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Marissa + Mark

Cherry blossoms and Dumbarton Oaks

All the fees that're fit to charge

Airlines charge a lot of fees—for phone reservations, changing a non-refundable reservation, checking bags, snacks. At this rate, our future airline tickets will look something like this.

When we buy a ticket, most people just look at the bottom-line price. But the fees can completely change the equation, especially if you end up having to change your plans now that some airlines are charging $150 per ticket.

Rick Seaney of FareCompare has a handy chart of fees. Keep it in mind next time you book. Now, why don't some of those travel sites start including this information with their price comparisons?

Living Liberally in 50 states

When I joined Drinking Liberally at the start of 2004, it consisted of a handful of (great) people meeting in a bar in New York. Now, on its five-year anniversary, the organization has grown to over 250 chapters including all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and even four foreign countries, and expanded to include Eating, Laughing, Screening, and Reading Liberally. Happy birthday Living Liberally!

Blog of the Month

Marc Fisher of the Washington Post just named Greater Greater Washington his Blog of the Month. It begins: "When a D.C. cabbie refused to take David Alpert from downtown Washington to a scruffy neighborhood clear across the city, the poor hack had no idea with whom he was dealing." Thanks Marc!

30th Birthday

Since I started Greater Greater Washington, I've been getting behind on photos. Here is my 30th birthday celebration in January.

(See the pictures)

Legal purity vs. realism

"Some fifty years ago a great German jurist had a curious dream. He dreamed that he died and was taken to a special heaven reserved for the theoreticians of the law. In this heaven one met, face to face, the many concepts of jurisprudence in their absolute purity, freed from all entangling alliances with human life. Here were the disembodied spirits of good faith and bad faith, property, possession, laches, and rights in rem. Here were all the logical instruments needed to manipulate and transform these legal concepts and thus to create and to solve the most beautiful of legal problems. Here one found a dialectic-hydraulic-interpretation press, which could press an indefinite number of meanings out of any text or statute, an apparatus for constructing fictions, and a hair-splitting machine that could divide a single hair into 999,999 equal parts and, when operated by the most expert jurists, could split each of these parts again into 999,999 equal parts. The boundless opportunities of this heaven of legal concepts were open to all properly qualified jurists, provided only they drank the Lethean draught which induced forgetfulness of terrestrial human affairs. But for the most accomplished jurists the Lethean draught was entirely superfluous. They had nothing to forget."

-Felix Cohen, 1935

Via Tim Wu.

Did the gas tax hurt Hillary Clinton in Indiana?

The Post's Chris Cillizza talks to some experts and comes up with a tentative yes. At the very least, it helped her a lot less than she had anticipated or hoped.

Urgent Political Proposal

This secret email was recently leaked from John McCain and Hillary Clinton's draft email folder:

CONFIDENTIAL/URGENT POLITICAL PROPOSAL
Dear Sir
First we must solicit your confidence in this issue. This is by virtue as being utterly confidential and "top secret".
We are SENATOR HILLARY CLINTON, the wife of the former United States head of state, PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON, and also SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN, friend and associate of current head of state PRESIDENT GEORGE W BUSH. We got your contact through business inquiries as we were searching for contacts of a citizen who can help save our and our family's political careers since our country has been frustrating us.
We are top officials of the United States Senate Government who are interested in importation of oil into our country with funds that are presently trapped in the FEDERAL TRANSPORTATION TRUST FUND dedicated to improving transportation. We wish to send this money to overseas accounts in the MIDDLE EAST but cannot due to restrictions in Congress Transportation Equity Act requiring that this money must be spent to build roads, bridges and high speed trains.
If you accept we will deliver to your a sum of 30 DOLLARS in the summer 2008 in form of a "GAS TAX HOLIDAY". You will then deliver this money to accounts of our friends in Middle East by taking it to your nearby gasoline station where they have information to forward the money. Please supply your bank account, social security number, address and your vote in DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES AND NOVEMBER GENERAL ELECTION.
But bear in mind that this transaction requires absolute confidentiality. Do not visit WWW.GASTAXSCAM.COM where there is information about dangers of our proposal and a petition to stop us from this diversion of funds.
PLEASE NOTIFY US URGENTLY OF YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF THIS PROPOSAL
Awaiting your rapid response
Yours truly
SENATORS HILLARY CLINTON AND JOHN MCCAIN

Read more and sign the petition at www.GasTaxScam.com.

A gas-tax window into a Hillary Clinton presidency

OpenLeft analyzes the politics involved in Hillary Clinton's recent proposal to eliminate the gas tax for the summer, a stupid gimmick that would make things worse and not help consumers. Her own advisors admit that this is a cheap trick to win votes, done purely for the political value. She is only proposing this because it is such a bad idea that it has no actual chance of passing.

Now, not content with scoring her own cheap political points, Clinton is calling out each Member of Congress to stand with her on the gas tax. She is even using right-wing language like "with us or against us," declaring that Members who don't support this policy are standing with the oil companies, even though this proposal doesn't "take on the oil companies" at all.

Colorado Democratic Senate candidadate Mark Udall blasted Clinton's behavior:

Senator Clinton claimed yesterday that I either stand with her on this proposal or stand with the oil companies. To that I say: I stand with the families of Colorado, who aren't looking for bumper sticker fixes that don't fix anything, but for meaningful change that brings real relief and a new direction for our energy policy. We can't afford more Washington-style pandering while families keep getting squeezed. It is exactly the kind of short-sighted Washington game that keeps us from getting real results to our energy problem.

Chris Bowers asks, if we're seeing this now from Hillary Clinton, we can expect more of the same in a Clinton presidency—not so unlike the worst of the other Clinton presidency, actually.

Are we to suffer through another Democratic President who will make impromptu, right-ward shifts toward bad policy, justified in nonsensical, Orwellian language, all the while claiming such a move must be done because it will score huge political points even though it is ultimately a bad political calculation, and then threaten the entire Democratic Party to fall in line behind such a move or else? This is basically all of my worst fears about Hillary Clinton becoming President rolled up into one giant ball of tin-foil and dropped on my front porch.

President Bill Clinton steered our national dialogue around conservative frames and left the Democratic party disorganized and hapless while chalking up only a few progressive accomplishments. We know know that President Hillary Clinton would do the same. President Obama has certainly had his moments of buying into right-wing frames, too, but Clinton's willingness to adopt craven political gimmicks that would actually hurt our country is in a whole other league of awful.

The cognitive style of Lessig-point

Larry Lessig has a very distinct style of presentation. Instead of putting up long slides with many bullet points and then reading from the slides (a terrible way to do presentations), he uses slides to punctuate his talks with key pictures and words (often one word or even one or two letters on a slide).

It's very effective. Does it work in other areas too? Yep. For another great presenter with a similar style, see Seth Godin.

At one point Google CEO Eric Schmidt enforced a "don't read your slides" policy at executive meetings. Too bad that, unless you are a CEO, there's no good way to make presenters stop doing it.

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ABC's cut questions

The big story of the day is how bad last night's ABC Democratic Presidential debate was, with George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson studiously avoiding any intelligent questions in favor of rehashing the campaign's inane "gotcha" moments long past.

The Minnesota Monitor was able to obtain a secret list of questions that ABC had planned, but ultimately cut from the debate. As you can see, we're all poorer for their editorial decision not to tackle these key issues:

Gibson: There is ample evidence that the public is tired of all the partisan turf battles in Washington--all the red vs. blue, day after day. Are you prepared to tell the American people -- here, tonight -- that you will set aside the red and the blue and tell us what some of your other favorite colors are?
Stephanopoulos: Senator Clinton, if you win this nomination, you'll be running against John McCain, a man who once joked at a Republican Senate fundraiser that the reason your daughter, Chelsea, was so ugly was that Janet Reno was her father. She was just a child then, an awkward teenager in braces. Do you take pleasure in the fact that, these many years later, she's turned into a total hottie?
Gibson: Senators, let's talk about white-collar crime. Your opponent John Edwards, before he left the campaign, spoke tirelessly of the need to rein in the depredations of corporate America. Tonight ABC News has learned that Martha Stewart, who spent time in prison for insider trading, has lost her beloved Chow, Paw Paw, to kidney disease. Surely that must move you at least a little? I mean, her dog died.
Stephanopoulos: Some media critics have bemoaned a growing conflation of politics and of celebrity media culture -- a tendency, even on the part of ostensibly serious journalists, to see everything through the lens of personality and character and to ignore issues. My question for you is, what's your most trusted source of celebrity news? And are there some celebrities who interest you personally more than others?

Easter in Hilton Head

(See the pictures)

Buildings, driveways, an escalator, and a party

(See the pictures)

Jame & Erika appear in Globe, trade ages

The Boston Globe attended a bar where Duke alumni and fans watched the pivotal game against UNC, and interviewed Jamie and Erika:

"I think people just want to be around that same energy," said Erika Alders, class of '04, who runs Duke Club activities with her husband Jamie, class of '02.

Hooray!

Unfortunately, they got the graduation years mixed up. Is this a consequence of reporter expectations that wives are always younger than husbands? In only 13% of married couples is the woman more than one year older. Did this reporter write down Jamie '04, Erika '02 and assume she must have switched them?

"This is to inform you that..."

This is to inform you that one of my pet peeves is emails that start with "This is to inform you that..." I can tell very well from the fact that there is information in the message, and that you are sending it out, that this email is to inform people about said information.

For example, I just got an email that said, "This is to inform you that weekly residential street cleaning operations resume on Monday, March 24, 2008." How about just "Residential street cleaning operations will resume..."? Or if you really need a lead-in, "Please be aware that..." or "Please note that..."?

The worst is from the In-Towner, a local newspaper, whose monthly emails about its new issue read, "This is to advise that the January 2008 on-line edition has been up-loaded and may be accessed at ..." They're a news organization! Concision is in a journalist's DNA. Yet, in addition to the superfluous hyphens, every email starts with the same totally useless, redundant, and unnecessary quintet of five (5) words.

Save traffic. Don't fund transit.

Dan loves traffic. But his lifestyle is under attack by politicians who are trying to "mitigate" traffic.

"In 2009, Congress will decide whether to continue to spend billions on highways and roads to generate more traffic. Or whether they're going to spend more money on trains and buses that suck the lifeblood right out of traffic."

Via Smart Growth America.

ReGoogle

In mid-January, I went back to the Google office to see some old co-workers and return some computer equipment that was in my NYC apartment. I grabbed a few photos of some of my favorite cute things around the office, the sorts of things that make working at Google a little less stuffy and sterile than your typical company.

(See the pictures)

Google Maps: Bike There

There's a site with a petition for Google Maps to add a "bike there" option showing directions by bike, including bike lanes. Great idea, though the obstacle to Bike There is finding bike lane data. While we're at it, how about just a "walk there"?

Google Maps is probably my favorite Google product and the one I use most often (probably more even than search). But it's always been just a little car-centric. It took years after it originally launched to get transit stations on (mostly because the data providers don't include transit stations themselves), and while transit lines are drawn in in some international cities like Sydney, you have to go to other mashups like OnNYTurf (NYC) or MetroMapr (DC, Boston, Philly, Chicago) for maps that show subway lines. Why should the route a car takes be in fat yellow lines, but not transitways or bike paths?

Via The WashCycle.

A New Year

We celebrated New Year's Eve in New York with friends, for the penultimate (in the correct sense of the word) party in my apartment there.

(See the pictures)

Dean's legacy, Obama, and Clinton

My grandmother wanted very much to live to see a female President. Unfortunately, that was not to be, and moreover, increasingly likely not to be this year for the rest of us either. I would very much like to see a female President in my lifetime. But I'd prefer a different Democratic candidate this year. I've been holding off any new posting about Obama-Clinton out of respect for Grandma Gloria, but it's time.

I actually don't share many of my friends' reasons for disliking Senator Clinton. I don't approve of her war vote, but there are many areas in which she'd probably govern more progressively than Obama and many in which she'd govern more conservatively. For me, the choice comes down to one issue: I don't trust her senior advisors.

Her inner circle comprises the same people who invented triangulation and stopped trying to lead the public toward understanding progessive viewpoints. They're the same people who criticized the 50-state strategy, the idea of organizing in every state and every district rather than focusing on the narrowest 51% needed for victory while ignoring everyone else. The senior people running Clinton's campaign presided over a tremendous decline of the Democratic Party into a frightened, small-c conservative and in many ways large-C Conservative bunch who think if they say as little as possible (what Lessig calls tiny speech) and talk to as few people as possible, they can hang on to power just a little longer.

In The Nation, Ari Berman chronicles the Clinton camp's cold war with Howard Dean—undermining his efforts in 2006, preparing to build a parallel DNC last year. The DNC used to be nothing more than a fundraising machine that lost all its institutional memory every four years. Now it has built a powerful, ongoing base of funders and databases of voters to organize over the long-term. The fact that Clinton's people like James Carville and Rahm Emanuel would choose to throw away what so many have worked so hard to build shows how short-term and out of date their thinking is.

From their beginnings in the early 2000s, through the 2004 election, to the Congressional victories in 2006 and on to today, progressive political blogs have pushed many issues but one major narrative underlay them all: Democrats need to be less cowardly. When they speak up for what they believe and fight for what is right, people respect and vote for them; when they hide in fear, as they did on Iraq even with majorities in Congress and an unpopular President, they lose respect. Strength and conviction win elections. But the Clinton advisors do not believe this, and their ascendancy in the party would turn back the clock to old strategies and more failure.

We don't know for sure how Barack Obama will govern on the issues. But we do know he practices the strong form of politics. When Clinton attacked him with the "red phone" ad, Obama fought back—successfully. When Republicans attacked him for not wearing a flag lapel pin, Obama didn't race to get a flag tattoo, he explained himself coherently.

This is the kind of President we need. I don't know if Obama would appoint a bunch of Republicans to his cabinet. But I do know that his senior advisors won't tell him to half the states in the country, fire the new organizing talent in the party, and wish that blogs and grassroots activists would just write a check and shut up the way the Democratic rank and file did in the 80s and 90s with we-know-what success.