You don't need a weatherman

... to know which way the wind blows.

Tommy Menino (D-mostly) jumps on the Elizabeth Warren bandwagon just in time to make himself out as the kingmaker on Nov. 7.

Welcome, Mistah Mayuh.

Henceforth I claim that I am PolitiFact

This doesn't mean I am ending PolitiFact, oh no! Sure, I may be ending PolitiFact as we know it. But that's a whole 'nother beast.

It's true that I will not be staffing PolitiFact beyond my own herculean efforts. It will no longer be run by the St. Petersburg Times. Nor will I be bending over backward to cast a pox on both their houses whenever possible. I won't be neutral either - how could I with the name lovable liberal?


But this will still be the same program we've come to rely on to distinguish fact from fantasy.

Because it has the same name.

If you believe PolitiFact on Medicare, you should believe this.

(Yes, I realize this is from April. Under my new management, PolitiFact will no longer have to be timely either.)

Update: Now I remember. I was on this topic because of BlueMassGroup, so h/t.

No. 1 again

This week I'm tied for first in influence among Massachusetts political blogs. Ah right.

Look, any ranking that puts me ahead of Blue Mass Group has, uh, an idiosyncratic algorithm for determining influence.

But, hey, doesn't this again make me an award-winning blogger?

Like Vladimir Putin

Putin, kindred spirit to Duhbya, only appears to be showing the Republican Party how to cheat the voters. In truth, the GOP has been doing this for many, many years, having learned how through absorption of the Dixiecrats, with their long experience suppressing black votes (though that's not how they referred to them).

The Rolling Stone article has this:

Suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP's electoral strategy. Shortly before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich — a principal architect of today's Republican Party — scolded evangelicals who believed in democracy. "Many of our Christians have what I call the 'goo goo' syndrome — good government," said Weyrich, who co-founded Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. "They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

Republicans are happy to manufacture the consent of the governed out of whole cloth. Revolutions have been fought over this sort of abuse.

McCain plays the race card, media whiffs

Here's the sequence:

• McCain ad says, "Obama (did you know he's black?) doesn't belong among previous Presidents."
• Obama mentions this: "You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know." This is the entire excerpt that refers to appearance.
  
• McCain has the unmitigated damn gall to claim that Obama has thereby played the race card.
  

Obama may let McCain off the hook, but I don't have to be charitable. The McCain camp doesn't deserve it.

Not only is this completely and premeditatedly dishonest, it's racist. This bullshit is extruded in McCain's name from the fetid mouths of Tucker Bounds and Steve Schmidt. I don't care whether McCain is personally racist or not; he's obviously eager to appeal to the racists in the Republican base.

And by the way, most of them used to be Democrats, until they found the Democratic Party inhospitable to their bigotry. So they moved to Richard Nixon's Republican Party.

(h/t Charley on the MTA at BlueMassGroup)

Vanity press

No, not what's been masquerading as a free press for well over a decade. My own vanity.


In breaking and important news, BlogNetNews has designated lovable liberal the seventh most influential blog in Massachusetts. In the liberal rankings, I'm fourth, tied with Left in Lowell, which is in my blogroll. BlueMassGroup is - no surprise - number 1. Dan Kennedy's site, Media Nation, which I had not heard of before, looks like the professional journalist's blog and it is at number 3. Rounding out the top five is Ryan's Take at number 2, which is full of Beacon Hill news.

Now if only my traffic and comment volume can match the hype!

Update (8/3): Up to number 4 overall. Even more hype to catch up to, though of course that much volatility suggests a grain of salt.

Cheney stands up

... now that Duhbya is lying down. What branch is Darth in today?

On Blue Mass. Group.

Insurgents v. party regulars

Over and over again in the history of the Democratic Party, insurgent candidates and their people (Patrick, Bonifaz, Dean, Reich, Bradley) butt heads with party regulars and their people (Reilly, Galvin, Kerry, O'Brien, Gore). I've been on both sides (Patrick, Galvin, Dean, O'Brien, Gore), so maybe I have some useful observations, and hopefully they'll be unifying.

Regulars are often too insular. Many of them think they own the party and actively resist the arrival of new people. C'mon, these are reinforcements. We need the fresh blood of patriots - but unspilled.

Insurgents are often too self-entitled. Many assume that anything that goes against them is nefarious and illicit. C'mon, the regulars have been fighting the good fight for years; you can't expect to show up and run things just because you're young and beautiful and impatient. Good ideas are just talk unless you work to put them on the agenda and try to pass them.

Regulars carp that they've never seen the insurgents until they just showed up at a caucus. Insurgents sometimes encourage this by winning once and then never coming back to do the steady work of reform from within.

Insurgents often think that some ideal of fairness that they grasp intuitively can override the rules. They may be unhappy if you exclude them from voting at a caucus because they missed the deadline for registering as Democrats, as if the regulars are supposed to be able to see in their hearts that they really were Dems in time.

Process reforms can help these relationships work better. Transparency is a big one. I've been to at least six Mass. Democratic Conventions so I'm prepared for strange delays while the power brokers put the fix in. New people are very put off by this. I don't like it either, but the rules permit it. My desire to change those rules doesn't mean I'm blustering about changing their outcomes this time around.

Politics is both competitive and cooperative, a combination of hard ball and burying the hatchet. The rules are the rules, but we need to help each other when the primary is done.

Often in the past, we haven't helped each other. Scott Harshbarger would've been governor if both wings of the party regulars had cooperated. (Can't blame insurgents for that one.)

Modern campaigns need such deep organizations that those organizations have to be permanent. They can't be put together overnight. As Democrats, we are waaaay behind the Republicans on this.

My challenge for regulars and insurgents alike:

Build your organizations. Don't settle for precinct captains; we need eyes and ears and eventually voices on the street (or apartment building floor) level. But prepare something lasting; don't worry about ideological purity or a long history of working with the party. Unify. Come September, be ready to hand over as much of your grassroots as possible to the nominee and the local party committees. That's one part of the formula for winning.

Originally posted on Blue Mass Group with this poll attached:

How many times in the 5 listed contests were you an insurgent?

o Never (hack!)

o Once

o Twice

o Three times

o Four times

o Five times (Green!)

Convention transparency

After the 2002 convention fiasco, we Dems spent four years working through the McGovern-Dukakis process to reform approval and endorsement of primary candidates. On the plus side, voting on the floor was smooth and efficient. But what was the net result?

All candidates gained the ballot. Counting fewer than 5000 votes still took so long that the convention lasted into the evening. Each of the gubernatorial candidates is a credible candidate; I will support the winner after September. So, what's wrong with the outcome?

The problem is that the process is dishonest - or looks dishonest. Votes delivered by power brokers to give razor-thin margins of approval matter more than the rest of our votes.

A fair and above-board process would have the following features:

No counting of votes until all votes are recorded. No changing of votes once voting closes. All challenges during the convention must be made in view of the convention by identifiable delegates. After voting has closed, the only admissible challenge is teller accuracy. Counting must take place in public view of the convention. The tallying should be complete in fifteen minutes. And then we could get on with convincing the electorate.

Originally posted on Blue Mass Group.