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September 30, 2006The Foley Sex Scandal In Red And Blue
If you want objective and thoughtful insights into reports of an online sexual relationship between Republican Rep. Mark Foley of Florida and a former congressional page, don't spend your time on political blogs.
But if you want to see just how differently folks in red and blue America see the world, the blogs that are chattering about the sex scandal are a great place to start. You also may be impressed by the amazing talent of bloggers to spin the news to their own advantage and to connect totally unrelated events. I know I was.
Here's the way Democratic bloggers see the scandal:
-- Americablog: "When Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La., first learned about the Foley e-mails, he went to Rep. Tom Reynolds, the chair of the GOP House campaign committee. Not the Ethics Committee. Not the Speaker. Not the Capitol Police. He went to the top GOP House political operative."
-- Balloon Juice: "That is the kind of committment and dedication to duty that we have grown to expect from this corrupt Congress and loathesome administration. And you wonder why the war in Iraq is such a mess- these are the do-nothing fools providing the oversight.'"
-- Crooks and Liars: "The clerk reads the resolution calling for an ethics investigation into Foley. Republicans boo [Minority Leader] Nancy [Pelosi] when she asks for a recorded vote. With a huge sex scandal brewing, they boo Nancy. I think they should take a long look in the mirror."
-- The Huffington Post: "What's illuminating is the congressman's behavior. Sending text messages and e-mails? As if he could never be caught; as if he was invulnerable. And it's exactly the kind of arrogance and poor judgment that has come to dominate the Republican Party."
-- MyDD: "This is getting good. The Republican leadership is starting to feed on itself."
-- Talking Points Memo: "I don't think cover-up is too strong a word since there was apparently an active effort to keep the allegations from the only Democrat who serves on the Page Board. That decision, I think, speaks volumes."
And here's the way Republican bloggers see it:
-- Captain's Quarters: "Democratic protestations on this matter seem rather hypocritical, given the history of their party and page scandals. ... I agree that the Republicans have some 'splaining to do. However, Democrats hardly covered themselves in glory when running the show for the last decade they controlled Congress in a situation that was objectively more serious than Foley's pathetic cyber-sex efforts."
-- GOP Bloggers: "I can't help but think that if Foley was a Democrat, Rahm Emanuel would be talking to reporters about a 'Republican smear campaign,' and his fellow Democrats would be rallying in his defense, the same way they do with Bill Clinton, who has been accused of everything from sexual harassment to rape."
-- GOPProgress: "I have no doubt that Foley's behavior, over the next few days and weeks, will become hotly politicized -- used by hothead liberals to bash Republicans and make us all look like perverted sickos, used by dimwitted conservatives to argue that many moderates are lacking in moral values. All such claims will be baseless and fatuous. "
-- Wizbang: "Twenty-odd years ago, members of Congress boinking underage pages was worth a censure, and barely worth running them out of office over. Nowadays, just talking dirty to them is enough to get you ridden out of town on a rail. Well done, Congress."
Michelle Malkin wrote the best post I have seen on the subject -- about the only one that didn't try to cast political blame but that instead focused the blame squarely on Foley and sympathy on the page and his parents.
"Rep. Foley's apparent abuse of office and lecherous communications with a 16-year-old boy -- during what should have been one of the best times in his life as a page in Washington -- is every parent's worst nightmare," she wrote. "It happens to both boys and girls, and all parents must be vigilant and immunize their children against predators early and often."
This bit of outrage from Mike Krempasky of RedState was refreshing, too. "There is no more place for Mr. Foley in our party than there was for David Duke. And our party's leaders ought to make it clear -- don't take one red cent from Foley's warchest. Refund it to his donors. Give it away. Burn it. Whatever. Just don't use it to elect Republicans."
Posted by Danny at 08:20 PM | Comments (3)
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'Be Polite And Respectful' To Sen. Lott
It's a shame that so many people who troll the blogosphere need admonitions like this one today at Daily Kos:
If you can help us bring polite pressure to bear on Sen. Lott's office, we can get something good done today. (But seriously? It has to be polite and respectful -- if you cannot be professional in doing this, don't. It may backfire.)
The subject: a mandate that campaign finance data of Senate candidates be made available online.
Oh, and does anyone actually believe that Daily Kos or other Democratic blogs would have let die the story about Sen. George Allen, R-Va., allegedly using the "n-word" if he had admitted doing so and calling it a mistake? This from the same blog that is now spreading stories about Allen spitting on women?
Posted by Danny at 06:53 PM | Comments (0)
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As noted in Technology Daily:
The sponsor of a House bill to target operators of child pornography Web sites said he would resign Friday after questions arose about e-mails that he sent to a former male congressional page.
Florida Republican Mark Foley also is a co-chairman of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus. He introduced the bill, H.R. 5749, in July.
AP reports that Foley asked in the e-mail to the page how old the boy was and what he wanted for his birthday. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics posted the e-mails on its site after ABC News disclosed their existence.
Foley's election opponent, Democrat Tim Mahoney, called for an investigation. Foley has said there was nothing inapppropriate about the exchange.
Posted by Danny at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)
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Patrick Hynes, who made a name with himself online with the Crush Kerry blog in 2004 and at Ankle Biting Pundits after that, has had a rough couple of months in the blogosphere.
First he was exposed as a hypocrite in July when he insinuated unethical behavior by Democratic political bloggers even as he was engaged in some questionable actions of his own in his undisclosed role as a blog adviser for the political action committee of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Now Hynes is under fire again by a blogger upset over his connection to The Channel Changer blog, which is focused on telecommunications reform efforts.
Hynes was actively posting at The Channel Changer earlier this year. In fact, that is the forum he used to suggest impropriety by blogger Matt Stoller of MyDD in relation to the debate over "network neutrality" on the Internet.
After his troubles in the summer, however, Hynes apparently quit blogging at The Channel Changer and let someone else take over for him. Now a blog called Borderline has discovered The Channel Changer and has made all manner of accusations against Hynes. The Consumerist, Craig Newmark of the online classifieds site Craigslist, and Universal Hub have commented as well.
Hynes responded with a post of his own at The Channel Changer. "Well, I've pretty much quit blogging and I haven't posted here for almost two months. ... But the idea that I am 'secretly' behind this blog is absurd, as I have never presented this blog as anything but my own," he wrote. "The bottom line is, I've got too much going on -- business to run, a book to sell, baby coming in two weeks -- so I'm basically taking a break from blogging."
Here are the rest of this week's blog bits:
-- Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., met with a few bloggers. You can get the scoop at The Ballot Box, ShopFloor and TimChapman.com (here and here).
Various House Republicans, including Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois, also held a session with bloggers later in the week, as did Michigan Senate candidate Mike Bouchard, a Republican. Tim Chapman of the Heritage Foundation was at the House event, and The Ballot Box has a report on the Bouchard meeting.
-- New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson began a guest-blogging stint at MyDD this week and will post there periodically between now and the Nov. 7 election to draw attention to various electoral contests. "Democrats and the netroots can win in 2006 and build a track record of success for years to come," Richardson wrote. "That's why I'm committed to supporting and building the progressive online infrastructure we need to win now."
-- When looking at recent poll numbers that seem to conflict, Chris Bowers of MyDD came away thinking that there are two Americas. "Our work over the next six weeks will determine which nation we will live in for years to come: the nation with the huge Democratic sweep or the nation with the extremely narrow Republican majority?"
Later in the week, he suggested one way to achieve that Democratic sweep: "Google-Bombing The Election" by creating new Web sites that are critical of candidates the netroots oppose. "If the blogosphere were to work together to Google-bomb, say, 30 key Republican districts and direct people searching for a given Republican candidate to a good Web site, blog, article or advertisement that tells the truth about that candidate," he wrote, "we could make a huge impact on the flow of information on key congressional races to voters."
-- Two local bloggers in Howard County, Md., are conducting an online candidate forum.
-- A Connecticut television station reported on mud-slinging bloggers in the House race between Republican Rep. Rob Simmons and Democratic challenger Joe Courtney. The station reported that one of the bloggers in question, Tom Misenti, is a campaign volunteer for Simmons.
-- Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos wants people to believe that he's not the leader of any movement, that the netroots are all about the people. But for a guy who says the movement isn't about him, he loves to play the role of the general rallying his troops when they sound defeatist. The latest example is a post titled "There's A Reason This Is A 'Long-Term Movement.'"
-- The Canadian military is not too keen on blogging by soldiers. "The country's top soldier, Chief of Defense Staff Gen. Rick Hillier, has ordered ordinary Joes in uniform to check with their superiors before posting information on the Internet," according to the Globe and Mail.
-- From a Financial Times article headlined "Apostles Of The Blogosphere": Many politicians in America and elsewhere clearly feel the need to pay their respects to the blogosphere -- if only as a precaution. It is not self-evident, however, that the blogosphere's influence on politics is all for the good. A political consultant once complained that his bosses' reliance on focus groups handed power to people who were prepared to sit around for hours talking about politics with strangers, in return for a free sandwich. Similarly, if politics is increasingly shaped by the blogosphere, it will mean more power and influence for a subsection of the population willing to waste hours trawling through dross on the Internet."
-- Jim Geraghty took a critical look at the win-loss political record of the netroots in a column for The Washington Times. David Sirota, who works for netroots favorite Ned Lamont, the Democratic Senate nominee in Connecticut, was unimpressed by Geraghty's logic.
-- Bull Moose invented a holiday: "Hug A Nutrooter Day." The occasion: Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut has a 10-point edge over Lamont, according to a new poll, and the bull thinks the netroots are sure to be downtrodden by the news.
-- Pajamas Media hosted a discussion about partisanship at the National Press Club on Tuesday, and a few bloggers were on the panel. Paul Mirengoff of Power Line and Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics shared their thoughts online after the roundtable. See more post-event thoughts at Hit and Run, INDCJournal, OxBlog and Townhall.
-- The question at the Pajamas Media session was "How partisan is too partisan?" Maybe when two guys in the same party -- Democrats Dan Gerstein and David Sirota, a blogger -- behave like children toward each other.
-- RedState co-founder Mike Krempasky, who does blog outreach work for Edelman, and Ben Popken of The Consumerist also have been bickering. The subject: Krempasky's "off the record" work for Wal-Mart. Potamac Flacks has the story. Wal-Mart's outreach to bloggers has sparked controversy before.
-- In the summer, Sen. George Allen, R-Va., had the "macaca" problem; last week, he had the Jewish heritage problem; this week, he has the n-word problem (see the Allen campaign's response here). Slate pulls all the controversies together (and perhaps ones yet to come) in the new "George Allen Insult Generator."
-- Allen might have avoided much of the controversy plaguing his campaign had he not uttered the word "macaca" in response to a volunteer for his opponent who was videotaping Allen's events. Robert Bluey of The Ballot Box thinks Allen could have benefited from a few enterprising college Republicans to handle that whole situation instead.
-- Reporter/blogger Will Bunch let his one-time role model David Broder of The Washington Post know that he isn't too thrilled by Broder's recent columns that dismissively lumped millions of angry Americans into the same category as bloggers.
-- Have you ever wondered what members of Congress do all day? Keep wondering -- but do it on videotape and you might just win $5,000 courtesy of the Sunlight Network. All you have to do is enter the "Congress In 30 Seconds" contest that is running for the next few weeks.
Posted by Danny at 07:07 AM | Comments (0)
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RedState's Abortion Smackdown Of Mitt Romney
Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney may be regretting his decision to grant an interview to RedState. Shortly after the audio went online, a separate front-page post at RedState blasted the fellow Republican as a liar about his views on abortion.
The entry contrasted Romney's past statements for abortion rights with his contention in the RedState interview that "I've never called myself pro-choice." "There is no substantive difference between the position labeled 'pro-choice' and declaring your support for 'the right to choose,'" Ben wrote. "And that is something that Mitt Romney has done repeatedly over the course of his political career. To say otherwise is to tell a lie."
Jim Geraghty of National Review Online noted the smackdown. He chastised fellow Republicans who want to declare Romney "unacceptable" as the 2008 GOP presidential nominee over one issue --and well before the race has begun or Romney has officially declared.
"If the GOP base wants a pro-life candidate in 2008, fine; they are, definitively, the pro-life party," Geraghty wrote. "But if the litmus test was that the candidate had never wavered on the issue at any point in their career, neither [Ronald] Reagan nor the first President Bush would have made the cut."
At least as interesting to me is the fact that a blog would post an interview with someone only to then quickly attack that person for something said in the interview. (Geraghty mentioned that, too.) That may come across as a set-up, especially since the criticism was given the same prominent treatment as the interview.
It reminds me of the tendency of some bloggers to accept advertisements with viewpoints they oppose, only to then question or ridicule the content or to even tell their readers to ignore the ads.
Posted by Danny at 01:11 PM | Comments (0)
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Early this year, John Aravosis of Americablog created a stir when he bought the cellular telephone records of 2004 Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark to make a point about how easy it is get such records.
His attention grabbing stunt helped spur quick congressional action on bills to curtail the practice, which is known as "pretexting," or obtaining information under false pretenses. The House passed one measure on the issue in late April and another in early May. The Senate Judiciary Committee also approved a bill in March.
The legislation appeared to be on the fast track toward passage but then stalled. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., blamed the "mysterious disappearance" of the bill from the House's agenda on an objection from the Intelligence Committee over concerns that the measure could hinder intelligence-gathering activities.
But now, with lawmakers nearly ready to adjourn until after the November election, the subject is suddenly back on the radar. The reason: a scandal involving the computer company Hewlett-Packard, which allegedly hired private investigators to engage in pretexting aimed at board members, employees and journalists. The goal was to uncover internal sources suspected of leaking company information to the media.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee begins a two-day hearing today into the HP scandal. In the background, lawmakers who want to stop pretexting are working feverishly to move the legislation.
Andrew Noyes at Technology Daily has been covering the story for us this week and had two stories on the behind the scenes maneuvering over the bills. I thought bloggers might be interested since one of their own helped push the topic onto the congressional radar. Here are excerpts:
Lawmakers Seek Deal On Protecting Phone Records
The chairmen of two powerful Senate committees have been working closely with Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., to finalize a consensus bill to curtail "pretexting," a practice in which online brokers fraudulently obtain and sell telephone records for a fee.Alaska Republican Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., reportedly are "very close" to a compromise, Republican sources said. ...
Senate Judiciary staffers have negotiated changes to their bill to mesh with the House language "so if that goes through it can be signed right into law," a source close to the process said. But compromise might not come that easily. "Word is [that] Stevens is saying his way or the highway" when it comes to pretexting legislation, the source said.
State Pre-Emption Is Obstacle In Phone Privacy Debate
Differences over whether to pre-empt existing state laws reportedly is the sticking point to a Senate consensus on a federal bill against "pretexting," a practice in which Internet-based brokers fraudulently obtain and sell telephone records, sources said late Tuesday.Several Capitol Hill sources and consumer watchdogs said that Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, is insisting that language negotiated with the Senate Judiciary Committee pre-empt state laws on the subject.
Stevens' measure, S. 2389, would override state mandates that require telecommunications carriers or Internet-enabled voice services to "develop, implement or maintain procedures for protecting confidentiality of customer proprietary network information," according to a staff working draft. ...
If a pretexting bill with state pre-emption is enacted, it could halt state investigations by utility commissions into the lawfulness of electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency, the American Civil Liberties Union argues.
ACLU Legislative Counsel Tim Sparapani said his group supports a crackdown on pretexting but not when paired with potentially damaging provisions that could hinder state efforts to examine NSA spying without warrants. Five states have probes pending, and five others have requested investigations, the ACLU said.
Jeannine Kenney, a senior policy analyst at Consumers Union, also said the bill would not "do much to prevent the breach of privacy from occurring in the first place."
Posted by Danny at 07:10 AM | Comments (0)
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Blog Posts Lead To Resignation Of House Aide
As noted in Technology Daily this morning
A top aide for Rep. Charles Bass resigned yesterday after disclosures that he posed as a supporter of the lawmaker's political opponent in messages on a blog intended to convince people the race was not competitive.
AP reports that operators of two liberal blogs traced the postings to the House's Internet server. The office for Bass, R-N.H., traced the messages to his policy director, Tad Furtado, and issued a statement announcing Furtado's resignation.
Posting as "IndyNH" and "IndieNH," Furtado professed support for Democrat Paul Hodes but suggested that Democrats should invest their time and money elsewhere.
UPDATE: Political consultant Kari Chisholm of Politics and Technology has been tracking some of the online tomfoolery this campaign season.
Here's what Chisholm had to say after the New Hampshire scandal: "One more time: It ain't worth it, people. Don't be stupid. You're professionals. Let the high-school kids run around town stealing lawn signs; let the high-school kids screw around on the blogs."
Swing State Project and Wizbang also have posts on the scandal.
From Wizbang: "The guy might know all the ins and outs of the legislative process and how the House works, but he's a moron when it comes to blogging. ... Bass needs someone on his team who has a fairly good grasp of how blogs work, how bloggers think, and just what they do -- and don't do."
Posted by Danny at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)
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Bloggers who attended a bill-signing ceremony yesterday were invited to chat with White House budget officials afterward. The budget officials, including Deputy Director Clay Johnson, were so impressed with the impact of bloggers in pushing the bill in question into law that they want to work with bloggers toward common goals in the future.
Tom Shoop at GovExec.com, a publication here at National Journal, has a full report. Here is the meat of the story:
The Office of Management and Budget has launched a back-channel effort to reach out to political bloggers for their help in pushing the Bush administration's management agenda on Capitol Hill, OMB officials said Tuesday.
... At a luncheon sponsored by the IBM Center for the Business of Government in Washington later on Tuesday, OMB Director Robert Portman said that in Johnson's meeting with bloggers after the event, the deputy director told them, "You're so good at this. Can you help us with some of our other initiatives?"
Later at the luncheon, Johnson hinted at what some of those initiatives might be. He noted that Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, had introduced a bill aimed at strengthening federal performance evaluations and linking annual pay raises to minimally successful job ratings, but the legislation had failed to attract a single co-sponsor.
"If the American people knew that," Johnson said, "they would go as nuts as they did" when they learned that senators had placed holds on the spending transparency bill [just signed into law].
Later, when asked about how the administration's effort to put federal jobs up for competition from private firms is playing out on Capitol Hill, Johnson said, "One thing we just heard this past week was to let bloggers know that there are certain members of Congress who don't think that we should be trying to spend their money effectively. And then maybe mention a few of them."
Posted by Danny at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)
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No Love For Bloggers From Rep. Blunt
"The bloggers mobilized Congress. Congress did not mobilize bloggers."
That's what John Hart, the Senate spokesman for Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn, told The Washington Times yesterday when describing how the mandate for a publicly searchable database on federal spending came to be. The hat tip certainly was in order considering that some bloggers were even invited to today's bill-signing ceremony that paves the way for the database.
But Coburn's House counterparts aren't so willing to give public credit where arguably due to the blogosphere. After the ceremony today, the office of House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., didn't even acknowledge the role that bloggers played in forcing Congress' hand on the issue earlier this month. The office also barely acknowledged the work of Coburn and co-sponsor Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.
"BLUNT-DAVIS BUDGET TRANSPARENCY BILL SIGNED INTO LAW," blared the headline in an e-mail from the majority whip's office.
The publicity-grabbing headline is wrong both technically and substantively -- technically because the bill that President Bush signed bears the number (S. 2590) of the Coburn-Obama measure, and substantively because Coburn's work on the issue in August and September made it one of the hottest items on the congressional agenda.
It all makes perfect sense inside the Beltway, though. Conservative bloggers were a key factor in Blunt's failed attempt to ascend to House majority leader early this year, so he's probably not too eager to pat them on the back for anything. And what lawmaker in his right mind would give top billing to the guys from the other chamber?
In fairness to Blunt, Bush didn't acknowledge the bloggers, either, even though they were at the White House. His comments included praise for Coburn, Obama, Blunt, House co-sponsor Tom Davis, R-Va., and other lawmakers. He also called attention to the White House's own efforts to make government more transparent via the Web site ExpectMore.
And so ends the bloggers' 15 minutes of fame in Washington -- at least until they swarm again.
UPDATE: Instapundit has a firsthand report from the White House. I'll add links below from other bloggers as I see them:
-- Ace of Spades HQ
-- Americans for Prosperity
-- Tim Chapman: "Apparently a tip of the hat to the bloggers did not make the cut ... but that’s OK. At least they were invited."
-- Mary Katherine Ham: "The president didn't mention bloggers or Internets or even people power in his remarks, which I thought was silly. One sentence and he would have been talked about all day."
-- Hot Air
-- Porkbusters
-- The Right Angle: "The fact that Clay Johnson [of the White House Office of Management and Budget] was willing to spend an hour with us afterward illustrated the growing importance bloggers are playing not only on a political level -- as is often reported -- but also in terms of influencing policy on Capitol Hill."
-- Tapscott's Copy Desk
-- Under The Influence
UPDATE II: Burson Taylor Snyder, Blunt's communications director, noted in the comments that Blunt recognized bloggers in a timeline about the bill. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds picked up on that and said my critique "may be unfair."
Point taken. But I see a difference between publicly praising bloggers as Coburn's spokesman did -- and as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has done repeatedly (see the comment below as an example) -- and acknowledging the work of bloggers in a timeline that is buried on the House majority whip's Web site.
UPDATE III: John Hawkins of Right Wing News was invited but unable to attend.
And apparently the White House only reached out to the center-right side of the blogosphere that started the blog swarm on the Coburn-Obama bill. TPMMuckraker and its readers did much of the heavy lifting to put Democratic senators on the record about the measure but did not get an invite.
That is par for the course in Washington's approach to the blogosphere. Both Republicans and Democrats predictably only invite friendly blogs to their insider bashes. They'll have none of that "love your enemies" stuff.
UPDATE IV: GOPProgress also took note of the bill's enactment. That blog, too, was directly involved in the swarm for the bill but apparently was not represented at the White House.
Posted by Danny at 04:09 PM | Comments (2)
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As noted in Technology Daily this morning:
The authors of several prominent blogs will join President Bush today for the signing of a bill to create a database of federal spending.
The Washington Times reports that the bloggers will be recognized for their role in forcing the measure through Congress.
"The bloggers mobilized Congress," said John Hart, a spokesman for Senate bill sponsor Tom Coburn, R-Okla. "Congress did not mobilize bloggers."
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and Porkbusters said the passage of the bill demonstrates the role bloggers can play in forcing responsible government.
"That's sort of the big news here," Reynolds said. "What blogs make it hard for people to do in a whole lot of different ways is tell one group of people one thing and tell another group something different, and hope nobody noticed."
Posted by Danny at 09:08 AM | Comments (0)
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As reported by CongressDaily last week:
The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved legislation designed to give the public better access to government records and prod federal agencies into responding more quickly to Freedom of Information Act requests.
The measure would grant bloggers the same reduced processing fees for FOIA requests now enjoyed by journalists. The panel approved the bill, S. 394, by voice vote.
It is designed primarily to reduce the current massive backlog of unprocessed FOIA cases. The bill calls for stricter enforcement of the current 20-day deadline for providing some kind of response to FOIA and for the creation of a FOIA ombudsman to mediate disputes between the government and the public on information requests.
The legislation also would let the public track the status of FOIA requests online and via a telephone hotline.
Mark Tapscott of The Washington Examiner, who is a leading advocate for FOIA, took note of the panel vote in a blog entry this morning.
Posted by Danny at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)
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Dueling Candidate Blogs In Michigan
The battle for the Senate seat in Michigan now will be waged in part in the blogosphere, as both the Democratic and Republican candidates have launched blogs this month. That is as it should be in what top political observers now consider one of the most competitive races of this fall.
I've noted the new blog of Republican Mike Bouchard a couple of times this month. But the last time I checked earlier this month, Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow did not yet have a blog.
Now she does. Laura Packard, Stabenow's Internet communications director, pointed me to the blog this afternoon. It has been online since Sept. 12.
If you want to know why all candidates (and especially those in competitive races) should have blogs, just look at what has transpired in Virginia over the past two days, where Republican Sen. George Allen and Democrat James Webb are doing battle.
Over the past couple of months, the charge that Allen is a racist, or at least was in earlier years, has taken firm root in the Democratic blogosphere. On Sunday, Salon fueled that fire with a story that said Allen was a racist in his college days. The article quoted one former football teammate of Allen's on the record and two others off the record.
Democratic blogs immediately called attention to the story. But this time, unlike as happened in August after a politically costly verbal gaffe by Allen, the Allen campaign's own blog answered with a rapid response -- one that featured the contrary views of three other former Allen teammates, and they spoke on the record.
"As journalists accusing Allen of something pretty heinous less than two months before an election," Mary Katherine Ham added at Townhall, "the Salon gang really should have let these guys speak more extensively in the article, even if they wanted to bury it beneath the more newsworthy storyline about Allen being a racist."
Posted by Danny at 01:35 PM | Comments (1)
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Like me, Blogometer alum Bill Beutler has been tracking political blog scandals, and he has published a helpful guide to them over at Blog P.I.
In light of how quickly the blog scandals are emerging, Bill's list is amazingly up to date. It includes the latest controversy, the one involving alleged "sock puppet" from the office of Rep. Charlie Bass, R-N.H., who stands accused of posing as a liberal blogger. The subscription-based Roll Call published a story on that episode today, and Daily Kos printed an excerpt. Raw Story is on the case, too.
"For a crowd that claims progressive blogs help them out, they sure spend a lot of time trying to undermine them," Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga said of the New Hampshire news. Then again, at least the Bass campaign copped to their transgressions, unlike the equally stupid people at the Tom Kean campaign which were busted for denying their own trolling."
Posted by Danny at 01:19 PM | Comments (0)
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Netroots Limited: Say It Ain't So!
Time.com has a piece that is sure to spark reactions from Democratic bloggers. "The Netroots Hit Their Limits" argues that liberal bloggers and other online activists can't sway elections.
Here are some excerpts:
-- "Compared with established interest groups like organized labor and conservative Christians, the netroots play a small role in national politics. Even their most ardent players now recognize that you can't create a true movement using nothing but modems and instant messaging."
-- "When it comes to money, the bloggers are still playing with Monopoly dollars compared with groups like Emily's List and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The top several liberal blogs together have raised about $1.2 million over the past year, which isn't enough in most districts to run a successful congressional campaign."
-- "[T]hey're becoming pragmatic about policy goals. There's little demand from the netroots for Democrats to support gay marriage, for example, even though 91 percent of the people who gave money to or worked on Dean's campaign back it."
-- "The fact is, day-to-day campaigning in 2006 is not very different from how it was in 1996: candidates call a few very rich people to ask them to give money so the campaign can run ads on television and hope soccer moms catch them between cooking dinner and driving to practice. If the Democrats win in the fall elections, the roots of that victory will not be on the Net."
(Hat tip Althouse.)
Washington Post columnist David Broder, meanwhile, has taken two potshots at Democratic bloggers in the past four days. He dismissed them as "vituperative" and "foul-mouthed."
The response of Matt Stoller at MyDD: "I don't pay much attention to people like Broder, but even I noticed this rather unhinged attack on bloggers. We're getting to him, I suppose."
UPDATE: I figured it wouldn't be long before the netroots attacked the theme of the Time.com piece, and sure enough, Stirling Newberry verbally ripped Time author Perry Bacon to shreds at TPMCafe. (Duncan Black of Eschaton joined the bashing with a post dubbed "The Stupids" about the media in general.)
"Time has hired someone who is both pervasively dishonest in how he characterizes the people he interviews, ill-informed about the topic that he is writing about, and heavily biased in favor of the right wing. He lies about facts, he misinterprets data, and he mischaracterizes a movement that he is clearly intent on deriding. ... It shows why there is a blogging phenomenon: The editors of major publications are liars, promote lying and are atrociously smarmy while they do it."
Read the whole thing for Newberry's detailed analysis of the flaws he perceived in the article. He made some legitimate points, especially about the quote from MyDD's Stoller. When I read it, it sure sounded to me like it had to be taken out of context based on what Stoller himself has written in the past. I'll be eager to see his response to the article.
On the other hand, Newberry's unrestrained anger got the better of him when he called Bacon "absolutely dishonest" for saying that "the conservative Rightroots movement is only just getting started." That part of the story is absolutely true. "Rightroots" is a proper noun, and Newberry should know the movement began a little more than two months ago because even MyDD commented on the development.
Posted by Danny at 06:34 PM | Comments (1)
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Two conflicting opinions are emerging in the blogosphere of a Fox News interview with former President Bill Clinton that is set to air tomorrow. The subject is whether Clinton did enough as president to capture terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.
Clinton took offense at the line of questioning. His critics say he was angry during the interview; his fans argue that he showed "strength of character" in challenging his Fox interrogator, Chris Wallace. Transcripts and video clips are available in advance on the blogs. We link, you decide:
Angry
-- Clinton Flips Out Over Osama Hunt (Hot Air)
-- Clinton, He's Red-Faced And Angry (Althouse)
-- The Fruits Of An Unserious Presidency (Power Line)
-- Clinton Unleashed (Macsmind)
-- Compare And Contrast (Wizbang)
Righteously indignant
-- Strength Through Example (MyDD)
-- President Clinton Blasts Chris Wallace (Crooks and Liars)
-- Clinton Takes On Fox News (Think Progress)
-- Go Big Dog (Firedoglake)
-- The Big Dog Bites (The Mahablog)
As for Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters, he's sick of the whole debate about whether Clinton did enough to fight terrorism. Five years and running, with no opinions changed, is more than enough, Morrissey said.
"For five years, we have rehashed this long and embarrassing history of American cluelessness," he wrote. "It is a bipartisan history, with both Republicans and Democrats arguing at various times that administrations used terrorism as an excuse for their political benefit. All it does is poison the atmosphere and allow hyperpartisans to play gotcha games with political opponents. The time has come -- it has long since come -- for that history to become just that: history."
UPDATE: The Clinton footage has been aired, and the final reviews are coming in. Not much has changed from the unofficial assessments of yesterday, but here are some links and excerpts:
-- Althouse: "What Wallace asked just doesn't seem to be enough of a 'hit job' to justify attacking the interviewer like that. ... He lets it show that he thinks about how his enemies are persecuting him. Clinton leans way forward into Wallace's space. He even jabs him in the knee a few times with his finger."
-- Michelle Malkin: "Wallace was terrific. Unflappable. Unrelenting. Unapologetic. Clinton was a basket case. ... The King of Smirk really ought not jab his finger so testily and accuse anyone else of smirking. It's unbecoming."
-- Taylor Marsh: "Chris Wallace was visibly and demonstrably embarrassed. Bill Clinton nailed him to the wall. Wallace was also revealed to be the right-wing hit man that Brit Hume always wanted him to grow up to be on Fox. "
-- MyDD: "I think part of Clinton's brilliant performance here is that he's unafraid to say that Wallace is lying, or that [Fox News owner] Rupert Murdoch's personal behavior and politics is influencing the content of the show. ... Come to the blogs for honest discussion of his legacy, which is mixed on many policies but fairly good on terrorism."
-- Betsy Newmark: "[W]hat Clinton's done here is bring more focus onto what he did or didn't do to get Osama bin Laden. It can't be good for the Democratic Party to have the focus on Clinton again. And what is really irritating is his phony posutre of being all bipartisan and not criticizing the Bush administration when his whole rant is full of paranoiac accusations that Chris Wallace is a tool of Murdoch-motivated right-wing conspirators in asking one question."
-- Sister Toldjah: "Bush has never once blamed Bill Clinton for his failure to get [Osama bin Laden]. Not once. This is an incredible cheap shot on the part of Clinton [to blame the Bush administration]. Not entirely unexpected, but a cheap shot all the same."
-- Talking Points Memo: "Clinton is simply the most gifted politician of our times. ... I sometimes forget not just what a tremendously effective communicator he is but how much he just plain gets it. He intuitively knows the subtext to questions and so not only answers the expressed question but in a very analytical way picks apart the subtext and answers the implied question, too."
-- The Washington Note: "Chris Wallace deserved this throttling. Fox News' efforts to market this as 'Clinton losing it' diminishes Fox's credibility even more than the interview did, as Clinton is clearly at the top of his game and did much to set the historical record right."
Posted by Danny at 04:17 PM | Comments (1)
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Political Blog Scandals Of The Mid-Atlantic
The Senate campaign of Maryland Republican Michael Steele is trying to get as much political mileage as possible from the news that Steele's Democratic opponent, Rep. Ben Cardin, had to fire a campaign staffer over her anonymous blog.
Over the past few days, Steele's campaign has issued a steady stream of e-mail releases that mention the firing. Most of the e-mails promoted stories on the dismissal, like those written by AP, WBAL and The Washington Times and columnist Robert Novak. But the most interesting one, sent yesterday, made a connection between the blog scandal and Cardin's maneuvering over debates with Steele.
"Debates are serious, important conversations with Marylanders," the e-mail said. "Playing typical 'gotcha' Washington politics ... instead of actually returning a phone call to begin the discussion process is a transparent attempt to distract from the congressman's disappointingly narrow win in the primary and the recent discovery of a senior Cardin staffer's racially insulting blog."
The e-mail twice referred to the "racist comments" of Ursula Gruber on the blog and once called her a "senior staffer" -- in contrast to the "junior staffer" label the Cardin campaign used in announcing the firing. Cardin's campaign also has not identified the aide in question. Wizbang, the Republican blog that broke the story, identified Gruber as the aide after some online sleuthing.
Returning calls to negotiate any debates would "provide an opportunity for Congressman Cardin to apologize to Michael Steele personally for Ursula Gruber's racist comments about him on her blog," the e-mail added.
The blog in question, Persuasionatrix, was active only a few weeks, and the content has been deleted since the controversy broke. Wizbang Politics has an archived version, and the home page of Persuasionatrix currently points readers to Wizbang.
The Maryland blog scandal is but one of three to garner attention in mid-Atlantic states over the past few days. The latest occurred yesterday in New Jersey, where a blog called BlueJersey accused the Senate campaign spokeswoman of Republican Thomas Kean Jr. of anonymously posting comments on the blog. The spokeswoman, Jill Hazelbaker, denied having been involved.
The New York Times covered the story today. Top Democratic blogs like Daily Kos and MyDD also noted the revelations.
"If they're willing to lie about simple things like this, what else would they lie about to win?" Matt Stoller wrote at MyDD. "Does Tom Kean Jr. condone this type of unethical behavior in his campaign? And will he fire all those involved?"
On Sunday, meanwhile, The Washington Post reported on questions being raised about the ethics of paid bloggers who are covering the Virginia Senate race. Both candidates have bloggers on their staffs.
UPDATE: Blogs continue to be the subject of controversy in the Virginia Senate race. The Richmond Times-Dispatch ran a piece a couple of days ago about the campaign of Republican Sen. George Allen blaming Democrat James Webb for encouraging anti-Semitism on Democratic blogs in regards to Allen's Jewish ancestry. Allen aide Dick Wadhams in particular criticized bloggers paid by the Webb campaign.
Wadhams' blog attack prompted this retort from Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos: "Some of you will instantly grasp the irony. Remember, Wadhams was John Thune's campaign manager in South Dakota in 2004, the only Republican to oust a sitting Democratic incumbent. And he did so, in huge part, by using 'paid bloggers.' ... They want to dish it out, but they can't take it."
Another irony: Allen's campaign also is paying a blogger, Jon Henke. Salon took him to task this week as well: "Henke ... was regularly advocating on his own blog that there be a Democratic takeover of Congress as a means of restraining unprincipled and corrupt Republicans," Tim Grieve wrote. "Does radically changing one's political views in exchange for some pay by a political candidate forever undermine, or destroy, one's credibility as a political commentator? It ought to)."
Blog scandals aren't exclusive to Virginia or the mid-Atlantic, though. AP reports that the Minnesota Senate campaign of Democrat Amy Klobuchar this week fired chief spokeswoman aide Tara McGuiness. She watched an unreleased television advertisement of Republican Mark Kennedy from a local Democratic blogger who allegedly obtained it illegally.
The blogger in question apologized at Blanked-Out. Kennedy vs. The Machine, MN Publius, Power Line and Minnesota Democrats Exposed, Wizbang have more on the scandal.
Posted by Danny at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)
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Democratic bloggers are thrilled by a new poll that shows the Democrat in Ohio's 2nd District race once again within striking distance of Republican Rep. Jean Schmidt. They see it as vindication for targeting that district in particular and for refusing to admit defeat anywhere until votes have been cast and counted.
Ohio's 2nd gained political prominence more than a year ago during a special election that pitted Schmidt against upstart Democrat Paul Hackett. His biography as a former soldier who vigorously opposed the war in Iraq inspired the netroots to raise gobs of money and volunteer for Hackett.
Though the district is heavily Republican and, on paper, should not have been competitive, Schmidt won the special election by only 4 percent.
Hackett's success gave rise to the "fighting Dem" movement within the Democratic Party, and Hackett himself decided to run for the Senate this year (though he eventually withdrew). Schmidt, meanwhile, continued to generate controversy, especially with her maiden House floor speech that critics perceived as a personal attack against Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa.
Schmidt faced a tough primary in May, and her Democratic challenger, Victoria Wulsin, has run strong since then. A July poll put the race at an even 44 percent for each candidate, with 11 percent undecided. The latest poll shows a 45 percent to 42 percent lead for Schmidt, with 12 percent undecided.
Leading netroots blogs, which love to spin every electoral defeat into a moral victory, have seized on Wulsin's competitiveness as reason to celebrate their strategy of targeting longshot races -- even though her standing in the current poll is lower than the one in July.
"I have to believe that one of the main reasons that OH-02 is honestly close in 2006 is because the netroots threw so much into it in 2005," Chris Bowers wrote at MyDD. "We helped bring an anti-Bush message into OH-02, and it is sticking. We helped bring new activist excitement into OH-02, and it is sticking. We helped reveal to voters in OH-02 that Jean Schmidt is an empty suit, and that message is sticking."
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga agreed at Daily Kos. "This is the first time I've felt the 'l'ong-term' effects of what we're all building and it's given me a jolt of extra motivation (not that I needed it)," he wrote. "This is how we'll move our country forward, turning safe red districts into 'lean' red districts into 'toss-up' districts and, eventually, into blue.
"We'll leave no district behind because no district is hopeless. The only thing hopeless is the 'leadership' that politically abandoned so much of our great country for so long."
Posted by Danny at 08:26 PM | Comments (0)
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Poor Choice Of Cliches
"We're looking at where we can get the biggest bang for the buck."
-- Transportation Security Administration chief Kip Hawley, explaining why the federal government may spend less money on explosive-detection devices and more money on X-rays at airports.
Posted by Danny at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)
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That was Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the United Nations earlier this week. And I didn't stand with Chavez at a church in Harlem, N.Y., when he called George Bush "an alcoholic and a sick man."
That was Danny Glover the actor. I'm just a lowly journalist who hasn't written word one about Chavez (until now). So please, please, please, stop sending me e-mails that read like this:
-- "I'm very ashamed of you. I have been a great fan of yours. ... Danny, your actions are traderous! (sic) You should be ashamed politically. But on a grander scale the issues are spiritual and you are aligned with the devil and against God because of what, politics? Don't be a fool."
-- "Danny boy. If Chavez is your brother why don't you move to Vennez. Don't crap where you eat."
-- "I am sickened to live in the same country as you. I hope you don't call yourself an American. May God help you."
-- "You, sir, are a piece of trash. Never again will I spend my money or time to patronize any movie or film that you have an active part in. You have sunken to the lowest levels of Americanism possible."
-- "I cannot believe you live in this country and confess to be a communist."
By all means, boycott the movies of Danny Glover if you choose. Or maybe buy your gas somewhere other than Venezuela-backed Citgo, which is what bloggers like Michelle Malkin, Ed Morrissey and Mark Tapscott are doing or discussing. But please don't protest in my in-box.
Posted by Danny at 11:14 AM | Comments (4)
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The worst political story of this week, and one that sadly occupied too much time of both sensationalistic bloggers and journalists, was about the Jewish heritage of Virginia Sen. George Allen.
Thanks to Allen's "Macaca moment" this summer, his campaign already believes the media are out to get the Republican incumbent. A television reporter fanned that flame Monday at a debate between Allen and Democratic challenger James Webb. WUSA-TV's Peggy Fox asked Allen "whether your forebears include Jews and, if so, at which point Jewish identity might have ended?"
The debate audience booed the question, and Allen reacted angrily. He argued that neither candidate's religion is relevant. While live-blogging the debate Allen campaign blogger Jon Henke accused the reporter of "baiting" Allen and engaging in "religious McCarthyism." But Allen's answer to the question only made his religion seem relevant to a whole lot more people, especially bloggers and journalists.
The Hotline's Blogometer here at National Journal did a nice roundup of the blog commentary, including multiple critical posts at Daily Kos that are consistent with that site's strategy of "Building A Narrative" against political opponents.
In a series of entries, Hotline alum Howard Mortman also offered his perspective as both a Jew and a former journalist.
The story might have died after one news cycle, but Allen kept it alive, first by acknowledging after the debate that his mother is part Jewish and then by making a wisecrack about how, as a Christian, he "still had a ham sandwich for lunch" and how his mother "made great pork chops." (Jews are not supposed to eat pork.)
That triggered a whole new round of blog outrage among Allen critics like Americablog and Talking Points Memo. Jim Gandelman at The Moderate Voice added, next to a picture of a man with a foot in his mouth, "Let's just say that the way [Allen] responded adds more baggage. ... In all seriousness, Allen's problem seems to be an inability to answer sensibly and thoughtfully when put on the spot."
That analysis may well be on the mark, but I can't help but think that this episode says as much about the political blogosphere as it does about Allen. Which brings me to this powerful question from The Blogometer's Conn Carroll amid the controversy: "Blog supporters claim they offer a great opportunity for nuanced, reasoned debate, but when we look at the races they've actually affected, have blogs elevated or degraded the level of discourse in the race?"
At this point, I would have to say that "degradation" has a huge lead in the polls.
Here are your blog bits for the week:
-- A group called VoteVets, which shares the mission of the blog-backed "fighting Dems" effort, is running attack ads against Republican incumbents. But the ads themselves are under attack now for factual innaccuracies. Democracy Project from the right and TPMMuckraker from the left covered the story. Crooks and Liars and Daily Kos promoted the ads.
-- Chris Bowers at MyDD called attention to the netroots efforts of MyDD diarists in Colorado and western North Carolina as examples of how bloggers can become newshounds. "We are dealing with a near total market failure for local news in the country, which gives local action such as this the potential to weld far, far more influence on a local level than blogs can ever hope to do on a national level," Bowers wrote. "Local progressive blogospheres can become local news, practically."
-- On another topic, Bowers offered two ways of looking at the "diversity problem" of last week's blog lunch with former President Bill Clinton. The subject is a familiar one to Bowers, who in March 2005 wrote about "Diversity And The Two Lefty Blogospheres."
-- American Spectator reported that the Senate campaign aide in Maryland fired over a blog was recommended to Democrat Ben Cardin by the liberal group MoveOn and the Democratic National Committee. And Jim Geraghty of National Review Online said this of the racist comments made at the blog: "How much of an echo chamber do you have to be in to not grasp that these types of statements are a bad idea? That they're a stunningly bad idea for a campaign staffer?"
-- GOPProgress started a new "candidate of the week" feature, with Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., being the first one touted.
-- "DON'T VOTE": That's what the seniors' group AARP is telling people in an ongoing advertising campaign that will make its way to television next week. That kind of campaign begs an explanation, so AARP's chief Bill Novelli provided a lengthy one at Congress Blog.
-- Can the left-right blog alliance that pressured Congress into voting for a publicly accessible database on federal spending last? Larry Scholer of the Heritage Foundation tackled the question at TimChapman.com. My take: There never was a coalition, so of course it can't hold. The three blogs that did most of the legwork -- Porkbusters, GOPProgress and TPMMuckaker -- did not coordinate their efforts; they just shared a passion. The lack of a formal coalition, the kind that Beltway-types form all the time, made their success even more amazing to behold.
-- Some Bush administration are reading blogs and even communicating directly with bloggers, according to a couple of instances unearted by Extreme Mortman. The first instance was a Sept. 11 post at Real Clear Politics by Peter Wehner, a deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House office of strategic initiatives. A week later, a State Department spokesman contacted Power Line via e-mail, and the blog printed the communication.
-- The Examiner published a second story about how trade groups and lobbyists are using the latest online innovations to spread their messages. The first story focused on activities in the states, as well as on Capitol Hill. This week's story noted that lobbyists in Washington are using various online tools, including social networks and the YouTube video-sharing site.
-- Matt Stoller of MyDD, a leader in the blog swarm over network neutrality, accused the Glover Park Group of " doing downright unethically worded polling with Republican polling firms pushing for the end of net neutrality."
-- The House passed a bill aimed at allowing more drug-related searches of public school students. TalkLeft dubbed it the "strip-search bill," arguing that "the searches could take the form of pat-downs, bag searches, or strip searches depending on how administrators interpret the law."
-- Was there at one time a connection among Saddam Hussein in Iraq, al Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan? One blogger who has been helping in the search and translation of Iraqi documents says "yes." Tapscott's Copy Desk has the details.
-- Christians are taught to pray to God, but that apparently is not acceptable for chaplains in the 21-century U.S. military. Some blogs, including RedState, are complaining about the ban against chaplain-led prayers that recognize God. Two House Republican lawmakers -- Todd Akin of Missouri and Steve King of Iowa -- also took the issue to the blog of the Republican Study Committee, and The Washington Times wrote a story.
-- Gas prices are going down as the November election nears. Some people in the blogosphere and beyond smell a conspiracy, but Wizbang argued that there are perfectly good market reasons for the decline.
-- John Hawkins of Right Wing News explained why he accepted a blog ad for an "anti-religious book": "Even though this book really isn't my cup of tea and I have some reservations about it, I'm willing to run an ad for it. Maybe that's a mistake, maybe not, but it's in keeping with how I've traditionally handled advertisers."
-- The blog content from Real Clear Politics is now available at Time.com, thanks to a deal between the two sites. And so the convergence between the mainstream and blog worlds continues, albeit not to the liking of liberal bloggers like Ezra Klein of Tapped.
-- Speaking of convergence, the $100,000 that Reuters just gave to a forthcoming citizen journalism project called NewAssignment.net will be enough to hire an editor for the project. Reuters Media president Chris Ahearn talked about the investment at The Huffington Post. TechSpace commented, too.
-- I wouldn't expect any convergence between blogger Michelle Malkin and that other wire service, the Associated Press. Malkin's contempt for AP (she's not fond of Reuters, either) manifested itself again this week in a spat that pits the "so-called blogosphere" against the "so-called reporters" of the news service.
-- Liberal bloggers might want to think twice before accepting a gig at Tapped, the blog of The American Prospect. Brendan Nyhan quickly ended his relationship with the publication because of editorial interference over his entries.
Posted by Danny at 07:07 AM | Comments (0)
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Global Blog Aggregator Wins $10,000 Award
The blog aggregator Global Voices Online has won this year's $10,000 grand prize in the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, according to a release from the University of Maryland, which oversees the awards.
The site, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, publishes multilingual content from bloggers across the world. A team of blogger-editors picks five to 10 stories a day for roundups from their regions. Global Voices Online also has a partnership with the Reuters wire service.
"It's an extraordinary site that allows for both editorial gatekeeping and wide access to news and information from under-reported parts of the world,"said the panel of judges for the awards.
Global Voices Online bested competitors from the mainstream media, including The Washington Post, which received one of the $1,000 awards for its database of congressional votes since 1991. The Spokane Spokesman-Review in Washington state also was recognized for its "transparent newsroom," which includes blogging about the paper's editorial decisions.
Other $1,000 awards went toward a database of hurricane history, a clearinghouse for health news, a California newspaper's platform where local residents can build online networks, and a Minnesota forum for ethnic and community news.
Posted by Danny at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)
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Whenever government agencies ponder regulations, they solicit public comments. Rarely do those views make it into the public sphere, and when they do, it can take weeks or months.
So what's the solution for the wonk who wants to get his message out quickly? Blog it.
That's what Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation did yesterday with his comments to the Federal Communications Commission about broadcast indecency. His blog entry summarized the points he made to the agency.
His arguments against indecency regulation:
-- Parents have the technology to control content themselves;
-- The pace of content-filtering innovation is quick and tailored to parents' specific needs;
-- The fact that some parents fail to take responsibility for controlling what their children watch does not justify government intervention;
-- And the "community standards" that traditionally have governed rules about TV content should be replaced by "household standards" that put the burden on each home.
"I'm not holding my breath in expectation of a sudden reversal of course by the FCC on this front, but I would very much like the agency to provide the public with answers to the points I make above," Thierer wrote. "Put simply, why is the agency still regulating like it's 1956 when 2006 technology gives parents extensive control over the content that enters the home?"
Posted by Danny at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)
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Last week's "Blog Lunch That Backfired" with former President Bill Clinton netted Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake some national attention on MSNBC yesterday.
The brief segment with Keith Olbermann was about as substantive as most of the blog entries written after the lunch, but the host did ask one good question of Hamsher: Are the blogs at risk of becoming too insider and losing their grassroots appeal by dining with Democratic powerhouses?
"I don't know that the grassroots nature of the bloggers can ever be totally co-opted," Hamsher answered. "One of our strengths is that we have thousands and thousands of readers showing up every day ... holding us accountable for what we write.
"So it's hard for us to get insider without taking a lot of guff for it. But that is a danger, and I think one of our strengths is people who live outside of Washington, D.C., and bring that perspective to it. There's a whole host of people trying to keep us honest."
Being aware of the threat is half the battle, so Hamsher deserves praise for recognizing and publicly acknowledging it -- something that in my experience most bloggers have been loathe to do. But insider lunches and photo ops with a former president whose wife is expected to run for president herself in 2008 remain a bad idea if bloggers hope to maintain any credibility as independent thinkers rather than political tools.
According to Peter Daou, the blog guru for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, more blog lunches are planned. The bloggers who are invited certainly should accept if they can -- as a journalist, I would jump at the chance for a sit-down with a former president -- but they should don their skeptic's hats, ask some tough questions and report back with something other than flattering comments about the former president's lovely eyes and brilliant political acumen.
Posted by Danny at 11:36 AM | Comments (5)
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Hours Of Snooping Fun For Bloggers
A company called Storming Media launched a new Web site this week that promises hours of fun for curious bloggers who want to know how much their lawmakers pay congressional staff. The site is called LegiStorm, and upon its debut yesterday, the site received so much traffic (presumably from Washington insiders) that it temporarily crashed.
One blog focused on Washington PR-types already has done some digging that will be of interest to folks on Capitol Hill. Adam Kovacevich of Potomac Flacks used the data on the site to create a spreadsheet of salaries for Senate press secretaries. It covers their salaries from last October through March of this year.
Kovacevich prefaced the data with this thought about congressional staff salaries: "The vast majority of Hill staffers are hard-working, talented, and criminally underpaid, and the fact that Hill salaries don't keep pace with the private sector contributes to a lot of good people leaving government service."
Maybe bloggers should follow Kovacevich's lead and create spreadsheets of salaries for aides who work for lawmakers in their home states. That's a service that traditional media probably will not provide, and sharing the information would be useful to taxpayers.
Posted by Danny at 04:26 PM | Comments (0)
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Heather Greenfield, who writes the "People Column" for us at Technology Daily, took note of a recent blog post by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., on the issue of network neutrality. That's a topic of interest to many bloggers, so I am reprinting her item here:
Sen. Edward Kennedy announced his support for network neutrality in a friendly place that has been advocating for the concept -- the Internet.The Massachusetts Democrat posted his position on equal treatment of broadband content at The Huffington Post and at the YouTube video-sharing site. He said it is important to keep the Web free of content gatekeepers and open to innovation.
Cable and telecom companies have announced plans to create speed lanes on the Internet and charge some content providers more for faster service. While the companies have promised not to slow traffic on other sites, the worry of Kennedy and others is that Internet users will gravitate toward faster sites and create a business climate where the next YouTube or other startup could not afford to compete.
"I support net neutrality because I believe it's needed to protect the innovative spirit that has always characterized the Internet and represents the essence of democracy," Kennedy said. "Our strength and progress as a nation depends on this spirit of freedom and openness -- and it's our duty to protect it. We need to do more to ensure that all Americans have equal access to the Internet and that it remains free from discrimination and anti-competitive behavior.
Posted by Danny at 04:21 PM | Comments (0)
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Bloggers Swarm For Transparency Again
The last bipartisan policy blog swarm has barely ended, and the next already has begun.
Bloggers played a central role in Congress' quick action over the past two weeks in passing a bill that would create a database on federal grants and contracts. President Bush is expected to sign the bill into law soon.
The conservative-oriented Porkbusters coalition started that effort, but blogs of other political leanings, including GOPProgress and TPMMuckraker, eventually joined the fight and pushed it to completion.
Transparency fostered the nonpartisan unity in the blogosphere, and that same goal is behind the new effort that surfaced today. A column in The Washington Post about the lack of electronic access to the campaign filings of Senate candidates prompted a quick reaction from bloggers in both parties, including two who were key players in the 2005-2006 blog swarm over campaign finance rules.
Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters was first out of the gate in arguing that the blogosphere's next bipartisan demand should be forcing Senate candidates to file electronically, just as House and presidential candidates already do.
"For some reason, Trent Lott and a number of our elected representatives in the Senate want to keep us from accessing that information in a timely manner," Morrissey wrote. "Usually that means they either have something to hide or see the clunky, slow process currently in use as a hedge for their incumbency. We need to remind them that they serve at our pleasure, and that playing games with full disclosure does not please us in the least."
Within hours, both Mike Krempasky of RedState and Adam Bonin, a lawyer who represented three Democratic bloggers before the FEC, were on the case. "There's a bill to fix this, of course. And unfortunately for our side, it's one of our guys holding it up," Krempasky said of Senate Rules Committee Chairman Lott, R-Miss.
"So please, get on the phone and call Senator Lott's office. ... Make sure they know that [the bill] deserves a hearing -- and deserves a vote."
Bonin posted his thoughts at MyDD. "There is not much on which the left and right blogospheres agree, except, perhaps, on the ability of the Internet itself to transform politics," he wrote. "It empowers the masses and provides for greater transparency in government, allowing citizens to have a greater understanding of and power over what's going on in Washington."
That same belief also explains a new blog entry at Dollarocracy, a blog of the Sunlight Foundation, which has been working with Porkbusters to expose the lawmakers who are behind earmarks in spending bills.
"Today the only things expensive and suspect are the Senate campaigns themselves," Larry Makison wrote. "They’ll be collecting their last-minute campaign dollars from people whose identities won’t be known until weeks after the election is finished."
In Broad Daylight, another Sunlight blog, also has a roundup with more links.
Based on the events of the past couple of weeks, and on the fact that senators don't need more bad press heading into an election, I'd say the odds are even that bloggers can push this issue to the top of the Senate agenda, just as they did the "secret hold" on that database bill. Then again, Lott already has said that he is tired of the bloggers causing trouble for him, so maybe he'll take a firm stand against transparency this time.
In either case, the blog swarm should be fun to watch.
Posted by Danny at 04:09 PM | Comments (0)
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Jon Henke is now the "new media coordinator" for Sen. George Allen. That's a change in title from the "netroots coordinator" that the campaign of the Virginia Republican first gave Henke.
I first noticed the change as a result of yesterday's Washigton Post story about Henke and other bloggers paid by campaigns in the Virginia Senate race. But Henke has been using the new title since at least Sept. 7, when it first appeared at the bottom of one of his QandO entries.
I questioned the decision to adopt the lingo of bloggers on the left after Henke was hired, so I figured an update was in order.
Posted by Danny at 01:24 PM | Comments (0)
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Political Blogging From Oregon To Virginia
As the November election nears, journalists across the country are starting to pay closer attention to political blogs and their impact in various campaigns. Today's coverage alone featured lengthy stories in The Oregonian and The Washington Post.
The group blog BlueOregon received prominent play in the former story, as did NW Republican. The Post story focused on the role of bloggers paid by campaigns in the Virginia Senate race, including Jon Henke the blogger recently hired by Sen. George Allen, R-Va.
Both stories predictably include the kind of blog stereotypes that journalists love to repeat, like this:
-- "In the new blog frontier, it's definitely buyer beware. Inaccuracies are common, as is leaping to a conclusion without all the facts. Bloggers acknowledge that balance and fairness are not usually seen as virtues." (Oregonian)
-- "The campaign bloggers sometimes write their own bits. Other times, they spread gossip generated by others. ... The bloggers' posts often are over the top." (Post)
The Post also resurrected an issue that bloggers hoped they had helped put to rest earlier this year when their relentless, self-interested lobbying convinced the Federal Election Commission to largely exempt them from campaign finance rules. The article noted that the campaign of Democrat James Webb is paying two bloggers, and Henke is on Allen's staff. All three continue to blog independently of the campaigns.
Ironically, Republicans seem to be the ones crying foul the loudest in Virginia. Though bloggers from left to right united to defend their own interests before the FEC, less regulation of campaigns tends to be a stance taken more often by Republicans than Democrats. But according to the Post article, some Virginia Republicans argue that the Democratic bloggers are crossing the line and need to be held accountable.
"The gang at Raising Kaine PAC better start looking around for a good Democrat federal election law attorney," the paper quoted one conservative blogger as saying. "Something tells me that they'll be needing one."
The Post also called attention to the triangulation that campaigns are attempting when it comes to political blogs. Campaigns embrace the blogs when they're generating buzz and bucks, and they run like the wind when bloggers say or do stupid things. We are witnessing the emergence of "bloggible deniability."
Democrat Ned Lamont used the tactic first in Connecticut when a blogger closely affiliated with his campaign (but not paid) posted an entry with Sen. Joseph Lieberman in blackface. The blogger in question had produced Lamont's first video blog not long before that episode, but when questioned about the blackface controversy, Lamont tried to disassociate himself not just from the guilty blogger but from blogs in general.
"I don't know anything about the blogs," he said. "I'm not responsible for those. I have no comment on them."
According to the Post, a similar scenario is playing out in Virginia, though it involves paid bloggers. The Webb campaign pays Lowell Feld of Raising Kaine, but when he called Allen a racist on his blog, a Webb spokeswoman said, "Well, you know, Lowell doesn't speak for the campaign."
It should be an interesting fall for the political blogosphere.
Posted by Danny at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)
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Maryland Senate candidate Ben Cardin fired a staffer yesterday over a blog she had been keeping and that included racist comments about "Oreos" directed at Cardin's Republican challenger, Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, who is black.
The Washington Times and WBAL have the story. The controversy has sparked coverage by Republican blogs, too, including Wizbang, which has a cached version of the now-deleted comments at the blog in question, Persuasionatrix.
The Ballot Box, RedState and Mary Katharine Ham at Townhall have more.
Ham offered this tongue-in-cheek insight, which, sadly, is probably on the mark: "Well, take heart little staffer. When you're done with this gig -- which will be, um, today -- you'll have a wide-open future speaking on panels about blogs at technology and politics conferences. Seriously, they love people who have been fired for blogging, even when the firing was a result of their own stupidity."
The Steele campaign quickly seized on the development by sending links to the news stories in at least two e-mail releases.
UPDATE: Wizbang publisher Kevin Aylward e-mailed to say that his site broke the story about the fired Cardin aide and that the Times reporter saw the blog's entry and then moved the story forward. That's citizen journalism at work.
Posted by Danny at 08:18 AM | Comments (0)
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From July through earlier this month, the Project for Excellence in Journalism held a series of nine online discussions about the future of journalism. The last of them, conducted Sept. 8, focused on the online revolution, and the role of blogs was one element of the forum.
The experts who participated were: Robert Cox, founder and president of the Media Bloggers Association (of which I am a member); Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media; James (Jay) Hamilton, a professor of media and public policy at Duke University; blogger Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine; and Lee Rainie, the founding director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Click to the extended entry to read excerpts of what each said about blogs in response to a question from PEJ.
PEJ: Now moving specifically to blogs: Blog readership, according to survey data, seems to have stalled in 2005. Content analysis also shows there is little of what we most would think of as original reporting in blogs. Yet they often write about events outside the purview of the mainstream press. How ultimately do you think blogs and other citizen media will affect news reporting in America? Will we ever see them as a more significant, or even equally important part of the mainstream American news diet as traditional journalism?Cox: I do not accept the premise of the question. I believe that blog readership has increased dramatically each year and continues to grow. ... I would guess that the actual number of readers of blogs is up dramatically but that it is masked for several reasons. First, most active blogs cover politics and as 2004 was an election year, it should be no surprise that there was a spike in blog traffic between the Conventions and the Election. Second, going into 2004 few news organizations had their own blogs and since then, many of the most widely read blogs are now contained within sites run by news organizations and they do not break out their traffic numbers. Third, the widespread adoption of RSS among blog readers, the integration of RSS readers into the latest browsers has meant that an increasing number of blog readers need never visit the site and so are not counted as “unique visitors” by tools like SiteMeter.
Gillmor: There may not be much original reporting in blogs as a percentage of all blogs. But given the enormous number of blogs, it takes only a small percentage of them to do original reporting to add up to vast new amounts of original content. The most common kind of reporting is in niche topics that are too narrow for the traditional media and people who care about those subjects are finding some excellent journalists. Professional journalists, meanwhile, are constantly using blogs as tip sheets, much as they've used trade journals in the past. The best way to begin to understand the blogosphere is to join it, of course. When journalists use blogs (and other conversational media) they start to realize that the conversational aspect of this medium is the key. Remember: The first rule of a conversation is to listen -- and listening has not been professional journalists' most notable trait.
Jarvis: On blogs, you are concentrating on the wrong statistic; you continue to look at media as an act of consumption. Media are acts of creation. Except now, we’re not the only ones creating; our public, too, has the benefit of the printing press and the broadcast tower online. And the truth is that the number of blogs created has continued to explode, doubling every six months. Those people are not just readers, listeners, viewers, users, or consumers. They are speakers. So are we listening to them? That is the real question. If you are a journalist, a company, or a politician and you are not listening to your public, your customers, your constituents, then you are a damned deaf fool…
The right question to ask is how blogs and mainstream media can work together to improve journalism and an informed society. You should be asking how any mainstream journalist could possibly imagine not doing his or her job without the help of the public through blogs.
Rainie: First, reporters will increasingly feel compelled to read blogs to take the temperature of the public on issues, as a source of inspiration for story ideas, as good substitutes for man-in-the-street interviews, and for feedback on their own work…Second, blogs will probably introduce new subjects for news organizations to address. Third, the most important power of blogs is that they allow millions of niches to bloom. Fourth, blogs could become a standard source of information on big breaking news stories. Fifth, bloggers will continue to play the role of forensic analysts and dissectors of mainstream news coverage. Sixth, bloggers fill the inevitable gaps in news coverage and add perspective to news commentary ... I think bloggers in most circumstances will continue to be seen as supplementary contributors to MSM news work rather than as substitutes for MSM activity.
Hamilton: … Blogs do possess the ability to remedy some failings of market-driven news outlets. There are specific circumstances where you can expect for-profit media outlets to get stories wrong: if situations involve repeated interactions with government sources, which causes reporters to pull punches or act as transcribers; if an information cascade starts which generates a prevailing view of a story, which makes it difficult for a reporter to go against the grain; or if information is costly to pry out of organizations but bloggers have knowledge because of their work.
The topic of citizen journalism (specifically user-generated political content) arose again a week later at the George Washington University Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet.
According to Howard Mortman, one of the more impressive presentations was by blogger Michelle Malkin, who discussed the phenomenal growth of her fairly new Internet video venture, Hot Air.
Posted by Danny at 07:52 AM | Comments (0)
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First came word that a blog had hired a press secretary. Now press secretaries and other flacks in Washington have a blog written just for and about them. It went online a week ago.
It's called Potomac Flacks and is written by Adam Kovacevich, an assistant vice president at Dittus Communications and a former spokesman for the Information Technology Industry Council. He sees his mission as "chronicling the highs, lows, quips, quotes, comings and goings of Washington, D.C., spokesguys and spokesgals."
Earlier this week, Kovacevich had an interesting post on how blogs are being used in lobbying campaigns. The entry referenced a story on the topic in the Washington Examiner.
Potomac Flacks is now part of the blogroll in the left margin of Beltway Blogroll. It's in the media category.
I've also added a few other blogs I discovered in the past couple of months. They are:
-- Consumer Law & Policy Blog, a production of Public Citizen;
-- The Freedom Talks Blog, which is connected with FreedomWorks, the conservative forum run by former House Majority Leader Richard Armey, R-Texas;
-- Medical Matters, a group blog created by VOLPAC, the political action committee of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.;
-- National Security Advisors, a group blog on national security law that is written by three law professors;
-- The Oil Drum, whose topics include energy policy;
-- Overdrive, which is published by the American Bus Association;
-- And PolicyBeta, a work of the Center for Democracy and Technology.
The blog of Pollster.com also is linked in the campaigns category of the blogroll now. It replaces Mystery Pollster. The two entities recently merged.
Posted by Danny at 07:27 AM | Comments (0)
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"NOW," a public affairs program of PBS, aired a story on "left-leaning political bloggers" yesterday. The YearlyKos convention of June and the blogger behind it, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos, were featured prominently in the story.
The program is available online in video and audio. The Web extras for the show include quotes from bloggers about their role in politics, as well as the text interviews with leading bloggers Arianna Huffington and Andrew Sullivan that I linked to yesterday.
Here are some of the more interesting thoughts from the two:
Huffington
-- Noting that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., has hired a blog adviser, she said, "There's no one more mainstream than Hillary Clinton, so the fact that she's done this is indicative of the influence blogs now have."
-- "I heard from a friend of mine who works on the Hill that a lot of Senate Democrats were paying close attention to whether the blogs were going to focus on the [John] Bolton nomination -- and that when they did a number of fence-sitting Democrats decided to back the idea of a filibuster."
-- "Blogging has empowered the little guy, leveling the playing field between the media haves and the media have-only-a-laptop-and-an-Internet-connection -- which is a huge shift."
-- "It's disingenuous to have a discussion about blogger misinformation when the mainstream media have been responsible for so much more significant and influential misinformation."
-- "To be an effective political blogger, you need an original voice, unique takes, timely links, solid research, and passion."
Sullivan
--" We can help frame the debate [for the mid-term electioni], but we're not ground-operations, nor, in my mind, should we be."
-- "I believe our influence should be primarily within the world of ideas -- generating new policies, exposing corruption and stupidity, clarifying where mistakes are being made, pursuing issues with tenacity ... and revealing dirty tricks by either side."
-- Blogs "should be seen as a mid-point between talk radio and the op-ed. They are also forging a new way of writing - open-ended, provisional, conversational, and subject to constant revision."
-- The mainstream media's "misrepresentations and distortions often dwarf the [those of the] blogosphere's leading and most popular blogs."
-- "The qualities I look for [in blogs] are good writing, reliable reporting, wit, fun, and a ready ability to recognize mistakes, correct them and to change one's own mind in the face of new evidence. I also look to be entertained."
-- "My biggest disappointment with the blogosphere -- which had and has the potential to be a forum for real independent thought -- is how so much traffic goes to purely partisan sites and partisan propaganda."
Posted by Danny at 07:08 AM | Comments (0)
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This entry is bumped to the top of the blog every time new interview links are added. Click to the extended entry for the latest. Links to earlier blog interviews with lawmakers and candidates are available here and here.
Blogs bring much-needed passion to the political arena, but bloggers must be careful to keep their passions in check so as not to cross into destructive character assassination that further polarizes the atmosphere, Sen. John McCain said yesterday.
"Look, everybody's free to blog, but sometimes some of the stuff that comes across [is], I don't think, terribly helpful in maintaining the discussion, the dialogue and the debate," McCain, R-Ariz., said in his first-ever podcast with "The Glenn And Helen Show." McCain added, however, that blogs are "a very important way for us to passionately defend the views and positions we hold." (Hat tip to Tim Chapman.)
McCain mentioned as an example some of the attacks being leveled against Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman by liberal bloggers who support businessman Ned Lamont in his Democratic primary race against Lieberman. He said Lieberman's support for the Iraq war is fair game for bloggers to challenge, "but I don't think that makes him a lesser man."
Such attacks are not exclusive to the blogosphere, McCain acknowledged, saying that he has erred in the past by getting too personal with some political opponents. But he said bloggers could learn from his mistakes. "If you get personal with them," he said of his colleagues in the Senate, "then ... they never forget it, and that's human nature. And we don't need it."
McCain posted his first blog entry last month at the Porkbusters site dedicated to fighting special-interest earmarks in government spending bills. He mentioned that post and praised the Porkbusters effort in the podcast, which is the work of Instapundit Glenn Reynolds and his wife, Helen Smith.
"In politics and life there are tipping points, and the bridge to nowhere ... I think was a tipping point," he said in reference to a spending earmark for a bridge in Alaska that became a rallying cry against pork-barrel spending last year.
McCain also praised the work of Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., in fighting the Porkbusters cause. Coburn even has the Porkbusters logo on his congressional Web site. His latest battle was yesterday, and it produced some wins, as reported by Mark Tapscott.
"I admire him tremendously for the courage he's shown," McCain said of Coburn, adding that "he's stolen the title of 'Miss Congeniality' from me."
McCain also said the Federal Election Commission made the right decision earlier this year when it exempted bloggers from campaign finance rules, just as traditional media are exempt. "They're going to play a much bigger role" in politics as a result, he said of blogs.
McCain further noted the impact for good that blogs have had on the media. And he said they are changing Americans' media appetite from one based on television news to instantaneous online news marked by unvarnished commentary. "They not only want the facts; they want to know people's opinions on it," he said.
McCain opened the podcast with a comment about the influence of one blog in particular: Instapundit. Asked why he had consented to give his first podcast, McCain quipped, "Because Glenn is such a powerful and influential American, I thought that this would sow up any ambitions that I might have for the presidency."
That won McCain some laughs from the co-hosts -- but something tells me the senior senator from Arizona was only half-joking.
UPDATE: Jim Geraghty of National Review Online and Michelle Malkin also noted McCain's thoughts on blogs. Malkin's post highlighted some blog-related comments I did not mention, like McCain's belief that "bad bloggers die on the vine."
Over at Townhall, meanwhile, McCain came under fire from another prominent blogger over some recent comments the senator made in Esquire magazine. "You are a great American, a lousy senator, and a terrible Republican," Hugh Hewitt said in resurrecting a criticism he has leveled against McCain on his radio show.
UPDATE, 9/17: Liberal blogger Taylor Marsh interviewed Democratic House candidate Donna Edwards, a favorite of some leading bloggers, on Marsh's radio show.
UPDATE, 9/15: RedState Radio is on a roll with its candidate and lawmaker interviews. The latest chat was with Diana Irey, the Republican challenger to Rep. John Murtha in Pennsylvania.
I also should have linked to RedState's interview with Newt Gingrich. He's neither a candidate nor a lawmaker not, but his status as former House Speaker and leader of the 1994 revolution that put Republicans in control on Congress makes the interview worth nothing in this ongoing feature.
Instapundit also conducted another podcast this week with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.
UPDATE, 9/14: RedState interviewed Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan. The site also published a blog entry by House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. The topic: federal spending earmarks and budget reform.
UPDATE, 9/12: RedState interviewed Bob Corker, the Republican Senate candidate in Tennessee. And Instapundit posted a separate interview with Corker.
UPDATE, 9/7: Power Line interviewed Rep. Mark Kennedy, the Republican Senate candidate in Minnesota this fall. And at Townhall, Mary Katharine Ham chatted with Raj Bhakta, a GOP House candidate in Pennsylvania whose blog outreach I covered in a recent column.
UPDATE, 8/31: Two blogs have conducted interviews with candidates in the past week. ArchPundit published a podcast with Dan Seals, a Democratic House candidate in Illinois, and Right Wing News posted the text of a mini-interview with Chris Wakim, the Republican challenging Rep. Alan Mollohan in West Virginia.
Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarter's also nabbed some time with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., when Frist was in Minnesota, Morrissey's home turf. He published the interview in three parts focused on politics, U.S. policy in Iran and the push for Senate debate on legislation aimed at creating a federal budget database.
And Townhall talked briefly with Sen. Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican who is in a tight race for re-election.
UPDATE, 8/24: Right Wing News posted another candidate interview yesterday, this time with Republican David McSweeney, the challenger to Democratic Rep. Melissa Bean in Illinois.
UPDATE, 8/19: Right Wing News has posted two interviews this month with House candidates who are running for seats being vacated by gubernatorial candidates. The first was with Mike Whalen of Iowa, and the second was with Chuck Blasdel of Ohio.
UPDATE, 8/17: GOPProgress posted an interview with five Republican women in Congress: Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, and Reps. Judy Biggert of Illinois, Nancy Johnson of Connecticut, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Deborah Pryce of Ohio.
UPDATE, 8/10: I've been remiss in adding interviews to this entry over the past few weeks, so now it's catch-up time. Here's a recap:
-- RedState has been on an audio tear the past couple of weeks, fitting for a group blog that has restructured its management, started podcasting and redesigned its Web site in the past month. As part of its "RedState Radio" feature, the site has aired online interviews: with Ken Blackwell, Ohio's secretary of state and its Republican candidate for governor; and Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman. Other non-candidate interviews: radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh and Club for Growth leader Pat Toomey.
-- Daily Kos interviewed Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D.
-- Firedoglake published a report on its conversation with U.S. House candidate Eric Massa, a Democrat in New York's 29th District.
-- Captain's Quarters snagged some time with Republican Michele Bachmann, a U.S. House candidate in Minnesota's 6th District, and GOP Rep. Phil English of Pennsylvania, who was in the state campaigning on her behalf.
-- PoliPundit interviewed Diana Irey, another Republican candidate in Pennsylvania. She is challenging Democratic Rep. John Murtha, a much-despised figure in the conservative blogosphere because of his criticism of the Iraq war.
UPDATE, 7/20: A former porn star named Mimi Miyagi wants to be the next governor of Nevada. She's the longest of longshots, but John Hawkins of Right Wing News thought it would be fun to interview Miyagi.
UPDATE, 7/19: MyDD interviewed Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill of Missouri.
Posted by Danny at 07:04 AM | Comments (1)
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Net Neutrality: The Top Unreported Story of 2006?
The push for network neutrality, a term for the demand that the government enact rules to ensure equal treatment of high-speed Internet content by different providers, has been a passion for many bloggers this year. But a new report from Project Censored ranks net neutrality as the No. 1 "censored" story.
"The issue was almost completely ignored in the headlines until 2006," the report said. "And, except for occasional coverage on CNBC’s Kudlow & Kramer, mainstream television remains hands-off to this day (June 2006)."
We cover every angle to the story at Technology Daily, typically with stories at least once a week and often once (or more) a day for long stretches. (Some of our coverage is available for free at the Tech Policy Pod, our weekly podcast, and National Journal's Insider Update: The Telecom Act.) We also link to and summarize stories on the topic from other publications in our morning edition, and net neutrality is a recurring topic.
So I was a bit surprised to hear that Project Uncensored had chosen network neutrality as the most censored story of the year. Calling a story censored because it doesn't appear regularly on "mainstream television" seems to me to cheapen the definition of "censorship."
Another tech-related story made the list at No. 5. Project Censored dubbed the category "High-Tech Genocide In Congo." The focus is on a decade of invasions and wars in that African nation and the United States' alleged complicitness in the problems because it needs natural resources from the Congo for electronics, cellular telephones, and the aerospace and defense industries.
The report accuses the "corporate media" of overlooking the story.
The subject is not one that I have seen addressed anywhere, making it sound far more like a candidate for inclusion in a censorship report than network neutrality. But even then censorship may be too harsh a word. In America at least, censorship typically implies government intervention in the reporting of news, and sometimes it encompasses a willful decision by the media to ignore a story.
There is no evidence to support the first definition in this case, and I seriously doubt that the second one is a factor in the Congo controversy. The lack of coverage is more likely the result of unintentional ignorance by journalists (like me until yesterday) who simply don't know there is a controversy.
Posted by Danny at 04:41 PM | Comments (0)
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The lunch that former President Bill Clinton hosted in New York with bloggers this week is causing a firestorm of controversy throughout the blogosphere, both because there were no minorities at the event and because one of the female bloggers "posed" in a way that some people found inappropriate.
Both objections are debatable. Some minority bloggers reportedly were invited but couldn't make the trip, and posing for pictures is pretty commonplace. But readers who want the scoop on the controversies -- it does make for some amusing weekend reading -- can get the details and plenty of commentary at the following blogs:
-- Ace of Spades HQ
-- Althouse (and here)
-- CorrenteWire
-- Culture Kitchen
-- Dr. Helen
-- Feministing
-- Firedoglake (and here)
-- Instapundit
-- Lawyers, Guns & Money
-- The News Blog
-- Pam's House Blend
-- Personal Democracy Forum (and here)
-- The Republic of T.
-- TalkLeft
I do wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment from a reader who e-mailed Instapundit: "I find it appalling that anyone would find it acceptable to dine with a former president in clothes as casual as those in the picture." And I'm from West Virginia. (Go Mountaineers!)
On the other hand, Clinton is the president who answered on national television the juvenile question about whether he wears boxers or briefs, so I can't imagine he was too offended by the casual attitude evident in the bloggers' attire. Maybe he was just thankful they didn't come in their pajamas.
UPDATE: Earlier in the week, Christy Hardin Smith, one of the bloggers at the lunch, penned what is arguably the most substantive post about the event. She said that she and co-blogger Jane Hamsher went to the event with a mission: to "emphasize the need for better messaging and coordination/cooperation with blogs and the Democratic leadership, who seem to constantly be trying to work at cross-purposes with all of us."
She mentioned one example at length that is telling of the strategic relationship some bloggers are seeking with the powers-that be:
I thought both Jane and Matt Stoller made excellent points with regard to messaging failures in the Democratic Party and the need for better talking heads to represent us all on the news shows. And the need for much better preparation for those shows. We have offered, in the past, to put together prep information -- specifically on the CIA leak case, because Jane and I have been so steeped in the minutiae and the facts and bigger picture implications -- but no one has ever taken me up on the offers.I mean, honestly, how hard is it to task someone on your staff to Google for a couple of hours to put together some summary papers on issues you know will be hit on a Sunday show? Or to e-mail a blogger who specializes in a particular issue and ask for help? In case anyone is wondering: We would be more than happy to be helpful -- and we'd actually be discreet and prompt because it's just the sort of people we are.
Smith closed with this thought: "[T]his is an excellent opportunity for blogs and politicians to become much more comfortable with each other in the Democratic Party. The GOP has been using this communications medium to its advantage for quite a while, and it is high time we levelled the playing field -- but bloggers cannot do that by themselves; the elected officials have to start playing ball. And I hope that Clinton’s example of a reach-out will move that along."
Posted by Danny at 03:34 PM | Comments (9)
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The Role Of Blogs In Confirmation Hearings
The Sept. 9 episode of C-Span's "America & the Courts" explored the first year of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, and the subject of blogs came up at the tail end of the discussion.
Marcia Coyle of National Law Journal recalled the role that blogs played in the confirmation hearings of Roberts and now-Justice Samuel Alito after that.
Here is the relevant excerpt from Coyle's comments:
I started reading them very closely during confirmation hearings -- both political and legal blogs -- and I was amazed at the amount of information they generate. And it's not just gossip and rumor. A lot of them presented detailed background information on all of the nominees -- opinions, links to case, reports. Some had highly placed sources.I don't consider them established news media, but I do consider them I think in the future to play a very significant role, perhaps akin to what television did to the confirmation hearings. ... Putting cameras in the confirmation hearings and even on the Senate floor changed the nature of it. The senators are playing a lot to their constituencies. ... What I'm saying is I think blogs, podcasts, all of this is also going to have a major role down the road in how nominees present themselves and how senators question them.
I know in one blog site, and this was not uncommon, that people would post opinions maybe five, six, 10 times a day, and those postings would attract anywhere from 200 to 500 public comments. Special-interest groups all had their own blogs. They had podcasts during the confirmation hearings.
This is all part of trying to convey a message to the public, trying to influence, as well, the media. I know that White House officials talked to bloggers in order to get their message out about the nominees.
So I think what we saw with Roberts and Alito is only the very beginning of what will be quite fascinating down the road as we head more and more into the Internet age. And I'm not sure what the ultimate impact is going to be. ... But I don't think we're going to be able to retreat from the very, very public aspect of confirmation hearings today.
I think the public wants to see these nominees, and I think because of the immediacy of the Internet they're going to want to know as much information as they can or answers to the questions they have as soon as possible. So it will be very interesting to see how it plays out.
Posted by Danny at 10:16 PM | Comments (0)
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Earmarks have been all the rage in Washington this week, as Congress cleared to President Bush a bill to create a federal spending database and the House also passed legislation that would mandate disclosure of earmark sponsors in tax and spending legislation.
Bloggers, whose grassroots lobbying helped push the database bill to the top of the agenda, have followed the story closely all week, both informing their readers of news developments and posting commentary.
The Blogometer here at National Journal posted a worthwhile roundup of one aspect of the "pork" debate between bloggers. It included a piece in defense of earmarks by Ezra Klein, though he later agreed with the Sunlight Foundation that the lack of transparency about such spending is a problem.
The action on the database measure, meanwhile, prompted Andy Roth at The Club For Growth to sing the praises of Senate bill sponsor Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and the sea change that he may well be furthering in "old-school" Senate politics.
The club also made the House debate on earmark reform a key vote for grading lawmakers and later called attention to how members of the Appropriations Committeee voted.
Georgia Republican Jack Kingston in particular is taking heat for his vote. Kingston sits on the Appropriations panel and is popular in the blogosphere. But he isn't so popular that bloggers on a no-pork diet won't blast him for betraying their cause. See what The Club For Growth, Instapundit and Georgia blogger Jason Pye, who had a MailTube run-in with Kingston earlier this year, have to say.
Over at the moderate blog GOPProgress, Liz Mair agreed with the view of appropriators that the new earmarks rules should be tougher on the tax-writing committee. But she added that it is "better to get a 75 percent solution than do nothing."
Now here are the rest of this week's blog bits:
-- The Center for Democracy and Technology launched a new Web site, NetDemocracyGuide.org, that advises bloggers and other about political advocacy online in light of this summer's Federal Election Commission ruling on the topic. Adam Bonin, a lawyer for some bloggers who testified on the issue before the FEC, urged Daily Kos readers to bookmark the site.
-- Aggravated by the decision of the National Republican Senatorial Committee to help Sen. Lincoln Chafee win the GOP nomination in Rhode Island on Tuesday, one writer at RedState called for the disbanding of the NRSC. Blog P.I. ridiculed the suggestion as "the dumbest thing I've ever seen" on the front page of the redesigned RedState, and the moderate blog GOPProgress defended the NRSC.
-- Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos said Democrats need to do a better job of imitating Republican success at building "negative value" campaign narratives. It sounds more like manipulating voters to me, regardless of who is doing it or how successful it is. Moulitsas also griped about the prospects of Democrats picking New York as the host city for the 2008 presidential convention.
-- The Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce in Virginia will host a debate between Republican Sen. George Allen and his Democratic challenger, James Webb. Some credentialed bloggers, including Howard Mortman of Extreme Mortman, will be there to report on the event.
-- A new ad from Webb makes him sound like a Republican ... and Daily Kos' Moulitsas thinks that's just swell. That attitude seems to conflict with the appeal of MyDD blogger Matt Stoller that Democratic candidates not be ashamed to mention their party affiliation in ads. "The brand can be a net positive this year," he wrote. "Please use it."
-- Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., endorsed the blog-backed Rightroots effort to raise money for select GOP congressional candidates by placing blog ads that urge contributions to the cause. An ongoing fundraising challenge as part of Rightroots is the subject of a blog burst today.
-- The Sunlight Foundation launched the Punch Clock Campaign, offering a reward to bloggers and any other citizens who can convince their congressman to post their daily schedules on their Web sites. A contributor at GOPProgress called for a blog swarm to back the effort.
-- The Center for Citizen Media provided more details about its political transparency project. The effort, which just received a grant from the Sunlight Foundation, calls for the involvement of bloggers and others in one California congressional district.
-- PBS interviewed big-name bloggers Arianna Huffington and Andrew Sullivan about political blogs.
-- Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., held a conference call with Democratic bloggers, and McJoan has a full report at Daily Kos.
-- Is political hacking becoming commonplace? Or are politicians just playing loose with the definition of hacking? Personal Democracy Forum tackled that issue by focusing on a complaint in California linked to comments recently made by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Blogger Ezra Klein, meanwhile, penned a Los Angeles Times column about the California controversy.
-- MSNBC.com fired liberal blogger Eric Alterman, ending a decade-long relationship between them. But his Altercation blog quickly found a new home at Media Matters for America, where blogging will resume Monday.
-- Real Clear Politics announced a partnership with Fox News that will "utilize a tool for tracking the hottest chatter in the blogosphere."
-- Last week, I talked about the menu at Ruby Tuesday's. This week, I'll tackle the heady subject of kids' meals at McDonald's.
Our 6-year-old son, Anthony, was quite thrilled when Ronald and company decided to feature Hummers in the meals this summer. But environmental groups and bloggers were offended by the promotion of the gas-guzzling vehicles, challenged it and now want McDonald's to feature hybrid vehicles in future kids' meals.
I don't own a Hummer, and I don't want one, in part for the very reason that environmentalists hate them. But I also think it's a bit silly to protest the toys in kids' meals. So here's what I think: Hummer owners should unite for one day and conduct drive-through events at their local McDonald's restaurants.
Posted by Danny at 12:21 PM | Comments (1)
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Bill Frist's Calling: Build A Blog Empire?
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is presumed to be a presidential contender in 2008, but I'm not sure that is his calling. Maybe the Tennessee Republican should build a blog empire instead.
He already is well on his way. Frist started his blogging adventures last October with the launch of his VOLPAC blog. His name has popped up periodically in the blogosphere ever since then, usually in context of something innovative he is doing -- like a podcast with Instapundit, the launch of iFrist Volunteers, the creation of a medical blog, or his recent alliance with bloggers to pass a bill calling for a federal budget database.
This week's evidence: Blogging for Bolton, a VOLPAC project aimed at confirming John Bolton to head the United Nations. Bolton's "recess appointment" to the post is set to expire in January, and Senate Democrats have been blocking a vote to permanently confirm him.
Having seen the power of bloggers to spur quick Senate and House passage of the database bill, Frist is hoping to marshall their influence again for Bolton.
"[W]e need your help to turn up the heat on the Democrats by flooding their offices with your calls in support of Ambassador Bolton and the president's agenda for reforming the waste and incompetence of the United Nations," he wrote. "So call as many senators as you are able, check off the offices that you've called and then click below to register your calls. Forward this Web site to your friends, family and co-workers so we can keep up the momentum, and return to the site to see the climbing numbers of calls placed in support of John Bolton."
The effort even includes a button that bloggers can place on their sites.
In this case, though, Frist has a competitor -- and one who beat him into the blogosphere. Steve Clemons of The Washington Note, along with others, has been blogging against Bolton since February. His site, called Bolton Watch, is located at TPMCafe, itself a part of the blogging empire created by Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo.
Posted by Danny at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)
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Education Secretary Margaret Spellings today granted a podcast interview to RedState, which billed the episode as "the first direct foray of the Bush administration into the blogosphere."
The topics included the 2002 education law known as the No Child Left Behind Act, home-schooling (a favorite topic of mine because we -- well, mostly my wife -- are home-schooling our children), and the right of taxpayers to choose between public and private schools.
Administration officials should conduct more such interviews, whether for podcasts or straight blog entries -- and they should do so both in venues that are perceived as friendly and unfriendly. Hook the head of the Social Security Administration up for a chat with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, for instance, or have Attorney General Alberto Gonzales talk to Jeralynn Merritt of TalkLeft.
Based on the administration's penchant for controlling its message -- something true of all politicians but even more pronounced at the executive level of government -- I would be surprised if that happens. But I would love to see it. I can't think of a better way to embrace the open spirit of the blogosphere than to reach across partisan (on)lines.
Posted by Danny at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)
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Just weeks away from the November election, Senate candidates finally are starting to awaken to the value of candidate blogs -- especially the candidates who have been burned by the blogosphere.
Sen. George Allen, R-Va., is the latest to jump on the blog bandwagon with AllenHQ. He joins Republican challenger Mike Bouchard of Michigan and Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who is seeking re-election as an indepedent after losing to Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary last month.
All three campaigns have put their blogs online since Labor Day, the traditional start of the fall campaign season.
Bouchard's move was proactive. In August, he hired David All, the innovative "spokesblogger" to Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., for the fall sprint to unseat Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow. Both Allen and Lieberman reacted very lately to bad exposure in the blogosphere -- Allen to a verbal gaffe in August and his allegedly racist past, and Lieberman to the months-long blog swarm against him by bloggers within his own Democratic Party.
Allen's blog went online two days ago, less than two weeks after he hired Jon Henke of QandO as the campaign's "netroots coordinator."
Lieberman's blog already has been the subject of controversy. The campaign initially allowed interaction at the blog but quickly killed the comments feature after what campaign official Dan Gerstein called a "barrage of ugly, insulting and hateful comments that some Lamont supporters have been posting by the hundreds." Some people who commented also reportedly impersonatedLieberman campaign staffers.
The campaign posted a sampling of the comments that prompted an end to the feature and also posted a comment archive "in the spirit of openness."
Posted by Danny at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)
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After his encounter with former President Bill Clinton in New York yesterday, Chris Bowers of MyDD was awestruck.
He said he "felt a tremendous swelling of patriotic pride and love for America" during the lunch Clinton hosted for select Democratic bloggers. And afterward, Bowers called the experience "a dizzying and remarkable moment that reminds you just what the true promise of this nation really is, of the greatness we have achieved, and of the still yet untapped potential of America to accomplish far greater things still."
Sadly, Bowers' colorful but uniformative commentary is about all that curious blog readers can find about Clinton's unprecedented netroots lunch. For now at least, the bloggers who attended are far too enthralled by the whole experience (perhaps understandably so) to actually give people much substance from the lunch.
The Carpetbagger Report has one of the few newsworthy posts I've seen on the lunch. It revealed that "about a year ago, the former president began reading blogs, from both sides of the aisle, and his daily press clippings compiled by his staff include blog posts of particular interest. It seems to have piqued his interest in the medium -- how blogs fit into the left's infrastructure, what the impact the medium has on news dissemination overall."
But even that entry transformed into Clinton hero worship.
It reminds me of the way Republican bloggers behaved when they were invited to Washington earlier this year and given insider access to a steady stream of GOP dignitaries. The courtship of the blogosphere continues.
Here are links to and excerpts from the two better reports from the Clinton blog lunch:
-- Liberal Oasis: Clinton "dismissed criticism of liberal bloggers as counterproductive extremists. This is a healthy development -- for someone of Clinton's stature to recognize that blogs are more than potential ATMs to be talked down to, but can positively shape political discourse and create a more hospitable environment for Democrats to thrive. ... As more and more people already in positions of great influence become open to really hearing the substance that originates in the blogosphere, the influence of entrenched special interests wanes, and the voices of the grassroots get louder. Yesterday was a step in that direction."
-- Daily Kos: "He's very impressed by the amount of research and fact-checking that happens on the blogs on a daily basis, particulary compared to the traditional media. ... He was impressed and grateful for the work done in pushing into the mainstream the travesty that the ABC/Disney movie was. He encouraged Democrats running for election this year to run as Democrats -- to not run away from the party and to stand tough on Iraq -- regardless of their position on troop reductions, pullout, whatever."
The Mahablog, Seeing the Forest and TalkLeft also have posts on the event, though they don't say much. And there is nothing yet at Crooks and Liars, Eschaton, Feministing and Firedoglake, which were represented either in New York or by telephone.
UPDATE: John Amato of Crooks and Liars, Jessica Valenti of Feministing and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake now have posts on the meeting, but they are no more substantive than the others.
Hamsher used her space to take a potshot at high-level Democrats who like to say bad things about bloggers. "Maybe all those snappy, forward-thinkers in the Democratic Party who might have an interest in doing likewise could leave off calling us dirty urchins long enough to figure out most of us are actually successful professionals who have some interesting things to say and a lively place to say it," she wrote.
Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft updated her post with a few more details of the meeting, including Clinton's thoughts on criminal justice, a favorite topic of Merritt's. "We also talked about America's criminal justice system, how politicians are too afraid to do what's right, about the over-jailing of offenders, particularly those with minor drug offenses, about mandatory-minimum sentences and how they haven't worked or promoted fairness," she wrote. "He said former offenders should regain the right to vote."
Also see Merritt's comment on my entry below.
Posted by Danny at 10:34 AM | Comments (1)
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Bill Clinton, George Bush And The Blogosphere
Former President Bill Clinton dined with a select group of Democratic bloggers today, and John Aravosis of Americablog has one of the first reports. From his post:
He looks a little older than I expected, though befitting someone who was president for eight years (and he was first elected 14 years ago). He's got beautiful blue eyes (this isn't something I normally notice, but in his case I did, and he does, and I suspect he uses it to good effect). The man is smart as hell. He knows a lot about everything, and he gets it; he gets politics, he gets people, he understands what's going on, and knows how to get things done. His political advice is no-nonsense and straightforward -- he'd rather take an issue on than run from it (oh, for the days of that in a Democratic politician).
More reports no doubt will be available soon, and I'll link and post excerpts as I find them. But first an observation of my own: Iranian President Mahmood Ahmadinejad has a blog, and now the last Democratic president, who's wife may run for president in 2008, has reached out directly to bloggers in his party. When will the current occupant of the White House get in the blogging game?
I won't hold my breath. David Almacy, the White House director of Internet press, recently told NBC that President Bush has no plans to blog and doesn't need one anyway.
"The president understands the power of the Internet ... as evidenced in the whitehouse.gov Web site, where all the president's press conferences, speeches, statements are catalogued," Almacy told the network. "We also have 'Ask the White House' on the site where people can ask questions and get a response. That's our vehicle."
That is an utterly predictable and arguably understandable stance for the leader of the free world to take. The president controls the national (and global) bully pulpit. He can command the attention of every major media outlet whenever he wants. And while the White House and political press can get pretty combative with Bush at times, they are far more predictable than the rabble-rousers of the blogosphere.
But the notion that it is enough for a president in the fast-moving information age to have a static Web site with canned statements and staged Q&As is pretty short-sighted. It also dramatically understates the power of the Internet.
Odds are, however, that Bush and his old-school media shop -- the same kind you find almost everywhere in official Washington -- won't realize their missed opportunity until it's too late.
Posted by Danny at 07:30 PM | Comments (0)
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Michigan Senate candidate Mike Bouchard made a smart decision last month in temporarily hiring "spokesblogger" David All away from the staff of Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Mich. Now the fruits of All's labor can be seen in the new Web site for Bouchard's campaign.
Considering All's passion for the technology, it's no surprise that Bouchard's site has a blog. But All apparently had enough sway within the Republican's campaign to go one step further. The entire site, including the candidate's issue statements and press releases, is built on a blog platform.
Bouchard, who is trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow, posted a blog entry yesterday to mark the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Posted by Danny at 09:59 AM | Comments (1)
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Tomorrow's House agenda will include a vote on Senate-passed legislation to create a publicly accessible database on federal spending, according to the House leadership.
"The House will amend the Senate version with compromise language, and it will head to the president's desk," Burson Taylor Snyder, the communications director to House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said in an e-mail.
Bloggers across the political spectrum helped push the measure to unanimous Senate passage last week.
Posted by Danny at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)
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Senate challengers in New England are getting all kinds of love from bloggers in intraparty battles this summer. Last month, it was Democrat Ned Lamont in Connecticut. This month, it's Republican Steve Laffey in Rhode Island, who squares off against Sen. Lincoln Chafee today.
Chafee has upset conservative bloggers who call him a RINO, or "Republican in name only." Heather Greenfield previewed the Chafee/Laffey matchup yesterday afternoon at Technology Daily. Here is an excerpt:
Like Lamont, Laffey's has gained support at national blogs, and online groups interested in the race have battled each other with nasty postings on the YouTube video-sharing site.RedState offered an online discussion in January under a headline asking whether Chafee should be "thrown to the wolves."
"The race has thoroughly divided Republicans and has hurt [National Republican Senatorial Committee] fundraising efforts," RedState CEO Erick-Woods Erickson wrote as he introduced Laffey for an interview with the blog's radio program. "Some Republicans think Laffey can't win in November, and the NRSC has been so hateful in its attacks of Laffey, a lot of people who would otherwise contribute to the NRSC, including me, have refrained from writing checks."
... GOPProgress, a blog for moderate Republicans, sees the Chafee race as critical not just to maintaining GOP Senate control but a moderate voice in the party. The site began live-blogging the primary from Rhode Island over the weekend.
Voters in Maryland also go to the polls today, and the Democratic primary between Rep. Albert Wynn and challenger Donna Edwards has animated some Democratic bloggers. You can get more information and links on the race here and here.
Posted by Danny at 07:23 AM | Comments (0)
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Remembering The Victims, Then And Now
Thousands of bloggers are marking the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by remembering the 2,996 victims who lost their lives. It's a brilliant and powerful idea, one that showcases the talent of bloggers who have never met to connect online and produce moving content.
It's not a new idea, though. And ironically, The New York Times, the mainstream media outlet hated the most by bloggers, did it first. Five years ago, the paper produced "Portraits of Grief" on the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The profiles ran from Sept. 15, 2001, through Sept. 10, 2002, and they helped the Times earn the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2002. The Library of Congress also held a discussion on the series soon after the first anniversary of the attacks.
Maybe five years from now, bloggers and journalists will have figured out how to work together to produce quality content. That certainly should be a goal.
Posted by Danny at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)
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Every couple of months, some journalist with a superiority complex pens a blog-bashing commentary that is so simple-minded, it deserves to be held up to ridicule.
Andrew Kantor, the CyberSpeak columnist for USA Today, wrote just such a piece last week, condescending references to "amateurs" included. Here is an excerpt:
Bloggers and other amateur journalists have some of the same problems any amateurs do: They make up the rules as they go, and they run the risk of screwing up and hurting someone. But because blogging isn't their day job, they have little risk -- they aren't going to be fired. Professionals are constrained; they can't just do as they please.Lowes and Home Depot have given amateurs the ability to do work that was once the province of pros, and inexpensive digital technology has given amateurs the ability "do" journalism. But just as amateurs with a set of power tools can do great work or build a deathtrap, amateur journalists can do the same.
Having the tools and using them wisely are two different things. In their rush to get the Big Scoop -- something pros know come few and far between -- bloggers and other citizen journalists love, for example, to blow small things out of proportion.
Some of the criticisms Kantor made about bloggers are on the mark. I've been a bit dismayed myself lately to see the gotcha mindset snowballing within the blogosphere as citizen journalists try to make their mark.
But what Kantor and most of my other journalistic brethren fail to acknowledge -- either out of ignorance or self-delusion -- is that bloggers are merely imitating (probably unintentionally) the worst of what they see in the mainstream media. "Professional" journalists long ago mastered the art of blowing small things out of proportion. They are experts at building informational deathtraps. And very few get fired when they screw up and hurt someone. Some even get rewarded for it.
The fact is that both the professionals and the amateurs have much to learn from each other. We pros can teach the journeymen how and where to dig for great stories, how to treat people fairly in coverage even when you disagree with them, and maybe even how a bill really becomes a law. The amateurs can teach the pros how to better use the tools of the information age, show us the humility necessary to work effectively as a team, and help us recapture the passion that lured us into the business in the first place.
Ironically, the conclusion that Kantor reached about citizen journalists can be turned around on my industry with just a few tweaks. "[Professional] journalists are here to stay. ... But if they hope to be taken seriously -- beyond [the prestige of their many] press passes or [heavily marketed and sensationalized] scoops -- they need to take that next step beyond [their ivory-encrusted] toolbox. They need to learn [anew] the best ways to use it."
Then and only then will the professionals have the right to lecture the amateurs about how to produce quality journalism -- and only then will they not want to.
Posted by Danny at 06:38 PM | Comments (0)
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Sen. Santorum Quotes Bloggers
When the Senate on Tuesday debated the nomination of Kimberly Ann Moore to be a U.S. circuit judge for the Federal Circuit, Sen. Rick Santorum seized that as an opportunity both to tout Moore's candidacy but also to decry "activist" judges who are not in her mold.
In making the case against activist judges, Santorum, R-Pa., cited the recent decision by U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Michigan against an anti-terrorism surveillance program. And in bashing Taylor in particular, he appealed in part to the opinions of two prominent legal bloggers.
Here is an excerpt from Santorum's statement in the Congressional Record:
Howard Bashman, an appellate attorney and editor of the How Appealing legal blog, wrote in The New York Times on August 19 that "[i]t does appear that folks on all sides of the spectrum, both those who support it and those who oppose it, say the decision is not strongly grounded in legal authority."UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh wrote on his widely read blog: "the judge's opinion ... seems not just ill-reasoned but rhetorically ill-conceived. ... [B]y writing an opinion that was too much feeling and too little careful argument, the judge in this case made it less likely that the legal approach she feels so strongly about will ultimately become law.
Santorum appears to be the first federal lawmaker to specifically cite bloggers during floor debate. Blogs have been mentioned generically on the floor, but I don't recall anyone having quoted them before now.
As for Moore, she was confirmed 92-0, with eight senators not voting. Curiously, Santorum was one of the eight who didn't vote. A statement in the Record listed him as being "necessarily absent" during the vote.
UPDATE: A spokesman for Santorum just confirmed what I suspected -- that the senator just submitted his statement for the Record but did not actually quote blogs from the floor. So while it's not quite the first that I first thought, it's still interesting.
Posted by Danny at 12:38 PM | Comments (0)
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Topic A for much of the blogosphere this week -- and also a hot item in the mainstream media -- has been "The Path to 9/11," a docudrama set to air on ABC come Sunday and Monday. Critics argue that the story is biased and innacurate, and they are seeking changes to it.
I've not written anything about the controversy for three reasons: 1) I'm too busy in my day job, and the story is developing too quickly for me to follow closely; 2) The Hotline's Blogometer here at National Journal has done a great job of tracking the blogosphere's interest in and impact upon the story; and 3) the fight is over a movie, and my goals at Beltway Blogroll are to track the impact of blogs on policy, politics and journalism.
That said, the story has taken some political turns that merit a mention in my weekly roundup.
For starters, the Democratic National Committee joined the fray by urging its allies to petition ABC to keep "this propaganda off the air." The DNC also has covered the story extensively at its blog. Then today, Senate Democratic leaders sent a critical letter to ABC parent company Walt Disney about its obligations in using the public airwaves.
"This is nothing less than an implicit threat that if Disney tries to meddle in the U.S. elections on behalf of the Republicans, they will pay a very serious price when the Democrats get back in power, or even before," John Aravosis wrote at Americablog. "This raises the stakes incredibly for Disney."
Matt Stoller of MyDD also created another of his "open letter" blogs, resurrecting for the docudrama fight a strategy he has used when criticizing the media.
One of the more curious elements of the story was ABC's apparent decision to release copies of the docudrama to Republican-oriented bloggers and media outlets but to deny requests from Democratic blogs for advance copies. Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice cited those actions as evidence of how political the story has become.
"If you have conservative bloggers getting preview DVDs of the ABC film, and no liberal bloggers getting preview DVDs, you now have an ideological product that will 'lose' a segment of not just the blogosphere but the American public," he wrote. "If you have Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talkers hyping the film and saying how great and factually correct it is, and some former members of the Clinton administration insisting it is not entirely factual and charging it takes dramatic liberties ... then you have a product that is going to lose a large chunk of the American public."
Enough about that. Here are more blog bits from the week:
-- Late last month, the Federal Election Commission declined to grant an exemption for "grassroots lobbying" to a campaign finance rule that prohibits paid broadcast advertisements criticizing congressional incumbents 60 days before an election. The prohibition kicked in yesterday for this fall's election, and some bloggers are irate at what they see as an infringement on free speech.
Noting that mainstream media outlets largely have ignored the story, Andy Roth of The Club For Growth yesterday took the case against the ban public at his group's blog by publishing a roundup of bloggers' opinions. Once the press finally awakens to the story, Roth's entry will be a good place to go for background and to get a sense of the objections to the rule.
-- Last month, Instapundit Glenn Reynolds wisely warned Capitol Hill aides not to send angry e-mails to bloggers. David DiMartino, the communications director to Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, apparently did not get the memo during the recess, so now his snippy e-mails are online at GOPProgress for everyone to read.
-- Reynolds issued another warning to lawmakers this week on one of his favorite topics: earmarks for "pork" projects in federal spending bills. "I think that there will be major backlash if nothing gets accomplished this fall" to curtail them," he said.
-- The House Republican Study Committee recently redesigned its blog, and now GOP lawmakers are becoming regulars there. Tim Chapman of the Heritage Foundation said "this is the real deal ... not press secretaries blogging." Chapman also reported on a blog call by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa.
-- Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who is now running for re-election as an indepedent, launched a campaign blog. Emboldened and Personal Democracy Forum took critical looks at it.
-- The growing blog empire being built by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo is adding a new feature to its "collaborative journalism": amateur videos from campaign events to enhance the coverage at Election Central. But blogger Matthew Yglesias has ended his stint with TPMCafe and is back to blogging at his own site. Blog P.I. thinks that was a smart move.
-- Jerome Armstrong had some initial doubts about the new Adwatch project at MyDD, the blog he founded, but he now thinks it's a good idea for Democratic bloggers to critique the campaign advertisements of Democratic candidates. Michigan Republican Mike Bouchard no doubt agrees, so long as the critiques are like the one MyDD ran about Bouchard's foe, Sen. Debbie Stabenow. A Bouchard aide call the analysis of the Stabenow ad "brutal."
-- Leading Democratic political adviser Donna Brazile penned a praiseworthy column about blogs in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. Raw Story has excerpts.
-- Politics and Technology envisions a whole new Google-manufactured world for people who do opposition research to explore online. Bloggers could have a field day with it.
-- Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association (of which I am a member) has been talking regularly about blog ethics. That's a topic I cover regularly, too.
From The Working Press, a convention publication of the Society of Professional Journalists: "Cox's hope is that journalists and the mainstream media will give bloggers a chance to grow, develop and weed out the bad. 'Blogs that abuse the trust of the readers will be seen as unreliable,' Cox said." I share his hope.
-- Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan of GOP Bloggers announced a book deal.
-- I recently had a business lunch at Ruby Tuesday's. I used to like going there because of the numerous healthy options on the menu, but they were gone on my last visit. I'm actually on a low-carb diet right now, so I was still able to order a steak and vegetables. Still, I was irritated that it was my only option.
Instapundit and his daughter were even more irritated on their last trip to Ruby Tuesday's. They left -- and then Reynolds blogged about the new, fattening menu. That's not the kind of attention a restaurant needs.
Posted by Danny at 07:17 AM | Comments (0)
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Senate Passes Bill For Spending Database
Breaking news at the VOLPAC blog of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.:
Tonight I’m proud to report that the Senate unanimously passed S. 2590, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. The passage of this legislation is a triumph for transparency in government, for fiscal discipline, and for the bipartisan citizen journalism of the blogosphere. ... [T]he unprecedented synergy between online grassroots activists and Senate leadership provides a new model for participatory democracy in action.
For those who may have missed the biggest news in the blogosphere during last month's August congressional recess, that's the bill that was the subject of two "secret holds" exposed by bloggers -- and more procedural shenanigans this week.
Next stop: The House. Let's see how quickly Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., puts this blog-driven bill on the floor agenda.
Posted by Danny at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)
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The Sunlight Foundation today invested a nice chunk of change in the future of citizen journalism. The group announced its latest round of "transparency grants," and most of the money will be going into the blogosphere.
The Center for Citizen Media, which is led by new media pioneer and blog afficianado Dan Gillmor, will receive $25,000 for an election-focused citizen journalism test in one congressional district.
"The site will include in-depth biographical and political information on candidates, audio and video archives, campaign finance profiles, first-person reports, links to articles, etc.," the foundation said. "This project is designed to serve as a model for possible nationwide implementation in hundreds of districts in 2008."
Another $10,000 will go toward NewAssignment.net, a project announced earlier this year by New York University professor and PressThink blogger Jay Rosen. The donation matches the $10,000 gift already made by Craig Newmark, the entrepreneur behind the Craigslist online classifieds service.
The foundation described the project, whose target launch date is 2007, as an "open collaboration over the Internet among traditional reporters, editors and large groups of reader-reporters can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust." Rosen cited as an example the "Exposing Earmarks" project against federal pork-barrel spending that began last month.
Two smaller grants -- $2,500 and $1,600, respectively -- went to state-based political blogs in Kentucky and Connecticut.
The Kentucky blog, Bluegrass Report, has been at the center of a couple of controversies over the past several months. Late last year, blogger Mark Nickolas attempted unsuccessfully to get a press pass to cover the state legislature. (He eventually received one by landing a columnist's gig at a traditional newspaper.)
And this summer, Nickolas complained that a blog ban on state-owned computers was politically motivated, specifically at his blog. He has filed a lawsuit to overturn that ban.
The Connecticut blog, Connecticut Local Politics, was among those that took center stage this year in the run-up to the Aug. 8 Democratic primary between blog-backed challenger Ned Lamont and Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Lamont won that race and now faces an indepedent challenge from Lieberman, whose campaign just launched a blog this week.
Posted by Danny at 12:25 PM | Comments (2)
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Nearly two decades ago, the presidential campaign of Democratic Sen. Gary Hart self-destructed when the Coloradoan invited reporters to investigate rumors that he was a womanizer. The Miami Herald took him up on the offer and proved Hart wrong when he said "they'd be very bored."
A couple of weeks ago, Washington Senate candidate Mike McGavick, a Republican, encouraged similar press scrutiny with a confession by blog about an arrest for driving while intoxicated. While he scored points in the blogosphere then for his transparency, he is catching some heat from the mainstream media now for not being completely forthright in his account of the arrest.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer obtained a police report of the incident that the newspaper said shows McGavick "was less candid than he seemed last week when he disclosed a previously unknown arrest for drunk driving."
McGavick said he "cut a yellow light too close," for instance, but the police officer on the scene said he drove "through a steady red light." McGavick also appears to have been more intoxicated than he acknowledged in the blog entry.
After McGavick posted his entry, the GOP-friendly blog Real Clear Politics noted that the tell-all strategy could be effective -- but also warned that it could backfire if the candidate did not actually tell all. That seems to be exactly what happened, and the new information may be impacting McGavick's electoral chances.
"If you are going to confess past foibles in the context of a political campaign, you need to put everything on the table -- not offer it up in bits and pieces," Chris Cillizza wrote at The Fix. "McGavick still has a chance to unseat Maria Cantwell (D), but it has diminished over the past week."
McGavick's handling of the fallout from the latest information about his arrest will show exactly how astute he is when it comes to the blogosphere. Gary Hart had it easy when he foolishly turned the press against him; McGavick may be about to learn the hard way how even more unrelenting bloggers can be when they swarm.
UPDATE: This story continues to generate commentary in the blogosphere. Here is a sampling:
-- David Postman, the political reporter at the Post-Intelligencer, noted McGavick's response to the coverage of the police report.
-- Sound Politics, a current events blog in Washington state, defended McGavick against attacks from liberal bloggers. "McGavick self-confessed to an embarrassing incident in his past, and has now been forthright about discrepancies between his memory and the official record of the event," Eric Earling wrote. "Get over it already."
-- RedState said now is the time to offer support to McGavick, who recently was endorsed by The Club For Growth.
Posted by Danny at 12:15 PM | Comments (1)
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Rep. Jim McDermott doesn't expect much in the way of policymaking from Republicans this fall as Congress finishes the last few weeks of the 109th Congress.
The Washington Democrat said the opposing party will use its power in Congress not to address issues like immigration, gasoline prices and Social Security but to try to scare Americans during what they are calling "Security September." Their only goal, he said at The Huffington Post, is to stay in power beyond the November election.
Here is an excerpt:
Republicans will tell you to be afraid unless you pay through the nose at the pump, and Big Oil drills in every pristine environment left on the planet. Republicans will tell you to be afraid for Social Security unless they give your benefits to Wall Street, so you might have holdings like Enron. Republicans will tell you to be afraid unless they can mortgage America's 22nd century, so that today's super rich can just have more.Republicans had their chance and squandered it, leaving the American people with monstrous debt. Republicans had their chance and used it to divert America away from the real war on terror.
Republicans are calling this Security September. Just remember to be afraid -- afraid of what else Republicans will do if they remain in power after the November election.
Posted by Danny at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)
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Florida Blogger Faces Defamation Lawsuit
A blogger in Florida who allegedly has called a religious publisher "a very corrupt man" and "a lying, thieving con artist" is now the subject of a defamation lawsuit, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
In addition to seeking monetary damages, the Ligonier Ministries publishing firm asked a judge to stop Frank Vance of Contending for the Truth from posting any more slurs about company president Timothy Dick.
The newspaper noted that some judges have approved such requests, but First Amendment lawyers questioned those rulings. "I think a lot of judges don't know what a blog is," one lawyer told the Sentinel.
Vance responded to the lawsuit at his blog by making a new accusation -- that Dick had not notified him of the lawsuit, perhaps in an attempt to win the case by default. "It's highly unethical but who ever said that Tim Dick has any ethics?" Vance wrote.
He added that the lawsuit is part of a pattern. "Tim Dick has successfully silenced whistleblowers and anyone else who'd hold him accountable by issuing threats of litigation," Vance said. "All it seems to take to silence disgruntled employees, former employees, and other whistleblowers is a threatening letter from Ligonier's attorneys. This is the Tim Dick way. Evade accountability, and if anyone presses a matter too hard then just sue them."
Vance vowed to keep his blog online and fight Dick unless a court forces him to remove it.
Posted by Danny at 12:39 PM | Comments (4)
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The New York Sun has a report on the role that conservative blogs are playing in a Minnesota House campaign.
Democrat Keith Ellison is the candidate, and his bid has attracted critical commentary from blogs like Minnesota Democrats Exposed and Power Line. The newspaper said Ellison could either become the first Muslim, and first black lawmaker from Minnesota, elected to Congress or "one of the first politicians defeated in a Democratic primary because of hard-hitting posts by conservative bloggers."
The blogs have noted Ellison's ties to the Nation of Islam, and they are behind allegations "about his failure to pay taxes, suspended driver's license, and incomplete campaign finance reports," the Sun reported.
Here is more from the story:
Thus far, one of the founders of Power Line, Scott Johnson of Minneapolis, has written 20 blog entries about Mr. Ellison. He is particularly concerned about Mr. Ellison's presence and statements at rallies defending gang members accused of violence against police. ... "He seems to have a jones for cop-killers," Mr. Johnson said of Mr. Ellison.Many of the bloggers' posts taunt the Minneapolis Star Tribune for being slow to raise questions about Mr. Ellison's past. "I think I've eaten their lunch on this story. They're so paralyzed by political correctness they've let us have a field day," Mr. Johnson said.
A political writer and editor at the Star Tribune, Conrad deFiebre, said the paper "may have gotten some tips from the blogs." However, he said there has been no effort to suppress stories about Mr. Ellison. "There was no reluctance on our part and there were no delays," Mr. deFiebre said.
Mr. Ellison's campaign did not respond to requests for an interview.
Posted by Danny at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)
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The Candidate-Blog Conspiracy Theory
The re-election campaign of Sen. Joseph Lieberman today is expected to launch a redesigned Web site that includes a blog, and the Connecticut Democrat's intraparty enemies think it's a trap to catch them making nasty comments.
Duncan Black of Eschaton issued a warning to his readers, and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos seconded the warning. "It's basically going to be a trap to entice people to say mean things about the Last Honest Man so they can go whine to the press about how mean everyone is unlike Stay the Course Joe," Black wrote.
Rather than admonish Lieberman's political foes in the liberal blogosphere to behave themselves, however, Black just told them to save their harsh rhetoric for other forums. "There are plenty of other places on the internets where you can say mean things about Joe," he said.
UPDATE: Swing State Project joined the conspiracy blog crew with this post: "[P]lease don't feed the trolls. Or, as Domino's Pizza used to say back in the '80s, 'Avoid the Noid.' There are a thousand other blogs where we can spend our time. We don't need to take the bait and wallow in the inevitable muck of the LieberBlog. Just stay away."
Posted by Danny at 09:42 AM | Comments (1)
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Flacks For The Blogosphere? That's Wack
The netroots pride themselves on being just plain folks -- you know, "people power" and all that. They are "crashing the gates" of the political establishment to change the way Washington works.
So could someone please explain why in the world Firedoglake, one of the top liberal blogs, has hired a press secretary? That's about as establishment as you can get.
I hate to break it to Jane Hamsher, who certainly didn't explain the logic of the move well, but real people don't have press secretaries. And blogs shouldn't need them.
Unless, of course, they are going to do what new Firedoglake press secretary Christina Siun O'Connell promised in a comment about her role: "I’ll spin until I’m dizzy!"
"The people" aren't even inside the gates yet, and they're already acting and talking like their enemies. So much for the revolution.
Posted by Danny at 08:13 PM | Comments (14)
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The hiring of blog experts is all the rage in politics these days, and netroots favorite Ned Lamont, the Democratic Senate candidate in Connecticut, has hired another one.
The evidence surfaced discreetly in a disclosure by David Sirota at The Huffington Post and cross-posted at Sirota's own blog. The disclosure came at the bottom of a post arguing that "something has gone horribly, horribly wrong over at the re-election campaign of Sen. Joe Lieberman," whom Lamont defeated in the Aug. 8 Democratic primary.
"I have long been a volunteer supporter of Ned Lamont's candidacy and written extensively about the race," Sirota said in the disclosure. "As of Labor Day, I am officially working with the Lamont for Senate campaign on research. The writing on this blog is my own and not the official work I do for the Lamont campaign."
Lieberman's campaign, meanwhile, issued a press release about its forthcoming Web redesign. Election Central at TPM Cafe reports that the site will feature a new candidate blog.
Posted by Danny at 07:31 PM | Comments (0)
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When Sen. George Allen opened his mouth and inserted "macaca" a couple of weeks ago, I offered the Virginia Republican some unsolicited advice: Get a blog, and hire a blog expert.
Allen still doesn't have a blog, but today, Jon Henke of QandO announced that he is now Allen's netroots coordinator. I would think that a campaign blog won't be far behind.
Coincidence? You decide, but I think I'll take credit for this one. Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters also should take a bow. He recommended Henke to Allen in a post last week.
As for Henke's new gig, this is what he told QandO readers: "Obviously, this will change my focus quite a bit, but I will continue to blog at QandO whenever possible, generally on the issues and stories in this very important Virginia Senate race. ... I'll include the following disclaimer at the bottom of every post I write: Jon Henke is the Netroots Coordinator for the George Allen Senate campaign."
Now for some advice to Henke and the Allen campaign: Change the name of the job description. "Netroots" is a term coined by and associated with bloggers on the left -- you know, the ones that folks on the right derisively call the "nutroots." That's not exactly the message you want to be sending fresh out of the blog gate.
UPDATE: The Ballot Box, Blog P.I. and Captain's Quarter's praised Allen's decision to hire Henke. Captain's Quarters also suggested that a hacking of Henke's home blog turf, QandO, may have been related to Henke's new gig.
Posted by Danny at 07:21 PM | Comments (0)
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While I was traveling on my home turf today along one of the few West Virginia roads to nowhere Sen. Robert Byrd has not steered federal money toward, bloggers were hard at work proving that keeping secrets is a bipartisan tradition in Congress' upper chamber.
At the start of the day, rumors swirled that Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, was not the only senator to put a "secret hold" on legislation to create a federal budget database. By the end of the day, TPM Muckraker broke the news that there was indeed another culprit -- and a Democrat at that. It was Byrd, who represents my parents, brothers and other friends and family in the great Mountain State.
Byrd acknowledged that he had delayed floor debate on the legislation just before the August congressional recess because he had not had a chance to read it. His statement of admission, however, also said Byrd has now lifted his hold.
"Now that there has been time to better understand the legislation, Senator Byrd has released his hold," the release said. "Senator Byrd believes that the bill should be debated and opened for amendment, and not pushed through without discussion."
The blogosphere's obsession with the hold continued to generate commentary today as well. Here is a sampling:
-- BuzzMachine called the outing of Stevens (and now Byrd) "a textbook example of networked journalism. ... Where’s the Pulitzer for bipartisan, [professional-amateur] networked reporting?"
-- SunSpots: "[A]ccording to the Congressional Budget Office, implementing the online search database might cost ... about $15 million over the 2007-2011 period. ... But wait a minute! One of the very first grants that the Sunlight Foundation made was to create an online searchable database of government grants and contracts that is nearly identical in terms of functionality to the one that would be mandated. ... We made a three-year grant to the nonprofit organization OMB Watch for a total of -- hold your breath -- $234,713!"
-- Daily Kos: "Incredible. The two longest-serving senators in the Senate seem to have forgotten that they work for the people, and that it's the people's money they're playing with, not their own."
-- Tim Chapman of the Heritage Foundation said Stevens is just keeping his word by invoking a hold on legislation offered by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who challeged the Stevens-backed "bridge to nowhere" last fall. If the hold is payback, though, it seems to have come at a hefty public-relations price for Stevens.
-- Numerous bloggers and their readers tried to get Stevens on the record days before he finally admitted his role in blocking Coburn's legislation. Asked to explain why his office had not responded to those queries more promptly, a Stevens aide told TPM Muckraker: "Sen. Stevens was traveling, the staffers that worked this issue had also been traveling -- so it was hard for our people to get the information about this particular hold."
-- GOPProgress: "I'm glad Sen. Byrd has released his hold, but I have no doubt it was pressure from the blogosphere that pushed him to do so, not him 'understanding the implications' of the legislation after reading it and giving it full consideration."
UPDATE: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., has posted multiple blog entries on the database bill and the hold against it this month, and his latest entry states emphatically, "In September, I will bring S. 2590 to the floor of the Senate for the vote it deserves."
UPDATE II: Robert Bluey reports at The Ballot Box that Byrd's opponent this fall, Republican John Raese, already is trying to capitalize on Byrd's role in delaying action on the legislation.
UPDATE III: The blogosphere's successful fight to expose the Senate's secret holders merited a praiseworthy editorial in The Chicago Tribune. And GOP Bloggers noted the predictable hypocrisy of the Democratic National Committee in using its blog to decry Stevens for his hold while remaining silent about Byrd's.
Posted by Danny at 07:11 PM | Comments (0)
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Friday Festival Of Blog Bits
I made a 7.5-hour drive to Columbus, Ohio, to visit family last Thursday and decided to skip the Friday festival of blog bits at the start of my vacation. So ya'll get a double dose this week. I have lots of stories and links to share, so I'll get right to it:
--Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., found himself at the center of another controversy last week when news broke of his political action committee's relationship with Internet expert Nicco Mele. Mele built a name online and an Internet consulting company (EchoDitto) based on the Web work he did for 2004 Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean.
Jim Geraghty of National Review Online blasted McCain's people for being dishonest about Mele's ties to Straight Talk America. Mele later addressed the controversy at his own blog, proclaiming that "I like Sen. McCain - I think he should be president!" And Patrick Hynes of Ankle Biting Pundits, the subject of the earlier controversy surrounding McCain's outreach to blogs, also commented.
The controversy spurred commentary across the political spectrum of the blogosphere. Here is a sampling: Blog P.I., Bull Moose, Captain's Quarters, Daily Kos, Swing State Project and Tapscott's Copy Desk.
-- The Republican National Committee launched a foolhardy attack on Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the much-despised founder of Daily Kos and figurehead of the liberal blogosphere. Moulitsas rightly ridiculed the attack, as did Crooks and Liars and TalkLeft. I simply don't understand why the RNC thinks it necessary to demonize a blogger whom most voters don't know and whose influence is greatly exaggerated.
Blog P.I. also was unimpressed with the anti-Kos release. "To a devotee of attack journalism and smear campaigns, it's a rather unsatisfying document," math professor Olly Ruff wrote. "We carry no brief for Kos here, but when the slings and arrows are this poor -- or this poor -- it's hard not to remark upon it.
On the other hand, maybe the "new Kos" brought it on himself by adopting a tone much harsher than the "old Kos." David Weigel compared the two at AndrewSullivan.com.
-- Some Democratic bloggers and their readers declared Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., a bigot because he called a nice little Guatemalan man a -- wait for it -- "nice little Guatemalan man." I guess that makes my wife and me bigots, too, because we love to tell people about our nice little Guatemalan children, and I cherish the memory of the nice little Guatemalan man who chatted me up on the flight to the land of eternal spring for our second adoption in 2002.
I agree with this comment from a reader at The Plank: "[T]hese remarks are completely harmless. ... By hyperventilating over this non-offense, we're in danger of distracting people from far more legitimate causes for outrage. ... Let's be a bit smarter about picking our battles. For once."
-- Online Democratic activists upset by a perceived gamings of election have formed the Secretary of State Project to raise money for candidates who would oversee state voting systems. "We've concluded that the best way to protect elections is to have secretaries of state who, above all, see their job as defending democracy," James Rucker wrote in the opening post on the project's blog. "The candidates featured on this site, to whom we hope will generously give, represent a major step to restoring integrity to the democratic process."
-- MyDD launched an AdWatch project that calls on liberal bloggers to highlight good and bad television ads. The goal of the critiques is to improve the messages sent by Democratic candidates.
Also at MyDD, Matt Stoller lashed out at Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Real Clear Politics characterized the attack on Emanuel as "The Great Dem Purge -- Part II."
-- Mike Bouchard, the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan, introduced himself to bloggers in a conference call this week. Right Wing News has a report on the call. In neighboring Ohio, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland talked to bloggers a week earlier. A three-part transcript is available here, here and here.
-- A new project at RedState aims to compile a state-by-state list of right-of-center political blogs. Human Events Online editor Robert Bluey called the effort "the missing link" in outreach to conservative bloggers by the Rightroots online fundraising project.
-- Under The Spotlight highlighted one blogger's success at uncovering the arguably shady details of a federal spending earmark for Friends of the Congressional Glaucoma Caucus Foundation.
-- Club for Growth blogger Andrew Roth fact-checked a critique of a club-produced television advertisement that was written by the campaign watchdog FactCheck.org.
-- YouTube has become the trend technology story of Campaign 2006. In recent weeks, it has generated copy at The New York Times, Slate and TCS Daily, and blog commentary at Blog P.I., Daily Kos and EzraKlein.com, among others.
-- Likely 2008 Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards "glad-handed, praised and answered questions from Connecticut's local bloggers," according to the Hartford Courant. He apparently preferred them over the mainstream media. Edwards' prediction: "Bloggers are going to play a big role [politically], not just locally but nationally. It helps democratize the media. It's a way for more voices to be heard. Even the mainstream media now recognize this."
-- Right Wing News offered bloggers some tips for maintaining privacy while online.
-- John Cole of Balloon Juice warned some of his readers that he is ready to go to war over attack comments added to his posts: "[I]t is in your hands. Change, knock it off, or I will do it for you. I have had enough, and it is time for some of you to grow up."
-- After an under-dressed moment on the campaign trail, Chris Bowers wondered aloud whether there should be a blogger dress code -- one involving something other than pajamas.
Posted by Danny at 12:19 AM | Comments (2)
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