September 2007 archive

Companies know it. Your town gossip knows it. Politicians have known it forever. Today’s GOP especially has become amazingly adept at it. Negative marketing works.

It may not work on everyone, but it is effective and the tactic is now an essential tool to any winning political campaign. Many of us despise it, but in reality a main reason we hate it is because deep down we know it works.

You know who else knows it works? Our good friend here at Docudharma, pinche tejano.

I wrote this whilst nursing my youngest about a year ago.

There has been a lot of talk on Political Fleshfeast (PFF) about bannings and the rules/enforcement here at Docudharma. Buhdy, joined in this diary and was besieged. As you can imagine, the comments got pretty harsh. If you can’t handle harsh criticism of this site, I suggest you don’t follow the link.

Personally, I have fond feelings for this site, as many of you are people whose DKos writings I appreciated. I have also come to enjoy the … er … free-for-all at Political Fleshfeast. The depth of difference in administrative approach of these two sites is immense, to say the least.

I do not write this from malice, but from the viewpoint of a well-intended outsider. Some of the Docudharma disciplinary warnings quoted at PFF sounded … almost theocratic. Control of expression by contributors must allow a wide breadth of dissent, else full discourse is impossible.

At PFF, the startup was horrendous in that the posing, name-calling and general crap-spewing between lefties and righties was uncontrolled. Since, the level of discourse has improved (you only have to duck now and then) and a few very unlikely truces have been declared. That has come about without a single banning that anyone knows of.

I do not wish to get into a finger-pointing contest, nor will I. Your comments are invited, though I may or may not participate. Honestly, I write this only because I feel it needs to be said, not for any other purpose.

I wrote an essay yesterday titled, Collateral Damage. In it I opened with the same photograph reproduced three times of a pre-teen Iraqi girl mouthed ope’d in horror, clinging to herself, with the image of spattered blood puddled and dripping on the wall to her right and her father’s dead, bare feet to her left.  Someone’s hand is seen reaching to touch her father.  The little girl is alone in her own world of horror.

An astute reader alerted me to the need to place advance warnings on images of this type to allow people not to look, should they be disturbed.

Of course, I will honor that request, as I wish never to inflict pain or distress of any kind on anyone.

But I also have very mixed feelings about this.  Is it moral to be able to distance oneself from what is happening in Iraq?  Is it acceptable not to know and to experience what is being inflicted on victims of violence, whoever they may be, and for whatever societal sanctioned reason?

On this first Iraq Moratorium day, I’d like us to discuss the morality of immersion of and identification with the victims of violence.

and opened its website to anyone and without charge.

Back when the NYT decided to charge $49.95 (or some figure) for access to its most often read columnists, I thought it a moronic journalistic move and an even stupider business move. Obviously, the journalist want the widest audience possible to read their words of wisdom. There was no journalistic justification to limit that audience. Unfortunately, the business wieners gained the upper hand and shut of the reference source.

Note: Action item down at the bottom of this diary

I haven’t seen this posted anywhere, and with the focus no longer being on the US attorney firing scandal and the relationship between many of the US attorneys and election integrity issues, I think it bears pointing out.  The deal involves the reconfirmation of Hans von Spakovsky, a hyper partisan republican who has many MANY shady ties to voter suppression tactics over the past couple of decades, as one of six members of the Federal Elections Commission.

it’s 6pm and i hope when you read this, i’ll be waiting for my plane at Newark airport… and not stuck somewhere else… heaven’s love!

Here’s an excerpt from a comment by KrisC, just reacting, just writing in the raw