There are now two front page stories (hereand here), and one recommended diary on Hillary Clinton's remarks disparaging MoveOn and grass roots Democratic activists more generally.

I discovered to my surprise, while canvassing for MoveOn in NH in 2004, that most of the other MoveOn volunteers had never even heard of DailyKos.  Well, this site has grown, and I imagine that it would be better known among MoveOn members today.

But what about us? How many of us are members of MoveOn?

The infrastructure of the internet was paid for out of public funds and has never been the private property of any corporate shareholder. It is a public resource; it is part of the commons. "Enclosing the commons" means allowing private interests to claim public resources as their own private property.

Many of the resources that Americans own as a people --forests, minerals, government R&D, the broadcast airwaves, public schools, cultural spaces-- are increasingly being taken over by private business interests, often with the full complicity of our government. This trend represents a modern-day "enclosure of the commons" --a vast appropriation of common assets that is siphoning revenues from the public treasury, shifting ownership and control from public to private interests -David Bollier

Most "net neutrality" discussions focus on freedom of speech. But this is "the perfect storm" --for when "the commons" is information based, its enclosure is simultaneously a corporate give-away and an attempt to severely constrain free speech! (...isn't it funny how they seem to go hand in hand)

What I'm talking about is functionality and not colors, graphic art, etc.

I've been saving these up for a long time, and have collected them together into a single diary; it's been a while since we've had a diary that brainstorms about these type of things. I keep putting it off because there are so many important things going down.

But, on the other hand, DKos keeps growing and so we should also want to make it as good as we can.

1st suggestion: Why not have a link at the bottom of the recommended diaries pane saying "theres more..." and linking to previous recommended diaries in chronological order.

Sometimes I have been away for a few days and I want to see what the most important diaries were during the period I was gone. Also, sometimes I have been reading a recommended and had to run out the door for something. When I get back, it's gone and is no longer in the 50 most recent. If I can't recal some phrase or who the diarist was I can't get back to it with ease.

A lot of hopeful attention has been paid to the fact that a certain portion of Republicans have been expressing their disgust with the president who lost New Orleans.  True, there are probably more wingers who are Trying to Shore Up Bush's Crumbling post-Katrina Support (courtesy of MeteorBlades), and the spin machine will no doubt be back in full form pretty soon.

And yet it is undeniable that a lot of conservatives are pissed-off as hell.  

Basically, their disillusionment can be divided into two categories:

1. disillusion with Bush as a leader

2. disillusion with Bush's policies (of gutting the New Deal in favor of global adventurism)

It may seem that both types of criticism work in our favor, albeit in different ways, for the two types of criticism might even work together synergistically. But nothing could be farther from the truth. One of these two types of conservative criticisms of the post-Katrina disaster actually goes totally against Democratic interests.

And this something we have got to become damn clear about if we want to prevent these people from making a come-back.

I explain, after the fold...

there are a lot of extremely excellent diaries on the recommend list, and polls sometimes have an inexplicable popularity...

but please don't recommend this one.. the current recommended ones are too important

I just thought it would be interesting to see where we stand as a community

also: please read the important debates on this topic going on right now on the recommended list...

After all, a poll of our informed opinion be more interesting than on of our initial "gut" reactions.

While real Democrats have been reveling in the spectacle of a politician who is not utterly cowed by the White House, and who openly calls them the liars that they are, the Lieberman clones down at The New Republic are quietly stewing in their juices.

The New Republic, you see, can't stand George Galloway.  In one article he is called a "hardened leftist," even as he is also, contradictorily, accused of being a supporter of Saddam Hussain.  He even, we are lead to believe, has incited "foreign forces to rise up against British troops."  Perhaps his biggest crime, however, is that he apparently " managed to persuade his hometown of Dundee in Scotland to symbolically partner with the West Bank city of Nablus."

Why does The New Republic have it in for Galloway?

It's not because he's a leftist.  It's not even because of his sympathy for the Palestinians.  I'll explain below the fold.

I haven't seen anything on this account be Arab translator Erik Saar; it's late here in London so I don't have time to do a proper diary, but I thought it should be put out there.  As soon as someone else diaries on it, I'll delete this one.

Link to article

The slander of slain peace activist Marla Ruzicka by David Horowitz of the David Project has already been written about here .

But what has been missing from the discussion, so far, is any mention of David Horowitz and the David Project's central role in the intimidation campaign at Columbia University.

I'll spell all this out below the fold, but first I want to give some flavor of David Horowitz's Marla smear, and ask you all to consider this in light of the SCLM's failure to critically report on the David Project's equally heinous activities at Columbia University.  Horowitz's magazine virtually celebrates the killing of Marla who is termed, an "activist bimbette hampering those American soldiers and helping their terrorist killers":

An internal memo from the Provost, Alan Brinkley, to top administrators outlines his plans to implement union-busting tactics that would have the university not merely emulate the strategies of private corporations, but in fact go far beyond them.  What Brinkley has proposed calls for retaliatory actions against union supporters that would be illegal under the National Labor Relations Act.

But the BIGGER story is how this plays into the whole ongoing issue of academic freedom at Columbia and elsewhere, and how this is linked to the corporatization of higher education. . .

A New Republic writer (Tom Frank) attends an anti-war meeting and finds himself lost in a sadistic fantasy directed at anti-war activists Stan Goff, Arundathi Roy and International Socialist Review editorial board member Sherry Wolf.  As Alexander Cockburn reports:

Obviously we're all a lot better informed around here than our fellow countrymen (and women!) who rely solely on the SCLM. . . let alone those who rely on the so called "fair and balanced" media, let alone on Rush (I don't know whether those who are "informed" by the latter two can even be said to be informed of anything at all, but that's another story. . .)

What I would like to know is what sources --apart from dKos itself-- other readers of dKos read regularly and would recommend.  The title of this diary refers to listserves, but actually I'd be interested to hear about any other good sources as well.

Okay, I'll go first.  In the beginning, I started to read the Guardian and some other foreign presses.  But that involved wading through a lot of stuff that wasn't all that useful and I realized that I was missing a lot. So what I did. . .

This comes from the American Library Association Website.

The full story can be found here; since I hadn't yet seen it on DailyKos, I thought some of you might be interested.

Apologies if this item has already appeared; I couldn't find it in a search.

Anyway, apparently the anti-war group Not in Our Name had taken an add out in the New York Times that was meant to run on Friday, Jan. 21st.  Payment for the ad had been accepted, they had a contract as well as a confirmation number.  Then on the appointed day the add mysteriously didn't run.  They contacted the advertising department and found that

Continued below fold

. . . about the whole vote fraud issue. On one hand there are people I trust saying "it's been debunked."

And on the other hand I keep seeing things like this:

Electronic and paper ballots compared with exit polls in 9 states

I'm no mathematician, but this seems to me to at least raise serious doubts.  And while I admit to not having read every single debunking article out there, I have not found anything that has set my mind at ease about this.  

There is something very wrong here. . . and I don't mean the possibility of rigging. . .