Attorney Wilson Smith Interviews Saxby Chambliss

Attorney Wilson Smith, our fave trial lawyerin’ south Georgia podcaster, talks with Senator Saxby Chambliss in the days running up to the Martin/Chambliss Senate runoff on Dec. 2. Wilson seems baffled that Senator Chambliss has “no consistent philosophy of government.” But if Chambliss did, he’d then be saddled with the label of “leader” instead of par-for-the course “country club politician.” From the pre-podcast editorial:

What is amazing about Saxby (and many politicians, for that matter) is that he has no consistent philosophy of government that guides his votes. Hence, he makes fiscal conservatives angry when he votes in favor of Medicare Drug D, in favor of the farm bill and other such big expense items that garner votes from large constituencies. And yet, he will vote against healthcare for kids (SCHIP) because it is “big government.” I just don’t get it!

Full podcast, downloadable interview with Saxby is here.

Social Media Rubber Has Met The Road

This one blog post from Ford’s new social media director, Scott Monty, illustrates a terrific example of the role social media is playing in crisis PR communications.

In this particular case, the post demos how social media is being used to progress the overall conversation to a more positive consideration of the automotive industry… at a time when that industry, from a PR standpoint, seriously f-ed up.

From Scott Monty’s blog:

It’s been a rough week. And for someone who is new to the auto industry, this is truly a test.

And at Ford, our social media efforts are just in their nascency. My colleagues at GM have a pretty strong team in place, while I’m just one guy doing what I can. Since Ford doesn’t yet have a robust public platform in the social media space, it’s largely been a matter of individual engagement. And for much of the week, it’s been like fighting a forest fire with a squirt gun.

Full blog post here. You will need to explore it to understand this post at all. But in a nutshell, Scott jumping immediately into the media cycle to circulate this one YouTube video alone, the compelling statement from a Detroit area Congressman at the now infamous “Gulfstream Hearing,” has likely shifted the conversation already.

And how did I first come to click-on that particular video and LISTEN to it? Why Twitter. Of course. Scott from Ford is not only my Twitter friend now, but he’s also a Facebook friend. Now that’s getting up close and personal with crisis communications!

But the real winner here will be Ford… for having had the good sense to hire a social media director as autute as Scott Monty. He knows the medium he’s operating in like a cop knows how to sniff the air for doughnuts.

Scott might be new to Ford, but he clearly is not new to being precise, transparent, honest, blunt, no-frills and totally straight-up when the BS was (is) swirling all around him.

Take note Edelman. Wal-Mart, etc.

Jack Bauer Went Down To Georgia

I was delighted as the next person to have 24 return to our TV sets last night, although being aware of the mighty-righty blowhards’ proclivity to the show, I could never really achieve full-drama-immersion status with last night’s 2-hour special the way I could with Last Enemy, a much finer-tuned thriller/mini-series sharing an inordinate amount of bad-guy cast members with 24, yet trumping 24 in intrigue, intelligence, suspense and chills. (But not explosions.)

Reason being, I was often mentally interrupted throughout last night’s 24 special with visions of Erick Erickson as Jack Bauer, leading a pack of lost boys out of violence-plagued Clayton County, Georgia. With Dick Williams in the role of trusted side-kick, sacrificing himself for the sake of the innocents on a landmine that, conveniently, took out not only himself, but Brian Nichols at the same time. Clayton Commissioner Eldrin Bell had a bit part as a bandaged-up woman fleeing yet another superfluous explosion of hardware. Jason Pye, alas, had his scene left on the cutting room floor.

As if any Georgia mighty-righty would ever be caught doing anything more than wringing their hands over fussy old-man issues such as who gets to marry whom because Jesus told him so.

If anyone is interested in (media for instance) real stories of real “lost boys” from the Sudan, All Saints’ church here in downtown Atlanta was instrumental in relieving and re-locating actual children from their war zones.

Republican Party In Georgia Counting On Blacks To Frankly Not Give A Damn

Unless you’re living under a rock, or watching only all the negative campaign ads that don’t present any info about when the Georgia US Senate race runoff election really is (Dec. 2), there is a runoff election on December 2nd, a Tuesday. All day. In December. See your precinct. Between Republican incumbent Senator Saxby Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin.

The main strategy behind this absolutely critical runoff election seems to be chiefly that black Dems won’t bother to return to the polls on Dec. 2 for the white guy Martin. Says Tom Baxter today in Southern Political Report:

Just as he did when he was the president-elect in 1992 and former Sen. Wyche Fowler was the Democrat in a runoff, (Former President Bill) Clinton came to Georgia Wednesday to campaign for Jim Martin in his race against US Sen. Saxby Chambliss.

Martin has an uphill fight in this runoff, with African-American Democrats unlikely to return in numbers rivaling election day and Republicans eager to get over Nov. 4.

Full article here. More on the utterly patronizing tone in this matter is on display in this randomly-generated blog post from a brother:

The good news, for Saxby, is that you have to light a really big fire underneath a Democrat to get a Democrat to actually exercise enough personal responsibility to go vote in a run off election.  And I don’t think Bill Clinton has enough matches to light that kind of fire.  lol

Remember folks, the Obama victory supposedly showed us that a highly-informed electorate no longer pays much attention to the drively, whiny, obsolete, pricey, ad-buys on Big TV anymore. They pay attention to the community and the networks to which they are now deeply e-connected.

What I wonder is what black Georgia voters really think about Republicans and pundits and pollsters being oh-so-hip to their their current electoral habits and feelings, especially since Georgia Republicans couldn’t see a new political “habit” or trend or tea leaf brewing if one came flaming out of their cell phones and bitch-slapped ‘em sideways into Sundays.

Take the survey and tell the world what you do plan to do come December 2. Write-ins are welcome. Even encouraged:

Towery’s Back On-Air!

And he’s rested and ready to talk Martin/Chambliss runoff turkey. It’s all right here.

CNN Broke Twitter?

I bet @ricksanchezcnn finally broke Twitter for good. The fragile thing wasn’t meant for heavy MSM lifting. Between Sanchez on CNN at 3pm and the anti-Motrin ad moms today, the damn thing may never recover. Call some lawyers quick!

Welcome To New Media Slavery

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of citizen journalism and The Huffington Post and The Huffington Post’s citizen journalism project, OffTheBus. I’m a user and a cheerleader and a content creator for plenty of time-consuming, life-sucking, rather tiring citizen journalism initiatives. I won’t bore you with the details or the self-congratulatory remarks. You can read about them here. Or here.

But Arianna Huffington and Jay Rosen, bless their visionary hearts, are now, or soon will be, accepting awards for OffTheBus right and left (see Arianna’s thank-you letter to her OffTheBus contributors at the jump or here); however, OffTheBus is a grossly flawed business model… because it doesn’t pay the contributors.

Thus, I sure hope no one is considering adopting such a model as a business. Not seriously at least. As something else maybe, but not as a viable business model.

Creating cool, headline-grabbing platforms to harvest the collective mindset is not new media; it is new media slavery. And I for one will not continue to give away my content or my services for free.  I’ll go further to say that any media outlet thinking they’re going to cash-in by soliciting totally free journo-content from Joe Public will be gravely and financially disappointed. (Hear that iReport?)

The increasingly techno-sophisticated masses will soon get very restless for cash for their labors. The people who give enough of a shit to actually pick-up a camera and go out and commit citizen journalism give enough of a shit to soon become pro’sumer grade in their work. Then pro even. Better plan to pay ‘em. Lest you’ll be stuck with freebie, amateur crap that an increasingly media-sophisticated public will soon become very restless with – and reject.

AllVoices, another citizen journalism platform, does pay their contributors. Now which would YOU choose?

NYT Proves Teens Are Boring. And A Pitiful Source of Juicy Dirt

From today’s NYTimes… about how to waste time on Facebook:

NOT long before the election, The Times published an unflattering front-page profile of Cindy McCain, inspiring a new round of accusations that the newspaper was biased against her husband. Some critics were especially angry about one of the reporting tactics: Trying to find sources for information about Mrs. McCain, a reporter reached out to 16- and 17-year-olds through Facebook, the social networking site.

(NYT reporter Jodi) Kantor was trying to find creative ways around the public relations shield that protects a political wife like McCain, an intensely private person. Kantor did not misrepresent who she was or the story she was working on. She asked for leads to adults and did not ask the teenagers directly to say things, good or bad, about McCain. By sending a Facebook message, she gave the students the opportunity to consult with their parents or ignore her; in fact, none of the messages produced useful information.

The whole article that’s making me snort all morning is here. Anyone with half a nose for dirt need only read the National Enquirer or visit InsiderAdvantage’s many fine poltical news products. Elitist Ivy League media sure take the pointless road to Nowhere Fast.

Mapping Our Beloved South. We’re Left-Behinds Now.

Here’s a map of how the NYTimes perceived the South as being out of touch, and presumably left behind, from the rest of the nation… in terms of how we voted (markedly differently) on Nov. 4th. And here is the rather condescending analysis from the Damn Yankees too!

The map I want to see is the one displaying broadband access across the United States… overlayed with the how-we-Crackers-voted map. Then we might get a better picture of just how seriously left-behind we really are, in terms of politics now married with technology… and all the implications there.

From the NYTimes today:

Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter, a statistical analysis by The New York Times shows. Mr. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of 410 counties that runs from New York to Mississippi. Many of those counties, rural and isolated, have been less exposed to the diversity, educational achievement and economic progress experienced by more prosperous areas.

Could Merle Black of Emory get together with some computation and journalism geeks at Georgia Tech please!

A Study In Insufferability

Let me inflict on you, Dear Listener, a study in how women must simply… yell louder! In order to be heard through the insufferable dronings on and on and on and on and on and on and on, well you get the picture, of the male ego at full yap. Bless their hearts. It’s little wonder any of ‘em rarely see the Big Picture Forest – given their repetitive insistence on the tedious parsing of little trees into sawdust. Agghhhhhhhh!!!

Next time, Joe Dear… an advance agenda and a kitchen timer. Please.

Yankees In Georgia?!! How Did They Ever Get In?!

From Palmetto Scoop:

So perhaps now is as good a time as any to lend our expertise to our neighbors in Georgia, who The Palmetto Scoop has learned will be receiving a massive influx of Buckeyes over the next few weeks. That’s because president-elect Barack Obama has reportedly dispatched all of his Ohio staffers to the Peach State to help Democrat Jim Martin knock off incumbent GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss.

“We’re setting up our entire field team again,” said one emboldened Obama staffer in Ohio. “I’m coming to Georgia and bringing several hundred of my friends with me.”

More here.

The Political South: My How We’re Changing!

Tom Baxter of Southern Political Report post-morts the post-election southern landscape today. Most  interesting analysis:

Adding further complexity to the picture is the ribbon of blue counties which begin in Charleston, S.C., and thread through the heart of last week’s red states all the way to Chickasaw County, Miss. These counties, which encompass most of the Black Belt, gave Obama some of his biggest majorities anywhere: He garnered 87 percent, the highest county total I could find for either candidate, in Macon County, Ala., and Jefferson County, Miss. They’ve voted solidly Democratic in the past, but never simultaneously with Democratic majorities the size of those in Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Charlotte and other big cities across the South.

All this suggests a South with some familiar landmarks, but also one primed to change very dramatically over the coming decade. It’s easy to imagine, given the herculean challenges facing him, Obama losing the states he won last week in 2012. Given the age of McCain’s core supporters, it’s not inconceivable either that Obama could win states he lost this year.

But the South has shown that in one of the cricitical elections of our history, it was not all of one mind. And it’s unlikely ever to be again.

Full SPR article here. Heck, give a Cracker a laptop, some free broadband out in the scrub pines, and Lordy knows what might happen! From Bloomberg.com:

Obama has also made broader Internet access a goal and insisted that broadcasters focus more on public service. In a statement to the FCC last year, he called for `new rules promoting greater coverage of local issues and greater responsiveness of broadcasters to the communities they operate in.’

The above article in-full here.

No, Thank YOU HuffPost’s Off The Bus

Amanda Michel, Den Mother of the Huffington Post’s 2008 presidential election, groundbreaking citizen journalism project, Off The Bus, takes a moment to thank their contributors here.

I thus took a comment moment to thank Off The Bus for their media vision and leadership. It was an honor and a thrill to have been part of the 2007-2008 political process via Off The Bus. My comment back to Amanda and John and the other wonderful OTB editors is re-pasted here:

Thank you Amanda and John, etc. so much for giving me the opportunity to participate in the political journalism process in innovative and exciting ways that were not open to me elsewhere. Being an OTB contributor has renewed my passion for journalism, taught me new skills, returned me to my MSM roots while allowing me to try new things, and provided a wealth of ideas and concepts I will take with me and share with many as I grow my small media business locally.

It’s been an honor and a pleasure. I like to think I played a small part in these historic media times. OTB made that possible, and inspired me to look for any way I could to get involved in the new political media going on around me over the last year or so.

Plus, doing totally indie, one-woman video packages was just a whole lot of fun! You should see how I can unfold my tripod now with a few flicks of the wrist. Even an old NABET camera-dude would be impressed. Well maybe…

All the best as we all move forward.

All Men Are Liars – Installment #49,653

Everyone’s fave pundit, Thomas Friedman, says that conservative white men are liars. (Ya don’t say?) That they went into the private parts of the voting booth and checked the box for Obama… after telling their cronies all along at the country club Men’s Grill, presumably over a rare steak and a scotch-rocks, that they were, of course dude, for McCain.

That buried deep in their lying, tiny, twisted hearts, the motivation that they “wanted to honor their kids” prompted them to suddenly morph to Spike Lee upon walking in the door of their local voter precinct.

Bit of a stretch, eh? Especially when you know what conservative white men are really like deep down, but Friedman even brands this lying white men phenomenon “the buffet effect.” (As opposed to the Bradley effect, of course.)

You can decide for yourself in the video here, which I must say is pure pundit nirvana: Huffington, Hitchens, Friedman… all together for your punditry pleasurin’ at the BBC on election night.

As the scoffing cynic, I must note with a vague wave of some Blanche Dubois hankie to fairness, that my right-of-Buchanan, Citadel-bred dad did scour all of Cobb County, Georgia (High Newt Country) for hours yesterday, the day after our history-making election on Tuesday, trying to find just one extra newspaper. Not for himself, but for me.

Scenes from Election Night in Atlanta, GA 200

I’d have shot more, but I got tired of schlepping gear around so I went home early.

UPDATE: Shelby Highsmith has THE winning moment from Manuel’s Tavern here.

Twittering Through Election Night

My Election Night Tweets are as follows. From last to first:

God blessed America. about 12 hours ago from web
I am just too damn old for this one-woman band shit. Two stops already kicked my ass. Going home. Need pizza. #current #election about 14 hours ago from mobile web
@Tessa, yeah. We can network with Todd Palin’s buds. Not. about 15 hours ago from mobile web in reply to tessa Serious Obama bling! #current #atlvote – Photo: http://bkite.com/02cXG about 15 hours ago from Brightkite The look of GA Dems. Wow! #current #atlvote – Photo: http://bkite.com/02cVJ about 16 hours ago from Brightkite Big GA southern shoutout at DPG party for Hagan NC win. #current about 16 hours ago from mobile web Now at Dem. Party of GA party at Hyatt. Huge cheer on PA win. Mayor Franklin here. #current about 16 hours ago from mobile web I like the hologram! I really do! #current about 17 hours ago from mobile web No virtual people here! #current – Photo: http://bkite.com/02cN3 about 17 hours ago from Brightkite Atlanta Manuel’s Tavern is primed to ROCK! #current about 18 hours ago from mobile web

Ethel Mertz Reacts to Palin’s Loss

Ethel Mertz reacts to Palin’s Loss

Originally uploaded by cathleenritt

What To Wear?!!!!

Must plan Inaugural Ball gown/wardrobe… starting NOW! The ultimate What To Wear delicious dillema! Now who do I have to blog nicely about to get an Inaugural Ball ticket? What DC power-broker am I in good standing with? Must take severe inventory. Of data base AND closet. If I’m totally off the grid, it’s because I’m in deep wardrobe assessment mode. Just thank Jesus I look smashing in blue!

When Twitter Just Won’t Do

Reason #4578 to be glad you don’t live in Clayton County, Georgia:

A police helicopter will fly over Clayton County’s 58 voting precincts this afternoon to track the longest lines and monitor any potential problems.

Clayton County Commission Chairman Eldrin Bell dispatched the helicopter to help determine where to place 12 extra voting machines for the after-work rush.

Full massive waste of taxpayers’ resources here.

Election Night – Two For The Twitter Road

Two people you will want to add ‘n follow for Election Night on Twitter will be former Atlantans Tony Dornacher and Tim State… now living in Chicago. They have their tickets to the Grant Park Obama Rally in one hand, and their mobiles and cams in the other. Plus, they’re just funny guys with a great way with their 140 characters.

Tim is: @timstate and Tony is @tonydornacher. Their website Morgan Terrace is here. And of course, I’m @SpaceyG on Twitter. See in real-time what’s happening in Atlanta on Election Day by using Twitter search and the hashtags #atlvote and #votereport.

Have a great day out there everyone!!