One more time, with feeling:
and
Back when the 2008 primary season started to heat up, DailyKos purged its Hillary Clinton supporters. Oh, yes it did, you doubting Thomasinas. You can’t believe that a “news site” like DailyKos would be involved in hurrying them off the site as quickly as it possibly could to make way for the Obama ads but it did. And it wasn’t nice about it. I was one of the first victims. That’s why I’m here at this blog. And to be honest, I never regretted it. But as we were picked off, one by one, Hillary’s supporters got less of a voice in the left blogosphere. Pretty soon, a Democratic party loyalist got the distinct impression that the entire party was converting to Barack Obama with all of the fervor of a religious reformation. The jihad quickly spread to other blogs and the comment threads filled up with Obama zealots who were enthusiastic about killing the infidels. Some of those Hillary supporters fled to this blog and a few others. We weren’t welcome anywhere else. And mind you, we’re only talking about February of 2008. It happened quickly and thoroughly, almost as if someone had given marching orders for sites to be flooded with anti-Hillary rhetoric.
Digby held out for awhile but even she succumbed. In the book, the Bloggers on the Bus by Eric Boehlert, Digby confesses that she was “chickenshit”, intimidated by her commenters and somewhat dependent on ad revenue. Ok, fine. We get it. It took her by surprise four years ago.
But what is her excuse now for being a Doormat Democrat and not holding the party accountable for its rampant misogyny and sexism? Believe me, I hate to be doing this, pointing out the party’s ugly history, but it isn’t doing enough to combat the crazy assholes on the right. It is the Democratic party’s feet we need to hold to the fire, not the Republicans. The Republicans wouldn’t have been able to get this far if the gates weren’t already down to let the barbarian horde in. Where have the Democrats been for the past decade?
And what is Digby’s role in this? I’ve got a problem with her co-writer, thereisnospoon. Back in the Great Purge of DailyKos 2008, right in the middle of the Rec List Hostage Crisis, blogger Alegre, who was a well respected Hillary blogger on DailyKos, got fed up with the pressure to convert and decided to stage a “writer’s strike”. It was symbolic, of course, but its purpose was to call attention to the way that Hillary voices were being marginalized and persecuted on the largest and most influential group blog. Markos made fun of her. (nice going, Markos. How very impartial)
Alegre’s strike post got a lot of comments. Let me just highlight one:
Don’t let the door hit you (39+ / 0-)
on the ass on your way out.I have not been posting much or commenting much in the past months, but I have been reading almost everything.
You are propagating baseless, self-serving, inaccurate, and whiny meme’s on a regular basis.
You smear and deride with the worst of the lot, and you expect people to overlook your own behavior?
Spare us the drama.
Buh-bye.
The only way to ensure a free press is to own one
by RedDan on Fri Mar 14, 2008 at 05:26:55 PM PDT
straight from the HRC blast faxes (4+ / 0-)
really sad, actually.Head to Heading Left, BlogTalkRadio’s progressive radio site!
by thereisnospoon on Fri Mar 14, 2008 at 05:39:18 PM PDT
[ Parent ]
Oh, look! It’s thereisnospoon, suggesting that Alegre was getting her marching orders from Hillary’s campaign. We were very fortunate here on The Confluence to be invited to Clinton’s press briefings and got email updates but these were strictly informational. No one ever asked us to do anything. I kind of liked the low pressure tactics. I never felt indoctrinated by Hillary’s campaign and I doubt that Alegre did either. In fact, when it comes to the writer’s strike on DailyKos, Alegre got that idea from me.
This morning, Atrios pondered why it is that women are told that their issues are a distraction. It’s always the wimmen. Why is that? I don’t know. Maybe it’s because, it doesn’t really serve the purposes of the Democratic party or the Obama administration to rehash old history now, does it? The last thing they want is an uncomfortable spotlight directed their way so that all the ugliness of four years ago is revealed in all of its glory. “These are not the droids you’re looking for.” They would much prefer that the Republicans take the blame for all of the wretched mess that happened to women.
But Digby has to take a stand. What is the role that thereisnospoon plays on her site? The Democrats are never going to do right by us if no one holds them accountable and forces them to act instead of sitting back and letting them bask in undeserved glory. If you support the Democratic party, no matter what it does or *doesn’t* do, it will not do anything for you. And the attack on women is so severe that to do nothing and say nothing on your behalf is a crime against your own sex. That goes for NARAL, NOW, the Feminist Majority, Emily’s List and any other women’s advocacy group that has lost its brass ovaries in the past several decades. They are taking your contributions and giving them to Democratic organizations. What are they demanding in return? Why don’t we ask them? If they do not have the courage to stand up for women now, and hold the only party who pretends to care accountable for its actions, then we will continue down this spiral of fewer and fewer rights and less and less respect.
Make the Democrats answerable for all of the less than progressive candidates they are supporting this year. Make them explain why they are supporting an independent male in Maine rather than a liberal woman. Force Obama to vigorously defend you.
Women’s groups are not keeping up. When Occupy is taking to the street, demanding economic equality and non-believers are organizing and demanding recognition as a influential voting bloc at the Reason Rally this coming weekend, women’s groups are timidly hiding behind the Democratic party, hoping it will protect them. They’re still trying to work with the system that screwed them over four years ago. Fuck that shit. Organize a rally in DC, women. Get your act together. No one loves you more than you love yourself. Let’s stick up for ourselves and make the Democrats court us as aggressively as they court the pro-illegal abortionist lobby.
Make a choice, Digby. Get rid of your party mole or watch women’s rights get whittled away by the Democrats themselves as they pretend to protect them while doing nothing. Now is the time, when they are telling us to shut up and sit down, to stand up and raise Hell.
Do I expect Digby to actually do this? No, I expect that she’ll read this post and that she and her discussion group will laugh about it. Her conscience will feel a twinge but she won’t act on it because she doesn’t want to alienate herself from the group. Right, Digby? And they care about women HOW, exactly?
And for those of you ladies who naively think that DailyKos is some innocuous Democratic news site, pay attention: DailyKos is a site that uses thought reform tactics to promote authoritarian Democratic party propaganda. Whether it started off with this intention is debatable but there is very little doubt in my mind, after having seen it in action in the 2008 election season, that it was exploited by the political campaign operatives and that Markos put his thumb heavily on the scales for the Edwards campaign and then Obama’s campaign. Alternative voices were purged. Here are some posts I wrote a few months ago to warn people about the dangers of thought reform in the political blogosphere.
Ok, I think we’re on to something here
Finally, those of you doubting Thomasina’s who are caught completely off guard about what is happening this year and can’t possibly believe that Hillary was done in by her own party, go back to the origins of this blog and read from the beginning. We followed it very closely. It is not a pretty story. You will be disgusted.
The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pantsuit
I’ve got a theory that the last thing Republicans want is for the Democrats to start advocating for women. It suits them just fine that there are so many libertarian and conservative Blue Dog Democrats running for office. It works in the Republicans’ favor that so many new Democratic candidates are center right. The minute that the Democratic party starts to get energized and stops sitting on women, the non-religious and labor, the Republicans will be in trouble. As long as the Democrats take no stand, the Republicans win.
Think about it.
Filed under: General | Tagged: Alegre, Dailykos, Democrats, Digby, Emily's list, Feminist Majority, Hillary Clinton, love bombing, NARAL, NOW, occupy wall street, reason rally, The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pantsuit, thereisnospoon, thought reform, War on Women, women's advocacy groups, writer's strike |
The Confluence 
I keep trying to watch the Fractured Fairytales but I can’t do it. My heart freezes when they say that the Democratic National Committee striped Florida of it’s delegates.
I still can’t believe that was tolerated! Astonishing.
An election stolen in broad daylight. And never acknowledged or confronted.
Yeah, hard to swallow, huh? I think it hit me shortly after superTuesday that this is the way the Obot contingent was going to steal the nomination. They were going to deliberately withhold Hillary’s delegates in MI and FL from her win column, depriving her of the critical mass she needed to claim victory. But in the end, they would have to acknowledge those two states or they would have a voter rebellion on their hands in November. And that’s exactly what they did. But the worst was yet to come when they took 4 of Hillary’s legitimately won Michigan delegates away from her at the RBC hearing. It now looks like they knew that the delegate difference was going to be so close that they couldn’t take any chances.
The biggest losers were the Hillary voters, every last one of them from California to New Jersey. Without Florida and Michigan, we were hobbled. The primary should have been over on superTuesday, which is why I think Clinton’s campaign frontloaded the initial primaries and spent lavishly. They didn’t realize that Obama’s donors weren’t really Democratic party people. They were finance people who eat what they kill and the prey was us.
We got eated.
Hey Riverdaughter, great post!
Hi Bev! Loved your dress on Oscar night!.
RiverDaughter,
These women’s groups should pressure Obama to dump the conscience rule. All of this shit lately about birth control stems from Obama embracing Bush’s conscience rule which allows discrimination of women based on religion. The women’s groups don’t seem to be challenging him on it. Hillary railed against it when Bush first implemented it. Could you or someone else find that tape of Hillary doing a press conference about it. She explains so well where it could go if implemented. She explains in that press conference exactly where were are 4-5 years later. This is what made Obama’s inclusion of the fundies to his coalition so dangerous. He gave them Bush’s conscience rule which is quickly becoming a legal cornerstone for legitimizing discrimination against women.
I’ll look for that press conference, but I’m not a techy and don’t know how to post it, but I’ll try.
Yeah, what’s up with the women’s groups anyway? They act like they’ve got some pink disease where everyone is huddling in terror from the Republican horde. It’s a fucking disaster.
To post a video in the comments, do the following:
1.) copy the video URL
2.) in the comment box, type a [
3.) type youtube=
4.) paste URL
5.) type ]
It’s hard to write the steps without triggering html.
TINS isn’t a mole. He’s a shill. He’s not hiding, he’s right out in the open. And this history shouldn’t go down the memory hole, either.
Do you ever get the feeling the Rs have been let off the leash because the election is a foregone conclusion?
No, I think Republicans play to win. McCain was scheduled to win in 2008 but the financial collapse derailed that. And I don’t think the finance guys wanted to trigger that much of a collapse. It came dangerously close to bringing the whole world down. They were just there to take advantage of it. Probably thought they could arrange a bailout in advance of the election so that no matter who won, they’d be covered.
Republicans want to go back to the gilded age. Everything that happened since the Great Depression infuriates them. Their goal is to set the clock back so that they are permanently on top again and the people who are at the top of the pyramid never have to answer to anyone ever again. They are a party run by psychopaths and they will stop at nothing to win. Don’t ever turn your back on them.
Or–in 2008, a preponderance of the Malefactors Of Great Wealth (MOGW) decided that the Dinocratic Party had been tamed sufficiently that it made a better vehicle for their purposes than the Reptilian Party.
If the GOP is playing to win, why is their frontrunner a Mormon, whom the crucial Talibangelical contingent of the GOP will at least hesitate to vote for? Why is their runner-up a lunatic Savonarola-wannabe who wants to ban porn and contraception? Does this sound like a party coolly and competently plotting to retake the White House?
[1] The GOP had total control of the Federal government for four of the Dubya years, and disasters resulted. The Chimperial Cheney Assministration (CCA) screwed the whole kennel of pooches in positions Dr. Ruth never heard of. Maybe enough of the MOGW decided that ideologically moderate competence served their interests better than ideologically perfect reactionary incompetence? Maybe they decided it as early as 2008, and chose Obummer from the beginning–also keeping in mind that the disastrous failures of the CCA meant that they couldn’t get another Reptilian elected President that year without rigging the election beyond the limits of plausible deniability, with unpredictable results.
[2] The ideological perfectionists of the GOP showed signs of slipping their masters’ leashes then, and do so even more now. Maybe the Masters have decided to find more faithful dogs.
If my scenario be correct, then a preponderance of the MOGW (aka the 1%) have decided that the Dinocratic Party serves their interests better now, or at least that Obummer has served them with sufficient skill and diligence that they want to give him four more years, in which case the MOGW, who own both corporate parties, have ordered the Reptilians to take a dive this year, as I think they did in 2008.
I think the Reptilians couldn’t be trying any harder to throw this election away if it were a freshly-punctured container of chlorine trifluoride. (I threw that reference in just for you, RD.) 😉
**********************************************
Off topic: I’m on vacation this week. Boo-yah!
I think you misunderestimate the Republicans. The way to win is to motivate your voters and demotivate the other guy’s voters. In the end, the Christian right will come around to their ticket. How will they do it? Easy. Santorum takes VP. That way, their voters get everything they want. Romney satisfies the money masters of the universe and Santorum is there to keep him in check on the god front.
Meanwhile, I don’t think the so-called “war on women” is helping the Democrats. They have to choose whether to stick with their traditional base or try to peel away some evangelical votes like they did last time. So, expect their reaction to the attacks on women to remain muted, no matter how bad it gets. That’s definitely demotivating. And then there are gas prices and a whole host of nasty little schemes that the Republicans have planned to get the Democrats to vote against their own interests. The unemployment checks are going to start to trickle to a stop soon. I only have a couple of months left with the new formula. By the time September rolls around, gas prices, rising food prices, an increase in foreclosures and the unemployed running out of money will take their toll, as they are intended to. Very demotivating because Obama does not know how to politic himself out of the hole he’s in. And all the way to the “brokered” Republican convention, we are going to hear about deficit reductions and entitlement reform and deregulation until we are sick of it.
Unless Obama has some rabbitt up his sleeve, he’s going to be in a tough battle by October. Much, much tougher than the cakewalk he had in 2008.
You speak as if we the voters, right, left, or center, will have anything to do with who is inaugurated next year. I think the MOGW have already chosen the winner, though I am not sure that they have chosen Obummer over MITT 9000. The MOGW control the unaccountable computerized voting machines–and they have plausible scenarios to explain the victory of either of their lackeys– so they will get whomever they want. If they want Obummer, they’ll explain his victory by Reptilian Talibangelical extremism and MITT 9000’s robotic personality. If they want MITT 9000 after all, they’ll explain his victory by the things you said.
Also–MITT 9000 and Sanitarium? A heretic who wears magic underwear and a Papist? Yeah, the Talibangelical Protestants will love that. 😛
Monster, we have nothing to do with it. The gang at the top make the decisions. They never dreamed a woman would get more votes than a man -so they had to shut the vote down so their guy could be nominated.
The voters no longer decide anything. It’s all a sham
Monster, you don’t know the fundies like I know the fundies. They don’t think rationally. They think emotionally. That is not to say that they aren’t smart. Some of them are very smart. But when the right wing noise machine cranks up the volume and catapults the propaganda in September, you may be shocked to see how quickly they fall into line. There’s already a dedicated canula in their brains to receive the right signals in the proper order. Mitt will be rehabilitated, magic underwear and all. And Santorum will be appointed to make sure he doesn’t do anything funny.
You watch. I’ll eat this blog if I’m wrong.
Neither the fundies, nor you nor I, nor any other ordinary citizens matter unless the MOGW decide to allow us to matter.
If the MOGW want MITT 9000, we will receive MITT 9000, and the fundies will receive the credit or blame, depending on one’s perspective.
If the MOGW want Obummer again, we will receive Obummer, even if the MOGW have to use their bag of tricks to drag his dead @$$ across the finish line, like they did in the Dinocratic nomination of 2008.
The only uncertainty is who DO the MOGW want this time?
Loved re-reading your DK post – and the comments were unbelievable. Ahh, brings back the old days, doesn’t it. Thank God for The Confluence.
Hey, anyone know whatever happened to campskunk and New Hampster??
They were regulars at Alegre’s Corner. Not sure what happened to them. I really liked them but I suspect that the puma label scared them away from this site. Too bad. I think it doesn’t help anyone to get over it. The 2008 election was a turning point in this country’s history. Someday, historians are going to look back on it and say that’s the year that everything went south in an accelerated fashion. It was happening anyway but the Democrats hit the gas and took us over the edge.
NH has his own blog Partizane. He was burned bad by some people of bad intent. It is harder to comment there now. I am not sure about campskunk.
Who burned him? He was a good guy. I used to love hosting the cocktail hour with him when we were at DailyKos.
I don’t remember, but I think it was a similar situation to the one you found yourself in. He trusted users not to trash the place and they did. I really don’t know the particulars.
I don’t know anything about David Atkins / thereisnospoon except that his real world business is PR of some kind. (Whose isn’t in LA?) I stopped reading anything by him after this post on Aug. 10, 2011: “If the town of Kemp wants to revert to the era of witch burning and dowsing rods, that’s ultimately their business in a democracy.”
Digby kept him on after that. Didn’t even seem to notice that he was okay with lynching women whenever anyone felt like observing quaint customs.
And yet Digby is obviously very intelligent and usually has interesting, well-researched, and original takes on the news. Together with hosting a complete jerk. I just don’t get it.
My feeling is that Digby reflects the same psychological weakness that Hunter S. Thompson noted in George McGovern: “When the Big Whistle blows, he is a Good Party Man”.
Digby is a Democratic Party Brand loyalist. She (and her money-backers?) realized that a rising tide of bitter NObama commenters were threatening to lower voter support for the only choice which the Wall Street Democratic Party will permit on the 2012 Pres-ballot, so she brought mind-massage-marketeer Atkins onto her blog and deceitfully instituted the policy of secret erasure of comments and secret banning of commenters. Someone named Vast Left first protested about it and then the Crawdad Hole hosted/posted some comments about it. More recently the issue has been cussed and discussed in threads at Naked Capitalism.
OMG, it is so beautiful outside. Warm, 70’s, sunny. Gorgeous. I might take my laptop out to the deck and put up the umbrella. I got me some fine $6 moscato and strawberries. Bliss.
Forecast is for high-eighties to ninety degrees on Wednesday here in Southeast Michigan.
But remember, Global Warming is a Liberal Hoax.
A dirty librul hoax made up to cast doubt on *CAPITALISM*, The One True Holy Economic System that Jeebus’s daddy chose for us wicked lazy sinners. (Never mind all that stuff the actual Jesus, and the Hebrew prophets in whose tradition he followed, said about taking care of the poor and other vulnerable members of society, and all their denunciations of predatory business practices.)
Dkos is not and has never been a news site. Who would be foolish enough to think that? It started as and has always been a political site. News is only reported through the filter of what that means to politics. In it’s early days it became a Howard Dean forum where Kos may or may not have taken money or favors to support Dean and in 2008 it was an Obama site where kos definitely either took money and/or favors for taking his marching orders from Obama. The guy from America Blog did a half assed mea culpa about it after Obama was in office saying that they had done his dirty work, what was expected of them (presumably banning people who dissed Obama) and look how little they got for it.
Remember this drivel from Camille Paglia–Hillary Without Tears??http://www.salon.com/2008/01/10/hillary_15/
I so clearly remember questioning Daily Kos when someone posted a picture of a headless woman with enormous breasts. I was like, what does that picture have to do with this primary? And all i got in reply were sniveling and gleeful frat-boy comments. They were relishing the misogny. I never went back after that, but I believe it actually got much worse. I do hope women wake up that today’s Democratic party does not include or value them.
I remember that. Yes, it did get a lot worse. A LOT worse. They were pigs over there.
I used to go to Hullabaloo several times a day. About 3 months ago I deleted it from by bookmarks. I don’t miss Digby or Spoon one bit.
How can a blogger be “intimidated by my commenters”? What is the worst that commenters could do? Stop commenting and visiting? That would only be a source of fear if the goal of the blog is to become “A-list” in order to attract the lucrative attention of advertisers and advertiser money. Is that the prospective loss fear-of-which intimidated Digby? Loss of monetizable eyeballs and countable clicks?
Can one imagine (Retired) Colonel Patrick Lang at Sic Semper Tyrannis being “intimidated by” his commenters? For that matter, can one imagine the female-bodied-blogger behind Violent Acres being intimidated by her commenters? As only one example among many?
Well . . . perhaps now Digby has a more lucrative Revenue Stream and number of commenters is no longer an issue. Perhaps she is now intimidated by whatever new funders might be involved in the presence of David Atkins and the unacknowledged forced-absence of
some counter-Obama legacy commenters from her blog?
Well, there was a point in time when some of our early commenters and one regular users in particular went over to the dark side and started putting a lot of pressure on us to convert as well. They called us racists and Republicans. We were told were old, stupid, working class, smelled funny, had cooties and nobody liked us. And we found ourselves dropped from a lot of blogrolls. Those blogs never added us back, although I can tell that some of them are reading us. They drop hints every now and then. Yup, it was real subtle. I’m not making a living off of this blog, as our tip jar shows, but if I were, I’d be pretty rattled by all of the pressure.
So, I don’t doubt for a minute that her Advertising Liberally contacts made sure she didn’t stray from the pack. The weird thing is, if she had held her ground, she might have attracted a whole lot of new users and readers. But that’s not how love bombing and coercive tactics work. The point is to make you feel loved, accepted, and important. And Digby is a very good writer, no question about it. So, for her to take a stand, it would have meant losing a lot of status and possibly a good chunk of her readerbase. It was in her interest to just close her eyes to what Obama was doing and assume that he would do the right thing after his election. I think deep inside, she has always known he was not what he appeared to be but she bit her tongue and did the loyalist thing.
I’m sure it would have been nice for Hillary’s campaign if we too had just eaten our poison after the convention and not made a big deal about things. But although I think she was the best candidate for the job and a symbol for many women, what the DNC did with the primary votes wasn’t really about her. It was about exerting authority and determining for the voters who the next nominee was going to be. And that was a slippery slope to go down because if you don’t stand up for yourself and nip it in the bud, they’ll do it again whenever they feel it is convenient. Your vote becomes meaningless.
That is the position that I deeply regret that Digby did not take. With her influence, it could have made a significant difference. She gave into the system and now we are all confined by it.
It’s not a good thing.
I wish I had known about this blog in 2008. There was never any mention of it on Hullabaloo.
For me at the time, Larry Johnson was the face of Clintonism so far as I was concerned. And it may be that only the serial backstabbing betrayals of the Obamacrats would have prepared me over time to pay second-thought attention to this blog anyway. ( And the serial backstabbing betrayals of the Obamacrats have certainly prepared me for this blog, I must say). Still, it would have been nice to have known about this blog at that time, so that the experiment could have been performed on me.
(By the way, unless I just can’t see well, I don’t remember ever seeing The Confluence blogrolled at Hullabaloo. In which case, how was anyone there ever supposed to have been able to learn of its existence?)
I don’t think it ever was blogrolled at Hullabaloo. It was blogrolled at Corrente for awhile and then Lambert had a psychogenic fugue for a couple of days. He came to his senses pretty quickly but he kept his distance for awhile. It might have been on Charles Lemos’ site. I know we were mentioned by Vanity Fair. We made a couple appearances in the Caucus blog on the New York Times. Eric Boehlert put us in The Bloggers on the Bus in a couple of places. Taylor Marsh had us blogrolled for awhile. I can’t remember who else. But when the other pro-Hillary blogs started to fall, we got the boot toot sweet. There were PUMA blogs that we hung out with but even for a PUMA blog, we were kind of unusual. Heidi Li’s Potpourri made some guest appearances. I think she was most like The Confluence. But after the convention, Heidi Li went back to teaching law in DC.
It might be a good idea if you started from the beginning to see our evolution over the past 4 years. The whole 2008 election season will really open your eyes. We had a lot of frontpagers back then and I trusted some of them probably more than I should have. We never were racist or Republican but it became clear after the election that Gary and his partner Mawm were going to vote for McCain. The rest of us were just hung in there and refused to endorse anyone. It was a crazy, crazy time. But on the whole, everything we said that was going to happen, happened. The only place where we got it wrong was Obama’s election. Until the financial crash happened, I think he was headed for a narrow defeat.
We gained popularity all the way through the primary in 2008. In the spring/Summer that year, we were getting 50,000 hits a day — which is A LOT… And our posts were getting hundreds of comments – some within hours of posting.
People knew about us.
I can’t swear that Digby knew who we were but, her good friend, Susie at Suburban Guerrilla knew about us – we were on her blogroll until she removed us due to the PUMA thing. And even after that we were in contact.
Those were the days. At the peak of the convention, we got 52,000 hits in one day. That’s crazy. And I think that Darrah’s blog got even more. So, there was definitely concern out there among a lot of Hillary Clinton supporters because we had been abandoned by all of the other blogs.
Do you remember the emails we got from that other blog owner whose name I will not name? Amazing. He threatened to sue one of us for god knows what reason but I think he was desperate to disassociate himself from us after Hillary suspended her campaign. The pressure to convert was almost unbearable. But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. My conscience wouldn’t let me. It felt very wrong to go along with screwing 18,000,000 voters. I knew we were dooming ourselves to obscurity in the blogosphere oort belt but I just couldn’t do it. It was possibly my one act of suicidal bravery.
Can I cry now?
I do remember that — all of it.
Luckily for me I had support from more than this site — my family is staunchly liberal. But over half of us didn’t vote for Obama. With that kind of support all around me, the pressure from strangers had almost no effect.
Or so I thought. Watching those videos and reading the comments on old dKos posts has reminded me that the pain hasn’t completely healed.
By the way, someone delivered the most beautiful bouquet of orange roses to our headquarters in Denver. It was huge and must have cost a fortune. The donor was anonymous but I think they were from Clinton’s campaign. And then she referenced The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pantsuit during her speech at the convention. And when she asked her supporters to reconsider and ask themselves if it was all about her. And I *did* ask myself that. In the end, I concluded it wasn’t all about her. If it were all about her for me, it wouldn’t have been hard for me to do as she asked and vote for Obama. For me, there was something much bigger at stake. I saw how they ritually humilated her on the convention floor, I saw how Corzine gave away NJ’s votes and I knew they were sending a signal to us holdouts. They were saying that resistance was useless and we would be assimilated and as an American, that affected me deeply. So, I just kept on going.
sure brings back memories.and night mares. 😦
huh. When you were complaining about this the other day in the threads, I was a little… aw shucks why pick on Digby, don’t break down fences!
But now I see your point. Clearly. Seriously, yes, there is most definitely a major problem with constantly giving the liberal porndogs a free pass while failing to remember it was liberal men who took these attacks on women to a whole new level of putrid. Unchallenged, their rampant sexism only comes back to bite us over and over — and this rather predictable pattern will continue until the democratic women say “fuck you and no more”.
And yet, let’s remember that Digby is by far not the only liberal lady stuck in a wishful thinking mindset and more accurately. she only serves as an example of them all. Like all the other democratic feminists, without knowing more, I would assume she still has her good points.
But this thing most they do, fondly hoping “someday” men will perceive them as human and so men are worth protecting until that distant day arrives, it’s just so much bullshit. If men wanted to get over their sexism, they would have by now. Abuse victims are told to set a deadline past which they will not tolerate the company of abusers. Well sweeties, pick a year.
Anyway. Extremely informative, thank you very much.
a very smart woman told me years ago that even a two year old understands what you tell him the first time you say it. Then you tell him one more time to give him the benefit of the doubt and after that, if the two year old refuses to learn he is just being defiant. So why do you expect less from the men in your life?
They don’t get it because they don’t want to get it. That is why we need to bypass them. How many more years do we spend asking them nicely “please please be nice to us”? That’s for wimps, not for powerful majorities.
Exactly!
On a totally personal note, I’m starting to think about taxes and since I’ve got a new computer (since last year) am wondering if I should stick with HR Block.
Does anyone have a favorite (ha!) tax preparation program?
I use Turbo Tax. It’s easy for me to use because the program imports all of your data from the previous year. Takes about half an hour. Has a very extensive deductions questionnaire. You can download the state return when you purchase the federal return and it will import all of your data to the state return. Then you can just put in your property tax data. Piece of cake. It will file your taxes electronically, although my 2009 return somehow misfired and I had to send it in by snailmail. You can get your return deposited to your back account using TurboTax’s bank. They will charge you a service fee for this but if you’re getting a sizeable return, you may not mind so much. The cost of TurboTax has been going up over the decade I have been using it but you can deduct the cost of the program from your taxes. That’s one of the questions in the deductions’ section, so save your receipt.
Sounds similar to HR Blocks software. Except that I don’t really like Block’s questionnaire. I think I’ll look into Turbo Tax. Which level do you get?
I think it’s called deluxe. It includes the state return as well.
I just finished reading the software reviews at PCmag.com and was on the verge of taking your and their advice and getting Turbo Tax when I stumbled on this review TaxACT Online Ultimate Bundle (2011) which they say is the cheapest/best. They advise doing it online which is free until you file but, I can’t stand the idea of putting my tax info on some company’s server. So, I’m getting the Fed & State download for $21 bucks.
If it doesn’t work for me then I’ll get Turbo Tax and stick with that next year. But, I really like the idea of doing the whole thing for so little money.
fwiw, katiebird, I use TaxAct and was going to suggest it. I’ve used them for years (3? 4?). I believe they import data from other tax programs. Of course, they import previous years done in TaxAct.
What turned me off TurboTax years ago was the info that came to light about their software “phoning home.” For any company, but especially one I use for financial data, I want them to tell me about stuff like that up front. I don’t want to find out from a pc mag review. Makes me wonder what else they’re doing that they’re not telling me about. TaxAct, afaik, doesn’t mess with your data, which is all on your computer, in any way at all.
Also, I personally like that you can easily fill out the forms in TaxAct and not bother with the whole interactive wizard thing.
Thanks!! — I feel even better knowing you’ve used it multiple years.
One of the first blogs I read/found, if not the first, was NoQuarter. Up until then I had absolutely no awareness of blogs, what-so-ever! 😯
My guess, looking back, is that I had followed a link from NYT to Larry Johnson and ended up on his blog. But having now been introduced to the blogosphere there was nothing stopping me and I visited a lot of blogs back then in early 2008. (Many of those, little by little, sadly “succumbed” to Obama -worship.) My favorites soon became TalkLeft (up until the General Election) and, by following commenter ‘Goldberry’, 🙂 The Confluence.
Commenters at TL talked a lot of about “Cheetos” and “The Big Orange Satan” and only after visiting DailyKos did I understand the references, heh. But I never went back, and never read anything. The ‘reviews’ didn’t exactly encourage reading the site.
There also was a constant praise of Digby’s writing, but I just never managed to see her brilliance.
As for Alegre – one of the constant ‘satellites’ I kept visiting ever so often – when she was finally hired and did no longer have time to blog, she turned her site over to someone – I forgot her name – who made it into more of a pro-Obama blog than I could tolerate. Never knew why Alegre did.
Sometimes I wonder how I would have viewed Obama and his presidency today, if I hadn’t ‘come to’ blogging? What got me going back then was this sense that something wasn’t quite right in the Democratic Primary, but if I had relied only on the mainstream media I would never have known what it was. I wouldn’t have gotten to know Hillary Clinton, learned about the misogyni and the date May 31, 2008 wouldn’t have meant anything to me. To mention just a few important points.
At times I halfheartedly wish I hadn’t found the blogosphere. It does take up a lot of time and speculation, doesn’t it. But then again it has been worth it. After all. 🙂
(It’s me Pips. I just won’t bother to lock in.)
(… or log in, for that matter.)
I found my way to No Quarter by the strangest of routes. I used to read James Wolcott’s blog from time to time and one time he mentioned a very good guest-article on No Quarter by Patrick Lang.
After going there to read that article, I started reading No Quarter. I don’t remember the timeframes anymore.
I do remember that the very first place I saw birtherism highlighted and sold . . . and sold . . . and sold . . . was at No Quarter.
I think you mean “was” not “wasn’t”.
“Finally, those of you doubting Thomasina’s who are caught completely off guard about what is happening this year and can’t possibly believe that Hillary wasn’t done in by her own party, go back to the origins of this blog and read from the beginning.”
Or maybe I’m French.
Good catch. Thanks. I hate to edit.
You’re welcome.
I’m on the West Coast. What are you doing up so early?
Looking at some structures I built