Ok so, so far, the overwhelming reaction to my Plan B idea has been:

"OK! I'm ready to protest Wednesday. But....tell me where to go. I don't get the whole 'in the streets' thing."

Good idea to have a starting point at least. (We might just flash mob from there.)

Seems like people should pick a key location in their home city and decide on the best time, and take it from there.

For myself here in the SF Bay Area, we should probably end up at Civic Center - so there's someplace to congregate (since we'll be expecting tens of thousands of people).

So think about it. Where's the best location in your town?

Remember to share
this link to the Plan B stuff and spread the word!

http://video.lisarein.com/sfsu/..I wanted to get this up quick so it would be easy to tell people at the ACM conference.

Looks like I never told you that I HTML'd my Copyright/Creative Commons Paper and Guide.

It's all indexed and such so it should be easier to get around in.

Don't forget the handy pro/con table for Creative Commons Licenses

thanks!

lisa

They wouldn't dare do it again. But what if they do? We need a Plan B.

I've been thinking about this for a long time, and trying to choose just the right words to delicately suggest that, despite all of the obvious developments over the last few months, whereby the public has made it perfectly clear that it is ready for a change in this country's leadership, that the Republican's might actually cheat again.

Yes, despite the obviousness of what they'd be doing, and even with the added risk of pulling it off this year while everyone's really paying close attention. The stakes are just too high to just hand their power back over.

And really, why wouldn't they just do it again, when the previous election takeovers were met with such minimal resistance?

Maybe we can be ready for action this year, instead of dumbfounded and scratching our heads, like it seems like we end up every two years, for going on six years now.

So... What if the Republicans did it again this year? What if they stole the election again, right in front of us.

Despite all of the evidence that it can't happen - it happens! What then?

If they steal another election, with everybody watching, can we all agree to do something about right away, the day after?

Could we be in the streets the next morning?

Where? We'll figure that out later. We can just flood the streets, and let the flash mobs figure it out. Right?

Well. As of this evening, I'm really, seriously, asking you about this.

Why now more than ever? Because tonight, Keith Olberman did a piece contrasting the overwhelming numbers across the board in favor of the Democrats taking over with a recording of Karl Rove on NPR explaining how, by his calculations, the Republicans should retain the House and Senate, like always, saying "You may end up with a different math but you're entitled to your math. I'm entitled to The Math."

And I realized it's not a question of "what are we gonna do if."

It's really a question of "what are we going to do when."

We're not really going to stand for this again. Are we?

Can we become mentally prepared enough over the next 13 days to be ready to take some kind of real action?

Talk to me people.

Bush Talks about using "the google"

This is from CNBC.

Site helps fans play with videos.
By Janis Mara

A GUINEA PIG SPROUTS Romaine lettuce wings and soars aloft to a song by TMarie, a housewife shares her recipes for perfect chocolate chip cookies, and PresidentBush "sings" U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" in the top 10 video playlists on Berkeley-based video Web site Dabble.com.

The site, launched just two months ago by Mary Hodder of Berkeley, makes it possible to search through 2.6 million high-resolution video films online, then tag and organize them — and, of course, watch them.

The videos you see on sites like wildly popular, San Mateo-based YouTube and Mountain View-based Google Video are hosted — that is, stored on and served from — those sites. That means when you visit there, you can only watch videos from their site. Dabble searches the Internet for videos, then, like YouTube or photo site Flickr, lets you classify them in categories such as "comedy," cooking" or "politics."

Video is sizzling hot these days, with almost one-quarter of all Internet users — 24 percent — accessing video at least once a week, and 46 percent doing so at least once a month, according to a study by the Online Publishers Association. Some 18 billion videos streamed online in 2005, up from 14.2 billion in 2004, according to AccuStream iMedia Research.

"Well over 90 percent of peoples' time online is spentwith content, news being the number one category," said Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. "But video, of which news is the content leader, will be increasingly prominent in terms of what users do online."...

"We are getting 30,000 to 50,000 unique visitors daily. Not bad for a company that's only two months old," Hodder said. "We're very happy with the traffic."

Analyst Brian Haven of Forrester Research has commented that video sites "are becoming a dime a dozen," and Hodder readily acknowledges that there are some 260 such sites online. But Dabble is different, she says, because it searches the Web for videos instead of hosting them. Dabble currently has access to 2.6 million of the estimated 8 million videos online, and is working to get permission to aggregate the remainder.

http://www.insidebayarea.com/search/ci_4457347

Site helps fans play with videos
By Janis Mara, BUSINESS WRITER
Article Last Updated:10/07/2006 06:20:49 AM PDT

A GUINEA PIG SPROUTS Romaine lettuce wings and soars aloft to a song by TMarie, a housewife shares her recipes for perfect chocolate chip cookies, and PresidentBush "sings" U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" in the top 10 video playlists on Berkeley-based video Web site Dabble.com.

The site, launched just two months ago by Mary Hodder of Berkeley, makes it possible to search through 2.6 million high-resolution video films online, then tag and organize them — and, of course, watch them.

The videos you see on sites like wildly popular, San Mateo-based YouTube and Mountain View-based Google Video are hosted — that is, stored on and served from — those sites. That means when you visit there, you can only watch videos from their site. Dabble searches the Internet for videos, then, like YouTube or photo site Flickr, lets you classify them in categories such as "comedy," cooking" or "politics."

Video is sizzling hot these days, with almost one-quarter of all Internet users — 24 percent — accessing video at least once a week, and 46 percent doing so at least once a month, according to a study by the Online Publishers Association. Some 18 billion videos streamed online in 2005, up from 14.2 billion in 2004, according to AccuStream iMedia Research.

"Well over 90 percent of peoples' time online is spentwith content, news being the number one category," said Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. "But video, of which news is the content leader,
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will be increasingly prominent in terms of what users do online."

Hodder, Dabble's founder and chief executive, works out daily at a Berkeley gym just two blocks from the office and emanates a fresh-scrubbed glow of excitement over her newly launched business.

"I was just writing a search algorithm," says the 39-year-old CEO, leading the way up the stairs to a light-flooded office overlooking University Avenue in the heart of downtown Berkeley, where she and her nine employees work 10-hour days.

As new dot-coms launch and venture capital flows, a resurgence of the former dot-com boom dubbed "Web 2.0" is under way, and Dabble is part of it. Though most Web 2.0 startups are in San Francisco, as they were back in the late 1990s, both Dabble and another video-oriented site, Fliqz, launched in Berkeley in the last four months.

Like the dot-coms of days gone by, Dabble is funded by angel investors. Somewhat uncomfortably, like those long-gone dot-coms, the site isn't making any money. But there's a revenue model in place and a newly hired business manager to handle it. Like YouTube and most of the other video-oriented sites, Dabble.com plans to make money from advertising. Hodder says that she is already getting calls from potential advertisers.

"We are getting 30,000 to 50,000 unique visitors daily. Not bad for a company that's only two months old," Hodder said. "We're very happy with the traffic."

Analyst Brian Haven of Forrester Research has commented that video sites "are becoming a dime a dozen," and Hodder readily acknowledges that there are some 260 such sites online. But Dabble is different, she says, because it searches the Web for videos instead of hosting them. Dabble currently has access to 2.6 million of the estimated 8 million videos online, and is working to get permission to aggregate the remainder.

Dabble has a long way to go to catch up with YouTube, which accounts nearly half of all videos watched online with about 100 million viewings daily and has, according to Neilsen NetRatings, 20 million unique visitors a month. However, as Hodder points out, YouTube has been around a year and a half, and Dabble only two months.

Hodder, who holds a master's degree in information science from the University of California, Berkeley, worked at Technorati, is an information architect for several Web service companies with social media sites, and blogs for Napsterization and Berkeley news site Beast Blog.

"As more and more people make video, there's a giant fire hose of information online," Hodder said. "We're hoping to help people find what they're looking for."

Business Writer Janis Mara can be reached at (510) 208-6468 or jmara@angnewspapers.com.

Hey I forgot to let you know that I'll send you a free "dabbler" t-shirt if you try to remember to send me a picture of you wearing it for the Dabble Blog.

Just email me at lisa@dabble.com

Dabbler videos are also encouraged! We feature a
Video of the Day every day.

These usually get seen by a lot of people and get to bounce around in our popularity algorithms for a while.

The next one could be yours!

I've been putting a lot of playlists together for all sorts of stuff.

You can sort them by title or date created/updated.

Do check them out and lemme know what you think.

Here's one of my favorite memories of 2003 - The Jessica Lynch Rescue Hoax

First we heard about Jessica Lynch as a private who was attacked and fought down to here last bullet - even whipped out her knife, because she would not be taken alive!

Then we see the staged rescue where she was supposedly being held captive at the hospital.

Jessica Lynch

The other four people Miller saved

Turns out:

1) She was in a convoy accident/She was never in combat

2) She was being treated very nicely in the Iraqi hospital. There was no need to rescue her.

3) There actually was a hero that day - Patrick Miller - whose story the government decided to cover-up because it made their made up heroics for Jessica look bad.

4) He's such a devoted soldier, he doesn't want to make a big deal about it.

This has all been confirmed by both the BBC and 60 Minutes.

Here's a playlist of these clips so you can see them all easily, whenever it's convenient for you.

If those files are too large for you for some reason, I have them broken down into two and/or three parts here.
Patrick Miller

Hey I finally got my package of Stealing America DVDs.

Write me again at lisa@lisarein.com with your address, ok? I might have lost it already if you wrote me two weeks ago.

As I mentioned earlier, I am not making copies of Dorothy Fadiman's DVD and handing them out. I am choosing to send you one of the stack of copies I was given for my participation in the film.

I'm about to put up a bunch of clips from the movie too.

Let's start figuring out what we're going to do about it this year, if the disenfranchisement happens again.

I've created a bevy of playlists on the Foleygate scandal, so you can watch them in order or skip around to the coverage from different days, or browse by show, or whatever.

I have Foleygate playlists for MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart's Daily Show and Stephen Colbert's Colbert Report, and for different variations on all three shows, by date mainly. These three are the only shows really covering what happened and who was involved.

What's going on, of course, is even worse than was originally believed. It turns out that numerous people went to House Leader Dennis Hastert and told him about Foley's ongoing problem with sending pages both sexually explicit emails and emails that were just kinda creepy (but you got what he was getting at).
The Republican Leadership had known about it for years, and were covering it up for political reasons.

Here are all the Foleygate Playlists

I'm about to add a bunch more clips from this last week over the weekend.

I've made this funny
Chad and Steve playlist!

The first one is the real video from Chad and Steve that they put up after they got bought. The other two are parodies made by YouTube users. Enjoy!

Kind words from documentarian Peter Wintonick:

In terms of figuring out video on the net, of course we have our GooTubes and our Revvers and all the other perfectly great initiatives. But from me, byte by byte, Dabble is the next great thing, the next great think. Co-founder Lisa Rein presented a run-through. She is a multi-talented coder, podcaster, musician, re/mixmash artist and co-founder and first Technical Architect of Creative Commons, and the XML world's "it" girl. That's it as in I.T. If I was an enlightened patron of the electronic arts, or a venture capitalist, and I'll never be because I am still waiting for money to become open-source, Rein and her team at Dabble have cottoned onto something with vision which answers my age old consumer question: How can I get my head around and manage all that video that's out there on the web? Dabble provides an elegant, innovative answer. It zooms through literally millions and millions of clips and video videos out there and brings it all back to us at our little home/work stations. It scans, searches, organizes and indexes it all. It searches, makes sense and shares.

But the real genius is that it doesn't actually need to bring in video from all over the place, it points to that content that partners and creators have out there and lets your keyboard fingers do the rest in a few easy steps. Like all great new things it makes the complicated simple. The nice thing about Dabble for makers and owners of content, is that it's not a spider, and the original creator sources are attributed. And for all of us social networkers, which includes a few social not-workers too, Dabble’s bookmarklets, playlists and all sorts of value added features really do add connective value.

Just released a brand new song: Democracy.

This song comes with its own page to help explain the lyrics.

It's about what has become our sorry excuse for a democracy, and thinking about it for five minutes, in the context of the world at large.

I recorded the guitar and vocals for this on my mac laptop, using Audio Recorder. (I did mix it in protools, but I didn't do anything special that would have required protools.)

Hope you like it. I've made all the source files available for remix, and it's all under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

I decided to allow commercial use of the work. Let's see how far it can get!

So Forbes has a Mention of us in this strange "The Next YouTube" piece it ran.

Careful, when you launch the link, to look for the "stop" link right away, right above the "The Next YouTube" title, or it will start cycling through a bunch of other pages. I'm not sure what effect they're trying for, but the one they've got is definitely as annoying as hell :-)

But nevertheless, of course, nice to see Dabble mentioned in Forbes. And they seem to like us.

Oh yeah - they made Mary a Cal Professor too :-)

From
the article:

Make Your Own Channel

With user-generated photos and videos pouring out of dozens of me-too sites, smart aggregation tools are an obvious next step: Someone needs to keep track of all this stuff. One such solution is Dabble, lauched by University of California-Berkeley professor Mary Hodder in July. Dabble retrieves videos from users’ favorite sites around the web--kind of like a web-based TiVo. The video feeds show up at Dabble as a playlist.

Chopper's Horoscopes

I'll be on a panel October 17th at the Digimart Conference going on in Montreal October 16-18.

The panel I'm on is called
Your Space On My Tube - How to Engage with the Online World and Make Money, hosted by Scott Kirsner of the Cinematech Blog.

Scott's really bringing together a neat group of people, including the Eepybird guys, who did the Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments.

I'm really looking forward to it.

It will be great to be in Montreal again. I used to go to Montreal every year for the small, uber-geeky XML conference that used to go on there every year. I haven't gone to that conference since 2000 or so, and I had really missed Montreal.

Getting ready for the conference also forced me to write up an updated bio.

A couple of you have bugged me about this over the years, and I just didn't have time to think about it until recently. Sorry!

I'm finally going to go back and bring it all up to date. There's a lot going on, and I want you to know about it, so you can help me do better at everything. (Like always :-)

I had a great time guest co-hosting with RU Sirius and Jeff Diehl on this week's RU Sirius show. (MP3 - 26 MB)

We talked about election fraud (what a surprise) and interviewed Dan the Automator (Dan's myspace page).

Photos are forthcoming, but I hate to hold up posting for anything these days, because I seem to never get back to it...

Nice Diebold Playlist on Dabble of 8 videos on the subject.

Check out all the other cool playlists I've been making at Dabble, and sign up and make one yourself!

Here's a good one by Ed Felten and friends on their latest one minute diebold hack.

As usual, Tailrank has a nice memepage about it from the blogosphere.

It's quite a tangled cover-up. One that stretches far and wide across the Republican party. I've been collecting footage and actually trying to figure out how everyone's connected and such. They're turning on each other so fast, it's hard to keep up.

So I'll be posting up pieces of the puzzle, and some lists and maps and diagrams and things, so we can sort it all out.

The important part of the story is clear: Republican leaders made a conscious decision to keep quiet about Foley's pedophilia, and they did it for political reasons and personal gain.

Just when I thought these guys couldn't sink any lower. Now kids are fair game.

And they were trying to cover it up straight through to the end. Some of them were trying to strike a deal with ABC news - to give them an exclusive on Foley's resignation if they just wouldn't mention the emails.

It makes me wonder how many other deals like that with the media have been made over the last 6 years.

Oh well -- in this case, ABC News held out! Thanks ABC News :-)

Here's the
ABC News Blog story that got the ball rolling.

ps. I knew the Repubs/Fox News were going to start bringing up Clinton/Lewinsky too, but it isn't a fair comparison, because they were two consenting adults (she was 22!) -- end of story.

pps. Now Fox News has Foley as a (D) Democrat when they show any clips of him!
wow! that's good! (More on this soon!)

Court temporarily OKs domestic spying
By Dan Sewell, Associated Press

The Bush administration can continue its warrantless surveillance program while it appeals a judge's ruling that the program is unconstitutional, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday...

The unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave little explanation for the decision. In the three-paragraph ruling, judges said that they balanced the likelihood an appeal would succeed, the potential damage to both sides and the public interest...

The ACLU contends that the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which set up the secret court to grant warrants for such surveillance, gave the government enough tools to monitor suspected terrorists.

"We are confident that when the 6th Circuit addresses the merits of this case, it will agree that warrantless wiretapping of Americans violates the law and is unconstitutional," Melissa Goodman, an ACLU attorney, said in a news release.

Similar lawsuits challenging the program have been filed by other groups, including in New York and San Francisco. The issue could wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061004/ap_on_re_us/domestic_spying

CINCINNATI - The Bush administration can continue its warrantless surveillance program while it appeals a judge's ruling that the program is unconstitutional, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.
ADVERTISEMENT


Yes No
Yes No

Yes No

The president has said the program is needed in the war on terrorism; opponents argue it oversteps constitutional boundaries on free speech, privacy and executive powers.

The unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave little explanation for the decision. In the three-paragraph ruling, judges said that they balanced the likelihood an appeal would succeed, the potential damage to both sides and the public interest.

The Bush administration applauded the decision.

"We are pleased to see that it will be allowed to continue while the Court of Appeals examines the trial court's decision, with which we strongly disagree," Deputy White House press secretary Dana Perino said in a statement.

The program monitors international phone calls and e-mails to or from the United States involving people the government suspects have terrorist links. A secret court has been set up to grant warrants for such surveillance, but the government says it can't always wait for a court to take action.

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit ruled Aug. 17 that the program was unconstitutional because it violates the rights to free speech and privacy and the separation of powers.

The Justice Department had urged the appeals court to allow it to keep the program in place while it argues its appeal, claiming that the nation faced "potential irreparable harm" and would be more vulnerable to a terrorist attack. The appeal is likely to take months.

"This program is both critical to preventing terrorist attacks and fully consistent with law," said Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse.

The
American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in January seeking to stop the program on behalf of journalists, scholars and lawyers who say it has made it difficult for them to do their jobs because they believe many of their overseas contacts are likely targets. Many said they had been forced to take expensive and time-consuming overseas trips because their contacts wouldn't speak openly on the phone or because they didn't want to violate their contacts' confidentiality.

The ACLU contends that the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which set up the secret court to grant warrants for such surveillance, gave the government enough tools to monitor suspected terrorists.

"We are confident that when the 6th Circuit addresses the merits of this case, it will agree that warrantless wiretapping of Americans violates the law and is unconstitutional," Melissa Goodman, an ACLU attorney, said in a news release.

Similar lawsuits challenging the program have been filed by other groups, including in New York and San Francisco. The issue could wind up before the
U.S. Supreme Court.

I knew Chris Paine way back in 1993, when I was working with him on Telemorphix's 21st Century Vaudeville. He was a really sweet, smart, and very creative guy with big ideas about everything. Nice to see him pull it all together to create his little masterpiece, Who Killed the Electric Car?.

Chris Paine On The Daily Show (Quicktime, 15 MB)

Dabble Record for this interview

Due to an unexpected hosting emergency, my Songs From The Commons podcasts were down for a week or so.

They're back up now on the Mondoglobo site, and hopefully the blog part of it will be back soon too.

I've created my own archive that will always be available here as a backup too.

I have show 16 in the works. All this other stuff has kinda taken over lately, but I'll try to wrap it up this weekend.

So a lot is going on lately. There's so much going on, that I don't know where to begin in explaining it. So I'll just start putting stuff up...

It's all good, in different ways. On the creative musical and video front, I've been preparing a lot over this last month that I'm ready to start rolling out over these next few weeks. On the Dabble front, we're ready to roll out some new features and are adding a ton of new content collections from all sorts of cool websites. On the Wide Hive Records front, we have a number of new releases, and I sing background vocals on three different tracks on one of them: Salsa Blanco.

On the political front, I finally made time for a political fundraiser last Friday night, to meet a number of Congressional Candidates in this upcoming election, and I was instantly rewarded when none other than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stopped by to say hi.

I'm quite a fan of Bobby's lately, as he has been one of the few people to speak out about the 2004 Election irregularities in two different Rolling Stone articles (Was the 2004 Election Stolen? and Will the 2006 Election Be Hacked?), and on numerous television programs.

It was great to be able to hand him a copy of Stealing America. (There are a several clips of him included in the film.)

It was also a big reminder of the unprecedented attack on the environment by the Bush Administration - another critical reason why we have remove this administration and all the professional crooks that are running it at our earliest opportunity.

Photo by Mike Kash

Dorothy Fadiman has produced a new documentary, called Stealing America, that is based largely on a lot of the information that I put together in the Electon 2004 Aftermath category category of my blog.

I'll send you a copy of the DVD if you like, just send me an email with your mailing address.
Update and clarification 10/20/06 - I'm not dubbing copies of Dorothy's movie and giving them away. I earned 100 copies as payment for some archiving I did for the film. Part of our agreement was that I could have 100 copies. I'm choosing to send you one of these 100 copies if you "act now" :-)

I'll also be breaking it up into smaller clips and making it available online later this week.

If anyone can help me make it available in other formats, when I make it available soon, please let me know. It would be very much appreciated.

There's a showing at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, CA this Wednesday, October 4th, featuring Marc Crispin Miller, at 7pm.

There are a couple of other screenings scheduled in Northern California in October, but you can get a copy of the DVD and have a screening or throw a screening party in your town.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the upcoming election and how it seems like the repubs could just use the electronic voting machines and other tactics, like not putting enough machines in democratic precincts, to take over the election again.

To my knowledge, all of the systems that were in place in 2004 remain in place now.

Perhaps if films like Stealing America are seen by voters before this year's election, they will know to report it to the proper authorities if they notice any funny business going on this time.