Well That Resolution Worked Out Well!

OK, that didn't work out. I throw myself on the mercy of the court.

The news site doesn't leave much room for personal writing, sadly.

I have noticed that the text for typing a Blogger blog is much smaller than a Wordpress blog, but additional insights are wanting.

OK, gotta go. More later. (No Really!)

Resolution

I'm going to use this site more in 2010 than I have since my FDL gig started.

I don't quite know how, or in what fashion. Maybe for cultural observations. Maybe for TV/movies/music/literature. Maybe just to rip on Tucker Carlson's new "news" site. I don't know. But for something. It'll be nice to have a free-form outlet.

Like most resolutions, this will probably putter out around January 3rd. But it's in writing and in public, making neglecting it more embarrassing. So.

New Site

So my new site is live over at Firedoglake. The URL is:

http://news.firedoglake.com

You can pick up a feed at: feed://news.firedoglake.com/feed/atom/

Thanks everyone. I'll be dimming the lights here now.

RINO: Reformer In Name Only

My first post at Firedoglake is up, about how Governor Chamber of Commerce's talk on health care is never matched by action. Again, the dedicated site isn't live, so for now I'm only posting on the main page.

Friday Random Ten... The Last?

I've been toying with JUST keeping the site open for the Random Ten. So no, probably not the last. And I'm likely to have a few more things over the weekend if I have the time. So long but not goodbye...

On Call - Kings of Leon
Cosmic Sing-a-Long - Cryptacize
Party Up (Up In Here) - DMX
Everybody Loves Somebody - Dean Martin
It's Gonna Be (Alright) - Ween
What New York Used To Be - The Kills
The National Anthem - Radiohead
Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
No One's Gonna Love You - Nicole Willis & The Soul Investigators
Clouds - Cibo Matto

Have a great weekend.

And I'll Miss You Most Of All, Scarecrow

You can read my weepy, tear-stained goodbyes to Hullabaloo and Calitics. And now, you're probably wondering what that's all about...

Well, I've accepted a position with Firedoglake running a new site over there that will be called FDL News. The site has not yet gone live bit will come into being in the next couple weeks; in the meantime I'll be posting on the main site over there, starting next Monday (today was kind of a preview). It's an opportunity to do a mix of breaking news, analysis and some original reporting. Firedoglake has some fine bloggers in their stable and I'm excited about the opportunity.

What does that mean for this site, a labor of love for the past five - count 'em, five - years? Well, the large majority of my material will be produced at FDL News. I'm going to keep this site live for a variety of reasons, mostly to keep the archives open. Maybe I'll post some personal insight or two every now and again. But for the most part, "the balcony is closed," as Gene Siskel liked to say.

I'm a little torn up about this. I built this thing from nothing into... only slightly more than nothing. I've written over TWELVE THOUSAND posts here. It will be profoundly odd starting next week to have that not happening anymore. Profoundly odd. I started this out as a hobby, it became an obsession and has now progressed into a career. And it all started right here.

But I'll now have a much higher profile and a better depository for stories that would otherwise drift into the ether. It's going to be a huge challenge and in order to be able to meet the task, I have to focus.

As I said, I start Monday. I'll dim the lights here starting Friday - the weekend will be entirely taken up with moving. I will really miss this scruffy old place.

Thanks to everyone who ever came across this site. It's ridiculous that anyone would spend more than a minute reading what I have to say. It's even more ridiculous that more people will do it from this point on. You've all been great. Knowing me D-Day knowing you readers A-ha!

Forcing Myself To Write Something

I feel very drained by not just the health care debate, but generally by jumping back in to all this crap after being essentially offline for a couple weeks, etc.

Really not in a good frame of mind for all this right now.

In The 'Burgh

I am back from a wonderful wedding and honeymoon. I didn't want the new wife finding me with the laptop furtively typing away while on the honeymoon, leading to me getting a quickie divorce, so I held to my pledge to stay away. I'm sure I missed pretty much everything, so I won't bother recapping. So this is just to day that I'm back and on the ground here in Pittsburgh for Netroots Nation. Just a reminder that, if you're at the conference, you can find me on one panel over the weekend.

California: How Process Creates Crisis

SATURDAY, AUGUST 15TH 3:00 PM - 4:15 PM
PANEL, 317
California is the nation's largest state, and is often seen as a bellweather for economic and social change. However, the peculiar dynamic of state government institutions has threatened that role, as the state has slipped into an almost perpetual crisis mode. Despite an overwhelming majority of progressive lawmakers in the state legislature, the two-thirds rule for passing a budget and tax increases, among other issues, handcuffs them and empowers a radical conservative minority. Thirty years of short-term fixes and failed leadership have only exacerbated the problem and put the state—and the nation—in real danger. As Paul Krugman recently said, "Years of neglect, followed by economic disaster—and with all reasonable responses blocked by a fanatical, irrational minority ... This could be America next." In this session, we will look at the reasons for California's budget tangle, the larger implications for the progressive movement at large, and what some organizations are doing to change these outdated rules and take back state government for the people.

And I will be around throughout the weekend, so if you're here, seek me out and say hi.

Vote for D-Day in CREDO's state blogger poll

From an email from CREDO mobile:

CREDO Mobile and Netroots Nation are teaming up this year on the Blogger Awards program, under which three deserving bloggers will win a BlackBerry Curve smartphone and one year's unlimited service from CREDO. ...

Here's how it works. We'll be awarding one prize in each of three categories -- best national, state or local, and activist bloggers. Between now and 10 AM EDT August 15, you're invited to text in your votes to 27336 (that spells CREDO) in the following format: keyword
bloggername. Examples:

- National nolantreadway
- state david dayen
- activist maryrickles

So what do you need to do? Sent a text message to 27336 that says:

state david dayen

Help the hardest-working blogger in California win an award for his work.

An Announcement

So I will be away from blogging and the online world for the next week. That's because, in between posts over the last couple years, I met a wonderful girl, and we will be getting married in her hometown of Pittsburgh on Saturday. Somehow she likes the chained-to-the-computer-and-occasionally-unresponsive type. I don't know. But I'm pretty pleased about it.

I know that your main reaction, gentle reader, is "what's in this for me?" Well, I'll tell you. I've lined up a guest poster who you may know from around the blogosphere. Dante Atkins, who posts as hekebolos at Daily Kos and Calitics and everywhere else, will be filling in for me around these parts. Treat him kindly, or with studied indifference, as most of you do me.

After the wedding and a little "mini-moon" (a word I've coined for "shortened honeymoon," how do you like it?), the wife and I will go back to Pittsburgh for the annual gathering, Netroots Nation. So seek me out there and say hello. After all, you'll be on my honeymoon!

By the way, I should again plug the panel discussion I'm running at Netroots Nation on Saturday, August 15 called "California: How Process Creates Crisis," in room 317 at 3:00pm. The panel features myself, Robert Cruickshank of Calitics and the Courage Campaign, Jean Ross of the California Budget Project and AD-21 legislative candidate Kai Stinchcombe. If you're heading to the convention, I hope you can make it.

And that's it for me. Take it away, Dante.

Jumbo Squid!

If it was the summer of 2001, this would have pushed all those shark attacks right off the front page. The aquamarine menace!

And On A Lighter Note

...So I'm out to eat burgers and dogs and cole slaw with pineapple (our contribution), have a good holiday.

Here's a nice sing-along for your barbeques.

Memo to Calbuzz: Hey, right back atcha!

To: (insert fun and in no way dated Communist Party reference here) Comrades Phil Trounstine and Roberts
From: Dave

I read with interest your dripping-with-contempt response to my criticism of your reports on the Parsky Commission. Actually, 4/5 of the article concerned the Commission itself and not you, but I am reminded of the words of Carly Simon:

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you

As a regular reader of Calbuzz, I admire your sources, if not your willingness to string an entire article together based on two politicians standing next to one another smiling, as well as an over-emphasis on horse-race politics and narratives. But clearly, you have a bit of an inflated view of your clear-eyed mission of “journalism,” and the assumed objectivity that goes with it.

Allow me to be blunt: Calitics has been writing about the Parsky Commission since December of 2008, before there was such a thing as Calbuzz. We have followed up time and again, in particular when two weeks ago, Susan Kennedy tipped the hand of how this commission will go by stating that “Our revenue stream is way too progressive.” So it was not exactly some kind of amazing scoop to report on a commission that has open meetings and presents all their material in public, which is why plenty of contemporaneous reports were written, based on the documents posted on the Internet that the Parsky Commission presented in anticipation of their open meeting.

Unlike you, I don’t pretend to hide my opinions on the very clear economic and tax policy implications of the Commission’s report behind some false veil of objectivity. Most of my comments were directed at the report itself, and the way in which a flat tax would quite obviously shift the burden of taxation to the middle class and the poor; but I couldn’t help but notice clear language like...

the impending bankruptcy of state government should be sufficient to show players at every point of the political spectrum not only that sweeping change is needed, but also that everyone will have to compromise to keep California from sinking into the 9th Circle of Hell

...which certainly allows people, in my view, a window into how you determine the best policy, defined as the midpoint between whatever pleases those hateful hippies and the ranters on the right. That may be a nice and quick methodology, but it's anything but rigorous, and I'm pretty sure it's an apt description. After all, wasn’t one of you the communications director for Gray Davis, who was not above bold expressions of centrism and a fear of the spectre of “The Left”?

(How did pumping out that daily message for ol’ Gray turn out, by the way? What did that guy do after his two successful terms were up? Just curious.)

I mean, I’m very sorry for bringing up the inconvenient fact that so-called “objective” journalists can frame a story in such a way that they put their own thumbs on the ideological scale. You claim that your job is to “ferret out the facts” of the policymakers, you know, like hard-hitting reporting on an email to supporters and what one Republican said about another Republican in a press release, but it’s fairly clear from the above-mentioned article that you view flat taxes and eliminating corporate taxes as pretty sensible and down the middle, and it colored your coverage. I should probably just have shut up about it and gone back to my Communist Party self-criticism sessions, which by the way is a hilarious and timely joke. Here’s another one: In Soviet Russia, television watches you! You can use that!)

So this notion that I should just say thank you for illuminating a public document seems to be to be a bit too self-regarding, and your lashing out at me for pointing out the not-so-hidden biases in that particular article a bit to “the lady doth protest too much.” But of course, I have an infantile disorder.

Which brings us to this criticism about the Barbara Boxer press conference and certain bloggers clapping at the end of it, something of a hobby horse for you folks. I am not going to speak for anyone in the room but myself, but I know quite for certain that I didn’t clap, and I know what I asked. See, based on my notes (yes, I took them, just like a real live reporter) I know that I followed up a series of queries about torture (yours was some process question about how the Obama Administration "rolled out" the torture memos released a week before) with a specific question about a resolution before the state party seeking the impeachment of Jay Bybee for his role in authorizing torture, to which she answered “I’m very open to that,” reminding those assembled that she voted against Bybee’s confirmation as a federal judge. Now, at the time, I was involved in securing thousands of signatures from across the state endorsing this resolution, and when it came before the resolutions committee, I would argue that having Sen. Boxer’s agreement that calling for the impeachment of someone who helped authorize torture was a reasonable request actually helped get that resolution passed. In other words, it was a combination of what the netroots community does best – using citizen journalism and activism in tandem to effect progress on progressive issues.

Which I personally think is more of a relevant bit of work than asking a federal legislator about a state issue.

I’m just sayin’.

p.s. In the cited post, I used variations on the word “fetish” once, in a 1,400-word article. But it made for a smashing joke about therapists, so points for you!

Back

This blog will resume its regular posting schedule today, if anyone still comes back to read. There's so much going on, from Iran to health care to California's budget mess, and I suspect I'll be playing catch-up today. Thanks for hanging in there.

Dodging Parade Floats In Pittsburgh

Been kind of a whirlwind 24 hours, as I had a bunch of meetings in Pittsburgh today in the midst of the Penguins victory parade. Actually it wasn't entirely bad, though one location was closed, not for the parade, but FLAG DAY. Who closes for Flag Day anymore?

Anyway, I'm sure there's plenty going on that I can't get to at the moment. It'll have to keep.

Give It Up For Not Blogging!

I must say it has its advantages over blogging, at times. Anyway, this will be a good break away from the grind.

As far as I can ascertain, a white supremacist shot up the Holocaust Museum, conservatives are completely defensive about it, that right-wing domestic terrorism report from the DHS was pretty prescient, moderate wankers are wanking on health care reform, and California remains two clicks from the gutter.

Did I get everything?

As for me, allow me to recommend Pappy and Harriet's Pioneertown Palace. Pretty awesome little BBQ and juke joint in the Yucca Valley area that had Eagles of Death Metal and Peaches out for concerts in the last few days.

On The Road

I'm off to Palm Desert, for a week of fun in the sun, and afterwards I have a couple additional days of travel, so expect a light holiday schedule for the next week or so. Which of course kills me, since there's so much going on right now. But the calendar is the calendar.

Cheers!

On Pseudonyms

I haven't given this any space, but Ed Whelan, a guy who runs something called the Ethics and Public Policy Center, outed the Obsidian Wings blogger Publius because he criticized him. After a couple days of criticism from the left and the right, Whelan apologized and publius accepted.

I run a pseudonym on this site but my name is pretty readily apparent, and for me it's just what I happened to come up with when I started the site, so I kept it. At Calitics we were constantly getting criticism about hiding behind anonymous handles - as if that degrades the quality of the content somehow - so we defused that critique by using our real names. But I completely understand the desire for someone - for professional or personal reasons - to conceal their identity online, and the last thing I would ever think to do is to run down that information and report it to the world. The mentality of someone who immediately thinks that does not compute to me.

For hundreds of years, writers who wished to impact the political debate used pseudonyms - publius is names after one! - for whatever reason, sometimes just to allow the words to take precedence over the personality. If you look at the preening subjects of the Village these days, I think you'd only wish for pseudonyms.

Hopefully this sorry episode reveals an understanding about respecting other people's wishes, on the Internet or off.

Annual Announcement

This site, D-Day, has nothing to do with the historical event, D-Day. This is less of a problem than in past years, because Google fixed their algorithm slightly and now I'm the #7 search on "D-Day" rather than #1. Nonetheless, for those looking for information about the battle at Normandy Beach, check the other items on the Google search. It always makes for a fun traffic spike, but I really have nothing for you, except thanks to those who fought and died in that battle.

I'd offer personal recollections at this point, but members of my family were in Okinawa and Italy.

...D-Day is a contraction of my name.

Back

Just returned from a 5 1/2 hour drive from Sacramento to lovely SoCal, so no Rest of the Week in Review tonight. Will pick up in the morning.