Changing your mind is … unpatriotic?

You’re going to see a lot of this, unfortunately. McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers couldn’t manage a comment on Obama’s shift on Iraq without attacking his patriotism. Here is Rogers in the New York Times:

There is nothing wrong with changing your mind when the facts on the ground dictate it. Indeed, the facts have changed because of the success of the surge that John McCain advocated for years and Barack Obama opposed in a position that put politics ahead of country.

That last bit is so awkwardly grafted on that it’s obviously deliberate. And it’s going to happen a lot. Here we begin to see the real harm in Wesley Clark’s true but impolitic remarks about McCain’s getting shot down not being a qualification for president: they are so easily mischaracterized as an attack on McCain’s military service that they can be seen as justifying questions about Obama’s patriotism.

I recommend this David Greenberg essay in Slate on how patriotism has played out in presidential politics.

Dean screamed

Why am I posting the most overplayed clip in American political history? Because Paul Krugman today writes in the New York Times, “Howard Dean didn’t scream.”

Krugman adds: “Again and again we’ve had media firestorms over supposedly revealing incidents that never actually took place.” Yes, we have. And I can go along with his other examples: Krugman correctly points out that Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet, Hillary Clinton did not say she was continuing to campaign because Barack Obama might be assassinated and Wesley Clark did not impugn John McCain’s military service. (Although Clinton’s and Clark’s remarks were impolitic in the extreme.)

But come on. Dean screamed.

Fox moves from eccentric to weird

Is it just me, or do the Fox News Channel‘s recent missteps strike you as qualitatively different from what has come before? It’s as though your eccentric uncle has finally gone off the deep end, his uncertain grounding in reality having given way to something else entirely.

The latest, as you may have heard, is that Fox altered photos of two New York Times reporters to make them appear more sinister, elongating their faces, yellowing their teeth and giving one of them a receding hairline.

That follows Fox’s labeling Michelle Obama as “Obama’s Baby Mama!”, and Fox host E.D. Hill’s wondering whether the Obamas’ playful fist bump was a “terrorist fist jab.”

You can dismiss all of this as right-wing propaganda if you like. I’m not so sure. It strikes me as genuinely nutty, and it makes me wonder whether the rudder has fallen off.

Think it has anything to do with Roger Ailes’ being unhappy over the nice things Rupert Murdoch has said about Barack Obama? Just wondering.

Tweaking Gmail with IMAP

It’s tech week at Media Nation. Fresh from foisting my video issues on you, I thought I’d give an update on my ongoing efforts to make Gmail dance to my tune.

Taking some excellent advice from a few astute readers, I set up Apple Mail to engage in two-way communication with Gmail via IMAP. As promised, this proved to be a far better set-up than accessing Gmail via POP. With IMAP, Apple Mail is more or less in constant contact with Gmail, syncing messages and folders so that what’s on my hard drive is exactly the same as what’s in my Gmail account.

One thing that surprised me after I first set up Apple Mail was that copies of all my Gmail messages (and I save pretty much everything except spam) were downloaded automatically to my hard drive. I suppose that’s the idea. But what about when an iPhone user sets up IMAP communications with Gmail? Do all those messages get downloaded to the iPhone, too? That doesn’t make much sense.

Now, here’s the best part. My biggest problem with Gmail is the way it interfaces with my Northeastern account. I had set up Gmail so that it would grab my NU mail. But occasionally there are delays of an hour or more — usually not a big deal, but sometimes critical. Also, although I haven’t found any specific examples for a while, I swear that there were occasions when important NU mail never made it to Gmail.

So, I reconfigured Gmail to stop receiving NU mail, and then set up a separate Northeastern account in Apple Mail using POP (no IMAP available). Now all my NU mail is downloaded directly to my hard drive, bypassing Gmail completely. And once I’ve got it, I can move it into Apple Mail folders that are then synced to Gmail and its labeling system. It gives me all the advantages of Gmail with none of the disadvantages.

I had hoped to be able to sync Gmail Contacts with my Apple Address Book. But to do that, you need an iPhone or an iPod Touch, or a willingness to hack your Mac. Fortunately, it was simple to export my Gmail Contacts as vCards and then import them into Address Book.

All of which means that I’ve attained e-mail nirvana, right? Well, not quite. Here are some issues that probably can’t be solved, and that I’m trying to decide whether I can live with or not:

  • Cloud computing is better than desktop computing. The single best thing about Gmail is that you’re doing everything on Google’s servers. You don’t have to worry about which computer you’re working on. And you don’t have to have a bunch of different programs open. I’ve now got Apple Mail and Address Book running pretty much all the time, and that’s on top of Firefox, NewsFire, Word and whatever else I’ve got running.
  • Gmail is more aesthetically pleasing than Apple Mail. And it’s not just aesthetics. Gmail lets you compose a perfectly formatted HTML message. Apple Mail is stuck in RTF, even though it seems perfectly capable of reading HTML. I often find myself switching to Gmail to compose, secure in the knowledge that IMAP will bring everything back together in the end.
  • Labels are better than folders. Apple Mail uses folders. Gmail uses labels. IMAP makes a seamless transition from folders to labels. But, in Gmail, you can assign more than one label to a message. You can’t do that with folders.
  • No more Gmail Chat. Not unless I fire up Gmail. I don’t use it that much anyway, but I like to know it’s there.

What’s my bottom line? I haven’t quite decided yet. In a perfect world, I would stick with Gmail on the Web, but my Northeastern account is enough of a complicating factor that a hybrid solution probably makes more sense.

One thing I have not yet done is take up another reader’s suggestion and take Mailplane for a test drive. I did poke around the site a little bit, and I’m not sure it would make my life any easier. If anyone has tried it, I’d be interested to know what you think.

For that clean, squeaky Gmail Soap feeling, click here.

Fair use: The video (II)

I’ve re-uploaded my fair-use video to fix the whopper of a typo that Donna Halper found. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of Steve Garfield and John Farrell, the quality is the same.

I did apply some custom settings when creating a QuickTime file, and it looked terrific on my MacBook. But YouTube didn’t like the file, playing the audio without any trouble but presenting the video as a series of stills.

Why wasn’t Ramírez suspended?

I considered letting this go, but figured some readers might wonder why I was taking a pass on the Manny Ramírez situation.

Assuming Ramírez behaved as has been described — shoving traveling secretary Jack McCormick to the ground, or hard enough that McCormick fell — then he should have been suspended without pay for three games.

It’s really not a hard call. And I don’t like it that Terry Francona and Theo Epstein appear to be more worried that Ramírez would go south on them for a month than they are about doing the right thing.

I don’t want to make too much of this. But the Sox are making too little of it.

Paying for the news voluntarily

How much are you willing to pay for high-quality coverage of your community? Our local weekly costs $46 a year for a mail subscription. The local daily costs $4 a week, with tip. So we’re paying more than $250 a year.

But what if we were talking about a free community Web site? If the site had a chance to hire a journalist, would you be willing to contribute, say, $50 or $100 a year, even if you could still access it for free if you chose? It works for public radio. Why not for online local news?

That’s the idea behind Representative Journalism, a project started by Leonard Witt (above) of Kennesaw State University, in Georgia. Witt plans to give it a try at Locally Grown, an ambitious-looking site that serves the town of Northfield, Minn.

Witt described the project this past Saturday at a “Sharing the News” symposium at UMass Lowell, sponsored by the New England News Forum. You can watch a video of Witt’s presentation here.

Witt said he got his inspiration from a GPS his wife gave him for his car. He entered “barbecue,” and was presented with a list of options — and he realized he would never again consult the newspaper for restaurant listings. The Internet, he explained, has “decoupled” advertising and editorial content.

“The economic structure behind the old model of making the news is falling apart,” he said. “If we want high-quality news in the future, somebody’s got to pay for it.”

The discussion got bogged down when Witt offered two hypotheticals that he presented as being similar, but were actually very different. In one case, a community site might hire a journalist to cover important regional stories, as is the idea in Northfield. In another, a Web project of some kind might be looking for a reporter to cover, say, endangered species in Florida.

The first idea seemed to go down a lot better than the second, as it was pointed out that folks contributing money to the coverage of a particular issue, as opposed to a geographic region, would be tempted to demand that the issue be covered in a certain way. Witt responded that there would have to be some educational efforts undertaken ahead of time. And he admitted that he hasn’t worked out all the bugs, explaining that the Northfield experiment will be a chance to test out the idea.

“The whole reason I’m doing this is that I believe journalists should be paid a fair wage,” he said.

Will it work? I think it’s a promising model. One thing I wonder about, though, is that community sites are not necessarily driven by journalism. At a recent “Future of Journalism” conference at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, Jan Schaffer, executive director of the Institute for Interactive Journalism, said the best community sites tend to be run by local activists who see their role as making connections and expanding the civic conversation.

Grafting a hungry young reporter onto that model could be a recipe for trouble. But it’s certainly worth trying.

More: Here’s a comprehensive rundown on the Lowell conference by Aldon Hynes.

Two contradictory thoughts

Yes, state Sen. Jim Marzilli, D-Arlington, should resign, and I suspect he will now that he’s been indicted on charges that he sexually accosted four women in Lowell on June 3.

But this effort by the Massachusetts Republican Party to push Marzilli out the door is cheap and sleazy. It’s unworthy of a major political party, which, of course, the state GOP isn’t.

Questions about a 22-year-old’s death

Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham does an exceptionally good job of framing the questions over the death of David Woodman, the reveler who stopped breathing while in police custody following the Celtics’ victory, and who died over the weekend.

As Abraham points out, there is a lot we don’t know. Which means that Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis’ approach — announcing there was no excessive force even before the investigation gets under way — is wrong.

File away Shelley Murphy and Christopher Cox’s story on the fact that all nine officers involved in Woodman’s arrest went to the hospital to be treated for stress, leaving it to an officer who wasn’t there to write the report. It could be meaningless, or it could prove to be a key to understanding what happened that night.