Easy HTML For Comments

A visitor’s guide to making your comments stand out

Formatting HTML to make your comments doesn’t have to be hard. Except that most people don’t do it often enough to remember the tricky details. Here’s how you do the most common formats:

Copy and paste into your comment:

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Linking to another webpage: (replace riverdaughter.wordpress.com with the information for your site.

<a href=”https://riverdaughter.wordpress.com”>The Confluence</a>

The Confluence

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Making your text bold:

<b>The Confluence</b>

The Confluence

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Making your text italic:

<i>The Confluence</i>

The Confluence

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Making your text bold AND italic:

<i><b>The Confluence</b></i>

The Confluence

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And QUOTES! Have you ever wanted to make something REALLY stand out?

<blockquote>Just copy and past this line (you can put as much text as you want here)</blockquote>

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Inserting Images into comments:

<img src=”http://www.Replace_With_Your_URL”&gt;

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Inserting YouTube videos into comments:

The process for inserting videos in comments is different than inserting videos in a post.  There’s a little more code to insert the videos in a post.  In a COMMENT, the URL is all you need.

And PLEASE …. don’t put anything after the video URL ….

 

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That’s it! This handy guide should give you the power to make comments that catch the eye of the most casual ready. Try it out today!

It’s catfood for you!

Giving us the first clear idea of their plans for managing the federal budget, the deficit fiscal commission’s Catfood Commission co-chairs, Erskine Bowles and former-Sen. Alan Simpson released a teaser report today with hints of the proposals they want accepted:

Panel Weighs Deep Cuts in Tax Breaks and Spending

The proposed simplification of the tax code would repeal or modify a number of popular tax breaks — including the deductibility of mortgage interest payments — so that income tax rates could be reduced across the board. Under the plan, individual income tax rates would decline to as low as 8 percent on the lowest income bracket (now 10 percent) and to 23 percent on the highest bracket (now 35 percent). The corporate tax rate, now 35 percent, would also be reduced, to as low as 26 percent.

As Susie Madrak says, “In other words, tax cuts for 2%, austerity for everyone else!”

The Obama Movement

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Sean Wilentz discusses how Obama sowed the seeds of his own destruction:

The dream of the Obama presidency based on a movement model of politics was devised by Marshall Ganz, a veteran union organizer and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, hired as an Obama campaign official and charged with training Obama volunteers—and articulated by Ganz’s ally, Peter Dreier, also an Obama adviser, a member of Progressives for Obama, and a politics professor at Occidental College. Ganz was both the theorist and practitioner of the Obama-as-movement-leader notion while Dreier played the role of publicist, heralding the new age in articles in The Huffington Post, The American Prospect, and Dissent. Ganz’s projection of the Obama presidency gained its prestige from the hallowed memories of the civil rights and farmworker union movements, imbued with high moral as well as political purposes. He posed it against the threadbare, craven horse-trading and maneuvering of parties and all previous presidential politics, which Ganz believes were “practiced to maintain, rather than change, the status quo.” The Obama experiment, a movement that arose from the grassroots apart from the Democratic Party, would usher in a purer moral and more effective leadership to the White House. Obama would not merely alter government policy but also transform the very sum and substance of the political system.

As its advocates were thrilled to point out in the aftermath of the 2008 election, their own work had ensured that Obama and his presidential campaign embodied the social movement model—and they insisted that the model was what elected him. The “real key” to Obama’s victory, Dreier wrote, was not the meltdown of the financial system in 2008, the military stalemate in Iraq, George W. Bush’s unpopularity, or even Obama’s then much celebrated charisma. The victory was owed, Dreier wrote, to “grassroots organizing.” For the first time ever, Dreier exulted, Americans had “elected a former community organizer as their President.” And just as the insurgent campaign had been transformative, so would the Obama presidency. As organizer-in-chief, President Obama would rely upon the movement that had elected him in order to reform health care, end global warming, and restore economic prosperity. Freed from the constraints of the status quo by this new political idea, the White House would be able to orchestrate through the movement and inspired through Obama’s oratory the much vaunted “change we can believe in.”

That sure sounds pretty neat, doesn’t it? So what went wrong?

Dana Milbank: Cheat off the Smart Girl, Bro!

Cross-posted from The New Agenda

Some of you might remember the reprehensible sexism of the repulsive Dana Milbank from back when he suggested that Hillary Clinton should drink “Mad Bitch” beer. Or from when he defended Alan Simpson after he likened Social Security to a cow with 310 million tits. Or perhaps from his numerous previous hit pieces against Hillary Clinton, both as a zombie candidate who just won’t die, and as the Secretary of State who takes on the easy work and demands constant praise. Even if you don’t, what you need to know is that Milbank has a history of bashing women on sexist grounds, and Secretary of State Clinton is one of his favorite punching bags.

Wednesday News

Good Morning Conflucians!!

The aftermath of last weeks election is still being felt. In fact, it’s not over yet. The Senate race in Alaska is still being counted. Regardless of whether the winner is Miller or Murkowski, the seat will be held by a Republican. But it will certainly be interesting to see who won. Both because of the tea party angle and because of the possibility of a write-in candidate winning. The latter outcome would be very interesting and perhaps eye opening to many citizens of the country. The fact that we don’t have to take the two choices given to us would be refreshing. Everyone seems to be talking about it including WaPo, Politico, and Reuters among, well, everyone. And of course as you’d expect, the lawyers are at the ready. Miller has already launched one lawsuit requiring that Murkowski name be spelled correctly and exactly as it is registered. That’s silly as the law clearly gives leeway to counters to determine intent. Some of the legal fun from WaPo:

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) both urged supporters to donate money to Miller’s legal fund, in part to send enough lawyers and monitors to Juneau. In Anchorage, tea party supporters pooled their frequent-flier miles in hopes of sending about a dozen volunteers to be trained as official observers.

Murkowski, meanwhile, has reportedly hired lawyer Ben Ginsberg, who represented George W. Bush in the 2000 recount fight and Republican Sen. Norm Coleman in his 2008 recount battle in Minnesota.

Miller has also argued that the law requires Murkowski’s name to be spelled properly, though election officials ruled that misspellings are okay as long as the voter’s “intent” is clear – a subjective standard that could lead to a litany of disputes.

Video hit of the day: Hamish & Andy interview Hillary Clinton

We posted this video this morning but, we love it so much we’ve got to post it again:

And if you liked that, don’t skip the Official State Department Transcript of the interview — the video left some good stuff out!