About Democrats.com

Democrats.com is an independent community of Democratic Party and progressive activists. We proudly support the Democratic National Committee (http://democrats.org) and its chairman Howard Dean, but they do not control us in any way.

Democrats.com was launched at the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles by two veteran Democratic consultants Bob Fertik and David Lytel. (Lytel left at the end of 2002 to launch ReDefeatBush.com.)

Our vision was to create the leading news and community Web site for the progressive base of the Democratic Party, in order to lead the fight against the radical right and the Republican Party. We called ourselves the "Aggressive Progressives."

We quickly fulfilled our vision after the polls closed on Election Day 2000 and reports streamed in from Florida about the infamous "butterfly ballot" and the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of Democratic voters. Long before the word "blogging" was invented, we posted real-time news from Florida and around the country about the grassroots effort to "count every vote."

When the U.S. Supreme Court threw out 175,000 Florida ballots that had never been counted, we worked with the Congressional Black Caucus to write the brief they used to challenge Florida's electors on January 6, 2001 - a scene that was made famous at the start of Fahrenheit 9-11.

From 2000 to 2004, Democrats.com published the first and only daily news service by and for Democratic activists. Each newsletter contained roughly 20 links to the most important stories published that day, both in the mainstream media and on progressive Web sites. We also organized online and offline campaigns on important issues like opposing the invasion of Iraq and impeaching George W. Bush for lying and war crimes. For more details, read our History.

On Election Day 2004, Democrats.com switched to a blog format. We now serve as many as 260,000 pages per week, which makes us one of the most popular Web sites for Democrats. Our e-mail list of subscribers and supporters totals over 350,000, which makes us one of the most powerful and effective Democratic activist groups.

Advertise on Democrats.com

Democrats.community is the leading online community for America's 100 million Democrats.

To help support the growth of our community, we accept advertising and sponsorships from Democratic candidates and committees, as well as progressive causes and businesses.

To place an order by credit card, click here.

For more information, click here.

1. Blog Ads

Weekly Pageviews: 60,000-280,000

Premium Ad: $300 per week
Regular Ad: $100 per week

"Our ad is performing ridiculously well on your site. The click-thru-rate is 1.85%. That's by far our best performer right now.  Looks like we've got a good fit."
- Dan Thomas, White Horse Books, 12/13/05

"For the record, Democrats.com outperforms any other blog on the entire liberal blog advertising network by more than 3-fold for clicks per pageview.  Keep up the good work, and I look forward to working with you in the future."
- Brendan Bush, Online Coordinator of WakeUpWalMart.com, 11/4/05

2. E-mail Standalone Mailings (Text or HTML)

Total Audience: 500,000

Per Message: $0.10 (minimum $1000)
*Per Clickthrough: $1.00 (minimum $2500) -  our most popular program
Per Opt-out: $1.00 - ideal for political campaigns
Per Opt-in: $2.00

3. E-mail Alert Sponsorships (Thumbnail image + 2 paragraphs + link)

Total Audience: 500,000

Cost: $2,000
Placement: below first news item (see sample) - only 1 per newsletter
Opens: 60-90,000 (typical)
Schedule: typically once per week but no fixed schedule

Are We the Democratic Party?

Democrats.com is completely independent of the official Democratic Party and its elected officials and candidates.

We are an online community of grassroots Democratic Party activists that was launched in 2000.

We led the fight in November 2000 to count every vote in Florida. We organized the first protest against the Iraq War when Bush spoke to the U.N. on September 12, 2002. We demanded Bush's impeachment after the Downing Street Memos were published on May 1, 2005.

We do not speak for the Democratic Party in any way - we only speak for ourselves. 

The official website of the Democratic National Committee is
http://democrats.org
You can contact them here:
http://democrats.org/contact.html

 

Candidate FAQ: Will Democrats.com Support My Campaign?

Democrats.com wants to help Democratic candidates, but we must do so within the law.

Here's what we cannot do:

• Democrats.com is not a PAC so we cannot contribute money to campaigns. (We created ImpeachPAC in 2005 but closed it in 2007).
• We have a strict rule against fundraising on Democrats.com so we cannot ask our readers to contribute to a campaign, nor can we allow candidates or their supporters to post messages on our site for contributions.

Here's what we can do:

• We can let you post forum topics about your campaign, as long as you respect our readers and reply honestly to their comments (login required)
• If you are running for Congress, we can let you send internal emails to our readers who live in your district, as long as you respect our readers and honor their remove requests
• If you are running for a state-wide office, you can rent our list of activists who live in your state
• We can post front-page blogs about candidates who use their campaigns to fight for the issues we care about most, including getting out of Iraq asap, impeaching Cheney and Bush, ending torture, and fully restoring the Constitutional rights that George Bush has destroyed (habeas corpus, wiretapping, etc.)
• We can point you to a great list of progressive PACs which might give you money

For more info contact us.

Contribute to Democrats.com

Democrats.com depends on the generosity of our members to keep growing and fighting for a better and more progressive America. Because our work is political, contributions to Democrats.com are not tax deductible. But every dollar you contribute will help us fight George W. Bush and the Radical Republican Right!

We accept PayPal!

You can also contribute with a credit card. Or mail a check to Democrats.com PO Box 721066 Jackson Hts, NY 11372 Please write your e-mail address on the check.

Thank you for your support!!

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Email FAQ

Democrats.com operates many email lists to update you with the latest information on topics you care about. Each list has its own subscribe/unsubscribe system; in most cases there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email.

Activists: This is our main email list, which goes to everyone who joins our blog community or signs our petitions. We mail 4-6 times per month.

Partners: We are funded largely by paid email ads from progressive candidates, causes, and media. We carefully screen each ad to make sure it is progressive. We mail 2-6 times per month.

Yahoogroups: We began in 2000 with several yahoogroups: dem-daily, dem-weekly, and dem-activist. Since 2004, these lists have rarely been used. We also created yahoogroups for many states and counties, which are moderated by volunteers and accept posts by subscribers. The volume of each of these groups depends on the subscribers.

Blog post subscriptions: Our blog system (Drupal) allows each blog user to "subscribe" to many types of posts (nodes) by clicking "subscribe post" below each node. To review your subscriptions, click "My Account" and then the "Subscriptions" tab at the top. You can subscribe to threads, blogs, categories, content types, and rss feeds. When content is added to any node to which you have subscribed, you will receive an email. The bottom of each email has a link that lets you manage your subscriptions.

Member-to-member emails: We allow local organizers to email activists in their Congressional District by email. You can block such emails from organizers who annoy you.

Forums

Q. I can read the forum messages, but I can't post a comment or create a new forum thread.

A. You must register (see box on the right) and you must log in.

Q. I recently created a forum topic. Why did it disappear from the forum boxes on the right?

A. There are 2 forum boxes - new and active.

• New forums are the most recent additions.
• Active topics are those that received the most recent comments.

If you want your forum to remain visible in the active box, you must encourage other community members to post comments in it.

Q. I pasted formatted text from another Web page to a forum entry, but the formatting is messed up. What do I do?

A. Forum entries should be pasted as unformatted text only. If your source Web page is formatted, then paste it to a temporary Notepad page, and recopy the unformatted Notepad document. Then you can paste it into a forum entry.

Q. I was able to create new thread topics for a while, but now I cannot.

A. Democrats.com is a community built on mutual respect. If a member creates too many threads promoting their own ideas and activities, without showing interest in the ideas and activities of others, our Moderators will use their discretion to remove thread posting privileges.

Q. I subscribed to receive replies to my comments, but now I don't want to receive those replies any more. How do I unsubscribe?

A. You can do this two ways:

1. To unsubscribe from ALL replies, view your user profile, then click "edit", then check "Disable subscription notifications." (If you want to no longer want to " Automatically subscribe to threads in which you post," uncheck that box too.) Then scroll down and press "submit."
2. Click here to unsubscribe on a thread-by-thread basis

Q. How can I embed an HTML link in my post?

A. It's just simple HTML - click here for a longer explanation of the "anchor tag"

• Here is some plain text.
• <a href=http://democrats.com>Here is the plain text inside a link to Democrats.com</a>

History of Democrats.com

Democrats.com was founded by two Democratic political veterans, David Lytel and Bob Fertik. Our goal was to create the best possible news and community site for America's 100 million Democrats. We called ourselves the "aggressive progressives" to highlight our determination to fight for the progressive values that unite Democrats.

The site was launched at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles in August 2000, when Democrats chose Al Gore  to continue the peace and prosperity of the Clinton-Gore years.

On 9/27/00 Democrats.com introduced the first daily e-mail newsletter written by and for Democrats. We also created the first online Democratic community that was free of right-wing attackers.

During the fall campaign, Democrats.com tried to alert the media and the nation to the fact that Bush had lied in his biography about his National Guard service, and in fact went AWOL for the last two years of his six-year obligation. Our effort was led by Lt. Bob Rogers (Ret.), an 11-year Air National Guard veteran. We and others offered thousands of dollars in rewards for any witnesses who could prove Bush reported for duty either in Alabama or Texas in his last two years, but no one ever claimed the rewards. Three days before the election, the New York Times ignored all witnesses and instead cited a torned, undated, and unsigned document as "proof" that Bush reported for duty. The rest of the media followed the lead of the Times in killing the story - which resurfaced in February 2004 (more below).

When the polls closed on Election Day, Florida was the deciding state - and it was too close to call. At 2 a.m. that night, Bush's cousin John Ellis at Fox News called Florida for Bush, which was quickly followed by NBC, CBS, and the morning newspapers. Democrats.com heard about widespread voting problems in Palm Beach, so we contacted local lawyers to help investigate. We ran a banner ad campaign at on the Palm Beach Post's Web site to collect thousands of affidavits from voters who experienced problems. These and similar reports led the Gore campaign to request a recount in Palm Beach, Miami Dade, Broward, and Volusia - where a massive computer glitch caused Gore to initially concede to Bush.

While Republicans screamed "Sore Loser" and "Get Over It," Democrats.com organized dozens of nation-wide protests to "Count Every Vote" at TrustThePeople.com. We also launched JusticeinFlorida.org to support a lawsuit  by voters in Seminole County Florida against Election Supervisor Sandra Goard, who illegally permitted GOP operatives to fill in 4,700 incomplete Republican absentee ballot requests, while discarding incomplete Democratic absentee ballot requests.

As recounting proceeded in various counties, Democrats.com was the only Web site keeping track of the actual results (GoreWonFlorida.org). Katherine Harris certified Bush as the winner on 11/27/00 by only 537 votes; on 12/9, Florida's Supreme Court added 383 Gore votes from manual recounts in Palm Beach and Miami Dade - cutting Bush's lead to 154 - and ordered a recount in all of Florida's other counties. But a 5-4 Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court stopped that statewide recount, thus making Bush America's first court-appointed President. On Jan. 6, when Congress met to count the Electoral College votes, Democrats.com drafted a formal challenge to Florida's electors for the Congressional Black Caucus. Nearly four years later, this challenge became famous as the opening sequence of Fahrenheit 9-11.

Chronology of major events:

8/15/00: Democrats.com officially launches with a "Hush-in" on privacy at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles featuring Rep. Louise Slaughter (NY), Rep. Jay Inslee (WA), Attorney General Christine Gregoire (WA), privacy advocates Robert Ellis Smith, Bob Gellman, Evan Hendricks, novelist David Brin, and industry visionaries El St. John (Silvertech) and Alex Fowler (Zero-Knowledge Systems).

9/20/00: Democrats.com begins the first daily news service written by and for Democrats. In order to reach the largest possible audience, Democrats.com News is available by e-mail for free, relying on the support of its generous readers.

10/4/00: In its first investigative report called "The Smoking Jet", Democrats.com reveals that George W. Bush was mysteriously suspended from flight with two years left in his military service, and never again reported for a single day of duty, contrary to two direct orders. Democrats offers a $1,000 reward for anyone who can prove that Bush actually reported for duty with the Alabama National Guard in 1972, as Bush insists without evidence. The reward remains unclaimed.

11/9/00: Amidst reports of widespread voting irregularities in Florida, Democrats.com launches a Web site called Trust the People. Democrats.com collects affidavits from Palm Beach voters who believe their votes for Al Gore were wrongly counted for another candidate.

12/1/00: Democrats.com launches a Web site called Justice in Florida to support the lawsuit by voters in Seminole County Florida against Election Supervisor Sandra Goard, who illegally permitted GOP operatives to fill in 4,700 incomplete Republican absentee ballot requests, while discarding incomplete Democratic absentee ballot requests.

1/6/01: Democrats.com drafts a formal challenge to Florida's electors for the Congressional Black Caucus. Fourteen House Democrats protest the Supreme Court's illegal selection of George W. Bush by walking out of Congress.

12/10/01: Washington DC forum:  Authors of Books About the 2000 Election and its Aftermath, held at American University, drew 200 students and citizens. The featured authors were Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., author of A More Perfect Union,  Newsweek reporter David Kaplan, author of The Accidental President,  Nation columnist John Nichols, author of Jews for Buchanan,  and U.S.Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, author of Breaking the Deadlock

12/12/01:  Rising from the Ashes, Towards Democratic Victories in 2002 and 2004, a forum held at the historic Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City, drew 500 enthusiastic Democrats who refuse to ""get over it."" Featured speakers included pundit Paul Begala,  New York gubernatorial candidate Carl McCall, NYU professors Todd Gitlin  and Mark Crispin Miller, activist Liz Abzug, talk show host Ellen Ratner, author John Nichols, Mediachannel.com editor Danny Schechter, State Senator Tom Duane, City Council members Yvette Clarke  and Robert Jackson.

1/4/02: Democrats.com issues an activist alert to our members and others  asking them to show their support for Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's sensible plan for economic recovery that generates hundreds of letters and gets a  few dozen published in papers across the country.

1/11/02: Democrats.com introduces Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie to Nation Books, which agrees to publish an English language version of their groundbreaking book Bin Laden: The Hidden Truth about the secret diplomatic failures that led to the September 11th attacks.

1/14/02: Democrats.com  launches Enrongate Web site and Internet advertising campaign to amplify its call for a special prosecutor.

2/1/02: Democrats.com opens a new office in Washington, DC.

3/1/02: In response to the ""swift and ferocious"" attack on Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Democrats.com puts out an  activist alert asking members to write a letter in support of Daschle to their local newspapers. 

3/8/02: Democrats.com  launches RadioActivism.com to engage activists to protest the firing of the sole non-conservative voice left on the air in Washington, DC, the capital of the free world. 

3/9/02: We host an  online chat with award-winning journalist Greg Palast, who discusses his book The Best Democracy Money can Buy as well as his recent article in Harper's about the unlawful efforts of the State of Florida to remove citizens from its voter rolls.

3/11/02: Democrats.com co-founders David Lytel and Bob Fertik begin a new original column exclusively on Democrats.com called  Capital Offenses: A report on the latest outrages from Washington, DC

3/15/02: We release a new game called Pick Up Ann Coulter.

4/01/02: In our annual celebration of April Fool's day, we release  UnfairandImbalanced.com.

4/02/02: To celebrate Paul Begala and James Carville's arrival on CNN's Crossfire, we open  FairandBalancedBouquet.com which allows people to send a red, white and blue bouquet of flowers to the CNN executive in Atlanta who hired them.

4/02/02: Democrats.com launches a  Caught in the Crossfire feature on Democrats.com that highlights the best exchange on CNN's Crossfire each night, in case you missed the show and enjoy sharing that glorious moment when Novak and Carlson scream at the unfairness of being challenged by Carville and Begala.

4/03/02: Democrats.com arranges a 45 minute guest appearance on C-SPAN for Greg Palast, a visit to the DNC to meet Terry McAuliffe, and his presentation before 250 citizens at the Martin Luther King, Jr. library in downtown Washington (along with co-sponsors WPFW-FM, VoterMarch, the National Newspaper Guild and Vertigo Books).

4/12/02: Democrats.com co-founder David Lytel makes  a presentation on Internet-enabled campaigning and the role of the Internet in returning the Democrats to power at the Campaign for America's Future meeting in Washington.

4/13/02: The Washington Post publishes Democrats.com co-founder David Lytel's  op-ed on the mistreatment Al Gore has received by the commercial news media. 

4/29/02: Democrats.com publishes a  Special Report on its exclusive interview with Jean-Charles Brisard, co-author with Guillaume Dasquie of Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth, reviewing how well their reporting of the events leading up to the September 11th attacks has held up since it was originally published in France six months ago.

5/8/02: Democrats.com holds a party/meeting in San Francisco to discuss setting up a Northern California chapter of Democrats.com

6/5/02: Democrats.com launches BuckStopsThere.com to provide ongoing coverage of the series of revelations on the Bush Administration's advance knowledge and warning of the attacks that came on 9/11

6/13/02: The new Northern California Chapter of Democrats.com meets for drinks, dinner and discussion in San Francisco 

6/14/02: Democrats.com holds a political party in Berkeley.

6/19/02: Democrats.com delivers a detailed letter from researcher Nancy Kuhn setting out the civil rights and election law violations that took place in Florida in 2000 and 2001 to a majority of members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, as well as to the staff director and general counsel, in anticipation of their hearing in Miami the following day. 

6/24/02: Democrats.com co-founder Bob Fertik publishes an expose of the Bush 9-11 Photo Scandal, which documents the evidence that Bush ordered the shooting down of the Heroes on Flight 93, a moment that may have been captured in the photo Republicans are selling for $150. Right-wingers react viciously to this story, including a denunciation by Rush Limbaugh on 7/1/02 that results in dozens of hate-filled letters from his dittohead followers.

7/16/02: Democrats.com launches Bushgate to track all of Bush's many scandals as they move inevitably towards Bush's impeachment. 

7/16/02: Democrats.com launches Petition to Say No to Government Spying on US Citizens through programs like Ashcroft's proposed Operation TIPS.

7/17/02: Democrats.com launches FairandBalancedBoxofChocolates.com to enable people to thank NBC for getting Phil Donahue back on the air by sending a special box of Leonidas chocolates to the president of NBC.  

7/30/02: Democrats.com launches a Petition to Stop Bush's 'Wag the Dog' Invasion of Iraq, which collects nearly 8,000 signatures in one week.

8/2/02: Democrats.com creates Bush Pokey Scorecard after Bush promises to ""throw corporate criminals in the pokey, where they belong."" We're tracking how many of Bush's corporate cronies actually serve hard time in jail, because the proof is in the pokey!

9/11/02: In an incident we're calling Farrago North, Laura Dove of the National Republican Campaign Committee came upon the photo caption contest on our site that we ran last May, in which we invited users to send in their captions of the infamous photo of George W. Bush pretending to be in charge of the country during the attacks of 9/11.  You'll recall that many months later the Republicans were widely criticized for using the photo as a fundraising tool, and they're obviously still pretty sensitive about it.  We were in the midst of a campaign raising money for Senator Paul Wellstone, so the NRSC sent out a press release attacking Wellstone for permitting his advertisement to run on a site containing such ""vile"" content.  [This is on the day when America was in mourning over our losses of a year earlier, and Vice President Dick Cheney observed this somber event with a mud slinging celebration on the Rush Limbaugh show.)  The Minneapolis Star-Tribune was the only paper in the country to print the attack, then thought better of it, and finally printed our letter.  Hey, we report, you decide, as the Republicans say.

9/12/02: Democrats.com organized one of the first anti-war protests when George W. Bush spoke to the United Nations.

9/25/02: Democrats.com co-founder Bob Fertik appears on Fox's O'Reilly show and addles the dishonest old spin hack by arguing that most Americans OPPOSE Bush's war when they understand the costs.  Tell them how much it is going to cost in dollars and lives and the attack Iraq majority deflates like O'Reilly when confronted with facts.

9/26/02: The day after Fertik's visit to his show, O'Reilly smacks him again, like any bully making sure that the victim isn't able to offer up his own defense.  Above all O'Reilly can't let Fertik's assertation that popular support for a war against someone who had nothing to do with the attacks against us is massively inflated.

9/27/02: In a Newsday profile, Bob Fertik gets in a few good licks about how bold and creative use of the Internet can harness and express the grassroots-based, popular appeal of the Democratic Party  -- when the party genuinely puts its effort behind mobilizing public support.

11/15/02: Democrats.com launches the first Presidential Straw Poll for Democrats only. Al Gore won each poll until he formally announced that he would not run. John Kerry led briefly after that, but Howard Dean has led ever since.

2/15/03: Democrats.com organizes a rally in support of the Franco-German Peace Plan outside the German Consulate at the United Nations. Despite advance permission from the NYC police, the police prevented us from rallying at the last minute. So we joined up with the massive New York City protest that shut down the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

2/28/03: Democrats.com offers a $1,000 reward for convincing evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. This follows Bush's declaration that Iraq's destruction of its Al Samoud 2 missiles would not be sufficient to prevent war because they are just the ""tip of the iceberg."" Democrats.com's response: where's the iceberg?

1/30/04: Democrats.com launches MediaWatch (http://democrats.com/media), a brand-new campaign to challenge pro-Republican media bias. Media Watch has 3 goals: (1) document specific examples of anti-Democratic media bias (2) take direct, immediate action to challenge anti-Democratic bias (3) keep up the pressure to END anti-Democratic bias.

2/2/04: Democrats.com launches a grassroots impeachment campaign against George Bush at ImpeachCentral.com and ImpeachBush.Meetup.com. Within days, the ImpeachBush meetup has more participants than the Bush campaign meetup!

2/24/05: Democrats.com launches BlogCall, a weekly conference call to bring progressive investigative bloggers together with the mainstream media. BlogCall is featured in the New York Times.

3/28/05: Democrats.com forms the DebtSlavery.org coalition to fight the "Debt Slavery" Bankruptcy Bill in the U.S. House. The coalition includes Progressive Democrats of America, AFL-CIO, The Nation, National Organization for Women, American Progress Action Fund, National Community Reinvestment Coalition, People's Email Network, Public Citizen, Democracy Week, Black Commentator, Thom Hartmann Show, Milwaukee Labor Press, Politology, Fly By News, Billionaires for Bush, Evans Media USA, Take Back America, United Progressives for Democracy, Rapid Response Network, Public Campaign Action Fund, Progressive Populist, ACORN, Drum Major Institute, Campaign for America's Future.

5/26/05: Democrats.com co-founds AfterDowningStreet.org to highlight the publication in Britain of the "Downing Street Memos." These memos, dated July 23, 2002 proved the Bush administration deliberately fixed the "intelligence and facts around the policy" of invading Iraq - a full 8 months before the invasion began. AfterDowningStreet.org formed a broad coalition to demand a Congressional investigation into whether President Bush committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war.  AfterDowningStreet.org worked closely with Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) to hold hearings in the Capitol on 6/16/05, and to hold Town Hall meetings around the country on 7/23/05 and 1/6/06.

11/4/05: Democrats.com launches ImpeachPAC to raise money for Democratic candidates who support the immediate and simultaneous impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney for lying about Iraq.

1/25/06: Democrats.com led the netroots campaign to filibuster Sam Alito, which ended on 1/30/06 when 19 Democratic Senators betrayed us.

HTML Tips

Q. How can I copy formatted content from a Word document or another Web site?

A. Word documents include a lot of HTML tags that don't work on Democrats.com like <font> and <p class> and <span>.  We encourage you to copy just the text of your document and paste it into a format-stripping program like Notepad. Then copy/paste it again as clean unformatted text into Democrats.com.

Q. How do I embed Youtube objects or other video?

A.  It's a bit tricky:

1. Click "disable rich-text" below the editing box so you are working in pure HTML
2. Paste the <object> code
3. Separate the <object> code from your text with <p> (either before or after) so your text doesn't wrap next to the video 
4. For the "Input format" setting, choose "Pure HTML"
5. Scroll to the bottom and press submit
6. Note: You must repeat this operation each time you edit your node because the rich-text editor "eats" the <object> code every time you re-load it

Q. My post with a Comedy Central video displays text strangely to the right of the image, rather than below.

A. Delete "align='left'" (or center) from within the Comedy Central embed code 

Q. When editing a blog or forum node the rich-text editor often strips out the paragraph formatting.

A. Highlight and copy text in any node before editing, so you can paste it if it appears all wrong in the editor.

Jobs

Democrats.com has no full-time employees or interns.

If you are looking for a job in the Democratic Party or the progressive movement, we encourage you to visit these sites:

• Democratic GAIN - a national membership association for progressive political professionals and organizations
• EMILY's List - teaches campaign professionals how to be campaign managers, researchers, field operatives, and fundraisers
• Feminist Career Center
• HillZoo.com - "On-the-Hill" or "Off-the-Hill"
• Idealist.org - non-profit and progressive jobs around the world
• New Organizing Institute - progressive internet organizing jobs
• Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) - nonprofit tech jobs
• OpenLeft - progressive jobs
• Politics1 - campaign jobs
• Polling Report - jobs with pollsters
• Other job banks for non-profit jobs

A good place to find a job is with a Democratic candidate, especially for state or local office. Entry-level jobs rarely pay much (if anything), but allow you to gain experience and meet people who might hire you in the future.  Find your local Democratic party here.

Login

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A: Creating a login is an extra step beyond subscribing to our emails or signing our petitions.

To create a login, click here:
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Our Heart and Soul

Every community has a heart and soul. The heart and soul of the Democrats.com Community is our passion for freedom and justice - and our belief that George Bush and the Republican Party have systematically subverted both in the service of unfettered corporate power at home and naked imperialism abroad.

These are not abstract concerns to us, and they are fully supported by overwhelming evidence which we have meticulously documented since we began publishing in 2000.

We believe the elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen by Karl Rove and his operatives by disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of poor voters and by rigging electronic voting machines. The extent of these crimes is slowly becoming known through the investigation of the U.S. Attorney scandal.

We believe Bush and Cheney immediately filled the federal government with corporate executives who were given carte blanche to loot the federal treasury through massive tax cuts for the rich, huge no-bid contracts to Republican-run corporations, and the elimination of all regulations protecting workers and the environment. Halliburton is just the tip of the iceberg of these scandals, which were most obscene in Iraq and New Orleans.

We believe the Bush administration's imperialist policies were written by the oil giants in Vice President Cheney's secret Energy Task Force in 2001. We believe they seized on the 9/11 attack to act on their dream to turn Iraq into a massive, permanent U.S. military base in the heart of the Middle East so they could control the world's oil.

We believe Bush and Cheney created a police state at home by secret allowing the NSA to wiretap all Americans without a warrant and by enacting the USA Patriot Act to let the FBI seize all personal and business records without warrants. We believe the destruction of human rights in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo will ultimately come home with the destruction of human rights in the United States, as we are seeing with the Hamdi prosecution.

We believe the "War on Terror" is a smokescreen to conceal imperialism abroad and corporatism at home. We believe Islamist terrorists can be defeated through de-politicized intelligence work and close cooperation with foreign governments. We believe we must reach out to the Muslim world to expand prosperity and reduce hatred and hostility.

We believe Bush and Cheney have packed the Federal courts and the bureaucracy with "loyal Bushies" who will enforce Bush's corporatist and imperialist policies for years to come, even if we elect a Democratic President.

We believe the only way to restore freedom and justice is to:

1. Bring our troops home from Iraq as soon as possible
2. Impeach George Bush and Dick Cheney and prosecute them for their crimes
3. Sweep all Republicans out of office in 2008
4. Force the Democratic Party to repeal rightwing laws and policies and replace them with progressive laws and policies

We believe we cannot take freedom and justice for granted. We must fight every day to stop Bush, Cheney, and the Republicans from using the power of the government and the Corporate Media to turn us into corporate slaves. To win this fight we must be organized nationally, in 50 states, and in 435 Congressional Districts.

But our fight for freedom and justice is not at its heart a matter of politics. Politics is just a means to an end, and the end is freedom and justice in every sense of the word.

The Founding Fathers said it best in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

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The Founding Fathers declared our most important freedoms in the Declaration of Independence:

1. Life
2. Liberty
3. the Pursuit of Happiness.

They guaranteed these freedoms with the Constitution:

• Form a more perfect Union
• establish Justice
• insure domestic Tranquility
• provide for the common defence
• promote the general Welfare
• and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

After dividing the powers among the three branches of government (Legislative, Executive, Judicial), they added ten specific amendments which they called the Bill of Rights:

1. Freedom of assembly, speech and worship
2. Freedom to bear arms
3. Ban on forced housing of soldiers
4. Ban on searches without warrants
5. Basic rights for those accused of crimes
6. Due process in all criminal trials
7. Right to sue for civil damages
8. Ban on cruel and unusual punishment (torture)
9. This list does not exclude other rights
10. Powers not given to the federal government remain with the states

From the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 to the Great Depression of the 1930's, these guaranteed freedoms made the United States one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world.

But in the 1930's, a political movement arose in direct opposition to freedom: Fascism. While it began far from the United States, Americans realized its continued spread would ultimately threaten freedom here. To stop the spread of fascism across the world, President Franklin Roosevelt articulated Four Freedoms in his 1941 State of the Union:

In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression - everywhere in the world.

The second is Freedom of worship. That is, freedom of every person to worship whomever (be it God, or any other deity/deities) in his own way - everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants - everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor - anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

At the end of 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II. After four long and bloody years, we defeated fascism.

As Americans, our freedoms reached a peak in the 1960's, which saw the fullest expression of our social and cultural freedoms. But the very expression of those freedoms created a backlash and unleashed a new wave of conservative authoritarianism in the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and ultimately George W. Bush.

The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 slowed the march of conservative authoritarianism. But it was a brief victory: in 1994, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh led far-right "Republican Revolutionaries" to power in Congress. From that moment on, President Clinton was under incessant attack, starting with the Federal government shutdown of 1995 culminating in the impeachment travesty of 1998.

The Stolen Election of 2000 was a watershed event for the members of Democrats.com. Al Gore won the popular vote by over 500,000 votes, but the requirement for an Electoral College majority meant the President would be chosen by the winner in Florida. On Election Day, Florida was simply too close to call. But instead of patiently counting all of the votes, the TV networks - led by FOX and NBC - declared George Bush the winner in the middle of the night. And from that moment forward, the entire Corporate Media treated George Bush as the President-elect and Al Gore as the sore loser - even though 175,000 machine-rejected votes had not been counted.

At first, the Bush campaign denounced the effort to resolve the dispute in court. But when the Florida Supreme Court ruled all 175,000 votes should be counted by hand, the Bush campaign immediately persuaded the 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court to overrule the Florida Supreme Court and bring an immediate halt to the state-wide manual recount.

The Democrats.com Community was born during the recount struggle. We "blogged" the recount battle long before the word "blogging" was invented. We organized online and in the streets with a single demand: "Count Every Vote." When the partisan Republican majority of the Supreme Court threw out 175,00 uncounted votes, we worked with the Congressional Black Caucus to challenge Florida's illegitimate electors in a scene made famous in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. But outgoing Vice President Al Gore ruled the challenge out of order, and George Bush moved into the White House on January 20, 2001 - amidst the largest anti-inaugural protests in history.

From that moment on, all of our core freedoms were under attack. Operating in secret, Vice President Cheney's Energy Task Force - comprised of the nation's largest energy companies - surveyed the energy supplies of the world and made plans for U.S. corporate domination of those supplies. Bush and Cheney ignored all warnings of an Al Qaeda attack inside the U.S., and Bush himself sat in a Florida classroom as four hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field en route to the Capitol.

Immediately after 9/11, Bush promised to get Osama Bin Laden "dead or alive." Bush invaded Afghanistan but let Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora. But capturing Bin Laden wasn't a real priority for Bush - he had much higher priorities.

Bush, Cheney, and their neocon appointees seized on the 9/11 attacks to plan a military expansion of the U.S. empire into the Middle East. Afghanistan was just a warmup exercise for the long-planned war in Iraq. The Bush Administration lied through its teeth for six months before launching an unprovoked and criminal War of Aggression in Iraq. Bush's invasion gave rise to an insurgency which has evolved into a civil war. But because Iraq has the world's second largest reserves of oil and sits between the oil fields of Saudi Arabia and Iran, Bush plans to keep the U.S. in Iraq forever.

Bush's imperial expansion was never popular at home. Before the invasion of Iraq, millions protested in the streets. To keep the anti-war movement at bay, Bush unleashed all of the police powers of the federal government through illegal NSA wiretapping and FBI surveillance of citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. Bush's assault on our freedoms at home was accompanied by naked fascism abroad in the form of torture, disappearances, and murder.

In 2004, Democrats across the country worked their hearts out to defeat Bush. But just as in 2000, the Corporate Media was entirely controlled by Karl Rove and the Republican spin machine. The Swift Boat Liars were given unlimited coverage on the cable news networks, convincing millions of Americans that John Kerry had actually shot himself in combat and awarded himself a Purple Heart. Once again the election came down to a single state - this time Ohio - and once again their were widespread accusations of disenfranchisement and voting machine fraud. But once again the Corporate Media declared Bush the winner and John Kerry chose to quit rather than fight to make sure every vote counted.

By 2006, the disaster in Iraq became clear to all Americans who were not drinking the Republican/FOX News kool-aid. Despite Karl Rove's best efforts to stop the electoral tsunami by rigging the elections (what he famously called "The Math"), Democrats won majorities in the Senate and House. But Democratic efforts to end the war have been blocked by Bush's vetoes and his lockstep support from Republicans.

Looking ahead to 2008, Democrats have a solid lead in the polls. But Republicans will run yet another expensive and vicious campaign, and their appointees will do everything they can to rig the results.

Platform

The Democrats.com Platform:

Immigration

We support comprehensive immigration reform that strengthens our borders, protects U.S. workers and their wages, reunites families, and allows those who pay taxes and obey the law to earn the opportunity to apply for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

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