A while back, I got the url democrobot.com, based on a conversation with Jon Berger and Eric Klotz about how there aught to be a digg.com for political news. At the time it was sort of trendy, and not especially needed (this was in early 2006 IIRC).

I think the time for such a site may be drawing near. The relationship between the established blogosphere, the newsmedia, and the major Democratic political campaigns is becoming increasingly symbiotic. Many major bloggers walk the line well, but quite a few don't. Trust is on the decline as people play favorites without acknowledging their biases, and/or take professional gigs with no disclaimer.

Add that to a campaign season which seems to have a very strong top tier, and you have a very different scene than 2003-04, when the internet fueled disruptive insurgent candidacies. At this point, online communications are a fully-integrated integrated part of the political establishment, and that includes much of the widely-read blogosphere. This isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but it's not like before.

However, at the same time, there are a large number of new/upstart citizen journalism projects which will produce a large volume of (relatively) independent campaign journalism. There's also a much greater chance that staffers will post anonymously about the inner workings of some campaign operations in more obscure fora. There will also be a glut of low-quality audio and video content to sift through. This is all new.

The sifting is what's needed. That's where democrobot might have a purpose. If you added in Zack's old "PPipes" idea of aggregating progressive/Democratic mailing-list messages, you'd have something that would be pretty interesting, and pretty useful too.

I clearly don't have a lot of bandwidth to take on additional projects, but it might not be all that much work to get up and running. We'll see.

I admit it; I'm a little stressed.

There's a lot going on right now. The revolution is headed into uncharted waters. My life is taking unexpected turns into unknown territory. Business is booming. It's also cold as hell out here, and we're running out of wood.

There's a lot going on.

Politically the season is officially on. I've been doing some work with a couple of old cohorts on Future Majority. It's principally the creation of Mike Connery and Alex Urevick, who I know through MFA, and through hanging out while I lived Brooklyn, etc. We're pretty close, and I've started helping get the site really cooking as a project for Chapter Three.

This is going to be an interesting cycle. The way I see it there are three strong challengers from the Democratic field, and any one of them (Clinton, Edwards or Obama) could win, and there are plenty of lesser-known possibilities who could come up and surprise everyone. The question is who do we want to send?

My sense is that the real action this year is issue based, rather than candidate based activism. This lets us tie in with Speaker Pelosi's Congress, and to push the potential candidates into creating stronger and more powerful campaigns.

It's a lot of work. There's a lot going on.

Personally I've made some steady progress. Since I am my own ride into town, I've made it to the gym for two weeks straight. This is a good thing.

However, I've yet to effectively branch out into public life here, although I am getting a feel for town. Walked around and checked a few places out on Friday. It was early (I was killing time waiting for Mark to finish his Lifeguard shift) so nothing much was happening, but it did feel good to be my own presence in the world.

So I did my part and watched the State of the Union last night. Reading the coverage I find myself once again out of step.

• I thought that on the whole Bush's speech was nice, although he's clearly getting worn down and sort of cranky. Get the president a juice box and someone get Condi to take a nap.
• Substantively it was pretty stupid, both politically and policy-wise. Although that's been covered elsewhere, in brief by embracing themes like Health Care and Immigration Reform, Bush is alienating some substantial subset of his remaining support. He also proposed things -- like subsidized opt-in insurance -- that are terrifically ineffective.
• Did no one else see him grab Speaker Pelosi's tit at the end???
• While I liked how he started off on calling out CEO pay, and I like that everyone seems to think it was a tenacious response, Jim Webb's ditty felt stiff and boring to me, like a high school teacher giving a lecture. I like his reasoning and tough, brass-tacks bearing, but I prefer it seasoned with some passion.

Anyway, I'm pleased that Bush had to thematically go our way on Health Care, Energy and the like. That matters. When it comes to making programs happen, the President actually can't do anything. As easy as it is to forget this after the last six years, the President actually doesn't make the laws, at least not according to the Constitution.

This means his stupid proposals are just that -- empty talk -- but the subject of that empty talk bodes well for people like me who savor the notion of energy independence, universal health care, universal net access, and an economy that embraces the notion of service rather than servitude.

The notion of a "blogger ethics panel" is a sort of big inside joke, and it's a nice snarky comeback when people in the traditional media wail over the tone or reliability of some content from the "fever swamps." After all, it's not as though members of the traditional press, especially the political press, have any sort of actual leg to stand on.

And so fair enough. Joe Klein doesn't get to lecture Atrios. Reasonable people agree.

However, I have an issue in that I don't really want Joe Klein as my yardstick. I like reading blogs, and I do it because there's real information there. As this is the first political cycle where the medium will be fully embraced (even Hillary comes out swinging with live webcasts), I expect we'll see a lot of trickery.

And that's a shame. It's a shame that people who carry the title blogfather will go and say things like:

As a historical note, I was semi-involved with the Draft Clark effort. Markos and I had formed a consultancy group in January of 2003. I liked Dean; he Clark. We agreed that whichever hired us first we'd both work together on that campaign.

After they were hired, Jerome did not disclaim, but promoted Dean heavily. Markos posted that he did "some technical work for Howard Dean," while helping to spread the word as well*. Somewhat misleading, I have to say.

Ah! But James Carville does the same thing! It's true, you're right, and as we said Joe Klein owes Atrios a million beers, but see that's why I don't listen to James Carville or Joe Klein, and haven't for several years now. They're both in their own way egotistical shills. Klein and Carville I mean. Armstrong and Moulitsas? Well, the jury is still out.

People call for people to be fired because they use the word "faggot" in public.

There's a legitimate case to be made if, as is somewhat implied, there was a lot of on-set animosity -- that whole "hostile workplace environment" thing, which is legit -- but it seems to be the height of Political Correctness (and I use that term pejoratively here) to agitate for someone to lose their job as a result of a public statement they made, even if it was in the context of an awards show and thus semi-official.

Which is not to defend this guy's choice of language. Poor form, and all, but do we really want to start firing people on this kind of basis? Seems extreme to me.

Now, GLADD's position -- that it's not good language to promote and that he should apologize -- is far more moderate than those expressed by the entertainment press and a the VP of the Directors Guild, which seems to be that if you're homophobic, that's grounds for dismissal. This is why people fear and loathe the idea of Hollywood, even as they lap up the products.

Without defending homophobia, I think it's well within our individual rights as citizens to dislike whoever we dislike for whatever reasons, rational or otherwise. Acting on those feelings is different, but its a very dangerous thing to try and normatively shape ideas (e.g. creating thoughtcrime).

Real honest online activism; getting every member of congress on-record about escalation is an important step in stopping it.

It's also a great use of the interweb; a lot more real and effective than circulating petitions which (pssst, here's a secret) are mainly about listbuilding.

This, on the other hand, actually may matter, so check the link and see if your representatives have gone on the record (mine have) about whether or not they support the Bush/McCain doctrine escalate in Iraq.

Jerome Armstrong, who I still have to post a recap about, continues to behave like a thug on MyDD. The latest example is a popular diary written by an Edwards supporter which takes Barak Obama to task for using similar language to Joe Lieberman. Jerome put it on the front page, and edited in an image from Google News with Edwards using similar language.

The image is two and a half years old, so that's pretty weak sauce, but the point here isn't the substance of the argument; it's what Armstrong did with his admin powers.

Here you have a community site that's had a pretty good vibe to it over the past year or two. It's a community that has good things bubble up from the diaries, and has a smaller (but in many ways sharper) community of commentators than the bigger blogs.

On this community site, you have one of the admins taking a community contribution, editing it without permission to completely flip it around on the author, and putting the result on public display.

That's thuggish, bullying behavior, and it's destructive and wrong. Even if Jerome's an Obama fanboy and was hurt by the community member's diary -- or maybe as he said was the case with Dean in this post and they've put him on the payroll so now he's carrying water -- this is a shitty way to behave on a community website. It's a petty violation of what anyone would consider normal standards.

This upsets me partly because people in the campaign world think Jerome actually has good advice (highly debatable), but more because he really brings the whole tenor of MyDD down. Matt and Chris and Jonathan and the other posters have a good thing going, and Armstrong's half-bright technology posts, childish abuses of admin power, and transparent frontpage shilling muddy the waters.

I'm pretty sure this is actually from Eyes on the Prize. I've got a torrent file for that here (broken link before), and I strongly suggest you grab it and seed.

Not only do we all owe this man for a large portion of the level of racial integration we have today, anyone who wants to change the world also owes him big time for the path he laid down. You want to see how it's done? Check it out.

I mean, listen to the oration. Where the hell is that kind of voice in today's turbulent and troubled times?

Two years ago, the saintly leaders at DownHillBattle did a nice little bit of copyright and general activism by organizing screenings of the seminal Civil Rights documentary Eyes on the Prize, which has not been available for sale for some time because of all the clearances necessary for the archival footage.

Their action was called Eyes on the Screen, and it used BittTorrent to distribute the first two episodes of the video series. I participated in SF, torrenting the first two episodes and setting up a showing at this anarchist loft I had a couple of connections with.

It was probably one of the single most rewarding pieces of activism I've participated in, as it drew a very diverse crowd both young and old, and people were very moved by both the documentary (which is GD amazing) and the circumstances (internet wizardry) by which it was presented.

That event was one of the rare moments in my time as a velvet revolutionary where I really felt like my work was building on, rather than digging itself out from under, the legacy of the 1960s. It was fucking inspiring.

Holmes and Nick and Tiffany got some serious pushback from the original producers who claimed they were really working hard on getting everything together for a DVD re-issue, and that this "stunt" was putting it all at risk. In response, they took down the torrent link and instead encouraged people instead to get the video from a library for screening.

Well, it's on now. Bush will double-down more troops. Nancy will go all-in to beat it back, but Bush will veto and the House and Senate don't have 2/3rds majority to come over the top. Maybe in the time it takes to do this, more Republicans will flip, but it still seems unlikely that this can be effectively fought with procedure.

After all, Bush already started the escalation, sending more troops yesterday as a matter of fact. He's the decider!

I don't know what to make of this. It's kind of chilling that the President can keep surging forward even though everyone knows it's not really going to work out. It seems like a pretty big failure that there's no check or balance here, because this is moronic and (considering that people are dying) also somewhat monstrous.

The other spooky thing is sending those aircraft carriers, putting a Navy man in charge, and talking up the Patriot missile batteries (which are no real use against IEDs). That all points to Iran. But he wouldn't be stupid enough to try that, would he? Would he? Could we stop him if he was?

Not a fun line of thought to consider.

UPDATE: Shitters. I'm starting to get a very bad feeling about all this. It's very very Nixon part deux, but kinda worse in some ways.