Progressive Blogs

Marcy Wheeler wants everyone to close their Chase account to protest JP Morgan Chase's efforts to force Chrysler into bankruptcy.

JP Morgan Chase’s corporate single-mindedness threatens to put 40,000 Chrysler workers in Michigan out of a job, along with 150,000 Chrysler dealer employees and tens of thousand workers at Chrysler’s suppliers.

And JP Morgan Chase’s insistence that it should jump the line ahead of retirees means hundreds of thousands of retirees may lose healthcare benefits they worked all their lives to earn.

Michigan’s economy is already in terrible shape. But JP Morgan Chase seems intent on making it much worse.

So what is Marcy doing with her money?

A blogger I have long admired (but never met), Joseph Cannon of Cannonfire, wants me to apologize.

I support what Fertik has written here [on breaking up the banks]. But he has yet to take one important step:

APOLOGIZE.

Apologize for printing crap like this during the primaries:

The Last Hillary DLC-Straw

I have been silent about the neocon, Republican-Lite, Democratic “Leadership” Council (DLC), and their poster girl, Hillary, during the Primary season -- but enough is enough. Just like Joe LIEberman, Hillary is helping McCain to split the Democratic Party -- just as the DLC has been doing for over a decade.

Yesterday Sarah Palin complained to Greta van Susteren about being criticized by "some blogger probably sitting there in your parents basement wearing their pajamas blogging some kind of gossip or lie." To show her solidarity with us bloggers, Rachel wore... pajamas! (h/t Ali Frick)

Perhaps someone can help me, because I really don't understand why Kos regularly attacks Rep. Dennis Kucinich as being "loony" or something similar. Here's the latest:

Here's what too many people still don't understand -- there's nothing loony about the netroots. This isn't fertile territory for the McKinneys and Kuciniches of our party. This is fertile territory for the Howard Deans of our party -- sensible, pragmatic progressives who aren't afraid to be Democrats. Why? Because we're the nation. We're not clustered in DC and NYC, we're spread out over all 50 states, and we know better than anyone what it takes to win in our own backyards.

As victory draws near for Obama and the Democrats, a handful of bloggers are getting ready for end-zone dances - let's hope they don't jinx the results.

Still, it's a fair question: how much credit do bloggers (and blog audiences) deserve if Democrats win?

Unlike 2006, there was no "macaca moment" - a single Youtube that transformed an election, in that case Virginia Senator George Allen's expected victory. So judging the role of bloggers requires a more sophisticated analysis.

The single most important moment in the presidential campaign had nothing to do with bloggers - it was the sudden collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 16. McCain was still enjoying his convention bounce, but when the bottom fell out of the stock market, it took McCain's campaign down with it.

Commandante Markos wants us to "break their spirits" - and gives us our marching orders for a sweeping victory on Election Day:

I realize there are people uncomfortable with aggressive language and action. That's the difference between liberal weenies and movement progressives. Liberal weenies sit around thinking that "the truth" is enough for victory, and that if we simply explain to voters why Democrats are better, why, we can't possibly lose any elections! That's the crowd that wants to keep the "high ground" and doesn't want to go down in the gutters and fight the GOP where they live, lest we get a little muddied ourselves.

Look out Bush Democrats - here comes Accountability Now. But its success depends on our ability to find more primary challengers. If you know one, tell them!

Jane Hamsher writes,

Primary challenges work.  The threat of a primary challenge in 2010 will change behavior in 2008.  The question is -- how can we create a system where we aren't dependent on chance for a Donna Edwards (or Ned Lamont) to emerge? 

I frequently rail against the willfully ignorant and stupid people who call themselves "pundits" and pollute our airwaves. Today I want to do the opposite: praise a real pundit who came out of nowhere (politically speaking) and rose to the very top of the "profession." His name is Nate Silver and his website is FiveThirtyEight.com, named after the total number of Electors in the Electoral College. (If you divide by two, 269 is a tie so 270 is needed to win.)

Last night, Silver made the "big time" with an appearance on Countdown with Keith Olberman. Watch the video below and you'll see why Silver is so good: he's precise, factual, thoroughly informed, practically wise, and humble.

After the CIA's miserable failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, then-Senator Pat Moynihan proposed eliminating the CIA and putting the State Department back in charge of collecting intelligence, as it was before World War II.

Now, after the intelligence community's catastrophic failure on Iraq, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is proposing an idea that's nearly as radical: intelligence analysts should talk to bloggers like Juan Cole:

Last weekend at Netroots Nation, Matt Palevsky of The Real News had a brief but thoughtful interview with Matt Stoller of OpenLeft.com about how much the Netroots can change American politics and the world. Stoller, as always, was militantly realistic:

The scale of what we need to do is far larger than our capacity right now. Just changing the way we relate to each other and the land around us - because we have a country and a world that is actually run by thieves - that's the problem.