Last week I heard the perfect one-line description of Organizing for America. Mary Jane Stevenson, the newly hired California State Director, got up before a big room full of Democratic Party donors -- who were there to drink fine wine and eat elegant little nibbles and enjoy the name entertainment at a luxe Beverly Hills hotel " and did something unusual. She gave them a field pitch. She asked them to join OFA " which she described as "the President's Field Team."

Dear Elected Overlords: With debate about health care reform moving to center stage, I wanted to write you a brief note highlighting a basic truth. Namely, private health insurance sucks.

The issue around carbon taxes is generally framed correctly: we need to get rid of carbon. I've discussed the real world, immediate problems of burning Dangerous Fossil Fuels (DFF). There are of course carbon-neutral fuels that address climate change but even they have particulate issues that are NOT resolved. But getting rid of DFF completely should be a planetary goal for the next few decades.

Our elected overlords are right now meeting with the unelected overlords of the health care world. The meetings are intended to create a health care reform bill of some kind. But there is no reason to write such a bill at this point. HR 676 is already written. It is a Medicare for Everyone bill.

The California Department of Finance wants to "drill baby drill" off the Golden State's coastline, and they're willing to undermine 70+ years of checks and balances to do it. Will we let them get away with it?

On June 17, the State of Missouri plans to execute Reginald "Reggie" Clemons for the 1991 murders of two young women, Robin and Julie Kerry. It plans to execute him even though it has never proven, nor sought to prove, that he killed them or intended to kill them. It plans to execute him even though another man, convicted of more direct involvement in the same murders, received a life sentence.

The first tentative conversations I heard about murdering abortionists happened over dinner at one of the Operation Rescue leader's homes. Jon and I sat among the large family of kids with our own growing one (there were at least 9 kids among us) and Jeff (staffer) said that clearly the movement needed to escalate. Passive resistance was not effective.

Every year in Washington, D.C., the Campaign for America's Future (CAF) convenes the largest conference of activists positioned anywhere to the left of wherever the center has drifted off to. You can sense my cynicism, and yet this year I was very pleasantly surprised.

I finally got a copy of Eric Boehlert's new book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press. I'd like to recommend this book to you even though I have some significant problems with it. The book is at its strongest when it focuses on the positive achievements of the netroots movement and its relationship to the traditional media.

I live in Dayton, Ohio. Dayton was a bright spot of industrial America, a sort of early twentieth century Silicon Valley. There are not many jobs here now.

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