Second, for the established left organizations, their funding model has evolved (or devolved - take your pick) to oftentimes relying upon a few well-to-do funders.

In the past, with paper-based models of advocacy journalism, those well-to-do funders were vital, both as a source of regular funding and as an entree to others who would do likewise.  If you go back to the wingnut magazines of the 80s (like, say, National Review, which I subscribed to then), you would see relatively obscure companies regularly taking out full page ads week in and week out.  I remember one company - a maker or seller of those carpets you could get with a message imprinted - that bought a full back cover for literally years on end. There were doubtless some people who benefitted from finding out about that carpet company through its ad buy because they needed carpets, but I suspect the biggest beneficiary was the magazine, which had a regular funding source.

The pitfall of such regular, bigtime funders is twofold:  the organization makes itself vulnerable to having to satisfy the funder's whimsy, and the organization can get lazy about developing more support and supporters.  The first pitfall itself has two dimensions:  the funder's personal satisfaction and, as Rahm is showing, the susceptibility to indirect control of the organization by TPTB, through a little lean on the funder by TPTB.

So, the organization winds up toeing the line that TPTB puts out, day in and day out, lest it go under.

In blogworld, as we all are aware, both the entry costs and the costs of staying present are a lot lower.  It's the transition from part-time avocation to full-time operation that makes a blog expensive.  That expense is not in the medium:  electrons and the means of expressing them are next to free.  Compare that to paper and printing. Rather, it's in stuff that supports it:  server space, research (PACER access still costs 8 cents a page, and court transcripts are wildly more).  Compare that to postage in print-world.  

And then there is the cost of the author's time.  In print-world, a lot of those authors were willing to get a start on the ladder of politics for minimum wage or so.  Not so in blogworld.

Many of us here are lawyers:  the 20 minutes I'll spend writing posting this comment is time I could be billing (if I had clients);  my experience would justify that third of an hour being worth $60, $80, $100 or maybe more.  I will get no money for it.

Blogworld, though, has the real benefit of being amenable to grass-roots organizing and collecting.  If a blog develops a following (because it's well-written, makes sense or for whatever reason), then an appeal for a couple bucks to the readership can yield a decent sum in relatively short order.  But that grass-roots organizing can also be used to encourage calls to Congresscritters, letter-writing campaigns, primary challenges, and the like.

What Obama and Rahm have done is interesting.  They built a campaign around grass-roots organizing (and self-replicating organizing) and won.  Then, once the campaign was won, they just put that organization on ice, turned their back on it, and went to a very top-down model.  Signally, when it went from Change.gov to Whitehouse.gov at noon on January 20, the "ask us questions/raise issues" box on the site disappeared.  They did not want any inconvenient questions - like "when are you going to prosecute torturers?" being raised, so they closed the question box.

I get emails from the campaign, like a lot of people, a couple times a week I guess.  I don't even bother to open them.  I don't want to be told what to think.

In putting the grassroots on ice and closing the question box, though, Obama and Rahm went one further - they won't even talk to the people on the Left who were so instrumental in building that organization and ensuring that victory.  Rather, they spend their time sucking the sh*t out of the backsides of the banksters they should be putting in jail and give the back of their collective hand to the people who brought them to the dance.

For that reason, I commented on Jane's post yesterday that, come election time, I'm just going to sit on my hands.  My senators voted for the MCA and I told them then (one to his face, politely) I could not vote for them because of that and would not until it was changed.  It hasn't changed and I haven't voted for them.

The problem is navigating the inevitable blame-heaping which will come if and when the Dems take a beating in 2010:  Rahm and his ilk will blame the liberals for the losses suffered when, in reality, Rahm, Obama and the corporatocrats turned their back on being Democrats and thereby will have cut their own feet out from under themselves.  

"They come to us, expecting us to give them free publicity, and we do, but it's not a two way street. They won't do anything in return. They're not advertising with us."

To me, that sounds like Jane Hamsher is expecting payment in return for her blog support.

"Most want the easy way -- having a big blogger promote their agenda," adds Markos Moulitsas, the founder of DailyKos. "Then they turn around and spend $50K for a one-page ad in the New York Times or whatever." Moulitsas adds that officials at such groups often do nothing to engage the sites's audiences by, say, writing posts, instead wanting the bloggers to do everything for them. [emphasis supplied]

Again, if these are explicit demands, then yeah that's an image problem.  

When it comes to blogs, I think the worst type of editorial bias is the "moving on up" bias.  And then sometimes there's a need to kiss up to your sources - which you see in intelligence reporting/blogging a lot.  As an example, this post annoys the h*ll out of me.

More broadly, though, there's a tendency in the blogosphere to presume that the Google-able corpus of knowledge on torture is a definitive account of our government's dalliance with it over the last decade or so. That's just not the case.

The frustrating thing about intelligence reporting is just how dense and murky and opaque it is, and very few people who do it are able to create comprehensive accounts of what goes on. That's why it's necessary to hedge conclusions. A piece I've chased for years concerns internal CIA resistance to torture. I've confirmed very little of it, which is why I've not yet published anything. But if it pans out, I think it's fair to say that it would complicate much of the picture of what people inside the agency did and didn't resist, and how and why they did it.

BFD.  I fail to see how if you signed off on a rendition to torture but possibly, maybe, felt conflicted, you are therefore not someone who just SIGNED OFF ON TORTURE.