June 29, 2005
CapitolLink: Rep. Frank on Karl Rove
Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank joined the ranks of contributors to The Huffington Post yesterday. He seized on the forum as a chance to tout his House floor speech that criticized White House adviser Karl Rove for blasting liberals' reaction to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The blog posting quickly summarizes Frank's opinion that Rove dishonestly smeared liberals in order "to resuscitate the discredited claim that the war in Iraq was a response to 9/11." The rest of the post consists of Frank's floor speech. Here's a snippet: "Rove's bizarre, reckless assaults on his opponents ... are the latest example of a pattern of abuse of power and influence which has become the hallmark of Republican rule."
Yesterday's edition of The Huffington Post also included posts from Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., on the congressional outcry over a bid by financier George Soros to buy the Washington Nationals baseball team, and from Rep. Charles Rangel. The New York Democrat offered his advance reaction to the speech President Bush gave later in the evening on the war in Iraq.
Former Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., also weighed in on the anti-terrorism law known as the USA PATRIOT Act, parts of which are up for renewal. He said the statute "needs some common-sense fixes to keep our liberty safe."
Posted by dglover at 04:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 28, 2005
CapitolLink: Lawmakers Take To Blogosphere
Rep. Bernie Sanders tried his hand at blogging last week by serving as a guest at TPMCafe, the group blog run by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. Sanders' stint at the keyboard is part of an emerging trend: lawmakers who share their insights or push their agendas in the blogosphere.
The activity is most evident among Democrats and on left-leaning blogs like Daily Kos and MyDD that include "diary" sections. TPMCafe and The Huffington Post, another new group blog run by columnist Arianna Huffington, also encourage participation from lawmakers.
Democratic Reps. John Conyers of Michigan and Louise Slaughter of New York, each of whom also has a personal blog, are the most prolific participants. Conyers has posted comments fairly regularly at Daily Kos and The Huffington Post, while Slaughter has engaged readers at Daily Kos, The Huffington Post and MyDD.
Sen. Jon Corzine of New Jersey also has posted once each at Daily Kos and The Huffington Post, and Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin has addressed campaign-finance rules for the Internet at Daily Kos and MyDD. Corzine's gubernatorial campaign also has a blog called Corzine Connection.
Other Democratic lawmakers who have contributed to blogs at least once this year include: Sens. Evan Bayh of Indiana and Barbara Boxer of California; and Reps. Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois and Ed Markey of Massachusetts. In addition, former Sen. John Edwards, the North Carolinian who ran for president and vice president last year, was a guest blogger at TPMCafe a few weeks ago.
Lawmakers' presence in the blogosphere bears watching, so Beltway Blogroll will point you to new posts. Look for the "CapitolLink" kicker in future headlines if you want to track what members of Congress are saying on the blogs.
Posted by dglover at 04:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
New Bill On 'Eminent Domain'
Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, has introduced legislation on "eminent domain," the government's right to reclaim private property at fair-market value. He filed the measure in reaction to last week's Supreme Court decision on the issue, a ruling that has triggered a flood of criticism in parts of the blogosphere.
Blogger Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy has the details, and he predicts that if the bill is enacted, "the effect on state and local takings will be modest, though perhaps the symbolic impact might be more substantial."
Posted by dglover at 07:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 25, 2005
Words Will Ever Hurt Me -- And Silence, Too
Parents know how cruelly children can speak to each other, so they teach their own kids that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." That may be true on the playgrounds of youth, but in the political playground that is the U.S. Senate, words can get you in a heap of trouble -- especially if bloggers start telling the world what you say.
"More than most people," Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin said this week, "a senator lives by his words." And after several days of being bashed in the blogosphere, Durbin knows more than most senators just how much politicians can hurt themselves with their own words.
Durbin incurred the wrath of bloggers on the right for a June 14 Senate floor speech that compared the U.S. military treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to human rights atrocities like the Holocaust. The bloggers blasted Durbin so ceaselessly that The Chicago Tribune said they helped turn "a speech that nobody heard" into one of the hottest topics in the nation.
Durbin apologized a week later. "I am sorry," he said, "if anything I said caused any offense or pain to those who have such bitter memories of the Holocaust. ... I am also sorry if anything I said in any way cast a negative light on our fine men and women in the military. ... I offer my apologies to those who are offended by my words."
But the apology offended even more bloggers than the Holocaust comparison. Durbin's initial critics pounced on all of the "ifs" in his apology, and those who had defended his underlying point about prisoner abuse lambasted him for not standing firm.
At about the same time, another batch of senators learned a different lesson about words: If you don't speak when bloggers think you should, you could take some heat for that, too.
The outcry against those senators came from the left, after the Senate on June 13 adopted a resolution of apology for the lynching of blacks throughout American history. The bloggers complained that several senators "refused" to co-sponsor the measure.
"The reason?" Americablog asked rhetorically. "So they can hide the 12 or so senators who apparently think it's bad politics back home to sign onto a resolution that apologizes for not passing anti-lynching legislation sooner."
Daily Kos and other blogs published a lynching "wall of shame" of senators who had not co-sponsored the resolution by the day of the vote -- 22 of them, including three Democrats, according to Congress' THOMAS Web site -- and blog readers started contacting those lawmakers' offices.
The pressure apparently worked. By the end of last week, 11 of the 22 remaining senators had co-sponsored the resolution. Ironically, the latecomers included Arizona Republican Jon Kyl, who, although he did not co-sponsor the measure until June 23, said on the Senate floor that he supported it "in the name of honor and national unity."
There is another irony that pulls these two tales together: Eight days before Durbin offered his apology, he delivered an impassioned apology about lynching on behalf of the Senate.
"To all who lost a loved one to lynching and to those who lost a piece of their own childhood and their own sense of security," Durbin said, "we say today formally and officially in the Senate that we were wrong -- wrong for failing to protect them, wrong because we never said we were sorry. By apologizing to the victims of lynching ... we can reclaim that piece of our soul and move forward in time as one nation indivisible."
Posted by dglover at 04:23 PM | Comments (1)
June 24, 2005
Blogging The Supreme Court
The eyes of all lawyers are on the Supreme Court right now as it ends its current session, and the days when those experts waited to feed their reactions to key cases through the mainstream media are over. Now they just post them to the Internet immediately.
The activity at SCOTUSblog, a product of the Washington-based law firm Goldstein & Howe, illustrates the trend perfectly. Guest posters at the site addressed the Supreme Court ruling on medical marijuana earlier this month, and now SCOTUSblog has recruited participants for similar discussions on just-released and pending decisions.
The first debate began Thursday, when the court ruled in a case regarding eminent domain. The decision to let governments buy private property at fair-market value for municipal development purposes started a chain reaction of criticism in the blogosphere, and SCOTUSblog quickly became a central portal for expert opinion.
SCOTUSblog also is planning similar "meta blogs" next week on cases that will determine whether the Ten Commandments can be displayed on government property and whether file-sharing companies can be held liable for the copyright infringement of their customers.
The Picker MobBlog, meanwhile, has a roster of experts ready to post reactions on MGM v. Grokster, the file-sharing case, and on Brand X Internet Services v. National Cable and Telecommunications Association. The latter dispute will determine whether high-speed Internet service over cable modems should be lightly regulated as an "information service" or more heavily regulated as a "telecommunications service."
Randy Picker, a law professor at the University of Chicago, explains his thinking behind the blog this way: "The idea is to bring together a group of interested people to blog on a particular topic, do so, and disband. I will post on the blog intermittently between mobs, but the mobs will be the heart of the blog. I think of this as an online reading group or an online workshop."
Sarah Lai Stirland, our intellectual property reporter at National Journal's Technology Daily, also reports that at least two other blogs are expected to address the Grokster case when it is released: Copyfight, one of the blogs at Corante.com; and Deep Links, the blog of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is defending Streamcast Networks in the dispute.
Posted by dglover at 12:40 PM | Comments (1)
June 20, 2005
The Power Of The Blog
Last year was a big one for bloggers on the political front. They breathed life into the presidential candidacy of Howard Dean, now the chairman of the Democratic Party; they earned credentials to cover the political conventions; and they helped Republican John Thune of South Dakota topple the Goliath that was Senate Minority Leader Thomas Daschle.
| People who are passionate about the business of government already have discovered the simplicity, immediacy and global reach of blogging. | ||
The high-profile debate over Social Security is a good example. The topic already has generated thousands of blog postings.
The conservative Club for Growth, led by former Rep. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., started a blog on Social Security in January. SocialSecurityChoice.org unabashedly claims its mission as promoting President Bush's "ownership society," in particular personal retirement accounts.
By contrast, ThereIsNoCrisis.com challenges the notion that Social Security faces any "crisis." The blog is run by BlogPac, which bills itself as "a group of bloggers not content to simply write words or read them, but eager to take action on the pressing issues of our day."
The retirement group AARP also has a Social Security blog. And a fourth blog, Talking Points Memo, has dedicated much of its space to challenging the Bush administration's stance on Social Security over the past several months. The blog ranks Democrats who may be swing votes in the debate as part of "The Fainthearted Faction" and Republicans as members of "The Conscience Caucus."
That's four blogs focused on one issue -- two by established advocacy groups and two by Internet upstarts who have seen and seized the power of the blog.
The blogswarm that stung the Federal Election Commission (FEC) earlier this year is even more telling of blogs' emerging influence in Washington.
When one commissioner hinted in a News.com interview that the agency might regulate blogs under campaign-finance law, bloggers of all political persuasions rallied against the FEC. The commission blinked, proposing a much narrower set of rules than the draft suggested by the FEC's general counsel -- a draft that was made public by a blogger.
Conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt predicts more such blogswarms in his book "Blog: Understanding the Information Revolution That's Changing Your World."
"What is coming soon -- and perhaps even in the summer of 2005 -- are clashes between competing blogging camps," he writes. "The perfect interblog storm is brewing and will break when the next Supreme Court nominee is sent from the White House to [Congress]. In fact, all future Supreme Court nominations are going to ignite blog wars."
Both inside and outside the Beltway, people who are passionate about the business of government already have discovered the simplicity, immediacy and global reach of blogging. And with Bush in office four more years and Republicans dominating all branches of government, the conditions are ripe for another round of information warfare that targets not just candidates but their ideas.
Wide-ranging blogs like Instapundit and Talking Points Memo are well-read by policymakers. Think tanks like the New America Foundation, Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation either have their own blogs, or have affiliated staffers who write independent ones.
Trade groups as prominent as the National Association of Manufacturers and as obscure as the Air Conditioning Contractors of America have Web logs, as do watchdog organizations such as the National Taxpayers Union and the Project on Government Oversight.
Judges and lawyers have policy blogs. Academics, journalists, public-relations consultants and scientists have them, too.
The blogosphere even includes members of the U.S. Congress, state lawmakers and the British Parliament.
Whether the subject is arms control, education, immigration or taxes, policy mavens and wannabe wonks are finding their voices in blogs.
Andrew Cochran, a former top aide to the House Financial Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee and now a consultant, created a counter-terrorism blog in January. He told National Journal's Technology Daily that he was inspired to start the blog through his work at Public Policy Partners after seeing how much influence blogs had in last year's campaign.
In Congress, one of Nevadan Harry Reid's first acts upon replacing Daschle as minority leader was to hire Ari Rabin-Havt as the director of Internet communications, with one key mission being outreach to bloggers. And Thune hired lawyer Jason Van Beek, one of the bloggers whose coverage of the Daschle-Thune race in 2004 helped Thune get elected.
All of which explains why I am starting this column. Blogs are big newsmakers. They are transforming the political and policy worlds, and I will follow that transformation.
"Beltway Blogroll" is intended to be a biweekly column, but is being published in blog form for three reasons:
- It just makes sense to use the medium that sparked the idea for this column;
- It makes it easy to post off-deadline updates when the need or desire arises; and
- I want to hear from you. I agree with Dan Gillmor, who wrote this in "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People": "If my readers know more than I do (which I know they do), I can include them in the process of making my journalism better."
Posted by dglover at 12:06 AM | Comments (11)
