John Chandley’s son Christopher just called to say that John passed away last night.

As many in the community know, Scarecrow had been battling lung cancer for several months.

His children were with him when he passed. Christopher said “he loved you and he loved his work at Firedoglake.”

He was a brilliant writer and editor, a loyal friend and a deeply moral and committed soul. He will be terribly, terribly missed.

Update:  Perris had a great suggestion.  Please feel free to leave a commemorative link to your favorite posts from Scarecrow in the comments.

Here’s mine — when Scarecrow figured out what caused the Deep Horizon oil rig to blow a week before BP did.

Because the war on Christmas would not be complete without the sacrilege of non-Christmas specific holiday crafts.

This season, Lucy pays homage to Orlando Bloom in the classic slouch hat knitted in broken rib stitch.  The pattern can be found for free at Ravelry, where you can friend me as JaneHamsher.

I also knitted some fishtail pattern wrist warmers for myself, made out of Paton’s Kroy sock yarn:

I very much enjoyed seeing people’s art projects on the equally sacrilegious Happy Thanksgiving Knitting, so if you’d really like to get under Bill O’Reilly’s skin feel free to leave links to your holiday (or non-holiday) artistry in the comments.

Walmart workers in Pico Rivera prepare to strike

Find a Black Friday Walmart action near you.

Firedoglake has been working with the Walmart strikers in preparation for Black Friday. We’ve been talking with young organizers across the country who are finally starting to have some traction against the big box monolith that has wiped out small American businesses everywhere they’ve been been built.

Walmart is not going to take this lying down.  They have filed a complaint with the NLRB trying to stop the strikers, and yesterday when an employee in Florida walked off the job, Walmart called the police who issued her a warning for trespassing.

Having worked with groups ranging from Occupy WallStreet to OccupySandy to the Keystone XL tree sitters,  we’ve learned an awful lot about supplying demonstrators.  We’ve consulted with experienced union strike bosses to anticipate needs that demonstrators will have that they may not even realize until they’re in the thick of it.  And ironically,  the Walmart strike organizers said they actually learned a lot from studying the FDL member distribution system we set up for Occupy Supply.

So once again we’re digging in behind the workers, sending supplies to the picket lines and directing nearby activists to attend the Black Friday protests in solidarity.

Public support for the strikers is going to be critical to the narrative that comes out of Black Friday.  If you’re inclined to show up and support the strikers, they can really use your help:

You can search for a Black Friday Walmart action in your area here.

We’ve seen that bringing change to Walmart and its third party contractors is possible. In September, 38 warehouse workers in Elwood, IL struck alongside 600 supporters, and were able to clog up an important national distribution point for Walmart facilities across the nation. The strike was successful, and the workers were allowed to return to work without retaliation.

But Walmart employees have a long way to go for justice, and the Black Friday actions are a major step in that direction. With your help, we’ll show Walmart strikers that we’ve got their backs and help them continue to strike until their voices have been heard.

We’ll continue to support the Walmart strikers long after Black Friday.  We hope you’ll join with us in supporting them.

Happy Thanksgiving from Lucy and her mom

When your dad is a minister, some old lady is sticking a pair of knitting needles in your hands before you can walk. Like tuna noodle casserole and out-of-tune pianos in the basement, it’s a staple of a church upbringing.

So I’ve been knitting for as long as I can remember.  I like to pick up patterns over at Ravelry (I’m JaneHamsher,  if you’re on Ravelry, friend me!)  My best friend from high school, Mary Jane M, is a bit of a star knitter over there and sometimes I do test knitting for her.  I knitted the Fair Isle sock in this pattern (and took the photo too as I recall, though I think I just snapped the shutter since it was Mary Jane’s foot in the sock.)

Recently I knitted this Burberry-inspired cowl pattern in green. I picked up the yarn at the Knit and Stitch yarn shop in Bethesda.  I wish I could remember what the name of the yarn is because it knits up really nicely.

The dogs and I have a fire going in the fireplace, we’re watching the Macy’s parade, and I’m working on these mittens, worn by Kristen Stewart in possibly the stupidest movie of all time, Twilight.

Lucy wanted to say “happy Thanksgiving” too, so she jumped in the photo.  That’s  me in the green cowl and new red hair.  Katie was attending to other urgent business in the yard.

So happy Thanksgiving, from all of us to all of you.

What’s your hobby, and how are you faring this fine Thanksgiving day?

John "Scarecrow" Chandley

Our front page editor John Chandley, aka Scarecrow, has been around FDL since we opened the doors in 2004, and I can’t think of anyone who has been a more loyal friend to the community. His insights and his passion for justice have inspired all of us throughout the years.

People may have noticed that for several weeks now, I’ve been on front page editing duty in his place. What they didn’t know is that John was recently diagnosed with metastatic melanoma which has spread to his lungs and his brain.

John is in the hospital right now, waiting for Glaxo Smith Klein to approve him for the use of dabrafenib, just about the only known drug effective on treating his form of melanoma after it has spread to the brain, because it can cross the blood/brain barrier. I don’t want to get into how the thieves at Glaxo Smith Klein are charging thousands of dollars per month for a drug that was developed with NIH funding or that John has to be hospitalized to afford it even if he is approved, because I’ll just be shaking with rage and it will detract from the point of this post, which is to wish him the best for a speedy recovery.

John didn’t have WiFi access in the hospital so we bought him a wireless card yesterday and Phred and her husband delivered it to him in the hospital last night. So I know you can read this, Scarecrow.

Get better fast John.  We miss you and love you.

Microsoft has apparently forked over big cash to Amazon to have its Bing search engine installed as the default on the new Kindle Fire HD.

Ars Technica:

“All text you enter in Amazon Silk’s address bar is sent to a default search engine,” Amazon writes in the Amazon Silk browser terms and conditions, updated yesterday. “The initial default search engine is selected by Amazon Silk, and we may change the default search engine in the future without notice to you. If you would like, you may choose to use a different search provider as your default search engine. The privacy policy of the selected default search engine applies to information sent to it.”

Google signed a deal for $300 million last year to be the default search engine in Mozilla’s Firefox.

Microsoft is no doubt desperate to reverse the trends in this chart:

Google’s cozy position as a government-granted monopoly has certainly reaped rewards for the company, and they’re eating everyone’s lunch in the global race for the almighty online advertising dollar. Microsoft had to make a big move.

I switched to DuckDuckGo a few months ago when Google changed their algorithm to favor their own sites and it became impossible to find anything I was looking for. When DuckDuckGo doesn’t work and I need a more sophisticated tool I do find that Bing consistently has a better chance of delivering what I want, although the creaky design takes some getting used to.

Bottom line:  I don’t think it’s a bad move for Amazon.  Kindle users will probably be better served by the deal.

Now that Google has admitted in court documents that it has paid “so many commentators it’s impossible to list them all,” it looks like everyone’s a suspect.

On CNBC, Consumer Watchdog’s Jamie Court suggested Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson might be on the Google dole when the latter ripped into a bizarre screed about how consumers just don’t care about their internet privacy, and Consumer’s Union is bigger than Consumer Watchdog anyway, so how would they know what consumers want.

Court replied:

There’s a case right now where Google has to disclose all the bloggers it pays to get its viewpoint out.  And I don’t know if you’re on that list or not.

Carlson and Court were on CNBC discussing the proposed $22.5 million settlement between Google and the FTC.  The FTC accused Google of telling Safari users it wouldn’t use tracking cookies or deliver targeted ads — and then doing so:

The settlement is over Google’s override of the cookie controls in Apple’s Safari browser.

As the FTC explained, Google snuck around those controls by creating an invisible HTML form and then using JavaScript to pretend a user had submitted it.

Per Brad Reed: “Google’s cookie-planting antics were revealed this past February by Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student at Stanford who published research showing how Google used loopholes within Apple’s Safari browser cookie-blocking policy to place unexpected third-party cookies within the browser.”

In the proposed settlement, Google gets to skate on any admission of wrongdoing, and “denies any violation of the FTC Order, any and all liability for the claims set forth in the Complaint, and all material allegations of the Complaint save for those regarding jurisdiction and venue.”

Consumer Watchdog has filed a motion challenging the settlement with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, which must approve the deal.

As part of the proposed settlement, Google is creating a “Red Team” to protect consumers from…well, itself.

I know I feel safe.

Meg “Mini Mitt” Whitman gritted her teeth and announced the worst quarter in Hewlett Packard’s 73 year history. Part of the loss is due to a write-down of the value of EDS which HP acquired from Ross Perot in 2008, and also due to the cost of severance payments to the first wave of the 27,000 workers Whitman sacked.

Revenue declined in each of HP’s four major business segments: Personal Systems; Services; Imaging and Printing; Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking.

Whitman, who has been described as Mitt Romney’s “protigee” at Bain & Company from 1981 to 1989, was also funded by his big donors during her 2010 California gubernatorial bid.

She has been at the helm of HP for almost a year now, and nobody is saying that HP wasn’t a troubled company, or that turning it around would be easy.  But her future plans for the company sounded a bit vague on this week’s analyst call:

[W]hen we look at 2013, we’re going to tumble all of the pluses and the minuses. We’re going to put in the investments that we think are required, and yet we have to have a cost structure that allows us to win in the marketplace. So, we’ll have a crisp view of that by 2013.”

“Crisp view?” Is that oligarch-speak for “bumpy ride?”

If she does indeed know where she’s going, she’s doing a crappy job of communicating it — a critically important quality in someone who wanted a job inspiring confidence in voters.  “Governor Meg” was a bullet well-dodged.

It’s not clear what Judge William Alsup was fishing for on August 7 when he ordered both Google and Oracle to submit lists of authors they had paid to “report and comment” on their Clash of the Titans copyright infringement case.

What is clear is that Alsup was not amused when Google decided it would flout his order, and he smacked them pretty hard with an Order to Supplement on Monday:

Google suggests that it has paid so many commenters that it is impossible to list them all. Please simply do your best but the impossible is not required. Oracle managed to do it.

Oracle did comply as Alsup notes, and in the process oh-so helpfully ratted out both Ed Black, President of the Computer and Communications Industry Association and Jonathan Band, an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center as two of Google’s “paid influencers” in its own filing.

They seem to have a pretty big bug up their collective ass about it, too:

Oracle notes that Google maintains a network of direct and indirect “influencers” to advance Google’s intellectual property agenda. This network is extensive, including attorneys, lobbyists, trade associations, academics, and bloggers, and its focus extend beyond pure intellectual property issues to competition/antitrust issues. Oracle notes that Googles extensive network of influencers has been the subject of recent press coverage.

As Oracle points out, Google cited Band’s work — with no acknowledgment of their financial connection — in an April 3, 2012 copyright brief to the court.

Venkat Balasubramani argues that Judge Alsup’s August 7 order is overly broad, and could be interpreted to include anyone with AdSense ads running on their site. Which prompted Eric Goldman to assert that there was no way Google could comply with the order in the allotted time — precisely the position Google took. Which Judge Alsup did not exactly find funny ha-ha.

Alsup clarified that AdSense participants need not be listed in his Order to Supplement.

While most of the press has focused on dirty hippy “paid bloggers” aspect, it’s clear that the people who are really worried about Alsup’s somewhat unprecedented order are the elite crowd of academics and professional journalists who may not have disclosed that they are on the Google dole, and have been presenting themselves as objective commentators. (Don’t worry, guys. It doesn’t seem to have hurt Jonathan Gruber’s career.)

Dan Levine wonders if Alsup’s order was prompted by a July 27 column in the San Jose Mercury News by Chris O’Brien, which outlines the way that tech giants funnel money to their respective experts to churn out friendly policy prose.

But it’s also possible that over the course of the trial, Alsup wound up on the business end of one of the PR “war rooms” that vendors set up on behalf of corporations (and political campaigns) to flood social media channels with chatter. Alsup seems to be a tech-savy guy who learned to code in Java for the trial. Judges read their own press, and it doesn’t take a Hawking-level IQ to spot a boiler room full of over-caffeinated Twitter trolls with multiple ID software and an IP anonymizer repeating bullet points off an oppo sheet (viz, HBGary, Leonie Enterprises).

Judge Alsup may just be curious to know how deep Google’s propaganda machine goes, especially now that the trial is over. I am too, for that matter. He has ordered them to try harder and come up with a legitimate list of paid commentators by noon on Friday. If Google has decided that judge baiting is a fun new sport, I may just get my wish.

You can find court documents from the Oracle vs. Google case here.

There's only one Carnac

In the contentious 2008 Democratic Presidential primary, there were many members of the FDL community who passionately supported one candidate over another.  We chose as a blog not to endorse either candidate because we did not want to alienate either significant sector of our community.

Moreover, we firmly believe that elections are the time when candidates are the most responsive to the needs of the constituents whose votes they hope to woo.

In 2012, the LGBT community shut their pocketbooks and suddenly the President Obama “evolved” on gay marriage.  Likewise, DREAM Activists who have faced deportation for years announced that they would occupy Obama campaign headquarters in swing states — and the President decided he would use his own authority to grant them work permits.

We believe that the Presidential election should be a time for healthy discussion among those who have different and often passionately held points of view.

Some argue that failing to support the President and being indifferent to a Mitt Romney win could mean the Supreme Court is poisoned for a generation.  That’s a valid position.

Others argue that cynically accepting the “least worst option” fuels a race to the bottom; they may look to third party candidates for answers.  Third party candidates have historically forced major party candidates into more populist positions.  They have also played the role of spoilers.  It is not engaging in bad faith to bring up either of these points.

But most importantly, groups whose votes are still up for grabs are using this time to advocate for things they care about that are within the President’s purview to impact, much like LGBT and DREAM activists have done.  Because once a candidate knows you’re in the tank for them, your ability to leverage your support is gone.  That’s just a political reality.

The White House blocked the FDA from making the Morning After pill available over-the-counter.  The President needs women voters to turn out for him in 2012.  There’s a lot of room there for “evolution.”

The President also needs young voters to turn out for him.  He could reschedule marijuana tomorrow, something that could have enormous impact across the globe, but particularly among young people of color in the US.

Individual writers on FDL may take different positions.  It does not mean that as a blog we endorse any of them.  Our goal is to make a fair home for all sides of this discussion, and not shut it down

If you don’t see your particular position reflected on the front page, it probably means nobody has crafted a well-written post on the topic, and you should think about doing that over on MyFDL yourself.  And by well-written, we mean concise and fairly stated — not a long, rambling, invective-filled screed.  We don’t intend to compromise the editorial standards of the front page in the process

The one thing we have no interest in being is a mind-reading site.   “You just want Obama to win” or “you just want Romney to win” or “you just don’t care about X” furthers no conversation.  Its only intent is to poison the discussion and launch a pie fight.

Unless your name is the Carnac the Magnificent, nothing will get you bounced from FDL faster  than assigning nefarious and unacknowledged electoral motives to people you disagree with.

Our only goal is to foster a vigorous and open debate on FDL in the ensuing months.  The fact that we will not be playing the role of arbiter is not a reflection of any hidden agenda, but rather a continuation of what we have historically sought to be during times when our community is intensely divided:  a town square where a fair discussion of the merits of all sides can take place.