The AP is clueless

Read up on the boycott here

A well deserved bitch slap

Damn that felt good.

No more leverage

Good piece at Open Left explaining why the blogosphere has pretty much lost its ability to be of further influence in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Best of the best

Have you voted for your favorite woman blogger yet?  Many good choices here…

Vote.

When wingnuts attack

It seems my friend Joe has been called out for not being reliably conservative, this time by my long time friend and former co-blogger Mick Stockinger.

There’s a lot of room to argue about this sort of thing when Tom Delay and Trent Lott represent the right, and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid the left, but even on that scale, I’m comfortable within the Blue Dog zone, and that’s probably where I belong. Still, I understand completely why my key card to the conservative circle of trust has been revoked, after all, in the very post Mick links to, my advice to Republicans was:

Off with you all, now. Put your thinking caps on, buy a good pair of sandals and a sturdy robe, and start to grow your beards. We’ll check back in with you in eight years or so.

Well, let’s put it in simple terms.  Joe is capable of independent thought, and is looking to advance specific policies rather than a political party or platform.

Mick is a nice guy and I say that even though we no longer blog together.  But sometime over the last few years he’s lost what attracted me to his writings in the first place - objectivity and  an uncommon perceptiveness of people and events.

The sad reality is some people are simply unwilling to recognize what has happened during the Bush administration, and what its effects on conservatism in the US have been.  When people like Joe and John Cole, who are neither liberal nor progressive, are flocking to the Democratic Party, something is rotten in the state of the GOP.

We approach 2008 election with democratic candidates who are imperfect, but are clearly a cut above the GOP offerings - a party which controlled Congress for most of Bush’s presidency and stood by holding the lube while the administration proceeded to rape the Constitution.

I am proud to consider people like Joe and John my friends - as well as others who are concerned about what these last eight years have wrought and how to restore the balance of power in Washington.

Pot meets kettle

Ed Cone does a great job with Michael Skube’s anti blog hatchet job.

I called Michael Skube to learn more about his outlook on blogs, and verified that he knows very little about blogs and bloggers, and had done almost no research before writing his N&R column (unposted) (why?).

It was a strange conversation, in that he told me twice that his real point about blogs was: “Who has the time to read them?” But the great bulk of the article is not about this odd habit some people have developed of reading on computers, it’s about trashing blogs and bloggers.

To be fair, the question of time does come up in the fifth paragraph of his article, and he spends three paragraphs wondering where people find time to read the web.

Read the whole thing.

Markos’ keynote

He’s looking awful spry for someone with a newborn in the house.

Are you an addict?

60%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Projecting his fascination

Projecting his fascination

Andrew Sullivan is usually an interesting read. But when he gets off on a tangent, it’s REALLY a tangent. It’s too bad more of his readers probably don’t share his passion as a connoisseur of cock. Because he’s been spending a lot of time lately - perhaps more than usual, focusing his attention on other people’s penises.

OK Andrew, we get it. You don’t like circumcision. But your passion defies logic, and calling it genital mutilation as if it were in the same league as what happens to females in some cultures is just hysterical.

Maybe it’s time to obsess over something else?

Digby at Take Back America

More of a ratings joke

Sheesh.

Could be worse. Shakesville was NC17.

That reality thing again:

from Greenwald:

Needless to say, the memo is authentic. And some of the accusers are slowly starting to admit it (with no apologies to Johnson or The Washington Post for impugning their integrity, from what I have seen).

And so we have but the latest in an endless series of right-wing-blogger outbursts of accusatory bile and claimed discoveries of wrongdoing and fraud where the only fraud and wrongdoing is from the blogger-accusers themselves. It is literally impossible to count the grand humiliations of this sort to which the right-wing blogosphere has repeatedly subjected itself. Over and over, they make the most vicious accusations without the slightest basis in fact.

Time and again, they are revealed to be people completely unmoored from reality or without the slightest regard for basic precepts of responsible commentary. Facts which are unpleasant to them are deemed to be “fake” for that reason alone, and the most serious accusations come spewing forth from their mouths without any regard to whether they are actually true.

Read it in full.

Why cartoons are a bother

One of the smarter guys got a cease and desist notice.  What a waste of time.  But it’s why I don’t use many graphics or cartoons myself.  Just not worth it.

Blogger released

Via CNN:

Video blogger Joshua Wolf, who spent a record-setting stint behind bars for refusing to turn over his footage of a chaotic 2005 street protest, walked out of prison after cutting a deal with prosecutors.

Wolf, 24, said Tuesday he was looking forward to “pizza and a beer” after having spent 226 days in prison — more than any journalist who’s refused to testify.

Under the deal with prosecutors, Wolf agreed to turn over the uncut video, which he also posted on his Web site Tuesday. But he refused to testify before the grand jury about the events at the protest or the identities of participants.

Amateur night

And it’s a good thing.

Great post by Chris Bowers at MyDD on how technology is increasingly allowing “non professionals” to enter the game and make a real difference in a whole lot of fields.  Of course, his focus is politics.  An interesting read.

I think what Freeman says is both absolutely right and can be applied to the realm of politics as well: new technologies have allowed amateurs without formal training to reach, or sometimes even exceed, the knowledge and abilities of professionals in the field. This is ironic, since the blogosphere is often looked down upon by some political and media professionals because much of the content is produced by amateurs with little or no experience / formal training. For example, just think of the amount of times you have heard a pundit say that the progressive blogosphere “doesn’t know how to win elections,” or something to that effect. Claims of our ignorance abound, and some even become famous. Still, whatever individual instances of idiocy certain people can be dig up to justify these claims, the fact is that the collective knowledge of the political blogosphere is immense in terms of every policy area, every aspect of campaigning, every aspect of political maneuvering, every aspect of political infrastructure, and every aspect of media. Even though it often takes time to sift the wheat from the chaff, it is like an ongoing convention, conference or seminar on every facet of politics one could imagine.