6/6: Another Day Before Dean Blows Up As A Story?

The Hotline's Blogometer takes the daily temperature of the blogosphere. For more information on the thinking behind this feature, go to the end of the story.

Do the online Dem activists still stand with Howard Dean? Is John Kerry calling on Congress to impeach Pres. Bush? Does Amnesty Int'l still think that Gitmo is a "gulag"? Are conservatives angry at the media for how they handle media stories? Are liberals trying to sort out their differences and find out how to win? Read on to find out.

TRACKBACKS:

Where the blog swarm is headed, who's taking part, and what they're saying:

• With Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) and ex-Sen. John Edwards criticizing Dean and a LAT/AP story about the turmoil being widely quoted, Dean is arguably the story of the morning: QandO; Baldilocks; Political Wire; Pejmanesque; Southern Appeal.
  
  

  >> Liberal Hullabaloo: "We know that Bush and his cronies believe they will lose credibility if they admit they are wrong about anything and they are probably right. ... However, there are plenty of liberal hawks like Joe Biden, for instance, who also seem to be backed into a corner because they think that they will lose credibility with... who, exactly? Fred Hiatt? Tim Russert? Because they sure as hell won't lose credibility with the base of the Democratic party --- they'd be heroes. See, to us, admitting you were wrong about Iraq means that you gain credibility, not lose it.
  

  >> Liberal Ezra Klein disagrees: "Edwards and Biden, frankly, are right to denounce Dean. I like the Governor but his recent rhetoric doesn't just go too far, it goes there pointlessly. What, for instance, is the use of saying Republicans have never made an honest living in their lives? I'm as partisan as they come, but with Republicans easily winning the middle class, even I'm not able to believe this is a clear cut proletariat v. bourgeoisie confrontation."
  

  >> Conservative Ipse Dixit is one of several who thinks Dean's job is in jeopardy: "Howard 'Even Better For The GOP Than Terry McAuliffe' Dean's days as DNC Chair seem to be numbered. His (short) tenure thus far in that position has been marked mainly by embarrassingly outrageous remarks about Republicans (which is saying something given the standards of Democrat rhetoric) and, worse, lousy fundraising. I think we know which of the two has more to do with the fact that prominent Democrat Sen. Joe Biden (plus still-thinks-he's-a-prominent-political-figure John Edwards) are criticizing his remarks."



• On the right, there are many links and little disagreement that Amnesty Int'l is losing the argument against Guantanamo Bay. Reuters report on Amnesty Int'l dir. William Schulz, who said on "FNS" that he doesn't "know for sure" if Gitmo is a "gulag." Linking: Secular Blasphemy; Oh, That Liberal Media; The Corner; PoliPundit; Joe Gandelman; Little Green Footballs; Publius Pundit.
  

  >> Slant Point sums it up for many: "We all know the rhetoric is at DefCon 5 these days over the war, and Amnesty ... is just the latest to toss verbal missiles at America without evidence or reason other than milking the anti-American machine that lives off hype, hysteria and hate. The 'Gulag' remarks were not even in the official AI report, but the damage was done. Newsweek couldn't have wished for a better June."

DEAN: The Screaming Deanies

Longtime Dean watcher/Dem activist David Sirota: "Dean understands that these centrist elites will never be his base of support within the party - nor should a chairman want them to be. So he has a political incentive to stay on the populist progressive message as DNC Chairman. In other words, the grassroots and the progressive wing of the party have become crucial to his political career/survival - and that's who he is going to fight for. ... It's true, some of Dean's best qualities are double edged swords. Outspokenness can sometimes lead to mistakes. Candor can sometimes lead to giving voice to a truth the political Establishment just doesn't want to admit. But that's really no excuse for high-profile Democrats to publicly attack him in the press as they have recently."

Lefty Dadahead: "Biden has no clue what 'the majority of Democrats' think, unless by that he means the majority of his buddies in the Beltway. ... So do us a favor, Joe: next time you have a problem with Dean, make a f---ing phone call."

• Dem Oliver Willis: "Whether you agree or disagree with what Howard Dean said, why bother condemning him? The only people who want you to condemn it are: 1) the media, in their endless strategy to paint the Dems as being "in conflict", 2) the Republicans. There's nothing to be gained here."

On 6/4, Dean said: "I would make the argument that America is safer when Democrats are in the White House, than when Republicans are in the White House..." Alexander McClure responds at PoliPundit: "Does anyone remember how his party and the media re-acted when Dick Cheney said that George W. Bush's defeat might mean an attack on America?" He adds, sarcastically: "I'm sure we will hear similar outrage."

Conservative Beltway Buzz points out this a.m.: "ABC News reports DNC grassroots fundraising director Nancy Eiring has resigned. Eiring was 'one of the few holdovers in the Dean era'" from McAuliffe's time at the DNC.

FOWLER: When They Said They Wanted Democrats To Fight, This Probably Isn't What They Meant

Swing State Project's Tim Tagaris describes a scuffle between Donnie Fowler and Swing State Project's Bob Brigham, relating to Fowler's own DNC bid and the role blogs had in shaping that race. Of Fowler, he writes: "What's amazing to me is, here is a guy that headed up the Michigan field operation for Kerry in 2004, boasts of himself as a lifelong organizer, ran for DNC Chair, and still doesn't recognize the necessity of talking with people, not at them. He used the blogs as a billboard for his brouchereware, got called on it, and has the audacity to get pissed." He updates later: "Bob just called me to say Donnie Fowler Jr. just threw a punch at him -- and missed. I'm sure he'll have more when he returns." Brigham updates himself, later. A number of lefty bloggers start taking notice.

• Matt Stoller from Blogging of the President comments: "This is proof that the Democratic Party needs an HR department."

DEMOCRATS: Daddy, What's A Democrat?

At TPMCafe, Columbia prof Todd Gitlin reflects on attending the CAF conf. in DC (see 6/3 Blogometer). He singles out a few alarming speeches: Arianna Huffington "sneering at 'spineless'" Dem leaders, "among whom she counted" Sen. Hillary Clinton; Jesse Jackson for implying his support for a "progressive" 3rd party; ex-NOW pres. Kim Gandy castigating John Kerry, Rev. Jim Wallis and Bono for centrist tendencies, saying: "If this is what it means to be a big tent... then I say let's keep the skunk out of the tent." Gitlin concludes: "There may be combustibles here to blast the Democratic Party apart. When we don't have George W. Bush to keep us glued together, the centrifugal spirit will rise again. Fox News, with its usual restraint, said the conference was 'plotting to shift the balance of power.' If only."

"Armando" at DailyKos writes more on the "Big Tent" tug-of-war. Touching on the topic via a Washington Post article, he writes: "Ben Nelson is the Senator from Nebraska, not Senator of the Democratic Party."

Matt Yglesias writes, "when you ask if America is "the greatest country in the world" most voters say that it is. When you ask if Democrats believe that America is the greatest country, most voters say that they do not. I think it's clear that this perception creates some electoral problems. Indeed, it's a particularly serious kind of electoral problem because my guess is that the perception is probably correct."

• Tom Maguire snarks: "And in related news, I expect some future pollster will discover that Dems also have a bit of a problem explaining how it is that they are deeply religious but never let it affect their public policy positions. The suspense is brutal, as the reality based community [i.e. liberal blogs] slowly confronts reality."

WAR ON TERRORISM: Do We Still Want To Win?

MN-based conservative Ed Morrissey: "Ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere, dear readers, and friends, I submit to you that this week represents the nadir of responsible thought about the war on terror." The Koran abuse story "has been front-page news for two or three weeks now, ever since Newsweek decided to run a poorly-sourced item about Gitmo guards flushing a Qu'ran down a toilet. Now we have the Pentagon report detailing five supposed events where guards mistreated copies of the Muslim scripture, and the media and the blogosphere have reacted like this is another My Lai."

• Author/columnist Austin Bay finds the report intriguing but incomplete, but says: "Five incidents -- is that a pattern of abuse? Is that indicative of a policy? Of course not." On the story about a soldier urinating into a cellblock vent, he notes: "I see ABC News is hyping the urine story -- 'urine' is such a grabber as a headline. Will stories be written and aired about the prisoners' backgrounds? Who are these men? What did they do when they served with Al Qaeda and the Taliban?" Last we checked, the post had six updates by Bay and 60+ reader comments. There are similar thoughts from Power Line and La Shawn Barber, Michelle Malkin.

Univ. of MI prof Juan Cole, on Biden's call to raze Gitmo: "Absolutely right. The main reason is not that it is a continued scandal and creates a very poor image among Muslims worldwide of the United States. This allegation is true, and the US press has done a poor job of covering the continued fall-out of the Quran desecration story among Muslims world-wide. But it isn't the main reason the prison should be closed. The main reason is that the Bush Administration established the prison at Guantanamo in hopes of gutting the Bill of Rights. ... Guantanamo Prison should be closed because it was conceived as the beginning of the end of the American Republic."

KERRY: Unimpeachable?

Conservative RedState, on Kerry's statement to the New Bedford Standard-Times that he will "raise the issue" of the so-called Downing Street Memo -- a leaked document that says that Bush had decided to attack Iraq long before approaching Congress with the issue -- upon return to D.C. RedState, on what Kerry's call means: "Since Republicans control the House by a fairly large margin, there is zero chance that we will see any Articles of Impeachment come out of this. Instead what we might get is a bunch of impotent Democrats, possibly assisted by the Press-Democrat itself, waving arms and howling at the Moon about how Bush needs to be impeached because a memo drafted by the British government uses the work 'fixed.'"

DC-based lefty Mark Schmitt assesses how the right frames this issue: "[A]ny mention of the memo makes you automatically a nut calling for impeachment. And instead of discussing the memo, we'll argue about impeachment. Very clever. But there's a limit to these tricks, and I think it's been reached."

DC-based righty Bill Ardolino is tipped off to an eyebrow-raising story from AlJazeera.com (which he later notes is not affiliated with Al Jazeera the TV network): "John Kerry to call for impeachment of George Bush" He concludes: "This is either bad reporting (not including the direct quote that reveals that intent) or propagandizing/sensationalism."

Liberal The Next Hurrah writes that 1990s-era "impeachment fatigue" lingers, and in an acknowledgedly "tin foil hat-ish" post, argues that despite the "Downing Street Memo," impeachment is a "pipe dream even with a Democratic Congress. Worse, I'm sure the Bush people know this. Worse still, I think they knew this even before Bush ran for president the first time."

BLOGS VS. THE MSM: Social Security Or Pretty Girls? Hmmm ...

Right-leaning Instapundit: "In response to Linda Foley's refusal to either substantiate or retract her charges against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, journalist Hiawatha Bray is running for the Newspaper Guild executive committee as a write-in candidate." Bray is a business/tech columnist for the Boston Globe. As he wrote in an open letter to Foley posted in late May, Bray has been outspoken in his concern about her allegations.

GWU prof Orrin Kerr: "I am often amazed at how brazen the MSM can be in selecting what types of missing persons reports it selects as leading stories, especially on websites and TV. The missing person is almost always young; always a woman; always white; and always attractive. Right now the CNN.com home page is leading with [a] missing persons story, featuring (of course) a photograph of the attractive young woman front and center."

Liberals Josh Marshall and "Billmon" object to the Los Angeles Times reporting that Bush campaigned on Social Security reform during the campaign. Billmon disagrees, saying the press ignored substantive coverage to focus on the SBVT, etc: "The media simply took Bush's vague, mushy and highly misleading description of his "reform" plan at face value, and discounted any evidence to the contrary as partisan cheap shots."

James Wolcott weighs in on Okrent-Krugman (see 6/2 Blogometer) and the suggestion that the New York Times encouraged Okrent: "I don't think Times management and editors hate Krugman so much as they resent him. And what they resent is not so much his politics or his intellectual swagger as his indisguisable independence. ... Krugman ... has carved out his own constituency with readers. That makes him harder to control. Consequently, he doesn't have to play the same games everyone else does."

IN THE STATES: Coin Of The Realm

Colorado Pols goes in-depth on just how Dem GOV candidate Rutt Bridges' campaign kick-off turned "disastrous."

AmericaBlog, on the ongoing Coin-gate scandal in OH, as uncovered by the Toledo Blade: "Today, the paper has FOUR, yes FOUR, major political stories examining the role "Coin-gate" will play in next year's race for Governor. ... What a great way to spend a Sunday... reading about squirming, nasty Ohio Republicans wrapped up in the biggest scandal to hit that state in decades. And, they are all involved."

Charleston Daily Mail columnist Don Surber sizes up a possible match between Sen. Robert Byrd (D) vs. Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R) at his personal blog: "Attacking Byrd as old or racist or even pacifist will not work. Capito knows this and likely will do the same as Ireland did. She will present herself as a new, fresh face for the 21st century. She might do this by agreeing with the Legislature that Byrd is the West Virginian of the 20th Century. This is gonna be fun. Old politics vs. new ideas -- and the battle of [Capito father Arch] Moore and Byrd, two old lions who never squared off when they could have in the '60s and '70s.

WATERGATE: Revise? No Consent

Liberal Max Sawicky attempts to undo "historical revisionism" from the right (and some from the left) about Watergate: "The Felt hubbub from the Right aims to intimidate the press and potential whistle-blowers from the pursuit of justice. And there's a whole lot of justice that remains to be done."

Obsidian Wings quotes a few passages from the Nixon tapes and Watergate testimony to rebut the "revisionism" of Ben Stein and others (see 6/3 Blogometer) and writes: "This is not just the normal lying, cheating, and minor corruption (although Nixon had a particular flair for that) ... This is planning murder, arson, and of course burglary ... This is not just 'what all politicians do.' This was different."

"Atrios," at Eschaton: "I shouldn't be surprised by this stuff anymore, but the Nixon revisionism has been so extreme that in a decent society some of the players (cough Ben f---ing Stein cough) would never be handed a microphone again."

MISCELLANY: Bubblicious

Blog pioneer/vc/ICANN board member Joi Ito discusses the decision he was party to that created the .xxx designation: "Our approval of .XXX is a decision based on whether .XXX met the criteria and does not endorse or condone any particular type of content or moral belief. This is not the role of ICANN. I realize that some will view this as ICANN endorsing pornography on the Internet, but this is not the case."

Bloggers, particularly on the left, have been talking about the possibility of a burst housing bubble for some time. Among them, Matt Yglesias and right-leaner Kicking Over My Traces. Now Dan Gillmor writes, the San Francisco Chronicle "deserves much credit for taking a stand on this brewing financial debacle for so many people now leaping into a market where they are being played for suckers. Desperate to buy -- if that is the right word for taking out interest-only or no-down-payment loans -- before it's "too late," they are taking chances that too many of them will bitterly regret."

DailyKos contributor Al Rodgers posts the images of many, many screen grabs from network and cable news over the weekend. If you didn't watch any TV news in the past few days, read this and you may feel as if you had.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: How To Make It In Blogging Without Really Trying

Hugh Hewitt: "At the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC a few weeks back, the panel of which I was a part was asked by an audience member how to build an audience. My advice then was to grab a single topic and obsess long enough and in enough detail as to attract an audience interested in that subject. Contested, important races are the easiest way to stake some turf and attract a following. Readers will come for the news and hopefully stay for the analysis."

LEST WE FORGET: Building Materials

What a pre-fab building in West Virginia looks like.