the ad for John McCain you may see on the lower left-hand side of your screen does not in any way, shape or form constitute an endorsement of McCain by this blog.
Bleeding Heartland will strongly support the Democratic nominee this fall.
We are part of the liberal Blogads Network, which is how the ad found its way to this page. If McCain’s campaign wants to throw away its money advertising on liberal blogs, I’m not going to complain.
(UPDATE and correction: Bleeding Heartland founder Drew Miller informs me that the McCain ad was being served by Google, not Blogads. Apparently Drew put up some kind of filter to block johnmccain.com, so the ad will no longer show up on this page.)
My share of all advertising revenues generated by Bleeding Heartland will be donated to BlogPAC, a political action committee run by the bloggers Matt Stoller, Chris Bowers, Mike Stark and Natasha Chart:
Blogpac funds progressive leadership and experiments with injecting new voices in the political process using internet activism. We give grants, no strings attached, to activists on the internet who have a demonstrated record of success in either creating progressive change or creating the space for progressives to make change. We also seek moments to inject progressive power into the political system through focused internet and new media activism.
Stoller and Bowers used to blog at MyDD and now run the shop at Open Left.
Chart posts on several liberal blogs, including MyDD and Open Left.
Stark is most famous for asking Virginia Senator George Allen (shortly after the “macaca” incident) if he had ever used the n-word. It was a question no mainstream journalist would ever have asked Allen, but the senator’s dishonest reply opened the door to a stream of stories about how Allen had casually used racial slurs in the past.
One of my favorite bloggers, Steve Gilliard, later wrote that Jim Webb owes his Senate seat to Stark, because Stark helped drive a media narrative that was devastating to Allen.