Vote for the Netroots awards

Have you? The link is right here. This blog, you'll see, is among the nominees.

Call the governor on voting bill in Tallahassee

I just did it and the staffer said she'd be glad to pass it along.

There's a story out that Gov. Crist is thinking of vetoing this retrograde bill, and now is the time to encourage him in that direction.

Call 850 488-4441.

Facebook and emails are alive with concern about the Republican drive to restrict voting rights -- and solidify Florida as the laughingstock of the nation. It's wonderful to see the Netroots in action!

Parade Magazine joins the Netroots parade

Parade Magazine may have been around longer than God. The epitome of old hat, Parade sometimes gets tossed unread in my house. This week I glanced at the cover and started to open and read the cover story about the way cyberspace is on the leading edge of politics and political campaigning. Well, there wasn't anything new to me, but here's the link in case you want to check it out.

You'll note that our old friend Simon Rosenberg of NDN is quoted as the authority on what's up.

Best line at FDP convention goes to Dan Gelber

My convention was fun and interesting. Not like my first, two years ago, when Howard Dean, John Edwards, Barack Obama, Mark Warner and Tom Vilsack were strong orators, stirring the crowd and displaying the strength that the Democrats would present for the 2008 election. It was still only 2005 then, but it was already clear how badly the Republicans were leading this beloved country, and what an opportunity it was for us in the ’06 midterms and the ’08 presidential elections.

I made up my mind then as to who was the best presidential candidate. This blog, however, is neutral, and you have to know me personally to see whose button is on my shirt. I haven’t changed my mind. I’m laying this out so the reader will understand why I’m not upset that the Democratic candidates are staying away from Florida. I don’t need any more information to make up my mind. Those who gnash their teeth about the supposed lack of attention paid to Florida are wasting their dental enamel. Florida will NOT be ignored. Its needs WILL be met. Even if the candidates stay away right up until November 2008, Florida is too important to be left out of the federal budget or limelight. Squealing and wailing is, to me, a sign of insecurity.

The Florida delegation at the Denver nominating convention will be seated, one way or another, and their votes and our votes in the primary will count. I confess to feeling annoyed when the media report that the Florida primary will all be in vain, or votes won’t count, or even that they won’t be counted.

Sorry, this is a Rovian conspiracy to keep Democrats from voting. The Republicans always are trying to get Democrats to stay away, and this entire affair has been a Karlish trick to drive down Democratic participation in the Jan. 29 election. For a while, they were trying to slip some wild property tax change through as a referendum, but now it looks as if they have screwed it up too badly for that to happen. We’ll know for certain about this by Monday night, when the legislature must pass something to get it on the ballot by Jan. 29.

That area (the budget and taxation) needs more careful consideration than something slammed together behind closed doors and presented at the deadline – though that’s the way the Jebbian party operated for eight years, so we must be careful that it doesn’t happen again.

So my appeal goes like this: Please, stop suing others in the Democratic Party. Please, stop shooting ourselves in the foot. Instead, be united as Democrats. Concentrate our fire on Republicans.

A little ridicule is good. Here I’m taking Dan Gelber as my model, and I see that his raking comments at the convention were picked up by the media. Let the Republican candidates campaign in Florida as much as they like, the leader of the state House minority Democrats said.

“The truth is, the Republicans are here almost in excess,” the Orlando Sentinel quoted him as saying in his Saturday speech. “You see these Republican candidates everywhere. And the more you hear about them and see them, the less you like them.”

The Miami Herald picked out a different line from Gelber’s speech: “All they do is trash our candidates and pander to their base,” he was quoted as saying. “I think we should keep them in the state of Florida as much as possible.”

The Herald also opined that the posters distributed for Gelber's speech were “deliberately ambiguous” in that they said he was running “for Senate” without saying exactly that he is running for the state Senate. Wow, it could also mean the U.S. Senate, and the bumbler incumbent, Mel Martinez, will be up in 2010.

The plot thickens. And lengthens.

As we speculate on that, let’s follow Karen Thurman’s admonition. Concentrate on building the grass roots, the state party chair said.

And we have the wisdom of our own Miami-Dade County veteran, Maria Roberts: “I feel very positive about building the Democratic Party, and that’s what this convention is all about,” the Herald quoted her as saying.

To that end, the netroots gang showed up 60 strong for a series of workships Saturday afternoon on how to do a better blog, a better website, how to organize an on-line community, how to be a candidate with an on-line presence. We're at the heart of the Florida Democratic Party now, and we need to continue getting ready to we can pounce into action when the nominee becomes known -- February, shall we say?

UPDATE: This post vaulted to the front page of the Florida Politics blog Monday morning. Check it out at this link. And read on there, too. Florida Politics performs a valuable service in summarizing what's happening, what's reported, in our political scene.

EVEN MORE: The Netroots blog has more detail here on the Netroots workshops. A lot of good information was transmitted, and we could watch in awe as the tech experts made those laptops work.

Very proud blogger

Kenneth Quinnell presents the "best professional blog" award to Larry Thorson

Your blogger is back from the Florida Democratic Party convention with some loot -- an award from the party's Netroots Coalition for the "best professional blog." Don't let yourself think that this blogging is lucrative, and thus the word professional. No, in that sense, I'm back in the pre-Avery-Brundage era of unpaidness. This is blogging for the love of it and love of good Democrats.

Thanks so much to those of you who joined the drive to stuff the ballot box -- you did it!

State blogs are flourishing

Thanks to the Florida Netroots for pointing out the great diary on DailyKos summarizing the growing state blogs around the USA. This is highly recommended reading for those like me who didn’t have a clue about blogs a year ago. And now I are one. You can be, too.

Texas is one of the examples. We all think Texas is such a red state that it's impossible. But in fact, Democrats only need to take a half-dozen seats to take control of the state House. Blogs may make it happen.

And have you considered joining the Florida Netroots? What is/are netroots, you ask? It’s the grassroots on the internet, and if you’re using email to assist your political activities and doing research online, you’re already part of the netroots. So why not see what its most avid practitioners are talking about? Oh, no, you say, I don’t want to get any more email. This may only mean two or three a day. Go ahead, sign up. You can always unsubscribe if you must. Here’s where you do it. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/floridanetroots/join

New Name for YearlyKos in '08

It was the second YearlyKos, and the last. Surprise, surprise. About two thousand people heard it from the lips of the founder Saturday evening and stopped breathing for a second – Wait a minute! We’re having the best time of our progressive lives at this convention of bloggers/netroots activists, and never again?

The Kos of Daily and YearlyKos, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, was giving the closing keynote address to the meeting, and he laid the news out in the first words of his speech. A feeling of drama rose and then was resolved in the next sentence: The name will change. Next year it will be the Netroots Nation Convention.

This may not help the wider world comprehend what’s going on. New language, my friends. New actors. Remember, this is life out here, political life mixed in with technological life, and all aspects of it are changing. Last year at the first YearlyKos in Las Vegas, one top Democrat turned up; this year in Chicago seven of the eight Democratic presidential contenders spoke at a debate forum before a crowd that had not been constrained at all by no-applause rules. Need a standing ovation? This is the crowd to give it.

You may still be trying to figure out what Kos means, and next up is netroots. I can tell you that Kos is just short for Markos, and that the founder is 35, born in Chicago, raised partly in El Salvador, back in the U.S. and into the US Army after high school, educated up to a law degree, founded the website in 2002, married with two kids.

Netroots is some combination of the Internet and grassroots, and there’s a big component of activism in true netroots. In Florida there’s a network of people trying to grow awareness and effectiveness of statewide netroots, and I try on this Miami-Dade Democratic Party blog to dip into and learn about the Florida netroots. Coming to Chicago and the YearlyKos was part of my education. I’m not sure whether I’m getting an A or a C in this course, so I’m going to stop pontificating here and let some of Markos Moulitsas’ speech roll out. (Don't forget dailykos.com for more news.)

“… we’re activists. We don’t do silence. …

“I’m given a great deal of credit for our movement’s success. But let’s be brutally honest – what I’ve done is... build a website.

“Let me say that again – my chief accomplishment the past five years has been building a website.

“I simply provided a safe haven for progressives to meet ... and then a beautiful thing happened.

“Without my planning or prodding, You started organizing.

“You started talking to each other and deciding, on your own, to take charge of your politics.

“You began a conversation about the direction of our country. …

“You decided that it was no longer enough to watch a 30-second political ad, or simply to hit the polls on Election Day.

“You realized that our nation wasn’t going to fix itself. We couldn’t depend on our Democratic Party to save us.

“The media was AWOL.

“We shared a common disgust at the irrelevance of our once proud party and its allied organizations. …”

“Then technology changed everything.

“Whether it was blogs, or podcasting, or social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, or MoveOn, or YouTube, people quickly adopted myriad communication technologies emerging from the web and turned them to political purposes.

“Millions did so.

“And while individually we were still nobodies, together, we became ... somebody. A very important somebody.

“And that makes some people very uncomfortable.

“Like David Broder. Joe Klein Robert Novak. Bill O’Reilly

“Echoing what so many of his colleagues think, Bill Kristol on Fox News was outraged that anyone would take us seriously. He called me a “left-wing blogger who was not respectable three or four years ago.’

“And he was right. In their world, I wasn’t ‘respectable.’ None of us were. …

“As our good friend Atrios likes to say, We weren’t "very serious people."

“You see, we weren’t stupid and gullible enough to fall for the administration’s lies on Iraq.

“Those ‘respectable’ people couldn’t stop praising Bush for being "bold," and "resolute".

“They fueled what has now become the biggest foreign policy debacle in American history. …

“They said us crazy bloggers were pushing the party to the left, and that our increasing influence would doom Democrats to electoral defeat in 2006 and beyond.

“David Brooks in The NY Times wrote in 2005 that thanks to bloggers – those rabid flying venomous sheep - Democrats would be sure to carry just Berkeley for decades to come.

“Many Democrats nodded along in agreement.

Did we listen? No. …

“Of course we’re not going to listen.

“We learned to tune out the likes of David Broder and Joe Klein years ago. But what’s amazing is that we’re no longer alone.

While we were once lonely voices on the outside, people on the inside have discovered that we’re not so scary after all, that they don’t need to fear us.

“We’ll get our hands dirty. We’ll deliver results. And they’ve learned that, quite frankly,
We tend to have a habit of actually being right about things.”

“Still, there’s a lot more to this movement than being right. The hallmark of this movement is the leaders it generates.

“It’s a movement that continuously refreshes itself, taking advantage of its democratizing infrastructure to give anyone with the right idea and passion a chance to change the world.

“It’s a world in which the gatekeepers in the traditional media, political and activist establishments can be easily bypassed.

“It doesn’t matter whether the elite think we are respectable or not. They have no right to judge us.

“It is those leaders – YOU -- who are changing your country.

“Me? I’m just a guy who built a website.

“Just a year ago, we were a freakish curiosity. I stood before you at the first YearlyKos conference and declared that we had arrived.

“People snickered and mocked me. Those reporters at the back of the room. They were laughing at me. They were laughing at us.

“But then Ned Lamont kicked Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic Party.

“And how about people-powered Jon Tester and Jim Webb?

“We helped recruit them into the race, helped them win tough primary races, and pushed them over the finish line.

“It was fitting that their early-morning razor-thin victories – those victories that the netroots fueled -- gave Democrats control of the Senate.

“In the House, dozens of candidates with strong netroots support won their races, others came shockingly close.

“In Massachussetts, the people-powered movement helped elect the state’s first African American governor, Deval Patrick.

“And suddenly, we were no longer a curiosity. We are effective.

“We delivered victories that were born of our passionate political conversations.

“And now?

“We are a full-fledged partner in the progressive coalition.

We have gathered here in my hometown, Chicago, to celebrate not just with ourselves,
but with our allies in the labor movement, our friends in the issue groups, and our party leadership. …

“Earlier today, we had a conversation with the next president of the United States of America.

“Like any movement, we are maturing. We threw stones, got people’s attention, and
perhaps a bit surprisingly, they listened.

“That early hostility – based on substantive differences – is now giving way to new respect and trust.

None of us in this new coalition – the netroots activists, the issue groups, the party officials – None of us can win on our own. And we don’t need to. We have each other.

“And yet, seeing all that we’ve accomplished, I still can’t believe that this all started with a bunch of frustrated progressives hacking away at computer keyboards.

“I’m often asked if I knew what I was doing when I first started Daily Kos.

“Of course not. I’m not that smart. This was never my intent. It wasn’t some brilliant master plan.

“I had no idea that our country was full of natural leaders, all looking for a way to get involved.

“I simply built a website. It was you who built the netroots.

“And together all of us will build a true progressive America.”