I am Oh so tempted to keep reading diaries and coverage about this - it's fun.  However, if we want to help make this thing take off we need to do our part.  

Letters to the editors to the local papers will help this spread.  In case you don't have them handy, the Democratic Party site has a tool you can use to send out LTE's.  

My letter goes as follows:

It now makes sense why John McCain thinks the economy is fundamentally strong and supports Bush's disastrous tax policies that give enormous tax cuts to the wealthy at the expense of everyone else: he simply can't relate to regular people.  McCain has so many houses he can't keep track of them and thinks that people earning up to $5 million fit into the middle class.  So it's no wonder he doesn't understand how unfair it is to the non-rich who are struggling right now.  

UPDATE: I know how easy it is to just read the frontpagers and diaries on the story and not help to move it forward.  Cheers to those of you who've written LTE's! Feel free to share your letters here.

John McNicotine is now for the tobacco lobby after years of working against it.  He not only opposes the cigarette taxes he used to support but also opposes FDA regulation of the tobacco industry after years of supporting it.  McNicotine is an ex-smoker and should understand just how addictive nicotine is, and he even acknowledged the exceptionally high death rate for tobacco users when he joked that cigarette exports to Iran were part of his plot to kill Iranian citizens.  For McNicotine to cave in to the tobacco cartel is the ultimate flip-flop:
http://www.boston.com/...

Why has McNicotine caved in to the interests of the tobacco drug cartel?  It couldn't possibly have anything to do with hiring tobacco lobbyist Charlie Black as his senior adviser.  Move along folks.  There's nothing to see here:
http://firedoglake.com/...

Now let's use the traditional Rethug "moral values" and "sanctity of life" frames against McNicotine!  There's more in the flip.

As we continue to celebrate the Olympics with profound pride and patriotism , I wanted to share some disheartening rankings that reflect our country's stark decline relative to the rest of the world. I list these fully knowing this community's cognizance of such issues, but sometimes numbers yield a haunting, and thus effective, reminder.  For anyone truly proud to be American, these numbers should anger, motivate, and prompt action.  

32nd - World rank of U.S. infant mortality rate.

First - CEO to Worker pay ratio (531:1) (Second place is Brazil at 57:1)

9th - Adult Literacy Scale (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)

12th -  student reading ability (Source: OECD)

37th - U.S. rank on the Healthcare Quality Index (World Health Organization)

David Roberts at Grist and Matt Stoller at Open Left have given Al Gore and We Can Solve It grief of late for not taking a hard enough stance against the wingnuts in their campaign to stop Climaticide. One of their complaints had to do with an early We Can Solve It ad that they thought gave green cred to right wing scumbag Newt Gingrich. Maybe Gore was listening.  This new ad definitely hits a better tone.

"We DEMAND that we use them."

Yes! This is how WE we all need to be talking. We're not asking any more.  Kudos to Al Gore and the We Campaign for getting it right this time.

Dr Rick Warren, Pastor of Saddleback Church in CA will be featured on Larry King on CNN, Monday August 18 at 6 PST and 9EST.

The purpose of this diary is to get people organized to call and write in for this event and push back on Saddleback-gate, Cone of Silence-gate etc.

That's a saying among the United Farm Workers, and this summer it is more fitting then ever.  Yesterday we mourned, Today we act, Tomorrow we will gain justice.

Since May, six farm workers in California have died from what appears to be heat-related causes.  This brings to 15 the number of farm workers whose death have been investigated as heat-related since Governor Schwarzenegger took office.

A motto of the United Farm Workers is Si, Se Puede!, which the Barack Obama campaign has borrowed in its anglo version as "Yes, we can!"

Senator Barack Obama adopted the English version "Yes, we can!" first during the 2004 Illinois Democratic primary race for U.S. Senate, and it has become a mantra of his 2008 presidential campaign.

Wikipedia: Sí se puede

Come around after the fold and I'll show you how we can work together to save lives in California. Si, Se Puede!  Yes, we can!

So I have been a in the shadows lurker until now but I have decided to contribute my first diary for the pleasure of the Kossack nation.  
This is really "change you can Xerox" or maybe a color inkjet that can print a full bleed.
More below the fold...

Six California farm workers have died since May from what appears to be heat related causes.  The latest one was Maria de Jesus Alvarez, 63, mother of nine, who died early this month.  The first one to die was 17-year-old Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, who died in May.  Marie was about a month pregnant when she died, and likely did not ever know she was pregnant. The state fined the labor contractor $262,700 for failing to follow heat illness prevention regulations at the time Jimenez was stricken, but that won't bring her back. And the deaths have continued at an accelarated pace since then.

You can help to end this tragedy. This Monday, August 18, more than 800 farm workers from throughout California want to go to Sacramento to lobby the Legislature on a key bill that will help them help themeselves. They want the chance to tell the Governor and their elected officials to support AB 2386, "Secret Ballot Elections for Farmworkers," which has moved out of the assembly and which will be voted on that afternoon in the state senate.  

How you can help, after the fold.

Gardening is my joy and my agony. It’s my joy for all the reasons gardeners already understand and non-gardeners never want to hear about. But it is my agony because in my family, I am the only one who likes to work outside – the children did not inherit the dig-in-the-dirt gene. What that means on a practical level is that in the Summer, when life is relatively leisurely, there is plenty of time to do everything that needs to be done. In the Fall, however, when life gears up to its school-year pace, the lawn and garden get to be a bit too much to handle. When it gets to that point, I start taking shortcuts.

That’s what happened last Fall, the first one after we moved to our new home. Though my goal is gradually to turn most of the yard into edible landscaping, the home as purchased has a decent amount of grass to maintain until then. Keeping up with the weeds organically was no problem as long as I had time to go around and pull them. With the onset of Fall, though, the crabgrass sprouts began to take over and spread their dreaded seeded tillers across the lawn. In frustration and out of fear of losing a season’s hard work just as frost was about to put everything to bed, I made a rookie mistake.

Over 140 clergy sent a letter to presidential candidate Barack Obama urging him to return to the strong peace and social justice focus that helped him win the Democratic primaries.

This is a response diary to a pretty stupid trend of breathless armchair diaries.  I'm not naive enough to think it will stop, but I want to offer the organizer's perspective.  Campaign organizers can't talk to the press or blog (message control), so I'll let you in on the mindset.

We Are the War Room We've Been Waiting For:

And that's a large reason why the Chicken Little proclamations that we so often read and hear elsewhere - the petulant demands from armchair campaign managers that the Obama fight back in specific ways - are so silly:  Surrogates almost always make the better counterpunchers and anybody with a modem or a network of friends or neighbors is now as much of a surrogate as the big names that can garner mass media attention. When you can do something yourself, it's just plain infantile to call upon daddy or mommy - or the presidential candidate or political leader upon which you project that role - to do it for you. Hopefully, one of the lasting results of 2008 will be the emergence of the more grown-up form of political activism in which rather than calling on others to do things for us we simply do it ourselves.

True story. The scene is a Manhattan supper club, circa 1952. Eleanor Roosevelt approaches a table at which John and Elaine Steinbeck are dining. Elaine makes introductions, and then...

Eleanor Roosevelt: "When I go to the Soviets, they ask, 'Does that awful treatment of farmers still happen in the U.S.?’ I say, 'No, my husband and John Steinbeck took care of that.’"

John Steinbeck: "That is the best literary review I've ever received."

-- National Steinbeck Center video archive

Those of you with long memories or wonky fixations will recall our years-long push to force Senate candidates to file their FEC disclosure reports electronically and bring them into the 21st century.  It's beyond ridiculous that we haven't eliminated this convoluted mess, as I explained last September:

Let's remember what it's all about: it costs taxpayers about $250,000 a year for a private Virginia contractor to convert the Senate paper filings -- which are created by the campaigns using computers and software -- back into electronic format for the FEC to post on its Web site. The conversions take anywhere from 18 to 27 days to complete, which means that most of the last campaign filings for the Senate do not become electronically available on the FEC website until after the election.

So the Republican Leader in the Senate and the head of the Senate Republicans' campaign committee are conspiring to not only block more timely disclosure in campaign finance, but also to try and stymie the ethics woes that they face.  Indeed, as Dennis Green said, they are who we thought they were.

Sen. Feingold has more to say.  

As mentioned above, it's NRSC chairman Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) who was gumming the works with procedural nonsense.  It's time to route around him.

Our friends at the Sunlight Foundation, Change Congress, Public Campaign and other pro-technology, pro-transparency reform organizations have launched a new wikified tool to make it happen: Pass223.com.

The website is simple -- it tells you where your Senators stand on the bill and on Sen. Ensign's opposition, and how many calls have been made to each Senator.  Click on your Senators' names, and it will pull up a phone script tailored to where s/he stands on both the underlying bill and Sen. Ensign's attempts to derail it.  Make the call, report the response on the website, repeat with your other Senator.

It should just take a few hours for the readers of this site to steamroll through this electronic whip sheet and obtain the information needed on all 100 Senators.  Then, we can start applying pressure where needed.

Can you make two calls today to bring greater transparency to the Senate?

Here are seven new frames for current topics suggested by Susan C. Strong Ph.D., Founder and Executive Director of The Metaphor Project, from the recent Metaphor News, July - August 2008, an occasional publication of the Metaphor Project: www.metaphorproject.org

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"It's changin' out there. Just like last time. There's a storm comin' Harry. And we all best be ready when she does."-- Rubeus Hagrid from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

We do love anniversaries here in the USA. This year it was the 40th anniversary of 1968, one of those years like 1776, 1860, 1929, 1941 and 2001 where we stood at some kind of societal crossroads.

Of course the problem with anniversarial history is that the only time we're supposed to think about our history is when the Corporate Media waves its digital wand and provides us with a safely sanitized version that doesn't threaten the present Established Order.

Via Kevin Drum, Mother Jones has a remarkable story today about one Mary McFate, who spent the last 10 years as an activist with gun control groups such as Ceasefire and the Brady Campaign, eventually becoming a prominent figure in the movement who sat on several state boards. As Mother Jones discovered, McFate—real name Mary Lou Sapone—was actually a spy for the gun lobby, which had sent her to infiltrate the movement.

Petition: Medals of Dis Honor

Twenty-three soldiers from the Seventh Calvary were later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for the slaughter of defenseless Indians at Wounded Knee.

We are asking that these Medals of DIS Honor awarded to the members of the 7th Calvary of the United States Army for the murder of innocent women children and men on that terrible December morning be rescinded.

Credit & permission for image to & by www.myspace.com/removewoundedkneemedals

My guess is, there are thousands - hundreds of thousands in fact - out there just like me.  Tired of accepting a backseat.  Tired of feeling powerless and voiceless.  Tired of the squalid state of our public affairs.  At at heart, more than ready, willing, and able to take on the system.

I hope I didn't spoil things, but those are the final words from the epilogue of the new book by our very own Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Taking on the System:  Rules of Radical Change in a Digital Era.  I was fortunate enough to receive an uncorrected proof so that I would be able to write about it.  As you can tell from the front page, you have less than a month until it is "officially available."  

And since I have already told you the end of the book, let me do the same for this review.   Go forth, purchase, and read.  With less than three months between its publication date and our next national election, you will have a lot of useful information to absorb.

If you want to know why I say that, you will have to keep reading this diary.