....subtitled, goodbye Tom J, who recently joined "the banned" at Daily Kos.
Strikes of political blogs are generally only symbolic protests and this one is no different. A week ago, a Daily Kos diarist was banned from the site by an administrator, for no apparent reason, which ticked off Arab and Palestinian bloggers, and their sympathizers. So one of them called for a strike, and others joined in.
The banning was of Tom J. Tom J was a regular diarist at Daily Kos who provided factual diaries about daily events taking place in Israel and Palestine against its indigenous inhabitants, the Palestinians. Diaries about the effects of Israel's occupation, the enforced colonization it has been conducting for over 40 years, stories about killings, house demolitions, wrecking of farmlands and orchards, and deprivation of water resources, all for the purpose of expanding Jewish settlements, the towns and cities Israel has built over the years on stolen Palestinian lands.
Tom J provided a daily account of the horrors taking place through news stories, pictures, and videos, the kind of reporting that is usually censored from mainstream US media. Without implying conspiracy, Tom J is also the proprietor of the site, STOP AIPAC.
By simply revealing the reality, Tom J continually disturbed the large gang of right wing Zionists who blog at Daily Kos, viewed his diaries as Israel-bashing, and him as part of the "Israel is always wrong" crowd. However, under the brutal conditions of the Palestinian occupation/colonialism, there has never been an "Israel is right" diary posted on Daily Kos that justified Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians. Diaries about left wing peace activism inside Israel or Palestine or in the US, especially among Jewish peace groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, recently condemned as anti-Israel by the ADL, have always been considered Israel-bashing, strange as it may seem.
Watching Chris Bowers' Daily Kos postings on filibuster reform, it is depressing and sad seeing how many are still opposed to ending the filibuster. Broadly speaking, the netroots has watched four years of pervasive and systemic minority obstruction in the Senate which has served to significantly weaken any progressive governance. There has been a large amount of analysis in the netroots on this, with a broad consensus that the price for minority obstructionism is going to be paid for the majority whom the country blames for any and all failures to address their problems. A number of polls confirm the public neither knows nor cares about Senate rules, and are only dimly and occasionally aware of Republican tactics in this regard.
The most frequent progressive refrain to defend the filibuster is the old standby: "Well what if the Republicans take over? Won't it be nice to be able to stop them privatizing Social Security/reinstituting slavery/eating kittens?" My sense is that this viewpoint is on the upswing compared roughly and unscientifically to how often I would see this view in an anti-filibuster piece from 2008 or 2009. That's somewhat understandable. With Democratic fortunes on the downswing, it is natural to fear what Republicans would do if they got the governing triple-crown. They are dominated by awful people with frightening agendas. It's sensible to want to cling to anything which might avert the worst of this.
The filibuster will not achieve that aim. The filibuster is unlikely to serve any useful purpose in preventing anything substantial the Republicans might attempt. This isn't for the "Democrats are too weak to use the filibuster" reason (thought that is a problem), the deeper issue here is that the "Nuclear Option" fracas of 2005 proved that the filibuster is Tinkerbell; a fairtale. It only lives so long as 51 Senators keep clapping for it. The reason to get rid of the filibuster is that the Republicans will not hesitate to eliminate it if and when it suits them from the majority, so relying on it to stop anything really bad from happening is deluded wishful thinking. Besides, the way to head off those Republican majorities is to govern better and that cannot happen with the filibuster.
As one of those who used Dkos/R2000 data on various occasions, resting a fair amount of my own analysis on the assumption that the data was real, I feel personally implicated as well as violated by the revelations that R2000 fabricated its data. That it did so is now beyond dispute, since R2000 owner Del Ali admitted as much openly in his own defense in an email to TPM. His defense is that he didn't fabricate it out of thin air, but "merely" manipulated it within the margin of error:
Yes we weight heavily and I will, using t[h]e margin of error adjust the top line and when adjusted under my discretion as both a pollster and social scientist, therefore all sub groups must be adjusted as well.
Although it is not crystal-clear what Ali is suggesting, one interpretation is that he feels he has the liberty "under my discretion as both a pollster and social scientist" to adjust his topline results anywhere within the margin of error. Thus, if his raw data had the Democrat at 46 percent and the Republican at 44 percent, and had a margin of error of +/- 4 percent, the Democrat's number could presumably be adjusted by Ali to be anywhere from 42 percent to 50 percent, or the Republican's anywhere from 40 percent to 48 percent.
As you can see, this would give Ali quite a bit of discretion: he could adjust his poll to show essentially anything that he wanted, from a decent-sized lead for the Democrat to a modest one for the Republican. Needless to say, this is not what they teach you in Polling 101....
Long story short, the line between a pollster who is fabricating data and one who mutilates real data beyond recognition is rather blurry, perhaps even intractably so. While I wouldn't want to hire either one of them, it might make quite a bit of difference from a legal standpoint.
The amazing thing here is that Ali actually thinks his confession is a defense!
But he's hardly alone in this sort of delusion. His company includes the New York Times, which has made a similarly damning confession, confirming its conscious and intentional decision to stop correctly identifying waterboarding as torture once the Bush Administration took it up. As the abstract of the Shorensen Center report "Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media" explained:
The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.
Just like Del Ali, the New York Times thought that confessing was their best defense, as Michael Calderone reported for Yahoo! News: [emphasis added]
Primarydoc just published a diary on Daily Kos contending that the site is contributing to false advocacy and Iran-bashing based totally on false propaganda, principally the long unsubstantiated notion that Iran was contributing to the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq.
The ad features these words, with background visuals,
Iranian Bombs Are Killing Americans
On The Battlefields of Iraq
It is accompanied by shots of an IED exploding and a picture of a helmet and rifle, usually a symbol of a dead soldier. The Website skin is the advertising strip across the the top of Dkos' front page and is prominent, and highly expensive.
The Institute for Global Jewish Affairs did a study and found that Salon, Huffington Post and Daily Kos, large left wing blogs, were hotbeds of anti-Semitism! This belabored notion, that the left wing or the left wing blogosphere is anti-Semitic, of course, was immediately dismissed by Muzzlewatch, the anti-propaganda arm of Jewish Voice for Peace.
In contrast, however, it is also the case that left wing blogs like Daily Kos are being used by bloggers intent on plying Israeli propaganda in an apparent attempt to justify Israel's occupation and colonial activity under the guise of being left wing writings.
By blogging on a certain website, we help to legitimize its viewpoint. We generate advertising revenue for the site through our own hits and through hits that are a result of responses to our posts from others. We contribute to any reputation the site may have for being especially renowned and important. We contribute to the personal reputation of its editors and founders and help their voice extend further and sound louder than it might if we stayed away. In exchange, we get a place to share our views and learn about others.
I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that the views being presented right now on health care at Daily Kos are, at least at this time, doing more harm than good in the fight for reform. First among my concerns is the total failure by the editors to promote any kind of national health care system, which could but does not necessarily have to be Medicare for All. Given public opinion polling showing that a majority of the public probably would favor Medicare for All given the choice, the current monotone focus on the public option is simply a red herring that does more to hurt the fight for real reform than to help it. Secondly, even this focus is not what it claims to be. As Kip Sullivan has said, it's a "bait and switch."
To an ignorant few, the election of a black president signals a transition into a period of post-racialism, where all of the racial tensions and struggles of the past have been overcome and racism no longer exists. Even though there are signs of improvement, such as the election of Barack Obama, America is far from overcoming it's embarrassing racial past and becoming a 'post-racial' society. (Some of us hope that we never do become a post racial society. Even though race is a social construct, I believe that especially in America, it is important to understand and embrace our own and each other's racial identities and histories). It is inevitable, however, that we are increasingly becoming (or recognizing that we actually are) a multi-racial society, which can be very uncomfortable to those used to the status quo.
We at Sum of Change have been releasing lots of videos from Netroots Nation. We have released some 40 highlights videos, but today we release a panel in entirety for the first time. This was the first panel I attended, bright and early at 9:00am on Thursday, August 13th.
Three of today's video's come from 'Four Perspectives from the Social Change Blogosphere: Case Studies from Civil Rights/ Pro-Migrant Bloggers' a panel at Netroots Nation 2009 in Pittsburgh hosted by Kety Equivel, the New Media Manager for the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), with David Bennion, a non-profit immigration attorney, Prerna Lal, a blogger, youth organizer, and new media consultant, Edmundo Rocha, the Publisher and Content Producer of Para Justica Y Libertad, a latino centered political blog, and Dee Perez-Scott, who runs the blog 'Immigration Talk with a Mexican American'.
Netroots Nation '09 is over. Of course, we are still up until 5:30am (again) working on footage. Today we filmed Valerie Jarrett's conversation with Netroots Nation attendees, a keynote panel with Governor Jon Corzine, Anna Burger, Kevin Drumm, and Dean Baker, the closing keynote with Senator Jim Ferlo, Richard Tumka of the AFL-CIO, and Darcy Burner of the American Proggressive Caucus PolicyFoundation, and four more panels.
We'll start off with a real quick video on an issue that means a lot to me...
6:50pm - I finally found a minute to sit down and type up some thoughts on my first trip to Netroots Nation. We are close to done with day 1 of filming. We filmed 8 panels, interviewed a handful panelists, and are prepping to film President Bill Clinton's keynote address. Below, you will find a play list of day 1 coverage, including interviews with Greg Dworking (DemFromCT), Nate Silver, Congresswoman Donna Edwards, Monique Hoeflinger, and Michael Wilson:
The other day I responded to an entry that pertained to the ratings-bump Obama experienced during the Sotomayor nomination. That comment, which violated no rules, was hidden by a pair of users because they took offense with a single word used to describe the current occupant of the Oval Office. The word is "dictator," and it is the unvarnished truth. Unfortunately, the truth is too much for far too many alleged left-wingers to handle.
The abusers of the rating system are TValley and fbihop. Without offering so much as one word of argument, one challenge to my description of Obama, my comment was hidden for no other reason than the two individuals who troll-rated it found the truth unpleasant. Regardless of whether one agrees with such an assessment of the guy or not, the comment violated no terms of service and did not deserve to be hidden. I request that the hide-rating be annulled and my comment restored to visibility within the thread. I also request more strenuous oversight of the rating privileges so that such abuse is weeded out. Otherwise, we risk this site turning into another Daily Kos.
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