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We Just Love A Fight
I note an absence of any complaining about horse-race coverage lately. Posts here are either on who's going to do better in some technical circumstance, or they are about cults vs. sleazy pols. There are occasional exceptions, looking at policy details, but since those policies are so similar, at least in comparison to the opposition, I guess we can be forgiven for just having some fun and rooting for our respective teams.
But what is there really to be said on the contest? It will happen, it is happening, there will be a winner. In the meantime, those deadly serious issues of executive usurpation, willful lawbreaking, shameless politicization of justice, human rights violations and inhumane treatment of prisoners, utter failure to address pressing needs like infrastructure and energy innovation, and damn it all, bringing Osama Bin Laden to justice (yeah, right!) are being ignored here.
More items to forget: Valerie Plame, Sibel Edmonds, the climate, internet neutrality, the surveillance state, martial-law enabling acts, detention centers in the U.S. built by Halliburton, stupid drug laws, stupid agricultural subsidies, stupid monetary policy, stupid financial market policies, insanely huge personal wealth for a few, incredbly low literacy rates for the supposed leader of the free world, beggarly wages for the low-end worker, and there is New Orleans.
Let the election go, it'll be fun, the GOP is toast, likely. But there is much to do, and we can't wait until January 2008 to start planning.
Comments (8)
Hey! This is an election, not a seminar. :-)
"If I wanted to read, I'd go to school." Butt-head
February 18, 2008 1:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yup. Can't really whine about the horse race coverage while checking the net every two hours to see if there's a new poll.
It's exciting !
February 18, 2008 5:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm trying to find the reason I don't seem to care about posts here. Not only the individual blog posts, but the main pages are just plain boring, lately.
The site changeover is part of it, but where are the interesting writers for the Cafe? Do you notice the paucity of comments on all the Dionne-related posts? I remember new contributions picking up a hundred comments in a day. Now I'm watching them trickle in, barely reaching twenty per column.
I don't think it's just me.
February 18, 2008 9:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
63 comments on Kosovo so far at Yglesias and he covers the Election plenty heavily and doesn't have any fancy forum software. I think it's all in the quality of the audience you draw by offering quality thinking that's an alternative to what's in the MSM, not just rewarmed campaign talking points, expanding on MSM, or a knee-jerk opinion on what you just saw a pundit say on the tube.
Mho, Tom, it started quite a bit before the software change. The software change just gave the trajectory a giant leap. Are you sure you aren't fondly remembering a TPMCafe of a year or more ago, not the one of two months ago? I saw the difference ever more clearly looking at those old posts a day or two ago.
I can help remind you: recently, you got involved with member kozmik on a thread, the thread itself was rather a bit on the P.C. pablum side, but in an attempt to disparage that, with his methods, he degraded the whole situation further. The "discussions" of the recent past were increasingly not good discussions. In that thread, devon, I recalled, said, it seemed no longer worthwhile to even spend time on front page posts, that the interactions were increasingly too distasteful for him, and that the only nice discussions left were on Reader Blogs. If you recall, the book club previous to this one, it was the Republican operative and that one was, well....
Actually, one strang related thing, I have been immpressed with how adult many of the new Election Central bloggers behave compared to how the Election Central threads were when they were on TPMCafe for a while. The purging of mood that comes from that might be helpful for a renaissance or phoenix rising, you never know.
February 18, 2008 10:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
Think you're right.
BTW, how do you get to posts that date from before the change?
February 18, 2008 10:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
How,
I picked a name of contributors here awhile on the front page, clicked on it, and started cross-surfing from a post. First, there are a lot more archival posts on their profile pages, (pseudocyants even said that it looked like the techies were putting those archives in first.) I did it like this: from a contributor post list, you click on an older post, then see names of commenters you remember active at the time, you can go to their user page, look at the old comments on their profile page, and you get links to long interesting threads of contributors long gone. It did seem that all the contributor's posts are here and available. Just did it surfing, nothing organized. There is no organization, no way to access any of it other than surfing.
Oh, one bummer is that the old threads no longer have the indented threading, but I've seen that happen before with other software transfers on other sites, apparently a bummer that can't be avoided.
February 18, 2008 11:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm going to do something "heretical" on this thread and comment on Tom's post.
You have an excellent point, Tom, that once we have a new president, we are still left "fighting" for all the important issues, those you named, and more.
I think all of us need to keep our eye on that ball, because given a Dem president, we all will have to light fires under Congress to make sure we pull back from the brink that bush has led us to and get back our good name among nations and the habit of caring for our citizens.
Thank you, Tom, for that excellent reminder!
Now for some comments on the comments above: I agree that EC seems to have settled down, now that posters must use a "name" and not keep changing names all the time. That's a help. Also, the number of one line posts with 4 line titles does seem to have decreased at the Cafe. And that's a mercy! I do think that some new posters have emerged here with terrific information and interesting theories - in the reader blogs. But indeed we used to expect very polished reader blogs with links and quotes and setting forth of arguments. And that appears to have declined overall. Part of this is due to a lack of an edit feature or a delete this post option. Hopefully we'll get there sooner rather than later.
February 18, 2008 2:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well said, TheraP!
We have to keep an eye on all of them. The last thing this country needs is to have the Democratic rank-and-file making excuses for an ineffective Congress or President. I don't want to fall into the trap that the Right fell into: defending a President and his Congressional sympathizers against clear violations of the Constitution.
If we don't get very quick action to totally revamp the Military Commissions Act, repeal the Patriot Act (or at least its more heinous provisions) and close Gitmo (during the first year) I will start campaigning against them. Time is of the essence.
February 18, 2008 4:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
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