Well, it's happened. I've been invited into the rarefied stable of Huffington Post bloggers. There are only six of us there. Or several hundred. I can't remember.
I wrote up a piece on the conservative blogosphere's reaction to a new report outta the Center for American Progress and Free Press' on how and why there are several thousand conservatives on talk radio and just like three liberals. Hope you'll have a look.
Thursday night was the annual benefit for the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, and a reminder of the tradition centered around Martin Luther King Jr. that DMI comes out of. (The very name "Drum Major Institute" comes from a quote of MLK's, something about "if you want to call me a drum major, call me a drum major for justice." Honestly, I'm still not quite sure what it means.) One of the evening's hosts was DMI's Bill Wachtel, whose father Harry founded the Drum Major Institute and was an advisor to MLK. And the evening's blessing of sorts was delivered by the former (?) minister at the Riverside Church, the same church where MLK delivered his famed speech on Vietnam.
The honorees were newly-Independent NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Tavis Smiley. Smiley couldn't make it -- he had an important appointment with Jay Leno -- and so Dr. Cornel West accepted his award for him. A couple poorly-lit photos and a video clips. First up, Mayor Mike from the side:
This photo may well stink, but there's something I like about it. It's the shoes of three of the four Bolanos brothers, the only four brothers to all fight in Vietnam, just after they introduced Bill Richardson at Take Back America down in DC last week. Under their chairs was pretty much the only place on stage I could get decent lighting.
The vast TPM (Talking Points Memo) Media empire sent a representative in the form of Andrew Golis to the 4th anniversary party of Drinking Liberally at Rudy's in NYC. Andrew and the TPM team put together a video detailing why it's so important that progressives and liberals get together in a safe space and drink beers, not only in New York City but in some 200 plus chapters across the country. In the midst of the revelry, Andrew managed to interview many of the people there that night. I'm in the video a bit, as are Katrina Baker of Living Liberally, Philip Anderson of the Albany Project, Kombiz Lavasany of the UFT/DNC, and others. Have a look:
Back in college I spent a few days in the Mathare Valley that's the setting for what we're hearing about the Kenyan Police's crackdown on the Mungiki sect. I think I probably think of that place every day. The stories I've read so far don't convey the full scope of the bleakness of Mathare, but this from a woman named Clarice King gets close:
I can recall some college students from New Jersey who visited us in the Valley in 1996. As we took them into the area where our Project is located, one of the young women began to weep. As we went further down into the Valley, her weeping turned into uncontrollable sobs as she passed piles of garbage like miniature mountains. Unattended animals, toddlers, children, and adults were rummaging through these garbage heaps. What a shock it was to her, as it was to me on my first visit. A putrid, foul odor is ever present because of the garbage piles and the open sewer trenches filled with animal and human waste. These flow everywhere and seem to encircle each dwelling place. A pastor who has a church within the Valley took an individual who lives in Nairobi to visit one of his projects. As the visitor was leaving she said to him, "I would rather die than live here."
Nope, wasn't me weeping. But I was standing next to the woman who was. And while maybe I didnt' show it, I was pretty much completely devastated. I wrote in my journal that night that to know that someone could live and die in a place like Mathare made it a much different world than the one I thought I knew.
Man, I don't like to self-horn toot, but I'm just so pleased about this: the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy has seen fit to name me to its Netroots Advisory Council. I think the Drum Major Institute is just awesome. The goal of the Netroots Advisory Committee is to "find new ways to tap into the wisdom and energy of the netroots to enrich the public debate about the policies that shape our lives." Hope I can be of some help.
I don't know who left the door open, but somehow I've been allowed to join an amazing lineup of signatories to a letter encouraging the FCC to promote competition and protect open networks as they auction off the really desirable 700 MHz chunk of radio spectrum that's coming back to the govmint control in 2009 as part of the great national switchover to digital television. I wrote about spectrum reform here. In short, a good spectrum auction would fix all of America's problems.
The bodies are no longer being dragged from houses and buildings toppled by Hurricane Katrina, but nearly two years later many in the medical community think the storm is still killing. Storm survivors are dying from the effects of both psychological and physical stress, from the dust and mold still in dwellings to financial problems to fear of crime, health experts and officials say.
Yeah, I know. What I should be directing my ire toward is the conditions that led to this mess and the incompetence that made it so destructive. But it's easier to hate the weather.
Joe Green is one of two partners at Project Agape, which is the group behind the new Facebook Causes app that was released last week (?). With Causes, any of Facebook's 20 million users can direct cash and volunteers to their favorite non-profit group. Joe's been trying to crack the puzzle of how social networks can be used in the political context for a while now, ever since he discovered field organizing work and Friendster at roughly the same time. I had the chance to interview Joe this weekend for my MyDD Hearing Progressive Voices series. We went deep, all the way back to how his love of politics is connected to Hubert Humphrey's suitcase:
My grandfather got me interested in politics. He had grown up very poor in Minnesota, a Jewish guy who sold Christian bibles door-to-door to pay for night law school. He got to be friends with [Hubert] Humphrey when he was mayor of Minneapolis. Minneapolis was a very anti-semitic place. Humphrey worked to change that. When he got elected to Senate, Humphrey did not have much money. The only luggage he had was cardboard so my grandfather and his law partners bought him his first real set of luggage and sent him off to Washington. I like that image of politicians without a lot of money.
Won't you go on and have a read? (I'm working on getting better at asking people to read my stuff. Think my approach still needs quite a bit of work.)
