October 16, 2005
'It Would Be Irresponsible Not To' - 02:54 PMReading over the coverage of Judith Miller's recent testimony in the Valerie Plame investigations, I'm starting to work on a theory. It's still very rough and tenuous, but here are the basic components I'm working with: "The Government Accountability Office...
July 06, 2005
'What's It All Mean?' - 07:33 AMIn the middle of an excellent post on the decline of the labor movement, Matthew Yglesias writes this: What you see when you look at something like the Bankruptcy bill, however, is that on most subjects the influence of public...
July 01, 2005
'Grab a Helmet' - 04:15 PMIt's about to get ugly. This was originally an update to the post below, but I figured it was important enough to warrant its own spot on the main page. Sandra Day O'Connor has resigned her post as Supreme Court...
'I Love the Smell of Astroturf in the Morning' - 10:20 AM
If you actual read the Washington Post article I linked in the last post, you may have noticed this throw-away paragraph at the top of the second page: Rhetoric was just as sharp at a gathering here of conservative activists...
June 17, 2005
'Filler' - 06:00 PMTeresa Nielsen Hayden spins a variation on this week's theme over at Making Light: Paul Graham’s The Submarine talks about one of the secret engines of the world: the PR industry. “Suits make a corporate comeback,” says the New York...
June 16, 2005
'Democracy Data & Communications, L.L.C.' - 11:45 PM(From a continuing series) "Do you need to generate calls from grassroots advocates to Capitol Hill when a vote is scheduled to take place in a few days? Are you launching a response-oriented issue advertising campaign that needs 800-number support?...
June 13, 2005
'Defining Astroturf' - 06:45 PM(Hey, I've been noticed. Hello, Making Lighters!) In my previous post on the subject I ended by asking, "When is an astroturf group not astroturf?" In the resulting post and comments thread spawned over at Making Light, several different flavors...
June 08, 2005
'Deceiving Us Has Become an Industrial Process' - 09:39 PMThe post title is a quote from this Making Light post from the end of 2004. It concerns an organization called Common Good, who purport to be a grassroots organization "dedicated to changing what it calls the lawsuit culture." But...