Why Is David Lightman Still Clueless About Blogs?

by: tparty

Tue May 29, 2007 at 13:00:08 PM EDT

Dodd's tech staff comprises Tim Tagaris, 30, a veteran of the Democratic National Committee and last year's Senate campaign by Ned Lamont; Tim Cullen, 33, a former software developer who did similar online work in Dodd's Senate office; Matt Browner-Hamlin, 25, known in the blogosphere for his myleftnutmeg.com site; and Brett Schenker, 28, a political consultant who is considered an expert on discovering new technologies and making them work for campaigns.

As Matt himself noted in a comment, this was not the only factual error in Lightman's exceedingly sloppy article about the Dodd campaign's tech team (he also blatantly misattributed two quotes from different people to Matt and apparently completely mischaracterized a quote by Andrew Rasiej).

Nor is his latest article the only indicator of what has been a consistently demonstrated cluelessness about the blogosphere, and a fixation on the horserace numbers as evidence of how seemingly every effort of the Dodd campaign online or off is either "laughable" ("Dodd's Showing In Polls Laughable", January 31), "flat" ("Dodd's Flat Campaign Breaks Out Tough Talk", May 14),  or leaves the campaign "attention starved" ("Attention-Starved Dodd Gets Tough With New Ad", May 23).

One need only look at Lightman's headline description of the campaign's team as "young" (four people straddling either side of 30 years old is hardly "young" for an internet team on a campaign) and his pejorative accusation that they were "defensive" during the interview to get an idea of where his biases lie.

But there's a more basic dishonesty - and/or complete ignorance of online politics - that lies at the core of Lightman's criticisms of the Dodd campaign's online efforts. The metrics he uses to compare Dodd to top-tier candidates - the number of eyes on Hillary's theme-song YouTube challenge, the number of friends Barack Obama has on MySpace, the poll numbers that (shock!) didn't move in the hours following the campaign's website revamp - reveal nothing about the actual impact of the campaign's recent efforts. For instance, their pioneering use of UStream to provide unvarnished, unedited live presentations of the campaign in action and behind the scenes, in tandem with the candidate's strong leadership on Iraq and other issues, has given Dodd some real traction online in the past couple of weeks. Look at opinion leaders in the blogosphere, and there's ample evidence that what they're doing is working. Such movement obviously takes time to percolate in the polls (or on YouTube or MySpace), and there's no guarantee that it will continue (watch the next dKos and MyDD straw polls if you want a better metric). But it's ridiculous to imply that Dodd's online efforts - which started up in earnest only a couple of weeks ago - are falling flat because there's no immediate bump.

Given Richardson's very subpar and haphazard performances recently and Biden's innate foolishness and increasing forays to the right on Iraq, Dodd stands a real chance of moving to the top of the second tier in the coming weeks. And if he does, it will likely be due in large part to the campaign's successes communicating directly to voters online in innovative ways - with about one quarter the staff of the top-tier candidates.

As usual, Lightman is not giving the Dodd team anything approaching a fair shake here. But more fundamentally, he is showing that he understands very little about how the blogosphere functions... or that if he does, he's willing to pretend he doesn't in order to slam his favorite target.

(Disclosure: I did a few hours of freelance graphics work for Dodd in February, but no longer do.)

Howard Wolfson Uses CFL Playbook

by: tparty

Wed Feb 21, 2007 at 17:18:11 PM EST

I made the following statement today in response, and I wanted to share it with you:...

"If Senator Obama is indeed sincere about his repeated claims to change the tone of our politics, he should immediately denounce these remarks, remove Mr. Geffen from his campaign and return his money."

Sound familiar? Just a little bit?

Attacking surrogates and feigning offense and indignation is a page straight out of the Lieberman-Gerstein playbook. Combined with Hillary's recent insinuation that other Democratic candidates don't think terrorism is a problem, her declaration that anti-war Democrats should probably vote for other candidates, and Wolfson's previous unwarranted attack on John Edwards for beginning his campaign in a "negative" way by asserting his position on Iraq and challenging the Senators in the race to do more, it's part of a disturbing pattern.

(And, of course, as Arianna Huffington notes, Geffen not only doesn't work for Obama in any official capacity, his only involvement was co-hosting one event, which "makes it kind of hard for Obama to 'remove' him.")

John at Americablog also reacts:

It's becoming increasingly clear that Hillary isn't running as a new Democrat, she's running as as a non-Democrat. Her strategy seems to be attacking everything and everyone associated with the Democratic party, and especially its base - and using Republican talking points, at that - in order to somehow position Hillary as a modern-day Diogenes, independent, above-the-fray, alone in the wilderness, forever on the look-out for honest politics.

In other words, Hillary is Joe Lieberman.

This may be a bit of an overstatement at this point.

But with poisonous rhetorical attacks like these already continually emanating from her campaign, and almost a full year to go before the first primary votes, she may be well on her way.

These types of tactics have no place in any Democratic primary, and any candidate or press operation that engages in such tactics needs to be called out on it loudly.

D. Anger Stein Rips Edwards, Bloggers

by: tparty

Fri Feb 09, 2007 at 19:41:16 PM EST

"There's a big problem in the Democratic Party right now," says Dan Gerstein, political strategist and Lieberman's 2006 campaign spokesman. "I think for a lot of Democratic bloggers, there's extremism, there's an anger, and there's a lack of accountability for what people say and do."

Digby has more.

After being so utterly destroyed online throughout the 2006 race, Gerstein seems to be making it his life's sole mission to wedge the netroots from campaigns and the party infrastructure, even going so far as to delusionally claim in a DLC magazine article that the 2006 election results were all about voters wanting more "bipartisanship." He is joined in this mission by fellow DLC dead-enders and many of the same right-wing blogs that backed Lieberman last year.

They are fighting the same fight. The man certainly has no shred of credibility as a "Democratic" strategist.

Actually, he retains no shred of credibility as a human being. Here's the short version:

• In the spring and summer, Gerstein - anonymously and unofficially - went after the Huffington Post demanding Howie Klein be censored, smeared Ned Lamont as anti-semitic by going after Maxine Waters, defended Lieberman's race-baiting flyers in CT, and much more.


• In September, Gerstein lied and said Lieberman had not "taken a significant amount of money from registered Republicans".


• Right after the primary, Gerstein went absolutely nuts in an inverview with a Hartford Courant columnist Helen Ubiñas.


• In October, Gerstein wrote a seriously unhinged, furious letter to the NY Times all but claiming that they had been brainwashed by bloggers, after they endorsed Ned in the general.


• And, of course, he once seriously tried to convince people that a sunset was a sunrise.

And this man is talking about "anger" and "lack of accountability"?

(Another Overly Cautious Disclosure: I am currently doing some online work for Ned Lamont.)

Who Is For Real In Journalism World?

by: tntcomm82

Thu Feb 08, 2007 at 11:38:40 AM EST

By ANDY THIBAULT
The Cool Justice Report
www.cooljustice.blogspot.com
Feb. 8, 2007

EDITOR'S NOTE: This column is available for reprint courtesy of The Cool Justice Report, http://cooljustice.b...

Is Ken Krayeske any less of a journalist than those who process the low-grade vomit of politicians, business leaders or police chiefs over the course of many years in the same job?

The short answer, of course,  is no.

Let's look at it another way. Suppose you're a bowler. You have fun bowling. You're pretty good. You join the pro bowlers tour and earn some money. Guess what? You're a professional bowler.

For those mainstream journalists who still don't get it, a slut - male or female - is an amateur. A whore is a pro.

Clearly, the bar one must hurdle to become a so-called professional journalist is pretty low. I contend this is a good thing.

Anyone and everyone should be able to stir the pot of democracy and enhance the public discourse. As I tell students, to be journalists, they must hang out with people. They must gather facts. They must have a focus. They must write simple declarative sentences. They must revise their writing.

Ideally, this would be a meritocracy of sorts.

Readers, viewers and listeners make the call on legitimacy by their choices of venues. Increasingly, they are looking for alternatives.

Whereas citizens used to go to newspapers to fight corruption when the system failed them, now they must go elsewhere. Newspapers, tv and radio stations have shown they are not interested.

Many citizens now go to blogs and other alternative media for their news.

For those unfamiliar with Krayeske, he is the journalist and political activist who was arrested for taking photographs of Gov. Rell's inaugural parade in Hartford last month.

The cops and courts have closed ranks on the Krayeske case. Yeah, we circulated a flyer about this dangerous vegetarian / pacifist before the parade, but we knew it was Krayeske and we didn't know it was Krayeske when he took those photos - er, "breached the parade route" by stepping off a curb and/ or he was riding his bike too fast near the parade. We forgot to give him a speeding ticket. We did remember to take his freedom for 12 or 13 hours until the inaugural festivities were over, but that was just a coincidence. We jacked his bond up to $75,000 and hassled him for wanting a lawyer, but that's nobody's fault.

Should any citizen - even a journalist - be treated this way?

Many members of the establishment press are not very concerned. Some are threatened by Krayeske.

Krayeske went off the track. He had something greater than a one-dimensional life. Besides working for conventional dailies and weeklies, he wrote for High Times and managed the gubernatorial campaign for a Green Party candidate last fall. He has been busted for civil disobedience at an anti-war protest.

He writes with a point of view and makes no attempt to disguise it.

Mainstream journalists would never do that. Some hide behind a cloak of objectivity and actively support the status quo. The best among them try to be fair. Others take the tack: Let's screw this crook in as fair a way as possible.

As the historians Judith and William Serrin put it in the book, MUCKRAKING, The New Press, 2002: "Journalists wear disguises, and one of them is the disguise of objectivity ... All good journalists have agendas. They wish to put the crooked sheriff in jail. They wish to unveil the patent medicine fraud. They wish to free the innocent man from jail."

Some journalists want their readers to get angry. They want to see wages go up and the death rates of babies go down. They want to see changes in a political judicial system that results in more minorities and the poor going to jail than to college. They wonder why some people are in jail while powerful people who commit crimes are untouchable.

I got fired up about this column after I read a piece in The Connecticut Post by Ken Dixon. Dixon is a decent guy. He is basically a solid reporter. He really missed the boat, though, on the Krayeske case, providing some cover for those who would turn away from police and government misconduct.

Krayeske, Dixon asserts, "should be happy that the Hartford police did not massage his noggin ..."

It appears this is something Dixon would like to have done himself. I gather Dixon is pissed off that Krayeske dared to mingle with reporters and ask a question of Gov. Rell during a campaign stop.

"He crossed the line ... ," Dixon wrote. "This is a no-no and working reporters don't like civilians - let alone opposing campaign managers - chiming in as if they were reporters too."

Oops, Mr. Dixon. I must diagnose you with a case of too much time in the Capitol Press Corps. So what if Joe The Hot Dog Vendor or Jane The Janitor have questions for the governor as well? The mainstream press doesn't own this space. We all do.

Worse than the noggin comment, Dixon also wrote: "[Krayeske's] even tried to shame the Connecticut Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists into funding his little winter promo campaign .."

Forgive me, but here are a few facts:

When cops violate the civil rights of citizens, said citizens tend to be charged with criminal offenses. The classic example is cops charging interfering after they beat someone.

Krayeske was covering the parade and his photos have been published widely, Prosecutors are dragging out Krayeske's case, refusing to look at witness statements exonerating Krayeske.

There are very few capable and tough civil rights lawyers in Connecticut, and these lawyers cost money. At the national level, the Society of Professional Journalists does not have much of a problem supporting bloggers, videographers, freelancers or others outside the mainstream.

Who's naked now, Ken Dixon? Who's flacking for whom?

Why wouldn't a state Society of Professional Journalists stand up against civil rights violations of anyone, whether they are mere citizens, journalists or hacks? Why wouldn't a state Society of Professional Journalists respond to inquiries from someone whose civil rights have been violated?

A good reporter would not need a travel budget to find shame in this matter.

  Andy Thibault, author of Law & Justice In Everyday Life and a private investigator, is an adjunct lecturer of English and a mentor in the MFA writing program at Western Connecticut State University. He also serves as a consulting editor for the literary journal Connecticut Review. Website, www.andythibault.com and Blog, http://cooljustice.b...

Courant Editorial Eviscerates Lieberman for Filibuster

by: tparty

Thu Feb 08, 2007 at 10:33:09 AM EST

Nearly all Senate Republicans - and independent Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut - ducked debate Monday on the president's troop-surge plan for Iraq. They can't hide much longer from this critical issue. Nor can they protect the president from Congress' and the public's waning confidence in the war.

...A nonbinding bipartisan resolution crafted mostly by Republican Sen. John W. Warner said it "disagrees" with the president's plan to send another 21,500 U.S. troops into Iraq's civil war. The resolution fell 11 votes short of the 60 needed to begin debate on it. Voting against debate were 45 Republicans and Mr. Lieberman, who said the resolution would "discourage our troops."

Surely Iraq's deteriorating battlegrounds are more discouraging than debate would be. Just as surely, soldiers themselves are debating the wisdom of escalating a war going badly.

In stark and welcome contrast to Connecticut's let's-not-talk-about-it senator stood Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, who argued passionately on the floor that "if we want the president to listen to Congress, then we'd better start acting like the co-equal branch of government that we are and stop acting timidly, fearful of being held responsible for demanding a different course in Iraq."

Remember that Samuel Alito wasn't worth filibustering for Joe (because "it was time to move on"). But apparently the threat of a non-binding debate on Iraq rises to the level that necessitates pulling out every parliamentary trick in the book.

And about his "discouraging the troops" smear... the Secretary of Defense seems to strongly disagree, while giving the troops much more credit for their intelligence and emotional maturity than Lieberman does:

Pace and Gates said they did not think debate in Congress would hurt the morale of troops in combat, undercutting an assertion by many congressional Republicans that members opposing the war were undermining the fighting forces there.

"As long as this Congress continues to do what it has done, which is to provide the resources for the mission, the dialogue will be the dialogue, and the troops will feel supported," Pace said.

Gates added that troops understand members of Congress want to find the best way to win the war. "I think they're sophisticated enough to understand that that's what the debate's really about," he said.

Again, there's a protest outside Lieberman's Hartford office today at 4:30pm.

If he's there, someone should ask him why he has a lower opinion of our troops than the Secretary of Defense does.

Update: Via Americablog, 11 troops have been killed in the two days while Lieberman has prevented debate of Iraq in the Senate. About 300 American troops have been killed since election day.