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It is a misnomer to call the Tea Party a protest movement. It's just a bumper sticker movement spawned in irrational anger but without coherent protest. Genuine protest over war, injustice, racism, bigotry, and crimes of all kinds produces great protest poetry, the outpouring of inspired language capable of moving others and producing genuine change. I think of Allen Ginsburg's “Howl,” which begins, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness….” or Lawrence Ferlinghetti singing, “I am awaiting a rebirth of wonder,” or Adrienne Rich saying, “The moment of change is the only poem.” There's also my friend Alec Emerson who wrote a poem in memory of Kent State.

A girl, half kneels, awkwardly, beside a corpse.
Looking up, in stunned agony, she
raises one arm.
The Ohio National Guard
reloads to protect itself.

These and other protest poems arise from outrage but are expressed in a quieter insight, using language to arouse feeling and to mourn or take action or effect a change of heart. But this Tea Party movement has no heart and thus no poetry in it. It has only bumper stickers, like

I Am Not Your ATM
I Voted for Change, Not more Taxation
I Voted for Obama, Not Debt for Our Children
I Want My Country Back!
I Will Keep my Freedom, my Guns, my Money. You Keep THE CHANGE!
I Will Not Grab My Ankles

What drives these people is anger generated not by injustice, war, bigotry, racism, or crime but anger generated by fear, the fear that their America is changing, that providing health care, for example, for all Americans will ask them to share what they have and to level the playing field of opportunity for all Americans.

One of our great founding thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great, great grandsire of my friend Alec Emerson, spoke and wrote about America as Opportunity and because he had witnessed the destructive nature of illness, said this about the importance of good health:

…but I will say, get health. No labor, pains, temperance, poverty, nor exercise, that can gain it, must be grudged. For sickness is a cannibal which eats up all the life and youth it can lay hold of, and absorbs its own sons and daughters. I figure it as a pale, wailing, distracted phantom, absolutely selfish, heedless of what is good and great, attentive to its sensations, losing its soul, and afflicting other souls with meanness and mopings, and with ministration to its voracity of trifles.

Among the thirty-three advanced countries in the world, only America does not offer its citizens universal health care, and if the Tea Party has its way, ObamaCare, as they call it, will die in the womb and be stillborn. Somebody find me a poem about stopping health care or why illness is a good thing and should be cherished, or, perhaps a poem about denying an Hispanic child the right to a good education.

No, the so-called Tea Party movement will die childless because it has no soul as well as no heart, which is why they won't win in politics. As we say in sport, they haven't a prayer of winning the game.

It is a misnomer to call the Tea Party a protest movement. It's just a bumper sticker movement spawned in irrational anger but without coherent protest. Genuine protest over war, injustice, racism, bigotry, and crimes of all kinds produces great protest poetry, the outpouring of inspired language capable of moving others and producing genuine change. I think of Allen Ginsburg's “Howl,” which begins, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness….” or Lawrence Ferlinghetti singing, “I am awaiting a rebirth of wonder,” or Adrienne Rich saying, “The moment of change is the only poem.” There's also my friend Alec Emerson who wrote a poem in memory of Kent State.

A girl, half kneels, awkwardly, beside a corpse.
Looking up, in stunned agony, she
raises one arm.
The Ohio National Guard
reloads to protect itself.

These and other protest poems arise from outrage but are expressed in a quieter insight, using language to arouse feeling and to mourn or take action or effect a change of heart. But this Tea Party movement has no heart and thus no poetry in it. It has only bumper stickers, like

I Am Not Your ATM
I Voted for Change, Not more Taxation
I Voted for Obama, Not Debt for Our Children
I Want My Country Back!
I Will Keep my Freedom, my Guns, my Money. You Keep THE CHANGE!
I Will Not Grab My Ankles

What drives these people is anger generated not by injustice, war, bigotry, racism, or crime but anger generated by fear, the fear that their America is changing, that providing health care, for example, for all Americans will ask them to share what they have and to level the playing field of opportunity for all Americans.

One of our great founding thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great, great grandsire of my friend Alec Emerson, spoke and wrote about America as Opportunity and because he had witnessed the destructive nature of illness, said this about the importance of good health:

…but I will say, get health. No labor, pains, temperance, poverty, nor exercise, that can gain it, must be grudged. For sickness is a cannibal which eats up all the life and youth it can lay hold of, and absorbs its own sons and daughters. I figure it as a pale, wailing, distracted phantom, absolutely selfish, heedless of what is good and great, attentive to its sensations, losing its soul, and afflicting other souls with meanness and mopings, and with ministration to its voracity of trifles.

Among the thirty-three advanced countries in the world, only America does not offer its citizens universal health care, and if the Tea Party has its way, ObamaCare, as they call it, will die in the womb and be stillborn. Somebody find me a poem about stopping health care or why illness is a good thing and should be cherished, or, perhaps a poem about denying an Hispanic child the right to a good education.

No, the so-called Tea Party movement will die childless because it has no soul as well as no heart, which is why they won't win in politics. As we say in sport, they haven't a prayer of winning the game.

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Publishing A Children's Book

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Material from:How To Publish A Childrens Book

Bleeding Cool recently posted that Mark Millar was planning to pitch Marvel a sequel to his Wolverine arc Old Man Logan. Well, Mark has posted that e-mail conversation between himself and Marvel CCO Joe Quesada.

On Jun 30, 2010, at 4:37 PM, Mark Millar wrote:

My dear Joe,

You know that Old Man Logan sequel I’ve had in my head since last year? The one I was swearing I was going to write? Well, I was flying home from a wee break last night and I mapped out about half of it. Very excited about it and would love to get going on it towards the end of the year.

You game?

MM

On 1 Jul 2010, at 05:39, JoeyDaQ wrote:

My dearest Scotish Bastard:

Give me a day to th–YES!!!!!

There you have it folks. There’s life in the old adamantium bones yet. No word yet of Steve McNiven’s involvement however…

SWIPE FILE: Grant Morrison’s Sinatoro and Gary Erskine’s Earthfall

The first is the poster image for Sinatoro, the movie for which Grant Morrison is writing the screenplay.

The second is a colour version of the cover for the planned-but-cancelled Zombieworld series Earthfall from Dark Horse, …

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A study conducted by usability consultant Jakob Nielsen claims that reading on e-book readers like the iPad and the Kindle still doesn't match up to the reading speed of good old printed paper. The test chose 32 people (admittedly a small sample, but one that was felt to be representative of an e-reader audience), taught them how to read on both the Kindle and the iPad, and then clocked their speed in reading through an Ernest Hemingway story on both devices, a PC-based reader, and the printed word.

It turns out, according to the study, that the iPad was generally faster than the Kindle at reading speed — about 6.2% slower than reading a normal book, compared to the Kindle's 10.7% slower than the printed word. The way it all worked out, there was no actual significant difference between the iPad and the Kindle, so the study can't say officially which one of those is faster. But the difference between the Kindle and the book was significant, so reading print is faster than e-readers so far.

The iPad and the Kindle barely beat the book in ease-of-use, while the PC lagged way behind, so the study is still bullish on e-readers in general. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of reasoning on why the e-readers are slower — is the audience just not used to them, or is there something in the mechanics that make things slower? Since e-readers can adapt for usability and your standard book is pretty much as good as it's going to get, we'll likely see the iPad overtake a printed page in usability very soon.

[via PC World]

Dear Steve:

Everybody seems to be emailing you these days about the whole iPhone 4 antenna issue and giving you guys grief over it, but don't worry, I'm not writing you about that.

Back in December of 2008, I–or rather my Romanian developer, Alex Brie–submitted my self-published mystery novel, Knife Music, as a book app to your App Store. After waiting a week for it to be reviewed, I was stunned to learn my app was rejected for having “objectionable content” (your gatekeepers even sent a screen shot of the tawdry bit they didn't like).

I never thought my book was all that racy, although it does have some mature themes, such as teen suicide and male doctors' sometimes uneasy relationships with their female patients. But it wasn't any more risqué than many popular novels these days–or the lyrics to all those rap songs and R-rated movies you have in iTunes.

Anyway, after being disappointed for a couple of minutes, I realized, hey, wait, Apple just rejected my book! In my day job, I'm an executive editor at CNET, so I have decent instincts about what makes a good tech story, though it doesn't take a genius to figure out that anything Apple related–especially something with a negative slant–seems to light up the traffic numbers. All the major tech sites picked up on the story, including our own CNET News as well as your personal favorite, Gizmodo, and some more mainstream pubs.

Suddenly, a lot more folks were aware that my book existed. As I said, I self-published the thing, but not before having some frustratingly close calls with major publishers–or so my high-powered agent said. After so many passes, it was nice to get a rejection that turned out to be good!

The only problem was I didn't have an app and I really wanted one (it's not about writing the Great American Novel anymore, it's about writing the Great American App, right?). So, in an effort to adhere to Apple's standards, I stripped out every naughty word in my book. It wasn't that hard, because, as I said, I'm no Henry Miller. And lo and behold, once I did this, my app was approved.

Not surprisingly, I got a little grief for censoring myself, but I write for the Web, and I'm used to being flexible and updating my reviews and stories as companies upgrade their software and sometimes make critical fixes. When the app was accepted, it quickly shot to #7 in the free book apps list and stayed in the top 100 for four months until I took it down. I don't have to tell you how popular the iPhone is, but over 1,000 people a week were downloading the ebook and I was getting emails from readers in places as far away as Malta (yes, they speak English there).

All that awareness also helped sales of the paperback, which I published through Amazon (Booksurge) and on the Kindle, where I was selling it for $3.99 and it briefly hit #1 in the legal thriller category (this was before Grisham was published digitally, however).

Anyway, after a little over four and half months on the market, a local TV station in New York, NY1, did a story on the book, which led to some renewed interest from publishers and an eventual contract from The Overlook Press, which is publishing Knife Music this month in hardcover, with an ebook edition to follow from Penguin, which distributes Overlook titles.

Was it all due to my iPhone app? Probably not, but it was certainly a major help, and it may be the first iPhone app that's been turned into a hardcover book.

I'm also happy to report my developer recently submitted a new, uncensored Knife Music iPhone/iPad app–it's about 40 percent of the book, not the full book, but it is free–and it was approved, with a NC-17 rating (or whatever you guys call it). So there's definitely been some progress and glad you guys listened to all of the complaints from authors who felt their book apps were unfairly rejected.

Personally, now that iBooks has arrived, I think standalone, text-based book apps are a dying breed, but the future is bright for more graphically rich and interactive book apps. I only did the app again because you guys aren't allowing authors to submit free ebooks to the iBooks Store and neither is Amazon or Barnes & Noble without some special arrangement with the publisher. I also put the excerpt up on Scribd for a limited time, though the iPhone/iPad has two bonus chapters.

Anyway, thanks again. And thanks for having a good sense of humor about some of the Apple articles I've written over the years at CNET, including my latest series on the iPad and the one where I had you and Jeff Bezos going at it in a fictional conversation, discussing the arrival of the Kindle. You do have a sense of humor, don't you? If you don't, you know there's an app for that.

In finishing, I'd like to invite you to my reading on July 27 at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park (7 p.m.), just a couple of miles from where you live. I grew up in Palo Alto and much of Knife Music takes place in the area. Come by and support a great independent bookstore that was included in the Huffington Post's recent list of favorite independent bookstores.

Sincerely,

David Carnoy

David Carnoy is an executive editor at CNET.com and the author of “Knife Music,” a novel that has nothing to do with technology.

Lost looker Evangeline Lilly dropped by Craig Ferguson’s couch last night for some after-hours chit chat. And after covering a few non-kid-friendly topics (Ferguson’s snake-shape mug, the potential removability of Lilly’s dress, etc.), she shifted gears to give a sneak peek of a children’s book she’s writing called Squickerwonkers (we’re guessing at the spelling there). Here’s a sample:

“The name is Squickerwonker, perhaps unknown to you. But that’s it, Squickerwonker. And here’s what Squickerwonkers do…”

Of course, Lilly didn’t spend six years on that island for nothing: She ends her little recitation with a Lost-worthy cliffhanger about the Squickerwonker’s “horrible secret.”

Are they actually smoke monsters? Or maybe they exist in an alternate universe? Lilly says she doesn’t have any firm publishing plans yet for the book, so I guess we’ll all just have to hang in there for a while. But you know what? The whole thing actually sounds kind of cute.  We’d totally pre-order a copy for ourselves our appropriately aged cousins next Christmas.

What do you think PopWatchers? Check out the clip below and then let us know: should Lilly take a crack at children’s book writing?

I had a hard cover book, probably from the early to mid 1970's, about the history of words. It was illustrated in a very psychedelic style (think Peter Max or Yellow Submarine).

Details are sketchy, but I seem to recall it having an explanation of the origins of the word "bus" and "omnibus". I believe it also used the example of "ghoti" being a possible spelling of fish.

I have no idea what the title is.

It may have been associated with the Childcraft and/or World Book series.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer:

This year, the conversation was mellower.

Participants in the National Book Critics Circle panel on the future of book reviews chatted about e-galleys, the elegance of deckle-edged pages and the perils e-blast publicity in a Book Expo America session that registered fewer sparks than the one in 2009.

Read the whole story: The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Get HuffPost Books On
Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz!

Know something we don't? E-mail us at Books@huffingtonpost.com

Publishers Weekly:

A swarm of book bloggers converged on Javits Center in their first convention last Friday, which drew 250 people to a day-long lineup of speakers and panels following Book Expo America.

Read the whole story: Publishers Weekly

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Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz!

Know something we don't? E-mail us at Books@huffingtonpost.com

The New York Post:

One of the most powerful agents in the literary world, Esther Newberg, blasted rival super agent Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie for what she claims is his long-running practice of poaching writers from other agents.

Read the whole story: The New York Post

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Know something we don't? E-mail us at Books@huffingtonpost.com

US Lawmakers Target The Pirate Bay, Other Sites

A group of U.S. lawmakers targets The Pirate Bay and other sites as notorious for copyright infringement.

by Grant Gross

Wednesday, May 19, 2010 01:30 PM PDT

The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus, a group of U.S. lawmakers concerned with copyright infringement, has listed The Pirate Bay and five other Web sites as “notorious” file-sharing sites.

In addition to The Pirate Bay of Sweden, the caucus put isoHunt of Canada, Mp3fiesta of Ukraine, Rapidshare of Germany and RMX4U.com of Luxembourg on its Web site list. Also included was large Chinese search engine Baidu.

The sites “provide access to countless unauthorized copies of copyrighted works made by U.S. creators,” the caucus said in a press release Wednesday. “Some of these sites are among the most heavily visited Web sites worldwide.”

This is the first year that the caucus, formed in 2003, has released a list of notorious sites. The caucus has been releasing an annual watch list of countries it considers weak on copyright protection since 2003.

The countries named Wednesday were China, Canada, Russia, Spain and Mexico, the same countries that made the caucus' list in 2009.

***”Our nation and our economy is what it is today, because of the ingenuity and ideas of our people — ideas that have been safeguarded through strong intellectual property rights protections,” Senator Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican and caucus member, said in a statement. “Those very ideas are increasingly at risk from piracy and counterfeiting abroad.”****

Copyright infringement is not a victimless crime, as it is often portrayed, added Representative Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican.

“Piracy denies individuals who have invested in the creation and production of these goods a return on their investment thus reducing the incentive to invest in innovative products and new creative works,” he said in a statement. ******”The end result is the loss of billions of dollars in revenue for the U.S. each year and even greater losses to the U.S. economy in terms of reduced job growth and exports.”*******

IsoHunt, a BitTorrent and peer-to-peer search engine, was sued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in 2006, and earlier this year, a California court has proposed an injunction that would require the site to filter keyword searches.

“There are many non-infringing uses for BitTorrent technology and we hope you will be able to continue to use isoHunt for these,” the site says in a post on its front page.

The Pirate Bay, often called TPB, has long resisted takedown notices sent by copyright holders. When the U.K. record label Gr8pop referenced the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act while asking The Pirate Bay to remove the music of one of its artists, a representative of the site said it follows Swedish law.

“DMCA is an American law,” the site's representative wrote to Gr8pop in 2008. “Sweden is not a part of the United States. TPB has no connection to United States and hence does not follow U.S. law.”

In April 2009, four operators of The Pirate Bay were found guilty in Swedish court of assisting copyright infringement. That case is on appeal, and the site continues operating.

The MPAA and the Recording Industry Association of America praised the congressional caucus.

“The release of this report casts a damning spotlight once again on several nations with lax copyright protections and websites that brazenly traffic in copyright theft,” Mitch Bainwol, the RIAA's chairman and CEO, said in a statement. “I'm particularly struck by the … decision to identify significant global Web sites that facilitate massive theft; theft that destroys jobs and cuts short the dreams of creators who find it more difficult to attract the capital they need to build their careers.”

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The Tea Party People

There have been several efforts made in recent weeks to figure out who exactly makes up the tea party constituency.  With all the studies and polls and demographic research happening, you’d think we stumbled across a rare species of two headed turtles or the mysterious and never-before-photographed pipsquack bird.

Previous polls have been conducted traditionally with phone banks and surveys.  However, the tea party is primarily organized online and it makes sense to measure activity online.  If for nothing else to sample the data in a new way.  And not with some easily manipulated online poll, either.

PBS has conducted an exhaustive online search of tea party directories, Facebook pages, and other social networks to measure the location of most tea party members.  The results are not scientific, but they are pretty interesting.

First, here is the map drawn from the total number of active tea party participants in the country, broken out by county.  Areas shaded in green are those with the higher concentrations of tea party members.

Next up is a sampling of tea party participants per 10,000 residents in any given county.  For every 10,000 people in Erie County, 2 people are actively involved in the tea party.  Careful, one might be right behind you!

The darkest areas indicate the “highest” level of participation with 10 in 10,000 residents being registered or active online.  If this is a movement, I think Dale Volker has had larger ones during his morning grumpy.

What is pretty clear from this sampling is that the primary centers of the tea party are in boom town counties which suffered the greatest hits during the housing crash and recession.  The other data point of note is that the areas with the highest concentration of tea party membership appear to be very solid republican counties in red states.  I know, I’m shocked as well.

Aside from all of this ongoing research and demography, there is pretty clear evidence that the tea party movement isn’t anything especially new.  It is a loose confederation of right wing citizens.  Traditional “Ron Paul” libertarians (who have been singing this song for years on the margins of American politics) make up the original core of the movement.

However, after Sarah Palin scared most of the fearful neo-cons that the Islamofascistsocialist black man was coming to take their guns and liberty, those traditional libertarians now have company.  The neo-conservative, Christian base has decided to bully their way into the Thomas Jefferson tent at oppressedwhitemanteapartypalooza.

Tea Party supporters are likely to be older, white and male. Forty percent are age 55 and over, compared with 32 percent of all poll respondents; just 22 percent are under the age of 35, 79 percent are white, and 61 percent are men. Many are also Christian fundamentalists, with 44 percent identifying themselves as “born-again,” compared with 33 percent of all respondents.

Shorter version of the above story, McCain voters make up the majority of tea party participants.  The same people who cheered on Sarah Palin at rallies in 2008, watched Sean Hannity’s nightly expose on Jermeiah Wright, and told John McCain that Obama was a muslim, etc. are all loyal members of this new “movement”.  It’s not a movement.  It’s the same old Republican base with new and improved packaging, tri-cornered hats and a crippling lack of irony.

What makes it a political force is that they have one of the world’s largest media companies promoting their agenda on America’s top cable news network, in The Wall Street Journal, in The New York Post and on the top syndicated radio programs and widely read websites like Drudge, Breitbart, Fox properties, etc..  Because they have control of such a significant stake of U.S. media, they are driving the conversation on other networks and outlets.  Fomenting the anger and fear as far and wide as possible that the black man and his merry band of half-assed socialists are coming for your freedom.

Now that anger over the healthcare reform bill is dying down, the economy is slowly improving and infighting amongst the loose libertarian/Ne0-Con tea party groups is beginning, will they be a force in November?  Can their media machine sustain the roar of last summer and this spring?

I suspect they will be…a force for Republicans to deal with in the primaries.  They’ll slice off votes from moderate Republicans, challenge long time incumbents and generally pull the larger party to the right.  See, Paladino, Carl.

When the tea party fringe is introduced to the rest of society and a wider demographic base of voters that is gradually shifting younger, more diverse and better educated…their platform will go over like Paladino’s horse porn in church.

If Democrats can play to the central themes and appeal to centrists and moderates, I suspect Officer Barbrady might have the best advice on how to deal with the tea party “movement”.

While Republican lawmakers are united in their opposition to the Senate’s financial-reform bill, the Tea Partiers—still fighting to repeal health care—don’t seem to care. Benjamin Sarlin on whether the movement can get energized.

Republicans and Democrats alike have been gearing up for battle on financial reform, with GOP senators united in their opposition and Democrats all but daring them to filibuster. But if it comes to a fight, will the Republicans have any backup outside Capitol Hill?

Tax Day rallies last week in Washington, D.C., were devoid of signs, slogans, and speeches on the finance bill, and influential right-leaning websites like Red State and Hot Air have all but ignored the issue this week, despite major movement on the Democrats’ legislation. There are some exceptions—Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) took at least a little heat from activists for playing ball with Democrats on the legislation last month—but by and large there’s been no high-profile campaign to defeat the bill, and a number of conservative activists concede that the grassroots are inactive.

“It’s almost like the whole grassroots movement can’t get loose of [health care]. Because of the repeal issue, the battle isn’t over. The Tea Party movement is not moving on.”

Dick Armey, president of Tea Party organizer FreedomWorks, acknowledged in an interview that his group has yet to make its mark on the debate.

“We haven’t had a chance to study it,” Armey said. “We have a general skepticism that wouldn’t know how to regulate the financial industry.”

Karen Hoffman, founder of the conservative group DC Works for US, attributed the lack of interest primarily to the Tea Partiers’ continued involvement in health care. For Congress, the debate over the Affordable Care Act ended with its passage, but the Tea Party movement is still organizing long-shot campaigns to repeal the law, challenge it in court, and undermine its provisions on a state level.

“It’s almost like the whole grassroots movement can’t get loose of it,” Hoffman said. “Because of the repeal issue, the battle isn’t over. The Tea Party movement is not moving on.”

Phillip Dennis, founder of the Dallas Tea Party and state coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, said he was largely unaware of the finance legislation, but expected it to stir a reaction eventually.

“I think it will become more on the radar as it becomes closer to a vote,” he said. “I don’t think a lot of people understand it yet and the details are just starting to come out.”

• Kinky Friedman: Why Dems Should Blame Themselves for the Tea Party

• Obama’s 7 Broken Promises It may be too late for the Tea Party movement to organize, even if it can be persuaded to take the Republicans’ side. A bill could come to the Senate floor as early as Wednesday, and the administration is aiming to fast-track the legislation. Progressive groups are starting to become active on the issue: The AFL-CIO is planning a major protest on Wall Street on April 29, while the Democratic National Committee’s grassroots arm, Organizing for America, is calling on its members to lend their support to the bill. Reform supporters have also received an unexpected spate of encouraging news in recent days, particularly the Securities and Exchange Commission’s complaint against Goldman Sachs, a development that could lend momentum to their efforts.

“I think that [Goldman Sachs] is a game-changer in that it reinforces the need for comprehensive financial regulatory reform,” said Brandon Rees, deputy director of the AFL-CIO’s office of investment.

Heather Booth, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, told The Daily Beast that the Goldman case “certainly underscores the need for real regulation to rein in the banks and rein in this type of risky behavior.”

While a number of experts on the left have criticized the proposed financial legislation, saying it does not go far enough, the pro-reform camp has been buoyed by an unexpectedly strong bill on the Senate side, a surprise to observers who expected its provisions would be weaker than the already-passed House bill. Booth called Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s (D-AR) recent decision to crack down on the derivatives market with tougher restrictions “stunning,” given the widespread expectations that she would water down regulation in committee.