You can kill a revolutionary but you can’t kill the revolution. All photos by Anne C. Savage This afternoon, as I was sitting in a Netroots Nation 2016 panel titled “Rejecting the Pale, Male and Stale Leadership Pipeline: Roadmap to Building Inclusive Orgs”. Suddenly, a group of young, mostly African American activists burst into the room carrying a spay-painted banner […]

Without health insurance, this woman would not have received the treatment she needed to survive. In April 2014, Marion N. Seidel was given the news no one wants to hear: “You have cancer.” She had a cancerous tumor on her tonsils that had already started affecting her lymph glands — a potentially dire situation. Regular readers of Eclectablog or those […]

I’m on a listserv along with Working Families Party communications director Joe Dinkin. He posted his initial response to the #BlackLivesMatter protest at the presidential candidates townhall meeting at Netroots Nation last Saturday that I found to be one of the most impressive analyses of the event that I’ve read. He turned it into a piece for The Nation titled […]

The following is a guest post from Sommer Foster, the Political Director for Equality Michigan and a long time political activist. Like Anne and me, Sommer was at the #BlackLivesMatter protest during the presidential candidates’ townhall meeting last Saturday at the Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix. Anne and I have shared our perspectives as white progressive allies. Sommer brings the […]

Processing… I’m processing the protest. I’m processing the articles written about the protest. I’m processing comments people are leaving about the protest. I’m processing how prevalent racism still is, even in the progressive community. And I’m processing my photographs. As I go through the hundreds of images I took during the presidential candidate town hall protest at Netroots Nation on […]

“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” – Dr. Martin Luther King NOTE: You can view more photos from the event in Anne’s post HERE. In the two days since black activists from the #BlackLivesMatter movement took over a Netroots Nation townhall forum with presidential candidates Martin O’Malley and […]

NOTE: This post has been updated HERE and you can see more photos from the protest in Anne’s post HERE. The main event at the Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix, Arizona this year was a “Presidential Town Hall” featuring one-on-one discussions between journalist and undocumented American Jose Antonio Vargas and presidential candidates Governor Martin O’Malley and Senator Bernie Sanders. I […]

At Netroots Nation 2014, I explained why I think Obamacare is a winning issue for Democrats — and what we can do to help. It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. And I’m a firm believer that Obamacare is a winning issue for Democrats. To make the case for […]

For those of you who missed the opening night keynote speeches at Netroots Nation in Detroit, here is my speech welcoming the conference attendees to the Motor City.

For me, one of the highlights of last week’s Netroots Nation conference was the powerful, riveting speech by Rev. William Barber, the charismatic leader of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement. He spoke about “a moral movement for a moral crisis as the only way to higher ground” and what he calls the “moral fusion movement”. There have been several times […]

Why the current Congress isn’t working for the people — and how Democrats can change that. Do you miss “Schoolhouse Rock”? Me, too. And there’s no question that many members of the current U.S. House of Representatives, particularly Republicans, could benefit from a re-run, a refresher course on how legislating is actually supposed to work. During the Netroots Nation conference […]