One reason we have problems in this country is the number of lying idiots who work for major press outlets. The lastest entrant in the media class twit of the year sweepstakes is Perry Bacon Jr. who says "the Netroots hit their limits" because "Liberal online activists are finding you can't move elections with just modems and IM."

First, let's get something that reporters are supposed to get right - facts. Liberal activists are far more likely to have broadband. If Perry wants to be a more skillful distortionist, he needs to get things like that right early, so at least he has some credibility to blow.

Second, the birth of liberal politics online, back in 2003, was when people realized that merely being online didn't do anything - when liberals on the net went from complaining on forums, to running blogs and, this will shock Perry Bacon Jr. - running meetups. Had he penned that headline in 2003, he would have been making an astute observation. Now, he's just a liar. But let's dig deeper. [Update Steve Gilliard lays into Bacon Jr. as well.]

You've heard the story: the Netroots, the Democratic Party's equivalent of a punk garage band—edgy, loud and antiauthoritarian—are suddenly on the verge of the big time.

He's obviously not talking about most people I know. The panel I was on at yearly Kos featured a professor, an economics consultant and former central banker, a tax lawyer and myself. Hardly the stuff of punk garage bands. We were talking to a packed audience about the importance of saving, investing and having balanced budgets with a strong currency. Really truly the edgy stuff. Verge of the big time? No we were on the verge of the big time in 2005, when Howard Dean won the DNC chair's race, and his most serious competition was Simon Rosenberg - another candidate backed by the emerging techno wing of the Democratic Party.

It's really important not to pack ledes with obviously wrong information. This reads like someone who wanted to write for Rollling Stone, but wasn't hip enough.

"...are now said to be Democratic kingmakers."

By who? basic journalistic practice says that if there is a controversial assertion, and this one clearly is, then it needs attribution. That way readers can judge the reliability of who said it, and the reporter who decides to highlight it.

It's also factually incorrect. The Democratic kingmakers are the big donors and the town and county level activists. These are the people whose support makes or breaks candidates. Bloggers, at best, can break a candidate into the national spotlight. Bloggers can turn viable candidates with local bases of support into nationally visible candidates. This is not kingmaking, but it is something that is important. Tester, Lamont, Patrick are all candidates who won with blogger support, but they were viable candidates because of local discontent with the status quo. And every honest blogger knows that.

After they relentlessly derided Senator Hillary Clinton as calculating, overly cautious and lacking true liberal bona fides, she hired an adviser just to deal with them and even demanded that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld resign. Coincidence?

The adviser's name is Peter Daou. It is again a good idea to know who you are talking about. Peter Daou is a well known blogger, ran and founded the very respected Daou report, and is a solid political professional, having been asked by John Kerry to run his internet arm. I've worked with Peter before, I've also told him that if he decides to make a run for higher elective office, that he has my support - so I can say with confidence that Peter isn't far left. Yes he's a center-left writer and internet professional, his client base ranges far and wide, and he has the demonstrated capacity to make things happen. I also have direct, though very off the record, information which solidly puts Peter outside the hard left which Bacon Jr. wants to put blogging with.

Moderate Democrats say it with remorse, conservatives with glee, but the conventional wisdom is bipartisan: progressive bloggers are pushing the Democratic Party so far to the left that it will have no chance of capturing the presidency in 2008.

This is something that is only heard from largely Republican circles and from people like Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller - that is, people who have crossed the party base repeatedly in order to get gushing words from people like Bacon Jr. I was just at a political gathering, and the local Democratic State Senator wanted to talk to me about funding for the state university system, I told him that I'd be happy to work on raising visibility for the idea. Opening opportunity for people who can't afford $30,000 dollars a year for a private university doesn't sound like far left to me. But maybe things are different inside the Time Magazine/Fox News bubble where anyone to the left of Tom DeLay is painted as dangerously far outside the American mainstream.

Even their most ardent players now recognize that you can't create a true movement using nothing but modems and instant messaging. "The Netroots cannot elect someone alone," says Matt Stoller, a blogger at the popular group site MyDD.

Once again, I know that Bacon Jr. is being dishonest here. I know Matt Stoller, have worked with him in the past, and probably will again in the future. When he and I were planning to bring blogging to bear on the movement to Draft Wesley Clark - and we were hardly the only people doing this - our early conversations centered on how to get the national media to pay attention to a phenomenon that was already growing on the ground.

I didn't meet Matt online - though I had glanced at his blog a couple of times. I met him as one of a group of volunteeers who were working on opening a Draft Clark office in Dover New Hampshire. We repainted the walls. I went out and bought a New Hampshire flag to hold. So I know that Perry is lying about the context of the quote, because Matt Stoller has known for years that elections are won by real people on the ground and "the internet" is like "the telephone" - that's his analogy - it works only when it is integrated into the rest of a campaign. That's what he preached when he was blogger for the Corzine for Governor campaign too.

So they're branching out. Beyond posting exhaustive pieces about bias in Fox News coverage and uploading videos of presidential wannabe George Allen making a fool of himself, they're adopting the old-school tools of electoral politics, like canvassing their neighborhoods and calling their member of Congress.

This again shows just how off the dollar menu Perry Bacon Jr. - the imp in me keeps wanting to put the word Cheeseburger after that, since he really should be asking people "Do you want Fries with that?" - is. Last year I penned this proposal for the Democratic Party:

What is the Open Convention? There are three spheres of political action - the paleo politics of local organization, a unity of place and the bonds that tenure in that place bring, there is old politics - media and micro-political issue groups as well as the old line "inside the beltway" apparatus, this focuses on demographic reality - and there is the new politics which manifests itself on the internet, but which should be seen as "psychographic". In otherwords, there is the geographic democratic party, the demographic democratic party, and the psychographic democratic party. Each is different and does not entirely understand or trust the others.

The Republican Party overcomes this with massive amounts of money and corruption - it simply buys unity by the top down mechanism of funding people. Bribes in, bribes out.

The Democratic Party does not have access to the vast pool of corruption that the Republicans have, and the slashing away of funding for the technocratic state has turned the liberal and progressive world into a constant scrounging act for funding and jobs. This has produced an animosity within the Democratic party that the other side has used to great advantage. The Miers fight is one of limited career slots - the food fight going on over her is the normal state of affairs in the Democratic and progressive universe.

The solution is to create bonds of community and communication. The Open Convention would be a means to campaign by building a message, not in a top down or mythical bottom up way - but using the Democratic Party apparatus as the center of a sphere. For every open source project there is a core of people who represent the judgement of what works and what doesn't - who have the advantage of having all the feed back and data about what has worked and what hasn't. However, the driving force of the creation is the vast network of people who need the project - who need the open source Operating System, Encyclopedia or other end product.

The open convention would be a series of events, including meetings in state and local party gatherings to push ideas upward, and explain ideas that are important - forums and media events to capture the old politics democratic party's attention - for example, conduct a poll a week on some issue, and then package it with the Democratic solution to the Republican problem - and electronic and internet events, such as online wikis, online voting, sending out a paragraph for discussion and getting major liberal blogs to post threads on it to secure input. The result of each step would be repackaged - and often explicit questions would be asked.

Seems like there is a clear recognition there, and by the commenters, that mobilization on the ground is part of the mission. Far from "branching out", the idea of mobilization was key to both the Dean and Clark movements in the 2003 pre-primary era. It was key to the election of Howard Dean as DNC chair, and it was key to the Ned Lamont and Deval Patrick campaigns. Both campaigns came to the internet early, because many of their early universe of voters, particularly for town caucuses needed for state convention support, were on line.

This is the demographic fact that brought me to blogging in the first place - that the people who are, in the worlds of the John Berry's indespensible book the Influentials are online. They went online because they value knowledge, and a community of pragmatism. They want to know, and the internet is where people share what they know. The people who show up to meetings, who are the back bone of political parties, are online, because online is where they get the expertise which is how they build their contacts in the real world.

The image of the "autistic netroots" is one which established media likes to play, a way of telling their readers "these people are wierdos, they aren't like you". And yet as Bacon Jr. shows, it is the other way around - it is he who is out of touch, and doesn't know what is going on, having seemingly missed the last few years of political history.

He also misses that the same effect is occuring on the right wing as well. The Toomey campaign to knock of Spectre proceded in exactly the same way as the Lamont campaign - a candidate who appealed to the every day base of the party gathered support by appealling to national sources of funding, internet writers and bloggers, and physical meetings. Toomey had meetups, these meetups formed the corps that organized counties for him, and it was this direct physical contact that made the campaign viable early. And Toomey isn't going to be mistaken by anyone, except maybe Perry Bacon Jr. , for "left".

The conservative Rightroots movement is only just getting started.

This is a statement which is so absolutely dishonest that if Time magazine had any standards, it should fire Bacon Jr. on the spot. In fact, online activism for the right is older, and for a long time more effective than online activism on the left. It began with the freep. The Free Republic was the first place where online activism could deliver results that people cared about in politics. The Freep could shift an online poll - "freeping" a poll became a verb in online politics - they could barrage people from Congress with angry emails, or television or media people who they disliked. In fact, before liberal activism was much of anything, online right wing activism had helped push the coverage of the 2000 election fiasco to the right, and organize the demonstrations in Florida to support the legislature appointing electors if they so chose to do so, and that Al Gore was trying to "steal" the election.

Before this, people like Matt Drudge poured material into the hands of the Freep. I remember clearly the day that the words "Monica Lewinsky" hit the public discourse, within hours people, hopped up on talking points from the Free Republic were visible online, and telling people in person. I know, my landlord at the time was one of them. That is, before there was liberal netroots of any particular stripe, the Freep were already intergrated into the sewer to rumor to mainstream cycle.

Time has hired someone who is both pervasively dishonest in how he characterizes the people he interviews, ill informed about the topic that he is writing about, and heavily biased in favor of the right wing. He lies about facts, he misinterprets data, and he mischaracterizes a movement that he is clearly intent on deriding. It is unfortunate that Time Magazine chooses to fan the flames of media hostility by hiring, promoting and printing such clear and obvious failures of reporting and professionalism. It shows why there is a blogging phenomenon, the editors of major publications are liars, promote lying and are atrociously smarmy while they do it.

The reality is that online activism is older on the right than the left, and with outlets such as Righmarch and Townhall.com, better funded and more staked with people that the right wants to turn into stars. Michelle Malkin is only the latest person created by right wing online activism. Right wing online activism has given us a host of verbs - "to fisk", "freep a poll" and "swifboating" - that's a clear sign of an important group, when even many of its political opponents use its language. Bacon Jr. should learn to report before trying to distort.

The reason they don't like blogging is because in the world of being online, they can get caught at it, because on the record really is on the record, as opposed to "buried beneath all the other stupid things people said that are now forgotten."