prancing lightweights

RE: Jennifer Brunner's Son Right Angle Blog - Ohio's Online Conservative Community -- Here's the note from me that Matt Naugle mentioned as being "negative." I intended it to be instructive and defining. These jejune political-specialty bloggers are twisting and perverting our political dialogues still further, to a point where we have prancing lightweight posers and gossip-mongers purportedly speaking for all of us. These Blackwell boy-acolytes are not my Republican party. My note follows:

Matt, it seems you've created a little stir in the blogosphere this morning with that cheap shot using the Brunner kid. This is the kind of cheesy, low-level, inconsequential baiting that keeps us all from moving forward as a community--you're trying to divide people who should be working together.

The worst thing about it all is that you say you're doing this in the name of conservatism and the Republican Party. Please, don't pretend to be speaking for the rest of us.

We may be in the same party, but we're not on the same team.

My team builds community and works for the good of all the people, not just for a particular shrill, fringe faction of a party now in decline in this state because it got too
self-righteous.

draft-dodging gamers and gangsters: high time for Rove & Company to account

A New Mystery to Prosecutors: Their Lost Jobs - New York Times--here's another smelly long tale about behind-the-scenes machinations prior to the political change of command at the start of 2007. What's so ironic is that these creeps in Republicans clothing, these draft-dodgers, these boys who would never put it on the line themselves but love to do sneaky-pete, clandestine operations from the shadows of government--what's so ironic is that we're losing our freedoms and our government and our assets to a bunch of adolescent-level gamers who operate as gangsters with impunity and government immunity. We have to expose them and strip them of their protections. (how about old gamers versus young gamers, CIA versus CIA (Central Intelligence Agency versus Cleveland Institute of Art?) It came as a revelation to me a few months ago, reading through The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, that our young gamers here in Cleveland can save the world. (in the sections about PAM, decision markets, games, and simulations). We also need to be aware that these old gamers, like Karl Rove, have the potential to destroy the world as we know it, as well.

Read the whole article; the link is permanent. Here's an excerpt:

United States attorneys have four-year terms but can be removed at any time, and for almost any reason.

But across the country, legal and public officials have expressed dismay over the firings. In Western Michigan, for example, lawyers and a federal judge came to the defense of Margaret M. Chiara, the United States attorney there, saying she was well regarded.

“It just doesn’t look right,” said James S. Brady, who was United States attorney in Western Michigan during the Carter administration. “It compromises the credibility that justice is being dealt with fairly and impartially. There is a fear that politics have entered in life and death situations.”

Discussions began in October at the Justice Department about removing prosecutors who were considered flawed or deficient in carrying out administration policy by law enforcement officials, lawmakers and others, several officials said. The White House eventually approved the list and helped notify Republican lawmakers before the Dec. 7 dismissals, officials said.
While Justice Department officials expected that top assistant prosecutors in each office would probably fill the jobs initially, the officials said they had not chosen permanent successors. However, officials knew that if the replacements were to have a substantial tenure before Mr. Bush left office, they needed to be named quickly.

The list of prosecutors who were targets was approved by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and the deputy attorney general, Paul J. McNulty, the day-to-day manager of the Justice Department since he was appointed in the fall of 2005.

Under Mr. Gonzales, Mr. McNulty has become a powerful deputy with a wide-ranging portfolio. He was a United States attorney in Virginia, but he worked in Congress for more than a decade and was once legal counsel to the House majority leader. He is regarded in legal circles as more attuned to policy and politics than his predecessor, James B. Comey, a former career prosecutor in New York.

That leadership change may explain the removal of prosecutors who had mostly been in place since the start of the Bush administration.

“I and my colleagues are the same people in December of 2006 that we were in 2001,” said one former prosecutor who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. “The only thing that has changed is the administration of the Department of Justice. We were making the same arguments and the same points before.”

Justice Department officials, who would speak about the department’s decision making only anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss personnel matters publicly, now acknowledge that the dismissals were mishandled. They failed to anticipate how much attention the highly unusual group firing would draw, and the agency’s contradictory accounts about whether the dismissals were performance-related helped spur suspicions.

Tim Ryan and some "loud umbrage"

OPENERS: Ryan creates stir on House floor--from the PD political blog, here's some more good stuff from Tim Ryan (MTB 08/19/2006), who has a take on things that aligns fairly closely with what I consider proper and in the best interests of all of us.

Insomniacs seeking some ZZZs watching last night's House debate over
Iraq were in for a jolt when Niles Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan got hold of the mike
at around 11:40 PM.

A Republican, identified by Ryan staffers as Indiana's Steve Buyer, took loud umbrage at several points when Ryan attacked Republicans for calling his party's distaste for the war "unpatriotic." Buyer was gavelled down several times as he attempted to object to Ryan statements such as these:

"We never called the other side unpatriotic ... We've called you incompetent. We said you're incapable. And we've said you're derelict of your oversight responsiblity. But never, Mr. Speaker, have we called anyone in this House unpatriotic." When Ryan was asked whether he'd yield the floor to a parliamentary inquiry from Buyer, he snapped "I don't yield" with belligerence reminiscent of his congressional predecessor and former mentor, Jim
Traficant.

"We've heard a lot over the last couple of days about the American
Revolution, and the Civil War and World War II," Ryan concluded. "Well, Mr. Speaker, our president today is not Washington, he is not Lincoln, and he is not Roosevelt. And so I think our Republican colleagues should take the advice of the Secretary of Defense. And that's: You go to war with the president you have, you don't go to war with the president you wish you had."

To view video of his speech, click here.

Mitt Romney meets Tennessee bloggers

Interesting piece from the Boston GLOBE. Read the whole thing.

This article points up the importance of the blogosphere as a huge, "self-directed focus group", and obviates the need to have a more balanced venue for important community conversations, like Meet.The.Bloggers, and not a gaggle of partisan blog-hacks, all currying favor "Over cold cuts, cookies, and soft drinks," ostensibly blogging for baloney. The Republicans need to reexamine what happened here in Ohio last time around, where Democrats who were open to participating in the community dialogue carried the day, while Republicans shied away from anything spontaneous they could not control themselves, and got whacked. MTB is a good way for all of them to reconnect. Here's more of the article:

Members of the mainstream press weren't invited.

But influential Nashville-area bloggers Bill Hobbs and Nathan Moore were, and both penned accounts Romney must have liked. Hobbs likened the governor to Ronald Reagan. Moore called Romney impressive and declared him "a formidable candidate for the 2008 nomination."

That Hobbs and Moore were asked to the private gathering illustrates a growing effort by Romney and his political team to cultivate a relationship with the conservative blogosphere as he prepares to enter the Republican primary, which is already being shaped as never before by countless bloggers, pundits, and other online opinion-makers.

"Particularly in a primary kind of setting," Romney explained in an interview last week with the conservative magazine Human Events, "you want to be very closely connected to the online world, to the blog world, and make sure your perspectives are being understood, and that the misperceptions, which inevitably creep up, are being nipped in the bud."

Though pro-Romney bloggers around the country have been dutifully defending him for months, the governor is increasingly taking steps to manage his own message. The importance Romney is placing on developing a rapport with bloggers reflects not only the pivotal role the Internet now plays in American politics, observers say, but also a recognition by Republicans that they have not been as aggressive as Democrats in using the web to gather support and money.

Perhaps the clearest indication of Romney's belief in the influence of online information is his hiring of Stephen Smith, 24, formerly the web guru for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, to run his online communications operation. Before Frist abandoned his presidential plans last month, Smith helped him record podcasts and keep in touch with bloggers.

"Steve is going to serve as the conduit both from the bloggers and online community to the campaign, as well as from the campaign to the bloggers and online community," a Romney communications adviser said last week. "He's building bandwidth between the two."

Smith's hiring is an acknowledgment of the viral power of web media: how they can instantly drive news stories and sustain them for days on end, said the adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Romney has not officially announced that he will seek the presidency.

"It's a very unique audience, and that uniqueness requires a unique understanding of the audience and the mediums involved," the adviser said.