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Once more into the breach. This time, with videos. Lots of them. I’d leave a comment, rec it, tip it, but my DailyKos days appear to be over for good. I’m glad people like BWD remain, doing their best to remind us how far we’ve come. Long way yet to go, but we are on our way, in a new decade filled with promise instead of trepidation, hope instead of fear.
And here’s one more video, just for you, BWD.
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Someone else is wondering. Payola anyone?
They pay people to blog here; they manipulate the system to get on the rec list, including–as verified–using Twitter to drive people here to rec their posts as soon as they are made, regardless of what they contain.
As a result, they make it seem like their views are more popular than they are.
Here’s what I know about the public option campaign I got hoodwinked by. Bob Brigham told me he was paid $4,000 a month to do blogger outreach back in the summer. Others surely got paid to blog at DKos, and do more outreach. I sat on conference calls with many other state bloggers being pushed to do this, that, the other, to force members of Congress to sign FDL’s pledge, which this diarist takes down pretty thoroughly.
I no longer believe the money that paid Bob Brigham all came from online donors. I suspect it originally came from labor, specifically for public option campaigning, and since the public option has dried up, that labor money dried up. So where is the money coming from now? Perhaps it’s coming from Grover Norquist. I don’t know. I bet we’ll find out, because if some progressive group, labor or otherwise, gave Jane Hamsher money, they’ll probably want to know for damn sure whether or not it’s now being used to go after the White House and Rahm Emanuel, specifically.
I’m a bit weary of being the first guy to call foul on blog payola, then get hammered for it to the point I get banned at DKos, then watch the rest of the world catch up with the facts. But I am happy to see that DKos diarists are wising up.
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Today, there’s a recced diary at Kos lamenting the departure of blackwaterdog, which I documented when it happened. The purge at Kos is ongoing, and it’s really a sad commentary on the state of the Democratic Party netroots, in one particular manner. When I returned to DailyKos after numerous bannings, I wrote about the value of what Markos Moulitsas has created in DailyKos.
If you want to change our country, DailyKos is a required arena of engagement. And for that, Markos Moulitsas deserves all the credit in the world. I’d love to someday debate Markos, have a drink, put the past in the past, and thank him, to his face, for creating with his own hands this historically powerful tool for progressive politics, the Democratic Party, and our country.
That’s the positive side of DailyKos. The damaging side? The commenting interface creates layer after layer of opportunities for users to force out opinions they do not like. Over time, if you are consistently deemed to have an opinion that enough users disagree with, you will inevitably be banned. That’s good if you want to keep out right wing trolls.
But that dynamic, created by the commenting interface itself, is now ripping DailyKos into pieces, focusing the echo chamber not in support of Barack Obama, but against. That was not only inevitable with me, it was inevitable for blackwaterdog, and now inevitable for anyone who strongly supports Barack Obama. If a Kos diarist engages in support of Barack just far enough, your clock is ticking at DailyKos. That’s just a fact.
That’s also a problem. A big problem. If the single most powerful online tool for political organizing on the left, DailyKos, cannot tolerate loud, aggressive, and unbreakable support for a Democratic Party president of the United States, DailyKos will become marginalized. There have been numerous, widely documented instances of such purges at DailyKos, but not until recently have the purges been targeted at supporters of the president we all just elected.
I don’t know if this can be solved. But unless and until it is solved, DailyKos will lose influence, and will never be the force for change it can and should be in support of electing Democrats, its stated goal. Leadership from Markos himself would be useful here. Otherwise, Markos’ site will not be a site for Democrats. It will be a site for people who claim to be Democrats when it suits them.
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If you get banned from DailyKos for calling out painfully obvious self-promotional Glenn Beck biz model media whoring by Cenk Uygur and Jane Hamsher weeks before everyone else notices, can you get un-banned? Just askin.
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Big time. And it’s ABOUT time. Thank God someone over there has a fucking clue. In this instance, it’s Jed Lewison with the brain. Now if only I can get my account re-activated!
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Enjoy an entire presidency of irrelevance. You’re off to a fine start!
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Woohoo! I don’t know how many times I’ve been banned from DailyKos, but today’s banning coincides with receiving my first email from a whining Jerome Armstrong in more than 4 years. So awesome!
All because Jane Hamsher shit her own bed. And after I helped raise a huge sum of money for Jennifer Brunner on a recommended diary, one of many recommended diaries I’ve had at DailyKos since rejoining a month ago. If the DailyKos community wants to join with Jane Hamsher and teabagger Larouchies, go right ahead folks. We’ll still be helping re-elect Barack Obama in 2012, with Ohio’s electoral votes, which every last one of you will be begging us Ohioans to do, in your sleep.
For posterity, here’s the now dead account.
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Just posted this diary at Kos.
I’m liking the fact that Markos is getting some exposure on Meet the Press today, because I like that political pressure is coming from the left in a way it never did before Markos began this site. However….
There’s a reason why Joe Scarborough had that smile on his face, laughing all the way to the Republican bank as he was surrounded by people happily bashing Barack Obama.
And if you can’t figure out the reason that Joe Scarborough was laughing and smiling and sitting with the smugness of a duplicitous game player watching his opponents join him in the game, well……can’t help ya.
I did like two things I saw today on MTP. First, both Markos and Howard Dean walked back this “kill the bill” nonsense. Second thing I liked was the notion of regulating the health insurance industry as a public utility, both from Howard Dean and from Markos. No public option? No public competition for the insurance industry? Fine. Regulate them like a public utility.
Everyone needs health care, just like everyone needs electricity, water, sewers, garbage pickup, you name it. I’d like to see if the reconciliation process will go in that route.
And I suspect you’ll find open ears. Dennis Kucinich might even be interested, and could even take a lead role. After all, Dennis cut his political teeth on public utility battles. Dennis was almost recalled as mayor of Cleveland, in fact, put Cleveland into default, over a fight with public utilities, in order to save Cleveland’s only municipal power company. Those of us in Cleveland know that battle still defines Dennis’ career, for better or worse.
Progressives get it. If you regulate the health insurance industry as a public utility, you can justify mandating everyone buy their product, because of that regulation. I haven’t seen that level of regulation in any of the previous bills, perhaps this can be a part of conference discussions.
For example, public utilities must go through open, transparent, and government approved processes before they raise their rates even one cent. Why shouldn’t this apply to health insurance? I’d just love to see Republicans defending against the notion. They’d twist themselves in knots.
At that point, I think Markos will be getting the last laugh on Joe Scarborough.
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Which I will be putting into my RSS feed.
Recently, it became almost impossible to say anything positive about this president. Not even if you back it up with facts and real news. So instead of just letting all that toxic to really burn me, i decided to create this little corner, where people can just share their support for the president, without being mocked and put down. It’s not a Forbidden-Obama-Criticism-Zone by any mean, and there won’t be any rules. Only one thing will be unacceptable: Disrespect towards the president or other posters. This is the president of The United States. The first black president. A terrific man who’s been a target of an awful hate machine since the day he decided to run for the presidency. And he’ll be shown the respect he deserve here. The same goes for the people who support him. There are plenty of blogs all around, where it’s almost required to insult Obama’s supporters, so if anyone wish to do that – Take it somewhere else
For those who don’t know, blackwaterdog was a regularly recommended diarist at DailyKos, who mainly posted a series of beautiful photo diaries, made up of White House photos of President Obama. Those diaries never failed to reinforce my pride in our president, and this country for electing him.
This week, blackwaterdog posted a fairwell diary, thanks to the poisonous environment which prevails at DailyKos these days. As Modern says below, the state of the DailyKos community at this moment is near toxic, so toxic, that even beautifully shot photographs from the White House staff photographer are met with near hatred. I’d cross post this in my account at DailyKos, if I didn’t think it might get me banned for the Nth time [UPDATE- I got banned anyway for calling out Jane Hamsher. Lovely.]. I don’t need that, especially since I was able to help convince the DailyKos community to light the blogosphere fuse for Jennifer Brunner.
The vicious demonization, by the hard right, of the first African American president in the history of the United States, is now joined by his most disloyal former supporters on the hard left. It was probably inevitable. And all over one provision, in one bill, on one issue, which if this president wanted to, he’d have been quite reasonable to ignore in the face of a calamitous economy on the verge of total inferno. I’ve had my battles with the hard left of our party, and I don’t shy away from it. I find this episode to be utterly predictable, but no less sad. And they will all look like a bunch of damn fools in a year or two.
Barack Obama’s genius is that he smokes out the people he can’t trust long term, without so much as lifting a finger. Barack doesn’t pick fights – he lets people self select the battles they want to fight with him, and then he goes about thoroughly defeating them, repeatedly, all with a smile. It was evident in the way his campaign handled the lefty blogosphere, it was evident in how he ran the campaign, and it is evident now in how he governs. When both the farthest right wing neanderthals and the farthest left of the Democratic Party both despise him, Barack’s getting somewhere.
I suspect he knows this.
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