Required Reading: of Progressives, Blogs and Conventional Wisdom

Elana Levin

Required Reading: of Progressives, Blogs and Conventional Wisdom

Tom Paine.com is an excellent daily online public affairs journal for progressive commentary and aggregator of underreported news. If you don't already read it you should - and not just because they run DMI's work quite frequently.

I was going to save this for the blogstroll but Tom Paine isn't a blog so here you have my suggested reading for the week.
With Democrats up in the polls the many-mouthed talking-head-beast that feeds on the sunday morning-type news shows has been making noises about the Dems' lead being attributable to "moderate" candidates running for office. That sure is some interesting spin.. We've already discussed on DMIBlog that pundits and politicians alike confuse speaking to the middle class with advocating for allegedly "middle of the road" policies (which don't even match what an actual middle of the road policy would be in cases like universal healthcare which the majority of Americans support).

Regardless, it is actually progressives who are likely to cause projected conservative losses at the ballot box. Read Isaiah J. Poole's wonderful op-ed in Tom Paine.com called "Who Are You Calling Moderate" because friends don't let friends fall for bad spin.

Markos on Daily Kos has a great post explaining how the 50-state strategy he and Jerome Armstrong advocated for in their book along with Howard Dean, has actually become the conventional wisdom.

Meanwhile on Kid Oakland's post yesterday entitled Blogging 2.0 earned a well-deserved flood of attention from the big blogs. He takes a look at major movements within the netroots- things like the success of online cooperative projects, utilization of YouTube and the rise in local blogging- and suggests that we have entered Blogging 2.0. Blogging 2.0 means

"an era where blogs also begin to merge the functions of the town hall and the local paper on the local level, a moment where local citizen journalism and local grassroots activism merge in this new media environment"

I think he's on to something. While it still doesn't address the power imbalance of the digital divide and lack of broadband access in lower income communities, etc. I do think his post is an excellent analysis of the direction the netroots is headed in.

So read it.