Bloggasm

An Obama staffer I’ve spoken to just received this email:

our contributor’s incredible outpouring of support has allowed us to offer all full time salaried staff hired on or before September 6th four additional weeks of severance pay.

In light of the recent bannings of power users on Digg, my friend Neal, a power digger himself, posted this video rant:

The blogger at Say Anything, a prominent conservative blog with over a thousand readers a day, has photoshopped Obama next to a noose, suggesting that he should be hanged.

The blogger begins his post by giving Kudos to Michelle Malkin

I took a screen grab of the post for when he takes it down. If you need a copy of the screen grab please email me.

UPDATE: The post has now been pulled from Say Anything but is still available at this site. I think it’s fair to say that this guy has let the genie out of the bottle, the underlying racial tensions that have been making their way just beneath the surface have been unleashed.

How long will it take Michelle Malkin, the sewer of the blogosphere and lead Sarah Palin cheerleader, to address the recent findings that Palin abused her power in firing her police commissioner? How quickly can she create a post worth of spin to try to attack the investigators?

Also, as of this writing, Drudge Report still doesn’t have anything up about the news. He’s famous for rushing to his computer and having something up within 5 minutes after breaking news, more verification of his true allegiance.

If you’re tuned in to all things Digg, you likely know that another round of power users have seen their accounts shut down because they were allegedly using scripts to auto-digg friends’ submissions.

Every time the spotlight becomes focused on the man behind the current — i.e. power users — there is a new flurry of proclamations of how Digg really isn’t a democracy at all because, well, not all votes are created equal. The social networking site Mashable has a post up rehashing this debate; “In the years following its creation, Digg became less a democracy and more a republic, with a select few users responsible for the majority of front page stories,” wrote David Chen.

This is evidenced by the fact that the average new user could submit interesting links all day and never come up with more than a handful of diggs on each — well below the 100 to 250 diggs needed to cross the front page threshold. But if you were to apply this concept to real-world democratic systems, you’d see that there is nothing undemocratic about this notion.

Since when did the ability to level a single vote ever wield real power? Think of any political or policy initiative, any political campaign, any petition or attempt to bring about real change. Would we ever be as naive to think that without constant lobbying, networking and collaboration, that anything meaningful in a democratic system would ever get done?

So why do we cry foul when a single voice drops a link into an ocean of other links and it doesn’t get much traction? If that voice believes that his link truly is unique and full of all things wonderful, then shouldn’t he have to lobby and push it and advertise it, just as any lobbyist, political or special interest group would?

I certainly hope that Rich Lowry isn’t doing Google Blog Searches on himself, for his sake, because the search results make for some delightful reading.