NEW YORK - The Walt Disney Company and News Corp. today announced the formation of a sweeping new entertainment and news venture that will provide the highest quality journalism, political coverage, and sports reporting to a global audience.

The joint venture, which combines the two companies' ABC and FOX Entertainment Group properties, will give Disney and News Corp. unparalleled resources in today's digital era.

Under the deal, Disney will become responsible for all feature films and will take over Twentieth Century Fox and Fox Studios, while News Corp. will become responsible for cable and broadcast television.

Executives for Disney and News Corp. confirmed that several name changes are on the way, including the rebranding of ABC, the nation's most watched television network.

Anne Sweeney, President of Disney-ABC Television Group, said the name change to Fox better reflects the network's values.

Yesterday, management at Seattle's AM 710 KIRO, owned by Bonneville International, abruptly cancelled The David Goldstein Show (which ran on Saturdays and Sundays from 7 to 10 PM here in the Pacific Northwest) and terminated two other weekend hosts, to be replaced with reurns and syndication. The move, made to cut costs, ends an eighteen month run for our good friend David Goldstein, one of the few bloggers nationwide to succeed in breaking into the traditional media and getting his own radio show.

David's show frequently featured guests from the netroots community, including many contributing editors here at Daily Kos. In response to KIRO's ungracious and sudden termination of David's show, we have written an open letter to KIRO which we urge you to join us in signing.

The text of the letter follows below the fold. When you sign, remember to check your email to confirm your signature so it shows up!

We're working on organizing the state delegation and we'd like to know if you are planning on being in the Windy City this August so we can invite you to the state social (we had one last year, and it was a lot of fun!) as well as connect you with other local Kossacks.

If you're going, please let us know by sending a message to netroots (at) nwprogressive (dot) org. Let us know your screen name/handle on Kos, where you live, and what plans and travel arrangements you've already made. We look forward to hearing from you!

The Federal Way School District in Washington State has appallingly decided to place a moratorium on the showing of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth because one wingnut parent doesn't like the former Vice President or his documentary, which doesn't include a Book of Revelations perspective on global warming:

"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. ... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn't in the DVD."

If Mr. Hardison doesn't want his children exposed to - gasp - science, then why are they enrolled in public schools? There is no doubt a good private school not too far away that teaches creationism. (How about the Federal Way Christian Academy, 30817 Pacific Hwy S).

WakeUp WalMart is currently in the midst of its "Change Wal-Mart, Change America Tour" which is a coast to coast journey with stops in nineteen states.

I've joined several of the organizers on their campaign bus, Smiley, as we head from  Portland, Oregon to the final stop on  the tour - Seattle, Washington.

Over the next few hours, I will be blogging LIVE from the road (yes, you read that right - from the road - on our organization's blog, sharing facts about Wal-Mart and its irresponsible business practices, perspectives from the organizers, and information about the final events in Seattle. I'll also be updating this diary on DailyKos with insights, pictures, and possibly even multimedia.

For updates, follow me below the flip. Feel free to post questions about the tour and about WalMart in the thread, and I'll see if we can provide answers.

I'm not going to use this diary to relive everything that happened at the convention, but I do want to share my experience with fellow netroots activists.

I believe this was the first convention in our state party's history to be liveblogged, and not only that, but also "livepictured" and "livevideoed".

Over a total of two days, I wrote 17 posts detailing happenings at the convention. I actually posted more than that because I updated several of my posts. So I actually "posted" close to thirty times.

The average amount of time most delegates spent at the convention (excluding when we all retired to our hotel rooms to sleep) was roughly 26 hours. If you divide that by the number of times I posted, that's about a post every single hour - which is pretty amazing.

(Continued on the flip)

As Kossacks, we know all about the "Netroots Revolution".

You're participating in it right now, by logging on to Daily Kos and reading this diary.

Over the last few years, more and more progressives have discovered the power and the benefits of organizing online. More progressives are launching blogs or websites and taking advantage of technology.  

While the national blogosphere will certainly continue to grow, the great untapped potential of this medium actually exists on a local level.

In our corner of the country, we've been hard at work over the last sixteen months trying to harness that potential. We've helped unite and strengthen the local blogosphere to a point where it has managed to accomplish some amazing things.

We launched Pacific Northwest Portal back in January 2005 with the hope of taking online organizing to new heights.

The day we unveiled the website to the world, I had high hopes, but didn't really know what to expect. We'd spent weeks putting the site together but I wasn't sure whether people were even going to like it or find it useful.

I needn't have worried.

365 days later, Pacific Northwest Portal is still online and growing in popularity. From its first day in existence until now, web traffic has been steady and consistent at a surprisingly high level. During its first year of operation the Portal has been significantly strengthened through a series of constant upgrades.

For me, though, there's something even more important to celebrate today, beyond the existence of the site. It's the community that has been empowered by Pacific Northwest Portal.

We have only barely begun to counter the Right's dominance of the airwaves. Air America, which is not even two years old yet, has had a promising start, but still we have a long ways to go.

The Northwest Progressive Institute (NPI) is working to help build an infrastructure that will enable the progressive movement to take the country back from the Right. We believe the Internet is the medium that will allow us to do this.

We also believe that we need to offer more than text and graphics.

That's why, last week, we launched the first in what will become a regular series of podcasts.

Podcasting is basically using RSS to distribute audio content over the Internet, which can be listened to on both computers and mobile devices.

Today, NPI is pleased to announce that our podcasts won't just be distributed over the Internet - they'll also be aired on the radio.

The awards are named for David Neiwert, a freelance journalist and the founder of one of the Northwest's most respected blogs, Orcinus, which has been on the Web since the beginning of 2003 and is currently syndicated on Pacific NW Portal. Besides writing Orcinus, Mr. Neiwert has reported for MSNBC.com and has also penned several oustanding books, including Strawberry Days, Death on the Fourth of July, and In God's Country.

NPI thanks Mr. Neiwert for graciously agreeing to allow us to name this awards tradition in his honor, and we offer our congratulations and heartfelt thanks to the winners of this year's awards. Award recipients may display the banner to the right on their blog sidebars.

The awards begin after the jump.

She'd been looking for more information on the local Republican Party's attempt to disenfranchise thousands of voters by challenging their registrations (more about that here).

She was vaguely aware of the existence of an online progressive community, but had no idea we had a such a strong regional, or local, blogging scene.

She was amazed in particular at how many blogs that we have listed (and linked!) in our Regional Blogs directory, and wanted to know: "How on earth did you find all of these different blogs?"

As I contemplated my answer to her question, I thought I might as well offer my explanation about how we've been connecting the dots in the progressive blogosphere to the whole Daily Kos community.

Read on to learn more....

Voters in Washington State defeated Initiative 912, a ballot measure which would have repealed a recent gas tax increase passed by the Legislature and signed by Governor Gregoire. The tax funds transportation projects throughout the state.

The drive to repeal it was led by local two right wing talk radio hosts, along with a cadre of organized anti-tax zealots.

I've been asked by several people to explain how it was possible that Initiative 912 was defeated. We're still incredulous, but we have a pretty good idea of why we succeeded.

We didn't just do well on this one ballot measure, either. We had a great election overall.

I won't go into too many details here, but follow the link above to Pacific Northwest Portal to see coverage and analysis for all the ballot measures and the major races for elected office.

Join me below the fold as I recount the saga of I-912. It's a long story, but it's a good one.

They never quit, do they?

King County is the latest setting for the newest series of Republican dirty tricks.

Using the 2004 gubernatorial election saga as an excuse, the Republicans have filed challenges to nearly 2,000 voter registrations within King County - Washington State's most populous county, and a Democratic stronghold.

Just days before this Tuesday's general election, thousands of voters have received letters in the mail informing them that their right to vote is being challenged by the Republican Party of King County. The story broke a few days ago and has been since covered extensively by the local media (more links below the jump).

It's an outrageous attempt to harass and intimidate King County voters from going to the polls or mailing in their absentee ballots. The Republicans are filing these challenges now in the hopes of influencing this year's race for King County Executive, which pits progressive Democrat Ron Sims (the incumbent) against Republican challenger David Irons.

(more below the fold)

Just over a week ago, a group of us, mostly bloggers, decided to take a big step beyond just fighting the initiative from our computer screens.

We decided to go out to one of Washington State's most unsafe structures - the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle, an aging, elevated expressway which was damaged in the 2001 Nisqually quake that struck the Seattle area.

So that morning we met near one of the onramps to the viaduct. We took some of our "Safety First - NO on 912" yard signs (pictured to the left) mounted them on poles, and put up a 3x5 sign which read:

WARNING!
ENTERING I-912 EARTHQUAKE DISASTER AREA
TO FIX THIS ROADWAY
VOTE NO 912

With an average of 810,234 visits and 937,537 pageviews every day now (according to SiteMeter) Daily Kos has undoubtedly become the anchorweight for the national progressive blogosphere. It is a thriving community, home to thousands upon thousands of caring, patriotic Americans.

This site has served its national audience well. But there is one huge area of the blogopshere that Kos does not serve very well - and that is politics at a local level.

Just nine months ago, a team of people, including myself, realized that we in the Pacific Northwest needed some kind of progressive counterbalance to local conservative megasites like Sound Politics (great name, bad logic).

We set out a vision and a blueprint to create an entirely new website to serve the regional progressive community. After just two or three weeks of development, we launched Pacific Northwest Portal, and announced its debut here, not knowing what to expect.

Yesterday, I posted a diary entitled, "Local Politics Matter: Netroots Prepares for Initiative Fight" which subsequently made it onto the Daily Kos Recommended List for a few hours.

The diary concerned our efforts to create a stronger, more empowered progressive community through Pacific Northwest Portal, a website which we created to tie the region together and provide reality based news and viewpoints.

But I'm also reminded that a new power has emerged in America - the power of the netroots. The power of the Daily Kos community and the larger community as a whole. What we can achieve by working together.