Phoebe Connelly

Founding Editor Bob Kuttner is joining us on TAPPED with commentary about his new book, Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency, and on economic issues in the campaign. Well, Obama’s Challenge (the book) is stimulating a lot of press notice, but not exactly the sort I had in mind. […]

Eds. Note: Founding Editor Bob Kuttner has just released a new book, Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. It’s already receiving wide acclaim; Hendrik Hertzberg writes that it is “riveting, brilliant, and persuasive,” though he neglects to mention either Bob’s dashing good looks or air of mystery. In any […]

Did you know you can travel across the country without leaving a Republican congressional district? Well, the College Republican National Committee has sent four young people on a road trip to prove it! And naturally, they’ve set up a site, Where is the Red?, to let you follow the progress of four very earnest, very […]

I’ve always liked Lewis Carroll; my father used to recite “Jabberwocky” to me before I went to bed. Glad to see Lewis put to good use by the U.S. Court of Appeals in their first review of the military tribunals at Guantanamo: The three-member court, which was made up of two Republican judges and one […]

We’re happy to announce that Mark Schmitt is joining us as executive editor of The American Prospect on July 14. (Happy Bastille Day!) You already know Mark from his prescient observations about small-donor democracy, his smart analysis of 2008 as the theory of change primary, and his long-running Prospect print column “The Out Years.” Mark […]

The PDF conference has me thinking a lot about the generational divisions created by how we interact with technology. It started with a conversation I had with two organizers about the potential for organizing via text messages. One woman asked, “So, do either of you have a landline?” I haven’t had a landline since 2002, […]

Listening to Lawrence Lessig speak here at PDF. I’d suggest if you haven’t read it already that you head over to The Nation and read Chris Hayes‘ recent profile of Lessig and his new campaign Change Congress. –Phoebe Connelly

At the current panel, “Inside the Presidential Campaigns: What Worked, What Didn’t,” Tracy Russo, who worked on the Edwards campaign, just went after McCain for lacking hands-on knowledge and understanding of the Internet and social networking tools. Mark Soohoo, from the McCain campaign, jumped to his candidate’s defense, saying that the importance of tech wasn’t […]

I’m here at the Personal Democracy Forum, and sad to report that they aren’t allowing coffee into the auditorium. We just heard Zephyr Teachout speak, she asked us to consider whether the innovations we’re seeing in political technology were actually creating civic participation. “How many people have within them the knowledge of what it would […]

So apparently Ana Marie Cox is moderating a debate on technology and politics between representatives of the Obama and McCain campaigns at next week’s Personal Democracy Forum conference. The catch? It will all occur via Twitter. I’ll be attending the conference and blogging about it. The two-day lineup is here and here. Leave a comment […]