I love the four other candidates in the Air America contest. They are all great bloggers and a couple of them I am delighted to call friends. This is an election, though, and I like competing in elections, so I thought I would give you reasons you should consider voting for me in spite of the high quality of my competitors. I am not going to call it my top ten reasons, because I might think of others later that are even better, but for today, here are ten:
1. Progressives fight for underdogs and I am a serious underdog in this race. The whole nature and mission of the progressive movement is to fight for the underdog, and I am a really serious underdog. The other bloggers have more traffic on their sites. Karl has the whole massive organization backing him up, for God’s sake. Digby is the huge favorite, because she is well, Digby. OpenLeft is just this modest little blog devoted to helping the movement get stronger, so I don’t have much of a natural base by comparison. And speaking of reasons for being an underdog…
2. I am an evil insider. I know, I know, this will actually be seen by many of you as a reason to vote against me. But here’s my argument: if I win this contest, I think it will give me added leverage with the insiders I am trying to push in a progressive direction. Right now, the people in DC who talk to me do so because they know me – I have worked with them on campaigns (issue and electoral), I have served on boards with them, I worked with them while in the White House. But if I am also seen as an influential blogger, it gives me that much extra leverage when I am leaning on them to move more to the left.
3. OpenLeft is an important blog and deserves attention. OpenLeft is one of the most important blogs in the progressive blogosphere, a place where important new projects get launched, other bloggers and movement leaders get influenced, DC insiders take notice, and progressives really engage each other in the debate. My winning this contest would really boost OpenLeft’s exposure to new readers.
4. I played a role in launching Air America and getting other progressive radio/TV hosts off the ground. A few short years ago, progressives had almost no presence in radio or cable talk. I am proud to have played a role in changing that for the better:
The 501(c)(4) organization I founded and chaired, American Family Voices, hosted a conference of progressive donors and strategists in the spring of 2002 where the idea of Air America got hatched.
I served on the board of Democracy Radio, a non-profit group that helped launch the Ed Schultz Show and other progressive radio shows.
Leo Hindery and I sent a memo to the top management at MSNBC in 2004 laying out the reasons and metrics of why they should go to more progressive talk, suggesting that with Fox dominating conservative Cable news viewers, and CNN taking most of the mushy middle, there would be a bigger audience potential if they had some strong progressive voices on the air. While our strategic ideas did not take hold immediately at the station, over time they became convinced we were right and began moving in that direction.
5. I have helped some other cool organizations get started:
MoveOn.org. Wes Boyd described me as the first insider who understood what MoveOn was trying to do, and who helped them in their early days.
Center For American Progress. I played a big role in the early days of launching CAP.
Progressive Majority. I was one of the three founding board members.
Ballot Initiative Strategic Center. Was a co-founder, housed them in my office, raised their initial seed money, and was the first chair.
USAction. Housed them in my office, and helped them get off the ground.
Americans United For Change. Was a founding board member.
Center for Progressive Leadership. Was a founding board member.
I am currently working with Darcy Burner to launch the Campaign For A Progressive Congress and the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, the new 501(c)(4) and PAC organizations that are working with the CPC.
6. I have been attacked by name by Rush Limbaugh at least 3 times. Once when I was working in the Clinton White House, once when AFV held a conference of progressive donors, and once when AFV did phone calls to Republicans about the Foley/page scandal. Pretty cool, huh?
7. I helped save school lunches. In early 1995, Newt Gingrich was on a rampage, getting much of the Contract With America passed through Congress without breaking much of a sweat. Democrats were demoralized and ineffectual in their initial response. The first issue we were able to put them on the defensive with and then beat them on was the school lunch issue. I was the White House point person for getting a coalition organized in opposition to the Republicans on that issue.
8. I got on the air one of the most effective ads against Bush in his first term. After 9-11, Democrats were generally scared for many months afterwards of going directly after Bush. But when he decided to go to Wall Street and give a speech on corporate elites, I couldn’t resist. I dug up some of the old records from Harken Energy and Haliburton, and did an AFV produced and paid for ad directly attacking Bush and Cheney for their hypocrisy on that whole corporate elite thing. The White House made the mistake of calling a press conference within 3 hours of our ad going up, and attacked it repeatedly, causing the cable and broadcast network news programs to run it repeatedly on and off for weeks afterward. The ad and the ensuing media flap drove Bush’s approval ratings down 15 points over the next 6 weeks, marking the low water mark for him before the 2002 elections, and giving momentum to get the Sarbanes-Oxley financial regulations bill passed.
9. Lord of the Right Wing. On December 17th, 2003, ironically on the 6th anniversary of the day voting ends in the Air America contest (is that fate or what?), a new PAC I founded launched one of the biggest political web videos of all time. (I bet you didn’t know that about me, did you?) Called Lord of the Right Wing, and released the same day as the 3rd Lord of the Rings movie, it was a cartoon of George Bush as a Gollum-like character grasping for power. It ended up getting over 8,000,000 views over the next few weeks.
10. I know when to stop. This post has gone on long enough. I hope I convinced you. Vote here.
In addition to your generosity, a number of people have stepped up to help us meet our costs at OpenLeft. Like debcoop, whose matching offer Chris wrote about today, and Raven Brooks w/Netroots Nation, whose Twitter offer I mentioned yesterday.
If you’re not able to give personally, I have two more folks who stepped up.
Tim Tagaris, a longtime friend of OpenLeft who worked for the Lamont campaign in 2006 and now is with SEIU, is giving $1 for each new Twitter follower up to 250 before midnight EST. He started at 1,120. He’s now at 1,155. That’s not a lot. Let’s bump it up. And trust me, he’s worth following.
The same goes for Robert Greenwald with Brave New Films and his generous offer. His Twitter feed is here.
If you’re on Twitter, two hours left to start following. We’re just over halfway towards our goal. Thanks to Tim and Robert, and thanks to you for helping us out.
This past summer, The Opportunity Agenda conducted a scan to determine the state of immigration advocacy on the social web, looking specifically at the following: blogs that frequently cover politics and reach a mass audience, Twitter, YouTube, and the two largest social networking sites (Facebook and MySpace). This research built on a similar scan we conducted in 2007.
Turning specifically to blogs, we found that while in 2007 major progressive-leaning blogs (including the DailyKos and others) were unsafe territory for immigration advocates. Today, however, the climate is much more receptive. Major progressive blogs discuss immigration, and the comments are usually constructive. Meanwhile, the pro-immigration-specific blogosphere is thriving. One such blog, Citizen Orange, counts well over 100 blogs actively advocating for practical immigration reform.
While the main point of our scan was to provide a snapshot of online immigration advocacy in the summer of 2009, our research did lead to a number of recommendations.
Update: Okay, it appears I completely misread this, and it’s a January list with the new Technorati rankings in parenthesis. Whoops. We still rock.
Technorati just updated its criteria for determining how they track and rank blogs. Here it is:
Because most searches are looking for items less than a month old, we’re going to narrow that window in a similar way. In the past, because the data window was so long, Authority and the Top 100 lists it powered were relatively static. With the new algorithm, the resulting Authority will better reflect the fast-changing nature of the blogosphere. Its new inherent volatility will also show which blogs are rising and falling in authority, rewarding authors on posting frequency, context and linking behavior, as well as other data inputs.
And as a result, TechPresident, a very respected blog whose writers work on meta-blogosphere issues out there, have released their new rankings… and OpenLeft falls at #35!
34. CQ Politics
35. Open Left 36. Hullabaloo (28)
I want to really emphasize a few things about this:
First, and most importantly, we would be nowhere without you, our readers. And nowhere without the lively comment discussions we have here. And as Chris said at our Netroots Nation caucus, nowhere without our lurkers! So let’s hear it for our lurkers! Woo!
There are hundreds if not thousands of political blogs out there- progressive, conservative, libertarian, whatever.
A lot of the blogs on the full list are institutionally-backed blogs, not independently-run and funded like ours. I see The Caucus from the NYTimes, ABC News’ Political Radar, ThinkProgress, Washington Wire from the Wall Street Journal. Many of their writers are paid on salary to do this full-time, with a steady income, funded by corporate ad revenue, foundation grants, etc. Here at OpenLeft, with the exception of Chris Bowers, and Matt Stoller when he was here, every single one of our front-page writers juggles OpenLeft with other jobs/responsibilities. And Matt/Chris were/are responsible for writing the bulk of content, day and night. I think it’s a testament to independently-run blogs that we’ve done so well.
In addition to that, running a blog is harder than it looks, particularly when you do action projects like we do. The writers on other blogs I mentioned have full-time staff to help with e-mail blast graphics and tech support when the site goes down and their writers don’t have to worry about fundraising. We don’t have any of that. Again, a testament to how possible it is to write independently and do well.
A little on our funding. Since I’ve only started writing full-time as of a month or two ago, a little background on me. Since we launched in July 2007, I’ve managed advertising and special joint revenue projects like the MoveOn/Rethink Afghanistan DVDs, SEIU, and so forth. Advertising revenue is way, way down, which we rely principally on. A lot of progressive institutional partners like Brave New Films, CREDO Action, SEIU and Friends of the Earth have been there for us, and I want to thank them. A lot of advertisers, too, like Rep. Alan Grayson, who is currently advertising in a Blogad spot, along with our other past advertisers. And you’ve been there for us, like during our fundraiser earlier this year that blew away our expectations. This is a big reason how we’ve kept the lights on.
Who knew we internet left fringers in pajamas could be so influential?!
So we’re proud of OpenLeft and I hope you are too. If you like what you read here, please consider chipping in to support our independent writing via the button below, or buy an independent DVD at the top of this page, or sign up to help SEIU’s health care campaign, also at the top. From all of us at OpenLeft, thanks for helping make us a top-50 political blog.
As many of you know, I’ve been writing about the marriage equality ballot initiative in Maine for some time. I’ve been writing about this campaign not only because I care as a gay man, but because I care about the broader progressive movement.
As I wrote here, I think a win or loss in Maine will have a profound impact on the LGBT movement. A loss will mean the right-wing is batting 1.000 on marriage initiatives since 2004- through constitutional amendments, Prop 8, and now this. It gives the haters something to go back to their right-wing funders with, it shapes the media narrative that the country isn’t “ready” for gay marriage. And it means couples will remain second-class citizens.
But I also think it will impact non-LGBT progressives. Here’s why:
I often hear the theory that issue movements are disconnected- that a win or loss on marriage equality has nothing to do with, say, a win or loss on climate change. Ergo, the straight individual living outside of Maine won’t be impacted by what happens in Maine. I don’t think that’s true.
The conservative movement is very interconnected. The right-wing foundation which funds anti-LGBT orgs also funds clean coal “studies”, right-wing press outlets, and more. A win on any of these issues keeps right-wing money flowing overall, while defeats help to interrupt right-wing resources in other areas. Resources won’t dry up, as there will always be die-hard activists, but they can lessen if there are across-the-board losses for conservatives on health care this fall, on marriage in Maine, on cap-and-trade later this year.
For our side, if we string losses together on issue after issue, it becomes demoralizing. It’s demoralizing to movement activists as well as to many donors and foundations. Doubtful? Think of how many people you know who said they haven’t felt so inspired- or even voted- since Kennedy in 1980, or McGovern in 1972, or even Kennedy in 1960, until Barack Obama. Winning and losing matters, and it matters across a multi-issue plain.
Because I believe in this inter-connectedness, and the critical nature Maine plays in a movement of which OpenLeft is a part, I’m going to travel to Maine next month to blog on the ground about the campaign. I’m traveling in conjunction with the New Organizing Institute’s National LGBT Blogger and Citizen Journalist Initiative, another critical part of our movement. I’ll be doing video interviews with key folks on the ground- including campaign staff, bloggers, traditional media, activists, and even a right-winger or two. I’ll be talking to local voters, and sending back lessons on the politics of marriage equality, something we’re going to be looking at here in DC very soon. I’m also hoping to explore how the campaign impacts progressives across the country, and shed a little light on Maine politics, including our favorite senior Senator there.
For this, I need to ask for your help.
As you know, such a venture has expenses, I’d like to ask for your support to help cover travel expenses (the rest will go to OpenLeft projects). I assure you that your dollars will be going to generating quality, interesting daily content here at OpenLeft on the Maine campaign, as well as instructive and productive lessons on our progressive movement overall. Between coming to the finish line on health care next month, getting a view from on the ground in Maine, and continuing to build an inside-outside progressive movement, I guarantee OpenLeft will be in its element.
When ACORN came under unprecedented attack last election cycle for our work bringing new low- and moderate-income voters of color into the electorate, Adam Bink, one of the editors there, reached out to our small online team and offered the resources of this vibrant progressive community to help us combat the firestorm of accusations and lies pushed by partisan activists.
He and people like Mike Lux, David Sirota, Chris Bowers, Natasha Chart, Matt Stoller, and Paul Rosenberg rearranged their priorities and gave their time to debunk the accusations and put the attacks and our work into context. Their advice was instrumental in helping ACORN build relationships with progressive bloggers and online activists, relationships that helped folks across the blogosphere contribute to our defense. Near the end of the entire saga, in response to a thank you video to the progressive online community that the Working Families Party produced with me, Digby said something that captures what I think is the essence of what happened in 2008. She said, “It’s beginning to feel like a movement.”
Well, it certainly felt like that to me too. And my involvement with the progressive online aspect of that movement all started with the OpenLeft community.
So when I found out that OpenLeft was facing a funding crisis (and I know a few things about facing fundraising crises as the CEO of a poor people’s organization) I knew I had to help. So I did. When ACORN was being attacked, OpenLeft stood up. Now its our turn. When OpenLeft is in trouble, ACORN will always have its back.
But you need to help too. OpenLeft is too important to the progressive movement to be allowed to fail.
If you believe that there is a need for a space that offers deep progressive analysis of both policy and politics, then you need to give.
If you believe that there is a need for a space that offers cogent analysis of the changing electorate and its potential impact on progressive public policy, then you need to give.
If you believe that there needs to be a place dedicated to holding elected officials accountable for their promises around progressive public policy, then you need to give.
If you believe there needs to be a space where progressives can discuss long-term goals, strategies and tactics outside of the short-term urgency of specific campaigns or elections, then you need to give.
Because the truth is that, while there are many sites that do some of these things very well, there are practically none that do them all and do them all so well. And that’s probably the biggest reason that you need to give.
Credit conditions really did improve post-bailout, rather than get worse as it looked like they might have. The right thing to do is keep the crosshairs where they belong – on George W. Bush and Hank Paulson who decided to implement their recapitalization scheme in an irresponsible manner. Normally, when you “inject capital” into an enterprise you get a share of the action – board seats, voting shares, etc. – not just a dividend. That way, the public’s representatives would have had a way to ensure that the public interest was safeguarded as banks played with the public’s money. But Bush and Paulson care more about ideological correctness (free market!) and helping their buddies (Goldman!) than they do about safeguarding the public interest. Since there was no way to bring an alternative, less horrible administration to power back in October, I see no real alternative to doing something and then letting Bush and Paulson implement it poorly.
This is a widely held view, and I’m not sure it’s wrong. Credit is alive; when you use a credit card it works, and if the bailout hadn’t passed we could have been in a situation where ATMs and credit cards would have stopped working. It was that dangerous. Still, it’s worth comparing the bailout position to what would have happened had Congress refused to pass a bailout. Let’s just say for the sake of argument that Bush and Congress couldn’t agree on a package, and that nothing – the worst case scenario – came to fruition. Poof, ATMs and credit cards stop working.
What happens then? As Dean Baker noted at the time, the Federal Reserve would simply have nationalized the banks and provided credit. Credit cards and ATMs turn back on in a few hours or a day or so, there’s some damage, but now the Fed has control of the banking system. And then Congress could actually deliberate about what to do, and present President-elect Obama with the authority to actually fix the problem. That would have been the right way to deal with the crisis, instead of giving Paulson $700 billion which he is clearly distributing to his buddies.
It’s hard to describe the amount of damage this kind of overt abuse does to a nation. There’s a tremendous loss of confidence in our system of government, and as government is the only entity that can get us through the next several years, that’s a huge problem. So yes, I suppose the bailout worked to keep the credit markets functioning, just as the invasion of Iraq certainly removed Saddam Hussein. He really isn’t a threat to the world anymore, though the world is a much more dangerous place because of the invasion.
Floyd Norris quotes a GE spokesperson saying something amazing.
It was yesterday that General Electric said it would borrow through the Federal Reserve’s new credit facility when it opens for business next week.
Bloomberg quotes a G.E. spokesman as follows: “This is our way to demonstrate our support for what the Fed is doing, which is providing all around liquidity.”
So accepting welfare is now a feature, not a bug. Got it.
Even as McCain is pulling out of Wisconsin and New Hampshire, the Bush administration is working aggressively to get what they can while they still can get it. Bailout Sleuth reports again that the Treasury is blacking out more contracts, this time with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and Ernst & Young.
Bailout Sleuth also reports that Ernst & Young was the auditor for Lehman Brothers, and both Ernst and Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers worked for AIG. Ernst and Young in fact paid $1.6M in penalties to the SEC for because it “violated independent auditing standards in connection with work” associated with AIG (and PNC Financial). Fortunately, firms can recuse themselves if they feel it necessary.
There’s amazing work being done all over the sphere, from Josh Marshall’s unbelievably important tracking of robocalls and voter suppression to the fundraising against Michelle Bauchman to the work to beat back Prop 8 in California. On Wall Street, though, it looks like they are gearing up for one last party. Apparently those executive pay caps the bailout supposedly put on these banks aren’t working so well.
Financial workers at Wall Street’s top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year – despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.
Staff at six banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are in line to pick up the payouts despite being the beneficiaries of a $700bn bail-out from the US government that has already prompted criticism. The government’s cash has been poured in on the condition that excessive executive pay would be curbed…
At one point last week the Morgan Stanley $10.7bn pay pot for the year to date was greater than the entire stock market value of the business. In effect, staff, on receiving their remuneration, could club together and buy the bank…
None of the banks the Guardian contacted wished to comment on the record about their pay plans. But behind the scenes, one source said: “For a normal person the salaries are very high and the bonuses seem even higher. But in this world you get a top bonus for top performance, a medium bonus for mediocre performance and a much smaller bonus if you don’t do so well.”
Many critics of investment banks have questioned why firms continue to siphon off billions of dollars of bank earnings into bonus pools rather than using the funds to shore up the capital position of the crisis-stricken institutions. One source said: “That’s a fair question – and it may well be that by the end of the year the banks start review the situation.”
The game here is rigged, of course. I’m hearing rumors of talent transfers to Dubai, London and Hong Kong. The fashion world is probably not far behind, since they are tethered to making beautiful status symbols for the hyperwealthy, and those wealthy will no longer be in America. Next year, banks will dramatically reduce bonuses, I’m sure. But that’s because the real money will be made abroad, and New York City’s economy will be devastated.
Here are your answers to the survey I set up a few days ago.
Do you support this bailout?
69% 295 No
31% 131 Yes
Do you think the Democrats pushed hard enough for concessions?
40% 172 No, and shame on them for not getting more.
48% 206 No, they had more leverage than they used.
12% 50 Yes, ultimately, this legislation just had to go through.
Do you think that Congresspeople who voted for this bailout deserve primary challengers?
20% 87 Yes, this was a total betrayal.
40% 173 Coupled with other bad votes, yes
6% 25 No, this was a good vote.
34% 144 Not really, it was a tough call.
Do you approval of the job that Nancy Pelosi is doing as Speaker of the House?
68% 289 No
9% 39 No Opinion
23% 99 Yes
Do you trust Barack Obama?
23% 100 I don’t know
21% 90 No
56% 238 Yes
Are you interested in supporting primary challengers to incumbent Democrats in 2010?
19% 82 I don’t know
8% 32 No
73% 312 Yes
We’ve been noticing something really weird on our site recently. For the past month, our traffic has been spiking to near record levels, but there have been no blogads. We have lots of readers, but no advertisers. I don’t know exactly why, but I have a theory. Lots of ad purchasing on blogs is done in packages put together by progressive groups that fetishize Obama. We are critical of progressive groups that fetishize Obama, therefore they don’t buy on us. This isn’t true of all groups, but it’s true of enough so that we are left off of lists or just never added.
So anyway, I’m hoping that you will make up some of the difference by contributing a few bucks. Think of it as buying a more skeptical media rather than one that lies to you. We’ve got some neat things in store.
If you want to give recurring monthly donations, you can give here.
If you give, we’ll set up a security perimeter to protect you from this sleeper cell.
Update: Ok, the
contribution page is fixed. You can now give non-recurring donations.
Back in May, we did a fundraiser for OpenLeft, and 210 of you sent us a total of $11,198. I think it’s time you get a report of where we’ve put some of that cash, and even some context stacking us against superlobbyists so you can (partially) judge the value.
Update: for more context on why this is important, please see Amy Alexander’s The Color Line Online in The Nation
We’re now at the midpoint of our first, more-leisurely-than-anticipated mutual guest blogging series. Thanks to Melissa McEwan, Sara Robinson, Pam Spaulding, and rikyrah for their time, energy, and extraordinary posts. In retrospect, our original plan of getting all the posts on OpenLeft and the mutual posts on the guest bloggers’ blogs all in one week was a little over-ambitious. Oh well, live and learn.
Another thing that didn’t go as planned was that we didn’t stick narrowly to the initial topic.* Pam and the Jack and Jill Politics folks both said they’d like to take a more forward-looking approach than in our framing. Since our primary goal is diversity of voices on the front page, I said “sure.” Apologies to all for not having communicated this better, and thanks to desmoinesdem, sb, dr anonymous, and Paul for their replies when plukasiak brought this up in rikyrah’s thread. Apologies also to any who see this as resulting in false advertising, biased discourse, or disrespectful towards the concern of feminists/womanists; that wasn’t the intent, but I can see how it could look that way. OpenLeft readers had said they wanted to hear from these bloggers, and I thought their proposed subjects related well to the initial theme. Was this the right decision? If not, what should I have done? It’s a good discussion for the comments. On the communications, all I can say is “oops”.
STATE BLOGS
