Watch blog, anyone? Here they come.

This will be two days in a row that I'm touting work by Ken Quinnell, but here goes. During the YearlyKos convention of bloggers in Chicago, one new wrinkle that came up was called a watch blog. It's a blog that focuses on a politician's actions and analyzes them. More likely, it focuses on an office-holder and points up his/her foibles.

Suddenly, we've got a bunch of watch blogs in South Florida -- all over the state, in fact, aimed at Republicans in Congress and state government.

Look at eyeonileana.blogspot.com. Target is U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, District 18.

Or thelincolnobserver.blogspot.com. Target is U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, District 21.

Or his brother Mario Diaz-Balart, at saynotomario.blogspot.com. Mario Diaz-Balart is U.S. Rep. for District 25.

The three are the Republicans who, thanks to having redistricted so many Democratic-leaning voters into the two other congressional districts in Miami-Dade County, are re-elected with comfortable majorities. The two Democrats representing the county in the U.S. House, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Kendrick Meek, are re-elected unopposed -- in effect wasting many thousands of Democratic voters who could topple one or more of the three Republicans.

These three watch blogs are signs that the Republicans won't have it so easy in 2008. The docile mainstream Miami media (dmMm), which doesn't bother to cover Congressional races and then wonders why Congress is so little respected, will have grassroots contention. The people want respectable representation, along with the good government that might ensue.

Thank you, Ken Quinnell, for creating the three watch blogs and all the others that offer chances to post news and analyses that the members of Congress would rather not hear. He also created watch blogs for the Republicans in the state Cabinet, and Sen. Mel Martinez, as well as the other Republicans in Florida's U.S. House delegation.

Now it's up to local activists to announce themselves to Quinnell, declare their Democratic credentials, and start posting news and analysis as it becomes available. Check those blogs: they have clear directions on how to get started.

Is it difficult to be a blogger? Not especially, though it's new and there are some technical tricks to master. Anyone who can do email and word-processing can handle blogging.

For an example of how the watch blog can step beyond the starting gate, click on the link for the one that watches U.S. Rep. Gus Bilirakis, of Florida's 9th U.S. House district. This watch blog has been in existence for quite a while.

Here's a link to a fine analysis on one of Quinnell's new watch blogs -- one on U.S. Rep. Tom Feeney, former speaker of the Florida House. It's called the Feeney Alert, and the first post goes into the confusion Feeney tries to spread over his vote to kill the SCHIP program for children's health. The first post was written by Eddie Schwieterman.

UPDATE: Clint Curtis is running against Feeney in '08, and his manifesto is posted on DailyKos as of today, Aug. 17. The link is here.

There's a post on DailyKos that was full of tips for amateur blogging. In other words, to be a blogger you don't have to be a pro -- as this blog shows every day that I post.

Does anyone out there want to run a blog watching our South Florida members of congress? I'd be glad to work with someone toward that goal. Just send an email to this blog -- address along the right column. And if there's already something in the works, please let us know here.

It helps if there's a vigorous political blog run by local established journalists, like the Melbourne-based Florida Today's Brevard Watch that provided basic material on Tom Feeney's pronouncement. Do we have that in the Miami Herald's Naked Politics blog? Remains to be seen.

More on YearlyKos

There was a lot of reporting going on at the YearlyKos, and much of it went up on blogs. Via the Florida Democratic Party, here's a link to reports by Alison Morano, head of the Pasco County Democratic Party, on the convention.

Analysis of YearlyKos

Sorry for the break in posts to the blog. I'm on a road trip visiting friends and not always able to access the internet. Here in Ohio with rain on the roof and wireless access, some info is pouring in. Friends relayed this nugget from the Washington Post. I'll do some scoping around myself and hope to add other links here later to help analyze the YearlyKos meeting.

Meanwhile I can report from many more hours listening to the right wing on the car radio that their hatred of the blogosphere (which they now conflate with the Democratic Party, or perhaps vice versa) is not diminishing with the passage of a few days since the YearlyKos ended. We are accused of hating the United States, of "wanting to lose" this war. Hannity seems to be leading the charge on this, along with O'Reilly. No need to shut our mouths -- just be aware of incoming fire. It's further proof of the impact of the blogosphere.

And as to analyzing the impact of YearlyKos, what better than to see a report on the bar at the convention center hotel: hardly any beer left! With photographic evidence in this link. That's Markos himself in the photo. We had fun while upsetting the wingnuts.

UPDATE: One of the unexpected turns of YearlyKos, to my mind, was the strong link with the Teamsters Union that showed up on Saturday afternoon. Here's a link looking at that event and the next step that could be taken. Question: are our Miami-Dade schoolbus drivers unionized?

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.”

Vietnam Vets also convening in Chicago

Eugene Cherry, war resister, expresses gratitude to VVAW members.

Too much going on to do any real live blogging, so here is a link to the New Yorker’s blog on YearlyKos.

One of Hertzberg’s posts there ends with a lament that there’s no revolution in the air at the YearlyKos convention in Chicago. I had a different experience by getting away from the grand McCormick Place convention center where the Kossaks are meeting. Being a Vietnam veteran in addition to blogging, I spent Friday evening with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. (Let's stop here for a second to warn Bill O'Reilly that there are some rude words in this report, but we learned them in the US Army.) It’s the VVAW’s 40^th anniversary meeting, and on Friday night a happy crowd of old and young vets enjoyed Vietnamese food at the Thai Binh restaurant in an Asian neighborhood north of the Loop.

Here the atmosphere was more to the revolutionary mood unfound at YearlyKos. The “open mike” format for speakers was perhaps more liberating than the formal VVAW sessions scheduled for Saturday at Roosevelt University; present were not only the around-60 age group of Vietnam Vets, but also the young generation of Iraq veterans, including resisters.

Eugene Cherry, 24, stood at the microphone and expressed gratitude for the help he’d received from VVAW and like-minded anti-war groups as he fought to get discharged from the Army – the Chicago native is finally free as of July 13. Click here for background on his case.

Others from the younger set wore T-shirts with “Support War Resistance” on the chest, and some of the youth fashions would have pleased Hertzberg’s desire for something more defiant that the bloggers’ look.

“Remember to reach out to other veterans,” one speaker said. (Do you hear that, Kossaks?)

A Vietnam vet led a cheer-leader’s chant: “Give me and F! Give me a U! Give me a C! Give me a K!” A big “FUCK” roared out, and what’s it for? “Fuck You!”

And who’s that for? The answer came from Carl Rogers of Los Angeles, the first vice president of VVAW when it formed in 1973. He recalled the event back then when so many Vietnam vets threw away their medals earned in that war, and said it was the perfect “fuck you” gesture of the day. His lament for our present circumstance was that we’ve yet to find the perfect “fuck you” gesture for the Iraq war.

So there was some defiant, revolutionary atmosphere to be had in Chicago. Just not at McCormick Place. Where we’re blogging like crazy – and maybe that will turn out to be the factor that helps turn this country against another wrong war. Without all the misery of revolution. Nor homeless veterans in the streets.

Day One of Yearly Kos (ignore O'Reilly)

I am not going to let Bill O’Reilly set the frame for the YearlyKos. No, his vile attack on DailyKos, our wholesome Internet forum, shall not overwhelm the positive and uplifting message that emerged on the first day of the convention in Chicago.

The reader may deduce that my plan to lay out a straightforward report on Howard Dean’s inspiring keynote speech was stopped in its tracks by the misfortune of having Fox News erupt on my hotel-room TV as I was preparing to write.

It’s true that it was hard to ignore O’Reilly’s hectoring of Sen. Chris Dodd. The TV instigator (moderator not the appropriate word) demanded that Dodd condemn a stupid year-old cartoon from DailyKos depicting Joe Liebermann kneeling before King George’s fly, and while I was trying to marshal my thoughts, their argument boiled back and forth in my hearing. Well, why doesn’t he call just it a putative blow job? I wondered.

Not to be deterred, I plunged ahead searching my database for the notes feverishly taken from the fast-taking Howard Dean. But I had to struggle to ignore bloviating from “comic” Dennis Miller, whom O’Reilly called in to bolster his dislike of the Daily and YearlyKos (“There are hookers who put an embargo on that convention,” Miller postulated). O’Reilly himself said there is hate -- “Maybe even murder” -- on the left wing of the Internet. It was nigh impossible to keep to my mission of portraying the event in its natural colors and tones.

In fact, sad to say, I could not stay focused on a reasonable reportage mission when so much hatred of the event I’m covering was blasting into my eyes and ears.

Solution: change the channel. Now the Braves and Astros are in extra innings, and life is good again. The American pastime wins, and Bill O’Reilly can take his hatred into the soundproof chamber on the far side of the remote control. At home, thank goodness, I do not receive O’Reilly or Fox Cable News on my primitive TV. All the right-wing hating that I can tolerate is on talk radio. Here in a hotel room I am tempted by the wider selection on the cable. At home, never.

But, back to the Howard Dean speech. Let me count the standing ovations: a lot! Here was a happy crowd of 1,400 Americans (actually, I also met a Croatian and a Frenchman on Thursday among the attendees), a generally well-educated and hard-working collection of saints … and, no doubt, some sinners, too.

The Democratic national chairman said some new stuff, as far as I can tell, and the crowd responded with applause as he reaffirmed the 50-state strategy and went on to announce a “prospective policy” of searching through election laws and practices everywhere so that potential problems will be known months ahead of election time.

As to the Internet, Howard Dean has a different view from the “fair and balanced” views of Fox News’ guru.

“It has re-democratized America,” Dean said. “There has been a shift in power.”

He said the YouTube debate was “sensational” in giving ordinary people a chance to question presidential candidates. “What a surprise the Republicans don’t want to do it,” he said. He recalled YouTube’s contribution to the 2006 election result, saying the Democrats would not have a Senate majority without what YouTube did.

The advent of the Internet, he said, had changed much in politics. Where politicians used to announce policy and await reaction, now “we listen to you before we start talking. … It means real two-way campaigns so the views of Americans have influence on the candidates.”

“It is an extraordinary evolution,” he said. “It means politicians have to acknowledge that power is loaned to us. We don’t own the power, and we need to earn the power every two years.”

Dean said every election now has to be about young voters, because they are increasingly voting Democratic, and that habit must be continued. He said surveys show that young voters from all ethnic groups vote at about the same rate, meaning that their civic habits are coinciding, and they accept the same vision of America.