Midday open thread

• We’re down to the last 36 hours or so for fundraising. On our own O2B page, we busted through our ridiculously aggressive goal of $2 million yesterday with $108,000 raised during the day. I guess that goal wasn’t so aggressive after all. But the new goal might be — 30,000 donors by the end of the day Friday. We need 8,500 more of you to step up, even if it’s just $5, to help us build our army of small-dollor donors that can go head-to-head against corporatist assholes.

  We’re making good progress with our other two goals. We wanted to raise $40,000 for Bob Lord in Arizona, and we’re just $15,000 shy of the goal. And we wanted to raise $70,000 for Gary Trauner in Wyoming, and we’re just about at the halfway mark — we need $37,000 more to close the deal.

  But beyond those two, down the list, there are some great candidates and causes. We’ve raised $32,000 for SD Healthy Families to fight the anti-choice bill in South Dakota designed specifically for a Supreme Court challenge. Equality for All has gotten $220,000 from this site for its effort to protect marriage in California from the Mormon Church and its bigoted allies. Al Franken is approaching $200,000. Charlie Brown is over $75,000. Darcy Burner just bust through $325,000. Almost everyone is over $50,000. Pretty impressive stuff.

  Let’s finish strong. Please help if you haven’t already, and can afford to do so.

• Theologan Ryan Bolger is mashing up Taking on the System with the story of Jesus. So far he has three parts, a look at the gatekeepers in Biblical times, the shaping of conventional wisdom and mobilization efforts. My book is obviously forward-thinking, but it’s kind of cool seeing it applied to a completely unforseen field like this.
• Ashley Todd is out of jail as part of a weenie liberal “first-time offender” program.
  

  Under the deal announced in court Thursday, 20-year-old Ashley Todd will be released from jail and required to undergo mental health treatment. Her record eventually will be expunged as long as she goes to treatment, stays out of trouble and keeps authorities apprised of her whereabouts.

• Sweet.
  

  A little more than a month earlier, teacher Joyce Ben-KiKi had Aron and his classmates each send letters to a famous person as part of a language arts lesson. Ben-KiKi wrapped the exercise around well-known children’s book character “Flat Stanley,” so along with the letters, the children each tucked a Flat Stanley figure they had made into each envelope.

  “I told them not to expect a letter back,” Ben-KiKi said. “I told them these people are very busy and most likely will not write back.”

  The list of recipients was impressive: Yankee third basemen Alex Rodriguez; Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Olympic gold medalist Mark Spitz; Republican presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. John McCain.

  Obama was the only one to write back. Two other boys, Avshalom Drescher and Zachary Goldberg, both 8, also wrote to him, but Aron was the first to get a reply.

  Obama’s three-page letter to Aron described Flat Stanley’s visit with him and his staff in Washington, D.C. It chronicled their busy day together, which included coffee with constituents, a Senate committee meeting and a trip to the gym. It also had historical facts about the U.S. Capitol, details of Obama’s job and a confession from Obama.

  “Sometimes I get a little nervous before talking in front of a crowd, but Flat Stanley helped me practice the speech,” Obama wrote. “He made me recite it in front of him and then even gave me some advice so the speech would go smoothly. Flat Stanley is really a great coach.”

• I like the sounds of this:
  

  In a process reminiscent of the Labour party in the 1980s and the Conservatives in the late 1990s, the Republicans could end up as an extremist rump, reduced to a few stronghold states and obsessed with causes that seem not to matter to the general public.

  Across America, moderate Republicans are facing a tough battle as the Democrats look set to increase greatly their strength in Congress. Some analysts are seeing Democratic gains of up to nine Senate seats and 30 seats in the House of Representatives. In a leaked Republican party document last week, an incredible 58 House seats were ranked as potentially at risk with 11 of them virtually written off as already lost.

  If the Democrats perform strongly enough to control 60 Senate seats then they would have a virtual free rein over the political landscape. Republicans would probably survive only in their heartland, thus thrusting the party further right at a time when the country has shifted left. That would mark a profound change similar to Ronald Reagan’s win in 1980 which seemed to usher in a conservative-dominated era.

• Five more days until the great socialist uprising in America.
• My little company SportsBlogs is all grown up now.
• Just when you think the wingnuts couldn’t get any crazier, they one-up themselves. It would be a much blander world without them…
• John Cole on Obama’s infomercial:
  

  Notice what is missing from that, conservatives? Attacks on John McCain. For 30 minutes, Barack Obama talked about what he thinks are the problems currently facing the country, about what he thinks he can do to help fix them, how you can help him, and why it is important to elect him. He did not spend his time telling you why you should not vote for McCain, he spent his time telling why you should vote for him. You may not agree with his ideas, but you can not argue he has them and is presenting them to the country in a clear and nonthreatening manner.

  Now, for a moment, consider what the Republican 30 minute infomercial would look like this year- if I had to guess, it would be ten minutes about McCain as a POW, ten minutes of McCain saying he isn’t Bush, and then ten minutes of bullshit smears about Ayers, Khalidi, socialism, celebrity, and maybe Rick Davis could go before the cameras and pull a tire gauge out of his ass. For sheer nostalgia, maybe the lead McCain blogger could put those table-top gamers back in their place again. All the while, McCain could pepper his speech with folksy rejoinders about earmarks. And now that we are done with a hypothetical Republican 30 minutes, how did McCain actually respond to the commercial? In case you missed it, he whined about public financing (when did that become a Republican cause) and then muttered something about Obama delaying the World Series, and even that was a lie.

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