Matt Stoller's blog

Blogpac-supported candidate Donna Edwards defeated Congressman Al Wynn in Maryland's fourth Congressional district on February 12, due to an unprecedented collaborative effort between the netroots and the progressive movement.

Congratulations everyone!

Well, our 'Freeze Out Fox' action campaign succeeded in only three weeks. Tom Collins and Harry Reid's letter canceling the debate is here. Roger Ailes of Fox News is mad.

Blogpac-backed New York blog The Albany Project is helping Governor Eliot Spitzer push for a reform agenda following a Democratic victory in a state Senate special election. As New York Democratic Party co-Chair Dave Pollak said:

Thank you, thank you, thank you. This couldn't have happened without you. This is only the beginning. We are only scratching the surface. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

In New Hampshire, Rep. Jim Splaine is blogging on Blogpac-backed BlueHampshire:

About a week ago I wrote a Blog post about Iraq in BlueHampshire, and one of the readers suggested putting in a resolution so we can get the New Hampshire Legislature on record opposing the "new" policy advocated by President George W. Bush.

The process at this point requires getting permission of the House Rules Committee to introduce a resolution, since the deadline for filing legislation for this current year was December 6th. If we don't have deadlines, we can't manage workload. Already about a thousand bills are in various stages of discussion at the State House.

Democrats in Nevada are going to have a Presidential candidate debate forum hosted by Fox News. Blogpac is taking action against this egregious granting of credibility to what we all know is a partisan propaganda outfit.

Read this diary for the gory details.

Blogpac is fighting against a smear against progressive blogs and John Edwards from the right-wing and front-groups like the antisemitic Catholic League. Over the past two days, Blogpac's campaign has successfully pushed back in the media. More than 2000 emails have gone to reporters to correct errors in their stories. The effect has been substantial, as Glenn Greenwald notes.

A story invented and driven by the right-wing blogosphere resulted in a prominent discussion in The New York Times of the serious ethical lapses and extremist views of John McCain's personal blogger, and even the presence of anti-Semitic slurs against Henry Waxman by that blogger's readers in the right-wing blogosphere. McCain's own blogger was thus forced defensively to contradict the central premise of the right-wing scandal: "I would caution against holding candidates responsible for what their bloggers and blog consultants have said in the past."

Blogpac's core mission is to support the internet activists that make progressive politics work. We'd be hard-pressed to find a better example of this than Lane Hudson, the guy who pushed the Mark Foley story into the national news through his 'Stop Sex Predators' blog. Because of his independent activism that created immense progressive change, Lane is the first recipient of a Blogpac Citizen Hero award (and more importantly a $2000 check for rent, liquor, food, health care, or anything else). Congrats, Lane, and thanks for what you do.

Laura Packard at MyDD has announced a new Blogpac project, the 50 state blog network. The goal of this project is to produce a strong network of state-based blogs across the country, to help grow their local blogospheres and turn red to blue on a statewide basis.

Over the next few years, using some nifty technologies, you will be able to login to any blog using the same ID, and we'll be able to begin to connect all sorts of neat shared data together to allow for a much stronger progressive movement. Blogpac is looking for other ways to help support state-based blogs as well.

Blogpac had a small amount of money, and we used it to provide operating expenses for groups getting off the ground. Here are some of the groups we helped fund:

Yearly Kos 2006

Drinking Liberally

Do More Than Vote

Blue America PAC

Blue Jersey's Think Equal Campaign

Blogpac had two major election-related projects and one minor one.

Use it Or Lose It: When a Democratic wave looked likely, we decided that putting everything into this election was the most appropriate strategy. Use it or Lose It was a campaign to pressure Democratic lawmakers in safe districts to donate part of their warchest to the DCCC so it could be used in competitive races.

Google Bomb the Elections: Despite the prevalence of search in American life, search engines are not well-used by campaigns. We worked with liberal blogs to elevate credible mainstream on political candidates content in search rankings so that when users searched for certain political candidates, appropriate content would show up high in the results.