Category Archives: blogging

Smoke-Filled Backrooms of the Internets

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Thursday night I attended the gala awards party sponsored by the Drum Major Institute honoring Wynton Marsalis, Anna Burger, and Markos Moulitsas.

I had a very good time. But I wasn’t aware until today how close I came to being sucked into a vortex of intrigue and controversy and smoke-filled rooming. And possibly money, although money has a way of fleeing the room whenever I show up, so the money thing is a long shot.

Anyway, I got to the party, held at a nightclub called Lotus on Manhattan’s west side, a bit late. The room was too tightly packed with bodies to mingle much, but I managed to wriggle my way to the bar and claimed a spot next to Steve Gilliard and his blogging partner, the lovely Jen, a.k.a. Jenonymous. So I not only could order drinks but was lucky enough to snag a couple of steak cubes as a tray floated by, which in that room was a major coup.

I couldn’t see the honorees as they were introduced and spoke to the room. But I could hear the remarks. But then I got caught up in talking to another gentleman sitting at the bar who turned out to be a frequent commenter on Unclaimed Territory. Small world. So I wasn’t listening to the remarks all that closely and don’t remember what anybody said. I’m sure it was all very stirring, though.

When the awards part of the evening had concluded, Elana Levin of DMI rounded up us bloggers and took us to a downstairs lounge where we could talk about blog stuff. This was truly a star-studded group, as bloggers go. Along with Steve and Jen were two of the Great Babes of Blogging, Liza Sabater and Lindsay Beyerstein (Lindsay did listen to the remarks and blogged about them, here). Bob Fertik of Democrats.com, another survivor of Conference-a-thon, seemed to have recovered from the ordeal, or else he was faking it very well. Soon Lance Mannion and Blue Girl strolled in. Also Tom Watson and several other bloggers — I have not recovered from Conference-a-thon and cannot be responsible for remembering anything clearly — were there was well. And, oh yes, Kos arrived and took a spot in the corner.

Listen, folks, this is as much celebrity gossip as you’ll ever be likely to find on The Mahablog. Enjoy it.

So we had a lively talk about blog stuff, mostly on the grand themes of what we’re all about and whether we’re really reaching anyone other than “the choir.” We let Kos get a word in here and there, but on the whole he seemed perfectly happy to just hang out and listen. Then Kos left and the crowd thinned, and we were left with a small group that included Steve, Liza, Lindsay, Bob, Elana, and some other folks, and we became determined to find something to eat. So we tumbled out of Lotus and into the West Village street. After some fruitless wandering Steve decided to take charge and lead us to a place that would reliably supply us with hamburgers. He cruised straight and purposefully through waves of strolling people like a ship under sail, with the rest of us paddling frantically in his wake, to the place of hamburgers, and they were good hamburgers. And then I realized it was close to midnight and I had to get back to Grand Central before the Metro North Railroad turned into a pumpkin.

This all seemed fairly innocent to me, but what do I know? I’m still just a small-town Ozark Mountain girl. There’s times all these big city doin’s make me feel like I jes’ left Dogpatch.

According to Jason Zengerle of the floundering New Republic, that basement lounge was in fact a smoke-filled room, albeit a no-smoking one, and I had been sitting in the midst of a conspiracy so immense it would have astonished Whittaker Chambers.

As explained by Glenn Greenwald,

Over the last few days, Jason Zengerle of The New Republic has been engaged in a bizarre crusade to depict “liberal bloggers” as a bunch of mindless, obedient zombies who take orders about what to write from Markos Moulitsas, all in order to ensure that they can continue to enjoy the great financial wealth lavished upon them by virtue of their participation in the “Advertise Liberally” network, which Markos founded but does not operate. To prove this “point,” Zengerle published what he purported to be various e-mails regarding recent accusations against Jerome Armstrong, which Zengerle claimed were sent to the “Townhouse” Google group — comprised of 300 or so journalists, political operatives, bloggers, advocacy organizations, and others designed to facilitate communication between these usually isolated groups. To the extent the “substance” of Zengerle’s accusations are worth responding to, Ezra Klein and Max Sawicky (among many) have done so quite thoroughly, respectively here and here.

I’ll let you sort out the allegations and the refutations of the allegations. But as a participant in the Advertising Liberally network, I want to assure you that the amount of revenue received is not enough to buy my loyalty. A fair amount of hamburgers, yes, but not loyalty. I’m holding out for bigger bucks on the loyalty thing. And Kos and Jerome do not run the Advertising Liberally network; Chris Bowers does. I got in because Chris invited me to join, and I didn’t have to do nothin’ for it. Believe me that any club inviting me to join is not all that exclusive, although there are specific criteria. (Also see Chris on “Who Owns the New Republic?“)

Anyway, Zengerle claims that one of the sources of his allegations was an email from Steve Gilliard. But did Steve write the email? Steve says he has no record of it.

I told Zengerle the same thing and that he needs to provide the provenance of the e-mail so I can confirm or deny it. If it turns out I didn’t write those words, I’m going to write Franklin Foer, the editor of the New Republic and demand a retraction and an apology.

I write thousands of words a day between e-mails, IM, posts and comments. It is easy to lose a phrase or e-mail in that, which I why I can’t call it a fabrication. It may be taken from another e-mail, or a post, but I cannot find those words in my mailbox.

See what I mean about controversy and intrigue? And yet not much was said about any of this Thursday night. “Zengerle is an ass and TNR sucks” pretty much sums up the consensus.

While I’m on the subject of Thursday night I want to say something about the Drum Major Institute. DMI is a progressive think tank dedicated to “defending the American dream.” They’re doing some good work, and I hope to hear more from them in the future.

Rabbit Redux

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I was out late last night, so bear with me, here — Michael Tackett and Jeff Zeleny write in today’s Chicago Tribune—

FBI agents in an undercover sting operation arrested seven terrorism suspects in Miami on Thursday who allegedly were plotting to attack the Sears Tower in Chicago, the FBI headquarters in Miami and other U.S. buildings, officials said.

The suspects had “aspirations” but “no means” to attack the Sears Tower or other buildings, a senior federal law-enforcement source said.

The men were all Muslims who thought they were plotting “in conjunction with Al Qaeda” but they really were dealing with law-enforcement undercover agents, one law-enforcement official told The Miami Herald.

The men, who told neighbors in the Liberty City area of Miami that they were starting a children’s karate class at a warehouse, had been plotting for an undetermined amount of time, but their scheme was thwarted well before any attack could be carried out.

“They talked about belonging to an Islamic army. They wanted to raise an army in the U.S.,” a second senior law-enforcement official said Thursday. “But they didn’t have the means to do this.”

“There was no threat at all,” the senior federal law-enforcement source said, referring to the Sears Tower. Chicago police said the city is not on increased alert despite the news.

And later in the article …

The men, who had been subjects of an undercover federal investigation, were apprehended without incident in an adjacent Miami neighborhood.

“There was no imminent danger to the community,” said Judy Orihuela, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Miami. “Everybody is in custody who was part of the group. We’ve been conducting the investigation and we know that it’s been dismantled.” …

… Sears Tower officials would not comment directly on the arrests. But a spokesman said that no plan to attack the building ever had been carried out. Tenants said they had not been notified about the plot.

“Law enforcement continues to tell us that they have never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that has gone beyond criminal discussions,” Sears Tower managing director Barbara Carley said in a statement.

No big bleeping deal, in other words. Of course, if you’d only seen the headlines (Fox News: “Seven Nabbed in Miami on Terror Charges in Plot to Hit Sears Tower“) you might have gotten a different impression of what went on.

In one of her most brilliants posts yet, Michelle Malkin calls the suspects “black Muslim radicals” and provides us with an overview of recent terrorist threats coming from black Muslim radicals, going back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and including the Beltway snipers and black Muslim inmates in Folsom Prison. She even takes a swipe at “the old school black Muslim thugs (and Jesse Jackson pals) of the Chicago-based El Rukn.”

And then she says … get ready for this … “Bob Owens catches the Democratic Underground already playing the race card.”

Awesome. You don’t have to parody Malkin. She does it herself.

Still, if indeed we are swimming in terrorist threats here at home … why are we in Iraq, again?

Ellen Goodman writes in today’s Boston Globe (emphasis added):

… over the past two weeks as the House and Senate debated exit and no-exit strategies, there emerged a phrase in the rhetorical war that has not fallen on deaf ears. It’s the assertion that we are fighting the terrorists there so we won’t have to fight them here. As the president said in the State of the Union address, in the West Point graduation speech, in the surprise visit to Baghdad, “we will stay on the offensive against the terrorists, fighting them abroad so we do not have to face them here at home.”

In the midst of the mutual taunting and sound biting, this still resonates with the American people. So it’s time to ask whether we are indeed fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them in the New York subway. If so, what does it mean? What does it portend?

From the get-go, the Bush administration framed the war in Iraq as self-defense, as part of the war on terror. In fact, Iraq was never on the State Department’s dance card of terrorist strongholds. The attempt to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11 was as phony as the assertion of weapons of mass destruction. By no stretch of Dick Cheney’s imagination was Iraq a front line on the war on terror. But it is now.

Over three years, it’s become the recruiting ground, the favorite destination for terrorists who take their place alongside insurgents and civil warriors. No sooner is Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi killed than a claim comes in that the brutal torture and murder of two American soldiers is the work of his successor.

If Iraq is the neighborhood in which terrorists have chosen to fight America, are we now sending soldiers to keep them in that neighborhood? Are we now sending sons, daughters, husbands, wives to be the designated terrorist attractions? If not cannon fodder, are they I.E.D. fodder?

This week at a news conference, The Wall Street Journal’s David Rogers, a Vietnam veteran, challenged the House majority leader. “In Vietnam, they used to put us out in these fire support bases and hope we would get attacked. Is that what you are doing?” he asked. “You are putting people in Iraq and hoping they get attacked so you can bring out the terrorists?” Has it come to this?

Wasn’t that the “flypaper theory” all along? And shouldn’t we put the righties on the spot to explain, if all these black illegal immigrant Muslim radicals are swarming about the country anyway, doesn’t that mean we’re failing to fulfill the mission in Iraq?

Goodman adds, “This administration had no post-Saddam strategy for Iraq. Now it seems they have no post-Iraq strategy for the war on terror.”

Yesterday, Dan Froomkin discussed Karl Rove’s exploitation of Iraq for political purposes. The plan is for Republicans to deride any Democratic plans to withdraw or redeploy troops in Iraq as a “cut and run.” It seems Karl has no post-Iraq strategy for winning elections, either.

Miss Lucy

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Sorry I’m a little uncommunicative. Today my feline roomie Miss Lucy had another mastectomy. We recently passed the one-year anniversary of her first mastectomy with no sign of recurring cancer, but then I felt some tiny little lumps, so I took her to the vet yesterday. The vet called awhile ago to say the surgery went well.

Anyway, I’ve been sitting here most of the afternoon trying to compose a post and not getting anywhere. I think I need a break.

Congrats to Kos

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You might have noticed the orange animated ad in the left-hand column — “honor Kos for speaking truth to power.” This Thursday night Markos Moulitsas (along with Wynton Marsalis and Anna Burger) is being honored by the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy in New York City. Read more from Jane Hamsher, here.

I realize there’s some ambivalence about Kos among leftie bloggers. See, for example, Nick Bourbaki’s posts at Wampum, here and here. And yesterday I ran across some snarking at Kos in a comment thread at Unclaimed Territory discussing Ned Lamont’s challenge of Joe Lieberman’s Senate seat. This guy, for example,

I hope that your laudible support for electoral challenges to centrist/conservative Democrats extends also to *third-party* challenges of centrist/conservative Democrats. At the moment, progressive third-party voices are being generally shut out of most of the so-called “progressive netroots”… most egregiously at the site of your friend and colleague, Markos.

Unless there’s a D after the name of the candidate in question, Markos would greatly contest what you yourself have just written above: that few things are more constructive than a democratic election where pro-war views get openly debated and then resolved by voters.

The writer goes on to say that he’d been banned from posting at Daily Kos merely for advocating third-party candidates. Maybe, but I know from my own experiences that people who claim they were banned from a site for expressing perfectly reasonable and temperate opinions are usually, um, not telling the whole story. As a blogger who makes robust use of twit filters herself, I support any blogger’s decision to ban anyone from his or her site for whatever reason. And, yes, this includes rightie bloggers who ban lefties. A blog is the blogger’s creation, not a public utility, and bloggers have a right to exercise editorial discretion whether I like it or not.

IMO the commenter quoted above exemplifies the “let’s-keep-shooting-ourselves-in-the-foot” faction of progressivism. Consider: We are up against a big, well-funded, and well-organized extremist right-wing faction that has taken over the White House and Congress and is well on the way toward taking over the judiciary. This faction spouts rhetoric about “freedom” and “democracy” but in fact supports radical theories about the Constitution that have put this nation on the road to totalitarianism. The regime in power has gotten us into one pointless and ruinous war and appears to be preparing to get us into another one. They are threatening the health of the planet by ignoring global warming, and the point at which it will be too late to act is fast approaching. They have strengthened their grip on power by corrupting elections and appropriating news media so that citizens can’t learn the truth. They are strangling our economy with profligate spending combined with irresponsible tax cuts, and every second that passes we are deeper and deeper in debt to other nations, like China.

The house is on fire, in other words. Some of us think our first priority is to put the fire out any way we can. We can argue about what wallpaper pattern would look best in the master bedroom some other time.

If the Democrats can win back a majority in the House this November — or, even better, the entire Congress — the Dems will have some power with which to fight the Right. That doesn’t mean they will, of course; I expect we will need to apply pressure on a future Dem majority to be sure they use their subpoena power (which they don’t have as a minority) and conduct meaningful investigations to expose the Bushies and the extremist Right for the danger to America that they are. But a Democratic majority in even one house will curtail much of the Bush regime’s ability to steamroll over American rights and values any time it pleases.

I want to be clear that I support Democratic candidates in the November elections (most of ’em, anyway) not because I believe they are always right or because I think a Democratic majority in the House will fix all our political problems. I admit that many Dems running for election in November are less progressive than I wish they were. And even If we succeed in taking at least part of Congress away from the Republicans there will still be a long, hard fight ahead to restore America to anything approximating political health.

But a Dem majority would give us a better position from which to fight and a lot more ammunition to fight with. If we don’t take back part of Congress in November, it means two more years of having no power in Washington at all.

The Bushies can do a lot of damage in two years, folks.

Looking beyond the midterm elections — if we succeed, our next goal as netroots activists should be to increase our influence among the Dems. We must deliver the message to the Democratic Party establishment that it’s time to stop dancing the Clinton triangulation two-step. We must sell progressive policies to the public and pressure Dems in Washington to enact those policies. If we can topple Joe Lieberman, the most egregious of the DINO Bush bootlickers, this would send a clear signal to the Dems that they must reckon with us, and that they can’t take our loyalty for granted. This is essentially the argument made by Kos and Jerome Armstrong in Crashing the Gate.

There’s a lot more to be done to make America safe for progressivism again, such as reform media so that our messages reach the public without being twisted by the rightie noise machine. Election reform, real campaign reform — all vital goals, and none will be easy to achieve.

But if the Dems don’t succeed in the 2006 midterms, prepare to kiss it all off. That’s reality. And another reality is that until we change the way we conduct elections — allow instant runoff elections, for example — third party candidates will not only lose, they will split the progressive vote and hand elections to Republicans. This has been happening in America since the first political parties emerged, which was while the ink was still drying on the Constitution. I do believe a pattern has been established.

Where does Kos fit into this? IMO Kos is more of an organizer than a blogger, but that’s OK. The netroots are a cornucopia of great bloggers, but great organizers are harder to come by. I don’t always agree with Kos, but I admire his ability to get in the faces of politicians and media and demand attention. The YearlyKos convention — which was fabulous, IMO, and if they have another one next year I’m already there — was a major step toward giving netroots progressivism real power in the flesh. I couldn’t have done it. I suspect most of us couldn’t have done it. But Kos did it, and he deserves the credit. So, I congratulate Kos for being honored by the Drum Major Institute. I wish him continued success, and I hope more bloggers step out from behind their monitors and follow his lead.

And if we keep fighting, the day will come when progressive goals will be achievable. Goals like providing health care for all Americans and a genuine commitment to reducing global warming will no longer be kept dangling out of our reach by the power of the Right.

Last January I caught some flames with this post, in which I said that too much of the Left was “stuck in a 1970s time warp of identity politics and street theater projects and handing out fliers for the next cause du jour rally.” But for at least forty years — since I was old enough to pay attention to politics — I’ve watched earnest and dedicated liberals stand outside the gates of power and hand out essentially the same fliers for the same causes, year after year, decade after decade. And in most cases we’re no closer to achieving real change than we were forty years ago. On many issues we’ve lost ground. Yet too many lefties (like the commenter above) care more about ideological purity than about accomplishment.

If in-fighting over ideological purity is getting in the way of having the power to enact progressive policies, then the hell with ideological purity. Speaking truth to power is grand, but let’s not forget the ultimate goal is to be power. I believe one of the reasons we have been rendered into a minority is that too many lefties act and think like a minority; we’re perpetually out of power because that’s how we envision ourselves. So even though an overwhelming majority of the American public now agrees with us on Iraq, for example, somehow we’re the extremists, and the hawks — who dominate government and media — paint themselves as mainstream. Righties, on the other hand, maintain total faith that the majority of Americans are with them, even if poll after poll says otherwise. And that faith has empowered them.

We are the mainstream. We are the majority. But to take our rightful place in American politics and government we must start thinking like a majority and acting like a majority. It’s way past time to stop standing outside the gates of power handing out fliers. It’s time to crash the gate.

Still Decompressed

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This is an addendum to the post on the YearlyKos and Take Back America conferences I published yesterday at Unclaimed Territory, in which I complained that there was much talk of building progressive media infrastructure but no real plan for doing it. Robert Perry writes at Consortium News:

Some e-mailers and friends have asked why I didn’t attend some of the recent progressive conferences – like “Take Back America” or the “Yearly Kos Convention” – where media was on the agenda. The short answer is that I have been to progressive meetings in the past where media was discussed – and almost nothing gets done.

As the Right has built up a vertically integrated media infrastructure that stretches from newspapers, magazines and books to talk radio, cable news and well-funded Internet sites, wealthy liberals mostly have sat on their hands. Even now, as the Right expands that infrastructure horizontally down to state, district and local levels – with ominous portents for Election 2006 – well-heeled liberals remain mostly passive.

And this pattern has been going on for years.

In the 1990s – after I left Newsweek over internal battles about what I viewed as the magazine’s mis-reporting of the Iran-Contra Affair – I talked to executives of leading liberal foundations about the desperate need for building honest media in America. I often got bemused looks. One foundation bureaucrat laughed and announced, “Oh, we don’t do media.” Another liberal foundation actually banned media-related proposals.

It’s as if American liberals and possibly some tribe in Borneo are the only groups on earth who don’t understand the transformational power of media.

I believe we have progressed to the point that American liberals — the ones at the conferences, anyway — now understand that in the long run “building honest media” is our biggest and most essential task. Without this, even though we might win elections here and there, liberals cannot expect to take back any real political power or have any influence in American policies. But how do we do this?

Perry explains the steps taken by right-wing think tanks and foundations to build the Wingnut Echo Chamber that would assimilate most of the “MSM.” He continues,

Indeed, in the treatment of Clinton during his presidency and Gore during the pivotal Election 2000, it was difficult to distinguish between the hostility from the right-wing media and the venom from the mainstream media. Yet, wealthy liberals – including many who made their fortune in the entertainment media – just couldn’t get their brains around the need to build strong media outlets for honest journalism.

There were always reasons why that couldn’t happen. One plan was too ambitious; another plan wasn’t ambitious enough.

Other times, perfection became the enemy of the good. There were esoteric debates about how media outlets should maintain their purity by not taking commercials, even though that guaranteed that under-funded operations couldn’t pay professional salaries or achieve necessary technical standards.

Or there were self-absorbed discussions about how liberals don’t need media the way conservatives do because liberals are more free-thinking. Or there was the defeatism about how liberal talk radio couldn’t succeed. Some activists even thought one answer was to get Americans to stop watching TV (after all, the strategy to get Americans to turn off their radios had worked so well).

There was also a strange embarrassment on the Left about the importance of money in achieving what needed to be done. The reason we put the word “consortium” in our title was to stress our view that the only hope for achieving the honest media needed to address America’s political crisis was to pull together substantial resources for building strong media outlets and producing quality journalistic content.

But whenever I’d attend one of those progressive conferences, I left with the feeling that the people who had the money were not serious about doing anything with it, at least not on media. Or maybe they just didn’t see media as all that important.

Even in the past year when some liberal foundations have told me that “oh, we now get the media thing,” what they really wanted to do with their money was put it into activism on media issues, such as organizing demonstrations to oppose funding cuts at PBS.

When I spoke to two foundation officials a year ago and made my pitch for the need to support journalistic “outlets and content,” one of them responded, “oh, those are just words.” What they decided to do with their money was to support “media reform,” i.e. organizing around media issues.

After this year’s “Take Back America” assemblage of liberal activists had ended in Washington, I sat down with a West Coast friend who had attended the conference. He had been there pushing the need for investments in media and had concluded, “All they care about is organizing.”

Yeah, pretty much. That said, I think the YearlyKos media panel, which consisted of real smart people I had actually heard of — Jay Rosen, Christy Hardin-Smith, Jamison Foser, Duncan Black, and Matt Bai — was way better than the TBA media panel, in which some polling consultant took up most of the time. But without money there’s not much we can do but organize.

Bryan Preston Is a Shameless Liar, Too

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The question at hand is whether there’s something about being a rightie and being a pathological liar that tend to go together. Or being a rightie and pathologically stupid; take your pick. Bryan Preston at Hot Air is shamelessly calling ME a liar and then twists facts to “prove” it.

Bryan pulls a sleight of hand by implying that I claimed the audience at Hillary Clinton’s speech had not booed at all, which is a lie. I said they had not booed the troops in the part of the speech presented in the Michelle/Bryan video clip. And then he quotes a bit of a Time magazine article about the boos at the Clinton speech to “prove” that I lied. But the Time article refers to a different part of the speech, and in fact the Time magazine article corroborates what I wrote about the speech last Tuesday. Behold — this is what I wrote Tuesday:

Earlier, Senator Clinton had also spoken on the subject of Iraq. She is opposed to an open-ended commitment of troops, she said, but does not support setting “a date certain.” This inspired some boos, as well as applause.

Time magazine:

But then she came to Iraq. “I do not think it is a smart strategy,” she said, “either for the President to continue with his open-ended commitment, which I think does not put enough pressure on the new Iraqi government, nor do I think it is smart strategy to set a date certain.” Members of the crowd yelled, “Why not?” There was loud booing. It was almost impossible to hear Clinton as she spoke over the crowd to declare, “I do not agree that that is in the best interest of our troops or our country.” After her speech, as Clinton was walking along the stage and shaking hands with attendees who had rushed to meet her, more than a dozen members of the crowd stood and started chanting “Bring the troops home! Bring the troops home!”

Bryan the Dim claims that Time magazine “has our back”; no, dear, it has MY back. Not yours. If you listen to the UNEDITED version of the speech, it should be obvious even to an idiot — which, I suppose one could argue, might leave out Michelle and Bryan — that the crowd was heckling Clinton, not booing the troops. The heckling isn’t clear in the video, but I was in the hall during the speech, and I heard some people yell “bring them home.” Which is what the Time magazine article says, too, although it refers to the end of the speech.

And anyone who is a regular here knows I am no Hillary fan. I might have heckled her myself except that I was wearing a “press” pass and was trying to look objective.

I wrote more about what went on in the hall in another post titled “Booing Hillary” and followed up a bit more in “Take Back Washington.” Clearly, I never said that the audience didn’t boo during the Clinton speech. I had already written three posts referring to boos during the Clinton speech. What I said was that they were booing Senator Clinton, not the troops.

Bryan also makes a Big Bleeping Deal about him being the one who edited the speech, not Malkin. But Malkin claimed ownership of the video clip on her blog — “We’ve captured and posted the video of Hillary getting booed as she asks progressives to support the troops.” So as far as I’m concerned, whether she or Bryan did the actual technical work (and chopped off the video clip to give a false impression of what happened) is beside the point.

For more from someone else who was there, see Susie at Suburban Guerrilla.

Update: Taylor Marsh, who was there too, is a better person than I am. She attempts to walk Michelle and Bryan through the speech to show them where they went wrong. Patience of a saint, I say. I just want to hang bells and warning signs — “flaming liar” or some such — on them just to let folks know to keep their distance.

Update to the last update: We need bells and warning signs for this little wingnut, too.

Update to the update of the update before that: BTW, the little wingnut linked above seems to think the U.S. won the Vietnam War.

What Do We Want?

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The Internet connection seems to have picked up a bit, so I’ll try to be a good little exhibit and demonstrate my keyboarding skills for the folks.

In his most recent Newsweek column, Howard Fineman demonstrates he’s only a couple of years behind the Blogosphere:

Democrats aren’t likely to find leaders and answers here in the capital, and can’t expect the traditional media to light the way. Instead, Democrats need to be a “states’ rights” party in a new sense, shunning the sclerotic political machinery of the capital for the new ideas, programs and tactics sprouting in the states–and in the digital netroots of America.

So far, so good.

Americans want optimism and ideas, and are tired of hearing about the capital.

Hmm, let’s think about this. Do Americans really want “optimism” and “ideas”? Most politicians I’ve ever seen radiate optimism like the sun, except when they’re in fear mongering mode. Us morose and brooding types don’t go into politics. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it up the wazoo with ideas.

What do we want from politicians? Do we want to be wooed with promises (Oooo, baby, what would you do for a new health care policy?). Or do we want people who seem to be serious about governing? And how would one demonstrate that?

Fineman says the Dems have to think outside the box. No, really, he said that. And he gets paid for that, mind you.

A reference to Yearly Kos:

Zuniga and Armstrong bring the communications story up to date. The most successful presidents tend to be those who master the new media forms of their time: the letter-and-pamphlet writing era of Washington and Jefferson, the speechmaking-telegraph days of Lincoln, FDR and radio and newsreels, JFK and Reagan and television. Now the Net awaits its own Great Communicator.

[Interlude: Glenn Greenwald dropped by. It’s nice to meet people that are, you know, people, and not just verbiage on my laptop monitor.]

Maybe it’s because I’m working in a fishbowl, but I’m having trouble articulating what I’m looking for in a politician. Progressivism, certainly. Thoughts?

[Interlude: NeoJoe came by and says hi!]

I’m Hungry and My Feet Hurt

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I am coming to you from Bloggers’ Row at the Take Back America conference, which is in the Exhibit Hall of the Washington Hilton. The Take Back America people gave me a press pass, but the “MSM” types are somewhere else. Does that mean we’re an exhibit?

And did I mention the wireless Internet provided to us sucks? The guy from _____ Company had better fix it, or his company is going to get slimed by a whole lot of bloggers, big time.

Jet Lagged

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Phase I of Conference-a-thon is complete — I’m home from Las Vegas. Tomrrow morning I fly to Washington, DC for the Take Back America conference. I hope to spend the rest of June napping.

My backpack is stuffed full of notes from the Kos conference. For that matter, my head is stuffed full of ideas from the Kos conference. But right now I’m too frazzled to pull the ideas out of my head and distill them into language.

I expect to be live blogging the TBA conference, so I hope to have some actual content posted here sometime tomorrow. Thanks so much to Donna and Erin for keeping the blog fires burning these past four days!