Wondering which lying brands to boycott? An answer

Wishes come true, sometimes. Today while driving I idly wondered how to put pressure on the backers of the lying liars on Fox News. Hmm, how to organize a boycott of the advertisers …

An hour later I’m home and browsing my email and here’s one from Democrats.com (The “Aggressive Progressives,” they call themselves. This is close to but NOT the Democratic Party, which uses the .org suffix). They have an email form that sends a blast to all the advertisers and tells them I’m not buying their stuff while they advertise on Fox News.

Bingo, I’m signed up. Here’s the list of advertisers as of Aug. 9, i.e. yesterday.

Some of these may be kinda hard to separate from my daily life, like AARP, Apple, Brita Filter, Nexium, US Postal Service (!). But I’m gonna start NOW.

Current Advertisers (8/9/09)
60Plus.org
AARP Insurance
Accu Chek Aviva
ADT Security
Ally Bank (allybank.com)
Apple
Avodart
Brita Filter
Broadbive Security
Conservatives for Patients Rights
Ditech (ditech.com)
Forex.com
Golden Corral
Healthy Choice
HSBC Life Insurance
Mens Warehouse
Mercedes-Benz
Metastock
Nexium
Pepboys
Radio Shack
Rapid Wash
Red Lobster
Sargento Cheese
Super8 motels (super8.com)
Superior Gold Group
United Healthcare Insurance
United States Postal Service
Wallstreet Journal
Weitz&Luxemburg

Check it out. There’s already a fairly long list of advertisers who have given up on Fox News. In fact, this campaign has been going on for quite a while. Gulp. uh, when do we win?

We have to take the view that all this is commercial. The lies, the network that blasts them out, the advertisers who pay too much to have their message associated with the lies – all commercial ventures. We have to take our commercial steps, too, in addition to our voting, community organizing, sign-making, demonstrating, thinking.

Be a Bold Progressive. Take the pledge

I did it. I'm going to pass it around, too. The prospect of having a pretty good president come November but a Congress full of Liebermans and Hoyers is keeping me awake at night.

Along comes Matt Stoller on his blog, Open Left, with a timely idea to help me sleep better. And he has allies in the blogosphere.

The idea is to have lots of people sign a pledge to demand bold progressive policies from the next U.S. government. Here's the link to the pledge.

This is the link to the Open Left post on this project.

I'm going to pop this up on the Florida Progressive Coalition blog, too, if it's not up already, and maneuver it onto Facebook, as suggested on Open Left.

There's a little box at the bottom of the pledge-signing form that asks the signer to say what progressive means. My comment was that it would probably mean fighting Obama over Afghanistan. Which is fit to become another occupation.

Tuesday progressive panels in Big Tent at Denver

There’s a tremendous amount of progressive stuff going on around the convention in Denver and much is pointed at the bloggers. The Big Tent, where the bloggers are concentrated, has an upstairs hall where panels lay plans and speculate hopefully about the new world around the corner in an Obama administration.

Here are some notes from Tuesday afternoon’s panels under the rubric of Take Back America (check out ourfuture.org).

U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-IL, beat the drum hard for universal health care, pointing out it was the main complaint she heard canvassing voters in the ultimately successful drive to put a Democrat in the Illinois seat held by former Speaker Dennis Hastert. The result, she said disproved the old nostrum that politicians didn’t care about the issue because “no politician ever has lost for being against universal health care.”

“Sixty people a day die for lack of health insurance,” she said.

Barack Obama must be backed by a movement of people demanding universal health care to make it happen, she said.

U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee of California said the modest progress in Congress on the Iraq war issue is entirely due to relentless pressure from the progressive community, which must strive to become the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn, outlined three main tasks for MoveOn, which was well represented in the audience:

• Keep telling the story of the Iraq war, how it started and why it may be ending, never giving up on the judgment that it was “fundamentally wrong.”
• Elect Obama.
• After victory in November, keep pushing.
  
• In a Q-A session afterward, I had the first question, asking him to explain why he hadn’t mentioned Afghanistan in the context of this country’s foreign problems. Pariser said Afghanistan simply didn’t have a broad mandate from MoveOn members, and it was something to keep under consideration.
  
  Asked about media reform, Pariser said this was a huge concern among MoveOn members, who object to the increasing concentration of media ownership and are passionate about net neutrality.
  
  Former U.S. Rep. David Bonior made a strong plea for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which makes it easier to form unions.
  
  Arianna Huffington, co-founder of Huffington Post, declared that the American public is shifting in its political views. “This is a progressive country now,” she said.
  
  Talking about building progressive infrastructure, she said new media had several important tasks, among them:
• “Define the new center.”
• “Build communities around it.”
• Media should have a light side as well as serious analysis and comment, to attract those who want to follow celebrities and to help people live without stress.
  
  Her big mission: “Relentlessly pursue the truth about John McCain.”
  

Playing for keeps: progressive strategy

Thanks to a brief intro on DailyKos that caught my eye, here is the latest rendition by our gurus, the NDN gang of Simon Rosenberg and Peter Leyden (the rest of the NDN gang is Joe Garcia), of their vision of the future. It's like 1932, and we're embarking on a half-century of government by the good guys. Check out their article in Mother Jones.

We will be required to work like dogs (quoting Debbie Wasserman Schultz) to win the elections along the way, but otherwise the cards are stacked in our favor.

To learn more details, drop in on the ndn.org web site and be prepared to stay and study for a while.

And if you are dubious about their guru status, I refer you to "The Argument," the recent book by Matt Bai, about progressive politics since the '04 election.

Florida Progressive Radio -- again

Trying to help introduce new stuff, here's another promo for Florida Progressive Radio -- available on the Internet, and the link here is to the already-archived program on Sunday July 29, during which your faithful blogger was the first caller.

Listeners will hear that your blogger approves of being nimble in political campaigning -- that is, reacting quickly, being proactive, letting no moss grow. The reference is to the blogging done by Michael Calderin and Christian Chiari, both candidates for the Florida House of Representatives, reacting to news that the Republicans in Miami-Dade County were holding lavish fund-raising spectacles this weekend. This link takes you to my post earlier this weekend on this topic.

Since then there has been further evidence of nimble thinking: Dave Patlak, pictured in that earlier post, organized a protest at the site of the Republican gross excess in South Beach. He reports that Marco Rubio, speaker of the state House of Representatives, descended from his tour bus and opined that Big Dave had a perfect right to mount a protest. Thank you, Your Majesty!

Radio blogging

Florida progressives are even more widespread than the R-side fears -- now on blog radio. Here's the link to the main website. There's a bunch of programs already up from the first appearance some weeks back. The most recent one, only 15 minutes long, features a Biblical critique of Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jim Naugle. Access it at this link. There will be laughing. And you don't need a radio to listen. Can be a podcast.

Home-grown progressive radio in Florida

There's yet another progressive radio show in Florida. Not Air America by any means, but heck, it's one more way to hear good guys and the better ideas. Here's a link to the first show.

Now my friends, give the guys a break for the first couple minutes. They were unrehearsed and not radio pros. (Like this blog ...) But after some test test test, they got it rolling.

And if you go to the Florida Progressives' blog you'll see some background to how it got started.

Blinded by Charlie’s light?

Some people seem to think that our Republican governor is such a mensch that everything will be OK. We’re forgetting that he had a running mate, and in fact while Charlie has been basking in approval, the other guy made quite a booboo. It was rumored for days in the blogosphere, and finally emerged into print in Thursday’s Miami Herald.

Here's a link to one of the blogosphere reports.

It was the Florida Progressive Coalition that did most of the detective work, so it gets an extra star for good effort.

Now, what's this about? The Republicans will claim some doofus ignorance about the "internets," as W says, or "the tubes," as the elderly Alaska senator for life says. But what was happening here was a little censorship. A Republican official (the lt. governor) editing out some unflattering personal information about himself. And doing it on a public forum where editing is only supposed to be done by qualified persons -- certainly not the subject of the critical item.