They work as barristas at a coffee shop I go to everyday. These are friendly, hard-working and engaging young women and I enjoy chatting with them in English, or, at times, my fractured Spanish, about all sorts of "standing in line at the coffee shop" topics: their children, my nieces and nephews, the weather, holidays, soccer teams etc. etc. Even on my days with the earliest call times...when I line up at the cafe at 6AM these women will already have commuted in, been there and got the coffee brewing.

Their "call time" is almost always earlier than mine. That's not unusual.

You see, Rosa, Brenda and Claudia are recent immigrants to the United States. Just three of the millions of hardworking immigrants from all over the world raising families and contributing to the American way of life.

They've asked me to share a message with the readers online. They've asked me to provide you with a chance to act...

In his first three paragraphs Mr. Nagourney spins a trifecta of terrorist arrests, "tough" Republicans, "timid" Dems and then, as a coup de grace, turns the Lieberman/Lamont primary on its head as if his lede had literally been written at Karl Rove's desk.

Now, it might seem that the strategic response to this familiar situation would be to counter each of these points and attack: attack Nagourney, attack the "tough" Republican frame, attack the "weak" Democrat frame, attack Karl Rove, attack the New York Times.

We've done that. That doesn't win elections.

Just one week ago, over one thousand of us met up in Las Vegas at the first Yearlykos convention. It was an experience that replicated on a communal scale the thrill that Matthew Gross must have had when, as Joe Trippi recounts above, Matt drove from Utah to Vermont unannounced to work on the Howard Dean campaign.  We at Yearlykos took online politics offline.  Names became faces.  The netroots networked. Candidates courted bloggers. The blogosphere, quite literally met the press.

In contrast to Trippi and Lessig in 2003, however, we had new buzzwords at Yearlykos; the convention was awash in references to "People Powered Politics" "the millennial generation" and "social networking software."

With this essay, however, I'd like to make the case for a quiet phrase that we've let fall into disuse.   I'd like to talk about open source politics.

Driving through the tunnel on Yerba Buena Island in five lanes of traffic (the bridge is crossed by 280,000 vehicles a day) one can see opening up along the entire length of the first part of the western span...in one gulp...a little over one mile of jam-packed traffic sitting 300 ft. above the surface of the Bay.  Before one's eyes creeps a sea of steel and rubber riding on a suspension bridge of steel and concrete...powered, built, fabricated and maintained by the burning of fossil fuels.  It's something to see.  And something to think about.

Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote a post election piece on dKos that tried to start a discussion about changing the face of the Democratic party.  Today, I'd like to take that topic up again through the lens of feminism...I know I'm not saying much new to anyone here, but I wanted to put these thoughts down all in one place.

Warning:  This is a long essay, real "oatmeal" if you know what I mean.  I print it here in hopes it reaches a few more folks than it did on my blog, where I occasionally write long pieces like this and, thank god, mostly shorter ones as well.

Peace!!

Mike Finnegan in the LA Times reports that labor leaders are very worried about the prospects for Proposition 75:

"We're not winning on this thing, and we've got to step it up," Steven Neal, a Los Angeles County Federation of Labor official, told scores of union leaders at a campaign breakfast last week in downtown Los Angeles. He likened the battle against Proposition 75 to a "sinking ship" in need of rescue.

Argh...more below...

Matt had an anti-Arnold hat on, and more than one political button adorned his jacket...and I was the only guy in the place with a yellow legal pad.

We talked about Richard Pombo the scuzzy GOP congressman in neighboring CA-11, we talked about Jerry McNerney, Pombo's 2004 grass roots environmentalist opponent, we talked about the upcoming vote on ballot initiatives and that day's protest by Alliance for a Better California...

and we talked about the heartbreak that ABC wasn't opposing Proposition 73, an anti-choice proposition that would change the California State Constitution to put in "life begins at conception" language, in addition to opposing Propositions 74-78...

but Matt had some other interesting things to say that I thought I'd pass on:  thoughts about the state of organizing and the netroots today...

Ms. Shirek has been a tireless and unabashed fighter from the progressive left.  The granddaughter of slaves, Ms. Shirek spent sixty years in the Bay Area working on justice issues.  When she was forced, by age requirements, to retire from a senior center she founded, Ms. Shirek ran for Berkeley City Council, was elected and served for the next twenty years, towards the end of which she was criticized by some for 'moderating' her views.

Looking at her life achievement, however, Berkeley could find few citizens who represent the city's values and spirit so well or whose life story is so worthy of tribute.  That won't stop the GOP from opposing the simple local act of honoring her.

People who write online in a sustained way...as many of us here, including myself, have done...are engaged in a project that dates back a ways.

You could say that our work represents the latest flourish of the "small press" movement that presaged the Enlightment in Europe.  I have no doubt in my mind that if Denis Diderot, Voltaire and Mary Wollstonecraft were alive today, they would be bloggers.  In so many ways, they already were.

You could also take our work further back to the free speech democratic traditions that anticipated what we call the 'invention of democracy' in Athens 2500 years ago.  What is scoop, after all, other than a Socratic dialogue?....(If there is one figure who might stand in for the spirit of the blogs, our real blog father, wouldn't it be Socrates?)...What is blogging more than conversation in writing...like those of the Vedic and Talmudic Scholars...or the work of the Chinese writers Lao Tzu or Confucius and their historical collaborators?

Forgive me booman, but I'm NOT going to crosspost this anywhere else for obvious reasons...dKos needs no Meta from me tonight, lol.

But I would like to share a couple thoughts / questions.

I made a comment today on dKos that echoed pieces I've written on my blog and on dKos:

race and racism: on dkos (do click on the comments)

and the race card.

I'd like to put out to the Booman political community (I've posted this at MyDD as well) that a discussion of race and poverty in the aftermath of Katrina is inevitable...and that how we have that discussion is important.  If you're interested....please read the flip.

what will they think of next?

I mean CLICK, ClICK, CLICK on that ad you (might) see to your left....

This one goes out to the individuals...those who stood up, who stood out, who refused to sit still or sit down and who paid the price for that...sometimes in blood, sometimes in dollars, sometimes with years in a prison cell, sometimes with life itself.

This one goes out to the whistle blowers, the contrarians, the prophets raging in the wilderness and the protestors chanting in the street....those who cannot brook hypocrisy and the abuse of power...those who are pure of heart...