Off To #NN16

In Case You Were Worried

That Liberal Central Command would run out of things over which to further subdivide itself:

Netroots Nation is going to Arizona, Daily Kos is not

by kos

SAT JUL 19, 2014 AT 12:54 AM PDT 

Netroots Nation announced two days ago that Phoenix, Arizona would host its 2015 conference. I wish the conference the best, but it will unfortunately take place without Daily Kos' attendance or assistance.

I made very clear in the wake of Arizona's passage of SB 1070 that I would not be setting foot in the state, nor spending a dime in it until the law was revoked. The law, however gutted by the courts, remains on the books, as does systemic harassment of Latinos, so my pledge still stands...

Every now and then I am reminded how very far I am from anywhere near the center of anything.

You call the Capt’n, “Capt’n”

Roger Ailes and Brit Hume explain to new DLC meat how thing work on Fox teevee.

“Any man loses his spoon spends a night doing ‘Fox and Friends’.”

For a vastly more bedazzling, ensorcelling taxonomy of the Classes and Orders of this phenomenon, hie yourself over to The GNB, pull up a chair and listen to LowerManhattanite tell the ancient tale of cowardice, amnesia, liebermans, fords, pillbugs and Monty Python.

Here’s a little center-cut taste:

…
Okay...I love Crooks and Liars, but I swear, I almost wanted to bop John over the head with his trusty media flashlight until the batteries exploded out, for his exposing me—us—to the reason why the pitiful, toadying, little gnome that is Harold Ford, was away for so long.

He wasn't missing. He was “away”” of his own volition evidently—hiding under a fucking rock with the rest of the pillbugs, and worms and all manner of many-legged creatures/pests you never see until you trip over said rock, and “ewwwwwww!”, there they are, exposed—all slimy and twitchy, and crawling around until you can get that rock back on top of 'em—hard, thank you very much—so you don't have to see them again.

Alas, not only didn't we get the rock back down—HARD!—quickly enough to re-acquaint ol' Harold with his natural habitat, but apparently, the annoying little bug wants to hang out in the light for awhile, and is scuttling for all he's worth to stay there.
…

I swear, just when you think the Muvah Tongue has gone a little thin and cottonmouthy, you find that the likes of LM and Digby have been husbanding vast, sparkly caches of Sekrit Transitives and Magyk Glottals under their floorboards and are a’comin’ over the hill like the Adjective Cavalry on fresh horses.

For the rest, you go here now.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Markos Interruptus Edition.

Was busy winding up Ykos (The Give-and-Take by the Lake) convention, finishing off some work that had penetrated the castle’s perimeter defenses and was waiting for me when I got home late Saturday, running the previous post over a medium-grit whetstone a few times, catching up on some correspondence (behind on which I still am), disarming a neglected and pissed-off cat who was poised to kill me as I dragged my weary self in the door...

(Dramatized here

...and assorted other small etceteras, as well as sharing beverages and terrific conversation with some fine, ardent, thoughtful, committed, incredibly smart, funny, sweet-smelling, thoroughly normal, good-lookin’ Constitution-lovin’ Dirty Fucking Hippies.

Hanging with them Saturday and Sunday, hearing their experiences, the stories of their paths and passions, was absolutely the highlight of the time I spent at the Big Orange Thing.

(Also a note to the organizers: please use alligator-clippy things and not hooks to attach badges to lanyards next year, because for some reason [probably having something complex and physicsish to do with albedo and light-pressure] the badges were more often than not turned white-belly up and vital-statistics-down.

Thus further foiling my plan to discretely peek at name-tags looking for friendlies.

Ok.

Fine.

In the interest of full disclosure I will stipulate that I was marginally more focused on the name tags of libidinous liberal lasses than on other demographics.

Which was, truth be told, a policy I foreswore when a tiny lady from Sonoma decked me for what she mistook for lascivious eyeballery and it became clear that unless I wanted to go down in history the Kos Ogler, this was a losing strategy.)

So the Mouse Circus got a little short-sheeted, which was just as well since it was another All GOP All the Time day.

Condi, for example, was everywhere.

On “Fox News Sunday”


Rice:We’re gonna chart a reasonable course (in Iraq).

Also she uses the word “stable” a dozen times or so.

Not democratic. Not Rule-of-Law-centric. Not allied with us.

Just “stable”...and we’ll just sorta look the other way on that other stuff.

You know, kinda like it was under that Saddam guy.

Wallace: Sectarian deaths are still way, way up, so how can you say things are getting better?

Rice trots out the new Phrase that Pays: These are "al Qaeda–inspired" terrorists (and other insurgents).

Watch for this one to be all over the Hate Radio like a rash.

Wallace: So since the whole purpose of the Surge was all to create breathing space for the government, and since the various components of the government have either disintegrated outright, or have up and gone to W’Ali World for the rest of the summer, how can anyone say it is working?

Rice: Because its hard, Chris. Hard work.


Rice: I mean, we could have this solved tomorrow, but the Iraqi parliament could vote on this shit tomorrow, but they don’t wanna because they want everyone to agree.

What. The. Fuck. Did. You. Just. Say?!

Rice: They don’t want a 51-49 vote on important stuff.

So let me make sure I understand this very clearly:

A bare, purloined, slander-based "majority" created by the deliberate, calculated, 30-year-old Republican policy of divisiveness and hate is plenty good enough for Don Karleone and the Dear Leader to declare an overwhelming mandate from the People and from God to eviscerate democracy in America...

...but exactly that same kind of majority is just not fucking good enough to get our kids the out of slaughterhouse of the Dear Leader's Iraqi Debacle?

Words fail me.

Rice (on domestic spying): It is important that we do everything within the law to keep an eye on the bad people or “thousand of innocent people die!”

Ergo, when Nosey Nates find out that the Dear Leader has been committing serial felonies by the thousands and wiping his ass with the Constitution by illegally wiretapping Americans, it is important to rewrite the law to make his felonies legal.

Gotta love these "Law And Order" "Law Made-To-Order" Republicans…

Rice: …and to have some artificial barrier between the United States and the rest of the world makes no sense.

driftglass: Really? Well that brand new theory of national sovereignty is going to come as one hell of a shock to Immigration opponents don’t you think?

Funny, I remember when these annoying impediments were called “civil liberties”.

Rice: And we cannot leave our Good Friends the Saudis…yadda yadda yadda (See "Face the Nation" below).

Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon from the generally Evil Socialist Pesthole, the stinking liberal Brookings Institute.

Shorter Pollack: I was Tom Friedman when Tom Friedman wasn’t cool.

Shorter O’Hanlon: We are suppressing the violence. That's all.

But?

But the central government is showing no signs of diving through this very tiny window…

Wallace: And if liberal Democrats succeed in pulling out and losing Iraq, wouldn’t that be bad?

There is nothing new here except the depth of the bullshit being troweled onto the facts.

The Surge is a tactic to accomplish a specific political End.

The End is not being accomplished, is nowhere near being accomplished, shows no sign of moving in the general direction of accomplishment.

The Sunnis bailed out of the government.

The rest of the Al’Dermen have gone to the beach for the rest of the summer.

The “solution”: Wait another six months and then see.

Surprise!!!

…one…two…one…two… three...four.

All we are saying, is keep us at War.
All we are saying, is one Friedman more…

On “Face the Nation”

Condi again.

Schieffer: Isn’t it true that most of the foreign fighters are Saudi.

Rice: The most “unguarded” entry point is with Syria. They’re coming in through the airports.

Schieffer: But the Saudis? The fucking Saudis?

Rice: The Saudis are working hard. Hard! To keep the fanatics they create and fund from going to Iraq. But it’s hard work.

Schieffer: “A-list blogging”-hard? “Coal-mining in your underpants”-hard? “Dodging IEDs for the greater glory of the Dear Leader”-hard? Give me some perspective.

Rice: Hard, Bob. That’s all I can say. Te rest is all Umbra-class, Pat-Tillman-rated secret.

Schieffer: So why are doing a $20 billion arms deal with people that are sponsoring the murder of Americans?

Rice: We cannot let our friends and strategic partners go unarmed in that region. Not after we have worked so hard to make into a violent, chaotic, profit-making hell-pit.


On “Meet the Press”

Robert Gates.

Shorter: Up in Raleigh things are falling apart, and the rubble is bursting into flames. But in Mayberry things are looking up. In fact, the Darlings have joined up with Barney Fife to hunt down Ernest T. Bass.

Also Mount Pilot, is getting a little better.

Russert: But to make peace, aren’t we cutting deals with people who have killed Americans?

Gates: Well, that sort of thing is inevitable.

Yeah, that’s war for you; after the guns fall silent, you’re stuck trying to make a marriage (or at least a helluva three-day pass) with people who were shooting at you a few minutes ago.

The difference in this case is the relentless, shrill, demonizing, Manichean rhetoric that, since Day One, Republican have leveled at everyone who is blowing up anything in Iraq, and anyone at home who thinks the Dear Leader is not infinitely Wise and Good.

(Just to clarify, it is not that we think that the Dear Leader is not infinitely Wise and Good.

It is that we think that his crew of Constitution-garroting Thugees are, in fact, bad men doing terrible things for despicable motives.

We think that anyone who voted to re-elect this pack of jackals and who has vociferously supported them in their serial and tragic fuckuppery is automatically disqualified – for the next generation -- from saying another fucking word about anything except who turned in a better Gavotte on “Dancing With the Stars”.

And that anyone who both supports these despicable, blood-drunk brownshirts and their Neocon wilding against the Constitution AND stood up and cheered as these same blood-drunk brownshirts hunted Bill Clinton for seven years and then impeached him for trivia, needs to be exiled from the public square and the polling place for the next three generations.

I hope this clears up that little misunderstanding.)

Gonna be kind of hard to climb back down that 1,000-mile-high mountain of wingnut “Worse than Eleven Hitlers!!” rhetoric and into the real world isn’t it?


“This Week” did the GOP Sockpuppet Debate.

You want a ‘lil taste?

Mitt: I’m Pro Life!

Brownback: No you’re not! Watch the YouToobs!

Mitt: Quit being holier than thou!

(Then, video from five months ago of Mitt going Full Metal holier than thou all over Rudy’s ass.)

Mitt: That was a million years ago. And Jesus does too like me better!

God have mercy on us when these moral dregs and intellectual flotsamauri are the very best that one of America’s two major political party can produce.

And then I washed the taste of perfidy out of my mouth out with OJ and rolled off to good coffee and great company at the tag-end Yearly Kos.

Abraham Lincoln:

The laziest blogger in the world.

Day Three at the Big Orange County Fair lead me by the hand through a scattering of colorful, pointillistic bits straining to become a Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

There are some pieces of blue sky, part of Digby’s face, kittens, candidates, some grass, scattered across the three-dimensional veldt of a dozen breakout rooms and grand halls.

Toilets-cum-chatrooms and room parties.

In-groups and out-groups.

The button-festooned and the buttoned-down.

Full of people trying to figuring this blogging thing out.

This Roshoman technology.

And to grapple with it, we (myself included) disinter Descartes and begin dissecting and deconstructing. What does it do? How does it work? How can it work better? How can it work better for me?

OK, what does it do again?

Coming at the mysterious, black monolith from every angle and sight-line with a necessary-but-insufficient specificity – How can I harness this plow-horse to cut furrows in my fields? – accompanied by a conspicuous silence from the Big Picture viewing gallery.

Not to pick on them, but Labor makes a good example of this phenomenon, speaking many times of having to “get the word out”.

OK…to whom?

Who is it that you are trying to talk to? That you don’t already talk to? And with what intent? Do you want to deliver monological sermons about wages and benefits, or Are You Ready For Some Fucking Football?

For something loud and cranky and uncontrollable, that may veer wildly into issues of class, race, fairness or the stupid, alienating shit Labor does sometimes?

If not, stick with newsletters and websites, because this is not your magic bullet.

Because there is no magic bullet.

In the passing along of received wisdom – much of it valuable and interesting – over and over, the new-new blogger establishment tries to extrude the new-new thing into old media sausage skins and it keeps bursting out and blobbing all over the pretty paradigms with emergent purposes and promise that just do not fit.

They have run bang up against the limitations of time and resources that govern good intentions. When you have limited choices, there is little to judge. But when you have real power, people are going to judge how you use it. The choices you make.

So what choice are we making? Are we broadening or constricting? Are we reaching out to the weird kids under the bleachers, or lapsing into lunch room castes?

What choice should we make? And how will we know when the establishment is moving in the direction of excellence?

And here is where there is a story to tell...

So what do the disparate threads of blogger high-school cliquishness, the overwhelming preponderance of the male and the melanin-poor here in Chicago, the needs of Labor, Net Neutrality and so forth have to do with one another?

Why are they all under this big, weird roof?

Actually, they have equally to do with each other, and to do with the habits of the hands on the tiller. There really is a story here, but I have only caught little tumbleweeding wisps of it blowing through the halls.

So let's start with Labor as an entry point into wider waters.

The way they can help themselves is to forget about “getting the message out” because the people you desperately need to speak to don’t blog, don’t lurk, might not own a computer, very probably don’t have broadband, and don’t give much of damn about your message.

Because the people whose world you are trying enter are the working poor or the just-plain-poor; the real people in the real world that really do most need the power that a Rationally Organized Labor Movement could give them. People who, if treated with respect and peer-to-peer, would probably most adamantly carry your message, because for them the struggle is about good jobs for themselves and their kids.

And to do that, you need to reach them where they are, as they are, with conversation. If not, you will be perceived of as arriving on their doorsteps just like Americans have arrived in Third World countries for decades: We come in, make nice with the natives for seven minutes, yadda-yadda, start sneaking looks at our watches, and then out comes our shopping list.

And because these are not stupid people, it becomes quickly and painfully clear that we are really there to extract what we want from them -- oil, land, gold, dues -- and to badger them into agreeing that its for their own good.

Of course good organizers know this, which it why Labor could do worse than, say, throwing some money into “blogganizers”™ in the neighborhood where your Movement’s future currently lives and dies: because the moms and dads and churches and coaches in those blighted and left behind places are the natural constituencies of the Labor Movement and the Democratic Party.

They are hard-working Americans who want a better future for their kids. Who vote for you, but will not carry your water because you do not speak to them where they are, as they are, in a language they respect.

And to do that, you need ubiquitous, broadband internet access. To do that you need net neutrality.

Ah! A theme emerges...

To do that, you need cohorts of smart, straight-talking bloggers of color. Hispanic bloggers. Women bloggers. African-American bloggers.

And not under orders to hammer your message door-to-door like they’re pushing tin on commission. Because for this to work, you need to get comfortable with them catalyzing conversations on- and off-line far, far away from the Home Office. Conversations that may or may not lead to a discussion of wagesandbenefitsandNAFTA, and someone signing on the dotted line.

You need movement-thinkers not narrowcasters, which means getting your brethren and sisteren in the Bakers Food & Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) to lay on a second shift and crank out a lot more product, because if you want to succeed you will be casting a lot of bread upon the waters.

This is, I believe, part of the answer to why blogging desperately needs to expand into those communities and not wait until some critical mass of rage against the GOP machine is reached among the working poor as it was among (mostly) white (mostly) tech-comfy (mostly) guys. (This was expounded as the Serious Market Theory for why the Left Blogosphere came into being, why it is saturated, and and why, sorry, there is no room for you little fella.)

Part of the answer to "Why broadband?", and why the high school hierarchy knife-fights about traffic and popularity is, in the end, trifling.

For all the Flickr, Twitter, SMS, SMBD, FeedToob, and ScratchnSNFF widgets, for all the talk of ”Content is King” and the lone blogman being dead, for all blogrolling-versus-linking punch-ups, in one panel after another people (good people) slip or sprint towards the monkey bars and refrigerator-box forts of the old hierarchy.

Listen through one door and your hear Labor speaking of the glory days of radio and how they have to get into this new technology to “get their message out”.

Their impulse is understandable and correct -- they do not want to be left behind and pulverized by yet another technology revolution like they were with television -- but let me repeat: Out to whom?

Always that is a question that goes unspoken and unanswered (except maybe in the Lurker Caucus :-)

Kids do not lay out on the roof on warm, summer nights, listening to the crystal WiFi set they built in their garage, hoping to pick up a signal from the Big City.

Families do not huddle around the broadband Philco, listening earnestly to the staticky news from Over There.

And yet that one-to-many model is the one we keep falling back on because that is what we understand.

Until it becomes the $.99 paperback book you can stuff in your back pocket, every new technology is a shiny technology, beloved by engineers and professional kerners, and feared/avoided/grudgingly-tolerated by most normal people. But for all the flashdazzle and wheedoggie of the intertoobs, blogging is just democracy by the job-lot, delivered at the speed of light.

So we have the working-poor and the outright-poor to whom we not only have genuine moral obligations, but who are also – still and again and always -- the great, undiscovered salvific of Progressive Labor, Party, Movement and Nation.

And in our hands we find the greatest tool ever created to let them finally speak as they choose.

This geographic-independent, caste-independent, language-independent, capital-independent, bi-directional communication miracle, and fuck you if the unwashed track their feet over your nice, clean paradigm.

In the end, this is why the big pie fight, over A-listers, diversity, tech, and territoriality has a much larger and more vital meaning. And why, in the end, it will always be craft and sincerity, quality and heart and how well you back up your fine, inclusive words with sweaty action that will win this long war to save our beloved country from its fears, bigotries and its internal enemies that feast on that darkness.

Because for all the talk about how Content Roolz (which does have its merits), nobody bitches that Abraham Lincoln doesn’t crank out new posts every day.

Hell, let’s face it, that lazy, lone blogging fuck hasn’t posted new content in over 140 years.

And yet for some reason his shit is still being read, linked to and commented on.

Also he refuses to blogroll me.

Bastard!

Fanatic (Second) Life and Semiotic Death

Among the Soapblox Bums.

…he said, knowing full-well he was purloining and abusing the fine title of a fine Rolling Stone article by Stewart (Whole Earth Catalog) Brand -- “Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.”

Sometimes, when out and about, I find myself to sitting at the periphery of a wireless cloud, straaaaaining to slip the surly bonds of Earth to touch the Face of Blog. I try to make it a virtue; to use it as a meditative moment to relive the glory days of 9600 baud modems, 50 MG hard drives and watching for anxious minutes as the screen repaints itself and I learn that, yet, she does have glorious tits.

Call it kilobyte nostalgia, except it's not real. True, those were the wide-open, pioneer days, when writing mad-tight code could get you laid, and everyone at the clubs knew how to do the “Electronic Handshake” (You put you right squeal in. You take your right squeal out. You put your left squawk in, and you squeak it all about…)

But I do not pine for the Good Old Days of Big Iron.

These are the good old days.

And so it was that I found myself at the outer perimeter of the folk (2000-ish? With 250 members of the credentialed press? Hehehe. I like those odds…) waiting for Dr. Dean and the senior senator from Illinois to tell us that the intertoobs have arrived.

And they have, sorta.

It is a grand time, with cool discussions busting out all over, about which more late.

For now, the small, vital thing I learned was, everything I do is wrong.

Ah, but I knew that going in, so I guess I’m ahead of the game.

The lone blogman is over. Dead as Diogenes. Soooo mid-2006. Like Waits’ tragic mystery woman in “Hold On” – she of the “charcoal eyes and Monroe hips” – the lone blogger is leaving the arena “Just like a bullet leaves a gun”. Or should. Or so I am told.

Too bad.

If I nicheblog, or localblog, maybe there is some hope.

If I get a buncha friends, a barn and some costumes, maybe we can put on a show and save the farm!

If I become a village smithy diarist ‘neath the spreading chestnut tree of a Big Blog, hammering molten consonants into custom-crafted adjectives with my large and sinewy hands, then perchance I shall leave some small impressions in the digital sands.

Perhaps not.

However there is much to enjoy here, and these thoughts do not trouble my mind.

Whereas it is very hard being an Alpha blogger. Very, very hard. They have worry-lines, and agita, and have to fret over fluctuations in the price of blogads.

Heavy indeed hangs the head that wears the "Heh. Indeedy."

Or, as Huxley put it:

"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard..."

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Or, anyway, so I am told.

On a side note, one conference over, the Shriners are here. Funny hats, rituals, hierarchy and good causes.

And that, I think, in the end, is how a fair man can render a fair judgment on a day at the Big Orange Fair: By looking for an answer to the question, "Have forms and formalities consumed the mission and the passion?"

At YKos, the evidence suggests they very definitely have not, and that is why I do not pine for yesterday or worry about what happens in the pantheon when the thunder gods choose up shirts and skins.

Because these are the good old days.

And we are winning.

Or so I am told.