Saturday Evening Open Thread… 10 February 2007

“I think the American public’s very satisfied with what’s happening,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. “We’re on the right side of the angels here.”

 Oh I don’t think so…….

Madman just popped me this…

CHICAGO – In Washington, Democrats are blaming Republicans for the Senate’s failure so far to vote on a resolution opposing a troop increase in Iraq.

But in the heartland, some voters say such excuses no longer are good enough.

Having banked on the promise that Democrats would force a change of course in Iraq if they won control of Congress, some of the people who helped the Democrats get there are growing impatient.

They’re frustrated that Democrats sank so much energy into a nonbinding resolution then dropped the bipartisan plan of Sens. John Warner, R-Va., and Carl Levin, D-Mich., like a hot potato when Republican leaders who support President Bush maneuvered them into a corner.

All the finagling has gotten in the way of a formal debate or vote in the Senate on Bush’s plans for Iraq.  [snip] 

And this tidbit as well… no shock.  I don’t expect heroism… nor suicide… but they have to go home and afaiac, aplogise to the voters.  If not now, then later, I suspect.

Democrats, who control the Senate 51-49, have nine new senators this year. All have supported Reid’s handling of the Iraq issue so far.

And a bit more

Democrats saw a trap: If they backed Gregg’s resolution, then didn’t get 60 votes on Warner-Levin, the only formal statement out of the Senate would voice no opposition to the troop increase. If they rejected Gregg’s, opponents would run ads accusing them of hurting the troops.

Their decision: Hold off on a formal debate. Senators who are critical of Iraq policy have been waiting a long time for a debate, though, which they couldn’t get when Republicans were in charge.

Despite Democratic senators’ confident talk, their party is worried about keeping voters’ faith.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the House couldn’t let members go home Feb. 17 for a weeklong recess empty-handed. So the House plans to begin a three-day debate Tuesday and vote on its own resolution opposing the troop buildup.

Call when y’all are ready.

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UPDATE, 4:40 am Sunday

This may be old news to some, but it fits in with what I post about, so a link to peeder’s diary on the Dkos business model.  A semi-insider view.  Emphasis is mine:

[W]hile people around here describe him as “moving into the bigtime” it seems to me that his star has fallen quite a bit since Yearly Kos, his fame an easy-come, easy-go kind of thing. I doubt he has anywhere near as much recognition at this point as the least popular NYT columnist, much less a TV news personality. Viewership has been flat (apart from being condensed around the election). Opportunity not seized.

Now he thinks his staff and volunteers will cover for him on his front page, freeing him to do his new projects that he finds more interesting.  But while he has tried, he never managed to find and develop an heir apparent  […]

So I see his business as suffering from two highly related managerial errors: Firstly, as far as I know, he’s bootstrapping all these ventures, not taking external investment. By a law of microeconomics, this limits his growth to his internal rate of return. Similarly, his retention of authority limits his growth to his own attention span.

To be fair, it’s again not clear he ever had good choices available in either area.  [snip]

Just have to have a hardy laugh at that last…

And a trenchant comment from peeder to the thread:

And he ended up with a community

full of attention addicts, who of course can’t resist “meta” and creating personal conflicts, because it makes them the topic of discussion.

by: peeder @ Fri Feb 09, 2007 at 09:39:42 AM PST

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Which gives me an opening to address the recent photo and the resultant BlahgSnarl Krakatoa.  Del Dem saw fit to post a diary filled with some pretty dark invective (fine, it is what Boyz and their tug boats, Blog Maids and Manservants do), it rode at the top of the Rec List for I don’t know how long.  It also blew my traffic to some stratospheric (and ludicrous) heights… DD sent, over about 4 days, an additional 25K in “hits”.  A friend who posts on his/her own Word Press site and thus sees “Top Posts”, “Top Blogs”, “Fastest Growing BLogs”…and the rest of the internal PR,  told me that Mcat landed in the top 30 blogs on WP.

Does that mean anything?, No.  Does it change anything for me?, No.  I will go on the same.  I have seen too many storms in life to care much. This is the smallest ant farm I have viewed. 

Take that or leave it.  I long ago told Kid Oakland who was trying (I do believe at the behest of DHinMI) to engage me in an email “friendship” … all the writing, all the snarls, all the invocations and protest and whatever else, every night it rolls right back out on the ether it rolled in on with the dawn.

In other words, I was not impressed.  But DD certainly, as he has done over and over, exposed himself.  I know, guard the children from that view!

Anyway, peeder’s diary is interesting, and the thread is in some ways an absolute hoot!  So many people online, in abusive and co-dependent fake communities, play several sides of the game.  I have noticed they do just the same in Real Life… 😉

 Addendum..

Ding! Ding!  A prize to “sometime” for succinctness:

The volunteers wouldn’t begrudge

him financial success, so long as it doesn’t appear excessive. Nope, it’s his management style that will kill him. He doesn’t understand the necessity of superior customer service in a competitive market.It is simply a failing strategy to tell your customers regularly that it they don’t like your fucking company they should fucking take their business elsewhere, you don’t want them. That failing strategy is aggravated when it is enforced by managers who take the customers they really don’t like outside, in front, and beat them up, during business hours.

by: sometime @ Fri Feb 09, 2007 at 16:27:42 PM PST

[ Parent ]

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UPDATE, 10:45 am Sunday…

CSTAR kindly left the link to the ballot today in Portugal, with question as to how “Pimp Conehead” will fare on the abortion vote today… 😉

Inglese 😉

[T]he center-left Socialist government wants to grant women the right to opt for abortion during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy.

 

Portugal, where more than 90 percent of people say they are Catholic, has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the European Union. The procedure is allowed only in cases of rape, fetal malformation or if a mother’s health is in danger, and only in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

In 23 other EU nations, abortion is permitted within much broader limits. Women can ask for abortions up to the 24th week of pregnancy in Britain and up to the 12th week in Germany, France and Italy.

The government has portrayed the ballot as a measure of Portugal’s willingness to adopt more modern attitudes.

Its effort to change the law, though, has run into emphatic opposition from the influential Church, which wants to keep the restrictions in place.

And a snip on the Prime Minister:

Anticipating a repeat of the 1998 referendum, Prime Minister Jose Socrates has said that if the turnout is too low to make the ballot binding but the “Yes” camp collects most of the votes cast, he will use his party’s majority in Parliament to push through legislation allowing abortion.

 

Socrates, a longtime campaigner for abortion rights, has called the current law “backward” and “a national disgrace.”

I was doing something rote the other day… and fell to thinking if Roe is overturned, the “trigger” laws in 11 or so states snap into place and for women in those dark red bloody states abortion is banned fully… well, what if the abortion ship were to dock in the Gulf.

Why… I feel certain that all hell would break loose.  Women would be arrested for ‘unauthorised departure from the Homeland’ (Achtung!)..  the US federal government, ably reinforced by the National Guard of Alabama (Senator Sessions in the lead) and some vagrant militia from MS commanded by Haley Barbour, wearing white neckerchiefs for “tradition”, white shirts with red crosses on their back, would bomb the abortion ship.  Bob Casey would argue in the senate for Pennsylbama to join the Righteous Reclamation mob… oops! I mean, Army.

The women and the ship’s staff would be deemed Terrists…

Really.  I can see it…  America has become a cartoon.

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UPDATE, 11:58 am

TruthOut has the Frank Rich column on Obama up.

 [H]istory is going to look back and laugh at last week’s farce, with the Virginia Republican John Warner voting to kill a debate on his own anti-surge resolution and the West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd seizing the occasion for an hourlong soliloquy on coal mining. As the Senate pleasured itself with parliamentary one-upmanship, the rate of American casualties in Iraq reached a new high.

    The day after the resolution debacle, I spoke with Senator Obama about the war and about his candidacy. […]

Now that Mr. Obama has passed through Men’s Vogue, among other stations of a best-selling author’s cross of hype, he wants to move past the dumb phase of Obamamania. He has begun to realize “how difficult it is to break through the interest in me on the beach or that my wife’s made me stop sneaking cigarettes.” He doesn’t expect to be elected the leader of the free world because he “can tell a good joke on Jay Leno.” It is “an open question and a legitimate question,” he says, whether he can channel his early boomlet into an electoral victory.

    No one can answer that question at this absurdly early stage of an absurdly long presidential race. But Mr. Obama is well aware of the serious criticisms he engenders, including the charge that he is conciliatory to a fault. He argues that he is “not interested in just splitting the difference” when he habitually seeks a consensus on tough issues. “There are some times where we need to be less bipartisan,” he says. “I’m not interested in cheap bipartisanship. We should have been less bipartisan in asking tough questions about entering into this Iraq war.”  [snip]

Well that last did not make much sense to me, I sense a tiny viral mind spin… but “bi partisan, to be or not to be”, in some caniption of quadruple strangulation, is certainly the mating call we shall be hearing.  The conservative Dems (Jerry Rafshoon and Ham Jordan) and Repubs (Doug Bailey, Ford communications guy and now Blogometer/National Journal) and policier actors (they have conscripted Sam Waterston to speak for them) of Unity ’08, are rubbing their hands.

We watch all of that out here, writ larger than life:  Arnold.  Big Dems got on board with Arnold the last go round.  Angelides could not get a hearing. Arnold, who has put forth his own “Universal Health Care” (it’s all the rage, now that the corps are screaming!), with his left hand, or maybe his right hand (who knows?) will be stripping a HALF BILLION from poor children.

Too much “policy”, with bi-partisan support, smells like napalm.

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UPDATE, 1:04 pm

I think this is an opportune moment to post again the Billmon LAT opinion piece from fall of 2004.. Be the media:  Blogging Sells and Sells Out (HTML version of the LAT pdf).  To be fair to the tyke (LOL I have been called worse!), link to Kos response (and he links to others within).

[W]hen I say blogging is headed for a kind of commercialized senility, I’m talking primarily about political blogs—those that have, or claim to have, something to say about government, economics, foreign policy, etc. Not surprisingly, these are the blogs most likely to show up on the media’s radar screen. …

“To be sure, there are still plenty of bloggers out there putting the 1st Amendment through its paces, their only compensation the satisfaction of speaking the truth to power. But it’s going to become more difficult for those voices to reach a broad audience. If the mainstream media are true to past form, they will treat the A-list blogs—commercialized, domesticated—as if they are the entire blogosphere, while studiously ignoring the more eccentric, subversive currents swirling deeper down. 

Not the most glorious ending for a would-be revolution, but also not a surprising one. Bloggers aren’t the first, and won’t be the last, rebellious critics to try to storm the castle, only to be invited to come inside and make themselves at home.” …

Sivacracy published the bulk of the text as well in Feb 2006 (and linked to the pdf), catching on to it (in part) from a comment of mine at mediagirl.org… attached to a column on the A’dam trip that 20 Oh So Lucky Bloggers were gifted with from BlogAds.  Ms Marcotte among them.  It is an interesting post and thread.  Catch Ann Bartow, who picked up the Billmon reference for Sivacracy… AB comments on a BlogSheroes ad for, what else?  Kate O’Beirne’s really quite nasty book.  Don’t be surprised.  Catch the so slippery slide in reply…

It all congeals.

Further this is an opportune moment to spread a forming rumor (Mother did not call me Pathe News for nothing as a child)… well a bit more than a rumor!… Money.  IRS.  Various forms of cash flow.  Including but not limited to:  Donations, ad sales, ad space “donated” to candidates (that would be money in kind)… “gifts” (like that A’dam junket) that should be declared as income…  I rather suspect that not too far in the future there may be an example made.

That too is just how it works.

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Ooops!  I shut down “edit” too soon.  In thru the transom from a reader, wtih athe added comment:  Who knew those threads could be so elegant? 

And I do believe this comment fits right in with the Billmon opinion piece…  and needs some light and air…

[new] LOL (3+ / 0-)

Recommended by:

Elise, condoleaser, GoldnI

I think I prefer circumcised to non-circumcised.

Less chance of something getting caught in the teeth, huh?  I’ve always thought you were a very practical woman, Elise. :-p

No tears to cry. No feelings left. This species has amused itself to death.

by Kevin in Long Beach on Sun Feb 11, 2007 at 01:24:19 PM PST

[ Parent ]

You know you needed to know that… 🙂  Are the B-B-Blahgs just begging to scream, BITE ME!  I BEG YOU!

I suspect wish fulfillment en route…

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