Announcing EENR Blog

I am late in announcing this. The new blog went up just as I had some health issues I had to take some time out to deal with, so it's actually been up for a couple of weeks.

I'm proud to announce the new blog from the EENR group, EENRblog.com. This has truly been a group effort, with many hands making light work. The entire EENR group contributed work to envisioning and creating the blog and providing content. Now we have a lot of great new members creating content too!

I especially want to thank Jamess and RedJet. James did most of the technical setup, although a few others, such as edgery, dk2, and I helped with that too. RedJet did the visual design for the blog. Many others have been keeping the blog running smoothly, welcoming new members, and coming up with ideas and content.

Here's the official announcement, adapted from one penned by edgery:

Introducing EENR (www.eenrblog.com) – a new home for Edwards Democrats, progressive activitists, and all interested in serious discussions to further a progressive populist agenda, with a side of fun of course!

Brought to you by many of the same folks (and several other familiar faces) who gave you EENR every night at Daily Kos and now the new EENR For Progress series on Sundays at DKos and Docudharma.

We've tried to set standards for discussion that reflect our desire for open communication, and those wonderful lessons we all learned in kindergarten, "Play Nice and Share Your Toys." There are lots of toys.

EENR has a nice unique feature, 12 subject sections located in the left side column. This gives us essentially twelve front pages, like a really big multi-sectioned newspaper.

Diarists can be Front Pagers in these sections, encouraging new talent to rise to the fore in different areas. Of course, we'll be promoting the best of these to the home page as well.

One thing EENR is not, however: it's not focused on the presidentials. That may be strange to some who are really focussed on that, and some of us still are. Just not at at this particular blog. Taking the Edwards Plan for One America as a blueprint, we are exploring the issues from that progressive and populist perspective.

That's not to say we won't look at local and state races to promote progressive candidates. We've added a weekly EENR For Progress: Candidate Endorsement series that will appear on Monday evenings at EENR as well as DKos and Docudharma. Our initial installment of this series featured Gilda Reed (LA-01), Larry Kissell (NC-08), and Barry Welsh (IN-06), and raised over $400 – not bad for a bunch of newbies.

EENR is still a work in progress in terms of design, though the essential elements are in place. At this point, we're not looking at adding ads (pretty controversial among our gang) though we may revisit the idea of free space for issue-oriented campaigns or endorsed candidates in the future.

I hope you'll stop by and take a look, maybe offer a few words of wisdom to spark a conversation. Oh, and a plug now and then won't go unappreciated. It's a big sphere out there, we're a little piece but hopefully one that can carve out a well-received niche.