Free Republic

Call it ActRed. There’s something of a competition brewing between three new Republican groups angling to cut into the online fundraising advantage enjoyed by Democrats and their Internet money machine, ActBlue. Rightroots, Big Red Tent and Slatecard.com are the latest in a series of as yet unsuccessful efforts by GOP operatives to close their party’s Web-cash gap with Democrats. All three will allow visitors to their websites to contribute to Republican candidates running for federal offices, plus in Rightroots’ case a few who aren’t – namely might-be presidential candidates Fred Thompson, Newt Gingrich and Chuck Hagel. The committees will forward...

O’Reilly really couldn’t have stacked these two Factor segments any better. First he has Sen. Chris Dodd on to talk about the DailyKos and the YearlyKos and that Photoshop he keeps showing that came from Kos. If you haven’t seen it, you’ll see it in this segment, don’t worry. Once he and Dodd go a few rounds shouting at each other, O’Reilly brings Dennis Miller on to deliver the coup de grace. Or, several of them. Since neither segment works as well alone, I’ve given you the entire Dodd segment and the choice cuts from Miller Time. Video at link

Last month, in a straw poll on the popular liberal blog Daily Kos, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), the front-runner for her party's presidential nomination, won only 9 percent of the vote, lagging far behind former senator John Edwards (N.C.) with 36 percent and Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) with 27 percent. She couldn't make it past 4 percent for most of the year. But as the who's who of the progressive blogosphere -- the "Net roots" -- gather in Chicago for the Yearly Kos convention, which started yesterday, Clinton will be there. Her attendance underscores two seemingly contradictory realities: the...

Last week, top-down campaigning collided with bottom-up netroots organizing when Barack Obama's web team wrested control of an unofficial Obama MySpace page from its diligent proprietor. The power play resulted in the loss of 160,000 MySpace friends for the presidential candidate and one very disillusioned organizer. Twenty-nine-year-old Obama enthusiast Joe Anthony, a Los Angeles paralegal, created MySpace.com/BarackObama long before Obama's presidential bid began, and maintained it—with the campaign's knowledge and encouragement, he says—for more than two years. But as Obama's popularity grew, so did his MySpace profile, and as the page neared 200,000 members, the campaign became increasingly uneasy about...

Soon after Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton announced her bid for the presidency on the Internet, her campaign was boasting of its success in one of the most important new presidential battlefields: the Netroots Primary. Within hours of launching her bid Saturday, her campaign Web site had attracted 10,000 messages of support, 2,200 submissions for its blog contest and had signed up people to its email list at the rate of 100 a minute, the campaign said. Mrs. Clinton's embrace of the Internet shows how seriously candidates are taking the power of the online activist community. Bloggers and other Netroots activists...

NEW YORK In an article in the upcoming Sunday edition of The New York Times Magazine, frequent contributor Matt Bai looks at the aftermath of the recent midterm elections. Yet he suggests that things may not be all that rosy for Democrats as voters seem suspicious of anyone who gains power in Washington, D.C. In Bai's view, the Dems have another possible problem: the very same liberal bloggers that helped make them the new majority in Congress. The party's leaders have vowed to put together an agenda and work with the president and other Republicans to implement it. But Bai...

National Democrats have abandoned their anti-war Senate candidate in Connecticut, say liberal bloggers who earlier this year were heavily courted by top Democrats in their quest to take over Congress. Democratic nominee Ned Lamont -- darling of the left-wing blogosphere -- now trails Sen. Joe Lieberman by 10 points or more, and the highly energized bloggers who helped win him the nomination in August blame the national party. Matt Stoller, a District-based blogger, wondered this week why Mr. Lamont is getting trounced. "Well there are a number of reasons, but among the most prominent is the total abandonment of Lamont...

"The Democratic Party, and even the centrists within it, must sever all ties with Al From and the DLC. They must not be allowed access to Democratic Congressional leaders. They must not be allowed a role in the nomination process in 2008. They must not be allowed a presence at the Democratic convention. By supporting Bloomberg, Al From and the DLC have indicated they no longer are interested in participating in the Democratic Party and we should see to it that they get their way."

JONATHAN Tasini has less than a month to become New York's Ned Lamont. The Democratic primary is on Sept. 12, he's at 13 percent in the polls and he's just had his best fund-raising week ever online. However, as Primary Day approaches, the "netroots" have yet to make the Tasini campaign a cause célèbre, with all the money and press attention that doing so would mean. This, despite the fact that the centrist, Iraq-War-supporting Sen. Hillary Clinton, presumptive frontrunner for the '08 Democratic presidential nomination, should by all rights be a much juicier target for the "progressive" Left than the...

...while liberal bloggers haven't had as much success as conservative bloggers at breaking big stories, they have done one thing extremely well: raise money for liberal candidates. Granted, they don't have much of a win and loss record, because more often as not they seem to support candidates that don't have any chance to win, but that doesn't change the fact that they are funneling lots of lucre into Democratic coffers. So, why have the liberal bloggers been able to raise so much money when conservative bloggers have been unable to do the same thing? Well, as RNC eCampaign Director...

It may have been frequently described as a referendum on the war in Iraq, but last night's Connecticut Democratic primary battle could also be considered an indicator of the Internet's future as a political tool. Buzz about the political blogosphere and its potential power reached the national scene during the 2004 presidential race, when former Vermont governor Howard Dean made a name for himself with a campaign that was largely run online. Dean's defeat in the primaries, however, led many to believe that perhaps the Internet's potential as a campaign tool was overrated. But now that 18-year incumbent and one-time...

LIEBERMAN LOSES: Connecticut's 3-term senator concedes in Democratic primary -- wealthy political newcomer seized on his support for Bush and Iraq war - Ned Lamont's upset victory over incumbent Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary Tuesday is an electoral lesson about the power -- and potential liabilities -- of bloggers and online organizers, a growing liberal political force collectively known as the "netroots." From the initial support of Lamont by influential bloggers like Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos to the cash and volunteers supplied by the online progressive hub MoveOn.org to the 11th-hour accusations on Tuesday that vandals...

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on August 9, 2006 - 08:06. Howard Dean's 2004 presidential primary run was largely fueled by internet-driven support orchestrated by campaign manager Joe Trippi. That campaign fell famously short in the echoes of Dean's Iowa caucus-night scream. But with Ned Lamont's win, the left wing blogosphere can this morning claim perhaps its first major victory . . . at least in a Democratic primary if not in a general election. And that, in turn, raises the real question. Does the same left-wing blogosphere that can influence the outcome of Dem primaries foist on the party candidates...

Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it. Indeed, it is in this same point of view that the inhabitants of the United States themselves look upon religious belief. I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion – for who can search the human heart? – but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican...

David Brooks of the New York Times has been on a quite an anti-liberal blogosphere roll of late. After eviscerating Markos Moulitsas Zuniga – the proprietor of the Daily Kos – in a June 25 op-ed entitled “Respect Must be Paid For,” Brooks again ripped into Kos on Friday night’s “The News Hour” on PBS (video link courtesy of Crooks and Liars). Brooks followed this up with another op-ed tangentially on this subject Sunday. On Friday evening, the discussion between host Jim Lehrer, Mark Shields, and Brooks centered around Joe Lieberman’s problems in Connecticut. Lehrer asked Brooks how Lieberman is...

After months of fierce attacks against her on the Internet, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is ready to meet her Web enemies head-on - by hiring a political-blog guru who worked on John Kerry's presidential campaign. Clinton tapped Peter Daou, Kerry's director of blog outreach and online rapid response, to rehab her battered image among left-wing Internet surfers. Clinton has been pummeled in the liberal blogosphere for her centrist stance on the Iraq war, for backing a pro-life Democratic Senate candidate in Pennsylvania and for being the co-sponsor of a GOP measure to ban flag-burning without amending the Constitution. Daou is...

SAN ANTONIO--More than one political venture has met an unseemly end in the hardscrabble landscape of South Texas. It was here, in 1948, that Box 13 gave Lyndon Johnson a dubious 87-vote primary victory, crushing former Gov. Coke Stevenson's Senate aspirations. It was here, two years ago, that a bitter primary fight for a House seat shattered a friendship between two Hispanic Democrats. And it was here, this month, in a rematch of that contest, that a blogger-led quest to defeat a mainstream Democrat and drive the party further to the left smashed head-on into the realities of local politics....

One of the major suprises of this past election was the strength of Paul Hackett in the eastern rural counties of Scioto, Adams, Pike and Brown. Conveniently, Brown has a website with numbers and past election results. Some interesting factoids about Brown County Ohio: Registered Democrats 4,612 Registered Republicans 3,763 Bet you didn’t know that. November 2004 Bush: 12,647 votes, about 65% Kerry: 7,140 votes, or about 35% June 14th 2nd district primary: Republicans received 2,287 votes, of which Jean only received 392 specifically Democrats received 1,217 of which Hackett received 762. August 2nd general election turnout doubled to about...