When my partner Ray got the pitch from Mitch Stewart of Organizing for America on Monday, he had other things to do with his discretionary money, but the first paragraph got him:

Every single day, special interests spend a staggering $1.4 million lobbying Congress to shut down the President’s agenda for health care reform.

Certainly he could afford the $5 the president was asking for. In fact, he gave $10. But the next morning, he found the account he uses for web purchases overdrawn. The DNC had not only authorized $10 twice, they had authorized $500.00 as well. For three days, despite scores of phone calls, the transaction had neither been reversed nor had anyone at the DNC or Blue State Digital acknowledged the error.

Blue State Digital, founded in 2004 by four former Dean staffers, at first denied any involvement or responsibility. But the emails and the donation page point to them, so they finally resorted to the claim that their involvement was none of our business.

The DNC at first claimed donor error, then flatly denied that no more than one transaction took place. The bank produced documents complete with Terminal IDs, sequence numbers and switch timestamps proving the DNC in fact made four transactions, but refuses to remove the hold unless the DNC advises it in writing to do so.

Its the ultimate Catch-22, with all the trappings of the kind of government bureaucracy the right tries to scare up as a bogeyman to keep health care private.  “Do you trust the government,” they ask, “to provide your medical care?”

Late this afternoon, the DNC did apologize, and tried a new story. It was an address mismatch that caused the transactions to fail. That never stopped Blue State during the campaign, and there were lots of donations with the same exact data.

Nor could they explain how an address issue turned $10 into five hundred but they attempted, without success, to reverse the charges; the charges that yesterday didn’t exist.  Because of their previous denial, Ray’s now canceled the card and faxed a flurry of dispute documents back and forth to the bank.  The DNC is still trying to decide whether or not it requested and received an auth code. Their spokespeople don’t seem to know.

Ray thinks the government needs to guarantee every American health care, and there should at least be a public option. He’s spent a lot of time in verbal gunplay on Facebook with our insurance industry friends, but his powder is no longer dry.

In frustration he finally wrote the White House (the BlueState-served webpages hide out behind a link to www.whitehouse.gov). Its not easy to argue that a group of people can tackle something as difficult as multi-billion dollar health care when they can’t figure out why a $500 charge attempt got made for a $10 donation, and claim its none of your damn business when you inquire about it.

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When cable and high power satellite suddenly gave the media and the media consumer as many pathways as they could use to stream content and the 2000-channel universe began, something very important died. The ability to create and broadcast more worthy programming than there was room for in the pipe had an upside.

Before the FCC threw open the floodgates and granted new station licenses with abandon in the 1980s, there were relatively few outlets. Radio stations could employ whole staffs to produce shows that aired once. Sometimes they weren’t aired at all, and their production costs written off.

In the golden days of radio, KFI employed an orchestra whose job was to sit in the studio and be ready to play on a moment’s notice if called upon by the local announcer who was himself standing by in case the network feed failed. News departments at the early television and major full-service radio stations, even into the 80s, were large enough they could take over and feed content 24/7 if a new story caught the public’s attention.

Nothing saves energy like shutting down 2 days/week.

In mid 20th century Los Angeles, brush fires, floods, even a little girl down a well, commanded 24/7 coverage. The stations realized that was a part of their service commitment, and the licenses were so valuable and the renewal process so onerous, that overtime got authorized and journalists went without sleep.

Somehow, we’ve lost that. As Iran explodes in anger, MSNBC cries poor and runs Lockup:Indiana and Sex Slaves-The Teen Trade. Ten years ago that might have flown, but in the face of Twitter and Facebook’s minute by minute coverage, MSNBC looks out of touch. CNN cycles old programming, even though CNN International could be switched live to US Domestic viewers, but that brings up commercial concerns.

But last night, an isolated live CNN origination of Larry King Live with Christiane Amanpour crackles across twitter, and numbers soar. Today, CNN is in high gear doing live focused coverage. Perhaps this will convince MSNBC that news is important, even if its not something you can easily cover at a time when you don’t want to spend money. Or perhaps, like radio, NBC/Universal realizes the golden days of cable are numbered and you’re best to take every last dime out before the roof falls in.

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The near 60-year history of counterintelligence has been one of having no one in charge of the enterprise. The CI community is not organized or integrated to accomplish a national mission.

Rather, the various CI elements are part of a loose confederation of independent organizations with narrower and varying responsibilities, jurisdictions and capabilities.”

—Michelle Van Cleave

The Twitter social networking site became an international political football this week when the State Department deemed it so valuable in keeping the world abreast of conditions in Iran, that it asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled update and remain online.

The Islamic Republic first tried to control public dissent over suspicious election results by the old-school method of stifling journalists, but they were choking an already dying media and making their own situation worse by helping the decentralized alternative to mushroom.

This has led to a new kind of intelligence and counterintelligence activity, where the role of the “mule” is played by the Internet-astute in their offices, studies and bedrooms; an elaborate cat and mouse game, where Iranian Twitter users tweet information, that information is then repeated by others outside the reach of Iranian control, and the original tweets are deleted by the Iranians who originally posted them.

It’s accelerated the evoution of the citizen journalist, because when you remove the real source because you fear for their safety, you take the burden of the credibility of the content on your own shoulders. A lot of people are coming of age in this sudden change: the Iranian students whose bravery is an inspiration to the world, and the responsible users of the social media networks that are trying to help them by reading the shadows half a world away.

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When William Randolph Hearst was the current incarnation of the devil we today call Rupert Murdoch, his premier columnist was one Westbrook Pegler. Books have been written about Pegler damning him with faint praise, and there’s no lack of material to trash him. He started as a sports reporter and columnist, then moved to politics becoming the chief attacker of FDR. He was, for his day, O’Reilly, Hannity and Limbaugh all rolled into one.

Time soured Pegler; he became a rabid anti-Semite and early proponent of the John Birch Society. But he was by all accounts a great writer. He was like Andrew Sullivan on steroids; somebody who could take a totally distasteful political theory and delight you with his description of it. His wit was lethal; he inspired the quote, “It feels good to have your throat slit by a professional.”

I wish I had him back for just a day, or even a small measure of his talent to describe what’s happened to the folks who sponsor the #tcot and #p2 Twitter hashtags. He was at his best when describing people in shouting matches with each other over meaningless fine points and irrelevant details. Even he might not be up to the task.

Hashtags are short tag descriptors that Twitter users include in their tweets so that downstream search engines and applications can perform automated categorizations. Both the left and the right have gotten into pissing contests in the last two weeks over what terms should be used, who may use them, and what they should mean.

Pegler would probably use a card game as metaphor. He liked those. Just when the players worked out what the winning hands were, and what all the chip colors meant, new players would arrive. They’d argue with the old players endlessly but then that argument would be eclipsed when even more players would show up with their own chairs, sit at the table and throw in a new deck of cards.

These twin catfights didn’t arise from conservatives being more anxious to monetize hashtags and website membership than liberals, or liberals unable to decide if good is enemy to the best or vice versa. Its because the players don’t own the card table, or the card room, or the game, nor do they make the rules. Twitter does that by allowing anybody to use #tcot and #p2 for anything they want, and unless that changes, we’re all arguing over the ownership of something we don’t own in the first place.

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As a self-professed new media expert on Twitter, I’m expected to have at least one “next big thing” social media idea, but I’m so edgy that I’ve got two.

Twitter has now reached its late teens (in social media years) and has begun the process of cleaning up its childish things. It recently announced that it would start cancelling and reassigning moribund accounts.

Somebody who took a valuable username, tweeted one tweet and wandered off in a daze shouldn’t be a dog-in-the-manger for someone who would put that enviable 3-character moniker to good use.

That’s where my new social networks come in: two new sites designed to keep flakes from frittering away the valuable naming resources and web real estate of the big guys.

These are gateway networks, one each for Twitter and Facebook. New users who don’t pass a simple online Web 2.0 proficiency test at Twitter and Facebook are sent to my two networks for their trial runs.

I call them Fritter and Flakebook.

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The Great Influenza by John M. Barry is suddenly shooting up on the sales lists. As I write this, its #20,474 at Barnes & Noble, and has hit #3,009 at Amazon. Meanwhile at Twitter “Swine Flu” is trending and some of the comments are scarier than the potential porcine pandemic itself.

Between those with smug security because they don’t eat pork, to those who brag that fear fatigue from 8 years of color-coded panic has desensitized them to any threat, we’ve got a crucible that could concentrate this possible pandemic instead of prepare us for it.

There are lots of reasons to read Barry’s book. Even if this flu mutates into mild in the next few days or weeks (which is at least as possible as a pandemic), The Great Influenza tells far more than the story of virii. It describes how the allopaths rose to power in world medicine, and the abysmal state of medical schools and medical research in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century.

But it concentrates on the many diverse factors that came together to make the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1920 the deadliest plague in recent history. WWI moved mass populations and housed them in close quarters.  These were often people who had no history of travel and therefore little or no exposure to a wide range of virii. This was the powderkeg but a chance mutation was the spark.

In all these intervening years with all our gained knowledge we have also been filling up a new powderkeg. Though most have much greater general immunities, some of our population does not. Our international globetrotting on jets may more than overcome our increased immunity.

But in many ways we’re far better prepared. We have an international media presence that can warn a public in minutes that used to take weeks or months, along with this we also have an international well of gossip and misinformation that travels at the speed of light. If this is in fact a pandemic, we may have to deal with fear broadcast by people who believe swine flu comes from bacon, or that a neighbor’s cough is an act of domestic terrorism.

As we’ve recently seen, Twitter and similar social media can be nothing more than a giant international mood swing or a great force for good, especially when wielded by people whose <140 is backed up by the shared knowledge we’ve gained in the four pandemics we’ve suffered in the last 110 years.

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