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October 31, 2006Pajamahadeen Party At CNN
Call it a Pajamahadeen party. CNN will host select bloggers on Election Night in order to generate instant reaction to results in the Nov. 7 mid-term election, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The list of 20-plus blogs that will be represented include Althouse, Americablog, Ankle Biting Pundits, Betsy's Page, Captain's Quarters, -- Crooks and Liars, Eschaton, La Shawn Barber's Corner and TalkLeft.
The party has sparked at least some negative feedback. "I am not getting paid to appear on CNN," Ed Morrissey wrote at Captain's Quarters after some of his readers questioned his decision to participate. "They are covering my expenses, but they have made no demands of positive coverage or even that I will watch CNN's coverage on this evening.
"They are covering my expenses, just as anyone who engaged me as a public speaker would do, and even then it's limited to a round-trip ticket and one night at a Marriott-brand hotel. I may have my price, but that and a free meal ain't it, if you know what I mean."
Posted by Danny at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)
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Bloggers paid by campaigns were a rarity two years ago -- so rare that their work and their ethics, whether for Republicans or Democrats, became fodder for controversy. Bloggers on the campaign dime (and off) have been even more controversial this year, but that is at least in part because there are far more of them.
With increasing frequency, candidates across the country are paying bloggers to write blogs, develop Web sites, connect with energetic allies on the Internet, respond to online critics, and advise their employers about how to behave in the blogosphere. Others are paid to do more traditional campaign work like communications consulting and opposition research.
Their pay scales range from a few hundred dollars a month to a few thousand, with some of the bloggers earning top dollar for their expertise.
The best-known example is Jerome Armstrong of MyDD, the "blogfather" of Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. Armstrong and Moulitsas rose to Internet fame together during the 2004 presidential race. But with the exception of the book "Crashing The Gate" that they co-authored this year, they have pursued different professional routes since then.
Moulitsas focused his energies on blog publications, in sports as well as politics, while Armstrong chose to make his money in political consulting for Democrats. He has earned a nice wad of dough, too -- more than $200,000 in less than two years.
Armstrong's first gig via his company Political Technologies was with then-Sen. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who was elected governor of the Garden State in 2005. State campaign records show that Armstrong earned $24,000 for "media time" and another $15,000 for "Web site fees."
From February through November of last year, Corzine also paid Matt Stoller, now a lead contributor at Armstrong's MyDD blog, nearly $31,000 for his work on the campaign's blog, Corzine Connection. Stoller netted another one-time fee of about $240 for "media time."
While working for Corzine, Armstrong was on the payroll of at least two other politicians: Rep. Sherrod Brown, who is now leading the Senate race in Ohio; and former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, who recently announced that he will not seek the presidency in 2008.
Federal Election Commission records show that Armstrong netted more than $100,000 in his work for Brown from April 2005 through this July. The payments were primarily for Web design, hosting and services. Forward Together, the political action committee that Warner created as he pondered a presidential bid, had paid Armstrong $65,000 for "computer consulting services" through September, the last figures available.
In addition to making the most money for his Internet-related services, Armstrong arguably has been the focus of the most controversy. His work for Warner and connections to Moulitsas sparked a rush of critical commentary in both the traditional media and on blogs this summer.
On the right side of the blogosphere, Patrick Hynes of Ankle Biting Pundits, who blogged at the now-defunct Crush Kerry in the 2004 presidential race, has done quite well as a new media consultant. His most notable job is with Straight Talk America, the political action committee of Sen. John McCain. The Arizona Republican is considered a leading GOP presidential contender in 2008.
Hynes' fees so far, according to FEC records, total $31,500 to his company, New Media Strategics. The latest $5,000 payment was made Sept. 1. After catching grief for not telling his readers of his work for McCain, even while penning friendly blog entries about the senator, Hynes also disclosed that he has done consulting for the seniors' group AARP.
At least two other PACs of presidential contenders have blog experts on their payroll.
The HILLPAC of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., has retained both Jesse Berney and Peter Daou. Berney earns more than $1,300 a month, according to the PAC's finance records, and Daou, who still writes The Daou Report for the online magazine Salon, is paid $1,250 a month. Both joined HILLPAC a few months ago.
In September, Daou helped organized a luncheon between former President Bill Clinton and liberal bloggers. Although the gathering generated criticism for various reasons, Daou promised that it was the first of more to come.
Volunteer PAC, which is affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., also has a new-media whiz on staff. The PAC pays Stephen Smith a salary of about $1,870 a month.
He did not blog before joining VOLPAC but said in an e-mail interview that based on Frist's "real willingness to engage aggressively with the blogosphere and to harness new means of communications and activism, I jumped at the opportunity to assist him." Smith's projects for Frist have included creating a blog aimed at confirming John Bolton to head the United Nations and recruiting "iFrist volunteers" to work on behalf of the Republican agenda.
Democratic Senate nominee Ned Lamont in Connecticut hired two "netroots" experts fairly early in his campaign and added two more in the fall. The aides are Aldon Hynes, Charles Monaco, David Sirota and Tim Tagaris. (Hynes' wife, Kimberly, also is a paid scheduler for the campaign.)
Tagaris, the Internet director, earned nearly $21,000 from late July through Sept. 29, according to Lamont's October quarterly report. That ranks him among the campaign's highest-paid aides. Before joining the Lamont campaign, Tagaris blogged for the Democratic National Committee and for Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Brown paid him nearly $17,000 over four months in 2005.
Earlier this year, Tagaris told Beltway Blogroll that he eventually plans to run for office in Ohio.
High-profile bloggers like Armstrong, Patrick Hynes and Tagaris are just the tip of the emerging political Internet. While identifying blog experts can be a daunting task for multiple reasons, including the lack of electronic searches for many campaign finance records and the disparate approaches to disclosure taken by bloggers, it can be done.
Here are some of the paid campaign bloggers and new media advisers identified by Beltway Blogroll during weeks of research this year:
-- Dan Gerstein of the now-dormant LieberDem. He was a senior adviser to Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., for years before opening his own consulting shop. After he stopped blogging at LieberDem, Gerstein recently rejoined Lieberman's campaign as a paid staffer. He received payments of $7,000 and $14,000 in September.
-- Jon Henke of QandO. He was hired by the campaign of Sen. George Allen, R-Va., after a string of verbal gaffes by the candidate. Henke was paid about $2,300 on Sept. 15.
-- Abraham (Josh) Chernila and Lowell Feld of Raising Kaine. This summer, they began working for Allen's rival in the Virginia Senate race, Democrat James Webb. They are the grassroots coordinator and netroots coordinator. The latest FEC report shows disbursements of about $7,700 to Chernila and nearly $3,600 to Feld.
-- Scott Shields. He has been on hiatus from MyDD since May to work as the Internet director for Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J. Shields' starting monthly wage was $2,562; it was bumped up to $2,905 in September.
-- David All. The "spokesblogger" to Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., All currently is on leave and working for Senate candidate Mike Bouchard, R-Mich. In September, All was paid $6,468 for "communications consulting." The Bouchard campaign also spent more than $9,600 on Web development in August and September, presumably for its revamped, blog-based site. (All earned more than $49,000 while working for Kingston from July 2005 through January 2006, according to data at LegiStorm.)
-- Laura Packard. Her duties as Internet communications director for the campaign of Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., include writing at the campaign blog. Her salary is nearly $3,700 a month. Aaron Hofman also posts entries to Stabenow's blog, and he earns about $2,200 a month.
-- Michael Brodkorb of Minnesota Democrats Exposed. The Senate campaign of Rep. Mark Kennedy, R-Minn., has paid Brodkorb nearly $4,600 a month for press consulting since May, he said in a telephone interview. Brodkorb also said he received one-time payments of $5,500 each this year from GOP House candidate Michele Bachmann and the National Republican Congressional Committee. He offered press advice to Bachmann and did opposition research for the NRCC.
-- Julie Fanselow, the freelance writer behind Red State Rebels in Idaho. Since May, she has been the "blog manager" for Democrat Larry Grant at a rate of $1,300 a month. Despite Idaho's Republican leanings, Grant suddenly is a strong competitor for the open seat, arguably in part because of support from the blogosphere. Fanselow also disclosed that she did paid consulting work for another candidate in April.
-- Aaron Silverstein of Heading Left. The campaign payroll for House candidate Bill Winters, D-Colo., includes $850 a month for Silverstein's services. Silverstein also was hired this year as the get-out-the-vote coordinator for Jefferson County Democrats in Colorado.
-- Jesse Taylor. He quit blogging at Pandagon last year to blog instead for Ohio gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland and has been earning slightly more than $2,050 a month. Strickland, a Democrat, appears likely to defeat Republican Kenneth Blackwell.
-- Mindy Finn. As the director of new media and political technology for Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., she is one of the contributors to the campaign blog. Her salary is about $4,400 a month. Luke Bernstein ($4,300 a month) and Stanley Olshefski ($2,300 a month) also post entries. Jon Jones, the blogger for Santorum challenger Bob Casey, earns some $2,800 a month.
-- Andrew Tweeten. He earns about $2,600 a month as the blogger for Democrat Jon Tester in Montana, who currently is in a good position to oust Republican Sen. Conrad Burns.
-- Alex Armour. As the political director for Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., he writes at SchaBLOGsky, one of the earlier candidate blogs. Armour's salary is about $3,200 a month.
Posted by Danny at 08:30 AM | Comments (3)
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Ted Stevens, Porkbuster?
The White House contacted select bloggers and offered them signed copies of a bill that mandates a publicly accessible database on federal spending, according to a post by Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters. Bloggers helped push the bill into enactment, and some were invited to the White House for the bill-signing ceremony.
The best part of the story: The bill bears the signatures of President Bush, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. "Ted 'Bridge to Nowhere' Stevens. Ted 'Secret Holder' Stevens," Morrissey said. "Victory tastes sweet indeed."
Posted by Danny at 04:20 PM | Comments (0)
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Using Blogs To Sling Political Mud
From Captain's Quarters: "A little over a month ago, the [George] Allen campaign collected a series of quotes from the novels of James Webb, including the one depicting a sexual assault on a young boy, and wanted to have someone release them in order to answer the tactics of the Webb campaign. ... I politely declined to publish these excerpts. Others did, and that's their choice."
Who published the excerpts that have the Virginia Senate race in headlines across the country again? The Drudge Report broke the story when the Allen campaign sent the Webb novel excerpts to that site Thursday, and John Hawkins of Right Wing News actually called attention to other Webb writings a month ago.
But the important point from the Captain's Quarters blurb is the part about Allen's campaign going to the blogosphere to do its dirty work. Anyone familiar with blogs no doubt suspected that kind of behavior already; this is a rare instance where the tactic of seizing upon blogs as a catapult to sling mud has been laid bare.
UPDATE: A look at "The Season Of Sleaze" in the YouTube era: "[T]he one-two-three punch of Google, YouTube and a broadband connection means that anyone can do in a few seconds what I did yesterday -- learn about offensive ads in a newspaper story, then take a look at them yourself.
Posted by Danny at 12:38 PM | Comments (0)
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CapitolLink: Speaker Hastert Blogs At RedState
"The Choice Could Not Be Clearer" -- that is the title of the post that House Speaker Dennis Hastert authored at RedState this afternoon in the final push toward Election Day.
Hastert, R-Ill., endorsed the notion that Democrats still view the world as if it hasn't changed since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks while Republicans have a post-9/11 perception of reality. His message to voters: Choose the one that they think makes the most sense.
Here are excerpts of the entry:
To Republicans, the lessons of 9/11 are clear. We are at war with Islamist extremists and have been since at least as long ago as the first World Trade Center bombings in 1993. More to the point, they are at war with us. ... They will fight us whether we choose to fight back or not. As far as Republicans are concerned we are in a fight for our freedom and even our lives. ...At a fundamental, instinctive level, Democrats think that there must be something we're doing to exacerbate all this, that there must be something they could do that would make Islamist suicide bombers pack up their bomb vests and stop threatening us. ... If only America would abandon its tough-talking, uncompromising stance, we could immediately spark the dawn of a kinder, gentler jihad. They think, in short, that 9/11 was an aberration, not part of a pattern. This is nothing short of insane.
Posted by Danny at 10:21 PM | Comments (1)
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We editors in the news business are big on "enterprise" stories -- the kind that aren't tied to any particular news event, the kind that require skill at uncovering nuggets buried deep within bureaucracies, the kind that are made easier by the Freedom of Information Act.
The great thing about FOIA is that it's not just for journalists. Any citizen can use it, and that includes bloggers.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation knows that, and after having seen some amazingly enterprising citizen journalists break important stories, the group is eager to train more people to do the same. That's why EFF today released a primer on FOIA that it bills as a legal guide for bloggers.
Among other things, the guide points bloggers to the "FOI letter generator" produced by the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press. The guide also notes the conditions for getting fees waived for FOIA requests and for expediting requests through the bureaucracy.
The guide was published online at the tail end of a week when journalists have been debating the future of investigative reporting in the face of staff cutbacks at newspapers. Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz sparked the discussion with a column that praised the media for breaking "many of the major probes involving members of Congress." But he suggested that cutbacks could undermine such efforts.
Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media made this point in response: "We should worry about the economic implosion that is costing jobs and sapping resources from investigative reporting. But many in the Big Media have been losing their appetite for this for some time. We need to find ways to move ahead on the assumption that the negative trend will continue."
That's where bloggers -- and groups like EFF that are giving them free and valuable advice -- enter the equation. Bloggers have available to them the tools that they need to unearth and write the best stories of tomorrow, if they will but seize the power.
Posted by Danny at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)
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Online conspiracy theorists who think bureaucrats are out to get blogs are spreading another rumor this week. But Defense Department officials told Federal Computer Week that all the chatter about a Pentagon-endorsed Internet blockade against liberal blogs is wrong.
Lt. Gen. Steven Boutelle, the Army’s chief information officer, said there is no policy to filter Web access based on political content before the November election. “We would never block political Web sites. ... The Army does not do that. That's something we've never done,” Boutelle said.
Wonkette is behind the current outcry over government policies on Internet use that are designed to keep employees from wasting taxpayer time and dollars on pornography, gambling and other sites. Blogs also have been targeted as a category in some instances because of regular access to them by workers who do not need to read them for their jobs.
Wonkette tackled the topic after receiving an e-mail purportedly from a politically liberal Marine in Iraq who could not read Wonkette and other sites. "I have gone through lists of liberal sites, and most of them are blocked," the e-mail said. "I've also taken the time to go to some conservative sites ... none of which are blocked."
As has been the case with other ego-driven bloggers who hear from readers that access to their sites have been blocked, Wonkette did not bother calling the Army for comment before reporting the allegation.
The report in Federal Computer Week noted that the Army has no official policy on blocking blogs, but Boutelle acknowledged that unit commanders and systems administrators may be acting locally.
Air Force Capt. Gary Arasin, a Central Command spokesman, said the military in general focuses on categories like porn and high-bandwidth audio and video, not on specific sites Arasin said. But a systems administrator could implement Internet filters without telling senior officials, said an official at WebSense, which supplies Web-filtering software to the Army.
“We don’t know exactly how they use it,” the source said. “They can choose the policies however they want to.”
Posted by Danny at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)
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Gay Advocate Fired For Exposing Page Scandal
As noted at National Journal's Technology Daily this morning
A gay rights group on Wednesday fired one of its employees after it was discovered that he had created a blog that published copies of the suggestive e-mails that former Rep. Mark Foley sent to a teenager.
The New York Times reports that the Human Rights Campaign said it first learned of the employee's actions this week and immediately fired him for misusing the group's resources.
After the messages appeared at Stop Sex Predators, ABC News released its own independent report, which resulted in the disclosure of more sexually explicit messages from Foley, R-Fla., to House pages.
The creator of the Web site declined requests sent by e-mail to identify himself after news of the scandal broke. Instead, he posted a message urging the news media to ask questions about "when the Republican leadership knew about it, what they did, how they were connected, what favors took place, etc."
Posted by Danny at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)
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'Google Bombs' On The Campaign Trail
Reprinted from National Journal's Technology Daily (also available through National Journal partner MSNBC)
By Heather Greenfield
The 2006 campaign is about to be "Google-bombed." Both liberal and conservative bloggers have embarked on plans to manipulate the Google search engine so that negative articles about the candidates they oppose appear near the top, potentially influencing undecided voters.
Liberal bloggers had the idea first. Chris Bowers of MyDD outlined the strategy Sunday. He said the plan involves purchasing "Google AdWords that will place each negative article on the most common searches for each Republican candidate. Simultaneously, I will produce an article on MyDD that embeds that negative article into a hyperlink."
Bowers asked bloggers to help add links, and they spent the next few days compiling negative news articles on Republican candidates in about 50 targeted races.
Conservative blogger John Hawkins of Right Wing News learned of the strategy and urged his allies to "fight fire with fire." Hawkins expressed concern that the Google-bombing campaign just might work for Democrats.
"Who would be doing a Google search on a particular candidate in the final days of a campaign?" he wrote. "Probably an independent voter who is trying to get more information about a candidate. And if the first article he runs across is a brutal hit piece, well, that could be the information that helps him make up his mind."
Pete Leyden, director of the Democratic think tank the New Politics Institute, just published advice on search-engine strategy. "It will definitely work," he said. "So few people are buying political search ads [that] a blogger can get it for literally pennies per eyeball."
"It's a very smart move," Leyden said.
Jeff Mascott of Rightclick Strategies, who advises clients about online strategies, said buying Google AdWords and placing them "is a very cost-effective way in reaching an individual." But he also said that with Google updating its search criteria every 30 days, the Google-bombing campaign likely would not work in time for the election.
Mike Connell of Connell Donatelli Inc., online strategists for conservative candidates, agreed. "It may not be too little, but it may be too late," Connell said.
Google is not thrilled by the idea. "We don't condone the practice of Google-bombing or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results," spokesman Ricardo Reyes said. He added that such campaigns are not impossible but are unlikely to be effective given the complexity of the Google search algorithm.
Before the bombing campaign, a Google search of Sen. George Allen, R-Va., found a Washington Post article about of his alleged racially disparaging remark just below his campaign Web site in ranking. A search of Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., also found mostly negative articles among the top 10 sites anyway.
Kari Chisholm, a Democratic new media strategist for one of Burns' opponents who lost in the Democratic primary, doubts that the Google-bombing campaign will be very useful. "It's not about chasing the 1 percent of voters that haven't figured out there's a difference between [Democrat] Jon Tester and Burns," Chisholm said.
Posted by Danny at 04:28 PM | Comments (1)
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The Military's Love-Hate Relationship With Blogs
The military's love-hate relationship with blogs, which I mentioned in a column in the spring, has been on display in recent days, with the Pentagon sending mixed signals to bloggers. Here is a recap of some of the coverage:
-- U.S. Central Command sent an e-mail to bloggers in order to encourage them point readers to information on the CENTCOM Web site. One goal is to virally spread news that may be ignored by major media.
"I would like to invite you to check out our Web site. ... It's one more resource for information and you're free to use any of it (video, audio, photos and articles) in conversations on your blog," the e-mail said. "Also, if you would like, you can be added to our mailing list. ... Most of the time we can get CENTCOM information out to bloggers before it appears in the main stream media."
Spc. Chris Erickson, a member of CENTCOM's "electronic media engagement team," sent the e-mail, which was obtained and published by Raw Story. The blog outreach effort was first disclosed in a March press release.
-- While the Pentagon brass clearly think enough of blogs to solicit their help in spreading good news, commanders in the field apparently don't share that view, as evidenced by two recent incidents:
1) Camp Lejeune did not respond by telephone or e-mail to a blogger's questions about body armor for soldiers, and an official at Camp Pendleton answered by saying that questions from bloggers don't merit a response.
"We talked to [name withheld] at Camp Pendleton, and were told that the Department of Defense does not support blogs," Captain's Journal reported. "We responded by posing the following question: So if we were the L.A. Times or some similar MSM outlet, you would support our questions? In a profound revealing response, Camp Pendleton said, “but sir, you aren't the L.A. Times. You're a … blog!"
2) Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, the director of the combined press information center in Iraq, refused a request from renowned milblogger Michael Yon to embed with U.S. troops in Iraq. "I do not recognize your Web site as a media organization that we will use as a source to credential journalists covering ... operations," Johnson wrote in a July 18 e-mail that Yon cited in the Oct. 30 issue of Weekly Standard.
Yon said Johnson "has repeatedly gone on record decrying the lack of press coverage in Iraq, all while alienating the last vestiges of any press willing to spend month after month in combat with American soldiers."
After reading the magazine article, blogger Michelle Malkin wrote, "I hope the Pentagon has a good answer to this that does not involve sneering at milbloggers." And in an update to that entry that further demonstrates the military's inconsistency about bloggers, she noted that journalist/blogger Michael Fumento made it through the military public affairs maze and is now blogging from Iraq.
-- As a resident of Manassas, Va., I was particularly interested in a story about a Virginia National Guard unit dedicated to watching blogs. The 10 members of the data-processing unit scours official and unofficial Army Web sites for "operational security violations," or OPSEC. That's military-speak for disclosing information that could put U.S. troops in jeopardy.
Milblogs like Andi's World and BlackFive insist that they appreciate the need for maintaining OPSEC, but they warned that strict military policies on blogging could do more harm than good by debilitating a powerful medium.
UPDATE: Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald blasted the military for its approach to blogs. "When something good is happening in the military, you can rely on someone high up and behind the lines to try to kill it. Slowly. Bureaucratically. Bleed the life out of it," he wrote. "That is what is happening to milblogging, the Internet phenomenon that lets soldiers in Iraq tell us what they see, do and think."
Posted by Danny at 01:53 PM | Comments (2)
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Sen. George Allen almost sounded like a blogosphere expert in his guest post at RedState yesterday.
You would never suspect from his opening praise for bloggers and their importance to candidates that Allen, R-Va., waited until August -- after he had been busted by the media and derided in the blogosphere -- to hire a blogger as a new media coordinator. Oh, the irony of Allen waxing eloquent about blogs.
After bowing before the altar of the political blogosphere, Allen then gave obeisance to Porkbusters and other bloggers for helping push into law a bill requiring a publicly searchable federal budget database. "That means greater transparency and accountability for American taxpayers," Allen wrote. "I was proud to be a sponsor of that bill."
All of that deference to bloggers was Allen's way of backing into the lead for the real topic of his blog entry: cutting federal spending by enacting a "taxpayers bill of rights," among other things.
Then for good measure, he closed with a redundant nod to Porkbusters. "I applaud Porkbusters' citizen activism, which aims to increase transparency in government in order to cut wasteful and unnecessary pork-barrel spending," he wrote. "I share that goal."
Allen failed to mention his support for budget earmarks directed to Virginia, including defense earmarks he touted earlier this month and various transportation expenditures, energy and water projects, and more in fiscal 2006. To be fair, he was very transparent in touting such projects by press release.
UPDATE: Allen's foray into the red half of the blogosphere appears to have worked in a political sense. Captain's Quarters cited the senator's entry as evidence that he has joined the fiscal reform effort, unlike his Democratic opponent, James Webb.
But like Allen himself, Ed Morrissey ignored Allen's spending record in the Senate, focusing instead on what Webb might do as a senator. "Readers will not find anything about fiscal responsibility on Webb's issues pages," Morrissey wrote. "They will find the basis of a lot of public projects, which usually means higher taxes and more waste. ... One Virginian at least sounds serious about fiscal responsibility, and it isn't Webb."
Posted by Danny at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)
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Admittedly no fan of Sen. Barack Obama, Matt Stoller of MyDD wants the Illinois Democrat to run for president in 2008 anyway.
But don't think for a minute that Stoller is ready to support Obama. Instead, he wants to put the Democratic Party's latest "rock star" to the test and, if it comes to it, expose his "symbolic emptiness."
"[W]hen Obama has to face his first round of negative ads, and his first real negative campaign on a state or national level, does he really want to face the charge that he's a pretty face and an empty suit?" Stoller wrote after Obama announced that he is considering a presidential run. "Is that what he wants to be known as? I hope not. That's not what I want for this incredibly talented and brilliant man, and that's not what I hope for our Democratic Party."
Oddly enough, Bull Moose Marshall Wittmann, a regular whipping boy for liberal bloggers, is on the same wavelength as Stoller when it comes to Obama's substance. While Wittmann said Obama "appears to have an impulse to transcend the polarized partisan divide and seek a new politics of national unity," he argued that the senator has yet to offer any "distinctive policy, proposal or position."
Wittmann differs from Stoller, however, in that he said Obama's promise is to fashion himself in the moderate mold of policymaker. He is just waiting for Obama to "challenge the liberal orthodoxy." "An Obama candidacy has great potential -- but only if he truly challenges his party and our country," Wittmann wrote.
If Obama runs, it will be interesting to see whether he moves more toward the left, as Stoller hopes, or the center, as Wittmann would like to see.
Posted by Danny at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)
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The Best $918.21 James Webb Ever Spent
Ned Lamont surely must be jealous of fellow Democrat James Webb.
Up in Connecticut, Lamont put another $2 million of his own money into his Senate campaign Saturday. That brings to $12.7 million his total personal investment in his bid to unseat Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat running as an independent since Lamont beat him in the Aug. 8 primary.
In Virginia, on the other hand, it took Webb less than $1,000 to vault him into a competitive race with Republican Sen. George Allen.
The Old Dominion's seat looked to be safely Republican until August. That is when Allen referred to Webb volunteer S.A. Sidarth as a "macaca." Sidarth had been videotaping Allen's campaign events, and the macaca incident, which some people interpreted as a racist reference to Sidarth's Indian heritage, triggered a series of negative stories about Allen that continued for weeks.
According to the October quarterly campaign filing at the Federal Election Commission, Webb spent all of $918.21 for Sidarth's services -- $433.21 for "travel reimbursement" and another $485 for "reimbursement," both on Aug. 24. The campaign no doubt considers it money well spent.
Posted by Danny at 01:01 PM | Comments (0)
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Secret ballots are taken for granted in America these days, but it wasn't always the norm that it is now. The first president elected by secret ballot was Grover Cleveland in 1892, so until Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, more presidents had been elected by open ballot than in secret.
Polling in private emerged for good reasons -- fears of intimidation and bribery before voting, and retaliation afterward -- and the United States isn't likely to return to officially sanctioned open ballots for the same reasons. But Americans remain free to voluntarily disclose how they voted, and in a political blogosphere that has become increasingly obsessed with transparency, that's exactly what is happening.
On Friday, Instapundit Glenn Reynolds availed himself of the early-voting option in Tennessee and invited his readers to vote themselves by guessing which Senate candidate, Republican Bob Corker, Democrat Harold Ford Jr. or write-in Frank J., won Reynolds' support. Forty percent guessed that he voted for Corker, and 36 percent said Ford. The rest went to Frank J.
The majority guessed correctly. "I liked Harold Ford Jr. when we interviewed him, and I wouldn't shed any tears if he were elected; he'd raise the caliber of the Democrats in the Senate," Reynolds said. "But when push came to shove, I voted for Corker. I liked him, too, and ultimately the combination of Ford's 'F' rating on gun rights and the sleazy 'outing' behavior of the Democrats was such that I just felt I had to vote Republican in this race."
In the local House race, Reynolds sided with Democrat John Greene in a "protest vote" against Republican Jimmy Duncan Jr.. He also backed Democrat Phil Bredesen for governor and, true to his libertarian bent, voted against a constitutional ban on gay marriage.
(Two votes for Democrats and one against an amendment also opposed by the Democratic Party. So why is it that leading Democratic bloggers hate Instapundit so? Oh yeah, his support for the Iraq war.)
Reynolds may well have started a trend in the blogosphere. Today, Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters disclosed not only his absentee ballots in Minnesota but those of his wife as well.
"Both of us supported the Republican candidates on our ballot, and did so gladly," he wrote. They also wrote Morrissey's name in for mayor of Eagan. "I sense a grassroots groundswell for a new mayor here in Minnesota's eighth-largest city," he said. "I'll check after Election Day to see if any other Eagan residents decided to cast votes for Edward Morrissey, and I'll be sure to report on the results. I'm already preparing my concession speech."
People's political leanings generally are quite obvious on their blogs, so such voting disclosures aren't likely to surprise many readers. Even so, it's interesting to see the current generation of Americans so willing to make their ballots open to the world on the Internet when their political forbears fought so hard to keep ballots secret.
Posted by Danny at 09:10 AM | Comments (7)
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The Farmer And The Computer Police
This is a story that has nothing to do with blogging but that begs to be told far and wide.
The characters: A farmer; his wife, who teaches elementary school; and three children who get A's in school.
The setting: A Saturday morning on a Pittsylvania County farm in the heartland of Virginia.
The plot: Wife is home alone; husband drives up to find police vehicles in driveway; men in flak jackets, with pistols drawn, drop into shooting position as farmer approaches; husband and wife are grilled and held for five hours in home as a para-military team searches it; chidlren are interrogated upon getting home from school; computers and digital equipment are seized.
The climax: Nine days later, chief county investigator returns equipment and says, in effect, "Whoops, sorry about that, got the wrong Internet address."
The farmer's outrage (quite restrained, if you ask me): "I support the police and their efforts, but I believe every United States citizen should fear and be angry about these tactics. I will not rest until I know what went wrong in this investigation. I pray that you will not, either."
Posted by Danny at 08:32 PM | Comments (0)
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Republican bloggers are fretting the prospect of their party losing control of Congress when voters go to the polls in 18 days, but I get the distinct impression they will be celebrating if at least one Democrat is re-elected.
A new Quinnipac University poll in Connecticut shows that Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat who is running as an indepedent after losing the Aug. 8 primary, has a 17-point lead over Democratic nominee Ned Lamont.
After word of the poll spread, it didn't take long for another round of the curious cross-party gloating from the GOP blogosphere that ensued a couple of weeks ago after another poll. That Reuters/Zogby poll actually showed Lieberman with a stronger, 20-point edge.
The reason for the joy is simple: To GOP bloggers, the race isn't about Lieberman, Lamont or the potential spoiler in the race, Republican candidate Alan Schlesinger. It's about their online enemies, the netroots who helped fuel Lamont to Democratic victory in August.
Hence post-polling statements like this at GOP Bloggers: "Do the liberal netroots feel stupid now?" Or this at Hot Air: "I'll ask again: Where are the nutroots now?"
Former Republican and enthusiastic Lieberman supporter Marshall Wittmann also scoffed at the netroots and their "the people-powered fraud." Writing at Bull Moose, he noted that Lamont is having to spend his own millions on the race.
"It appears that despite all of the fevered efforts of the nutroot community, the fervent keyboarders are a bit cheap," Wittmann said. "They may be 'crashing the gates,' but they aren't exactly making a rush on their bank accounts for their boy, Negative Ned."
Democratic bloggers aren't exactly ignoring the Connecticut Senate race. As I noted in today's "Blog Bits," Matt Stoller of MyDD is in the Constitution State now to cover the contest, courtesy of readers who paid his way, and blogs like Daily Kos and Firedoglake still write about the race.
But based both on the (in)frequency of their entries and the tone of them, the netroots simply aren't as engaged in the battle as they once were.
The troops simply didn't need stern lectures like this a few weeks ago: "If you aren't happy with what you are hearing about poll numbers or establishment Democratic support for the Connecticut Senate race, well, here's the solution: Get up off your butt and do something about it. You can volunteer for Ned's campaign, for canvassing, or calling, or whatever."
UPDATE: Democrat Jon Tester, another netroots favorite, has a good shot at defeating Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont. But if both Tester and Lamont lose, Jim Geraghty of National Review Online said, "I may need medical attention as a result of laughing so hard at the netroots."
Posted by Danny at 07:50 PM | Comments (0)
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Michelle Malkin thinks the European Union wants to stifle video bloggers.
"This proposal to force Internet innovators to apply for broadcast licenses is an attempt to squash competition under the guise of protecting children and regulating 'hate speech,'" she wrote.
Malkin urged bloggers to contact the EU Council and object to the plan. She's also tracking other coverage of the issue.
Ars Technica addressed the topic, too, and News.com compiled some blog reactions.
The rest of this week's blog bits:
-- Bloggers are being credited with stopping a military aircraft sale to Venezuela. "That effort failed once the bloggers alerted Congress about the double-dealing," said J. Michael Waller of the Institute of World Politics. Captain's Quarters commented on the decision.
-- A Canadian politician was suspended from his party because of his blog.
-- Congressional Quarterly published a belated piece on the power of bloggers to move legislation when they unite. The focus was on the new law to create a federal budget database that National Journal has been covering since August -- at Beltway Blogroll, Technology Daily and GovExec.com. It's nice to see CQ join the party ... now that it's over. (Full disclosure: I worked as a reporter and editor at CQ for nearly seven years, so I coudn't resist that dig at a rival.)
-- The blog-backed Rightroots fundraising effort for select Republican congressional candidates netted more than $242,000 from its Aug. 1 launch through Oct. 15, according to a recap of the project at Right Wing News. Rightroots merited an article in Roll Call, as noted by Raw Story.
-- With the help of her readers, Arianna Huffington penned a concession speech for Connecticut Democrat Ned Lamont in an attempt to motivate him in the last weeks of his bid to unseat Sen. Joseph Lieberman.
-- Matt Stoller of MyDD is back in Connecticut blogging for Lamont after readers donated the $3,000 (and more) that Stoller said he needed to cover the race. It's the second such request by Stoller in the past couple of months. Just before Connecticut's Aug. 8 primary, he solicited sponsors to pay his tab, and they did.
Chris Bowers of MyDD also recently made another of his trips on the campaign trail, this time for Dan Maffei, the Democratic candidate in New York's 26th District. And Jerome Armstrong, who has done Internet work for Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown, returned to blogging about Ohio (and other places) last week, after former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner announced that he will not run for president in 2008. Armstrong had mostly quit blogging after starting to work for candidates like Brown and Warner.
-- Like Stoller, Liz Mair of GOPProgress is reporting from the road in Connecticut this week. But she is covering four key House races in addition to the Senate battle. Mair also is visiting other states, including Rhode Island, in her campaign tour.
-- The San Antonio Express-News surveyed the lay of the political blog land in Texas and concluded that blogs "aren't kingmakers, but they sometimes have the power to bedevil campaigns by concentrating attention on candidates' foibles, past transgressions and records."
-- Erick Erickson of RedState endorsed the Libertarian candidate in Texas' 22nd District, the seat once held by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Matt Lewis of The Ballot Box said that is the wrong call. Erickson responded to the criticism by pointing interested parties to the online contribution page for the GOP candidate in the race.
-- A Democratic political consultant in Tennessee threated to sue a Republican blogger for suggesting a connection between the consultant and the release of e-mails in the ongoing House cyber-sex scandal. Instapundit's analysis of the consultant's threats: "This generally backfires."
-- Did Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos sell out to big oil in the form of a Chevron ad that points to an "astroturf" Web site? That's what some of his readers are saying.
-- A councilwoman in Long Beach, Calif., blogs as a way to connect with her constituents, but she is a rarity. One councilman admitted that he had never heard of a blog, though he was intrigued by the idea.
-- The ConvergeSouth new media summit in Greensboro, N.C., was just a week ago, but attendees already are talking about how to improve the conference next year, which would be the event's third. One blogger crafted his "fantasy program" for the self-described "unconference." Another celebrated the role that "powerful women" played in this year's event.
-- Last week's Friday festival included an item on Wal-Mart's continued troubles in the blogosphere. There is plenty more to read on the topic this week.
For starters, the Edelman public relations firm, where RedState blogger Mike Krempasky works on the Wal-Mart account, is catching as much or more heat as the retail chain and was pressured into a belated apology. Potomac Flacks and Publishing 2.0 have more on that angle.
BusinessWeek also ran an article titled "Wal-Mart vs. The Blogosphere," and BlogHer reacted to the controversy.
-- Liberal blogger and commentator Kirsten Powers briefly opened Powers-Point to reader comments by request but quickly had to shut the feature down because of the "liberal intolerance" of a "liberal nut."
-- Daily Kos and Eschaton are sick of unsolicited e-mails, which I can understand. But what I find striking is how often bloggers on the left get irritated and lecture their readers about how to behave online. I rarely, if ever, see the same leave-me-alone/go-blog-on-your-own-site attitude from bloggers along other points on the political spectrum. Why is that? Just curious.
-- The San Francisco Chronicle reported that a blogger/activist "is well on his way to becoming the longest-jailed journalist in U.S. history." The blogger's lawyer recently described for the newspaper the video that landed him in the slammer for refusing to turn it over to police.
-- Some blawgers, that ever-growing population of bloggers who are lawyers, are facing scrutiny from state bar associations over their online musings. The issue: Should attorney advertising rules be expanded to cover blawgs?
-- From BBC News: "There's not just an oil boom in Saudi Arabia -- there's a blogging boom, too."
-- As the father of three children adopted from Guatemala, I'm always looking for reasons to write about adoption. John Hawkins of Right Wing News gave me a reason this week when he jumped to the defense of singer Madonna in her attempt to adopt a child from the African nation of Malawi. The Washington Post reports that the adoption also is of great interest in Britain, Madonna's adopted home.
-- I also love to write about Guatemala, and Wizbang gave me a reason to tackle that topic. "The Land Of Eternal Spring" is in the running for a seat on the U.N. Security Council and is leading Venezuela. I blame Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez for the string of amusingly bizarre yet annoying e-mails I received recently, so Guatemala gets my support for two reasons.
Posted by Danny at 07:02 AM | Comments (0)
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Larry Sabato And Bill O'Reilly On Blogs
Renowned political analyst Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia tackled the subject of blogs in an appearance on Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor" last night, and he didn't have much nice to say about them. Neither did show host Bill O'Reilly.
Think Progress has a partial transcript, and here are the key excerpts:
Sabato: "The blogs on left and right, and I mean way left and way right, the things they come up with daily, the vitriol, the vile nature of the comments. And then they have hundreds and hundreds of people e-mailing."
O'Reilly: "these are hired guns. These are people hired — being paid very well to smear and try to destroy people. ... If I can get away with it, boy, I'd go in with a hand grenade."
Posted by Danny at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)
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Captain's Quarters is based in Minnesota, but that geographical fact didn't keep Republican Sen. Rick Santorum from making an appeal for re-election in Pennsylvania at the well-trafficked blog.
"If you want to keep your taxes low, defeat the Islamofascist threat to our freedom, and restore sanity to our judicial system by appointing judges who won't re-write the Constitution every chance they get, then my victory in Pennsylvania will help protect you and your family from the radical left seeking to seize control of the United States Senate this November," Santorum wrote.
Besides "Islamofascist," he saturated the post with plenty of other code words no doubt designed to rally the conservative base. Two other examples: "Bill Clinton's massive tax hikes" and "we cannot cut and run from Iraq."
The base heard the message. GOP Bloggers responded to Santorum's blog post by urging its readers to volunteer if they live in Pennsylvania or contribute to Santorum if they live elsewhere.
The message: "We can all understand that our congressional GOP hasn't been exactly stellar -- but they are still our GOP and the only party who will even so much as give conservatism a second glance. Too much is at stake for anyone to indulge in a fit of perfectionism -- with the life of our nation on the line in the war on terrorism, we daren't let the perfect become the enemy of the good."
Posted by Danny at 12:45 PM | Comments (0)
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In The Blog's-Eye: The 'Worst' Congressmen
Yesterday, I stumbled across Radar Online's list of "America's Dumbest Congressmen." Today, I discovered that Rolling Stone has a similar list -- "The 10 Worst Congressman" -- in its latest issue.
There is little overlap in names between the two lists. At this rate, every lawmaker seeking re-election could become equally infamous before the election. The familiar cries to "throw the bums out" can't be far behind.
The Rolling Stone list, part of the magazine's cover story on "The Worst Congress Ever," is different from Radar Online's in ways other than the names. For starters, it is about as partisan as it could get. Nine of the 10 lawmakers on the list are Republicans, and the only Democrat, Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana, is under federal investigation and had his homes and congressional office raided.
Rolling Stone also picked only House members, leaving the impression either that: a) the magazine's editors think the Senate is squeaky clean, or b) that Rolling Stone doesn't realize the Senate is part of Congress. I vote for the latter.
At any rate, here are the magazine's picks for worst congressmen:
10) Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo.
9) Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky.
8) Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa.
7) Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif.
6) Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo.
5) Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif.
4) Rep. William Jefferson, D-La.
3) Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska (as at Radar Online, he is recognized in part for the "bridge to nowhere" that so animated bloggers)
2) Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis.
1) House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.
Readers are discussing the list, including its partisan slant, at National Affairs Daily, the blog of Rolling Stone. (Who knew Rolling Stone had a blog ... and especially one focused on national affairs?)
Posted by Danny at 05:01 PM | Comments (0)
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The Stanford University medical school yesterday released a study that pajama-clad bloggers undoubtedly will appreciate.
Based on a telephone survey, the researchers found that more than one in eight Americans admit to some sort of "problematic Internet use." Some people even visit their doctors as a result.
Lead author Elias Aboujaoude listed the impulse to "make blog entries" among the compulsions, and he said such drives are "not unlike what sufferers of substance abuse or impulse-control disorders experience: a repetitive, intrusive and irresistible urge to perform an act that may be pleasurable in the moment but that can lead to significant problems on the personal and professional levels."
"Repetitive, intrusive and irresistible urge" -- yep, that sounds like my symptoms. And save for the "single" part, I fit into all of these categories, at least until I hit 40 in a few weeks: "single, college-educated, white male in his 30s, who spends approximately 30 hours a week on non-essential computer use."
I wonder: Do they have an anti-blogotic yet?
P.S. Please don't tell my wife about this blog entry. She has been trying to get me to quit cold turkey.
Posted by Danny at 03:52 PM | Comments (0)
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The campaign of Rep. Chet Edwards has dismissed an intern who posted to his blog, Affable Athiest, an image of a desecrated American flag.
The dismissal came after another blog, Right of Texas, broke the story and after RedState wondered aloud whether Edwards, D-Texas, Justin Mueller, would can the intern.
"The photo of the individual with the desecrated American flag and offensive t-shirt is revolting and in direct conflict with the values of Chet Edwards and our campaign," campaign manager Chris Turner told Right of Texas. "He has volunteered sporadically, and given his actions, he has been told that he is not welcomed in our campaign again.”
Mueller commented on the dismissal in a post at his blog. He claimed that he was "expunged from the Democratic Party.
"Well, thanks to the wonderful folks down at Right of Texas, a right-wing blog, I have been kicked off of the Chet Edwards campaign," Mueller wrote. "Apparently, being opposed to the mass slaughter of innocent people, and then expressing that disgust is enough to get you hounded and expelled from any traditional electoral channels whatsoever."
Posted by Danny at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)
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There may not be a blog conspiracy at the Interior Department, but there is an irrational fear of blogs by the chief information officer, W. Hord Tipton.
Speaking yesterday at a breakfast hosted by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association International, Federal Computer Week reports that Tipton defended the department's decision to ban employee access to blogs as a necessity to prevent information leaks and other problems.
“Blogs just scare the pants off me, particularly when Interior people want to launch blogs and take ownership of those types of things.” he said. “We don't allow people to go to blogs unless we know where they are, who they are and what have you.”
He also noted that bloggers have reacted angrily to the blog ban, which applies to all but about 100 sites for now. One blogger even created an image that featured Interior's logo and the word “BANNED!” “These bloggers are a pretty vicious group,” Tipton said jokingly.
Somehow I suspect that few bloggers will find his comments amusing.
Posted by Danny at 12:07 PM | Comments (2)
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The Blog Suit That Everyone Is Talking About
Last week's $11.3 million defamation ruling against a blogger prompted an editorial in The News Journal of Wilimington, Del.
"The court imposed one of the largest penalties so far over Internet messages," the newspaper noted. "The money may never change hands, But it's a warning that the medium has less distinction than the message and that libel rules may very well apply."
A Florida jury issued the decision, and the blogger in question is from Louisiana. The news also prompted coverage in USA Today and The Washington Times, as well as a local reaction piece in Maryland.
So that makes it official: It is national news when a blogger gets smacked down by a jury of her peers, some of whom probably had never heard of a blog before the trial.
The good news is that the coverage and commentary of such a minor lawsuit further prove that blogs have secured their place in American culture, both as a medium of note and as a human-interest story. They are not the fad that so many of my journalistic brethren hoped a couple of years ago.
Posted by Danny at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)
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Radar Online has chosen the top 10 of "America's Dumbest Congressmen."
Although three Democrats made the rankings, the top of the list is heavily weighted against Republicans. Some of the lawmakers, like Alaska Republican Don Young of "bridge to nowhere" fame, earned the dishonor for actions noted at Beltway Blogroll:
10) Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky.
9) Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I.
8) Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont.
7) Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga.
6) Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio
5) Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.
4) Rep. J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz.
3) Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla.
2) Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska
1) Rep. Katherine Harris, R-Fla.
Click to the Radar Online article for explanations of why they were selected.
Posted by Danny at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)
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RedState's Forecast: Let It Snow!
RedState snagged the first blogosphere interview with White House press secretary Tony Snow.
The topics of the interview, available as a podcast, included Snow's decision to go on the campaign trail for Republicans (a first for a press secretary), why media organizations that disclosed once-secret anti-terrorism surveillance programs still have White House access, and personal topics like Snow's bout with cancer and what it's like to work in the White House.
UPDATE: Tim Chapman of the Heritage Foundation listened to the podcast and concluded that Snow has what it takes to be a great blogger when he leaves the White House. If that's true, he also has what it takes to be a great blogger while still at the White House -- but I wouldn't expect President Bush to give even Snow that much freedom.
Posted by Danny at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)
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Frank Quimby, the Interior Department spokesman I quoted in today's column on the new blog-blocking ban for Interior employees, e-mailed a detailed response to me after I finishing writing last week. Here is that statement:
Our vendor who is carrying out the Internet-filtering project is part of a consortium of vendors who maintain a database that contains the categorization of all public Web sites that have been discovered on the Internet. When we by policy decide to block a category of sites, the list of those sites to be blocked comes from this database. They are not rated, evaluated or further categorized by content -- only by high-level category.While the department's system administrator has the capability to unblock a site by making a request to the vendor to remove a specific site from the blocked list, that is a formal process that is logged and audited. No such requests have been made on this subject.
Finally a suggestion was made that our site may have been hacked and this selective filtering of blog sites was being carried out by a hacker. While highly unlikely, we checked and this has not occurred.
So, in summary, we are blocking all sites that are categorized as blogs, period. No further consideration is made. We do not/have not/will not block a blog based on its content. It gets blocked because it has been identified as a blog.
This system is not perfect, but it is a learning/adaptive system that gets better over time as we tune it. There will be cases of a site being mischaracterized as a blog when it is not. Conversely, there will be blogs that are not identified as such for one technical reason or another and will not be blocked.
The key is for employees to use the tools provided and assist us in making it better. The folks making false claims about content blocking want to remove the restriction on blogs altogether.
Federal Times also had a story on Interior's blog ban. Quimby told that publication that a review of 22 blogs on Friday showed that only five of the 15 conservative sites that allegedly were blocked were inaccessible, while two of the seven liberal sites were.
UPDATE: At the request of "Politics Central" at Pajamas Media, Baron Bodissey of Gates of Vienna investigated the blog ban at Interior more deeply and has a new theory on what happened: "[T]he issue is not selective blocking of blogs; it's the selective unblocking of blogs," probably by a low-level employee who likes to read liberal blogs.
Posted by Danny at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)
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A few months ago, Mark Nickolas of Bluegrass Report worked himself and fellow Democratic bloggers into a tizzy about a blog ban aimed at state employees in Kentucky. Nickolas smelled a conspiracy engineered by his political nemesis, Republican Gov. Ernie Fletcher, and sued to overturn an Internet-filtering policy that Fletcher's administration had applied not just to blogs but to numerous categories of content.
Now there is fresh conspiratorial talk about a blog ban -- only this time it's at the federal level, and bloggers on the right are the ones crying foul.
The rumors surfaced last week, thanks to a self-described Interior Department employee who clearly has too much spare time at work. Upon realizing that employee access to certain Web sites had been retricted, the employee compiled a list of inaccessible blogs and contacted Gates of Vienna.
"Please, please get the word out about this," the employee said. "It not only royally sucks that I can't read stuff during down times at work, but they are being so blatantly biased as to what is being blocked." The worker's list of banned sites included Captain's Quarters, Little Green Footballs, Michelle Malkin, Power Line, Protein Wisdom and Wizbang. The list of still-accessible blogs included Americablog, Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo.
Gates of Vienna dutifully spread the word online, and before long, the online legend of the Interior Department blog ban had taken firm root. Atlas Shrugs, Bird of Paradise, Boker tov, Boulder, Brendan Loy, Little Green Footballs and The Retread Ranger Station were among the blogs to post entries about Interior's actions.
Loy penned this taunt: "I'd love to see the department higher-ups try and explain the selection of banned sites -- although I'm guessing this is probably the idiotic decision of some mid-level IT muckety-muck who thought (stupidly) that no one would notice, so I'm sure if the question is asked loudly enough, the policy will change."
The rumor even merited a mention at Instapundit, though Glenn Reynolds had the forethought to phrase his blog-blocking post in the form of a question.
Thankfully, at least one blog had enough sense to look at the rumor logically and realize that there might be more to the story than reported by bloggers who think themselves important enough to be banned. "I wouldn't expect [a conservative blog ban] with a conservative government in charge and especially so with this administration," said a post at Nerve Endings Firing Away. "I suspect the 'blocking software' isn't configured right. Let us see how this story develops."
As was the case in Kentucky, that is pretty close to what happened at Interior. "There is no basis of political affiliation to determine the blocking of Web sites," said Frank Quimby, a public information officer at the department. He added that the revised Web-filtering policy implemented Sept. 27 involves "an adaptive learning process."
Employees who need acess to certain Web sites to do their jobs will be able to request it via boxes that pop up when they try to visit blocked sites, Quimby said. He noted, for instance, that his office needs to be able to read blogs, along with other media sites, "and we assume that we will be granted that access."
Quimby said the majority of employees will continue to be blocked from accessing blogs because they are not needed for work. He also said that blogs initially have been blocked as a category because some of them contain hate speech, sexually explicit language and other "inappropriate" content, but the department still has not yet firmly established what sites fall into the blog category.
"There's a lot of surprise and some chagrin, and a lot of employees are upset," Quimby said of the revised policy.
Ironically, the department implemented software filters on its computers because of employees who had abused Internet privileges -- like the one who apparently spent time on the government dime trying to read blocked blogs and then complaining to bloggers who would listen.
Quimby said voluntary rules on Internet use had been in place since 2000 but had failed miserably, as documented in two internal department reports, one by the chief information officer and the latest by the inspector general. A simple search at Technorati would have pointed any curious blogger to a post at Homeland Stupidity about the latter report called "Excessive Indulgences." Illustrated in part by a bare midriff, the report was released less than two weeks before the filtering began.
The inspector general concluded that the department lost more than 104,000 hours of productivity to employees visiting Internet auction and gambling sites. The report further noted that one Interior employee had been convicted for having nearly 30,000 images of child pornography on his government computer, and dozens of other employees have been disciplined for inappropriate Internet use.
"That certainly has had a significant influence on our decision-making," Quimby said of the report's findings.
Bloggers may be justified in questioning such decision-making, whether at Interior or statewide in Kentucky. The merits of government-sanctioned software filters certainly have been debated for years, and the decision to ban blogs as a category and make only case-by-case exceptions arguably is an extreme reaction.
But bloggers who have made a name for themselves by fighting waste in government really should keep their egos in check and stop screaming conspiracy every time their governments try to keep employees from abusing the Internet. Pork clearly isn't the only problem in American bureaucracy.
Posted by Danny at 11:36 AM | Comments (1)
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A RedState Plug For A Blue Carolinian
Is RedState co-founder Mike Krempasky endorsing a House Democrat from North Carolina for re-election? That's the report from BlueNC.
Krempasky was among the speakers at this weekend's ConvergeSouth new media conference in Greensboro, N.C. He was there representing Edelman, where he works as a vice president doing blog-related work for Wal-Mart and other unnamed clients.
According to to BlueNC, Krempasky said this during extemporaneous comments: "One thing that I've certainly never done is endorse a Democrat. Ever. ... But Brad Miller ought to be re-elected." Miller's Republican opponent, Vernon Robinson.
"There was NO question whatsover among the applauding audience that Mr. Redstate was repudiating Vernon Robinson," BlueNC reported.
The same entry was cross-posted to a diary at Daily Kos, where the author added in a comment that Krempasky "ventured into the Miller-Robinson race without prompting. Just goes to show that even Republicans can be embarrassed by the sheer idiocy of some of their own."
Krempasky's apparent plug for a Democrat follows by days a bizarre episode involving Alex Kowalski. On Oct. 3, he posted what he called his "Final Post On RedState." He accused the Republican Party of "hubris" and failing to "police itself," and said it wasn't likely to be safe for him to vote Republican for a long time.
"The simple fact is that for the last two years, I think all of us have worked very hard, for free, to try to bolster a Republican majority that hasn't deserved our support," Kowalski wrote. "I've given hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours of my time, and I'm deeply ashamed of having been a part of this movement."
At the end of his post, an "editors update" with the slug "Kossacks rejoice in Kowalski's departure" linked to an diary entry at Daily Kos. It celebrated the decision by one of RedState's own to jump ship.
The bizarre part? Three days later, after much heated bickering on the comment thread of his earlier post, Kowalski returned to RedState with a post titled "OK, Let's Not Freak Out Completely."
He insisted that he does "not want Republicans to self-immolate because of my concerns and even emotional outbursts. In fact, it is the exact opposite of that that I would like to see us do. We have a lot to accomplish that is unfinished business in the next two years and if anyone is construing that I think my personal statements should be used to discourage our base from voting, or anyone else, they're wrong." And Kowalski has posted four more entries since then.
UPDATE: Ed Cone points to audio of Krempasky's endorsement of Miller.
Posted by Danny at 09:15 PM | Comments (0)
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John Hawkins opened Right Wing News to questions from readers on Friday, and one of the queries might well qualify as a frequently asked question (or at least an unvoiced suspicion of critics) for bloggers in general. The gist of it: Do conservative blogs get "talking points" from the Republican Party, and do they follow them?
As asked by Hawkins' reader, the question was loaded with commentary like this: "I only ask because I have noticed that you have been falling into line more with GOP electoral strategy, which I think you might normally take issue with."
Hawkins defended his record by noting a handful of specific instances where he has not only resisted the party line but "flogged" the GOP for its stances on issues like immigration and homeland security. Then he went further by arguing that the same cannot be said of Democratic bloggers.
"[Y]ou'll find much more uniformity in the topics they cover and the line they take on those topics -- and, let's face it -- they've actually been caught coordinating how they're going to deal with particular issues," he wrote. "So, if you want to know if bloggers are being bossed around, the answer is, 'no,' at least for those of us on the right side of the blogosphere.'"
Posted by Danny at 08:42 PM | Comments (0)
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All of a sudden, the executive branch is awakening to the power of the blogosphere. Just look at the evidence that has been mounting over the past several weeks:
-- Education Secretary Margaret Spellings granted a podcast interview to RedState on Sept. 14.
-- Two weeks later, the White House invited bloggers to a bill-signing ceremony for a new law mandating a publicly accessible federal budget database. Bloggers play a key role in pushing that measure into enactment.
-- After the bill-signing ceremony, officials with the White House Office of Management and Budget met privately with bloggers and expressed an interest in working with them on future endeavors.
-- On Oct. 5, the Federal Trade Commission launched Tech-ade, a blog focused on the agency's Nov. 6-8 hearings on consumer protection on the Internet.
Now add the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the list.
The CDC actually has existed in the blogosphere since July 13 by way of Health Marketing Musings, the blog of center Director Jay Bernhardt. I just discovered his online outreach thanks to a blog at Computerworld that called attention to Bernhardt's most recent post. It was titled "This Blog Can Save Your Life!"
Here are some excerpts:
There are some obvious ways that CDC can improve our preparedness for future emergencies by scanning and leveraging new media to improve our media monitoring, real-time surveillance, and situational awareness. By understanding new media and partnering with local bloggers, CDC's first responders can have eyes and ears on the ground in every emergency, sharing early observations and critical information in real time. ...Because the CDC brand has global recognition and high credibility, our emergency health messages are likely to be cited and shared widely through the blogosphere, adding reach and shelf life to messages disseminated through the mainstream news media. In addition, new media are critical for getting targeted health and risk communication messages to today's teens, who are at least a million times more likely to get visit MySpace or YouTube than governmental site(s). ...
Today's Web 2.0 tools that leverage and harness the "knowledge of the crowd" offer great potential for solving our most difficult public health problems and building and empowering communities of change. One great example is Flu Wiki.
Bernhardt also noted the role that local bloggers played in providing information after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, and the interest that bloggers took in disseminating information about the recent e. coli scare and the subsequent recall of spinach.
All of the recent activity follows by nearly two years the example that the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy set in becoming the first agency to have a blog. That site is called Pushing Back and is just one of a few attempts at technological outreach by the office.
The office also is podcasting and last month put its most recent anti-drug television advertisements online at YouTube. Such efforts are part of the online drug war, which also features the use of social-networking sites, podcasts and other technologies by drug-legalization groups.
Technology Daily covered that story last month. Here is the meat of our article:
The White House anti-drug ads on YouTube attempt to better educate parents and teenagers about drugs. But according to drug office spokesman Rafael Lamaitre, the effort is more than an attempt to fight back in the war on drugs. It also represents a "groundbreaking effort" to illustrate the effectiveness of promoting ideas through the Internet and new media."The amazing part about using YouTube is the cost-benefit analysis," Lemaitre said. "Thousands of people are seeing our messages, and it's costing us nothing."
Lemaitre believes technology has played a pivotal role in the war against drugs. He said that since 2001, there has been a 20 percent reduction in drug use among teens. And the agency's YouTube channel has received nearly 20,000 views since Tuesday.
"Drug-legalizer-types are feeling threatened by our agency adapting to these new technologies that they originally thought were just for them," Lemaitre said.
But according to Marc Emery, the publisher and editor of the pro-marijuana magazine Cannabis Culture, pro-drug organizations do not feel threatened by government-sponsored ads. "If anything, the videos will get parodied extensively," he said. "We probably will make a parody ourselves. You will probably see us uploading something to YouTube within the next 10 days."
Cannabis Culture boosted its drug advocacy with the posting of its 16-page "Stoner Voters Guide," which shows the voting records of all 434 House members on marijuana and drug issues.
Emery said that for anti-drug groups, technology can be self-defeating.
Though the White House drug office is attempting to curb drug use through online advocacy, the Internet also is serving as a resource for drug users, especially teens.
In July, ONDCP Director John Walters hosted a roundtable discussion with several adolescents to discuss how technology has aided their substance use. The participants said they used the Internet to discover new ways to get high and to learn how to grow marijuana, make drugs more potent and detoxify before drug tests.
In addition, a California man was jailed Sept. 13 for allegedly selling marijuana on the popular classifieds site Craigslist.com.
But Lemaitre said technology is not self-defeating because it has helped educate parents to restrict and monitor their children's Internet use. "We can adapt," he said. "The Internet and social-networking sites have shined a spotlight on the terrible things teens are doing online."
UPDATE: Daily Kos and Effect Measure, a blog for public health discussion, also mentioned CDC's blog entry, while the blog On Social Marketing and Social Change noted that Health and Human Services Department officials were among those at a recent conference where people discussed the role of online social networks, blogs, wikis and other new technologies in spreading health information.
Posted by Danny at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)
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A Free-Speech Chill In The Blogosphere?
A Florida jury's decision to award a woman $11.3 million for defamatory blog posts about her has at least one public official in Maryland hoping that other bloggers will take a hint and halt their personal attacks.
"I hope this sends the message out there that you can't just write what you want and get away with it," Salisbury City Council President Mike Dunn told The Daily Times of Delmarva. He said he stopped reading the area's local blogs a long time ago because of their attack mindset. Salisbury Mayor Barrie Parsons Tilghman even held a press conference in February to complain about blogs.
Charles Jannace, a lawyer in Salisbury, said the jury award will not silence him at Justice For All. His co-blogger, Joe Albero, said his posts do not open him to being sued.
Posted by Danny at 09:18 PM | Comments (0)
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Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., made an online appearance at GOPProgress to tout her intelligence modernization bill. Specifically, the legislation would update electronic surveillance laws with the aim of protecting the nation from terrorists while also preserving Americans' civil liberties.
"My bill involves all three branches of government with a series of checks and balances to protect the civil liberties of ordinary Americans from excesses that can happen over time when power is concentrated in a single branch of government," Wilson wrote. "We have time limits, reasonableness tests, notification requirements, stronger congressional oversight, and various reviews written into the law."
Posted by Danny at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)
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Friday Festival Of Blog Bits
Rightclick Strategies and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce hosted a blog conference for trade associations, government affairs professionals and public relations folks this week.
The pitch: "This workshop looks at how to identify the influential blogs, how to engage them, and how to protect the reputation of your organization and its members when attacked from the blogosphere."
Pat Cleary of Shop Floor, the blog of the National Association of Manufacturers, was among the speakers. Potomac Flacks profiled him last week.
The conference was timely in light of a controversy that emerged late last week surrounding ThinkProgress, the blog of the Center for American Progress.
Some observers accused ThinkProgress of gaming results at social news sites like Digg, Netscape and Reddit, which promote content based on voting. "Right or wrong, these social news sites are becoming an emerging battleground for political campaigns and advocacy groups," The Bivings Report said.
ThinkProgress denied the allegations in a comment on the blog of Jason Calacanis, who offered "advice and a road map of how to be a good community member."
Calacanis founded Weblogs Inc., which America Online purchased a year ago, and as an AOL employee is now affiliated with Netscape. His tips for groups that promote their content at social news sites are to: 1) Be involved beyond stories that link back to your site; 2) be upfront about who you are; and 3) be fair with the titles and descriptions of your stories.
Here are the rest of this week's blog bits:
-- The legal risks posed by online activity, including blogging, are in the news again. USA Today and The Washington Times reported that a jury awarded a woman $11.3 million in a defamation lawsuit over blog postings about her. And CIO News covered the topic in a broader story about the reliance on electronic records in litigation.
Not all court decisions are going against bloggers, however. A California court yesterday sided with anonymous bloggers who had been sued by a Jewish religious leader for discussing allegations of sexual misconduct by him. According to a release issued by Public Citizen, Mordechai Tendler had no grounds for his lawsuit to reveal the identities of the bloggers, and the court is requiring him to pay their legal fees. In July, Tendler dropped a related lawsuit he had filed in Ohio.
-- Picking up on my post about how quickly the netroots faded from the political scene in Connecticut, John Hawkins of Right Wing News shared his thoughts on why bloggers aren't likely to have much impact in general elections, as opposed to primaries. Bull Moose, meanwhile, mocked the "nutroots" for failing to generate enough money to help Democrat Ned Lamont battle Sen. Joseph Lieberman.
-- The bloggers on the front lines of the online charge to crash the political gate apparently are getting sick of their whining troops. Both Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos and Duncan Black of Eschaton scolded their followers for, well, following when they could be leading the charge themselves. Black also told bloggers to get out of their pajamas and away from their computers to volunteer for their favorite candidates.
-- Is the right ceding the new media realm to organizations that are set on promoting a liberal agenda? Washington Examiner blog board member Robert Cox thinks so. A journalist in Maine, meanwhile, described that new media world like this: "Everybody is potentially a journalist; we just don't call them that. We call them bloggers. They have an opinion to share about any subject, and they aren't shy about expressing them, mostly anonymously and with little personal or institutional accountability."
-- RedState recoiled at the news that Republicans seem to be conceding that electoral losses, and perhaps control of the House, are inevitable. So the blog invited its readers to join a contest about "why you should vote Republican in 2006." Blogger Liz Mair of GOPProgress finished first. RedState also recognized the entries that won as runner-up and honorable mention.
-- China has closed the blog of a Tibetan intellectual, according to Human Rights Watch. The group called the move "a sign that another round of media crackdowns is underway."
-- Wal-Mart just can't stay out of trouble in the blogosphere. In a column earlier this year, I noted the outcry against the "big box" behemoth for its outreach to bloggers. Now the retailer is catching heat again because of a promotional travel blog published by a Wal-Mart-backed group. The latest controversy also ensnared a Washington Post photographer who contributed to the travel blog as a freelancer. The Post and AP covered that aspect of the story.
-- Cato Unbound posted two essays in response to Moulitsas' theory about the emergence of "Libertarian Democrats."
-- Liberal blogs like Crooks and Liars are getting just a wee bit paranoid about the mistakes Fox News makes in pinning the wrong partisan label on Democrats. Such mistakes are not a conspiracy; they're just the result of embarrassingly sloppy journalism. I've seen it in every newsroom where I've worked, and I've committed the sin myself sometimes, usually while rushing on deadline.
-- One Jerusalem hosted a blog call with Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch. Reports on the call are available at Atlas Shrugs (which also posted a transcript), In Context, Mere Rhetoric, Tel-Chai Nation and Wizbang.
-- Blogometer alum Bill Beutler is not impressed with how journalists source some of their stories -- in particular how they fail to give blogs credit for breaking stories that catch the attention of the media.
-- From Baptist Press: "Christian colleges cannot avoid having their students use blogs, [Scripps Howard News Service columnist Terry Mattingly] said, explaining that if schools prohibit official blogs, students still will write private blogs. He recommended that Christian colleges allow blogs but teach their students how to write blogs responsibly."
-- The revised standards book for at CBS News doesn't outright prevent employees from having blogs, but it might well discourage the practice. CBS news executives must pre-approve all blogs. "We can't have people having personal blogs venting their opinions," senior vice president Linda Mason said. "So we ask when people have a blog that they tell me about it, and the people who have told me about it mainly have blogs that deal with running, or with gardening, or something totally apart from CBS or political issues. And that's fine."
-- Nora Paul, director of the New Media Studies Institute at the University of Minnesota, believes that blogs are "over-hyped". A recent Gallup poll cited in the story that quoted Paul gives some credence to her view, but a National Review Online piece about "Internet Dependency" among journalists demonstrates that blogs are significant in some quarters.
-- A fantasy league for Congress? That sounds like a game made for political bloggers. If you're interested, the election draft starts at 8 p.m. today.
Posted by Danny at 06:07 AM | Comments (0)
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FTC Launches Blog Aimed At Consumers
The Federal Trade Commission last week unveiled a blog aimed at consumers.
The site is called Tech-ade and is designed as a communications tool in advance of related public hearings about consumer protection scheduled for Nov. 6-8. The anonymous blogger is a paralegal in the Bureau of Consumer Protection.
"The blog format is particularly appropriate for the FTC Tech-ade hearings for a number of reasons," the opening entry said. "First, it complements and supplements the hearings by covering areas and providing interviews that cannot be showcased at the live event.
"It also enables us to keep the public updated on what to expect from the hearings and allows us to bring information to a wider audience than will be present at the actual event in November. Finally, our use of the blog is a way for the agency to experiment firsthand with a communications tool that has grown in popularity over the past few years and may well become even more prevalent in the next Tech-ade."
The Reuters wire service mentioned the blog, as did blogs like Micro Persuasion and Potomac Flacks.
"This is the federal agency that views itself as most on the side of consumers, so it's a natural that they'd be a trailblazer for other agencies," Adam Kovacevich wrote at Potomac Flacks. "Let's hope that folks at other agencies catch on and start more administration blogs."
Amen to that. Thankfully, there is evidence that the administration is warming not just to the value of blogs but also to other forms of Internet outreach. The two examples that come to mind: a September podcast interview that Education Secretary Margaret Spellings granted to RedState and the interest that the White House Office of Management and Budget showed in working with bloggers.
Posted by Danny at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)
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President Bush is not known for giving many press conferences, and blog posts like the one that Rep. Diane Watson penned at The Huffington Post after Bush's chat with the media yesterday give him every reason to avoid them in the future.
Here's a taste of what the California Democrat had to say:
A press conference is a rare event for this administration. It appeared to be a tortuous event for Mr. Bush. More than any other president in recent memory, his inability to frame and articulate the issues is embarrassingly obvious.The president appeared even more unsettled at today's press conference -- witness his comments on the sartorial tastes of the press -- to the point of being unhinged. And for good reason. A press conference is the closest this president comes to an unscripted event, perhaps the nearest this president will ever come to holding a conversation with the American people.
Posted by Danny at 12:07 PM | Comments (0)
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North Korea's nuclear test, one of the hottest topics in the blogosphere and beyond this week, prompted Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to post a guest entry at Captain's Quarters.
Here are the arguments that open and close his entry:
Korea doubts the world's resolve. It is testing South Korea, China, Russia, Japan and the United States. They launched seven missiles in July and were criticized by the [U.N.] Security Council but suffered no serious sanction. We have talked and talked about punishing their bad behavior. They don't believe we have the resolve to do it. We must prove them wrong. ...This isn't just about North Korea. Iran is watching this test of the council's will, and our decisions will surely influence their response to demands that they cease their nuclear program. Now, we must, at long last, stop reinforcing failure with failure.
UPDATE: GOPProgress praised McCain's blog post as one that "went far to endear him to bloggers, and a wide swath of Republicans alike, for several reasons, foremost among them being that McCain showed what he has that other potential presidential contenders lack -- deep foreign policy knowledge on the trickiest of issues. Moreover, he showed a consistency in views on a very complicated issue -- something his critics often (if often wrongly) accuse him of lacking or failing to demonstrate.
Posted by Danny at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)
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Transparency: The Tie That Binds Online
Transparency is the one theme that consistently unites not just bloggers but Internet activists in general.
Achieving that goal is the aim of three distinct efforts that were in the news yesterday. We reported on them at Technology Daily. Here are excerpts from our story:
More information to help voters make decisions at the polls next month is now just a few mouse clicks away, thanks to a trio of projects launched by watchdog groups over the past few days.On Tuesday, OMB Watch and the Center for Responsive Politics launched a searchable database called FedSpending.org to offer information on government contracts and federal assistance programs. For the first time, itemized information on $12 trillion in government transactions between fiscal 2000 and fiscal 2005 is available online. ...
The new database was unveiled just days after President Bush signed into law a bill, S. 2590, that directs the White House Office of Management and Budget to create a similar searchable database by Jan. 1, 2008.
The data already available by the private watchdog groups is not as extensive and will be updated every six months instead of every 30 days, as the law directs OMB. Bass said he hopes his site, which took six months to get online, can serve as a prototype for OMB. ...
On Monday, meanwhile, Public Citizen, rushed to publish an online searchable database of campaign contributions in time for the election. It released 10 state-based reports of lobbyist contributions. The goal is to expand the database to include all states by the election. ...
Over Columbus Day weekend, the Sunlight Foundation also challenged bloggers and other citizens to search campaign records about congressional spouses on campaign payrolls. The volunteers searched campaign filings for 437 lawmakers in less than two days and found that 13 Republicans and six Democrats paid spouses from campaign funds.
Posted by Danny at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)
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Being A Congressional Spouse Can Really Pay
Searching one congressman's campaign finance records can be a tedious task; searching them for all members of the House could take weeks. But put a bunch of bloggers on the task and you can get the job done in two days. That's exactly what the Sunlight Foundation did -- and on a holiday weekend.
At 2:25 p.m. on Friday, the government watchdog group invited citizen journalists to cast some sunlight on the practice of lawmakers hiring congressional spouses to work on their re-election campaigns. By 11:18 a.m. on Sunday, their work was done.
"Citizen muckrakers have investigated 437 members of Congress and tentatively found 19 spouses who were paid by a member's campaign committee, totaling some $641,200 since January 1, 2005," Bill Allison wrote at Under the Influence, one of the foundation's blogs.
Republican lawmakers who have put their spouses on campaign payrolls in that time outnumber Democrats by 13-6. One of the Republicans, Ohio's Bob Ney, pleaded guilty in September to corruption charges in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.
The top spender also was a Republican. Howard (Buck) McKeon paid his wife, Patricia Kunz, $74,462. The top Democratic spender was Bart Stupak of Michigan, whose wife, Laurie Ann, netted $62,206. The rest of the top five spenders were: Louie Gohmert, R-Texas ($53,261); Richard Pombo, R-Calif. ($52,950); and Fortney (Pete) Stark, D-Calif. ($45,800).
Only 13 states were represented in the list, with five of the lawmakers in question representing California. The only other states that appeared on the list multiple times were Illinois and Texas, which had two lawmakers each who paid their spouses.
As Allison noted in announcing the project, it is not illegal for lawmakers to make such payments. But critics think it is ethically questionable. "Some members of Congress, by hiring their spouses, in effect use their campaign treasury to supplement their own bank accounts," he wrote. "The practice is legal, disclosed in obscure corners of campaign finance reports, and rarely mentioned by those who cover campaigns."
And that's what the project is all about -- highlighting facts that tend to stay buried in Washington's campaign finance bureaucracy and letting citizens decide for themselves whether those facts should matter.
"So much for what people here in Washington say about the cynicism of the public!" Ellen Miller wrote at SunSpots, another foundation blog. "Anyone who believes that citizens don't want to get involved in monitoring what their representiatives do here in Washington has just been proven wrong."
Posted by Danny at 08:39 PM | Comments (4)
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24 Journalists And One Blogger Talk Ethics
The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., hosted 25 people for a conference aimed at drafting guiding principles for online ethics in journalism. All but one of the people there were traditional journalists like me. The last participant was Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association.
Cox merited a mention in Poynter's recap of the conference, and as an MBA member, I wanted to note it:
Cox indicated he would be content if the finished guidelines were simply available to those bloggers to make their own decisions about following them or not."We have an ethics policy, but we don't call it an ethics policy," Cox said. "We have a statement of principles. ... Some feel it [an ethics code] is contrary to the spirit of blogging."
That gets to the heart of the matter, of course: how to develop guidelines that would be worth considering by a range of stakeholders that includes traditional news organizations, individual bloggers, and the millions of people who read, view and use content on the Web.
Posted by Danny at 08:54 PM | Comments (0)
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Connecticut Democrat Ned Lamont was the biggest political story of the summer. His Aug. 8 primary victory over Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the party's vice-presidential nominee in 2000, gave hope to Democratic bloggers who until then had achieved mostly moral victories (read: electoral losses) in their bid to "crash the gates."
But in the past two months, since Lieberman decided to challenge Lamont again in November as an independent candidate, Lamont has faded into the blog background. He's also now 20 points behind Lieberman, according to the latest poll being cited by Instapundit and other blogs.
All of which has one writer at Democrats.com asking this question of his netroots comrades: "Do bloggers have what it takes to actually get a candidate elected? And if we don't, what are we trying to accomplish?"
That quote calls to mind the point that National Review Online blogger Jim Geraghty made in closing his Washington Times column a couple of weeks ago: "If Mr. Lieberman wins, it will be time to close the book on the hype of the 'netroots.' A serious political movement figures out how to win a general election or two in the first 26 tries."
UPDATE: Excerpts from a new The Connecticut Post feature article about the role of blogs in the Lieberman-Lamont race:
After the primary, many of these Connecticut bloggers became national political celebrities, their names and pictures featured in everything from the Hartford Courant to GQ magazine. But now, with just over four weeks left until the election, these same bloggers seem to be shying away from calling attention to themselves. ...Kelly Monaghan, the man behind BranfordBoy and the person who runs My Left Nutmeg, declined several attempts for comment for this article. None of the Connecticut bloggers contacted for this story returned e-mail requests for comment. Some cited a need for anonymity, while others expressed a mutual reluctance among the bloggers to take the focus off Lamont and place it upon bloggers themselves. ...
The Lamont campaign's Internet communications director Tim Targaris offered some insight to the bloggers' newfound reluctance to speak with the media. "I think their concern, and I think it's a shared concern, is that this really is a huge grassroots program, and it's not just about blogs," said Targaris. ...
Lieberman's campaign finds the resounding anonymity associated with these blogs -- and their reluctance to speak with the press just a few weeks before the election -- to be disturbing. "Their silence speaks volumes," said [Dan] Gerstein. "They want anonymity, but they don't want accountability. When a newspaper reporter writes a story, they put their name on it, and they have to defend it.
Posted by Danny at 08:07 PM | Comments (0)
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Former House Speaker Thomas (Tip) O'Neill was famous for the maxim that "all politics is local," and this weekend, some of the nation's top conservative bloggers acknowledged that the adage may be just as relevant today in the blogosphere.
Political blogs established a national reputation first thanks to high-profile takedowns of politicians like former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., and journalists such as former CBS News anchor Dan Rather. They've also secured some noteworthy policy victories in fights against the federal bureaucracy, including the Federal Election Commission and the Senate.
But local bloggers across the country have been battling just as unrelentlessly against the politicians, journalists and bureaucrats in their communities. Their efforts were one of the hotter topics of conversation Saturday at Carolina FreedomNet, a blog conference hosted by the John Locke Foundation, a North Carolina-based think tank.
The foundation published video snippets of a panel discussion on that topic (plus one other panel), and national bloggers such as Mary Katharine Ham of Townhall, the daughter of foundation communications director Jon Ham, blogged about it after the conference.
"I've always felt a little guilty that I'm not better informed about the city council," Ms. Ham wrote. "The folks who do follow and blog that stuff are doing yeoman's work." She also warned that "are in danger of conceding the battleground to lefties, which is dangerous."
"Local blogging communities will become, and are already in some places, really important to electoral politics and local policy," Ham added. "Both are of great importance to conservatives. You don't want local left blogger down the road blogging up the need for a new granola-paved bike path and the need to use your tax dollars to pay for it, and not have your own message to counter him. If there's a vacuum, they will fill it, and the right blogosphere tends to be a bit behind on these kinds of things."
Ham offered one specific suggestion for local blogging by conservatives: exposing media bias in their communities.
More coverage of the conference is available at Gay Patriot, Hang Right Politics, Power Line, Sam's Notes, Sister Toldjah and Wizbang.
UPDATE: Ed Cone, a well-known blogger in Greensboro, N.C., also was at Carolina FreedomNet.
"This was a conservative political conference built around Web themes, utilizing a traditional format of panels and a keynote speaker. It worked well on its own terms," he said, adding that the ConvergeSouth Web conference in Greensboro this coming Saturday will be "a very different kind of thing."
I attended ConvergeSouth last year primarily to learn about podcasting, and several months later, I became National Journal's first podcaster for Technology Daily. Our weekly episodes are available at the Tech Policy Pod.
Posted by Danny at 07:53 PM | Comments (1)
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Blogging To Get Out The Vote
"Bug" isn't typically a word that people want to hear when it comes to their computers, but the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is touting a "volunteer Web bug" that it hopes bloggers and others will help spread.
The bug "will allow anyone with a Web site to help with [get-out-the-vote] efforts for the Senate candidates he or she supports," the DSCC announced at its blog, From The Roots. The tool "allows online activists to show their support for the candidates of their choice by signing up volunteers."
The campaign committee added, "With the joint efforts of the candidates, the netroots and the DSCC, we can defeat the rubber-stamp Republicans that have failed to hold President Bush accountable."
MyDD and other Democratic blogs, meanwhile, are working independently to drive people to the polls in November by reminding them of voter-registration deadlines. The first ones were in Nevada and South Carolina today, and people in Iowa and Vermont can register as late as Oct. 28.
Posted by Danny at 06:16 PM | Comments (2)
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This is the best "no comment" I've heard in 15-plus years of journalism inside the Beltway: "We're not going to comment on the fact that Bob Ehrlich's floundering campaign is now under criminal investigation."
The issue that prompted the quote: Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich mailed dollar bills as part of a fundraiser that encouraged the recipients to return the currency and $25 more. According to The Washington Post, the mailing is being investigated as a possible violation of state campaign finance law.
The flack who found a way to make that biting comment while officially giving no comment: Rick Abbruzzese, a spokesman for Ehrlich's Democratic challenger, Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley.
O'Malley should give Abbruzzese a raise for that one.
Posted by Danny at 05:35 PM | Comments (0)
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Washington powerbrokers who cut their political teeth before the relatively tame media of another century seem incapable of learning how to behave in the era of blogs. That is especially true of members of Congress.
Despite seeing colleague after colleague humiliated on the Internet because of the goofy or offensive things they say and do, lawmakers keep acting in ways that are sure to go viral online.
Add New York Republican Thomas Reynolds to the list. The chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee has been ensnared by the cyber-sex scandal that last week toppled Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla.
Foley's relationship with underage House pages is at the core of the controversy, so what did Reynolds decide to do this week when he held a press conference to talk about his ties to Foley? He surrounded himself with children.
Old media might have mentioned that curiousity in passing in the pre-blog era, but it probably wouldn't have caused the uproar it did online this week. Bloggers, including two citizen journalists who were at the press conference, were outraged for two reasons: 1) They said Reynolds was trying to hide behind children; and 2) Reynolds refused to send the youngsters away when his interrogators hinted that there could be some explicit questions unfit for children's ears.
The Buffalo News noted the difference between media past and present in its post-press conference coverage. "The mainstream media reported afterward that children -- mainly those of Reynolds' political supporters -- were at the news conference. But the bloggers were able to freely criticize Reynolds for bringing them."
Reynolds should have known that it wasn't wise to have children at a press conference about a cyber-sex scandal. And after so many of his colleagues have been embarrassed on YouTube and other online forums, he should have known -- or at least his flacks should have known -- to expect bloggers with an agenda, and video cameras, at his public event.
He clearly didn't, though -- and he certainly won't be the last member of Congress to be busted by the blogosphere because of his ignorance about how the rules of the media game have changed.
Posted by Danny at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)
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With great tragedy comes great irresponsibility. Come man-made hell or natural high water, someone, somewhere will try to profit from disaster.
It happened after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It happened again after Hurricane Katrina. And now, sadly, it is happening again as a result of the House page scandal.
I received this unsolicited e-mail last night: "We are accepting the best offer for CongressmanMarkFoley.com. Would you be interested in making an offer? We will sell it really cheap, and it gets a lot of traffic."
The e-mail was from the "manager" of a moving company in Houston, so it strikes me as a clear case of cyber squatting. The solicitation piqued my curiosity enough to make me search "Mark Foley" at the eBay online auction site, and as I suspected, a listing for CongressmanMarkFoley.com is there, too.
The sales pitch is much more elaborate: "Great Domain Name! Politics and Congress are turned upside down by boy-loving pervert Mark Foley. Republicans and Democrats scramble to respond. A great domain name for a variety of uses: use for fun; use for business; use for politics; use for comedy; use for strategy. Did he have sex with a child? Serious bidders only, please."
It has two bids so far, with the current high being 6 cents.
I also found buttons with head shots of Foley in place of the "O" in "GOP" and the motto "Grand Old Perverts" underneath. The current bids for those range from $3 to $3.25 each. A now-defunct Foley 2006 re-election button is going for $10.50. The bid for a t-shirt with "Mark Foley: Real American Pervert" emblazoned across the front stood at $9.99 this morning. PutMarkFoleyInJail.com is selling for $1.
Bloggers are participating, too. Inspired by comments that Foley reportedly made in one online chat with a House page, Americablog just added to its online shop t-shirts that say "My Congress went Republican, and all I got was a little horny," and "Do I make you a little horny?"
To be fair, attempts to profit at Foley's expense are not on the same scale as the fraud that followed 9/11 and Katrina. Some of the products strike me as legitimate forums for political free speech, at least for the people who might buy them, and the 2006 Foley campaign button one day may have real value as political memorabilia.
I also can see good reasons for buying Web addresses dedicated to hot news topics. After former President Bill Clinton was impeached, I reserved clintonlegacy.com and clintonlegacy.net. I'm a history buff, and Clinton was so obsessed with his legacy at the time that I thought it would be useful to create a site for exploring that legacy objectively -- sex scandals, impeachment and all.
(I still own the URLs and may use them for a journalistic purpose someday, though these days I think more in terms of a blog dedicated to the presidential ambitions of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.)
Even so, I find myself repulsed by the idea that a moving company in Texas bought a Web address with the sole aim of making money from a scandal where children were victimized. There's a yuck factor that should make everyone think twice before pursuing that kind of venture.
I'm certainly not interested -- and I hope the bidding stops at 6 cents. Then the seller will have lost money on his disgusting attempt to benefit financially from who knows how many pages who were pursued by a public official they should have been able to trust.
Posted by Danny at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)
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Are Political Blogs A Cyber Threat?
Surveys have consistently shown that very important people read political blogs, and the size of that elite readership is certain to increase as the blogs gain influence. That will be great for democracy, if you ask me.
But if you ask the geeks of the world, guys and gals who have a greater grasp of both the good and evil at work on the Internet, you might get a different answer. They might tell you that the computers of all those VIPs who read blogs, and the information on their computers, are in jeopardy.
"Blogs can spread malicious code as quickly as they spread news," according to a column in yesterday's Ottawa Citizen. "If I wanted to steal a bunch of passwords, I would hide malicious code inside a comment on a popular blog. As soon as your reader downloaded that comment, you'd be infected. Or I would start a blog that sounded particularly interesting (or pornographic), tempt a bunch of people into subscribing to my feed, and inject naughty code into their computers that way."
All you pols and journalists, consider yourselves warned. And be careful out there in blog land.
Posted by Danny at 12:04 PM | Comments (1)
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Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos this week took his "throwaway" political theory about "Libertarian Democrats" to the virtual pages of Cato Unbound, the online magazine of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
"No one will ever mistake a Democrat of just about any stripe for a doctrinaire libertarian," Moulitsas wrote. "But we've seen that [the Republican Party] is now committed to subverting individual freedoms, while [the Democratic Party] is growing increasingly comfortable with moving in a new direction, one in which restrained government, fiscal responsibility and -- most important of all -- individual freedoms are paramount."
Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, Harold Meyerson, editor of The American Prospect, and Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief of the libertarian magazine Reason, will reply at Cato Unbound.
John Hawkins of Right Wing News already has done so at his blog. His conclusion: "'Libertarian Republicans' ... may not be that common, but the moniker 'Libertarian Democrats' is an oxymoron."
Club For Growth blogger Andy Roth agreed, acknowledging that "Kos makes some good points" but "never adequately disproves or reconciles the fact that being a libertarian Democrat is a contradiction in and of itself."
You can read more reaction to Kos' piece at MaxSpeak, RedState, The Remedy and ZenPolitics. A TCS Daily column also tells the tale of one leftist's transformation into libertarianism.
Now for the rest of this week's blog bits:
-- Has Kos lost his stomach for politics? Not likely, but a new article in Wired said he is "'going offline' next year, taking his obvious knack for building online communities and applying it to that other great American pastime: sports. And once he gets his network of sports blogs ramped up, he'll turn to building communities in the real world, a chain of giant meeting places 'replicating megachurches for the left' -- complete with cafes and child care."
-- The cyber-sex scandal that forced Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., from office last week has prompted some Republican lawmakers to return campaign contributions they received from Foley. Election Central at TPMCafe is keeping track of the candidates who are returning the money.
-- Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney may not have won over the RedState audience with the interview he granted there last week, but he has plenty of friends in the blogosphere who want him to run for president in 2008.
-- David Perlmutter, author of the forthcoming book "Blogwars," revisited "The Blog Lunch That Backfired" in a post at the USA Today opinion blog. He argued that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., has three options in her approach to Democratic blogs: ignore them, attack them or co-opt them. (Perlmutter also posted an unedited version at his site, PolicyByBlog.)
Jeralynn Merritt, who was at the aforementioned lunch with former President Bill Clinton, took exception to Perlmutter's thesis. "Talk to us, bring us into the fold, let us know your values and your beliefs. We'll listen," she said of the approach politicians should take to blogs. "We may or may not agree, but we'll appreciate the overture and respond. Now, is that so hard to fathom?"
-- The latest vision of Eric Schmidt, a top executive with the Google Internet firm, is "truth predictor" software that could instantly check the accuracy of statements made by politicians. Captain's Quarters said such a tool would fine plenty of fans in the blogosphere.
-- Burnt Orange Report, a blog in Texas, is using its expertise on politics in the Lone Star State to analyze congressional races there and offer predictions for November.
-- The latest podcast for "The Glenn and Helen Show" focused on problems with e-voting machines (a topic dear to our hearts at Technology Daily) and more as the election nears. The subject of the interview: John Fund, author of the book "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy."
-- From USA Today: "In the past two years, more than 50 lawsuits stemming from postings on blogs and Web-site message boards have been filed across the nation. The suits have spawned a debate over how the 'blogosphere' and its revolutionary impact on speech and publishing might change libel law."
-- The latest census of blogs by law professors, courtesy of Concurring Opinions, puts the count at 306.
-- Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems and a blogger, has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to update for the Internet era a rule mandating "widespread dissemination" of company information for investors. He argued that his company's blog or "any other freely available company blog or Web site should be considered sufficient in satisfying the objectives."
-- "Inappropriate content": That's the message that the YouTube video-sharing site sent blogger Michelle Malkin in explaining why the site removed her "mini-movie" about the months-ago riots sparked by cartoons depicting the Muslim religious leader Mohammed. Malkin said her "innocuous video" had been online at YouTube for a while and reported that YouTube also has banned other videos critical of jihad by Islamic extremists.
-- Believe it or not, the political blog conference is not just an American favorite. Ireland is having one, too. It's in Dublin tomorrow. In the states, New Hampshire bloggers will gather later this month for a conference whose motto is "Blog Free Or Die."
-- Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine stood outside the ivory tower of journalism this week and shouted this message up to the editorial writers who for too long have rested comfortably on their perches: "Fork the editorial page (before you have to stick a fork in it): Embrace new voices and viewpoints. Listen before lecturing. Break free of the limits of paper and use the Internet to create a limitless platform for experts to inform the discussion. Become moderators and enablers of the debate that is already going on in the community." The editorial writers had plenty to say after the new media lecture.
-- "Citizen journalism" advocate Jay Rosen answered questions from Slashdot readers about the movement and about his forthcoming NewAssignment.Net project.
-- Political Wire struck a content-sharing deal with U.S. News & World Report that will give the blog space on the magazine's Web site and access to content from U.S. News for publication at Political Wire.
-- T-shirt sales are a staple on blogs large and small, and the folks in charge of "blogger relations" at the public affairs consultancy Issue Dynamics think that creativity is worth noting. Hence the new "Blogger Chic Series" of posts about the best blog t-shirts. It will run on Mondays. The first entry is dedicated to the "bloggers' rights" t-shirt of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Posted by Danny at 06:46 AM | Comments (0)
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CapitolLink: Blogging About Cyber Sex
Much of political America is preoccupied with sex these days -- the cyber sex that former Rep. Mark Foley of Florida reportedly had and wanted to have with congressional pages -- and that is true even at Congress Blog, the online forum that The Hill newspaper created for "blawgmakers" and others interested in what happens on Capitol Hill.
Sandwiched between serious policy posts that cover everything from mine safety and foreign aid to Sudan to government-sanctioned torture and military commissions are a series of random entries about the Foley scandal.
Rep. Dale Kildee, D-Mich., made the first appearance yesterday. He is the lone Democrat on the three-member board of lawmakers that oversees House pages, and he is upset that he learned about Foley's interactions with pages months after board Chairman John Shimkus, R-Ill., knew.
"I was outraged to learn that the House Republican leadership kept to itself the knowledge of Mr. Foley's despicable behavior toward the House pages," Kildee wrote.
"I am now equally outraged to learn that Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert announced today that there will be changes in the policies of the House page program." He called that decision "yet another example of the House Republican leadership being more concerned with finding political cover for themselves than with the safety and well-being of the House pages."
Here are excerpts from other entries at Congress Blog:
-- Rep. Bud Cramer, D-Ala.: "As further details are disclosed about the interaction between Foley and congressional pages, the clearer it becomes that we must continue to educate our children about the dangers of online communications."
-- Rep. Geoff Davis, R-Ky.: "Earlier this year, Mr. Foley's Florida Republican leadership PAC donated $1,000 to my re-election campaign. On Friday, the same day as Mr. Foley's resignation, I donated $1,000 to Boone County court-appointed special advocates" for child court cases.
-- Angie Paccione, a Democratic House candidate from Colorado whose opponent is GOP Rep. Marilyn Musgrave: "This morning, I called on Marilyn Musgrave to join me in demanding that Speaker Dennis Hastert step down from his leadership post. ... I am asking Marilyn to help me in urging Foley to transfer his campaign funds to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children."
-- Chellie Pingree, president of Common Cause: "Common Cause calls on the House of Representatives to return to Washington, D.C., before Election Day on Nov. 7 to establish an outside ethics commission to provide ethics oversight and enforcement of a body that has proven now beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is incapable of policing itself."
UPDATE: More commentary from lawmakers below as I find their blog entries.
-- Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., at Congress Blog: "As a father and a grandfather, protecting the young people who come to Washington to work for the Congress as pages is my highest priority. I urge anyone who has information that they believe will help to call the page tip hotline number [created Thursday]: 1-866-348-0481."
-- Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., at The Huffington Post: "The Ethics Committee is scheduled to meet on Thursday and hopefully we'll get a prompt investigation of this situation. We need to know if other pages were put in jeopardy because the leadership didn't act sooner."
Posted by Danny at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)
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The Heritage Foundation hosted a panel discussion yesterday that celebrated the power of blogs in pushing into enactment a law that calls for a publicly accessible database on federal contracts and grants. Technology Daily was there. Here is an excerpt of the story from Staff Writer Winter Casey:
Those who hope to use the power of the Internet to engage the public in helping influence government action should consider choosing an issue that has bipartisan appeal and excites the public interest, Internet and media experts said Wednesday.They gathered at the Heritage Foundation to discuss how authors of Republican and Democratic Web logs this summer influenced the passage of legislation aimed at creating a Google-like search tool for the government. ...
N.Z. Bear of The Truth Laid Bear and Porkbusters said the reason the bill inspired the blogosphere was because it was so "obviously a good thing" for all ideologies. Bear said bloggers harnessed the power of the public to call lawmakers' offices about the holds. The blogs "did try to motivate the public" and it became "fun and entertaining" for people to participate, he said.
"It wasn't the blogs that made this happen but facilitated it happening," Bear said.
Rebecca Carr, a national correspondent for Cox Newspapers, said bloggers exposed the secretive nature of Congress. The public felt disenfranchised about the Senate's legislative process, she said. Carr noted that government transparency issues and corruption are bipartisan problems.
Mark Tapscott from The Washington Examiner, who also blogs at Tapscott's Copy Desk, said the Internet gives the public the power to focus all its talents simultaneously. He also noted that lawmakers may want to take more steps to use the Internet to interact with the public.
Other coverage of the event is available at The Right Angle and Tapscott's Copy Desk.
A day before the Heritage event, the bloggers' work on the database bill and the interest it sparked from the White House Office of Management and Budget were the subject of a Washington Post article, which prompted more thoughts from Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters. Morrissey also was among the bloggers invited to take a sneak peak at a similar database that the watchdog group OMB Watch will unveil Tuesday.
And on Monday, Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., penned a column in The Examiner about the successful push for a federal budget database accessible to the public.
The piece included the following praise for bloggers: "In the Internet age, making this information available online should be automatic, which is why a vast array of interest groups, bloggers and commentators from both ends of the political spectrum joined forces to put public pressure on Congress when the bill was stalled."
Posted by Danny at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)
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Congress is wary of a Homeland Security Department program that privacy advocates fear could be used to mine data from people's blogs and e-mails, among other sources.
As reported by Technology Daily earlier this week, lawmakers have ordered the department's inspector general to investigate the analysis, dissemination, visualization, insight and semantic enhancement program, which is known by the acronym ADVISE, because it appears to lack clear guidelines and oversight.
"The ADVISE program plan, total costs and privacy impacts are unclear, and therefore the conferees direct the inspector general to conduct a comprehensive program review and report within nine months of enactment of this act," congressional appropriators wrote in a report for the bill to fund the department this fiscal year. President Bush signed the bill into law yesterday.
Here is a Tech Daily excerpt with more details on the program:
Homeland Security spokesman said ADVISE is not yet an active program. When complete, he added, it will "deliver technology or a set of technologies to provide the capability to connect the dots" of intelligence, which was a need cited by the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.ADVISE "extracts important relationships and correlations from a wealth of data and produces actionable intelligence," the spokesman said. "What it does perform is data integration at a large scale." He would not describe the specific type of data collected.
ADVISE is one of 12 data-mining programs used or under development by the department, the inspector general stated in an August report. That report provided a general overview of each program but did not detail specific activities, costs and privacy impacts.
The Christian Science Monitor also reported on the ADVISE project earlier this year.
Homeland Security is not the only federal entity interested in the information on blogs. IBM is at work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop computer technologies that could translate foreign-language Web sites, including blogs.
Posted by Danny at 11:47 AM | Comments (0)
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Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., at The Huffington Post: "As the Foley scandal continues, more brave U.S. soldiers will lose their lives. No matter how bad that scandal gets, or how much any other story gets covered, we can't lose sight of the most outrageous scandal of all -- the Bush administration's disastrous Iraq policy."
Posted by Danny at 11:32 AM | Comments (0)
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I figured it wouldn't be long before some enterprising blogger tried searching the Congressional Record for official nuggets about former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., in the wake of the sex scandal that drove him from office last week.
I did a little digging myself over the weekend but didn't find anything earth-shattering. A blogger named Elisabeth (Lis) Riba had better luck, though. She found some speeches about the congressional page program by Foley, as well as praise that other lawmakers heaped upon Foley because of his work with the pages. Foley resigned over salacious electronic communications that he sent to some of the pages.
You can see her findings at Riba Rambles.
Posted by Danny at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)
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Minnesota: The Land Of 10,000 Blog Scandals?
Sometimes it doesn't pay for bloggers to be paid by campaigns -- or to work for free. In fact, bloggers and campaigns alike are learning this year that maybe they weren't meant for each other. That is especially true in Minnesota, which has been the breeding ground for blog scandal after blog scandal since mid-summer.
The first controversy involved the campaign of Democrat Coleen Rowley, who is challenging Republican Rep. John Kline. Kline's campaign accused Rowley of using a blogger as a "double agent" to gather inside information about the Kline campaign. David Bailey, the blogger and campaign volunteer in question, denied the charge and defended himself at the Rowley campaign's blog.
A second blog-related scandal hit the campaign of Democratic Senate candidate Amy Klobuchar. In that instance, a blogger not connected with the campaign appears to have illegally accessed an unreleased advertisement by Klobuchar's GOP foe, Rep. Mark Kennedy, and sent it to Klobuchar spokeswoman Tara McGuiness. She was fired for having looked at the television ad.
Now the Gopher State is in the midst of another blog brouhaha, this time over a Republican blogger who is being paid by two campaigns and Democratic bloggers who have received "new journalist" fellowships from an outfit called the Center for Independent Media.
The Republican blogger is Michael Brodkorb of Minnesota Democrats Exposed. He previously disclosed that Kennedy's campaign pays him, but until the Democratic blog MN Publius reported it last week, Brodkorb had not mentioned that GOP House candidate Michelle Bachmann also paid him $5,500 in August for opposition research and press consulting.
Other Democratic blogs, including City Pages, Minnesota Monitor and Minnesota Republican Watch, picked up the news.
Brodkorb, a former GOP operative in Minnesota, responded in part by reporting that the media center "is spending at least $31,500 (seven paid bloggers x $4,500) to pay liberal bloggers in Minnesota."
"After this post," he wrote, "we'll see who in the liberal blogosphere is actually interested in disclosure and whose using disclosure as a way to attack the messenger because they can't attack the message."
At least one of the bloggers in question, Matt Martin of MN Publius, answered when Brodkorb called him out. And City Pages acknowledged that "Brodkorb's greater point, that more than a few in the liberal media are themselves paid to blog, bears greater disclosure."
At this rate, there is plenty of time for more blog scandals to surface in Minnesota during the last five weeks of the campaign. And I imagine that others are brewing across the country. Shoot an e-mail to dglover@nationaljournal.com if you know of any.
Posted by Danny at 04:58 PM | Comments (0)
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Some online research by a Vermont blogger has prompted House candidate Martha Rainville to fire a campaign aide for plagiarism on the candidate's Internet site.
AP, the Burlington Free Press, the Brattleboro Reformer and the Vermont Guardian reported the story. The blog Reason and Brimston received credit for exposing the plagiarism.
Rainville fired Chris Stewart for plagiarizing material for her policy statements from other candidates, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee. Both are Democrats.
Reason and Brimstone's Julie Waters downplayed her role in breaking the story and driving it into the mainstream media. She said her blog was just one of many Web sites she chose to share the information she found, and the media latched onto the story because she e-mailed multiple journalists.
"Blogs are very important, and I think they've provided some valuable resources," Waters wrote, "but this particular story is not about blogs, nor is it about me. It's about a candidate with manufactured talking points who only seems to have a surface understanding of the ideas she's using to pretend her independence."
Posted by Danny at 04:26 PM | Comments (0)
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The select Republican congressional candidates who have won the support of like-minded bloggers under the Rightroots banner just won something potentially more valuable: a plug from the Republican National Committee.
When Rightroots ran an online fundraising push for its favorite 21 candidates last month, the RNC vowed to send a mass e-mail if the group met its goal of generating 100 contributions for each of the candidates in 15 days. Rightroots met the goal, and the RNC sent its e-mail today.
Here is an excerpt of the e-mail, as posted at Right Wing News: "Maintaining our majorities is a team effort, and I want to call your attention to an innovative online effort to help our party's rising stars win some of the most competitive House and Senate contests in America. It's called Rightroots, and it enables you to directly support the candidates of your choice in the races that will decide this election. Take a moment to learn more and support our party's rising stars today."
The e-mail already appears to be having an impact, according to John Hawkins of Right Wings News. "It went out this afternoon and we were at roughly $130,800 when they sent it out. At the moment, we're at $144,826 and rising. It'll be interesting to see where we end up when the momentum finally slows down."
Posted by Danny at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)
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Accountability In The House Sex Scandal
When congressional scandals go nuclear, as the one involving former Rep. Mark Foley and congressional pages did over the weekend, the instinct of most politicians is to duck and cover, and the fact that Congress is now in adjournment until after the November election theoretically makes that possible.
But in practice, the duck-and-cover strategy won't work any more in the information age than it would have worked during the Cold War had an atomic bomb actually been detonated. Bloggers are too determined to hold their elected officials accountable for those officials to avoid answering tough questions.
They proved that during the August congressional recess by badgering senators about who was responsible for a "secret hold" on a bill to create a federal budget database. Now Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo is aiming to prove it again by asking Republican House candidates whether they think Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Fla., should lose his post over the scandal involving Foley, R-Fla.
"Does the Republican candidate in your district believe that Denny Hastert should remain as Speaker? If they're elected on Nov. 7 and the Republicans retain their majority, will they vote for him for Speaker?" Marshall wrote in an appeal to his readers. "It seems like a pretty fair and germane question. Ring up your rep. Let us know what you hear. We'll share your results with the rest of our readers."
The project isn't likely to generate the same bipartisan support as the August blog swarm over the budget database, but Marshall is sure to have plenty of helpers. The only question is how many Republicans will try to duck and cover between now and the election -- and how many will succeed.
Posted by Danny at 04:13 PM | Comments (0)
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Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schulz wins the distinction of being the first lawmaker to blog about the online sex scandal that drove her fellow Floridian, Mark Foley, from the House last week.
Schulz, a Democrat, tackled the topic at Congress Blog. Foley is a Republican.
Schulz focused her ire not on Foley but on House Republican leaders and allegations that they knew of Foley's interactions with teenage pages but did nothing to stop it or punish him.
"What kind of message does this send to these boys and girls that are in the page program to experience our Congress and our democracy up close?" she said. "Apparently the message was [that] if you are a member of Congress, then you are above the law, that we will turn a blind eye to accusations of soliciting minors."
Posted by Danny at 12:52 PM | Comments (1)
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The Michigan Senate campaign of Republican challenger Mike Bouchard this week will begin a formal outreach effort to friendly bloggers.
David All, the communications director for the campaign, announced the "call to action" late last night in an e-mail blast to "key conservative bloggers." Bouchard's opponent is Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow. Both her campaign and Bouchard's launched blogs last month.
"Many of you have already personally invested your time in this race by keeping your readers up to speed on news from the campaign and by sending me personal notes about your thoughts on the race," All wrote in his e-mail to bloggers. "You are helping point out to your readers and the [mainstream media] that this race is clearly winnable."
The e-mail includes a link to a video blog from the campaign and asks the bloggers to either link to it or embed it on their Web sites. All added that later this week, the campaign will launch a "Bloggers for Bouchard" coalition that people "can join and help spread the message through a quick link."
All invited bloggers to share their ideas about the effort with Bouchard's campaign and added, "I'm looking for someone to head up the effort."
Posted by Danny at 11:09 AM | Comments (0)
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Mark Nickolas, who blogs at Kentucky's BluegrassReport, sure does like to pick fights with the governing powers-that-be in the Bluegrass State.
Late last year, Nickolas generated a mini-blog swarm when he complained about being denied press credentials to cover the state legislative session. Then in the summer, he cried foul when the state decided to block government employee access to certain political blogs, including BluegrassReport. Nickolas said the decision was politically motivated and sued to overturn it. Now he has filed a complaint that alleges judicial ethics violations by a state Supreme Court candidate.
The Courier-Journal in Louisville reports that Nickolas has accused William McAnulty of ethics violatioins by having his secretary solicit contributors to attend a $250-a-ticket fundraiser.
McAnulty was appointed to the state's high court by Gov. Ernie Fletcher. Nickolas once worked as the campaign manager for now-Rep. Ben Chandler, who ran against Fletcher for governor in 2003, and Nickolas regularly criticizes Fletcher, his administration and Republicans in general at his blog. Nickolas also supports McAnulty's political foe, Judge Ann Shake.
Here's an excerpt from the Courier-Journal article about Nickolas' latest beef with a Kentucky Republican:
McAnulty's secretary, using her home e-mail address, invited people to attend a fundraiser scheduled Sept. 15 that was to feature an appearance by U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. The event later was canceled because of a conflict in Obama's schedule.McAnulty declined to comment on the complaint
His opponent, Jefferson Circuit Judge Ann Shake, would say only that "it is up to the Judicial Conduct Commission to decide whether the complaint is significant and if it is, how significant."
Posted by Danny at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)
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As noted in this morning's Technology Daily:
The potential for bloggers to damage business or personal reputations is a growing concern, according to Stan Collender, a public relations specialist at Qorvis Communications.
The Washington Post quoted Collender in a story that warned, "Don't Try To Censor A Blogger."
"It's like pamphleteering on the corner, only it's cheaper, quicker and vastly more broad," Collender said of blogging. "But unlike the traditional media, it's completely unregulated in that there's no fact-checking, no editing. It has all the potential for creating a lot of damage to someone's or something's reputation very quickly, and it's almost impossible to eliminate it."
Experts advise that if bloggers take hold of an issue, the worst decision a person can make is to try to squelch the fervor.
Posted by Danny at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)
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The unfolding cyber-sex scandal involving former Rep. Mark Foley, who resigned Friday, has spread to the House leadership that appears to have known of Foley's involvement with a former congressional page for months. The word "cover-up" is now being aimed at various top House Republicans, and they are losing support from Republican bloggers as a result.
At least one prominent GOP blogger, Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters, urged House Republicans to demand the resignation of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and possibly Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. "Republicans have to act swiftly to remove the stench of Foleygate from the party," Morrissey wrote.
He added, "Allowing Foley off the hook was a mistake in judgment, but this is a betrayal of those who trusted Hastert to lead the House with dignity, honesty, and integrity."
That's a reversal in tone from Morrissey's earlier post on the matter, which sought to deflect some of the attention from Foley and the GOP in the current scandal by calling attention to the way Democrats reacted two decades ago to another scandal involving congressmen and congressional pages.
UPDATE: Now GOP Bloggers is trying to deflect criticism of GOP leaders toward the press for echoing "liberal talking points" about the Foley scandal and "asking Hastert and others, 'what did you know and when did you know it?'" when some publications had seen Foley's e-mails but did not write about them.
Talking Points Memo also criticized the St. Petersburg Times for its explanation of why it sat on the story.
UPDATE II: RedState is now on board the blame-the-media bandwagon -- and for good measure added "leakers of the information, who were undoubtedly Democrats."
UPDATE III: Is the mainstream media at fault for not reporting the story sooner? Or, as The American Thinker, Blog P.I., Just One Minute and Right Wing Nut House suggest, is a politically motivated blog called Stop Sex Predators really to blame for manipulating the media into covering the story just in time to drive Republicans from control of Congress?
The number of conspiracy theories and amount of spin generated in just one weekend is mind-boggling.
UPDATE IV: A writer at GOPProgress also has urged Hastert to resign as House Speaker. "Right now, the GOP has been put in a position where it looked like we were going to retain the House," SJ Reidhead wrote. "Now I don't know. I do know if he doesn't step down, we're going to lose it in disgrace."
UPDATE V: Another call for Hastert to resign, this time at La Shawn Barber's Corner.
Posted by Danny at 07:00 AM | Comments (15)
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Blog Timelines Of The Foley Sex Scandal
Both ThinkProgress and TPMCafe have them.
Posted by Danny at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)
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