See You in Austin for the Netroots Nation Convention!

Nice Video from last year (I was there though I didn't make it any of these scenes-- I am complaining to my gator-agent now.) Who is going this year? The GNB team will be there in force, and we are looking forward to meeting, greeting, learning, speaking, and drinking liberally with all of you! NETROOTS NATION CONVENTION-- was YearlyKos, 7/17-7/20 in Austin Texas. Find out all about it here. We have to try to get over Stubbs while we are in town!

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Do You Know What I Mean?

(Work Safe and in a bloody New Zealand accent anyway mate.)

Contest! Can You Name That Innuendo?

This is a hard one. Come up with the most innuendos from the New Zealand commercial. The winner gets 69 GNB points (not redeemable at the Republican convention).

No cheating by looking at the list where we stole this.

No. We won't explain them to you. Or say if we've participated in... it, them, er...those activities.

Mind your own business. Or ask very nicely at YearlyKos. I'm bribeable with sushi. Feed me enough salmon-avocado-maki and I might wrap you up tight, dip you in something hot and spicy, and roll you in my mouth... if you know what I mean.

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yearlykos presidential forum

Sorry about the radio silence. My mac is dead. defunct, passed on.

Currently I am watching the forum with Dodd, Gravel, Richardson, Clinton, Obama and Edwards.

Its apparently Obama's birthday, so the crowd sang happy birthday.

The candidates all sound good, its variations of their respective stump speeches, so not a lot of anything new. Kucinich is, surprisingly, anti nuclear ;)

This is really interesting convention, the attendees are very diverse in age, not so much in race, but they do cross income boundaries to some degree. I would reccomend, if you can to come next year. Its really nice to see all the democratic candidates coming here and answering questions, not from Wolf Blitzer, but from people. people like you and me and to have the moderators make sure they answer. I have been to DNC meetings and have to tell you that this is sooooo much better. We need change the nature of the parties convention so its more like this.

I encourage you to go and watch some of the video that has been produced.

Later tonight, Some of the bloggers here and myself are going to in my family's Irish American tradition will hoist a glass for Steve. we will dispense with the traditional brawl though. If you at home want to join us. we will toast him at 9:30pm central time.

more later.

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Yearly Kos Seminar Impressions Open Thread

Who are those guys?

Photo: "Doc" and Hubris relax. Hubris is the oh so slightly younger one on the right (married to the talented, delightful, and yes, lovely, Mrs. Hubris.) I'm the other one.

doc, can you put up an open thread for Newsblog and Groupnewsblog people who are here at Yearly Kos so we can post up our seminar impressions

the littlest gator

It is done. Post away.

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Chicago, Chicago...

Lazy August Afternoons (Mornings and Evenings Also)

Nope, you didn't imagine it. Posting is a bit slow.

Hubris Sonic is at YearlyKos in Chicago. Sara's there as well. I've been getting ready to go on vacation and LowerManhattanite is in NYC holding down the fort.

My long-promised article which started out on doping and is now an essay, not just on doping, on lying in sports and life -- Should You Lie? About Trust -- got kicked back to me by the delightful Sara who as it turns out is a demon of the 8th bolgia when wielding her editor's pen. *shudders* The final essay will be substantially better thanks to Sara's pitchfork and manical laugh watching me struggle in and out of the pits superb editing, but can't be finished before the kids and I leave on our long bicycle ride.

In short, it's August. Hot, muggy, and slow. LM will post. Perhaps HS and SR will post. I will attempt to post at least once more before leaving Saturday morning at some fracking ridiculous hour. But with three of us traveling (two by plane after YearlyKos and myself and the kids by bicycle all of this coming week) and who the hell knows how LM travels... It's New York City so the possibilities include subway, train, taxi, bus, boat, aerial tram out to the island (oh come on, you remember that scene near the end of The Professional where 12-year old Natalie Portman [Mathilda] took her stuffed bunny rabbit and rode the tramway out to Roosevelt Island in the middle of the East River, yes, you know you do), and if you really want to get fancy, helicopter, private plane and ship. (Of course personal vehicles but who the hell is stupid enough to drive a car in the city?!) Not to mention you can walk damn near anywhere in New York. Gods I love New York.

My point is, the posting... It's August and till Monday August 13 when I return from vacation and all four of us are back home turning out the politics, snark, video, politics, news from the GNB Sports Desk, tech, the politics, and whatever else crosses what little's left of our travel-addled minds in the muggy heat which is August.

Till then, patience. Hugs to all. And please remember to keep breathing.

PS. Links, stories, background information wanted. Always.

Got a hot tip? Something we should read, a link we should see, background info even if it isn't a story. Maybe a secret to leak, or someone to talk with, please -- email us. You are our eyes and ears.

Contact us and tell us what's what. Thanks!

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The Monkey Hates You For Your Upright Stance

And That's Why He's Wildly Flinging His Feces At You, Markos—You And The Netroots.

One of the things that Steve and I used to e-mail each other about back in the days of the original News Blog, was the futility of the right in its efforts to replicate the grass-roots success of Daily Kos. We'd laugh, and joke about the tepid, jackleg efforts—the weird, red-headed stepkids like RedState and Tacitus, (both started oddly enough, by a really weird, red-headed kid) where the well-known 'top-down" style of wingnut idea management and corraling the community were writ large, and hammer-to-the-head stupid. The cheap, KOOL welcome mat, astroturf/activist sites like the embarassing "Victory Caucus", and perhaps worst of all, the re-launched, much-hyped, Edsel-with-the-fins-sanded-off of a site—Townhall. Run by the amazing, breathless fellatio machine that is Hugh Hewitt, just before its scintillating un-cocooning from dormancy, we heard this, about its wonderful future a year ago:

"While on the air, Hewitt uses the first to surf news sites, then swivels to the second during breaks to update his well-trafficked blog. "Both spoken words and written words are powerful," he says. "Acting in harmony, the effect is exponential." Just ask Rick Santorum. In May, he urged Hewitt's listeners to fork over campaign funds, and the host, ever eager, posted a link. Donations shot up 500 percent.

_________________________________________

The hope? That "Web 2.0" wherewithal can transform what was once an op-ed clearinghouse into a single nerve center serving the separate conservative communities of talk radio and the Internet. To Hewitt, a valuable White House ally, the math is simple: add 6 million Salem fans to Townhall's 1.4 million unique monthly visitors and you've got an audience six or seven times the size of liberal site Daily Kos, the Web's biggest political blog. "We will overwhelm them," he says.

Steve and I laughed our asses off when Hewitt put that steaming pile of idiocy out there for all to see. "We will overwhelm them"? Excusemeplease? The only thing missing from that nutty rant was Hewitt whipping off his 38C Maidenform-brand "Mansiere" and banging it on the desk angrily for emphasis, to the whir-and-click of Black and White news cameras.

The issue though, is not a laughing matter for the right. People had plans. Big plans—big, dreamy, cotton-candy on trees, sillyfuck plans to just run shit for-ever, as evidenced by the laughable curio that is Hewitt's Regnery joke book from last Spring, > Painting The Map Red: The Fight to Create a Permanent Republican Majority. You had Rove on the election's eve, angrily crowing about how those who doubted the GOP's chances didn't have "THE MATH". And then... 48 hours later, the flaming windmill fell in on old Frankenstein on November 7th, as the elections upset all that silly-ass map painting, and "math" figuring.

It didn't happen in a vacuum. There were reasons behind it—the souring of opinion on the GOP's lockstep backing of the clusterfucked Iraq war, the corruption as evidenced by the many-tentacled Abramoff/Cunningham/Foley Cover-Up scandals, and yes—the naked racism on the part of the GOP in their ham-fisting of the immigration issue, just to name a few.

But the factor that wounded them the most painfully in the '06's—and the one that scares them more than anything else, is the rise of the Netroots. Liberal, Progressive, Dirty Fucking Hippie online activism kicked the scoffing wingnuts dead between the pegs in '06. The Netroots coalesced into a fact-checkin', investigative journalism-in', story-drivin', candidate-houndin', fund-raisin' machine that the internet right could only wet-dream of being. And DailyKos, with its massive readership, stable of talented scribes/thinkers/members, and sense of actual community was the big, orange lightning rod for the right's bitter "hateration", post-that '06 ass-whipping. Daily Kos' championing of candidates like Montana's Jon Tester, and VA's Jim Webb, along with its ability to get the word out on Dem campaigns needing help, damaged the wingnuts' chances in a big way, and they haven't forgotten it. Add into the mix, the Dems and their '08 candidates realizing the potency of the Netroots in '06, and responding in tangible ways to that concentrated influence on things such as the various war votes, and the folly of kow-towing to the right—i.e. dissing the Fox-"sponsored" Dem debate, and you have a pissed-off, one-time kingmaker/ball-breaker who's desperate to matter again, and willing to scorch the whole fucking earth to make it so.

Which gives us O'Reilly's crazed attacks on Kos and YearlyKos '07 in recent days. Oh, it has been rich, too. There's jealousy, and-and spitefulness galore in this fest of drama-queenery-cum-high dudgeon. Again though, at the core...fear drives this enterprise. A fear spawned by a sad realization of the right's fateful dilemma in an every-possible-way-changing world.

You see, the nature of politics itself has changed. With the internet, and its instant feedback, as well as the ability of its users to create and distribute content, gather in a "space", and commiserate and act, a fatal flaw of the way the right-wing operates was exposed. That fatal flaw being that "community", where people act was never a part of the way GOP politics was supposed to work. Again, their paradigm is the old, "top-down" school of thought, where the "people'—or folks like you and me are supposed to do what the command structure says to do. And the command structure is the typical gathering of jowly, gout-suffering bigwigs who've always run things. The Dems had to get their DLC-worshipping asses kicked for a decade before their "Top-down" paradigm shifted. As such, that kind of style inhibits thought, and imagination from the "community". It locks people in to tired, and ultimately past-their-shelf-life ways.

It relegates the GOP faithful and their "activated" online community to little more than drone status.

Because you can be one of two things as a politically involved person. You can be a carpenter, and actually come up with things to build, and make those things using tools...or you can be a fucking tool that somebody uses to build something.

A tool...a nail, doesn't control its own destiny. It's just a thing to be used. A nail has never built a Goddamned thing it ever wanted to. A carpenter on the other hand... :)

No, I'm not going all messianic or anything like that, with a whole "Jesus/Carpenter" thing, but I think you get the picture. The GOP hierarchy doesn't want carpenters—they are the carpenters. They want nails they can hammer. Which is why in this interactive age of politics and activism, the right lags so far behind. "Top-down" sucks, baby.

I saw Kos at a New York "Drinking Liberally" function last year, and clearly remember him visibly blanching at the idea of his being called "a leader" per se. He stressed the idea of there being a "community of leaders" where everybody does their part towards a group of common goals. He totally eschewed the whole "Dear Leader" mantle some would like to ascribe to a person so they don't have to take responsibility. That stuck with me. Because in the '06's, it all came together. Down the stretch, every batshit freeper on earth was looking to Rove, and Mehlman and the upper end of the GOP power spectrum for guidance when those same people were the ones who had fucked the party raw and ungreased into the painful position they were in as the election neared. The Dems were responding to the grass roots, and squeakiest of wheels online—squeaky wheels representing numbers beyond comprehension.

The people, if you will.

And you see how that turned out. :)

Now you have an angry GOP leadership. Angry because they've lost control of the government. Angry at the Netroots and in shorthand for them—Markos—for soundly whipping their asses while changing the political party paradigm. And angry at a flailing, desperate constituency that wonders "What went wrong?", and is increasingly blaming them for the policy-stalling loss. Included in that GOP leadership is their pundit class, who can only snipe pissily as their Pollyanna, Niedermeyer-"all-is-well"-ing blew up in their faces and tainted what was left of their credibility with "the drones '.

O'Reilly is in that pundit/leadership class...and he's verrrrry angry about how things are going. He sees his nemesis Olbermann, gaining cachet daily, and Keith's rising star hitched directly to the sentiments of the Left's online "community". He also KNOWS about the right's fuck-up with its "drone"/Queen Bee setup, and that they don't dare walk away from it.

Why?

Because that wouldn't just upset the applecart of GOP command and control. To see that pissed-off "base"—what there is of it that could actually emulate a Kos-esque community, potentially drive debate—and hold politicos responsible—and fund-raise with gusto, well...that would effectively render the Republican Party's kingmakers in places like The Carlyle Group, its silent, but powerful oil and energy oligarchs, and, and media giants like his fucking bosses Murdoch and Ailes null and fucking void, baby.

It would render Bill-O himself, null and fucking void, too.

He can't let that happen. You helped whip his beloved party's ass. And your success at that risks showing "the drones" how they too can bypass the bullshit we did, and directly impact the landscape—so uh-uh, fuck all that, Kos—you've gotta be stopped now. He's gotta come at you in desperate full-bore, keening all the way. You/The Netroots—FDL, Crooks & Liars, AmericaBlog, Atrios, Greenwald—you've all gotta go down. And if it means jumping up in your face like a an idiot screaming on the playground as his pants fall down, revealing a skid-marked ass, then so be it! They used to mock you, and then you knocked 'em the fuck out, so respect must be regained somehow. Even if it's via hysterical raving about bullshit, and using third parties like sponsors for the dirty work, instead of coming at you like a fucking man.

The best part though, is the utter ineffectiveness of O'Reilly's monkey-scat tossing—1200 whopping responses to his call to drown Yearly Kos in the bathtub, and then of course, the inevitable, embarrassing blowback of his dipshittery.

He screwed up and brought the whole Mackris/Falafel/Dildo thing back into the discourse and saw the words of posters on his own site come back to bite him when Home Depot ditched his show as a sponsor, because of Liberals alerting them.

The stupid monkey hates you for your upright stance, Kos. So he tosses shit at you willy-nilly. And then? Then, he sniffs his own scat-covered finger and passes the fuck out.

Stupid monkey. doesn't he realize how the internet cuts both ways?


But you know what? Bill-O's venom may have another basis as well. We all know about his jealousy, and raging ego, and how he hates to be trumped. I got word that the raging succes of YearlyKos really pissed O'Reilly off.. Primarily because it eclipsed his own secret convention of the faithful.

Yup. He had to scrap it. I grabbed a screenshot he had up for the secret site for it. Here it is:

(Click to enlarge)

Sad, isn't it?

Enjoy YearlyKos '07! :)

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Chicago Restaurants and local food

Here on falafel day, I am thinking about what foods to try and which restaurant to go to in Chicago during YearlyKos. I will not be eating that culinary monstrosity the 'chicago dog'. [shudders], chaos theory is not substitute for creativity.

Any suggestions?

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Hoisting a glass

I dont know how many groupnewsblog readers will be at YearlyKos but Mrs Robinson and I will be going and possibly Lowermanhattanite. If anyone would like to join me on anyone of the nights to hoist a glass for our friend Steve, curse the Yankee's and mourn whats left of our constitution please feel free to post a comment, or just come up and ask; I will be manning one of the registration booths on a number of days. I will post where when I know.

Also, sorry I have not been online recently I was at Fuji Rock Festival, working, and I unexpectedly didnt have any internet access. Sorry for the radio silence.

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