This is the Burning the Midnight Oil Midnight Thought for tonight … which will be found in Burning the Midnight Oil for Electoral Reform … but not until later tonight (Monday).

Posted here because … well, Docudharma blogs the future. Yeah, normally further ahead in the future than three or four hours, but if I didn’t already have this part in the draft diary queue, ready to go, I’d have no idea what I was going to say.

And, yes, the two most important parts of the Midnight Oil are, first, the commentary that follows and, second, the diary roll, so what I’m giving you here is a Bronze Medal at best … but thems the hazards. I haven’t finished the diary roll yet, because I am still reading diaries, and I have no idea what direction the commentary is going to take. Third Place is the only part of the future I can see with any clarity.

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Midnight Thought

Is the present mess any worse than a National Primary, dominated by 30 second sound byte ads and providing a revenue windfall to television networks, both broadcast and narrowcast, and raising the hurdle for a grass roots popular campaign even higher than they are now?

Well, heck, I don’t know. The present mess is pretty bad but … all in all, given the example that jumping up to the first Tuesday open date on the calendar does not, in fact, make you decisive, and given the example that breaking the rules agreed to by the state parties working together under the auspices of the National Democratic Committee is not the high road to massive influence …

… it seems like we – we, here, means both the body politic in general and progressive populists in particular – would really would end up better off running the the next Open Primary under the current mess than as a National Primary.

So, no, I don’t think that the present mess would be improved by a Mess Media Dominated National Primary (and I am not copyrighting that phrase … I’m releasing it into the Public Domain, so feel free to use it anywhere and everywhere without bothering with attribution … but do attribute it if you are running for President and making a speech … you don’t want to pull a Biden, after all).

But, just because a Mess Media Dominated National Primary is teh suck, doesn’t mean the present mess is the best we can do. Oh, no, there’s plenty we could do better.

And fighting for electoral improvement is, after all, an old Progressive Populist fight.

This is an archive of a diary from the OAC blog … the table of contents cross-links require the full diary, they don’t work from the abbreviated view.

The balance of the links that can be updated to live diaries will be over time

BruceMcF in Diaries; 1/27/2008 at 10:46 PM EST

Hi, this is the How To that accompanies the TOC: YouTube. It provides some background information on the “why” of the whole process, and step by step help on how to use some of the tools linked to in that diary.

Join me beneath the fold for the scoop.

Why YouTube playlists?

Why Video CD’s

What if I have different programs I like

How to download a YouTube playlist

How to convert an flv file to an MPEG1 file

How to burn a set of MPEG1 files into a Video CD

How to share your work

From the One American Committee supporters blog, “Argument and Analysis” OpenMic post,

3.05.2006, posted here for archival purposes

I read that John Edwards calls on the Democratic Party to present Big Ideas, and I would stand up and applaud (except that risks having someone else in the computer lab call security).

After living in Australia for a decade, my number one suggestion for a Big Idea is about the fight to restore democracy to the US of A.  And the biggest step in that direction is a mandatory automatic Run-Off election in all federal elections.

From the One American Committee supporters blog, “Argument and Analysis” OpenMic post,

2/16.2006, posted here for archival purposes

When I was studying Economics in grad school, I had a crusty old professor who would say, “War on Poverty? If they really wanted to fight a war on poverty, they’d give the poor money, declare victory, and move on.”

Now, solving the problems of poverty is more complicated than that, but according to the Centre of Full Employment and Equity, here in Newcastle, Australia, solving the problem of unemployment is just about that simple.

People don’t read, they watch TV.

Since the dawn of the Television Age, this has been a club that the Power That Be have hit us on the head with. People watch TV, and those with money can buy their way Onto TV, and those approved by the estalishment are Broadcast on TV News … and progressives, whether progressive elitists or progressive populists, are largely left out.

And when progressives get on, its because the trendy lefty cocktail set … could be New York, could be Hollywood, wherever … sniff about the inability of TV to cover any Important Issues … and so the progressive populists, about whom nobody sniffs if they are ignored, are left out entirely.

But … well, but the environment is diff’rent. The technology exists. We can do what the Russian dissidents did … we can spread our message by Samizdat.

And how do we get people to read it? Well, we hand them a video, and they can watch it on TV.

That’s the Video Samizdat Revolution.

And it hasn’t happened yet, but if you want it to, it can.

NB: This is a candidate diary with the references to the candidate removed. The candidate diary itself will go live on the Big Orange, sometime a little after midnight.

One serious confusion in some progressive populist thinking online has been a misunderstanding of the role of the progressive blogosphere as a tool for building a progressive movement.

However, as a progressive populist looking at the passive-voice descriptions that “populist messaging fails because there is not a populist movement” … I feel like jumping up and down and yelling, “read your history books you idiots!”

A populist movement is not created in coffee house discussions, whether live or online … it is created in the process of fighting for things, and in the process learning how to engage in a political fight and transform ourselves from political consumers to citizens of a Republic.

And without populist messaging leading the way, there will be nothing to take to our fellows when we get out amongst them.

Picture Credit: David Leeson (#8)

Welcome to the next in my (sporadic) Long Emergency series of essays.

This one is a real cheap rip-off essay, in which I simply rip out the short policy proposal wrapped up in a Daily Kos candidate diary, and present it without the candidate diary parts.

Here is a version of the national Wind Resource map:

It should, I hope, be clear that much of the best resource is in areas that do not have the highest electricity consumption. And at the same time, that is a lot of the terrain that the transcontinental freight rail must traverse to get where its going. And, at the same time, we desperately need to get the main freight rail trunk lines electrified, by hook or by crook. Ergo, I got a grossly oversimplified policy proposal to present.

• The Federal Government invests in publicly owned infrastructure to electrify the main railroad
• In return, the owners of the right of way cede use of the right of way above the part that they need to public use, together with access to the ground level right of way for support structures
• That right of way is used to establish long distance High Voltage DC trunk lines to bring sustainable energy from the places that have it to places the need it
• In areas where there is a commercial wind resource, the usage rights above those trunk lines are available to be leased out for wind farm operators, with the lease payments rolled back into the funding for the program

Some answers to some challenges to the proposal, after the fold.

(Crossposted)

There are many things we encounter in the Primary Season. Too many to recount here.

So I will use the law of three, and recount three.

Opposition. Need. Reconciliation.

We encounter opposition, we generate opposition, we oppose others, sometimes we oppose ourselves.

We address needs, we point to needs, we have needs, sometimes we create needs.

We, eventually, consider reconciliation.

More, over the fold.