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If you're going to the Blue Hampshire Bash tomorrow, we'd love to know, so that Hermanos can get a head count on approximate numbers. So if you think you can come, RSVP to this spiffy new email addy created just for this purpose (BEFORE 10PM TONIGHT PLEASE):
bluehampshirebash AT gmail DOT com
Also, don't be shy about adding any dietary restrictions (vegan, etc...) to the email so we can give the restaurant a head's up if need be. And here are the aforementioned details, with some new detail on the details:
When: Monday, 24 August, 4-7pm (music from 4-5, food from 5-7) Where: Hermanos Cocina Mexicana, 11 Hills Avenue, Concord Price: $7.75 per person for the incredibly delicious food.
Sunday Update: Some final detail good news, bad news. The good is that our special guests include US Reps. Carol Shea-Porter and Paul Hodes, NH-02 congressional candidates Rep. John DeJoie and Anne Kuster, and DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas Zúniga.
The Monitor today, btw, sat down with Markos. A snippet:
Mandating health insurance without a public plan will turn off young voters, Zuniga said. "Imagine you're 25 years old, suddenly the government is demanding you spend $500 to $1,000 a month on health insurance without mechanisms to keep costs down," he said. "I think you'll see a bitter, angry, hostile reception from younger Americans."
The bad news is that due to being out of state on family business for the last couple of weeks, I won't have a BH t-shirt to unveil at the party. However, I'm still working on it, and I suspect we'll be able to offer one (or possibly more than one design) fairly soon.
Many thanks to Jack, Jon, and Beth for handling the bash details in my absence, and looking forward to seeing you all.
I'm so old I remember when Obama went to Portsmouth before he was even a candidate. Have fun with these gearing-up-for-the-primary flashbacks I found (and if you remember others, please post a link in the comments). The comment threads are as funny as the initial impressions.
I am especially delighted to announce one more honored guest to our Blue Hampshire Bash - Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter!
And that's in addition to you, Dear Reader, as well as:
US Congressman Paul Hodes
NH House Rep. John DeJoie
NH-02 Candidate Ann McLane Kuster, and
Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas Zúniga
Here's the when and the where:
When: Monday, 24 August, 4-7pm (note the extra hour we added) Where: Hermanos Cocina Mexicana, 11 Hills Avenue, Concord Price: $7.75 per person for the incredibly delicious food.
Also: we were able to add an extra hour up front (4-5), so please come earlier if you can to hear a JonnyBBad/GreyMike mystery musical extravaganza.
And after we're done at seven, head on over to Gibson's to hear Markos talk about his latest book.
Over in Vermont, WCAX did a spot (h/t VDB) on Old and New Media. In it learned that bloggers are untrustworthy shape-shifters,
"We are not a blogger who is coming and going, building new identities every day based on their own opinions, that is not going on with us. That is why we are credible. We are just not going anywhere," says Catherine Nelson, the general manager of the Rutland Herald.
grandstanding thieves,
"The loud voices proclaiming the death of newspapers, if you dig into who they are, are the people on the web," says Dennis Stern, a senior vice president at the New York Times.
..."[Bloggers] are perhaps stealing, maybe that is too strong a word, but stealing their news from newspapers and television. They are not doing original reporting. So the funny thing would be, if newspapers were to disappear tomorrow, we would be pulling the rug out from under them," Stern says.
and unfocused exaggerators:
"One of the problems in this new media world is the lack of focus," says David Mindich, who chairs the journalism department at St. Michael's College. "Bloggers merely augment what traditional journalists do."
In 2003 I would have been invested in knocking down wankery like this with some long-winded treatise. But in 2009, it's just embarrassing; I don't have the patience for such a farrago of head-in-the-sand-ism, arrogance, and incomprehension, other than just to stand back and marvel at it (by non-credibly, and in unfocused fashion, augmenting stolen words).
Democratic Executive Councilor Bev Hollingworth of Hampton said she never asked Ayotte whether she meant to serve out the full term when she voted to reappoint her in March.
"It never entered my mind that she would be considering not staying," Hollingworth said. "I thought certainly she would be staying on.
If the Governor has enough faith in AG Kelly Ayotte to nominate her for yet another term, can we the people of New Hampshire expect her to serve that term in full and not use that honor to step down early and run for some other position?
This is a fair and reasonable question to ask, imho.
Very Fair and Reasonable (4.00 / 1)
I agree with you, and I hope that the members of the Executive Council ask that question. If someone is nominated to head up a department for a four year term, the acceptance of that nomination should be in and of itself a commitment to serve the full term.
(NB: iirc, I think it was actually elwood who mentioned that fair and reasonable question first, but I'm not finding it at the moment...)
Of course, Governor Lynch did ask that very reasonable and fair question, but it's terribly, terribly unreasonable and unfair of us to point out that she broke her commitment to him and quit for dreams of higher things, much like the previous Republican Vice Presidential nominee.
The news business. I learned about it in a newspaper that wasn't on newspaper.
It's an old Roman curse to wish you "to live in interesting times," and today's times are certainly "interesting" - and that's a big understatement - for newspapers.
But recall a relatively few years ago when television appeared, many obituaries for the movie industry were written. But it didn't happen. We still have a movie industry. It is much different than it was at the dawn of the television era, but it has adapted and survived.
So I suspect it will be with the news business. No one can predict what it will look like when the Internet revolution has run its course, but unless you think that society as a whole is willing to give up objective news in favor of the opinion and invective that seems to dominate the Internet at the moment, the news will survive in one form or another.
Roman curses. I didn't learn about it in a newspaper that wasn't on newspaper.
Adding: In other news I didn't read on newspaper, when newspaper folk plagiarize bloggers, it's called "using words" and an "error."
Addinger: Found out yesterday you can sign up early for Pindell's latest non-newspaper, New Hampshire Political Report. No word yet on what blend of "objective news" v. "opinion and invective" it will have.
Sorry - I have disabled the account of the gentleman in question from this forum (and thank him for his public service, and support of HB436), because I really can't get over this from two years ago.
Ayotte added that the evidence against Buckley was so lacking that prosecutors even weighed charging Steve Vaillancourt with making a false report to police.
"We seriously considered bringing charges agaist Mr. Vaillancourt, however, the statute requires that someone knowingly made a false report to law enforcement. Mr. Vaillancourt orginally brought this letter to the governor's attention, and even by his own admission, not for the purposes of initiating a criminal investigation."
Those who don't know me will cry foul and say that I'm protecting my own unfairly. Those that know me will laugh at the idea that I do the bidding of anyone at NHDP.
Sorry for the technical difficulties, folks. You should now be able to log in and comment normally.
Update by Mike: Please know we do have a BlueHampshire Group on Facebook that we use on occasion when things go south on us. You may want to join up.
Upperdate (Dean): According to JonnyB, we are also back and running on WaPo's Cillizza roll too, albeit with a Republican blog that pretends it isn't Republican, or a blog.
Just like Blue News Tribune earlier, BH underwent an upgrade yesterday. As far as I know, service was uninterrupted during it, but some nice changes are better security, diary urls with title words in them (a bonus for Google indexing and searching), and - best of all - you can embed YouTube and other vids without having to hack away at the html that used to cause errors.
A sad denouement to a site that I once linked to and cheerled at every turn:
to contact@politicker.com
date Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 7:12 PM
subject Blue Hampshire and PolitickerNH
mailed-by gmail.com
Dear Sir or Madam,
I've been receiving a number of complaints from my readers about politickernh.com, which, despite its defunct status, is putting every blog post we have on our front page as its "News Feed".
We are a blog, not a news outlet, and our material is posted on your site in full without any context or additional writing by Politicker's reporters. Nor were we ever approached about this happening.
I ask that you please not continue to use us as a "news feed" for your site.
Or if you won't, please do not label our blog posts a "News Feed", please use fair use quotes (as we do on our site, three paragraphs or less), and please provide it in the context of your own writing (as we do).
Otherwise, it appears you are making advertising revenue straight off of our work.
Thanks for your time,
Dean Barker
Managing Editor
Blue Hampshire
No answer as of yet. So I'm curious to see if a robot or a human is behind our new and unwanted shadow site - thus the experiment here.
Apologies for filling up the front page with this, but if it works, it's worth it.
Watching this is really brings home how much of an epic fail it was for the House Republicans to vote themselves en masse into do-nothing status. Fools.
And regrets: BH is (mostly) a labor of love, so there are some times when my real life gets in the way of attending to things in a timely way. Which is a way of saying sorry to everyone who has sent me email recently that I haven't yet responded to. My apologies - I hope to get my inbox cleaned up shortly...
As many of you already know, on Wednesday, in the blink of an eye, Blue Hampshire came perilously close to losing its home, its software platform, and all two-plus years of its history. The hosting service we use, Soapblox, was hacked, and for a time our host was overwhelmed with the magnitude of the problem and announced he was closing up shop for good.
While all has been repaired for the moment, try to imagine what this would have meant. Blue Hampshire, along with perhaps a hundred or so other community-based Soapblox sites would have been back at square one, and would have had to scramble to reconstitute communities that are playing a vital role in reshaping our politics to include more citizen participation and activism. Swing State Project, Open Left, Calitics, Burnt Orange Report, even Jim C.'s new Blue News Tribune. The loss, while I'm sure a temporary one, would nonetheless have been incalculable.
Using the collective might of lefty blogworld, our plan is to take this crisis and turn it into an opportunity. When each of us started our little soapblox communities, we had no idea that in the space of a few years we were going to be sitting on a thriving network of state-based progressive political sites. Places where ideas and issues both filter up to the national blogs to receive widespread attention, and filter out to the political oxygen of the state, through mentions in the press, messaging that makes its way into campaigns, activism and legislation that finds its origin here, etc...
It's time to strengthen the infrastructure of the system that gave us that potential in the first place. Chris Bowers has an important post up explaining how money raised through his BlogPac will be wisely spent on beefing up the system security in the short-term and making the soapblox network more dynamic and powerful (and open-source, I gather) in the long-term.
I highly encourage you to give to this worthy goal by clicking here or on the ActBlue thermometer in the right margin. When you do, you will be taking part in the building of a new and exciting progressive architecture all over the country, and right here on Blue Hampshire. Elections come and go, but we stand, from a historical perspective, at the beginning of a new framework for everyday people to engage with their civics. And as Democrats, you know that the more people you can get engaged in the process, the more progressive ideas win in the court of public opinion, and the greater the chance we have of getting people to represent us who hold those same values.
(Bumped: To call attention the update - promoted by Mike Hoefer)
Damn. Someone at Gawker discovered our Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.
For its liberal bloggers, too lazy to research alternatives, it was the - how to put it? - politically correct way to publish. And why should they have bothered looking elsewhere, since it was a fine choice for their purposes? But I suspect their built-in biases against market mechanisms played a role.
Sorry - no link. I suspect my built-in bias against celebrity sarcasosites played a role. Or I'm lazy. Or something.
Back out of the land of Teh Stoopid for a moment, there's something coming today about that little misadventure - stay tuned.
Update by Mike: Here is the "little something" Dean mentions. Save Soapblox. Dean will have more on our approach later, but for now this diary at DKOS will give you some background and the chance for early giving.
Many thanks to Mike Hoefer, Internet Supergenius for redirecting us and somehow getting full functionality.
Major major problems.
More when I know more.
And while we figure out a battle plan, now would be a good time to save the diaries from your account that you would like to save. The preservation of our data archives is an open question right now.
Update: looks like we're back in a more sustainable way. The advice about saving stuff, imo, still stands.
Update 2x: I just want to take a moment to thank everyone who has reached out to us, both with offers to help and also to underscore what a loss it would be to have to rebuild BH from scratch. We've certainly had outages before, some of them maybe for even longer periods of time. But what made this one unique was the possibility that the hackers were going to end the very concept of soapblox, which would have meant a major infrastructure project for us and probably some 100 other sites.
Special kudos to Jim C. for offering us an extended sleepover at Blue News Tribune, even as he was unaware of the fate of his own, new soapblox gig, and to Skip at GraniteGrok, who, knowing that keeping grassroots New Media going is a non-partisan issue, quickly offered a helping hand.
Update 3x: Looks like we're on the road to recovery. And I'll have more on how you can help BH and the 50-state network strengthen its presence in the coming days.
