April 19, 2006
The big boys are picking through the bones, sifting the flesh for the cause of death. By big boys I mean A-listers here in the blogosphere and the political world, the kind of people with single-name cachet. Gill. Lebkowsky. Trippi. Exley. Steele. Hynes. And by death, I mean the Kerry campaign...
June 8, 2005
I read Chris Nolan because she makes me think and she teases out subtleties that ordinarily might escape me. In The Man Behind the Curtain she takes Kos to task for promoting a future in which bloggers have all the exemptions of journalists and all the freedoms of partisan hacks: The...
May 31, 2005
Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo blog has spawned a group weblog experiment called TPM Café. Like other popular political community blogs such as Daily Kos, MyDD, and RedState.org, TPMCafe runs on Scoop. For more information about participating, see the site's Frequently Asked Questions....
March 28, 2005
Over at Personal Democracy Forum, Micah Sifry reviews Hugh Hewitt's book Blog (about the political blogosphere) and finds it useful but hopelessly biased toward the right. This shouldn't be surprising, given Hewitt's day job as a right-wing talk radio host, but it's still somewhat disconcerting given the misleadingly neutral-sounding title of...
March 24, 2005
In My Back Pages, billmon explains why he reopened the Whiskey Bar and what motivated his continued approach to blogging: So what are you supposed to do when high officials in your own government - in power, right now - brag publicly, if anonymously, about committing (or at least enabling) bestial...
February 8, 2005
The AARP now has a blog. Will the first black woman President of the United States keep a blog?...
February 2, 2005
Feel like snarking back at the president or celebrating the Iraqi franchise or critiquing the production values of the pageant? I'll be here: Join in a State of the Union BackChannel Chat, Tonight | Personal Democracy Forum (reblogged from The Power of Many: How to sit in the peanut gallery for...
January 18, 2005
Over at Civilities, Jon Garfunkel has done provided us all a useful service by partly transcribing and commenting on the recent Dave Winer interview of Joe Trippi that deals with Zephyr Teachout's take on the Dean campaign's hiring of Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas as consultants (Dissecting the Most Important Podcast...
January 11, 2005
Apparently reporting miscarriages to the proper authorities is not as popular as some may have supposed. I suspect we are going to see more and more of this type of people powered shut downs on really really stupid legislation in the future....
December 13, 2004
Quoting The bloggers in the Oval Office... (BuzzMachine): Omar and Mohammed just told me about their visit to the Oval Office this week. They said President Bush assured them that we would finish the job this time. They told the President that they were grateful for their liberation and that the...
December 7, 2004
I had this problem recently trying to post to Personal Democracy Forum from MarsEdit (the Ranchero application I use with NetNewsWire, my feedreader). James Walker has the solution (using drupal's blogapi with MarsEdit | walkah) - it involves selecting Movable Type instead of Drupal to get full category support....
November 13, 2004
in Freeing the facts, California Insider Dan Weintraub writes: This NY Times piece on the role of blogs in fanning, and then debunking, stories of fraud in the presidential vote carries at least a mildly handwringing tone, as if somehow this turn of events was unfortunate. I disagree....
November 2, 2004
Brian Reich examines the role of Markos Moulitsas Zúniga in the current election cycle: Mike Krempasky, one of three founders of www.RedState.org, a conservative community blog that was formed, at least in part, as an opposition to The Daily Kos, says the opportunities that Kos has created will actually benefit others...
As if I didn't already have enough places to post blog entries, I've recently become a contributing editor at Personal Democracy Forum where the staff is furiously blogging the election all day, particularly looking for technology related angles. We'll be watching the buzz, the pollwatchers, the chatter coming from social media...
October 21, 2004
A letter from a city councilmember running for mayor of LA to an anonymous blogger (4th Floor Blog) has convinced her to shut down her blog (via Martini Republic and LA Observed). Here's part of the letter: I appreciate the opportunity to respond to your comments, no matter how misguided and...
October 20, 2004
At Watermark, Sharon Brogan notices that some bloggers are pointedly eschewing politics i nthe runup to the election, and she asks her readers for guidance on whether they prefer a blog that focuses on some core areas of knowledge or one that ranges over a wide variety of topics, including political...
September 24, 2004
At meta-roj blog, roj has done a good job of tracking down the Swift Vet's blog-spam tactics: meta-roj blog: BLOGSPAMMER ID: Swift Boat Veterans For Truth In other news, been kind of quiet around here lately.... My energy has been going into The Power of Many and most of my other...
September 13, 2004
Interesting comparison of the "less-sticky" right wing of the political blogosphere: MyDD :: Top-Down Right-Wing Blogosphere Growing Powerful...
August 19, 2004
One thing I heard a lot in Boston during the DNC was people telling me sotto voce that they or their staff or someone on their team or "everyone here" reads blogs. I was told by one Senate committee staffer that they have a person in their office monitoring relevant blogs...
July 27, 2004
It's unbeliveable to me that at CNN they're complaining that the Democrats still don't have a clear vision. WHAT!? They spent all their attention to Barak but obviously not on TERESA. Teresa [teh-REH-za] Heinz just proved to us why we should vote for her. Yes, contrary to the pundits on CNN...
Bem vinda, Teresa! Nós te recebemos com braços abertos Just ponder this one out : If Kerry wins, Teresa Heinz will be the first African-American official First Lady of the United States. Ponder that one. Christopher Heinz is going places ... The man is hot. And is funny, too! An almost...
In a moment ripped off from empty-handed.com: HAW HAW HAW, Liza Sabater here blogging the convention from my smoothie and cookie encrusted sofa. Actually, not. I am here, sitting in front of my trusty Mac, Lola. Yesterday I missed the two most important speeches of the evening because, yes people, I...
July 23, 2004
Daily Kos || Blogger mania: One reporter asked Jerome of MyDD what he would be covering at the convention. Jerome replied, "I'll be writing about you writing about me." It's getting to be that absurd. (Posted from BlogOn, day 2)...
July 22, 2004
Atrios says he'll be there too. Maybe I'll learn his secret identity Posted while at BlogON......
June 4, 2004
Two interesting things happened at last week's panel on censorship that had me pondering the importance of these events: Take a paycheck, lose your freedom of speech At one point, Monica Crowley, a Republican wonkette, complained about how the lack of uniform standards was affecting her choice of words on...
May 24, 2004
One of the interesting perks I am getting out of being an oft read blogger is that, as an influence maker, I am getting invited to all sorts of events. That is the case today at THE WEEK panel discussion : Censorship of Common Decency? The Backlash Against Media Excess....
May 19, 2004
Note : I posted this first at the typepadistas directory Shelly Powers of Burningbird hits it over the head once again with her comment about social class, the MT debacle and social software scientists (and makers). Her post, I believe, sums up the lack of distinctions when speaking of social ...
May 8, 2004
Dave Neiwert finds the media wanting and writes a must read manifesto. -- The revolution also will demand certain legislative and structural changes that will break up the monoculturalization of the media and return it to its former diversity and openness. Foremost among these is the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine....
March 12, 2004
The Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk blog recently ran an interesting article treading that familiar territory of comparing the abundance of public-minded outspoken masculine weblogs with the paucity of famous political blogs by women. The author of The Blogosphere: Boys 'n' Their Toys (even the title is reminiscent of the title...
February 16, 2004
The John Kerry for President Blog now features an aggregrator page listing recent blog and news items that mention Kerry. [via Scripting News]...
February 11, 2004
At his new Change for America website, Joe Trippi has started a blog. Just one post so far ("Still in the fight") with 127 comments last time I checked....
February 4, 2004
The Rude Pundit is shockingly right about everything! (via The Little Teapot)....
January 19, 2004
Scott Rosenberg announced the new War Room '04 section of Salon, using a weblog format and incorporating contributions from across Salon's staff. It's not part of the Salon blog community in terms of rankings or updates, and it doesn't (yet) appear to have an RSS feed, but it's still a fairly...
November 25, 2003
Now, I'm still super-skeptical of the actual impact that blogs will have on the presidential election, or politics in general, but the new blog run by Matt Stoller, Jay Rosen, and Christopher Lydon, The Blogging Of The President: 2004, looks like it'll be worth watching. True, Lydon has drunk deep of...
November 19, 2003
Leading left blogger Kos says, in Bloggers at DNC convention: There is interest amongst individuals inside Democratic Party circles to do something special for bloggers at the Democratic Party convention. He invites suggestions about how bloggers can participate in the convention, beyond simply getting press passes. One suggestion from the comment...
In order to help the DeanSpace people document their software package for would-be site developers, I figured it was necessary to, like, actually use the software myself. I got a domain name from sites.fordean.net and free hosting from Bruce Forkush, logged in as admin, and started flipping some switches and voila!...
November 10, 2003
Tom Coates writes about the political compass postings that have been meme-ing their way through the blogosphere lately. I know I took the test and posted my results here sometime, but I'd have to use my search feature to find it, or take the test again to see if I've drifted...
Clark Campaign to Debut Big Blog The presidential campaign of Wesley Clark understands the power of blogs. That's why the candidate will debut a big community site that centralizes the personal blogs of his supporters and offers grassroots tools. By Chris Ulbrich. [Wired News] I'd say I'm really excited about this,...
November 5, 2003
This sounds like a job for feedster: Chris Lydon wants us all to write The Blogging of the President. [Joho the Blog]...
November 4, 2003
Visiting the DNC, Franken apparently dictated an entry for the Kicking Ass weblog. I'd read a real Al Franken weblog, if he had the time to write it. Hell, Bill Maher and Margaret Cho do....
October 30, 2003
According to Tom Tomorrow, Neal Pollack is declaring this coming Tuesday (November 4, I believe, "Luskin is a stalker" day. Oh, and Tom (or whomever maintains your blog for you), your RSS feed stalled out some time in September....
October 29, 2003
I'm too busy this week to keep up with all the juicy weblog gossip and topics du jour, so I'll just point you to Rogers Cadenhead's coverage at his Workbench blog of this emerging story: Atrios, the pseudonymous publisher of the liberal political weblog Eschaton, has been contacted by the attorney...
October 28, 2003
So much for downtime. My FrontPage book is in the can (but still needs a website), and the revision of my Dreamweaver book proceeds a pace, ably handled for the most part by my new coauthor, Lucinda Dykes. My next major project is more than a month a away. Mostly I've...
October 17, 2003
My aggregrator was filled this morning with discussions of blogging outages across the political spectrum (from right-wing to far-right-wing... just kidding), starting with CalPundit and on down. Dean Esmay had the scoop as far as I could tell. Metafilter now has this summary: Last night Hosting Matters (and their related resellers)...
October 3, 2003
One of the students in my weblogs class at Seybold last month was the web administrator of the Community Technology Foundation of California (zerodivide.org). They use a sophisticated CMS to maintain the site but are experimenting with weblogs and wanted to see whether they might be more easily customizable, because -...
September 30, 2003
Billmon think's truly pathetic that journalists are getting their background on the Plame Affair from blogs, but one of his commenters points out that its the journalists who aren't reading blogs who are harder to understand. It's a great thread, not least because it includes this rewrite of Shakespeare by "Monica":...
September 28, 2003
Mike Kasper from EdwardsforPrez.com (an unofficial Edwards-supporter site) followed up my comment from a few days ago about John Edwards writing some of his own blog entries. I compared his first efforts to cat-blogging, in the sense of journal- or diaristic entries. I actually think that's a good place to start...
September 25, 2003
Reading John Robb, I saw that John Edwards is now posting some entries directly to his campaign blog. No links out (not suprising) and mostly cat-blogging type diary stuff, but it's a start....
September 17, 2003
The Democratic National Committee has started a blog called Kicking Ass at the democrats.org site. I guess it beats faxing the talking points around, and I like the way they've jumped in with both feet. There's no calendar or forward-and-back links from individually archived entries, so I can't tell when the...
September 10, 2003
Well, I was sitting next to Ross Mayfield and across from Tim Bray in the speaker's lounge at Seybold when they told us that a bomb threat had been called in to Moscone North and South (where the Oracle conference is taking place) so just to be safe they asked us...
September 7, 2003
This Boston.com article (A hired gun who muses with fingertips) profiles Matt Gross, who first proposed to the Dean campaign that they should enliven their official web presence with a weblog. Incidentally, the Dean campaign if looking for a sysadmin (with a well specified skillset) willing to move to Burlington, VT,...
August 4, 2003
As noted in Art of the Possible (The Cluetrain Candidate), David Weinberger, the author, academic, and consultant behind JOHO the Blog and such influential volumes as The Cluetrain Manifesto (coauthor) and Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, has endorsed Howard Dean and formally joined his campaign staff as a senior adviser....
June 28, 2003
Billmon, whose list of WMD-related quotations posted to his Whiskey Bar blog rocketed around the political web a month or so ago has tracked down a series of quotations from Senate leader Bill Frist that seem to contradict his more recent take on the reason we went to war with Iraq....
June 23, 2003
Instead of accusing the governing U.S. and U.K. executive administrations of misleading, exaggerating, or even lying to the public about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, I'd rather stipulate to their existence, especially the chem and bio weapons that western countries helped him develop. I have another question entirely: Where are they?...
June 21, 2003
The loathsome, overblown, mendacious bullying TV host Bill O'Reilly has grabbed a tiger by the tail by using his mass-broadcast media pulpit to castigate the Internet. Bloggers of all stripes bite back....
June 12, 2003
Is evil Tom DeLay the inspiration for Hank Hill's neighbor Dale Gribble on King of the Hill?...
June 5, 2003
Orcinus hits the nail on the head (again). He was writing a while back about how Christian extremist terrorists in the U.S. are described as lone nuts or wackos and not identified as terrorists by the FBI or Justice Department. They are always treated as exceptional. I really don't see the...
May 13, 2003
Someone on the Well just pointed me to Katrina vanden Heuvel's blog. They've got RSS feeds too....
April 1, 2003
Looks like the next blogger celebrity deathmatch (after Cory vs. Pirillo) is going to have to be o-dub vs. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs. In an odd echo of the Anil vs. LFGers squabble from last year (also involving MSN's blogspotting site), a new war of words is escalating ("I'm...
March 31, 2003
Has everyone on the planet seen the morans picture by now?...
March 24, 2003
. A little late in the game, I find a link to Cronus Connections' A Warmonger Educates a Peacenik. Will Instapundit be linking to this (or has he already)? I wonder.An excerpt:Peacenik: Why are we invading Iraq?Warmonger: For the last time, we are invading Iraq because the world has called on...
From the left (and from John Perry Barlow, recently) I keep hearing about how the U.S. and NATO use depleted uranium in their weapons, putting Iraqis (and others) at risk of radiation poisoning or genetic abnormalities. I also seem to recall scoffing at this or "debunking" of the danger from the...
March 20, 2003
Instapundit has his doubts about the identify of Raed. His comments prompted me to echo him, though: These are very interesting posts, but the question isn't so much is Glenn real, or in Tennessee. It's whether he's really an ordinary American as he claims, or something else (conceivably, on either side)....
March 11, 2003
Dismayed at D-squared's removal of his Shorten Den Beste post that finally provoked a response from the man's reader-fans, The Poor Man offered a series of amusing Shorters, nailing himself in the process. The Chomsky one ("Shorter Noam Chomsky: Whatever someone said recently is pretty rich, considering East Timor"), which I...
March 4, 2003
Too much work, constant deadlines, and a general disgust with the state of geopolitics has made me reduce my reading of the media to a bare minimum. It's too easy to get stressed out and crazy from the barrage of propaganda, lies, and distorted truths in the mediasphere. Blogs are no...
February 20, 2003
The Bush Crime Family meme I've seen bandied about on the Well and elsewhere has spawned a comic at the Village Voice, The Bushopranos.Where are those humorless lefties when you need them? This cartoon fights the Bush restoration/rematch narrative that put their team within striking distance of the prize with a...
February 8, 2003
Check out the excellent work at Is That Legal? covering the Howard Coble story. Coble, who you may recall was opposed for reelection by blogger Tara Sue Grubb recently stated that the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II was done for their own good. This is the man in...
February 6, 2003
Like father, like son. This graphic published in Yahoo! News - Politics yesterday speaks volumes:...
January 31, 2003
Says Kurt Vonnegut, in this short interview from In These Times: "I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers."...
January 29, 2003
I'm no fan of the Nation Review, but this Jonah Goldberg image cracked me up: (In case you want to test the query, yes, it's fake, but it's still hilarious.)...
January 27, 2003
San Francisco based film maker and photographer Bijan Yashar will be projecting George W. Bush's State of the Union address in real time onto the wall of the Shell Station at Market and Sanchez. He will filter the live speech through a camera utilizing extreme and shifting angles to "reveal implicit...
Matthew Riemer, writing in YellowTimes.org, debunks the notion that criticism of American foreign policy is inherently anti-American....
January 15, 2003
I was just musing on how the right in this country has succeeded at presenting their views in the most poll-tested appealing ways possible, and still they are alienating more than half the population with their agenda items in many areas, especially outside of the multi-front effort against terrorism (which was...
December 29, 2002
From a letter in the business section of today's Sunday (S.F.) Chronicle thanking columnist David Lazarus for bringing out SBC Pacbell's process for obtaining permission (or making it difficult for you to withhold permission) for sharing your personal information. Rather than suffering through a phone-tree thicket, go directly to http://sbc-pacbell.com/rescpni to...
December 11, 2002
Justice a la Ashcroft. The way the prosecutions of John Muhammad and John Lee Malvo are being handled can give us some good insight into what John Ashcroft considers "appropriate" in a criminal case. While it's certainly understandable that Ashcroft, and much of the public, want to see Muhammad and Malvo...
Total Information Awareness.. Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans By JOHN MARKOFF The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe … including the United...
November 22, 2002
The Well is a private conferencing system, its "current" topic notoriously incivil, and yet there's been a great discussion there lately, with a frank exchange of a wide range of views about geopolitics today and the war on terror, and litttle patience for unexamined truisms. Since I only "own my own...
November 6, 2002
Sullivan calls the election an endorsement of the tax cut. I guess even when his team is winning the spin never ends: In his Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan slips in "...for the tax cuts" as presumably one of the motivating factors that led the electorate to give Bush both houses of...