Diary: Rob's Blog-- New Comment Flagging, an interview and Implications of a Moderate's Swiftboat Strategy

Ratcheting Up Our Site Development Goals I've asked our programmer to put more time into working on OpEdNews. Frankly, he's been reluctant to put too many eggs into one basket-- progressive website being such weakly funded entities. But I've him to increase his time commitment to OpEdNews by about 25%. That means we will need, every month, a bit more financial support to make our budget. We're just getting started with this new level of new feature development, which will definitely get more features up and running sooner. To make it happen, we need your financial support. Please Make a Contribution Today Comment Flagging Your financial support this past month has enabled OpEdNews to build and implement one of the most sophisticated comment flagging programs of any website. It was put into action last week. It will make our site a friendlier, more pleasant place to spend your time. We ask that you flag comments that are ad hominem personal attacks, advertising, pornographic, or that you otherwise deem inappropriate. We also ask that you flag comments that are so smart, so insightful or brilliant that they deserve being fleshed out into an article. If you like the fact that we keep on adding new features, please Make a Contribution Today The Swiftboating has begun, and one of the purportedly most moderate Republicans is guilty. He represent and proves why the nice, moderate Republicans are just as dangerous, just as necessary to be removed from office. And he is an example of why angry progressives, unhappy with less than perfect Democrats, even Dems who voted for the anti- habeus corpus bill, must be supported to replace right wing extremist enabling Republicans. My article below, discusses it. Bush has massively changed the Muslim World An exciting development for OpEdNews has been the development of correspondents from all over the world-- Waziristan Pakistan, Australia, Gaza, Ramallah, Egypt, Europe, London... and Yemen, on the horn of Africa. The reports that have come from our Yemeni correspondent have been a bit disturbing, so I started an instant message conversation with Mohamed Al Azaki. By the time we were done, I realized, we had recorded an interview with some powerful ideas an information. We both polished it up and now, it's published below. rightwing commentary on OpEdNews There's a blatantly rightwing article supporting president Bush, right here on OpEdNews. It's not a nasty one, like some rightwing trolls. It's a fairly clear statement of one conservative's opinion. I thought it would be useful to post it here so our readers could comment on the article-- reply, debate, discuss and debunk. What do you think? BTW, the article is clearly labeled, for the sake of child safety. "Liberal Tax raiser"-- the accusation across the US Unimaginative RightWing moneymen are attacking Joe Sestak (philly burbs) as a liberal, tax raising congressional candidate. Same thing for another Philly Dem congressional candidate Lois Murphy. The ads say that the Dems will raise the average tax bill by thousands, and billions for all. And the ads are true. But the fact is, the Dems are targeting the super rich people who were given huge tax breaks by the Bush administration. On average, the raises look lilke they touch average americans. But the TRUTH is they won't touch them at all. it's a statistics game that is totally misleading. I hope Sestak and Murphy go after their creepy, rightwing extremist, corrupt Republican enablers-- Weldon and Gerlach-- and call them on their lies. I doubt the right wing owned print media will do their jobs. This is something that you can expect all across the US. Don't hesitate to write an article about your local candidates, or encourage them to submit press releases and op-eds to OpEdNews. We're already publishing a good number of articles by congressional and senate candidates across the nation. We can publish the article to our local pages. We'd love to see a lot more than we're already doing. have a great one. Rob Kall