You don't have to be a six-footer. You don't have to have a great brain. You don't have to have any clothes on.

Sometimes, a headline manages to combine both the extraordinarily obvious and completely wrong into one convenient passage: Here's an example from MSNBC:

Catholics slam bloggers hired by Edwards

Group claims campaign tarnished by ‘two anti-Catholic ... vulgar bigots’

Two bloggers hired recently by Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards were criticized Tuesday by a Catholic group for posts they had written elsewhere on the Internet.

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, demanded that Edwards fire Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan.

For the backstory, John Edwards hired two famous bloggers to work for his campaign, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwan, who writes under the pseudonym Shakespeare's Sister at the blog of the same name. Both of them have been rather harsh on Catholicism in the past, not that the church didn't in most cases have it coming, what with defending and protecting any number of priests who like to molest and anally rape young boys and doing their best to fight reasonable birth control throughout the entire world.

Because of their writings, the Catholic League jumped all over the Edwards campaign, especially their president, Bill Donohue. Is he an important Catholic clergyman, you ask? Not at all, he's just the president of a large organization of right-wing Catholics, famous for the following quotes:

"The gay community has yet to apologize to straight people for all the damage that they have done."

"Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, OK? And I'm not afraid to say it. ... Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions."

He's a lovely fellow, isn't he?

What MSNBC totally missed is that the bloggers in question have offended any number of right-wing Catholics, right-wing Protestants, right-wing Jews, and right-wing atheists over time. Donohue speaks not for all Catholics, but for a particular right-wing organization. My wife's former boss is president of a left-wing Jewish organization, but it'd be ridiculous to claim that she speaks for "Jews"; rather she speaks for some Jews. If my wife and I get angry about the local grocery store in March/April, we don't get to claim "Jews slam Champaign supermarket over lack of Passover-related items" (this isn't a real complaint of ours, I'm just drawing an example). Donohue speaks ostensibly for his 350,000 person organization, who represent half of a percent of American catholics. He speaks in no official capacity for the Church itself, nor for the majority of American Catholics, who it turns out are a group that basically tend to behave like a broad cross-section of Americans, because they're a broad cross-section of Americans. Just as one can claim that the Catholic church is against abortion but a majority of American Catholics favor it's continued legalization, even more so may Bill Donohue have a problem with two bloggers while most American Catholics could give a flying one. It really isn't all that hard. The lesson, as always, is that way too many journalists are basically incompetent, and that bigots on the right-wing will always have a platform to launch ridiculous fake-outrage propaganda campaigns no matter how odious they happen to be. Thankfully, Edwards didn't cave, and now the left-wing blogs are launching attacks back on the Catholic league for their utter hypocrisy and misrepresentation of Catholic values. Serve it cold, people, serve it cold.

Scientific Literature/The Boss/The Horse's Mouth (Friday Cat/Concert/Better Know a Blog Blogging #5)

Friday Catblogging

I gave a talk this past Wednesday, so Karina decided to help out by studying the journal articles I had printed out. For those with good eyesight, that's a map of the dark matter in the universe going back billions of lightyears on the computer screen.

Friday's Concert Clip

Two weeks ago, I suggested that Green Day was the conscience of my generation, as frightening as that sounds given that a decade ago they were primarily famous for pop-punk ditties about masturbation. With apologies to the Dixie Chicks, the musical conscience of our nation is the same guy it's been now for the better part of three decades. His friends probably call him Bruce, but here we'll refer to him as The Boss. his album from this past year, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions" would easily top my chart for album of the year, managing an amazing mix of righteous anger and musical hilarity. Most of the songs here weren't written by Pete Seeger, and they're certainly not sung in the same way; rather, this album carries on the traditions of Pete Seeger trying to wake up a sleeping nation. Musically, the album is a tour of Americana, with large doses of New Orleans Dixieland, Irish-inflected fiddle tunes, and some more traditional roots and gospel numbers.

We'll start out with the most fun song on the album, "Pay me my money down", which comes as a 2-for-1, since this video also includes the band's rendition of a song I grew up singing in elementary school, "Erie Canal".

Next, moving into some politics, the haunting British anti-war ballad "Mrs. McGrath", a song about losing limbs in a war (it's a common theme, really, see also Johnny, I hardly knew ye and The band played Waltzing Matilda). The lyrics have been updated a bit for the modern era:
"All foreign wars I do proclaim
live on the blood and the mothers pain
I'd rather have my son as he used to be
Than the King of America and his whole navy"

Continuing on this theme, the best song not on the original album, whose title says it all: "Bring 'em home".

Lest we close on too depressing a note, someone seems to have put the prettiest song on the album, Shenandoah, to their own pictures of its scenery. Personally, I think the song is even more beautiful because of the gravel in his voice, lending it a melancholy counterpointed by the rising tone of the backing vocals. Some commenters apparently disagree over at youtube, but I believe it is because they are soulless morons who wouldn't know good music if it stuck a foot in their...well, you get the picture.

Better Know a Blog

One of my favorite blogs out there just switched home's moving from the borg-like liberal blog network at The American Prospect to the borg-like liberal blog network at Talking Points Memo. Today, we'll say a bit about The Horse's Mouth, a blog by Greg Sargent, which describes itself as "A blog about the repoting of politics -- and the politics of reporting". Some of you might have noticed I have a bit to say about these matters, so it should come as no surprise that I probably rank among his top 10 or 20 most frequent commenters. Greg's a cool guy, and very in tune with his audience, known to actually give thoughtful replies to many of his commenters, at least until you get tens or hundreds of them in a single thread and it's kinda hard to keep up.

The blog's focus is on how the media reports on politics: the unspoken assumptions that badly need to be clarified, how facts are molded to fit the current narratives (rather than the reverse), and how many leading pundits are often wrong about pretty much everything but in such a way that it never comes close to reducing their lucrative media appearances. If there is one thing I've learned from his blog and similar ones, it's that once a narrative is established (Gore thinks he invented the internet! Bush would be good to have a beer with! Democrats are effete and thus should not be listened to on matters of national security!), almost nothing can break it. Most of the reaction to Jim Webb's response to the state of the union involved how masculine he was, rather than the actual content of his criticisms! The media operates like this constantly. The little assumptions they make are everywhere, and it slants their reporting systematically. It's not that the slants are inherently left-leaning or right-leaning, just that it obscures the actual news under a cloud of trivial cow poop.

One of his current campaigns is an attack on the "centrist" label applied to anything that Senators Chuck Hagel or Joe Lieberman propose. Lieberman is near the median position for the Senate on domestic issues, but far to the right on foreign policy. Hagel is the exact reverse. On foreign policy, however, neither is anywhere near the center of the actual viewpoint of Americans, who are beginning to overwhelmingly turn on the war. The median position in the country is to pull all troops out within a year. With respect to that, a large majority of the Senate is out of the political mainstream, including the entirety of the Republican party. This is nothing new, they've been that way for a while. With regard to every item on the democrat's 100 hour agenda the public was strongly supportive, at least 60% in all cases. Thus, the liberal House of Representatives is "centrist" if the word has any meaning whatsoever. So long as the media has it's way, the word won't. Luckily, blogs like this are watching the gatekeepers, so there is still hope for positive change.

Catblogger/Jim's Big Ego/Too Hot for TNR (Friday Cat/Concert/Better Know a Blog Blogging #4)

Friday Catblogging

Karina is tuckered out from a long evening spent editing all my spelling errors and grammatical mistakes as I post another blog entry.

Friday's Concert Clip

Today, we'll go with a favorite from my grad school days in Boston. The band is Jim's Big Ego, one of the bands I saw live upward of twenty times. Jim is a cool guy, a great songwriter, and something of a visionary. Their last album was released under a Creative Commons license, allowing listeners to do basically what they like with it, including redistribute it, use it to make videos, or sample it into other forms. You can buy either the CD version or the downloadable e-album here. Back in the day, he used to post the band's songs to Napster, before the big fish decided to kill it off, and he also designs websites.

In honor of my very busy week, here's a youtube video for Stress, his ode to caffeine, more caffeine, and getting away from it all, set to video with clips from the anime series Cowboy Bebop. I cannot begin to tell you how funny the song is. Listen to it right now.

Also hilarious, especially as a historical document, is the flash animation he himself made for Y2K Hooray, his song about the end of the world. Little did we know that armageddon would skip January 1, 2000 and hit us instead on November 7 that year.

Finally, for those who want an extended sample, check out this free concert recording from archive.org, and check out the free stuff at his website.

Better Know a Blog

Today we'll go with the first of several bloggers who also write for The American Prospect, America's finest liberal political magazine. He is Spencer Ackerman, and his blog is called Too Hot for TNR, in honor of The New Republic, which canned him because he's not a crazy neoconservative Likudnik hawk. Rather, he is one of the finest journalists we have in the country on matters of Middle East foreign policy. I particularly recommend the first story he wrote after joining the staff at TAP, in which he argues that we should make human rights the centerpiece of American foreign policy, rather than democracy promotion (see Iraq for an example of the latter not working so well just yet). See also why he predicts that the current escalation "surge" "augmentation" will fail.

Lest anyone think he is just another boring reporter, I should relate the story that he once tried to prove to the yahoos at TNR that one could be against the Iraq war but still hate terrorists by volunteering to “skullfuck” the corpse of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to establish his anti-terrorist bona fides. He's also a courageous guy, who signed up for an embedded tour of Iraq for stories that will appear at some point in TAP, The Nation, or a similar as yet undetermined source. Basically, he's a foul-mouthed guy with a fantastic grasp of Iraqi policy, and he's more than proving that at least in the case of The New Republic, age does not bring the slightest drop of wisdom. Check out his blog and you will learn some shit.

Jungle Cat/American Idiot/Talking Points Memo (Friday Cat/Concert/Better Know a Blog Blogging #4)

Friday Catblogging

Karina, believing herself camouflaged, lays in wait for the legendary balcony squirrel.

Friday's Concert Clip

If you had asked me a few years ago who the musical conscience of our generation would be, I would not have really considered answering Green Day (note: my generation doesn't include Bruce Springsteen, who would otherwise qualify). Still, American Idiot really may be the most popular album from Generation X/Y/Next to really come out strongly against the war in a way that's still fun to listen to. The album may not have the gritty punk ethic that some of their more hardcore fans prefer, but it's damn catchy.

We'll go with three videos from the album, none of which are the über-ubiquitous "When September Ends", itself not even one of the more memorable songs on the album. Instead we'll go with video clips of

• The title track, American Idiot, from which I got the title of one of my first posts at this here blog.


• The nine minute-long medley track Jesus of Suburbia. Did I mention that this is actually a concept album? Yup.


• The song Holiday, the most clear anti-war song on the album, as evidenced by it's intro when played live and the lyrics.

By the way, one of the most frustrating experiences in looking for song lyrics is the numerous ads and popups most of those sites run (the popups can be blocked by FireFox, of course). Let me strongly suggest LyricWiki to y'all to alleviate this problem. It's run by Wikipedia, so you can trust it.

Better Know a Blog

Today's blog is Talking Points Memo, which started as the blog of Joshua Micah Marshall. He began his career as a writer at The American Prospect, whose blog we featured last week. Unlike the bloggers we've covered previously, he is not a flaming liberal by temperament, rather more of a moderate, though developments over the past few years have certainly driven him to occasional shrillness. Given his journalistic background, his take on things is often a bit more factual and a bit less pure opinion then some out there, especially in the sources he links to. As a result, his blog is rarely the place you'll find partisan outrage, but it is a great place to find links to scholars and journalists covering important stories on both foreign and domestic policies. Among the idiosyncrasies is an occasional campaign to get politicians on the record for important issues, first used on the effort to fight privatization of Social Security. Today, he's been figuring out where Republican Senators stand on escalation (7 against, 9 wavering). Needless to say, all the Democrats are against and the CT for Liebermanites are for.

One unique feature of TPM, as it's known, is a series of expansions into new territory in the blogosphere. First was TPMCafe, a discussion forum with "tables" covering foreign and domestic policy, from some of the leading voices on the left. This led to a spinoff of it's own, Election Central, which featured polls and campaign items leading up to the elections, and has kept functioning in that role since. Another side project, TPM Muckraker, is one of the more innovative projects in the blogosphere. Two full-time researchers collect stories of how money influences politics, both legally and illegally. The latter is a Republican specialty; at last count, 29 Congressmen, administration officials, and key lobbyists have a place on the Grand Old Docket. It also features the Daily Muck, a recounting of news stories in the morning's papers dealing with the day's most blatant corruption and malfeasance.

For those who want serious discussion of policy and politics, this is the blog for you.

Devil Eyes/Go To The Moon/Tapped (Friday Cat/Concert/Better Know a Blog Blogging #3)

Friday Catblogging

If you try to take the remote control away from Karina, you are liable to get the devil-eyes. Then again, control of the remote is a standard privilege for the small and furry.

Friday's Free Concert Clip

Since I used them for Wednesday's NASA article title, we're going to go with a video of Moxy Früvous's You Will Go To the Moon, complete with science nerd graphics. I particularly like the simulation of Earth's impact with another object that formed the moon back when the solar system was young.

It turns out that they played the song at their November 24, 1999 show at the Harro East in Rochester, and that I'm pretty sure at some point during the show you can hear Alex and I whooping in the background...but that's not the reason I'm mentioning the show. Let's face it, I saw them over 50 times, so it's not hard to pick shows that I attended. No, I would suggest that one of our readers, and he knows who he is, play tracks 13 and 14. That is all.

Better Know a Blog

I've danced around this one long enough. If you like some policy with your politics, there is no better blog out there than Tapped, the official blog of The American Prospect magazine. Situated comfortably between The Nation and The New Republic, though thankfully closer to the former, it may very well be the finest political weekly in the land. They cover both foreign and domestic policy, generally with a bit of wonkishness, but not so much that the reader is expected to be an expert. Unlike the strident voices that my co-blogger finds occasionally grating (and I can't blame him), they tend to maintain a bit more decorum, though they have been known to light up those who make foolish statements (Jonah Goldberg, Kathryn Jean Lopez, and the rest of the gang at the consistenly wackily conservative National Review are always popular targets). Popular topics at Tapped include healthcare (they're for universal coverage, as we all should be), foreign policy (they prefer strategy to strategery), electoral politics (they're not sold on the mainstream media's bizarre notion that the Democratic congressional class of 2006 is conservative, primarily because it's not), and organized labor. The latter topic deserves mention: organized labor is a key part of the democratic movement, but is very poorly represented in the blogosphere, and it is good that they're doing their part to include it in the discussion. Beyond the main blog, they run two additional blogs via the magazine and several of their contributors have blogs of their own, all of which I'll mention in the coming weeks, focusing on, respectively, politics and the media (Horse's Mouth), global economics (Beat the Press), foreign policy and hardcore music (Spencer Ackerman's toohotfortnr), and everything under the sun (both Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein). Reading Tapped regularly will give you an amazing grasp of political events with which you can impress your friends and acquaintances at wine and cheese parties. Print and online subscriptions are available as well.

Field goal / Lightning Jazz / Daily Kos (Friday Cat/Concert/Better Know a Blog Blogging #2)

Friday Catblogging
The kick is up, and it's GOOD!!! The Giants win the ballgame and claim the final playoff spot in the NFC!!!

Friday's Concert Clip
Having started out the week on a rather blasphemous kick (Monday we looked at how our independence seems to vanish in the haze; Wednesday we tried imagining there's no heaven; Tomorrow we're going Across the Universe), this week's musical clip seemed pretty obvious, and no, it's not actually going to be a Beatles song. Instead, we're going with Dan Bern's "Lighning Jazz", a.k.a. "Hey God, How's It Hanging Tough Guy?". If you're browser is being kind, you can go to his

March 28, 2004 show

at Joe's Pub in NYC, which is available, free and completely legal, from Archive.org's etree service, and try track 15 using the embedded player that should open up in the upper right corner of the page. If that fails, you can download the song directly using

this link to the MP3 file.

Again, this is completely legal; many smaller folk artists encourage people to tape their shows and distribute them, and they encourage you to spread their music as widely as possible. Honestly, check out all the songs from this set. I'd name my favorites, but I love most of them, and much of the fun is in the discovery. If you like his stuff, you can buy it here.

Better Know a Blog
Well, I put it off for a week, but this week we go with the grand-daddy of them all: Daily Kos. To explain the name, "kos" is the online handle of Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who created the blog after being a prominent poster at MyDD, which is also in our blogroll to the right. Daily Kos, though, cannot be defined by just one person; it has grown to be the largest liberal political blog in the country, if not the largest of any political stripe, because it is a community effort. Thanks to an amazing software package known as "Scoop", anyone can register for an account at dKos and post one diary per day about anything they want. If you like what someone else has written, you can comment on their diary, or on one of the main page stories, leading to active discussion threads that can reach up to hundreds of comments. You can quickly make online friends (or enemies, I suppose), finding kindred spirits who share your particular interests. Several prominent diarists are chosen each year to be "Frontpagers", who, along with Kos himself, get to post stories to the main page, typically about politics, but not exclusively. One of last year's frontpagers, DarkSyde, rose to prominence by writing a weekly popular science column, and throughout last year had a bigger science readership than just about any other writer in the nation, hundreds of thousands of readers per week.

Separating dKos from many of the other liberal political blogs is its focus on electoral politics. Simply put, it is not really a policy forum. Long-term strategies and position papers are often mentioned, but the organizing principle behind the "Kossack" community is electing Democrats, primarily those from the progressive wing of the party, and trying to grow a grass-roots progressive movement that can become a force in American politics. This is not just a pipe-dream; a collaboration between dKos, MyDD, and the Swing State Project helped to raise $1.5 MILLION dollars last cycle through the online Democratic fundraising website Act Blue. The approach they take, which encourages debate and embraces partisanship, strongly frowning on Democrats who attack other Democrats (paging Joseph Lieberman!), stands in marked contrast to traditional democratic single-issue groups (NARAL; Sierra Fund, etc.) that try to acheive policy goals through a bipartisan approach that failed pretty miserably under the previous Republican leadership, since moderate Republicans often gave nice speeches but supported a leadership that blocked any pro-choice, pro-environment or pro-labor bill from ever seeing the light of day.

Dkos takes some getting used to, as it is a pre-existing and tight knit community, but it does contain more content than just about any other blog out there, admittedly with a lower signal to noise ratio than most. If you are feeling unadventurous, check out the Recommended Diaries in the upper right; these are the diaries from the past few hours of which the community itself thinks most highly (they're chosen by you, the viewer!). If you like what you see, lurk for a while and then sign up for an account. Heck, I may even cross-post some of the entries from here over there sometime, to reel in more unsuspecting innocents into our dastardly schemes, just as soon as I figure out what we're dastardly scheming.

Friday Cat/Concert/Better Know a Blog Blogging

Friday Catblogging!!!

Never one to pass up a tradition started by others that requires next to no work on my part, I though I'd join the multitudes in the blogosphere who enjoy Friday Catblogging.

Here is Karina, who rules the lap with an iron fist and gravelly tongue:



Friday Concert Clip

For today's concert clip, we'll take the easy way out and go with my favorite song of the year (at least, I heard it first this year), "Not a Crime ", by Gogol Bordello (h/t Atrios for the vid). Their live show is utterly insane, and let's face it, how many other gypsy punk bands are there?

BTW, if you haven't heard of it, check out the incomparable Archive.org music library for over 35,000 free, completely legal concert recordings (thx Alex for reminding me).

Better Know a Blog

Ok, the title is ripped off from Colbert, but it seemed appropriate. If you look to your right, you will likely see a mouse and a mousepad. Look less to your right, so your eyes still have the monitor in view. Over in the righthand column, there are a bunch of links to other blogs. As a blog, we have the blogospheric responsibility to link to blogs, blog about blogs, and especially to link to blogs blogging about other blogs and their links. Anyway, to save you some trouble, I will begin a multipart series describing what each of those websites is like, since clicking on each one in turn would take at least three minutes of your time, if not a full five minutes. Ahh, but where to start. The obvious choice is the biggest blog out there (Daily Kos), but I'll start with the one I've linked to the most so far, which is undoubtedly Eschaton, by Atrios, a.k.a. Duncan Black, who sat in front of me at a Gogol Bordello show in Philadelphia. Did I mention the show was insane?

Anyway, Eschaton is one of the biggest liberal blogs out there, certainly in the top five in terms of overall traffic. This may seem strange at first, since Atrios doesn't actually say all that much, often content to limit himself to a snarky comment and a link, like this, or even just a comment with no link at all. Keep up with him (he has 10-20 short posts per day), and you will find that beyond just being incredibly sarcastic, he has extremely good political instincts, links to every major happening in politics in a given day, and dispenses less BS than just about anyone else around. My esteemed colleague may worry about empty lefty rhetoric, but I would argue a quick read will show how much more actual content there is in Eschaton's snark than in much of what passes for news.

Recurring themes include Friday Catblogging, the always fun "wanker of the day", and late night links to cool youtube videos. More recent recurring themes include calls for a "blogger ethics panel" when journalists are guilty of the same low standards that they always accuse bloggers of having, finding examples of "journamalism" where the mainstream media just basically punts their credibility, and my personal favorite, actually writing down the lengths of time various pundits and politicians claim are crucial for determining the fate of Iraq, and then calling them on it when these periods expire. This latter item has led to the introduction of the "Friedman Unit", or F.U., named after Tom Friedman of the NYTimes, who said "the next six months are crucial" every six months from November 2003 until this past May! Suffice it to say, when I grow up, I want to be like Einstein, but if I ended up like Atrios I'd be pretty happy anyway.