Why I’m glad I haven’t picked a candidate yet

Via skippy, I found this piece at Time Magazine’s blog Swampland…

But yesterday’s praise (some of it in comments here) for the Obama campaign’s rapid response is souring as word spreads around the net that the architect of that rapid response, Robert Gibbs, comes with some baggage. He was the spokesman for “Americans for Jobs, Health Care and Progressive Values,” the group behind an anti-Dean ad you might remember:

Click for more. Oh. That ad. Yes, as someone who first became involved in politics because of the Dean campaign, I certainly remember the way the other Democrats ganged up on him. That ad was the sort of thing we expected from the Karl Rove–not from fellow Democrats.

I’d probably be really unhappy about this if I was really excited about Obama as a candidate. I don’t dislike him the way I dislike Hillary, but I’m not exactly sold on him either.

Maybe I’ll just make some popcorn, kick back, and watch with detached amusement while all of the candidates who are not Al Gore tear each other to pieces.

And root beer. Think I’ll go get me a root beer too.

Coming soon: complete sentences

I had hoped to have a real post written up by now, but a work project is starting sooner than I expected. And it would be nice if we didn’t have to wait for all the planets in *my* world to align properly before we can have some content on this blog that is non-meta. So I’m going to post, in no particular order, some thoughts and hopes for this blog:

Genuinely a “voice of the netroots” where we can post or crosspost about the issues we feel passionate about.

“Raise all boats”–really. Mutual linking.

Crossposting encouraged, but not of flame wars.

No one person or blog is perceived as the *leader* (the right wing likes to smear these leaders and thus the movement they represent. Would like to be more robust than that.)

Democratic, in the sense of avoiding the “media consolidation” phenomenon.
In content, Democratic, liberal, progressive, Green, independent–not aligned with one party or candidate, but addressing issues of importance to the “little people” (especially “the least, the last, and the lost” that are sometimes deemed inconvenient to discuss by the powers that be)

Hold all politicians/candidates accountable.

I’ve started on a list of tags or categories, which will appear in sidebar on the right. Right now all you see are “uncategorized” and “meta”, but as people write posts about different topics, those categories will appear as well. That way, when this blog hopefully does have lots of front page posts, readers will have the option of going directly to the topics they are interested in, rather than scrolling through everything.

Some topics I came up with, off the top of my head, are 2008, anti-war, current events, Democrats, election integrity, environment, global warming, healthcare, immigration, and terrorism. I’m sure I’m missing some obvious ones, but that’s a start, at least. We can add new categories as we go.

But first I need contributors (who are willing to sign up for a WordPress account if they don’t have one already, because there’s where this blog is being built.)