Bloggasm

For the last several years, thousands of blogs — many of which are anti-war — have displayed a small widget on their sidebars with a wildly fluctuating number that jumps up by several thousand nearly every second. The widget comes from Costofwar.com and purports to detail the money spent thus far on both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. If you happen to be for one war and against the other, you can choose which cost to display, and if you’re against both it includes a widget logging the combined cost.

At the current rate of increase, the combined cost of these two wars reported on this site will reach $1 trillion on Sunday, May 30, the day before Memorial Day. Of course the true monetary cost of war, just like estimating casualty from wars, is a hotly debated topic, one in which the factors calculated into the number make all the difference — the money spent caring for injured veterans for years after the war has ended, the cost to the government by the rising price of oil that comes as a result of a war in the Middle East, etc. In the case of Costofwar.com, it claims that it’s just calculating the spending allotments passed by Congress that go directly toward the war. It then projects the rate of spending of that money by dividing it by hours, minutes and seconds — hence the continually scrolling number.

But while we won’t ever truly know when we’ll pass the trillion dollar mark — or whether we’ve already passed it — Internet activists won’t let the May 30th date go by unnoticed. The Brave New Foundation — a progressive non-profit affiliated with Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films — has launched a new interactive Facebook app that the group hopes will educate users on the true cost of war — and where that money could be better spent.

“It does act as a symbol,” said Derrick Crowe, political director at Brave New Foundation, referring to the Costofwar.com counter. “I’m looking at it right now, and we’re at 999 billion and 300 million and some change. As you watch these numbers fly by I don’t think unless you’re looking at something like this it’s possible to comprehend just how fast the wealth of our country is flying out the door for these wars … The idea of spending a trillion, it’s the reason why when you look at an infomercial and the price is always $19.95. It’s because $20 sounds like a lot more. For us, with the trillion dollar mark we’re crossing into a different order of magnitude now.”

The Facebook app provides an online shopping cart — similar to what you’d see on Amazon — that allows you to choose from a variety of spending options. You can “hire every worker in Afghanistan for a year” (COST: $12 billion), pay for “health care for 1 million children for one year” ($2.3 billion), or even “buy out Bill Gates and Warren Buffet” ($133 billion).

“There are two reasons for doing this,” Crowe told me. “One is to show the opportunity cost for this kind of spending. When you go to our app, just take one of these trade offs. If you, for example, bought 10 million university scholarships for graduating seniors this year, and you add that to your cart, that leaves you with $920 billion left to spend. You haven’t even begun to put a dent into the total amount we’ve spent in the war. That’s the thing we’re trying to drive home, is that you could make an entirely new country with this money, you could change the face of the United States if you prioritized these other things and spent the money here. Can you imagine 10 million federal government scholarships, what that would mean for the level of education and the skills for our future workers if we decided to invest the money in them? That’s one piece, the second is to kind of come at it from a negative way at the same time. As you’re tooling around with this, it’s really hard to hit the trillion dollar mark. And when you spend about five minutes on here, and you use this really comprehensive list, and you go to your cart and find you’ve only spent like $300 billion, and you’ve already done things like buy out Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, a private island, and fund a new Apollo program and things like that, it really drives home just how much a trillion dollars is. Folks have done graphical illustrations showing a stack of bills to the moon and back or something like that, what we wanted to do is to show you just how difficult it is to spend this kind of money when you’re not dumping it on a war.”

The fact that the trillion dollar mark comes on the eve of Memorial Day, Crowe said, helps drive home the group’s message even more. Brave New Foundation is promoting this primarily on Facebook — its page has over 30,000 fans — and on outlets like HuffPo and Alternet. This activism also happens to come right before Congress votes to appropriate even more money for the wars.

“While that’s going on, we want to make sure voters and constituents and people in general understand that when they’re talking about adding billions, that’s on top of $1 trillion that we’ve spent on these two wars.”

Given that the GOP recently launched its own website, America Speaking Out, to crowdsource its spending agenda, one would think Congress would be open to such suggestions. But it’s worth noting that in past talks of budget cuts suggestions to decrease war spending are few and far between. Whether placing a $1 trillion price tag will sway voters on war spending depends on if it can overcome what many consider to be an untouchable target of budget cuts: the American military.

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When measuring a media outlet’s influence, the idea that the White House reads or listens to what you have to say would be a good indicator that your political sway reaches far beyond mere readership, but Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald has the distinction of being one of the few who can write something that results in the Obama Administration actually dispatching operatives to push back against his posts. Early last week Greenwald posted the “case against Elena Kagan,” a long detailed piece arguing why the potential Supreme Court nominee would be a bad choice for the Court, partially because of her views on executive power and her lack of record. A few days later, the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein reported that “former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, who is leading outreach efforts around the upcoming court vacancy, reached out to progressive allies to dismiss [Greenwald's] article written about Kagan.” Though he didn’t name who these progressive allies were, Greenwald noted in a follow-up post that there were three notable pieces — “this piece at Slate by former Clinton Solicitor General Walter Dellinger; this Huffington Post argument by legal analyst and author Linda Monk; and this cliché-filled, ad hominem, substance-free rant from Akin, Gump partner Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog” — that criticized his post on Kagan.

Though he noted in his post that he didn’t know whether any of these pieces were a direct result of White House outreach, it’s interesting to see a blogger who first began writing on a simple Blogspot account hold so much sway over an important decision, in this case who may be the next member of the Supreme Court. Given that one of Greenwald’s most constant criticisms of the traditional media is the insider’s access that the Beltway elite clamor for, sometimes at the expense of journalist integrity, I asked the Salon blogger if the knowledge that the White House is reading his work affects what he writes. “First of all, I don’t have the kind of access that can be taken away,” he replied. “I don’t rely upon or get invitations to speak before senior White House officials, and I don’t rely upon talking to people like that to do any work that I do. So the kind of conflicts I typically write about are the ones I avoid having. The kind of access in that regard isn’t anything I have, seek, or want.”

Greenwald noted that in the pushback against his piece, the Administration didn’t seem concerned so much with his attacks on Kagan’s views of executive power, but rather his points on her lack of experience. “I think that most progressives don’t care as much about executive power now that a progressive is in the White House now,” he said. “I think they’re more concerned with the ‘why take this risk?’ argument because she has no record. That I think is a powerful argument.”

I reached out to the three Kagan defenders who Greenwald had cited in his piece, but only one — Linda Monk, who wrote the Huffington Post piece — responded to my request for an interview. Monk is a constitutional scholar and is particularly notable (at least for this subject) because of an op-ed she penned for the Washington Post two decades ago concerning the Robert Bork nomination to the Supreme Court. Monk told me that she was not pressured by anyone in the White House to write her HuffPo piece (I asked Greenwald about this and he doesn’t doubt her, and neither do I), and she agreed with the idea that the Salon blogger has enormous influence in this debate. “[Greenwald]’s definitely a moral leader on this issue, but he also rallied the political opposition to the Bush torture policy,” she said in a phone interview. “I think future generations are going to look back at him and call him the hero of this entire episode.”

Monk said that while she agreed with most of the blogger’s points, there were a few she disagreed with, which is why she wrote her piece. “I think he’s tremendously influential in the sense of driving the debate. And we’re all having the debate about Elena Kagan, and I wouldn’t say we wouldn’t have it without him, but he’s certainly been a leader in it.”

I asked Monk to compare the blogosphere’s role in influencing the Supreme Court nominations to her own experience during the Bork episode, particularly since she had been able to bring her argument to the Washington Post back in 1987. “I didn’t have op ed access then, I was just getting started then,” she replied. “And I was just persistent; I was an unknown and this was a very rare case where someone who didn’t have a regular op ed in the Post got to publish there. With the blogosphere, that access to write op eds has diminished even more — it’s much harder to participate at the Washington Post, but with the Huffington Post it’s great, I can participate in real time, without having to wait to see if my piece will come out before the news cycle has changed … Glenn Greenwald, who’s in Brazil, reads my Huffington Post article and responds to it, and I can respond to him in real time, and then thousands if not millions of people all around the world who do care who’s being nominated can participate in real time.”

But even though Greenwald said he doesn’t allow his influential readership to taint what he writes, he does enjoy his influence. “I’ve built up over time a platform where I can have influence. If you’re writing on politics you want to have influence on something, you don’t want to be writing pointlessly, and so sure I’m aware that my blog is well read in Washington, in Congress, and to some extent in the White House. I’m aware of that and happy about it, but it never affects what I write. I just try hard to block out all those influences.”

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The Congressional Budget Office released it preliminary estimate of the Senate health care bill yesterday and found that the bill would reduce the deficit by $130 billion in the first 10 years and $1.2 trillion in the second 10 years. Upon the report’s release, conservative bloggers and pundits began trying to discredit the CBO, saying that the office allows Democrats to cook the numbers and its estimates are often not a good indicator of reality.

If the CBO is so unreliable, then these bloggers wouldn’t cite it uncritically when it favors their positions, right?

Let’s see:

BEFORE

This only comes as news to people who haven’t worked in the private sector, of course — which means the entirety of the Obama administration and most of the Democratic leadership in Congress. It takes a CBO analysis for them to understand that increasing costs on businesses means increasing costs on their customers — or forcing them out of business altogether. This time, the CBO explains the impact of raising fees on financial institutions to the clueless

– Hot Air, 3/5/10

They insist that people will not see a reduction in benefits in the future in Medicare, and that these cuts strengthen the system for the future. The CBO’s letter shows that cuts to the budget will have to result in cuts to the system and benefits if Congress intends on using the money to pay for other efforts.

– Hot Air, 12/23/09

AFTER

The Washington Post comes closer to the real problem with any CBO analysis, which is that the bill attempts so many changes that a comprehensive analysis becomes almost impossible to make. Analysts start having to make a compounding series of assumptions that could well prove false, which would result in unpredicted outcomes.

– Hot Air, 3/19/10

***

BEFORE

On Wednesday of this week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirmed Butler’s analysis, writing about Democrat claim that Obamacare strengthened Medicare

– Heritage Foundation blog, 12/24/09

AFTER

The Congressional Budget Office admits its fiscal evaluation is “preliminary,” and others call the numbers “phony.”

– Heritage Foundation blog, 3/18/10

***

BEFORE

CBO: Two Cheers For Trickle-Down Economics

A new analysis of potential stimulus options from the Congressional Budget Office concludes that cutting employer payroll taxes would provide a bigger boost to GDP and employment than a similar cut in employee payroll taxes.

– Investor’s Business Daily, 1/14/10

The result of the narrow age-rating band in the House would be to raise costs for the young and healthy and make them less likely to sign up. CBO also finds that the House bill’s greater subsidies for out-of-pocket costs would be more attractive to less healthy individuals.

– Investor’s Business Daily, 11/2/09

AFTER

Five Reasons The CBO Figures Are Phony

The Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary “score” says the health care overhaul will cost $940 billion over the first 10 years, saving $138 billion over that time. But the CBO must assess legislation as written, rather than whether it will actually be carried out. Or, as the Economist put it, “The CBO is required to pretend to believe many impossible things before breakfast.”

– Investor’s Business Daily, 3/18/10

***

BEFORE

My syndicated column today torches President Obama’s fiscal freeze follies. A new CBO reports says the year-old Porkulus will now cost $75 billion more than originally estimated. Which is why the White House is scrambling to de-emphasize its spending discipline pose and talk about something else.

– Michelle Malkin, 1/27/10

Related news from the CBO this morning [she then block quotes a report that states, "The latest congressional budget estimates due Tuesday predict a $1.35 trillion deficit for this year, a top Capitol Hill aide says."]

– Michelle Malkin, 1/26/10

AFTER

The poor number-crunchers have been working overtime as Speaker Pelosi and the Dems have re-jiggered and re-jiggered to meet farcical fiscal discipline goals. It’s Enron-style accounting and everyone knows it.

IBD’s Ed Carson outlines “Five Reasons The CBO Figures Are Phony.” Spread the word.

Update: At a press conference to trumpet the preliminary numbers that Dems are treating like definitive Scripture, Pelosi proclaims: “I love numbers. They’re so precise.”

So. Precisely. Bogus.

– Michelle Malkin, 3/18/10

If you cannot trust government’s numbers, you cannot trust government’s words. This is the lesson of the House Democrats’ desperate promotion of a phony-baloney, Congressional Budget Office analysis of their latest health care takeover package.

– Michelle Malkin, 3/19/10

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While listening to the audio, one finds it difficult to discern the identity of the person asking the questions, or the venue where the questions are being asked, but the person answering the questions is almost certainly Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

The anonymous questioner asks what can be done “about Obama and the birth certificate thing?” to which Cuccinelli responds, “It will get tested in my view when someone… when he signs a law, and someone is convicted of violating it and one of their defenses will be it is not a law because someone qualified to be President didn’t sign it.” He then claims that “as Attorney General,” he can challenge the birth certificate “only if there is a conflict where we are suing the federal government for a law they’ve passed.”

The questioner then asks how it can be proved Obama’s birth certificate is a fake.

“Well… that’s a good question,” Cuccinelli says. “Not one I’ve thought a lot about because it hasn’t been part of my campaign. Someone is going to have to come forward with nailed down testimony that he was born in place B, wherever that is. You know, the speculation is Kenya. And that doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility.”

This is the same Ken Cuccinelli who recently came under fire for encouraging Virginia universities to rescind their anti-gay discrimination policies, a move that several groups have condemned as rooted in homophobia and bigotry.

The audio in question was released today by Ben Tribbett, a Virginian political blogger who is often credited with breaking the George Allen “macaca” video. The blogger uploaded the video onto YouTube with a still image of Cuccinelli as a visual.

I spoke to Tribbett, a former colleague, on the phone about the story. In order to protect his source he wouldn’t tell me where and when the audio takes place, or when he first learned of it; he would only say that it took place “at an event Ken was at.”

“I think it shows a shocking lack of judgment for an Attorney General to be having this kind of blunt conversation with a conspiracy theorist,” Tribbett said. “I think his lawsuit against the EPA, his letter on anti-discrimination policies and this audio shows that he is turning the Attorney General’s office into a circus freak show.”

Tribbett said the lack of details about the where and when of the audio wouldn’t make it harder to pin this on Cuccinelli, and that he reached out to the attorney general via email over the weekend with no response. He said that he’ll run any reaction from Cuccinelli if he offers one.

The video is below:

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Not long ago, Quentin Kidd, a faculty adviser for the student government association at Christopher Newport University, located in Newport News, Virginia, spoke with two politically active students at the school. Nicolaus Usry and Shannon Rhoten, heads of campus Republican and Democrat organizations, had come to him disturbed by a recent letter sent to several schools by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. According to the Washington Post, the letter “urged the state’s public colleges and universities to rescind policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation,” arguing that “their boards of visitors had no legal authority to adopt such statements.”

Usry and Rhoten, along with hundreds of other students and faculty, strongly disagreed with this notion and wanted to quickly organize some kind of response.

“So Shannon created this Facebook page, as it was kind of a natural way to communicate,” Kidd told me in a recent phone conversation. “I didn’t actually realize that they would put me on as an administrator of the group, but they did. And I think their goal initially was to raise awareness, and they saw this as the most expedient way to do so.”

In less than 48 hours, the group has amassed over 600 members and is among several others that have sprouted up across the state, almost all of which are organized by students vehemently opposed to campuses rescinding policies relating to discrimination against gays.

Kidd said the students are already organizing an on-campus rally, and the Facebook group has acted as an effective way to disseminate news.

“I’m not even sure that they would bother with the traditional method of posting fliers around campus,” he explained. “In their minds I think it would be a Facebook-generated event; they’ve already got 600 people in 48 hours that have joined this group. They can create an event as part of that group and immediately speak to 600 people and then encourage those 600 people to speak to anyone who doesn’t already know about it. So in this way, virtual organizing is simply the only way they’re going to do it.”

My brother PJ is a junior at CNU and one of those who joined the Facebook group. “Everyone seems to be really upset, even some of my conservative friends,” he told me. “Several of my friends who are in the Young Republicans club are involved with the organizing of opposition. Students fought really hard a few years ago to get the discrimination wording added to CNU’s discrimination policy….. many of those students who fought for it are now seniors, and they are really upset.”

Kidd, who has been a faculty member for 13 years and taught at Texas Tech before that, said that social media has created a new form of campus activism that is reminiscent of the Vietnam protests that swept across American college campuses decades ago. “As I was going through college and graduate school, campus activism was sort of on the wane. I was probably at the heart of the post-Vietnam wane in campus activism, but it’s really picked up a lot in the past eight years.”

The faculty member stressed that this current example of social media activism isn’t directed toward campus administrators, but instead is targeted at Cuccinelli and, to a lesser extent, Virginia Governor McDonnell. To his knowledge, no campus faculty or administrators have given any indication that they plan to rescind the anti-discrimination rules.

“My sense is that there’s a level of frustration and anxiety demonstrated within the last two days — with 600 people joining in 48 hours — that’s just right under the surface,” he explained.

Facebook, therefore, is simply a way for this surface tension to break out into the open and, these organizers hope, send Cuccinelli a message, one that relays that his anti-gay rhetoric will not go unchallenged.

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Earlier today, Salon’s Max Blumenthal published a piece making seemingly disturbing accusations against James O’Keefe, the ACORN-punking self-described “investigative journalist” who was arrested recently for alleged phone tampering in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office. The story made a number of allegations ranging from his involvement in an event where “O’Keefe was manning the literature table at [a] gathering that brought together anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism,” to supposed instances in which the young conservative expressed dismay at having to share living space with black people in college.

I’ve taken particular interest in the O’Keefe story because he sent me a few emails before he became famous for his ACORN video; he had somehow heard that I specialize in digital PR and wanted to know if I could help him spread some videos he had made. After the exchanges I promptly forgot about him until later when his name was splashed all over the news.

Following his arrest and subsequent release I sent O’Keefe a few instant messages on G-chat, hoping to get some quotes from him about the incident, but received no response. But today I tweeted a link and headline to the Salon article, and several hours later received this email from O’Keefe:

you do realize onepeoplesproject is a fringe, radical group raided by the fbi, right?
that article is libelous guilt by associationm will be retracted and its pathetic someone like you linked to it

(Before I go on I should note the irony that O’Keefe pointed out the fact that One People’s Project was raided by the FBI when he, himself, was arrested by the FBI and has seemingly tried to claim that the agency’s charges are groundless.)

I immediately responded to O’Keefe that I would be glad to run a response to the Salon piece on Bloggasm. He responded with a link and the words “Looks like entire story was bogus and based on false sources, with the source admitting as such.” The link he gave led to a David Weigel piece in the Washington Independent in which Weigel doesn’t necessarily deny claims in the Salon article, just says that he couldn’t corroborate whether O’Keefe was sitting at a table handing out racist literature.

I responded to O’Keefe’s email, saying, “just to clarify: you weren’t at the table?”

He followed up with a link to a Big Government article in which he actually does deny sitting at a table; the piece also says that O’Keefe was at the event to watch a debate between panelists with radically different views, and that he wasn’t there to represent any particular viewpoint.

It should be noted that Blumenthal reached out to O’Keefe’s attorney with no response. Also, there are several other claims in the piece aside from O’Keefe’s attendance of the event. However, now that O’Keefe has officially responded to at least some of the accusations, I think it would certainly be fair for Salon to update the article, not only linking to O’Keefe’s response but also quoting the most pertinent parts.

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When Mark Rosenthal launched a Facebook group recently supporting a boycott of Whole Foods, he did virtually nothing to promote it. He left his computer for a few hours and when he came back he found that between 50 and 100 people had already joined.

“I was just starting it as a place to get the word out to my friends who I know shop at Whole Foods,” Rosenthal, 39, told me in a phone interview. “I have friends who spend hundreds of dollars a month at Whole Foods in Los Angeles and New York.”

The activist decided to create the group after reading a now widely-circulated Wall Street Journal op-ed from Whole Foods CEO John Mackey. The op-ed argued against a public option and in favor of deregulation of the current health insurance system in the US, and it blasted universal health care systems in other countries like Canada and the UK.

Many of the grocery store’s loyal customers — who tend to be left-of-center — grew angry at the op-ed and have organized boycotts. As of this writing, Rosenthal’s Facebook group has grown to over 26,000 members, and over the past week he and others have branched out to other social media platforms, including Twitter, Wordpress and Flickr.

“[The op-ed] lit a fire under me,” Rosenthal said. “This person was using his company as a sort of Trojan horse for a bunch of discredited, bad ideas that we have said no to over and over again. And it was just really frustrating because we had an election where we voted on these things, and we said no to these stupid ideas about deregulation being the solution to any of our problems. We’ve said no to the notion that ‘I’ve got mine and everyone else can go suck an egg.’”

As the Facebook quickly grew, he was approached by others who offered to help organize the boycott, and within days he added several other administrators to the group. One of those people was Steven Mikulencak, a town planner located in New York. The group soon got on a conference call and planned to expand outside of the Facebook group. Mikulencak registered the domain wholeboycott.com and quickly set up a Wordpress account for it. The group also designed their own special logo for the boycott, effectively creating their own anti-Whole Foods brand.

“I believe [Mackey] set up 99% of the boycott with his op ed,” Mikulencak told me. “All social media has to do is go the extra 1%. As a town planner I’ve studied community organizing and have worked with grass roots efforts, and I’m looking at this as an extremely effective, fascinating way to organize. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

Both Mikulencak and Rosenthaul told me that they’re taking their time in promoting the boycott and are refraining from rushing to make any major decisions. They’ve begun posting user-submitted photos from people who are taking pictures of receipts from other grocery stores they’re shopping at and on the blog they’re listing boycott events that are taking place around the country. But they’re doing very little to actually organize these individual events.

“Our strategy is mostly through social media,” Mikulencak explained. “That has to connect with groups on the ground. We’re not organizing those, that’s spontaneous and independent from us. We hope to be a clearing house between all of them. The people on the ground will have to take some initiative, organize their own groups, set up some meetup.com accounts, and picket and leaflet and let their voices be heard.”

The activist said that much of the impetus behind the campaign has had very little to do with his own efforts, and more to do with an organic mass movement that has sprouted up.

“I’m coming to the conclusion that this is much bigger than the group that’s online. It’s growing no matter what we do. We realize that time is on our side, and we’re going to take our time, and let a coherent message evolve from our group. We’re a very patient group; boycotts take a lot of time. So we’re not feeling particularly rushed.”

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