Been doing the Progressive Democrat since shortly after the 2004 election. It originally grew out of my attempt to keep people's grassroots spirits up after the 2004 election and originally it was just a handful of readers. When I spend time on it, nowadays I get around 80 hits a day. Though when I am away on vacation and not keeping it up, that drops to more like 25 hits a day. Still, since I originally had less than 100 readers period, that's growth.

The diary below was originally posted in my blog the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

Several years ago I was a telemarketer in Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn for a wholesale ophthalmic lens company. We sold lenses to small independent mom and pop stores you might purchase a pair of glasses from and our profit margin was thin.

My co-workers were predominantly uneducated and older than forty. Several of my colleagues labored for years on their feet as "lens pickers" with little compensation. Trust me it's far more grueling then it sounds. Sometimes during a busy crunch I helped out on the lens floor and was exhausted after a couple hours. Typically, the lens pickers toiled from 7:00AM to 7:00PM when we packed up at night for messenger pick up.

On the heels of the Netroots victory in Connecticut with Ned Lamont, there is much excitement, confidence, and hope pervading the progressive blogosphere. But where do we go from here?

That's a no-brainer. Now we have to get him and other 'Netroots' candidates elected -- into positions of policy-making power and influence that will help our movement ingrain itself in the political establishment. This is the step necessary to truly shift American policy toward the progressive agenda that was set forth by its forefathers. This is how we'll infiltrate 'establishment' politics creating fundamental, long-lasting change.

And here, at DailyKos (And it's offspring Political Cortex), we Kossacks/Cortexans have something even more special. We have a 'DailyKos/Cortexan Candidate' -- someone born of our community to carry our message to the legislatures even as the rest of us carry our message to the masses.

This diary was written expressly for Daily Kos, but I thought other progressive bloggers might find it interesting.

Yesterday I was devastated. A friend told me my favorite TV show Stargate, had been cancelled. This was actually announced last week, but I'm not involved in online fandom, so I had to get the 411 the old fashioned way. My friend is entrenched in online fandom, so I guess I'm in the second tier for info propagation from Stargate fandom ground zero. This is approximately where I would put myself in the progressive politics information stream, as well. Not in the room, but an interested party with my nose stuck to the window.

The word "devastated" might strike some as grotesque hyperbole in the context of a cheesy sci fi show. Wouldn't it be more appropriate for me to be devastated over Darfur or the warehousing of the poor in the U.S.? I've been pondering this for the last 24 hours, and I believe I've come up with some insights that may be of use to Kossacks and other people involved in political campaigns.

[Also posted as a diary at The Big Orange.]

As all those Kossacks congregate today and over the weekend in Vegas, I will be trying to find various ways to avoid grading this stack of papers (with a stack of exams to follow next week -- stupid quarter system).  I had tried to convince myself over the past weeks and months that I would find a way to go, but with the end of the academic year, a cross country move coming up in less than a month, and a down payment on a house (first time buyers!) that makes any kind of extra expenditure such as this weekend would have been very difficult to justify, I find myself still here, regretting already not going to what I am convinced will be an historic gathering.

So I will purchase the AirAmerica stream, and I will cram as much of the C-SPAN coverage as I can fit onto a videotape (TiVo ... hopefully after the move), and I will stare at all the folks whose nyms are so familiar (and many who aren't) and marvel at the thought of Kos and Atrios and Jane Hamsher all in the same location with Howard Dean and Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer, etc.

Why am I?  After five years of lies, law-breaking, and disregard for the Constitution, the question of the hour isn't whether or not Bush's own cronies will finally see fit to give him a rebuke.  The question is why are we putting up with this crap?

It's certainly not my regular habit to post front page articles singling out a diary on another blog, but this diary by stephdray over at Daily Kos so perfectly mirrors my own frustration, that I want to do more than paste it here.  I want to print out a thousand copies and hand it out on street corners.

Know what?  I just might.

You didn't used to be like this.
You didn't used to get enraged at George Bush's picture whenever it came on the tube. Now you flip him the bird, even if you're standing in front of the bank of televisions at Best Buy. And you never used to wonder if you should even be shopping at Best Buy. You never used to worry about whether or not your money was financing the destruction of the environment, the constitution, your future, your kid's future. You never needed to know what 'Buying Blue' meant.

In case anyone's wondering why the Big Orange is down, here's the following explanation from Markos:

Our host used to lease space at a wholesaler data center. The host  bought its own building, and is in the process of physically moving  all their servers to the new facility. The process was supposed to  take 2 hours, in the dead of night, and we were supposed to have a  message on the site explaining the situation.

But, as is often the case with technology, things didn't go according  to plan. I'm not sure what the problem is, and since I know they're  scrambling trying to make things right I don't want to call and  further delay them demanding an explanation. There will be time for  that later. But bottom line, moving 10 servers (in addition to all their other clients) from one physical location to another is not easy. Lots of things could go wrong, and apparently many of them did.