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If asked, who do you think Sen. Joseph Lieberman would blame for the lack of civility in American politics? You don't need to wonder anymore because the American Enterprise Institute asked this week at a discussion on the topic and Lieberman answered. Think Progress has the report.

Predictably, the Democrat who nearly lost his seat in the Senate last year because of liberal bloggers who attacked him relentlessly took a shot at blogs. He said blogs "have added another dimension of vituperation toxicity" to a political system corrupted by "attack ads, the kind of divisiveness of the cable news coverage of politics, talk radio."

I don't have any idea what "vituperation toxicity" is, but it sounds painful. It could have been worse, though. At least he didn't blame America's political woes entirely on blogs.

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, joined in the blog-bashing. He blamed blogs and other outlets with putting “more information out in the public realm than there ever was, and some of it is to drive one point of versus other, dividing people more and more."

Think Progress, by the way, has started a "blog fellows" program. You can get the details and application here.

Posted by Danny at 06:02 PM | Comments (0)

Reprinted from Friday's PM Edition of Technology Daily

by Michael Martinez

Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire on Friday is expected to sign into a law a measure to shield journalists -- including bloggers in the news business -- from being forced by the government to disclose confidential sources.

The bill, H.B. 1336, would make Washington the 33rd state to enact such a "shield law." The District of Columbia offers similar protection.

Under the Washington proposal, people engaged in the "regular business of news-gathering" would be protected from being compelled to reveal confidential sources who wish to remain anonymous, regardless of what type of technology they use to distribute their content. Bloggers employed by news-gathering entities would be protected. Independent bloggers could be considered as entities several ways, such as becoming limited liability corporations.

Bruce Johnson, an attorney at the Seattle-based firm Davis Wright Tremaine, helped draft the bill. He said it would draw a fair line between bloggers who are operating as journalists and those who are purely "hobbyists."

He said the cost of business licenses in Washington should not preclude many bloggers from applying for them.

The Washington law also includes another technology-related wrinkle -- it would shield reporters from attempts to seek telephone or Internet records and other information for the purpose of identifying their sources. Johnson said the provision would be particularly useful in cases where parties try to use such techniques to sidestep the shield law.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said she hopes Washington's new law will help spur momentum in other states and on Capitol Hill. Shield legislation stalled during the 109th Congress but is expected to be revived this session.

Dalglish said she is not aware of any state shield laws that explicitly exclude bloggers -- even though many of them were authored before the blogging boom of recent years.

She noted that Alabama's statute is particularly unique. Sports Illustrated lost a defamation case in 2005 when a federal court ruled that the state's shield law does not protect magazine reporters.

Massachusetts, Missouri and Texas all are currently considering shield laws. Dalglish recently testified in support of the Texas proposal. "I haven't gotten any frantic e-mails about it yet," she said.

Few state-level shield laws have been tested by questions about whether they should apply to bloggers. Apple Computer sued last year to unmask the sources of bloggers who leaked information about an unreleased product. The company dropped the suit after a California appellate court ruled against Apple in May 2006.

Johnson said the legal landscape is still evolving, but the growing number of states with shield laws is making it harder for federal lawmakers to ignore the issue. "Each state law is an additional brick in a building that may turn into a federal shield law," he said.

Posted by Danny at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)

As noted in Technology Daily this morning:

The United Nations is one of the only institutions comparable in its size and importance that allows bloggers not affiliated with traditional media to have press credentials and join its permanent press corps, The New York Times reports.

Stephane Dujarric, who was a chief spokesman for former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and works for the U.N. department that oversees media accreditation, said guidelines for bloggers are a work in progress.

"New media is definitely a challenge to all organizations who accredit journalists, and I think we're doing well in meeting that challenge," Dujarric said.

In other news, The Washington Post reports on a study that said as women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they can be the targets of more sexually threatening language from readers than male bloggers.

Posted by Danny at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)

Democrats have been in control of Congress for only a few months, and at least one Democratic blogger already fears that the party's rise to power this year has made his netroots colleagues go soft on Iraq war policy.

Here's what Big Tent Democrat wrote at TalkLeft:

When the left blogs/netroots decided to cheerlead the House supplemental, playing the "pragmatic" insider, they ceded their real power in the debate. MoveOn and others simply failed to understand what their power is. It is not in settling for inadequate proposals and cheerleading inevitable compromises. It is describing the progressive postion and providing a narrative that keeps the Beltway, media and politicians honest.

The left blogs/netroots forgets this at its peril. If it goes down that road, and comes to resemble the right blog relationship with the GOP in its relationship with the Democratic Party, it will be considerably weakened as a force in the political debate.

Posted by Danny at 09:26 PM | Comments (0)

The rise of political blogs will be evident in San Diego today at the California Democratic convention. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, 50 credentialed bloggers will join the 400 mainstream journalists registered to cover the event -- and there are sure to be both journalists and delegates who also live-blog about the event.

Are such developments good or bad for politics? The Chronicle tackles both the enlightened pro, boon-to-democracy answer to that question ...

"What this is doing is blowing apart the old calculus for who gets to come to the party and who doesn't," says Peter Leyden, director of the San Francisco-based New Politics Institute, a think tank that tracks the intersection of the Internet and politics.

With the 2008 presidential election just 556 days away, political parties and candidates understand that bloggers have become a critical part of the commentary on political developments "on a scale that is absolutely astounding," he said.

"Many of them have passionate followers, people who are crazy about politics," Leyden said. "And if you legitimize them, and bring them into inner circles ... they will get a huge new segment of folks energized that aren't necessarily reading newspapers and aren't involved in politics."

... and the naive, fear-the-blogs con answer, given by someone who ironically trashes anonymity on blogs while cowardly insisting on anonymity for himself in the mainstream media:

[O]ne key state Democratic strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of concern for riling the netroots crowd, warns that such efforts are potentially positive and negative.

Netroots commentary can frequently be intensely personal, even "totally mean and irrational," the strategist said, with some bloggers finding power in their ability "to assassinate political characters online."

"It's amplified by the anonymity, and it can be scary that it's so irresponsible," the insider said. "And it's pulling the mainstream media in that direction."

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

Some sound advice from Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine about how MSNBC (and all networks) should handle future airing of political debates in the Internet era:

If MSNBC had any sense, which it doesn’t, it would have taken every one-minute answer from last night’s ping-pong debate and put them up on YouTube themselves. Then, today, we’d be able to watch each one without feeling as if we were trying to count cars on a speeding train. And, more important, we’d be able to comment on them and embed them in our blogs. ...

But it’s happening without MSNBC, of course. There are already loads of clips up on YouTube, put there by dastardly copyright thieves, in NBC News’ view, or by engaged voters and viewers, in my view. ... The net result ... is that the discussion is happening on YouTube and on blogs but not around MSNBC, thanks to the network’s rules and to the fact that its clips are not linkable or embeddable and are chosen by producers instead of voters. A true case of cutting off the nose.

Posted by Danny at 11:24 AM | Comments (0)

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton caused a minor stir this week with her guest-blogging appearance at Firedoglake, a site where one of the lead bloggers last year painted Sen. Joseph Lieberman in blackface before apologizing and removing the entry at the behest of Lieberman's opponent.

Clinton, D-N.Y., posted an entry at Firedoglake on Tuesday to mark Equal Pay Day and to tout her legislation aimed at guaranteeing women the same pay as men when they do the same work. Clinton also briefly engaged the blog's readers in the comments at the bottom of her post.

Mary Ann Akers, who writes The Sleuth blog for The Washington Post, reported that Democratic activists privately questioned Clinton's decision to appear on Firedoglake because of the tarnished reputation of Jane Hamsher, one of its chief bloggers.

Last summer, while following Democrat Ned Lamont of Connecticut in his bid to unseat fellow Democrat Lieberman, Hamsher posted an image of Lieberman in blackface at The Huffington Post. Although Hamsher never worked in a paid capacity for Lamont's campaign, she did produce a video for the campaign. Her close connections to Lamont prompted the campaign to contact her about the image.

She deleted it and apologized, but according to Akers, the incident is fresh enough in the minds of some Democrats that they think Clinton should have kept her distance from Firedoglake. Dan Gerstein, who worked for Lieberman's campaign last year and was reviled by bloggers like Hamsher, was among those who questioned Clinton's decision.

"Just as pure strategy," Gerstein said, "why would you want to take a risk and invite scorn and controversy and an accusation of hypocrisy when you don't have to?"

Peter Daou, a blog adviser for Clinton's campaign has not responded to my e-mail for comment.

The questions about Clinton's choice of blog venues comes less than three months after a higher-profile controversy involving the campaign of fellow Democrat John Edwards.

The Edwards brouhaha occurred when his campaign hired Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen, two bloggers whose anti-religious writing enraged Catholics and others. Edwards resisted calls to fire them, but both Marcotte and McEwen quit on their own within days of being hired.

Clinton's decision to appear at Firedoglake doesn't seem likely to snowball into that same kind of full-blown blog swarm. For starters, Clinton didn't hire Hamsher, and as Ann Althouse noted, it's a stretch to "pin that blackface nonsense" on Clinton.

What's more, Clinton ironically is now the victim of some blackface nonsense directed at her. Today, conservative cartoonist Chris Muir painted Clinton in blackface in a "Day By Day" strip that pokes fun at her recent attempts to speak in a Southern accent.

Even so, the Clinton-Firedoglake connection revives questions about whether direct interaction with the top liberal bloggers poses a greater risk to Democratic candidates than potential benefit -- and also whether bloggers are letting themselves be co-opted by campaigns.

Although she won't blame Clinton for Hamsher's blackface disgrace, Althouse criticized Clinton's decision to blog at Hamsher's site. "Firedoglake is a hardcore place, and Clinton doesn't belong there," Althouse said. She also scoffed at the suggestion that Clinton guest-blogged. "The blog is publishing a press release."

One commenter at Firedoglake agreed: "Forgive me, but maybe someone can tell me exactly what was accomplished by having Hilary as a 'guest?' ... [S]he didn't say one thing that wasn't part of her campaign talking points and managed to duck answering any of the more pointed questions."

Several readers also complained that Clinton had dodged a question from netroots star Matt Stoller of MyDD.

Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft applauded Clinton's appearance. But her praise gets to the other concern of co-opting. "I hope you do it again on other issues," she wrote. "It's a great way for the candidates to make our acquaintance and strengthen our working relationship with them."

The problem is that the pursuit of a "working relationship" with campaigns can undermine the very spirit of the blogosphere. As one Firedoglake reader noted: "Senator Clinton is very on message. I don't think of a blog as a place to focus on just one subject. I can understand a candidate insisting on this as a requirement for appearing, but, on the other hand, it just doesn't seem bloggish."

Critical readers seemed most annoyed by the fact that Firedoglake limited the questions asked of Clinton to the equal pay topic she chose to discuss. Here are some their reactions:

-- "I found it discouraging that the questions here turned into the softballs we rip on the press pool for asking."

-- "You can’t ask for commentors to keep it on topic here and then criticize Beltway journalists for having cozy relationships with politicians. Why should it be cozy for Senator Clinton here or in D.C.?"

-- "Is it really a democratic kinda thing to limit discussion to one issue? Was she REALLY only prepared to discuss ONE issue? Hmmm."

-- "[T]hese kinds of cameo appearances are of very little use, other than enabling the candidate to hype her talking points."

-- "I think you guys made a mistake, believing that you could INCREASE your blog power, or readership, or whatever, by bringing Hillary in here, having her field a few sweetheart questions, and then having her waltz out with credit for making a 'tough blogsite' appearance."

Posted by Danny at 06:24 PM | Comments (12)

Upon checking my stats for this blog a moment ago, I was a bit surprised to see the address loc.gov among those generating a small slice of the traffic for today. I've been blogging here for nearly two years now and never once have I had traffic from the Library of Congress, so I decided to follow the online trail.

I was thrilled to see where it led -- to the new Library of Congress Blog, which debuted yesterday. That is an awesome development -- and I'm not just saying that because Beltway Blogroll is one of the six blogs on the site's blogroll right now.

Here is what library blogger Matt Raymond had to say in the opening entry:

The library has in its care more than 134 million items, with 22 million items online. That's a lot of content, by any measure. More and more people online are looking to blogs to help them navigate and make sense of the content that's "out there," to say nothing of the world around them. With some 71 million blogs at last count (or so says Technorati), it's a conversation an institution like the library should be a part of.

The Library of Congress was producing electronic content long before the Web even existed, so it’s fitting today that we become one of a (surprisingly) small handful of federal agencies with a bona fide blog. It's probably a bit early to come up with some sort of grand "mission statement" for this blog, but it will be in keeping with the spirit of the library's mission as a whole: "to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people, and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations."

I've already added the library's blog to my Bloglines feed, and I'm eager to see how that mission develops.

In presidential politics, meanwhile, the campaign of Arizona Sen. John McCain joined that of fellow Republican Mitt Romney in the blogosphere. They are the only two frontrunner GOP candidates that currently have campaign blogs.

Romney's five sons are doing the heavy blogging at the Five Brothers blog launched earlier this month. GOP new media expert David All shared his early impressions of the McCain campaign's blog.

CLARIFICATION: I should have said that McCain and Romney are the only two "frontrunner GOP candidates" with campaign blogs. A reader e-mailed to remind me that darkhorse candidate Mike Huckabee also has a blog -- and actually was the first GOP candidate to have one.

Posted by Danny at 04:28 PM | Comments (0)

Last year's election saw the emergence of local blogs that targeted specific members of Congress or promoted favored candidates -- sites like Dump Mike Ferguson that lobbed attack after attack against the Republican incumbent of that name in New Jersey, or like LamontBlog in Connecticut that touted Democrat Ned Lamont in his intraparty bid to unseat Sen. Joseph Lieberman.

Such blogs were relatively rare last year, but there already are signs that they will be far more common in 2008. The latest evidence is a Newsday article focused on "the blog war in New York" alone.

For now, Democrats, who always seem to be five online steps ahead of Republicans, are on the offensive. The piece noted blogs that target GOP Reps. Peter King (Peter King Watch) and Vito Fossella (Veto Vito). There also are blogs aimed at Nassau Legislature Minority Leader Peter Schmitt (Peter Schmitt Watch), also a Republican, and the Nassau GOP (Nassau GOP Watch).

The advantage has local Republican worried. "Readers should consider proper defenses," Scott Sala told his audience at the New York GOP-oriented blog Urban Elephants. "Pro-candidate blogs? Anti-Dem elected officials blogs? Counter posts? Etc. We cannot lose the blog war in New York."

CORRECTION: I copied the reference to "Scott Scala" straight from Newsday. His name actually is Scott Sala. I have made the correction above.

Posted by Danny at 09:11 PM | Comments (1)

Flacks on Capitol Hill and in the rest of Washington remain largely clueless about how to deal with the new media beast that is the blogosphere, but they are not alone. People in the corporate world are struggling with the best ways to approach bloggers, too, and they are getting some good advice, albeit sometimes conflicting.

Washington flacks should read it and ponder what will work best for them. Here it is:

-- Church Of The Customer: "Get to know bloggers before pitching them. Build a relationship before a pitch. Introduce yourself to a blogger with an email or phone call. Explain your work and your clients. Ask ... if future news about your industry or clients is of interest to them. Seek permission."

-- Emergence Media, which has compiled a guide on how to pitch bloggers: "It’s one thing to know the A-list bloggers; its another to know what mid-tier blogs they read. Just like in regular PR, you may need to hit the mid-tier bloggers (who are read by the A-list bloggers) before you get covered by the big leagues. Don't be fooled by looking only at Alexa data or Technorati rankings; see who links to them, too."

-- WebProNews: "I've been involved in several blogger outreach efforts recently. In each case, I carefully read several posts and comments, along with 'About This Blog' details, then crafted an individual message to that blogger. ... [M]ost bloggers appreciate solid content they can write about that's consistent with the focus of their blogs, assuming you approach them correctly."

Beltway-bound flacks also might be able to learn something from the example of the American Petroleum Institute, which has held a couple of conference calls with bloggers. API has smartly geared the calls toward bloggers focused on the institute's energy niche, and it posted both a transcript and podcast of its latest call (April 18) at the API Web site Energy Tomorrow.

That made it easier for blogs like Green Options that could not participate in the call to still share information from it with readers. Other reports on the call can be found at:
-- Wired's Autopia
-- EcoGeek
-- Energy Roundup at The Wall Street Journal
-- The Houston Chronicle blog NewsWatch: Energy
-- The Oil Drum, The National Association of Manufacturers' ShopFloor
-- And TreeHugger.

Posted by Danny at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)

House Republicans, the Republican Study Committee wants you! To blog!

That's the message of an e-mail that Brad Dayspring, the flack for the committee, sent to GOP press secretaries today. Here's the text of the appeal for content to keep the RSC blog lively:

I just wanted to bring to your attention that after a hiatus, the RSC Blog is back and active. In order for us to make it a success, we need to incorporate postings from your bosses. You can check out the new style or "tone" that the blog has taken, but please know that you don't have to write a 700-word op/ed in order to post. In fact, as you all know, most of the time, short, conversational posts tend to be the most effective ones.

I encourage all of you to send along posts from your boss about his/her actions and priorities, news snippets or stories that you think we should highlight, or anything else you think is appropriate.

Please note that posts should be focused on news or issues consistent with RSC principles. Don't hesitate to send me something as simple as three lines from your boss on whatever subject is on his/her mind.

Hopefully, in short time, our product will be operating with a format similar to National Review's "The Corner" -- with posts/views/action/commentary from a variety of members. Feel free to give me a shout if you have any questions/concerns/comments/insults.

Posted by Danny at 02:02 PM | Comments (0)

The head of Michigan's Democratic Party said he and his colleagues are "proud to be the first state party in the nation to host a Bloggers Caucus at our state conventions" -- whatever that means. Richard Burr, who writes for the politics blog of the Detroit News, thinks it's a bad idea.

"Michigan Democratic Party Chairman Mark Brewer is trying to corrupt and compromise liberal bloggers by getting them signed up as party members and giving them their own party caucus," Burr wrote. He added, "[W]hen bloggers get their own Democratic Party caucus, they are nothing more than party toadies, a registered special-interest group that happens to masquerade as opinion writers."

-- The first client of Republican new media consultant David All, the Majority Accountability Project, will be a curious (and very un-Washington) cross breed of GOP activism achieved by expose-the-Democrats investigative journalism.

From the press release: "MAP will be the premiere information resource on the House majority and conduct its own investigative stories not being done by the mainstream media or the liberal-dominated Internet news services. MAP will compile and maintain comprehensive reports on members of the majority, such as House votes, campaign financing, district activities, policy positions and public statements."

-- Democratic Internet consultant Kari Chisholm visited Five Brothers, the new campaign blog being written by the five sons of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and learned that Romney is paying students a commission on funds they help raise for the campaign.

Chisholm said via e-mail that the practice is professionally unethical. "Mitt Romney is training the next generation of GOP fundraisers to be unethical and sleazy. Unbelievable."

-- Asian American journalists don't want blogs (and other media) reporting the fact that the Cho Seung-Hui, the young man who killed 32 people and them himself at Virginia Tech on Monday, is an Asian.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News responded by saying "Asian" as many times as he could. The condescending tone in a release from the Asian American Journalists Association -- "the standards of news reporting should be universal and applied equally, no matter the platform or medium, including blogs" -- might have had something to do with his reaction."

-- Blogs are part of "America's Golden Age of media" and a good argument against imposing new limits on media ownership, according to Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation.

-- Blogging in Egypt "has evolved within the past year from a narcissistic parlour sport to a shaper of the political agenda. By simply posting embarrassing video footage, small-time bloggers have blown open scandals over such issues as torture and women's harassment on the streets of Cairo." (Hat tip to Instapundit.)

-- The interviewer becomes the interviewed: Ed Morrissey started his tenure as the political director of BlogTalkRadio this week with a "get" for his own CQ Radio show. Howard Kurtz, the media critic for The Washington Post and the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources," was the guest. You can listen to Morrissey's interview with Kurtz here.

A top presidential campaign aide to Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, meanwhile, was the guest on another BlogTalkRadio show hosted by two Virginia Democrats. Those two bloggers, Lowell Feld and Ben Tribbett, also have signed a deal to write a book called "Netroots Rising."

-- Who's fighting on today's media battleground? It's the "digital utopians of Silicon Valley" against the journalistic "bourgeoise," of course. At least that's what Andrew Keen, the author of a forthcoming book called "The Cult Of The Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture," thinks.

Posted by Danny at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)

My friend Rob Bluey is a bit miffed that I deleted my previous post on "secret holds." As I told him:

It was deleted because it was accidentally posted. I thought I was saving it offline as a wrote in "scheduled" mode and changed my mind about the post late yesterday.

I was surprised to see it appear in my RSS feed and then start seeing links to an archived page this morning when my post was NEVER on the front page of Beltway Blogroll. It was never supposed to be published in the first place, so I had our techie go in manually and delete it after I started seeing links to it.

I basically said in my current post what I had said in the deleted one in terms of whether there was technically a "hold." I just changed my view as to whether that mattered.

But I appreciate Rob's point, sarcastic or not, that this whole debate is about transparency, so it doesn't look great for me to be deleting an entry, something I don't recall having done on this blog before. With that in mind, the entirety of my original post is in the extended entry:

Blogosphere rumors of a "secret hold" on legislation to mandate electronic filing of Senate campaign finance documents appear to be greatly exaggerated, according to the Senate minority leader's office and the text of yesterday's floor debate.

Democratic Sens. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin and Dianne Feinstein of California tried to get a vote on the bill yesterday, but Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., objected on behalf of another Republican senator.

Led by the Sunlight Foundation, blogs pounced on the inaction today and accused the unnamed senator of placing a secret hold on the bill to prevent more transparency in the Senate. The watchdog group reminded readers of its blog, In Broad Daylight, that two senators availed themselves of the chamber's "hold" tradition last year to block a bill on federal budget transparency, only to be embarrassed by bloggers into lifting the hold.

"We need your help to find out who placed this secret hold!" Paul Blumenthal wrote. "Call your Senators and ask them if they are the one with the secret hold on S. 223. Then report back."

There's just one problem. A spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he isn't aware of any hold on the measure. "I know there was an objection raised (not by Sen. McConnell) to a unanimous consent vote yesterday on the bill, but that’s different from a hold," Don Stewart said via e-mail. "My guess is that senators wanted to review the bill, not prevent the bill."

The Congressional Record seems to bear out that view.

What actually happened on the floor is that Feinstein asked "unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of [the bill] ... that the committee-reported amendment be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be read three times, passed; and that the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action." In other words, she requested immediate passage of the bill, without any floor debate.

The anonymous Republican senator in question may well oppose the bill itself, but his or her objection technically was only to an expedited vote on the measure -- and that's not at all unusual for the more deliberative half of America's legislative body.

The bill obviously does not have clear sailing to Senate passage. A press release issued by Feinstein notes that it has been "held hostage" in the past by lawmakers who see the popular bill as a good vehicle for making other campaign finance changes, and it may face that fate again.

But the rush by bloggers to characterize yesterday's action as a secret hold like last year's against the budget bill -- and to rally their readers to expose the secret holder -- seems to be spin.

Posted by Danny at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)

I've been inside the Beltway too long. I know this because of the blog entry I inadvertently posted yesterday (now deleted), before realizing I had fallen prey to a bunch of insider mumbo-jumbo about arcane Senate traditions.

The subject of my attention was the latest blog swarm against "secret holds" in the Senate. On Tuesday, two Democratic senators tried to win expedited passage of a bill, S. 223, to mandate electronic filing of Senate campaign finance documents, but an anoynmous Republican senator objected and thus blocked action on the bill.

Led by the Sunlight Foundation, blogs pounced on the inaction and accused the unnamed senator of placing a secret hold on yet another bill aimed at government transparency. The watchdog group reminded readers that two senators had availed themselves of the chamber's "hold" tradition last year to block a bill on federal budget transparency, only to be embarrassed by bloggers into lifting the hold.

"We need your help to find out who placed this secret hold!" Paul Blumenthal wrote. "Call your senators and ask them if they are the one with the secret hold on S. 223. Then report back."

Multiple blogs, including Instapundit, TPMMuckraker and GOPProgress, which played lead roles in last year's successful fight against the secret hold, touted the latest call for transparency in government. Even The Caucus, a blog of The New York Times, reported the story.

I loved watching bloggers out the secret holders last year. It was a telling example of the power of networked citizen journalism. It also put to shame we Beltway journalists who see parliamentary shenanigans all the time and ignore them rather than asking simple questions like, "Are you the senator behind the secret hold?"

With that in mind, I decided to ask that simple question myself this time. Knowing that a Republican was behind Tuesday's objection to expedited passage of the electronic disclosure bill, and that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is no fan of campaign finance law, my first instinct was to contact his office and see if he was the culprit.

McConnell spokesman Don Stewart responded immediately via e-mail and said McConnell was not behind the objection. But then he said something else that completely threw me off the scent of the transparency story: There was no "hold" on the bill at all because it had not been "hotlined" -- another Senate tradition by which lawmakers privately gain unanimous consent to a bill and then move it to the floor.

His point sounded plausible, so I did a little more reporting and indeed learned, by checking the Congressional Record, what actually happened on the floor.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked "unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of [the bill] ... that the committee-reported amendment be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be read three times, passed; and that the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action." In other words, she requested immediate passage of the bill, without any floor debate.

The anonymous Republican senator in question may well oppose the bill itself, but his or her objection technically was only to an expedited vote on the measure -- and that's not at all unusual for the more deliberative half of America's legislative body.

I mentioned all of that in a post much like the one Robert Bluey of the Heritage Foundation penned when I realized that McConnell's spokesman had been dodging my other questions.

Specifically, I asked four times, in some way or another, "Which Republican senator objected to the bill?" Stewart ignored the question the first three times and never answered the fourth e-mail. In that last e-mail, I also asked whether McConnell will vote for the campaign finance transparency bill on the floor. No response.

That's when it dawned on me that for whatever reason, the minority leader's office doesn't want to talk about the substance of the bill and whether it should be passed.

While bloggers may be wrong on parliamentary procedure, they appear to be right on the money in assuming that some Republican lawmaker -- and perhaps the Senate Republican leadership -- doesn't like yet another transparency bill and may even be working to keep it from seeing action. "In our mind," the Sunlight Foundation's Blumenthal wrote, "a hold is a hold is a hold, unless you want to debate what the definition of 'is' is." He urged people to keep pressuring their senators for answers.

Republican new media consultant David All agreed with that sentiment: "Regardless of what procedure was used -- secret hold/anonymous hold -- the facts point out that this bill was blocked in one way or another. Whether it was to review the bill -- which is a noble pause for reflection -- is not the issue." He also predicted that "this procedural hiccup" will help win passage of the bill "in the very near future."

I entered this fray as a journalist, not as an activist for or against the particular bill in question. I just wanted to ask a question and get an answer. That didn't happen. With me at least, Don Stewart chose spin over transparency, and I'm not happy about it.

So to all of you bloggers out there, I wholeheartedly endorse the underlying message of this campaign against a non-hotlined, secret, non-hold objection: Keep calling your senators and demanding answers. I don't care whether you're doing it because you're more interested in journalism (like me) or campaign finance activism. Just do it -- and don't let anyone stonewall you.

Posted by Danny at 12:07 PM | Comments (1)

Two members of Congress are scheduled to be special guests at a fundraiser in Washington tonight for the second annual YearlyKos Convention, to be held in Chicago Aug. 2-5.

The guests are Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., and Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C. Gina Cooper, executive director of the convention, which is named after liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos, also plans to attend.

Here's the pitch from an e-mail sent this afternoon by People for the American Way, a co-sponsor of the convention: "Join activists, organizers and on-lookers as we drink, laugh and carouse liberally to celebrate the blogging community and prepare for the 2007 YearlyKos Convention. Free food, cheap drinks, lively conversation and progressive camaraderie!"

The fundraiser will be from 6:30-9:30 p.m. at the Mott House on the corner of Maryland Ave. NE and Constitution. The minimum donation is $35, and for a $100 pledge, you can join the host committee. Registration for the event is here.

Posted by Danny at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)

The April quarterly campaign reports have been filed, and that means everyone can get the answer to the question I know you've been asking since February: How much did those two bloggers who caused so much trouble for Democrat John Edwards back in the winter cost him?

In one sense, you can't put a price tag on the cost of the first blog scandal of Campaign 2008. We'll probably never know whether Edwards alienated Catholics by hiring Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister, two bloggers whose sharp-tongued and sometimes vulgar religious criticisms won them almost universal scorn after the Edwards campaign hired them in January.

Edwards' decision not to fire Marcotte and McEwan in the face of that outcry actually won him the favor of the netroots, a core constituency in the Democratic Party. Chris Bowers of MyDD vowed his support to Edwards precisely because he stuck by the bloggers. Bowers also noted that Edwards won a national primary poll amid the controversy.

But thanks to the Federal Election Commission, it is possible to put a price tag on the scandal in terms of dollars and cents: The Edwards campaign paid Marcotte and McEwan a total of $4,769.06 between Jan. 31 and Feb. 14.

The first payment of $1,769.06 went to Marcotte on Jan. 31 for "salary." Then on Feb. 14, two days after Marcotte had resigned and one day after McEwan had done so, each of the bloggers was paid $1,500 -- Marcotte for "consulting/Internet services" and McEwan for "consulting/events."

The language of campaign finance reports is often confusing, so I'm not sure why Marcotte was paid a salary the first time and referred to as a consultant in the second payment. I'm also unclear as to why they were paid after resigning their jobs, though presumably it was a payment for "time served" during the previous several days, a severance payment or some combination of the two.

I contacted the Edwards campaign by telephone and e-mail but have not received a response yet. I will post an update if the campaign gets back to me.

Posted by Danny at 12:38 PM | Comments (12)

As noted in Technology Daily this morning:

A handful of enterprising bloggers have been able to generate six-figure salaries from their sites, according to a recent study.

The Boston Globe reports that research conducted by PQ Media found that blog advertising became a $36.2 million marketplace in 2006 and could grow to $300 million in the next three years.

Even though blogging has become a lucrative business for some, experts said the majority of blogs are not designed to turn a profit.

"A lot of the blogosphere does not make sense if viewed from the point of view of a business model," said David Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. "Blogs remain, I believe, primarily conversational."

In other news, the Globe reports on college students who are being paid by their schools to blog about campus life.

Posted by Danny at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)

From McClatchy Newspapers:

Bloggers and activists are writing a new chapter in the marriage between Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein and husband Richard Blum.

Feinstein has real power. Blum has serious money. For 27 married years, the politician and the investor have excelled professionally while facing periodic queries about Blum's far-flung investments.

The latest round now comes powered by the Internet, fanned by activists on both right and left. The partisans find common cause in questioning Feinstein's role in Pentagon spending while Blum was investing in defense firms.

Critics have accused Feinstein of having a conflict of interest by serving through last year as chair and ranking member of the Senate's Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee at the same time that her husband had financial interests in two firms that rely on defense contracts.

Posted by Danny at 09:22 PM | Comments (0)

In the aftermath of the first blog scandal of Campaign 2008, Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise accused Republican bloggers of "scalping" her fellow feminists, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwan Of Shakespeare's Sister.

The scalping term surfaced again this week after CBS Radio fired shock jock Don Imus over allegedly racist and sexist comments he made about the Rutgers University women's basketball team. Jeff Jarvis of PrezVid wondered whether people need to be more forgiving of mistakes in an era of "ubiquitous video."

"[M]y fear is that as we see more of each other in ubiquitous video ubiquitously played, we will see more moments of humanity -- that is, screw-ups -- and so we need to decide, rationally, what deserves a scalping and what does not. And we should not be held at the hands of ransom demands from our publicity-crazed, self-appointed guardians of righteousness ... who will hold a press conference and demand a firing if they can get airtime or money out of it."

How true, how true -- and for the blogosphere, too.

In my years of blog-watching, I have been amazed at how quickly today's online watchdogs are to drop the f-word. I'm not talking about the one banned on the airwaves by the FCC; I'm talking about the one spelled f-i-r-e-d, or its face-saving sister, r-e-s-i-g-n. Nary a scandal, real or imagined, goes by without some blogger on the right or the left demanding that so-and-so resign or be fired if he refuses to go quietly.

As Jarvis said, sometimes it's justified. "Imus? Good riddance. Sen. George Allen? Bye-bye now. Trent Lott? He got his proper drubbing. Those are deserved departures from center stage. These public figures were caught at their worst, being themselves, and so they got their justice."

But every controversy does not warrant a firing or a resignation, and demanding as much runs counter to another goal of many bloggers: candor and transparency in politics.

"They will mess up. They will say something in an unguarded moment," Jarvis noted. "Yet we want them to be unguarded. We want them to be human. So when they are human and they do mess up, we can’t demand their scalp for every screw-up.

"We have to judge whether this was merely a mistake or whether it revealed a fatal flaw in their character. And we need to be make that judgment ourselves, not under the threat and deadline of the press-conference piranha. We cannot run politics and the nation by the tyranny of the gotcha moment."

Posted by Danny at 02:54 PM | Comments (0)

Here's a nifty concept: The presidential campaign of Republican Mitt Romney has launched a blog called Five Brothers that will feature content from the candidates five sons, Ben, Craig, Josh, Matt and Tagg.

Oh, and the candidate and his wife, Ann, also are listed as contributors. Each of the writers has separate subscription feeds, too, making it easier to tune out the actual candidate and instead read just what your favorite son has to say -- plenty about Dad, to be sure.

"The style of the blog will be fairly informal, according to the welcome entry. "Some of us will post a lot more regularly than the others, as three of us are working full time on the campaign while the other two are only able to help part-time. We are all married, so you might hear from our wives (maybe even our children) occasionally. We also hope our Mom and Dad will find some time between events to post."

Republican new media consultant offered this response: "They won’t really be able to say what always needs to be said, and they could take some of the comments more personally than they should. My hope ... is that they include senior advisers who can dig into the data of polls credibly, crunch fundraising numbers, and talk tech."

He also noted that "if you can believe this, Mitt is the first top-tier Republican candidate to have a blog. Finally."

Posted by Danny at 01:13 PM | Comments (1)

Reprinted with permission of National Journal magazine

By Kellie Lunney

Tom Regan feels like he has traded one dream job for another. The host of National Public Radio's soon-to-be-launched news blog commutes every week to Washington from Boston, where his wife and four children live.

Regan, married to Barbara Petzen, the new education director at the Middle East Policy Council, is a former, self-described "Mr. Mom." Before the NPR gig, he wrote the Christian Science Monitor's "Terrorism and Security" blog each day, until turning to domestic duties. "I can do laundry with the best of them," says Regan, who spent two years at home with his kids. "It was hard to give up."

This isn't NPR's first foray into the blogosphere, but Regan says that his blog will cover current events pegged to the daily news. "We are in severe tire-kicking stage," says the former Nieman journalism fellow of the rollout. "Every blog has to have that right voice."

Regan, 50, moved to the United States from his native Canada in 1994. An early advocate of online media, he helped the Halifax Daily News in Nova Scotia become the first newspaper to go online in Canada. He then went to the Christian Science Monitor, where he helped build that publication's Web site.

Regan enjoys the energy of online media. "Most who work in it and are interested in it are curious and innovators." As for what makes a winning blog, Regan cites quality writing, brevity and a good editor.

Posted by Danny at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)

Since his snide dismissal of bloggers as pajama-clad losers with no checks and balances in September 2004, Jonathan Klein has been the poster child for mainstream media cluelessness about the blogosphere. But as of this week, Klein has a challenger, and one with a much higher profile, for that dishonor.

In a speech to New York University journalism students, NBC Evening News anchor Brian Williams warned them of the future that awaits them in the field: "You're going to be up against people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe. All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I’m up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn’t left the efficiency apartment in two years."

Dean Barnett of Townhall, Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Dish and the folks at ThinkProgress are among the footsoldiers of the bathrobe brigade who have taken Williams to task for the comment.

"How unbelievably rich is that?" Barnett wrote. "Three years after Rathergate, this Catholic University drop-out still thinks the blogosphere consists of shut-in half-wits."

No word yet as to whether Pajamas Media will launch a new Bathrobe Communications division in response to the latest MSM dig against the blogosphere.

Posted by Danny at 09:26 AM | Comments (9)

From Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters:

The Democrats won majorities in both chambers of Congress in part by promising that they would change the way Congress conducts business, both in terms of ethics and productivity. Calling the Republican-led 109th a "Do-Nothing Congress", Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid promised more action, longer work weeks, and a blockbuster first 100 days.

How has that worked out? Not particularly well. The 110th has managed to get all of two bills passed into law by the end of their first 100 days:

-- H.J.Res.20 - Revised Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2007 (02/15/07)

-- NATO Freedom Consolidation Act of 2007 (04/10/07)

That's it -- one continuing appropriation and the NATO act. The continuing resolution was itself a leftover from the 109th Congress, about which the Democrats complained endlessly in the opening weeks of the 110th. At least it gave them something to do.

CQ readers might ask what previous Congresses did in their first 100 days. After all, each session requires some organizing efforts, committee assignments, lobbyist meetings, and the like. The Repubican-led 108th still managed to get a couple of more bills approved into law.

Click the link for more of The Captain's analysis.

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

Iraqi spokesman Ali Aldabbagh briefed conservative bloggers at the weekly blog briefing held by the Heritage Foundation.

Heritage's Rob Bluey recapped the briefing and linked to posts by other bloggers. He added this thought: "In retrospect, I wish I had recorded Aldabbagh’s answers on video. Anyone who can communicate as effectively as he can should seek ways to bypass the biased media and reach out to bloggers directly."

Here are more blog bits:

-- Republian new media consultant David All praised the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for the "messaging triangle" it has created, including a bloggers' conference call. All also has a roundup of links to an ongoing discussion about why Republicans lag behind Democrats in online fundraising.

-- Tech Daily Dose, the blog we publish at National Journal's Technology Daily, live-blogged last night's virtual town-hall with Democratic presidential candidates, which was hosted by MoveOn. We'll have fresh coverage in today's PM Edition.

-- Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, is afraid of the gun-toting, "rabid, rabid Republican" who lives across the street from her in North Carolina. That sounds like the perfect angle for a Libertarian discussion on BlogTalkRadio -- and it will air tonight, with the neighbor in question as the guest.

-- Smoking Politics and its sister show at BlogTalkRadio are new forums dedicated to challenging "the right's strategy of Fear and $mear."

-- This from Eric Alterman in The Nation: "The advent of the Internet -- particularly the blogosphere -- has changed [political punditry]. Now, not only are the things pundits say and write preserved for posterity, there are legions of folks who track pundit pronouncements, fact-check their statements and compare them with previous utterances on the same and similar topics. They also demand a degree of transparency about methods of inquiry and the reasoning behind conclusions drawn."

TalkLeft said bloggers need to take the lesson to heart: "I worry about the same type of process happening with the blogs. ... I hope we can avoid the logrolling nature that became, and still is, the MSM punditry. ... I do hope we can engage each other, disagree with each other, point out deficiencies in each others' arguments."

-- Matt Stoller at MyDD wonders, "Are Blogs The Broadsheets Of Labor?"

-- World Politics Watch has the scoop on Arab political blogs and how they are helping citizens "engage in sustained, focused political argument, and perhaps even hold national leaders to account," among other things.

-- The student newspaper at the University of Oregon thinks bloggers should be given a legal "shield" that will let them protect sources just as other journalists do. "It only makes sense, considering that online journalism is quickly outpacing the print medium," the paper said.

-- The traditional media's hatred of blogs runs so deep that even publications like Motor Trend magazine are not above taking shots at blogs. Columnist Ellen Goodman voiced similar complaints about blogs.

-- Here are two sound explanations of why newspaper blogs generally don't work: They " lack passion and enthusiasm -- two critical elements for successful blogs."

-- Why blog? Well, for one thing, it just might help you land a job.

Posted by Danny at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)

Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson isn't a presidential candidate yet, but the current actor on the "Law & Order" television series took one of the first steps toward that end this week: He posted a guest blog entry.

In the information age, presidential candidates have to pay their dues in the blogosphere just like they do on radio talk shows, daytime and late-night television, and every other forum where they can reach potential voters. Some do it by holding conference calls with bloggers and others by guest-blogging at popular sites.

So as Thompson ponders his entry into the race for the Republican nomination, it made sense for him to get online early. His venue of choice was RedState. His topic: Iran's ability to "kidnap British citizens, subject them to brutal psychological tactics to coerce phony confessions, finagle the release of a high-ranking Iranian terror coordinator in Iraq, utterly trash the Geneva conventions and suffer absolutely no consequences."

And his was no drive-by, feel-good entry, either. He tackled a heady, hot topic in a lengthy essay. The piece read more like an op-ed than a blog post -- and he won kudos for it.

The Hotline's Blogometer observed, "now that Thompson is blogging at RedState, we're convinced he's running," and also offered a roundup of reactions to his post.

Posted by Danny at 03:56 PM | Comments (0)

National blogs get all the big media attention, but local blogs continue to leave their political imprint in pockets across America. Kansas City, Kan., is the latest to see the impact of blogs. Here's the beginning of a report from The Kansas City Star:

In the campaign running up to the recent Kansas City election, candidates posted their schedules on Internet blogs. Some used blogs to respond to criticism. The winning candidate for mayor posted a video of his pet poodle. One City Council candidate used a blog to announce his plans to run as a write-in candidate. (He was later deemed to be ineligible.)

The Kansas City election brought a new animal to the local political circus -- the "blogosphere." Several candidates, including Mayor-elect Mark Funkhouser, had their own blogs, and others posted on a dozen other political blogs.

Not that blogs changed many of the election results. But this was a test run for blogs on the local level, and experts say they will only grow in importance.

Posted by Danny at 01:09 PM | Comments (0)

As reported in Technology Daily's "State Roundup" last week (while I was on spring break):

By Michael Martinez

A federal judge in Kentucky this week denied a motion to dismiss a lawsuit accusing the Republican administration of Gov. Ernie Fletcher of blocking state employees from a Democratic blog for political reasons.

U.S. District Judge Karen Caldwell has referred a lawsuit filed by Mark Nickolas, the author of the liberal BluegrassReport, to a federal magistrate. Nickolas sued the administration last summer after his blog was targeted by a Web-filtering initiative designed to improve the efficiency of state employees.

Fletcher aides said the blog was among a trove of sites that was blocked by a content-neutral filtering program. Nickolas, who managed the failed 2003 gubernatorial campaign of now-Rep. Ben Chandler, D-Ky., said he was censored and that his site was blocked the week after he was quoted in a front-page story in The New York Times about Fletcher being indicted in a hiring scandal.

"So much for all the predictions by Fletcher loyalists that the case would be dismissed," Nickolas wrote this week.

Mark Inman, the state's technology commissioner at the time the filtering initiative was implemented, told the Lexington Herald-Leader last month that officials in Fletcher's administration bragged to him about specifically blocking BluegrassReport. Inman, who was fired last year and replaced by Mark Rutledge, also told the newspaper that he heard Cabinet