One effective response is to engage people as individuals. Someone, for instance, who says Ted Ferrioli showed leadership skills in the 2005 session (from building positive coalitions, to allowing his members to speak and sponsor legislation he opposed in a way that was extinct in the House, to conversation with ordinary voters)is not someone who will vote for or otherwise support someone who is obviously part of groupthink.

Another response is to go back to the grass roots campaign style which saw money as an INGREDIENT, not "all that matters" or what is necessary to pay consultants and other "political professionals".

It is time for us to see legislators who actually talk to the home folks and the press and leaders whose word can be trusted when they talk to various county parties. It means putting policy debates above pleasing lobbyists and pressure groups. We need to start discussing details, incl. how things are funded.

One example: Now that SB 1 has passed, how are we going to restructure mental health programs run by the state? Is enough money now available to move the patients out of the earthquake prone State Hospital J Bldg? Should a newer State Hospital be planned on the grounds of the old one, or smaller community centers planned? What are the funding options for either solution?

Slogans won't answer those questions, only serious policy debate. A friend told me the other day that such policy debate seems scarce on Blue Oregon. What do readers here think of that?

On the Gordon Smith topic I put the link to the Washington Post column addressing this on a national level.

Let the jokers post, just find a way for folks to rate other posters. It is a technical problem, that's all.

Kari Gets In Over His Head With LeftyBlogs

The point is not the traffic problem but the blankness of the culling process. Some voices are like Jesus in a vat of urine. Putting a shrowd over it won't make it go away.

Salvador you are exactly right. I had a teeny blog and I got tired of the misanthropic people who have nothing better to do than be nasty. And believe me, there are some seriously messed up people out there, left and right. Politics seems to draw in the nut cases sometimes. Unfortunately the only proven way to deal with it seems to be a DailyKos type of system.

One effective response is to engage people as individuals. Someone, for instance, who says Ted Ferrioli showed leadership skills in the 2005 session (from building positive coalitions, to allowing his members to speak and sponsor legislation he opposed in a way that was extinct in the House, to conversation with ordinary voters)is not someone who will vote for or otherwise support someone who is obviously part of groupthink.

LT,

If you think Ferrioli is some magnanimous soul, benevolently cheering his wayward flock (Westlund and Morse) for their independence, forget it. He was powerless to stop them. You didn't see him shed a tear or try to stop the Defense of Marriage Coalition when they savagely attacked Morse and Westlund for their sponsorship of civil unions.

If Ferioli was Senate President (God forbid), how long would it have taken him to strip Westlund and Morse of chairpersonships? Legislative leaders don't silence people by not allowing them to speak. What are they gonna do? Muzzle somebody? No, they punish once the speaking is done. The only thing Senate MINORITY Leader Ferrioli could do is maybe take away their snacks in the member lounge. If that.

Ferrioli had to make coalitions by necessity, or get absolutely nothing done. Don't kid yourself LT.

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No, covering it up doesn't make it go away. And, engaging persons as individuals works in the sense that it develops personal knowledge which refutes claims of "a strong wing of rightist extremism." It's not a strong 'plurality' wing, it is the faction which is 'strongarm'. The few mental cases among the rightists, (which is a higher percentage than among leftists), are the ones who resort to violence, and overstate their popularity by force of coercion and threat to maim or murder opposing speakers, which silences contradiction. But individual-beliefs evidence that you collect person by person shows the mental-case criminally violent rightists are not popular and are few ... the other, most, rightists are afraid, and duly ashamed of hate-filled thoughts of their own, and clueless to the wide world, or for all three reasons, and keep silent in effect.

And always did, in America, since the corruption of the U.S.Grant era and its descendants. It was an embarrassment to admit voting Republican, ever after 1870. Because it was the minority voice, the voice acclaiming royalty and elitism. And segregation. And persecutions.

It still is the few, the unconscienced, the mental defectives. Literally, physically, their brain anatomy lacks the 'receiver' piece that picks up the thought signals other people transmit. No empathizer. Or, no 'pathos' organ. Or one grown to a shriveled state of disuse. And, you. can. see. it. physically in the brain scan images.

As one commented: Then came Talk Radio. Which was essentially a loud projected image of a 'majority' Right-wing, Violence-using, Bully-bold Bandwagon rolling across Americans, but there was no veritable structure of a bandwagon that carried you if you climbed on. Many climbed on the imaginary radio talk mirage, fell through it, and are lying there now as road-runover. And indignant, seeing they were fooled is now wounding their pride.

Why were they fooled -- hypnotized, entranced, intoxicated -- by the radio fantasy image? Well, everyone can be fooled, this is about the few percent who are easiest to fool, the first ones fooled. Without the brain component for empathy, personality image, (celebrity), looks the same as personality in person.

Damaged brains cannot tell real people from actors. (Or, not necessarily 'damaged' brains, simply undeveloped brains as in normal children cannot tell real people from photos, 'in-person'from 'pre-recorded'.) When fantasy radio says there is a Violant Rightist bandwagon rolling by, simple sound effects of clip-clopping horses sweat-leathered to a creaking turning wagonwheel is all it takes for them to think it is so. Because they don't think. In some respects, they can't think.

Instead, by substituting intense emotional communication, (either violence or sexuality in the media), the emotional arousal fills the brain's awareness, senses, (it works on everyone), and the limited few I'm describing think they are thinking. Because their brain is stirring.

So, this theory, (the violently criminal rightists are a small number, [even in Congress, but notice how the 'normal-brain' majority was silenced by death threats in anthrax letters -- wanna be an independent-minded lawmaker? And they never caught them, they're still. out. there.]), with only a minority of rightist anti-social undesirables in reality and on blogs, predicts that the way to deal with them is case by case, as criminals, and sentenced to being outcast by peers' pressures.

That is, other 'bloggers' speak up and vote them out of the discussion. Mostly by ignoring their individual comments. Or challenging their individual thinking. That's one way of looking at the Sheehan Showdown with Junior. She has singled him out and isolated on him and asked him point blank -- What "noble cause"? -- in his words to give his individual thinking. He stands silent.

And that's what is happening on the blogs. The trolls are stupider and stupider in any fantasy claim they try to write, and more and more of them are silenter and silenter.

I doubt PDX media watcher blogger bidness is over. I expect a resurgence. Like bojack blogger bidness a while back, and communique quandary bidness. (Ever heard of "rout, rally, rout, rally, rout, rally, rout"?)

It didn't seem to me that 'uncivil discourse' or 'rightist troll diatribe' knocked PDX mediator off the air. It seemed to me it was a threat (albeit in a 'rightist troll diatribe') to disclose the name of mediawatcher and his(?) fear of losing his job if he was outed, that shut down the site.

My belief in how to handle it is for the 'collective' of praticipants there to isolate and outcast the few stray brain-damaged trolls. I recognize that it seems unlikely peer pressure could change or end that anti-social behavior. But talk radio's 'imaginary peers' is what first drove the behavior off the path, and it is possible that 'real peers' -- real. time. hands-on, game on peers -- could steer them back, by setting a lead to follow.

Here on Blue Oregon, and on PDXmediawatch, and at blogs all over in my experience, the good writing drives out the bad. Typical blog trajectory starts with a gush of smart alecky taunts and memorized one-line put-downs among the 'friends of the blogger,' and a couple months and two hundred comments later, the troglodytes are outnumbered and remove themselves.

I don't know, maybe Kari blocked Steve Shoppe and Liars Larson off this blog, but I figured they simply walked away burnt out. I know J.PEEK was blocked out, but he was headed for burnout, too, and it probably wasn't necessary.

There simply isn't enough of them to bring enough effort to change (or stop) the thinking of all the rest of us. They lose by attrition. No need to ban them every time; let them in and isolate on the violators and cast them out one by one, case by case.

This is all only my opinion.

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Problem with stripping the anonymity is that PDX Media Watch is intended to be a place where the employees of competing companies can analyze the quality of their respective organizations, with input from the companies' customers, without filtering opinions to keep the bosses comfortable.

Name me a private industry in which workers wouldn't be canned if the boss knew they were anywhere near such a project.