Again, Sorry for the Light Blogging

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Sorry I've been out of action recently. Mostly, it's because we're busy as hell here at the office. The last few weeks have been crazy, with at least three pitches going on at any given time. The end of this week and the beginning of next week are critical times for us, pitch-wise, so things might continue to be light here for a bit. I also haven't been blogging because I've been absolutely dumbfounded. Bush actually admitted to a mistake this week. And John Roberts actually said something I agreed with during his confirmation hearings (The "umpire analogy").

Hell didn't freeze over, the earth wasn't knocked off its axis, the dead didn't rise from the grave. But I'm a little weirded out.

Stop the "Stop Playing the Blame Game"

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So "Stop Playing the Blame Game" is now apparently an official Republican talking point. After all, we wouldn't want anyone to become distracted from the tasks at hand by a game of Pass The Buck, would we? How ironic that this comes from the party that manufactured at least two major scandals during the Clinton administration, aimed directly at the President, both of which distracted him from major initiatives underway at the time. Here's my even bigger problem with this. The Blame Game seems to be the only thing lighting a fire under the asses of the people who need to get their butts in gear. Remember that the storm had already started to batter the Gulf Coast and New Orleans well before the first grumblings about lack of resources, structure and order started up. Only when certain lazy assheads started to have the attention of the nation focused on their incompetence did resources start flowing.

Where personal responsibility fails, fear may succeed. (Fear of losing one's job, fear of becoming an object of national ridicule, etc.) That's why I don't think it's distracting for people to be looking around for the folks who screwed up here. In fact, it's helpful, even as we struggle to pump the water out of New Orleans and start to undertake the gruesome and trying tasks ahead.

So if you had to craft a progressive talking point to counter "Stop playing the blame game," it might be along the lines of "Well, the blame game seems to be the only thing motivating people to get things done."

Spam Is Spam Is Spam

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I've started labeling newsletters (even ones supposedly "relevant" to my industry) that I've been force-subscribed to as spam within Cloudmark's SpamNet. Especially if the newsletter publisher absolutely refuses to unsubscribe me. I wish more people would use P2P solutions for keeping spam out of their inboxes. One of the biggest differences between P2P solutions and others is that it democratizes the process of determining whether or not a sender is a spammer. I think that makes the penalties for force-subscribing people to newsletters much more strict - if enough people decide that the newsletter publisher isn't playing by the rules, the newsletter isn't received by anyone who subscribes to the P2P tool. And getting unblocked isn't as simple as calling some ISP or blacklist provider and getting whitelisted again - it will be re-building reputation to the point at which a majority of P2P users whitelist a publisher.