Follow the Light. Hear the Voices. It's not all Fox and Hounds. It's not even C-Span.

For the past couple of years I've been watching with trepidation and, yes, sadness, as C-Span, that formerly great political  leveler, has been moving farther and farther to the right.  There was a time when they were scrupulous about their fairness.  I haven't forgotten the days when Brian Lamb seemed to feel strongly about their responsibility to present issues without bias.

These days things have changed enough that the moderators of Washington Journal find themselves using up precious minutes defending their choices against more and more urgent calls for some equity. They firmly deny the obvious fact that they give more quality time to Republicans and their issues than they do to Democrats. 

  They will say they read from many papers, and it's true, but if they choose, say, the New York Times, they'll only read the portions that weaken the Dem positions and strengthen the Republicans.  They choose the portions of articles they highlight based on how effectively they think it bashes government policies.  I didn't notice that same attention to detail during the dreaded Bush years.

Their papers du jour are the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and the New York Post.  They  bring on guests from The Heritage Foundation, (just this AM Lisa Curtis from the Heritage Foundation was on  talking about WikiLeaks), The American Enterprise Institution, and the Cato Institution, and treat them as if their utterings are actually those of the American People.

Where are the folks from MoveOn.org or People for the American Way?  Where are the spokespeople for the labor organizations?  I see the U.S. Chamber of Commerce pushing their myth that unfettered business will fix everything, but I don't see representation of the obvious evidence showing that unfettered business benefited mightily from the ruination of our country.  (Today Laura Ingraham was on C-Span2's BookTV touting her latest screed against Obama.  Where's Robert Reich or Al Franken or Rachel Maddow?)

 Okay, I am biased and I make no bones about it.  I not only lean Liberal, I stand firmly on what I consider hallowed ground.  I haven't written about this before because I wanted to be sure I wasn't letting my biases get in the way.  Was I seeing something that wasn't actually there?  Are they fair and I'm just missing the times when the Democratic/Liberal/Progressive point-of-view is presented honestly and fairly, with the same amount of time given?

I wish I could say I'm wrong.  I used to have a real love affair with C-Span.  I watched it religiously and I marveled at the amount of unbiased information I could get from them.  Something happened to C-Span during the last few years of the Bush administration, but I was still blindly in love at the time and  refused to accept the growing signs of their abandonment.  It was there, I just wasn't admitting it.  Now I am.  They've left me--and you--and all of us who refuse to toe the Republican/Right Wing line.  They've gone over to the dark side and I'm completely baffled.  Just when we need them the most, they've sided with the enemy.  Why?

(August 2, 6:45 AM - C-Span 2 repeating the 7/16/10 airing of the 2010 Eagle Forum Collegians Summit at the Heritage Foundation.  Phyllis Schlafly and Michael Coffman spewing their Right Wing nonsense to a motley handful of students, but the C-Span cameras were there.  Why?)

Why??

It's one among many "whys".  Why are foolish clowns like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin the anointed titular heads of the Republican Party?
 
 Why are hate-filled organizations like the Tea Party and the NRA viewed as celebrators of democracy?

Why are our fearless leaders afraid of all of the above?  Why is the supposed free press afraid?

The answers are constantly being sought by those of us in the Liberal/Progressive blogosphere.  The good news is our numbers are rising.  The bad news is that there are so many of us, only a select few will rise to the top to be seen and heard by what passes these days for multitudes.

But now there is Twitter.

Yes, Twitter.

I know, I know.  I made the same jokes about Twitter and Tweeting as everyone else, but here's what's so great about Twitter:

Everything.

Plus you get to follow people who either know what they're talking about or can lead you (RT or ReTweet) to someone else who knows what they're talking about.  You can RT anything you find enlightening or amusing or nutty or sad, and it saves you from having to come up with your own 140-character quote-in-a-jar.

 There's even a secret code that opens the doors to other liberal/progressive Tweeters and lets them know you're one of them. (#p2)  There are other secret codes, of course, but I'm still bungling my way through so it's the only one I feel comfortable sharing right now.  There's TweetDeck and Bitly and hashtags and a whole host of other confusing and arcane necessities required of heavy-duty Tweeters and their acolytes. (That's me.)

But the whole point of my post here is to shed light on some pretty amazing bloggers.  These are people I might never have discovered had it not been for Twitter--and that's a fact.  I find pretty amazing bloggers in other places, too, (like Talking Points Memo Cafe Reader Posts , Alternet Soapbox, and Open Salon--where every would-be blogger--including me--is welcome).  In fact, there are legions of pretty amazing bloggers who are singing our song, spreading our message, and proving beyond doubt that liberals and progressives are out there in numbers that would be staggering to the MSM if only they would take the time to look around.

Here are a few of my favorite Twitter bloggers:

Tomfoolery with Otoolefan:  Check out his his piece about Thomas Sowell.  Priceless.
The Political Carnival with Paddy and Laffy
 A Free America: You Decide
EZKool
Lady Liberty Speaks
Wolfrum
Radio Graffiti
Drums n Whistles (Karoli)
The Jack Wade Show

From Talking Points Memo:

DickDay
FlowerChild
American Dad
The People Choose
Beneath the Spin - Wattree
Sleepin' Jeezus
Joe Wood
Brown Man Thinking Hard - Kris Broughton

And others:

Nutwood Junction
Bucko's World
Out Left

There are so many more (including my Favorites on the right side of my blog), but this gives an idea of the quality of the political blogs out there.  They're wonderful and deserve a spot at the top.  At the very least, they should know how much they're appreciated.  And the country should know they're here.  Please help spread the word.  And feel free to add names to my list.   Let their voices be heard.

Ramona

My Words on Bill Moyers' Lips - I'm Speechless

I missed Bill Moyers Journal on Friday night, and I was away from home all day yesterday until about 8 PM, so I had no idea that the end paragraph of my lowly blog about Moyers' interview with Wendell Potter made it onto the top of his show. (The clip shows my blog at Talking Points Memo but the content is the same as the original post here.)



Rowan Wolf over at Talking Points Memo Cafe saw it, blogged about it and put it on YouTube. To say I'm pretty stunned by this is a total understatement, and normally I don't like to toot my own horn, but this may be my 15 seconds of fame, so you'll have to forgive me for this, please.

I really want to talk about how blogs and bloggers have come out of the shadows and onto the battlefield. It's becoming a powerful vehicle for change, but with that comes the same kind of responsibility that journalists advocate but don't always follow. There are thousands of political bloggers out there now, and picking and choosing is a daunting, time-consuming occupation. Our political views are often going to be different, but the one thing we should be able to agree on is that we've come to this new vehicle for change with the understanding that we have an obligation to tell the truth as we see it and understand it. We'll make mistakes--plenty of them. Most of us are not professionals, after all, and our passion is bound to get in the way of clear thinking and good judgment some of the time. But our voices are out there; we're growing stronger, and I believe this country will be the better for it.

I came late to blogging. I just didn't get it. So much of what I saw was superficial, shallow navel-gazing--a kind of helter-skelter motor-mouth. Every thought, worthy or not, was transported onto a personal page for everyone to read--even those just merely, superficially interested.

I think it was the blogs on The Daily Kos that first convinced me it could be used to pull whole communities of people with common interests together so that one voice became many, and many voices could ultimately gain the power to change things.

I started my own blog here on January 20, the day of Barack Obama's inauguration. I remember hesitating for a long time before I hit the "Publish Post" button. It seemed like such a conceited, ego-driven kind of thing to do, but after the past eight years, and after the heady jubilance of the Obama victory, the passion to do something was overwhelming.

All I can do, really, is write. I'm not good at organizing or speechifying or getting on the telephone to try and convince anybody of anything. Writing is re-writing, and since I never get my thoughts straight the first time, it's the perfect vehicle for me. But I wanted my blog to include more than just my voice. I wanted it to be an open outlet for the blogs, articles, columns and videos so many of us were sending to one another by email almost every day. I've created links to many of them, but there are so many good writers out there who have a voice and are working hard to get themselves heard. It's becoming a real movement now, and outlets like Talking Points Memo are right at the forefront.

Somewhere along the way, Iwas lucky enough to find Talking Points Memo and the TPM Cafe. A whole new world! Intimidating at first because, man, are they smart! But I started a blog there and they welcomed me with a generosity that actually kind of floored me. My comment section here on this blog remains forelorn and lonely, but at TPM the comments sections are lively and boisterous -- full of good talk and good information. You can always count on the commenters to make you get it right. That's the terrifying beauty of political blogging--we're all opinionators and we make our opinions known!

But this one blog about Moyers and Potter must have struck a tiny nerve. My Blogspot blog had 162 hits that day and the next, and it received 656 Diggs--all because it was posted on TPM.

We have the power to make change. On my last post, I was wallowing in Faithlessness, but today I'm energized. And all because Bill Moyers spoke my words for a few seconds on his show. Okay, I'm ready to get back to work. Health care, labor, education, voter fraud, congressional shenanigans, shameless fat cats--bring 'em on.

What can I say? I'm easy.

Ramona

Blogorama: Of Free Speech and Miracles

When I first started writing, there was no internet and thus no blogging, and thus no everyday opportunity to opinionate--or bloviate, as the case may be. If we were lucky, our opinions would be published in our local newspaper's "Letters to the Editor", and we would be thrilled to see ourselves in print. If we were really lucky, we might secure a space on the Op-Ed page and actually get paid a few dollars a column to write about anything that popped into our wee little heads.

I did that for a few years, and while I worked hard at it and was every bit as passionate about the world around me as I am now, the chance for any meaningful readership numbers was about as slim as my chance to win the PowerBall.

Still, I wrote--and gave it all I had.

Now I write here, not out of any sense of ego or authority, but because I have something to say and I can do it for free on the World Wide Web. That's a concept that's pretty astonishing. (Okay, there may be a bit of ego--let's face it, how could it be otherwise? But I claim no authority.)

The downside to this freedom to bloviate is that the WWW is an equal opportunity monster of humungous proportions. A jillion people can set up a jillion blogs and do the same thing I'm doing right here, right now. I'm exquisitely aware that to be one in a jillion is to be nothing at all. A mere speck in the sands of exaltation.

But still I write--and give it all I have.

The upside of creating a blog, besides the obvious one of writing your heart out with the knowledge that you'll be "published", no matter what, is that you soon find yourself in amongst a community of like-minded bloggers who will pay attention to your blog if you'll pay attention to theirs.

As pathetic as that may sound, it's actually a terrific system, leading to all manner of serendipitous discoveries.

I "met" one such blogger by reading her comment on another blog, which I discovered when that blogger commented on mine. I went to her blog (Preserve, Protect and Defend) and commented on her comment and now she occasionally comments on mine, while I do the same on hers. She calls herself "Two Crows", which is fine with me. I don't need to know her real name to appreciate her writing. The point is, I never would have found her if not for the intricate, intertwining paths of the blogosphere.

Robert Reich has what he calls his "personal journal" through Blogspot. I was thrilled to find it, because he writes the way I would want to write if I had the talent, and more times than not I get to shout "Amen" while I'm reading him. But more important, he's using the exact same template that I chose for my blog. His is spare and elegant and at the same time welcoming--the perfect showcase for his words--while mine. . .well, you'll just have to take my word for it that we started out on the same page.

But the reason I bring any of this up is because I still haven't gotten over an extraordinary, spontaneous happening last week among the TPM Cafe bloggers on Talking Points Memo. I'm a blogger newbie on that site, so I have no real history there. I don't know any of the bloggers well yet, but I liked what I saw there from the first day I found the site.

One blogger in particular--dickday--stood out because he was funny and so very clever--a kind of modern day chronicler of deliciously skewed Arthurian legend. He commented on a couple of my blogs and was incredibly kind and welcoming. I was nervous as hell to be among such smart people so I latched onto one of them--dickday--and followed him wherever he went.

Last week his regular posts just stopped. So did his always amusing comments. I vaguely wondered where he was but I didn't pay too much attention. Everybody understands that blogging can be every day or it can be sporadic. Apparently with dickday, it had come to be a regular event, almost like clockwork, and his followers were worried.

Then began a search the likes of which we've never seen since Stanley went looking for Livingstone.

After a day or so of scurrying around, someone finally heard from him. His computer had crashed and he was sending a feeble message from the wilds of his local library. dickday without a World Wide quill. Unthinkable! But money was tight and using the library as his home base was out of the question.

That's when the Cafe bloggers went into action. Within minutes (or so it seemed) someone had come up with the idea to find dickday a computer. Within a few more minutes someone offered a perfectly good CPU. Before long a PayPal fund was set up for donations toward the necessary extras, things were packed and shipped and someone who lived a few hours away volunteered to go over and set it up. The entire thing was a marvel in efficiency--Whoosh! Things happened.

But what was breathtaking to me was the caring, the concern, the compassion. I honestly have never seen anything like it in all my years on forums anywhere. So, I'm hoping they won't mind (because I and a few others were hesitant at first to make this so public), but this is my tribute to those folks who took it upon themselves to honor someone they have never met, and who did it with such extreme joy and such absolute good will.

Times are tough and it's easy to be cynical about the world we live in and the people we meet along the way. This was good. It was so good. If it doesn't qualify as a true miracle, it's probably as close as I'll ever get to seeing one.

Bravo to those good folks. May they ever keep joy in their hearts and a penny in their pockets. And may dickday get those fingers tapping and tell us a tale for the times.

(cross-posted at Talking Points Memo here)