(h/t Black Snob)

Veteran Journalist Amy Alexander examines her time at the NAACP and describes the 100+year old organization as gradually becoming a vehicle for the NAACP President to massage their ego.

At very detailed length, Alexander describes her time as the “voice” of Jealous, writing his editorials, crafting his talking points and attempting to get him media ready. The key word is “attempting.” Many people have remarked that Jealous’ jump to erroneous conclusions on Sherrod smelled to high heaven of someone who’s not media savvy (or even regular savvy). Alexander paints an even more damning portrait — of a man in love with himself and in love with the limelight, but incapable of meeting the needs of the 101 year old, historic civil rights organization.

Amy Alexander

Rachel Maddow shows an excellent piece about the consistency of Fox News use of the “Southern Strategy” in an attempt to scare white voters by depicting blacks (and in particular POTUS Barack Obama’s administration) as somehow being “out to get them.”

So, I’m trying to get back to daily blogging, now that I’m not using my free time monitoring World Cup action.

There’s an interesting story out today by Politico.com ;”Carlson Launches Olbermann Site” in the Politico “Click” section — which is kind of like a political gossip magazine.

Here’s the money quote:

But the battle has been kicked up a notch today, as the Daily Caller has purchased www.KeithOlbermann.com. The site, as you can imagine, directs readers to Daily Caller’s online offerings.

Politico seems to have received the information directly from @TuckerCarlson which had a retweet from @dailycaller directing Olbermann to check the dailycaller.com homepage.

While I have been oblivious to the on-going feud between Olbermann and Carlson because of World Cup action, I’ve found this latest stunt by Carlson a fairly lame attempt to “punch-up” and grab headlines. Currently, Olbermann not only has his own popular MSNBC show, he still does sports-casting and plenty of guest spots on other talk shows. Tucker Carlson has been fired from several shows, (although I’m sure he does plenty of guest spots) and is likely burning through money as he attempts to grow dailycaller.com. Carlson simply wants to get into to a war of words with Olbermann to get free links from outlets like the politico.com, huffpost and other outlets.

So, here’s a quick tear-down of this stunt:
1.) Carlson probably spends X,XXX to buy KeithOlbermann.com from the previous domain owner who had the domain parked at godaddy.com.

2.) Carlson taunts Olbermann in an attempt to get him to give some free publicity by “punching-up”

3.) Huffpost, Politico and others take the bait and print up articles that link to dailycaller.com and keitholbermann.com .

4.) When Olbermann, notices and comments via twitter that Carlson knows what he is doing a pretty clear-cut case of the abuse of a domain name via ICANN (the regulating body for domain names), Carlson responds by calling Olbermann a “CRYBABY.” Then Carlson uses first amendment issues to try to hide his behavior; however, there’s a big problem with Carlson’s strategy beyond the mere ICANN arbitration process…

Carlson actually has used the ICANN arbitration process called UDRP to get TuckerCarlson.com in a very similar situation!

Tucker’s situation is explained on domainnamewire.com here:

Celebrity wins decision for TuckerCarlson.com.
Conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson has won rights to the domain name TuckerCarlson.com.  The decision handed down through World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) under UDRP on June 2. In Carlson’s complaint, he claimed common law rights to the name “Tucker Carlson” Domainnamewire.com

As a result, the longer Tucker Carlson carries on this particular tactic the more he will look like a hypocrite. It’s really hard to call someone a crybaby about the abuse of a domain name when you have used a remedy to acquire your own domain name from a commercial user. Worse, Carlson wasted the Daily Caller’s money by purchasing the domain name from the previous owner.

Will Carlson and the DailyCaller.com disclose how much they paid for KeithOlbermann.com ?

Update:
So a few people on twitter have stated that dailycaller is using “parody and criticism” — um not so much, the domain redirects to dailycaller . com. Even if the name was a special Keith Olbermann version of the dailycaller.com, Carlson & Co are still capitalizing on Keith Olbermann’s name in a confusing manner in a commercial fashion.

Politicians names are fair game, while public figures / celebrities are not.

Hopefully Carlson will hand the name over to Keith Olbermann and allow the filing fees to go to charity rather than lawyers and others.

At the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan catches some classic institutionalized racism.
Pathetic display by John Derbyshire

Derbyshire’s thoughts here…

“At some level, I’ll agree, this is not our business. North of five million people have been slaughtered in the Congo this past twelve years, and nobody much (no, not me—how about you?) has lost a wink of sleep over it … [But] the Congo is nothing to me. Israel is something to me. It’s an outpost of my civilization, organized on principles I agree with, inhabited by people I could live at ease with. They defend themselves, their borders, their interests, with the kind of vigor and thick-skinned determination I’d like to see my nation display. (If only!) I admire them and wish them well.

There’s an affinity. In some tenuous sense, they are me, and I am them. The Gazans? I’ll care about them right after I start caring about the Congo.”

Emphasis by Sullivan.

If what Derbyshire says is an accurate observation of how foreign policy should be determined by countries, isn’t obvious what will happen to as the demographic power shift occurs in this century?

Brasil is an emerging as a huge economic powerhouse with a population of 200MM and over 50% of that population people of color (who recently sided with Turkey on a few key UN votes).

Turkey already a NATO powerhouse and teetering on the edge of the Middle East and European …

More interestingly, what happens as the demographics change sharply in the United States?

General McChrystal is relieved of command it’s fascinating…

Here is the amazing Rolling Stone article about the “Runaway General”

So, I’m basically live blogging the relief of command by General McChrystal.

I don’t think that any General, (non-founder) CEO or worker should ever be so central to a company or service that they can not be replaced.

It seems like an awful lot of mission “rah rah.” Nothing major.

I’m starting to get disgusted with CNN’s lopsided coverage of the oil spill.

Rather than examining the claims of different parishes, and comparing their claims to the reality of the situation, they have descended into a non-stop complaints and foolish emotion-heavy vignettes with very few actual bits of information.

New plans, new machines, and new ideas are great; however, do they actually work? Anderson Cooper rarely asks if the proposed technology is actually affective and if the technology is actually worth the time and effort. Additionally given the volitale nature of both oil and toxic chemicals, he doesn’t bother to back-up the Coast Guards concerns that the ships might be incredibly dangerous given the oil, toxic fumes and electronic equipment (I would think this would be an obvious concern).

At the same time LA Republicans are complaining about the response, CNN seems to ignore the role that Republicans — particularly Bobby Jindal had in creating the current regulations on the books. The current regulations place a significant amount of the planning and expertise behind the clean-ups in the hands of oil companies like BP. In fairness to BP, the congressional testimonees showed that every single major company relied on similar clean-up plans.

As a result, the same people complaining about the response by both BP, the Coast Guard, the Federal Government, allow no burden on the state and local government who have both pushed for expanded drilling without regard to safety (before the BP spill), and now are pushing for drilling to continue without any sort of review of existing platforms.

Anderson Cooper’s show is particularly egregious, as he both shamelessly panders to local officials, without bothering to critique the fact that they are the main people pushing for more offshore drilling.

Bobby Jindal is grandstanding in front of television cameras — taking interviews, and walking along shores in hard hats day after day. Oh yeah — he’s busy criticizing everyone else instead of taking his own huge share of the blame.

1.) It turns out Jindal has only bothered to deploy 1,100 out of 6,000 National Guard members to handle LA coastline.

It also was revealed that the state has called up only 1,100 of the 6,000 National Guard members authorized for the spill clean-up efforts, Peterson said.

2.) Also Jindal hasn’t yet dispersed the 25 Million in funds BP provided as a grant to assist LA immediately.

Peterson said that at a meeting Thursday with BP officials, coastal Louisiana legislators and representatives of the Jindal administration, it was disclosed that the state has spent only about $3 million of a $25 million BP grant for spill-related expenses, and that it has not yet issued a contract for BP’s $15 million grant to promote tourism attractions threatened by the spill.

NOLA’s article on what Jindal is really doing

All this time Southern Republicans have been pounding a drumbeat about both “states rights” and “drill baby drill” ; yet, when a direct outcome of those policies causes a massive accident, rather than having a state-level response, there are nothing but complaints.

Jindal himself is uniquely responsible for this current calamity — In 2006, Jindal sponsored the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act (H.R. 4761), a bill to eliminate the moratorium on offshore oil and gas drilling over the U.S. outer continental shelf.

This is hilarious, Obama should avoid trying to sound tough and definitely stick to calm, cool and reserved. Take a listen to this hilarious auto-tuned song based on the Matt Lauer “ass kick” interview.