Passing Comments

Election day, November 4, is less than two weeks away. Finally! A good interval in which to begin sharing some comedy from the political battlefield, it seems to me.

Yesterday, Obama popped in (via video) for a surprise, just-for-laughs visit on the popular daytime program, The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Topics covered include dancing, Halloween costumes and George Clooney:

Yesterday Michelle Obama sat down for an interview with comedian Jon Stewart of THE DAILY SHOW. An early comment she makes is that she and Barack have been campaigning for 20 months - so for those who feel as if this U.S. Presidential electoral process seems endless, I think she might agree with you.

Part I (04:14) intro blurb
Michelle Obama knows there are some people who will never vote for Barack Obama, but most Americans want a leader who will find solutions that make sense.

Part II (04:28) intro blurb
Michelle Obama puts herself in the position of a voter when she listens to her husband speak

UPDATE: On the same day, Michelle Obama did another major interview, this one on The Larry King Show. Here she talks more seriously about various aspects of the campaign and the Obamas’ home life.

Upon viewing some of the morning-after reviews of the vice presidential debate:

Spunkiness! Apparently, that’s pretty much all it takes — a perky jut of the chin, a few winks of the eye, and some clicks of the tongue to win some people’s (and some of the news media’s) thumbs-up for your candidacy to land an office in the White House.

These who jab those thumbs upright would have us think that it doesn’t matter what your position is on Iraq, tax cuts for the haves versus the increasingly have-nothing-at-alls, or Roe versus Wade, or gay marriage, or global climate change or energy policies. No, it’s not whether you’re yea or nay or even undecided on these issues that will earn you votes, it’s just the mastering of that cute Gidget goes to Washington attitude that matters.

We’ve come a long way, baby! Wink.

And she’s advising the American people also to avoid seeing things through a naively pink glow, especially now. The widely-praised writer of The Shock Doctrine — a book that reveals how the rich and powerful exploit natural and manmade disasters for profit — is warning that the ongoing Wall Street meltdown is a demonstration of more of this ruthless greed in action.

From her blog yesterday: (”Now is the Time to Resist Wall Street’s Shock Doctrine” Sept 22, 2008):

I wrote “The Shock Doctrine” in the hopes that it would make us all better prepared for the next big shock. Well, that shock has certainly arrived, along with gloves-off attempts to use it to push through radical pro-corporate policies (which of course will further enrich the very players who created the market crisis in the first place…

Summing up the current highway robbery scenario now being staged in the U.S. Congress, Klein warns that there are no saviors who are going to look out for us in this crisis. Certainly not Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, one of the companies that will benefit most from his proposed bailout (which is actually a stick up). Loud, organized grassroots pressure on both political parties is our only hope, she says.

Here is a video of Klein last week on the popular political affairs talk show Real Time with Bill Maher, debating the current crisis.

I don’t know about you, but that was the first question that popped into my head when I saw the headline this week about Rwanda’s achievement? (”In a world first, women in the majority in Rwanda legislature” AFP, Sept 18, 2008).

As I remember, it was only in 1994 that Rwanda ended a genocidal war that left 800,000 of its people dead. How does a country move from being one of the most tragic in history to being one of the most forward-thinking in history in the span of only 14 years?

The answer: It was the first terrible event, the war, that was the catalyst for a new law that led to the second situation of more women in political leadership, according to sources cited on Wikipedia’s Rwanda page (”Gender Conflict and Development” by Tsjeard Bouta, 2004; “Strengthening governance: the role of women in Rwanda’s transition” by Elizabeth Powley).

In short, per Wikipedia, a new law and a new philosophy by the new government:

By law, at least a third of the Parliament representation must be female. It is believed that women will not allow the mass killings of the past to be repeated.

The recent video from AlJazeera, below, is the first of a two-part report on Rwanda. It explores the country’s past tragedy and its recovery. The report also features interviews with some of the women now assuming such a featured role in the government and social programs of the country (”Africa Uncovered: Rights & Reconstruction” Sept 1, 2008).  Ah, and yes, there’s also an interview with a man who objects to this speed-tracking of women as leaders. Gee, imagine that.

I found these videos here at the WE Empower website.

The Christian Science Monitor has an article on Tzipi Livni’s primary victory yesterday that has put her in line to become Israel’s new prime minister (”Can Livni clean up Israeli politics?” by Ilene R. Prusher, Sept 19, 2008).

Prusher offers a look at Livni’s political history and what kind of change she may or may not represent for her country’s policies. Livni has been compared by some to Barack Obama and his message of change, according to the article, but some experts quoted in the piece say this is a false analogy.

For another assessment and close-up look at Livni and some of her recent work in relation to negotiating with the Palestinians, below is an analysis from Daniel Levy in an interview today with the Real News Network (”Livni poised to be next Israeli PM” Sept 18, 2008):

A few days ago in a phone conversation, I was discussing the current U.S. Presidential campaign with a British friend. In particular, we were talking about the stupefying clamor that is characterizing much of the traditional media coverage of Republican vp choice Sarah Palin.

My friend said that the impression she is receiving is that the American public in general loves Palin, and that if it’s true that American voters are so silly, it may be cancelling out the resurgence of international good will toward the United States that has been generated by Barack Obama’s candidacy.

I responded by declaring my own profound hope — which is that what we are seeing is not a true picture of American voters as a majority, but is rather a super-hyped reflection of the actions of a small, noisy core group of ultra partisans, religious extremists and political opportunists, coupled with a widespread failure of much of U.S. traditional news media to do its job well.

One part of this hope of mine stems from reports that the polls — even those that can be trusted — are not measuring the huge number of new and returning voters in this election. The second part of my (cockeyed) optimism is a gut feeling that we couldn’t possibly be so blind as to choose to stay on the same, disastrous path that we are on now.

Cloning Spiro

It seems to me that those who remember the election campaign of 1968, and the surprise selection of Spiro T. Agnew as Richard M. Nixon’s running mate then, may be recalling those past times during these weeks of observing the hysteria and anger in response to John McCain’s “gotcha” surprise of a running mate. In the early days of Palin’s arrival as candidate, Jonathan Singer at MyDD.com wrote about this (”Sarah Palin is Spiro Agnew” Aug 29, 2008):

It has been forty years since someone as inexperienced as Sarah Palin has been put on a national ticket, and surprisingly enough there are some real similarities between Palin and her unprepared predecessor, Spiro T. Agnew, who also had been governor less than two years at the time Richard Nixon picked him to be his number two and who also had a corruption problem lingering in the background that would end up causing his running mate problems.

In a Wikipedia page on Agnew, it is noted that he was chosen so he could act as Nixon’s hatchet man during the campaign. Nixon-as-candidate certainly must have been pleased because — and I remember this well myself — his protege excelled in highly partisan, condemnatory language, more often than not creating divisiveness and stirring up anger of voters pro and con whenever he spoke. Related excerpt:

In short, Agnew was Nixon’s “hatchet man” when defending the administration on the Vietnam War.[4] Agnew was chosen to make several powerful speeches in which he spoke out against anti-war protesters and media portrayal of the Vietnam War, labeling them “Franco Un-American”.

This trait is one of the factors that has reminded me most of John McCain’s protege, Palin. And in laying out this path of attack by his “soulmate” as he calls her, McCain has also duplicated the approach of Agnew. In a New York Times article in 1970, while Agnew was still vice president, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., described the strategy well (”The Amazing Success Story of ‘Spiro Who?’” July 26, 1970): (boldface mine)

His (Agnew’s) heart is, however, deeply in another range of questions. Historians, notably Richard Hofstadter, have drawn a distinction between “interest politics” and “status politics.” Interest politics revolves around conflicts of policy: whether we should raise or lower the interest rate, encourage or obstruct collective bargaining, extend or abolish farm price supports. Status politics revolves around personal values and folkways, social aspirations and frustrations, religious traditions and ethnic identifications-those intangibles which, without finding explicit embodiment in political issues, nevertheless affect the climate of politics and sometimes, especially when economic prosperity reduces the pressure of interest politics, determine political results. It is cultural politics, and not public policy which is the Vice President’s bag. He has emerged as hero, or villain, not in the battle of programs but in the battle of life styles.

And hiding Sarah

In Palin’s case, this “status politics” weapon of attack is also, of necessity, accompanied by an even more brutal one — her persistence in grossly misrepresenting (completely denying, actually) her own official record that, among other things, certainly belies her efforts to present herself as a fiscal reformist.

A second striking factor in the similarities between Agnew and Palin, as mentioned above, is the slim political resume of both. And the third is the twin clouds of ongoing investigations for corruption while in office — one such cloud hovered over Agnew just as a major one now hangs over Palin. Agnew’s eventual fate was a criminal conviction that forced his resignation from office.

Here’s hoping that if a similar fate is in store for Palin, the resignation will be from the office of Governor of Alaska, and nothing more.

For those who weren’t around in those old Agnew days, or who may want a trip back in time, below is a video of former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite discussing Nixon’s surprise vp choice, and Agnew himself at his first press conference as vp candidate.

Yuriko Koike, who already has made history by becoming Japan’s first female defense minister, now wants to burst through another of the country’s glass ceilings. Today Koike announced that she is running for the post of Japan’s prime minister, according to an article on Bloomberg.com, a position that to date has had a males-only ID tag attached to it (”Koike Is First LDP Woman to Seek Japan’s Premiership” Sept 8, 2008).

Some more bio info here.

And below is a video of an interview with Koike last May at a World Economic Forum. Koike shares her views on various current issues including the energy crisis, internationally shared values, and some developments in the middle east:

Defending First Ladies — past and future

A young feminist calls for her mainstream colleagues to show just as much solidariety with Michelle Obama as they did with Hillary Clinton.

Jessica Valenti, the founder of Feministing.com, writes in an essay in the UK’s Guardian that Ms. Obama is offering to be an advocate for women if she becomes First Lady, so women need also to become advocates for her as she faces sexist and racist attacks from the media (”The baiting of Ms Obama” Aug 21 2008).

Speaking of Michelle Obama

Just in case you missed it, Ms. Obama’s widely praised speech last week at the Democratic National Convention, from C-SPAN:

Obama’s mother of all text messages

Nielsen Media estimates that 2.9 million people received Obama’s text message on August 23rd announcing his selection of a vice presidential running mate, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal (”Nielsen: About Three Million Got Obama Text” by Amy Schatz, Aug 25, 2008).

And how the wait drove CNN anchors a bit nuts

See the short video here at 23/6 of how the news media is having to adjust to new technology (”Obama, if you don’t text us soon, CNN will go insane!” Aug 22, 2008).

A chat with Caroline

When it came time to choose someone to help him choose a vice presidential nominee, Obama asked JFK’s daughter Caroline to help. After the choice was made, the famously reclusive Ms. Kennedy sat down with NBC’s Tom Brokaw to talk about the process (”Caroline Kennedy Speaks On Veep Vetting Process” The Huffington Post, Aug 24, 2008). See a video clip here.

And the vice presidential nominees are…

To read the basics about Obama’s vp choice, go here (”Obama introduces Biden as running mate” CNN, Aug 23, 2008). And look here for info about McCain’s vp choice (”McCain taps Alaska Gov. Palin as vice president pick” CNN, Aug 30, 2008 ).

Crossing paths — a hurricane and the GOP Convention

The hurricane now approaching the area of New Orleans is taking priority over politics as usual. Story here (”Republicans scale back convention due to Hurricane Gustav” by Maeve Reston and Mark Z. Barabak, Los Angeles Times, Sept 1, 2008).

Michael Moore explains the election

In a new book, “Mike’s Election Guide,” the famous film director offers “the definitive guide” to the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election.

Moore approaches the subject with his usual satiric wit. One chapter title, for example, is “How many Democrats does it take to lose the most winnable election in American history?” A sample chapter is available to read here online.

Blogging the election

A highly regarded and informative blog about what’s happening day to day, and hour to hour sometimes, in the election is written by Marc Ambinder for the Atlantic Magazine.

Polls and pols

One of the most popular go-to blogs for news and commentary on the various political polls is here at Pollster.com. The blogger is Mark Blumenthal, bio here.

Watching Obama and his new running mate

Last night, Obama and his vice presidential running mate Joe Biden sat down for a long interview with the highly rated TV news show, Sixty Minutes. In this short video clip, Obama responds to questions about why he chose Biden, and his reaction to McCain’s vp choice, Sarah Palin:

UPDATE: See more of the interview here and here.

(See previous round-up here)

Just like a lot of other people, I love to watch champions. But I find the story of an underdog equally irresistible, so when I saw the moving photo of 17-year-old Samia (Samiya) Yusuf Omar accompanying a recent article about her by Charles Robinson on Yahoo! Sports, I clicked to read (”Somalia’s runners provide inspiration” Aug 24, 2008).

Sports writer Robinson pours a bit of his own heart into telling the story of the young runner Samia. Introducing the piece as the Olympic story we never heard, he writes:

It’s about a girl whose Beijing moment lasted a mere 32 seconds – the slowest 200-meter dash time out of the 46 women who competed in the event. Thirty-two seconds that almost nobody saw but that she carries home with her, swelled with joy and wonderment. Back to a decades-long civil war that has flattened much of her city. Back to an Olympic program with few Olympians and no facilities. Back to meals of flat bread, wheat porridge and tap water.

The race Samia lost, how and why she lost it, and the reaction of the spectators in the Olympic stadium, as Robinson recounts it, seem like something straight out of a heart-melting Disney movie. Who knows, someday it may be. You can read the article here.

BBC News also has a story featuring an interview with Samia (”Against the Odds: Samiya Yusuf Omar” July 21, 2008).

For a comedic take on some people’s fears about the proton-smashing Hadron Collider project, you can read Gail Collins column today in the New York Times (”Digging Ourselves a Black Hole” Aug 23, 2008).

Specifically some fear that (gulp!) the Collider will create a black hole that will devour the planet, rather than boost the research of particle physics, as its creators predict, according to Collins. So, she writes, she talked to a Brown University physicist, Greg Landsberg, who pooh poohs such fears.

Read the full column here.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.
by Emily Dickinson

For fans old or new of Emily Dickinson, a new biography is just out. Titled “White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson,” it’s by Brenda Wineapple and it’s getting high praise from critics.

You can find one recent review here from The New York Sun (”The Activist and the Recluse” by Eric Ormsby, Aug 6, 2008).

And if you want to read an excerpt from Wineapple’s book itself, there’s one here on the publisher’s website (Random House/Knopf).

If I were king of the world or ruler of China — neither of which I have any chance of ever becoming and I’m okay with that — I would send a limo to the home of that little seven-year-old Chinese girl with the killer voice (who got shoved behind the curtains because she reportedly failed the cuteness test) and I would bring her to the closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. Then I would put her on center stage and cue the orchestra.

I’m willing to bet a pair of favorite old flip-flops that a fair share of the world’s population would tune in and hum along as she sang her heart out. And in the process, Chinese leaders would win more points with public opinion than all the Olympic athletes of all time.

What could possibly top such a closing act and the restoration of good sense and fairmindedness it would represent? The only possible thing would have been if Yang Peiyi had been standing there in a pretty red dress in the opening ceremonies singing her heart out. But that’s a bell that can’t be unrung, so there it is.

For a humorous, compassionate and informative take on what happened to Yang Peiyi, I highly highly recommend Gail Collins’ column in yesterday’s New York Times (”I’m Singin’ in Beijing” Aug 13, 2008). Collins is a former editor of the Times editorial page, and was the first woman ever in that particular top job.

In her columns, Collins often approaches subjects with an emphasis on the informed perspective. Yesterday, for example, she pointed out that the China leadership is not at all alone in the world in its favoring of show over substance.

In this quote from the Yang Peiyi column, Collins frames the overall issue with her usual wit:

Now this is an Olympic crisis everybody can get into. While your heart goes out to the athletes suffering the agony of defeat, very few of us can internalize the trauma. Really, you have to be able to imagine yourself getting onto the balance beam before you can relate to the pain of falling off.

The chance that the Chinese leaders will right this particular wrong done to a child, not to mention the human heart, is pretty slim, I think. Reading Collins’ piece on it and her quotes from various experts at least offers the comfort that this was a slight felt round the world.

Earlier this week on a major American news show on CBS, the host and veteran newsman Bob Schieffer interviewed Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, who’s been mentioned often in U.S. media as a top contender to be chosen as Obama’s vice presidential running mate.

Schieffer’s opening question to Kaine referred to the recent fighting between Russia and Georgia:

This morning’s headlines tell it all. American presidents, as we look at this situation going on in Russia, have to deal with problems that sometimes don’t come up at all in campaigns, so I guess my question this morning, Governor, is when we see what’s happening today, doesn’t that, won’t that bolster John McCain’s argument that the Presidency needs someone with experience dealing with issues like these?

What interested me most about Schieffer’s question was how much it reflected a perception — or rather misperception — that was analyzed recently in an article by Harvard University professor and foreign policy analyst Samantha Power (”The Democrats & National Security” by Samantha Power, The New York Review of Books, Aug 14, 2008).

In the essay, Power takes a close look at some of the factors that, according to her, have led American voters generally to regard the Republican Party to be much better on national security issues than the Democratic Party.

Power writes:

“This faith in Republican toughness has had profound electoral consequences. Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican presidents in times of perceived danger and Democrats in times of relative calm.”

Power, who formerly served on Obama’s campaign as his foreign policy advisor, examines some of the origins of this faith in GOP toughness, and also questions its justification. She lays out some specific suggestions for how Obama and the Democratic Party leadership can reverse this crucial trend in voter thinking. Read full article here.

As of yesterday, the guardian.co.uk website has a new video series  titled “In The Director’s Chair” and the first interviewee is Gurinder Chadha. The director of the popular “Bend It Like Beckham” talks about her own career path, what she tries to achieve in her work, and why she chooses to make commercial films.

Chadha’s new film is a comedy, “Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging.” And as in “Beckham,” the story  focuses on the world of teenage girls.

The trailer:

It’s far more than merely interesting to consider that while all the noisy, so often violent events of life are flooding our attention each day, also somewhere, somehow on this earth a person such as the poet Kay Ryan is quietly living her life, quietly, persistently, day by day by day achieving an enduring and nourishing creation to share with her fellow humans.

As a writer for Salon wrote in a review of her work: “With aplomb and wit, Ryan sallies forth against quandaries as immense as the nature of nothingness and as petite as the mechanics of dewdrops rolling off a leaf.”

In an interview in 2004 with The Christian Science Monitor, Ryan is quoted: “‘I’ve tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy,’ she says, explaining that the simpler her routine, the more complex her thinking can be.” (”Poet Kay Ryan: A profile” by Elizabeth Lund, August 25, 2004)

Here are the closing lines of her short poem “Paired Things”: (PoetryFoundation.org)

So many paired things seem odd.
Who ever would have dreamed
the broad winged raven of despair
would quit the air and go
bandylegged upon the ground,
a common crow?

Today Kay Ryan is being named as the new Poet Laureate of the U.S. You can read a sampling of her poems here (”Selected Poems by Kay Ryan” New York Times, July 17, 2008).

A short video here of Ryan reading and talking about her poems (from the Academy of American Poets):

Yesterday’s Boston Globe had an article reviewing some new scholarly studies and opinion about why women seem to be avoiding en masse certain science and engineering careers (”The freedom to say ‘no” by Elaine McArdle, May 18, 2008).

Anyone who’s curious about this particular situation probably will find this article of interest. I was especially struck by a finding described in this paragraph midway or so in this longish piece:

Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don’t do nearly as well in verbal skills. As a result, the career choices for math-precocious women are wider than for their male counterparts. They can become scientists, but can succeed just as well as lawyers or teachers. With this range of choice, their data show, highly qualified women may opt out of certain technical or scientific jobs simply because they can.

Read the whole piece here. I found the link to this article at the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) website.

Certainly should be, according to the Guardian’s political columnist Polly Toynbee. With its new constitution, to be ratified later this year, Europe is about to get its first-ever fulltime president.

Writing about the prospect this month in E Sharp, Toynbee runs through the short list of names up for the job (after first dismissing the chances of Tony Blair), and then poses the forgotten question (”Another Angle” by Polly Toynbee, May-June, 2008):

So what of the other runners and riders most often touted for the job? A trawl through names mentioned most frequently throws up these: Jean-Claude Juncker (Luxembourg), Anders Fogh Rasmussen (Denmark), José Manuel Barroso (Portugal), Aleksander Kwasniewski (Poland), Guy Verhofstadt (Belgium), Carl Bildt (Sweden) and Bertie Ahern (Ireland), whose resignation may now have ruled him out. But have you spotted the one overwhelming disqualification they all have? They are all men, every one of them. No doubt when Henry Kissinger famously asked, “Who do I call when I call Europe?” he assumed he’d be calling a man. But of course the new president must be a woman. No doubt about it — and here’s why.

After explaining her rationale, Toynbee then names the woman she considers the best candidate. That choice is Sweden’s Margot Wallstrom, currently vice-president of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union. Here’s why, she says:

She (Wallstrom) knows the EU institutions inside out, so is already better qualified for the job than most of the men on the list above. She wants the job, she deserves the job and has the nerve to step forward and say so.

Read more here (PDF file).

Here’s a video of Wallstrom being interviewed last fall from the European Union channel on YouTube:

Russell Morse definitely knows how to bring fresh meaning to the saying “telling it like it is.” In a commentary piece for New America Media yesterday, Morse begins:

PHILADELPHIA, PA — I’m concerned that this election is turning me into a misogynist.

Last night, I watched Hillary Clinton deliver her victory speech in a hotel in downtown Philadelphia, cringing. I looked around nervously and realized I was in a ballroom full of my mom. Instantly, I became terrified of this middle-aged white woman army, marching through America, stomping young people’s dreams out with their sensible shoes.

If you’re in Barack Obama’s camp during this hundred-year primary, you may love every word Morse writes. If you’re in Hillary Clinton’s, probably not so much.

Maureen Dowd, eat your heart out!

From The Independent (”Closing the gender gap: Why women now reign in Spain” by Andy McSmith, April 16, 2008):

For the first time in history, unless you believe the ancient Greek myth of the Amazons, a European country has a government in which more women than men hold positions of power. The new Spanish cabinet, sworn in by the socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has nine women alongside eight men, including Spain’s first woman Defence minister, Carme Chacon, and its youngest-ever cabinet minister, the 31-year-old minister for equality, Bibiana Aido.

Long, long, long, long (looooooooooonnnnnng) overdue! Read the rest of the story here

Religious scholar Karen Armstrong was awarded the 2008 TED Prize in February. In accepting her prize — $100,000 and the granting of “One Wish To Change The World” — Armstrong wished to start a movement to build a Charter For Compassion. The purpose, as described on the TED website, will be “to help restore the Golden Rule as the central global religious doctrine.”

In her acceptance speech at the conference in Monterey, California, Armstrong said to her VIP-studded audience:

“I wish that you would help with the creation, launch and propagation of a Charter for Compassion, crafted by a group of leading inspirational thinkers from the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and based on the fundamental principles of universal justice and respect.”

TED stands for technology, entertainment, design, according to the website, and the organization was started in 1984. Previous TED Prize winners include Bill Clinton and Bono.

In this video of her speech, Armstrong traces the lineage of the Golden Rule back to its first known appearance:

Megan and her Webkinz “Henry”

Being classically blonde, with a perfect figure and limitless wardrobe just isn’t enough anymore, apparently, if you’re a doll (literally speaking).

According to an article in yesterday’s Washington Post, the affections of little girls are turning more and more these days to some virtual pets (with stuffed, plush real life doppelgangers) by the name of Webkinz (”A Virtual Popularity Contest - In the Online Playground, Barbie’s Doing the Chasing” by Annys Shin, Feb 19, 2008).

Last year the sales of Barbie doll products fell 15 percent, the article states, and the competition from Webkinz had something to do with that. The stuffed animals are marketed with their own digital “Webkinz World” where their owners can go online and play games, pretend shop and spend, and interact in cyberspace with friends.

What does this have to do with Barbie? Excerpt from the article:

“When you’re spending a lot of time [on Webkinz], you’re not spending four hours on Barbie dolls,” said Gerrick Johnson, a toy industry analyst with BMO Capital Markets.

As it happens this week we have house guests and one of them is Megan, an eight-year-old girl. When I mentioned the WaPo article and Webkinz to her parents during breakfast today, Megan’s face lit up as if it were the sun itself.

“Do you want to see Henry?” she squealed, and off she dashed to the bedroom, to return with one of the plush ones (see photo above).

Later I decided to do a little market research of my own so I asked Megan a few questions, the first one being if she had a Barbie doll.

“I have lots of Barbies but I never play with them,” she said, hugging “Henry” the Webkinz.

“Why?”

“She’s boring.”

Uh oh.

To read an article with more information about Webkinz and other virtual worlds now online for children , see a 2007 article from the New York Daily News here (”Webkinz: Big money lessons for little kids” by Elizabeth Lazarowitz).

A gazillion and climbing, roughly speaking. But if you insist on actual facts and stuff and the latest informed commentary, check out this essay by Sarah Boxer on The New York Review of Books website.

Boxer, an author and New York Times reporter and critic, draws info from ten books recently published on blogs. In addition to an overview of all things bloggy, as she puts it, her review is full of interesting color bits. At times she snapshots the big picture and then entertainingly tacks on a gold nugget of a detail, as in the following:

(The largest number of blog posts, some 37 percent, are now in Japanese, according to a recent Washington Post article by Blaine Harden, and most of these are polite and self-effacing—”karaoke for shy people.” Thirty-six percent of posts are in English, and most of them are the opposite of polite and self-effacing.)

Hint: don’t miss the essay’s final two paragraphs, summing up blogs — she nails it.

The United Kingdom is ahead of the pack in the digital revolution, says James Thickett, Director of Research of Ofcom, the UK’s official regulatory body of communications industries.

The pack he’s referring to is made up of the twelve countries surveyed for a new Ofcom report just released yesterday. Nations studied were France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Japan, Canada, the UK, and the U.S. The report on the global communications market also provides a look at the four arriving powerhouse economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Some of the Ofcom report findings were:

• The UK is picking up digital television at a higher rate than other countries, with 76 percent of UK households having gone digital by the end of 2006. In second place was the U.S., with 61 percent, followed by Japan with 60 percent;

• Broadband connections had arrived at over half of all UK households by the end of 2006, bringing the country ahead of the U.S., for the first time;

• Women use the Internet more than men, both in the UK and in the U.S. In the United States, women, at 52 percent, led men in online presence, while in the UK men and women spent the same amount of time online except in the 18-34 age group where women were a leap ahead of men in percent of use (57 to 43).

Thickett summarizes the new Ofcom report findings in a video presentation (below). He particularly highlights what he describes as enormous growth in mobile communications across the globe.

In the sector of mobile phones, for example, he said the UK has one of the highest rates of growth in the world, with 115 mobile connections for every 100 people. Only Italy has a higher rate, with 130 connections for every 100 people.

This massive rate of growth in the use of mobile phones also is happening in Brazil, Russia, India and China, according to Thickett, with those countries accounting for over 40 percent worldwide of new mobile connections.

The full report is available online

The Internet has surpassed television as the first choice among 16-24 year-olds in Europe, according to a new study released by a media trade organization, the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA).

Titled “Shifting Traditions: Internet Rivalling TV In Media Consumption Stakes,” the September 2007 survey is based on more than 7,000 random telephone interviews, according to the EIAA press release. Countries represented were the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

The study found that in the 16-24 year-old age span:

• 82% use the Internet between 5 and 7 days each week while only 77% watch TV as regularly (a decrease of 5% since last year);

• 10% more time is spent on the Internet than in watching television;

• almost half (48%) claim their TV consumption has dropped off as a direct result of the Internet.

Other key findings of the survey found that 169 million people are now online across ten European markets. That growth is being driven by increased use of the Internet among seniors and women. Internet users are staying online nearly 12 hours a week on average, the report said, and social networking sites,  MySpace and Facebook as two examples, are now visited by 42% of Internet users.

The song that launched Aretha Franklin into the rock music stratosphere 40 years ago was much more than a pop music hit, according to a multimedia celebration of “RESPECT” on the website of the daily newspaper the Detroit Free Press. The year of the song’s release was 1967, and the civil rights movement in the U.S., was fully in motion. Aretha’s “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” arrived just at the right time.

“It gave an anthem to the civil rights movement and, ultimately, it served as a call to arms for women everywhere,” the text of the presentation states.

The video below (”Forty Years of ‘RESPECT’,” Detroit Free Press) is a music-filled, narrative history of the singer, the song and the times. A text version is here.

Will there be more room for women’s voices with the digital revolution of news media that is underway online? Yes, and the increase already exists, according to a recent study that found that women make up half of all bloggers.

Perhaps this means good things for improving the status of women as a result of the ongoing weakening of the MSM “gatekeeper” that often still continues to bar women from serious opinion pages, and frequently ignores them in favor of the male when an expert comment is needed. Read about this and more here.
(”Do We Still Need Feminist Media?” by L.S. Kim, Ms. Magazine, Posted November 9, 2007 - Alternet.org)