[Keith Ellison gives the Netroots keynote on Saturday: the Minnesota politician the Star-Tribune chose to ignore.]

I sat down to have a nice departing breakfast at my hotel in Minneapolis yesterday morning after a satisfying Netroots Nation, and as is my custom on such occasions, I bought the local Sunday paper. In this case, that meant buying a copy of the Star-Tribune.

Now, I will admit I am impressed that the paper has thus far refused to succumb to the Shrinkage phenomenon that is reducing modern papers to the size of postage stamps. The Star Tribune is still printed on standard old broadsheet paper, and it is graphically quite appealing as well.

But what I went there to read was to see what coverage they had of Netroots -- easily the largest gathering of political bloggers in the country, and one of the most powerful gatherings of progressive activists in the country as well.

Now, I expect that local readers will tell me that the Minneapolis paper is a long-established right-wing Republican rag, and gauging from their Sunday editorial-page lineup, that certainly is the impression I came away with. And no doubt it is despised by the PowerLines of the world for not being right-wing enough, which then becomes their excuse -- "See? Both sides hate us! Therefore, we must be exactly right in the middle!"

So to be honest, I wasn't really surprised to see that the Star-Tribune, as I perused it over my coffee and hashbrowns this morning, had actually completely ignored the presence of Netroots Nation in their city and carried not a single word about events there. And indeed, if you check their archives, they couldn't even be bothered to send a single reporter over to the convention center this week to write about the many luminaries there. Instead, their coverage consisted entirely pieces filed by Associated Press reporters. Oh, wait -- there was one piece by a columnist that talked about Netroots and its deeper meaning without any indication he'd ever set foot in the convention.

That's just embarrassing.

But then I nearly blorted my coffee out onto the rag when I came across Bob Von Sternberg's loving coverage of the Republican luminaries at the Right Online conference, complete with big pictures of Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty, which meant that they not only sent a reporter, there was a Star-Trib photographer there as well. (Von Sternberg wrote a second piece, for online readers, about Right Online as well.

There was no indication whatsoever that the Star-Trib was aware that Right Online has ALWAYS been a deliberately imitative gathering -- they follow Netroots Nation around like a pathetic wannabe girlfriend, a creepy stalker, setting up shop in whatever city we gather in. Which means that next year, they'll be in Providence, Rhode Island too, no doubt.

Previous gatherings were truly pathetic. They first tried this in Austin, and it was hilariously tiny. The same thing happened in Pittsburgh and in Vegas last year.

But this year they made it ridiculously cheap for anyone to attend, thanks to heavy Koch Brothers underwriting, as Tina Dupuy observes. So they were able to boast some decent attendance numbers -- I saw one site claim there were in excess of 1,200 people, and my independent sources inform me that's probably correct (and not in the realm of the mythical 1.7 million who marched at the GlennBeckpalooza in Washington that in fact gathered about 90,000 people).

Moreover, the story did end with this nugget that in fact is almost completely wrong:

Meanwhile, a couple of blocks away, at the Minneapolis Convention Center, RightOnline's liberal counterpart, Netroots Nation, was holding its own conference with Sen. Al Franken headlining.

Yep, that's the entirety of the Star Tribune reporting staff's coverage of Netroots Nation. Meanwhile, Right Online gets two long pieces, photos in the print edition, and several videos in the online edition.

Moreover, it's true that Franken was indeed the keynote speaker Saturday morning -- but he was only one of several keynoters throughout the conference weekend. The "headliner" at the convention, if anyone, was Rep. Keith Ellison on Saturday night.

Now, I can just hear the Star-Trib's reporters and editors explaining their thinking: Pawlenty and Bachmann are from Minnesota, after all, and deserve priority for their readers, right?

That sounds good. Until you realize that both Franken and Ellison are from ... wait ... I need to look this up ... oh yeah! Minnesota! Huh! Whoda thunk?

You know, I love when mainstream reporters whine that blogs ruined their business and made them irrelevant. Incidents like this demonstrate just how they have managed to do that all by themselves. Bloggers just are filling the vacuum created by the black holes remaining in the spaces that were supposed to be occupied by their journalistic standards.

You may want to share your thoughts with the folks at the Star-Tribune about those standards. You can call their front desk at (612) 673-4000, or you can write Von Sternberg at vonste@startribune.com and let him know what you think. It might be useful to make your feeling known to Political Editor Patricia Lopez too.

Please be polite and thoughtful. It makes a difference.

DOWNLOADS: (399)

PLAYS: (4750)

Embed

Last night at the closing keynote session for Netroots Nation, we were entertained by the fabulous singer-songwriter Jill Sobule (her official site is here), who wrote this song especially for the convention.

It's not safe for work. But it may well become a progressive anthem for the 2012 election cycle.

I met Jill briefly, and she said she's a big C&L fan. Well, here's back atcha, Jill.

Here's the lyric:

They say we want our America back
Our America back
Our America back
When they say we want our America back
What the f--k do they mean?

Remember the Garden of Eden
Before Eve hung out with that snake?
You could walk down the street
And not worry about thieves
All the kids could go trick or treating

Then those foreigners started comin' in
Like those Germans in 1790
Then the Irish arrived, the potato blight
The neighborhood started changing

Life was better
We lived right
Life had a paler shade of white
When they say we want our America back
We want our America back

Before there was Ellis Island
And that statue we got from the French
And that's whore's still alerting
The strangers she's flirting
Inviting them into our beds

The Guineas, the coolies, the wetbacks, the Jews
The gays and the terrorists
And who let in that woman looks after my kids
And the one who is cleaning my nest

Life was righteous
Life was clean
Send them back including me
When they say they want our America back
Our America back, our America back
When they say they want our America back
What the f--k does it mean?

Before the gays had the agenda
Before the slaves were free
Before that man from Kenya
Took the presidency

We want our America back
Our America back
Our America back
When they say they want our America back
What the f--k do they mean?

At Netroots Nation, Felipe Matos of the Trail of Dreams caught White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer in two lies, yesterday: (1) Obama "hears from DREAM Act Students all the time," and (2) Obama "does not have the executive authority [to stop the deportations of DREAMers]."

The first lie is probably the greatest disrespect to the migrant youth movement. It is not widely known that Obama refuses to meet with undocumented people himself. Undocumented youth have certainly confronted him at public events, but Obama refuses to meet with undocumented people to talk with them about an immigration system that is doing violence to them.

Felipe Matos would know that Obama refuses to meet with undocumented people because he himself walked 1,500 miles from Miami, FL, to Washington, D.C. only to be denied a meeting with Obama. Obama has met with currently documented former DREAMers, but not with undocumented youth themselves. Felipe himself makes this clear in the video, only to be dismissed by Pfeiffer:

Felipe Matos: He has spoken to people who are not DREAM Act-eligible, people who are not undocumented, because he has made it very clear that he doesn't want to talk to undocumented people.

Dan Pfeiffer: I don't think that's accurate.

Felipe Matos: I mean I was in meetings with Valerie Jarrett when she told me that so I know it's accurate.

Netroots Nation (17 June 2011)

While the first lie is disrespectful to the migrant youth movement, it is probably the second lie that does the most violence to migrant communities. Obama does have the power to grant administrative relief to migrant communities. The Immigration Policy Center has made that very clear.

As a former teacher of constitutional law, and as the signatory of nearly 80 Executive Orders, President Obama understands that the role of the Executive branch of the U.S. government has never been limited to blindly enforcing laws passed by the Legislative branch. In fact, the effective implementation of any law (criminal law, tax law, environmental law, securities law, etc.), requires the Executive branch to interpret that law and develop strategies to implement it. Every new administration brings its own set of values and priorities to this task. That is why federal regulations, policies, and procedures change from administration to administration.

This fundamental fact has been repeatedly recognized by the Obama Administration outside of the immigration context. Speaking in 2008, President Obama’s transition chief, John Podesta, noted: “There’s a lot that the President can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that.” Speaking in 2010, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer observed: “The challenges we had to address in 2009 ensured that the center of action would be in Congress. In 2010, executive actions will also play a key role in advancing the agenda.”

Dan Pfeiffer lied to Felipe Matos, pure and simple, just as Obama has been lying to Latino voters across the country.

I'm struggling a little bit with categorizing these as lies so blatantly right now, primarily because I feel an unproductive narrative of liberal anger at Obama is emerging from Netroots Nation. Were I to craft my own productive narrative of why Obama needs to provide administrative relief to migrant communities, it would go something like this:

We're not asking Obama to ignore the laws that are already on the books, as broken, unjust, and violent as we feel those laws are. What we are saying is that the Obama administration has limited resources to enforce the law, and that his administration should use those resources wisely. At a time when the federal government is struggling with a growing deficit, it makes no sense to spend thousands upon thousands of dollars detaining and deporting young people who know no other country as their home, or any undocumented people with strong and productive ties to their communities in the U.S. for that matter. Even with the Obama administration deporting over 400,000 people a year, now, the undocumented population continues to hover at around 11 million people. There's even research to suggest (pdf) that heavy enforcement actually increases the undocumented population in the U.S., not because more people are coming in, but because less people want or are able to leave.

If Obama continues to force pro-migrant voters to choose between helping to elect him, and stopping the deportations of our family members, friends, and peers, guess where we're going to put our energy? Dreamers have regularly shown the ability to mobilize tens of thousands of people to stop their deportations one-by-one. Wouldn't Obama prefer that they direct their energy at convincing or electing lawmakers who can change the laws, rather than have us continue to direct our energy at his administration?

As it gets closer and closer to election time, pressure is going to increase on the pro-migrant movement to shut our mouths lest we help elect a nativist Republican to the presidency. It's difficult to say where different pro-migrant groups will fall as that pressure increases but I can say that I certainly won't help elect someone that continues to decimate my community. With Obama deporting more people that George W. Bush ever did, and now implementing a program, [In]Secure Communities, which would turn every local police officer into a border patrol agent by 2013, there might even be situations where a Republican president would be better for the pro-migrant community.

In other words, does Obama want to continue wasting limited resources and grassroots energy by continuing to deport folks who don't need to be deported, or does he want to save money and direct that energy towards lawmakers who should be taking responsibility for fixing this unjust immigration system? I hope the answer is clear and that Obama grants migrant communities administrative relief.

Kyle de Beausset is a pro-migrant blogger at Citizen Orange.

Our own Blue Gal is in the running for a Netroots Nation scholarship.

There are a lot of good people up for the scholarships, but let me tell you why you should support Blue Gal. Not only has she been blogging since 2004, you'd be hard pressed to find another blogger who so generously champions small blogs. (She also organizes the Blog against Theocracy blogswarm every year.)

And that's not all. She's one of the people who make the wheels work behind the scenes here and writes most of our nightly open threads.

A vote for Blue Gal doesn't mean you can't vote for anyone else -- you get three. A full list of applicants is here.

But we'd really, really, really like it if you'd click here to vote for Blue Gal. Thanks!

This is the best video ever. After seeing Harry Reid accept Dan Choi's West Point ring at Netroots Nation last summer, it is just poignant to see it returned. I got up at 6 am yesterday to watch the signing ceremony for the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and it was sweet. I especially appreciated this declaration from the president:

"For we are not a nation that says, 'don't ask, don’t tell.' We are a nation that says, 'Out of many, we are one.'"

It's not over. There is much more to do, especially with Proposition 8 moving through the courts and DOMA still on the books. But it is a step forward -- an important one, and one to celebrate.

Lt. Dan Choi's most recent tweet is one I'm keeping to remind of what is yet left to do:

The next time I get a ring from a man, I expect it to be for full, equal, American marriage.

You betcha, Lt. Choi.

John and I have been wandering the halls at Netroots Nation here in Vegas this week, having a blast hanging out with our blogospheric friends. But we also led one of the conference's first panels yesterday morning, titled "Right Wing Populism and the Tea Parties".

It also featured our friend Adele Stan of AlterNet and the amazing Hugh Jackson of the Las Vegas Gleaner. Of course, I'm a little biased, but I thought the ensuing discussion was very good, the room was pretty full and the questions very thoughtful.

Turns out that some folks from rightward publications were there too. Susan Davis of the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire was there and filed a pretty balanced story.

However, I noticed that she also truncated not only the title of our book, Over the Cliff -- she omitted the subtitle, How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane, though that in fact was a significant theme of the panel as well -- she also truncated the quote from me as well:

“After the 2008 election we were all celebrating, but we also became complacent,” said liberal blogger David Neiwert. “The right never gives up.”

“The answer to the tea party is to activate the populist wing of the progressive movement,” he said. “We need to seize on [the public’s frustration] ourselves and channel it to our movement.”

What I actually said in full was this:

"After the 2008 election we were all celebrating, but we also became complacent. But having studied the right for many years, I can tell you: They never, ever, give up. They are relentless. Even after their ideology has been completely discredited by eight years of conservative rule, even after they have driven the country into an economic abyss, they keep going -- even if it means going insane in the process."

Oh well.

And then there was Chris Moody of the Daily Caller, who couldn't take the time to talk to any of us afterward, and wrote an even more distorted account headlined "Liberals warn: Don’t write off the Tea Party (even if they’re crazy)".

You'll note, if you read the piece, that Moody omits my explanation for why we call the Right "insane," namely this, which I said:

"We say that they've gone insane a little bit facetiously, but really, we say it because they believe things -- lots of things -- that are provably untrue. And that really is a kind of insanity. It's why we sometimes just say these people are nuts."

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (775)

PLAYS: (4036)

Embed

Bill O'Reilly's promos promised all day yesterday that he would "expose" what "really happened" at the Netroots Nation gathering in Pittsburgh last week.

But the best he could do was produce some clips of moderately fiery rhetoric from a few speakers (actually, everything he features is in fact pretty reasonable, not to mention factually accurate) and then launch into one of his patented rants about how the "far-left" (why the hyphen, dude?) is actually all about "redistributing wealth," which is why we want "government-run health care."

Of course, he can produce no evidence to support this. Progressives at Netroots Nation, in reality, favor the compromise known as the "public option" instead of full-fledged government-run health care, perhaps better known as "single payer." And no one I heard said a word about "redistributing wealth." Maybe we harbor such sentiments secretly, but if O'Reilly wants to make that characterization, he ought to offer some evidence to support it.

If you want to read a fairly objective and dispassionate report on NN, check out Christopher Beam's report in Slate.

DOWNLOADS: (1444)

PLAYS: (12623)

Embed

Not only is Charlie Pierce one of my favorite writers -- his latest book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, is one of those rare must-reads that's simultaneously a delightful piece of prose -- he's also one of my favorite people. Here he is, at his Netroots Nation book signing, talking about the Creation Museum in Kentucky that is the centerpiece of the book.

I taped every panel I went to and this was my favorite snippet. Unfortunately, as you can see, I'm still very much in the learning phase for handling one of these cameras well.

DOWNLOADS: (964)

PLAYS: (1543)

Embed

I spent all day traveling yesterday, so I wasn't able to get this up, bu Darcy Burner's keynote speech at Netroots Nation on Saturday night was classic Darcy: concise, but compelling. Especially the heart of the speech:

So President Clinton -- how many of you were here for President Clinton's speech the other night? -- President Clinton did something very interesting in his speech. He delivered two fundamentally contradictory messages. He said, support the health-care legislation no matter what it is. That was one message he sent that he delivered quite clearly. But the other message that he delivered was that "Don't ask, don't tell" became policy even though he knew it was the wrong thing, because, he said, we didn't support him and make him do the right thing. That second message, that we have to make our leaders do the right thing was raw and true.

We can't rely on people in authority to make everything right. We have got to do the hard work of governing. It's our job as Americans. It's our obligation. And to be perfectly blunt, I consider it my obligation for Henry.

The vehicle we have for change is the people we have elected, and we have done, collectively, a tremendous job of electing people to office in this country. We have taken back the House, we have taken back the Senate, we have taken the presidency of the United States.

But that is just the beginning of the battle. There are a lot of people -- mostly not the people in this room, but a lot of people who thought that was sufficient and have stopped. We have to help the people that we have elected. And to be perfectly blunt, we have been asked to.

I have been working for the past several months with the Congressional Progressive Caucus -- eighty-three of the most progressive members of the United States House and the United States Senate -- and the message that I get from them consistently is: "We are doing everything in our power to make a difference. But we have to have the support of the grassroots. We need the grassroots helping to frame the message, we need the grassroots applying pressure."

In the health-care debate that's going down right now, the Congressional Progressive Caucus did something absolutely revolutionary in March -- which is that in March Congressman Raul Grijalva, the newly elected co-chair of the caucus, whipped the progressive members of the caucus and got enough of the members to say, "We will not support any piece of health-care legislation that doesn't include a public option."

That the progressives were able to then send a letter to President Obama and to Nancy Pelosi and to Steny Hoyer saying, "Guess what? You want health-care legislation? It isn't the Blue Dogs you need to be worrying about. You need to talk to progressives, because we are drawing the line, and we are not going to back down."

The next day I heard it being bandied about that Darcy suggested caving on the public option. As I told my friends, that wasn't what I heard. And if you watch the video, I don't think it's what you'll hear either.

[Video from Sum of Change. Mine sucked.]

This was a really productive discussion, and I'd like your thoughts. I talked to Joe Sestak (PA-7) backstage after the panel, and he told me he would start a netroots caucus in the House - and one in the Senate if he wins!

It might be the answer we're looking for; I believe it could increase our clout. (As someone commented to me today, politicians just don't care about one $20 contributor. But a few thousand $20 contributors can inspire a little respect.)

If Joe makes this happen, it means that caucus members will keep us informed on developments regarding our issues, and it means that caucus members who respond to our issues will be able to use us as attack dogs more effectively. This seems like a win/win.

Rep. Pat Murphy (PA-8), an early netroots favorite who joined the Blue Dogs after his election, approached me in the convention center lobby and quite enthusiastically told me if there was a netroots caucus, he would "absolutely" join. (This was after I first called him a few rude names over his FISA vote. But we kissed and made up, and he told me to call him any time I had a question. The fact is, he is with us on most of the issues. Not all, but most.)