The DNC, along with many other groups, asks me for money all the time.  I think this is a fairly common problem for concerned middle class people.  For example, I recently received a check from my mom.  When I asked her why, she said that she had been getting too many fundraising letters, and it forced her to think of which causes she really cared about.  Awwwww.

But I also wondered...Why doesn't the DNC just have an endowment?  Or does it have an endowment that I just don't know about?  And what good would it really do if it did?

A number of factors have recently conspired to give me a daring idea (that I pray hasn't been treated already in some diary I didn't get to).  What if the progressive blogosphere had its own representative in the White House Press corps?  I say we need someone on the inside, who answers to us instead of the media companies.  Someone who cares what we think instead of what the beltway insiders think.  And someone who can ask White House officials our questions directly.

I started thinking about this possibility on Friday, when Chris wrote a couple posts about letting him and Matt "work for us".  I also read this post
 by David Corn on tompaine.com about how blogs and commentary are all well and good as far as they go, but they require someone to do reporting somewhere along the line so everyone else can have facts to comment on.  The problem?  Actual reporting is more expensive than commentary.  But it's time we the netroots graduate from commentary to fact production.

There has been some blogger fact production already, but too often it depends on being in the right place at the right time.  Bloggers were huge in covering Hurricane Katrina, but that was because they were already there.  Firedoglake showed how amazing it is to be onsite, in the halls of power, side by side with and upstaging the MSM when they covered the Libby trial.  We need to regularize our fact production. (more...)

The California Democratic Party is in trouble.  Whereas on the national level grassroots Democrats have done a good job of wresting the DNC out of the hands of the corrupt (and corrupting) corporate donor types, on the state level we haven't been able to do the same yet.  The two examples I have of the problems with the state party are the money laundering for Fabian Nunez and the failure of the wealthy elites who run the party to stand behind Angelides.  See below the fold for more.