The event went according to plan. Congressman Hall – who the hecklers should have known has a lot of professional experience standing in front of crowds both supportive and hostile – kept his cool, supporters politely applauded and the angry mob snarled.

Some of the highlights included a 15 year old girl being booed, a small business owner being booed and the Congressman being booed when he told the story of his brother’s extended hospital stay and death and concurrent troubles with the family’s insurance plan.

They even booed the mention of Senator Kennedy.

One woman complained that if we provide coverage for the estimated 48 million Americans without insurance there will be long lines at her doctor’s office. The guy in the picture above screamed about all of our problems being the fault of illegal immigrants.

And the best line of the night, from the Congressman himself “…well actually the czars were before communism….”

I suppose I should just avoid these sort of events since all they do is get me aggravated and push me to write angry letters to the editor and blog posts and get me into more trouble. At least that’s what Sue tells me.

E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post has a great perspective on the current fracas coming soon to a Town Hall near you:

But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?

Link

I’m inclined to agree but to add that a significant portion of the screamers are motivated by fear, not by fact. I’ll leave exactly what they are afraid of for others to guess.

More pictures from the event are here. The Journal News article is here. I was interviewed by News12 and I’ll put the story up as soon as it’s on their web site.

*Wow, two Kaiser Chiefs references in one week. They should pay me.

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I’d be remiss if I let the day go by without mentioning the Ada Lovelace Day celebrations. As the father of two geekettes in training (GITS?) I’m all about women in science and technologies.

Girls are smart when they are young – naturally curious things who don’t mind breaking a nail in the pursuit of knowledge and world domination. They like jokes like “are those make with real Girls Scouts” and  “Sudo make me a sandwich.” And they can be tough little things with a perspective on the World that you sometimes don’t expect.

My Twin Princesses love looking through the telescope, crazy Japanese robot animation,  listening to shortwave radio and going to museums to see icky, slimy things. Number One loves the math exhibit at the New York Hall of Science.

I hope they never change.

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photo.jpg, originally uploaded by david parmet.

I love those “here I am” apps for the iPhone. Using BrightKite I once found Brian Oberkirch only one story above me (but 1/2 hour later) in Washington DC of all places. I’ve been playing with Outside.in (over there on the sideboard) and Radar for my iPhone, just to see what and who is around me.

Somehow though, the folks who built the Radar iPhone app think I’m only up here in the wilds of Northern Westchester for a brief visit until I get back to mid-town Manhattan.

I guess if you are sitting in some garage in Palo Alto, the 45 or so miles from Yorktown Heights, NY (where this screencap was taken) to Hoboken, NJ might not seem so big.

But if you live in Westchester County, “local” does not necessarily equal “New York City metro area.” I’m more interested in what’s happening in White Plains (which has a very nice newspaper with it’s own website, thank you very much) or Stamford (ditto).

Oddly enough, if I’m in New Canaan, CT – just a couple of miles from my home but on the other side of the NY / CT border, I get news from Stamford, CT, which is walking distance.

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Now that the XM / Sirius merger is complete, I’ve lot Fred but gained 1st Wave.

We’ve been a two system family for some time, with XM in the van and Sirius in Sue’s car. So I’ve heard the difference. Where Fred would play Electricity, 1st Wave would play If You Leave.

In other words, I’ve lost all the songs I loved in the 80s and in return I’m getting all the songs that make me want to forget.

At least I have YouTube for a pre-Midge Ure Ultravox fix. Or Foxx.

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So when I hear from certain political corners that there are “pro-American” and “anti-American” parts of our country, and infer that as a New York liberal I’m in the latter portion of our great land, I get a bit annoyed.

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Yep. Journalists telling politicians (and their assembled flacks) that they need each other. Because without the politicians, the journalists would be out of their jobs.

So the latest dust up between A-list bloggers and PR flacks has taken the form of Gina Trapani, editor of Lifehacker, against a rouge’s gallery of agencies she’s decided to blacklist for the sin of, among others, emailing her directly instead of using the editorial email address.

So for the crimes of a few ACs, she’s blacklisting whole agencies.

Gina, do you honestly believe that nothing good or on topic will ever come from Edelman? Or any of the other agencies you have blacklisted? And is the onslaught of email really so bad that hitting ‘delete’ is too difficult?

What Gina, and most other full-time bloggers, have to learn – assuming they want to be treated like journalists – is that they are always going to need sources for good stories. Those sources don’t grow on trees – some of them might even come from PR agencies.

In the meantime, good luck writing all of those blog posts every day.

Bonus link: More smarts on the subject from Geoff Livingstone and Jason Falls.

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all of whom (are) quite intelligent, armed with all kinds of the latest devices (many, many people (have) iPhones, for example) and not sluggish about technology

…if any of them would even know who Kara Swisher is. Or care.

Link

Bonus link: Matthew Ingram:

I don’t think the concept of Twitter is quite as foreign as many people make it out to be — and certainly no more foreign than the idea of “instant messaging” was not all that long ago.

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Sometimes I wonder if we’ve lost our collective senses of perspective, if not our minds.

Here in the Bedford Central School District (motto “Please, We’ll Put Your Kid In The Gifted Program If You Promise Not To Sue Us”) the high school has been evacuated twice in the past few months owing to various “threats”.

More likely these threats, which turned out to be graffiti on the bathroom walls threatening to blow up the school, were designed to help the perps avoid a test. And of course the perps got what they wanted, plus the added bonus of attention and the gratitude and admiration of their peers.

That gratitude might be short lived owing to a new policy subjecting every child going in or out of Fox Lane Middle and High School is subject to random searchs of their bags, their lockers and their persons. Way to go, teaching children to respect authority and all. Treat them like criminals because of a joke.

When I was in High School we were treated like responsible adults until we stepped out of line. And we made jokes about blowing up the school and watched movies like Rock and Roll High School and somehow ended up alright. Because, news flash, the job of the American Teenager is to flip the bird at authority. Believe it or not, the drinking age was 18 and sometimes during my senior year, I even had a beer, legally. And I survived.

Now we’re treating eight year olds like criminals for sniffing markers.

Where did we lose our minds?

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Press kits, originally uploaded by david parmet.

So you spent all last week putting together this amazing press kit. Four color printing and embossed folders.

Well guess what. I’m in the press room right now and no one is reading them.

Next year, try putting out something that gets them out of the press room instead of leaves them trying to figure out what the hell you are talking about.

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Many times recently I’ve been sitting in conferences listening to ‘experts’ talk about various subjects. I’ve always said my definition of expert, especially when it comes to social media, is loosely defined as ‘a few years ahead of you on the learning curve’. It’s funny though that these experts were asking ‘what is social media?’ just a short time ago.

So what do we do, as an industry, about the so-called experts?

For one thing, stop paying to go to conferences that are serving up these experts. And stop patronizing the sponsors of these conferences.

On the subject of conference sponsors, let’s reward those who are putting on quality programs. Let me plug the Society for New Communications Research’s Annual Research Symposium and Awards Gala in Boston next month. If you are reading this and interested in the Future of Our Industry(tm) you better plan on attending.

And what about the individual speakers and experts who give out advice like “add content to your company’s Wikipedia entry?”  How about naming names? Let’s use our collective Google-juice and make sure the permanent record is corrected.

That’s a start. Let a thousand flowers bloom in the comment section and throughout the marketing-blogosphere.

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