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Well this totally sucks. Not only that, but not one of the netroots blogs from New York State --you know, the ones that actually help the party raise money for their candidates-- got into the state pool.

Who gets in? Oh, yeah, right, the blog owned by the pro-Clinton journalist that now rights for Politico.com.

Nice.

UPDATE : Hopefully we will be able to bundle our state bloggers with the culturekitchen.com national bloggers and get credentialed.

I just find this odd, that none of the blogs that have helped the NY Democratic Party raise thousands of dollars for local candidates and worked hard to get out the vote here in the state, not one of them got credentialed in the state pool.

This is very odd indeed.

AfterDowningStreet.org has an amazing historical overview on why tomorrow there will be massive demonstrations and labor union strikes all across the country : 122 years of the 8 hour week and end of child labor, 5 years of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, 3 years since the discovery of the Downing Street Minutes, 2 years since the nation-wide immigration rallies of 2006, almost 2 years ago when Nanci Pelosi and Democrats in Congress and the Senate took the impeachment of George Bush for misleading the country to war, "off the table". Yet in one of the most mindboggling examples of the Bush Administration's information war against Americans, May 1st has been declared Loyalty Day.

And here's the thing : You and I know that when it comes down to it, the war against immigrants is a war against labor which is part of a larger attack from the only people who benefit from the other kind of corporate-led violence like the occupation of Iraq.

As my friend Roberto Lovato said earlier, paraphrasing ActUP, "Silence = Death". If you are like me, you hate marches but you go to them because you know that as a symbol of solidarity in dissent you need to go.

So dust off your walking shoes and get your arse to the streets and square tomorrow at 2 or 3pm.

There's going to be a lot of noise here in the next week to ten days. We're doing some major repairs and upgrades on the site that will fix the comment and posting problems we've been having in the last month.

And with that, I leave you with a time-lapse video of a construction site of 1 Bryant Park, on 4nd Street and Sixth Avenue.

Enjoy.

Talking to Michael about Spitzer and to other people, I am struck by how different the public persona I had met was from the public Spitzer persona that others knew.

I was only in several social situations with Spitzer and spoke to him only a couple of times. Yet during those public "private" appearances (they were at closed events) I was able to observe the man.

What did I take away? Even though the man knew how to commandeer a room and appeared to have a hyper-social personality, Eliot Spitzer struck me as a very private, very shy man.

Yes, it's shocking to hear since so many describe him as powerful, intense and overwhelming. Which I don't disagree with. It's just that if you got physically a bit too close to him (as it happened to me a couple of times) he would get very quiet and, what struck me about him was that he couldn't look at me straight into my eyes.

And as I was telling my husband, I've packed on some serious poundage, so it's not that I am looking babealicious these days. Yet I noticed that Spitzer was actually shyish in a nerdy way. At least to me, he wasn't that overwhelming as other people have described him.

Make of that what you wish.

CNN has confirmed that Eliot Spitzer will announcing his resignation at 11:30am.

Last night I saw a flurry of emails blanket my inbox with aq series of "unbelieavable", "still in shock" and the not so occasional "I'm angry".

I had spent most of the afternoon trying to sort out my thoughts fast enough for an Op/Ed, and I would always come back to the misgivings I've had since he took office a little over a year ago. That Eliot Spitzer's problem and weakness has always been his success because he never really needed anything other than a vote from you or me to get elected.

Eliot Spitzer didn't really need a million New Yorkers giving $5 or $10 donations to his campaign to get elected. He never needed to learn how to get people out on the streets to support his campaign to get him elected. He never needed to swallow his pride and shut up and take criticism from his own base in order to gain political influence. And he certainly never had to pound the pavement and get people out on election day to make sure people would get out of their homes and offices to cast a vote.

Metro newspaper just published Voices: Spitzer floated on air, but lack of roots did him in, my Op/Ed on the Spitzer debacle.

Here's the money quote :

For netroots activists like me, who have had the chance to take a peek at the mechanical beast, the New York State Democratic Party, Eliot Spitzer was nothing but a political insider’s rock star that only needed “The (little) People” to vote so the “politics as usual” could rock New York and roll into Albany. Yet there’s a reason why “politics as usual” is losing the fight in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary.

Eliot Spitzer’s weakness has been the lack of a true grassroots base. He never had his feet held to the fire by his own party base, by The People who ended up voting for him. The Republicans have known this all along, and it’s not a coincidence that they tried to scare him last year by astroturfing the Internet with fake attack blogs.

Pam Spaulding alerted me to the demotardic shenanigans of Andrew Cuomo. My quick response is ending up being a larger piece on race, so let me just get the news out first.

Andrew Cuomo, the Attorney General for the State of New York and Hillary Clinton supporter, has earned not just a culturekitchen Demotard award. He also gets to hang on his door a Reappropriate "Racism Fairy" badge and enjoy a video prelude from Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing :

Andrew Cuomo (who could easily be played by John Tuturro, the italian guy in the video clip) said of the primary process that, “You can’t shuck and jive at a press conference ... all those moves you can make with the press don’t work when you’re in someone’s living room.”

His response to criticism for the quote? Well, what he really meant was "bob and weave" your way through a situation. That it was never meant as a reference to Barack Obama.

Yes, because "shuck and jive" is really all about bobbing and weaving.

Geezus.

I have more respect from Klansmembers than from Europeanoid liberals with repressed racist tendencies that get manifested in curiously inappropriate moments like, you know, when they're talking up their white candidate who's poised to lose the nomination to a black man.

This is the last of the videos I shot at Elizabeth Upton's class at LaGuardia Community College. They are recent (and not so) immigrants who are in her English as a second language class (or the CUNY Language Immersion Program).

Here is part one of the series.

Then mozie on to part two.

Sultana asks the questions we all've been waiting for:

The students worked hard at coming up with questions. Sultana is actually asking the question for another student, Malva, who knocked it out of the part but was too shy to get on camera to speak her own words.