An example:

There‘s a lot of talk about existential risks. I worry that painful episodes are even more likely. You know, 60 million people were killed in WWII. That was certainly exacerbated by the powerful destructive tools that we had then. I‘m fairly optimistic that we will make it through. I‘m less optimistic that we can avoid painful episodes. I do think decentralized communication actually helps reduce violence in the world. It may not seem that way because you just turn on CNN and you‘ve got lots of violence right in your living room. But that kind of visibility actually helps us to solve problems.

I’m not entirely sure that’s a convincing argument right there. The broader idea that decentralized media is an improvement, a catalyst for problem solving and violence reduction is one that I tend to buy into, and have acted explicitly to support.

But, CNN is not a great example – nor does most of the blogosphere seem to be at any given point. There are obvious notable exceptions. Maybe the Enough Project, to pick an example that is reputable and focused on informing about a certain kind of catastrophe the rest of the world is nominally aware of.

CNN is neither decentralized (I suppose it may be more so, technologically, than before) and certainly could be doing a better job, if we think its mandate is to report on global problems and inform its audience enough for them to understand who the stakeholders are and what the possible motivations and causes are.

We need media that less habitually cites mostly official sources, and that constantly questions ostensible motivation and intent, that keeps track of credibility and gives credit where credit is due, rather than to the bearers of titles, and rather than accepting what is given as a reason or goal or assuming such without evidence. The individual reporters (both independent and within large commercial institutions), certain non-profit institutions, activist-journalists, and other media makers who do this consistently seem hardly visible to the general population at the same level as entities like CNN. I only hope that they do catalyze attention and informed change enough to be helpful.

Colin Powell was on Face The Nation today. Bob Schieffer lead the interview by asking him first about a recent volley of remarks that one might say started with Powell critizing conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh during Q&A at a cybersecurity conference, as reported by Chris Strohm of Congress Daily. Then Cheney went on the record, also on Face The Nation, after being asked by Schieffer, saying he’d pick Limbaugh over Powell. Powell’s response this morning was, in part, to affirm he still saw himself as a Republican and to invoke Jack Kemp as an example he admired.

Washington’s stenographers must’ve started scribbling as soon as they heard this because that has become the headline of the day at both the Washington Post (“Still a Republican, Powell Urges Party to Become More Inclusive“) and the New York Times (“Powell Still a Republican, Despite Party Differences“).

But Schieffer also asked Powell if he agreed that EITs were effective and when he knew about them. Powell claimed to have been kept apart, without direct knowledge, and that the CIA “had to be given some room” (really, given their history of abuse?). Schieffer didn’t ask Powell why he didn’t insist on knowing the nature of the elicitations in which were given to him and his aid, Lawrence Wilkerson, as evidence for claims he had to make to the world.

While admitting being party to some discussions, Powell pleaded ignorance, saying “I don’t know know what I don’t know.” Logic hard to deny, but he’s really not saying anything there. Almost Rumsfeldian.

At the same time, in saying “we” used “EITs” — a pseudonym for torture — he admits to his complicity in human rights abuses. He seems to think it was OK to do that, but maybe just for a year or two. “It’s easy now to look back … to say … you shouldn’t have done anything. … Now we see that these [tactics] are not appropriate,” Powell said.

The Geneva Conventions didn’t make that clear before? Isn’t there some contradiction suggested in what Powell admits being a party to and what he says he didn’t know at the time? Such questions were not pressed in the studio.

If we take Powell at his word, he seems to have conveniently not known and not asked (and if he asked and got no answer, still proceeded in his role as an apparent cog rather than a principal), despite his responsibility.

The importance of this issue and the overall shallowness of Powell’s replies, as a one-time “principal,” seems more critical to me than his political affiliation and political name-calling. To me this subject of national security, the answers, the questions and the un-asked questions would make a more substantive lead.

Isn’t it relevant to ask why Powell was making claims apparently based on assertions with little context from an agency (CIA) with a known track record of lying? An agency whose other primary source for other claims (“Curveball”) was challenged by the Defense Intelligence Agency? This was when Powell was Secretary of State and reports say that the State Department’s own Bureau of Intelligence and Research was skeptical of these claims.

My friend Sam Husseini was outside Face The Nation, and followed-up to ask Powell about torture that produced lies used in support of the specious claims Powell made before the United Nations. Jonathan Schwarz sees a disparity between Powell’s comments now and what he said before the UN.

Ray McGovern, an ex-CIA analyst (who once had a sting briefing the first President Bush) and Catholic activist, has written a piece based in part on an email interview with Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s chief aide during his reign over the State Department, that should leave even more questions in your mind. One might even wonder if Powell is leaving Wilkerson out to dry.

Updated (26 May 2009): Robert Parry at Consortium News follows-up on Powell’s Face The Nation appearance and Sam’s question, bringing along analysis that goes deeper into Powell’s career.

Public Knowledge has blogged about this tonight.

I had the privilege of speaking with Sherin Siy earlier today and I appreciate Sherwin Siy’s point of view and his critique of both the situation as we understand it, and of my take on the situation.

I tend to agree with the paraphrasing of Lawrence Lessig that it doesn’t make sense to press copyright too far or all the time when it comes to political speech. But, as it was also noted, my particular photo is not essential to the “dialogue” happening here. It doesn’t make sense to abuse the terms that I’ve willingly shared this work under. And I feel I’ve been deprived of the reserved right to grant permission under other terms to use it further than the chosen Creative Commons terms allow.

I am trying to practice my belief in a “tool” that actually factilates sharing, that strikes a balance so that political speech and other dialogue can benefit from shared culture, from reuse and remixing and inherently maybe even be more constructive when the rules of the Commons are followed. I am trying to strike a balance between that and developing and sustaining my photography.

As I inspect my images closer, and the ads, it appears they may be using one or a couple similar images of mine taken from the same vantage point at about the same time. But that they are my images, unique to this event, remains clear – the angle of the photo, the angle of light, the apparent focal length, the basic nature of the exposure, the matching of key features of the expression, is all consistent with this event and my unique point of view.

The photo is one of several I took of Murtha in profile at a town hall in Virginia in 2006, listening to the public talk about the Iraq war and the Bush Administration. The scene was a packed room, full of people with 9/11 memorial t-shirts, American flags, comprising of local constituents that included veterans and Defense Department employees. There were peace activist veterans and veteran peace activists alike. Murtha’s scrunched facial expression as depicted in my photo is one of concentration and attentiveness (something you might derive from seeing the whole set and knowing about the event). In the ad it is reduced to a context-less scowl coupled with something else entirely.

I share many photos on Flickr under Creative Commons licenses and this photo is one of those. The Creative Commons is a way of using copyright to share material while retaining rights as one sees fit. It is a philosophy for using copyright constructively.

The license I chose was the “Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic” license, and the conditions are boiled down to the following points:

• Provide attribution
• No commercial use
• No derivative works
• And, of course, make clear the terms under which the CC-licensed work being used is available to others as well.

It seems obvious to me that the Russell campaign’s production people didn’t give proper attribution in the video or elsewhere, nor did they make the terms of the license clear in redistributing my work. They’ve manipulated the background of the photo further taking it out of context, which I believe constitutes a derivative work, and while this isn’t commercial speech, they did use the ad as fodder for fundraising. Depending on how the ad was created and the relationship between the producers and the campaign, I kind of wonder if the “commercial use” restriction wasn’t still violated (but that is speculation).

I don’t like the implication that I gave the Russell campaign permission beyond the limitations of the license I gave to the public. I’m trying, whenever I feel it appropriate, to share my photos with the commons to support the kind of substantive media and dialogue I believe in (even if I disagree with a given argument) and I am trying to be able to do more media making. Inappropriate use of my work undermines this.

This morning I woke to see, upon closer inspection of the web site, that my image is being used in other promotional content on the campaign site and in another spot, “The King of Pork” ad.

I didn’t react publicly right away last night because I reached out to friends who know lawyers and to Public Knowledge for advice first. I got the beginnings of advice this morning. I’ve written Russell’s campaign to ask them to stop using my work beyond the bounds of the Creative Commons license and I’m interested in finding out what more I can do.

I feel like I should say I am also all for fair use (an implied right that long precedes the Creative Commons) but I don’t think this fits. Others have agreed.

I don’t know yet if they’ve run these ads on TV, but they appear to want to and they have gotten a sizable enough views on YouTube for a congressional race.

I would hope that when Creative Commons works are used properly in any kind of speech the public would understand such use is not the same as endorsement by the original creator. By not following the rules of the Creative Commons license, Russell’s ad leaves people to reasonably conclude an endorsement by me if they happen to recognize the photo or find it elsewhere, properly attributed. Ben’s message to me last night was an example of such an inference – that I had somehow collaborated with this campaign – being drawn by a complete stranger.

I could imagine Creative Commons-supplied works figuring into constructive mainstream political volleys some day. Where dynamic and well-attributed and linked remixed works themselves could be maps to the nuance and reality of the political scene, via which deceit and inaccuracies could be routed out by tracing the component parts of these works.

This misuse is an example of diminishing the productive uses of copyright, of the commons and I find this a threat to democracy (however important this small example is or is not). The consequences of stomping across the commons could become quite significant if people become afraid to share their work, particularly if like much of mine it is documentary in nature, because they’re afraid it will be unattributed, taken out of context, or worse.

By documenting this publicly, I’m not implicitly defending the comments by Murtha that the first ad is ostensibly criticizing. I personally have fundamental disagreements with Murtha’s hawkishness, nevermind the pork end of his role in defense spending. To be frank, I doubt I agree with much of Murtha’s or Russell’s stated positions or their track records overall.

Inskeep at one point does mention that “we’ve had our share of critics” (ah, yes, “one’s share” again — meeting some minimum obligation to defer to the minority view that doesn’t fit conveniently in the two sided volley that they’d prefer, I guess) in questioning the Republican guest who voted against the bill.

But the critiques Inskeep has apparently been informed of (I am most familiar with those of Dean Baker, not sure if he was a guest) do not seem to inform the questions. Shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t Inskeep ditch the verbage that defers to Capitol Hill back rooms and actively try to reconsile all the assertions, including those beyond the default false dichotomy?

If there is a bias, shouldn’t it be towards those who don’t have a vested interest in the power structure and who have a track record of getting things right? Shouldn’t there be less deference for those who have been repeatedly wrong or massively inconsistent without rationale?

Instead Inskeep sounds like he is play-acting sounding puzzled that the two party machines could not keep the game playing the way the normally do and making little effort to go much further. Backroom tactics can be news but they should either be equal or second to routing out the facts of the issue, reconsiling the assertions about the public policy and the problems.

That most Americans opposed the bailout seems to be a footnote: often mentioned as an aside, never explained in as many words are given to all the tactical explanations.

Much emphasis has also been given to Wall Street’s reaction to the vote — but what do we expect? It is the trader’s own industry that is affected, whatever the real meaning for the rest of us is. I know so many have their futures tied-up in mortgages and investments, and this is real for a lot of regular Americans, but it seems like the casino of Wall Street is prone to manic behavior. Perhaps Wall Street isn’t unlike a three year old who just ate all the cake, is sick, wants more cake still, and is throwing a tantrum of impatience because typically capitulating parents can’t come to any other agreement as to how to handle the infantile beast.

A rough metaphor perhaps. But what I mean to say is that Wall Street is not a purely rational actor in this case (if it ever is), as it is not remotely observing other parts of the system and then making projections based on it. Its own profits, treasure, is at stake, and whether or not things could work without a bailout of this sort, the analysts and traders seem to have an incentive for the market to behave “badly” at worst and little perspective to be level-headed at best. The stock market cannot be relied upon — again — this is problematic for a lot of people who are tied up in it as other guaranteed benefits have been stripped away (by bought lawmakers and Wall Street lobbyists). If help should get to anyone, perhaps to them.

But let the traders thrash about a bit more. For all those who need real help, let us consider other ways for the State to spend $700 billion, so long as it can be done and we still have this state around to cajole into helping the people it allegedly exists to serve.

The so-called “Beijing 6″ were ultimately sentenced, through an extrajudicial proceeding (they did not get to go to court), to 10 days of detainment. As some of us guessed, it turned out to be shorter, with the end of the Olympics.

I received a message via Facebook that one of Brian’s colleagues, Jeffrey Rae, called his father to say he and others were being put aboard an Air China flight to Los Angeles.

I haven’t had the time to summarize and annotate my thoughts on the media coverage of the detainments. I’ve been trying to help make some connections between Brian’s family and the media, and hold down the day job as well.

I suppose the short version of such thoughts would be this:

The articles I’ve seen in the New York Times, Agence France Presse, the Associated Press, and elsewhere have not given much space to the broader context of the Students for a Free Tibet actions, or other protests, and have not bothered to acknowledge the different roles of some of those detained. Not all were participants in the protest. Brian, Jeffrey Rae, and others are asserted to have had a purely documentary role (and my personal knowledge inclines me to believe this). No evidence has been presented to the contrary and yet they’re all implied to be people who knowingly broke the law (however unjust it may be). That may be true for some of them, but some were not even breaking the law as best we can tell.

While what these detainees have suffered is far less than what Chinese dissidents have suffered, the “Beijing 6″ and a couple others have received special treatment with respect to the precedent set in handling previous alleged disruptions during the Olympics.

The former has only been glazed over throughout the Olympic coverage and the latter only mentioned in passing in a couple of reports so far. The facts are lightly reported and the context only exists for those of us who read voraciously and cull as much we can. The papers and the wires have done the public no favors in understanding this situation.

Eowyn, Brian’s wife, shared this thought with many of us overnight:

I’ve spent a lot of today pondering a question that came to me sometime last night — If this is how the Chinese government treats US citizens when the eyes of the world are focused on China, what do they do to Tibetan and Chinese activists, who have no real rights, when no one is watching? I can’t even imagine.

Update: This evening I heard of a report on NPR yesterday, and heard another for myself today that actually distinguished the two different groups of detainees related to the Students for a Free Tibet incident — using the terms “activists” and “citizen journalists.” An improvement in accuracy.

I think “citizen journalism” has become a bogus term. (The synonyms that Wikipedia currently suggests are mostly better.)

To me, one can reduce it to either you’re doing journalism or you are not. Journalism does not have to mean professionalized, dispassionate, (allegedly) neutral stuff that one hears about from the lofty offices of the broadcast networks (paid for with what, anything less than socially acceptable hush money from sponsors?). It does have to mean getting your facts straight, it does mean independent thinking, and challenging unsupported assertions before you endorse them as fact. Some of the most revered journalists in American history were often also called activists. They had credibility because they were still independent, and the facts they reported held-up.

Before the term citizen journalist was born, members of the DC Indymedia center (such as it was at the time), were accredited by the Washington Metropolitan Police Department with press credentials. I point this out only as a way to say that I think since then, “citizen journalist” has only served to make it easier for people actively trying to contribute to community media to be marginalized further than they already naturally were (by way of not having thousands or millions of dollars to back them). There is now what is seen as lesser category to cage people in, regardless of their work product, before getting to “real journalist.”

I think the term was coined with positive intent. It is part of the vernacular of an ebullient forward-looking analysis of new media and the power of the Internet to democratize. I get it, but I do think that general usage has possibly confused things for some, diluting a sense of what journalism is and giving an impression of a sort of false dichotomy within journalism (not that there aren’t any others).

This is a roundabout reaction to the news that my friend, Brian Conley, founder of Alive in Baghdad, and a ‘”citizen journalist”‘ says the press release, is being held in a Chinese jail. I wonder if this citizen journalist component will be played-up somehow (by all sides?), and I fear this could cloud fundamental issues of human rights. Extra labels do not always help. I hope for the best, we were to collaborate soon in another effort.

He appears to have coordinated with some Tibet activists to document some of their protest. Just because NBC news (to pick one) probably wouldn’t do this (they’re busy giving us objective analysis of the Olympics with their China-hired Kissinger associate) and because he chose to show an interest in the Tibet cause does not make this not journalism.

In fact, with the associations being no secret (as opposed to the false projection of untouchable so-called objectivity) and his work as verifiable as anyone else’s, it makes it even more real journalism.

The way Carvin tells it, he was first asked what he was doing and left alone, seemingly with permission, to go about his business. Then security returned giving conflicting messages about what he could and couldn’t do, and why (read his account). He was threatened with arrest multiple times. After pressing for a coherent explanation and to talk to bosses, he still had to pack-up and leave.

Before I express my solidarity, I do want to say Carvin should not have been surprised that he’d get some trouble: The Gigapan requires a tripod and rules against tripods have been common for a while, well before the so-called post-9/11 era.

Aside from security issues, more mundane rules and bureaucratic measures that require special permission for some photography in the name of safety and congestion have been in place for some time in many public and private spaces, particularly in Washington, DC. If one is going to use a tripod and is involved in any sort of media making, they should expect to be challenged by those responsible for the space if nothing is pre-arranged. I do think such policies are sometimes questionable and are often arbitrarily enforced but as an employee of NPR, he might have more easily obtained special permission to use his tripod. That said, the conflicting permission and conflicting reasoning Carvin recounts sort of balances that out.

Fundamentally, I think indignance over this treatment is justified. Often in the name of security, and sometimes in the name of private property, civil liberties are aggressively curtailed by security officials who often seem to know less about the rules they’re apparently enforcing than the bill of rights some of them (at least when they’re police) are sworn to protect. That isn’t saying much.

I have witnessed and experienced similar situations myself.

In Washington, the hostility towards photography in open spaces by tourists and amateurs, even members of the press and others seems particularly intense. On Washington’s metro system I’ve been approached by police and asked to show them the photos I had just taken. Another time, I was told I could not take a photo in the Metro because there was an elevated security level — but the rules publicly available did not back this up.

Often I was subject to scrutiny while others who were taking pictures were not. The only discernible difference I could imagine is that I often carried a Digital SLR camera body — so I either appeared professional (still not a crime) or somehow more competent (not a guarantee by any means) and the nature of my photography was apparently supposed not only to be different (a weak assumption) but extra-legal (false).

This year in Union Station, while I photographed an anti-war flash mob, I saw videographers get repeatedly approached by Amtrak police and suited officials and told they could not film. Enough seemed to challenge, in front of enough witnesses, that the authorities seemed to relent.

In 2002, while covering World Bank and anti-war protests as a then-contributor to an incarnation of DC Indymedia (which had been recognized by DC’s police department — which took our applications and had just begun to issue credentials to many of us) and collaborating with the DC Radio-Coop (a project of organizers with Washington’s Pacifica station WPFW and DC Indymedia), I was swept up in a mass-arrest. Other other press, legal observers, medics, passers-by, and demonstrators — were all illegally arrested. I’ve been shown video of cops pointing to me, and arresting me out of sequence from the crowd they corralled after I had held my camera up above my head in trying to get shots of the arrests at the other end of compressed block of people I was in.

I spent hours in buses and hog-tied on mat, spending time with AP, Newsweek, and Magnum photographers. All but the Magnum photographer and myself got released early, apparently after negotiations between their employers/sponsors and the authorities. When those who could be were contacted, all those who were sprung early with the help of their boss were reluctant to join a free-press oriented lawsuit a credentialed videographer and I tried to organize. Eventually we joined a different suit that included protest participants, which the Magnum photographer also eventually joined coincidentally, and we settled without pressing the issues specific to our journalist status. The Committee to Protect Journalists included mention of the arrests in a press release.

It isn’t just Washington, DC, though: After Boing Boing picked up on Andy Carvin’s story, they shared a couple more similarly themed accounts from the Los Angeles area, one involving the FBI.

Similar instances of arbitrary rules or baseless enforcement of allegedly applicable rules or laws regarding photography have been reported on in the past too. Including twice in the past couple of years where the New York City Metro Transit Authority and the city government was subject to a public backlash after the respective authorities expressed the intent to implement more restrictive rules on the basis of security and public safety.

The example of Union Station raises concerns both about the civil liberties associated with photographing that which is plain view to the public, and the encroachment of civil liberties in general by places that seem public but which are not. This isn’t always a factor of increased privatization of what was public. Sometimes the entities that own or control certain spaces that were always technically private and [mis?-]understood to be public seem to exploit the murkiness of places that are — by most perceptions — seen as public because of their association with public spaces and public or government-subsidized services.

I know there are lawyers will say my qualifiers are going too far, but when we’re talking about subsidies, public-private corporations, and hubs of public services, I think the equivocation on the “privateness” is deserved. In the case of Union Station, I’m talking about Amtrak and the Washington Metro system.

This is likely to get edited for clarity and updated for the addition of sources after I get some sleep and Twitter comes back up.

You may parse the term anti-American differently than I, and if it is truly that subjective, I think that only gives more cause to use the term sparingly. To me the terms signifies a general disdain for all things American: Americans, American culture, the actions and policies of the US government. I’m not convinced that is accurate in the case of Muqtada al-Sadr. When you can isolate the sentiment to some subset of those categories a more accurate term can almost always be found, or qualifiers need to be deployed.

One of the additional instances was on May 2. I posted a “tweet” shortly after I heard it. My recollection is that in this case it came from a presenter, not in the voice of a reporter in the field. I visited the NPR site and went through the Morning Edition stories for that day and I cannot find the use in the only story in that day’s archived line-up about Iraq. It was a discussion about an interview with a member of Sadr’s militia.

It seems most likely that I heard the use in the presentation of news headlines by Carl Kasell (the headlines are a part of the broadcast which is not apart of the show per se, and not publicly archived as thoroughly as the show itself). Less likely, but not ruled out (as stories do sometimes seem to get tweaked before they’re rebroadcast for the second time on the East Cast or for the West Coast), perhaps I did hear it in this story and it got edited out.

In fact, the May 2 story was a reasonable piece that judiciously used qualifying terms and appears to be an honest attempt at figuring out what the “Sadrists” are all about. It effectively pokes holes in the idea that Sadr or his followers are truly “anti-American.”

But then, this morning, May 5, I heard the term used again by Tom Bowman in a news piece (again, not archived with Morning Edition and only select audio eventually shows up in the “News” section of the NPR web site).

I’m sure there are more than these three instances in the span of time between Brian’s first notice of the use and today.

This may seem to be nit-picky, but I think this is symptomatic of a broader problem where motivation is ascribed to subjects without due qualification or substantive evidence. Sometimes it comes in the form of accepting stated motivation (say from official spokespersons) other times it comes in the form of the inaccurate use of language. Both phenomenon are, at best, lazy and at other times malicious.

In this case, given the evidence of the nuanced reporting that can sometimes be found in the more in-depth segments of the show, I’m going to go with “lazy.” It seems to be shorthand slang to fit into those seconds-long spots in the brief newscasts. But it is inaccurate. If we return to Brian’s comment, that Sadr is not “anti-American” but “anti-occupation”, we find in his complaint a solution — the equally short but more accurate term “anti-occupation.”

There’s another problem of inequity, which I don’t have time to get into: That of a general trend of accepting the stated motivation of certain actors — say President Bush — and not accepting the stated motivation of others — let’s say, Osama bin Laden, in spite of evidence that both are just as believable, or that the accepted position actually isn’t supported whereas the stated motivation not accepted might be the most supported by evidence. But that’s worthy of an essay of its own and I’m hardly the first one to highlight these issues.

Mostly fond and polite remembrances were aired across the media.

But in an often included common clip, which I heard it on NPR and others heard or saw elsewhere, was an excerpt from a debate between Buckley and Noam Chomsky on Buckley’s Firing Line program.

Chomsky’s voice, and voices of those who share overlapping views in their analysis of United State government policies and actions, are simply rarely heard in Western public and commercial news media today. But plenty of Buckley’s intellectual progeny are on the air all the time.

There are many instances of marginal progress to be cited in the United States and around the world. We’ve inched forward in many ways in the past half-decade or so. But in the sense of diverse, open debate on the media most people have the most access to we have reverted.

I’m not ignoring the potential and the great examples that can be found, usually after hunting, on the Internet in that statement. It’s my understanding that most working class people get their news from radio and television still, and media access and media content does not usually speak directly to “them” (I say them, I might say us — but I’ve probably broken out of any sociologists definition of the classes).

Today he posted a brief analysis of the current conflict in Chad, starting with recent (but to some, long-forgotten) history of “development” efforts made by transnational corporations (ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco), backed by the World Bank, in concert with an obviously corrupt government.

Analysis like this is part of what journalism should be: Giving credit where credit is due and identifying the disparity between the asserted policy, the allegedly intended cause and effect and what the evidence suggests the actual cause and effect may be and, depending on how policy-makers act in the face of the evidence, what actual policy may be despite rhetoric.

Complementing Silverstein’s more wizened and first hand observations regarding this conflict, I had my own brief anecdotal encounter with the issue. One Friday evening last August, leaving the Press Building, I encountered a small demonstration by Chadians of their Ambassador at the National Press Club. Here are a couple of shots and a summary of what I learned from them.

Nothing else was shown of what this individual said, so perhaps he had a more nuanced view. But I wonder why people say things like that and I wonder why the press focuses on that. It seems like elections would be much more functional, primary elections especially, if you lined up behind the candidate who most represented your concerns and then voted for them—and then you found out who the leader was.

And if you were a “good” party member, you then supported that leader.

Instead people are encouraged to hedge their bets and pick a winner—before they actually pick a winner based on something meaningful.

Of course this has been the case for many election cycles now, so its probably a self-fulfilling habit: There probably is not anyone these people would really want to line-up behind based on the full portfolio of their issues or a close analysis of their credibility. For me, despite all the talk of “hope” and “change” (cliches that, coming from DLC Democrats, are oxymorons without being compound words), that sentiment applies across the aisle.

There’s a problem when people feel there are no good candidates and no clear leader, even the “clarity” presented by not having to deal with actual issues.

Of course, there are people who have looked closely at this kind of failure of democracy. And the dysfunction of horse race politics, poorly moderated debates and media myopia are not the only problems. Take a look at the work of non-profit endeavors like Fair Vote and Open Debates.