I just saw this in the SF Chronicle and I couldn't believe my eyes:

"Advocates of barring the use of federal funds to combat legalized medicinal marijuana picked up only two more votes this week in their dogged but longshot annual effort to gain the approval of Congress, leaving them deeply disappointed and searching for answers.

The medicinal pot forces, who cite public opinion polls and votes of the public in such states as California as they lobby lawmakers, were particularly angry that such freshman Democrats as Rep. Jerry McNerney of Pleasanton voted late Wednesday night against the proposal, which was an amendment to the annual Justice Department spending bill.

Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project called McNerney's vote "appalling.'"

http://www.sfgate.com/...

I apologize for taking up front-page space with this kind of meta, but I was the subject of a call-out diary earlier today, so I figured it was incumbent upon me to respond.

The diary ( http://www.dailykos.com/... ), which cryptically refers to my user name in its last sentence (confirmation of this can be found in the comments), accuses me, among other things, of abusing Daily Kos's community moderation system, of being a troll, and even of being a Republican plant.

I think anyone who reads my comment history can see that I am neither a Republican nor a troll. As far as I can tell, I have never even had a single hidden comment. I post mostly, though far from exclusively, in the Israeli-Palestinian discussions...

I own and operate a publication, and I accept ads from all kinds of companies, many of which do plenty of scummy things. So I have no reason to be holier-than-thou about the ads that Kos runs on his site.

However, in light of the fact that we currently have an ad on the front page from a virulently racist Muslim-basher like Glenn Beck, and in light of the fact that, in the run-up to the recent election, we had a front page ad from Chevron, a company whose greed has resulted not only in the despoiling and polluting of our planet but in the deaths of tens of thousands of people (and let's not forget that the ad was against Prop 87, a California initiative that I would guess was supported by most people on this site), I have a question: What kinds of ads should Daily Kos not accept?

I know that this question has been raised before. And it seems that...

Today is our day for crowing and for rubbing Republicans' faces in it. So I'm wondering what you're all doing to make the sting of defeat especially hard for Republicans and their friends in the media.

Don't hold back: they fucking deserve the gloating--and we deserve the chance to gloat.

So are you going to call your local Republican party headquarters and explain to them how they only have themselves to blame? Or perhaps call your local newspaper and ask them how they feel about the fact that noone listened to their endorsements of Republicans? Or are you going to go to Little Green Footballs, Red State or the Free Republic and troll the fuckers a little?

Tomorrow we have to worry about what comes next. Today, however, it is our God-given right to lay some brutal pwnag3 on the Repukes.

There's a feature on Nancy Pelosi in the San Francisco Chronicle today. You can find it at http://www.sfgate.com/...

One passage stands out as especially interesting: in it, Pelosi appears to claim that there is a possibility the Republicans will steal this election. Here's the passage:

"Pelosi cautioned that the number of Democratic House victories could be higher or lower and said her greatest concern is over the integrity of the count -- from the reliability of electronic voting machines to her worries that Republicans may try to manipulate the outcome.

"That is the only variable in this," Pelosi said. "Will we have an honest count?'' "

There you have it in black and white: even the Democratic minority leader believes that Republicans may manipulate the counting of votes.

...we can GET OUT THE VOTE.

I'd like to help with this, and so I'm planning to take three days off in advance of the election in order to do so (not much, I know, but I have my own business that requires huge amounts of my time). Unfortunately, I live in San Francisco and walking precincts for Nancy Pelosi seems, well, a little pointless to say the least.

So if anyone can point me to volunteering opportunities that are available to me in San Francisco, but that will allow me to help the Democrats win marginal seats elsewhere in the country and thus retake the House (and maybe even the Senate), I would really appreciate your help.

Whatever suggestions you all make, I'll also pass on to my friends here. Thanks.

I was just over at Little Green Footballs, and I see they now have links under each of their front page entries that people can use to recommend their stories to news-sharing sites such as Digg and Deli.cio.us. This will result in those entries potentially getting a wide readership beyond the LGF site as well.

My suggestion is that Daily Kos do this too for its front-page posts. Other sites you might want to provide buttons for include Newsvine, NowPublic, and Reddit. Media-sharing sites are becoming extremely popular, and by not jumping on this bandwagon sooner rather than later, you risk losing ground to the right-wing blogosphere.

We've seen a lot of straw men poking their ugly heads up on Daily Kos the past couple of weeks--the two most prominent being 1) the Hezbollah-supporting Israel-hater and 2) the Zionist who considers any criticism of Israel whatsoever to be antisemitic.

My hunch is that there is nobody here who even remotely resembles either of these caricatures: but, in case I'm wrong, if you're a Hezbollah fan, or if you feel that even the slightest criticism of Israel is antisemitic, please check in here and explain your points of view.

My guess is that, despite all the flamewars back and forth about what's going on in Lebanon, Israel and Gaza right now, 99% of Daily Kos participants would agree with the following points:

Gideon Levy, who I believe used to be a spokesperson for Shimon Peres, has just published in Ha'aretz an op-ed slamming Israel's attack on Lebanon as completely out of proportion and as the actions of a bully. The piece is available at: http://www.haaretz.com/...

...at his disposal, making him a super-trusted-user, so to speak. That, of course, is perfectly OK. This is Kos's blog, and, if he wants, he can give infinite troll-rating capabilities to whomsoever he pleases.

However, I do think it would be a good idea if a) the existence of super-trusted-user status were clearly stated (for example, on dKospedia) and b) if the recipients of such status refrained from using their troll-ratings against people who disagree with them (and instead used them against actual trolls).

From today's SF Chronicle:

"The fast-moving electoral controversy appears to be driven as much by Lopez Obrador's grassroots supporters as by the candidate himself, and it has illustrated the emerging power of Mexico's bloggers.

Just wanted to draw people's attention to an entry on the Webb-Allen race in Randy Shaw's blog. (For those of you unfamiliar with San Francisco politics, Shaw is a well-known homeless activist. While to the left of the bulk of Kossacks, he is also a pragmatist. If you're into San Francisco politics and are sick of 1) the rich socialites who seem to dominate the Democratic party here and 2) the impractical, ideologically rigid leftists who oppose them, Shaw's blog is a must-read).

He explains the significance of the Webb-Allen race thus:

"While Democrats have a solid chance of defeating conservative Republican Senators in Pennsylvania and Montana, the incumbents in those states (Santorum and Burns) have scandal-related problems that could prove key to their defeat. But the race in Virginia between Democrat James Webb and Republican Senator George Allen will be primarily decided on ideological grounds, and will tell us whether red-state voters in 2004 are truly dissatisfied with the Republican national agenda."

The rest of the article is here: http://www.beyondchron.org/...

...we have a mainstream Democratic politician like Tom Vilsack giving credence to fraud allegations, and citing people like Steven Freeman, who, as I recall, until recently, was being dismissed by Kos front pagers and other "anti-fraudsters" as not having the expertise (in that he is an academic, not a professional pollster) to claim that the exit polls in Ohio were accurate and the election results therefore suspicious. On Heartland PAC's Web site (http://www.heartlandpac.org/...) Vilsack writes of RFK Jr.'s recent Rolling Stone article:

Here's a take on Yearly Kos--and some criticism of Markos and Jerome for cozying up to Mark Warner--from the left. The blog is called beyondchron.org and is operated by Randy Shaw, a well-known homeless activist in San Francisco. Shaw, by the way, while far to the left by most people's standards, is also very much a pragmatist (perhaps because the left is so established in San Francisco, you get a lot of far-left politicos who are not dreamers, but wonky pragmatists--Aaron Peskin, president of the Board of Supervisors, is another good example). He also happens to be at least a lurker on Daily Kos.

I'm not surprised that the mainstream media didn't cover the RFK jr. story. That's what we've come to expect of them.

What I did find surprising was how the story was treated by the front page of Daily Kos. Now, I'm not necessarily convinced of the fraud argument myself, but, when you have a very prominent member of the Democratic party publishing something so controversial in a mainstream publication--and when you have nothing but diary after diary on this on Daily Kos for days on end--you'd think you'd see some mention of it on the front page.

Hurrah! Hurrah! We've killed Zarqawi! Unfortunately, the fellow appears to be a little like Jason in Friday 13th: he keeps coming back from the dead. Check out, for example:

March 4, 2004:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...

May 11, 2005:  http://www.adnki.com/... ... &par=0

June 2, 2005:  http://www.adnki.com/... ... &par=0

November 20, 2005:  http://www.jpost.com/...? ... 2FShowFull

June 8, 2006:  http://www.cnn.com/... ... index.html

Don't know if a diary has already been posted on this (I couldn't find one), but Salon today has a rebuttal by RFK jr. of Farhad Manjoo's rebuttal of RFK jr.'s piece on the alleged stealing of the presidential election in Ohio. It also has a rebuttal of Kennedy's rebuttal by Manjoo.

http://www.salon.com/...

Or, at least, not according to this new article by Farhad Manjoo that appeared this morning in Salon:

http://www.salon.com/...

I haven't seen any diaries on this, so I thought I'd throw the article out to the dKos community and see what you all think. I'm sure someone can come up with a better diary than this one, but I just wanted to make sure that everyone saw this piece.