…gonna be fun. We’ve shelved ‘Tammany’ as a name, and are going with ‘Montecore.’ One hopes it will serve as a reminder that it has fangs and claws, and that I treat it with appropriate care.

Ali Eteraz, a Muslim commentator who is close to the epicenter of where Islamic thought in the West ought to be, and who is consistently interesting, is interesting again today.

I always considered myself a humanist and do still. It just cannot be the case that only one ‘side’ of a political divide have a monopoly on humanism. I know for a fact that Isaiah Berlin would not exactly be welcome in some parts of the left; nor Solzhenitsyn. [I also know that Burke would be ridiculed in some parts of the right]. I cannot in clean conscience engage against religious supremacism and exclusion if I engage in ideological supremacism and exclusion.

I believe in human solidarity. In the elimination of cruelty and humiliation. I believe in living beyond labels and identity markers.

Welcome to the muddle in the middle, Ali. Come pull up a comfortable chair and I’ll pour the drinks.

Over at liberal security site Democracyarsenal, guest blogger David Schanzer posts ‘Game On Now For National Security Debate‘.

Unfortunately, the Democratic frontrunners did little to dispel this notion during the first presidential candidates’ debate. Obama chose to talk about the Hurricane Katrina response when asked the first thing he would do after a terrorist attack on U.S. soil And, when Brian Williams served up the Giuliani quotes on a silver platter to Clinton, she did not discuss how to defeat al Qaeda or combat the spread of the global jihadist movement, but instead expounded on the virtues of greater port and subway security.

This isn’t going to cut it in a general election. Because of the still lingering security gap Democrats face, progressives cannot wait until the general election to start speaking convincingly about the threats the nation faces and how to deal with them. Promising to end the Iraq war (as if that could actually be accomplished), will not necessarily be enough to defeat a Republican opponent who is not Bush and will most certainly have his own plan to wind down the war.

Now is the time to get our game day faces on for the national security debate. And we will have to do better than our congressional leaders and presidential candidates have done in this regard since the election. In my posts over the next three weeks, I’ll be discussing some ideas about what I think progressives ought to be saying to prevail in this debate.

I’ll be checking back there and reading his posts with interest. Of course, he’s tagged as a ‘concern troll’ in the second paragraph. That alone may be reason to support him. I’m looking forward to his posts, and to engaging him in what I hope will be a useful and interesting discussion.

Up too damn early this morning (I keep CA time when I take short trips East) and into a cab from Alexandria to Dulles. But my day got off to a great start in talking to the cabdriver, an Ethiopian immigrant who’s been here for 16 years and brought his five kids over.

They’re quite a burden on our economy – four have graduated college, one will graduate from Rutgers next year, three of them own their own businesses and all of them seem well launched in the world. He’s incredibly proud of hem – as he ought to be – they don’t smoke, don’t dance, drink only a little, and work very damn hard – as he put it. He’s homesick for Ethiopia, but admits that he’s “an American now.” And welcome…

That was kind of the tone of the whole trip for me. Meeting and talking to all kinds of really smart and interesting people.

On a meta level, the issue of the milblogs as a tool for exposing more of the story about the war than is seen in the MSM continues to grow. It’s apparent that the military is locked in an internal struggle between those who see the milblogs as a valuable voice in the information war, and those who are afraid of losing message control because of them.

I deal with the exact same issue pretty much every day in my job, and one of the things I drill home is that you – the corporate, government, military you – has lost control of your message. It is being remixed, commented, critiqued, and flamed out in the Internets, and if those critiques, comments, or flames have any merit – they will get picked up an amplified.

So the answer is (to quote Von Riper again) to be “in command but out of control” – to influence and shape the dialog by participating in it, and realizing that while you may have the largest megaphone but not the only one. At some point the military leadership will get a clue…from talking to Blackfive, it sounds like it’s happening sooner rather than later. The fact that President Bush recorded a message which opened the conference may be a clue as well.

But an amazing crew, and a few takeaways…

Soldiers Angels, Soldiers Angels, Soldiers Angels. Sign up, give money, do something. If you support the war or hate it, this incredible group of people is doing amazing work in supporting the troops in the most direct way possible.

Lots of good feedback on Victory PAC – we ought to be official, and have a bank account next week and everything. Let’s see what comes of it, and have some fun. If I can get Blackfive, John from Castle Arrgh and Noah Shachtman of Wired to think it’s a good idea – it’s probably a good idea.

Oh, and I picked up the Tiger…(very big grin!)

I’m in Alexandria VA, at the 2007 Milblogs conference chatting with folks about Victory PAC and our information war. I’m really looking forward to meeting all these folks, and some other folks in DC. I’ll try and do some kind of report on the way home.

One thing I miss about the LA Times is the funnies.

I finally broke down and subscribed to DailyINK, the King Features comics service…it’ll be great.

Update: Apologies to the commenters – I deleted the wrong extra copy of the post, and it took your comments with it. I’ll see if I can recover them.

Van Riper is the author of one of my favorite phrases – “in command and out of control” – which defines the kind of management style that community-based enterprises require.

Obama’s campaign tripped pretty hard this week when they forcibly evicted a volunteer who had – over two+ years and on his own dime – built the unofficial Obama MySpace page into one with 160,000 friends.

The story is pretty well told over at Micah Sifry’s blog.

There’s an astounding amount of vituperation aimed at the volunteer – a L.A. paralegal named Joe Anthony – in the comments and on the blogs.

There’s also a strong thread of anger at Obama’s campaign.

From my POV it would have been an easy problem to solve – assign a junior staffer to work with Anthony and assist with the workload (he’s got a day job, and running a site that popular starts burning hours), give him invites to some high-roller events here and a chance to have coffee with the Senator…et la, problem solved.

Instead, the campaign has bout itself far more than $44,000 worth of negative publicity, which was amateurish and stupid.

And we learn that in spite of the communitarian face on modern campaigns, they are still probably too centrally run. The problem, of course, is how to combine the ‘do your own thing’ ethos of Campaign 2.0 with the media microscope. A two-pipe problem, but one that could have been easily avoided here.

I’ve complimented Obama in the past, but no points to his team for this one, I’m afraid…

A lot is being made of Rick Moran’s excellent series of posts on Iraq over at Right Wing Nuthouse.

Sample reaction, from Newshogger:

The big news over on the rightwing blogs today is Rick Moran, of Right Wing Nut House, recanting his support for Bush’s occupation of Iraq. Rick blames the incompetence of Bush’s policy and its execution saying that waning US support for that incompetence “will ultimately doom our efforts to take any military success achieved via the surge and turn it into progress on the political front.” Perhaps with another dozen or so Fiedmans, Rick says, Bush’s failings could be turned into success, but those Friedmans will not now be allowed by the American people.

If you actually read Rick’s post, it’s far from clear that he’s sitting and supping with Dennis Kucinich just yet. Actually, he’s come to pretty much the same conclusion I have – that the war is likely to fail because we can’t maintain the political consensus necessary to stick it out.

Here’s Moran:

If we had 3 or 4 years and the political will to maintain troop levels where they are now, then we would have a real chance to make the difference. But our commitment to the military aspects of the surge will be measured in months, not years. By early fall, the race for President will be in full swing and the obvious lack of political progress in Iraq will increase calls for some kind of redeployment – probably from even some Republicans.

He has no useful prescription, except that the political forces here in the U.S. need to play together better (note that I don’t either…).

For now, the imperative is preventing unmitigated disaster. It may involve giving in to the Democrats and withdrawing some of our troops and redeploying some others. Is the President a big enough man to do this? Or is he more in love with his legacy and would therefore resist changing course to reflect the reality of what is happening on the ground and in the councils of government in Iraq?

Yeah, that’s just fricking great. We’ll come up with a solution that mollifies the warring political parties here while ignoring the realities of the real warring parties in Iraq. Maybe not.

Rick’s not wrong about his analysis. But his prescription is pure poison.

Chris Bowers – June 2006:

Stop thinking that the best way for progressive activists to help the progressive movement is for those activists to live in poverty. You can’t do your best work when you struggle to pay your bills. When it comes to blogging, you can’t do your best work on a dial-up modem in a studio apartment, a ten-year-old computer chair and a five-year-old cell phone. If you want to keep the best and most effective progressive activists in the field of activism rather than the private sector, don’t tell them they need to live like monks.

Chris Bowers – April 2007:

In one of my very first major posts on MyDD–a post which I paid $25 to write at a Kinkos in Modesto, California as there was no other way for me to get online–I posited the political blogosphere as the avant-garde of political and opinion journalism. Considering that it is now quite old in blogosphere terms, and the conditions under which I wrote it, I am surprised at how well it still stands up. Here is an excerpt (emphasis in original):

While the poetic and artistic avant-garde sought to relocate the primary purpose of art away from the aesthetic function, I had a very difficult time figuring out what the Blogosphere sought to do differently than the Political Opinion Complex. However, at long last I think I have it.

While the corporate funded Political Opinion Complex seeks to distribute information primarily for the purpose of consumption, the primary goal of the Blogosphere is to distribute political information for the purpose of agitation / direct action. The POC only wants you to consume what it produces. The Blogosphere seeks for its consumer to act after, or even as a result of, consumption of its product. To put it another way, The Blogosphere is a counter-institutional formation that seeks to relocate the primary purpose of political and opinion journalism in agitation toward action rather than in profit-based consumption.

Three years later, I no longer agree with some of the specifics of that formulation, but I still subscribe to the general sentiment (for example, I wrote something similar in an article for the BBC last October).

I’ll skip over the lame ‘vanguard’ trope, which was fresh back in 1902.

It reminds me of all my artist and writer friends who are frustrated that they can’t make a living doing their art. But they, at least, lack the arrogance to presume that they are owed a living.

And I’ll suggest to Chris that he flat misses the point of the modern political & advertising message machine – it is exactly to get people to act. What’s different about the Internet is that the space for action and nature of the action desired changes, and the expectation is that because you’re a customer, you’re also a part of my marketing team.

Now, one of the things I do is to help companies do this. It’s rapidly becoming a platitude among people who are knowledgeable in marketing.

The difference between Chris and I is that I acknowledge that it’s a living – an interesting and lucrative one – and he purports that what he’s doing is, in essence, art.

Bowers’ defense will doubtless be that his ’cause’ differentiates us.

Riiiiight.

I’ve got a ’cause’ for Chris. It’s defending the ideal of America against a faux political avant-garde that’s in it for the money. You’re no different than James Carville – except that he’s won some elections, he gets paid more, and he’s a better writer.

Alan Dershowitz on Jimmy Carter and the appropriate response to Mearsheimer and Walt.

I have met cigarette lobbyists, who are supported by the cigarette industry, and who have come to believe honestly that cigarettes are merely a safe form of adult recreation, that cigarettes are not addicting and that the cigarette industry is really trying to persuade children not to smoke. These people are fooling themselves (or fooling us into believing that they are fooling themselves) just as Jimmy Carter is fooling himself (or persuading us to believe that he is fooling himself).

Ouch.