I have to confess to two things right off the bat, before I get to the substance of the diary.

The first is that I did not read Arianna's "Moving to the middle is for losers".  The reason is that the title said it all and I did not agree with the premise of the title to begin with (if the premise is wrong, the conclusions have no material relevance).  I was annoyed by the utter mindlessness with which the left seemed to fall for this stupid McCampaign meme that the corporate media was priming the pump with.

The second is much more fun to confess:  I have long been a fan of Rudyard Kipling in general and his If in great particular -- I love that poem: I love its style, its substance and its sheer quiet counsel (I fancy that I live by its premise :-)

So read both (just click on the links above) and follow me over the fold to see what Al Giardano has to say about all this, oh so beautifully...

Last night I posted this diary about how Chris Dodd is Being Vetted for VP, based on an AP article.  It also mentioned that Joe Biden and Ken Salazar are not being considered, and that Kathleen Sebelius and Claire McCaskill avoid answering.

Over at The Field, Al Giordano has a more detailed article on some of the other potential candidates.

This diary has been updated to include the latest news regarding the petition to get Al his credential back & Debra Kozikowski's actions.
We have over 1350 signatures on the petition that will be delivered to Howard Dean & Nancy Pelosi in Austin at Netroots Nation. A small group in CensorDebs state have written a letter to her and her bosses in MA. Since that news was published on the http://fieldhands.ning.com/ site, a signer to that letter has recieved a threatening phone call from Debra Kowzikowski. I post this here because it needs to be exposed.
http://fieldhands.ning.com/...

If you read Al Giordano, you know by now he has moved his blog from Rural Votes to The Field at narcoshere.com.  If you do not read Al you should start right now.

This is a "blogger inside baseball" story, so if you think such things are trivial, feel free to skip.

Long time progressive writer Al Giordano ended up writing a new blog this year, quickly building traffic based on his astute coverage of the Democratic primary battle. He parked this blog at the site of a fledgling organization called Rural Votes run by Deb Kozikowski, a vice chair of the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

Al built his blog into a mini little powerhouse, worked his way up the Technorati rankings and was able to score a blogger pass for the DNC convention. In addition, his readers raised several thousand dollars to help get him there.

Then one day Al wrote a piece that cited Saul Alinsky (the inspiration for my forthcoming book, in fact), and Kozikowski freaked out.

From: DebbySKoz@cs.com
To: narconews@gmail.com
Date: Wed, June 11, 2008 at 8:00 p.m.
Subject: What Are You Doing?

Rules for radicals? Give me a break. We have a meeting with Farm Aid and other interested parties in the next two weeks -- what do you think you are doing? This is not helpful -- do you WANT Barack Obama to lose? Talk about creating the petrii dish for beautiful loser syndrome. I am including Matt in this conversation b/c w/o an understanding The Field goes fallow. I mean it, Al. I cannot allow you to rule this roost to the detriment of the overall mission. I'll take the hit if you refuse to be a team player and quit. An Obama funder I have been courting is horrified. That makes three -- two in the last week. You are wrong headed. This has NOTHING to do with rural at all and this particular hero of yours according to Time Magazine in 1970 -- "SAUL ALINSKY has possibly antagonized more people—regardless of race, color or creed—than any other living American."

This is pretty funny, if a tad pathetic. Alinsky is a true American hero, and like I said, my forthcoming book pays homage to him. But that should give you a taste of this sordid affair. (I won't get into the details, you can get them at Al's site if you want them).

Bottom line, she thought Al was harming her site, so she didn't just pull the plug, but she purged all of his past writings from the site. That's fine, it's her site. Kind of short sighted, since Al's blog was the best marketing possible for her obscure little organization. (Should I ban Saturday Morning Garden Blogging on Daily Kos because it doesn't directly relate to the mission of the site?) But whatever, no one cared much about that.

What was a problem is that Kozikowski essentially stole the money his community had raised to send him to Denver and kept the blogger credential Al earned for herself. When I asked her about it via email, she came up with a bizarre rationalization that she had used her apparently boundless clout within the DNC to pull strings and get those credentials. Total delusions of grandeur, and completely contradicted by emails from her Al posted on his blog.

Whatever. This post isn't designed to run Kozikowski or her lame organization through the mud. I think they're pretty irrelevant and will stay that way.

This is all to explain and promote an effort by some of Al's readers to get the DNC to issue him a new credential. So if you value Al's work and think he should get credentialed (like me), sign the petition.

This diary has been updated to include the latest news regarding the petition to get Al his credential back & Debra Kozikowski's actions.
We have over 1350 signatures on the petition that will be delivered to Howard Dean & Nancy Pelosi in Austin at Netroots Nation. A small group in CensorDebs state have written a letter to her and her bosses in MA. Since that news was published on the "Fieldhands" site, a signer to that letter has recieved a threatening phone call from Debra Kowzikowski. I post this here because it needs to be exposed.
http://fieldhands.ning.com/...

If you read Al Giordano over at "The Field", you know by now he has moved from Rural Votes to narconews http://narcosphere.narconews.com/... If you do not read Al you should start right now.

Last week I wrote a diary about Al Giordano and his departure from RuralVoters.com, the website where his blog, The Field, appeared for six months and quickly became must-read blogging.  I'm not going to rehash the details here, so please read the diary for the essential background.  I tell the story fully and, I might add, quite compellingly.

I had some outstanding questions about the whole situation and I wrote to Al for some background, and he was kind enough to fill in the blanks for me.  I provide his unedited comments after the jump...

While I am not as fanatically attuned to the blogosphere as many Kossacks are, I am more attuned to it than most of my friends, and when we discuss the media coverage of the political scene this year, I inevitably cite the three people who have become, in my opinion, the Big Stars To Emerge in the political media -- Chuck Todd, Nate Silver and Al Giordano.

Up until a few days ago, Giordano's blog, The Field, was seen at RuralVotes.com.  They have parted ways.  The story of how Giordano and Rural Votes broke is one that is not particularly unique -- it's as old as journalism itself.  But the story here is not only the battle between Publisher With Something To Lose and Upstart Journalist, but the battle Progressives, Liberals, Democrats -- whatever you want to call us -- have with our own history.

Hokey dokey...Al Giordano is one of the brightest stars in the progressive blogging community.  Incisive, steady and penetrating progressive commentary on the primaries and election cycle.

As some of you may know, his preeminent blog...The Field...moved from Rural Votes to its NEW home as a result of contretemps arising from Al citing Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals in a post about organizing.  (Censored for Alinsky? Sheeeesh!!!! Go figger! Oh well.)

More after the flip

During the long primary season, many here at Daily Kos came to appreciate (and link to) posts by Al Giordano, driving force in the "Authentic Journalism" movement, over at The Field. For much of that primary season, these posts were hosted at RuralVotes.com

But at the end of last week, Giordano and the hosts of Rural Votes parted ways, apparently due to a dispute over censorship. Giordano has indicated that one of his missives which discussed what the Obama campaign learned from legendary activist and organizer Saul Alinsky was taken down by Rural Votes, for reasons which still are unclear. (The presumption by many is that Rural Votes wrongly feared, in a concern-trollish way, that the association with Alinsky would somehow be used to smear Obama).

In any case, fans of The Field have been wondering (a) what is going to happen to their donations (approximately $5,000) to send Giordano to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, and (b) what is going to happen to the extensive archive of stellar Field content (and comments), which are no longer accessible at Rural Votes.

There is, however, a way around Rural Votes' embargo: Namely, pages cached by Google. Try this link:

http://tinyurl.com/...

This will be short.  Al Giodano, the incredibly astute and visionary progenitor of The Field, one of the most important of my "go to" blogs, has sought out greener pastures and will no longer be featured at the "rural votes" blog site.

It seems to shake out like this.  Lately, Al had been exerting efforts to organize the "FieldHands" into discernable geographic blocks to facilitate work for Obama.  Go HERE if you want to check that out or join.  And then...Al vanished.  It all went dark...one of the most frightening thing that can happen in the Intertubes.  Happily, Al has resurfaced.  Unhappily, this appears to be tied to his attempts to organize or to quote the 13 rules for radicals of Saul Alinsky.  Al promises to kiss and tell about the journey from censorship to freedom of political thought sometime on Monday.

More after the flip

For those of you who read Al Giordano’s blog ‘the Field’ but don’t keep up with the comments, Al has parted ways with RuralVotes after a blog entry was allegedly censored last Wednesday.

The Field is now hosted on NarcoNews.com

Al Giordano has a brilliant analysis of the social movement that Obama has led to get us where we are today as a campaign.  When others doubted this strategy, Obama and his team held firm, and discipline won out in the end.

He begins with a quote from Karen Tumulty in TIME:

Barack Obama was campaigning last October in South Carolina when he got an urgent call from Penny Pritzker, the hotel heiress who leads his campaign’s finance committee. About 200 of his biggest fund raisers were meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, and among them, near panic was setting in. Pritzker’s team had raised money faster than any other campaign ever had. Its candidate was drawing mega-crowds wherever he went. Yet he was still running at least 20 points behind Hillary Clinton in polls. His above-the-fray brand of politics just wasn’t getting the job done, and some of his top moneymen were urging him to rethink his strategy, shake up his staff, go negative. You’d better get here, Pritzker told Obama. And fast.

James Wolcott's blog is fabulously entertaining.  

Amost as good as the article in Vanity Fair that he wrote all about Daily Kos.

His take on the latest pastor flap had me roaring.

We talked a little bit about Obama's latest temporary albatross, Father Pfleger.  What struck me was less the contents of his sarcasm, but his showboating... up there strutting, preening, and mugging for the audience like Jumpin' Jack Flash, at some moments nearly morphing into the late Sam Kinison with his rasping crescendos.  If the Catholic Church is offering this sort of solid, nightclub-worthy entertainment, I may have to consider setting aside my atheist qualms and rejoining, as long as I can get a good table near the front.

I have always believed that laughter is the quickest way to God.  This election season has blurred the boundries like never before.

Further down the page, James Wolcott agrees with another of my beliefs.  We need to send Al Giordano to Denver.  Follow me...

Earlier today, Al Giordano reported an amazing story from unnamed sources: that Hillary Clinton "went nuclear" with the Democratic Primary nominating process because Obama had privately rebuffed her as his Vice Presidential pick.

That argument from "secret sources" appears to have been brought into question by none other than Barack Obama himself.

According to Andrew Romano at Newsweek, Obama was asked if he'd consider a VP nom "even if his or her spouse is an occasional pain in the butt." Obama laughed and, echoing a London Times piece by Andrew Sullivan, responded:

Feeling a sickening feeling in your gut?  Irresistable urge to wring hands?  Feeling pieces of the sky on your head?  You DON'T need to go there.  I have the solution for you!!!  Read on!  Oh...And hey, those with the desire (paid for or otherwise) to cause confusion and disillusion for those in another camp?  Watch out, y'all.

It's not often that I diary an article from another blog rather than reporting news or thoughts from my interior.  Given that this is the Friday before yet another manic primary weekend however and given the tsunami of cold sweat that has been deluging from the pores of handwringers (and the concern trolls who would heave buckets of cold water and have us believe it was sweat)...I thought that I should refer people to this article at The Field entitled...Boot Camp for Chicken Littles.

More after the flip

When my older son was about 10, we devised a simple dice baseball game (snake eyes a home run, 3 a single, 4 a strikeout, etc.) and kept tinkering with it until game results closely mirrored those of regular major league games - scores in a range of 1-0 to say 12-11.

Cross-posted at Election Inspection

Well, we're about a week and a half away from the Pennsylvania primary and three and a half weeks away from the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, so I'd like to take a moment to offer a few predictions and thoughts about how all three states will turn out.

I'll make this short.  I would make this a comment, however, due to the extraordinary opportunity being offered by The Field, I'm giving this diary status.

Act now!!!  For the next 24 hours, we can write to The Field and discuss,  our support for our candidate with Deb Kozikowski, an undeclared superdelegate from Massachusetts.  This particular blog has been up for several days.  Al Giordano, blogger extraordinaire and the guiding light of The Field, sez that this amazing "offer" will be over in 24 hours.  (I note that Super Deb is the proprietor of Rural Votes. the home of The Field, as well).