---

Salon.com Politics | Lott's amnesia

On Tuesday, on the racist Web site Nationalist.org, past Lott supporter Richard Barrett expressed offense that Lott would retract his remarks and try to portray Thurmond's candidacy as anything other than what it was.

"The reason that you have been elected is because you have been a segregationist, pitted against integrationists in your various elections," Barrett wrote. "Now is not the time to sound a wavering trumpet." Lott owed an apology "to the memory of William L. Colmer, once Dean of the Congress, who placed you in public life, and who was as staunch a segregationist as ever could be," Barrett went on. "I still have the photo of you, me and Congressman Colmer, when we all were together in Pascagoula, here on my wall and would like to say that I have been proud of it."

Barrett schooled Lott, saying, "You owe your loyalty to Mississippi, not the NAACP, to Bill Lord of Carrollton, a segregationist and one of your most-ardent supporters, not Jesse Jackson of Chicago, an integrationist and one of your more-vocal critics." After all, Barrett was the one "shaking your hand at your victory celebration, not Al Gore.

"Your original statement of solidarity with Senator Thurmond and Mississippi was from the heart and honest," Barrett wrote. "Isn't 'honesty the best policy'?"

categories: salonika x-syndicate

3:18:26 PM    say what []

---

I have so many plans for the future that share that same first step. (Sometimes I feel like Homer in a Simpsons re-run I saw recently: he and Marge are stalking a judge and they are startled by an nighttime milk truck delivery. Homer says, "Hey... maybe I should become a milkman!" and Marge asks him to focus, but I'm digressing....)

Chris Gulker did an analysis of the Blogging Ecosystem and the Userland community server rankings and extracted some interesting patterns. Not suprisingly, the top marker of popular blogs is that their author is famous.

If you want more readers, you should become famous and, lacking that, write frequent, long posts about stuff that you know well.

Step 1: Become famous...

I should point out that the Web enables a form of microfame or nanofame amidst smaller-but-sometimes-more-focused communities than are found in the old media's fame-o-sphere. Ray Ozzie is a superstar blogger but ask your uncle who he is.

This reminds me of the advice I give about getting nonfiction published. In descending order of effectiveness, try to

1. Be famous or sexy or famous for being sexy
2. Write about something famous or sexy
3. Have some scandalous new bit of information about someone or something famous or sexy
4. Offer something the reader will value more than the cost of the book, such as a surefire way to become, rich, famous, sexy, or promoted.

categories: metablog

1:20:48 PM    say what []

---

---