Grassroots

I've always thought of the internet as a kitchen where every web page, every email, every embed is a menu of creative delicacies feeding the soul of our culture. Every image, every word, every interaction carries meaning for the post or page where it is found. Collectively, all those billions of moments are not just being archived for as long as the blog or website is in place. Together, they are transforming our consciousness -- the way we talk, the way we speak and, more importantly, the way we think of each other.

When I started blogging in 2001, there were fewer than two-million blogs worldwide. Blogger was the biggest blogging platform and yet a work-in-progress for the little company that created it, Pyra. MovableType, Typepad's older sister, was still in beta. Wordpress didn't exist and neither did Flickr, YouTube, MySpace or Facebook. Google was only 3 years old. Wikis were just going into the early adopter mainstream -- Wikipedia had just been launched in January of that year.

It was an exciting time to set foot on the web and publish online from a technological point of view. Historically speaking, it was a tumultuous time as well.

I started blogging in December of 2001, months after the destruction of the World Trade Center. As any other New Yorker, I was still shell-shocked, yet had no time to dwell with a baby and a toddler to take care of. Yet it was the smell of the still-burning debris, magnified by the prospect of our country not just going to war but trampling our constitution in the process, that pushed me out of a writer's block I had been carrying for years and dropped me smack in the middle of the first wave of bloggers.

I did it in search of kindred spirits, in search of other women and men who shared my hopes, my fears and my sense of outrage. And I make the distinction of putting "women" first because back in the day it was rare to find women with their own online domains.

I was a teacher for almost 10 years here in NYC. When I started, I was very young (21 years old) yet had had years of experience teaching children, teenagers and adult alike as a Spanish language instructor.

I decided to work as a teacher a few years after graduating from college, so when I started as a Public High School teacher here in NYC, I couldn't teach Spanish, for it wasn't my major in college. I was thrown into the History department of Eastern District High School to teach a mostly immigrant population of teenagers History and Social Studies in (mostly) Spanish and (some) English.

It was a horrible and yet formative experience in my life.

Years before teaching, when I was still a Catholic, I had studied the teachings of  Gustavo Freire's in "Pedagogia do Oprimido" and Leonardo Boff in "Teologia da Liberação". What struck me, as a  middle class intelectual wannabe of "grey collar" parents, was the focus on the violence of poverty.

Hunger, homelessness, unemployment, discrimination, illiteracy : We don't even have to talk about actual physical violence acts in order to think of all the different violent ways in which poverty and marginalization hit many communities of color.

Yesterday I had a bit of fun at the expense of the Republican noise machines and their efforts to paint themselves already as a loud and marginalized minority in Capitol Hill. I was so caught up on the moment that I didn't blog about it until this morning but Kenneth Quinnell described it as a "Twitter Bomb" and has happy to spread the word :

Twitter Bomb

This wasn't my idea (although I came up with the cool name), I think Liza Sabater was the one who started it, but it's too brilliant to pass up.

Those of you who are on Twitter, send as many tweets as you can over the next few days with #dontgo in them. The conservatives are using this hash mark (like a tag) to spread misinformation about offshore drilling and their latest publicity stunt. What Liza and a few others started doing was to flood that hash with counter-commentary or irrelevant posts. Sort of like a google bomb, this can either disrupt what they're doing or, at the very least, annoy the crap out of them. We can all do this.

Whatever you're posting on twitter, try to fit #dontgo into it. And make sure you include the # sign, which is key.

If you aren't on Twitter, this might be the type of thing to get you into it.

And before I even start to explain, let me break down the lingo for you.

Baratunde Thurston, Some Rights Reserved

Baratunde has been going to Philadelphia almost every weekend for the past weeks. So yesterday, thinking what I am going to do with the kids this week --they are in Spring Break. I decided to rent a car and drive down to Philadelphia to help out the Obama campaign any way we can and in the process, be a part of history.

I'll post later today updates and definitely come back here after 10pm when we'll have the chatroom open while waiting for the results.

C'ya later!

Robert Shales is right on the money when he says, To this observer, ABC's coverage seemed slanted against Obama. Memeorandum exploded in posts from irate liberals and journalists who saw nothing but a thinly vieled hatchet job against the front-runner of the Democratic Party.

Close to fifteen thousand people have sounded off at the ABC News post about the debate (which, by the way, they changed from "Clinton, Obama find brotherly love at Philly Debate" to "Philly Fight Night : Democrats Spar over Electability").

I suggest you add to the comments over there as well as give a ring to their offices :

Call 818-460-7477
Press 2,
Press 1

Then you can press one of these two choices :

967 (News wth Charles Gibson) or
199 (other news)

As I wrote at the chat last night, it's as if ABC News wanted to outfox FOX News. It was an incredibly embarrassing scene to watch.

Not only that, George Stephanopoulos should not have been one of the moderators. As the former speech writer of Bill Clinton and still a Clintonista, if you are going to have someone so biased, then you ought to create balance. Which is why I shall forever refer to him as "Clinton's Boy".

Last night I saw a flurry of emails blanket my inbox with a series of "unbelieavable", "still in shock" and the not so occasional "I'm angry".

I had spent most of the afternoon trying to sort out my thoughts fast enough for an Op/Ed, and I would always come back to the misgivings I've had since he took office a little over a year ago. That Eliot Spitzer's problem and weakness has always been his success because he never really needed anything other than a vote from you or me to get elected.

Eliot Spitzer didn't really need a million New Yorkers giving $5 or $10 donations to his campaign to get elected. He never needed to learn how to get people out on the streets to support his campaign to get him elected. He never needed to swallow his pride and shut up and take criticism from his own base in order to gain political influence. And he certainly never had to pound the pavement and get people out on election day to make sure people would get out of their homes and offices to cast a vote.

Metro newspaper just published Voices: Spitzer floated on air, but lack of roots did him in, my Op/Ed on the Spitzer debacle.

Here's the money quote :

For netroots activists like me, who have had the chance to take a peek at the mechanical beast, the New York State Democratic Party, Eliot Spitzer was nothing but a political insider’s rock star that only needed “The (little) People” to vote so the “politics as usual” could rock New York and roll into Albany. Yet there’s a reason why “politics as usual” is losing the fight in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary.

Eliot Spitzer’s weakness has been the lack of a true grassroots base. He never had his feet held to the fire by his own party base, by The People who ended up voting for him. The Republicans have known this all along, and it’s not a coincidence that they tried to scare him last year by astroturfing the Internet with fake attack blogs.

Go read the whole thing.

This last weekend, Democrats picked up another seat in Congress. It wasn't just any seat, it was Dennis Hastert's formerly "safe Republican" seat. The win was solid, with Democrat Bill Foster winning 53% of the vote. This was a major blow to the Republican Party.

Salon.com reports that "National Republican Congressional Committee spokeswoman Karen Hanretty [said] in a statement that 'one election in one state does not prove a trend.'"

This is typical Republican blindness, pretending that data points are isolated incidents without looking at the broad picture. Republicans do this with global warming as well, ignoring decades of solid scientific data and pretending that a single cold season somehow is more important than those decades of data showing a clear trend.

I have news for Hanretty: this IS a trend.

Indicted Tom DeLay's old, "safe Republican" seat in Texas has been taken by a Democrat. Pedophile Mark Foley's old, "safe Republican" seat has been taken by a Democrat. The governorship of Kentucky, once "safe Republican" has been taken by a Democrat. The governorships of Montana and Virginia have been taken by Democrats. State legislatures around the nation have been flipping to Democrat like crazy starting in 2005. And, of course, Democrats overwhelmingly took the House and marginally took the Senate in 2006. Fundraising by Democrats is at record highs. Fundraising by Republicans is at record lows. Almost each and every special election that has been held for a Congressional seat since 2005 has flipped from Repub to Dem. Republicans are retiring or flipping parties at record numbers. It started in 2005, and this trend started when Americans saw the true cost of greedy Republican mismanagement when hurricane Katrina hit.