Zennie Abraham: 180 iReports to Date, 74 aired on CNN

Wow, I had no idea I had so many iReports tagged for use by CNN, 74! Out of 180 iReports submitted, that's about a 40 percent rate, not bad overall.

Zennie on CNN's "Money and Main Street" as iReporter

Thanks to the iReport team for this. They and Anderson Cooper are the best!

The California Supreme Court’s Illogical Prop 8 Decision

 

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On YouTube



Tuesday, May 26, 2009 will go down as an eventful San Francisco day, sunny, and yet dark, and one that saw a lot of people marginalized who didn’t want to be. But then, who does. Before I turn to who said what, and who got arrested, I stick my head right into the belly of the beast, the California Supreme Court’s decision.


Today, in first upholding Proposition 8, the voter-approved initiative to make same-sex marriage illegal that passed in November 2008, and yet protecting the 18,000 same-sex marriages that were done before the passage of the initiative, the California Supreme Court successfully stood logic on its head. I’ve just read the Court’s entire 167-page decision, and while I understand the reasons given by the majority of justices (six supporting the decision, one against it and even then the six judges that agreed were not perfect in their union) I’m concerned with the logic behind them.


To cut to the chase, the Court has placed the 18,000 same-sex marriages in a legally questionable second-class status of rights that, even though the Court claims to protect their rights under marriage, didn’t even consider if those rights would be maintained if the couples elect to divorce or remarry each other for the sake of the children they have.


First, even though I’ve read the full document, I encourage you to do so as well. Even if you think you can’t understand what’s there, challenge yourself, read it, talk about it with your friends. And most of all learn from it.


A Three-Pronged Decision


The California Supreme Court based its decision on three considerations, if the initiative was a constitutional amendment or revision, the validity of the initiative process itself, and if Proposition 8 itself is retroactive, applying to existing same-sex marriages.


In upholding Proposition 8, The California Supreme Court tried to get itself out of a legal pickle created in early 2008, when it protected same-sex marriages in a case called “The Marriages Cases”. To recap, the Court determined that marriage was not limited to a man and a woman.


But later in the same year, Californians passed Prop 8, which earned 52 percent of the vote. Then, California Attorney General Jerry Brown challenged Prop 8 in the California Supreme Court, most famously. (Brown used the observation that “natural law” was over the California Constitution, and since Prop 8 eliminated the rights of a group of Californians, it was in violation of the “unalienable rights” granted by the California Constitution and “natural law”. In today’s decision, The Court wrote that while Brown’s argument was creative, and I would add logical, it was “without merit.”)


And there we have the Court’s pickle: upholding their own decision protecting existing same sex marriages, and yet protecting the initiative process of which Proposition 8 is a part.


In the Decision the majority of judges argue that the initiative process itself is part of The California Constitution and thus can’t be considered something that alters and is outside of the California Constitution. Moreover, the Court writes that Proposition 8 itself is not a constitutional revision, but just an amendment. Why? Because the Court’s majority claims it only concerns marriage and doesn’t call for a large number of word additions or changes. The decision outlines a number of case examples where the Court’s decision backed the idea that an initiative was an amendment and not a revision to the California Constitution, as some of Prop 8’s attackers have claimed.


Finally, the Court majority asserts that even though the framers of Prop 8 may have intended otherwise, the way it was written itself prevents it from being retroactively applied. Thus, existing same sex marriages are upheld.


But here’s where the problem starts, even if one agrees with the other aspects of the majority’s decision. The Court writes “a retroactive application of the initiative would disrupt thousands of actions taken in reliance on The Marriages Cases by these same-sex couples, their employers, their creditors, and many others” (p. 134) and then goes on to mention that such would result in “undermining the ability of citizens to plan their lives according to the law as it has been determined by this state’s highest court.”


But I argue in upholding Prop 8 and existing same-sex marriages, the Court has placed the rights of the existing married couples in disarray and damaged the California Constitution in the process: it’s not for all Californians. If same-sex married couples chose to divorce, they can’t then marry someone else of the same sex, or remarry the same person even if it would be to the benefit of the family they established! There’s no evidence in the Court’s decision – and I looked for it - that this was taken into account.


The dissenting opinion by Justice Moreno focused on the stripping of rights to a minority group, but since the reality is that being gay or straight is really more fluid than fixed and the choice of the individual, the Court’s decision impacts a much broader group of the population and one that’s hard to quantify.


Peaceful Protests in San Francisco


The decision left a lot of people scratching their heads in and around San Francisco City Hall and the California Supreme Court building just next door. While a peaceful protest complete with pre-arranged arrests amassed on Van Ness Avenue between the City Hall and Davies Symphony Hall, a large press conference was held in the South Light Court in City Hall.


California Supreme Court There, many of the lawyers who worked to combat the passage of Prop 8 shared their observations with the audience. San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who played a key role in the battle against Prop 8, said I’m disappointed... I think the Court in my view focused on procedure rather than arguments. And that fundamental rights are part of the debate.” He said it was back to the ballot box, a view shared by the Court itself in the decision issued today.


A Shameful Intellectual Display


The Court’s majority decision was shameful, to say the least. I told someone that people will develop an intellectual argument to support their raw emotions, and this California Supreme Court did just that. The Court’s emotional bent is to protect what was decided by it and by the voters in the initiative process rather than challenge it, even if such an alteration would protect the full state constitutional rights of all Californians.


Some conservatives have interpreted the California Supreme Court’s decision as the Court defining marriage as between “a man and a woman”, but that’s wrong. The Court is protecting the initiative called Proposition 8 which claims marriage is between a man and woman because it interprets the California Constitution as consisting of these constitutional amendments and the Court has stated that its job is to interpret the state constitution and that it’s not above it. That distinction is important because should voters pass a new initiative that overturns Prop 8, the Court would be legally inclined to protect it as well.

Susan Boyle, "Diversity", Win Sunday's "Britain's Got Talent" Finals Round One

 

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Susan Boyle, who electrified audiences around the Internet world with her audition on the UK show "Britain's Got Talent" won the first of five finals rounds today, featuring 40 contestants who made "the cut" on Saturday.

This round featured Boyle, violinist Sue Son, the daring Darth Jackson (a combination of Michael Jackson and Darth Vader), young Natalie Okri , belly dancer Julia Naidenko, (who Telegraph.uk blogger Anna Pickard refered to as "Julia Havalottaconstanants", I'm serious), chainsaw artist Kevin James, and a dance duo called "Faces of Disco", as well as a 67-person dance group called "Diversity."

According to Pickard, who live-blogged tonight's event, Boyle sang at 9:33 PM in London and picked an Andrew Lloyd Webber song that Pickard described as "a musical that begins 'midnight ... doo doo dee doo doo evening'" which reads that it must be the song "Memory".

Pickard explains Boyle had a new hairdo and and "dyed and fitted" dress, but the best news to me is Simon Cowell apologized for the belittling way the judges addressed Boyle before she belted out her amazing rendition of "I Dream A Dream" from Les Miserable and shocked the World. If you didn't see Boyle's first performance, it's worth a review:



It's Not Over, Yet

The audience and judges picked Boyle, along with Diversity and over the performance of young Natalie Okri, who Pickard writes was "standing in the middle of a stage and silently weeping."

That gets eight of the final 40 out of the way. The BGT shows for the rest of the week feature the rest of the finalists. Who will win is still up in the air, with perfomers like Harmony and Shaheen Jafargholi yet to appear again.

Here's the full list of the BGT 40 finalists:

Aidan Davis – Dancer
Ben and Becky – Ballroom Dancers
Brit Chix – Rock Band
Callum Francis – Musical Theatre
Darth Jackson – Michael Jackson/ Darth Vader Impersonator
DCD Seniors – Dance Troupe
Diversity – Street Dancers
DJ Talent – Rapper
Dream Bears – Comedy Dancers
Fabia Cerra – Burlesque Dancer
Faces of Disco – Comedy Dancers
Flawless – Street Dancers
Floral High Notes – Flower Arranging and Opera Singing
Fred Bowers – Breakdancer
Gareth Oliver – Comedy Impersonator
Good Evans – Family Singing Group
Greg Pritchard – Male Soprano
Harmony – Musical Theatre
Hollie Steel – Singer/ Dancer
Hot Honeyz – Dancers
Jackie Prescott and Tippy Toes – Dog Act
Jamie Pugh – Singer
Julia Naidenko – Belly Dancer
Julian Smith – Saxophonist
Kay Oresanya – The Living Saxophone
Luke Clements – Juggler/ Street Performer
Mama Trish – Drag Act
Martin Machum – Guitarist
MD Showgroup – Dancers
Merlin Cadogan – Physical Performer
Natalie Okri – Singer
Nick Hell – Street Performer
Shaheen Jafargholi – Singer
Shaun Smith – Singer
Stavros Flatly – Comedy Dancers
Sue Son – Violinist
Sugarfree – Street Dancers
Susan Boyle – Singer
The Barrow Boys – Wheelbarrow Dancing
2 Grand - Singers

Page Mill Properties and East Palo Alto Redevelopment Agency Should Work Together

 

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Several weeks ago I started my first look at the East Palo Alto problem of tenants being evicted from apartments by the housing developer Page Mill Properties and discovered a small group of "tenant activists" were behind a kind of smear campaign that blocked the real truth from seeing the light of day: that Page Mill Properties was facing a terribly-designed rent control system and an underground economy where apartments were sublet by the tenants at markup rates.  In my alternative approach talking to planning professionals I know and who are familar with the problem in EPA, I've come up with a solution.

The irrrational activists

This revelation of Page Mill's "underground economy" problem earned me the ire of activists who started a massive personal attack campaign against me, paced by representatives of  Tenants Together and Chris Lund who really represents himself as Tenants Together associates say he's not a part of their organization.

The attacks centered on the idea that I was paid by Page Mill and even had Paul Hogarth of BayondChron "friend" me on Facebook, thus becoming one of almost 3,000 contacts, then because a Pat Murphy was one of my Facebook Friends, asserted that we must be working together, forgetting that such illogic (an appropriate term as this is "Star Trek" week and that was Spock's favorite word) would mean I was working with everyone from perennial Republican Presidential Candidate Allan Keyes to conservative columnist Michelle Malkin as both are or were Facebook Friends. But then Hogarth "defriended" himself so I could not point out that he and I were friends.

He forgets that such acts leave a trail. Here's a screenshot of the email subject heading where Hogarth "friended" me and reads "Paul Hogarth added you as a friend":

But all of this crap masks the real story of what's going on in East Palo Alto.  In one of his email tirades, Hogarth wrote that he didn't care about the involvement of the East Palo Alto Redevelopment Agency.  That's true for many of the so-called activists, and the truth is they don't have the background to even analyze what the agency has or has not done, let alone an understanding of what such agencies do under California law.

What Redevelopment Agencies Do

Redevelopment agencies in California are generally established by a city or county's elected body of officials (but as a side note, a joint powers authority or even, say, the Port of Oakland, can establish its own redevelopment agency.)  The intent of the agency is first to establish an area called "blighted" as a "redevelopment study area" and then after the agency's report on and plan for the area is complete to get state approval for the establishment of a "redevelopment project area" where the agency can collect property taxes via a formulation method called "Tax Increment Financing", or "TIF".

TIF is where we start with what's called a "base year" of assessed value of say, 1 million.  Then according to state law and re-established with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1998, the agency can mathmatically increase that value by 2 percent annually.  So say two years later, the project area has a value of $1,020,000.  The agency will add that percentage increase each year and have an increment of $30,000 and from that a tax revenue (at one percent of the increment) of $300 by the second year.

But let's say that's part of a bond the agency has floated and it's 20 years long.  That means the agency can collect a total of $194,000 in revenue from an increment of $20,400,000 minus the base-year assessed value.  Doesn't sound like a lot of money, right?  Well, project areas are much more valueable than a milion bucks, more like billions, so that TIF money can add up and can be used to provide "bridge loans" to developers trying to provide affordable housing in an area like East Palo Alto.  And that's why I asked "Where was the East Palo Alto Revelopment Agency?" in this whole "Page Mill Affair".

EPA's redevelopment planning mistake and a solution

According to an unnamed source, the reason the EPA was not and is not involved in the Page Mill issue is because the housing they purchased is not in a redevelopment project area so TIF funds can't be used to help Page Mill, and for reasons that are not clear to the person I talked to, the EPA's project areas were not drawn to include housing units.  The source also agrees that was a huge planning mistake.

From my experience, what EPA's agency did was to form the project area boundary lines such that money from office and retail developments - which are more expensive than housing - was captured. But the problem is they can't use the money for housing because the boundaries don't include the housing units that were later purchased by Page Mill Properties.

Another source says the other issue is simply one of money.  Even with its development activities, EPA is still a relatively poor city.  In cities like Oakland, where I worked for its redevelopment agency and two Oakland mayors Harris and Brown, we commonly approached developers to build projects using the money generated from our project areas as an attraction tool; EPA's agency doesn't have such wealth so it's far less likely to show up as, say, The International Council of Shopping Center's Spring Convention in Las Vegas, looking to do deals with developers. 

That written, EPA's redevelopment body and not Page Mill, which was a late-comer, has been at the forefront of gentrification in that city and as far back as 2001.  One example is the decision to help developers build an IKEA store rather than a grocery store, upseting some local residents.  Today, in his state of the city adress, EPA's Mayor Ruben Abrica points to IKEA as a symbol of the city's growth:

In East Palo Alto, "you can get the best Mexican food, the best barbecue, the best island food. You can even get Swedish meatballs up at IKEA."

And in the same speech, Mayor Abrica stressed the need to update the city's rent control laws, which started the whole problem with Page Mill and led to the unusual rate of subleted apartments that Page Mill discovered.  The evictions the activists complain about were - for the most part - actually those sublets; the tenants didn't even live there in those cases. Moreover, the East Palo Alto Rent Board was allowing arbitrary rent increases which Page Mill contends were given to tenants who were then "re-renting" their units. 

Now the EPA Rent Board is seeking the advice of the members of rent boards in Berkeley and Oakland to, as Mayor Abrica said "update the city's rent control laws".

Meanwhile the pace of gentrification continues and the EPA Redevelopment Agency has three project areas active, the University Circle, the Gateway/101 corridor, and the Ravenswood Industrial Area.  The University Circle Project Area includes a Four Seasons Hotel (called "The Four Seasons Silicon Valley")

All of this development, coupled with a general trend of African Americans spreading out in the Bay Area and while the population - at 7.5 percent in 2000 was projected to have decreased to 7 percent in 2007, has caused a reduction in EPA's Black population.

The African American population in EPA has given way to a diverse group of Latinos,  Asians, and Blacks but the city is still largely politically controlled by older African Americans.  It may have been this political rub between older Blacks who see what they knew fading away due to demographic change and gentrification and a White developer new to the EPA political scene, that led to the flurry of lawsuits from both sides.  But also a lack of good, sound technical expertise and input was and is the problem; politics has ruled the day even as the City of EPA has excellent professional staff.  They should listen to them.

The solution is the EPA's redevelopment project area boudaries need to be redrawn to incorporate the housing that Page Mill's upgrading.  The improved property values will be a new source of agency revenue that it can use with Page Mill to keep the units at affordable levels while maintaining Page Mill's ability to take care of them and realize a good rate of return on their investment. Moreover, EPA and Page Mill will emerge as true partners.  I admit re-drawing redevelopment boundaries is a time-consuming issue, but the rewards are worth it for city, building developer, and tenant.  To it's credit, Page Mill's Jim Shore, after I explained this idea, expressed to me that "We would be willing and happy to work with the (East Palo Alto) redevelopment agency." 

This is the kind of professional problem solving approach not brought to this issue by the activists who've attacked me.  As far I'm concerned, their lack of technical planning experience, and their unwillingness to work with people who have it, let alone really learn about redevelopment, and coupled with their desire to smear and demonize and harrass people have only made the Page Mill issue an ugly mess.  Unless they're willing to embrace an intelligent, professional, technical, detailed, urban planning approach, and advocate for EPA redevelopment project area redesign, they should stay out of this issue.

Twitter Retains Fewer Users Than Facebook and MySpace? So?

 

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YouTube, MySpace, Metacafe, DailyMotion, Blip.tv, Stupid Videos, Sclipo and Viddler

I saw an interesting blog post today over at Webguild.org reporting that Twitter is "Doomed" (in fact the title is "Twitter Doomed") and I had to laugh. There have been any number of people explaining either why they don't use Twitter or predicting its demise. There's even a website-style blog called "Twitter Backlash". But back to the post that got my laugh banks engaged and this sentence:

Apparently more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month and pre-Oprah more than 70 percent of Twitter users failed to return to the site according to David Martin, Vice President, Nielsen Online.

Apparently Nielsen believes it appropriate to lump in Twitter with social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and others, and that's the problem. Twitter's a micro-blogging environment much more than a social network and thus should not be compared to Facebook and MySpace. Facebook and MySpace have places for photos of whatever you're doing or a place for installing your favorite music to share with others. That's not what Twitter's designed to do. Thus comparing them is lumping Apples with Oranges.

Twitter, again, is for the act of "micro-blogging" or explaining something in less than 150 characters. That's a system that can be and has been incorporated into a social network like Facebook, but it's not a social network like MySpace and Facebook.

I think what's happening is because one can communicate with others on Twitter, or have "friends", it's viewed as a social network as opposed to something that allows social-networking.

Two different actions.

In Facebook I have various pages, I'm a "fan" of President Obama, and I can see my friends photos, attend events I'm invited to, and play games they invite me to engage in (when I have time).

I can't do any of that on Twitter.

So it should come as no surprise that Twitter has a lower retention rate than Facebook or MySpace. Hey, people like to learn about other people which is what we use Facebook and other networks for. (Personally, I swear by Linkedin which I use far far more than MySpace.)

I don't see Twitter as a competitor to Facebook, but as complementary to Facebook. My Tweets go from my Twitter page out to my followers then onto my Facebook page and for good measure migrate over to my FriendFeed page as well. And my blogs are hooked in the same way: Blog to Twitter to Facebook to FriendFeed. Hey, that horizontal subscription count can add up!

The reason Twitter has a lower retention rate is simple: there's less there. It's a great place for the rapid transfer of information but that's it and you have to use it to understand its value.

Alas, Twitter doesn't have the revealing voyeur factor, so unless someone comes up with an app to send Paris Hilton sex tape through Twitter, the retention rates always going to be less than for Facebook, and that's just fine with me. Twitter's going through a shake out period where everyone thinks they have to use it. It's not for everyone. Eventually, we'll get rid of the wanna bees and be left with a really engaged Twitterverse.

Hooray!

Van Jones: Oaklander and Obama's Green Jobs Czar on CNN's Larry King Tonight

 

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Van Jones, President Obama's new "Special Advisor For Green Jobs Enterprise and Innovation" who I have featured in our "Oakland Focus" blog and videos several times and I last talked to as he closed his account at Gold's Gym in Oakland where he was a member for years, is the guest on CNN's "Larry King" show tonight starting at 6 PM PST, 9 PM EST but CNN runs a "loop" so if you missed Van at 6 PM or 9 PM respectively, you can catch him again later in the evening and the video on CNN.com two days later. (I hope.)

Mr. Jones is the author of the New York Times best-selling book, "The Green Collar Economy" and the co-founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland. Over his career as activist and author, Jones has tirelessly fought for alternatives to violence and incarceration.

In her tribute to Jones, Rosemary Pritzker wrote:

Van Jones has been making waves for over 10 years as a human rights activist. In recent years he tried to point out the environment/human rights connection, but didn’t receive attention from the upper echelons with decision-making power, such as the United States government and the Clinton Global Initiative, until just a few months ago. For decades environmentalism was seen as crunchy, dirty, and based on restriction of everything from fun to taste. But lately there’s been a major shift, bringing green into the mainstream, or, as Van says, “eco-freak” became “eco-chic”.

Van, as they say, has "captured the Zeitgeist" of late, but has managed to remain the same person. Always polite and nice to everyone.

Here's a video interview I conducted with Jones last year as he was introducing his book:



Check out Van on CNN tonight. He deserves all of the good fortune he's received.

Alex Shoumatoff's Vanity Fair Article On The Bohemian Club Reveals His Unfortunate Reporting Approach

MySpace, Metacafe, Blip.tv, Crackle, Sclipo, Viddler and Howcast

Bringing an end to a story that made my blogs famous, infamous Vanity Fair (VF) Contributing Editor Alex Shoumatoff finally published his work on the Bohemian Club’s timber management plan and how he got snared by police for tresspassing at its private retreat near the town of Monte Rio, Calif.

If you remember, Alex Shoumatoff set out last year to help his Harvard roommate Jock Hooper do a smear job on the Bohemian Club, which is a kind of resort home for many San Francisco luminaries, and not all of them male. Hooper was someone described as a "disgruntled former member" of the exclusive gentlemen’s club that has is favored by the business elite, former presidents, international leaders, and men who enjoy music, wine and song, and ok, I know at least two women who've recently been there (with their boyfriends). The club's lightened up a lot over the years.

Anyway, Hooper quit the club when it wouldn’t approve his forest management plan (read: major ego) and then became the leading critic of the club’s plans to preserve and protect old growth redwood trees on its property. He then got Alex and Vanity Fair to do some dirty work for him, or try to.

Now I write this with the full expectation of being invited to the 2010 Vanity Fair Oscar Party, rather than having to sneak into it. Hear me talking Graydon!

This story started last year when Shoumatoff managed to sneak in to the Bohemian Grove during the annual event the club holds in July. But his wandering, covered in detail in his story, only lasted 40 minutes before he was arrested by security guards and a part-time service employee at the famed Grove who quickly spotted that the kind of sloppy, preppy Topsider-wearing editor was not one of their own.

In VF, Alex writes that he was trying to fit in with that style of dress, but folks I talked to say he wasn’t hard to miss: he was dressed like a caddy wearing a Pebble Beach pullover and apparently asked off-beat questions that proved to be his downfall. Most of which he mentions in his article.

He was quickly captured cowering behind a bush, but his large body gave him away. He was then arrested by the Sonoma County Sherriff’s Department, spent the night in county jail, and forced to pay a fine for trespassing. His arrest was captured in the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Post, Gawker, Huffington Post, and, of course, here at zennie62.com and the San Francisco Sentinel .

Shoumatoff’s piece in Vanity Fair this month may be the first case of a hatchet job that turned into a hachet boomerang: Club members say Shoumatoff’s piece is so dramatized and so full of factual errors (that I will detail in a follow-up post), that it proves to be an embarrassment for him and well as Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter. And they refered to being attacked by "right wing bloggers"!

I'm neither right of center, nor posessing wings like a bird, but I am a blogger. As an Oakland guy who hangs out in San Francisco a lot, has worked for and helped many local politicians both Democrat and Republican (but I'm a Dem), and gotten to personally know a number of "Grovers" as Alex calls them, I can tell you they're more than a little tired of people putting them into this "conservative White male" box, especially since this "liberal Black male" has been invited to visit and by members who are not all White, and aren't at all conservative.

I'm happy to come to their defense to be frank.

I'm glad Alex got caught because he could have just used the contacts he was developing to visit the club in a legitimate fashion. Instead, he bozoed his way in and looked like a clown in doing so.

And the club's forest plan? According to several sources, it's going through the review process well. But what I find so interesting even over the important consideration of the trees, is how one blue-blood institution, Vanity Fair, can muster the gall to call another blue-blood institution The Bohemian Club "elitist" when VF's not even invited me to its Oscar Party, and Graydon Carter will not take my calls.

This'll teach 'em!

Zennie's Gold Card Song A Hit On CNN and iReport

On Saturday I for some reason as I was showering started thinking about the song "The Sound of Silence" and then how my friend Russo has a tendency to sing these songs with a weird voice, so then I was thinking of a submission to the iReport on what I've given up to save money, and that led to my American Express Gold Card which I'd stopped using. I had all of those thoughts in one minute of shower time, then I started thinking about the lyrics to the song.

See, American Express, or AMEX, is trying to go back to its old business model where you as a card holder never had a balance, you just paid what you owed each month. So it's sacking the balance-holding accounts regardless of whether you paid on time or not. My account wasn't "sacked" but I had seen first the establishment of a credit limit then decreases in that limit which caused AMEX to ask for more money for no logical reason -- to me. So I figured why keep using it? Save money.

Thus the song.

Goodbye Gold Card my old friend! We've seen good-eats on the high-end..
People tell me AMEX has crashed. People say their credit is
smashed. But I'll tell you, that's not going to happen to me; I'll
set you free. And use, my cash! Well, ok and my PayPal and gift
cards, and other things.

And this YouTube video:



Which I also uploaded at iReport here:



And that version was seen over 69,000 times in one day because CNN elected to post it at CNN.com and well it went from 25 views to 15,000, to 69,000! But I didn't know it was going to be on television and that happened Sunday as I was in the gym. And then I've gotten facebook messages from people and texts and phone calls, so I figured I should share the video and lyrics for anyone who wanted to sing a silly song. I've got another song somewhere in me, but it works better when it's not forced out into the open!

Off To LA For The Academy Awards Today - Zennie

Yep. As my Twitter update reported, I'm off to Los Angeles for the Academy Awards -- well, for a visit to the grounds to make videos one day before the event. Excited? Yes! But I've got to get to the shower and get to the airport, and it's snowing on top of all that!

Catch the Academy Awards coverage over at our Hollywood Blog!

Julia Allison and Gawker's Obsession With The Online Star

Julia Allison's exploits are regularly covered by the online publications Gawker and Valleywag, who complain that she wants attention, then give her the attention in the process. Why? She's a great example of self-promotion.

I wrote about Allison a while back in this tongue-in-cheek take on her search for White Guys at tech parties. In the age of Obama I think she got the hint and started paying attention to men of color too, a good thing. But why is Gawker so taken with her?

Regardless of the reason, Allison is clearly an Internet star and a model of how to cheaply build buzz using online resources available to anyone. Heck, I'm taking notes from Julia.

Tony West Appointed Assistant Attorney General By President Obama

Tony West, who you've frequently seen if you're a visitor to the Oakland Focus Blog , and my YouTube channel Zennie62 , was appointed Assistant Attorney General by President Barack Obama.

Congratulations, Tony!

I just interviewed Tony, who became a friend during the campaign, on November 12th here and in a talk where one can learn more about the man and his vast background (for example, he's worked in some way for six presidents and now seven) who was just appointed on Friday of this week:



But that was not the first time I talked with Tony. Here's the other videos:

This one last year at the California State Democratic Convention:



And this one when then-Senator Obama visited San Francisco for a large fundraising event:

Frappr Map - Trying It Out

Zennie Abraham At JFK After CNN "Roland Martin: What They Didn't Say At The Debate" Show Appearance

I'm sitting here at JFK waiting to get on to the flight back to San Francisco and the Bay Area.  I had a terrific time in New York and at CNN and I'm going to write more when I get settled.  Right now, I need massive amounts of sleep.

If you didn't catch the show, here's a video of it.

 

McCain: No Debate; Obama: Let's Debate - The Blog Report

"The Blog Report With Zennie Abraham" Coming To CoLours TV

http://zennie2005.blogspot.com - This is my presentation of our new show "The Blog Report with Zennie Abraham" coming to the CoLours TV network soon.

CoLours TV is at 9407 on the DISH Network, so if you have Comcast, dump it and get the DISH Network so you can tune in.

The show is in three basic segments: politics, pop-culture, and sports.

DNC Convention - Zennie62's Trip - Arrival In Denver

This is our first video during our DNC Convention coverage.

Zennie Abraham on KQED's "Forum" Thursday, June 25, 2008

I will be a guest and part of a panel on the matter of Deborah Edgerly, Mayor Dellums, and the "state" of The City of Oakland, Thursday Morning June 25th on KQED's "Forum," 88.5 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's a call-in show. I don't -- yet -- know who the other panelists will be.

ValleyWag.com Happy Hour At Mooses In SF - ValleyWag.com

ValleyWag.com editor Owen Thomas graciously invited me to join him at Mooses for his firm's Friday Happy Hour. The star of this show was Laura Goldberg, the noted tech publicist who's currently with Ask.com, and we were joined by the founder of Lunch 2.0 and some other colorful people.

Fun times!

Zennie62 - My Channel Is Featured On YouTube Today

Well, to my surprise, my YouTube channel, "Zennie62" is one of the featured channels -- there are just four -- listed on YouTube as I write this on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 1:25 AM. I was so jazzed about this, I took a photo showing my current position, as it may not last by the time some of you see this!

It's a high honor to know that the YouTube editors like my 77 videos currently running. I also feel that because of this, I've got to do more videos with even better content. It's a challenge, but I'm up to it. I'm thinking of returning to my commentary segments that I did last year as well as more videos on local Oakland issues and more "mashup" videos.

I keep thinking I've not done that many videos - Renetto's got like 159 out there, so I've got an idea of what the benchmark is

I've got an uphill battle but the end results are worth it.

Thanks YouTube!