Chris Bowers Fights Poverty on MyDD
A rant by Chris Bowers won't help counter the accusation that Daily Kos-affiliated bloggers select candidates and causes in exchange for financial support. In a post describing his struggles to make ends meet while he's publishing MyDD and building the "netroots," Bowers tells this to progressive donors and organizations:Find some way to support bloggers, or stop asking us to support you. I have been working on the problem of getting more money to bloggers for over a year now. The biggest obstacle I see to it is that progressive donors and progressive organizations are worried that if they fund bloggers, bloggers will eventually say something "crazy," and the organizations and donors in question will end up looking bad. Fine. If that is their rationale, I can live with that. However, don't then go and tell bloggers that they should stop criticizing Democrats and progressive orgs whenever Dems and progressive orgs do something stupid. If you think we are useful, but generally too unstable to deserve regular funding, don't expect us to be quiet when Democrats and progressive organizations do things that make us mad. Don't think you can keep us in relative poverty because you don't like some of the things we say, but also think that we should shut up when we don't like what you say or do.
I'm trying not to be cynical here, but the quid pro quo in the preceding statement should be obvious to even the most fervent Kossack: Pay up if you expect us to shut up when you screw up.
Though his description of $40,000 a year as "relative poverty" is asking for trouble, Bowers has proven value as a liberal fundraiser. The netroots donation page on ActBlue, which he administers with Markos Moulitsas and two other bloggers, has pulled in $225,000 from 3,000 individual donors for 12 Democratic candidates. Factor in follow-up donations and four more months, and they could foreseeably make a seven-figure impact on the mid-term elections.
But Bowers, like Moulitsas, doesn't seem to recognize the risk he faces by tying his activism so closely to his capitalism. If people start to believe that his political positions can be bought, his support will sink faster than one of Jerome Armstrong's favorite stocks.
Warren Buffett Won't Spoil His Kids
Jacob Weisburg of Slate has written a nice fan letter to Warren Buffett for giving bajillions to charity, but he gets carried away at one point:There's a human and personal dimension to this as well: Buffett didn't want to cripple his own children by raising them to expect a free ride. As he pointed out in response to a question Monday, people at his country club who complain about the debilitating effects of welfare should recognize that they're creating a cycle of dependency by giving their own kids "a lifetime supply and beyond of food stamps." Buffett has followed through on his beliefs. While he endows the philanthropic work of his children, he doesn't plan to leave them great personal wealth. One of his aphorisms is that you should leave your kids enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.
Buffett's children Susie, Howard and Peter range in age from 48 to 52. It's a little late to worry that they'll grow up to be slackers.
The Head of the Anglican Church
Times are tough these days for the Anglican Church. Not only are they considering a schism with their American churches to get the gay out, but this Reuters photo indicates that their leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is a disembodied head.
That guy scares the hell out of me.
Bloggers Don't Want Anyone to Name Names
Two of the best-known Daily Kos diarists, Redacted and Expunged, are uncomfortable with people knowing their real names.Redacted discourages the press from identifying him, as he told the Philadelphia Inquirer:
... the 47-year-old blogger who goes by the pen name [Redacted] gave an interview on the condition that I not write what I know about him, because the publicity could hurt his blogging or his job. Let's leave it at this: he works in corporate marketing in the Philadelphia area.
He's also an ex-financial journalist, which he likens to being an ex-cop -- "you never lose your instincts, you never lose the world view. I am privileged to take a certain attitude about the world, which is usually one of bemused contempt. It's a wonderful way to make a living -- if you can find the right organization."
Expunged threatened to quit blogging when named by a political magazine:
A major Right wing site has chosen to support a troll's campaign started at this site to out me.
The writing is on the wall. I will likely be giving up blogging as a result.
Expunged's "you won't have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore" announcement ignores the fact he was outed in other places, presumably with his consent, before the magazine ran his name. He spoke at a technology law conference in 2005 whose organizers identified his job and Kos affiliation, was named on NPR's Morning Edition and has a photo on TPM Cafe that's also on his employer's web site.
He's currently engaged in an effort to put the genie back in the bottle on Wikipedia, which has drawn editors into a page deletion debate that hinges on whether revealing his full name constitutes a personal attack:
The page was used to "out" the subject, connecting his real-life identity with his username on dKos. He had worked to keep his real-life identity separate from his blogging. Once the page was created, being Wikipedia it became highly visible. It was then picked up by NRO. Since he saw it as a threat to his livelihood, he quit blogging. Using a Wikipedia article to "out" someone and threaten their livelihood is clearly an attack.
Redacted hasn't hidden his identity much better than Expunged. He was a long-time reporter at a national newspaper, blogged from Davos in 2004 and writes under an abbreviated form of his name.
I can understand the urge to blog under a pseudonym to protect your privacy and avoid job-related hassles, but when you reach a point where you're fielding speaking offers and press calls, you have to make a choice. You can either bask in the Sally Field "you really like me!" glow of mainstream media coverage, thus inspiring more people to seek your name and background, or turn away the press and do everything in your power to become a less-interesting blogger.
The ability of people to be both famous and attention-repellent has not survived the web, even in the tiny bubble of celebrity currently enjoyed by political bloggers.
Actually, I lied when I said there's a choice. Anything Redacted or Expunged could do at this point to obscure their identities would only make them more interesting.
Slashdot Founder Modded Down
Business 2.0 counts Slashdot creator Rob Malda among technology's 10 people who don't matter:Remember the days when "getting Slashdotted" was every sysadmin's worst nightmare? Referrals from the "News for Nerds" website would send so much traffic to websites that many crashed. But for those that survived the flood, it was the online equivalent of a papal benediction. Today, the buzz has moved elsewhere. Slashdot's editor-driven story selection model is being supplanted by user-generated systems such as Digg. According to recent Alexa data, Digg already has more daily reach and generates more page views than Slashdot. Malda knows his subject, and he's a good editor, but in the end, he's just no match for the power of the multitudes.
To its credit, Slashdot ran this item, filing it in the "ouch-that-hurts" department.
Bunker Mentality at Daily Kos
The liberal blogger ArchPundit scoffs at the notion that Daily Kos user diaries might be deleted for being critical of the site's founder:Go to Daily Kos, sign up for an account and see if Kos stops you from posting about all of this.
He won't. The only time he's stopped stuff was a wild conspiracy theory around election time, libelous content or otherwise harmful material such as using another site's bandwidth.
My server logs suggest otherwise. A Kos user posted a diary linked to Workbench's first entry on Jerome Armstrong's SEC problems at 1:03 p.m. Thursday.
By 1:40 p.m., the story was gone and a few tags had been added by a moderator: "troll diary" and "Rethug talking points."
Jerome Armstrong Pushed Second Stock
I've been trying to pin down MyDD founder Jerome Armstrong's stock-related activities in 2000, when the SEC alleges that he touted a Chinese Linux company called Bluepoint on Raging Bull without disclosing that he'd received $20,000 in stock from the company's management.Though Armstrong's message board postings related to Bluepoint are no longer available on Raging Bull, I found dozens of messages on the InvestorsHub site in which he promoted a related company before a merger, never revealing he was issued 25,000 shares in the deal.
An SEC filing reveals that Armstrong received the shares in a reverse merger executed by the Chinese wireless startup AccessTel, which acquired a publicly traded online mall called Shopss.Com on Dec. 18, 2000.
From September 2000 to March 2002, Armstrong posted 95 messages using the account myDDdotcom on AccessTel's InvestorsHub board. He predicted great potential for its technology and a big increase in price, deriding critics as "bashers." He never mentioned his relationship with the company, which was formed by some of the same executives who created Bluepoint.
On the same day as the merger, Armstrong announced that he had just bought 250 shares of the company:
... i did DD call quite a bit this weekend, and am satisfied to continue holding, patient for their plan to become widely known. Today I just bought a whopping 250 shares in my son's (Jackson) educational IRA that I just set up for the toddler, hope it grows as much as he is.
Before Armstrong's SEC case went to court, he reached a December 2003 agreement with the commission to provide testimony in related investigations and never engage in stock touting. He did not admit guilt but is prohibited from denying the charges:
Defendant agrees (i) not to take any action or to make or permit to be made any public statement denying, directly or indirectly, any allegation in the complaint or creating the impression that the complaint is without factual basis ...
The agreement makes it unlikely that Armstrong will eventually "go on the offensive" to answer these charges, as Daily Kos founder (and business partner) Markos Moulitsas asserted last week in a private mailing list post to liberal bloggers. If Armstrong does, even through intermediaries, it'll reopen the case against him.
The SEC's suit alleged that he touted Bluepoint on Raging Bull when it began to trade publicly in March 2000, receiving stock in three companies at below-market prices. He made at least $20,000 selling the shares, the commission estimated, and none of his posts revealed that he was being compensated.
Armstrong denied the allegations in an August 2003 court filing, but his denial confirmed that he was posting on Raging Bull about Bluepoint while he had a financial relationship with company insiders Michael Markow and Francois Goelo:
Armstrong recalls that at least one of the three stocks under question was bought at above the market price. ... Armstrong does not know the specific amount he gained from selling the shares of three securities in question that he purchased from "Markow and Goelo."
Markow operated Global Guarantee Corporation, a company that received 1.5 million shares in the AccessTel merger.
Bluepoint has gone out of business. The company laid off all employees in 2005 after an aborted attempt to develop Linux software for the car industry and exists today as an empty shell hoping for a merger. "As of December 31, 2005, the only asset the Company owned was cash of US$514," its annual report states.
Shares of AccessTel are worth seven-tenths of a cent now, down from around $1.25 at the time of the merger. The New Jersey company has left the wireless business and sells ladies pantyhose manufactured in Lebanon.
In an October 1, 2000, posting on InvestorsHub, Armstrong said that SEC enforcement of messages on an over-the-counter message board was extremely unlikely:
The only thing anyone ever gets nailed for in the OTC is deliberately and misleadingly pumping to dump, anything other than that is just too ordinary for the SEC to bother.
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