Oh Ellen. I have asked myself that question many times. I used to visit this site all the time before this election heated up and there was a revamp of the layout. Now, its seems like anyone who posts ANYTHING somewhat critical of Barack Obama or in praise of Hillary Clinton is either completely ignored or is lambasted in their comments section. I've even seen obviously sexist and downright offensive comments in numerous posts. There seems to be this belief among Obama supporters here that anyone of a differing opinion is stupid and deserving of any level of humiliation. I guess you might wonder why I even bother coming back to the site, I ask myself that too. But why give in to a bunch of bullies?

Glad to be of service.

It's what I call the TRIBAL effect: A recommendation generally has little to do with quality, or originality, or literacy, or insight, or anything connected to anything like any of those. What is reccomended is what hews to the tribal legend, regardless of how silly or derivative it might otherwise be in a normal conversational context.

The same can be said for responses: Anyone can see by basic scanning that the great majority are simply, "Me, too!" in more words (sometimes MANY more), either to support an attack on the occasional heretic poster, or to advance the "Me, too!" argument one more lumbering step.

My advice is, don't let it worry you. If you have something to say, say it straight-out in good conscience, and let the chips fall.

I hope this was helpful.

Another "whatever" may be that though I only recommend something that I'd like to bubble to the top, I also find myself having somewhat higher standards, if I've got something one or two recommends short of the bottom spot. Call it a "survival instinct", if you will.

The same is also kind of true with the "latest" list. Once something disappears the traffic seems to drop and it doesn't take long until it's two clicks away. So, though I might find something else worthy of a post, I'll generally not put it up until my most recent has gotten too far from the start.

Ellen, I take a different view. There are also many Hillary supporters on this site too that attack anything supportive of Obama. There are probably also some "GOP" moles that try to keep the pot stirred. But the tenor is reflective other scenerios where people disagree on the candidates and the issues.

I say post your article and let the chips fall where they may. There are no guarantees just the opportunity that the site provides for you to air your opinion. We can't dictate the reaction.

Recommendations on the site are certainly not an objective measure of merit.

I agree the negative tone on the site gets out of hand. It's counterproductive for Obama supporters like me and for Clinton supporters to go overboard in bashing the other candidate. I guess you haven't seen this yet from the Clinton side, but trust me, it can come from there, too. Most often the things that seem over-the-top on the Clinton side come from the Clinton campaign.

Clinton supporters think the Obama campaign has been guilty of sexist attacks. Obama supporters don't see a factual foundation for that. Clinton supporters say we're blind to body language and other subtle communications.

To Obama supporters, it appears polarization based on race and gender has been intentionally heightened by the Clinton campaign. There have also been statements indicating McCain is a superior candidate to Obama, that Obama is unfit to be president, and that Obama can't win, period. Clinton's big financial backers have threatened to withhold financial support for Democratic Congressional candidates unless they get what Hillary's campaign wants. Hillary has also cultivated Matt Drudge and Richard Mellon Scaife, long enemies of the Democratic party. Such actions strike Obama supporters as harmful to Democratic prospects.

I will add some of us - myself included - were as happy to vote for Hillary as Obama before the negative campaigning kicked in.

If you can put a more positive construction on the way Hillary has conducted her campaign, I would truly love to hear it.

If you can point out facts showing comparable tactics or unfairness toward Hillary on Obama's side - by Obama or his campaign itself, not by out-of-control supporters - I would welcome that, too.

We are sorely in need of some line of discussion that gets us back together and ready to win in the fall.

I found this blog by being redirected from an article I was reading on the Huffington post. I try to find "objective" blogs and not just hate filled ones that do no more than attack. I prefer to engage in blogs that will give me pause to consider another point of view.

Rallyround, I'm fairly new here, too (started blogging/commenting around Super Tuesday). I have wondered about how posts get to the Recommended list and have learned from observation that it's fairly predictable. The software itself moves posts into the Recommended list based on the total number of recommendations. The threshold at any given time can be as low as 5 recommends and as high as 20. The posts that are in the Recommended list stay there for 24 hours (unless the lower threshold for Recommended rises significantly). A post can be bumped out of the Recommended list if subsequent Recent posts get a LOT of recommendations. But when a post does get to the Recommended list, it tends to just garner more recommendations since it is highly visible. Click through the Recommended list and you'll get an idea for what kind of numbers pull a post into that list and keep it there. Regardless, 24 hours after the post date, the post is removed from the Recommended list and is lost to posterity. That's a real downside to the system since a good post could generate a lot more discussion if it didn't disappear within 24 hours.

So, how do posts from the Recent list get to the Recommended list? Sometimes it's quite difficult for a post to make it simply because of the number of new posts that are made in a given time frame. The Recent list can get completely replaced with new posts within one hour. If in that time frame an insufficient number of readers opened a post, it will just not get the number of recommendations needed to move it into the Recommended list. There is a strange corollary to this, in that no post will get a high number of recommendations when traffic in new posts is high, and long after the post has disappeared from the Recent list it can pop up in the Recommended list with a small number of recommendations. (I know I could explain that better, but I don't feel like writing another 3 paragraphs to do so.)

With respect to the disparity in comments vs. recommendations, there is no certainty on how the two will correlate. I've seen posts with 40 comments and 3 recommendations. In those cases, it seems there's a pile-on of comments contradicting the original poster and a sense that the post itself isn't worthy of recommending. The converse happens as well. I wrote a post a couple of days ago that made it into the Recommended list (after a few hours) and only had one comment. It received several more recommendations once in the Recommended list, but only 3 more comments. I gathered that people appreciated what I was saying and probably had nothing to add or argue about. (Or maybe they felt it was too obvious a point to bother discussing... who knows.)

As to which posts get recommended, there is definitely an element of popular bloggers receiving more recommendations. There's probably a dozen bloggers here who are a well known quantity and they receive recommendations fairly quickly, regardless of whether a given post they've put up is superior to other posts that have appeared around the same time in the Recent list. After observing this phenomenon for a bit, I have come to agree with the tastes of the majority here and tend to add my recommend if the post is from someone who has a track record of well-written, thoughtful or entertaining posts.

In the end, to a large extent, the recommendations are a reflection of the mood of the readers online at any given time or a simple reflection of the news cycle. A poorly written or cursory post that contains breaking news will frequently get recommended because it raises a new subject for discussion. Sometimes, an especially egregious and stupid argument will receive a lot of recommendations because readers just like to see a good flaming or a good back and forth.

At bottom, I've come to learn that the posts that make it into the Recommended list are not necessarily the best written or most thoughtful posts, but in general the best posts do get recommended. Because it's something of a crap shoot at times, I wouldn't suggest anyone judge the quality of their submission based solely on how many recommendations it gets or whether it makes it into the Recommended list. However, the more you submit good, thoughtful or entertaining posts, the more likely it is that you'll become a known quantity and that you'll receive a high number of recommendations and comments.

Hope that's helpful in understanding how the Recommend process works here at TPM.

My policy is to recommend any blog post that points out Obama is a secret Muslim. And anything by Sinbad.

And anything about Muppets. Love those furry little guys.

Not enough Muppet blogging, if you ask me.

Well, that's just not true. Former Army Secretary Togo West, who accompanied Clinton to Bosnia, said he was not surprised "that there could be confusion" when someone who has taken a number of trips tries to recall details of a particular trip 12 years earlier.

"The important thing is that she was there. Our soldiers saw she was there and heard her and knew that our country cared about them and what they were doing," West told the AP during a telephone interview.

West was actually with her when she told one version of her war story. He can be seen on stage, nodding in the background.

What you should be thinking about is how someone who obviously embelished her Bosnian experience to make it seem more dangerous than it was -- whether she purposely lied or fantasized the experience -- could still be leading Obama in polls in key states like PA, KY, WVA and IN. If he were a viable candidate, people would be dropping support for her and flocking to him in droves. Obviously, in spite of everything she has said and done, many people in key states think she is the lesser of the two evils.

Perhaps a feature revealing the recommenders of a post by name or pseudonym, such as there is over at Kos, would encourage people to think twice before recommending a post titled, "Idiotic for VP" and elevating it up to the recommended list.

as someone who writes both campaign-related and non campaign-related posts, i would tell you that the recommendations and comments i recieve are of asimilar number for both types of stories...but that said, i have tended to troll in the "what's going on, hillary?" waters, and that might explaion the lack of vitriol i see here.

as to why "good" diaries don't get noticed...sometimes it's the subject matter. i've done stories recently on issues related to nuclear weapons, the "subprime" crisis, and other similar topics; and there are often times that the reader just doesn't want to take the journey into these other waters.

if the reader is coming to the site for campaign news and views, almost by definition this lowers the probability of that reader perusing "off--topic" stories.

history does suggest that this tendency will abate after the elections (particularly the primary)...but come late september this (and most) sites will be nearly 100% "d candidate vs. mccain" stories--and considering the stakes involved, that's probably not too surprising.