same manner at the world stats in the graph here. U.S. production is just barely up. And persistent Joblessness is still incredibly painful for every family in America experiencing it.

Posted via web from Southwest Postings

Maud Newton: Blog

All week someone’s been searching my archives for the old design of this site, so here it is. I liked it better the original way, honestly, even though the paint spatters gave everyone else a headache.
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This seems like a good time to mention that we’re gearing up for a complete redesign. This header’s gotta go, the color scheme has to change, longer posts will need to shift to the left, etc., etc. I hope to have everything figured out and switched over by the end of the year, because I’m not sure how much longer I can bear to look at these cut-out letters.

via maudnewton.com

Maud Newton's one of my favorite writers. Her blog has been on my list of favorites for several years. Her personal family stories are just great; her literary critic's eye is flawless and her sense of humor is unique.
This is a recommendation that you stop by and catch her stuff . . . and you don't have to wait for the redesign. Enjoy it today!

Posted via web from Southwest Postings

ProPublica: Two-Years-Old—and More Than 100 Stories Partnered - ProPublica

Two years ago today, the formation of ProPublica was announced [1] in The New York Times. Since then, we’ve published more than 100 partnered investigations, posted hundreds of pieces on our Web site and created tools for other journalists to use (such as ChangeTracker [2], our Bailout Guide [3], and Recovery Tracker [4]).

On this occasion of our “birthday,” we would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of the newspaper, TV, radio and online outlets that have helped us in our mission to hold those in power accountable for their actions. We literally couldn’t have done it without them.

And while we’re celebrating our second year of life, we would also like to remind everyone that our stories can be used for free under the terms of our Creative Commons [5] license. All we ask for is proper credit, a link back to us, no edits and no selling it on your own.

via propublica.org

Happy Birthday to ProPublica. This great idea has been a special resource for my blogging since its inception. I especially like their spirit of helpfulness to ordinary citizens and their fiercely nonpartisan investigative journalists. Kudos and many more good years to come!

Posted via web from Southwest Postings

Filling an empty blogging bucket

It begins with reality -- Much of the following was news to me, though you may be ahead and already know these things. I found out because I have spent the morning trying to break out of a non-creative box which leaves me without inspiration to write.
Dry spells -- Others have said the same thing and I had been reading about the decline of political blogging. I had been having the feeling that my blogging stats are down and I wondered it it were just me. I knew my Site Meter statistics had been down since June. So I checked at Technorati. In addition to my stats, which had changed, I found out that Technorati.com is going to be completely rebuilt very soon.
Breaking out of boring -- So I will save some time towards more creativity by temporarily omitting the Technorati tags I have been using at the ends of posts. While I was there I checked the Too 100 list to see whether there were good writers whose work I was missing, who could be inspiring me again.

Reading the best -- Using the list, I rejuvenated my Google reader via its Power Readers index. I began with The Strange Death of Liberal America (see "the decline of political blogging" above); and "44" at the Washington Post. This article on the hot New Jersey race shows why "FiveThirtyEight" became another of my feeds. He is an absolute whiz at predicting outcomes.

A picture is worth 1000 words -- I then subscribed to Andrew Sullivan, who had linked to The Big Picture (featuring a fabulous photo spread on Afghanistan). Much of my random surfing focused on imagery, Time Magazine's pictures of the week, for example. I concluded with Rachel Sussman's groundbreaking portfolio of The Oldest Living Things in the World.
Is social media on the web to blame for my empty bucket? Possibly, though I regularly cull my list of those I follow on Twitter. I want nothing inane. Tweets like the following example keep me involved with material that seems substantial. Rachel Maddow: "Read the godawful news of 8 US troops just killed in Afghanistan immediately before going on set for MTP this morning." My FaceBook account includes only people I have invited, plus it remains private. They are relatives, in-person friends and blogfriends. No empty bucket there.
At the end of the day -- This is what I have learned, or relearned. Creativity is about breaking the rules. The amount of political blogging has actually declined, probably for natural reasons. Regular and vigorous weeding out of one's surfing or feed-reading material is essential. Tomorrow I plan to go through my regular Email newsletters unsubscribing to several that are not useful or interesting. Imagery is an essential break from a words only regimen. I works on a different part of the brain. And social media is worthwhile for its connectivity, something else needed for an empty bucket.
(Image by Wordle.net)

Posted via email from Southwest Postings

Speaking of Twitter: a round-up

Tweets from my current collection of favorites:

ReTweeted by several people whom I follow -- This is a wonderfully fine piece written by Rececca Solnit.

"How 9/11 Should Be Remembered," is from the Utne Reader (9/11/09).

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Obama speeches -- Last week was a very big one for President Obama at the podium. He spoke to school children at the beginning of their year and he spoke to a joint session of Congress. And on 9/11/09 he and the First Lady helped paint a Habitat house.

"Presidential Speech Week Self-Control Report Card. Nation's Schoolchildren: A. Joe Wilson: F.," is by pourmecoffee (9/10/09).

"Read Obama’s closing remarks, full transcript, the letter from Ted, and the plan he laid out - plus photos," is from The White House (9/9/09).

"The sleeper agents brainwashed by George W. Bush's speech to students in 1991 should be coming out in force any minute now," is by reporter John Dickerson (9/7/09).

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Healthcare, this and that -- These days it is all about healthcare. Here are a couple of great little pieces of writing.

"RT @chrislhayes: RT @Atrios early stages of potential flu epidemic prbly excllnt time to make sre illegal immigrants dn't hve #healthcare," is from The Nation (9/10/09).

"Annoying: Lunatic shouters get a seat at the table on #hcr but single payer advocates are treated like lunatics and denied one," is by libbyspencer (9/90/9).

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David Baldacci - At it again: a reprise

[Original post date - 11/9/07] Thursdays usually focus on the wars, the Middle East or national security. Baldacci's books are thrillers about national security.

Best selling novelist, David Baldacci's new book Stone Cold came out this week, and I was privileged to read an advance copy. What fun it was to discover this new (to me, at least) author. He writes about one of my blog's favorite fascinations, the federal government. " Spooks, Spies - Eyes and Ears in the Skies," is one example. I cannot imagine where I have been all this time.

During the past ten years, 13 of Baldacci's books have been bestsellers. They should have been familiar to me, because my blogs are often written about what is behind the door of chilling government power -- spying, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, illegal domestic surveillance and threats to civil liberties, all subjects woven through the scenes in this author's books.

This novel's fascinating main characters will be familiar to dedicated Baldacci fans because Stone Cold is the third in his popular Camel Club series. Traits found in lead characters were carefully woven in moral shades of gray in several previous novels; two of the best sellers were "The Collectors" and "Simple Genius." And the new book does not disappoint; we meet people who span the warp and woof of good and bad, flawed and heroic. Baldacci uses an interesting technique; he lets his readers in on his character's thoughts via italics. For example - a CIA man trying to find his targets reflects on his experience:

. . . Gray's men had checked. Still, with Carter Gray's resources no one should be able to simply vanish. No wonder these terrorist sleeper cells were proving nearly impossible to uncover. America was too damn big and too damn free. In some ways the Soviets had had it right: Spy on everybody because you never know when a friend might turn into an enemy.

Baldacci's fiction tapestry is that of government. His is not the government you and I would know from mainstream media accounts. Baldacci's is a very recognizable shadowy universe that hides spooks, spies and assassins, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Secret Service, and even the Chair of the Senate Intel committee. He introduces a new character in this book, nemesis "Harry Finn." Psychologically astute, Baldacci often lets you know what his characters think. Here is a wonderful example:

. . . And when Gray had left the government, he had also left most of his protection behind. . . but Finn was confident he would eventually get to the man.

When Finn looked at the life he had now as part of a family of five in a quite ordinary Virginia suburb complete with a lovable dog, music lessons, soccer matches, baseball games and swim meets, and compared it to the life he has as a child, the juxtaposition was close to apocalyptic in its effect on him. That's why he rarely thought of these things close together. That's why he was Harry Finn, King of Compartmentalization. He could build walls in his mind nothing could pierce.

With this novel I walked into what seem to be very complex and realistic scenes from the high powered world of governance. I now know what I have been missing -- a dynamite read, at times almost literally. Because his characters have the latest nifty gadgets and like to blow things up, a computer becomes the weapon in one of the author's intricately interwoven plot lines. To quote from the book:

Finn had been able to get his device past security because it didn't have any explosive materials in it. Instead, the device had been designed to ignite a chemical reaction inside the components in the CPU. It was a reaction that would make the otherwise harmless CPU a bomb, a possibility no one in the computer industry would want you to know.

Meet Baldacci's well known hero, "Oliver Stone." Asked in a Publishers Weekly interview why he named the lead character after a famous film director, Baldacci said, "Stone the film director has a reputation for taking on controversial subjects. Naming my character after him was an act of homage to a man who isn't afraid to take unpopular positions." To quote the author from another interview:

Oliver Stone first entered my imagination when I was a young lawyer. I walked past Lafayette Park in the mid-1980s and saw the protesters there. Fast-forward nearly twenty years and the sign, "I want the truth," is flying proudly in that same park, at least fictionally. Gray characters are the most interesting. They have flaws, divided loyalties, moral complexity, and internal debates about what to do. Do the ends always justify the means? We've seen it recently with the Bush administration where you had former Attorney General Ashcroft and his top lieutenants ready to hand in their resignations over the warrantless surveillance matter.

To quote from Stone Cold's subsequent park scene from above, Oliver Stone approaches the White House:

He would never be allowed to enter the front gates and lacked even the right to stand on that coveted side of Pennsylvania Avenue. What he could do was wait in Lafayette park across the street. He used to have a tent there until the Secret Service made him take it down. Yet freedom of speech was still alive and well in America and thus his banner had remained. Unfurled between two pieces of rebar stuck in the ground, it read, "I want the truth." So did a few other people in this town, it was rumored. To date, Stone had never heard of anyone actually finding it within the confines of the world capital of spin and deceit.

This skilled writer will introduce you to fast-paced and easy to follow threads of intrigue, mystery, complex twists and turns guaranteed to keep you turning the pages. In Washington D.C. for book signings on Wednesday, David Baldacci is scheduled to be in Richmond, VA on Saturday, Nov. 17. He plans to be at the Barnes and Noble store on Brook Road at 2:00 p.m., if you live in the area.

In conclusion -- and because I am also a reading advocate -- I learned that Baldacci and his wife are passionate about keeping families reading. In 1999 they founded the "Wish You Well Foundation." The organization's mission is to support family literacy in the U.S. by fostering and promoting the development and expansion of new and existing literacy and educational programs.

Partnering against the cold of hunger -- His foundation has recently partnered with America's Second Harvest: The Nation's Food Bank Network, the largest domestic hunger-relief organization in the U.S. to donate books to families in need. The joint initiative is called "Feeding Body and Mind." Donations are coming in from all around the world, and they are now seeking corporate sponsorship to continue broadening their efforts.

My “creativity and dreaming” post today at Making Good Mondays is about Twitter.

Technorati tags: domestic surveillance writing government Baldacci review

See also Behind the Links, for further info.

Blogs: My general purpose/southwest focus blog is at Southwest Progressive. My creative website is at Making Good Mondays. And Carol Gee - Online Universe is the all-in-one home page for all my websites.

Big blogs vs little blogs - reprise

[Post date of original - 4/10/05] This post was reprised in honor of the just completed Netroots Nation convention in Pittsburgh. This organization came about as a direct result of Markos Moulitsas' blogging.

Dialy Kos' founder and host Markos Moulitsas was just interviewed by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN's Q & A program. It was a great conversation that really gave a rather accurate picture of what blogging is all about, for both novices and Nerds-in-the-Know. MM was open, candid and articulate about his motivations and biases. And at one point he talked about how anyone can become a blogger, which is where yours truly comes in.

I am one of the ones who do not have web page design capacities, so it is good that I do not have ambitions to be widely read. So my blog, on its standard template, will not stand out enough to catch many, if any, readers. But what I liked about MM's comments pertaining to bloggers of my type is that it was not a put-down. I did not feel diminished by his description of this type of writing; I felt accepted as one of the many variations of the Blog phenomena.

That talent for authenticity is typical of the great bloggers and why so many of us "go by to say 'hello' " to them every day. Thanks, Kos. What I can promise here is my own authenticity as best I can manage it, derived from many years of climbing up Maslow's "hierarchy of human needs."

After this interview the Daily Kos site was flooded with new visitors, reinforcing the host's willingness to go on television . He generally tries to avoid even watching the tube, feeling it is mostly too shallow. He was also flooded with requests for help from beginner bloggies like me. He referred them to the tool I use, so the sphere will be expanding a bit, with lil' bittie blogs like mine, and some who will turn out to have a real flair for it in the coming years. Talent will out; good luck to all. Just be authentic. That's what gives the satisfaction to both the reader and the writer.

See also Behind the Links, for further info.
Blogs: My general purpose/southwest focus blog is at Southwest Progressive. My creative website is at Making Good Mondays. And Carol Gee - Online Universe is the all-in-one home page for all my websites.
Technorati tags: daily kos blogging markos moulitsas