Democracy for Pgh Endorses Sestak & Hoeffel, NOW Endorses Sestak

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A couple of Joes
The Allegheny County Democratic Committee (ACDC) is holding their primary endorsement process right now, but progressives may want to consider these recent endorsements:

NOW PAC has endorsed Rep. Joe Sestak for the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania.

Democracy for Pittsburgh has endorsed Rep. Joe Sestak for the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania.

Democracy for Pittsburgh has endorsed Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Hoeffel for Governor of Pennsylvania

http://joehoeffel2010.com

http://joesestak.com
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Reform Pittsburgh Now Site

Blogging from Podcamp downtown.

I just came from the press conference announcing the official opening of Reform Pittsburgh Now website. Looks like an interesting idea.

Councilman Bill Peduto ran the show with the newly famous and ever apple-cheeked Justine sitting just to his left. The room was dark (better to see the projected websites, my dear) and cool and completely full. Agent Ska was there with her camera. Rauterkus live blogged. I felt completely old-skool with a pen and paper.

As far as I can tell, the website's a blending, a co-mingling if you will, in an odd post-modern Reece's Peanut Butter Cups sort of way, of local politics and something Bill Peduto called "social media." Justine et al were to be the "social media" part of the venture. Peduto's former campaign manager Matt Preston will be in charge.

Peduto began the announcement by saying that the Pittsburgh city council will have a new make-up in January as three of the nine will be newcomers. But as yet there's no new agenda to reform the city. This is where the website and it's related Political Action Committee come in.

PACs are usually run, he said, by special interest groups, law firms, lobbyists, and the like. This PAC, he said, will be different. Run out of cyberspace, pushing for reform and transparency in local government, it'll be something new in these parts. It'll be a new way for more people to get involved in the process.

In an earlier session today, I heard Cynthia Closkey and Christina Schulman discuss how blogs can create a community of readers. In the case of Reform Pittsburgh Now, Peduto's looking to form a community of people all linked by their own interest in reforming the local political scene. He's looking to to raise the bar above the "personality politics" that's been the status quo for so long and to create an interactive forum for local folks to be better involved in the process.

There'll be a calendar of events, a library for public documents and so on. In a few months, there'll be so much material in the website's "library" that one could spend every minute of a weekend and still not have enough time to get through it all. Every minute of a weekend (48 hours x 60 minutes/hour) is, I think, 2,880 minutes. That's a lot of minutes.

I was curious about the funding, though. In the question period after the presentation, I asked how all this was being paid for. Bill said that the first $3000 came from his mayoral campaign account. The after that, he approached political types of every stripe for funding.

The PAC, as it's set up, is prohibited from endorsing particular candidates. When asked how it could then influence any politicians, he said that the PAC (and the website) would be making it easier for people to contact officials on their own. That's the pressure.

Bottom line, he said, was to make it fun - get the negativity out of local politics.

Sounds like a good idea.

Reform Pittsburgh Now Debuts at Pgh PodCamp

What: Reform Pittsburgh Now Live Site Release
When: Saturday, August 18, 2007, 1:45pm
Where: Pittsburgh Art Institute, 420 Blvd of the Allies, Rm B (435)
Broadcast Live: live.podcamppittsburgh.com

Bill Peduto will be unveiling the website for Reform Pittsburgh Now at a live web-cast session at Pittsburgh PodCamp (http://www.podcamppittsburgh.com/ )

The session will focus on the use of social media to affect policy change. Panelists include Bill Peduto, John Carman ( http://www.avenuedesignstudios.com/ ), and Justine Ezarik*** ( http://www.ijustine.tv/ ).

The Reform Pittsburgh site will be highly interactive including blogs, Talk Shoe live call-ins, and mucho videos.

***If you don't know who ijustine is by now, you haven't been watching any local or national news this week. She's the Pittsburgh video blogger who has a very well-produced video out there about her 300 page iphone bill from AT&T (see youtube clip here). The bill included the text of all her text messaging. If only Cheney, Libby and that whole gang had used the iphone we could have just staked out there mailboxes for their bills instead of trying to sue them to find the "missing" emails. (OK, OK. I grant you that you'd likely get shot if you went within 500 feet of Cheney's mailbox.)

Reform Pittsburgh Now

This evening, in the rooms where his mayoral campaign once hummed along and then shut itself down, Bill Peduto began an interesting political experiment. Using the network he has leftover from that campaign he's looking to kick start another local political movement - Reform Pittsburgh Now!

Clad casually (see picture), he began the meeting with a brief summary of the reasons he unplugged his run for the Mayor's office. He said he would have lost, and lost big. The loss would have damaged any chance of further reform in this city. The only way to level the playing field against Luke Ravenstahl's huge poll numbers was to go negative - big time. But going negative would inevitably have alienated his supporters and so on.

Peduto reiterated just how big Ravenstahl's poll numbers were with a joke (now safe to tell, he said, as it's no longer Holy Week). Peduto said that if Jesus himself were running in this campaign not only would Luke still win big, but he'd get the carpenter's union endorsement to boot.

Forgive me but it took me a few minutes to get the carpenter's union joke.

He went on to say that there's an odd mindset in the city. People are tired of business as usual, HOWEVER they see the solution to business as usual as Luke Ravenstahl.

So what was the meeting for? He's looking to have Pittsburgh's progressive community have a greater hand in setting the agenda for reforming city politics. The crowd of about 75 was faced with 10 or so desks, each with a sheet of paper taped to it. Handwritten on each sheet of paper was a policy issue - Economic Development, Education, Art/Technology and so on.

Everyone was then invited to head over to the policy group with which they were most comfortable and start brainstorming. The plan was to have a set of reform policies in place by the end of the month of May. At that point, Peduto would then begin to present them, one by one, to City Council. Within a few minutes each table had some sort of crowd around it, though of the ten or so tables there, most of the buzz seemed to be happening around the Economic Development, Transit, and Public Safety tables.

I guess that's what's on people's minds.

Peduto said while he was happy with the showing tonight, he's looking to expand the group to possibly 600 by the end of the year. It'll be made up of people interested in policy, but not necessarily politics.

When I asked him HIS place in the group, he said he's the voice. When the agenda is set, his seat at City Council will be the access point for the reform group into city politics. The existence of the group, he said "is to show other elected officials that it's safe to jump into water."

Earlier in the evening, when commenting on why it's important to have such an organization pushing a reform agenda, he said, "If we don't do it, no one's going to."