Thanks for drawing attention to this. I had heard about it from some mailing lists I'm on but they didn't have a link to back it up.

Nathan, I'm really enjoying your blog since I discovered it via Calpundit the other day. Lots of great stuff, and I too feel that unions -- despite the fact that they are one of the cornerstones of Dem support -- are actually an untapped resouce. Or at least an underutilized one.

Which leads me to my question... what is your take on the Partnership for America's Families brouhaha? Seems like a good idea, but the left shooting itself in the foot again with internecine squabbling. Or is there more to it than that?

As a non-union member, I would love to get involved in some kind of organizing that had that weight behind it.

Issa, worrying that internal fighting might drain resources is a reasonable concern, but when you are dealing with big money and organizational coordination, it's almost inevitable. And in some ways a good sign that people are serious enough that there is leadership positions worth fighting over, since bullshit "coalitions" are formed all the time where everyone happily defers to "the leadership" because everyone is really just doing their own thing and nominally making noises about real coordination.

The Partnership seems to be a real funding and organizational structure, almost a de facto alternative to the Democratic National Committee for progressive unions and their allies, so THERE SHOULD BE FIGHTS over leadership. It's called democracy.

As for this particular fight, it was partially about ego and jocking for position, largely between AFSCME and SEIU, but also a serious discussion about how best to mobilize black and latino communities for 2004. There were serious disagreements over that crucial issue-- AFSCME felt that the Partnership was going about it the wrong way; the rest of the leadership thought they had a far better plan.

So AFSCME and its allies not working within the Partnership can try their model and the Partnership will do theirs. There might be some advantage of complete integration of efforts, but it may be useful to compare the results of the two efforts and they may even end up being complementary-- who knows?

Oh I don't know, if the Freepers succeed in stuffing the MoveOn ballot for Sharpton and Kucinich it might be a blessing in disguise. I'd like to see Democratic Party politics pushed leftward. There was a similar situation back during the Clinton administration, at least in those states with open primaries, of Democrats voting in the Republican primary for Pat Buchanan on the grounds that he would be unelectable in the general election. Not a good strategy, I think, in retrospect, in part because it was giving a boost to Buchanan and his crypto-fascist views, and in part because not enough people did this to really make a dent. I suspect the Freepers won't make much of a dent here either. MoveOn has too much grassroots support among real Democrats. Even if they do they would be hurting their own cause and helping ours, by pushing the political debate to the left.

I did notice in the Freeper thread that some of them appear to have registered multiple times for the MoveOn primary. You have a good idea with requiring people to pay a small fee to participate, this would prevent multiple registrations and help raise money for MoveOn. As an aside, the Freepers as usual look like a bad self-parody in this thread: MoveOn a "communist" organization? Yeah right. These people are truly paranoid and out of touch with reality.

ST, thank you for posting that same story 3 times with a fake email address. (AOL doesn't allow 2 letter screen names, so st@aol.com is impossible)

What the hell is this, "Spam the liberal blog comments with this one maybe-WMDs-were-there story day"?

As I said to the guy who posted it at Pandagon: even if that report is factual, and recent, unless it was found resting on several thousand litres of anthrax or tons of VX, Bush still overstaed the WMD threat greatly.

Getting back to the whole moveon thing...

I think, if they were careful with parsing the email headers, they could weed out the multiple voters.

And unless there's over a million freepers signing up (even including the multiple addresses thing), they won't make much of a dent. MoveOn's membership is really substantial.

That said, has anyone notified MoveOn yet?

JoeF-- I've deleted the spam, but I think you underestimate the likely effects of folks like FreeRepublic-- they spend a lot of time "freeping" polls. If only 5% of the participants are Freepers, who disproportionately "cheat" (voting multiple times), they could easily blow themselves up to 25% or more of the votes. That will seriously distort any results in the poll.

Don't worry about the Freepers.

As usual, they prove they are the biggest dunces on the planet.

If they were SMART, they'd stuff the ballot box in favor of Dennis Kucinich.

Sharpron is NOT getting any help from anyone else, besides the Freepers. And their numbers will not count for much out of the hundreds of thousands who will vote.

The Dean people are doing the same thing, and can only muster between 20-30 thousand votes from their activist lists, and even THEY admit it's only a drop in the proverbial bucket.

Kucinich, on the other hand, looks like he's competitive with Dean and Kerry, and if the Freepers supported him over Sharpton, they may actually have an impact.

MoveOn.org should require everyone who wants to vote in their primary to donate a certain amount of money to the organization. Something small enough not to discourage people, but not nominal enough to fail to deter would-be saboteurs.

Say $25?

That way, if the Freepers want to mess with MoveOn...they will have to contribute to MoveOn as well.

All it would take would be a $5 fee to join MoveOn to make this problem largely disappear. Just like a medical deductable, it's amazing the what having to pay even a tiny amount of money will do to those who aren't exactly "serious." It won't solve the problem completely of course, but it would certainly reduce it to statistical irrelevance.

I suspect that for MoveOn.org the importance of the online vote is to draw in potential supporters who then may contribute afterwards. Think of this current effort not as a primary, but more as a way to build their membership list.

It's not costing MoveOn any money to respond or send spam, er, polite solicitations to those who sign up for the primary, after all... ;-)

Hesiod, we should be so lucky that the freepers support Kucinich. If MoveOn goes in favor of him, he'll force the centrists/pragmatists to the left (as well as the DNC). Dean is just a centrist with a few leftist shouting points, and Kerry doesn't need the money anyway.

A poll tax!

How-Weird Dean
The dean of Democratic dementia is officially running for president. In a Burlington, Vt., speech today, former governor Howard Dean shouted at supporters: "You have the power to take our country back! You have the power! You have the power! You have the power!" This came a day after a highly entertaining appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," in which the wannabe commander in chief was unable to answer when host Tim Russert asked him how many military personnel are on active duty in the U.S. military. It's a "silly" question, Dean answered, "like asking me who the ambassador to Rwanda is."

Dean also claimed that "there's only one person who's contending for the Democratic nominee for president who did serve in the military." Presumably he's referring to Dick Gephardt's service in the Missouri Air National Guard (1965-71). Dean apparently is unaware that another Democratic candidate, John Kerry, also served in the military. He was in the Navy from 1966 through 1970 and the Naval Reserves from 1972 through 1978. He even served in Vietnam. Granted, Kerry doesn't exactly advertise his military service, but you'd think Dean could be troubled to do a little research before he makes statements like this about his opponents.

Another Dean blooper came in the course of outlining a Krugmanic conspiracy theory about the motives behind the Republicans' economic policies:

These tax cuts are incredibly bad for the economy. I believe their purpose is essentially to defund the federal government so that Medicare and Social Security, the icons of the New Deal, will be undone. Karl Rove and others have talked about going back to the McKinley era before there was any kind of social safety net in this country. Really that's what the campaign's about. It's to undo what I consider radical Republicanism.

Dean must be taking history lessons from Wesley Clark. In fact, Medicare was not part of the New Deal at all. It was enacted in 1965, two decades after Franklin Roosevelt's death.

As for Dean's theory about the Republican agenda, it simply makes no sense. It's true that Karl Rove looks to McKinley as an example, but that's because McKinley ushered in a several-decade period of Republican dominance. The GOP held the White House for 28 of the 36 years starting with McKinley's inauguration in 1897. A party can't win that many elections without being popular, and destroying popular programs like Social Security is no way to become popular. What's more, the Bush administration is now proposing to expand Medicare by establishing a prescription-drug benefit. Dean doesn't like the president's proposal, but he says if he were in Congress he might vote for it anyway:

It's clearly an election-year sop, but what Senator [Ted] Kennedy says, and he has probably the most extraordinary record on health care of any United States senator, what he says is this is the opportunity to get this in the door. We know it may not work. But let's do the best we can. And we'll try to fix it later once the entitlement is established.

So Dean accuses Republicans of having a hidden agenda of eliminating entitlements, while openly admitting Democrats have an agenda of expanding them.

Dean also tells Russert that the death penalty isn't a deterrent, except when it is:

I think there may be one instance where just possibly it could be and that's the shooting of a police officer. If you're about to pull a trigger on a guy who's in uniform and you know that you're going to get the death penalty and if you don't pull the trigger something different will happen, maybe that might save the police officer's life.

He adds that "we don't know whether in the long run the Iraqi people are better off" without Saddam Hussein, and says he favors a constitutional amendment to balance the budget even though "it's not very good public policy."

Will the Dems be crazy enough to nominate this guy? If so, it should make for a colorful campaign next year.

Nathan -- could you take down some of the repeat posts from the troll?

It's my understanding that MoveOn is going to verify the results of their election by doing a poll of their members to make sure that someone hasn't manipulate the poll--either electronically or by the Freeper method described.

I wholeheartedly endorse the idea of the election--the only chance we have to beat Dubya is to come up with effective ways to counter the incredible pot of money he's going to have, and MoveOn could well be one of the key pieces to the puzzle...

I've noticed that several of the freepers are saying they'll vote for either Dean or Kucinich, both of whom have considerable support from actual MoveOn members. They'll do a pretty piss-poor job of freeping the poll if they go ahead and vote for these guys.

Ultimately, though, I'm inclined to think that the ballots are being cross-checked with telephone directories and the like.