I (supposedly) write like

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

This is the "badge" that was generated when I inputted my text from "At least you can afford shoes", below. Apparently I Write Like is the newest thing, for people who have time to kill and require flattery and haute distractions. I heard about "I write like" from Jim Macdonald, here.

(Incidentally I inputted the verbiage from the Euronews interview with Elif Şafak, and "I write like" decided the unnamed blurb writer is just like Kurt Vonnegut.)

Writing n' junk

"Do We Still Need Libraries?"

What's the purpose of libraries—really? To be a community gathering place? To promote life-long learning? To help users navigate the information flow? To store print documents for the historical record, as Nicholson Baker argues they should (and aren't) in Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper?

Libraries can serve all these functions. But what they mean to us as physical spaces is changing, and the information-science vision has now been enshrined at Cambridge Main.

from Martha Nichols, who also writes at Talking Writing, a literary blog. I didn't even know there were such things, but if there are blogs for immigration rights activists and healthcare administrators and realtors and hockey fans, I guess that shouldn't surprise me terribly much.


and, "Do Novels Still Matter?" also by Nichols, who is apparently some sort of troublemaker.

OK, one last Salon.com related link:

"Are video games the next great art form?"
Developers are pushing the limits of storytelling, interactivity and design. Why aren't they getting any respect?
By Alex Jung

and, not from Salon, Gina Telaroli, "the top 10 film blogs"

BBC News, "What is Secret Cinema?" This video makes me think some people have more free time and disposable income than sense, although I suppose blogging may strike some as being the same sort of thing, at least as far as the time goes.

"the resident" re Peak USA

9.12. Now what?

First, the nice young lady above is Lori Harfenist of The Resident. I imagine a lot of people, whether they lived in NYC in 2001 or not, share her view that fretting about conspiracies is redundant, while allowing that a generally corrupt government is likely. I wonder if she actually does look at things that way, given how she characterizes suspicion of the government, and I wonder what she and Bob from Pacifica would make of each other's views.

As you may have noticed, I closed the comments on Rob's 9.10 post, "Riding old 9/11". For now, comments still aren't moderated. I'd prefer to avoid that, and I don't want to have to reprimand anybody, regular visitors especially. I regard all the persons who participated in the previous comments as regular visitors, and feel all are due respect, and need to offer it in kind.

Over at A Tiny Revolution, Bernard Chazelle posted "Everything's a Lie" discussing some the same issues Rob and the commenters touched upon below, in Rob's post.

Here's Chazelle:

But here's the funny thing. People don't seem to mind [i.e.the lying] very much. This is pure Hegelian alienation: the acceptance that some creatures, by virtue of their function status, are normatively alien from us. They may do things (lie, kill, steal) that no one else would be allowed even to consider. Normative is the key word here, because they can't just do anything. They are strict norms of conduct they must abide by. So a senator who steals a stamp may go to jail, but if the same senator pushes for a billion-dollar bill to favor a baby-killing (military) industry that will make him mega-rich once he leaves office, that's fine. He can go on and give speeches about taking on the baby killers. If a president lies about his intern's extracurriculars, he gets impeached. But if he lies about a bogus threat and bombs the crap out of the Sudan, that's OK. So it's not true that anything goes. The modalities of lying have to be accepted. It's what you might call a normative alienation. See the division of labor: they get to lie and the little guy doesn't, but the little guy gets to approve the norms and they don't. This applies not just in politics but across all modes of power.

Here's part of what I wrote over at ATR:

I don't know if Walter Mondale was uniformly honest, I imagine he wasn't. But he was honest about the possibility of raising taxes, and got walloped in '84. Bill Clinton promised everybody that he would be a warm, huggable kind of conservative-- essentially-- and was wildly successful.

I'm lying myself, because that's not what Clinton said in '92, but a more accurate description of how he refashioned himself in '95.
[...]
If regular readers of lefty blogs all sit on their hands and stay out of the 2010 midterms, I'm guessing this will reduce turn-out by 1 or 2 percent at the most. If those same blog readers go and vote for whoever among 3rd party candidates make the ballot-- even if it's libertarians-- then presumably 3rd party candidates might poll at 1.5 to 2.0 percent nationally, instead of 0.5 to 1.0 per cent.

But some liberals would blanch at the thought of doing this, in part out of fear that the TV talking heads would spin it as support for social security privatization. (But most who think of doing it but decide against it, I'd wager, would only stop themselves because of the thought that it might mean the republican might get in or stay in.)

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Time magazine guy on labor day

Ze Frank(?) on Labor Day and Socialism

Nine tenths of the law?

////////////ADDENDUM 29 Aug 2009: this is what I posted on Thursday. Since then I received an email from somebody named Laurentiu Pop(possible link) who said it was an error and that their post was removed, and it has been removed. Although I am probably entitled to some of the (ill-gotten) revenue they got from the ads they posted on MY WORK, I recognize it's probably unrealistic to pursue it, in terms of cost/benefit, so I'm not planning to do so. //////////////////////////// ///////////

Somebody named Elizabeth(link) at a web site called Human Trend decided to nab my entire "Sanford an the Son" post from earlier this summer, which I posted at Hugo Zoom, here, and at Dead Horse, here.
I left a comment as follows:

Elizabeth, if that is your name,
please tell me why you decided to steal my post(from Hugo Zoom and Dead Horse), but did not feel you needed to give me proper attribution. This isn’t an excerpt, but the entire post, even my photo-editing work.

Perhaps ironically, my comment is awaiting moderation as I write this. I don't know if she thought that leaving the "cross-posted at Dead Horse" bit at the bottom constitutes sufficient attribution, or she just meant to steal this cleanly and forgot to lop off the bottom. For the record, No, I DON'T think it's sufficient attribution. Although I'm not necessarily against someone posting an entire post of mine(with attribution, which also means a link back to the source) IF it's a really short one, say under 50 words. But this wasn't a short post, and I wasn't asked or mentioned.

For longer posts I'd think any time you're venturing over 50 per cent of the original you're definitely going over the line, maybe even sooner if the excerpt is really long in itself. And I always give attribution. So should you, Elizabeth.

GWB n' BHO

Sanford and the Son

Mark Sanford: OK, I'm not going to say, I don't know what the big deal is, because I know it IS a big deal. Cheating is wrong, darn wrong. I let my wife down, I let my adorable children down, I let the employees of the state of South Carolina down, the voters, even the reporters who heard about the emails but were forced to behave as if they didn't know where I was. I let all of you down, and I'm sorry.

Narita Barnswell(AP): Governor, how do to intend to show the people that your no-good South American hussy meant nothing to you, and you mean to move on?

Governor Mark: Narita, I'm not going to say that, because I still love Maria. I don't want to be a hypocrite.

Bing Mathers(Fox News): Governor, are you saying you don't care what the South Carolina voters or even Fox News viewers think, that you are going to choose love over propriety and your miserable career? Is that what you're saying?

Jesus(suddenly appearing): Bing, I think the governor has spoken from the heart. Like me, he values love, and understands its transcendent quality. Mark, I love you, and if you really love your antipodean floozie, I want you to know I support you, as long as your heart is true and your kids don't have a problem with it. Have you asked them?

Gov. Mark: huh?

Jesus: I've noticed that kids from wealthy, loveless families often figure out pretty quickly if mom and dad don't love each other, and if they're good kids the hypocrisy usually gets to them. Or they grow up to have problems with booze and prescription drugs, or maybe betting on the horses. It's a toss-up.

Lori-Ann Santoro(CNBC): Jesus, if that's really you, are you saying the republican party should stick by the governor?

Jesus: Honestly Lori-Ann, I couldn't care less what the republicans do. They're mostly a bunch of soulless weasels, just like the democrats. I'm just here to support Mark, because I believe in love. Does anybody have any pertinent questions?

Dennis Perrin(suspicious character): Hi Jesus. Dennis Perrin here. My question is: will the Lions ever have a decent team again?

Jesus: Man, I don't know. They really ticked the Big Guy off when they refused to trade Barry Sanders, and I don't mind telling you He was hoping for a chance to see Barry play in the Super Bowl, just once. There was a time, they could have gotten an entire defensive line for him, but they decided they'd rather hold him back and sell tickets.

Gov. Mark: Wait a minute. Jesus, are you saying you couldn't care less about my career?

Jesus: Yes. Don't you already have enough money, and didn't you say this Maria is your "soul-mate"?

Gov. Mark: I'm sorry, but I'm confused. I'm doing the right thing, by sticking with my marriage. It's what the voters want.

Jesus: Oh, me. It's what this crowd of moralizing drunkards wants, because they want to scold you on the television and feel powerful when you subsequently toe the line. As far as I can see your marriage ended a long time ago, when you and the missus stopped loving each other. You don't even know or care what the voters want. Maybe you don't even care about what you want. I remember whispering in George Junior's ear a few years ago, about how he needed to take that wad of money his parents gave him and go open a video store in Houston where he could spend the rest of his days harmlessly ogling Rice co-eds renting R-rated movies, instead of running for congress. Because I knew his thwarted desire would keep screwing itself tighter and tighter, and maybe someday he'd kill thousands of people. But he didn't listen either.

Look. Some people in this world have a buffet of choices and others don't, but you seem to think you deserve some kind of credit for pretending you belong in the latter group. A waitress at the Waffle House who's boyfriend is in jail and can't get help raising her kid falls in the no choice category. You don't. Maybe you were so deliberately clumsy about ducking out of the country because you wanted to be caught, you wanted your hand forced so you could come clean and stop being a hypocrite. If that's the case, why are you back-tracking now?

Gov. Mark: I want to do what's right.

Bing Mathers: Jesus, doesn't the governor deserve credit for trying to set right his life, even under such intense media scrutiny?

Jesus: Even under-- do you hear yourself? Bing, neither you nor any of these other characters give a damn about the governor's life, let alone the well-being of his soul. You're just peeved because Fox wouldn't fly you to L.A. to cover Michael Jackson's death.


Helen Thomas(important old lady): Jesus, if we could back up just a bit please. Are you saying weasels don't have souls? What about otters?

Jesus: Hey, Helen. No,I'm not saying that, I just didn't want to call them a bunch of soulless jerkwads, because it doesn't sound like something I'd say. So I tried to put it in terms most of you could relate to. Weasels are OK, and so are otters. Anyway guys, I got other stuff to do. Let he who is without sin, etcetera etcetera. I'm outta here. (Jesus leaves.)

Gov. Mark: What about me?

(a far away clap of thunder is heard. The reporters all go "ooh" and move to the windows of the conference room to look. It starts to rain.)

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

not to be confused with-- oh, you know...

via Abdusalaam al-Hindi, who hasn't posted for a while.

regarding Arthur Silber

Arthur Silber "The Power of Narrative" has a new series going, but he is also in bad shape financially, and has called out for assistance from his readers, so I'm noting this to encourage you to help him if you are in a position to.

the old blogroll

A Tiny Revolution*
Abdusalaam al-Hindi
Abu Aardvark
American Samizdat
Art of Peace*
Arthur Silber
Arvin Hill*
Avedon (The Sideshow)
Ayn Clouter*
Aziz: City of Brass
Baghdad Burning
Bill: Thoughts on th' Eve of th'Apocalypse*
Brad DeLong
bride of acheron*
bubba n' company*
Burnt Orange Report*
Chris Albritton: back-to-Iraq
Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque
david parsons' blog*
Denis DeKat*
Dennis Sanders
Empire Notes
eteraz
Ethel the blog*
Fiat Blog!*
Follow Me Here
Frans Groenendijk
Gorilla in the Room
Helena Cobban,Just World News
Jack, the Grumpy Forester*
Jim Henley
Joe Bageant
John Caruso
Jon Swift*
Josh Buermann
Juan Cole
Juli,Meanwhile Back at the Ranch*
Khalid Jarrar: Tell Me a Secret
King of Zembla*
Lawrence Lessig
Liberal Oasis*
lunaville
Mahablog*
Mark Kleiman,Same Facts
Martin Wisse*
Mere Islam
Micah Holmquist*
Nielsen Haydens
Orcinus
Paul Goyette, Locussolus*
phronesisaical*
Polygon, the Dancing Bear*
realitique*
Rob Payne, Halcyon Days*
Robert Lindsay*
Rotus*
Seeing the Forest*
semitism
Silt3 (Vaara)
Siva Vaidhyanathan
Skimble*
Skippy*
Skookum
Stan Goff, Feral Scholar
th' pime
the open mind*
the Penguin*
Unfair Witness*
Versen 2002
Xymphora
Your Right Hand Thief(aka Oyster)*
Zeyad, Healing Iraq
Zeynep Toufe, Under the Same Sun

****in' Blogrolling dot com

The two or three nice persons who read my wee blog may have noticed that I took down my main blogroll recently. This is because the host of my main blogroll( until recently) was blogrolling.com, which allowed you to post a few lines of script to your template, whether in a blogger environment or elsewhere, and add or subtract or otherwise edit items on your blogroll at their site without having to potentially reformat your template each time, making it(again, until recently) a much appreciated free service.

I guess they have to do whatever they need to in order to remain profitable-- or to finally make a profit, as the case may be-- so apparently they decided to crappify their basic free service and make it a lot more difficult to use, both for the blog host and any random user who wants to click on a link. Now the link is set up to take you to an ad first, and won't let you see the actual url you are linking to, and editing the blogroll from their website is now substantially more difficult than before. Possibly I'm overreacting, and the subscription version of their service, which to be fair I must acknowledge I've never used, might be a lot better. And again, it's not as if I ever paid them anything, so I have no business being too annoyed by this development. It would've been nice if they'd emailed users of the free service regarding the changes-- and who knows, maybe they did, and the spamcatcher go my email and hence I never saw it.(When you post your email address in a public place, like on a page of a blog, even if not on the main page, almost inevitably you'll get far too much junk mail to slog through and read everything that lands in the junk folder, lest it be important, even if you're just restricting yourself to reading the titles.)

Anyway, I will repost a regular hand-coded blogroll in a few days, before the end of the month at any rate. If you've been linking here and want me to link to you, email me or leave a comment here, and I'll look at it(unless you're just selling stuff.).



from Blogbloke(2005): "why you shouldn't use blogrolling.com"

Blogrolling.com(January 2009), "More on BR2"

Madisonian.net(Mar 2009), "Blogrolling.com is evil"

NL Blogroll.com(Mar 2009), "Blogroll complete"

22 Feb 2009

photo:David Sutton, mptv.net

Some odds and ends:
UNT's CyberCemetery to preserve Internet sites from Bush administration. The UNT Libraries will preserve all federal government agencies' web sites that were created during the Bush administration.


Allison Kilkenny : "Obama’s War on Terror May Resemble Bush’s in Some Areas"

from Mark Kleiman's "Same Facts" blog: Jonathan Zasloff,
The Politics of Child Poverty

Admittedly this is from some three months ago, but I've been meaning to mention it.
(And it hasn't suddenly lost relevance in our post-GWB era of goodness and light.)

Happy Birthday Ronald Reagan (Thanks for Ruining America)By William Kleinknecht,AlterNet.

The Onion:"Nation's blacks creeped out by all the white people smiling at them"

from The Motley Fool:
"This bailout is great" and

"This bailout is terrible", both by Richard Gibbons.

Why this photo? The Oscars were on tonight but I didn't watch them. I generally did watch in my teens and twenties when I still thought they were relevant, but that was then. The girls are still pretty, of course, and I imagine they still do the luminaries-who-died-last year bit, so I thought that apropos of that I'd include this b&w image of Charlton Heston, who passed away in '07, seen here in his snazzy Jaguar E-type. I didn't care for most of his politics but it's hard to criticize his choice of wheels. Cross-posted at Dead Horse.

the infernal return

I've been thinking of changing the direction of Hugo Zoom a bit, but am presently undecided-- at first I meant to make it a just a place to host ephemera that entertains me, while using Dead Horse strictly for political opining. I may still do that, but I realize that there's ephemera, and there's ephemera. So I may post thusly:

Dead Horse: political stuff

Hugo Zoom: some political stuff, and some ephemera, and

Versen(my mostly inactive 2002 blog): more ephemeral ephemera.

I was also thinking of renaming Versen(my 2002 blog) weh weh weh.

I haven't decided yet.

20 Nov 08

1956 Lincoln Continental Mk II, classiccar.com

I've been under the weather of late, hence the dearth of posting. However, Rob Payne has been doing a lot of posting recently at Dead Horse, HZ's sister site.

Dead Horse: September 1st(Part 1 of 2)

Sometimes it's difficult for me to write according to the perceived dictates of blogging, by which each post is supposed to be about a discrete topic, ostensibly separate from the topics that precede and follow. For example, when I look at the miasma of events in recent weeks I try to give them a context, at least within my own noggin. South Ossetia, Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, the "pre-emptive" Minneapolis police raid(also here (via), hurricane Gustav, the forced resignation of Pakistan's corrupt strongman(and the continued non-resignation of our own president), they're all connected, at least in my mind.

Yesterday I called my father, whom I hadn't talked to in a couple of months, and I expressed my disappointment with Obama. My pop is intelligent enough not to fall for the "historical opportunity" song-and-dance, and he's not the sort to be reactively aghast at the thought that somebody might think that the meaningful differences between the two parties is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Nevertheless, he said that he felt the differences that do exist do matter, and that you don't have to be crazy about the nominee to vote for him, because at least he's not McCain, etc. You know, the lesser-of-two-evils argument.

The cartoonishly earnest change-fetish segment of Obama's supporters get a lot of media(and blogosphere) attention, but, win or lose, it's unlikely they make up that big a segment of the voting populace, or even of the people who will end up voting for him. I suspect that the number of voters who choose Obama in November who take a more sober approach like my father are far larger. In a recent comment thread at Jonathan Schwarz's ATR, Nell of A Lovely Promise argued that turning away from the Democratic ticket because you're hoping to hasten the decline of the US empire was a form of "armchair Leninism", and noted that it's pollyannish to expect that a more enlightened state would inevitably emerge from the rubble-- and I suspect she's right.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.)

Rachael Ray hates you for your freedom

She also feels you are insufficiently perky. Have you heard about this? I hate to admit I find it amusing, just as I find it amusing that some people want to have a boycott because they caved to the crazies. Who cares about wars and secret prisons and the pump and dump of the mortgage market? Let's boycott Dunkin' Donuts! (Actually I'm already boycotting Dunkin' Donuts, but just because I'm too damn fat.)

This, n' that, etc

I was excited by the doings of "Blogroll Amnesty Day," and enjoyed poking around and finding sundry similarly small blogs that struck me as interesting.
I've added (and been added by),
Rotus,
Rob Singleton,
Jon Swift
Skippy
Art of Peace

In addition, I asked Barbara O'Brien of th' Mahablog to add me, even though she was already on my blogroll and she did, which was exceedingly nice, especially as she's kind of a bighshot, like Skippy and Jon Swift. And I've corrected my previous error in not linking to Josh Buermann of Flagrancy to Reason.

There are a few I have missed that I've been meaning to add, which I will shortly.

Incidentally, I left a comment at Rotus asking him(?) if he was aware of the defunct US kit car company by the same name that used to manufacture a Lotus 7 replica in the 1980s, designed to take Toyota or Mazda mechanicals(hence the slightly impolitic pun of "rotus", suggesting the stereotypic Japanese person's pronunciation.). I think they were based in Maryland. Caterham Cars in the UK makes a pricey but officially licensed replica, and lots of other companies in the US and UK and elsewhere still make unauthorized knockoffs.

Technically the Rotus was a knockoff of the Lotus Super Seven that replaced the original 7, but I won't burden you with too much auto pedantry, just refer you to the links below should you be curious. Also, pictured below is Patrick McGoohan in KAR 120C, the most famous Lotus 7 ever-- which was actually made by Lotus, and featured in The Prisoner.

Wikipedia's Lotus Seven article,

BBC on the 50th anniversary of the Lotus 7


photos:Rotus Cars, BBC

B.A.D. blogging, etc.

"Maha Barb" O'Brien of the Mahablog informs us that today is "blogroll amnesty day" a day wherein lefty bloggers may pledge to freely blogroll somebody else in exchange for the same favor.Call it quid pro quo blogging, or networking, or what have you.

As a lowly nanoblogger with very little "traction" and a documentary project I've been trying to fund, naturally I owe it to myself to participate, so I am. As an added inducement to persons who might wish to "blogroll" me, I'm offering a free j-peg of virtually-rich, virtually-buttery Lorna Doone cookies.

The cookies are offered on the honor system naturally, and I can't exactly stop you from copying my j-peg without blogrolling me. But somewhere, there's a virtual Irish priest who will scold you for taking my virtual cookies under false pretenses, and he will haunt you in the long virtual night, so just don't do it. (Cheaters never win unless they're the New England Patriots, as fellow documentarian Terrell Owens reminded us last year.)

So, I say: blogroll me, and go Giants. If you want me to blogroll you, please leave a message in the comments below.


See also: Skippy th' Kangaroo: "blogroll amnesty day"
Jon Swift: "blogroll amnesty day,"
HZ(2005),"Lorna Doone blogging,"

Finally, I will have additional comments about "Iraqdoc 2008" later this week, by Wednesday.

Moulitas's Michigan hubris

photos:NBC,dailykos.com


A couple of weeks ago I promised you an essay about the countercurrents within modern liberalism, in which I would try to explain why the connection between liberalism and conservatism today is anything but the two-dimensional continuum that most people think it is, and how there are very significant ways in which the popular conceptions of the democratic party leadership are just plain wrong, and they are hardly "liberal" in any meaningful sense.

I've dropped the ball so far, mostly because of sundry distractions but also because of the unwieldiness of the subject matter. But I will address it, fairly soon. In the meantime other things keep happening that function to dovetail with that percolating essay about the hidebound democratic leadership and their deep-in-denial followers. One of them was an absolutely idiotic, too-clever essay by daily Kos's founder Markos Moulitsas in which he advocated that his readers (often termed "Kossacks") cross over and vote for Mitt Romney in Michigan.

"Let's Have Some Fun in Michigan"

In 1972, Republican voters in Michigan decided to make a little mischief, crossing over to vote in the open Democratic primary and voting for segregationist Democrat George Wallace, seriously embarrassing the state's Democrats. In fact, a third of the voters (PDF) in the Democratic primary were Republican crossover votes. In 1988, Republican voters again crossed over, helping Jesse Jackson win the Democratic primary, helping rack up big margins for Jackson in Republican precincts. (Michigan Republicans can clearly be counted on to practice the worst of racial politics.) In 1998, Republicans helped Jack Kevorkian's lawyer -- quack Geoffrey Feiger -- win his Democratic primary, thus guaranteeing their hold on the governor's mansion that year.

With a history of meddling in our primaries, why don't we try and return the favor. Next Tuesday, January 15th, Michigan will hold its primary. Michigan Democrats should vote for Mitt Romney, because if Mitt wins, Democrats win. How so?

For Michigan Democrats, the Democratic primary is meaningless since the DNC stripped the state of all its delegates (at least temporarily) for violating party rules. Hillary Clinton is alone on the ballot...

First of all, Hillary Clinton was not alone on the ballot-- Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel were still on the ballot, as well as withdrawn candidate Chris Dodd. More on that in a moment. Moulitsas wanted to encourage his readers, as well as their readers(since many blog readers(possibly most) are also themselves bloggers) to encourage Michigan democrats to "cross over" and vote for Mitt Romney, because this would allegedly hurt the Republican party.

Kos's hubris is difficult to fathom, although I suppose given how prominent DKos has become in recent years, maybe it shouldn't be surprising. There are many bone-headed assumptions here, even though if stroking the egos of his readership is the goal and he doesn't really care about what the democratic party supposedly stands for-- an increasingly common trait-- then I suppose he's actually pretty smart in making his pitch for Romney, irrespective of the outcome.

Obviously there are a large number of things liberal and would-be liberal Michiganders could do with their vote. You could stay home and say "fuck you democratic party" for taking away my state's delegates and telling me my vote won't count-- perhaps even with an email, with or without cursing.(I'd recommend without.) You could vote in the republican primary, also held on Jan 15th, whether for Romney or someone else-- such as for Ron Paul.

Kos insists that voting for Romney, who went into Michigan without a major primary win(he did win the barely-covered Wyoming caucus), would somehow hurt the GOP because their eventual nominee wouldn't be decided way ahead of time. He's smarter than us noobs because he's been on Meet the Press(above), so he knows this is so.

Anyway. You could vote for Kucinich or Gravel to protest the way the democrats have shrunk from the fight in congress, or even for Dodd to register your more specific disapproval for retroactive immunity of the telecoms that handed over personal data to the administration without legal authority. I would think a couple of thousand votes for Dodd might not be reported by MSNBC and company, but you can bet Senate staffers would take notice of it a lot more than a couple of thousand emails.

Avedon takes a similar tack, although she is more gracious to Kos than I am. Here's the comment I left her:

Kos has gotten arrogant, which leads to stupidity. I didn't read all the posts he wrote about Michigan, but he fails to note in the "Let's Have Some Fun..." one that Romney was in fact leading in the delegate count going into Michigan. Either he didn't know this or didn't care. Either way it seems he's starting to believe his own publicity, as it were.

And besides, why do people automatically assume it's bad for a candidate to not have the nomination sewn up before the convention? Just as some voters may have voted for HRC because they were tired of Matthews and others dumping on her, might not the party that goes into its convention without a clear winner end up with an advantage and a more sympathetic candidate, partly because people are getting tired of the horse-race style political coverage, and partly because the party that goes into the convention w/out a clear winner will paint the other one(not entirely unreasonably), as the party that gamed their own voters into voting for their pet establishment candidate?

I know that if I was Romney or McCain or Huckabee and I only managed to get the nomination at the convention itself that's how I'd paint "HRC Clinton the 2nd."