Over the next few years, I expect the African-American political blogosphere to explode in importance.  I've met enough African-American reform leaders to make me believe that there's a African-American 'Crashing the Gates' movement happening right now and that it's about to come online.  The NAACP suffers from the same institutional inertia as NARAL and the Sierra Club, and that means there's a market for new leadership.

For instance, the Republic of T has an important post on Bobby Rush and his support of the COPE Act.  The CBC is an important battleground in the fight over net neutrality, paralleling the fight that we're having now over liberal boomers cutting deals with the right to hold onto power.

That may be the reason Bobby Rush takes big checks from telecoms, to make sure, as one of the articles above puts it, to make sure that the "right" neighborhoods get faster downloads and that his constituents' communities remain the "wrong" neighborhoods. Keep the internet out of the "wrong" neighborhoods, or impede access to it, and you keep potential political power out of the "wrong" neighborhoods and -- more to the point -- out of the hands of the people who live in those neighborhoods.

At Jack and Jill Politics, Jill is fighting for the character of the Congressional Black Caucus and the open bragging by Al Wynn of his stolen election.  On the non-blog front, I've also recently started getting emails from ColorOfChange.org, a group asserting leadership on progressive black issues.  And I just noticed ForwardPAC, a PAC to support progressive African-American women.

The net neutrality is a very important signaling fight, because it cuts right through the rotten core of our political system.  The Mike McCurry's and the Al Wynn's are part of the same generation of political operatives, the post-1974 group that decided that collusion with right-wing interests made strategic sense.  Beating them back is going to take time, but it's happening all over.

There's more...