Wednesday, April 27, 2005

I'm participating in the Saturday morning session on Local Politics at BlogNashvile next weekend. I guess I'm supposed to go first, so I'll start now and we can hit the ground running. Retail politics at wholesale prices, that can be our theme, at least for the first 5 minutes. The web is world wide, but it is powerful at a more human scale too. That's true for candidates, community activists, citizens, political sites, and elected officials.  All benefit from the web's prowess at connecting people into networks and communities, publishing in diverse media, collecting money, moving fast, and not costing very much. Given relatively low budgets for local players and the scarcity of serious local political coverage by many papers and TV stations, blogs and other web tools may be even more important at a local and regional level than they are on the national scene. They can even lead the media to cover local issues more closely. We can talk about the nuts and bolts of campaigning, what people have experienced first-hand or seen or would like to try. All the usual poli-blogging challenges apply: integration of web tools and online cadres into existing organizations, turf wars, gaffeophobia, and so on. You can see my links are pretty Greensboro- and North Carolina-centric. That's what I know best, and I've got some war stories to get us started, but this is meant to be a group activity in which everyone who wants to say something intelligent becomes a discussion leader or contributor. It's about politics, but not about your politics or mine; all soapboxes will be checked at the door. Pointed observations are encouraged and modest gloating may be tolerated if justified. Y'all come. 5:05:07 PM   permalink   comment []

Happy Birthday Lisa. I love you. All that nice stuff that Sydney said in that card she made you, well, me too. No wonder Luna likes you best. 3:47:48 PM   permalink   comment []

Be very afraid: Darth Tater is in town. I thought I felt a disturbance in The Force on South Elm Street...(via Greensboro is Talking) 8:09:18 AM   permalink   comment []

Juan Cole in Common Dreams: "We don't care if you read our web logs...Blogs operate in a different political economy than does mainstream media." 8:06:32 AM   permalink   comment []

Rise of the oligarchs: Duncan Black and Kevin Drum on the Wall Street Journal's shilling for the out-of-sight rich. Drum: "So in 1979 the super-rich earned 3% of the money and paid 5% of the taxes. In 1999 the super-rich earned 10% of the money and paid 11% of the taxes." An idea for Social Security: keep a cap on taxable income...but have a special 1% SS tax kick in on every dollar of income after, I dunno, $1 million? 7:53:27 AM   permalink   comment []

Sounds like an activist judge to me: "Just days after a bitterly divided Senate committee voted along party lines to approve her nomination as a federal appellate court judge, California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown told an audience Sunday that people of faith were embroiled in a 'war' against secular humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots, according to a newspaper account of the speech...Democrats have questioned speeches in which she called the New Deal the 'triumph of our socialist revolution.'" 7:46:58 AM   permalink   comment []