Information Clearing House
(February 24, 2006):

Rumsfeld boasts of the vast changes in "communications planning" taking place at the Pentagon.

A "public affairs" strategy is at the heart of the new paradigm, replete with "rapid response" teams to address the nagging issues of bombed-out wedding parties, starving prisoners, and devastated cities. No problem is so great that it can't be papered-over by a public relations team trained in the black-art of deception, obfuscation, and slight-of-hand. Trickery now tops the list of military priorities.

"US Central Command has launched an online communications effort that includes electronic news updates and a links campaign that has resulted in several hundred blogs receiving and publishing CENTCOM content."

The military plans to develop the "institutional capability" to respond to critical news coverage within the same news cycle and to develop a comprehensive scheme for infiltrating the internet.

The Pentagon's strategy for taking over the internet and controlling the free flow of information has already been chronicled in a recently declassified report, "The Information Operations Roadmap"; is a window into the minds of those who see free speech as dangerous as an "enemy weapons-system".

The Pentagon is aiming for "full spectrum dominance" of the Internet. Their objective is to manipulate public perceptions, quash competing points of view, and perpetuate a narrative of American generosity and good-will.

There's more...

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it is we do here at MyDD, and how our efforts help put more Progressive Democrats in power. In general I think we entertain ourselves by speculating, debating and hypothesizing about what is going to happen in politics, what the implications are of what has happened  and of course constant discussion of what Democrats should do to win elections.

But I fear something is missing, particularly in this last component. Now, I've never run or won an election before, so I think it is a little crazy for me to make suggestions on how we should win, but I don't think it is crazy for me to suggest how candidates can better connect to their grassroots activists and clearly this is one component of winning elections. The challenge is for candidates is figuring out what the hordes of MoveOn members, Kossacks, DFAers, etc... collectively believe - what issues and messages are we looking for from our candidates? Sure there are plenty of blog posts, diaries and comments on lots of different topics in many different forums, but does what someone writes on DailyKos mean that we all support it? Do Chris/Kos/Stoller/Scott/etc... define us? Even if they did, where is this 'definition' located?

So what to do?

I am involved in a project that is designed to deal with this problem. The project is called the Online Progressive Congress and the basic idea is...

There's more...