Rift On Israel Divides Democrats

The Article: Israel rift roils Democratic ranks by Ben Smith on Politico.

The Text: Two of the Democratic Party’s core institutions are challenging a bipartisan consensus on Israel and Palestine that has dominated American foreign policy for more than a decade.

The Center for American Progress, the party’s key hub of ideas and strategy, and Media Matters, a central messaging organization, have emerged as vocal critics of their party’s staunchly pro-Israel congressional leadership and have been at odds, at times, with Barack Obama’s White House, which has acted as a reluctant ally to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government.

The differences are ones of tone – but also of bright lines of principle – and while they have haven’t yet made any visible impact on Democratic policy, they’ve shaken up the Washington foreign policy conversation and broadened the space for discussing a heretical and often critical stance on Israel heretofore confined to the political margins.

The daily battle is waged in Media Matters’ emails, on CAP’s blogs, Middle East Progress and ThinkProgress and most of all on Twitter, where a Media Mattters official, MJ Rosenberg, regularly heaps vitriol on those who disagree as “Iraq war neocon liar” (the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg) or having “dual loyalties” to the U.S. and Israel (the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin). And while the Center for American Progress tends to walk a more careful line, warm words for Israel can be hard to find on its blogs.

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Michael Steele: The Notorious G.O.P.

This is just embarrassing.

I Could Be You And You Could Be Me

Runaway by Imperial Teen off of Feel the Sound.

Swapping Is The New Buying?

In order to shift focus away from mindless consumption, this New York City vending machine allows patrons to donate items and receive used ones for free. I wouldn’t like socks, though.

Our Unimaginative Internet Economy

The Article: Our Unimaginative Internet Economy by Mary Joyce in OWNI.

The Text: We idolize the billionaire geniuses of the Internet, people like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. We associate their companies with innovation and creativity and, on a technical level, this is true. But financially these firms have not innovated. They have made their money by tweaking the most boring old media monetization models – not old like the 1990?s, old like the 1740?s and 1830?s. For all their technical and managerial skill, these men are simply the ad salesmen and mail-order catalog distributors of the digital era.

You can’t make money selling digital goods.

Out in the real world people make money by selling goods and services of finite supply. On the Internet, you can’t do this. Any digital good by definition has an infinite supply. This is because, in the words of Lawrence Lessig, digital means “perfect copies, freely made.”

Hence the damage the Internet has done to companies such as newspapers, film studios, and music labels that sell goods that can be digitized (words, images, and sounds). Hence SOPA, the attempt by these industries to create legal obstacles to infinite digital supply. You can’t blame them for trying, but in the end they will lose. (I could make an argument that, because of the loss of profits by a range of media companies, the Internet has destroyed more profits than it has created, but I won’t try to do that here.)

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