Happy Blogosphere Day

Today is a very auspicious day. For those who don’t know, July 19 is Blogosphere Day. Bob Brigham, one of the granddaddies of the progressive netroots explains (hat tip Howie Klein):

On this day two years ago, Stephen Yellin used Act Blue to catapult -- and save -- Ginny Schrader's campaign in PA-08. The Beltway crowd and their targeting lists cared little for Ginny until the seat abruptly opened up. Ginny Schrader wasn't running because it a district she thought she could win, but because the district in the Philly suburbs was a critical district for Democrats to win the state and we needed to have a candidate. This 50 state perspective suddenly became relevant to the Beltway crowd when the seat opened up, but during the day that became known as Blogosphere Day the DCCC refused to say they would support Ginny. In fact, a good deal of the money raised was donated as a message to the DCCC to respect the fact that the voters in the district had voted for her to be the nominee and the will of the people should be respected instead of trying to bring in another fair weather friend candidate. It worked, the DCCC backed down and the netroots attention to the race forced the NRCC to spend twice as much money in the expensive media market as the DCCC -- money that otherwise would have been spent elsewhere.In 2005, Paul Hackett was running in another race that those in DC who only want to spend money on TV had written off. The District was overwhelmingly Republican, yet the NRCC had written a $5,000 check to Mean Jean Schmidt a month earlier, yet the only attention DC attention on our side seemed to be on the DCCC blog. But again, from within a few hours of the race opening up, blogs were following the campaign. There was a consensus that the race would be next to impossible to win, but would be a great way to test new ideas, especially the ground game. So July 19th -- exactly two weeks before the election -- was celebrated as Blogosphere Day 2005 and used to catapult the Hackett campaign (raising $100,504.47 from 1842 people by midnight). Hackett instantly became a contender, the DCCC wrote a $5,000 check the next day, and the following two weeks became the most intense netroots campaign effort that the world had ever seen. Blogosphere Day received a great deal of attention and became a netroots tradition.

Now I know this site has been suffering from a troll infestation. And I know that I haven’t been as active as I used to be. But this is still a blog goddamnit! And so let’s celebrate Blogosphere Day in style.

Our ActBlue page has been responsible for roughly 25% of Jerry McNerney’s fundraising through ActBlue. (I’m including the General Election Fund since the money went to McNerney). Collectively, we’ve raised $6,680.22 through this site. That means that we’ve given McNerney more money than most PACs. That’s an awesome figure. And it’s especially awesome when this amount came from no more than 59 donors. This compares to the $3,025.06 from 92 donors raised by the combined ActBlue page of Crooks and Liars, Fire Dog Lake, and Down with Tyranny. We’ve even raised over half as much as the Combined Netroots page has raised from McNerney. Most of these sites get as much traffic in an hour as we get in a month. So the dedication of readers of this site is amazing.

Of course, we know that Pombo is flush with cash. He has six times as much cash on hand as McNerney, and he’ll easily raise a lot more (even if he has to cancel one of his fundraisers for the sake of appearances).

So go to the Say No to Pombo ActBlue page and make a contribution today.

I hope we can hit $7,000 by the end of the day. That’s just $319.88. If we do, I’ll donate another $50 to the McNerney campaign.

Tags: CA-11, Jerry McNerney, Richard Pombo, ActBlue, Blogosphere Day