Scan through Left political blogs. What you’ll often find is gobs of talk, recycled posts about other posts, raging flame wars in the comments, a bit of anger and satire … but not much action.

Sometimes it’s an echo chamber. Scan, say, five big liberal blogs, and sometimes you’ll find that not only are they blogging the same stories, they’re referring to each others posts too. With the exact same BlogAds in the sidebar. Mostly they post about how screwed up Bush and the neocons are. This is news?

There are seldom calls to action or plans about what to do. To paraphrase Arlo Guthrie - if you want to end war, you’ll have to sing louder than that. Sitting behind a keyboard blogging about someone else’s posts, with your idea of activism being telling readers to fax Congress, isn’t going to solve much.

The majority of liberal / progressive blogs are oblivious to the antiwar and immigrant rights movements. Hello? Anyone home? One million immigrants just marched in Los Angeles and accomplished more in one day than liberal blogs have put together. That’s not an overstatement. Liberal blogs are focused on effecting change in D.C. and that’s exactly what the march did. Congress and the ruling class are somewhat aware of netroots and “Crashing the Party”, to be sure, but you better believe they are now seriously focused on the immigrants rights movement. One huge march, and it became a central issue nationwide. Liberal blogs have had nowhere near that kind of impact.

That’s how you get change. That’s how you get their attention. People in the streets. Mass movements.

Get involved. Do something. Find a group to join. Start one of your own. Not only do you feel better and more optimistic, you meet lots of people like yourself who are also working for change. But you got to do it real time with real people. Blogging and net activism are a pale substitutes for that. Off on your own, you can lose hope, get bitter. Get together with like-minded people and all that goes away. Organizing can be exhausting, it’s also exciting and fun.

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Molly Ivins

Old-fashioned anti-immigrant prejudice always brings out some old-fashioned racists. This time around, they have started claiming that Mexicans can’t assimilate. A sillier idea I’ve never heard. Why don’t they come to Texas and meet up with Lars Gonzales, Erin Rodriguez and Bubba at the bowling alley. They can drink some Lone Star, listen to some conjunto and chill.

California too.

From the L.A. Times on the death of country music legend Buck Owens.

“What a musical innovator,” said Chris Hillman, a veteran of California rock, country and folk music as a member of the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Desert Rose Band. “His music had so much norteño and Tex-Mex in it. It had such a California influence that Nashville never had….

“That put the state of California on the map. Not better, just different. It had more edge,” Hillman said Saturday. “There was a regional difference, and the different music that was out here — 90% of which was Hispanic, especially in Central California — filtered right into their stuff.”

I live in California now and have lived in Texas. Mexican/ Latino/ Hispanic culture IS part of the mainstream culture.

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From Mother Jones (excerpts)

Intellectual Property Run Amok

IN 1982, Motion Picture Association of America head Jack Valenti told Congress that “the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”

A DAY AFTER Senator Orrin Hatch said “destroying their machines” might be the only way to stop illegal downloaders, unlicensed software was discovered on his website.

MICROSOFT UK held a contest for the best film on “intellectual property theft”; finalists had to sign away “all intellectual property rights” on “terms acceptable to Microsoft.”

NEARLY 20% of the 23,688 known human genes are patented in the United States. Private companies hold 63% of those patents.

HUEY NEWTON’S widow is trademarking the phrase “Burn, Baby, Burn” for use as a BBQ sauce slogan.

FOR INCLUDING a 60-second piece of silence on their album, the Planets were threatened with a lawsuit by the estate of composer John Cage, which said they’d ripped off his silent work 4’33″. The Planets countered that the estate failed to specify which 60 of the 273 seconds in Cage’s piece had been pilfered.

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