Pandagon

Roll Your Own Candidate List

Have you been paying attention to the "Kos 8", excited but also the teensiest bit jealous because you have your own candidate list you want to support, but you don't have a readership of 100,000 people to wrangle attention from?

Well, America Coming Together (ACT) has the site for you - ActBlue, a site that lets you roll and promote your own list of candidates in an act of supportive defiance against Kos which actually lets you help him while also starting your own little JuggerKos.

Okay, there are way too many fake words that can be made out of "Kos". But if you're interested, rock it.

Down On One Hand, Not Up On The Other

The NRA has a novel argument.

It's an advocacy group...running advocacy programming. But it doesn't count, because the advocacy comes in the form of news and commentary. News and commentary that advocates a position. Coming from an advocacy group. But it doesn't count.

While Limbaugh and Franken are primarily ideological commentators...neither of their broadcasting companies are set up as political advocacy or lobbying groups. The NRA is.

I think that Bob Bauer is right, though:

I can see this being a big-ticket gambit to try to get CFR laws ruled unconstitutional, in whole or in part...and if it goes far enough, it might work. So, the issue is - oppose the station and potentially get CFR overturned (a situation which might not be so bad, except that no better law will arise in its place for years, if at all), or let advocacy news go unchallenged and break CFR by having every advocacy group under the sun get a radio or TV show and call themselves a media group?

Decisions, decisions.

Amnesty From This Idea

Yesterday, Instapundit linked to this TNR piece (happily squirreled away in the for-pay archives, ensuring once again that most of what's interesting on the site is inaccessible) about Amnesty International. As is often the case, I get the feeling he didn't read past the opening paragraph that agreed with one of his long-running tropes (AI spends all its time criticizing America).

Now, I'm going to say here that I don't have a TNR account, so I can't read the rest of the article, either. But since that one paragraph was introduced as an argument, so be it.

I hereby request that anyone who criticizes Amnesty International provide a full accounting of whatever's on the organization's front page before lodging the "they criticize America too much" line of attack. On Amnesty's front page:

• The AI Report for 2004, which is a summation of all the human rights violations they covered in 2003, worldwide
• Call for release of a Russian prisoner pending retrial
• Turkey's violence against women
• Humanitarian crisis in Haiti
• Slave trafficking in Europe
• The deportation of Egyptians from Sweden
• A letter to all coalition states in Iraq
• Croatia becoming a party to an Anti-Torture Convention
• Eritrea's resistance to human rights investigations
• The crisis in Sudan
• Israel's destruction of homes
• Call to action for investigation of human rights abuses in Iraq prisons

The problem here (as it always is in the case of Amnesty criticism) is with the people who only discover the humanitarian organization when it's pointing out something wrong with what the United States is doing. Amnesty does loads of valuable work in places that even the "why isn't anyone talking about this" right doesn't talk about. However, that almost never gets noticed, despite the fact that it makes up the bulk of their work.

If AI gets criticized for disproportionality and ignoring human rights crises because its critics have created a false distribution of their work, the group has no real chance to change. It's already doing what its critics say it should do, but it keeps getting criticized as if it never changes. To make the Simpsons parallel, it's like when Mr. Burns, stacking the company softball team with Major League ringers, kept telling Don Mattingly to cut his sideburns, despite the fact Mattingly had none. Even when Mattingly had shaved a strip to the scalp from one side of his head to the other, Burns kept haranguing him to cut the phantom sideburns, to the point where Mattingly had to leave the team for the sideburns he didn't have.

Amnesty Internation could go totally bald, and they'd still have to leave the team. Message?

Don't Fuck With AI.

Entering the Fray

I've been thinking a lot about Kerry's "Foreign Leaders" comment (which actually said "more leaders") lately. I'm deeply saddened that such a content-less charge was accepted so totally by the media and turned into a three day (and counting) story. It was the breather that allowed the Bush Administration to get their feet back under them and threw Kerry back on the defensive. And yet it should have never turned into anything, it should never have gotten the coverage it did. Though the wording of the comment was impolitic, Kerry was making a worthwhile point about how the rest of the world feels about Bush, a point that was totally obscured by the media coverage that focused on the "who" rather than the "why".

Normally, I can "see" what a campaign should do to deal with something, I can chart a strategy that looks good to me. But when the issue at hand is something as ridiculous as this, there's no way to reframe it, no way to end the frenzy, no way for the candidate to escape until the media decides to let him. So the only thing to do is help the media "MoveOn".

Back during the Dean Campaign, Matt Singer and I (though mainly him) ran the Dean Defense Forces. The DDF was primarily an E-Mail list that, when an unfair or untruthful statement came out about Dean, would send an alert to all its members complete with what was wrong about the story, contact information for the reporter(s), talking points to use and possible ways to format your piece. Then the letters would go out and the offending reporter would get two hundred polite notes the next morning setting the record straight.

The point was never to attack the reporter nor get a story pulled. Rather, the idea was to make sure the reporter knew what was wrong about what he'd written so s/he wouldn't make the same mistake again. It wasn't about attacking the media as much as gently correcting it when it needed a bit of help.

I'm thinking of bringing back the DDF, now renamed the Democratic Defense Corps. But I'd need real help to do it. So this post is a way to gauge support. If you'd be willing to write letters or take a leadership role in something like this, leave a comment letting me know. Based on how you guys react, I'll decide whether or not to devote the time and energy into rebuilding this response team.

Also, I'd really need some people with web design experience who could help us build a site, let me know if you'd be able to hook me up on that.