Yesterday I had a bit of fun at the expense of the Republican noise machines and their efforts to paint themselves already as a loud and marginalized minority in Capitol Hill. I was so caught up on the moment that I didn't blog about it until this morning but Kenneth Quinnell described it as a "Twitter Bomb" and has happy to spread the word :

Twitter Bomb

This wasn't my idea (although I came up with the cool name), I think Liza Sabater was the one who started it, but it's too brilliant to pass up.

Those of you who are on Twitter, send as many tweets as you can over the next few days with #dontgo in them. The conservatives are using this hash mark (like a tag) to spread misinformation about offshore drilling and their latest publicity stunt. What Liza and a few others started doing was to flood that hash with counter-commentary or irrelevant posts. Sort of like a google bomb, this can either disrupt what they're doing or, at the very least, annoy the crap out of them. We can all do this.

Whatever you're posting on twitter, try to fit #dontgo into it. And make sure you include the # sign, which is key.

If you aren't on Twitter, this might be the type of thing to get you into it.

And before I even start to explain, let me break down the lingo for you.

Below is a link to a story positioning Steve Harrison as the candidate of the people and Domenic Recchia as the Brooklyn machine's choice in City Hall News.

The article mentions the Daily Gotham, but the reporter didn't contact Bouldin and Mole as I suggested when he was writing the piece.

http://www.cityhallnews.com/news/128/ARTICLE/1316/2007-11-12.html

Believe it or not, some people want to know my opinion on things. Some of those things have to do with politics. For months now I've been telling people that Spitzer is not reaching out to the people he needs the most : The activists and advocated who pounded the pavement for him election.

Elizabeth Benjamin published yesterday an article that describes the sentiments of not only Democrats in Albany but everybody I know in the progressive grassroots.

In Clue us in, Democrats growl at Eliot Spitzer, Elizabeth gets on the record what people have been saying on the off since the Troopergate scandal broke off : Eliot has a serious communication problem with his base and this is not a problem we can just lay on his staff.

Here's the gold :

"He didn't consult us before, he didn't consult us now," said state Sen. Ruben Diaz (D-Bronx). "He let me go on the Senate floor and make a fool of myself. Now I have to take the time to stand up, eat crap and apologize. Eat my pride."

Some Spitzer allies saw the driver's license debacle as

You may have heard of the monicker, "netroots". It's used to define bloggers who emerged "organically" online --without any intervention of mainstream media or political institutions-- and have been transformed into a powerhouse of meshed political interests. That may be a bit debatable in some cases, yet it's clear that many digital grassroots movements have indeed started without the intervention of corporate or political interests.

Which is why the word astroturfing was invented. Originally it was used to define how a company or interest group would deliberately open up webiste or blog to make make it look as if a random citizen is advocating their cause. Nowadays you can find such activity in forums, discussion lists and in the recent astroturfing scandal, tampering with Wikipedia.

Now we have the potential astroturfing shenanigans of a certain Mr. Caputo. To say that there's more than a few things I love about this whole drama, is to put it mildly.

Our friends over at The Albany Project make note of an online offensive by the republicans, and that in turn requires some comment.

Maybe it's a variant of Sun Tzu that I've missed so far, but one doesn't normally pick battles where one is weak. And the simple fact is that in the online world, New York republicans are spectacularly weak.

The state of play is as follows: the republican Senatorial campaign committee has put out a web site, NYinJeopardy.com, which takes aim at a raft of Democratic incumbents in the State Senate. What's interesting about the content is that the attacks made on their various targets come mainly from the left - for example, Liz Krueger is painted as being soft on women's health issues. Simple observation: you're not going to beat the Senate Democrats from the left, and that you try says everything that needs to be said about your underlying weakness.

The greater weakness, however, is in the correlation of forces online. Simply put, it's no contest: New York has a thriving, independent, linked and networked Progressive blogosphere - networked not just locally and statewide, but nationally. There is nothing on the other side of the aisle that can even be compared to what we have, independently of the party, built up over the last few years - nothing.

The first email came at 12:41, the second at 5:38. The first was entitled "SPITZER'S ABUSE OF POWER", the second, "Spitzer Caught Spying"; both were sent by updates@nyfacts.net.

The same email went to Phillip at The Albany Project, Jay Jochnowitz at the Times-Union and Liz Benjamin at the Daily Politics. Presumably, more people got it as well.

The emails contained the full version of two slash-and-burn pieces by Fred Dicker of the New York Post, dedicated, as the subject lines suggest, to the Bruno-Spitzer conflict.

Nyfacts.net is, as the TU points out, carefully shielded to mask the identity of whomever put it up. The TU followed up:

NYFacts.net didn’t respond to an e-mail inviting it to tell more about itself. A visit to Web sites with variations of the name turned up blank pages (not “page not found” errors, though). The .com versions led to ads for a firm offering ways to earn money on the Internet.

Moveover, a check of NYFacts.nets’ Internet registry shows that whoever create [sic] it took extra steps to shield its identity. Its registration was dated today Monday, using a special proxy service that offers private registration.

Bruno’s office said it knows nothing about this.

So here's the really funny thing: this email didn't go to any of the regular Daily Gotham email accounts, the ones linked on this site and used in normal correspondence. It went instead to my account on the New Democratic Majority domain. And that's curious.

Time for me to start harping on one of my pet peeves. No, not site load times; given that we have roughly fifty seven ways of creating content, and every possible feature that nobody ever uses, of course the site loads slowly. That's one thing. My cross to bear.

No, what I'm talking about is this: every day, we get, collectively and individually as editors, solicitations and requests. Candidates want plugs for their candidacy. Fundraisers want publicity for their events. Organizations want plugs for their most recent report, event, fundraiser, personnel announcement.

Fine. So buy an ad. Seriously. We support what you're doing; that's what Progressive blogs do. We do more than that, certainly; the ad campaign for Craig Johnson, back in the day, was produced by The Daily Gotham. The banners you see currently, promoting the Brodsky Bill, also come from us. All 100% pro bono.