Political Blogging & E-Mailing
For Progressive Causes & Candidates
With working class roots in the Democratic Party going back over a century — and deep personal convictions about social, economic, international, and environmental progress — I have been writing about political issues for over 30 years.
From 2001 — in the wake of 9/11 — through 2010, I exercised my citizenship by conducting extensive in-depth research and writing hundreds of pieces that I then e-mailed and posted online — from pithy “one-liners” through insightful essays to comprehensive research reports that served as fact-checked references to counter widespread misinformation.
As I coached my professional and business clients wanting to get noticed on the Web, I respectfully posted my great many works online in sites that already had large followings. In particular, OpEdNews.com, for which I served not only as a contributing writer but also briefly as substitute News Editor, had over 300,000 unique visitors a month (now over a million)!
My work was often re-posted by others, often with large followings of their own.
And I e-mailed my writing, or links to it online, directly to progressive activists nationwide and eventually worldwide. My writing became respected by Party leaders, at the local to state and national levels, and was eventually quoted by major international news sources.
With writing, videos, and talk shows, I am proud to have played some small part in our truly making history — particularly by electing the first African-American as president, steering the economy away from the brink of disaster and back on the road to long-term growth, and enacting the first universal health care coverage for our great nation.
But most of all, I am proud and thankful to be an American, free to speak and write the truth as I see it, along with every other citizen, each with their own point of view — whose collective wisdom repressive regimes fail to respect or value.
Sincerely, God bless America and those who keep us free.
Doug
Making Media Social
- As Quoted by UPI, BBC News, & The Guardian (UK)
- Special Reports for Progressive Activists
- E-Mail to Activists Nationwide & Worldwide
- Articles Re-Posted on the World Wide Web
- Other Online Archives of My Political Writing
- Filling in as News & Opinion Editor at OpEdNews.com
- Subscribe to My Writing (via Feed Readers or E-Mail)
- Kind Words for Posts by Our Talk Show Guests
- A Family Tradition of Exercising & Protecting Freedom
As Quoted by UPI, BBC News, & The Guardian (UK)
“Douglas Drenkow, a researcher, writer and political commentator, summed up the situation in a recent column posted at OpEdNews.com: ‘The person in charge of our country’s public health — in the event of any sort of bio-emergency — is a lawyer, not a doctor or anyone else with an iota of formal training in the field.’”— UPI, December 1, 2005 (in wake of Hurricane Katrina)
“No amount of sugar coating can make the policies he has promoted any less poisonous to the body politic.”— As Quoted by BBC News [“Comments from Left Field” on the nomination of John Roberts for Chief Justice of the United States], July 20, 2005
“In a column last week entitled ‘The Case for a Woman as Vice President’, political writer Douglas Drenkow argued that it was vital for Obama to pick a woman. He needed to do so, Drenkow wrote, not just as a matter of Democratic politics but to lessen the impact if McCain went with the tide and selected a female vice presidential candidate. ‘Do we Democrats want Republicans to beat us to the punch?’ he asked on the political website OpEdNews.”— The Guardian (UK), July 12, 2008
Special Reports for Progressive Activists
From time to time, major issues would develop that would require comprehensive research, in-depth analysis, and clear and concise writing to fill in the gaps of information — and clear out the fog of misinformation — that inevitably accompanied such very complex, very public debates.
I thus took it upon myself to conduct such research and analysis and write such reports, which I would then disseminate to a widespread, yet targeted audience — particularly through popular political blogs online — and to highly motivated progressive activists — particularly those on my e-mail list.
Especially with such works I established a reputation for accuracy as well as advocacy, which would help open doors for subsequent research and reports.
Here is a list of some of these works, which you may download and read, to learn from historical experience and also to better understand specific and underlying issues still affecting us today:
- Healthy, Wealthy, & Wise: A comprehensive review of various strategies of health care reform, including the “public option,” particularly in terms of availability and affordability of care, examining the real-world experiences of several states and nations (October 7, 2009).
- Straight Talk on the Financial Crisis: An unflinching investigation into the immediate and historical causes of the 2008 global economic collapse, with emphasis on talking points to be reinforced or debunked during the then-ongoing presidential election (September 27, 2008).
- One Less Bell to Answer: A systematic study of the effects on the various segments of the telecom industry as well as the economy as a whole resulting from recent multibillion-dollar mergers and unprecedented technological change (March 6, 2006).
- Do the Math: Something Stinks: A purely statistical analysis of the major discrepancy between the late exit polls and the official results of the 2004 presidential election, demonstrating a 99.9375% chance of an incorrect outcome (a conclusion in line with a more sophisticated, more widely circulated analysis later performed by MIT-educated Steven F. Freeman, Ph.D., a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania) (November 12, 2004).
E-Mail to Activists Nationwide & Worldwide
Over the years, I have sent a great number of political e-mails to my (select, private) list of activists — including several members of the Democratic National Committee with whom I have exchanged correspondence — and others nationwide — including in such “swing states” as Nevada, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida. And many of my e-mails have been forwarded to other lists, nationwide and even worldwide, as by my friend in Geneva, former network TV correspondent Len Hart (“The Existentialist Cowboy”).
Articles Re-Posted on the World Wide Web
A number of my news and opinion articles etc. have been re-posted in their entirety in various sites online: sometimes with my knowledge and permission — as in LAProgressive.com or ExistentialistCowboy.com — and other times without — as by ThePeoplesVoice.org; the Pasadena Democrats (link no longer accessible), who found my reasoning interesting; the news archives of The Neil Rogers Show (no longer accessible), in Miami, or of the Invisus security company, which found my article on identity theft newsworthy; or such blogs as Dprogram.net, whose readers called one of my OpEdNews articles “crap” (It’s a free country).
Other Online Archives of My Political Writing
In some of the indexes to my works elsewhere, as at DailyKos.com or OpEdNews.com, you will also find listings of comments I have made to postings by others.
For my earlier socio-political writings, not originally e-mailed or posted online, read my Letters to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times, some of which are now available in the Times archives online.
In addition, you may visit Progressive Thinking, my online archive of published and unpublished work through June 2006, including some of my e-mails to individual, although anonymous progressive activists.
Filling in as News & Opinion Editor at OpEdNews.com
For about a month in 2005, I filled in as News & Opinion Editor for vacationing Rob Kall, Executive Editor, at OpEdNews.com — then with 300,000 unique visitors a month (now with over a million). I searched through “mainstream” and “progressive” sources online to find newsworthy and thought-provoking articles, for which I posted brief excerpts and links on the homepage of OpEdNews.com.
Subscribe to My Writing (via Feed Readers or E-Mail)
Through 2008, readers could regularly receive my political writings either by getting on my e-mail list or by subscribing online via original XML newsfeeds I created, in both the RSS and Atom formats.
For more information, please click here.
Kind Words for Posts by Our Talk Show Guests
You will also note (as by “Googling” “doug drenkow”) that I have occasionally written supportive comments for the writing posted online by some of the guests on the talk shows I produced, such as political consultant Robert Creamer, professor and author Harvey J. Kaye, writer/publisher Arianna Huffington, former Ambassador Swanee Hunt, Jim “Jibjab” Meskimen, and veterans’ advocate Paul Rieckhoff.
A Family Tradition of Exercising & Protecting Freedom
The family of my Great-Grandfather & -Grandmother Winter, whose centennial in America as a typical pioneer family was featured in the 1971 Academy Award®–nominated Documentary (Short Subject) The Numbers Start With The River, co-produced by the United States Information Agency.
Although using modern media, I am continuing a tradition dating back to the turn of the last century, when my Great-Grandfather Henry Winter spoke out in support of other small farmers and working families, as at national conventions of the Democratic Party; he was simply, yet courageously exercising his new-found freedom as an American.
I thank all those who have devoted — or even given — their lives so that we may speak freely (Loving our country even more than he hated fighting, my father gave up an automatic deferment as a defense-plant worker to volunteer for the U.S. Army Air Force during the height of World War II). It is not only our right but also our responsibility to speak our minds, so that we and those who come after us will continue to be free.
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