Originally posted by me:
There has been a lot of discussion of, and investigation into, this story going on over at Daily Kos.
Response by WildCat :
Oh boy! The (undisclosed) paid mouthpiece of the Howard Dean campaign is upset about this! I'm drowning in the hypocracy...
Error # 1: "(undisclosed)". I am puzzled how you made this particular error, since even the
Slate article you cite acknowledges and posts a link to his disclosure that he had been hired by the Dean campaign. Here is that link, to the
June 09, 2003 Daily Kos entry. (Please note the title, "
Full Disclosure", which is a subtle clue to its contents.)
Full Disclosure
I've been on the road a lot the past few months. Some of it was for my day job as a web developer. But the bulk of it was for my new political consulting firm...
I spent this weekend in Burlington, VT, where we officially accepted work on behalf of presidential candidate Howard Dean. Dean joins a Senate candidate in our still small but hopefully growing roster of clients.
Of course, this means many of you will accuse of me of certain biases (with good reason).
That's fine. I never claimed to be free of bias. But I've always been able to see past such biases to do what I love to do -- analyze the political landscape. For example, I'm biased against Gephardt, yet have had no problem slapping him in first for the Cattle Call. My approach to writing will remain unchanged. I won't turn this into a rah-rah for Dean site. That's just not my style.
Ultimately, I trust you all to take what I write with the proper grain of salt, fully appraised of whatever conflicts of interest I may have.
But for the record, I will not discuss my role within the Dean campaign, other than to say it's technical, not message or strategy...
There's more, but that gives the essence. I'd call that a pretty clear statement.
Kos not only disclosed this at the time of his hiring, he posted a disclosure prominently on his blog for the entire length of his contract with Dean. Here is a
link to an archived screen-shot of the June 23, 2003 Daily Kos. Please note this is posted at the top left-hand of the screen, in plain text and plain sight.
Disclaimer: I do some technical work for Howard Dean.
Far from being some "undisclosed" secret, Kos' contract to help the Dean campaign learn to use the web effectively was public knowledge more than a year ago, as evidenced by this
San Francisco Chronicle story from
January 14, 2004:
Web forum shapes political thinking; Dean consultant in Berkeley builds 'blog' into influential tool
Daily Kos is a political Web log, or "blog," an online diary where diarists can post anything they want. The political blogosphere is divided into right and left halves, and this one is on the liberal side. It's run by a man who is a paid consultant for Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean...
Error # 2: "paid mouthpiece". Kos was not paid to be a mouthpiece for the Dean campaign. He was paid to help the Dean campaign learn how to use the web effectively -- something he was well-qualified to do, and which he appears to have done a good job of.
In the wake of recent scandals where conservative pundits were hired to push Bush programs and GOP talking points, there has been an effort to spin Kos's contract with the Dean campaign into something similar. You appear to have bought into that spin.
The nature of his contract is stated clearly by Kos, and confirmed by news stories such as the one cited above. I have not seen any evidence to contradict this. Zephyr Teachout (aka
Zonkette) has recently begun claiming that
in her mind the real reason for hiring Kos was to get him to write favorable stuff. If you can find a psychic to read her mind, perhaps we can confirm her claim; otherwise, there seems no evidence to support it.
Kos was pretty angry about the phony allegations, and has done a good job rebutting them. Here are some links:
Pundit wankery
Zephyr Can Go To Hell
What Did Zephyr Know and When Did She Know It?
Error # 3: Georgia10 is not Kos. I wrote that the story is being discussed and investigated
at Daily Kos, which is a web forum community. You seem to have to have misunderstood that to say that it is being discussed and investigated
by Kos (Markos Moulitsas Zuniga)
Kos is the man who started the community, similar to the way Randi started JREF. Kos writes daily commentaries which you can find and read in one section of the site. Then there is another section of the site where
other people write various diaries, which become the opening posts of threads. The diaries I mentioned were started by
Georgia10 -- who has never, as far as I know, received any money from the Dean campaign. A rough equivalent to Georgia10's work there would be RSLancaster's work regarding Kaz.
I think she (and many of the others taking part in this investigation) are doing an admirable job with this. Why not
read one or more of the threads on Gannon that I linked to and
judge the work on its merits?
Error # 4: "hypocracy". The word you intend, if I'm reading you correctly, is
hypocrisy. [color=f7f7f7](One of the things that is so neat about Suezoled is that she can type
hypocrisy correctly faster than most people can commit it.)[/color]
Sorry, I know it's not polite to point out typos and spelling errors, but this error appears so commonly that it's worth pointing out occasionally.
