In December 2007 and May 2008, I applied for two types of press credentials on behalf of EverydayCitizen.com so that a team of correspondents from Everyday Citizen would be able to cover the Democratic National Convention in Denver this coming August.

The two type of credentials we applied for are: 1) General Blogger Corps credentials, and, 2) State Blogger Corps credentials. We applied for ten (10) passes for the General Corps and have not yet heard back. The General Corps passes are necessary for our team to provide full and comprehensive coverage all of the week long events! However, I'm very confident and hopeful that the Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC) will approve our requests for the ten credentials. I'll announce that here just as soon as we hear back about those credentials.

This week, we did hear about one of the requests - the State Blogger Corps! My request for this pass was approved! I'm very honored and proud that the DNCC has awarded it to EverydayCitizen.com! Now, we only await the upcoming announcement regarding the General Corps passes! Here's the full announcement and press release regarding this phenomenal recognition for EverydayCitizen.com (read it! it's exciting!) ...

"We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand." - Randy Pausch

My DREAMERS aka D.R.E.A.M Act activists have not only been hopeful, they've also been active. But how does a group continue to fight for the right to "DREAM", when groups and people filled with hate and animosity want to see you in shackles, torn apart from your family before the sun comes up, and have LIFE as you know it riped away.

How do you fight for the right to D.R.E.A.M. without being punished?

I guess the republicans are getting ready for Senator Obama's nomination. But instead of focusing on substance, they've decided to sling mud immediately. Case in point - former Arkansas Governor (and Baptist preacher) Mikey Huckabee made this astonishing statement at the National Rifle Association convention today:

...Huckabee joked to the audience that an offstage noise was Barack Obama avoiding gunfire. "That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he's getting ready to speak," Huckabee said. "Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor."

With only an announcement former Rep. Jim Slattery is just within reach of Sen. Pat Roberts with tons of time to make up the rest.

According to a recently released Rasmussen Poll

"The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Kansas voters found Roberts leading Slattery 52% to 40%.

The incumbent leads Slattery by twenty-one points among male voters, but just six percent among women. The Democratic challenger leads Roberts by three points among unaffiliated voters. Roberts earns the vote from 82% of Republicans while Slattery attracts 75% of Democrats.

From an ideological perspective, the candidates are tied at 46% among moderate voters. Roberts is viewed favorably by 60% of Kansas voters and unfavorably by 34%. Slattery’s numbers are 46% favorable, 38% unfavorable, and 17% of voters are not sure."

I’ve been left of center all my life. My early politics was influenced by my admiration of Martin Luther King Jr., the Kennedy's, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and the social teachings of the time I was in the Catholic church. In the mid 1990s, I attended an evangelical church for 8 years, and I learned to keep quiet about my political views. Since leaving that church due to conflicts, I’ve been on a mission to rediscover myself, to revisit my liberal roots. I’ve written in a Christian progressive site, and discovered the divide between liberals and progressives, and it got me interested in knowing where I stand in the liberal/radical spectrum.

I’ve been reading a lot of books in that time and found a beneficial relationship between liberals and radicals. Though the two groups have at times been hostile to each other, they both were needed to instigate needed social changes in American society.

From what I read, it seems that a basic difference between the liberal reformer and the radical is the extent of the changes that they hope to bring to society.

I grew up an atheist, but recently I have fallen in love with a movement that seems to be the most dynamic element of Christianity in American today. It’s a movement based on radical idealism, a faith that “all of creation will be redeemed.” These people are working toward a world with no poverty, no violence, no hatred or racism. And they believe they can do it. Even some of the most conservative evangelical churches are beginning shift away from the narrow, exclusive theology of “personal salvation” to a holistic gospel that calls Christians to build the “Kingdom of Heaven” right here on Earth.

My whole life, I’ve been searching for a movement that has the guts to try to truly save the world. The progressive movement in which I grew up has been in a downward spiral of lowered expectations. Meanwhile, Christians are charging forward with revolutionary zeal — and are even calling themselves “revolutionaries”!

There is one big problem, though: These revolutionary Christians have adopted a theory of social change that is just as narrow and unimaginative as the old theology they just left behind...

If you didn't watch "The Wire" rent the DVD or watch it on HBO. It just ended its five-year run on HBO, although it will have a long after-life in reruns. It has gotten universal praise for its gritty realism of inner-city life. I agree with the critics who compare "The Wire" to a great literary novel. Unpredictable plot twists, deft foreshadowing, and complex characters justify that judgment. The show juggled over 65 characters and kept them vividly evil, sad, or humane.

Like most great stories, the main characters were morally ambiguous, but so finely etched that we cared about them. Each week, I couldn't wait for the next episode. It was Dickens for television. Sadly the Wire is over. I looked forward to every episode.

But what's worse, it won't accomplish what its creator, David Simon, wanted the show to do. Simon wanted to spur our country to do something about the drug war and the plight of America's inner-cities.

A woman who spends years in medical school emerges to take her place alongside a panoply of male physicians — who, on average, make 38 percent more than she does. Female attorneys fare better — they make 30 percent less than their male counterparts. But it's not just a matter of higher pay for men in traditionally male occupations: Male registered nurses are paid 10 percent more than women — even though 90 percent of RNs are women.

This data, from a report by the AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees, touches on just one of the many "challenges," to utilize a euphemism, U.S. working women face today.

Working women have lots of concerns. Equal pay. Balancing work and family. Job security. Health care coverage. Paid maternity leave...

Many apathetic and disaffected people ask me about my drive, dedication and determination to change those politics that are not right. They're going to do what they want regardless of what we say... How are you going to change these things... Washington is corrupt... These problems are too big

These are all things I hear. What our forefathers must be thinking. To see our own countrymen surrendering without having even fought. How can we take our country and hand it over to these corporations? Have we forgot what it is to be American? How did we get to this point were we handed it all over without any questions or accountability?

My grandchildren occupy an extraordinary place in my life, better, my heart. Gracie turned 6 at the end of March. Wyatt celebrated his fourth birthday early in April. Owen blew out his candles in early May for the second time. Wow, do I love these kids! Words don't work for me when it comes to these three little ones. Nothing is better than being with them, listening to them, playing with them, just watching them. I think about them all of the time, for obvious reasons related to family and my love for their parents.

But, I also think of them when I consider what every child needs and deserves.

Self-help books are filled with advice about changing jobs, or even starting an entirely new career. For most of us, however, the reality is that we're not about to do either of those things, and we may not even want to. What we want is to improve the job we have -- to get more money, for example, or shorter hours, more flexibility, more interesting work assignments, or more responsibility.

It's not at all clear to most workers how to go about getting those things. To the extent that the advice columns in the newspaper address the issue at all, the recommendation is usually simply to go to the boss and ask nice, pointing out to him or her the fine work you've been doing and try to justify your request.

That's all well and good. But bosses didn't become bosses by handing out raises on request, or by letting their workers work shorter hours, or start a flex-time schedule, or telecommute. Eight times out of ten, the workers' carefully crafted request is denied. One time out of ten, maybe, it's granted. The other times, the request is not only denied, it gets the requester marked down as "dissatisfied" -- never a good thing to have on a worker's rap sheet.

...to the California Supreme Court.

"Our state now recognizes that an individual's capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual's sexual orientation," Chief Justice Ron George wrote for the court's majority, which also included Justices Joyce Kennard, Kathryn Werdegar and Carlos Moreno.

Who's really scamming the system? Each summer we operate a summer program called Urban Experience. The program is designed to educate people outside of the inner cities about issues that impact our friends and neighbors in the inner city.

This year we are working with the USDA to provide a session called Buck and a Half lunch, the amount per person, per meal that families receive through food stamps. The USDA's goal is to teach people how to make healthy meals with only $1.50 per person.

Our goal at the Urban Experience is to educate people on the time, effort, and obstacles associated with attempting to provide that healthy, buck and a half lunch.

Sid Blumenthal, a close friend and advisor of Hillary Clinton who has been widely credited with coining the term "vast right-wing conspiracy" used by Hillary in 1998 to describe the alliance of conservative media, think tanks, and political operatives that sought to destroy the Clinton White House, appears to be exploiting that same right-wing network to attack and discredit Barack Obama. And he's not hesitating to use the same sort of guilt-by-association tactics that have been the hallmark of the political right dating back to the McCarthy era.

Blumenthal regularly dispatches emails to a list of opinion shapers, including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers -- an obvious effort to create an echo chamber that will reverberate among talk shows, columnists, and Democratic Party funders and activists.

As an activist and organizer, I used to have a vision of my role in social change that kept me protected in a certain way from people and their problems. When I was a union organizer and community organizer, I spent countless hours at workers’ kitchen tables listening to their problems. Often they cried. I consoled. By a few months into a campaign, I knew enough about so many interconnected lives in a workplace or neighborhood for 100 John Sayles screenplays.

But my purpose wasn’t to help people, it was to “help them help themselves.” I wasn’t a social worker. In fact, as hard-nosed organizers, we were taught disdain for social workers who ministered directly to people’s short term needs. We were even advised by many of our mentors not to socialize with the people we were organizing, “because it could complicate things.”

When I met her, my wife Elizabeth became a new mentor to me. As a Christian who had always led a “missional” life, there had never been a time in her life when she wasn’t personally intertwined with a whole bunch of troubled lives....