No doubt this is a Democratic year, but that doesn't prevent Democrats from trying to find a way to lose. The current methodology is by attacking their candidate. Everyone knows The Right is unhappy with McCain, but the reason they win and Democrats lose is that they will choose party over candidate. Not the Democrats, who have a certain knack for screwing up sure things.

It is very simple really. The media is like a two-year old child. They will repeat what they are told by some outside source. If the Democrats profess happiness with Obama, all stories will reflect this and will shift the focus onto McCain's problems. But when there is dissatisfaction in the ranks...MYDD, Daily Kos, Huffington, TPM, Open Left, etc.,...all the sudden Obama has liabilities which leads the dumb media to exploring all of this other liabilities(Islamic name, black, Rev. Wright, no experience, etc.).

All liberal bloggers who have put this dumb FISA issue and Obama's move to the center up as a rallying cry on their sites, which he must do to win, morons, as not enough people agree with you and your leftist views, should be dragged out back and beaten....to quote Bill McNeal.

He broke faith,

Obama pledged to filibuster, and he is part of that old politics, in this case, that he said he wasn't. It will spur us to challenge him

It angers the blogosphere to its core

We want to be able to know: What did you do? If we can get that information, we can make sure they don't do that again. We can get the public engaged

Another Republican term is what angers me.

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of Daily Kos, said Monday on MSNBC's "Countdown With Keith Olbermann":

Let's be honest, it is either Obama or John McCain. So we really don't have much of a choice

At stake for Obama in the FISA vote is the intensity of support for Obama, Moulitsas said.

What is at stake in the 'Netroots'. Mr Moulitsas is your grandstanding attempt to gain further entry into the mainstream. With all it's fame and fortune at the expense of electing a Democratic president.

He goes on:

I don't want to hear him talk about leadership. I don't want to hear him talk about defending the Constitution. I want to see him do it," he said. "If he does, it will increase the intensity and level of support he gets from base Democrats. If he doesn't, we may worry he is just another one of these spineless Democrats who are more afraid of controversy in doing the right thing than they are in actually doing the right thing.

By the by, Keith Olbermann's special comment is on this very subject, how the FISA bill none of you have read but love to criticize Obama for selling you out over, is actually so poorly written that it doesn't prevent any of the Telecommunications companies from being CRIMINALLY prosecuted. It just prevents civil cases...i.e...all of Daily Kos joining up in a class action civil lawsuit because, most assuredly, the government is having the Telecoms monitor every single movement of yours.

Stop shooting yourself, Democrats, and the causes of the left by being petulent whiny bastards. The Right doesn't do this and The Right wins. The left does this and the left loses. It really isn't that hard.....don't shit where you eat.

These Netroots take themselves too seriously. The media is now feeding of their childish tantrums. I'm sick of them making Democrats lose.

Obama as nominee has to appeal to ALL Americans not just Democrats. If Obama loses, then this party is OVER. No party that loses 3 times in a row will be viewed seriously.

Shame on the 'NetRoots' bloggers who want to increase their fame and make 'statement's.

Shame on Mydd, Kos, Openleft, Salon.com, shame on you all. Who want fame and don't want to win.

(cross-posed at Kickin it with CG and Clintonistas for Obama)

Last week the blog Clintonistas for Obama was locked by Blogger.  The following message was provided:

Dear Blogger User,

This is a message from the Blogger team.

Your blog, at http://clintonistasforobama.blogspot.com /, has been identified as a potential spam blog. You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team

To unlock, a code had to be entered to request an editorial review from a live person, which took four days.  I also would like to preface that C4O's mandate is as follows...

We agree with Hillary Clinton, we support the progressive values she supports, and we share her dedication to making this nation better... That's why we support Barack Obama for President! :-)

The locking of the blog puzzled the group that posts there, and personally made me suspicious since C4O is the furthest thing from being spam.  So I decided to investigate this a bit further.  What I discovered was shocking and disturbing to be frank.  

My investigation began with a Washington Post article that exposes that the Obama smear emails originated on Free Republic. No shocker there. Freepers have been leaders of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy since its inception and full of smears, slime and innuendoes, especially about the Clintons.

But after the article was published, a Freeper, charged that the WaPo reporter has exposed the identity of anonymous posters in the past, and the WaPo article also "exposed" ordinary people who dared to think the rumour was important, but who denied being involved in the spamming.

The author is quite paranoid about it:

The article Mosk wrote today purports to be about efforts to track down where the `Obama is a Muslim' allegations began. However, it is actually a warning shot across the bow to opponents of Obama that they will be tracked down and exposed for speaking ill of the Obamessiah.

While it literally pains me to agree with a Freeper, is this what is going on?  Shutting down free speech online?  Finding the name and address of people who post anonymously on websites?  Reporters harassing them and exposing them to ridicule?  I am embarrassed to say that I have witnessed behaviour akin to this on 'progressive' blogs as well.

Which brings me back to C4O.  It seems that there is a concerted effort amongst a group to shut down political criticism of Obama.

Blogger offers readers the opportunity to flag blogs as spam or complain about objectionable content.  And apparently someone has been using this to shut down blogs that are perceived as critical to Obama.

Several sources, including Blogspasm report that several blogs that have been shut down by Google that are critical of Obama, and the suspicion is that Google is being manipulated to shut down the opposition.

Now no one could think that the Obama campaign is promoting such deeds, but when people attack and try to shut down sites critical of a political candidate - we all have to worry.

Is this really what some people have become, bullying and intimidation to fall in line with what is 'acceptable' discussion?  

We all have heard of the tragedy that hit Darcy Burner and her family just days ago. Well the netroots stepped up to help give Darcy some breathing room and a short vacation from having to raise funds.

We have been doing GREAT!

The comment below is from an update comment I left at EENR.
http://www.eenrblog.com/showDiary.do?dia ryId=1924

WOW! What a way to have a fundraiser... have your house burn down and almost lose your life!

But... we have ALL been stepping up to the plate! I believe in the last few days, on ActBlue, we have raised more money for Darcy Burner then her campaign did on their own just a few days ago.

Here is the update:

9,346
Supporters

$341,627
Raised

Remember that is started out at $250,000.

Here is what they did recently:
http://www.darcyburner.com/blog/lead_art icle/fewer_than_144_hours_to_raise_30000 /

It looks like they raised $72,000 in 6 days. We have helped Darcy with about $91,000 in just a couple of days AND only on ActBlue. I am sure they got a lot more via their website.
http://www.darcyburner.com/

So I say BRAVO to ALL of you!

Two years ago I met Lowell Feld.

I was working with Jerome Armstrong at Mark Warner's Forward Together PAC, testing the national waters for a very successful Virginia Governor. Part of my job was reaching out to bloggers in key states like Iowa and New Hampshire. Naturally we needed to have the strong support of bloggers from Warner's home state of Virginia.

It didn't take long to figure out that getting Lowell Feld of RaisingKaine on board the Warner train was crucial.

Lowell had other things on his mind though. He was busy helping Jim Webb win a contentious U.S. Senate primary and didn't really want to discuss the 2008 Presidential campaign. As much as he liked Mark Warner, he had other things on his plate.

Over the remainder of 2006, as Mark Warner focused on helping elect Democrats, I stayed in close touch with Lowell. He had joined Webb as a full-time staffer, leaving behind a secure government job for the stormy seas of the campaign trail. When the poll numbers weren't what he wanted to see, he vented to me and I tried to use my decade's experience on the campaign trail to give him perspective.

When "Macaca" hit, we IM'd back and forth trying to figure out how to turn George Allen's blunder into a perfect storm for the Webb campaign.

After the nail-biter of an election we celebrated the victory and began talking about what was next for the two of us. In particular, we discussed possible ways in which we might be able to keep contributing to the netroots movement which had helped revitalize the Democratic Party -- and, more broadly, our democracy -- over the past few years.

We looked back with awe at the amazing campaign cycle we'd just been through, one which saw Democrats win majorities in both houses of Congress against long odds, and one which saw not at least half a dozen scrappy, underfunded candidates -- including Jim Webb -- beat BOTH the Democratic establishment in the primaries and the GOP in the general.

We knew something amazing had happened. And, because we had been behind the scenes working the internet for Democrats, we had a nuts-and-bolts perspective on what really made the big wins of 2006 possible. We were both pretty sure it wasn't Rahm Emmanuel's "move to the center." We were also both sure that wouldn't have happened without the explosion of citizen activism called the "netroots".

Somehow, the idea of writing a book to tell the story of the grassroots movement that made the difference for Democrats in 2006 came up. We'd both been involved since the beginning (2003) -- me as a Howard Dean activist in Texas, Lowell as a part of Wes Clark's netroots campaign and as founder of the Virginia political blog Raising Kaine (in January 2005).

Lowell hooked us up with a book deal and the next six months were a flurry of research, interviews, digging up old notes and emails and writing. We couldn't tell all the important stories -- honestly we couldn't even tell a small fraction of the important stories -- but we tried to tell the stories we knew the best and one or two others where we had access to great sources.

The book we wrote, Netroots Rising, is officially released tomorrow. As a supplement to the book, we'll be posting some of the many excellent interviews we did during our research for the book. We also plan to conduct new interviews and to write about some of the great stories that we didn't have room for in the book that will be posted on the Netroots Rising site.

SusanG at DailyKos was kind enough to give us a very good review on Daily Kos today. She neatly summarized a key part of the book, something that we worked very hard to pull off:

This project is just beginning. We've made huge leaps since 2002 -- when there was effectively no way for non-wealthy individuals with no inside connections to impact the political system -- to now, when many of us have found ways to come together online and off to make many small impacts that cumulatively can be very large. There is an enormous amount of work remaining, but we wanted to tell some of the stories of 2002-2006 while the memories were fresh.  

No doubt this is a Democratic year, but that doesn't prevent Democrats from trying to find a way to lose. The current methodology is by attacking their candidate. Everyone knows The Right is unhappy with McCain, but the reason they win and Democrats lose is that they will choose party over candidate. Not the Democrats, who have a certain knack for screwing up sure things.

It is very simple really. The media is like a two-year old child. They will repeat what they are told by some outside source. If the Democrats profess happiness with Obama, all stories will reflect this and will shift the focus onto McCain's problems. But when there is dissatisfaction in the ranks...MYDD, Daily Kos, Huffington, TPM, Open Left, etc.,...all the sudden Obama has liabilities which leads the dumb media to exploring all of this other liabilities(Islamic name, black, Rev. Wright, no experience, etc.).

All liberal bloggers who have put this dumb FISA issue and Obama's move to the center up as a rallying cry on their sites, which he must do to win, morons, as not enough people agree with you and your leftist views, should be dragged out back and beaten....to quote Bill McNeal.

By the by, Keith Olbermann's special comment is on this very subject, how the FISA bill none of you have read but love to criticize Obama for selling you out over, is actually so poorly written that it doesn't prevent any of the Telecommunications companies from being CRIMINALLY prosecuted. It just prevents civil cases...i.e...all of Daily Kos joining up in a class action civil lawsuit because, most assuredly, the government is having the Telecoms monitor every single movement of yours.

Stop shooting yourself, Democrats, and the causes of the left by being petulent whiny bastards. The Right doesn't do this and The Right wins. The left does this and the left loses. It really isn't that hard.....don't shit where you eat.

These Netroots take themselves oo seriously. The media is now feeding of their childish tantrums. I'm sick of them making Democrats lose.

I've already written in one comment that I'm very disenchanted right now.  Somehow, we're still in Iraq, don't have universal healthcare, don't have stem cell funding.  We're seeing pushes for offshore drilling.  And this week, our party assumed the position when it comes to FISA.

What was even more infuriating is to see candidates that many candidates heavily supported the grassroots and the Netroots (both in the more limited sense that includes the page DailyKos, Swing State Project, etc collaborate on. and the broader sense to include all of the liberal websites such as Democracy for America and MoveON).  It's both heartbreaking and infuriating to see people like Patrick Murphy, Kirsten Gillibrand, Nancy Boyda, Jim Webb, and Jerry McNerney, people we thought would be the vanguard of the coming progressive era, vote they way they do, with the likes of Murphy and Gillibrand joining the Blue Dogs!

The rules are the rules. I wouldn't want to see any candidate or a DNC leader, for example, try to subvert or abuse them by having his or her supporters make new rules up or call following the rules "a nuclear option" just because another candidate's supporters are attempting to use threats of "party instability" or "not voting for the Party designated candidate", because they had another preference.

As we are all aware - I believe - the Party's superdelegates may use any or many determinants that are the popular vote to determine who they vote for as the party's nominee. Non-popularly elected delegates will most likely have a great impact on who the nominee is this August.

I do find it rewarding, in any case, that the shortcomings of the Electoral College, the Caucus system and it's easy potential for abuse and inexact counting of the popular vote, and winner take-all primaries are being discussed now, as I'm sure someone had to have done four years ago?

It's not so much fun having to actually discuss the rules by which an organization determines who they will put up for election, but maybe the rules will be somewhat amended by the next Presidential election in 2012 and there will be better oversight into how well the leaders of the DNC are leading the DNC.

Big Tent Democrat writes:

If Obama is the pledged delegate leader and the untainted popular vote leader, then I will be up in arms if the Super Delegates deny him the nomination. But I do not claim for a second that this violates the rules. It clearly does not. The whining about the existing rules comes from Kos and Josh Marshall and other die hard Obama supporters. THAT is a fact.

In essence, what some Obama supporters are arguing for is CHANGING the rules so that the pledged delegate leader is the nominee. Maybe we can adopt that rule for the next nomination fight. But we won't for this one. Instead, JUST LIKE the Clinton campaign, the Obama campaign and its online supporters are arguing for what they think the Super Delegates should do.

What bothers me is they are pretending they are not. It is disingenuous of them. I am arguing for my views as well. For making the popular vote the deciding yardstick. But I admit the rules do not mandate that my yardstick be followed. Obama, his news network NBC, and his legion of blog followers pretend they are standing for the rules. They are not.

I agree with almost everything BTD's posted on this subject in the last few days, and I'm so grateful that there are a few folks like BTD and Jerome pushing back against the shill-like narratives coming out of what is normally the reality-based community.  One comment: I think there's a corollary to this that needs to get explicitly called out by the widely-read folks who are still making some sense on this subject.  We seem perilously close to losing ourselves in our candidates, which is something I thought us netrootsers were supposed to frown upon...