The New York Times’ CMS Group has released ice.js, a track changes implementation for anything that is “contenteditable.” It requires jQuery for now. Features include multi-user editing tracking and the ability to reject changes.

I hate to write in the browser, but sometimes it’s a necessity and Ice looks like it may be worth a gander.

A demo is available.

The US versions of vastly overreaching anti-piracy legislation—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in the Senate—were rightly put down through concerted and coordinated effort on the internet. That the same fate didn’t befall the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) plum amazes me, but maybe we’ll be collectively more intelligent the next time it comes around.

But SOPA and PIPA look like they were created by pikers that took bad dictation from the entertainment cartel compared to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (.pdf; 36Kb) (ACTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) currently being hammered out by the members of the global copyright cartel themselves.

These are much more serious because they’re treaties and outside the reach of our elected representatives. Three years ago, the Obama administration issued a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request denial (.pdf; 444Kb) to Knowledge Ecology International, declaring the contents of the proposed international treaty a national security secret. The previous Bush administration similarly rejected an equivalent FOIA request (.pdf; 108Kb) from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). It’s apparently okay to have a national security secret drafted by the entertainment cartel and shared with Australia, Canada, the 27 member countries of the European Union, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Switzerland but not with the American citizenry.

If that’s not bad enough, because it’s being crafted as a treaty, no congressional approval is required. Public Knowledge calls it policy laundering:

“The greatest concern over ACTA is that it purports to ratchet up protections for IP rights holders without even the barest measures to preserve either the balance in IP law or due process rights of citizens. Without going through any pre-existing avenues of legal change—whether domestic or international—this treaty may be considered an act of ‘policy laundering.’ That is, the use of an international treaty to justify the passage of controversial legislation within one’s own country.”

Last month, Kader Arif, the European Parliament’s special rapporteur for the treaty quit, saying the European Parliament and civil society organizations had been excluded from the “masquerade.” Shortly before that, Helena Drnovsek-Zorko, the Slovenian signatory to the treaty, publicly disowned it and the Polish government suspended ratification after politicians protested wearing Guy Fawkes masks. In the US, more than 75 law professors sent an open letter to President Obama criticizing the secrecy surrounding the treaty.

David Jolly, writing for the New York Times, reports that european activists have amassed about 1.5 million online signatures calling on the European Union to reject the treaty.

Draconian intellectual property infringement criminalization is also creeping into the TPP, ostensibly an agreement to enhance trade and investment. Cory Doctorow, writing for BoingBoing, notes one TPP provision that has leaked calls for mandatory licenses for computer buffers. “That means that the buffers in your machine could need a separate, negotiated license for every playback of copyrighted works, and buffer designs that the entertainment industry doesn’t like—core technical architectures—would become legally fraught because they’d require millions of license negotiations or they’d put users in danger of lawsuits,” writes Doctorow.

Like ACTA, TPP is being negotiated in secret and Techdirt reports the parties have agreed to reveal the final treaty only four years after it has been ratified.

Techdirt also reports that when US civil society groups planned an open meeting to discuss TPP, the Office of the United States Trade Representative convinced the hosting hotel to cancel the groups’ reservation.

In the wake of Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) filing, it would appear some percentage of the net woke up to the weak value proposition offered by the corporate content aggregators. And if you want to see just how useless Google has become, search for “Facebook IPO filing.” The returns are filled with a lot of opinionating about the filing, but the filing itself doesn’t appear until midway through Google’s second page. That’s pitiful. Looking for an alternative? Take a look at duckduckgo. The same search query is even less useful, but it’s like Google was before it went off the tracks. If you want truly meaningful search results, we’ll need some updated version of the earliest days of distributed search.

So, now that Facebook is on the verge of going public we’re suddenly hand-wringingly worried about the commons in the form of the open web. “If Facebook’s IPO filing does anything besides mint a lot of millionaires, it will be to shine a rather unsettling light on a fact most of us would rather not acknowledge: The web as we know it is rather like our polar ice caps: under severe, long-term attack by forces of our own creation,” writes John Battelle in the lede for his “It’s not whether Google’s threatened. It’s asking ourselves: What commons do we wish for?”

That should be laughable—Battelle’s article carries a whopping 23 web bugs (or, more commonly “beacons”) that phone home about everything you do on the alleged commons of the open web. Instead it’s accurate (web bugs or no)—and just so very sad.

Battelle is correct when he notes that the open internet is shrinking as more and more people flock to walled gardens like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Apple’s iTunes Store, and all the rest. But it’s been happening for a long time, and hopefully will come around again just like the AOL, Geocities, and MySpace cycles before this one. Like I said, hopefully.

Battelle is also correct when he posits that Google has given up on the open web and is somewhat desperately trying to rebuild its success.

He goes on to make really important points about the no gatekeeping, neutrality, and interoperability being the foundation of the open web, and his is an important read. Even if he does go off into the deep weeds of hypocrisy with “no preset rules about how data is used. If one site collects information from or about a user of its site, that site has the right to do other things with that data, assuming, again, that it’s doing things that benefit all parties concerned.” Really? Just how do your 23 web bugs benefit all parties concerned, John?

More interesting to my eye is Dave Winer trying to clue his friend Robert Scoble into what most of us learned several years ago: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” Apparently Scoble didn’t get the memo. Winer, gamely, tried again.

The earliest articulated reference I remember is from a Metafilter discussion of the Digg 4.0 redesign. (Ed note: If there’s an earlier reference, please enlighten me by reporting an error.) Lots of us were thinking about what Winer historically calls “locked trunks” (last item) for a long time before that, but that clear, simple soundbite is what stuck.

Last Thursday, Apple introduced its first education initiative in quite a long while. The iTunes Store has been expanded to include a textbook section. And iTunes U has migrated into app form.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson—among the largest educational publishers—have all agreed to provide textbooks in Apple’s new iBooks 2.0 format at individual price points of US$15 or less. Schools can bulk-license iBook titles, distributing redemption codes to individual students that can then be individually redeemed through the iTunes Store.

But the big news is Apple’s 1.0 release of its iBooks Author app for its Mac platform.

iBooks Author is an ebook authoring application that allows an individual to create interactive ebooks that contain virtually any form of media—static or interactive. Apple’s iBooks ebooks on its iPad (with iBooks 2.0; and only the iPad is currently supported) can now come to life with sections that are watched, listened to, interacted with, and yes, even read. With iBooks 2.0, readers can easily highlight text, make bookmarks, and take notes. The notes can later be retrieved as virtual 3 x 5 notecards.

Available exclusively through Apple’s App Store, iBooks Author is offered at no charge. And it’s incredibly rich while being quite easy to use—especially for a version 1.0 release. Drag-and-drop virtually anything into the application—text (formatted text from Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages), images, video, Keynote presentations, and raw HTML—and it’s handled automatically. Best of all, if you’re familiar with Apple’s iWork suite—Keynote, Numbers, and Pages—you already pretty much know how to use iBooks Author.

Templates are included for six media-rich textbook formats (Basic, Contemporary, Modern Type, Classic, Editorial, and Craft), but surprisingly there are no provided templates for relatively simple books. And building a template from scratch looks like it’s quite a bit more difficult than it should be. Almost certainly future versions of the product will contain additional templates for different publication types—magazines, newspapers, novels, and everything else. As will some sort of collaborative workflow. Right now, it’s a great tool for an individual, but most publications don’t get made that way.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that Apple’s end-user license agreement (EULA) for iBooks Author is also a version 1.0 release and is seriously flawed.

While iBooks Author is capable of exporting .pdf, what fun is that? To use the program’s native file format—which appears to be a heavily modified, incompatible, and proprietary version of the EPUB 3 standard (more on that below)—you must either give your work away at no charge or sell it exclusively through Apple’s iTunes Store. That doesn’t mean that you can’t repurpose your carefully crafted content for other platforms, it just means that what iBooks Author outputs natively must be either given away or sold exclusively through Apple, on Apple’s terms (including its 30 percent take of the sales price).

The relevant bits from section 2 of Apple’s iBooks Author EULA:

B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:
(i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;
(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.
Apple will not be responsible for any costs, expenses, damages, losses (including
without limitation lost business opportunities or lost profits) or other liabilities you may incur as a result of your use of this Apple Software, including without limitation the fact that your Work may not be selected for distribution by Apple.

Making things even worse, Apple reserves the right to reject any submission and limits a ceiling selling price for each title to US$15. As Mathew Ingram, writing for GigaOM points out, this is Apple’s attempt to not only co-opt the K-12 public education system, but to wrest control of a major part of curriculum. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing—Apple certainly couldn’t do any worse than the Texas State Board of Education—I’m just saying we might want to think more before privatizing it.

For the commercial publishing market, Apple’s right to reject may actually be a benefit. Look at how Amazon’s offering has become polluted with spam books. Apple requires all submissions to have ISBN numbers which are available for sale exclusively from Bowker at prices ranging from US$125 for one, to US$1,000 for 1,000.

Like frogs in a pot of water that’s not yet quite boiling, anyone who’s rubbed up against Apple’s EULAs in the past will likely not be surprised. It makes complete business sense from Apple’s—and only Apple’s—perspective: Educators get a free platform to create textbooks that they can distribute to their students (and other educators) at no charge. So long as they have iPads. Meanwhile, Apple’s competitors stew in their own juices while their ebook market share presumably dwindles. And make no mistake, publications created with Apple’s iBooks Author can be outrageously compelling.

But for the rest of us, Apple’s onerous EULA is likely a deal-killer. As Dan Wineman pointed out shortly after Apple’s announcement, “Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty.”

Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s vice president of corporate communications had the same thoughts and tweeted Microsoft’s promise not to take a 30 percent cut, referencing the three core components of the company’s office suite: Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

But Apple’s iBooks Author is, after all, a free tool.

The more I think about this issue, the more I come around to believing that the EULA is not really that big of a deal. Have I drunk the kool-aid? Yeah, maybe; at this point I’m not sure. Apple’s in the business of selling stuff (and making sure that you want to replace your current versions of its stuff with newer shiner versions of its stuff). So, it gives away a tremendously useful application for creating ebooks, in order to juice its currently dismal third place in that business. If you don’t want to buy into Apple’s business model—and let me tell you that a 30 percent cut of the selling price is pretty much of a bargain for independent publishers—don’t; no one’s forcing you to use iBooks Author or iTunes Store. It’s an offer, not a mandate. There are other options available; they universally suck, but they exist.

Still, Apple asserting rights over a file format and what a user is allowed to do with the output from the application is—as far as consumer software goes—unprecedented. And then there’s the question of whether iBooks Author is really consumer software. At first glance yes, of course it is—that’s what the free distribution option is all about. On closer examination, I’m not so sure.

That said, Jason Snell’s analysis for Macworld is dead-on: Most publishers are not software developers and would rather spend their limited budgets developing content rather than coding.

But think how much more compelling iBooks Author would be if it exported to the industry-standard EPUB format. When Macworld‘s Lex Friedman and Dan Moren asked Apple’s spokesperson about this at the rollout, “The reply was that EPUB can’t support the many interactive elements offered in Apple’s new iBooks Author filetype,” writes Friedman. “But that answer doesn’t jibe: iBooks Author can export to .pdf and text, and neither of those formats supports inline slideshows or HTML widgets, either. I believe Apple’s real justification for not supporting EPUB is to lock in publishers to the iPad. And I believe that goal is a shortsighted one.”

If iBooks Author supported exporting to the full EPUB 3 open standard, publishers could use Apple’s platform for ebook creation for competing reader platforms, but the fullness of the native iBooks Author experience would be limited to the iPad. In short, Apple’s goal of increasing its sales of hardware and media would surely be met.

iBooks Author’s file format

iBooks Author’s native .iba file format is actually a zip archive containing XML files, property lists, and assets. It’s apparently incompatible with every version control system I’ve tried, which see only the blobbed zip archive.

The program’s published .ibooks file format is also a zip archive containing the same components. Only this one’s encrypted.

Baldur Bjarnason has the clearest examination of iBook Author’s file format that I’ve found. While most of the relevant file bundle components are almost valid XHTML5, the declarations used clearly indicate Apple’s not at all interested in supporting the EPUB standard. And the CSS files use so many undocumented extensions that they’re nearly indecipherable. “Apple has chosen to use custom properties to define strikethroughs, underlines, margins, and heights in various contexts, with no standards-compliant fallbacks, to get a level of control over the visual design that standard CSS does not offer,” writes Bjarnason.

Daniel Glazman, the co-chair of the W3C’s CSS working group, says Apple’s iBooks Author file format “(re-)invented the web totally incompatible with the web.” Glazman accuses Apple of doing what Microsoft tried in 1996-97 (remember embrace and extend?): “Implementing behind the curtains up to that point, extending standards but not disclosing the extensions, using unstabilized Working Drafts into shipped products, making the shipped solution incompatible with the rest of the market….” It didn’t work for Microsoft and we can only hope it won’t work for Apple.

In another article, Bjarnason points out that none of the provided iBooks Author widgets—Gallery, Media, Review, Keynote, Interactive image, and 3D—use Javascript. Javascript “is the only cross-platform and standard method for delivering interactivity in hypertext files, such as HTML or EPUB,” writes Bjarnason.

In yet another piece, Bjarnason sums up the pros and cons of iBooks Author’s file format. The one big con far outweighs any pro: “... Apple has forked the EPUB3 and CSS standards,” he writes. “It doesn’t matter if you agree or disagree, your opinion won’t alter reality.”

Unlike FrameMaker—especially before Adobe bought Frame; FrameMaker on a NeXT was my all-time favorite publishing platform—iBooks Author is definitively not a writing environment; it’s strictly for production.

Here’s hoping all of this is version 1.0 release bugs and will be addressed as we move further along. Worst case, Apple’s release of iBooks Author 1.0 will hopefully prove to be the tipping point for someone else to develop a similar tool capable of outputting industry-standard formats.

MaryJo Webster, writing for the Pioneer Press reports that Minnesota legislators will examine severance payments and payments for unused sick and vacation time made to retiring and laid off state employees. The paper reported in November 2011 that US$57 million in unused sick time had been paid to retiring and laid off state workers. An additional US$32 million had been paid for unused vacation time between January 2008 and June 2011. A few Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MNSCU) employees received six figure payouts. Those figures do not include the University of Minnesota.

Webster reports today that departing University of Minnesota employees received an average of US$4,500 for unused vacation and severance, compared with a US$12,000 average for MNSCU employees. “The Pioneer Press analysis of MNSCU’s payouts did not include the more than US$319,000 paid to outgoing chancellor James McCormick,” writes Webster. “When he retired Aug. 1, McCormick received US$180,000 in severance, plus US$92,965 for unused sick time, and US$46,896 for unused vacation.”

Mark Albert, Mike Maybay, and Erik Altmann for KSTP-TV were even more breathless in their coverage with a definite tinge of denigrating public employees. “For some, it could be a golden parachute—and you’re paying for it,” was their lede.

No, you’re not paying for it. At least not very much. Certainly not anything near what you think you are.

The great state of Minnesota sees fit to fund roughly 20 percent of the University of Minnesota’s budget. That’s a pitiful reflection of how important education is in the current culture, but that’s another argument. Getting paid for unused vacation and severance is earned income and taxed accordingly. It’s not a gift, it’s earned. It’s the institution’s binding obligation.

Make no mistake, I have very little love for the University of Minnesota. I was employed there from 2006-11 as the senior editor and ecommunications manager in the College of Design and laid off in December 2011. When I left, I received payment for unused vacation. My severance pay was initially denied (another argument for another time);  I filed a grievance and almost a year later the University finally paid it.

Work for civil servants at the University is structured such that it’s quite difficult to take vacation—especially more than a day or two at a time. As a result, the University carries a hefty unused vacation liability and long ago instituted a policy that prevented employees from accruing more than two-years’ worth of vacation, something Webster conveniently fails to note in her article. The University also has a wonderful policy allowing employees to donate accrued vacation to other employees that needed it.

Unlike other state agencies—including MNSCU—the University does not pay its employees for unused sick time. After accruing 800 hours of sick time, University employees are allowed to convert half of additional sick time to vacation time.

Severance for University civil servants is paid at the rate of one week’s salary for every complete year of service, up to a maximum of 52 weeks.

The payment I received for my unused vacation is included in the KSTP-TV spreadsheet (.xls; 1.1MB), but is inaccurate. My annual salary was US$59,821 (as evidenced by the severance payout noted below) not the US$62,161.60 reported and the severance payment I received after filing the grievance isn’t included. Here’s how it really shook out:

Gross payment for unused vacation: US$8,260.73
Gross payment for severance: US$4,601.60

So, yeah, I received US$12,862.33 (less about 30 percent tax withholding; double what millionaire presidential candidate Mitt Romney paid, but again that’s another argument for another day) when I left University employment. I also received six months of University contributions to my and my wife’s health insurance.

When Utne Reader was sold in 2006 and I was laid off after almost five years there, I was making a significantly higher salary (even though I was only working three-quarters time), received payment for unused vacation, and received three months salary as severance. As a non-full-time employee, I didn’t qualify for Utne Reader‘s health insurance program.

Today’s New York Times carries an op-ed by the US’ paper of record’s public editor, Arthur S. Brisbane—who, it should be noted, works outside of the Times’ editorial structure—asking if the paper’s journalists should call out lies when they’re encountered.

That the Times would even ask this question is, well, stunning. Like a two-by-four right between the eyes. I had to double-check that this wasn’t an Onion piece.

That Brisbane goes on to actually try to parse how journalists should report lies is doubly stunning. Apparently, pointed questions and calling out false or misleading statements (with a link to supporting evidence) is not even a consideration. Brisbane doesn’t actually write that he’s concerned about journalists’ judgement, but that’s clearly his worry as he writes that readers “worry less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.” And, if that’s the way the wind is blowing, Brisbane wonders how the Times could reveal the truth “in a way that is objective and fair.” Wringing his hands over the possibility of multiple truths, Brisbane asks, “Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?”

Just think about that for a few minutes. Go ahead, ponder.

Look: Calling out lies, misdirections, and misrepresentations is not a question of objectivity and if one has to ask how to do it, it’s too late. You’ve become a stenographer, not a journalist. Revealing the truth has everything to do with fairness and context, but nothing to do with “balance” or “objectivity.” Nor does it have anything to do with vigilantism; contrary to the hed on Brisbane’s piece. It’s the cornerstone of journalism.

This is purely a consequence—unintended or not—of the rush to what Jay Rosen calls the view from nowhere. Still don’t get it? Read Rosen’s interview with himself about it.

Rosen has published his initial reaction to Brisbane’s piece and it’s blistering in its accuracy, summed up in his deck:

“Somewhere along the way, telling truth from falsehood was surpassed by other priorities to which the press felt a stronger duty. Arthur Brisbane, public editor of the New York Times, was unaware of this history when he asked users of the Times whether reporters should call out false statements.”

Rosen writes that the other priorities that have surpassed truth-telling in the last 40 years or so “include such things as ‘maintaining objectivity,’ ‘not imposing a judgment,’ ‘refusing to take sides,’ and sticking to what I have called the View from Nowhere.” I believe Rosen’s assessment to be absolutely accurate, but woefully incomplete. The missing bit from Rosen’s assessment is the insistence of corporate media to strive to maintain the status quo at all costs. That endeavor—maintaining the status quo—is the wellspring from which all else in corporate media—including Rosen’s laundry list—flows.

Matt Taibbi, writing about the inanity of the Iowa caucus, articulates this prime directive of status quo maintenance succinctly:

“... a long, rigidly-controlled, carefully choreographed process that is really designed to do two things: weed out dangerous minority opinions, and award power to the candidate who least offends the public while he goes about his primary job of energetically representing establishment interests.”

Times readers have apparently been fairly consistent in asking that fact-checking and calling out of lies take place in the body of the work—in context—not in a sidebar that will likely get lost in archives and updates. That the Times hasn’t responded quickly to this and realized that providing context is one of the biggest ways it provides value is an indication that something else might be going on. If the truth isn’t what’s of utmost importance to the Times, just what is?

Update: Thursday, 12 January 2012 9:39PM CST: Arthur Brisbane, lacking the integrity that I believed him to have, attempts to walk all of this back by telling Jim Romenesko that he was “... hoping for diverse and even nuanced responses to what I think is a difficult question” and that he was “... hoping to stimulate a discussion about the difficulty of selecting which ‘facts’ to rebut, facts being troublesome things that seem to shift depending on the beholder’s perspective.”

Wow. Just wow. First of all, the question isn’t difficult at all; journalists have an obligation to report the truth and to judge when a source or subject is dishonest, dissembling, or misleading. Period. Anything less is stenography. That’s why I’m optimistic about and find the media bug initiatives (it’s “report an error” at the bottom of each article here) so encouraging. We all make mistakes.

As Robert Niles, writing for the Online Journalism Review notes, “Our mission is to find the truth, report it and defend it. If we can’t pack heat, our weapons will be research, empiricism and logic instead. Don’t like the results? Challenge us with your own data. We’ll shoot it out and see who’s left standing.”

Secondly, facts aren’t troublesome; nor do they shift (at least not over the short term within the context of this issue). And journalists don’t get to pick which facts to rebut.

Again, it’s important to remember that Brisbane, as public editor (or, more commonly ombudsman), is not part of the Times editorial operations. Dan Gillmor offers up a re-envisioning of what a news organization’s ombudsman should do in the networked age.

Brisbane digs himself deeper when he accuses people of responding to a question he didn’t ask. Re-read his lede; here, I’ll do it for you: “I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.” He just didn’t like the answer.

Brisbane then publishes a follow-up under the Times banner that dismisses his received answers as “more heat than light,” and tries to nuance his original question:

“My inquiry related to whether the Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut ‘facts’ that are offered by newsmakers when those ‘facts’ are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.”

Please. Facts that are in question are, by definition, not facts at all; they’re assertions. What’s next? That nothing can ever be proven as a fact, only more evidence can be accumulated? I got over that argument some 40 years ago in undergraduate school, thanks very much.

What would happen if greenhouses were constructed next to, or on top of, grocery stores? Produce would almost certainly be fresher and the transportation problem of sustainable agriculture would be one step closer to being solved. That’s the idea behind BrightFarms’ on-site greenhouses; the company contracts with grocery stores to operate hydroponic greenhouses on their roofs.

Imagine being able to eat tomatoes virtually year-round—even up here on the far edge—that were grown for flavor instead of transport. Imagine being able to buy lettuce that was picked that morning instead of six days ago (half its shelf-life) in California.

According to BrightFarms, “The average item of food in the United States travels at least 1500 miles. Gasoline can account for up to half the value of a head lettuce or pound of tomatoes.”

BrightFarms reports that it has contracted with 10 grocery store chains and is close to signing with three more. McCaffrey’s Markets will host a greenhouse in either New Jersey or Pennsylvania. Brooklyn-based Gotham Greens—with consulting help from BrightFarms—began delivering produce to New York supermarkets in June 2011. And a demonstration-scale greenhouse will be constructed at the Whole Foods Market in Millburn, New Jersey.

After looking at the City Pages’ staff picks for best 2011 concerts in the Twin Cities, it’s clear that I’m on another planet entirely. The only shows they list that I wish I’d seen are (in order):

1. Lucinda Williams at the Dakota, 20, 21, and 22 February
2. Justin Townes Earle at First Avenue, 14 February
3. tUnEyArDs at First Avenue, 12 November
4. Wilco at the State Theater, 6-7 December
5. Middle Brother at First Avenue, 26 March
6. Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson at Mystic Lake Casino, 11 February
7. St. Vincent at the Walker Art Center 2 October

I really wanted to make it to at least one of the Lucinda Williams shows but it was about a month before my valve job and I just wasn’t up to it. The other shows I really regret missing was Steve Earle and Allison Moorer at the Pantages Theater, 23 July and Spider John Koerner and Tony Glover at the Dakota, 7 August. There were others, but those are the big ones.

Without further comment, here are my picks for the best 2011 live shows in the Twin Cities:

1. The Radiators “Farewell to Minnesota” at the Cabooze, 12, 13, and 14 May
2. The Tedeschi Trucks Band at the Minnesota Zoo, 26 and 27 August
3. David Hildalgo and Louie Perez at the Varsity Theater, 18 November
4. Rickie Lee Jones at the Big Top Chautauqua, 30 July (Bayfield, WI; close enough)
5. Bela Fleck & The Flecktones at the Minnesota Zoo, 3 August
6. Dean Magraw’s Red Planet at the Artists’ Quarter, 10 December
7. Dean Magraw with Bruce Kurnow and Michael Bissonette at the Aster Cafe, 27 October
8. Dean Magraw with Bruce Kurnow and Michael Bissonette at the Black Dog Cafe, 5 July
9. Pieta Brown at the Dakota, 30 January

Bob Collins of Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) is one of my favorite corporate media reporters in the Twin Cities. He’s usually quite careful and articulate and generally has a point of view (as opposed to the view from nowhere). That’s why I was genuinely curious about his use of “fib” multiple times, in multiple forms in his “What did they know and when did they know it” piece this morning. After all, the head for the package of unrelated stories is “Credibility is early casualty in Koch probe.”

Collins’s usage of “fib” was in relation to Minnesota State Senator Geoff Michel‘s (R-District 41) comments to the press regarding the resignation of Minnesota State Senate Leader Amy Koch (R-District 19) over an “improper relationship” with a colleague.

Upon being asked when the four Minnesota State Senate leaders knew about Koch’s improper relationship, Michel told reporters—on the record—“the allegations about Koch’s behavior were first reported to them a few weeks ago.” That was not true, and Michel knew it. Tom Scheck and Catharine Richert, reporting for MPR, note Koch’s former chief-of-staff, Cullen Sheehan, revealed details of the improper relationship to the Minnesota State Senate leadership three months ago. “Three months ago, I became aware of a potential relationship between Sen. Koch and a staff person,” Sheehan told Scheck and Richert. “I then spoke to the staff person and he confirmed the relationship. We both then met with Sen. Koch and she confirmed the relationship. The next day I met with Sen. Koch to discuss the situation. I subsequently met with the Deputy Majority Leader” [Senator Geoff Michel]. Sheehan left employment at the Minnesota Senate in November, refused to identify the staff member, and refused to tell Scheck and Richert why he left the Minnesota Senate.

I was really curious why Collins chose to use “fib” to describe Michel’s outright lie to reporters asking what the leadership knew when. So I asked him, both in a comment on his piece, and in a tweet. Collins responded similarly on both Twitter and in a comment to his original piece. He finds “fib” a more interesting word. Fair enough. Except in his initial comment on his MPR blog, partially in response to another commenter, Collins writes, “Because everyone expects the word ‘lie’ when writing about politics. It has the same impact now as ‘Nazi.’ I don’t like writing words that go in one ear and out the other.”

Whoah, conflating “lie” with “Nazi” seemed way over the top to me, so I became even more curious. I looked up the definition of “fib” and according to the Oxford American English Dictionary, the word means “a lie, typically an unimportant one.” I referenced the definition in Twitter and in another comment on Collins’s article, asking if he was saying that what Senator Michel said was unimportant. Collins dodged the question in a subsequent comment on his article and told me in a tweet that I was “free to use whatever definition you wish.”

Wait. What?

Have we really reached the point where were all entitled to our own definitions as well as facts? Really? When did that happen? I reject the premise (both premises, actually) on its face. I told Collins in a tweet he was being dismissive/disingenuous.

Shortly thereafter, Collins tweeted, “‘Lie’ is an overused word in the usual babble of political partisans…” and went on to once again conflate the term with “Nazi.”

Since when is proper usage and accuracy partisan? I asked Collins in a tweet. (A quick perusal of the writings contained here indicate I’m as disgusted with the Democrats as I am Republicans, but truth be told, I find the Republicans much easier targets.) Collins dodged the question by responding, “‘Accuracy’ is acknowledging that ‘a few weeks’ could be 13 or 14. Unless you have a specific definition of a ‘few.’” Well, yeah, I’d hope most everyone would sensibly agree that “a few” means three or four—maybe five—certainly less than 10 or a dozen; especially in reference to what turned out to be a quarter of a year.

It was just sad—really sad—when Collins tweeted to me that he was “not comfortable saying a few cannot be 14, which is what it would take to constitute a ‘lie.’”

Koch, Michel, and a host of other Minnesota Republicans campaigned hard on forbidding gay marriage by putting a constitutional amendment on next year’s ballot to define marriage as the union between a man and a woman. The gay community has sent an apology to Koch for ruining her marriage.

I’ve been really careful to not identify the rumored subordinate in Koch’s “improper relationship” because I don’t have first-hand knowledge of the subordinate’s identity nor has anyone claiming to have first-hand knowledge communicated with me. To date, no one’s confirmed the rumor. City Pages and WCCO-TV are the only corporate media outlets I’m aware of that have acknowledged the rumor. MinnPost.com‘s David Brauer has an excellent piece on the matter, with a quote from University of Minnesota professor and Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Chris Ison:

“I’ve been fascinated by how careful the media have been. I have always been pretty conservative in these situations. If I don’t have it, I don’t have it. If circumstances make me 99.5 percent sure, but no person or document says it directly, I still don’t have it. I can use those circumstances to try to leverage someone to give it to me. But if no one will, I’m stuck. I don’t make that tiny leap based on circumstantial evidence. It’s somewhat of a principle—Don’t say what you don’t know. Don’t guess or assume. But it’s also pragmatic—I’ve seen reporters get burned when they take what seem to be tiny, safe leaps.  I still have to get someone to say it directly, or find a document to show it.”

Collins says that he’s uncomfortable “saying a few cannot be 14.” I take him at his word—he didn’t have it, using Ison’s parlance—and am comfortable with his erring on the side of caution, I suppose. I just don’t agree.

I expect fairness and accuracy in the reporting I consume—corporate or independent—and I demand neither be abandoned for supposed objective balance. And I prefer media with a point of view. If that’s “partisan”—and I don’t believe for a minute that it is—so be it. In this case I believe Collins sacrificed accuracy and precision in his use of “fib” and subsequent defenses devolving to parsing that term and “a few.” In the best case, it’s a matter of over-cautiousness; in the worst case, it’s something else entirely.

So, the US Republicans in both houses of Congress want to reduce the duration of unemployment benefits while imposing strict new qualifying requirements. Just as they adjourn without getting anything done this session.

US Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)—the senior Republican on the Finance Committee—tells Robert Pear, writing for the New York Times, “I don’t see why you have to go more than 59 weeks. In fact, we need some incentives for people to get back to work. A lot of these people don’t want to work unless they get really high-paying jobs, and they’re not going to get them ever. So they just stay home and watch television. I don’t mean to malign people, but far too many are doing that.”

Well yes, Senator, you clearly did mean to malign people.

We need a national referendum to reduce congressional salaries to 10 percent less than the nation’s median income. That would be about US$26,000, Senator Hatch. Think of the 10 percent as an incentive. Then we’ll see who’s sitting around watching television. Fact is, there are no jobs—high-paying or otherwise.

The problem, Senator, is that you can no longer get any work done or even budge because so many of the one percenters have crawled up your ass and nested. Right out of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.

That’s you right there in this detail from the third panel in the triptych, Senator Hatch. From the early days when you still had more room in there.

The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail) by Hieronymus Bosch.

The solution, Senator Hatch, is actually quite simple. You can learn it from Baltimore’s All Mighty Senators. It’s called the “Flex & Release,” Senator. I couldn’t find a video clip of the tune for you, but here’s a bunch of live shows from the internet archive. You’ll just have to visualize it for yourself. Practice it every day—several times a day—and I bet those one percenters just start falling out and running for cover.

So, Senator Hatch, until you and your bretheren do something about the bankers, brokers, and ratings agencies that got us into this mess, just shut the fuck up.

As if anyone cares, here’s my top albums list for 2011, without comment. I’m not sure the first five are in the right order; they’re all pretty much tied. Similarly, I’m not sure the last five are in the right order either. I do this mostly for me, so I can see how these selections stand up over the years. And yeah, there’s 18 because, well, there’s 18; so sue me.

1. Tom Waits: Bad As Me
2. Lucinda Williams: Blessed
3. Tedeschi Trucks Band: Revelator
4. Bela Fleck & The Flecktones: Rocket Science
5. Pieta Brown: Mercury
6. Ry Cooder: Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down
7. Gregg Allman: Low Country Blues
8. Gillian Welch: The Harrow & The Harvest
9. Wilco: The Whole Love
10. The Civil Wars: Barton Hollow
11. Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit: Here We Rest
12. Pert Near Sandstone: Paradise Hop
13. The Deep Dark Woods: Place I Left Behind
14. Charlie Parr: Cheap Wine
15. Hayes Carll: KMAG YOYO (& Other American Stories)
16. Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues
17. Dawes: Nothing Is Wrong
18. Middle Brother: Middle Brother

In a surprisingly bush-league attempt at appearing to be relevant, credible, and most of all “balanced,” Politifact—a fact-checking website—has pronounced US Democrats (and all others) guilty of the “Lie of the Year” for saying that US Republicans have voted to end Medicare.

Nonsense.

First of all, the claim is more than likely true. Republicans have voted to end Medicare (US House of Representatives 15 April 2011; the vote was 253-193 with only four Republican Representatives—Walter Jones (R-North Carolina), David McKinley (R-West Virginia), Ron Paul (R-Texas), and Denny Rehberg (R-Montana)—voting against the measure). It’s indisputable that Republicans voted to replace Medicare—a single-payer system with guaranteed benefits—with a privatized system with vouchers, whereby those eligible for Medicare would be given “premium support payments” to help purchase private healthcare insurance. Those vouchers would be intentionally designed to not fully cover the cost of the private insurance. Each year, presumably, costs of healthcare insurance would continue to rise while the relative value of the vouchers would decline.

Is that ending Medicare?

As Steve Benen, writing for Washington Monthly points out, “It seems foolish to have to parse the meaning of the word ‘end,’ but if there’s a program, and it’s replaced with a different program, proponents brought an end to the original program. That’s what the verb means.”

As someone who qualifies for Medicare but chooses to remain privately insured, I follow Medicare-related issues with some interest. In my opinion, the Republicans’ vote would absolutely end Medicare. Just maybe not immediately (under US House of Representatives Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan‘s (R-Wisconsin) plan, citizens older than 55—including me and my wife—would still be eligible for traditional Medicare). But that’s just my opinion, and as Jonathan Chait, writing for New York magazine points out, that’s precisely the problem. No one knows for sure because no one can know for sure. “But it’s obviously a question of interpretation, not fact. And the whole problem with Politifact‘s ‘Lie of the Year’ is that it doesn’t grasp this distinction,” writes Chait. “Politifact doesn’t even seem to understand the criteria for judging whether a claim is a question of opinion or a question of fact, let alone whether it is true.”

Secondly, the Democrats have told enough legitimate “pants-on-fire” lies this year, so why pick on this one (that’s actually probably true) except to present the publication as somehow unbiased. As Paul Krugman wrote for the New York Times, “The answer is, of course, obvious: The people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear ‘balanced’—and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.”

Charlie Pierce, writing for Esquire, points to the larger issue of how this kind of crap couched in “fairness” and “objectivity” is forever damaging journalism.

Some of the best analysis came in 140 character Twitter snippets:

Steve Yelvington: “Politifact has chosen the appearance of neutrality over the political peril of truth-telling.”

Jay Rosen: “My friends at @Politifact erred with their Lie of the Year… Sadly, they are likely to see the criticism it’s getting as confirmation bias.”

Steve Yelvington (again): “Politifact’s editors should make a circle and kick each others’ butts for being dumb enough to get sucked into matters of spin, not fact.”

Dan Gillmor: “The saddest aspect of @Politifact’s double-down on its earlier screwup is that there are lots of actual Dem lies to debunk”

Jalue Dorjee is believed to be the reincarnation—a tuklu—of a Tibetan Buddhist lama who died in Switzerland six years ago, and the eighth incarnation of the original lama who was born in 1655. Born in 2006 and discovered, through divination by high lamas, as a tuklu in 2009, Dorjee will likely leave his Columbia Heights home in five years or so to study and live in an Indian monastery.

Dechen Wangmo, the child’s mother, tells Allie Shah, writing for the Star Tribune of dreams she had while carrying him:

“One night, an elephant appeared with several little ones around it, she said. They merged into the small prayer room in the family home. Once inside, they vanished.”

Shah also reports the boy’s father, Dorje Tsegyal, having “vivid, symbolic dreams” including that of “many lamas surrounded by tall sunflowers.” When a high lama visited the Tibetan community in the Twin Cities, Tsegyal told him of his dreams. The high lama had “magical dreams” that night including one of seeing “huge tigers, one in each room of the family home.” Tibetan Buddhists consider tigers to be a good omen and a sign of protection and strength. After a series of divinations by different high lamas, the Dalai Lama officially recognized Dorjee as the reincarnation of Taksham Nueden Dorjee and gave him the formal lama name of Tenzin Gyurme Trinley Dorjee on 6 January 2009.

President Obama was never opposed to the provisions of this year’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that allow for US citizens to be detained indefinitely without due process. If passed and signed into law, anyone anywhere—including US citizens—can be imprisoned for any length of time without ever being charged with, tried, or convicted of a crime. Contrary to what his administration has said, Obama was concerned solely with imagined limitations on the executive branch with regard to the indefinite detention provisions. So, the corporate media is wrong when it reports that President Obama “backed down” yesterday under “political pressure” when he announced he would not veto the bill. He did it all his own self.

The NDAA was born of President George W. Bush’s administration’s manipulation of the nation’s fear, insecurity, and bias after the 11 September 2001 attack and provided the seed corn from which a whole collection of terrible legislation, most notably the USA PATRIOT Act, grew. It marks the slow descent of American civil liberties into a steep nosedive and is the worst case of fear-mongering politics since Joseph McCarthy. Where McCarthy saw communists and subversives; these people see terrorists. The parallels with McCarthy aren’t just vague generalizations. As Ateqah Khaki, writing for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) points out, “The last time Congress passed indefinite detention legislation was during the McCarthy era and President Truman had the courage to veto that bill.” Khaki is referring to the McCarran Act—the Internal Security Act of 1950. Truman vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode his veto.

As Glenn Greenwald, writing for Salon notes, “President Obama, needless to say, is not Harry Truman. He’s not even the Candidate Obama of 2008 who repeatedly insisted that due process and security were not mutually exclusive and who condemned indefinite detention as ‘black hole’ injustice.”

As Andrew Rosenthal, writing for the New York Times remarks, “... we got into this mess because a president thought he had the power to ignore the constitution and international law.”

If Obama had been opposed—really, in his heart, opposed—to the NDAA, it would be totally, absolutely inconsistent for this president. Remember, when he was a candidate he pledged to unequivocally support a filibuster of any proposed legislation that would grant retroactive immunity to the nation’s telephone companies with regard to the warrantless wiretapping program initiated by President George W. Bush. As soon as he had the Democrat nomination in the bag, Senator Obama not only voted against said filibuster but voted for the underlying bill. Once elected, Obama continued Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. Obama’s acceptance of this year’s NDAA means that the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay will never, ever close. No surprise; closing it was also a big Obama campaign promise.

Corporate media in the US continually misread these white-knuckle 180s as “caving to political pressure.” If only that were true. Barak Obama has failed to govern like he campaigned at just about every opportunity. The question is why. “Political pressure” is too simple—too wrapped up with a pretty bow—to explain Obama’s governing moves that are polar opposite of his campaign promises.

I try real hard not to succumb to conspiratorial thinking, but the way I see it one of two things happened. Either the Bilderbergers and Trilateralists sat him down and gave him the playbook or that’s just how Obama is and we were all duped. Take your pick.

Earlier this month we collectively learned that Carrier IQ had installed its software on some 150 million mobile phones and was monitoring users. Without the users’ permission or knowledge. Without warrants. Now comes news from MuckRock, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request proxy, revealing that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) used the Carrier IQ data for “law enforcement purposes.”

In response to Michael Morisy’s FOIA request, the FBI acknowledged that it had “responsive documents,” but refused to provide them, citing an exemption to the law allowing disclosure to be refused if it “might reasonably interfere with an ongoing investigation.” Because the FBI’s denial was a blanket denial, it remains unknown if the agency was using the Carrier IQ data to investigate individuals or Carrier IQ (the company) itself.

Responding to MuckRock‘s disclosure of its FOIA request, Carrier IQ denied ever providing “any data to the FBI.” As Morisy points out, that wasn’t the question: “My question was and is, ‘Does the FBI have manuals or instructions on how to access Carrier IQ data?’”

David Kravets, writing for Wired, reports that Carrier IQ met with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). According to Kravets, the company told him that it was “not aware of an official investigation….” This, of course, coming after US Representative Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) called on the FTC (.pdf; 201KB) to open just such an investigation.