Good evening, Firedogs!  Tonight I am pleased and proud to announce the TRex Virtual USO Tour, a series of posts profiling and saluting the campaign staffs of progressive candidates across the country.  We've been spending a lot of time getting to know the candidates themselves, but something that I learned from my time in Connecticut last summer is that every campaign is made up of a bunch of amazing personalities and dedicated individuals.  These people are the heroes behind the scenes; the phone-bankers, media-managers, block-walkers, sign-makers, strategists, policy wonks, and net-heads.

I'll be working with the Amazing Howie Klein (my future husband) picking which campaigns to profile.  Howie has done such great work with Blue America and his blog Down With Tyranny.  I'm really looking forward to working with him on this.  We'll be featuring members of the campaign staffs, asking them what music they've been listening to, and finding out where they're from and what they do when they're not saving the country from the Bush junta and its enablers.  We'll have games and contests and giveaways.  It's our way at FDL of saying thank you to the men and women who are helping make a Democratic tsunami in the mid-term elections possible.

I am enclosing a tentative list of the questions I'll be asking each campaign.  Any suggestions for revisions are welcome in the comments section of this post or by emailing me at df530 at bellsouth dot net.

Here are the questions:

1. Approximately how many people are working on your campaign?

2. What is the average age of your staff?

3. Tell us how some of you came to be involved in this election.

4. Do you have a campaign fight song you listen to when you want to get yourselves fired up?

5. What do you guys do in your down time?

6. Do you have a favorite hangout for off hours?

7. Has there been a best moment of the campaign so far for all of you?  A worst moment?

8. Tell us a funny story about something that's happened on the campaign.

9. Who on your campaign would you award yearbook superlatives to, i.e. "Class Clown", "Best Dressed", "Worst Dressed", "Most Likely to Throw a Desk", "Most Efficient", etc?

10. What do you as a group feel like your candidate's biggest strengths are?  What do you feel they can bring to the US Congress that their opponent can't?

That's my preliminary list, taken right off the top of my head.  Yeah, it's a little fluffy, but the point of this series is to have some freaking FUN amid the very serious business of winning the November elections.

It's an exciting time to be a progressive, isn't it?  So, let's have some fun! 

UPDATE!:  Let's have a contest.  All you visual arts folks out there can get in on this one.  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to design the tour t-shirts for TRex's Virtual USO tour.  You will need to include the following elements:

1. A 60ft. theropod.

2. Ned the Fighting Koi.

3. The name of this blog and the tour.

We'll pick ten designs to feature and each of those winners will receive a copy of the new Ray Sings, Basie Swings album.  And, pending the approval of Jane, our grand prize winner will have their t-shirt design added to our Café Press shop.  So, start designing, y'all!!  Time's a wastin'!!  The deadline for entries is midnight on Tuesday, October 11th.  You can submit your entries to my email address and I will forward them to the other judges.