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Archive for August, 2006

Secret Hold, Secret Senator

Published by William Beutler on August 30, 2006 in Campaigns, Earned Media, Instapundit, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Midterms '06 and PorkBusters. 7 Comments

[Note: Updated below.]

Just shy of a year in existence, the blog-based PorkBusters campaign is making bigger waves than at any point intervening. The investigation into a secret hold on an earmark accountability bill by Sen. Tom Coburn (arguably the campaign’s best friend in Washington) and Sen. Barack Obama is reaching tidal/tsunamic proportions, and even made CNN this week. Danny Glover — who never gets too old for this — has the back story.

PorkBusters LogoAs of this morning, the coalition of mostly right-leaning bloggers have narrowed down the suspects to just a handful of candidates: at least as of now it depends on who you ask, but Ted Stevens is to this case as Richard Armitage was to Plamegate — no one will be shocked if/when the hold turns out to be his; in fact, a little-noticed Arkansas newspaper report from Aug. 18 quotes Coburn himself going all J’Accuse! on Stevens.

As of yesterday, PorkBusters’ Secret Hold page counted Stevens, Thomas Carper, Mel Martinez, Mike Crapo, Judd Gregg, Orrin Hatch, Robert Bennett and Jay Rockefeller, down from about 40 senators earlier in the week. If nothing else, this list may well comprise the senators with the most Internet-illiterate staffs.

Until now, the PorkBusters campaign has mostly sailed under the MSM radar screen, even during its previous high watermarks, killing the bridge to nowhere and helping derail Roy Blunt’s try for the majority leader position. Some of the attention is undoubtedly owed to the left-oriented TPM Muckraker for having just now joined the effort to unmask the holder, and for good or ill, the liberal blogs usually get more media play.

It’s a curious bipartisanship, and not just because TPMm’s Paul Kiel got PorkBusters co-founder NZ Bear’s name (handle, actually) wrong in one post [update: since corrected]. For one thing, this is the sort of thing TPM Muckraker and site overseer Josh Marshall do all the time — the right-blogosphere doesn’t pursue investigations quite so often (the most successful have been one-shots like the exposure of fraudulent Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj). Nor is it too closely coordinated, considering the differing opinions of who’s in and who’s out: As of just last night, Republican-leaning PorkBusters had given a pass to Robert Byrd, whereas Democratic-leaning TPMm had not.

While conservatives might bristle at the notion that they need liberals’ support to grow the PorkBusters effort, the theme of openness is a natural fit with the Democratic netroots’ disillusionment with the Beltway elite. Daily Kos front-pager SusanG wrote about this a couple weeks ago, but only linked PorkBusters in an update, apparently unaware of its existence until then.

TPMm has given the project a shot in the arm, but it remains to be seen if the partnership will persist after this pursuit has concluded. There’s really no reason why the PorkBusters effort shouldn’t be more bipartisan. It’s true that pork has historically been a libertarian/conservative concern (this largely explains the lopsided participation) but in an era where progressives have learned to stake out a fiscal position to the right of Republicans whenever possible, more should be climbing aboard.

Indeed, the campaign is not especially partisan in nature, but fundamentally anti-insider in nature. If the PorkBusters bloggers can keep its momentum going in the next several months, with conservative blogs challenging Republicans and liberal blogs going after Democrats, it will reinforce the presumed anti-incumbent tenor of the midterm elections.

P.S. Traffic-wise, porkbusters.org has been supported almost exclusively by co-founder Glenn Reynolds. To be fair, the real campaign lives not on its home site, but on those of its participatory bloggers, again primarily Instapundit, but also Hugh Hewitt, and now TPM Muckraker. The site’s main page is essentially an RSS aggregator reposting just about anything mentioning PorkBusters about the campaign (including those who are not so happy about having their articles republished).

Update: Well, that didn’t take very long: Sen. Stevens’ office has admitted the hold was theirs. On the other hand, wouldn’t it behoove the Palm Beach Post to mention that the “much speculation” occurred in the blogosphere? Especially considering the Post reported this on their blog? That duty is left to Stevens spokesperson, who also utters these famous last words:

Going to the blogs and the media with these concerns is not the way we have ever operated.

Update 2: TPMm confirms Robert Byrd in fact also placed a hold on the bill, has now released it, and his spokesperson has succeeded in not saying something the blogs would take badly.

So the left-right coalition can count this as win, like the Kos-Krempasky testimony before the FEC last year: a rare cross-ideology collaboration (and at least in these few cases, when they team up, they do win). And now, on to the questions about what happens next. TPMm again, asks an intriguing question: Are Even Porkbusting Projects Full of Pork?

Blog Traffic As A Reverse Bell Curve (Kind Of)

Published by William Beutler on August 29, 2006 in Blog Fights, Comment Sections, Instapundit and Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere. 0 Comments

The comments to the Hotline On Call post that started the McCain/Mele Melee (feel free to borrow this phrase!) calls to mind, though doesn’t perfectly illustrate, a truism not just of politics but of the blogosphere in particular: Centrists are loved by no one, not even fellow centrists.

Originally, the post mistakenly identified Reynolds as “center-left.” Verbatim down to the formatting, reader Kathleen complained:

  Glenn Reynolds as a center left blogger?! you have got to be freaking joking.

And so it was corrected — but a few hours later Not Marc (possibly referring to post co-author Marc Ambinder, perhaps even a handle of the Not Larry Sabato variety) disagreed with the updated descriptor:

  Instapundit is not ‘center-right’. He’s hard right. Do the research: his front page regularly links to sites containing the most rabid, racist crap imaginable.

Here at Blog P.I., we have cast aspersions on the oft-proctored renounce-your-allies tests employed by the left and right, and this is a typical case; Reynolds points readers to Little Green Footballs, but that shouldn’t constitute an endorsement of LGF’s commenters. This kind of guilt-by-association has unfairly dinged the man behind Big Orange, and Reynolds has said before this is one reason why he doesn’t have a comment section of his own — and singled out the Lizardoids as a specific example. For what it’s worth, he doesn’t even self-identify as conservative, but in much of the blogosphere, it really doesn’t matter what you call yourself. (Many of Reynolds’ own fans even dispute his non-conservatism.) And if you do describe yourself as “center” anything, you’re more likely to get burned at both ends.

I’d also wager that even moderates are more likely to criticize fellow moderates, because their independence in part defines them, and their particular issues are also different. Centrist is not a definite category like Left or Right; it’s a None of the Above or Other. And overall, there are fewer moderates driving big traffic compared to their more ideological (or more easily-pegged) peers.

If you lined up a sample of blogs according to ideology along a left-right axis, I predict you’d find something resembling an inverse bell curve — though traffic would drop off again as one approaches either fringe. On the other hand: While the high traffic sites are found closer to the edges, if the center of this curve describes an amalgam of different philosophies, a long-tail effect would flatten the curve, maybe a little, maybe a lot. So it could be a fat upside-down bell, if that makes any sense.

All of which presumes, of course, that one could even agree on how to classify individual blogs as lefterer and righterer (these should be real words) compared to their peers. Which raises too many questions for this post, and cries out for the sort of levity provided by Fred, also in the Hotline’s comments:

  Who’s Glenn Reynolds and what’s Instapundit?

The McCain/Mele Melee II: The Republican Underground & Nicco

Published by William Beutler on August 29, 2006 in Blog Consultants, Campaigns, Defections, John McCain and White House '08. 3 Comments

Yesterday Blog P.I. surveyed the leftosphere’s reaction to former Dean web guru Nicco Mele’s defection to the John McCain camp, taking exception to some bloggers’ condemnations of Mele’s firm, EchoDitto. In this post I survey the rightosphere’s reaction to the same, taking exception this time to Mele’s disclosure w/r/t his firm, EchoDitto. And away we go:

Actually, the news registered only a blip on conservative blogs, where McCain has never been a favorite and the association with Mele is unlikely to change anyone’s mind either way.

But the situation has caused one small headache for the McCain camp: NRO’s Jim Geraghty is sure that Craig Goldman, executive dir. of McCain’s Straight Talk America PAC, had deceived him about the extent of Mele’s involvement in a conversation predating the Hotline’s scoop:

Even a “no comment” or “I can’t talk about this because no decision on that has been made yet,” would have been fairer. Instead, I’m told that Mele is “offering free advice” when in fact it’s the other way around, that according to the Hotline account, McCain’s people “recruited” Mele. … I’ll let others remark about the irony of this coming from an organization with “Straight Talk” in its name.

Responding, McCain blog consultant Patrick Hynes argues there’s nothing wrong with what Goldman reported, and certainly compared to what Geraghty reported about Hynes’ own disclosure issues, he’s right.

Goldman told Geraghty that Mele has not been paid, and nobody has disputed the claim. Geraghty seems upset that Goldman didn’t inform him that Mele had been around for months, but the distinction between Mele offering and Goldman recruiting strikes me as inconsequential. “Offering advice” is a stock phrase in Washington and says nothing about who approached whom. And as far as I can tell, he never led Geraghty to believe their association was necessarily a recent one. Unless there’s more to it, Hynes is correct: There’s no there there.

But there is another aspect of the McCain/Mele cooperation that strikes me as troublesome: The current McCain/Mele relationship stretches back to last fall, yet Mele didn’t step aside until called out by Hotline just this week. So in the past year since they first hooked up, Mele has been doing paid work for Democrats in his primary job while doing unpaid work for a Republican in his free time. This is highly problematic for EchoDitto, but it doesn’t reflect all that well on the McCain camp, either.

Yesterday I contacted both Mele and interim EchoDitto CEO Harish Rao to determine precisely when the firm became aware of Mele’s after hours freelancing, but still today, I haven’t heard back from either, and assume that I won’t.

But if the first sentence from Rao’s post on the 25th is any indication, then we already know:

Nicco’s recent post about his support for Senator John McCain has caused quite a lot of ruckus.

In the last post, I argued that EchoDitto could survive if they cut all ties with Mele, and I still think that is possible. But if the firm’s clients believe their projects have been compromised by having a secret McCain adviser overseeing said projects, well, this aspect of the Dean campaign legacy will probably be forfeited.

And for a supposed frontrunner, it sounds like McCain’s highest-profile blogger allies are a little reticent about the association being known.

The McCain/Mele Melee I: Embargoed Until Kos Gets Around To It

Published by William Beutler on August 28, 2006 in Blog Consultants, Campaigns, Daily Kos, Defections, John McCain and White House '08. 2 Comments

Last Wednesday at Hotline’s On Call blog, Marc Ambinder and Shira Toeplitz dropped a bombshell on the Democratic netroots the likes unseen since Jerome Armstrong was revealed a stock tout in a past life: Nicco Mele, the web strategist second only to Joe Trippi in credit received for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential run, has been informally advising 2008 presidential candidate John McCain. Not to get too pedantic, but Dean is an anti-war Democrat and McCain is a pro-war Republican. Mele’s McCain affinity seems largely based on his efforts, however symbolic, to get money out of politics.

After Dean, Mele went on to found the Democratic-oriented website building firm EchoDitto, which has built a solid reputation for itself. This revelation, however, is causing trouble not just for consultant Mele himself but for his consulting firm as well. And as we’ll get to below, some snap judgments about the announcement have yet to be revised.

Soon after the news broke, and while the leftosphere was scrambling to react, Mele confirmed at his own sporadically-updated blog:

While I currently don’t know what role I’d like to have in 2008, if Sen. McCain runs I hope to be helpful. This is a personal decision for me based on my own first-hand experience. I like Sen. McCain - I think he should be president!

Make no mistake about it — this is conduct unbecoming of a progressive blogger. In one comment section at Daily Kos, he got nicked “Anakin Mele,” and despite emphatic statements that he is not on the McCain payroll, more than a few assumed he’d been bought off.

But among bloggers who know Mele personally, fellow Dean alum Rick Klau stood up for him and identified as a concerned friend:

To those who’ve suggested he’s abandoned his principles to support John McCain, you couldn’t be further from the truth. Misguided? Maybe. A sell-out? No way.

Anonyblogger Vermonter noted in an entry cross-posted on more than one lefty blog that the original Deaniacs weren’t always motivated by partisanship:

One of the things that most people wouldn’t know is that quite a few of the main Dean web people were not at all sharply partisan about Dean and would often say favorable things about his opponents. And had very nuanced opinions about a number of topics. Meaning, well, they were very reasonable, non-dogmatic people. But, McCain, Nicco? Really?

Vermont NPR commentator Philip Baruth saw it as the “latest sign of the netroots migrating” rightward, conflating the episode with former Kerry hand Peter Daou going to work for Hillary Clinton — hardly a move of the same order, especially as Hillary has begun inching away from the Lieberman/Bush position on Iraq.

Most consequentially, however, lead Kossack Markos Moulitsas revealed in his take nothing we didn’t know already, namely that he can’t be friends with people whose political beliefs he doesn’t share:

I used to consider Nicco Mele, a top former Dean webhand, a friend until his rabid desire for regulating the blogosphere led me to write him off.

And he didn’t call for anything he hasn’t called for before, namely Mele’s exile from the left, which MoveOn’s Zack Exley proposed (in another dKos diary) in a considerably more thoughtful manner:

McCain has a credible chance of convincing large numbers of uninformed liberals that he is compatible with a progressive agenda. What he’s got going for him is his association with campaign finance reform, and a personal demeanor full of cultural liberal signifiers. … If he can swing a handful of defections of high-profile progressives, then he’s got a real chance of adding the phrase “McCain Democrats” to the lexicon in ‘08. … Democratic consultants and figureheads need to know that going off to work for McCain means losing their place in the rising Democratic tide.

It’s certainly an appropriate strategy; in national politics, you can switch allegiances exactly once, and as Mele is finding out, even that comes at a price. Of course, if McCain wins the presidency, McCain Democrats won’t be wanting for work. And even if McCain loses, there are worse fates than taking on corporate accounts.

But Kos went further, giving the impression that EchoDitto itself had a material connection to the campaign, because the “expertise and intelligence he is gathering from the following clients can and will end up as part of the McCain arsenal in 2008.” No one can argue with this excerpt, but it implies no organizational responsibility on the part of EchoDitto. The firm’s initial public statement was inadequate, but nevertheless made clear it would have no part in a Republican campaign.

If EchoDitto had remained silent, he might’ve had a point. But I’m still waiting for Kos and a host of others to acknowledge that one evening later EchoDitto New York dir. Harish Rao announced that Mele was stepping aside as CEO:

Nicco’s recent post about his support for Senator John McCain has caused quite a lot of ruckus. We at EchoDitto disagree with his decision. While Nicco does not work for Senator McCain, his support for a possible McCain candidacy runs contrary to many of our core beliefs at EchoDitto. … Everyone in this world has to follow their own heart. Nicco has agreed to, effective immediately, take a leave of absence from our company. We hope he takes some time to re-consider his position. I am assuming Nicco’s responsibilities for the duration of his leave of absence.

Somehow, I expect Rao will be losing the modifier from his “interim CEO” title before long.

Yet the Kos-imposed embargo remains in place. And so does the one from Steve Gilliard. More suprisingly — at least based on my own impression — so does the one from DavidNYC at Swing State Project, and he’d even allowed that the perfect solution would be for McCain Mele to go.

All of which provides an interesting coda to the offensive ally renouncement wars (we really need a better name for that phenomenon) earlier this summer. It is surely too much to ask that bloggers distance themselves from every awful thing said by someone on their own side. But is it really too much to ask that they unrenounce after the key circumstances have changed? As renunciation warrior Glenn Greenwald once memorably asked, when does the “self-correcting” blogosphere start to self-correct?

Update: DavidNYC follows up, and asks some good questions that didn’t occur to me:

I recognize that political consulting isn’t bound by the same rules of professional responsibility, though perhaps it ought to be. So does this leave of absence satisfy me? I can’t say that it does, in part because we haven’t been told what it means. Does Nicco still have access to firm resources? To client information? Is he still drawing a salary or otherwise receiving money from the firm? If Nicco straight-out left the firm, these questions wouldn’t exist. But even if EchoDitto answered them, I’d still be unsatisfied. How long will this leave last? Until Nicco changes his mind and admits his grave mistake? Until the end of the presidential election? Hell, what if - heaven forbid - McCain wins? Do we give Nicco a four-year or eight-year extension? And what if Nicco does come back - and then says he wants to support another Republican? What do we do then?

In an email to me this afternoon, DavidNYC pointed out that considering the degree of controversy, EchoDitto should have contacted its critics to alert them to Nicco’s leave of absence, something it apparently has not done. And as I said earlier, I don’t think Mele’s time with EchoDitto has long to go; they’ve revised their position once already, and I’d bet another is coming. If they don’t do this within another week or two, however, I think their critics would be correct.

Updated again: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Don’t miss the follow-up post, The Republican Underground & Nicco, which points out that either Mele alone or EchoDitto concomitantly concealed his moonlighting from their clients.

Who Are The Ad Wizards Who Came Up With This One?

Published by Olly Ruff on August 24, 2006 in Campaigns, Daily Kos, Lamont v. Lieberman, National Politics and RNC. 3 Comments

Unintended amusement abounds at this GOP press release, which is either an attempt to damage the Lamont CT SEN campaign by linking it to Daily Kos or vice versa. To a devotee of attack journalism and smear campaigns, it’s a rather unsatisfying document; we carry no brief for Kos here, but when the slings and arrows are this poor — or this poor — it’s hard not to remark upon it.

After a puzzling focus on the fact that Markos Moulitsas apparently went on holiday this summer and has recently returned, the release warms up by collecting a few of Kos’ pricklier comments — the infamous “Screw ‘em,” etc — and chides him for calling Joe Lieberman a “sore loser.” If you recall the “Sore Loserman” meme from 2000, they’re not really on very firm ground here.

As is typical of the form, the sourcing varies from overzealous to non-existent: the Las Vegas Review-Journal is invoked to establish that there might just be some kind of a connection between the blog “Daily Kos” and the convention “Yearly Kos” — or, possibly, to establish the unthinkably controversial statement that dKos is “left-leaning” — whereas the statement

MOULITSAS’ NEW JOB: CO-CHAIR OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY
just sort of hangs there in space. At best, we get deft mischaracterization, whereby
“I know it’s not the most popular thing to say, but the French are right. You don’t win wars against terrorism on the battlefield.”
is summarized as:
Moulitsas On Fighting Terrorism: “The French Are Right.”
and the fun game — good for any high-traffic site of any political affiliation — in which the site’s proprietor is criticized for the ridiculous or offensive statements of their commenters or diarists. The rest of the time we’re left with their amusingly obstinate refusal to say “Democratic Party,” the assertion that two thirds of the “Democrat” leadership “fled to” Yearly Kos, and the off-message allegation that dKos is an “out-of-the-mainstream blog,” which is less defensible even than it is comprehensible. As far as the leftosphere is concerned, dKos built the mainstream — and that’s exactly the criticism the RNC would presumably wish to wield against blogs of the left.

Of course, the point is not that the RNC shouldn’t be trying to drum up bad publicity about Kos and his blog. The point is that they really should be doing a much, much better job than this. What’s more, if they really are intending this as the first shot in an ongoing campaign (see “Lieberman v. Lamont” halfway down the page, see also here) then it’s especially alarming. One assumes their next salvo will include an informative paragraph explaining what “web log” means.

L’Affaire GoldFrisch III: We All Knew This Was Coming

Published by William Beutler on August 23, 2006 in Academic Blogging, Blog Fights, Comment Sections, Meatspace and Sock puppets. 59 Comments

This post was co-written with Tim Dreier of The One-Handed Economist; both of us are graduates of the University of Oregon in Eugene, where Deb Frisch once taught and now lives. As a matter of full disclosure, we’ve had a few scrapes with Frisch of our own, she having trolled the blog of a student magazine we both once edited. That’s covered below. For previous Blog P.I. coverage, see here and here.

The saga of Deborah Frisch, longtime comment troll and all-around kook, took another troubling, if not exactly unforeseeable turn in the last 48 hours. As far as we know, she is now the first troll of the political blogosphere to face criminal charges relating to such activity. On August 21 she was arraigned in an Oregon courtroom on charges of stalking and telephone harassment (PDF). The docket can be found at the link preceding, but is captured below for your viewing pleasure:

Deb Frisch's Lane County Docket

According to Don’t Hire Deb, a blog devoted to documenting Frisch’s outrageous behavior while depriving her own site of traffic, Frisch posted either $4,000 bail or $400 to a bondsman, and must reappear in court on September 25th. As is speculated in DHD comments and elsewhere, this likely stems not from Frisch’s well-publicized Jeff Goldstein-related misadventures (to the best of our knowledge she’s never called him) but rather similar interactions with former colleagues at University of Oregon (where she was denied tenure in 1994 and served as an adjunct until July 2001) including calling, emailing, and a quickly-removed post to her blog. 

Just a few months ago, Frisch was an obscurity known only to the blogs she trolled, such as our own Oregon Commentator and Steve Verdon’s Deinonychus Antirrhopus. But at this point, she is undergoing the most severe public self-destruction we’ve seen yet. And when you consider that includes Jason Leopold and other, better-known individuals, that’s saying something. Academic John Lott and attorney Glenn Greenwald may be guilty of sock-puppetry, but that’s bush-league compared to Deb’s prolonged breakdown. Michael A. Bellesiles? A liar and a hack, but so far as we know he never ended up in jail for his antics. And no, having his Bancroft Prize revoked is not the same thing. Hell, Jayson Blair managed to spin his utter fecklessness into a book deal, as did “fabulist” Stephen Glass. Frisch, though, is in a class of her own: a vitriolic sociopath whose delusion knows almost no bounds.

For those of you just tuning in, Deb made a name for herself in the rightosphere by making altogether disturbing, one might say John Mark Karr-esque comments about Goldstein’s family. Within hours of Goldstein having publicized her identity being called out by Goldstein’s readers, Frisch resigned from a Univ. of Ariz. teaching job, thereby pre-empting a probable termination. The story got some press play in the Tucson Citizen, Eugene Register-Guard and Inside Higher Ed. Goldstein sought and obtained a restraining order against her, and that might have been the end of it.

Instead, her online behavior became even more erratic: Posting fake suicide notes, angering colleagues on an academic listserv, claiming to pursue legal action against Goldstein, Ace of Spades HQ and Matthew Heidt of Blackfive. And most strangely, attacking the folks at lefty satire blog Sadly, No!, well known for its disdain of Goldstein, and which had previously belittled the Frisch controversy. More recently she has gone so far as to heckle Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden (whom she had claimed an interest in working for) and, apparently, now managed to stalk and harass former colleagues in Oregon.

Commenters at DHD, Patterico’s Pontifications and Ace of Spades HQ have posited that the cyclical nature of Deb’s “teh crazy” implies a drinking problem. Whether a joke or conventional wisdom, the notion has has gotten so much play that after the first of Deb’s bizarre attacks, the S,N! regulars mentioned her drinking whilst tearing her a new one:

Sadly No Responds to Deb Frisch

Three days later, Frisch was in a Lane County courthouse.

Over the course of a few short weeks Frisch has gone from employed university adjunct to unemployable Internet sociopath with a rap sheet. It’s one thing to troll a few right-wing sites for fun and attention, but another matter entirely to make thinly veiled threats about a man’s child, imply that he’s a pedophile, and then proceed to alienate essentially everyone in the blogosphere and more than a few in what we might call “meatspace.”

If we didn’t know any better, we’d call the whole thing unbelievable. But having followed the unfolding Frisch fiasco, it’s more than believable. It was an inevitability.

Update: Kevin Hayden from The American Street, in the comments:

As a Eugene liberal, I’m not surprised at this latest development. While many in the blogofear postulated that she’s some hero of the left for her claims to represent us, she’s actually been pretty abusive to people all over the political spectrum, online and off. … The blog that seeks to keep people from hiring her is superfluous to the reality that her rep precedes her like the trail of a slug moving backwards. My sources indicate her long and continuing pattern of trashing professional associates, many of them highly esteemed scientists and scholars, makes it unlikely that she will attain any position of note.

This sounds right to us; far from being her only target, Goldstein was just the one with the biggest soapbox. We won’t join in the clinical depression/alcoholism debate, and we certainly hope we don’t give the impression of gleefully piling on. Fortunately, the only person likely to be hurt in all this is Frisch herself — alas, not so fortunate for her.

Update 2: An interesting possibility raised in a non-political message board, found via our referrer logs:

The phone law they cited her under may not mean she used a phone. In 2006 stalking laws were amended to include posting anonymously on the internet. We’ve had trolls here who could be cited under that same law.

The poster is based in Kentucky, while Frisch was charged under Oregon laws, so we’re not sure if this is applicable or not. We haven’t had a chance to look into Oregon’s cyber-stalking laws, so we don’t know whether this is the case in California’s Canada. If anybody knows the answer, please let us know.

Update 3: Having perused Oregon’s H.B. 2918, a cyberstalking law passed in 2001 and a (perhaps too) brief summary of S.B. 1067 relating to “telephonic harrassment,” it’s our guess that this charge actually does pertain to actual use of telephones. On the other hand, IANAL, and neither is Tim.

Update 4: John Dunshee, a self-described Poor Schmuck, offers a clarification of Oregon bail procedure in the comments:

Oregon does not have bail bondsmen. The State itself takes that role. You only need to provide 10% to the jail to be released, and the truth of the matter is that in Oregon even if you have a bail amount specified, the jail can still release you on a “matrix release” without you putting up a dime. It is not at all unusual for someone to be released on a “matrix” be given a court date, fail to appear and have a warrant issued for that, be arrested again and released again. It’s all a jobs program for cops, lawyers, and social workers.

This is news to me, having never been arrested and only going through Lane County’s court system after getting caught at a university neighborhood bar with a fake ID. But I can affirm that Oregon does like its jobs programs: For a whole summer during college, I pumped gas at a Portland-area Chevron. At most gas stations in Oregon and New Jersey and nowhere else, self-service is illegal.

Monday Medley: Joe Lieberman, JonBenet, Raw Story, Katherine Harris and The Apocalypse

Published by William Beutler on August 21, 2006 in Comment Sections, Internecine Battles, Lamont v. Lieberman, Midterms '06, Republicans and Seriously. 2 Comments

Nothing really stands out today, so here’s a brief, likely unrepresentative trip around the political mediasphere:

  • If it hasn’t been said before, allow me to be the first: Raw Story’s comment boards are basically the mirror image of LGF’s.

  • In the bizarre case of semi-prominent libertarian blogger Jackie Mackie Paisley Passey, who drew much attention and much, much derision for an exceedingly arrogant post declaring just how desirable everyone must agree she is, one of the more eye-rolling aspects was her boast that one of her public photos had rated an 8.6 on Hot or Not. Yes, you read that correctly. Without an ounce of irony, she uploaded a photograph of herself to Hot or Not — and evaluated her self-worth based on the results.

    So… here I may be overstepping the bounds of good sense, if not propriety, but I took another public photo from her page and uploaded it to that very same shallow website. If you’re curious to know how she’s doing, well, have a look and rate it yourself.

    It may well be cruel to pile on at this point, and I don’t wish her ill, but it is still relevant, and my best defense is that I’m just holding her to her own standards.


  • The New York Times’ Kurt Eichenwald, who must have drawn the short straw to end up on the pedo beat, had another icky story ready to go today, just as John Mark Karr was en route to Los Angeles in a business class seat on Thai Airlines. This bit jumped out at me:

    In recent months, new concerns have emerged about whether the ubiquitous nature of broadband technology, instant message communications and digital imagery is presenting new and poorly understood risks to children.

    Um, do the last 120 months count as “recent”? Meanwhile at Hullabaloo, Digby asks:

    Considering this new awareness of the use of overly sexualized visual images of children by pedophiles, why has nobody taken the networks to task for repeatedly showing those Jon Benet beauty pageant videos ten years after the fact?

    Good question. I asked a similar question following Jane Hamsher’s deployment of that inflammatory Lieberman-in-blackface picture. If it was wrong for her to post it, what about everyone else who used it afterward? Is context really everything?


  • Josh Marshall is taking flak from readers and more than one fellow blogger for not being anti-Lieberman enough. As are others of his readers.

    The WSJ’s James Taranto has an amusing take:

    They said they would be greeted as liberators for toppling the old regime. Instead, they find themselves caught in a quagmire — a vicious, unwinnable civil war with incalculable costs in both resources and prestige. We refer, of course, to the Democrats in Connecticut.

    His proposed solution keeps the analogy going, but doesn’t make any sense:

    It looks as though Lieberman is in the race to stay — but there is an answer to the Democrats’ quandary. For the good of the party, Lamont could throw his support to Lieberman. This would leave the incumbent running essentially unopposed … allowing the Democrats to concentrate on beating Republicans. Lamont could declare that he made his point by winning the primary, but his own ambitions are less important than the party. He could then redeploy, going on the road with Lieberman, campaigning for Democratic House challengers in Connecticut and for Democratic Senate candidates elsewhere. Rather than stay in a race he is likely to lose, Lamont could prove he understands his own dictum: ”Stay the course’ is not a winning strategy.’

    Taranto frequently turns to jokes when he doesn’t actually have anything to add, and though he is undoubtely behind Lieberman in this race, this is probably one of those all-too-frequent circumstances. With the primary decided, the only candidate who has any business thinking about abandoning the race is Joe Lieberman. That said, it probably would work.


  • More or less along the same lines: I’m not one to praise recent Firedoglake addition Pachacutec — he’s Jane Hamsher without the Hollywood background — but his call for Stephen Colbert to have Conn. Senate Republican nominee Alan Schlesinger on the show is inspired.

  • The connoisseur of schadenfreude in me really hopes Katherine Harris runs for office again soon. What else is left of me declines to comment.

  • If Blog P.I. isn’t updated tomorrow, here’s maybe one reason why.

Revisiting The YouTube Election

Published by William Beutler on August 20, 2006 in Blogging Officials, Campaigns, George Allen, Lamont v. Lieberman, MSM and YouTube. 1 Comment

I was a bit grumpy when Slate’s John Dickerson covered the rising prominence of YouTube in political campaigns as if he was the first person to think of it, but now that it’s Ryan Lizza’s turn to remark upon same for the New York Times, I think it’s time to accept that it’s conventional wisdom already (fast, maybe even faster than YouTube’s own meteoric rise). After all, the Times is nothing if not a lagging indicator.

Lizza doesn’t add a whole lot to the discussion, though he does wring his hands in a manner of which previous commentators have declined:

Some political analysts say that YouTube could force candidates to stop being so artificial, since they know their true personalities will come out anyway. “It will favor a kind of authenticity and directness and honesty that is frankly going to be good,” said Carter Eskew, a media consultant who worked for Senator Lieberman’s primary campaign. “People will say what they really think rather than what they think people want to hear.” But others see a future where politicians are more vapid and risk averse than ever. Matthew Dowd, a longtime strategist for President Bush who is now a partner in a social networking Internet venture, Hot Soup, looks at the YouTube-ization of politics, and sees the death of spontaneity.

I don’t know the answer to this question; my fallback response is: Some of both. More interesting, I think, is why the two consultants split on the question. Some might guess that Democrats are quicker to embrace new campaign techniques whereas Republicans are slower to deem them necessary, and there may be some truth to that. The GOP had no GOTV strategy to speak of until 2002, although they’ve more than caught up since.

But I think it has less to do with party ideology than recent party (or factional) fortunes, and you’re more likely to embrace (and talk up) a new technology if you need it to deliver for you. In 2004, Dowd helped fend off an unprecedented new media assault on President Bush, so he’s got all the more reason to downplay its positive effects. But there’s also iconoclasts like John McCain, who face uphill battles inside the Republican party, and as of late has been courting conservative online activists to that end.

What interesting things Lizza does have to say about YouTube’s impact is arguably just as true about mere text-based blogging:

These days journalists are concerned not just about being cut out, but about being part of the show. Reporters often suffer the wrath of bloggers in the same way politicians do. At a recent conference of political bloggers in Las Vegas, reporters more than once reminded one another to be discreet in their conversations because anything overheard was fair game for bloggers to post. Now, as the campaign trail turns into a 24-hour live set, members of the press corps may find themselves starring on YouTube. “At least one big-time journalist will have their career or life ruined because some element of their behavior that was heretofore private will be exposed publicly,” predicted a senior adviser to a potential 2008 presidential candidate.

If you think YouTube is necessary for that, well, tell that to Dan Rather.

And Lizza’s “to be sure” section is particularly weak:

Then again, YouTube’s impact on politics may be exaggerated. For one, the site’s users are generally young and not highly engaged politically. “Most social networking sites cater to younger audiences, 18 to 24,” says Michael Bassik, vice president of Internet advertising at MSHC Partners, which advises candidates on media strategies. “For the most part, it’s not political conversations taking place there.” And maybe the Allen video wasn’t all that shocking after all. Jeff Jarvis, author of the BuzzMachine blog and an Internet consultant to The New York Times Company, doesn’t think all that much has changed. “Is it news that politicians say stupid things?” he asks. “Of course not.”

As for the former point, arguing that just because political videos don’t draw the same traffic as, say, that especially compelling video where a young woman took one picture of herself each day for three years is a straw man if I’ve ever seen one (and I suspect Lizza has quoted Bassik out of context). All such a video has to do is be “out there,” and YouTube undoubtedly accomplishes that.

As for the latter, well, tell that to Senator Allen.

P.S. Ohio’s Psychobilly Democrat makes a similar argument to that of my penultimate paragraph, noting: “The networked natured of blogs, that one links to another’s content, makes the blunders more accessible to more people across greater ranges of space.” To which I would add, it’s more evidence that all politics is national.

MyDD’s Matt Stoller Dissembles And Smears Non-Partisan Journalists

Published by William Beutler on August 18, 2006 in Blog Fights, Blogs vs. MSM and Netroots. 11 Comments

Matt Stoller, my #1 fan, has more complimentary things to say about me and my former employer this week, at MyDD’s Breaking Blue mini-blog. His post, in its entirety:

Get Rid of the Blogometer

I have to confess that I love the Hotline. It’s really a well-done newsletter on politics, much more driven by reality than the Note and much less courtier-obsessed than most tip sheets. I just wish they’d get rid of the Blogometer, which they just can’t get right. First it was William Beutler, who couldn’t cover the left without engaging in partisan hatcheteering. There’s this, for instance.

    8/16 is yet another example of the trend as a broad coalition of conservative bloggers and other established institutions join forces to promote an anti-pork spending project that, since the GOP’s in power, ought to bring embarrassment to GOP lawmakers in the midst of a tough cycle. With their current belief in partisanship at all costs (see CT SEN), would lefty bloggers ever put forward such an effort that had the potential to hurt so many Dems?
Liberal bloggers just defeated a Democrat in a Democratic primary, yet somehow that proves that we’re afraid to hurt members of our own party. Ok then. There’s a larger problem here, which is that you cannot just segment off blogs into their own little box. Or rather, you can on the right, since right-wing blogs are basically irrelevant. But on the left, there is no blogosphere that can be separated from the progressive movement at large, so segmenting them from the localities and issue areas they cover makes less and less sense, and makes Conn Carroll’s job increasingly difficult.

Let’s take this in order:

In spite of his (well-founded) respect for The Hotline, Stoller thinks the Blogometer section should be cut because it has displeased him, so far as we are aware, exactly twice: Once, an op-ed that I wrote for another publication (which I defended at MyDD), and again now that Carroll has asked a question that he disagrees with (and he doesn’t even comprehend that it was a question, not a statement).

As an activist, Stoller appears to project his own “hatcheteering” ways onto others, especially political journalists. Oh well. He’s made up his mind on this for sure, but if he thinks I’m an unblinking partisan hatcheteer, then he really isn’t reading very closely. Then again, Matt isn’t exactly known for his sense of proportion. And you can tell he hasn’t been reading very carefully in part beause his imprecise writing style implies that the “for instance” relates to me, when in fact he’s linking to Conn’s Wednesday column.

More evidence: Conn’s question is about whether the progressive netroots would go after “many” Democrats, not just Joe Lieberman, as the fiscally conservative Porkbusters takes aim at a majority of Republicans. Wasn’t the lefty argument that Lieberman was a special case, not a good Democrat, basically a Republican in disguise? Besides, if Stoller thinks the anti-Lieberman campaign might “hurt so many Dems” then it sounds as if he accepts Jacob Weisberg’s proposition that the nomination of Ned Lamont is perilous for the Democratic party. That can’t be what he means, but that’s what it sounds like.

Most confusing of all is Matt’s assertion that conservative blogs are “irrelevant” and can be put in their “own little box,” whereas liberal blogs are influential because they cannot be “separated from the progressive movement at large.” This analysis comes as a bit of a surprise, considering that his co-blogger, Chris Bowers, argued (rather preposterously) in March that the right-blogosphere had been “annihilated” because they “have now been incorporated into the established news media apparatus.” This was overly reductive and arrived at dubious conclusions, but it’s also the opposite of Stoller’s diagnosis. Are conservative blogs “irrelevant” because they work in tandem with the right-wing “message machine” or is the left-blogosphere powerful because they’re indistinguishable from the “progressive movement at large”? It can’t be both. If Stoller and Bowers disagree on this point, I’d like to hear why.

Not to mention, Stoller’s final link, to a National Journal Insider’s Poll, doesn’t say what he thinks it does. Instead of proving that the rightosphere is inconsequential, it merely shows that Democrats think the “netroots” will help them in the fall, while Republicans doubt that they’ll have much of an impact. The question didn’t even draw a distinction between the two halves of the blogosphere.

And I’m not the first to notice MyDD’s self-serving tendencies: As journalist David Kline, author of the book “BlogRevolt,” said of Stoller and Bowers’ New Politics Institute-backed study of the progressive blogosphere last year:

[The study’s] well-intentioned yet infuriatingly self-satisfied “analysis” of the supposed differences between the conservative versus progressive blogosphere reveals (once again) how the still waters of myopia and denial continue to run very deep indeed within Democratic circles.

There are several reasons why I don’t take Stoller and Bowers all that seriously, but their lackluster prose and inconsistent analyses are reasons enough.

P.S. All right, here’s two more, from Bowers:

  • Yesterday he told fellow bloggers to approach the new book by Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed thusly:
    Don’t read this book. Stay as far away from it as you can.
    Is that good advice? If the book is as potentially damaging to the netroots as Bowers says it is, shouldn’t they all read it so they know what they’re fighting against? Advocacy of ignorance doesn’t strike me as particularly wise.
  • The previous day, he responded to the new Q-poll showing Lieberman with a small double-digit lead over Lamont with the following headline:
    Lamont Cuts Lieberman’s Lead In Half
    That’s some spin, all right. What he doesn’t mention is that the July poll he’s comparing the new one against measured “likely Democratic primary voters” and the new one measures all “likely voters”. Somebody get this man a PR job.

P.P.S. If you don’t catch the headline’s reference, see Stoller’s first link.

Gil Gutknecht, Fire Your Internet Strategist

Published by William Beutler on August 17, 2006 in Republicans, Seriously and Wikipedia. 6 Comments

As the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported late last night, Rep. Gil Gutknecht (R) is the latest member of Congress to be caught red-handed trying to rewrite his own Wikipedia entry. Like the others who edited before him — and got busted before him — Gutknecht wanted to eliminate a reference to a broken campaign promise, and so, brilliantly, replaced the section with a few hundred words from Gutknecht’s official bio, thereby also making Wikipedia unwitting plagiarists. What it ended up getting him was a whole new subhead about the incident — not to mention the unflattering Strib coverage.

But that isn’t all his office tried to change. Most preposterously, they thought they could re-edit the very first paragraph into a colorful lead-in sounding nothing like any other congressional bio on the site, and somehow nobody would notice. Take a look at this screen shot from his entry’s History page, highlighting the differences between Gutknecht’s version (on the left) and the revert to what it looked like before (on the right). It’s a thumbnail, so you’ll have to open the full-size version in another tab:

Gil Gutknecht & Wikipedia Thumbnail

Did the Gutknecht people really think Wikipedians would prefer to hear about his family history and church attendance instead of, you know, the details of his government service, which is what qualifies him to be listed in Wikipedia in the first place? Many people who are what Wikipedia would term “non-notable” try to write pages about themselves; these are deleted as “vanity” pages. I’m going to guess it’s less common that “notable” figures seek to turn their own entries into vanity pages.

Gutknecht deserves all the bad press he gets for this, even more than the geniuses who came before him. Well, maybe a bit less than Wikipedia’s own founder, Jimmy Wales.

Of course it was unethical to do and idiotic to imagine they wouldn’t be caught. But it was also their very disregard for Wikipedia’s customs that all but guaranteed they would be called out, and quickly. If they’d had the sense to edit from an off-site computer, or bothered to create a User ID, or to make subtler changes, it’s very possible they’d have gotten away with it, at least for awhile, and likely would have escaped public attention entirely.

I’m all for wider web literacy, but to a certain extent, widespread ignorance has the unintended consequence of keeping people honest.

P.S. For local reaction from left-leaning bloggers, see MN Publius, Vox Verax and A Bluestem Prairie.

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