My Due Diligence on the Liberal Ad Network

The Drudge Retort has been kicked out of the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, a group of 75 liberal sites organized by Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and Chris Bowers and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD under the guidance of BlogPAC, a political action committee that Moulitsas and Armstrong began in 2004.

Bowers personally invited me to join the network in May 2005, sending several e-mails until I agreed to become one of its founding members. I thought it was a good way to bring liberal blogs closer together and make some money in the 2006 election year, so I've been working on it for six months, running the network's "Advertise Liberally" ad on the Retort 6.5 million times during that span and setting up a private blog for members.

The network has been experiencing a double super-secret flamewar since Bowers announced in mid-October that they were unilaterally changing the rules in a way that excludes several well-trafficked members, including the Retort, Raw Story and Smirking Chimp.

At this time next year, I planned to be sunning on the deck of a new yacht bought with political ad riches, thanks to our country's lack of meaningful campaign finance reform. I saw myself picking up the New York Times, reading about the newly elected Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, the first day of Karl Rove's prison term and the Texas Rangers' victory in the World Series.

Instead, I've just given six months of effort and free ad space worth $2,200 to a liberal ad network that's now my competition.

Some conservatives will have a field day with this, suggesting that liberal bloggers don't know the business world because we're up in our ivory towers smoking medicinal marijuana as we search for gay spotted owls who want to get married. But things could be worse for the liberal ad network -- it could be Pajamas Media.

I think the moral of this story is simple: Practice due diligence before getting into business with Moulitsas, Armstrong and Bowers. A trait that makes them entertaining bloggers -- a talent for getting into fights they don't need to have -- doesn't translate well to making a network of weblogs advertiser friendly.

I realized this a few weeks ago when Moulitsas used the Daily Kos front page to threaten potential advertisers:

... campaigns should advertise on blogs to reach readers, not to "endorse" the publication. We're bloggers. We'll say things that are "controversial". If campaigns don't think they can weather such storms, then by all means they should NOT advertise on blogs.

Because every time a campaign freaks out at a blogger and pulls their ads, we're going to raise a stink about it and inevitably make that campaign look bad. So they should think long and hard before putting money into a Blogad campaign.

My jaw dropped when I read this response to the Kaine gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, which pulled an ad from Steve Gilliard because of his provocative depiction of an African-American politician in blackface. The political situation for a Democrat in a tight race, days before the election, was less important than a blogger's need to keep it real.

Moulitsas can afford to say crazy stuff, because Democratic politicians view Daily Kos as an ATM machine and assembly line for grass-roots liberal activists. He charges $1,400 a week for ads and regularly sells 6-8 of them.

For the rest of the 75-minus-me members in the liberal ad network, "don't pull an ad or we'll hurt you" is a bit of a tough sell.

Politics · 2005/11/15 · 123 COMMENTS · Link

Plain-Dealer Concocts Blog Scandal

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer did a hatchet job this week on potential Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown and liberal blogger Nathan Newman.

On Tuesday, Plain-Dealer Washington bureau chief Stephen Koff reported that Brown plagiarized a weblog post written by Newman about Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's record on worker's rights issues.

Koff accurately describes how Brown's staff reused Newman's writing in a letter, but the 20-year reporter made a rookie mistake: He never asked Newman if he objected.

Newman doesn't object at all, and he informed the newspaper that his weblog entry was published on Daily Kos with permission for others to copy it: "Site content may be used for any purpose without explicit permission unless otherwise specified." An Associated Press story properly noted Newman's consent.

If Koff had spoken to Newman before the story ran, I have trouble believing it would have been published at all. No editor would want the story "Politician Omits Attribution on Letter; Original Source Doesn't Mind."

Instead of correcting its mistake, the Plain-Dealer has responded by attacking Newman in an unsigned editorial:

We need to know who is speaking. Is it a responsible, elected public official, or an Internet dilettante? Or is theirs a seamless relationship that makes a vote for Brown a vote for nathannewman.org or the Daily Kos?

Newman is an attorney and author with 20 years experience in public policy and postgraduate degrees from Berkeley and Yale. I'd love to find out which Plain-Dealer opinion writer wrote that sneer, so we can compare that journalist's background to a blogger dismissed as a dilettante.

Journalism · Politics · 2005/11/09 · 32 COMMENTS · Link

Cartoonist's Turn For the Worse

Gael Cooper regularly mocks the comic strip For Better or For Worse on Pop Culture Junk Mail, a great blog she's been publishing since 1999. Reading her latest entry reminded me of something I discovered recently: The creator of the strip, Lynn Johnston, shut down a longtime fan site in 2001 by threatening legal action:

We have our own very active website and are responsible for everything that is connected to For Better or For Worse. I support the initiatives taken by my syndicate to prohibit you from continuing your site. I hope we will not have to pursue this matter further.

The fan site, published by schoolteacher Rebecca Stephenson, made extremely limited use of Johnston's work, as you can see in the Alexa archive -- some people probably have more of her strips on their fridge. Stephenson wrote in the site's FAQ she was respecting copyright:

There is a strip on each of the character's pages which showcase them, but the reason I haven't put up any others is, first, because it is possible to find them elsewhere on the web (check the main page or the other FBoFW sites page for links) and second, because of copyright laws, I feel that I should only put enough actual FBoFW strips on this page to communicate the idea of what FBoFW is and who the characters are, and no more.

The site promoted Johnston's book collections and merchandise, noted the strip's copyright and declared its unofficial status. For three years before an official site was launched, it provided a place where fans could find out about the cartoonist and the characters. Her thank you for running the site, which was comfortably within the boundaries of fair use: Legal threats from the syndicate and Johnston.

With the pull she has at her syndicate, Johnston could have permitted the site under license or recognized that it wasn't an infringement. Instead, she bullied it offline to reduce the competition for her own site.

2005/11/08 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Mark Evanier attended an onstage Jerry Lewis interview Thursday night, learning an odd bit of trivia about the comedian's socks:

Asked about the white sweatsocks that he usually wears, sometimes even with formal garb, he said, "I wear them because I like them. They feel comfortable to me. I change socks about four times a day, always putting on a brand new, never-before-worn pair. Each year, I send hundreds of pairs of socks to --" and he gave the name of some charitable organization in Las Vegas. "There are people in Hollywood who spend just as much money each year on something else that's white but they put it up their noses."

Movies · Television · 2005/11/05 · 1 COMMENT · Link

My Name Server is Totally Lame

I started the day with a dead name server that knocked more than 100 sites offline, including Workbench, the Drudge Retort and all of the Buzzword.Com bloggers.

I've been using BIND for years and thought I had run out of interesting new ways to break it. Overnight, most name requests failed and my server log filled up with errors like this:

lame server resolving 'www.cadenhead.org' (in 'cadenhead.org'?): 67.19.3.218#53

A lame server is one that's not responding to a name request it is expected to handle. Requests began failing several days ago, growing in number as name servers around the Internet contacted my malfunctioning server when their cached data expired.

After using DNS Report to test my name server and poring over the configuration file /etc/named.conf and individual domain zone files, all of which appeared correct, I realized that something was missing from my server log each time I rebooted BIND. Lines like this:

named[30731]: zone cadenhead.org/IN: loaded serial 4418

This log entry shows that a name server has properly loaded a zone and can take its requests. When it's missing, the server has no idea it should handle that domain. I suspected that BIND had stopped looking at /etc/named.conf, so I checked the process status monitor:

ps auxw | grep named

This revealed that BIND was running out of a new directory: /var/named/chroot. Somehow, BIND had been moved inside a chroot jail, a popular security technique on Linux that limits a server to a directory and its subdirectories. If crackers break the server, they only can see the files inside the jail. The rest of the box is invisible to them.

I found the new location of named.conf in the jail, added all of my domain zones to the file and rebooted BIND. My server is no longer lame.

I've saved thousands of dollars over the years by running Internet servers on Linux instead of Windows, but there's a significant cost in work time, because something unusual goes fubar at least once a month. I can't tell whether this BIND change happened because of security patches I installed last week or an action taken by my hosting company without my knowledge.

In any case, it now works, so I won't be touching anything until something else breaks.

Security · Linux · Domains · 2005/11/04 · 13 COMMENTS · Link

Faith v. Constitution

Michael Thomson has written critically on the implications of a Catholic Supreme Court majority, focusing on issues where the church and court decisions might come into conflict:

... I am a proponent of diversity. I thought George Bush was as well. In his recent court appointee decisions, he has packed the court with adherents of a religion that controls and manipulates politicians, not just in the United States, but also all over the world.

This issue's being played mostly for laughs so far, and I do like the idea of letting a weeping statue of St. Thomas More settle close cases.

In time, I think the mass of Catholics on the court will become a problem, both for the justices whose views are anticipated to reflect church values and the fundamentalists who will be especially bitter when they don't. Evangelical Christians lost a chance to have one of their own on the Supreme Court with the withdrawal of Harriet Miers. If Samuel Alito is voted in and becomes a moderate like David Souter (Lord hear my prayer), I can't imagine they'll take that very well.

Another blogger, a practicing Catholic, wonders if the church might ever deny communion to justices:

If the Court were to decide a case in favor of birth control, homosexual civil rights, or abortion rights, will the justices be denied communion or even excommunicated? What about religious freedom? Separation of church and state? Prayer in the schools? In the face of such serious punishment, can a Catholic justice fairly and impartially decide the issues?

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of Scalito's confirmation.

Politics · 2005/11/03 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

President Bush Courts Catholics

Any legislator who is publicly supporting laws which favor abortion or euthanasia may not present himself or herself for Holy Communion. -- Raymond Burke, Catholic Archbishop of St. Louis

If Judge Samuel Alito is approved by the Senate, the Supreme Court will have five Catholic justices, a religious majority that is nearly without precedent in U.S. history. He would join Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

The only time this appears to have happened was 1792-1793, when four of the six justices belonged to the Episcopal church: Chief Justice John Jay and Justices James Iredell, Thomas Johnson and James Wilson.

The Constitution expressly forbids religious tests in consideration for public office, so there's a strong inclination against scrutiny of a nominee's religious beliefs, whether in support or opposition. With Catholics, this comes into conflict with a growing movement within the church to deny sacraments to lawmakers who oppose its views on subjects like abortion, stem cell research and euthanasia.

In 2002, the Vatican issued a doctrinal note stating that Catholic lawmakers must act in accordance with its teachings:

John Paul II, continuing the constant teaching of the Church, has reiterated many times that those who are directly involved in lawmaking bodies have a grave and clear obligation to oppose any law that attacks human life. For them, as for every Catholic, it is impossible to promote such laws or to vote for them.

The Catholic Church comes into conflict with different political factions over the Vatican's voluminously documented views. John Kerry, a practicing Catholic who regularly attends mass, was publicly denied the right to communion by Archbishop Burke during the 2004 presidential campaign, an action with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI while he served as cardinal. New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey was denied by another bishop for remarrying without getting an annulment.

Up to this point, American bishops have played the communion card solely against socially liberal Democrats. There has been no comparable effort to deny Justice Scalia for his support of capital punishment, nor a rejection of Catholic politicians who favor the Iraq war.

Though I'm undoubtedly going to be accused of anti-Catholic bigotry (in spite of being raised in the church), one of my concerns with Alito's selection is the historic majority that it establishes. When the church began actively politicizing the Eucharist, it called into question how life-tenured justices will reconcile conflicts between their Constitution and their faith.

Politics · 2005/10/31 · 52 COMMENTS · Link

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