As we approach the silly primary season for 2010, candidates are starting to post diaries. The Calitics Editorial Board may promote some of those candidate diaries to the front page, based on whether the Editorial Board believes the diary communicates substantive policy positions of which the Calitics community should be aware.
The Editorial Board understands that this policy will result in some candidate self-promotion and links to candidate pages in front page posts, and is willing to live with that tradeoff. Front page promotion of a candidate's posts does not imply endorsement of the candidate.
Candidate personnel should be aware that merely posting more diaries are unlikely to get them more promotion, and partisans should be aware that complaining about perceived inequities will have little effect.
Hey, so as you may have noticed, Calitics is a bit slow these days. With David Dayen leaving us for FireDogLake, and others of us just being busy, we haven't had as much content on Calitics as we'd like. So, we'd like to invite others to join us. It's not a lucrative gig, as Calitics is a labor of love, not so much profit. If you are interested let Brian know at brian at calitics dot com.
• PG&E is putting on a measure on the ballot to make community choice aggregation, ie a public competitor to the power companies, more difficult by requiring votes of the people when it passes. They've dumped a big pot o' money into the effort.
• John Benoit delayed his swearing-in http://blogs.pe.com/politics/2... as Supervisor to allow the special election to be combined into the June primary.
You may have noticed that my story about Sen. Boxer and others stepping up and insisting a public option in the Senate health care bill made its way to Firedoglake today. Well, there's a good reason for that.
I've accepted a position with Firedoglake running a new site over there that will be called FDL News. The site has not yet gone live bit will come into being in the next couple weeks; in the meantime I'll be posting on the main site over there, starting next Monday (today was kind of a preview). It's an opportunity to do a mix of breaking news, analysis and some original reporting. Firedoglake has some fine bloggers in their stable and I'm excited about the opportunity.
Unfortunately, what this means is that, due to the expected workload, I will be unable to continue writing at Calitics, at least in the near term. This is a big blow to me. I started here sometime after the 2006 gubernatorial election and have participated in Calitics' expansion to one of the more widely-read sites in the state blogosphere, and even a conduit for national blogs to understand what the hell was going on out here during the various budget and governance crises. The site has been a real boon to me in learning how to cover an unfolding story, which will greatly enhance my capabilities at my new job.
More than that, Calitics is like a family. All of us writers sort of built this site together and took it from scratch into as important a daily read to understand California politics as there is anywhere in the state, including (perhaps especially including) all major media outlets. Brian, Robert, Dante, Julia, Jeremy, Lucas and anyone else I've missed should be extremely proud of what they've been able to accomplish, and I have no doubts that they'll be able to make great strides in the future. This remains a crucial time for progressives in California, with so many challenges: to return majority rule to the state, construct a Constitution that actually works to govern the population, restore democracy to the citizenry, all with 2010 elections coming up to boot. Those are not small topics, and as a California resident I know I'll be looking to Calitics to help sort it all out.
I never intended for blogging to be anything more than a hobby, but it quickly grew to an obsession and now a career. Thanks to everybody here for helping make that a reality. And who knows, maybe you'll see me pop up in the comments every now and again. I'm going to stop posting here on Friday. I'll be sure to drop a URL and let you all know where you can find me once FDL News gets off the ground.
We are very excited to announce that Calitics now has an iPhone app! We've teamed up with Notice Software, a great mobile developer, to bring you the application. It's currently available only for the iPhone, but we expect a version for Android, the Google mobile OS, within a few days. The software offers some great flexibility for Calitics users with iPhones. You can easily search for posts and tags, making your Calitics daily fix easier than ever.
As a side note, apparently Apple rated Calitics a 17+ application. I guess California politics is no place for kids? I mean, what stake do they have in it? It's not like they need to know how much money is being cut from K-12 and higher education, right? I totally understand a PG-13 kind of rating. On occasion we are known to use a curse word or two. However, there's nothing on Calitics that a high school student shouldn't see. I can't really influence Apple's decision on this, but it is a little bit disappointing.
You can download it for just 99 cents from the iTunes app store today. The Android version should be in the Android Market by the middle of the week.
On exceedingly rare occasions we divulge ever so little about our personal lives here on Calitics. It's what makes a community a community. Plus I didn't want anyone to send out the search parties.
So I will be away from blogging and the online world for the next week. That's because, in between posts over the last couple years, I met a wonderful girl, and we will be getting married in her hometown of Pittsburgh on Saturday. Somehow she likes the chained-to-the-computer-and-occasionally-unresponsive type. I don't know. But I'm pretty pleased about it, as I'm a lucky man.
After the wedding and a little "mini-moon" (a word I've coined for "shortened honeymoon," how do you like it?), the wife and I will go back to Pittsburgh for the annual gathering, Netroots Nation. So seek me out there and say hello. After all, you'll be on my honeymoon!
By the way, I should again plug the panel discussion I'm running at Netroots Nation on Saturday, August 15 called "California: How Process Creates Crisis," in room 317 at 3:00pm. The panel features myself, Robert Cruickshank of Calitics and the Courage Campaign, Jean Ross of the California Budget Project and AD-21 legislative candidate Kai Stinchcombe. I've created a Facebook event for the panel, and for more information visit the Netroots Nation event site. If you're heading to the convention, I hope you can make it.
Absolutely fantastic work by an incredibly talented and passionate team.
If we didn't have this resource, we wouldn't be informed on state issues. The issues are complex, and the legacy media doesn't have the resources or the desire to handle complex stories.
This began as a comment left in David's story announcing the budget deal, but with greater reflection my reaction has grown worse. What set me off is two things: Robert's comment as a story update that "The February deal was bad, but this is far worse," (my emphasis) and David's subsequent story suggesting (facetiously, I hope) that he didn't realize until now that the side that gave less of a damn about who suffered in the wake of a failure to reach a budget had a tremendous advantage.
I'd like to believe that this is all just bitter and spontaneous reaction to a defeat for progressives and the people of the state -- sentiments that, ideally, would not have found their way into print. If not, if this is truly where we stand, then the implication is that we were wrong in May and the regular politicians who predicted this were right -- and, furthermore, that they were right because they are less ignorant about how the system really works.
I don't accept that conclusion. I intend this as a sharp slap in the face to rouse people who are playing right into the stereotype of progressive activists as people who know how to complain loudly but don't actually understand political realities. Robert, David, and the rest of us are better than that. We were right about May, even taking this prospective result into account, and we should start acting like it.
To: (insert fun and in no way dated Communist Party reference here) Comrades Phil Trounstine and Jerry Roberts
From: Dave
I read with interest your dripping-with-contempt response to my criticism of your reports on the Parsky Commission. Actually, 4/5 of the article concerned the Commission itself and not you, but I am reminded of the words of Carly Simon:
You're so vain
You probably think this song is about you
As a regular reader of Calbuzz, I admire your sources, if not your willingness to string an entire article together based on two politicians standing next to one another smiling, as well as an over-emphasis on horse-race politics and narratives. But clearly, you have a bit of an inflated view of your clear-eyed mission of "journalism," and the assumed objectivity that goes with it.
Allow me to be blunt: Calitics has been writing about the Parsky Commission since December of 2008, before there was such a thing as Calbuzz. We have followed up time and again, in particular when two weeks ago, Susan Kennedy tipped the hand of how this commission would go by stating that "Our revenue stream is way too progressive." So it was not exactly some kind of amazing scoop to report on a commission that has open meetings and presents all their material in public, which is why plenty of contemporaneous reports were written, based on the documents posted on the Internet that the Parsky Commission presented in anticipation of their open meeting.
Unlike you, I don't pretend to hide my opinions on the very clear economic and tax policy implications of the Commission's report behind some false veil of objectivity. Most of my comments were directed at the report itself, and the way in which a flat tax would quite obviously shift the burden of taxation to the middle class and the poor; but I couldn't help but notice clear language like...
the impending bankruptcy of state government should be sufficient to show players at every point of the political spectrum not only that sweeping change is needed, but also that everyone will have to compromise to keep California from sinking into the 9th Circle of Hell
...which certainly allows people, in my view, a window into how you determine the best policy, defined as the midpoint between whatever pleases those hateful hippies and the ranters on the right. That may be a nice and quick methodology, but it's anything but rigorous, and I'm pretty sure it's an apt description. After all, wasn't one of you the communications director for Gray Davis, who was not above bold expressions of centrism and a fear of the spectre of "The Left"?
(How did pumping out that daily message for ol' Gray turn out, by the way? What did that guy do after his two successful terms were up? Just curious.)
I mean, I'm very sorry for bringing up the inconvenient fact that so-called "objective" journalists can frame a story in such a way that they put their own thumbs on the ideological scale. You claim that your job is to "ferret out the facts" of the policymakers, you know, like hard-hitting reporting on an email to supporters and what one Republican said about another Republican in a press release, but it's fairly clear from the above-mentioned article that you view flat taxes and eliminating corporate taxes as pretty sensible and down the middle, and it colored your coverage. I should probably just have shut up about it and gone back to my Communist Party self-criticism sessions, which by the way is a hilarious and timely joke. Here's another one: In Soviet Russia, television watches you! You can use that!)
So this notion that I should just say thank you for illuminating a public document seems to me to be a bit too self-regarding, and your lashing out at me for pointing out the not-so-hidden biases in that particular article a bit too "the lady doth protest too much." But of course, I have an infantile disorder.
Which brings us to this criticism about the Barbara Boxer press conference and certain bloggers clapping at the end of it, something of a hobby horse for you folks. I am not going to speak for anyone in the room but myself, but I know quite for certain that I didn't clap, and I know what I asked. See, based on my notes (yes, I took them, just like a real live reporter) I know that I followed up a series of queries about torture (yours was some process question about how the Obama Administration "rolled out" the torture memos released a week before) with a specific question about a resolution before the state party seeking the impeachment of Jay Bybee for his role in authorizing torture, to which she answered "I'm very open to that," reminding those assembled that she voted against Bybee's confirmation as a federal judge. Now, at the time, I was involved in securing thousands of signatures from across the state endorsing this resolution, and when it came before the resolutions committee, I would argue that having Sen. Boxer's agreement that calling for the impeachment of someone who helped authorize torture was a reasonable request actually helped get that resolution passed. In other words, it was a combination of what the netroots community does best - using citizen journalism and activism in tandem to effect progress on progressive issues.
p.s. In the cited post, I used variations on the word "fetish" once, in a 1,400-word article. But it made for a smashing joke about therapists, so points for you!
No doubt the spin doctor wing of the political consultancy will be working overtime tomorrow morning to try and "explain" what actually happened today, why people voted the way they did, and what signal it supposedly sends to the state government as it tries to pass some semblance of a state budget in the months to come. Already the Republicans (who can't seem to win more than just over a third of the state in presidential, senatorial or legislative elections) are claiming that this is a mandate for cuts, cuts, cuts, and no new taxes, even though there was nothing remotely close to either an "all-cuts" or a "tax-n-spend" alternative on the ballot. Elected Democrats are a bit less clear, message-wise, although the smarter ones are belatedly focusing their message on the need to fix the budget by going to a majority rule on budget and taxes. Schwarzeneggar, who has been an utter disaster even by his own standards, skipped town and hid behind Obama's skirts, pretending vainly like Californian environmental standards were somehow his idea, and not an existing political movement that he sort of posed next to when the cameras were rolling.
So why did the measures fail, what does it mean, and what do the voters of California want?
Today, one of the biggest news publishers in the state, MediaNews, announced they will begin charging for their content. Amongst the MediaNews publications are the LA Daily News, the San Jose Mercury-News, and the Oakland Tribune.
MediaNews, which owns the Daily News of Los Angeles and other area papers through the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, said in a memo to employees that it will begin charging for online content with different premium tiers of access.
The memo, which was penned by MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton and President Jody Lodovic, said that giving away the content that appears in the print edition for free does an "injustice to our print subscribers" and creates "perceptions that our content has no value."(BizJournals 5/12/09)
This is bad news for bloggers, readers, and our overall democracy. We rely on newspapers to be there for all the small stuff. To follow what's going on in City Halls across the country, and to report back about how our society is working. And when it fails, it falls on journalists to give us the bad news.
But the MediaNews Corporate types got it exactly wrong when they say that relying on an open system gives the perception that it has no value. See, the thing is that information desperately wants to be free. Locking up information behind a wall does a disservice to us all. And at any rate, the wall can only linger as long as it takes something to be noticed online. Or, as Richard Stallman, the founder of GNU, said in the early days of the internet:
I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By 'free' I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one's own uses... When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.
But the question that remains for MediaNews and all other publications, is what is the model that leads to long-term viability. One important item to note is that these newspapers aren't losing money right now, or at least most of them aren't. They just aren't making as much money as Wall Street desires. And as many of these corporations are dependent upon debt, this is particularly true of MediaNews, they have to satisfy Wall Street.
Perhaps an e-reader, like Amazon's Kindle, is the answer, but fundamentally information should be in the free market. Walled gardens have failed in all but the most tightly controlled markets. Only the Wall Street Journal's pay website has really succeeded, but that paper has a niche that others just don't satisfy. But if MediaNews goes pay-only, will people just look to the other papers in the region?
I don't blame the papers for doing something to increase revenues, they are a business like any other. I simply fear that the attempt is misguided and will ultimately fail. We need to find some sustainable model that will keep journalism open and sustainable. How that happens is still far from clear.
You all know Dante Atkins from his posts around here and probably from his work on DailyKos as well. We are excited to announce that Dante is now joining the Calitics Editorial Board. The Editorial Board works to provide quality content for the blog, occasionally moderates the blog, and votes on the "Calitics Editorial Committee" endorsements.
In addition to his voluminous blogging efforts, Dante has been involved in the California Democratic Party, serving on the platform committee, and helped to produce the Home Invasion ad during the closing days of the Prop 8 campaign.
We are working to ensure that the Editorial Board works for the site and the broader progressive movement. We'll keep you updated on future changes, and you can always find more information about the blog and Calitics on the "About Calitics" page.
Calitics has been listed, for the second year in a row, in Chris Cillizza's rundown of the best state political blogs. Cillizza bases this entirely on reader recommendations, so on behalf of the staff, thanks for spending a piece of your day here, recommending us, and helping us build a progressive community here in California.
Once again, SoapBlox is having some problems. I've just returned home from a trip to India, and I'm not sure if my jet-lagged brain is up to the task of fully dealing with the situation. I honestly don't know whether the long-term future of the site will be with SoapBlox or whether it will head in other directions. I can only promise that in the coming days I will do my best to figure out a plan to provide some sort of stability.
That being said, there was some stuff going on today that is worth a mention.
• During our extended outage, D-Day wrote a post on his blog about the Yacht Party's attempts (so far successful) to block the bills that would allow the state to obtain the full stimulus payments.
• Meg Whitman is going all out against props 1A-1C on the special election, the bills to implement the month-old budget "deal" that is already under water. The so-called moderate's opinion piece in the Bee is pretty much Yacht Party orthodoxy respun. Taxes are always evil, yada, yada. Whitman is positioning to the right of Abel Maldanado, Arnold Schwarzenegger, heck, even Mike Villines. That I might end up voting the same way as her on the spending cap, does nothing to diminish the fact that she is now attempting to win the CA GOP nomination by running for Governor of Alabama. She'll need to spend more than $150 million if this is her plan.
• Asm. Diane Harkey's (R-Dana Point) husband is being sued for fraud involving real estate lending. The scandal threatens Harkey, as she has a considerable financial stake in the company.
Soapblox is an inexpensive, community-building content management platform developed by Paul Preston and currently used by over 100 progressive blogs. For only $15 / month, Soapblox has offered most of the features available on sites like Daily Kos and MyDD: user diaries, recommended diaries, promoted diaries, interactive comments, comment ratings, tip jars, and even things like quick hits. It is a lot of functionality for not much price, making it ideal for independent, progressive, grassroots media. As such, it has been adopted by about 90% of the fifty-state blog network, and also by several national sites including Pam's House Blend, My Left Wing, Swing State Project, and my own Open Left. Collectively, the blogs on Soapblox received over 50,000,000 page views in 2008, and provided a huge percentage of the state-level, local politics coverage in the progressive blogosphere.
Why Is Soapblox in Danger?
On Wednesday morning, Soapblox was hacked to within an inch of its life. A quarter of all Soapblox sites went completely offline, and their databases were gone. Most others were threatened, as My Left Wing and Open Left temporarily lost all of their diaries. The hackers were in so deep, that Paul temporarily threw in the towel and declared defeat. Dozens of bloggers that I knew were all frantically emailing each other. Desperate attempts were made to try and copy all of our data before The End. At one point I was, literally, running up and down the stairs in my apartment building freaking out, as there are few things I fear more than my website's content being wiped out. It was an impending blog apocalypse, where the entire archive and operation of over 100 blogs were almost wiped off the Internet with no hope of return. As the day went on, through a lot of effort Soapblox was able to fend off the attack, save all data, and restore full service. However, the threat remains.
Thus, today we are asking for your help at the SoapBlox ActBlue page. More on saving SoapBlox over the flip.
It seems soapblox, our software platform, is having some issues. We're currently trying to archive everything and working to make sure we can keep everything up.
UPDATE: It looks like we're out of the woods for the time being. BlogPAC, a sponsor of this blog, is working to ensure that SoapBlox remains a viable platform. We'll update again when we know more.
We California progressives have come quite a long way in this decade. Whereas America had its catastrophic political moment eight years ago, ours came on October 7, 2003. A disorganized and demoralized Democratic Party, out of touch with its base, saw its governor recalled and replaced by an Austrian actor.
Just as American progressives used the defeats of 2000 and 2004 to learn how to organize and place ourselves on the brink of an historic presidential victory, California progressives used the 2003 defeat to start doing the hard and necessary work of rebuilding a party and a movement. We saw some early rewards in 2005 when we beat Arnold's special election. And we saw some setbacks in 2006 when top-down party establishment led us into another gubernatorial defeat.
At the same time California progressives helped send Jerry McNerney to Congress and put Debra Bowen in the Secretary of State's office and helped Marcy Winograd nearly knock off Jane Harman. Immigrant rights activists took to the streets and created a new civil rights movement for a new generation. Those campaigns helped sow the seeds of the remarkable grassroots energy we have witnessed here in 2008. Up and down the state progressive activists have organized to help Democrats have a fighting chance at a 2/3 majority, helped put candidates like Charlie Brown and Debbie Cook on the brink of defeating two of Southern California's far-right freakshows.
And the outpouring of activism for the No on Prop 8 campaign is something to behold. That race is still WAY too close for comfort - if you have not yet volunteered for the campaign, be sure to do so as part of your Stay for Change action. Vote early and then get to work - we have an election to win.
As the history of California progressives in the 2000s shows, sometimes you've gotta hit rock bottom before you can make it back to the top. We're not there yet, and no matter how the results turn out today, we still have a long way to go. With Arnold Schwarzenegger still governor, with millions of Californians facing unemployment and foreclosure and the loss of health benefits, with the state budget in deficit and Republicans insist on using it to ram through Grover Norquist's radical agenda - we still have plenty of work left to do no matter what happens today.
But today's election is the end of the beginning. California progressives are no longer the party doormat, no longer a disorganized group. We are not just here to stay, but we are here to lead and we are here to resuscitate this state. The right-wing remains strong - so strong they may well pass Prop 8 - but no longer will they have the state to themselves. Today, the battle has been joined.
Earlier today I attended a panel called "Who's Leading Whom?" exploring the role of blogs in political media.I was there with Todd Beeton who wrote it up here. It was moderated by Arianna Huffington, and the panelists were Chris Cilliza of WaPo's The Fix, Greg Maffei of Liberty Media, Digby of Hullabaloo and Jonathan Alter- Senior Editor and Political Columnist for Newsweek.
Whether by design or not, much of the conversation centered around the extremism on blogs and particularly in the comments. Maffei commented several times that the nature of the internet lends to infinite commentary and thus potentially waters down the value of what's found on political blogs. I don't dispute the first part of this, but finding a readership demands that what's being written carry some sort of value. There's a meritocratic aspect that's often overlooked by purveyors of traditional media no matter how well they understand (or sometimes don't) the nature of blogging. Cillizza and Alter both repeatedly blasted the quality of comments on blogs (there's specifically) but failed to address the reason: blogs from widely known news outlets which don't moderate comments turn in to magnets for extremist and disruptive comments. It's perhaps understandable then that both would have a negative view of the comment aspects of blogs and tend to judge the broader notion of a blogosphere based on these experiences. But neither had any notable exposure to communities of commenters, rating systems, etc. which serve as an effective check on the more counter-productive comments.
In the same vein, Alter and Maffei in particular noted that the infinite space online leads to the purveyors of vitriol and extremists on both sides of the spectrum rising to the top. Aside from the fact that I don't think that's accurate, nobody managed to note that the exact same thing is true of newspaper opinion columns and especially the punditocracy on cable news. For the most part, nobody gets a steady stream of repeat gigs if they don't stir the pot. Whether they have anything accurate or constructive to say is secondary. So this criticism of blogs completely falls flat as far as I'm concerned, no matter how much these folks are commited to defending the honor of traditional media.
A lot of people are talking today about Sen. Obama's stance against Prop. 8; it's a recommended diary on Daily Kos. We had this on Calitics two days ago and nobody noticed. The Sacramento Bee reports on it and suddenly it's on everybody's lips.
I don't begrudge the Bee writing about the issue; it's newsworthy, and the result of a letter read to the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, not some secret. I'm glad they picked it up. But I'm very disturbed by the fact that progressive media is not supported to the point of being ignored, but when a dead-tree source goes with the same information it becomes a top story. I expect that out of the traditional media, but not the blogosphere. There is no question that Brian was the first person anywhere to report on Sen. Obama's letter to the club. And I can tell you that I did at least some behind-the-scenes work to promote the scoop to progressive media and blogosphere leaders. Didn't work.
I don't care that the Bee didn't report that Calitics was the first source to break this; would have been nice, but not totally necessary. But could bloggers at least note that we had this two days before the traditional media? If we aren't self-reinforcing we're never going to get anywhere.
