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My family is headed south on vacation today, so posting will be light here for a couple of weeks.

In addition, the site will be undergoing some maintenance during the Memorial Day weekend, so I won't be posting at all then.

I will resume more regular updates June 8. Enjoy the holiday!

Posted by Danny at 08:38 AM | Comments (0)

Former Federal Election Commissioner Brad Smith said the threat of campaign regulations for blogs is still very much alive, despite the FEC largely exempting blogs earlier this year.

Now a contributor at RedState, Smith pointed readers to a new article that included what he saw as a foreboding quote from Rep. Tom Allen, D-Maine.

Allen "co-sponsored legislation in March that would bring political Web sites under campaign finance rules if they spend $5,000 or more on their operations," the paper wrote. "He said he would watch how blogs factor into the 2006 races under the FEC rules before deciding whether to press the issue."

Smith's reaction: "We need to understand that these guys are relentlessly hostile to free, unfettered political speech. Every bit of freedom they see as a potential threat, and they are always ready to regulate as soon as they think the have the votes."

Posted by Danny at 07:04 AM | Comments (0)

Rep. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat who is running to become Ohio's next governor, made an appeal online for a compromise on stem-cell research yesterday.

The pitch came one year after the House voted to end Bush administration limits on such research, with Brown noting that the legislation has been stalled in the Senate ever since.

"Americans are united in their support for this vital research, which holds the promise to cure and treat cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cancer, Lou Gehrig's Disease, and spinal cord injuries," Brown wrote at The Huffington Post. He directed readers to a petition on his campaign site dedicated to the issue.

"The truth is that if the stem-cell research bill came to the Senate floor for a vote today, it would pass," Brown said. "A few extremists on the Republican side have been allowed to keep this vital research from moving forward."

Posted by Danny at 06:55 AM | Comments (0)

Associated Press and Technorati, the search engine for blogs, have reached a deal that will draw a virtual line between the most popular AP articles and the blogs that are writing about them.

"We currently track more than 40 million blogs," said David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, "and bloggers the world over are increasingly helping to shape our knowledge, opinions and ideas -- joining professional journalists in the telling of the complex stories of our lives."

It's a smart move on AP's part and one that I imagine more traditional outlets will follow soon enough.

Get the details on the AP/Technorati deal from PRNewswire. AP's technology writer also penned a story on that deal and another one between AP and the search engine Topix.net

Posted by Danny at 04:34 PM | Comments (0)

Democratic bloggers who have preached against the Republican "culture of corruption" are going out of their way to be consistent by publicly criticizing alleged transgressions of a lawmaker in their own party -- even before guilt has been formally established.

Their focus is Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana, the subject of an FBI bribery investigation. A diarist at Daily Kos said Democratic leaders should force Jefferson to resign, and blog founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga endorsed the idea. "No double standards," Moulitsas said. "Corruption is corruption, no matter where it may arise."

Party leaders shouldn't wait for Jefferson to resign, either, said the diarist blogging under the pseudonym VirginiaDem. They should send him a message.

"Strip him of his committee assignments. Pull support and sponsors from his bills. Cut off all ties between the party apparatus and his scandalous office. Return any money he has given to the party, even if given in previous cycles. Tell all Democratic candidates and officials that they must disassociate from him, too. ... Don't send him a nickel, don't throw him a fundraiser, don't sit around silently hoping he'll go away. Just show him the door."

Like most content in the political blogosphere, however, the appeal had a partisan edge to it. VirginiaDem said Jefferson needs to be forced out because his presence is undermining the effort to paint the GOP as the party of corruption. The postscript: "Whatever you do, don't act like a Republican."

UPDATE: Spurred by an appeal from House candidate Francine Busby, D-Calif., Duncan Black of Eschaton joined those calling for Jefferson's resignation.

"Jefferson is certainly entitled to his legal defense, and he's also certainly entitled to defend himself in the court of public opinion, but since the former is preventing him from doing the latter, I agree with Francine Busby that it's time for him to step down," Black said.

Posted by Danny at 12:34 PM | Comments (1)

Every Democratic member of Congress now has a copy of "Crashing The Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics," a book authored by bloggers Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga.

Volunteers hand-delivered the manifesto to House and Senate offices yesterday as part of the "Roots Project" spearheaded by liberal bloggers. PoliticsTV even videotaped the deliveries.

The next step, according to Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake: "[C]all your senators and your member of the House of Representatives and let them know that the copy of "Crashing the Gate" was from you and several thousand of your friends. We'd like calls from everyone ... so they understand that this isn't just a book they can put on a shelf somewhere, but that we hope that they will read it and start a dialogue with all of us."

Posted by Danny at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

Outgoing CBS Evening News anchor Bob Scheiffer gave the keynote address last night at the annual Deadline Club Awards ceremony to honor the best in New York-based journalism, and he shared a few thoughts about blogs and the mainstream media.

The report from FishbowlNY:

Schieffer also told an audience of predominantly print and television journalists to not let blogs "rattle us." He said that there are three types of blogs: "straight blogs," "partisan blogs" and "totally irresponsible" blogs -- those akin to people "who put viruses on your computer." Journalists, he said, should "ignore that part of the blogosphere."

That sounds about right to me in terms of the political blogosphere, though I'm not quite sure what Scheiffer meant by "straight blogs." I suspect that most political and policy blogs fall into the partisan category -- and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Posted by Danny at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)

The National Association of Manufacturers is not a believer in the hype about global warming. So Pat Cleary, NAM's blogger at ShopFloor, sure was surprised when he found a friendly link to his site from climatecrisis.net, the Web site for the global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."

The film is about former Vice President Al Gore and his crusade to halt global warming. The Web site for the documentary has a blog, and despite its criticisms of the film, ShopFloor somehow merited a link under the "Conversations About Global Warming." Clearly said the link, the only one to take a critical look at popular theories about global warming, remained online from Friday through Sunday.

"In what can only be a colossal mistake by the Father of the Internet, the official blog site for Al Gore's new movie has on its front page a prominent link to the blog you are now reading," Cleary gloated on Monday. In closing, he added in jest, "We want to thank Our Great White Internet Father for this magnanimous if unintentional olive branch and want to bask in the glow of balance and peace reigning in the kingdom, if only 'til somebody gets fired."

One ShopFloor reader saw things a bit differently, suggesting that the blog for the documentary "auto-pulled" the ShopFloor content via a tool provided by the Technorati search engine for blogs. "Frankly, I applaud them for letting be so transparent," the anonymous Xerxes said.

Clearly questioned that rationale. "I think this was a colossal blunder," he said in an e-mail, "so [Technorati] wouldn't normally work this way." But I checked the film's blog today and found a link to this equally critical post about global warming. It looks like other voices are at least occasionally welcome there.

ShopFloor, on the other hand, does not link to "An Inconvenient Truth" when it mentions the film. But it does jokingly link to less politically volatile and more mainstream movies like "Over the Hedge" and "RV."

Is somebody there worried about being fired if Gore's site receives similar link love?

Posted by Danny at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)

At 10:49 a.m. on Saturday, May 13, Bruce Kesler of Democracy Project fired the rhetorical shot heard 'round the conservative blogosphere. Under the header "Conservative Battle Fatigue," he diagnosed a trio of his favorite online writers as having the political equivalent of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Their open criticisms of President Bush and the GOP-led Congress, Kesler said, are symptoms of the ailment. They have been "worn down by defending difficult positions at the forefront of the battle against irredentist Democrats in Congress and their fifth column in the media."

Kesler concluded with this hopeful yet pointed thought: "I wish them a speedy recovery, before more adversaries are allowed to breach the walls because of their petulance."

All three bloggers -- Stephen Bainbridge, Ed Morrissey and Mark Tapscott -- rejected the diagnosis. And thus began a debate about what a true conservative is supposed to do when the "compassionate conservative" in the White House and the Republican revolutionaries in Congress lose their way on the path of rightward-ness.

Tapscott took the lead, noting that one of his goals "is to encourage a discussion in the blogosphere about whether the GOP deserves the continued support" of its base. An editorial he wrote for The Washington Examiner helped accomplish that goal by inciting Kesler to speak, and Tapscott then seized on the opportunity to continue the debate at his blog.

Over six days at Tapscott's Copy Desk, he posted seven entries on conservative battle fatigue. Tapscott outlined a series of conservative-minded votes on immigration, federal spending and other issues that Congress could take to "nationalize" this year's election and regain favor with its electoral base.

If they fail, he said, "conservatives then have an obligation to find or create a new party." And they can do that by seizing the tools of the Internet. "What the Internet has done to the mainstream media ... can and most likely will be done to all of the 'Bigs' of our society, including Big Government and the political parties that live by it," Tapscott wrote.

Each new post fostered more of the discussion he sought, both on his site and in other Republican pockets of the blogosphere. One of the more amusing contributions -- a flow chart that sarcastically mapped "a fiendishly simple path to Republican victory in '08" -- was posted at Point Five.

The debate really gained momentum when Jim Geraghty of National Review Online took exception to the thinking of some conservatives that maybe it would be better in the long run if Republicans lost control of Congress this fall.

"If I want a more conservative government, I get it by electing the more conservative of the two choices, even if he isn't as conservative as I would like," Geraghty said. "I do not get it by sitting on the sidelines and pouting, and letting the less conservative guy take the reigns of power."

That's when Hugh Hewitt joined the fun. He cast the debate as one between Geraghtyites and Tapscottians, and put himself in Geraghty's camp. He also needled Tapscott and reminded him of the judicial cost if Democrats regain control of Congress and thus keep conservatives off the federal bench.

"Do you really care about the abuse of eminent domain?" Hewitt wrote. "The absurd decisions stripping 'under God' from the pledge or the tiny cross from the city seal of Los Angeles because of a threat from the ACLU? How about the executive's ability to conduct the war and keep unlawful combatants from clogging the courts with their demands for due process for terrorists?... The list goes on and on, and the left's judges don't give up and go home."

The intraparty debate briefly cooled from boil to simmer late last week. Geraghty offered his closing thoughts Thursday, and Tapscott posted his "final note" the next day, after the topic made it into the mainstream media courtesy of columnist Peggy Noonan.

But The Washington Post turned up the heat again Sunday with a column titled "Bush's Base Betrayal." Key players in the blogosphere discussion -- Bainbridge, Kesler, Morrissey and Tapscott seized on that piece as an opportunity to cross swords again.

Kesler thinks the debate is worth having. "My objective was to draw out constructive alternatives and programs," Kesler said via e-mail. "I think that succeeded. I'm constantly impressed by the respect for each other and the ability of bloggers to be positive and constructive, far more forward-looking than most MSM columnists."

He identified a two-pronged consensus from the debate: building a stronger Republican majority, and renewing activism at the state and local levels to send a message to the Washington GOP establishment. He said the Geraghtyite view will prevail -- but "only because the strong stand by Tapscott will have spurred more than inside-Beltway Republicanism."

Tapscott agreed that the Geraghtyite philosophy appears to be the stronger one. "Judging by the bruises all over my head, I'd say it already has" prevailed, Tapscott joked.

Even so, he said the Tapscottians will exercise their voice at the polls. "How these folks vote will be determined entirely by whether the GOP leadership achieves significant progress in enacting the conservative reforms they've been promising for years," Tapscott said.

Posted by Danny at 07:18 AM | Comments (4)

Fans of Lorie Byrd and Alexander McClure, two former contributors at the conservative PoliPundit, quickly landed on their feet at different group blogs after last week's PoliPundit implosion.

Wizbang welcomed Byrd to its ranks today, and she introduced herself to readers. McClure made his debut at RedState on Friday.

Posted by Danny at 07:14 AM | Comments (1)

Getting a case all the way to the Supreme Court is a momentous occasion -- perhaps even the kind that merits a blog.

The Pacific Legal Foundation certainly thinks so. It has a new blog decidated to one pending environmental case: Rapanos v. United States. The foundation has dubbed the dispute "the most important property rights case before the court this year."

"Pacific Legal Foundation is representing John Rapanos, a 70-year-old grandfather of six who has stood up to federal regulators' 18-year crusade against him -- all because he moved sand on his own property without a federal permit," the foundation said in a backgrounder published online. Regulators tried to put Rapanos in jail for failing to follow federal law on protecting wetlands and lost, the foundation said, but now Rapanos faces financial fines and damages in a civil lawsuit.

The Supreme Court hears oral arguments in dozens of cases every year and rules on even more in one way or another, so there is great potential to expand the legal blogging community via case-focused blogs.

I can think of at least two good reasons to create such blogs: 1) provide regular news and commentary for the niche communities following the cases; and 2) build grassroots support for one view or the other. The new blog by the Pacific Legal Foundation skews more toward the first goal, but case-focused activist blogs may well be on the horizon.

And if the authors are lucky, maybe the court's justices will discover their blogs and consider the views they read there. It wouldn't be the first time that blogs played a role in the U.S. legal system.

Posted by Danny at 12:35 PM | Comments (0)

Bull Moose Marshall Wittmann, whose animosity toward the netroots is obvious in his writings, mocked the math skills of liberal bloggers who are celebrating Friday's showing of Democratic Senate candidate Ned Lamont at the Connecticut Democratic Party convention.

"The Moose observes that the McGovernites with modems cannot do math," Wittmann wrote. "By an overwhelming majority, Joe Lieberman is the officially endorsed candidate of the Connecticut Democratic Party. No matter how you spin it, if you are on the short end of 67 to 33, you lose -- unless if you live in the parallel universe of the netroots. ... When one has a modem, anything is possible."

Wittmann praised Lieberman's support for the war in Iraq and again chastised the mainstream media for failing to report that Lamont's campaign prominently used Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga in an online advertisement. Wittmann registered the same gripe in separate entries last week, noting Moulitsas' infamous "screw them" remark about slain contractors in Iraq that he called "mercenaries."

The presidential campaign of Democrat John Kerry dropped its link to Daily Kos over that comment in 2004, and Wittmann thinks the Lamont campaign should take the same stand by distancing itself from Moulitsas. "And when will the press focus on the fact that Mr. Lamont chose a co-star for his first commercial who once denigrated the deaths of Americans at the hands of terrorists?" Wittmann asked.

Posted by Danny at 09:07 AM | Comments (1)

Connecticut Democrats on Friday nominated Joseph Lieberman for a fourth term in the Senate. But The Boston Globe reports that his intraparty challenger, businessman Ned Lamont, won enough votes to force a primary on Aug. 8.

Liberal bloggers who have rallied around Lamont because of his opposition to the Iraq war rejoiced at the news. Though Lieberman won the race by a tally of 67 percent to 33 percent, bloggers said Lamont was the real winner because he mustered more than double the minimum 15 percent of delegates he needed to get into the primary.

"We might have just pushed Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic Party and put a whole lot of D.C. Democrats in awkward positions," gloated Matt Stoller of MyDD, who live-blogged the state convention. "If Joe becomes an independent, we will also have changed the netroots narrative."

Chris Bowers cited Lamont's showing as the latest evidence of the growing influence and organization of the netroots. He concluded: "I can only imagine that the right-wing political blogosphere must seethe with envy over how the media and the political establishment has become so much more entranced with the progressive political blogosphere. ... A new power is rising in American politics. The progressive netroots are altering the entire political ecosystem, and things will never be the same again."

One diarist at MyDD challenged the prevailing view about the Connecticut state convention. "Joe Lieberman is victorious. Ned Lamont is a loser!," he wrote under the pseudonym Lieberman Lives. "This was the liberal party faithful, and still Joe won over 65 percent. Now we'll take this victory and Joe will slam the door on Lamont, and his one issue. Gee Matt, and Chris, how does it feel to have lost by about 35 percent."

James Joyner of Outside the Beltway made a similar point. "So, despite getting 1,004 of 1,509 votes among hard-core Democrats, Lieberman was 'severely rebuked' and [the vote was] 'a stunning victory for Ned Lamont'? Huh?"

But such numbers-based opinions were clearly the exception. Triumphant entries like those at Daily Kos, Eschaton and Firedoglake were the norm.

Stoller acknowledged that the blog war against Lieberman has not been won. He predicted that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, for instance, probably still would invest its money and expertise in Lieberman if he decides to run as an independent. Plus Lieberman "has $5 million that he can spend on sliming Lamont," Stoller said. He urged bloggers to offer their financial support to Lamont via the ActBlue fundraising page for netroots candidates.

Tom Watson proclaimed Lamont "the first YouTube candidate" because his campaign and his supporters have used that online video service so effectively to rally support for Lamont. And as if to prove the point, Lamont quickly produced an online video to thank bloggers for their role in elevating his candidacy.

Here are links to other coverage of the Lamont/Lieberman race and the role of bloggers in that contest:

-- "Ned Lamont For Senate: This Is What I Believe In" (Bowers at MyDD, after spending time with the Lamont campaign)

-- "'Dump Joe,' Cry Liberal Bloggers" (Hartford Courant)

-- "Joe's Getting Blogged Down" (NE Magazine/Hartford Courant)

-- "Kos Celeb" (The Wall Street Journal)

-- "The Left vs. Joe Lieberman" (The New Republic, also in the Los Angeles Times)

-- Column in the Norwich Bulletin of Connecticut

Posted by Danny at 04:32 PM | Comments (0)

John Conyers of Michigan co-sponsored a bill on "network neutrality" in his role as the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and he blogged about the legislation at MyDD.

Net neutrality describes the legislative effort to prevent the owners of high-speed Internet networks from charging higher prices to deliver certain high-bandwidth content through their Web pipes. The topic has been the subject of a fairly intense blog swarm for the past several weeks.

Conyers co-sponsored the new bill with Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., because they are not satisified with the language on net neutrality approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. National Journal's Technology Daily reported last week that Judiciary was denied the chance to review that measure, so Sensenbrenner and Conyers filed the separate bill.

Conyers said telecommunications companies "have floated the idea of charging Web sites for access. Those who pay will get faster and more reliable delivery of their content to Web surfers. Those who do not will see the delivery of their content degraded.

"In the interests of openness, I frankly acknowledge that I am a recent convert to this point of view," he added. "A few years ago, I publicly expressed my view that regulation to stop impediments to net neutrality was a solution in search of a problem. At that point, I was aware of no telecommunications company that had expressed a desire to do so. That has clearly changed."

Posted by Danny at 03:53 PM | Comments (0)

PoliPundit may well have lost its place among the Republican blogosphere elite this week, as the group blog imploded in an ugly dispute over the site's stance on immigration reform.

The editorial divorce appears to have been coming for some time. PoliPundit, the anonymous blogger who founded the site, insisted on taking a hard line on immigration and didn't much like that the other bloggers he invited to the site openly disagreed.

The animosity among the PoliPundit contributors had become painfully obvious in recent days, perhaps most noticeably in two posts by D.J. Drummond. Drummond talked openly about his heated differences with the founder of the site but insisted that he had no plans to leave because of them.

That was before President Bush spoke to the nation about immigration reform, however. The spat quickly elevated behind the scenes after the speech, and within hours, PoliPundit contributor Lorie Byrd had announced her departure from the site.

Since then, PoliPundit has posted farewell messages from Drummond and Alexandar McClure, as well as his own retort to Byrd's last post. Though the bloggers who left have tried to be cordial since the split, the pointed and downright nasty comments on PoliPundit's post indicate how much damage the controversy has done to the reputation of the site and its founder.

Other bloggers also have criticized PoliPundit. "It's apparent that Poli has let his personal feelings interfere with his judgment here," The New Editor wrote. "When editors and writers at the MSM do that, we call them on it. A blog wallpapered with advertising should adhere to a higher standard than personal venting."

Dale Franks offered the perspective of someone who has engaged in debates with his colleagues at The QandO Blog, another group effort. "[I]f you're gonna run a group blog, then it seems to me that you have to allow for these disagreements at the margin," he said. "It is unreasonable to expect any group of three or more people to maintain perfect ideological lockstep. Moreover, it adds, I think, to the spice of a group blog. Overall, I think it's a good thing that members of a group blog can find and explore areas of disagreement."

Various blogs, including Captain's Quarters, Democracy Project and Wizbang, encouraged their readers to support Byrd in particular at her own blog and wherever she may go next.

For more blog bits from this week, go to the extended entry.

-- A confident report from Chris Bowers of MyDD after his election to a Democratic Party post this week: "I will now serve on the Pennsylvania Democratic State Committee. The city, the state, and the nation will change as a result. I promise everyone that.

-- Bloggers like to plug pet policy topics periodically, and the ones that merited mentions this week included voting rights for the District of Columbia and term limits for appropriators. Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge also posted two entries on telecom reform at TPMCafe.

-- Some bloggers sense "a subtle shift in the ways in which foreign affairs are being discussed in the blogosphere."

-- Tennessee blogger Bill Hobbs drafted a plan to save Bush's presidency. The gist of it: "screw the left every chance he gets" and stop caving to moderates and liberals.

-- Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga was featured in a campaign ad for Ned Lamont, a Democratic Senate candidate in Connecticut. Hot Air had a little fun remixing the ad. Lamont also launched his campaign blog.

-- Duncan Black of Eschaton made a fundraising pitch for two of his favorite candidates in his home state of Pennsylvania: Lois Murphy and Patrick Murphy (no relation). They won their primary races this week.

-- Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean accepted an invitation to speak at the YearlyKos convention in Las Vegas next month.

-- Who are the favorite columnists of conservative bloggers? Right Wing News has the answers.

-- Winfield Myers is back to blogging at Democracy Project after a break of nearly a year to serve as managing editor of The American Enterprise magazine. His new full-time job is director of Campus Watch.

-- A Huffington Post contributor launched a "meet the blogger" feature, with himself as the initial subject. That's just what I would expect from a blogger.

-- Allison Hayward of Skeptic's Eye may hold the honor of being the first blogger to attend a State Dinner. She was at the White House this week when Bush welcomed Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

-- The Wall Street Journal exposed some erroneous reporting on the Web about White House adviser Karl Rove; conservative bloggers rejoiced at the misfortune of their enemies on the left; and liberal bloggers bashed the Journal and boasted of their self-policing prowess. Such is the circle of life in the blogosphere.

Posted by Danny at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)

Liberal bloggers went ballistic last fall when Rep. Jean Schmidt appeared to call Rep. John Murtha a "coward" for advocating a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Now Murtha, D-Pa., finds himself in hot water over some recent blunt words he uttered about U.S. soldiers.

Army Times reported today that Murtha, a former Marine, said Marines "killed innocent civilians in cold blood" in Iraq on Nov. 19. Ironically, the incident occurred just days before the House floor debate where Schmidt, R-Ohio, made a reference to Murtha.

Michelle Malkin has a roundup on Murtha's comments under the header "John Murtha Hangs The Marines." And the Mudville Gazette wrote: "Let's keep in mind that no matter the outcome of this investigation, it has an effect on all of our troops. Given Murtha's latest comments, the media will no doubt fan the flames, leaving those on the ground to deal with the fallout."

Confederate Yankee called on the House to censure Murtha. "He has dishonored his seat, the military criminal justice system, the Marine Corps and the United States of America. How a man can make such vicious, unsupported claims and still proclaim to love the Marine Corps and America is beyond my understanding."

Posted by Danny at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)

Democrats in Kentucky on Tuesday rejected a military veteran as their party's congressional nominee for the 3rd District.

The defeat was the latest setback for a member of the "Band of Brothers" and prompted some people in the liberal blogosphere to question whether vets who run as Democrats have the ability to win.

Iraq war veteran Andrew Horne won only 32 percent of the vote, compared with 54 percent for John Yarmuth.

Yarmuth is the founder and executive editor of the Louisville Eccentric Observer, a 15-year-old newsweekly serving the Louisville area. He will face Rep. Anne Northup in November.

Two weeks ago, "fighting Dem" Joe Sulzer lost his bid to represent his party in the challenge to Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio. And Tim Dunn, D-N.C., withdrew from the 8th District race in North Carolina. (He won 12 percent of the vote because his name still appeared on the ballot.)

Those losses followed other troubles for veteran candidates as previously noted here, and they prompted some soul-searching at Swing State Project (as first reported today at The Blogometer).

"[T]he fighting Dems idea isn't turning out to be as powerful as some people, myself included, had hoped, in large part because very few of these candidates are running anything approaching even mid-major status races," DavidNYC wrote. "Yeah, there are a few nice profiles here and there in the tradmed every so often, but I don't think this is going to be as big as some of us thought."

Posted by Danny at 05:24 PM | Comments (0)

When it comes to their relationships with advertisers, bloggers are a different breed than their old media counterparts. That is obvious from the open barbs that some bloggers are directing at their newest advertiser: Hands Off the Internet, whose co-chairman is former White House press secretary Mike McCurry.

The group, whose members include major telecommunications companies and others opposed to Internet regulation, started an advertising run on several major blogs last week. The ads, which also are running in traditional outlets like NationalJournal.com and washingtonpost.com, promote an animated video at DontRegulate.org.

The video challenges the arguments of bloggers, elected officials and others who are urging "network neutrality" as a way to Save the Internet from unequal content treatment. "Is the Internet really in danger? Does the Internet really need saving?" the ad asks. The implied answer is a resounding "no."

The message is a direct challenge to the beliefs of hundreds of bloggers who have been swarming against dominant telecom firms for the past few weeks -- including those who write at the blogs where the ads are now running. Those blogs include Eschaton and MyDD.

You might think that bloggers who agree to take ad money from a nemesis would be a little more reluctant to directly confront that foe in the future. But that's not how life works in the blogosphere. In fact, the bloggers in question have not only continued their bashing of telecom giants, but they have condemned the very ad they agreed to run.

"Let them spend their money," Duncan Black wrote at Eschaton. "I'm happy to take some of it, but you can feel free to ignore the telco ad to the right."

Matt Stoller of MyDD decried the "childish and nasty tone" of the ad, which he said repeats "the lie that the government had no role in the Internet's success and that bloggers are a bunch of irresponsible rabble." He also encouraged other blogs running the ad to link to his critical post.

"Serious, this is a totally clueless attempt to attack and discredit the grassroots and the blogs," Stoller said. "By coming out with a dishonest and destructive campaign that repeats every single reactionary attack on bloggers, McCurry and his ilk are revealing themselves as naively unprepared for the future."

John Aravosis of Americablog adopted a less in-your-face attitude when he drew readers' attention to the Hands Off the Internet ad on his site. "I'm still trying to figure it all out," he said, "but as the anti-net neutrality folks just launched a site (and bought an ad on this blog touting the site), I'd figured I'd link to both the pro and the anti guys and let you folks start thinking about the issue."

His approach appears to have been the exception, however. Other blogs that both ran the ad and attacked it, either directly or indirectly, included Crooks and Liars, and Seeing the Forest.

Other bloggers who weren't part of the buy condemned the ad as well. MediaCitizen characterized it as an attempt to "deceive bloggers." The site also reprinted from the Save the Internet blog an analysis that dubbed the ad the "Big Lie Of The Week."

All of the animosity might make you wonder why bloggers would even give space to an avowed enemy. Apparently the idea of rejecting the ad did cross some minds. Seeing the Forest, for instance, admitted to initially rejecting it.

BuzzFlash seized on the development as an opportunity to decry blog ads in general and the Advertise Liberally network in particular.

"This is the deal with the devil you make when you start to depend on advertising," BuzzFlash wrote in an editorial. "You end up in bed with the very people who would like nothing better than to see you shut down in the end. They are paying you in the short term, in order to pass legislation that will knock you off the Internet in the long-term. If anyone ever asks again, why BuzzFlash doesn't accept advertising, let this example be your answer."

The editorial prompted Black to defend himself at Eschaton. "I do not endorse all of the candidates, causes, products, organizations, books, movies, television shows, etc. ... that are advertised here." he said in a fallback to the old media mantra about separating advertising from editorial. "If I pick and choose ads, then that means I'm implicitly endorsing the things advertised here, and that's just not the case."

But some bloggers -- the ones who think of their colleagues as activists rather than journalists -- simply don't buy that logic. "Please, fellow bloggers: Remove the wolves from your blogs. Now. You are confusing your readers and making the rest of us wonder which side you're really on," a blogger named Philip David Morgan wrote on his LiveJournal site. "Don't keep this ad on your blog. Get rid of it however you can or have to."

Posted by Danny at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)

Some folks like to debate the question of whether bloggers are journalists. I made my opinion on the topic known about a year ago in a roundtable at the Heritage Foundation: Bloggers are capable of producing solid journalism, but they are no more journalists than journalists who blog are bloggers.

The two do have a few traits in common, however, and one of them has become increasingly clear as journalists and bloggers continue their rhetorical warfare online. Bloggers have skins at least as thin as those in the hated mainstream media.

The latest case in point is a blog entry from Saturday at Think Progress. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., mentioned the blogosphere in a speech at Liberty University, and Think Progress editor Judd Legum didn't care much for McCain's analysis.

Here's what McCain said: "When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people. ... It's a pity that there wasn't a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium."

Legum's retort: "Oh, so McCain is always right. The problem is that we're bloggers so we're too impressed with ourselves to understand. If you are reading this, you are part of the blogosphere too, so you won't understand McCain's genius either."

Legum is far too sensitive, and his response to McCain was utterly unwarranted. I didn't actually hear McCain's speech, but by my reading of the text, it sounds like he was making a self-deprecating joke, not "attacking the blogosphere," as Legum put it. Granted, the senator made his point in a way that wasn't flattering to blogs, but a passing, light-hearted reference in a speech that never mentioned blogs again does not an attack make.

And even if he were serious, could any blogger with an open mind really object to McCain's point? I typically read or scan at least a couple of hundred blog posts across the political spectrum every day, and I don't know many bloggers, of any political persausion, who aren't "infatuated with self-expression." Their love of free speech and determination to speak their minds freely are precisely why they blog -- and good for them.

Furthermore, while not all bloggers consider themselves "much more eloquent, well-informed and wiser than anyone else," many of them certainly write as if they think that way. Humility in word is not a trait found frequently in the blogosphere. Bloggers -- like good MSM columnists -- write with boldness, and their words exude an unwavering confidence in their own ideas and opinions. If that were not the case, nobody would read them.

When politicians, journalists and others make ridiculous statements about bloggers, as they regularly do, bloggers are justified in challenging them. But not every negative comment about blogs needs a response -- and not every comment perceived as negative actually is.

UPDATE: McCain's reputation as a maverick Republican apparently makes conservative bloggers equally sensitive about his passing, harmless and arguably accurate references to the blogosphere. Byron York at The Corner, for instance, cited the jab at bloggers in McCain's speech.

Posted by Danny at 04:18 PM | Comments (0)

Pete Ashdown Day escaped my notice earlier this month. It was an online rally on behalf of Utah Democrat Pete Ashdown, who is challenging Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch this year.

Ashdown has a technology background -- he founded XMission, the oldest Internet service provider in Utah -- and thus has a loyal following in the online community. Bloggers who support him chose to post coordinated entries about the race May 2. Ashdown provided links to the favorable coverage at his campaign blog.

The positive blog swarm made perfect sense in Utah, which is aptly named the Beehive State. But I imagine such efforts will become commonplace as the campaign season gains steam and bloggers try to steer voters toward their favored candidates.

Posted by Danny at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)

I've been doing a little blog cleaning on the roll to the left the past couple of weeks and wanted to highlight some of the new links. The latest publications on the blogroll are:

-- Cato@Liberty from the Cato Institute, which complements the think tank's combination blog/magazine, Cato Unbound. I've also added a link to The Agitator, which is written by Cato policy analyst Radley Balko. His blog was featured in a Beltway Blogroll column in December.

-- Dollarocracy, SunSpots and Under the Influence, blogs of the new Sunlight Foundation. The group, whose mission is to use technology to make government more transparent to the public, also publishes Congresspedia, a collaborative encyclopedia about members of Congress based on the Wikipedia model.

-- Information Policy Action Committee, which focuses on intellectual property and other issues of the information age.

-- NetCompetition and Save the Internet, two new groups involved in the debate over a potential mandate for "network neutrality" on high-speed Internet services.

-- The Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership Blog. The institute is at the University of Virginia, and I will be one of the panelists at its Virginia blog summit next month.

Posted by Danny at 11:48 AM | Comments (1)

Rep. Edward Markey yesterday asked House Speaker Dennis Hastert about the "mysterious disappearance" of a bill that aims to protect the privacy of Americans' telephone records.

The measure, inspired in part by a blogger, had been on the House agenda for noncontroversial legislation last week but was pulled at the last minute. Markey, D-Mass., wondered aloud whether the decision to pull the bill is related to news that broke yesterday about the Bush administration collecting the phone records of millions of Americans.

"There are rumors, as you may have heard, that the House Intelligence Committee has sought an exemption from the bill's privacy protections, for 'intelligence-gathering activities,'" Markey wrote in a letter to Hastert, R-Ill.

"If true, this raises important questions concerning whether intelligence agencies are seeking an exemption in order to obtain the phone records of Americans without due legal process as part of some future plan, or whether intelligence entities were seeking an exemption in the bill to clarify the legality of such a program because they are currently gathering such records."

Markey, who has a blog on his congressional site and makes regular guest appearances elsewhere in the blogosphere, ended the letter with the kind of jab you would expect from a blogger. He asked if the bill is "in some legislative 'Guantanamo Bay,'" a reference to the military prison where "enemy combatants" are held without the kind of due process normally afforded Americans.

The House already has passed a related measure.

Posted by Danny at 12:47 PM | Comments (0)

The Los Angeles Police Department (supposedly) unveiled a blog today. Its motivation for doing so is one shared by most, if not all, public officials: The department doesn't like the way it gets covered in the media.

"The purpose of this blog is to provide real-time, unfiltered information to the public," the LAPD said in an online announcement of the blog.

Police Chief William Bratton was a bit more blunt in a Los Angeles Times story. "I see the blog ... as an opportunity to communicate with the public and educate them about what we are doing at the LAPD," the paper quoted him as saying. "But I also see it as an opportunity for me to respond to those issues where I feel the department is being misrepresented."

By the way, I said "supposedly" because when I clicked on the link provided in the department's announcement, I was redirected to an "under construction and coming soon" page.

Lesson No. 1 for the LAPD: Don't tell bloggers you've created a blog and link to it until it's actually there. That is annoying -- and also counterproductive if you're goal is to avoid bad press.

UPDATE: The blog link is working now, and curiously, the blog has entries dating back to Wednesday. So I guess the LAPD has been blogging for two days without anybody knowing it.

Posted by Danny at 12:29 PM | Comments (0)

Note to candidates and lawmakers: Beware bloggers who request interviews. If you decline, they might scold you publicly for saying nothing at all.

Ask Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn. He felt the sting of Jonathan Singer at MyDD this week after Singer's repeated attempts to add Lieberman, an unpopular figure among many Democratic bloggers, to his impressive list of candidate and lawmaker interviewees.

Singer blamed Lieberman's reluctance on an irrational fear of bloggers and offered this warning: "I believe it is very foolish for any politician to believe that they can be aided by ignoring the blogosphere, that the unrest will melt away if they do not engage their critics. We're not going away any time soon, regardless of what some Beltway insiders might hope, so it's probably better to be even a little open to us rather than to more or less act as if we don't exist."

Ari Melber of the Center for Constitutional Rights chastised Lieberman at The Huffington Post. "[T]he snub is yet another political error that will hurt Lieberman," he wrote. "It reinforces the perception that he would rather chat with [conservative talk-radio personality] Sean Hannity than a Democratic writer."

Here are more blog bits from this week:

-- Should George Bush Be Impeached? La Shawn Barber asked the question and caused an uproar among fellow conservatives when she answered it in the affirmative.

-- Robert Bluey, the editor of Human Events Online, and Tim Chapman, the new director of the Center for Media and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation, organized what they promise is the first of a series of off-the-record meetings on Capitol Hill for conservative bloggers.

-- Chris Bowers, a blogger at MyDD, is running for a seat on the Pennsylvania State Democratic Committee. He has six days to campaign and needs 100 write-in votes to win the seat. Another obstacle: Bowers said he is "not exactly the most popular person within the state Democratic Party."

-- Sarah Carter, the granddaughter of former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, made a front-page appearance at MyDD. She is campaign blogging for her father, Jack, a Senate candidate in Nevada. Sarah Carter, who also keeps a diary at MyDD and one at Daily Kos, touted her father's guest-blogging stint this week at Give 'Em Hell, Harry, the blog of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

-- Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., did some traveling abroad over the past several days and blogged about his policy adventures in Greece, Iraq and Turkey.

-- Some governors are "podcasting," but before you listen to their audio downloads, you might want to hear what Christopher Swope had to say about them at 13th Floor.

-- John Engler, a former governor of Michigan, posted his first blog entry last week in his role as president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers.

-- The YearlyKos conference next month will include a panel discussion on election reform that was announced this week.

-- Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos penned an op-ed in The Washington Post about the presidential ambitions of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. He thinks she has "a Bill Clinton problem." Power Line thinks Moulitsas needed a better editor, and Christian Grantham said the logic in the article is "intellectually retarded."

-- Time magazine published a piece about the emergence of blog specialists on Capitol Hill. Matt Stoller of MyDD was flattered to have earned complaints from anoymous Democratic aides.

-- Another installment of "Blogs and the 2008 Presidential Campaign," from Howard Mortman at Extreme Mortman. The subject is blogger Vincent Harris of Too Conservative. Mortman also posted the blog reading list of National Journal columnist Charlie Cook.

-- From the mind of Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine: "There is no blogosphere. There is only the people in it." By that warped logic -- really just an attempt to keep the bad behavior of a few bloggers from tarnishing the reputation of the whole -- there is no media, just journalists in it. Sorry, Mr. Jarvis, but like it or not, the actions of individual bloggers influence the way others see the collective blogosphere.

Posted by Danny at 07:11 AM

Rep. Major Owen, D-N.Y., made his antipathy for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld abundantly clear at The Huffington Post yesterday. Here is a sampling:

He is an arrogant old man with a juvenile conception of when and how to play the game of war, a game with toy soldiers and science fiction weaponry. Rummy is far more certain of his military genius than any of the great generals of our time: Zhukov, Montgomery, Rabin, Eisenhower. ... To set the record straight and allow our grandchildren to understand who is hero and who is villain, moderate peacemakers must shed their civility and confront Rumsfeld, the warmonger, in terms that match his extreme contempt for us.

Too many dedicated soldiers and innocent civilians have died wasteful deaths for history to ever pardon Rumsfeld. Continuing to speak respectfully of Rumsfeld is a misguided and ignoble gesture. ... In addition to a ban on the playing of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" at his funeral, we must all resolve that on-site or symbolically we will spit on Rumsfeld's grave. History must permit no small statues or even tiny medals to be awarded to heartless military tyrants.

Posted by Danny at 10:36 PM | Comments (0)

The Virginia Department of Business Assistance this week suspended a worker for 10 days for blogging on agency time, the Richmond Times-Dispatch and Martinsville Bulletin report.

The Richmond-based employee, Will Vehrs, told AP that the suspension was for "excessive casual use of the Internet." But he has been blogging from work for a while now and only recently landed in trouble when he took some jabs at the economies of Martinsville and Henry County in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. His comments were part of a caption contest.

The comments -- for which Vehrs later and repeatedly apologized, even inviting Martinsville and Henry County residents to post comments -- prompted outrage from some state lawmakers. Delegate Ward Armstrong of Henry County even wrote a letter of complaint to Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, asking him to call for Vehrs' immediate resignation.

Vehrs blogs at Commonwealth Conservative and addressed the suspension in an entry there.

"I think the punishment is unduly harsh and doesn't do anything to allow me to atone in a positive way for my mistake," he wrote. "It also doesn't address in a broader way issues with economically distressed areas or blogging by state employees. But that's their call, not mine. I had a three-part resolution to offer, but they never gave me a chance."

Vehrs also is blogging for the Martinsville paper as a form or penance and plans to make a trip to the area. "I remain very chastened by the ruckus I have caused, and I want people to know that those unfortunate entries I made in that ill-fated caption contest in no way reflect how I feel about your community," he wrote in his