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Very cool:
"Spinewatch is a newsgroup and link bank for campaign 2008 stories of a certain narrowly-defined type. Here, we keep track of reporting from the mainstream media where the press can be seen going further than it has traditionally been willing to go in describing untruths, calling out lies, and reporting clearly on statements at odds with well established facts. Even at the risk of saying that one side is worse than the other or one candidate is actually lying. A good spinewatch story is often marked by the absence of qualification, a boldness in categorization (”out of bounds!”) and a refusal to artificially balance the account when the facts themselves point one way."
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Quite a day to launch.
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A conservative defends organizing.
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A brilliant piece about the ways in which Obama became disillusioned with the principles of organizing and went into politics.
This transition, with the exception of this piece and Lizza's New Yorker piece, has been badly underreported and is ripe for exploration when it comes to social change questions. Judis does a fascinating job here.
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Wow. Bad metadata crashed a stock. Pretty stunning.
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David Weinberger on the echo chamber debates.
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The politics of empathy, perfectly argued. It is not just a moral idealism, it's an effort to step outside of our own subjectivity in a way that will allow us to see the capital T Truth.
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Jarvis on Tina Brown's "The Beast." She's saying some smart things about aggregation, but we'll see…
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Nailed it:
"What the Paul and Huckabee campaigns had in common was an embattled spirit, a sense of outrage against the powers that be. Jon Henke, one of Patrick Ruffini’s partners at The Next Right, argues that a “unifying grievance”—like the netroots’ opposition to the Iraq War—is essential to mobilizing a party’s base. After years in power, this is something the GOP as a whole conspicuously lacks.
Ruffini is well aware of this problem. Outrage is the logistical backbone of any political movement, he told me—it’s the equivalent of Wal-Mart’s supply chain. No outrage, no ActBlue. No outrage, no Daily Kos. No outrage, no Obama. "
Great article.