Netroots Nation is teh awesome.  It's such a joy and privilege to talk with and work with the people who are contributing their bright minds and willing hands to the cause of progressive political reform.

Yesterday I had the chance to talk with nyceve, a dynamo from Manhattan who has been a catalyst in literally saving lives via her efforts in health-care reform.  After getting charged up with a conversation with Eve, bleeding heart, and teacherken about the possibilities and challenges that face us, whom did I meet next?  Donna Smith, the "American SiCKO" who was featured in Michael Moore's documentary and now dedicates herself to health-care reform.

Sad news from Australia, Olive Riley has died.
She was born in 1899 and died at the age of 108.

And yes, she was the oldest blogger in the world

More after the flip

The other day I read a piece on Talking Points Memo that grabbed my attention. The title of the piece is "Do Blogs Take Labor Issues Seriously?" The writer of the piece points out that a lot of the blogs out there did not mention some important information on recent Supreme Court Rulings. His statements are accurate; it was the comments that caught me off guard.

This is just one labor activist's rant on the whole subject. My hope is to get some people to get on the bandwagon.

Over the very short period of time that I’ve been wandering the WordPress halls, it’s been a source of surprise to see so much activity along the lines of climate change denial. The short duration probably does not offer a representative sample, but still, wow–it seems that folks do protest too much.

The lion’s share of it is bluster. Most of what I’ve seen would otherwise be laughable, if removed completely from context. It’s still a reasonably free country though, and I’ll support the right of an individual to toss up their two cents, even if in so doing they reveal themselves as incapable of recognizing the scientific method even if it bit ‘em on the ass.

Some of it, however, a minority, is solidly reasoned, presented by people who are obviously technically literate and trained. It’s my opinion that they’re misguided and myopic, but no matter there, either.

Hi there.  My name is Richard Jensen and this is my first diary for The Daily Kos.  
What you need to know about me are these facts.
I live in Southern Oregon.
I work in Hospitality, where exactly I will not name. (Not that my employers would object to my postings but my opinions are my own and I see no need to cause them unnecessary grief.)
I have two MySpace pages.  One personal and one for filmmaking.
And of course, the big reason I am here is I am a life long liberal democrat.  Which means I live in a state of perpetual aggravation.
An aggravation I try to deal with by videoblogging or as the young people call it, vlogging.  

Of all the activities that constitute thumb twiddling none compares to the King Kong of time killers masturbation. It is the ultimate lollygag, a near-do-well's raison d'etre and a bachelor's fail safe. Leave it to the heathen French to deconstruct one of evolution’s great merriments the orgasm with their onanistic monopoly on rally killing, existential comedowns. You are not a true Frenchman until you can ejaculate nothing or should I say actual nothingness like our man in Paris Jean Paul Sartre and to refer to it as Le petite mort, well you get the ontological picture.

Home is an invention on which no one has yet improved.

A man defending his home is worth 10 invaders.

There is no place like home.

Home is home, be it ever so humble.

These phrases may have graced our ears 3,592 times, but ponderings on the meaning of home mean a little bit more to those of us in Appalachia these days.

Mountain Mondays will be a weekly celebration of our mountain home in Appalachia.

You see, in many ways, Appalachia isn't what it used to be. We have lost more than 1 million acres of land, along with 1000+ of miles of our once pristine streams, and 90% of our traditional coal jobs to mountaintop removal mining. This barbaric practice has reduced much of our home to rubble, and further damaged our perennially struggling local economies. The jobs are gone. The people are leaving. The water is toxic. And they are blowing up the mountains themselves.

But the face of Appalachian resistance to "Big Coal" is changing...

This is a "blogger inside baseball" story, so if you think such things are trivial, feel free to skip.

Long time progressive writer Al Giordano ended up writing a new blog this year, quickly building traffic based on his astute coverage of the Democratic primary battle. He parked this blog at the site of a fledgling organization called Rural Votes run by Deb Kozikowski, a vice chair of the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

Al built his blog into a mini little powerhouse, worked his way up the Technorati rankings and was able to score a blogger pass for the DNC convention. In addition, his readers raised several thousand dollars to help get him there.

Then one day Al wrote a piece that cited Saul Alinsky (the inspiration for my forthcoming book, in fact), and Kozikowski freaked out.

From: DebbySKoz@cs.com
To: narconews@gmail.com
Date: Wed, June 11, 2008 at 8:00 p.m.
Subject: What Are You Doing?

Rules for radicals? Give me a break. We have a meeting with Farm Aid and other interested parties in the next two weeks -- what do you think you are doing? This is not helpful -- do you WANT Barack Obama to lose? Talk about creating the petrii dish for beautiful loser syndrome. I am including Matt in this conversation b/c w/o an understanding The Field goes fallow. I mean it, Al. I cannot allow you to rule this roost to the detriment of the overall mission. I'll take the hit if you refuse to be a team player and quit. An Obama funder I have been courting is horrified. That makes three -- two in the last week. You are wrong headed. This has NOTHING to do with rural at all and this particular hero of yours according to Time Magazine in 1970 -- "SAUL ALINSKY has possibly antagonized more people—regardless of race, color or creed—than any other living American."

This is pretty funny, if a tad pathetic. Alinsky is a true American hero, and like I said, my forthcoming book pays homage to him. But that should give you a taste of this sordid affair. (I won't get into the details, you can get them at Al's site if you want them).

Bottom line, she thought Al was harming her site, so she didn't just pull the plug, but she purged all of his past writings from the site. That's fine, it's her site. Kind of short sighted, since Al's blog was the best marketing possible for her obscure little organization. (Should I ban Saturday Morning Garden Blogging on Daily Kos because it doesn't directly relate to the mission of the site?) But whatever, no one cared much about that.

What was a problem is that Kozikowski essentially stole the money his community had raised to send him to Denver and kept the blogger credential Al earned for herself. When I asked her about it via email, she came up with a bizarre rationalization that she had used her apparently boundless clout within the DNC to pull strings and get those credentials. Total delusions of grandeur, and completely contradicted by emails from her Al posted on his blog.

Whatever. This post isn't designed to run Kozikowski or her lame organization through the mud. I think they're pretty irrelevant and will stay that way.

This is all to explain and promote an effort by some of Al's readers to get the DNC to issue him a new credential. So if you value Al's work and think he should get credentialed (like me), sign the petition.

Well Granny calls us purity trolls, PsiFighter says we should just grow up, Olberman is telling Obama how to do his job, to read this blog lately you'd think the entire progressive movement is about to crumble to dust because our latest patron saint of progress has declared a measure of independence from us, the "righteous" left, or perhaps the "self righteous" left is apropos.

From the perspective of a generational researcher it all comes off like some kind of self indulgent comedy, like so many brilliantly argued theses on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. We become trapped by our own ideology, shouting into the echo chamber that is our own little corner of the blogosphere.

We wring our hands in fret, some because our once saintly anointed leader has spurned us, and others because now that we have entered meltdown mode he is surely to crumble amidst the loss of our once united support.

This might sound strange, but I am under attack. They have lit the torches and THEY ARE COMING FOR ME!

That's right; an angry mob of local bloggers. Very scary.
And they wanna run me off for my crimes.
What crimes you say?

We agree with Jon Henke that "there will always be a place for the amateur blogger who can get good information and write with a unique voice."  And we believe that once people get a taste of activist, netroots democracy it will be difficult - if not impossible - to convince them to return to mass media passivity.  For candidates, the challenge will be to harness the power of the netroots or lose to those candidates who do.  Either way, as the Washington Post concluded following the Yearlykos Kos convention in early August 2007, "Like it or not, the [netroots] appear to be here to stay".

So conclude Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox in their new book (published June 30) Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics  I will tell you now that I think anyone interested in understanding the netroots would be well advised to read this book.

Bleeding Heartland has been sparring with some Iowa Republican bloggers about the appropriate policy responses to the recent catastrophic flooding (see this post and this follow-up).

Here are some things I have learned.

A wonderfully angry SadlyNo blog entry raised the question as to which of the big name, respectable liberal bloggers who have been credentialed by the DNCC was against the Iraq authorization and invasion from the beginning... and who blew it?

Obama got it right, so did many Democrats including the then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Bob Graham, Defense Committee chair Levin, and of course Chariman Dean.

So many MSM/SCLM pundits got it respectably wrong and still have their jobs. Many of those who got it right and opposed the Iraq war suffered as a consequence.

The blogosphere is supposed to be an alternative to the SCLM/MSM.

Yet some bloggers whose judgement was wrong on Iraq have become very prominent and respected on the liberal/progressive/left since then. Presumably they have been getting most thigs right since then. But still. Let us remember who got it wrong at the time. And more honor to those who got it right!

Hello Kossacks,

For those that somehow missed it, the Obama campaign released a new website intended to fight the viral smears.

Hey everyone,
I have been shirking my normal blogging on account of summer law classes and work. On the side I have begun work on my own blog. Right now I have a blogspot but it is certainly nothing impressive. I am also working on a new website for the NDLSC (currently www.lawschooldems.org)

As we await Hillary's speech tomorrow calling for unity and for her supporters to support Obama, will the Hillaryclinton.com blog be part of that unity action instead of merely promotion for Hillary 2012, Hillary as an independent candidate, an extension of McCain’s website, promotion of Obama the antichrist, and the winner of my medal for the best site for 1001 ways to thrash Obama!

Maybe you're thinkin', "That's not fair!  They shouldn't ban someone just because the title is a little off!?"  To these people, let me break the good news: as far as I know, it's not true.  I just made it up. It's a little something I like to call, a bait-and-switch headline.  It's also the real topic of this diary, which could've been called, "BAIT-AND-SWITCH HEADLINES SUCK."

Personally, I have been waiting for a moment like this since the Web began to be online, back in the early '90s.  I had been working in local grassroots political organizing in Austin, Tx through the '80s and saw that the Web had a great potential to overturn an obnoxious paradigm that had seized the Democratic Party and rendered it intellectually moribund nationally and at the state level by dismissing the grassroots organizers of a previous era in favor of high dollar experts.

I worked media, using skills from a former job as a weekly newspaper ink-stained wretch.  Most of this was unpaid, partly paid or theoretically almost paid until I had a brush with professional campaign consulting. Then I saw the problem that the Democratic Party would be paralyzed by for a long time up close and personnel.  I quit and ended up driving a cab.