kos: The battle for the soul of the Democratic Party

Good article in the Daily Kos about the growing split between Dean supporters and the so-called mainstream Democratic party: The battle for the soul of the Democratic Party.:

...the hatred the establishment feels against Dean has nothing to do with ideology. Dean hasn't paid his dues with the establishment. Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi has made his name working the campaigns of insurgent (hence anti-establishment) candidates like Jerry Brown. He is not part of the chummy inside-DC club of Democratic Party consultants.

If Dean wins the nominantion, he becomes the head of the Democratic Party. He gets to replace McAuliffe and fill the top ranks at the DNC. Suddenly, a "DNC Chairman Joe Trippi" is a real possibility, and for an establishment that has spent the better half of the last decade laughing at Trippi's antics and dismissing him as a kook are suddenly standing on shaky ground.

Rant on blog spam

weblog spam:

Weblog spam is not the sort of thing that’s going to hit the front page of CNN anytime soon, but it has been a minor annoyance for some webloggers, and it has been my experience that these things can escalate from “minor annoyance” to “Usenet-level catastrophe” in record time. [...] The first thing that the anti-weblogging-spam advocates need to realize is that the spam landscape has changed. [...] Spam works and it is big business, and spammers are increasingly organized and increasingly business-savvy. [...] It’s organized crime rings who hire programmers to automate everything they possibly can (domain registration, ISP registration, free email account registration) and hire menial workers for pennies an hour halfway around the world to do all the manual things they can’t automate (like get past image-based login systems). They hire virus writers to write extremely sophisticated viruses that exploit all known holes in everything, install spyware, malware, adware, and remote control programs with which they can both send more spam and launch distributed denial-of-service attacks... against anti-spam advocates.

Read the complete article.

Sunday

Brunched at Noho Star with Misha followed by an aborted shopping excursion around NoLita. Frisket is at Monster Mutt for the day.

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I'm looking for a new pair of casual-but-dressy shoes and think I found them in a pair of Rockports but I want to do a little more comparison shopping.

My current pair of Eccoes are DOA, they wore rather unevenly and the left shoe cracked across the ball. Since my left arch is (and probably will forever be) sensitive, I've learned to get picky about my shoes.

We also dropped into Kamrooz Aram's workshop/studio via Oliver and Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery.