DNC Chairman Howard Dean gets things rolling in Chicago …

E.J.Dionne has a very good column today about Kos, Yearly Kos and seeing all of this in a longer-term context of partisan mobilization and new media. Dionne’s point of comparison for Kos is Rush Limbaugh, and while it’s easy to blanch at that comparison on its face, I think it’s also a very apt one when you judge it in functional terms.

The average age of TPM Readers is actually a bit older than most people think. At 38, I’m probably pretty close to our average reader in age terms. Still, there are a lot of you who don’t have a clear recollection of the political mood of the late 80s and early 90s. And even if you were old enough, perhaps you just weren’t interested in politics back then.

But all the other differences and parallels aside, the two eras seem very similar to me at the intersection of political mobilization and new media.

Nowadays, of course, ‘new media’ is the web or even Web 2.0, as it’s called. But twenty years ago talk radio was definitely ‘new media’. Not a new technology. But very much new media. There was a similar mix of bizarreness and uncanny novelty that a guy with a radio show could be standing toe-to-toe on the national stage with the biggest political players in Washington.

It’s important to separate out whatever we think of Limbaugh himself from, functionally, the role he played in the politics of the period, particularly from about 1990 through the middle of the decade. Back then the Democrats seemed pathetically wrong-footed or out of date on all these new ways of mobilizing and connecting with voters. And today the inversion seems pretty near complete. I wouldn’t want to compare Limbaugh to Kos or the rest of the progressive blogosphere on substance. But when you set aside Rush’s buffoonishness, racism and complete indifference to the truth, there is an important comparison on the level of novel ways of pulling in or at least energizing and empowering whole new political constituencies.

And the essential distinction — a very encouraing one for the progressive community and the Democratic party — is that what’s happening today is vastly more participatory and distributed, in the most concrete of terms, than anything happening back then.

The key to understanding all this, I think — and I’ll leave this to another post — is to get a proper handle on the interplay between the media technologies, the wave of organizational fervor that they are both helping to generate and also being sustained by, and the ideological shifts that seem to be sweeping over the body politic.

Like then, I think you can hear the rumbling over the horizon.

In case you missed it, take a look at the unfolding media story of The New Republic’s Scott Thomas Beauchamp diaries.

These were reports from a soldier in the field in Iraq reporting on some of the uglier sides of the US military’s footprint on the ground in Iraq. Imagining that every story that doesn’t kowtow to the Bush personality cult is another Rathergate in the making, the rightwing blogosphere exploded with a wave of accusations and fabrications, all alleging in one fashion or another that the stories were made up. The charges even got recycled and trumpeted in the Washington Post.

Unfortunately for them, TNR did a in-depth re-fact-check of the pieces (which given the Glass backstory, was, I am sure, extremely thorough) and with the exception of one relatively minor error they all check out.

And it turns out that the Weekly Standard, which did one of the slimiest hatchet-jobs under the byline of Michael Goldfarb, relied in large part on the word of a former porn star-cum-prostitute (who is currently being investigated by the Marine Corps for soliciting private donations to fund a deployment to Iraq he apparently never made) to level its charges that the TNR pieces were fabrications.

No word on whether the Standard does investigations of pieces that have run in their pages. Maybe the Standard’s Executive Editor Fred Barnes can enlighten us.

Media Matters has a good wrap up of the whole story here.

I wouldn’t normally link to an RNC web ad. But I will in this case because this RNC hit piece on Yearly Kos is so feeble — both in concept and execution — that I find it telling about the current state of the Republican party.

I’m inclined to think it’s the kind of thing that damages the GOP more than the intended targets. Most of it is a paean (enabled by Ron Fournier) to the now-thoroughly hollowed out DLC. And I think, at a telling level, it confirms what I wrote earlier.

A thought: How long a speaking slot does President Bush get at the 2008 RNC Convention? And when in the evening?

From the Chicago Tribune, Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) describing his decision to vote with Dems on the non-binding resolution opposing the surge …

Unlike his two Illinois colleagues and other congressmen opposed by the anti-war group, Kirk has more than a voting record on the conflict in Iraq.

As an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, Kirk is the only member of Congress who spends one weekend a month inside the Pentagon, where the day-to-day military operations in Iraq are decided.

“It’s an awesome experience because you’re with the troops,” said Kirk, whose only vote against the war effort came in February when he supported a non-binding bill opposing the recent troop surge in Iraq. “When the proposal for that operation came in, the senior commanders didn’t like it, and I sided with them against the president,” Kirk said.

Check out the exclusive Spencer Ackerman just posted at TPMmuckraker.com. Contrary to what President Bush said today, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and congressional Democrats were able to work out a compromise today on revising the FISA law. Then President Bush stepped in and overruled his own spy chief.

Associated Press reports that Obama’s terrorism speech sparked burning of American flags in Pakistan. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

TPM’s Andrew Golis interviews ret. Gen. Wesley Clark fresh off his speech at Yearly Kos. Don’t miss this. Good stuff …

Juan Cole of Informed Comment …

David Sirota , who needs no introduction …

Peter Leyden of the New Politics Institute …

Ramona Oliver of Emily’s List …