Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin and the Race of a Lifetime
By John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
          You may think you know the election of 2008, but how well do you really know it?  Game Change tells the story of the 2008 presidential election in a new and engaging way.  With dialogue and expertly detailed scenes, as well as new interviews and revelations, Game Change looks back on this historic election and exposes some of its most disappointing, exciting and revolutionary moments from behind the scenes.  Only after reading this novel-like account of the election will you be able to understand and appreciate just how groundbreaking this election really was. 

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
By Rebecca Skloot
          Although she used to be known as Henrietta Lacks, this poor, Southern farmer is now simply known as HeLa, well her cells are at least.  Lacks’ cells are known to be the first “immortal” human cells grown in culture.  Even though she has been dead for 60 years, her cells have helped develop the polio vaccine, uncover secrets of cancer, and have even lead to advances in cloning.  In this investigative biography and scientific thriller, Skloot follows the life of this extraordinary woman and her ancestors living today.  By observing this astonishing scientific breakthrough, as well as its consequences for Lacks’ family today, Skloot shows just how closely science and society can be related. 

Generally escalators that don’t work aren’t such a problem for me. I’m very familiar with Boston’s T and New York’s subway system and don’t mind taking the stairs in those cities. It’s usually faster to run up them and who couldn’t use a few more stairs in their daily wanderings? But, like I said, DC is different.

Before I get to the bad, the nice part about the Metro is that it’s clean, spacious, and generally runs on time. Unlike Boston, you can sit on some nice seats that aren’t carved to death and graffiti doesn’t stand a chance. It’s not too crowded and doesn’t smell like the rancid subway system in New York. I’ve been on nearly a dozen different subway systems and this one has got to be the nicest – once you’re on the platform.

Now we’ll go to the bad and the reason why I think it’s the only place where one can complain about escalators not working and not be picked on as being lazy. Washington has the longest escalators you could ever imagine. The longest escalator in the Western Hemisphere? Yep, it’s here. 508 feet of escalator. That’s nearly two football fields of mechanical stairs. Every single friend that I’ve had visit me here makes a comment about how far you have to climb on escalators in the Metro. Most snap photos at both the top and the bottom. Roslyn is probably 20,000 leagues under the DC swamp (I know it’s technically Virginia). Dupont isn’t as deep, but must be below a tectonic plate at the very least.

Yes, the Metro does have elevators, but I have only taken them twice here. The first time was when I just moved here and couldn’t see the steps down at Navy Memorial/Archives. The second was when I had a whole PC with me. I’m young and relatively in shape so I refuse to let myself.

Now that summer is here and everyone is visiting, things are getting brutal. This city was seriously built on a swamp and it’s the muggiest place I’ve been in the world. There are tons of jokes about ambassadors getting hazard pay for being sent to DC back in the day. Now, imagine climbing a broken escalator at least twice as long as you’ve ever seen in your life – in a suit – with a computer bag in 100 degree heat while you can practically see dew drops forming in the air in front of you. Not fun. I’m not kidding that people die when they don’t work.

Is it that hard to keep the escalators running?  I guess so, but can’t understand why. Fares are about to go up for the second time since I got here 7 months ago and it’s probably worse than the day I got here.  The Metro is so perfect – aside from the escalators! If you don’t believe me and the mayhem I speak of, look what just happened a few blocks away from me yesterday. Smoke + broken super-long escalators + lots of people underground = …

I promise my next post won’t be such a rant.

Sandler plays a super rich Hollywood agent with a gorgeous wife and some really bratty kids. When his youth basketball coach passes away, he takes his family to New England for the funeral.  There he reunites with his four boyhood buddies (played by Kevin James, David Spade, Chris Rock and Rob Schneider) and their families for a long July 4th weekend at the coach’s old lake house.

The rest of the story is fairly predictable. Each of the couples (except for Spade, who plays a single lecher) has their own dysfunction. There is a great deal of slapstick and tons of breast and potty jokes. And of course there is the warm message at the end as each family learns to appreciate its members more. Kevin James steals the show with his physical comedy; Chris Rock is surprisingly mild; and David Spade is funnier than expected.

Adam Sandler is the rare mega-celebrity who comes from New Hampshire, my home state. Every couple of years Sandler comes back to his old high school in Manchester to goof around with the students. New Hampshire has featured in many of his films. While Grown Ups takes place in a generic New England community, people who spend any time around Lake Winnipesaukee will recognize many scenery shots from the film.

Grown Ups is a fun film to enjoy this July 4th weekend and throughout the summer. It will remind you not to take life or yourself too seriously and to appreciate your loved ones and your friends. After watching it you’ll probably find yourself e-mailing your own childhood buddies to recount your own breast and potty jokes.

In celebration of the 30th birthday of the city’s annual Eatfest, foodies, beginning Monday, will be able to download an iPhone application deciphering the vast array of food and entertainment offerings at this year’s Taste of Chicago, Mayor Daley announced at a Taste of Chicago Preview at a South Loop Dominick’s Saturday.

It’s just one of the many new features at this year’s event that kicks off Friday, and has 11 new restaurants joining the more than 50 that will be offering dishes representing just about all of the city’s ethnic communities, the mayor said.

Since most of the visitors to the Taste are tourists and suburbanites who make a yearly trip into the city, having a functional application that catalogues the offerings and maps out the Taste in a convenient manner is a fantastic idea. By the middle of the day, the Taste is usually crowded and hot, and you can find yourself settling for half of a cheeseburger when you were really looking for a meatball drowning in Sweet Baby Ray’s spicy barbecue sauce or a dripping Original Rainbow Cone. The application has an interactive map with vendor locations, bathroom locations and links to a comprehensive directory of restaurants listing their menus, websites and where you can find them after the Taste is over. And lest we forget the second most important part of the Taste - the music - the app has a real-time schedule of acts and stages.

You can download the app here. Happy tasting!

About two weeks ago, following June 8 primary night, the big meme in political media was “The Year of the (Republican) Woman.”  Primary victories by the likes of Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina in California, and a strong performance by Nikki Haley in South Carolina, followed on the back of victory the week prior by Susana Martinez in New Mexico.

But since then, another narrative seems to be taking hold in some quarters—that these women aren’t really women, they’re men in skirts.  That is so because they a) didn’t emphasize their gender at every turn in the course of their respective primary races or b) don’t focus, or toe the line, on “women’s issues”—or both.  In particular, objections have been raised that these women either are not pro-choice or are insufficiently vocal about being pro-choice, and therefore—the subtext seems to be—they’re more akin to men in skirts than “real women.”

It’s a sort of modern, through-the-looking-glass version of the critique leveled by a few on the distinct, definite right wing of American politics regarding Hillary Clinton back in the day: She wears pantsuits, therefore she’s not a “real woman.”   The argument went then, real women wear skirts, and the items at the top of their priorities list are kids, husband, and housework, not kids, husband, and career.  It continued: Have a career and want to pursue it, even if it means making some sacrifices like not being a stay-at-home-mom?  Pro-choice?  You’re a feminazi who is destroying America—and you certainly shouldn’t be elected to high office, where you might serve as a role model.

The 2010 version, as I’ve heard it expressed and as seems to be implied in some stories discussing this new “Year of the Woman” from some on the distinct, definite left wing of American politics goes like this: Real women prioritize advocacy surrounding “women’s issues” and their careers, not advocacy on the issues that matter most to them personally and their careers—let alone their kids or their husbands.  Pro-life (or not vocally pro-choice)?  You’re a 1950s throwback who should never be allowed into a position where young women might listen to you or look up to you.

Read the article in its entirety at BlogHer.com.

For Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Tuesday’s victory was bittersweet: She narrowly secured her party’s nomination, though head-to-head polls indicate she will lose six of every ten general election voters to her Republican challenger in November. But for organized labor, who invested upwards of $10 million backing Arkansas Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s ill-fated primary challenge of Lincoln, it is all bitter.

From the outset of Halter’s bid, public employee unions and progressive groups rallied at the prospect of defeating Lincoln, whose opposition to labor mainstays like the Employee Free Choice Act and the public health insurance option were observed as mortal sins. The White House and Democratic establishment—most notably Arkansas’ favorite son, former President Bill Clinton—instead endorsed Lincoln.

The divergent paths of the White House and labor groups in the Arkansas nominating contest is symptomatic of a long-developing schism in the Democratic Party-organized labor coalition. For all the talk of a Tea Party-induced conservative schism, the movement has, largely, coalesced behind the Republican Party. The case is not so with frustrated labor organizers, as even loyal Democrats have difficulty swallowing the 21st Century union agenda.

But Republicans—and even moderate Democrats who stand in opposition to the union agenda—should not rest on their laurels. Unions organizers are, if anything, innovative agitators:

They tried securing establishment goodwill by subsidizing a presidential bid; they sought to establish their own party; and they attempted infiltrating another. It should be no secret now—labor is an agile beast. And as union organizers’ previous moves show, Halter’s defeat was only a minor obstacle in their greater campaign.

What is most disconcerting here, though, is the labor movement’s dynamic, imaginative tactics. We won’t know just what they’re planning next until we’ve already been broadsided.

Read the article in its entirety at Human Events.

Follow James on Twitter.

The exploding PR frontier of social networking
Hynes: The Social media revolution is now a permanent revolution

By Michael McCord of The Portsmouth Herald, February 21, 2010

PORTSMOUTH — Patrick Hynes didn’t invent one of the social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that have become so ubiquitous — but Hynes Communications has become a pioneer in fully utilizing social media communication for corporations, nonprofits and political campaigns.

Founded by Hynes in 2006, the company was a spin off from Portsmouth-based Calypso Communications and it has grown into one of the nation’s leading public affairs agencies with a popular niche in social networking and new media outreach.

“I had been blogging for quite some time at that point and I began to recognize that there was this need for large organizations to communicate with opinion leaders online,” said Hynes, who was online outreach coordinator for the 2008 presidential campaign of Republican Sen. John McCain. The company now has offices in Portsmouth and Washington, D.C., and it recently hired a social media expert to expand operations in the southeastern part of the country.

Hynes started the company with a deliberate plan to transcend traditional corporate public relations practices. “We want to help these organizations expand and adapt their communications strategies to maximize the reach of the social Web,” he said. “I didn’t see anyone else out there doing it the way I thought it ought to be done.”

Hynes now has five full-time employees with most working out of the Washington office. While many of the firm’s clients remain secret because of non-disclosure agreements, Hynes said others include the Freedom First PAC of Minnesota Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, the U.S. Senate campaign of former Hewlett Packard Chairwoman Carly Fiorina in California, the Workforce Fairness Institute, AARP, Mayo Clinic, and the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease.

Befitting the frenetic, 24/7 pace of social media, Hynes said his day starts at 4 a.m. by collecting as much newsworthy information as possible that impacts his clients and the work doesn’t stop.

“I live in a permanent state of news consumption. We sometimes need to monitor developments online on a minute-to-minute basis,” he said.

It’s work that requires creative problem solving in real time, said Hynes who admits “perhaps to the detriment of my business model, there is nothing formulaic in what we do.” The firm calculates what information is valuable to users of different social networks, the problems and challenges that need to be overcome and begins working its database of contacts.

“I try to package that information up in appealing and compelling ways for people,” Hynes said. “We need to be prepared to insert our clients’ points of view on a moment’s notice. And that means we spend a lot of time researching issues and preparing for various scenarios. Getting caught unprepared in my world is death.”

One of the most effective things the firm has done, he explained, was to put Sen. McCain on regular conference calls with bloggers during the 2008 campaign.

“It helped to give the bloggers access to a major national figure and it allowed Sen. McCain to drive his message outside the filter of the mainstream media,” Hynes said.

The explosive growth of social media communications has changed news coverage and how people get information — and it has altered the boundaries of public relations.

“The Internet has extraordinary power,” Hynes said. “Almost 80 percent of reporters say they get story ideas from things they read or see on the Web. In some cases, reporters are writing first draft material for their event coverage on Twitter.

“Just as important, the Internet gives a large organization the ability to communicate directly to its constituents without passing through the media filter. This is a complicated process that rewards only the most imaginative and adventurous organizations, but people can establish their own communications pipelines outside of the traditional media.”

Despite success in the political arena, Hynes said he wants the firm to maintain its ratio of 75 percent corporate and nonprofit clients and 25 percent political assignments.

“Politics pays less and it requires a great deal work beyond the scope of a contract,” Hynes said. “Because of the huge time commitment, we will limit what we are doing (politically) to large impact races with national implications.”

One of those races will be the anticipated U. S. Senate race in California between Fiorina and incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer.

Hynes believes the firm will triple in size in the next five years and become “the first choice for large organizations” who need social networking methods of communication to get the word out. The firm is already doing sub-contracting work for larger and more traditional public relations agencies.

“The social media revolution is actually in a fairly advanced state. I’m still a young man, but the communications world of my youth would not be recognizable to a person just entering the workforce today,” said the 37-year-old Hynes. “This is not to say there aren’t more innovations coming down the pike. In fact, the social media revolution really needs to be understood as a permanent revolution.”

At a Glance:

Who: Patrick Hynes

What: President and founder, Hynes Communications

Business: Social media public affairs

Where: Offices in Portsmouth and Washington, D.C.

Web: http://www.hynescommunications.com

Today it is the largest social networking site in the world, acquiring new users daily. Founded by Mark Zuckerberg, and his college roomies Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. It was originally intended to be a network for Harvard students, and was formerly known as theFacebook. However in the course of six years, and some fine tuning, Facebook is bigger and better than ever.

Today Facebook has opened its doors to everyone from relatives and high schoolers, to Businesses and Mom and Dad. It gives you a wide array of things to do, from games like MafiaWars to Jetman, or creating groups about practically anything. Heck you can even throw a sheep at someone to get their attention by using the Superpoke application. Facebook’s popularity has increased since its adoption, and has given people around the world the ability to stay in touch with loved ones everywhere. 

Six years strong and counting. It’s amazing how a simple idea can become a phenomenon with a little entrepreneurship and some hard work. So for everyone, I invite you to say happy birthday to Facebook, if you haven’t already. 

Maybe post it on your live feed!?

Patrick Hynes is the president of Hynes Communications, a national social media communications agency with offices in DC and Portsmouth, NH. Hynes served as the online outreach consultant for Sen. John McCain’s WH ‘08 camp. Hynes is also the author of the book In Defense of the Religious Right. But today, he is our Consultant Candid.

What was your first job?

The Weirs Beach Water Slide in Laconia, NH, baby.

What is your proudest moment professionally?

Helping Sen. John McCain win the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

If you could be in any other line of work, what would it be?

Well, I would be a stay-at-home dad with my three kids.

Of what political campaign (past, present or future) would you most like to be a part?

I would love to have run online strategy and communications for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign (if such a thing had existed.)

What individual who does your kind of work for the other party do you respect the most, and why?

Peter Daou, who was Sec. Hillary Clinton’s Internet Director. Daou is a straight shooter and an extremely bright guy.

Negative campaigning—good or bad?

A good thing.

What is your favorite restaurant to meet clients?

Rasika on 6th Street in Penn Quarter

What is the first section of the newspaper you read?

Wall Street Journal editorial page.

A question from the previous participant: If you could be any vegetable in the White House garden, what would it be and who would you like to pick you?

A red pepper picked by President Obama himself, I suppose.

Please pose a question for the next interviewee.

Who would win a fantasy presidential match-up between Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama?

While the alert e-mail itself looks like a phishing attack, tweets from a plethora of users are proclaiming that the email is in fact 100% true.  To be safe, if you receive this email, go to Twitter via your web browser and try to log in. If you can’t access your account then the email was legitimate and you should change your password as instructed. 

Twitter is reportedly working to better understand this latest attack, but they have yet to make a public comment on the incident.

Rest assured though fellow Twitter fanatics, don’t be alarmed.  Change your password and keep on tweeting because we all want to read about that movie you saw last night ... and what you’re having for dinner.

Firstly, Youtube signed a deal with the Indian Premier League on Tuesday to broadcast 60 live cricket matches. Youtube has done live broadcasts before starting with a Katy Perry led YouTube award show, but this is the first time that they’ve signed a deal to broadcast sports and most importantly, secured a contract to broadcast a series. According to Google (YouTube’s owner), viewers of the matches will be able to watch them live from anywhere in the world, select which camera angle they’d like to watch from, and be able to interact with other viewers across the globe via chat boards and the like.

Secondly, YouTube has entered the movie rental business. YouTube debuted its first full length movie available back in 2007, but on Wednesday, YouTube announced that they’d be promoting some of the films being shown at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City Utah… for cash. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Google was shopping around the idea to studios, but this week saw the official announcement of YouTube Rentals and the first videos are now available for $3.99 and watchable for 48 hours.

Next one. Did you ever wish that Pandora had music videos? Bam. Welcome to the YouTube Music Discovery Project. The service announced this week is just that. You punch in an artist and then hit the fitting “Disco” button and you’re off. You’re able to add and remove videos as they’re suggested, learn about the artist, and even play particular songs on demand which Pandora cannot do for you.

Wednesday also saw YouTube announce that they were beginning to roll out support for HTML5 video. True, this technical announcement might sound like the least exciting of the three, but it’s actually pretty on par. Now viewers will be able to watch videos without needing Adobe’s Flash plugin and HTML5 just got a big push as an open standard (making designers across the web giddy with excitement).

So, a few months after rolling out 1080p HD resolution and getting everyone excited, YouTube is making some new and even more significant moves. Not only are they expanding into new fields to increase revenue, they just pushed media consumption and the internet forward this week.

For a variety of reasons, the last few weeks have seen remarkable movement in the polls towards Republican State Senator Scott Brown.  At the start of the race, Brown was down by as much as 30 percentage points, today the smart money is on him edging Democrat Martha Coakley in the bluest of blue states.

Real Clear Politics looks at how it “may have started with a simple hashtag:”

On December 28, Brown announced what became the signature force behind his campaign, his pledge to be a 41st vote against President Obama’s national health care reform legislation. Accompanying that news on his Twitter feed was this notation: #41stvote. Referred to as a hashtag, those nine characters became a mechanism to attract like-minded activists and identify new ones. Reflecting an enthusiasm gap not just in the state but among national politicos, Brown now boasts more than 11,000 Twitter followers, compared to barely 4,000 for Democrat Martha Coakley.

That following paid dividends last Monday when, aided by a strong Twitter campaign from Brown and dozens of his newest online advocates, the Republican smashed a fundraising goal of $500,000 for a one-day “money bomb,” generating instead well beyond $1 million. That total from just 24 hours was well beyond what he had raised in the entire previous fundraising period. Where there had been skepticism before about what kind of impact Twitter could have, the Brown campaign is making a convincing case.

Throughout the piece, RCP quotes Republican officials and strategists from around the country who have clearly gotten the message:

“When I started, everyone joked that I was the director of shiny objects,” said John Randall, director of new media for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “This is not a shiny object. This is industry standard now. It’s definitely something that I point out to all the campaigns.”

“It’s absolutely the quickest, most accessible, most open platform for sharing information on the Web,” said Jordan Raynor, a Florida-based Republican online strategist. “Twitter by nature makes information valuable, if it’s valuable information. If you’ve got a juicy piece of news it’s going to spread fastest through Twitter.”

“We realized there is a changing phenomenon. More folks, particularly young people in that demographic that frankly our party has not done that well in the past, are getting their information [from social media],” [VA Gov. Bob] McDonnell said at an RGA conference after the campaign.

Certainly a number of factors went into Brown’s popularity spike, but the role of new media should not be overlooked.  In addition to a significant edge in Twitter followers, Brown has more than three times the Facebook Fans and nearly eight times the number of YouTube subscribers as his opponent.  All of this has fueled Brown’s populist, “Its the people seat!” message and have engaged the electorate to the point that election officials are expecting record turnouts across the Bay State. 

As with seemingly many things in the last few months, Martha Coakley and Massachusetts Democrats lost site of a key component to a 21st Century campaign and this blunder could certainly prove costly.  To really capitalize, however, the Republican Party must continue to invest in and employ these technologies based on the lessons learned in this race.

The Times had previously tried to use a product called TimesSelect which was an online version of their newspaper, which was free to print subscribers, but cost online-only readers $50 a year.  TimesSelect was ended in September of 2007 when the Times hoped that online ad revenue would increase their cash flow and allow it to hold onto the millions of readers migrating to free online blogs for their news.

The Times has been fighting a morbid storm for the last year. With the combination of the unstopping growth of new media news sources and with the drop in advertising because of the recession, the paper is facing huge income issues across the board.  The paper has been forced to repeatedly charge more for its print editions, mortgage its own building, cut staff (8% last year alone) and trim salaries for all employees (5% last year).

Apparently set to take action on the biggest question facing the struggling print media, the entire industry, let alone the NY Times, must be holding its breath.

But what happens if you get sick of all those messages on your Facebook wall? If you just can’t stand the chatter anymore?

Now one Web site is encouraging you to end it all — virtually.

“It doesn’t make your life better,” an introductory video on the site coaxes. “You always think you’re missing something. And above all, it makes you more stupid.”

The idea of the “Web 2.0 Suicide Machine” is to abandon your virtual life — so you can get your actual life back, Gordan Savicic tells NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly. Savicic is the CEO — which he says stands for “chief euthanasia officer” — of SuicideMachine.org.

The site is the work of group of artists, designers and programmers based in the Netherlands who wanted to create a way to let people destroy their social networking accounts.

“Basically, we try to remove as much content as possible,” Savicic says. “We change the profile picture and the password so you can’t log in anymore.”

Once you’ve decided to go through with it, all you need to do is give the Suicide Machine some information and hit a little button that reads “commit.” Then you can sit back and watch as your virtual life flashes before your eyes.

Bye-bye, former friends and followers. So long, profile pictures and passwords. Hello, real life 2.0.

The Suicide Machine boasts around 900 users, more than 58,000 friends unfriended and nearly 231,000 Tweets removed. It’s so deadly, in fact, that Facebook blocked the service last Sunday.

In a statement earlier this week, Facebook said the Suicide Machine violates their rules of user interaction. The company says it is “currently investigating and considering whether to take further action.”

A bit drastic if you ask me…

It looks like Google has sent out a message to all AdSense and AdWords partners letting them know that they’ve decided to do “something a little different this year.” Clicking on the link in the email takes you to a page letting you know that Google is giving $20 million to a group of charity as its holiday gift to everyone this year.

Specifically, the website reads, “This gift is for someone very special: Everyone. Because charities are experiencing their toughest year in decades, we have committed $20 million to helping those who help us all. Our gift to you is a gift to them. Happy Holidays.” It then goes on to list the 25 charities that Google has chosen as “intended recipients.” These include: Boys and Girls Clubs, Feeding America, Smile Train, HEAL Africa, Loud Against Nazis, Reporters Without Borders, and many others.

It’s not entirely clear if this gift will fully replace the Google swag that they have sent out the past several years, and everyone quickly posts to the Internet. Last year, Google sent out some, but it mostly canceled the gifts due to the bad economic climate. This year, it looks like they’ve taken a higher road. Google also had a holiday to all its users this year: Free WiFi in airports and some airplanes around the country.