Caught!

Richard Lawrence Poe's intrepid journalism has revealed my membership in a horrible conspiracy commenced by Hillary Clinton to corrupt the blogosphere with evil left wing propoganda.

He is, of course, only half right. I am a member of a widespread, disorganized movement in and outside of the blogosphere to get our country moving in the correct direction and to displace right wing propoganda with opinion and journalism we believe is more on target.

Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, Bill Ritter, George Soros, Jared Polis, Markos, thousands of universities and colleges, and many of my colleagues at the Center for Independent media are likewise part of this broad political movement that goes beyond the confines of the Democratic party.

I can't recall a single instance upon which I have ever spoken to Hillary Clinton. I saw her husband speak in person once or twice, I've seen her give speeches on television, I've met people who have met her, and I've received a junk e-mail or two from her. I've mentioned her in five blog posts, all of which make horse race references in connection with the 2008 Presidential race. I am, in fact, ambivalent about the leading Democratic party candidates in 2008, although I favor the winner of the Democratic Party nomination, which is hardly surprising coming from someone like me who is an officer of the Democratic Party of Denver (although I wasn't one when I started with CIM).

If she is, as alleged, a behind the scene force behind the Center For Independent media, her heart must be reasonably pure, because CIM overwhelmingly covers state and local political news, outside the state where she is in elected office, and few, if any of the bloggers with their own blogs, like mine, are doing anything to get Hillary Clinton elected as the next President.

I hope Hillary Clinton has put some resources forth to support, at arm's length, bloggers and journalists reporting independently on politics. In the movement that I am a part of, call it the vast left wing conspiracy, there is no need to issue orders or censor content or control ideas. Bloggers rank up their in respectibility with the Brookings Institute, or its counterpart the Heritage Foundation. We are more think tank than political machine. An investment in us is an investment in long term ideas to make our country a better place, and a more informed political discussion now. We don't need to pick winners and losers. The facts illuminate the choices as we go along.

I am basically a policy person. Politics is about both power and choice, but I prefer to spend as much time as possible on the choice side of the operation. I gather facts and analyze them. I try to ferret out the useful and the good, the useless and the bad. I look for solutions to our problems that are within the realm of the possible. I try to make non-obvious facts about how our world works plain.

Computer models have shown that it takes only a handful of birds in a large flock flying in formation to point the flock in the right direction, and that the birds that know where they are going don't even need to be in any particular lead or control position to do so. This works even if there is disagreement among the leaders that think they know which way they are going. Intensity of belief and numbers will point the flock in the right direction.

I suspect that politics is a similar beast. If you plug intensely in the correct direction and are in communication with some other members of the flock, you can have a real influence on where the flock heads. If you know what you are doing, that influence is positive, and I am arrogant enough to believe that my information gathering practices provide a sound foundation for pointing people in the correct direction.