Recently in Top Posts Category

Here are the ten posts that were most frequently read by visitors in August, 2007:

1. Holy Crap! Have You Seen Kucinich's Wife?!
   
2. Here's the upside to having a CAT scan on your birthday
   
3. Top Ten Chuck Norris Facts
   
4. What does leadership mean?
   
5. Marbury vs. Madison
   
6. Is POTUS hiding a serious heart condition from the public?
   
7. Why Democrats Should Have Voted Against FISA Bill
   
8. Paranoia Strikes Deep (Mark Adams)
   
9. Bush-Cheney Escape War Crimes Prosecution
   
10. Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back Into The Water...

Here are the ten posts that were most frequently read by visitors in June, 2007:

1. Holy Crap! Have You Seen Kucinich's Wife?! (03/07)
   
2. Is POTUS hiding a serious heart condition? (10/04)
   
3. The Sopranos Final Episode (Updated) (06/07)
   
4. Here's the upside to having a CAT scan on your birthday (04/05)
   
5. How I Happened To Meet Karl Rove (06/07)
   
6. Top Ten Chuck Norris Facts (12/05)
   
7. What does leadership mean? (03/04)
   
8. The Real Difference Between Democrats And Republicans (05/07)
   
9. The difference between Pre-emptive vs. Preventive war (06/03)
   
10. Rudy's Mobbed-Up Crony Cries The Blues (06/07)

Scandinavia was (is) buzzing about Bush's bulge. Meanwhile Mark Adams scored another post on the list with his call to pummel the president with bill after bill calling for an exit timetable. And for some reason, people suddenly wanted to know about the CAT scan I got 2 years ago when I had a sinus attack. Go figure.

1. Bush Bulge: Is POTUS hiding a serious heart condition from the public? (10/04)
   
2. Holy Crap! Have You Seen Kucinich's Wife?! (3/07)
   
3. Top Ten Chuck Norris Facts (12/05)
   
4. Here's the upside to having a CAT scan on your birthday (04/05)
   
5. What does leadership mean? (3/04)
   
6. Marbury vs. Madison (4/05)
   
7. The difference between Pre-emptive vs. Preventive war (6/03)
   
8. Send It Back (Mark Adams, 05/07)
   
9. Ara Answers The Proust Questionnaire (03/07)
   
10. Start Wearing Purple! (4/07)

The sublime ... and the ridiculous. In other words, the story of my life.

1. Holy Crap! Have You Seen Kucinich's Wife?! (3/07)
   
2. Would You Rather... (4/07)
   
3. Top Ten Chuck Norris Facts (12/05)
   
4. What does leadership mean? (3/04)
   
5. Marbury vs. Madison (4/05)
   
6. Hitting At Obama's Strengths (Mark Adams, 4/07)
   
7. The difference between Pre-emptive vs. Preventive war (6/03)
   
8. Barack Obama's speech at Selma (3/07)
   
9. Start Wearing Purple! (4/07)
   
10. Colbert dismantles Debra Dickerson (2/07)

Here are this year's Top Ten most popular posts:

1. Bush-Cheney Escape War Crimes Prosecution
   
2. Dickerson: "Obama isn't black"
   
3. Marbury vs. Madison
   
4. What does leadership mean?
   
5. Olbermann interviews Hamdan Lawyer
   
6. Colbert dismantles Debra Dickerson
   
7. Top Ten Chuck Norris Facts
   
8. Movie trailer mash-ups
   
9. The Daily Show: American Idol Recap
   
10. Would You Rather...

This is the Top Ten list of most popular videos I created in 2006. They were posted on both YouTube and Google Video.

10. Baton Rouge Jewish Film Festival
This is a 5-minute preview of the films being shown at the festival in January, 2007.

9. Amnesia
Inspired by David Byrne's song of the same name.

8. New Orleans Jazzfest 2006
The international music festival returns to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

7. Jesus Hates Democrats, So Vote AGAINST Stem-Cell Research
Passion of the Christ star Jim Caviziel gets creepy in an anti-stem cell research ad that ran in Missouri. This ad was eventually banned from YouTube -- but the proposition to support stem-cell research won, carrying Claire McCaskill into the Senate.

6. Tai Chi & Cool Jerk
My first video.

5. New Orleans Mardi Gras
Laissez les bon temps rouler! This video is the next best thing to being there.

4. My ad gets shown on The Colbert Report!
You're nobody til Stephen Colbert disses you. Crum-believable!

3. Bring 'Em Home
My daughter and I shot this one day at a municipal park in suburban Detroit; the music is from Bruce Springsteen.

2. Multiple ads for Democratic challengers
As a lark, I did 5 ads for Democratic congressional challengers: Patrick Murphy (PA-08), Paul Hodes (NH-02), Linda Stender (NJ-07), Jerry McNerney (CA-11), and Nancy Skinner (MI-09). I also did a generic ad for the Democratic party. Most got posted on candidate blogs and web sites, etc. Then Carol Gay (NJ-04) saw them and asked me to do one for her campaign. Eventually, Stephen Colbert saw THAT one and the rest is history -- see #4 above. [P.S. Carol lost, but many of the others won.]

And the #1 most popular video of mine from 2006 is...

1. Vote Republican (Because Jesus Hates Democrats)
A YouTuber sent me a video response to one of my candidate ads and I couldn't tell if he was being serious or not. So I, um, tweaked it to remove all doubt. An instant classic!

(This article was, of course, cross posted at Daily Kos)

Yesterday I listed the ten most read posts at E Pluribus Unum.

Today I'm listing my Top Ten "high-impact" diaries cross-posted at Daily Kos.

First, a word of explanation:

As you may know, there are thousands of diaries (posts) per day at Daily Kos. A tiny percentage become "recommended diaries" and are highlighted on a side-bar panel. An even tinier percentage are placed on the front page of the site. The vast majority of diaries come and go like waves lapping on the beach -- coming and going and being constantly replaced by new waves that also come and go. A "high-impact" diary represents the middle ground between a recommended diary and one of those waves on the beach. It is one of those diaries that gets the "optimum" combination of recommendations, comments and commenters. The system is somewhat arbitrary. Nonetheless, once a day, the high-impact diaries are recognized and share a brief moment of recognition.

These, then, are the diaries I posted at Daily Kos that recieved this recognition in 2006:

10. Connect dots:Cheney,Whittington=Bush lied under oath? (2/13)

8. (tie) Do the Democrats Have A Ground Game Like THIS One? (9/24)

8. (tie) (POLL) Dem Response To al-Maliki (7/25)

7. Fourth Generation Warfare: "You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network." (8/15)

6. NJ-04: Crum-believable! Colbert disses my ad for Carol Gay! (10/23)

5. Screw The Polls: Watch Prediction Markets (8/25)

4. Bush: Hiding a Serious Heart Condition? (8/23)

3. When Bush Taunts, Don't Defend: Attack Him Back HARD (6/29)

2. I'm an anti-war, yellow-dog Democrat -- and a Zionist, too (7/14)

And the highest impact diary I posted to Daily Kos in 2006 was...

1. Suskind: CIA knew "Osama backed Bush re-election" (6/21)

Without further ado (or waiting til Dec. 31), here are E Pluribus Unum's most-read posts of 2006:

10. Dad Gave Me The Keys (Mark Adams)

Wow, a real blog. How cool is this.

Mark's debut at EPU! Dude -- how cool are you?

9. Ohio Republicans, Offers That Can't Be Refused (Mark Adams)

In France, you can't even get away with taking a Viagra before a silly bike race. If they could prove that the Browns and the Cavaliers were "fixing" point spreads, or the Indians were throwing games, there'd be riots on Euclid Avenue. Push some inconvenient voters in the wrong direction, undermine our very democracy, and it's just business as usual.

8. Movie trailer mash-ups
Where else are you going to see the movie trailer for Brokeback To Future? OK, besides YouTube.com and every other blog and website on the Internets. All I can say is: God bless Google.

7. Marbury vs. Madison
I posted this in April, 2005 and it is still one of the most widely-read things I've ever written. It has bounced around in the top 50 sites (out of 175 thousand) at Google for the eponymous keyword phrase -- and it made a star out of our buddy Wince from Kansas:

Some would say God's Law is most high. Perhaps it is, as defined (for example) in the Bible. But we are not a nation that is governed by the church or the temple. Even if we were, all you have to do is look at the Talmud to understand that there is always more than one opinion about everything.

No, we are not a government ruled by the church. We are a government of the people, for the people and by the people. We follow a document that WE wrote.

Some would hope that God guided us in that ongoing endeavor. But if that is the case, it is also certainly true that God helps those who helps themselves.

It's hard to make your way through the difficult questions Wince, I know. But we all agreed, long ago, that this was a job for the people to do. We don't wait for God to judge these difficult cases for us.

6. What does leadership mean?

I think it was Chris Matthews who said voters respond most favorably to the candidate who can best articulate the following simple message: "Follow me!"

Bush did it better than Kerry and he won. The End.

5. Intelligent Design: “The sky is blue because God wants it that way.”
The title (and the post) is borrowed from Nobel Prize winner Eric Cornell. What more is there to add?

4. Commerce Committee to Vote on Net Neutrality Wednesday
This post contained the names and numbers of the everyone on the Senate Commerce Committee and I urged you to call them and tell them to support the Snowe/Dorgan amendment. Net Neutrality survived -- for now. Stay tuned.

3. Top Ten Chuck Norris Facts
Jeez, I didn't even write it. And/But this post ranks #9 out of 480 thousand sites listed on Google. I'm baffled...but endlessly amused (along with, apparently, the rest of the Internets):

A blind man once stepped on Chuck Norris' shoe. Chuck replied, "Don't you know who I am? I'm Chuck Norris!" The mere mention of his name cured this man blindness. Sadly, the first, last, and only thing this man ever saw was a fatal roundhouse kick delivered by Chuck Norris.

2. Foley Scandal: What's up with Rep. Rodney Alexander?
Major hat tip to Miss Julie, who asked the title question thereby inspiring this post, early in the Foley scandal.

And the #1 most widely-read post of the year...

1. Bush-Cheney Escape War Crimes Prosecution
Go ahead, click the link -- you'll notice that this post was "dugg" 854 times so far (and viewed nearly 4 thousand times at Google Video -- with a strange spike in traffic on the day after Christmas). It's Jack Cafferty breathing fire:

Under the War Crimes Act, violations of the Geneva Conventions are felonies, in some cases punishable by death. When the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Convention applied to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, President Bush and his boys were suddenly in big trouble.

I'll say. Senator Bill Frist, Congressman Dennis Hastert and their Republican stooges passed the Military Commission Act of 2006, destroying habeas corpus -- and allowing Bush-Cheney to get away without a scratch. This is a story that historians will be telling for decades to come.

P.S. Sometime soon, I promise to post E Pluribus Unum's Top 10 most widely viewed videos -- including the one of Stephen Colbert showing (and dissing) my ad for congressional candidate, Carol Gay.

Top Ten most frequently-read posts:

1. Commerce Committee to Vote on Net Neutrality Wednesday (June, 2006)
   
2. Top Ten Chuck Norris Facts (December, 2005)
   
3. Kana: Not the first time it happened (July, 2006)
   
4. Dad Gave Me The Keys (Mark Adams, April, 2006))
   
5. Intelligent Design: "The sky is blue because God wants it that way." (November, 2005)
   
6. What does leadership mean? (March, 2003)
   
7. Mastercard Commercial From Hell (April, 2002)
   
8. After the Israel-Lebanon war is over... (August, 2006)
   
9. What Congressional Democrats Must Do To Win In November (August, 2006)
   
10. Win Or Lose, "Netroots" gets bashed (Mark Adams, August, 2006)

Here are the ten "most read posts" at EPU during the month of June, 2006:

1. Intelligent Design: "The sky is blue because God wants it that way." (11/05)
   
2. Dad Gave Me The Keys (Mark Adams) (04/06)
   
3. Top Ten Chuck Norris Facts (12/05)
   
4. What does leadership mean? (03/04)
   
5. Movie trailer mash-ups (02/06)
   
6. The problem with humanitarians (06/06)
   
7. Scary pictures of Gore and Bush: Which one is worse? (05/04)
   
8. How (and why) does anyone defend Ann Coulter? (06/06)
   
9. For Mark Adams: Why Jeffrey Goldberg makes sense to me (06/06)
   
10. War is over if you want it (06/06)