Update: New posts below

(hopefully) and you can get your necessary Atrios fix at http://eschaton08.blogspot.com/ temporarily because blogger is, unsurprisingly, bloggered. Fixed!

Dear Santa

by digby

Last year I asked my readers to put a little change in the kitty if they had it to spare and many of you did. It was a wonderful affirmation of what I do and I’m still basking in its glow. Well, it’s that time of the year again, and while we are all counting our blessings and fighting the war on Christmas and freedom, I’m here once again, stocking in hand, to ask that if you have your credit card out and it isn’t maxed, you might send a little Christmas cheer my way once again.

I wish the blog was a self sustaining commercial enterprise, but sadly, there are only a handful of them that can claim such success and they are much, much bigger than this one. So, I’m going directly to you, my readers, in the hopes that you’ll help me keep this little site rolling for another year.

I spent much of the last year working on deals to move the blog to various MSM-style projects that never materialized. As with so many things in life, big blog talk usually equals zilch when all is said and done. So we still creak along here on blogspot with respectable traffic and lots of great friends who often link here and give the blog good mojo. (But I hereby put out the call once again to designers who have ideas for Hullabaloo and we’ll try to get those going this year without the “help” of the legit media. Who needs ’em, I sez?)

However, I’m hopeful that I will be able to explore some very exciting opportunities to write a book, the details of which have not been worked out but which I may now have the time to do — with your help. With the Big Election coming up, this may be the right moment to write my magnum opus on the history of the codpiece.(Just kidding.)

And as we are entering into some very new and exciting territory for liberals everywhere, I want to keep blogging in any case. We have some power to do good and even more importantly — stop the insanity. It’s going to get a little bit crazy here in the blogosphere, what with the primary season soon upon us, but it’s all to the good. I want to stay in the game and see if we can continue to make the impact that I truly believe we are already making.

Many of my fellow bloggers will be raising money for candidates and doing many creative and exciting new forms of online activism. I have never done a lot of that sort of activity although I will certainly keep all my readers informed about the action and point them in the right direction. (I don’t raise money because, frankly, I suck at it, as you can tell by this post.)

What I may not suck so much at is observing and analyzing what’s going on in the press and in Washington from an outsider’s perspective. The mainstream media is reluctantly learning that they cannot get away with their lazy reporting and DC insider provincialism without incurring a rapid and energetic response. During the run-up to the next election, like all my lefty blogger brethren, this blog will deconstruct these cheap narratives and phony character attacks and we will alert millions of people all over the country. We are watching them and they know it.

We will also be watching the new Democratic majority. We will be here to praise them and spread the good word whenever we can. And we will also be here to hold their feet to the fire if they lose their nerve. The blogosphere and the netroots represent a vanguard of well-informed, highly engaged citizens who are not easily fooled. We are keeping score. The new technology allows us to research speeches and votes in an instant and we can track contributors and expenditures and travel — all that good stuff that starts to corrupt around the edges. We are sophisticated people who understand how the world works and we aren’t expecting “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” idealism. But this political culture that’s been awash in corporate money is ruining this country and we expect our representatives to honor their commitments to honest, clean government.

And finally, in the run-up to the next election, this blog will continue to discuss many other things, from politics in popular culture to political history to, hopefully, a bit more wonkery as we start to delve into issues for the first time in six years. I’m going to be extremely engaged, as always, in issues of civil rights and civil liberties and I will continue to write about the under-the-radar attempts to subvert them, whether it’s through religion or government or corporate hegemony.

And we will all try our best to entertain you and stimulate you and make you feel, as I do, that by learning and reading we are arming ourselves to be informed, engaged and active political citizens. I have no patience with people who think it is a waste of time to read blogs when people could be stuffing envelopes. Many of us will do both, I have no doubt, and god love those who do. But I want us all to be able to sit at that Christmas dinner table, around the water cooler or on the stump, armed with the arguments and information that can engage the apathetic and the young and fight back the stale political conventional wisdom that has brought us to the brink these last six years. It sounds corny, but if we can do that, we can change the world.

Finally, I cannot say enough about the writers who contribute to the blog — tristero, poputonian and Dennis. They will not share in the proceeds of this little fund raiser — I asked and they refused, so their contribution to my well being is enormous and I thank them. They are all first rate friends, writers and supporters.

So if you can and if you want, you can hit the little buttons to the left or use my post box address to send along a little stocking stuffer to keep the Hullabaloo homefires burning for another year. (I added a subscription feature at a couple of readers’ request, if you like to use it. You can cancel at any time, of course.) To those of you who have sent in donations during the year, thank you again. It’s like Christmas all over again when I get one.

And to those who cannot contribute, perhaps you would agree to comment once in a while. This little community has one of the smartest political dialogs around on any given day and I’d love to see more of you participate. It’s where I get some of my best ideas.

So, there you have it. (whew.) Have a great holiday everyone.

cheers — digby

*I’ll be posting as usual, but this post will stay at the top for a little while. (That’s what the pros say to do and who am I to argue?) So scroll down for new stuff.

** I’m not at home and my email address has been behaving strangely for weeks, due to a changeover to a new cable system, so please forgive me if you don’t hear from me immediately.