Peter Salett played this song at a house party for Oklahoma Senate candidate Andrew Rice. It touched everyone in the room... deeply. I asked him if he could record it, which he did on Friday. It's not so much about Andrew Rice's campaign as it is about the struggle of the American people to take back our government and make it stop serving the interests of war profiteers and start serving the interests of ordinary Americans.

All week DownWithTyranny is the guest blog for AirAmerica. We decided to donate the generous weekly salary to one of the Blue America candidates and I'm hoping you'll help us pick which one. I laid out how to do it yesterday, although the short version is just signal us which candidate you want to vote for by adding one cent to a donation to his or her campaign (or just donate one cent) on the Blue America ActBlue page. The canddiate who gets the most votes (not the largest amount of money, just the largest amount of one cents) wins the AirAmerica check.

Blue Dog (and virulent Bush Dog) John Barrow (GA-12) always thought he would be vulnerable from the right. So he moved so far right that he's usually the Democrat most likely to vote with the GOP in the entire Democratic caucus. CQ Politics reports that his political demise looks like it will come from the Georgia Democratic Party mainstream, not the far right. For the last few weeks he has called every African-American he knows to beg them to ask respected state Senator Regina Thomas to not run against him. And on May 2 even I got a letter from Barrow, begging for help! (after the jump)

Ex-Senator John Edwards could do the transformative agenda he has espoused a great deal of good by making an endorsement. One candidate is a committed, grassroots progressive and the other is a pitiful Big Money corporate shill, in some ways only marginally better than the Republican incumbent. No, no, I'm not talking about Hillary; she may be a corporate shill but she's certainly better than the Republican incumbent and she's also much better than his sadly transformed doppelgangerish would-be replacement. You see, while everyone else is urging the Edwardses to do what Governor Easley just did and endorse in the presidential race-- where I doubt he would have much impact-- I would like him to do the right thing in the race for the U.S. Senate seat, currently held by pathetic rubber stamp Republican Elizabeth Dole.

Below the fold: Why John Edwards should help grassroots progressive Jim Neal win the Senate race.

Larry Joe Doherty:

When I sued lawyers, I sued them for breaching their fiduciary duty, failing to put the interest of their clients above their own. I've known how to do that for more than 37 years in my law practice and I intend to see to it that Congress gets an explanation of how to put their constituents' interests above their own. We don't have a national health care plan for the public but Congress has one for itself. I've called on Michael McCaul to give up his national health care plan until he can legislate one that's at least as good for the public as he gets for himself. He hasn't responded to that.

I've already pledged that I'm not taking the national health care plan afforded congressmen until we pass a plan that's available for the public. It'll be the same for me as it'll be for them or I'm not going to have it... If you don't appreciate how suffering takes place until you've suffered a little then Congress needs to go without its medical plan until they can give one as good to the public.

A few days ago Speaker Pelosi called a snap conference call for bloggers. I'm quite certain that almost everyone on the call wanted to talk with her about the FISA bill, particularly about warrantless wiretaps of American citizens and about retroactive immunity for Bush's cronies inside his regime and among his corporate supporters in the telecom industry. But Ms. Pelosi had brought us together to discuss the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act, which the Democrats had managed to pass overwhelmingly with the help of 47 Republicans. I had just finished writing a post about it and I was prepared to ask the Speaker a question while everyone else waited to get to FISA.

(this leads somewhere, after the jump)

A few weeks ago I met an extraordinary woman running for Congress just south of where I lived in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Her name is Sam Bennett and she's running against rubber stamp Republican/fake moderate Charlie Dent in PA-15. We invited her over to Firedoglake for a live blogging session and you can read the questions and answers here. She was endorsed by Blue America and we've been raising money for her campaign (here). Walter, her campaign manager, and I have been urging her to introduce herself to the Kos community and she decided to do it today-- and then realized she has to wait a couple weeks before she can post a diary. She asked me if I'd put this up for her, due to the timeliness of the message. She just sent the same message to her supporters:

We don't expect the men and women we support to necessarily support the same position we do on every single vote. But even in the short time Chris Carney has been in Congress, he has moved further and further away from all the other Blue America endorsees who won seats.

In terms of supporting progressive issues in general, he has established himself at the bottom of the barrel among the freshmen, along with candidates we chose not to endorse, like Jason Altmire (PA), Rahm Emanuel's Heath Shuler (NC), Nick Lampson (TX) and Brad Ellsworth (IN). Some of us were disappointed but none of the writers at DownWithTyranny, Firedoglake or Crooks & Liars chose to castigate Carney. And then something happened that has made us decide to speak up. We realized Chris Carney lied to us.

Jacquie, the Blue America media buyer who has been putting campaigns together for us all over America, has asked me to post this for her because she's too busy haggling with radio and TV stations to squeeze and extra ad or two out of sales reps for our candidates. I don't know where she found the time to write this.

We are getting down to the wire here, and thought an update on the fundraising for Blue America PAC was in order.

To prevent a 2010 partisan gerrymander by Republicans in Wisconsin, Democrats need to win back control in the State, which they have an excellent chance of doing this year, or they have to take back about a dozen seats between now and then in the Assembly, a much harder task but one that is starting right now. There is a great opportunity in the northern Green Bay suburbs, AD-89, where "Wisconsin's Tom DeLay," Ass Speaker John Gard is trying to move up to the congressional seat being abandoned by Mark Green (who's running for governor). It looks like both Kennedy and Gard will be defeated. Can Wisconsin progressives celebrate a trifecta by grabbing Gard's Assembly seat too?

If you've been listening to Air America lately you've no doubt heard some of the Take Back Congress ads. These very effective 60 second spots are part of a campaign that enumerates the 50 reasons to elect a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate. And the reasons are great; take a look or have a listen. Problem is, there are only 38 reasons, not 50. Can you help them write a dozen more ads why Democrats should be running the House and Senate instead of the Republican rubber stamp brigade?

Today we're going to have a little experiment in netroots participatory democracy over at Firedoglake. I hope you'll be part of it by coming over at 2 PM (est/11 AM in California) and hitting the comments button which is where the action will be. There's
no special Blue America guest candidate this weekend. We're getting down to the nitty-gritty and I wanted to have a different kind of discussion today. If you're a regular here, you know about our song and our customized versions and videos. I've been hearing from people around the country that they've started finding the ads based on the song on the radio and seeing TV spots as well. This morning I had a call from a friend in Minnesota telling me she had heard the spot aired for Wendy Wilde and today I saw the TV spot that Carol Voisin is running in Oregon. I've heard that Jerry McNerney's campaign, Coleen Rowley's campaign, Stacey Tallitsch's campaign, Mike McGraw's campaign and several others are also running it. Take a look at the Voisin ad and see what's she's done to the end of it.

You can go see the new Al Franken movie, Al Franken: God Spoke; in fact you should. And you can watch the trailer. You should do that too and here it is. But what you can't do is go buy the dvd for this wonderful movie. I guess in a few weeks or so you'll be able to. But right now, there's only one way to get your very own dvd of Al Franken: God Spoke: enter the Blue America raffle. Not only do I have 5 beautiful mint advance copies, each one has been autographed by Al specifically for Blue America.

(BELOW: Find out how you can win one-- and how you'll be helping drive the crooks out of the House by trying)

Yesterday Daily Kos was exploding with rage and anger over the Republican pedophile-- or at least virtual pedophile-- cover-up. My friend Claire told me that "people are crying out for ads in districts with responsible GOP" culprits. The Republicans are trying to worm out of this by claiming they never saw the undeniably outrageous IMs, but only the less outrageous (at least to them e-mails). The problem, of course, is  that by choosing to protect a congressional seat, instead of protecting the young pages who they were charged to protect, they covered up instead of investigated. Had they launched an investigation-- as was their clear and undeniable duty-- they would have found the IMs last year.

I've been following the Foley predator scandal for over a year. Yesterday I thought Jane at Firedoglake was joking when she wrote I had covered Foley 79 times. But when I clicked her link I had to laugh. 79 times! I'm still writing about Foley at Down With Tyranny, of course-- and about how Hastert and Boehner have covered it up and continue to try to cover it up! But there's another congressional predator at large in the GOP caucus.

The other day I woke up and Claire, someone I had never spoken to before but who cares a great deal about the direction our country has been going since Bush's usurpation of power, had donated $2,700 to the Blue America ActBlue page, spread out among 4 or 5 of our candidates. I e-mailed her a thank you and she responded by asking me to call her about an idea she had, which I did. We worked out her idea together, on the phone and in the course of a few e-mails.

I remember telling my friends how I feel exactly the same when someone contributes $5 or $1,000 to Blue America. I always assume that people donate what they can afford and they do it for the same reasons I do. It is very touching to me when I go down to the Blue America post office box and there's a $5.00 check from someone telling me they wish they could afford more after stretching their social security check to meet their basic needs. I feel so lucky to be in touch with these heroes.

When I started writing this over at Down With Tyranny it was just a little wrap up on how delusional Republicans are and how Democratic candidates are continuing to make headway in every part of the country. I'll get to that below the fold, but towards the end I turned it into a fundraiser; I can't help myself.

I hope you've already heard the Blue America campaign song Have You Had Enough and know a little something about our campaign to get district-targeted versions of the song on the air in October. You can read about it on our My Space page. Anyway, listen to the song, watch the videos, and see if you want to help. If you do, our ActBlue Page is open 24/7 and every cent that goes to the Blue America PAC goes towards getting the ads on the radio. And if you donate today (Tuesday)-- at least twenty bucks, you get a rare CD-- not sold in any store anywhere for any price-- of the song, done by Rickie Lee Jones and the two guys from the Squirrel Nut Zippers, Tom Maxwell and Ken Mosher.

I haven't seen many diaries about the race rapidly heating up in CA-25, other than this one from June by Altscott. A few months ago I went to dinner with the dynamic young Democratic challenger, Robert Rodriguez, and was mightily impressed. Today at 11 AM (PT) Robert's going to be Blue America's featured guest at Firedoglake and will answer questions about his campaign to unseat rubber stamp Republican Buck McKeon. I've got an advance up at Down With Tyranny now.