Hold Fast

Ari Melber has a great piece in The Nation about the Tea Party. He identifies what at first looks like an interesting puzzle about the critiques by the left of the Tea Party, namely that “liberal attacks on the tea party echo attacks on liberals.” What’s unrealistic to one voter is inspiring to another. Tea [...]

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Peter Daou has a follow-up to his piece on Obama and the blogs yesterday. He makes a couple points that I really don’t think stand up on their own any more. First, he continues to cite the critical writings of liberal bloggers like Glenn Greenwald, Marcy Wheeler and Jane Hamsher as contributing to a drop [...]

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Peter Daou makes some pretty interesting points his long and somewhat shrill look into “how a handful of liberal bloggers are bringing down the Obama presidency.” This is happening, Daou says, because key liberal bloggers are refusing to bend their principles to support the political agenda of the administration. Daou writes: The constant refrain that [...]

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Digby, writing on the penchant for some on the left to take a BURN IT TO THE GROUND attitude about politics and the policy course in Washington, has this to say about “those of you who are inclined to spend hours in my comment section throwing around snotty remarks drenched in puerile cynicism about how [...]

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I strongly agree with both Bob Herbert and Glenn Greenwald, who successfully endeavor to rebut the sophistical argument against progressives who aren’t supportive of the current health care bill as arriving at that position solely or primarily out of a quest for ideological purity. Herbert and Greenwald both focus their argument on the fact that [...]

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Robert Cruickshank, who does incredible work as the Courage Campaign’s policy director, has a must-read post at The Seminal on FireDogLake. Here is a large excerpt: The collapse of support for the bill reveals a deeper and growing divide, an unwillingness of most Americans to embrace a flawed process. In particular, progressives – activists and [...]

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Jake McIntyre has a post on Daily Kos in which he points out that parallels between supporting the Iraq war and supporting health care reform as it stands now: Has anyone else noticed that the split in the progressive blogosphere between those who are saying “it’s a good bill in spite of everything” (Kevin Drum, Matt [...]

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I think there’s a problem with the progressive online movement today. We came into existence under a bad Republican president and a strong Republican majority in Congress. The Democratic Party was in electoral decline. No Democratic message was effectively resonating in the face of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, deregulation of markets, and a massive [...]

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I love to see that the adjudication of left/right political slant on blogs is being made based on whether an outlet reflexively supports Obama. It’s so much simpler this way!

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So sayeth his Twitter feed. Of course, O’Reilly has tried to demonize Netroots Nation before. Back in 2007, when it was still called Yearly Kos and there was to be a Democratic presidential candidates forum at the event, BillO went on a weeklong campaign against Daily Kos and the convention. It was effectively put to [...]

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