Politics and Blood Pressure

I thought I'd got the politcal thing in remission with the heavy dose of soccer and theater this fall, but alas...

The site I spend the most time at (catching up on news and opinion) is DailyKos. Progressive, left-leaning, unapologetic, and VERY diverse in authors and perspectives (several thousand who regularly post and comment). The front page of dKos is a semi-coordinated staff of roughly 8 - the site founder plus a small group of regular posters who've produced consistently strong, clear, and well-researched pieces for more than a year or so before getting invited into the starting rotation.

Where have they produced this body of work? the dKos diaries... ANYone can post, and if it's good, the community (using tools on the site) can elevate a post, extending it's visibility to the community over the course of a day or more. If a piece is crap, it doesn't get recommended and falls off the "recent posts" list and into obscurity in a few hours (less during a heavy news cycle).

Once a piece is up (a diary or a front page article), all the members of the community (anyone who cares to register a username) can comment on it.

the dKos community was helpful early in my campaign effort - a script for my fundraising page was authored by a dKossack, my Spanish language webpages were translated by two members of the community (one also in Oregon, the other in Chicago), about $1000 of my fundraising came from dKos folks from Maryland to California.

Why mention all this? Because dKos has brought me (with some help from other sources) to some pronounced extremes in the past 96 hours. A new frontpager who goes by DarkSyde tends to write about things scientific - still a big interest, since I am teaching half a schedule of science this year. His recent post "A Cosmic Season's Greetings" was a wonderful read. But to swing me back to earth hard, dKos is the first place I was able to read (after a phone call tipped me to the event) of the death of one of my favorite actors, John Spencer. And then came last night in the House and Senate. Deficit Reduction, Oil Drilling, Defense Appropriations, Katrina Relief, Dividend Income Tax Reduction... all tied together, much added after Conference, and being brought for debate and vote at 2:30 (or so) in the morning (DC time). I was watching CSpan and flying from diary to diary on dKos. And seething the whole time. And that doesn't even get me started on NSA surveillance authorizations...

If you lean left and haven't visited dKos, yet...go. If you lean right, and have ended up at my site for some reason, take a moment to revisit exactly what you consider important - government staying out of your life? Keeping us safe? Honoring your individual right to believe something?

Anyway.

That's all for another long chunk of time. At some point (for you, Kathy) we'll get some date info up... look to mid 2007, for now.