Is anyone else having trouble publishing comments on the Air America blogs of Thom Hartmann and Rachel Maddow?  I log in, and it gives me the comment form, but when I submit it it's acting like I never logged in.

It's really discouraging.  Maybe Kos Media should offer to rebuild their blog into something that works as well as DailyKos.

Someone called the Thom Hartmann program today with a philosophy that I want to talk about.  "Be willing to lose."

The Democratic leadership in Congress is making choices designed to try and maintain their majorities.  They are afraid that Impeachement hearings would distract from their legislative goals.  They are afraid that voting against funding for the War would allow the Republican Party to claim that they don't support the troops.  They are compromising on their principles in order to maintain power, and those compromises are acting as chains that hold back their power, hold back their majorities, and hold them back from being able to connect with the people who elected them.

Be willing to lose.

I've seen quite a few emails talking about how we can have an influence in the 2008 election, so I thought that I would share a few links and resources that I have either found or created to help us become effective movers and shakers.

This resolution was introduced by Robin Hess in King County, Washington, and it has passed the King County Democratic Central Committee and the Washington State Democratic Central Committee.  We need a new direction in US Foreign Policy, and it's time we organized and developed that direction, from the grassroots.

I'm sharing the text of the resolution here and a few other places to get the ball rolling.

Cindy Sheehan announced her intention to run against Speaker Pelosi.  As an Independent.

I'm pissed.

People can justify just about anything.  We can come up with reasons why things happen, why things don't happen, and how to squirm around barriers and over glass walls while we try to justify our actions.  The power of language is that we can take truth and twist it with abstract words and concepts until we are blue in the face.  Until the ink from the dictionary and thesaurus bleeds onto our fingers, and turns into justifications.

"It's not time yet, we don't have the support, if we do it we'll lose the next election, and we don't want to look like we are going for revenge."

Enough.

http://darcyburner.com/

What we need is a new understanding of the terms of the debate. My intention here is to define what those terms are, explain where we are now, and where we want to be.  I'll also describe the directions that we could go that we don't want to, and why.  In this essay, I'm going to talk about the economic spectrum. I'm going to define that spectrum based on what I've learned from many places, most especially Thom Hartmann's radio program and the books that he has written over the last few years.

Howard Dean came to Seattle on Tuesday night, and gave a great speech about what the Democrats have done, are doing, and what we're going to do in 2007, 2008 and beyond.  He had some advice, and dealt with some foolish kids.  I've already dealt with the kids.  Here I want to address his advice.

Gov. Dean gave the core values that he is recommending the Democrats run on in 2008.  Those values are Strength and Toughness, Fairness and .. oh, yeah, Fiscal Discipline.  Strength and Toughness because we need to fix the impression that Democrats are weak on security.  Fairness because it's an good way to frame the cultural issues that drive our country apart.  And Fiscal Discipline because, well, the Republican's haven't shown any.

It was a good speech, but it was the speech of a party chair, not a Presidential Candidate.  So, I'm going to do my duty as a citizen of this country and a member of this party who wants something more to vote on than STFFD.  I'm going to reframe and articulate these values my way.  

I've had some domain names in my collection for a while, but haven't had time to do anything with them.  I've tried contacting quite a few people about doing something with them, and haven't heard anything back.  If you are interested, please contact me directly.

What are they?  below the fold

The Washington State Legislature website has a lot of really good information, and they have all the basic data to enable some wonderful grassroots communication.  But their focus is getting that information out to the public, not necessarily making it actually usable in a way that meets our needs.  Which is why I spent some time over the last few weeks playing with some code that Ray Minchew gave me for use on DFW a while ago.

You know how you can use MoveOn or Working Assets to write letters to congress, and the reply from staff comes back to you?  They've spent a lot of time building tools for us to use at the grassroots level that does most of the work for us.  There are a LOT of people working to build similar tools around the country.

Have you ever wanted to write a letter to all members of the Government Operations & Elections committee in the Olympia Senate, but all you could find is one email at a time that you had to laboriously add to the To: line in an email?  Annyoing, isn't it.

Try this instead:

http://46dems.com/...

It gets better.

Hi everyone,

I heard someone call in to the Ed Schultz show on Friday, and realized that Progressive Talk is under attack around the country.  The caller was Aldous from NonStopRadio.com, and he was letting Norman Goldman know that there was a place to go to start supporting those stations that need help.

I decided that wasn't good enough.  So I started building this:

http://left.wikia.com/...

This is an idea that I've been working on for a while. The core concept is that we should be building our civilization on a foundation of wealth instead of a foundation of debt.

The idea behind Capitalism is that capital is made available by people who have it to those that need it. That usually comes with a price. That price is interest rates. If you borrow money from a bank, they will charge you interest on that debt. If you have money in the bank, they pay you an interest on that wealth, because they can offer that money to other people in the form of loans. That is the basic concept behind banking.

There's nothing wrong with that, except that the people who have money are getting more benefit than the people actually using that money to improve our lives. The current system of borrow and spend, then pay back with interest does only one thing. It consolidates the wealth of our economy into the hands of those with the money.

That means it consolidates the power into the hands of those with money. And that's against everything that the United States stands for.

More after the fold..

To those who have expressed concerns about my quote,

I was not speaking from the experience of someone who lost someone in the war.  I was not speaking from that perspective.  I can't.  And none of the people that you have met would wish me to be talking from that perspective.

Let me give you the context for the word "fool".

"Life is, among other things, an elimination contest. We get eliminated from this and that and from them and him and her; and finally a germ or faulty pump valve eliminates them altogether. A few find the contest so disagreeable that they eliminate themselves. They are the 24-karat fools who miss the important point about it all; namely, that the major meaning of life is the opportunity to strive and struggle: an opportunity forever denied inanimate things. Striving and struggling implies that the striver is aiming to do something he is not doing now, or get somewhere different than where he is now."

Wayne Valdemar Brandon

Dear Democrats in Congress,

I've had enough. I've watched enough news, watched enough death, watched enough incompetence, enough, enough, enough.

Shut it down. I mean Congress. I mean the US House and US Senate. Obstruct everything. Stop everything. No more floor debates, no more back-room deals, no more sell-outs, no more legislation, no more purse strings, no more purse.

When all things are considered, all evidence examined and the history is written, I believe that we will reach this conclusion:

It's not incompetence, it's intention.

They're not apologizing for mistakes, they're celebrating their success.

This is sick:

http://www.buyusa.gov/...

On the "Buy USA" website, they're touting the fact that they are trying to create a Free Trade agreement with Peru.

Let's try this instead:

So, as I was saying, I decided to take a stab at Wyoming's state and local races on Campaigns Wikia, just to see what I could do.

http://campaigns.wikia.com/...

If anyone from dKos or the Wyoming Progressive Blogosphere wants to help fill in information about the candidates, that would be wonderful.  Local races welcome!