Political humor of the day: Crushing the gatekeepers

I'm not getting to the second part of the Iraqi deaths post for a couple days, as I'm working under deadline right now and will be pulling looooong days tippity-tap-typing on the 'puter (my non-pseudonymous alter-ego earns his living writing--and that's all you need to know), but I had to point out this bit of ridiculousness from the ever self-important Kos:

I don't know if I'd previously announced this or not, but I'm currently writing a book for Penguin Books, scheduled for September 2008 publication, on modern day activism.

In short, traditional activism was predicated on influencing the gatekeepers -- getting concessions from management in a labor dispute, or getting editors, producers, or pundits to alter their coverage of an issue or event, or pressuring the government to change course in its actions (like ending the war in Vietnam), and so on. There was never any expectation that the gatekeepers were going anywhere. The best we could do was force a change in their behavior.

Today, we are able to target the gatekeepers directly, working to change their behavior, yes (like with Time and Joe Klein), but also working to eliminate them or, when that's not possible, bypass them. We are building an alternate media, alternate party infrastructure, and alternate institutions of power and influence. As I wrote seemingly a lifetime ago in Crashing the Gate, the gatekeepers were welcome to work with us, get out of our way, or get crushed and rendered irrelevant.

In any case, that's the broad point of the book. Now, I'm looking for examples to fill the book of effective people-powered activism that has done just that -- bypassed the establishment gatekeepers (in media, politics, business, Hollywood, wherever), trampled them, or forced them to play nice. I've got several examples already sketched out, like the rise of Cindy Sheehan (and the fall as well, as a cautionary tale), the Draft Webb movement, the efforts of Mac and Linux fanatics to undermine the Microsoft borg, Energize America, the Lieberman/Lamont race (and "The Kiss" float), the immigration rallies, and so on.

Now leaving aside Kos's ahistoricism (apparently he's never heard of Mario Savio or the direct action tactics of the Wobblies, etc.) and the silliness of his examples (how exactly is running a multimillionaire primary opponent against one of the most warmongering members of the Senate, and losing, an example of this brand new phenomenon of "crushing" the gatekeepers and rendering them irrelevant? And of course large political rallies pressing civil rights issues are also an entirely new experience in American history! And so on.), what I wanted to draw your attention to was the bolded comment above. I can only imagine that what he refers to as Cindy Sheehan's "fall" refers to the shunning of Sheehan by Democratic partisans (not to mention the rhetorically nasty attacks she suffered on the pages of DailyKos itself) for, get this, daring to challenge the seat of Nancy Pelosi because of Pelosi's gatekeeping extraordinaire position that "impeachment is off the table."

I got nothing more here, that just speaks for itself.

I've brought this to the attention of Monsieur IOZ, because his rhetorical scalpel is far more honed than mine for nonsense such as this. I'm hoping he'll address this with his patented brand of scorn, but if he doesn't... Well, just click the link and read through a few postings and you'll get a sense of what he might have said.

And while I'm directing my nonexistent traffic to other bloggers, I'll note that I shamelessly borrowed the "Political humor of the day" label from Eli over at Left I on the News, who should be added to your blog reading schedule, if he's not there already.

[update - I was correct in thinking that IOZ couldn't resist commenting on the "rather extraordinary statement of triumph-by-defeat by the Little Colonel of Donk politics himself."]

Sunday tunes

Sunday tunes is anticipated to be a weekly feature of the resurrected blog. Aside from the fact that I'm unlikely to enjoy jingoistic anthems or bland corporate schlock, there will be no political considerations taken into final account for Sunday tunes.

For our first installment, we have Johnny Cash doing Kris Kristofferson's Sunday Morning Coming Down.

Notes on Iraqi death estimates (part one)

Any visitors to this blog will no doubt have noticed, at the top left of their screen, the estimate from Just Foreign Policy indicating, as of this writing, that there have been 1,118,846 excess deaths of Iraqis due to the US invasion and occupation of that currently benighted land. Just Foreign Policy opposes the occupation and, I suppose, could therefore be accused of bias towards inflating the numbers, but let me explain why I think this horrifying statistic is indeed the closest we have to a true accounting of Iraqi fatalities, albeit still an inadequate one.

The numbers derive their base from the Lancet Study of 2006 of excess deaths in Iraq and then extrapolates further in time based on the rise or fall of fatality rates derived from the reporting of Iraq Body Count. In order to judge the validity of Just Foreign Policy's numbers, then, we need to look at the methodologies of both the Lancet Study and of the Iraq Body Count numbers.

The Lancet Study has been subject to a number of criticisms, mostly by highly interested parties, including George W. Bush, who in response to a question about the study dismissed it's methodology as "pretty well discredited" and who had a year earlier cited the far lower number of 30,000 deaths, a number I believe was at the time commensurate with the low end estimate of Iraq Body Count (current low end for IBC being 77,327). I am neither a statistician nor an epidemiologist, but it is notable that when the same methodology was used to estimate death tolls from the Rwanda genocide and the 90's wars in the Congo, cases that didn't (directly) implicate American imperialism, the numbers were largely accepted at face value and included in headlines around the world. It is also notable that Roy Anderson, chief scientific adviser to Tony Blair's Defense Ministry, called the Lancet Study's methodology "robust" and "close to best practice." In a nutshell, what the researchers did is called cluster sampling. They generated random geographic spots across Iraq and where those spots landed on population centers, from villages to cities, generated random neighborhood maps and, from those, random household selections. Interviewers were then sent out to those households to inquire about household births and deaths prior to and following the March 2003 invasion. Following the interviews, and this is important, families were asked to produce death certificates for the deceased and in over 90% of cases these were provided, a remarkable number to my document-challenged self and indicating high confidence in deaths reported.

Iraq Body Count collates only reported and cross-corroborated violent deaths of civilians from the sources listed here (which still reaches the rate of 63.5 a day for 2006 and 50 a day for 2007 so far).

Even if one were to dismiss the quite obvious fact that Iraq Body Count is likely missing a large number of deaths because Iraq has become, as is almost universally acknowledged, the most dangerous place to attempt to be a reporter in the world, it also represents an undercount of the human fatality costs of the war in a number of highly significant ways.

I will discuss these and the reasons that the Lancet Study also represents an undercount of the results of US policy towards Iraq (in addition to some unavoidable problems with the Just Foreign Policy estimate) in the part II of this post.

Notes on the blog roll

I've just completed the blog roll for the relaunch of Bellum Americanum, in preparation of actually sitting down and writing something. At risk of stating the obvious, I'll point out that inclusion in the blog roll does not imply isomorphic ideological agreement on all or even any topics. It does mean that I have found information and viewpoints that I have found valuable to contemplate and think my readers (all none of you) will as well. Lack of appearance on the blog roll, however, does necessarily imply that I think that you or your organization combine some intolerable combination of imbecility, dishonesty, and/or authoritarianism!