Yesterday, I attended the invitation only Progressive Media Summit, organized by the Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee (DSOC).
About 70 progressive media people participated, including a number of people on the business side, including Tom Athans, founder of the Ed Schultz show, Ron Hartenbaum, owner of the Stephanie Miller show, and Mark Green, President of Air America.
There were representatives from firedoglake and dailykos and bloggers John Aravosis of Americablog, Jerome Armstrong of MYDD, Duncan Black of Atrios, and Matt Stoller of openleft, plus a number of talk show hosts and their producers, including Ed Schultz, Jon Elliot, Mark Levine, Christiane Brown, Rob Sherman and Andre Michael Eggelletion.
I was surprised to see many major progressive media sites not represented and I'm not sure if these were not invited or just chose not to show up in person or have a staffer represent them. These included: Huffingtonpost, Rawstory, alternet, thinkprogress, truthout, commondreams, buzzflash, talkingpointsmemo, counterpunch, thinkprogress, smirkingchimp, tompaine, wonkette...
I'm just glad OpEdNews was invited and that I made the decision to show up-- making the 3.5 hour schlepp down to DC and the five hour trip back-- by train.
The reward was direct contact-- Q & A, handshakes, conversations with almost two dozen senators and leaders in the house. Here's the list of members of congress who spoke to our small group. I had a chance to chat with, ask questions of and/or shake hands with and chat with the ones who I've placed an asterisk next to.
Sen. Stabenow discusses the record 62 GOP filibusters in one year
*Debby Stabenow Harry Reid *Jeff Bingamin *Amy Kobuchar *Stenny Hoyer Byron dorgan *Sherrod Brown *Chuck Schumer *Bernie Sanders *JOhn Conyers *Ron Wyden RObert Menendez *Bob Casey Jim Webb
*Patrick Leahy *Ted Kennedy Ben Cardin *John Tester *Barbara Boxer Diane Feinstein *Daniel Akaka Blanche Lincoln
The goal of the conference was to build bridges between the Democratic outreach committee and the progressive media, to thank us for what we'd done, to ask for patience, because they were very aware of high levels of dissatisfaction with the failure (my word) to end the war and deal with FISA, SCHIP, etc. Officially opening the meeting, Harry Reid told a story illustrating the need for patience,
A fellow asked God, "I've always wanted to know, with you, hOw long is a million years? And God answered, 'About a second.' And then, the fellow asked, to you, how much is a million dollars? God answered, "About a penny." And the man said, well, could I borrow a penny from you? And God answered, "I need a second to think about it."
Reid thanked the progressive media for being in the trenches, "protecting our backs" using the example of how the right wing media had attacked the Frost boy they had used as an example in the efforts to pass the SCHIP bill.
"You spoke out. You turned that from a negative to a plus," Reid said, "You did a wonderful job of responding.
...Your criticism, I always take it as constructive criticism, hard as that is sometimes, has helped us to stay grounded, to focus on what we're doing.
....The role of progressive radio, and of course, on-line work, has changed and increased in efficiency, breadth and I think in direction significantly. I recognize that you and I are not always going to agree on things... but I think if we are honest with each other, that's a tremendous step in the right direction.
Reid specifically singled out progressive media people in attendance who had been especially helpful-- Joan Carter with Dailykos, Christine Hardin Smith with Firedoglake, and talk show hosts Stefanie Miller, Ed Schultz and Christiane Brown (of Reno's KJFK.)
Rob Kall is executive editor and publisher of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, inventor . He is also published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com. He is a frequent Speaker on Politics, Impeachment, The art, science and power of story, heroes and the hero's journey, Positive Psychology, Stress, Biofeedback and a wide range of subjects. He is a campaign consultant specializing in tapping the power of stories for issue positioning, stump speeches and debates. He recently retired as organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology. See more of his articles here and, older ones, here.
To learn more about me and OpEdNews.com, check out this article.
and there are Rob's quotes, here.
To Watch me on youtube, having a lively conversation with John Conyers, Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here Now, wouldn't you like to see me on the political news shows, representing progressives. If so, tell your favorite shows to bring me on and refer them to this youtube video
My radio show, The Rob Kall Show, runs 9-10 PM EST Wednesday evenings, on AM 1360, WNJC and is archived on www.whiterosesociety.org Or listen to it streaming, live at either www.wnjc1360.com or here.
A few declarations.
-While I'm registered as a Democrat, I consider myself to be a dynamic critic of the Democratic party, just as, well, not quite as much, but almost as much as I am a critic of republicans.
-My articles express my personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.
They could invite me to dinner and I would still be disgusted with them. You should have asked them when they are going to police themselves and enact meaningful campaign finance reform and put some brakes on K-Street.
by
Timothy V. Gatto (348 articles, 177 quicklinks, 38 diaries, 574 comments)
on Tuesday, January 29, 2008 at 1:49:14 PM
FRUIT, CHEESE, AND SANDWIICHS WON'T JUSTIFY SUPPORTING DEMS
I'm not impressed with any of this. Instead of fruit, cheese and miniature sandwiches, I am more concerned about what they're going to do, and so far that is virtually nothing.
I can't understand why the majority of progressives continue to think supporting the democratic Party will do much good. For example, impeachment is the most important issue facing us, given that Bush was never elected, having been APPOINTED by the Supreme Court in 2000 and STEALING the election of 2004. Bush and Cheney are behind the loss of our civil liberties de jure, although not de facto, taking the power to declare anyone an enemy combattant and secretly imprisoning them without the right of habaeus corpus or a fair trial, or even any trial at all. He has introduced torture. He has pushed through legislation allowing him to spy on our emails and phone calls, been malfesant with respect to his duties as Commander In Chief by fabricating the intelligence, i.e. lying, to get us into the disaster of the Iraq invasion, and, when Joseph Wilson objected, committed treason by outing Wilson's wife as a CIA agent. The list goes on.
Yet Nancy Pelosi took impeachment off the table even before she assumed her post as Speaker of the House. John Conyers, in spite of the massive tome he produced on the theft of the 2004 elections, refuses to hold hearings or do anything else about it, and has even had Cindy Shehan and others who protested by sitting in at his office arrested. His telling you that impeachment is not off the table is meaningless if he refuses to do anything about it. Impeachment is the most crucial issue we are facing since it is necessary to stop our country's slide into dictatorship. The electorate, many of whom were hoping for impeachment, put the Democrats back in control of Congress in 2006. On this one crucial issue alone, if the Democrats won't call impeachment hearings, WAS THERE ANY BENEFIT FROM ALL THE TIME, MONEY AND EFFORT SPENT ON ELECTING THEM?
The Iraq war is the next most crucial issue. And I am not impressed by the Democrats plea that they must have 60 votes before they can override Bush's veto in order to end the Iraq War. Each time a bill to appropriate further money for the war is introduced, it requires 50% plus one of the votes to pass. The Democrats could end the invasion of Iraq by simply voting against further money for the war, leaving Bush and Cheney with no alternative but to pull the troops out.
Single payer is the ONLY way of containing our rising and exhorbitant health care costs but Hiliary Clinton tells us the majority won't accept it. If single payer is the only way of containing health care costs, then the only rational alternative is to keep campaigning for it until the majority is convinced to support it.
So I ask all those who campaigned for the Democratic Party. Was it worth all your time, effort and money if the Democrats won't do anything about impeachment, the Iraq war, and single payer health care? Rob Kall has argued that a third party can never win enough seats to pass their legislation under our present electoral system. But even under our present electoral system, there have been cases where a third party has displaced one of the two major parties. The Whig Party went into the dustbin of history when a new third party, the Republican Party, was founded in 1856 and went on to displace the Whig Party. I know you will argue that building a third party will take so much time as to be useless as a near term solution. But the evidence is in that your chances of success are zero by supporting the Democratic Party. So though it may take several electoral cycles, a strategy that has a chance of working in the long term is preferable to a strategy that has zero chances of success. You may argue that our present problems are so accute that we don't have time to build a third party. But you won't accomplish anything on these accute issues anyway with a strategy that has zero chances of working. I am sure you can find some legslation, out of all the legislation Congress has passed since the 2006 elections, where the Democrats have been preferable to the Republicans. But if, even after electing them, the Democrats refuse to do anything about impeachment, ending the Iraq war, and single payer, your efforts have been wasted and the results don't justify the time, effort and money you have put into them. So your only alternative to a strategy whose chances of succeeding are zero, it to buckle down to the effort of building a third party.
Parties are what we don't want. What we need is a thousand individual mavericks, each one voting on conscience for the general good, answerable directly to their electorate, immediately replaced if not for the general good, and publicly hanged for corruption.
In this way we will have true democracy, sufficient to eliminate any corrupt party system and power-ramp to the benefit of Big-Money, as we now see.
Easy to do, so do it. For Pete's sake, who needs the villains we now see uniformly gravy-training on the present 'administrative' racket?
by
amazin (34 articles, 0 quicklinks, 12 diaries, 400 comments)
on Wednesday, January 30, 2008 at 10:56:45 AM
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