Position: It accomplishes absolutely nothing constructive or meaningful, in terms of progressive causes, for members of the blogosphere to appear on national MSM TV.

Discuss.

Ok, kids. I’m annoyed and I have to share. I’m not going to pick on anyone person/poster, but today is a “this is my blog, so respect my house rules” post. I’ll keep it simple. Try to keep comments on topic. That’s easy to understand, right? We *never* expect, or even want, everyone who comments to agree with what we’re saying. That would be intolerably dull. We also *love* extra information that enriches our understanding of the issues: links, new blogs to check out, videos, pics…it’s all good. But spamming this blog with “theory of everything” cut-and-pastes from incoherent authors is Right Out. I don’t have the time I used to have to blog anymore, so when I come here, I want that to be time well spent. Be funny, be angry, be contrary, be yourself. But please try to keep the discussion, well, a discussion. Pedantry is really quite a bore, and you won’t win any friends or convince any enemies with it.

Down at the end of yesterday’s Froom is an item he found over at US News:

“Current and former Bush administration communications officials tell the US News Political Bulletin that they now believe they relied too heavily on traditional media and the White House press corps to get out the President’s message about the broader war on terrorism and the booming economy. ’We didn’t use the new tools of communication’ like the Internet, blogs and mobile technology, said a former key official. As a result, added another official, the President’s message was filtered through the mainstream press which eventually got bored with the story and stopped reporting the President’s repetitive messages. ’You’ve got to use the new tools. They can reach far more people than TV or the papers,’ said an administration official. ’A video on the Internet or some blogging can reach millions and we should have played with that much more,’ said the official. White House insiders, however, dismissed the complaints, mostly from former communications officials, claiming that they have worked with bloggers and non-traditional media but that the tide has turned against them.”

How many ways can you find that this statement is not just off-base, but in typical “Bushian” fashion is 180 degrees away from reality? We’d have found what Bush was saying believable if we’d read it on a blog? If I was a rightwing blogger I’d be pissed, enraged and heartbroken at being so dissed.

No, anonymous “administration official.” The “mainstream press” reported your lies just fine. And over and over again, tragically, to the point where there are still measurable numbers of Americans not confined to institutions for the mentally incapacitated who think that we’re killing Iraqis to pay them back for 9/11. And that “booming economy”? Please, my eyes hurt enough already. Somehow sending our manufacturing capability overseas in exchange for part-time, no-benefits, no-security jobs in service industries would somehow improve life? And the former “breadbasket of the world” is now so hard up we have to import both pet and human food contaminated with poison in order to make more money? This is what you mean by “booming” perhaps?

Yeah, I’ll believe that if I read it in a blog rather than the NYT or WaPo.  Read more 

Clearly, he’s not a fan of the blogosphere.

– Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.”

– Internet service providers (ISPs) are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain’s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face “even stiffer penalties” than ISPs.

Social networking sites will be forced to take “effective measures” — such as deleting user profiles — to remove any website that is “associated” with a sex offender. Sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and blogs like DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries.

There’s more. Gotta love the name of the bill: Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act. I’ve always said they’d use “the children” to shut down free speech on the internet.  Read more 

To Liberal Feminist Bias. She’s got a nappy head, and a freaking outstanding blogroll.

I just came across this site and I’m interested to see where they go with it. Think tanks abound in the Beltway, I’m not sure another one is needed or can make a difference, even with bloggers working for it, but I’m still glad to know people are making an effort. However, one quote on their blog (although I’m not sure that’s how they think of it) really ticked me off:

It is fair to say that the Strategist intends to make empirical evidence a more central element than most blogs, and we reject advocacy of strategies that are weakly supported by evidence (if at all). But you know what? The netroots may very well be right on any number of questions where their answer differs from the Beltway conventional wisdom.  Read more 

Now, I know not everyone doing this is doing so for “good” reasons. But the radical in me just loooooves to hear this kind of news:

“This is not just companies being paranoid about blogging, because they don’t understand it,” says Proofpoint’s Crosley. “This is a real enterprise issue, and there are real risks and impacts to the companies. One of ten publicly traded companies surveyed say they investigated the exposure of financial information that was directly relevant to the corporation in the past year. Obviously such exposure can negatively impact the price of a company’s stock, and it could lead to insider trading issues as well.”  Read more