This is from a email I received today from my friend Lin Far.

The Disappeared
A disappearance occurs when an organization forces a person to vanish from  public view; and I have literally `been disappeared' from mydd. I still do not know why. I have written 2 posts to Todd Beeton and  1 post to Jerome Armstong  for an explanation, a reason, an answer. I have heard from no one.

I have blogged here in behalf of my candidate, on Tibet, and about Factory Workers at Sunrise. My last diary about "Typical White People" aroused a strong and long discussion of racism. It was vigorously attacked by many Obama supporters, all of whom still seem to be blogging freely on mydd.  I have opposed the candidate I do not support with ideas, facts, opinions and details. I have slandered no one. I have documented each and everthing I have written. From comments on my diaries it has been clear that devotees of the other candidate have at times been incensed by my diaries.  And in one comment I remember saying, "Do you not believe in free speech, in the marketplace of ideas?"
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Apparently I have my answser. Censorship is a beguiling siren who sings her song to people on all sides of the political spectrum. And it does seem as if some form of censorship is operating with respect to my disappearance as well as that of others from the mydd diary list which as best I can understand it at this point in time includes: linfar universal, bud white and jfk(#s) Others have received warnings. I received no warning and no explanation.

So I wonder if this brief email by Todd Beeton  to someone who was wondering what was going on is a fair indication of what is happening:

With all the flame wars and Democrat on Democrat attacks, yes, we've
> gotten harder on diarists who attack, accuse, etc. If you'd like to
> send me some of the usernames of the folks you think were unfairly
> banned I'll take a look.
> You know what crap some Hillary supporters are writing about Barack
> on this site? It's disgusting and has no place on a Democratic blog,
> know what I mean?

When I was a schoolgirl I memorized this little quotation by the Frenchman Voltaire:" I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend the death your right to say it." It has always seemed to me to describe the essence of free speech and American democracy. And I have often hated things that I have heard being said, but I have defended the right of the speaker to his/her views. In all my time at mydd I have never demanded someone be removed. I think this is wrong.  The mainstream media is biased, often inaccurate and in general now a propaganda tool, rather than a free press. The blogosphere is essential as an antidote to this situation. So  for us now to behave as if we believe it is right and democratic to silence voices with whom we disagree is very wrong. More than wrong. It is another little slide towards the totalitarian state we have all feared under 2 terms of George Bush.

I have only one more thing to say about this experience. And that is that  `being disappeared' is devastating. I am less enthusiastic, more tired and profoundly less hopeful about a better future today than I was yesterday. When I contributed my $35.00 to the support of this site, I had never given money for the upkeep of a website before. But I believed the people here were doing their best to provide a place for all democrats regardless of which candidate you support. I feel foolish about that also.

It is not for me to say that owners of a website cannot do as they please. But this website is called direct democracy. And I liked that name. I believe in what those words mean. So in this context I simply cannot understand why the owners of this site are now backing away from it because they do not like the content of some diaries. This is a censorship issue. It is not about insults and bad language or gratuitous remarks. It is about censoring diaries and diarists whose content you do not care for apparently all with regard to Obama.

Free speech is a lesson learned by every generation. I learned mine in the streets of UC Berkeley and in Chicago in 1968. I have fought for a free press for a long time. And I will not stop now. I wish the owners of this site would reinstate everyone who has been dismissed, issue a statement on the policy of this website with respect to content and standby their policy of issuing warnings when they feel that line has been breached.

Then I wouldn't have to feel so bad about my $35 and I could go on feeling that this is a website be proud of.

Boy,after today's Obama speech, doesn't this REALLY make sense?

"I noticed over the last several weeks that the forces of division have started to raise their ugly heads again. And I'm not here to cast blame or point fingers because everybody, you know, senses that there's been this shift"

David Axelrod of the Barack Hussein Obama campaign may have decided in a Karl Rove style move to attack someone in the Clinton campaign for racism because he had advanced warning that the ABC News piece on Wright was coming. This may be because ABC had asked the Obama campaign about it already.

David Axelrod of the Obama campaign likely knew this was coming. The Church probably passed the word that ABC was asking questions.

So one week at least before the Ferraro comment, the Obama campaign knew that ABC was going to do a major hostile hit piece on the Obama Wright relationship. Its possible that this happened much earlier and Obama's comments about Wright earlier were already damage control for that piece. But they needed to go on offense to take control of the news coverage of race in the campaign.

They needed to make the controversy about the Clinton campaign and race, not the Obama campaign and race. So they needed to attack someone in the Clinton campaign first for racism. It needed to be someone big enough that it would get wall to wall media coverage. Ferraro was a previous vice presidential candidate. That made her perfect. If Obama attacked her personally, it would be guaranteed to take over as the top story. Obama in fact did attack her personally.

The following page shows the chronology.

http://oldatlanticlighthouse.wordpress.c om/2008/03/18/axelrod-obama-attacked-fer raro-to-mute-wright-story/

March 14, 2008
Playing by Obama's Rules
By Patrick Buchanan

from tomorrows Pittsburgh Tribune

Seems it takes a race baiter to clearly see race baiting.

www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/playing_by_obamas_rules.html

To observe Democrats this week, savaging one of their heroines, is to understand why the party is unready to rule.

Consider: At the 1984 Democratic convention in San Francisco, an unknown member of Congress was vaulted into history by being chosen the first woman ever to run on a national party ticket.

Geraldine Ferraro became a household name. And though the Mondale-Ferraro ticket went down to a 49-state defeat, "Gerry" became an icon to Democratic women.

This week, however, after being subjected for 48 hours to accusations of divisiveness by Barack Obama, and racism by his agents and auxiliaries in the media, Ferraro resigned from Clinton's campaign. What had she said to send the Obamaites into paroxysms of rage?

She stated an obvious truth: Had Barack not been a black male, he probably would not be the front-runner for the nomination.

Here are the words that sent her to the scaffold.

Editorial from today's Seattle Times:

The beginning of the end for the Obama campaign

By John Carlson

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/op inion/2004275515_johncarlson12.html

Everything in politics has an arc -- a beginning, a high point and an end. The art of campaigning is to hit the high end of that arc as close to Election Day as possible.

In 1988, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis ran 17 points ahead of Vice President George Bush -- in July. From then on, everything ran downhill and Dukakis won just 10 states.

Barack Obama has generated more excitement this year than any presidential contender in at least a generation. Having seen nothing like him in their lives, young people have signed up in droves.. Women faint at his rallies. That wouldn't happen at a John McCain or Hillary Clinton event unless it was held in 110-degree heat.

But excitement is closely tied to momentum and the Obama campaign is losing both. The affection for him is genuine, but it's less a long-term romance than a crush. And everyone knows that crushes either crash or fade. Ask an Obama supporter about the senator's greatest political accomplishment and the reaction is often the same: a crinkled eyebrow, an awkward acknowledgment that they can't think of anything, but he still inspires them because he represents "change" and "hope."

OK. But soaring, uplifting sermons promising "hope" and "change" eventually run dry unless they're connected to clear ideas and a coherent agenda.

But, Obama's words aren't a bridge to ideas and opinions, they're substitutes for them.

Obama's losses in both Texas and Ohio underscore why time is not on his side. These were the first primaries that didn't follow on the heels of another with another contest immediately following. Instead voters were able to sit back for three full weeks, listen to the debates, watch how the candidates and their spouses talked to different audiences in different parts of the state, hear their advertising and take their time digesting this information and discussing it with others at home, work and the barber shop.

When they did that, Obama began to fade. Like a hit record that's been on the charts for a while, they still smile when it plays but they're getting used to hearing it. In Ohio, a must-win state for the Democrats in November, people began to tire of it. Isn't there a "B" side?

Most Americans like Obama but they don't know him, and liking and trusting aren't quite the same thing. A TV spot asking whom voters would rather have picking up the phone at the White House during an overseas crisis at 3 a.m. simply asked what any reasonable voter would consider before pulling the lever in November. That's hardly a low blow or an act of "desperation" by the Clinton people.

And Michelle Obama didn't help with her comment about finally, in her 40s, "being proud of my country for the first time," and suggesting to a young audience in a working-class Ohio town that they should sidestep "corporate America" and instead seek out more rewarding, lower-paying jobs in teaching and social work. Whom did she think she was talking to, the senior class at Vassar?

There is much to like and admire about the first post-'60s candidate for president. But his constant incantations of "change" aren't enough -- especially when your Democratic opponent and Republican challenger already offer a clear change from the status quo.

The senator has built up a huge wave of momentum and he is still the odds-on favorite to get the nomination. But even as he surfs, the wave is beginning to crest.

I nominate Bill Bradley.

He spent his career trying and failing to reconceptualize liberal values so that they appeared centrist and appealed to centrists. He believed the Rhodes Scholar hype about how smart he was and thought himself deeper and wiser than other Democrat Pols.(Even though it was discovered in election 2000 that he had scored 300 points less than Bush on his SATs and 500 less than Gore)

Isn't it strange how the "liberal" Democrat in 2000 in reality was a fairly conventional centrist, and how the "centrist" Democrat in 2000 turned out to be more visionary and progressive than any other politician today.

As a Senator he supported the Reagan tax cuts, privatising social security and voted against and helped to destroy health care reform in 1994.

Instead of standing and fighting he GOP, he left the Senate fer 94 and came very close to running against us in 96 as an Independent candidate for President. In 2000, he did more than any other Democrat to divide our Party, slander and damage our candidate and help to elect a Republican to the White House.

And guess what?  He's back to do it all again!

First, let's look back.

THE DAILY HOWLER

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh031008.shtm l

Have attacks made during a Democratic primary ever been used in the general election? Duh! Let's return to Campaign 2000, when this happened to a well-known fellow--a fellow named Candidate Gore.

Readers, it's October 2000. Thanks to losers like the NYT's Bob Herbert, Gore is being trashed as a Big F*cking Liar again, this time in the wake of the first Bush-Gore debate. In the Washington Post, David Von Drehle writes (yet another) long piece reviewing Gore's troubling history. And because he was alive on this planet, Von Drehle mentioned Bill Bradley's attacks on Gore during that year's Dem primaries. He also mentioned what Bush had been saying, repeatedly, out on the trail:

   VON DREHLE (10/8/00): By the time former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley began thinking about challenging Gore for this year's Democratic nomination, he and his staff were convinced that the truth factor would be important in their race. "It was a big deal to us," a Bradley adviser says. The Bradley team perked up when Time magazine reported that Gore had bragged of his role in creating [sic] the earned income tax credit--a law passed long before Gore entered Congress.
    "Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don't tell the truth as a candidate?" Bradley demanded in a New Hampshire debate with Gore. This has become a favorite quotation in Bush's rhetoric.

This has become a favorite quotation in [Candidate] Bush's rhetoric. Again, this happened during Campaign 2000. Readers, do you remember that one? The one two elections ago?

At the final Gore-Bradley debate in New Hampshire, Bradley offered the following attack on Gore's troubling lack of honesty. Because it came from a high-minded Democrat, the press corps repeated it for the rest of the year--exactly as they will do with such attacks from Obama:

BRADLEY (1/27/00): If you don't trust the people to tell them the truth in a campaign, then how can the people trust that you're going to tell them the truth when you're president of the United States?

By this time, Bradley was desperate and angry--and willing to lie through his teeth. How absurd were his claims about Gore's "character?" By now, he and his campaign had spent two months pretending that Gore introduced Willie Horton to the American people--even though Bradley had gone out of his way to say the opposite in his best-selling 1996 book, Time Past, Time Present . But the press corps loved assailing Gore's character--and this was Bradley attacking Gore, not a Republican or conservative entity. The line was recited right through November. It helped put Bush where he is.

Now this faux liberal,  this present day "investment banker", is being sent out as a savage attack dog by team Obama spitting out his resentment filled venom.

LONDON TIMES

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/wo rld/us_and_americas/us_elections/article 3511833.ece

Former senator Bill Bradley, who is a leading supporter of Obama and ran for president in 2000, accused the Clintons of "lying" in pursuit of victory.

"The bigger the lie, the better the chance they think they've got. That's been their whole approach," he said. "She's going to lose a whole generation of people who got involved in politics believing it could be something different."

Bradley believes that Clinton will stop at nothing to tear down Obama even if it boosts John McCain, who was confirmed last week as the Republican nominee: "The Clintons do not do long-term planning. They're total tacticians and right now their focus is on Obama, not McCain."

Bradley believes that Obama should keep his hands clean but is willing to throw some heavy punches on his behalf.  "We need to know whether there were favours attached to $500,000 contributions, such as the granting of pardons, squelching an investigation, awarding a contract or deferring a regulation," Bradley said. "The Democratic party has got to be in dreamland if they think the Republicans are going to let these matters go."

Big Democrats can't attack our Democratic candidte's character. Bradley was lying in Campaign 2000 about Gore--and the mainstream press corps loved it. Bradley's 2008 role shows that Obama seems to be on the verge of going down that road again.

If so many Bradley supporters hadn't turned their back on Gore and the Democratic party, just think of how better off this country would be. Just think if we didn't have so many - if Bradley doesn't win I am voting for Nader people.

Bradley's line helped send Bush to the White House. And last week, there it was again! Is this the kind of "new politics" that we can now expect from Obama?