Can Russ Feingold lead us out of the wilderness?

Russ was scheduled to be a guest with Rachel Maddow tonight to talk about the threats to democracy being promoted by his home state of Wisconsin's new thug-governor, and also his new organization, ProgressivesUnited.

by Ken

Now this is the sort of thing I normally wouldn't give a second thought to, or certainly not a third thought: yet another organization committed to (yawn) advancing progressive values. Yeah, right. What's different is that this comes from Russ Feingold, and Russ is somebody I take seriously. Seriously.

The possibly-good news is that, as of when I tried this evening to click through to the link I received for Russ's new organization, ProgressivesUnited, what I got was something like this:

What a great response!

Support has been so strong that our website has crashed. Clearly, progressives are ready to unite around this cause!

We'll be back up with a full site shortly. In the meantime, watch Russ' video introducing Progressives United here. [Sorry, this little screen capture doesn't play or link to anything. Here's a link for the clip, the very one you can see above. -- Ken]

You can also join the discussion already under way at Progressives United on Facebook, and if you're looking help us combat corporate money, you can click here to contribute.

And then there's an e-sign-up form.

(Why do I describe the quick crashing of the new site as "possibly-good news"? Naturally one would like to think it's just the result of uanticipatably voracious demand, it's not easy to dismiss the possibility that it reflects a certain real-world cluelessness attached to the venture. One doesn't wish this to be the case. One does consider, though.)

I suspect I'm in the same boat with a lot of DWT readers: feeling that the whole politico-economico-socio system is so degraded that there's no hope for it but to tear the thing down, and no reasonable hope of tearing it down. Whereas Russ has built his political life around the conviction that change can be wrought within the system. (And his reward? To be thrown out on his behind by a one of those self-funding right-wing zillionaires with single-cell brains.) Like I said, if it was most anybody but Russ . . .


At this juncture, with the stream of the stream of believe-it-or-not lunacy spewing out of the halls of power courtesy of the surging far-right-wing sociopaths bidding fair to turn the country into a giant sinkhole, we really need to be grasping for . . . I mean, focusing on the available alternatives. For example, the other day I had occasion to mention in a comment the exciting conceptual work we've gotten from Drew Westen and George Lakoff, and it occurs to me that maybe we haven't been listening hard enough to what they've been telling us. I confess that George's work tends to go over my head, but every time Drew comes up with one of his "here's what we could/should be saying now" messaging messages, I'm overwhelmed with the feeling that, you know, I'll bet that could work.

Most recently, as the 2010 elections were shaping up to be, well, the disaster they turned out to be, Drew wrote an astounding post for AlterNet, "What Created the Populist Explosion and How Democrats Can Avoid the Shrapnel in November," which I wrote about in a September 1 post called "Can 2010 electoral disaster be averted? Drew Westen and Mike Lux weigh in." Needless to say, the circle of geniuses around the beleaguered president ignored or actually thumbed their noses at all of Drew's staggeringly sound, insightful prescriptions.

(Our friend Mike Lux's contribution, by the way, was a terrific post called "Weirdest political cycle ever?" on the recently deactivated OpenLeft site. I suppose one of these days we should talk about the quiet passing of OpenLeft.)

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