Below is a link to a story positioning Steve Harrison as the candidate of the people and Domenic Recchia as the Brooklyn machine's choice in City Hall News.

The article mentions the Daily Gotham, but the reporter didn't contact Bouldin and Mole as I suggested when he was writing the piece.

http://www.cityhallnews.com/news/128/ARTICLE/1316/2007-11-12.html

Believe it or not, some people want to know my opinion on things. Some of those things have to do with politics. For months now I've been telling people that Spitzer is not reaching out to the people he needs the most : The activists and advocated who pounded the pavement for him election.

Elizabeth Benjamin published yesterday an article that describes the sentiments of not only Democrats in Albany but everybody I know in the progressive grassroots.

In Clue us in, Democrats growl at Eliot Spitzer, Elizabeth gets on the record what people have been saying on the off since the Troopergate scandal broke off : Eliot has a serious communication problem with his base and this is not a problem we can just lay on his staff.

Here's the gold :

"He didn't consult us before, he didn't consult us now," said state Sen. Ruben Diaz (D-Bronx). "He let me go on the Senate floor and make a fool of myself. Now I have to take the time to stand up, eat crap and apologize. Eat my pride."

Some Spitzer allies saw the driver's license debacle as

You may have heard of the monicker, "netroots". It's used to define bloggers who emerged "organically" online --without any intervention of mainstream media or political institutions-- and have been transformed into a powerhouse of meshed political interests. That may be a bit debatable in some cases, yet it's clear that many digital grassroots movements have indeed started without the intervention of corporate or political interests.

Which is why the word astroturfing was invented. Originally it was used to define how a company or interest group would deliberately open up webiste or blog to make make it look as if a random citizen is advocating their cause. Nowadays you can find such activity in forums, discussion lists and in the recent astroturfing scandal, tampering with Wikipedia.

Now we have the potential astroturfing shenanigans of a certain Mr. Caputo. To say that there's more than a few things I love about this whole drama, is to put it mildly.

Our friends over at The Albany Project make note of an online offensive by the republicans, and that in turn requires some comment.

Maybe it's a variant of Sun Tzu that I've missed so far, but one doesn't normally pick battles where one is weak. And the simple fact is that in the online world, New York republicans are spectacularly weak.

The state of play is as follows: the republican Senatorial campaign committee has put out a web site, NYinJeopardy.com, which takes aim at a raft of Democratic incumbents in the State Senate. What's interesting about the content is that the attacks made on their various targets come mainly from the left - for example, Liz Krueger is painted as being soft on women's health issues. Simple observation: you're not going to beat the Senate Democrats from the left, and that you try says everything that needs to be said about your underlying weakness.

The greater weakness, however, is in the correlation of forces online. Simply put, it's no contest: New York has a thriving, independent, linked and networked Progressive blogosphere - networked not just locally and statewide, but nationally. There is nothing on the other side of the aisle that can even be compared to what we have, independently of the party, built up over the last few years - nothing.

The first email came at 12:41, the second at 5:38. The first was entitled "SPITZER'S ABUSE OF POWER", the second, "Spitzer Caught Spying"; both were sent by updates@nyfacts.net.

The same email went to Phillip at The Albany Project, Jay Jochnowitz at the Times-Union and Liz Benjamin at the Daily Politics. Presumably, more people got it as well.

The emails contained the full version of two slash-and-burn pieces by Fred Dicker of the New York Post, dedicated, as the subject lines suggest, to the Bruno-Spitzer conflict.

Nyfacts.net is, as the TU points out, carefully shielded to mask the identity of whomever put it up. The TU followed up:

NYFacts.net didn’t respond to an e-mail inviting it to tell more about itself. A visit to Web sites with variations of the name turned up blank pages (not “page not found” errors, though). The .com versions led to ads for a firm offering ways to earn money on the Internet.

Moveover, a check of NYFacts.nets’ Internet registry shows that whoever create [sic] it took extra steps to shield its identity. Its registration was dated today Monday, using a special proxy service that offers private registration.

Bruno’s office said it knows nothing about this.

So here's the really funny thing: this email didn't go to any of the regular Daily Gotham email accounts, the ones linked on this site and used in normal correspondence. It went instead to my account on the New Democratic Majority domain. And that's curious.

Time for me to start harping on one of my pet peeves. No, not site load times; given that we have roughly fifty seven ways of creating content, and every possible feature that nobody ever uses, of course the site loads slowly. That's one thing. My cross to bear.

No, what I'm talking about is this: every day, we get, collectively and individually as editors, solicitations and requests. Candidates want plugs for their candidacy. Fundraisers want publicity for their events. Organizations want plugs for their most recent report, event, fundraiser, personnel announcement.

Fine. So buy an ad. Seriously. We support what you're doing; that's what Progressive blogs do. We do more than that, certainly; the ad campaign for Craig Johnson, back in the day, was produced by The Daily Gotham. The banners you see currently, promoting the Brodsky Bill, also come from us. All 100% pro bono.

This is driving me insane! I can't seem to raise the levels of estrogen in this blog --and it's killing me.

So please people, take a moment to promote your favorite New York women bloggers. They can be "mommy blogger", "edubloggers", foodies, blawggers, hell even sex bloggers if you dare.

I absolutely positively want to see who is out there but also, I want to know who are the women who want to come to The Daily Gotham and just estroswarm the shit out of this blog.

Please, take my blog.

Please, join our cause.

Governor Spitzer, in his keynote speech yesterday, told us that

it’s springtime for the Democratic Party. We are sweeping away some of the old rules in Albany … we’re beginning to see the fruits of our labor.

It takes a lot of labor to make New York State politics bear progressive fruit, but the governor was right. We’re seeing revitalized Democratic leadership that has brought new funding and fairness to our school system, jump-started a serious conversation about campaign finance reform – and a host of other desperately-needed reforms -- moved in favor of marriage equality, and begun a serious push, at long last, to take control of the state Senate.

The labor of the emerging New York progressive netroots is also bearing fruit. The state party’s new leadership has been both proactive and responsive in its outreach to the blogosphere; they did a terrific job making us a part of the spring meeting and we have every reason to believe that they’re committed to building a stronger relationship going forward. One of the neatest parts of yesterday’s experience was chatting with local electeds and party officials who stopped by to talk, often just to ask “what is a blog?” Considering that the wealth of a party is really in its vast network of grassroots activists and local-level candidates and officials, it’s a great thing every time we’re able to take another step forward in mutual understanding between that network and the netroots (and, of course, most of us in the netroots like to consider ourselves part of that network). We have a lot of work to do, on both sides, but so far so good.

At the same time, this developing relationship presents both the party and the netroots with certain challenges.

So, as you may have noticed, it having been blogged across the state in all of your favored publications - The Albany Project, The Politicker, Rochester Turning, and here - a bunch of we bloggers were up in Albany yesterday to see what it looks like when the actual Democratic Party does its business.

Enlightening. Here are some impressions:

My man Eliot in the press gaggle.

Approaching Albany.

Bloggers Row; from left to right, Paul, Azi and Liza.

Phil, Dave, Paul, Dave, hams.

Edna and Celeste.