First: If Republicans take control of the Congress, does that mean Democrats and "liberals" and "progressives" and leftists don't have to recognize the legitimacy of the election and can ignore the election results and refuse to cooperate, and do everything in their power to stop any policies of the elected majority, the way the Republicans have done since the day the Obama administration took office?
Second: You may have noticed a lot of comment deletions lately. There's a few reasons for that.
I get e mails, even phone calls, as well as comments from regular readers of this post requesting, sometimes demanding, that I delete what they refer to as "the rightwing troll" ("troll" being an Internet users term, as I understand it, for someone who uses a particular blog or site's comment stream for their own repetitive tirades against it or against whatever) who dominates a lot of the comments here.
I usually let him carry on because it allows me and whoever reads his comments to see what the rightwing "message" (i.e. propaganda) of the moment is, since I can count on him to parrot exactly what those in charge of rightwing propaganda are propagating. (I have only seen him not parrot the message of the moment a handful of times over the past several years.)
When that repetitive parroting starts to veer toward merely name calling: ("socialist" "communist" "fascist" "jerk" etc.) I sometimes delete the comment. Or when it takes up way too much space with quotations and citings of sources that are either unreliable or have been proven to be deliberate distortions or outright lies meant to deceive the public. It's bad enough the mainstream media often parrots unreliable sources and false so-called "facts" etc., we don't have to do it here.
The other deletions are for comments that contain too much cursing. As anyone who has read my poetry or knows me personally can attest to, I use a lot of what they call "profanity" myself at times. But for this blog, I have deliberately avoided it so as to not trigger flags and other technical Internet stuff I don't even understand or know how to counteract.
So, that's the story on the recent spate of deletions. Amen.
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11 comments:
Dear M:
I've always regarded your blog as, essentially, a publication of which you are editor-in-chief. As such, it's up to you to decide what you want to publish in this publication. Not that you need me to tell you that, of course. But as far as I'm concerned, we liberals/progressives have been way too accommodating of the extreme right, as exemplified by Jim. Since no actual debate is possible with most of these people, why give them yet another platform to spread their propaganda?
yrs,
TPW
LOL. I love that the second comment here was deleted. It's like my friend Nikki said long ago, "You may as well be honest with people because they only hear what they want to hear anyway."
xo
J
Hey Mike. It's your ballgame and you get to set the rules. And if those rules are no name-calling, no cussin and no agitprop, they sound fair to me.
Connie
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/us/politics/19taxes.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
Front page, today's (10/19/2010) NY Times, President Obama cut taxes by $116 billion. Even Republican sceptics who at first auto-pilot responded that they though taxes went up admitted that indeed they have gone down.
He kept it low key because he wanted it to stay with people, not get spent like rebate checks.
You'll most likely get a comment that will be deleted on this, but it would be encouraging to see Jim man up and acknowledge this.
Robert,
Most tax folks do not count tax credits to people who do not pay taxes as a cut. It is considered a transfer or welfare.
Thats is such a typically condescending rightwing response, and totally irrelevant to Robert's point. Everyone who works for a living, NOT ON WELFARE, have had their taxes cut by Obama. On the other hand, if you make your money as a Wall Street bookie, I suppose you have no idea what it's like for working people.
I'm not surprised Michael, at Jim's autopilot, agenda-matic response, because he simply doesn't have the character to acknowledge the truth. Too bad.
The threat of a massive tax increase on January 1st is what has business expansion and employment paralized. Tax credits for folks who do not hire people does not stimulate the economy. If polls are to be believed, the electorate get it even if you and Obama/Pelosi/Reid do not. I understand relevancy for a socialist is not full employment but is what furthers the expansion
of government into the private sector.
Wrong again, as most economists contend that putting money into the pockets of working people stimulates the economy because they buy things with that extra money and this is a consumer based economy. Continuing tax breaks for the wealthy just adds to the ever growing gap between the rich and the rest of us as the wealthy do not consume or spend an equal portion of the extra money created by extravagant tax breaks for them, et-endlessly-cetera. And if you continue to call Obama a socialist and other labels that do not apply to his policies or his stated beliefs and the actions he takes to express them, I will continue to delete your comments, because you are either knowingly lying or just terribly uneducated, or a combination of both.
I assume by most economists you mean share the wealth economist Krugman who has increasingly become an international item of humor. Possibly you could share the name of other, non share the wealth economists.
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