Bumped from the diaries -- Jonathan... This is an important race. Read up, get involved.

Believe it or not, there's an actual race going on in Massachusetts.  The MA-05 congressional seat is vacant, Marty Meehan having resigned to take over UMass-Lowell, and there's a special election on October 16 to fill it.  The contenders are Democrat Niki Tsongas, Republican Jim Ogonowski, and some other folks.

At the moment, anyway, the race doesn't appear to be a gimme for the Dems.  The most recent poll has Tsongas up by 10, but actually trailing among independents.  And MA-05 is an unpredictable district that has sent Republicans to Congress in the past.

This is an important race -- among other things, a win for the GOP (especially in Massachusetts) would be a big shot in the arm heading into 2008.  We Bay Staters hope you'll give us a hand in electing Niki Tsongas to Congress.

Niki has engaged with the local netroots, and she'll be posting frequently on my home blog, Blue Mass. Group.  We've been blogging the race pretty hard -- in recent days, over the SCHIP brouhaha.  Tsongas would vote to override Bush's veto (if she's seated in time), or to support another round of the existing bill.  Ogonowski so far is being cagey as to what he would do, but he's staked out an extreme right-wing position on immigration, and is pushing the "SCHIP bill gives benefits to illegals" talking point.  We're working hard to show how bogus that whole line of attack is.

We'd love to bring some national attention to this race.  Like I said, it's not a gimme, and the more light that gets shone on how conservative Ogonowski really is, the better (he's pretending he's "not a partisan politician" -- you know, a uniter, not a divider -- but his positions are pretty much Bush party line).

We'd appreciate your help, either financial or otherwise!

Believe it or not, there's an actual race going on in Massachusetts.  The MA-05 congressional seat is vacant, Marty Meehan having resigned to take over UMass-Lowell, and there's a special election on October 16 to fill it.  The contenders are Democrat Niki Tsongas, Republican Jim Ogonowski, and some other folks.

At the moment, anyway, the race doesn't appear to be a gimme for the Dems.  The most recent poll has Tsongas up by 10, but actually trailing among independents.  MA-05 is an unpredictable district that has sent Republicans to Congress in the past.

You know what to do.

Bumped from the Diaries -- Jonathan... Wow. Very amusing, indeed. Scary, though. These scholars and pundits profess to be on high but neither take the time to follow up with any of the bloggers in question from the New York Times piece nor do even a little reporting to realize that I was clearly being sarcastic in my post last week.

[Cross-posted from Blue Mass. Group.  Thought y'all might be interested in this both to see what happens when MSM pundits who lack senses of humor read snarky posts, and as yet another example of how the MSM punditocracy sees political blogging.]

If you caught "Beat the Press" on Greater Boston on Friday evening, you saw a taped piece on political blogging -- inspired by last Sunday's NY Times op-ed piece and op-chart on blogging-for-dollars -- which included a couple of snippets of an interview with yours truly.  And then you saw the usual live chitchat with Greater Boston's usual suspects, all of whom duly tut-tutted about political bloggers getting paid.  If you missed it on TV, you can watch it on YouTube (YouTube swears it'll be up soon).

Now, for the record, I don't really give a crap whether a campaign wants to pay a blogger to blog -- as long as the blogger discloses the payments.  Taking campaign money without disclosing, however, is astroturfing, and is a very bad idea that gives blogging a bad name.  And I don't think anyone seriously disagrees with that.

But "Beat the Press" made a couple of big, big mistakes in Friday night's piece, and they were bad enough that I'm not very happy that I appeared in the show.  (Unfortunately, I had no control over that -- I did the interview without having any idea what the rest of the taped piece would look like, nor, of course, what the live chat would cover.)  The gory details are after the flip.

[Cross-posted from Blue Mass. Group.]

A big hat tip to Rick Hasen who noticed this White House press release (buried in the Friday night trash).  President Bush is going to nominate Hans von Spakovsky to the Federal Election Commission.

Who?

[Cross-posted from Blue Mass. Group.]

Mitt Romney, in a Boston Globe op-ed explaining his decision to veto a bill that would increase availability of the "morning-after pill," has called for nothing less than the overruling of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that declared unconstitutional certain restrictions on abortion.

More below...

Yesterday MA Democratic gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick held conference calls with the authors of at least two Massachusetts political blogs, my own Blue Mass. Group, and .08 acres.  It was an impressive bit of reaching out to the internets, the likes of which we haven't seen 'round these parts before.  You can read what transpired back at the home front:

Blue Mass. Group has a post up by each of our three bloggers: David, Charley, and Bob; and .08's write-up is here.

[Cross-posted from Blue Mass. Group.]

The issues of gay marriage in particular, and homosexuality in general, continue to sow deep divisions among mainline Protestant denominations.  The Episcopal Church's near-schism over the ordination of the openly gay Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire was exhaustively covered in the press.  Recently, the United Church of Christ voted to take a stand in favor of gay marriage - it is the first mainline denomination to do so (as the NY Times notes here, and as Renee in Ohio discusses here).  It's happening in lots of other churches too, though the mainstream media doesn't cover them all.  More below the fold.