Andrew Hoppin, the New York State's Senate's Chief Information Officer has had his team pretty busy. I got an email from their Director of Onine Communications, Phillip Anderson (one of the first bloggers here at The Daily Gotham and formerly of The Albany Project) describing the project:

The new site is extremely simple, with a Google-esque single search field. One can enter a bill number, a keyword, a Senator, just about anything and it find reams of information as well as comments on ALL Senate legislation. That's not all though.

The site and search are also available by phone by simply speaking a term and even by SMS text.

Sounds not just awesome but about what the state has needed for eons. If we could only get something like this for New York City. Oh right! It took a DEMOCRATIC GOVERNOR to put money into updating the state's digital infrastructure. With REPUBLICAN MAYOR BLOOMBERG? Unless that's money his company and media cronies get to pocket, keep hoping.

Read the press release after the jump:  read more »

Last night I saw a flurry of emails blanket my inbox with aq series of "unbelieavable", "still in shock" and the not so occasional "I'm angry".

I had spent most of the afternoon trying to sort out my thoughts fast enough for an Op/Ed, and I would always come back to the misgivings I've had since he took office a little over a year ago. That Eliot Spitzer's problem and weakness has always been his success because he never really needed anything other than a vote from you or me to get elected.

Eliot Spitzer didn't really need a million New Yorkers giving $5 or $10 donations to his campaign to get elected. He never needed to learn how to get people out on the streets to support his campaign to get him elected. He never needed to swallow his pride and shut up and take criticism from his own base in order to gain political influence. And he certainly never had to pound the pavement and get people out on election day to make sure people would get out of their homes and offices to cast a vote.  read more »

Metro newspaper just published Voices: Spitzer floated on air, but lack of roots did him in, my Op/Ed on the Spitzer debacle.

Here's the money quote :

For netroots activists like me, who have had the chance to take a peek at the mechanical beast, the New York State Democratic Party, Eliot Spitzer was nothing but a political insider’s rock star that only needed “The (little) People” to vote so the “politics as usual” could rock New York and roll into Albany. Yet there’s a reason why “politics as usual” is losing the fight in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary.

Eliot Spitzer’s weakness has been the lack of a true grassroots base. He never had his feet held to the fire by his own party base, by The People who ended up voting for him. The Republicans have known this all along, and it’s not a coincidence that they tried to scare him last year by astroturfing the Internet with fake attack blogs.  read more »

Removed by author, for re-evauation, on the advice of counsel

The Daily News published an editorial yesterday that begs to be commented. In "Full Cooperation, Please", they ask from the man at the center of the Eliot Mess, Eliot Spitzer's former communications director Darren Dopp, to full cooperate with the ethics committe investigating the hows and whys of his strategy to leak Bruno's improper use of state vehicles and money. "Darren Dopp must answer under oath every question posed by the commission and must turn over every document under subpoena", they say in the editorial. "Otherwise, Spitzer will have to boot Dopp from his $175,000-a-year job."

As the editorial rightly states, Bruno did break a number of ethics rules himself. Yet Dopp was way too unimaginative, a tad 'stoopid' and equally unethical to use state troopers to uncover the GOPers wrong doing.

Should Dopp have sought the 4th estate's help with this investigation? Maybe. Yet if he had no reason to trust mainstream media to cover Bruno, wouldn't it have been prudent to seek ... ah ... let me think, think, think ... maybe the help of the state's growing 5th estate? Shouldn't a man allegedly connected to the states grassroots gone to the blogs for this kind of oppossition research?

Ahhh ... but that's what so pathetic about Mr. Dopp. He can communicate 'change' and 'populism' and 'grassrootiness' but when it comes down to it, he wouldn't know what the grassroots looked like even if it collectively bit him in the ass.

That is what's so pathetic yet so eye-opening about the whole Eliot Mess.

Had Spitzer been truly the leader of a populist and grassroots base, he wouldn't have a communications director so ensconsend in statusquoism. If Dopp had been there thanks to the grassroots, he would have had the clarity of mind to develop a statewide infrastructure "by the people" and "for the people" to have the tools necessary for exposing the corrupt political machine we call Albany.

Which is why Darren "Dopey" Dopp and other democrats like him should be nominated for Demotards of the Year.  read more »