Archive: Year: 2006

Has there been a "change in mood and tactic[s] by online liberal activists"? That's the theory of MSNBC blog watcher Will Femia. He ties together the ferocious response of liberal bloggers to the Washington Post ombudsman's sloppy take on Jack Abramoff's campaign contributions and their equally angry response to Chris Matthews' comments on Hardball linking Osama bin Laden to Michael Moore, and argues that recent calls by Peter Daou, Markos Moulitsas, Molly Ivins and Josh Marshall for one form or another of left-wing backbone have something to do with this "change." It's possible that we're seeing a new kind of loose coordination happening. Certainly the "Open Letter" sites that liberal bloggers have created to showcase their critique of both the Post...

"I want you all to know that I’m reading your many comments. My wife Teresa reads blogs passionately, and I follow blogs too, and I’m glad I can be a part of this – and frankly I’m not worried about taking some slings and arrows along the way. I’ve faced worse! So keep the comments coming -- good, bad, hopefully not indifferent." With those words, former Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry ended his first diary post on DailyKos.com, the top political blog on the web. His topic: ostensibly it's cable TV's Chris Matthews' saying that Osama bin Laden sounded liked Michael Moore, which is getting all kinds of protest online. But his real point is to criticize President Bush for failing...

The Justice Department's decision to seek a court order forcing Google to turn over one million random Web addresses and the records of all Google searches from a one-week period isn't just overbroad and unnecessary, in my humble opinion, it's also dumb politics. Take this reaction from "Good Morning Silicon Valley," a popular blog run by SiliconValley.com: "What if we promise not to show the records to Karl Rove?" John Paczkowski, the blogger, adds, "Here's hoping the company prevails. The release of such records sets a truly unsettling precedent. And if the goverment's claim that other, unspecified search engines have already agreed to release similar information proves true, we have already lost our footing on a very slippery, very dangerous...

That's the question raised in a new way by The Raw Story, which reports today that the Republican National Committee's website appears to be violating the non-profit status of several major organizations by listing them as "GOP Groups." They are the American Enterprise Institute, American Values, Coalition for Urban Renewal, Frontiers of Freedom, the Heritage Foundation and the Leadership Institute. Raw Story's John Byrne writes, "If defined as a 'GOP group,' these organizations would not qualify for tax-exempt status under their charters." The RNC didn't comment on his story. I doubt this is actually a violation of those groups' tax-exempt status (if every time a partisan outfit linked to a tax-exempt group caused that group to lose its tax-exempt status, there would be...

A bunch of high-profile "center-right" bloggers have launched an online appeal to the "new leadership" of the House of Representatives, insisting that it must be "thoroughly and transparently free of the taint of the Jack Abramoff scandals, and beyond that, of undue influence of K Street." The Truth Laid Bear blog, which initiated the statement, also is taking questions from bloggers to be posed to the House leadership. I wonder if bloggers across the political spectrum could unite around a call for greater openness and transparency by Congress. This particular statement is too partisan, to be sure, to satisfy the left side of the blogosphere (which obviously has little faith in Republicans cleaning up their own mess), but the issue clear...

Did the Democratic National Committee's web site crib its privacy policy from the Republican National Committee's site? That's the question raised by former RNC e-campaign director Michael Turk (and PDF contributing editor) on his maiden post over at GOPbloggers.org. He doesn't seem too miffed about the possibility, by the way....

The live Senate hearings on Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court could transfix the nation...

Elana Levin of the Drum Major Institute, a progressive think tank based in New York, has a nice round-up of the "Year in the Blogosphere" from the liberal side of the aisle. In her view, blogs played a key role in several political developments: -the shake-up inside organized labor (Unite to Win and Edwize) -the shaky justification for the invasion of Iraq (DowningStreetmemo.com and DailyKos) -the Paul Hackett surge in an Ohio by-election (Grow Ohio and Swing State Project) -the Judy Miller mess (I#039d give Arianna Huffington credit for really dogging this story) -the collapse of Bush#039s Social Security privatization plan (TalkingPointsmemo.com) I went hunting for a parallel review of the year in the blogosphere from the conservative side, and found this transcript of a recent...