FYI - helpful extract from the rules about supporting Democrats and Democratic candidates

[HughMoran]

There seems to be some confusion about the rules here with regards to supporting Democrats (clearly Barack Obama is a Democrat). In an attempt to clarify the rules in a thread in GD, I extracted the most salient sections WRT supporting Democrats at DU - feel free to cut and paste when a clarification is needed:

In the basic rules section:

2. Who We Are: Democratic Underground is an online community for Democrats and other progressives. Members are expected to be generally supportive of progressive ideals, and to support Democratic candidates for political office. Democratic Underground is not affiliated with the Democratic Party, and comments posted here are not representative of the Democratic Party or its candidates.

If you click into the http://www.democraticunderground.com/forums/rules_detailed.html">detailed rules, it gets even more specific:

Democratic Candidates and the Democratic Party

Constructive criticism of Democrats or the Democratic Party is permitted. When doing so, please keep in mind that most of our members come to this website in order to get a break from the constant attacks in the media against our candidates and our values. Highly inflammatory or divisive attacks that echo the tone or substance of our political opponents are not welcome here.

You are not permitted to use this message board to work for the defeat of the Democratic Party nominee for any political office. If you wish to work for the defeat of any Democratic candidate in any General Election, then you are welcome to use someone else's bandwidth on some other website.

Democratic Underground may not be used for political, partisan, or advocacy activity by supporters of any political party or candidate other than the Democratic Party or Democratic candidates. Supporters of certain other political parties may use Democratic Underground for limited partisan activities in political races where there is no Democratic Party candidate.

Do not post broad-brush smears against Democrats or the Democratic Party.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

I hope this post proves helpful as it's time consuming to have to search through the rules every time this question arises, which seems to be almost daily from what I am reading.