We had an interesting discussion yesterday about the tendency we all have to choose information that validates our beliefs and reject the information that doesn't. The conversation focused mostly on the politics of the moment, both the conservative/liberal divide and the Obama/Clinton divide. Certainly, we can see in some of the discussions that devoted supporters of both sides have a tough time digesting bad info but love to trumpet good info. That's an important thing for us as a community to contemplate.

But it's also essential, I think, to broaden the focus from just our little world of debate to the whole world itself. In fact, I think Obama has pointed us in a direction that encourages us to break out of these mindsets even beyond our partisan politics.

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I just posted some instructions over on the reader blog posting page. Check them out and let me know what you think, what I should change, if I've horribly misspelled any words, etc.

We've been reading your feedback closely and thinking a lot about how to adjust the discussion elements of the site to improve your experience. In that light, we've made two changes to how the reader posts are presented that we hope you'll like. Details after the break.

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Atrios:

It's important to remember that none of us are above the fray, that we all have hackish tendencies to suppress information which doesn't fit our worldview and privilege information that does. We're more likely to excuse behavior from people we like and exaggerate the ills of people we don't like. I try to fight hackish tendencies especially during this intra-Dem battle, but I don't claim to have superhuman Nonhack powers.

How do you push back your hackishness? I force myself to read thoughtful conservatives, to read stuff outside of the partisan political blogosphere, and to generally take a deep breath sometimes. You?

We have your reader blog archives sitting in a database, but we don't want to start to push them live (which would be a day-long, server heavy process) until we know for sure that it's all in order.

So, we need your help. We asked last week, but still need more folks to email tpmbugs at gmail dot come to beta test the archives out. We need as many folks as possible, so please do jump in.

We want to get these back for you, but need your help to make it happen.

A while back folks asked us to let them know when we schedule book discussions so that they can go buy the book and come prepared. Now that we're scheduling our discussions out in advance (more or less), we decided to do just that with a calendar on the bottom right of the side.

Also, we want your help. What books should we be discussing? The thread is yours.

Believe it or not, we've finally been able to get the reader blog archives from the old site into our database. For now, they're on a testing site. We need your help, especially if you were a blogger at the old site, making sure that they're working and are all there.

So, help us out. Shoot an email to tpmbugs at gmail dot come and join the beta testing group making sure we've got this right!

You may have noticed that on the sidebar of the site you can now snag two RSS feeds for TPMCafe. The first is for this main column and the second is for all of the reader posts that go up. You can also grab a nifty widget to put up a list of the latest main column posts in the sidebar of your site. Enjoy!

While we're dealing with house business and waiting for the returns tonight, let me update you on the latest things that should now be working on the site and what's up next. I know things are taking longer than we'd thought, so thanks for your patience. Believe me, we can't wait for it to all be working.

Fixes after the break.

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We've had discussions here at TPMCafe of what we should or shouldn't consider acceptable behavior in commenting. We're about to post an official set of guidelines.

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I wanted to bring everyone up to date on some upgrades we're making to the site and also discuss community rules for posting and commenting. As you've probably been able to see over the last few days, comments and reader blog posts are now appearing on the site much more rapidly than they were before. We're also planning on pushing through another upgrade to the publishing software that runs TPMCafe early this next week and that should resolve some remaining glitches that have afflicted the site since the relaunch in early February.

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The Obama campaign is taking fire in Philadelphia because it's refusing to literally hand over bags of cash to local party bosses. Ward bosses are demanding "street money," loose cash they need to keep their loosely put together political machines moving. They aren't getting it because the Obama campaign believes they can, once again, circumvent an entrenched political hierarchy.

Obviosly, as Jay Newton-Small points out over at Swampland, part of this is optics. Promising a new politics and then handing out "street money" would be hypocritical, to say the least. But this also has to be put in the context of a sea change in how campaigns engage voters that started in the Dean campaign and is continuing in both the Obama and Clinton campaigns this cycle.

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Chris Hayes, stealing from his own publication, posts the text of a compelling editorial reflecting on yesterday's Petraeus/Crocker testimony:

Here’s the problem: after Bush and Cheney have left and even if the American people reject McCain’s plan to faithfully continue their policy, our politics will remain trapped. For empire comes with constraints, and it is within this cage of thought that our war “debate” continues to pace and growl. To “change course,” as the current vocabulary has it, requires more than a package of strategic adjustments. We must unlock empire’s cage and reject the entire project of occupation as something to be properly managed instead of ended as soon as possible.

Read it all.

Over the next few weeks we're going to be doing some upgrades to the software platform that runs TPMCafe as well as rolling out some new features that users have been asking for.

Tonight, we're looking for a few TPMCafe regulars to help us do some final beta-testing of the new version of the software. If you'd like to lend us a hand please send an email to tpmbugs@gmail.com. We'll send instructions.

And keep an eye out for further posts about new features we're designing for the site.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a democratic socialist.

He never called himself that in public. Cold War red-baiting was still powerful and haunted him even before his rhetoric turned to class. But his organizing was increasingly in that vein and privately he spoke of his support for democratic socialism. He was organizing a Poor People's Campaign and talking about the necessity to build an interracial movement for economic justice.

In this and in many other ways, King was a radical.  But, from watching most of the news coverage of the 40th anniversary of King's assassination today, you wouldn't know it.  The absence in our collective memory of of King's leftism is just one of the aspects of what Cornell West calls the Santa Clausification of MLK:

He just becomes a nice little old man with a smile with toys in his bag, not a threat to anybody, as if his fundamental commitment to unconditional love and unarmed truth does not bring to bear certain kinds of pressure to a status quo. So the status quo feels so comfortable as though it's a convenient thing to do rather than acknowledge him as to what he was, what the FBI said, "The most dangerous man in America." Why? Because of his fundamental commitment to love and to justice and trying to keep track of the humanity of each and every one of us. [...]

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This week, in light of Barack Obama's much-lauded and discussed speech on race in American, we asked a handful of academics, journalists and activists (and those somewhere in between) to offer us their thoughts on race in America. Specifically, we asked three questions:

1. Setting aside the politics of the moment (if that's possible), do you think Obama's speech advanced the national conversation of race in America?

2. Moving forward, what questions do you think we should be asking about race in America?

3. What roadblocks do you think have preventing us from having a productive conversation about race previously? How can they be avoided going forward?

We'll be posting their responses all week in the Special Guest blog. Feel free to offer your thoughts in the reader blogs and Chuck and I will link over to them.

Just in case anyone was confused, this isn't really Sinbad. Sinbad wanted us to make that clear to you. Seriously.

Update: I should also let you know that this isn't really Rambo.

So there I was five minutes ago, reading a story in the Washington Post about a group of innovative young journalists in Kenya who produce a grassroots web video show called "Slum TV." As I finished the piece I had what I'd guess is a pretty common thought: "This sounds like a cool project. I'd like to look at their website." So I scanned the Post article for a link. Scanned again. Went back to the beginning to catch the link on the first reference to the site. Went to the end to see if there were "related links." Checked out the sidebars for "more information." Gave up, went to google.

If I'm SlumTV, I'm pissed. That's activist partners, donors, more media attention lost. No small thing for a grassroots organization. Get a great piece in the Washington Post and can't even get a few thousand pageviews out of it. Sheesh.

(Yes, these are the things I get outraged over. It's a publisher thing). The link is here.

Since it's a quiet day here today at TPMCafe, I'll turn the mic over to you. Possible topics:

Why do people say Tiger Woods is black?

Outrage fatique: will it ever set in?

Feel free to invent your own topics as you see fit.

To steal from the headline over at the main page, have reports of Hillary Clinton's demise been greatly underexaggerated? Or, to put it more directly: is the media accurately reporting Senator Clinton's relatively small chance of becoming the Democratic nominee?

There is understandably continued frustration about some of the technical problems we're having w/ the community tools. I've been holding off on reporting back to you all because we've spent much of the last few weeks trying to get a handle on how and how quickly we can fix things. Believe me when I tell you we share your frustrations and then some. It is obviously not in our interest to have a site that's frustrating you, and we're doing everything possible to fix it. It hasn't been as quick as we'd like, but we're doing absolutely everything we can.

Let me give you a quick update on the details.

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A quick rundown.

Jo-Ann Mort took the chance to look back at New York's difficult political struggles with race and ethnicity.

Similarly, Jim Sleeper told the story of a black leader of New York's past similar to Reverend Wrightand says that Obama has put some pundits on the spot.

Nathan Newman offered a brilliant dissection of the way Obama argues that racial division marks class privilege and protects the power of plutocrats.

Todd Gitlin worries that the country may not be ready for the profound challenge Obama offers.

And Ed Kilgore takes a deeper look at what Obama's speech, ostensibly about race, argues about religion.

What did you think? Use this thread to link to your post or offer your thoughts.

Update: Workerbee reminds me below that I missed MJ's reaction. MJ thought it was Obama's best yet, and that Obama transcended even himself.

To mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, we're hosting a discussion on the media's coverage of the war since its initial failings.  The discussion will be led by Greg Mitchell and focused on his new book So Wrong For So Long. Mitchell is the editor of Editor & Publisher magazine.

Joining him will be military historian Robert Bateman, McClatchy military columnist Joe Galloway, Executive Director and Founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America Paul Rieckhoff, Washington Independent reporter and TPM alum Spencer Ackerman, and media critic and NYU professor Jay Rosen.

Mitchell's first post will be up later today.