Blue Spot

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In a year where Obama has made some progress picking up evangelical support, and has tried to show how important his own faith is to him, comments like these from his loyal subjects at Daily Kos are sure not going to help him. This barrage came after a well worded critique by a blogger called Newton Snookers of what he perceived as a slap in the face to progressive Christians by Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

Labels: Cultural issues, Kos, Netroots

h/t NewHampster

The thought of Democrats "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" was finally put to rest in 2006. Or so we thought. Lately, the snarky liberals around the blogosphere at such classy sites like Daily Kos, are trying to prove they can still give elections away.

All the latest attacks aimed at McCain's VP pick, Sarah Palin , are just serving to galvanize Republicans and I predict you will soon see many independents rallying around her.

Online communities such as Daily Kos, which was once a place where diversity was tolerated and was packed with thoughtful, objective, likable progressives, have become colonies for lewd, self-absorbed, mean-spirited, narcissists. They have adopted the tactics used by right-wing operatives and advocacy groups.

Everybody was happy to see the CNN show "Crossfire" finally put to rest. What we see online is a cyber version of this show. I realize that I have been part of the problem in the past and i vow to be more balanced in the future. I started doing this for myself, to document the abuses of the Bush administration and his cronies. But this hobby or for many, profession, has evolved into what Dick Meyer (Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium) calls a "permanent campaign."

The recent Democratic nomination process has highlighted some ugly facts about my party. Some will say and use the most vile and juvenile tactics to win. They will even attempt to destroy one of their own to get what they want and their friends in the MSM will co-operate (think Olbermann, Shuster, Matthews, Mitchell, Todd, Roland Martin, Brazille, Cooper). This is incredibly disappointing, and I will not support this.

Labels: Clueless Pundits, Gov. Sarah Palin, Hillary-haters, Internet, Kos, Liberals, Media bias, Netroots, Obama, personal attacks - mudslingling, supporters

Blogfather sees Netroots' growing clout - Mike Allen - Politico.com

AUSTIN, Texas — Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the Daily Kos political blog, told a huge annual gathering of online activists that they have shown their power and must continue pushing Democratic politicians to remain progressive.

"We’re not still at capacity — we’re not at our peak,” Moulitsas said to applause from the crowd of just over 2,000 at the Austin Convention Center. “We’re the mainstream. … What we really don’t like are Democrats who are afraid to be Democrats.”

“It’s been about four years — but in blog years, it’s like three millennia,” he said. “Remember, when I started Daily Kos, and when so many of you were starting your blogs and looking for information, about 2002, there was no strong, unapologetic, muscular, progressive voices in the media landscape. …

“God knows, if you’re a conservative, you’ve got a whole buffet to choose from. But if you were a strong progressive, you had nothing. So I started Daily Kos not because I had a grand vision, but because I was frustrated with the way my politics were going. And I found out very, very quickly that there was a lot of people like me — all over the country, also frustrated.

“And I know conservatives hate to hear this, but when people ask why Daily Kos was successful and why the blogosphere has grown the way it is, it is because there’s a market niche.”

Moulitsas said the progressives are “going to win again in 2008.”

“We’re not looking for ideological purity,” he continued. “Whether they’re opportunity or they’re investing in our country — whatever those values are, those are American values. They’re not left, right, center — they’re American values. And we’ve abandoned them out of fear, and we’ve got to stop doing that.”

Moulitsas drew hearty applause when he warned: “In 2010, we’re going to have some Democrats we’re going to pay some visits to in some primaries. … Too many Democrats in D.C. have lost touch. ...

“They still think this is a conservative country. And therefore, we’re going to have to remind them. And this is very helpful for them — we’re doing it for their own good. They’re going to realize that they can actually be who they want to be, because the people are ready for a progressive America.”

I have to say that I agree with much of what the DKos community stands for. I just hate the behaviour of the community in general. Their juvenile, vile attitude was a real turn-off during the primaries. However, generally speaking I agree with their principles.

But if you just take a step back and take your progressive shoes off for just a moment, that last quote from Markos just seems like a mirror-image of what conservatives are always spewing. I think what America is really ready for is an end to all the bickering from both sides. This is why the middle (and there is a middle folks) is going to play such a big role in this election.

Maybe Markos can say that he's not looking for "ideological purity," but the people that make up a large part of his community sure are. And we we quickly found out during the nomination process that there is no longer any tolerance for moderate views in the left-wing blogosphere. The slightest hint of bi-partisanship and your labeled a traitor. Ford's treatment at Netroots Nation is a perfect example. During a Q & A session that followed, a questioner called Ford a right wing shill and attacked him for working at Fox News as an analyst. These people are equivalent to the Right-winger who attacked McCain for not being conservative enough. If Obama had taken some of his recent positions during the campaign against Hillary, the netroots would not have supported him the way they did. Mainstream! I don't think so.

Labels: Kos, Netroots

Netroots Try to Label Fox News as Opinion - The Caucus - Politics - New York Times Blog

It may be the blogosphere’s equivalent of the scarlet letter, and the organizers of Netroots Nation, a gathering of liberal bloggers that is taking place this week, say they will be more than happy to pin it on Fox News.

Planners of the conference want to force representatives of the cable news network to wear credentials identifying them as opinion media rather than providing them with the regular press passes other news outlets will receive.

“Fox News calls itself fair and balanced, but it’s not,” Josh Orton, political director for Netroots said in an interview. He accused the network, which is popular among conservatives, of misrepresenting itself.
The Netroots, however, may not get their way.

A spokeswoman for Fox News said the network would not be sending anyone to cover the four-day conference that kicked off in Austin, Texas, on Thursday.

But if anyone from the network shows up, Mr. Orton said they would have to wear a press pass with the words “Opinion Media” printed on it. The credential would not restrict Fox’s ability to cover the conference, but Mr. Orton said that journalists from other media organizations like Air America, the liberal radio network, and the National Review, a conservative journal, would receive regular credentials. The difference, Mr. Orton said, is that those outlets are “explicitly progressive or explicitly conservative. They don’t have a branding problem.”

Fox News has long been a lightning rod for liberal criticism, especially in the opinion-charged world of blogs, and the move by organizers to, as they put it, re-brand Fox News is just another sign of continuing friction. The idea to label Fox journalists as opinion media is, in fact, not a new one. It’s been tossed around on blogs, and MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann also floated the idea on his show last summer.

I totally agree with this, but while we're at it, can we give the same "opinion media" passes to Keith Olbermann and Chris Mathews?

Labels: Fox propaganda, Media, Media bias, Netroots, Olbermann

Netroots feel jilted by Obama's FISA stand - Carrie Budoff Brown - Politico.com

When former Sen. John Edwards dropped out of the presidential race, the progressive Netroots took their affections to Barack Obama, defending him against attack from Hillary Rodham Clinton and others.

But with his support of a government surveillance bill that offers retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies — a bill that he vowed last year to filibuster — the honeymoon has ended.

Disappointed over his position on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the online activists feel jilted and betrayed and have taken to questioning his progressive credentials. One prominent blogger, Atrios, has even given him the moniker “Wanker of the Day.”

“He broke faith,” said Matt Stoller, a political consultant and blogger at OpenLeft.com. “Obama pledged to filibuster, and he is part of that old politics, in this case, that he said he wasn’t. It will spur us to challenge him.”

The FISA debate marks the presumptive Democratic nominee’s first serious break from the liberal Netroots in the general election. He is still their candidate, but the FISA issue has reignited skepticism among major bloggers, who had largely pushed aside doubts about Obama when Edwards, their favored candidate, ended his bid in February.

Obama’s post-partisan persona hasn’t always meshed so well with the noisy and contentious Netroots, and his rise to prominence has come without their full-throated support. He told reporters in February that he doesn’t read blogs and has long been viewed as cool to the Netroots — a notion that the candidate’s new media director, Joe Rospars, disputed this week at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, saying Obama was a favorite of the readers of the major bloggers.

Either way, the Netroots eventually took Obama’s side against Clinton, and some came to view him as a champion of progressive causes.

His stance on the FISA bill, however, has brought Obama back down to earth, in part because the liberal blogosphere cares more about civil liberties than many of the other traditional issues that have long dominated the Democratic agenda. While the mainstream media fixated on Obama’s decision to opt out of the public financing system — and newspaper editorial boards eviscerated him — the Netroots commended Obama for showing political savvy. After all, the readers of liberal blogs are many of the small donors who gave Obama reason to reject public financing.

FISA, however, was different. Many of the most popular progressive blogs built their following by mining anger toward President Bush, the Iraq war and what bloggers view as his disregard of the Constitution and the civil liberties guaranteed by it. By granting immunity to telecom companies, civil courts will likely dismiss lawsuits that might unearth details about the administration’s activities, eliminating an opportunity to hold Bush accountable.

“It angers the blogosphere to its core,” said Jane Hamsher, founder of the popular blog Firedoglake.com. “We want to be able to know: What did you do? If we can get that information, we can make sure they don’t do that again. We can get the public engaged.”

Obama’s decision to support the bill with the immunity provision was not surprising, she said. Republicans frame critics of such security measures as soft on terrorism, and the presumptive Democratic nominee probably does not want it used against him.

“[A] lot of people tried to convince themselves that he was a progressive hero, and I think they were disappointed,” Hamsher said. “You can feel a real shift in the zeitgeist online.”

Still, the disillusionment goes only so far. The liberal blogosphere’s most recognizable name, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of Daily Kos, said Monday on MSNBC’s “Countdown With Keith Olbermann”: “Let’s be honest, it is either Obama or John McCain. So we really don’t have much of a choice.”

Of course, the choice could have been between Clinton and Obama, but the idiots above did everything they could to destroy that opportunity. I think the words "I told you so" or "buyer's remorse" seem to be appropriate here.

Labels: Netroots, Obama

PolitiFact | Not the Clinton you think

A month ago, the editors of the Utica (N.Y.) Observer-Dispatch saw a sudden spike in Web readership for stories about the Rev. William Procanick, pastor of a local church who had been convicted of sexually abusing a child.

A story about Procanick was the upstate New York newspaper's No. 1 story in April, with 10 times the readership of the second-highest story. The paper's editors wouldn't expect such a story to generate so much interest, but Procanick's church was in a little-known town with a well-known name: Clinton.

In headlines and stories, Procanick was identified simply as "Clinton pastor."

For some supporters of Barack Obama, including one who posted an item on an official Obama campaign blog, that was an easy recipe for outrage. After seeing their candidate battered over his connection with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the phrase "Clinton pastor" was all they needed to conclude that Bill and Hillary Clinton's pastor was a convicted sex offender.

Never mind that Bill and Hillary don't attend Procanick's church, which is 225 miles from their home in Chappaqua, N.Y. And never mind that the Observer-Dispatch's stories never suggested any connection between the Clinton pastor and the political Clintons. In the lightning-fast world of the blogosphere, emotions often outrun the facts.

"Okay, so now that Bill and Hillary Clinton's pastor has been convicted of child molestation, will we see the same furor directed at Hillary that Obama has had to endure these last few weeks? I don't think so!!!!" said a chain e-mail that was sent to PolitiFact and pasted on blogs.

Similar postings have appeared a blog called "Black Love is Alive," in a comment on the National Journal blog "Hotline on Call," and even on a motorcycle blog called "The Sportbike Network," under the headline "Billary's preacher is now a convicted pedophile."

On My.BarackObama.com, the Obama campaign's official blog, Shemora Singletary of Columbus, Ohio, posted an item April 25, 2008, that was headlined "Clinton's former pastor convicted of child molestation."

Singletary, a volunteer blogger on the site with the nickname "Knowledge Seeker," groused that the media hasn't paid enough attention to the episode involving the Clinton pastor.
"Will this story get the press that Rev. Wright is getting?? And will the Clinton's have to answer for the character of this man??" she wrote.

She posted an article from the Utica paper and this postscript: "Now that Obama's lynching has gone off as planned, think the MSM (mainstream media) will run this story about Clinton's former pastor? Or would that upset the planned election of either Israeli-firster Hillary vs. Israeli-firster McCain?"

Singletary's posting drew two comments that said she was wrong. She acknowledged one of those comments but did nothing to correct or retract the inaccurate posting.

Singletary could not be reached for comment.

Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, said that the posting was not authorized by the campaign and that it was removed Wednesday morning after PolitiFact inquired about it. But it had been on the Obama site for nearly three weeks.

“This is one of more than 800,000 user-generated pages. It’s like a comment on your blog," Vietor said. "And it’s been taken down."

The posting was on a campaign blog created by volunteers who support Obama, but it's not always clear where an official Web site ends and the blog begins. The Obama blog has the same logo, candidate photo and quotation ("I'm asking you to believe . . .") as the regular campaign site. The only thing to distinguish it from the rest of the site is a headline that says "Community Blogs."

It has no disclaimer to indicate the messages may not be authorized by the campaign. To the contrary, at the bottom of the page it says "PAID FOR BY OBAMA FOR AMERICA."

(Since the campaign removed the page, we have preserved the original posting here.)

Labels: Hillary-haters, Netroots, Obama supporters

Labels: Fox propaganda, Media, Netroots, Obama, Obama supporters

Lord Kos melts down | Corrente Over at Corrente, Lambert has an excellent take on the hypocricy of Markos Moulitsas.

Labels: Internet, Kos, Netroots

Media: The Netroots Responds

On Monday night, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly aired a segment full of misleading, inaccurate claims attacking the upcoming YearlyKos blogger convention, its namesake DailyKos, and one of the event's sponsors, JetBlue. In his "report," O'Reilly cherry-picked an extreme minority of reader comments and diaries from the hundreds of thousands on DailyKos, claiming them to be representative of the community website and the greater netroots movement that will be gathering in Chicago from Aug. 2-5, 2007 for the progressive convention. Calling the netroots "the radical left" and DailyKos "hatemongerers" like "the Ku Klux Klan" and "the Nazi Party," O'Reilly compared YearlyKos to "a David Duke convention," calling it "one of the worst examples of hatred America has to offer." O'Reilly's segment, which has been latched onto by his ideological allies in the conservative blogosphere, is an attempt to discredit a movement that "each day" is having "more impact" on America's political discourse while "helping to renew our democracy." O'Reilly's pre-emptive attack on the convention is a testament to the fact that the netroots are not a "nutroots" fringe movement as critics would like to characterize it, but rather a snapshot of energized progressive activists agitating for change in America.

MYTH OF THE 'CRUDE,' 'ANGRY,' 'CRASS' FRINGE: The shoddy journalism of O'Reilly's YearlyKos hit piece is not the first time the progressive blogosphere has been the target of disingenuous attacks labeling it "the radical left." After several Democratic presidential candidates backed out of Fox News's debates due to the news channel's ideological bent, O'Reilly attacked the grassroots activists who agitated for the pullout, calling them a "radical movement" that uses "propaganda techniques perfected by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of information." Searching through two years of Washington Post articles, media writer Eric Boehlert could find just one profile of a progressive blogger. The article -- "The Left, Online and Outraged" -- portrays My Left Wing blogger Maryscott O'Conner as "a Bush-hating lunatic," using such key phrases as "angry," "rage," "fury," "angriest," "outrage," "crude," "loud," "crass," "inflammatory,""attack." As Boehlert notes, the Post's profile of prominent conservative blogger Michelle Malkin was "a Valentine's Day week mash note, presenting Malkin as a pugnacious, on-the-rise pundit who has her liberal critics up in arms." In reality though, the image of progressive bloggers as "unhinged," as Malkin describes them, is just a myth. The make up and politics of the netroots are actually quite mainstream.

By the way, here are some comments from Michelle Malkin's site:
On July 16th, 2007 at 6:23 pm, CruisersChicklet said:
Can’t you just see a Dem sleepover? Playing “Light As A Feather, Stiff As A Board” while Teddy-boy tries to steal bras to soak and then put in the freezer.. ugh!

On July 16th, 2007 at 6:24 pm, Rick Moran said:
I will tell you what is absolutely pathetically ironic about this.
Yeah, Reid is a grandstanding moron with the brains of a marmoset and the ethics of a hamstser. But this all nighter he’s planning proves a very important point.

On July 12th, 2007 at 10:41 am, freaksloan said:
Mr. Boehner is being too nice. Put a mic in front of me, and let me tell you what I think about these Rino’s. Mr. Voinovich here is Ohio is a total moron and doesn’t have the mental capacity to understand the threat we are under. If I ever come face to face with this Ohio Rino he will get more than just being called a Wimp.

On July 12th, 2007 at 2:02 pm, johnv40 said:
When is that old gasbag Helen Thomas going to retire? David Gregory is a disrespectful S.O.B

On July 18th, 2007 at 8:50 am, Independent Conservative said:
In addition to prosecuting and deporting criminal illegal aliens, several measures have to be taken to ensure the security of this nation:

1 - Put a limit on all kinds of visas. Entrance to the U.S.A. must be controlled. Legal Immigration shouldn’t be as easy as it is right now.
2 - Visas shouldn’t be easily granted to Muslims. And better if they weren’t granted at all. Let’s be blunt here. Yes, the State Department with the help of the FBI/CIA can find out who is Muslim and who is not.
3 - All borders must be completely sealed.
4 - The Muslims living in this country have to be monitored and investigated, all of them.

From Little Green Footballs:
itellu3times 7/18/2007 11:41:57 am PDT reply quote
re: #64 00buckshot

Chelseal Clinton asked if, as an American fighting man, anything scared him.
He told her there were only three things he feared:
1) Osama
2) Obama
3) Yo Mama

From Powerline:
Posted: 15 July 2007 06:47 PM [ ] [ # 22 ]
B. Goldwater

Total Posts: 2948
Joined 2007-03-24 Q. What’s the difference between Michael Moore and a one ton CARE package?
A. Michael Moore, if sliced real thin, can feed a larger Afghan village.

Signature
Muslim jihadists, posing as American libs and dems use web forums in a weak attempt to sow hatred and dissent amongst us Nanat sag suk mizaneh!

“To ERR is human, to FORGIVE divine. HOWEVER, neither is Marine Corps Policy.”


Well...that's all I could find in five minutes, but you get the point.

Labels: Fox propaganda, Netroots, YearlyKos

An unprecedented forum featuring potential 2008 presidential candidates will be held during the second annual YearlyKos Convention on August 4th in Chicago. The forum is an opportunity to use technology to empower regular citizens and grassroots activists to engage, vet and evaluate America’s potential leaders, both face-to-face and online.

read more | digg story

Labels: Election 2008, Netroots