Danny Glover reports on President Obama’s total restructuring of the White House message machine in a piece ominously titled “The Cost of Controlling The Press.”

Barack Obama’s White House is spending more than $80,000 a week to staff its old and new media offices. Add the price of speechwriters and the White House communications tab reaches nearly $100,000 a week, or nearly $5 million a year-and that is for salaries alone.

[...]

Although other staffers undoubtedly did work on the White House website and other Internet projects, Bush’s dedicated new media team appears to have consisted of two people-a specialty media director who earned $84,000 a year and a website assistant who earned $34,000. By contrast, Obama has the 11 employees in the Office of Public Engagement and another nine aides with titles such as new media director, new media creative director, deputy director of video and e-mail content/design lead. Those nine earn nearly $700,000 a year combined.

One has to read well into the piece, however, to understand that this is mostly a reshuffle of existing resources:

Overall, Obama is spending about 12 percent more for his communications operation than Bush-$4.97 million compared with $4.44 million.

So, while the White House spending nearly $5 million in taxpayer dollars for propaganda  seems outrageous on its face, it’s essentially par for the course. Presumably, the increase is a combination of cost-of-living adjustments and a reallocation of staff from other areas to communications. After all, Congress controls presidential spending on staff.

More troubling: Glover notes that the new communications team has managed to bypass the already Obama-friendly press on numerous occasions, including staged “town hall” meetings with preselected guests and even disinviting the press entirely from mundane events like photo-ops with championship sports teams, preferring to produce their own videos for release on the Web.

I don’t like it.  But, again, it’s a natural evolution of the system.  Ronald Reagan’s team was legendary for limiting access to the president and ensuring that their preferred sound byte was pretty much all the press had to report in a given day.  Bill Clinton famously bypassed the more difficult talk shows during the 1992 campaign, instead going on talk radio and late night comedy shows.  George W. Bush and his team gave more time to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and other friendly outlets.   Obama is taking that to the next level using social media techniques that PR firms have been advocating for their clients for years.

Again, this is probably not healthy.  The press is an important check on our politicians and, to the extent the politicians can bypass the press to get their message out, we lose that check.  It’s especially problematic at times, like the present, when the White House and Capitol Hill are controlled by the same party.

It’s quite possible, however, that the press will grow tired of being manipulated in this way and go out and do some actual reporting.  Hanging around the press room for scraps isn’t really journalism, after all.

Jeff Jarvis notes that there has been some controversy over Google’s Streetview, which allows people to see videos of what’s going on in the streets, including residential neighborhoods, in an ever-expanding number of locations.

In a few countries around the world, we’ve seen a backlash against Google’s Streetview as somehow an invasion of privacy, even though what Google captures is the very definition of public: what can be seen in the open.

I wish that journalists would defend Google and its definition of public, for it matters to journalism.

I don’t have strong feelings on Streetview, although I do find it mildly creepy that it’s displaying things going on in residential neighborhoods.  I strikes me that the good purposes to which this could be applied are few and the nefarious purposes are many.

What interests me about Jeff’s post, though, is how far he takes the argument.

No, public is public. We need that to be the case, for journalism and for society. We must protect the idea of public.

He contends, for example, that politicians caught in Amsterdam’s Red Light district, cracks in bridges, and the protests on the streets of Iran are public activities and those wishing to hide these things from the public shouldn’t be allowed to do so on some notion of “privacy.”  I’ve got no problem with any of that, although I do think there ought to be some sense of privacy even out in public.  Journalists and television cameras camped out on the sidewalks in front of some person’s house tend to go too far and, certainly, the scummy paparazzi that chase celebrities around hoping to get photographs to sell to the tabloids do.  Where precisely one draws that line, though, I don’t know.

Indeed, I’d say this doctrine should stretch to saying that everything a public official does is public – everything except matters of security. Thus Britain’s MPs would not be allowed to black out their spending of taxpayers’ money. Thus the default in American government would be transparency, making any official’s actions and information open and searchable. Thus anyone in Ft. Greene could scour Streetview to look for unsafe buildings.

This seems to mix apples and oranges.  I fully agree that how politicians spend our money ought to be absolutely transparent with, as Jeff says, some exceptions on matters of security.  But, surely, everything a Member of Congress or other public official does shouldn’t be “open and searchable”?  Their Netflix queues?  Their bank records?  Their kids’ report cards?  Where do we draw the line? Even public officials are entitled to have private lives.

Photo: Bad Control

Members of Congress are flooding YouTube with scads of amateurish, unwatchable videos, The Telegraph’s Mark Coleman reports.

Two months ago, the website added an official Congress channel, inviting Democrats and Republicans to share quirky political messages with voters.  But analysts say the move has been hampered by politicians’ inability to adapt to an online audience.

Andrew Rasiej, founder of the political technology site Personal Democracy Forum, said too many messages consist of warbling monologues that miss the point.

Other postings, including one by Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, were said to be too eccentric or random to resonate.  In a minute-long video, Mrs Pelosi showed footage of her life behind the scenes in the Capitol Building through the eyes of two pet cats. Making matters more bizarre, the minute-long film was captured to the strains of Rick Astley’s disco hit, Never Going To Give You Up.

Mr Rasiej said: “The problem for Nancy Pelosi, or anyone who tries to do this, is that you can’t fake authenticity. “The more you try to make the video authentic, the more inauthentic it becomes. And Nancy Pelosi’s cat video is the perfect example of overdoing it, and watching one’s head disappear in a pool of quicksand.”

In another video, Democrat Tim Ryan promoted the virtues of driving an environmental car by referring to the vehicle as a “chick magnet”.

This is amusing on a lot of levels.  But, um, wasn’t this the whole idea behind YouTube?

Any idiot can upload any video that they own and anyone can search the site to watch whichever of said videos catches their fancy.  Almost by definition, virtually every video will be amateurish dreck that few people want to watch except in a “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ sort of way.

With few exceptions, the truly good videos on YouTube and similar services are either 1) professional videos posted in violation of someone else’s copyrights, 2) professional videos purporting to be amateur videos until the actual source is ultimately revealed, or 3) pornographic.

via Stephen Green

John Nagl’s classic book on counterinsurgency is called Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. Less insightful, perhaps, but easier to implement is Neil Strauss’ survivalist video, “How to Turn a Cigarette into a Knife.”

Via Noah Shachtman, who has an interview with Strauss and several other videos. (Also, one of the most annoying pop-over ads I’ve yet to encounter.)

From Nick Gillespie and the gang at Reason: “If you find it hard to achieve and maintain growth, maybe Stimulis is right for you. Take Stimulis once every election cycle or whenever you’re in need of economic enhancement.”

And, from Mary Katharine Hamm (via Fausta Wertz): The Snuggie Stimulus!

The gang at JibJab have released a new animation, Time for Some Campaignin‘:

“Like the change we must change and the change we hold dear. I really like change, have I made myself clear?” is probably the best line.

UPDATE:  Newsweek’s Samantha Henig has an interesting interview with JibJab founders Gregg and Evan Spiridellis.

Do you consider the site nonpartisan?
Yeah, absolutely. When we produce political content, we’ll literally sit down and count the gags to make sure they’re even-handed. My brother and I have no political agenda other than to try to make everybody laugh. Personally, I don’t like one-sided, partisan comedy because it’s too easy to make fun of just one side. It’s more fun if you can find the consistent threads and themes that cut across both ways and make fun of that instead.

So you have no interest in influencing voters?
In the 2004 election people said, “How do you feel that your video had maybe impacted the way people voted?” and the answer was “Terrified.” If our videos are informing the way people are voting, then they should turn off the Internet and pick up NEWSWEEK.

But given that you know that you have this audience watching your videos, do you feel some obligation to use that as a way to get information out?
No, that’s not our mission at all. Our mission is to make people laugh. Where I do feel responsibility is to make sure there is no political message—that it stays 100 percent about the fun and the absurdity. The responsibility is not to inform. In my mind there are lots of other sources for information.

Much more at the link.

Daniel Strauss sat through a session at the center-left New America Foundation yesterday and came away with an epiphany about John McCain’s campaign: “It’s what he’s saying, not how he says it.”

Jeremy Rosner observed,

A lot of people have noted he’s just very incoherently between the right and the center, between offshore drilling and $300 million prizes for new electric batteries. … He just hasn’t figured out a strategy for being a presidential candidate. My advice is that he needs to sort of place a clear bet on whether he’s trying to do another Karl Rove base consolidation strategy or whether he’s truly trying to gun for the middle and change the Republican party — he just hasn’t figured that out.

Michael Cohen added,

If I were to ask all of you here ‘What is Barack Obama’s key message for his campaign?’ most of you could probably could answer pretty quickly, I’m assuming you would say change. If I asked you all the same question about John McCain’s campaign message I’m seeing a lot of blank faces.

I’d say McCain’s bumper sticker message is “Elect a grown-up.” And I don’t think wanting to drill for more oil while simultaneously trying to end our need for it in the longer term is at all problematic; it’s essentially a right-of-center answer to Bill Clinton’s “third way.”

I do, however, agree with the overall assessment: McCain isn’t running a focused, message based campaign. “Change” and “Hope” continue to strike me as an incredibly weak platform on which to seek the presidency but there’s not much doubt that we could use some of both. McCain’s got an uphill fight if he wants to convince people to vote to keep the White House in Republican hands and trust the cranky, old guy rather than the exciting, young one. Continually showing us videos of himself in a POW camp won’t get it done.

via Hal Hildebrand

As if to prove Robert Heinlein correct, the House Administration Committee is, apparently with honorable intent, considering effectively banning the use of popular social media sites, including YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook by Members.

Soren Dayton couches this in partisan terms: “In typical fashion, House Democrats are trying to pass rules that stifle debate and require regulation.” In fact, though, it appears that existing rules are being interpreted by some to preclude Members from posting on these sites and the current effort is to address that.

The Franking Commission, created to govern how Congress used their right to mail letters to constituents for free, apparently “frowns on official links to campaign-related Web sites, political parties, advocacy groups and ‘any site the primary purpose of which is the conduct of commerce.’” That’s understandable, if highly problematic in the current communications environment.

Aaron Brazell posts a letter from Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Massachusetts 8th) to HAC Chairman Robert Brady suggesting a workaround, noting for example that the “existing tools available within the House to [post videos] are not user-friendly or efficient, and that in addition, server space withn the House is currently insufficient to meet the growing demand for video.”  He proposes a series of guidelines to solve this problem:

• Official content posted on an external domain must be clearly identified as produced by a House office for official purposes, and meet existing content rules and regulations;
• To the maximum extent possible, the official content should not be posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information or any other information not in compliance with the House’s content guidelines.
• Any link from a House website to an external site on which the Member video is hosted must contain an exit notice.
• CHA, the Office of Web Assistance (OWA), or other designated House entity should maintain a list of external sites that meet whatever requirements are established by the CHA

The partisan angle is being pushed especially hard by Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) who, as Mike Masnick puts it, has “been using Twitter to ignite a totally misguided partisan war, pretending (falsely) that Democrats are trying to prevent him from using Twitter.”  Indeed, Culberson’s name, which I must admit I can’t recall previously having heard, appears in virtually every blog post I’ve seen on the subject.

Masnick appears to be right that Capuano is trying to “make it easier to post content on various social media sites.”  But the rules are so hamhanded that they’ll make things harder.  Jesse Stay points out that, “this would rule out any Twitter communication because by law, each Tweet would need to be prepended by a disclaimer, identifying it as being produced by a House office for official purposes and, as Culberson puts it, that will most likely in and of its self exceed 140 characters. Also, it would mean that any Congressman wishing to use a site such as Twitter to share publicly what is going on in Congress with their constituents will have to get prior approval, censorship essentially, before using such a site or technology.”

Mark Safranski also heard from Culberson and found him persuasive, largely because Nancy Pelosi and others are trying to reimpose the so-called Fairness Doctrine. He figures, “The net effect of the regs would be to make it practically impossible for members of Congress to use social media tools to discuss official business or share video of the same with the public while creating a partisan disparity in what little approved messages might be permitted.” Leaving aside the partisan angle, though and we’re still left with a really bad idea.

[O]n the technological merits alone this may be the goddamn dumbest thing I’ve heard of regarding the internet coming out of Congress in a long, long, time. The dinosaurs who are uncomfortable with computers, the unwashed masses being aware of their actions and free political debate want to turn the clock back to the 1970’s. Except during the 1970’s no one would have dared to propose controlling what  a democratically elected member of Congress could say to their constituents. Doesn’t it register in the Beltway that they are talking about public information that already belongs to the people of the United States? Senators and Congressmen should be interacting with citizens more freely, not less; the U.S. Congress needs radical transparency, not greater opacity imposed by the Democratic House leadership to better hide shady dealings.

It’s a brazenly Orwellian and most likely unconstitutional power grab by the Speaker of the House unlike anything dreamed of by any previous speaker – not Sam Rayburn, not Joseph Cannon. Nobody.

Ed Morrissey has a source (i.e., a flack sending out press releases to friendly bloggers) who says that Diane Feinstein is pushing a similar proposal in the Senate that would have “the Senate Rules Committee would become the Internet speech police for everyone in the Senate.”  Ed says this could have all manner of negative and far-reaching consequences.

David All passes along a message from House Minority Leader John Boehner which says, in part,

If the proposed rule is adopted, the free flow of information over the Internet between Americans and their representatives will be significantly curtailed. Americans who currently use free websites like YouTube to obtain uncensored daily information about congressional policy debates will instead be forced to go to websites “approved” by the House Administration Committee in order to continue getting such information. This would amount to new government censorship of the Internet, by a panel of federal officials that is neither neutral nor independent.

Interestingly, All contends, “not a single complaint had ever been filed against a Member of Congress for their web-use.”

One presumes that the net outcome of all this attention will be that Members are officially allowed to use social media outlets precisely as they’re already doing and that a handful more people will have heard of John Culberson.

John McCain’s latest ad, “Love,” contrasts himself with those dirty hippies who spent the summer of 1968 on sex, drugs, and rock and roll rather than being tortured for their country.

The voiceover:

It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The “Summer Of Love.”

Half a world away, another kind of love — of country.

John McCain: Shot down. Bayoneted. Tortured.

Offered early release, he said, “No.” He’d sworn an oath.

Home, he turned to public service.

His philosophy: before party, polls and self … America.

A maverick, John McCain tackled campaign reform, military reform, spending reform.

He took on presidents, partisans and popular opinion.

He believes our world is dangerous, our economy in shambles.

John McCain doesn’t always tell us what we “hope” to hear.

Beautiful words cannot make our lives better.

But a man who has always put his country and her people before self, before politics can.

Don’t “hope” for a better life. Vote for one.

McCain.

The response I’ve seen so far has been positive.

• Brian Montopoli summarizes the obvious message: “The spot casts presumptive GOP nominee John McCain as a man who served his country abroad while many of his peers were enmeshed in the upheaval of the 1960s at home.”

• DrewM. isn’t so sure, “I think the ad is fine, though I’m not sure tying Obama to the 60s is going to work considering the guy was born in 61.” (The original version of the post, as I got it in Google Reader, had a great line that’s since been redacted: “What’s the next McCain ad going to be…Hey, get off my lawn!?”)

• Matt Yglesias thinks “it’s a decent ad that does the job of simultaneously hitting McCain’s main biographical theme while also trying to position McCain as a candidate for those who think the country’s on the wrong track.”

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (not to mention angering Jim Geraghty) I continue to believe McCain is banging the war hero drum too loudly. He’s quickly getting into Rudy Giuliani a noun, a verb, and 9/11 territory. That he was a grown man dealing with the worst the world has to offer while Obama was in grade school is a point worth making. But it won’t be — nor should it be — enough to get him elected. Elections are about the future, not the distant past.

Some Obama supporters are apparently taking advantage of Google’s terms of service to silence anti-Obama blogs, Simon Owens of Bloggasm reports. The company automatically shuts down sites upon receipt of TOS violation claims until they’re able to do a human audit, a rather slow process with given little priority on the free BlogSpot service.

After some digging it became apparent that several Blogspot accounts had been shut down because of similar spam issues, and nearly all of them had three things in common: Most were pro-Hillary Clinton blogs, all were anti-Barack Obama, and several were listed on justsaynodeal.com, an anti-Obama website.

A “Flag Blog” link sits at the very top of every free Blogspot account. If a person finds objectionable content on a Blogspot site or suspects it’s publishing spam, he or she can click on the link and it will send a notice to Google requesting “human review.”

Larry Johnson and others charge that this is a coordinated effort by “Obama supporters,” a rather nebulous group, but they have no proof as of yet. Certainly, nothing yet ties this to Obama or his campaign team. Sister Toldja says “it wouldn’t be surprising to find out this indeed was happening, considering how so many far left Obama supporters react at the slightest hint of criticism of Barry Oh.”

Indeed. It’s hard to imagine, given the pattern, that “Obama supporters” aren’t behind this. I’d be surprised, indeed, if Obama or senior campaign staff had any knowledge of this. Unless some major news comes out toward that end, then, the Obama angle is only tangentially interesting.

The crucial issue here is the ease with which electronic speech can be stifled. Jim Geraghty observes that “Google may need to revisit its policy in managing Blogspot,” snarking, “At the very least, the system should inquire if the person making the complaint has adopted the middle name “Hussein”. And Warner Todd Huston reminds us that this isn’t a unique occurence, with many conservative blogs having previously fallen victim to Google’s policies.

The power of Google in the marketplace is troubling. I say that as someone who’s an avid user of their products, especially Gmail and Google Search, and who derives some small income through Google’s AdSense program. On the other hand, I also, like most other bloggers, am at the mercy of Google — by far the biggest player in Internet search — for ranking in their system and referred traffic.

As I’ve recounted previously, I’ve been the victim of BlogSpot myself. More than a dozen niche blogs that I had on that domain, including the original incarnation of Outside the Beltway, was summarily “disappeared” and I was unable to get a non-automated response out of Google. I’ve said it before and I repeat: If you’re serious about your blog, get your own domain.

It doesn’t end there, though. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act provides that those who claim copyright infringement on material published on the Web merely have to lodge a formal complaint with the server and the host is obligated to take the material down in short order. The burden of proof is on the publisher, not the claimant, to prove that they have a right to publish the content. That power could easily be abused in an election cycle.

YouTube (which has been absorbed into the Google collective) and various other highly influential online outlets have adopted similar “guilty until proven innocent” rules. I have received several notices from YouTube informing me that a company has claimed a copyright on a posted video and that, while the video I posted would remain operational, all statistics and so forth would be credited to the claimant.

[Claimant] claimed this content as a part of the YouTube Content Identification program. YouTube allows partners to review YouTube videos for content to which they own the rights. Partners may use our automated video / audio matching system to identify their content, or they may manually review videos.

If you believe that this claim was made in error, or that you are otherwise authorized to use the content at issue, you can dispute this claim with [Claimant] and view other options in the Video ID Matches section of your YouTube account. Please note that YouTube does not mediate copyright disputes between YouTube owners. Learn more about video identification disputes.

In fact, the videos in question were legitimately copywrited and I’ve got no quarrel with the outcome. I only posted them to my account to preserve them, having posted videos on OTB only to have the original poster remove them and screw up the post. But the policy here is bizarre: YouTube will take action based on a claim but they provide zero recourse!

Given that online communication is increasingly important in politics and business, we’re going to need a better, more efficient means of dispute resolution than we currently have. Right now, it’s far too easy to do mischief.

Though I’m not that fond of the Democrats on most economic matters, I don’t think they are socialists (what they are would involve a much longer discussion). The idiocy of socialism and national ownership of industry is apparent to most thinking people. Nevertheless, my first reaction to tripe like this is alarm:

Once I have a chance to think about it, though, I realize that FNC and other news organizations have an incentive to keep people worked up: ratings. As ridiculous as the woman being interviewed is, she has almost no chance of seeing her perverse dream through to fruition. Same goes for the Democratic Congressman who is pushing for nationalization. It would revive people’s worst fears regarding Democratic incompetence and ambitions.

I must agree with Allah that it’s still creepy, and alarming.

The cover story of the current Atlantic (Monthly) is an interesting piece by Nicholas Carr which asks, Is Google Making Us Stupid? It begins with the standard “the Internet is giving us short attention spans” meme but eventually gives us much more than that.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

[...]

Reading, explains [Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University], is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Much, much more at the link. It’s worth a read, presuming you have the attention span.

Max Boot and Ross Douthat debate the merits of Carr’s arguments vis-a-vis writing and reading books, with the former emphasizing the Internet’s virtues and the latter the drawbacks. For his part, Matt Yglesias was experiencing the Googlization of his brain but he’s been saved by the gift of Kindle.

My own experience closely mirrors Ezra Klein’s. I can still sit down with a stack of books as efficiently as before if I’ve got a major research project or book review due. But, increasingly, the Internet is my source of first resort for looking up facts, keeping up with the news, and the like. It’s simply a much more efficient means of accessing current information than combing the stacks at the library.

Moreover, half a decade of blogging has transformed me from a pure consumer of information into a content provider. Increasingly, I’m reading with the major purpose of finding topics to blog about and links and information to share with readers. That naturally leads to more skimming and hopping around than reading simply for the sake of deepening one’s own knowledge. But that was just as true when I went from being a political junkie reading non-fiction for enjoyment to a scholar skimming dozens of books and articles for material to use in my research.

CNN has issued a Breaking News alert: “Barack Obama has resigned as a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, his campaign says.”

The story itself is on their Political Ticker blog:

Barack Obama resigned Saturday from his Chicago church — where controversial sermons by his former pastor and other ministers had created repeated political headaches for the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination — his campaign confirmed.

The resignation comes days after the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a visiting Catholic priest, mocked Obama’s Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton, for crying in New Hampshire during the runup to the primary there.

Previously, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — former pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ and Obama’s minister for about 20 years — drew unwanted attention for the campaign when videos of several of his fiery sermons surfaced. In them, Wright suggested the U.S. government may be responsible for the spread of AIDS in the black community and equated some American wartime activities to terrorism.

Obama has said he was not present for the controversial sermons by Wright or Pfleger and had condemned both — most recently saying he was “deeply disappointed” by Pfleger’s “divisive, backward-looking rhetoric.”

This was inevitable, of course. Indeed, I was under the vague impression that Obama had resigned weeks ago after his most vigorous denunciation of Wright.

Dunkin’ Donuts has pulled an ad spot featuring Rachael Ray wearing a scarf around her neck because some thought it was a subtle nod of support to Palestinians.

Does Dunkin’ Donuts really think its customers could mistake Rachael Ray for a terrorist sympathizer? The Canton-based company has abruptly canceled an ad in which the domestic diva wears a scarf that looks like a keffiyeh, a traditional headdress worn by Arab men.
more stories like this

Some observers, including ultra-conservative Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin, were so incensed by the ad that there was even talk of a Dunkin’ Donuts boycott. ‘‘The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad,’’ Malkin yowls in her syndicated column. ‘‘Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant and not-so-ignorant fashion designers, celebrities, and left-wing icons.’’

The company at first pooh-poohed the complaints, claiming the black-and-white wrap was not a keffiyeh. But the right-wing drumbeat on the blogosphere continued and by yesterday, Dunkin’ Donuts decided it’d be easier just to yank the ad.

Said the suits in a statement: ‘‘In a recent online ad, Rachael Ray is wearing a black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design. It was selected by her stylist for the advertising shoot. Absolutely no symbolism was intended. However, given the possibility of misperception, we are no longer using the commercial.’’

The terrorists have won. Or maybe we’ve just gone collectively insane.

I was blissfully unaware of both the commercial and the the controversy surrounding it until seeing a link on memeorandum this morning. But, seriously?

It’s true that wearing the keffiyah as a fashion symbol has been a recurring trend among Palestinian sympathizers and various hipsters over the years. But Ray’s scarf doesn’t look anything like Yasser Arafat’s.

Further, the terrorists wear headdresses because that’s how men throughout the Middle East and North Africa dress. It’s a protective covering for the head in brutally hot climates. In any case, none of them are paisley.

The iconic “spider-web” black-and-white keffiyeh is often displayed symbolically by members of Arafat’s Fatah party (which more generally uses yellow as its party colour), although it has never been able to expropriate it as their exclusive symbol. The zig zag style of stitching is sometimes described as symbolic of their historic struggle and their inability to progress towards their objectives without having to avoid obsticles. This is in contrast to how many members of the radical leftist PLO factions (such as PFLP, PFLP-GC DFLP) prefer the checkered red keffieyhs — red being both the traditional colour of the workers’ movement and the red scarf supposedly more indicative of a bedouin and rural (thus poorer, more popular) background. The Islamist factions, such as Hamas, use green — representative of the Islamic faith — as a party color, but for keffiyehs they stick to the traditional black-and-white or red variants, with no particular preference evident. While widely known, this color symbolism is by no means universally accepted by all Palestinians, and its importance should not be overstated — red or black-and-white scarves are used by Palestinians of all political stripes, as well as by those with no particular political sympathies.

But, just to be safe, we should assume that every white chick wearing a scarf is a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer. Ray’s lucky her ad’s just been canceled and she hasn’t been hauled off to Gitmo for questioning.

UPDATE: Via Steven Taylor, I see that Tom Grant has discovered a much more egregious example of terror chic:

These fiends are everywhere. (While Taylor is reminded of an old Monty Python sketch about communists, it seems more to me like Ray Stevens’ “Santa Claus is Watching You.”)

Meanwhile, Doug Mataconis thinks sympathy for Arafat is the least of Ray’s crimes.

(And while we’re on the subject, what’s with the extraneous “a” in Ray’s first name? Perhaps another homage to Arafat? Or . . . Al Qaeda?)

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has even caught Meghan McCain — daughter of Juan McCain, hero of the Reconquista — wearing a purple plaid scarf keffiyah! Gawker has the photographic evidence. Nick Denton’s terrorist loving staff thinks it’s funny. They won’t think it’s funny, though, when the Straight Talk Express rams into Gawker HQ and explodes!

Leonce Gaiter believes that ,”If Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his former disciple, Barack Obama were white, this would not be a story.” He contends that, “White pastors have been spewing hateful bile and filth for generations. But it’s white bile, and that makes all the difference.”

Ezra Klein disagrees slightly, arguing, “Americans recoil from the Chomskyite critique, and any Democratic candidate whose personal relationships implied a sympathy for that worldview would have a tough time of it.”

But I read Gaiter as saying something different than that. If a white pastor were saying exactly what Wright did, it would be, frankly, really strange. Even in the most liberal circles, not many white preachers are likely to think that AmeriKKKa is deliberately infecting blacks with the AIDS virus and so forth. Rather, Gaiter is arguing that it would not be news if a white pastor proclaimed the white equivalent of Wright’s views.

There, I think, he’s wrong. Indeed, I think the backlash would be much, much stronger. We’re simply more tolerant of racism and anti-Americanism coming from an elderly black man than from a white man because there’s a sense that our history entitled them to a certain bitterness.

Gaiter is correct that “white pastors have been spewing hateful bile and filth for generations.” But we’re not talking about some random yahoo behind a pulpit but rather a close associate and mentor of a leading contender for the presidency. If a white presidential candidate had sat in a pulpit listening to this sort of nonsense for two decades — and the church put out videos — you bet we’d hear about it.

Look at all the controversy that ensues when, for example, Republican candidates make a speech at Bob Jones University. In those cases, the politician is merely giving a speech. Even the more mainstream nonsense put out by the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and James Dobson is heavily scrutinized — and rightly so — and candidates who are endorsed by these people are called on to renounce the more asinine comments.

Barack Obama has benefited tremendously by being a tabula rasa. His lack of experience and public record has mostly worked to his advantage until now. He’s a friendly, inspiring, fresh face upon whom people can project their own hopes, dreams, and values. Now, though, as he gets much closer to being the Democratic nominee, he’s coming under heavier scrutiny. And any damaging information is more powerful than it would otherwise be simply because people know relatively little about him.

My guess remains that he’ll mostly put this behind him and win the nomination and that it’ll have a marginal impact by the time the general election rolls around. If the race is close, with marginal outcomes in a handful of states deciding the outcome, this could be one of the things that decides it. But a dozen other issues and events will likely have a greater bearing on the outcome.