We won, and like the rest of you I am celebrating, but now comes the hard part.  How can the netroots and the grassroots capitalize on this victory and continue to grow the movement to take back the soul of the Democratic Party?  Electing Democrats is not the end, but simply a means to an end.   We will have won nothing if the new Democratic majority continues the normal money, career, influence peddling, and corporate friendly system that passes for government in Washington.  

Matt Stoller and David Sirota are exercised about a passage in Newsweek, which they say makes the Democrats look corrupt.  The passage quotes Rahm Emmanual about his efforts to raise funds from financial professionals in heretofore untapped industries, such as hedge funds and private equity funds.  The passage reads as follows:

The diary below was originally posted in my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal on May 11th.

I was an avid reader of Bill James' annual Baseball Abstract while growing up in the 1980s. As both a nerd and baseball fanatic, his methodical statistical analysis and incisive prose influenced me almost as much as listening to the Beatles. Perhaps the most memorable essay of James' career was in his 1983 abstract when he wrote about, "The Law of Competitive Balance." Twenty-three years ago I copied words of wisdom from that essay into the spiral notebook I was supposed to use for algebra:

"The Law of Competitive Balance: There develop over time separate and unequal strategies adopted by winners and losers; the balance of those strategies favors the losers, and thus serves constantly to narrow the difference between the two."