From the CNN article on the 2009 mid-terms:

Hoffman's loss certainly doesn't help these conservatives, but it is not a fatal blow, either. The battle for these activists was with the GOP leadership, and they won by successfully pushing GOP nominee Dede Scozzafava out of the race.

As I understand it, national conservative activists decided that a local Republican candidate was not conservative enough, recruited their own non-local candidate who entered the race, and attacked the local Republican candidate.

The Republican candidate recognized that her base was split down the middle, and withdrew from the race -- then endorsed the Democratic candidate. The Democratic candidate won.

I get the idea that this is an ideological victory, but what they did is not actually that difficult: they torpedoed a candidate by splitting her voting block. I guess that's what purges and in-group battles for control are all about, but hey. Am I missing something here?

So in a political matter unrelated to health care, former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee ruffled feathers this week by traveling to Israel and making barbed comments about Obama's policy towards Israeli settlements.

Much has been made of the fact that conservative bloggers ravaged Al Gore for doing the same thing a couple of years ago -- going to a foreign country and criticizing Bush's foreign policy. Glenn Greenwald in particular has harped on this, and one of the bloggers he pointed at has now come out condemning Huckabee for it, as well.

On the one hand, it's an admirable display of consistency: if criticizing the President's policies on foreign soil is wrong, then it's wrong no matter who's in office.

On the other hand? I disagree.

I'll come back to just what I've been saying for the past decade or so: disagreeing with the President is perfectly fine. Doing so publicly, in another country, even an enemy country, in front of people who also disagree with the president? Perfectly fine. Mind you, I'm steadfastly opposed to lying -- saying that the President plans to bomb Brazil, or something like that, is irresponsible in the same way that any public lie about important policy matters is irresponsible and unacceptable. But disagreement? We're a democracy (democratic republic, for the score-keepers in the audience): we're supposed to be able to handle this kind of thing.

If a crazy communist gets elected to Congress (my money's on Minnesota for sheer unpredictability), and they want to tool around the world talking about how America is full of imperialists, okay. Fine. If a hardcore libertarian wants to rally the troops and give speeches in China about how US trade protection should be abolished, okay. If the people they represent continue to elect them, so be it!

Really, who cares? We're big boys and girls. The president is expected to be an adult with a slightly thicker skin than your average livejournal member. The President is an elected leader, not the father of a dysfunctional family. "Maintaining a united front" is unnecessary on these kinds of policy matters, because we pass laws when stuff really matters.

From the New York Times:

A pending House bill has language authorizing Medicare to finance beneficiaries’ consultations with professionals on whether to authorize aggressive and potentially life-saving interventions later in life. Though the consultations would be voluntary, and a similar provision passed in Congress last year without such a furor, Mr. Grassley said it was being dropped in the Senate “because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly.”

It's worth noting that the measure in question was added to the bill by a conservative Republican, and explicitly denounced the scare tactics in an interview. Yesterday, he reversed himself and got on the 'they want to kill grandma" train, despite the fact that he's worked on similar legislation for several years.

Newt Gingrich, one of the people who's been flogging the political talk-show circuit talking about the evil of euthanasia death panel tyranny, wrote a Washington Post editorial in July saying that the same kinds of end-of-life care options were the key to successful heath care reform.

If you are one of the people they are talking to, you are being lied to. You are being manipulated. If you have legitimate concerns about Health Care reform, the liars do not care: they are not interested in making it better. Because improving health care is not as important as scaring you and making their political opponents fail.

I'm almost convinced at this point that health care and health insurance reform is dead thanks to the efforts of the liars: They will not kill the bill, because that would leave them publicly "blame-able" for spiraling costs and the plight of the uninsured. Instead, over the following weeks and months, they will whittle away essential provisions and cripple the bill until it's both expensive and ineffective. Then they can blame their opponents for "growing the Federal bureaucracy" and "the growing cost of health care."

There is no reason that this should be possible: the liars are a minority in a minority party that was utterly trounced in the previous election -- in large part because their opponents promised to pass health care reform legislation. The liars want this promise to be a millstone around their opponents' necks, dragging them down during the next election cycle, and to accomplish that they are willing to make your health care worse.

And from the looks of it, they are going to succeed.

I'm feeling a bit grim today. Don't worry. I'll get better.

When I say that I'm annoyed at people who are flat-out lying in public when important topics are discussed, I'm not talking about good-faith discussions on cost/benefit analysis or what not. I'm talking about this kind of stuff, from Sarah Palin:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

It goes without saying that there are no 'death panels' being proposed. It's also worth noting that today, insurance companies declare Down Syndrome a pre-existing condition and can refuse to cover any medical expenses. That's what the proposed health insurance bill is designed to stop. That's right: Palin is claiming that a plan to preserve her child's access to health insurance is in fact a plan to kill him.

Mind you, that doesn't stop The Investors Business Daily expanding on her warnings with another real-life example.

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Dear IBD Editors: Please note that Stephen Hawking was born, raised, and lives in the United Kingdom, and was covered at birth by the National Insurance Act of 1911.

The best part is that after spinning tales of "death committees" and calling the plan "evil," Palin posted on Facebook scolding people for not discussing health care civilly. That, friends, is the death of debate.

UPDATE: God, it just keeps getting worse. The IBD editorial that includes the Hawking comment also announces that the bill "compels seniors to submit to a counseling session every five years... about alternatives for end-of-life care." They even cite the pages -- 425-430. Unfortunately I have the bill and those pages do not compel any such consultations. They only extend coverage for them. Which is a bit like saying that Blue Cross is force-feeding opiates to the innocent because they cover Vicodin prescriptions.

So there's this guy I know.

He's angry (by his own admission), and he listens to a lot of talk radio. And since Obama's gotten into office he's shouted a lot about how the President is just like Hitler and also a Marxist and is orchestrating a devious takeover of the entire country with his PC tyranny and NO ONE IS BLINKING ZOG ZOG ZOG. There's a lot of the same ignorance-of-actual-fact that you see in any online political diatribe: asking why "none of the liberals care that Obama is doing X" on the same day that everyone from DKos to Glenn Greenwald rips Obama a new one for doing X, for example. It's like asking why conservatives didn't care when Bush tried to change the immigration system: saying it just demonstrates you don't actually know any conservatives, or even pay attention to what they say about any given issue or event.

His latest screed, though, gave me pause. At Whitehouse.gov, the administration is asking people to contact them via email if they receive chain letters or other disinformation about the proposed health insurance reform bill. There's a lot of patently false FUD floating around, and they would like to counter it as quickly as possible.

The Obama campaign set up a similar program during the primaries and the general election, when email chains and talk radio call lines were buzzing with rumors like "Obama is a secret Muslim" and "Michelle Obama gave a sermon and shouted, 'death to whitey!'" Getting a heads-up from people who heard those rumors allowed them to debunk them quickly, before the falsehoods hit critical mass -- a sort of rapid-response version of Snopes.com. Today, the rumors are things like "Obamacare forces the elderly to commit suicide to save money" and "The health insurance bill will make it illegal for you to get experimental treatments!" Patently false, but vigorously shouted on every corner by people who think it's okay to lie if you're lying about bad people. I can understand why they'd want to deploy a similar approach to the one that worked well in the campaign.

In the eyes of the talk radio jockeys that my friend listens to, however, asking people to forward disinformation to them is Orwellian repression of free speech. Ignore the fact that no one is talking about "snitching on neighbors" or "stifling dissent." The idea of finding out what false statements are being made about a proposed bill is apparently enough to cry, "Police state!"

Personally, I think the problem goes much deeper than any particular policy debate, any particular issue. Ultimately, it's about the erosion of the concept of debate in our culture, the devaluation of what conservatives commonly call the "Free Market of Ideas." Long ago, marketing swallowed rhetoric in the national consciousness. Now policy debates and important national issues are decided via choreographed ritual dances on morning television, talk radio, absurdly shallow press conferences, and ten-second CSPAN clips. Hell, when Obama actually talked policy at a recent press conference, TV pundits complained that he was "too wonky" and "too dry."

With depth of analysis out of the picture, the "war of ideas" is really the "war of marketing campaigns." witness Frank Lutz's influence in the Republican Party and Lakoff's being heralded as some kind of genius for announcing that people are influenced more by 'rhetorical framing' than actual content.

This isn't new of course. But what's growing, in my opinion at least, is the active and vigorous embrace of this vacuousness. The eagerness to abandon any responsibility to the truth as long as it accomplishes the goal of selling an audience on one's message. Witness the recent Bizarro-world information visualization put out by Representative John Boehner's office: a bewildering tangle of flowchart-boxes and wildly colored arrows purporting to represent Obama's 'Health Care Bureaucracy.' The people who seemed most angry at it weren't liberal activists -- they were graphic designers, people who consider it their jobs to communicate complex ideas visually. Boehner's office wasn't trying to explain something to the people who viewed the chart. It was an attempt to exploit what we know about how people process information to purposefully confuse them in the middle of a national policy debate. It's the Anti-Tufte.

Which brings us back to my friend's rant about the White House's "Orwellian" attempt to "suppress dissent." This was, he claimed in his forward, an attempt to take away his freedom of speech.

At what point, I ask, did "Freedom of Speech" become "Freedom to say untrue things and not be contradicted?" In what bizarre world are those two things the same? I guess when you stop caring about accuracy and truth, and your only rhetorical weapon is volume, having people respond to you with facts is pretty debilitating.

Is there any way to fix our national discourse? Any way to cut through the nonstop noise? I don't know. And that troubles me.

Those who know me are familiar with what I like to call my storied past: I was conservative religious pro-life dude who published an ideological 'zine for a bit short of a decade, etc. Calling me an 'activist' might have been a bit of a stretch, but I did door-to-door pamphleteering, wrote rabble-rousing screeds, sent money to Focus on the Family, railed against activist judges, etc.

Over time, I've changed and my beliefs have changed. It's a complex and tangly story, with no easy summaries. Suffice to say, this week's news that Dr. George Tiller was assassinated fills me with a profound sense of sadness, regret, and some anger.  Continue reading...

The big bloggy news this weekend is that Pajamas Media is shuttering its ad network come March 31st. A number of farm-league conservative bloggers (Protein Wisdom, The Anchoress, Ace of Spades, etc.) are apparently worried that they'll no longer be able to keep up their writing without the revenue.

One the one hand, I'm a little startled -- perhaps I'm naive but I didn't realize that the folks running those blogs were actually making money doing it. Apparently while I was holed up in my software development cave, the online ad market bounced so high that people could support themselves as moderately popular political bloggers. While I don't fault them for being disappointed at the online ad market's collapse, it feels like 1999 all over again.

Still, Pajamas Media isn't exactly steering itself in an inspiring direction. Fronting Joe the Plumber as a war zone correspondent feels a little gimmicky. The Long Tail is getting more treacherous these days, or at least getting squeezed.

Update: Atlas Shrugged has some thoughts on the closing as well; apparently the smaller blogs on its roster never got much of a cut, but her expectations seem to have been a little high to start with...

I was one of the original pajama bloggers. I thought PJM was going to rival AP, UPI, Reuters. Finally, a news portal of citizen bloggers and journalists that would counter the Pali stringers and left wing biased journalists of the news gathering agencies.

Doing actual solid reporting -- as opposed to critiquing and commenting on news stories that other people have written -- is real work that takes time and money. While there are some great examples of it out there, I'm not sure most of the politibloggers on Pajamas ever showed much interest or aptitude for that side of things. An old Internet friend of mine, Adam Tinworth, has a lot of interesting observations from the other side: he wrangles the online efforts for a large traditional media company, and his blog is must read material for anyone interested in the shifting media landscape.

Ars Technica published a solid piece on the internal dialogue conservatives are having about the party's future. A vocal faction in the grassroots is pressing for a greater emphasis on "outside-the-beltway" input from Silicon Valley folks and others who come from a tech background rather than a political one.

It's worth noting that the folks on the left Erickson acknowledges as models actually tend to be people with political backgrounds who learned some tech, not the opposite.... You need some people with serious kung fu on your team. But that's probably not the bulk of what a tech strategy is actually going to involve. Especially if you're talking about exploiting social media, a big part of the task is leveraging tools other people have built without any particular partisan agenda. That means thinking of innovative ways to think and use existing tech more than rolling out your own redundant ideologically-branded version of a popular site. (Cf. Conservapedia.)

That last point is an important one. It's worth noting that Erick Erickson, one of the drivers behind the 'rebuild conservatism: we have the technology!' push is the founder of RedState, a me-too clone of DailyKos that launched using the same open source software platform and the same group-blog model. One of the remarkable qualities RedState has demonstrated is message discipline: members who deviate from the site's party line are blocked or banned quickly. One of the most memorable instances involved the ousting of Ron Paul supporters during the Republican primaries. Months later, they complained that they were stymied trying to find volunteers to maintain their tech infrastructure. Turns out, one of the people who'd written the software went off to help build Ron Paul's web site.

That kind of scenario implies a deeper issue that might need addressing. The political left (or at least left-of-Republicans), for all its enthusiasm towards building tools, has a long history of grass-roots organization. Even more important, it has a long history of integrating lots of diverse sub-groups with sometimes messily conflicting ideals. While that makes message discipline across an entire political party (or even a web site) difficult, it means that they are, as a group, already comfortable with the wild west nature of distributed social tools.

The right has traditionally relied on church-based social connections for its own grass roots mobilization: witness Huckabee's showing in Iowa during the primaries, based solely on canny leveraging of area churches. And the Church has faced similar challenges trying to figure out how to leverage social media tools. It came up recently in another discussion about Christian-Branded versions of sites like YouTube and Twitter.

The impulse to clone an existing "thing" and slap a culture-specific label on it is strong. Unless the people you're hoping to empower with the tools are familiar (and comfortable!) with the way they work, you're just throwing code into the wind. It's interesting to watch this kind of a discussion play out in a semi-public way; I imagine it must have been similar as political parties tried to figure out how to best leverage radio and television...

UPDATE: Erick's post on RedState is actually a better summary of the issues they're facing than my one-liner gives him credit for. He's pointing out many of the same problems with magic tech-bullets, but he engages in the traditional RedState game of "No, the LEFT is top-down, WE'RE bottom-up!" when discussing the social differences in the activist base. Ah, well...

President Elect Barack Obama.

It's a strange feeling having supported a candidate without too many reservations. It's been a long time since I've done that -- even longer since I've done that and they won.

Catherine and I spent a good bit of the evening purposely avoiding our laptops or the news; it's easy to get into the stress-loop of realtime coverage, and it was definitely one of those situations where the results were out of our hands. Tuning in to see Obama's acceptance speech was a profound moment, I think. I can certainly understand those who object to some of the policies he's proposed, and who are concerned about some of the positions that seem to come along with a democratic majority and President. But his speech was one of those moments that people in our generation have never really had an opportunity to witness first-hand.

Here we have a candidate who, for the first time in my political memory, had everything including the kitchen sink thrown at him; yet continued to communicate a message of optimism for the future and hope for how we can deal with difficult times ahead as a nation. We'll see how he governs as a president, but as I've mentioned in previous posts, it's a genuinely inspiring thing. The fact that our next president isn't white (and was born to a single mother, no less) is a pretty remarkable thing in and of itself. The fact that he's a a gifted orator? It makes me actually look forward to dissecting his statements and speeches and figuring out if I agree with him or not.

I've been kicking around a lot of thoughts with the folks from #predicate over the past several weeks and months about how the campaign (both in the primaries and the general) have evolved. It's a fascinating story, I think, and there's doubtless time for the armchair quarterbacking and memoir writing. I'll probably post some thoughts later. For now, though, I'm happy.

Never let it be said that MetaFilter doesn't deliver. One link, one title: BOX FULL OF PUPPIES WEBCAM.

This is totally my go-to site until polls close. I've got it on the living room TV right now so Catherine and I can just look over and watch them scuffle. Right now the one with the green collar seems to be chewing on Red's head. It's a thug puppy life.

OMG SO CUTE.