One of the items that really caught my eye in reading
Don't Think of an Elephant was the statistic that 80% of talking heads on TV originate from the various conservative think tanks. (I don't know the source of this assertion, but I'm guessing that it comes from David Brock or Eric Alterman or one of the other good books describing the operation of the Mighty Wurlitzer.)
Then a couple of days ago in a thread over at Atrios on the Delay orchestrated broadsides against Ronnie Earle, a drive-by freeper started spouting remarkable details that had already been put together about cases Earle had prosecuted ten or twelve years ago. Someone had researched this and put together their background material for the planned offensive, and it was accessible to everyone from the high pundits to your garden variety troll.
And it hit me. George Soros (or someone similar) should hire me to do just this for our side.
Over the past several years, astute progressive pundits and bloggers have come to the rather easy conclusion that it is time for us to build an answer to the Wurlitzer, and to do so quickly. The blogosphere and Air America are widely seen as two of the building blocks in this effort.
But we need to move forward with building a broad institutional base. Organizations like Media Matters and the Center for American Progress are a start, but we are still vastly outnumbered, outspent, and most of all outsmarted in the media.
The good news is that there is an oversupply of cheap and eager labor just waiting to be called on to do precisely such work. You see the talent (and ambition) percolating around the blogosphere. In particular, there is quite the glut, let me tell you, of Ph.D.s in the humanities and social sciences who have not yet found tenure-track work who might, just might be looking for a job that would properly utilize their well developed skills in research, writing, and analysis. It's no accident that such folks are prominent in the progressive blogosphere (e.g. Duncan Black, Josh Marshall, etc.) (then there are those who do have jobs and are still eager to participate -- Alterman, Brad DeLong, Juan Cole, etc.).
So George Soros, or someone similar, it's time for us to fund ever more Heritage Foudations and American Enterprise Institutes and the myriad of smaller such organizations that exist on the right. And it is time to take advantage of the pool of cheap talent that is sitting out there, working now for free (dopes like me who often spend more time blogging than doing our real jobs) but eager to have the resources to really be of use to the larger progressive cause.
So hire me. And folks like me. (And no, of course I'm not just talking about folks with Ph.Ds, no degree ever made skills and talents on its lonesome.)
-- Stu