I recently postedabout my desire to have an online tool that would allow you to plug in your address or zip code and up would pop the nearest competitive congressional district where you could put your volunteer efforts toward if your own district was held by a Democrat and was totally safe.

My supposition is that in Los Angeles, and other big metro areas, most people are within a reasonably short distance of a competitive district even if their own is not one of them.

The commenters had some great things to add, but no one knew of such a tool.  

Since I'm not tech-savvy enough to construct something a tool like that, I've decided to start at the opposite end and work my way back.  That is, I started by figuring out where the safely held Democratic districts are and those Republican held districts that could be in play.  

What I've found for the South Bay of Los Angeles is really preliminary, but I think can help show what a tool like this could do to help people think strategically about where locally they can put their volunteer efforts to most use and to empower them to take action, since being in a non-threatened Democratic district can feel rather disempowering.

Chris Bowers had an awesome action item diary on Thursday aiming to bring down McCain by making sure articles that demonstrate why he'd be a horrible president are the ones that come up at the top of web searches for "John McCain" and "McCain".

It's brilliant and should be used here and everywhere.  I'm doing my part, but because I'm not a frequent commenter, my impact is rather limited.  

If there were some way to identify the most prolific commenters on DKos and reach out to them if they aren't using their sig line to help with this search engine optimization project, then I imagine that could be a big help in making this effort succeed.  

Anybody know how to look that up?    

PS. Just so there's some value added to this meager diary, please check out the McCainizer, a great tool to make the hyperlinks for McCain to these top articles much easier (This tool is brought to you by Jimmy Crackcorn)

If you are like me, and a bunch of other Americans, you live in a safely held Democratic congressional district.  You know that it won't flip to Republican in a million years.  So making a big effort to help out the local campaign seems kind of low on the priority list.  

How would you find out how close a competitive congressional district is to you?  Wouldn't you like to have a tool that you can use to discover where the closest district where a Democrat has a shot of unseating a Republican?  You just enter your zip code and BAM, a list of the nearest districts comes back in the results, with perhaps some background on the race so you could figure out where to put your volunteer efforts?

Perhaps there's something already out there - if there is, I haven't found it.  If there's not, it would sure be a great tool.

Here's why:  

Hillary Clinton has been banking her campaign for months on the idea that superdelegates (SD's) are going to come around and endorse her because she's so electible.  Well, as we have seen, if she's had any effect on this, it's been to convince SD's that the time was right to endorse Barack Obama rather than her: Clinton's superdelegate lead of 97 on Feb 3 has turned into SD deficit that's now 28.

Those focused on trying to force an end to Clinton's destructiveness have been trying to push unpledged SD's to come out for Obama.  Were just the remaining unpledged SD's who already favor Obama to come out for him, this thing would be over.  We should continue the effort to pressure unpledged SD's to endorse now, and to make the case that for the party's sake it should be for Obama.  

But we must not leave out of our focus Hillary's SD's.  At this point there are more Clinton SD's thatn unpledged, and I think there's a lot to suggest that some of them are pursuadable.  Let's please not forget the point that Hillary has been making over and over - superdelegates do whatever they think is best for the party.

Please follow below.

Can't the Blue Dogs see their hypocrisy?  After all their free passes they gave hundreds of billions for Iraq war funding, now they are threatening to hold up Jim Webb's GI Bill because the couple billion it could potentially cost is not offset with revenues. [UPDATE: The cost is apparently $50 billion initially, and $4 billion per year thereafter. This doesn't change the fact that this program is one that will pay for itself over time and that it would be very shortsided to subject it to pay-go rules, even if the war expenses were under the same restrictions, which they are not]

Update: The whole interview is now available, and I'm swapping out the videos with 80% of the interview for the ones that have the whole thing.  After viewing the whole thing, I don't feel any different about Dean's appearance.

There aren't many Democrats who are quick enough and willing to be fully prepped to do well in 'interviews' with Fox.  Howard Dean has proved himself in the past, and he's done it again.

Here's the evidence:

Part One (interview starts at 0:28)

Part Two

This is the kind of effort that needs to be done to make real progressive change -- building the grassroots expertise amongst active young people. It's a win for Obama, because this will means lots of people working on a volunteer basis for his campaign. But it's also a win for progressive causes everywhere, because there will be tons of organizers who have the expertise to make a much bigger impact fighting against corporate interests that are often embraced by even our own party establishment.  It's essential that we support this effort.

Here's Barack with the scoop:

UPDATE: The 'IL-03:3333' mini-challenge will be extended until tomorrow midnight.  The total new donors today exceeded 300 and tomorrow's total will need to keep up the same pace to get there.  It'll still be a challenge to do this, but together we can do it.

This morning, I made a pledge to donate $333.33 to Mark Pera's campaign if by the end of the day (midnight pacific), the number of individual contributors to his campaign on ActBlue had reached 3333.  

That was a really big goal, as we're not in the 1st day of the fundraiser, and there were 2716 contributors at the time.  

However, here we are, having topped 3000 (3009 at last check) and still have more than 2 hours to go in the day.  

Your $10 or $20 or $5 if that's all you can spare could get us there.  Chip in if you haven't already.  Then bug your roommate or contact a sibling or other family member who is a progressive and tell them to act now.  

Better late than never!  I haven't received any email from MoveOn yet concerning their endorsement, which will really be what results in donations for her campaign, but I imagine this is forthcoming.  

Congratulations to Donna!  I have given to her campaign and am thrilled that she will getting exposure to millions of people who will hear of her campaign via an email from MoveOn (they better!) and will receive tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for her campaign as a result.  

Earlier today, I wanted to see highlights of last night's Late Show with David Letterman which I unfortunately missed.  I didn't go to Youtube because I thought that any clips posted there would be taken down by CBS for copyright violation, since that's what Comedy Central does for Colbert and the Daily Show.  I went to the CBS Late Show webpage instead.  I didn't expect to see any of the anti-producers fireworks from the show there because I never thought CBS would host material that was helping make the writers case.  Well I was might surprised at what I saw.    

UPDATE: Since I posted the diary, I have found the email from MoveOn that asked us members to participate in their survey.  It was from 9/6/07, and at the end it said

 I never got that "report back" - did you?

As you may know, MoveOn has the ability to raise significant amounts of money through an email appeal to their membership (which numbers in the millions).  Back when they countered Lieberman's fundraising event for Susan Collins by putting out an email appeal for Tom Allen, over $355,000 was raised for him in a matter of a couple days.  

I think it's fair to say that getting Pera and Edwards comparably funded to (or even better funded than) Lipinski and Wynn would mean our guys will win. This should be right down MoveOn's alley of something they would be for, and it has the ability to make that happen.  So what are they waiting for?

So, since MoveOn has the ability to get these two great candidates into office, why aren't they doing that?

A couple things:

UPDATE:  We're now up to $625 -- just $325 to go and one more whole day to get there.

I want to thank those of you that donated to Mark Pera in my weeklong fundraiser for Mark that ends this Saturday night.  I set a goal of $500 and was matching people's donations and we just made the goal earlier today -- two full days ahead of time.  As promised, I matched the donations that came in and put in an extra $50 for making the goal.

If you - or your friends or family - give to Mark Pera on my Mark Pera fundraiser page by next Saturday, I'll kick in a matching donation of my own.  Check it out.  

(I've done this kind of matching pledge before (including earlier this month for Mark Pera) so take that as assurance that my pledge is for real).

The details:

UPDATE: It's 10:18 and so far there's 9 separate contributors and with $145 raised.  You all rock! I'll honor the pledge through midnight pacific.  If no one else chips in, then by tomorrow morning I will match the 9 donors x $10 and put in $90, so the new total will be $235. .. I kicked in $100-final total is $245. Thanks!

In case you didn't see it, MissLaura earlier today highlighted a local TV news piece in Chicago that should prove to be totally devastating to Dan Lipinski's effort to fend off the challenge of real Democrat Mark Pera.

I'm going to ask you to contribute to Mark Pera, and I realize that you have to be careful with how you allocate your money because there are other campaigns that you also want to support.  Let me give you 2 good reasons to donate to Mark Pera today.

[This diary is being constantly updated to improve upon it. If you have any suggestions, please share them.  Check back in occasionally to see if there are any updates.  X-posted at Calitics. Thanks!]

The Courage Campaign and the Democratic party establishment are pushing back against the Dirty Tricks Initiative.

What can we as individuals do to help fight this campaign and hopefully prevent it from getting on the ballot?

Let me make a few suggestions:

Kevin Drum pointed out from the NY Times article today on the secret torture opinions in 2005 that some lawmakers actually knew  about the existence of at least one of these opinions:

Later that year [2005], as Congress moved toward outlawing "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

Although Kevin wants to know what the Presidential candidates in Congress knew about these secret torture memos in 2005, I want to find out want the Gang of Eight knew, because it's most likely if any Democrats were to find out, that they would be the first to be informed. 

OK, so Alberto Gonzalez announced his resignation today.  He said he won't be stepping down until September 17.  And Harry Reid has apparently made some deal with Bush that Bush won't do any recess appointments while Congress is out of session.

However, we would be stupid to trust Bush to honor such a deal, right?

Already there is a push from the right to do a recess appointment according to Josh Marshall. 

We need to cut off this option by getting on our leadership and our individual state Senators to have a pro forma session in Congress, which could forestall Bush from appointing anyone without Senate confirmation.  These are not normal times - we need to do this. 

Let me make a few points and a call for activism with our Senators on actually making a proforma session of Congress a reality:

Tired of hearing people applaud Republicans for vague language about bringing back troops, when these same Republicans opposed Democratic efforts to do things that would actually have caused that to happen?

Then you'll be glad to see this Stephen Colbert piece (via the excellent C&L) on Dick Lugar's recent words about reducing troops in Iraq.