Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Internet’s first Blogger Strike.

PZ Myers, a biologist and proprietor of Pharyngula, a blog on biology on on ScienceBlogs.com, announced in a post yesterday afternoon that he was officially “on strike,” including in his demands to management increased communication, support, transparency, and trust from ScienceBlogs.com management.

Information is the key to unlock a door. Too often political leaders hide behind complexity to justify their activities. They don’t expect their audiences to understand procedural nuances or wonkish details. They thrive on the public’s boredom. This is the space than an FDL can fill. And it’s been great to provide those keys to this community every now and again, so they can unlock doors and challenge power.

Last year, a bunch of you donated money to support the work I do. That money has supported–and continues to support–my work on accountability and rule of law. At a time when some folks in DC wanted me to work for them on completely different issues, for example, your support allowed me to instead spend over six weeks wading through OPR documents to expose key details about our torture regime. Your support allowed me to get research materials and travel to do research. Your support allowed me to continue to focus on topics–like torture and wiretapping–that I wouldn’t have had the time to research otherwise.

Now, I’m asking for your donation of $20, $50–or whatever you can afford–to support our larger FDL effort: our fight for real financial reform, for improvements to the health care bill, to save social security, for a real climate change bill, for some sanity in our Afghan policy. Your support will go to keep the servers running, the editors preparing content, the moderators ensuring the vitality of our ongoing conversation. Your support will go to ensure that our many talented posters will have a place to contribute their work. Your support will help Jane keep this special place running.

Writing on his blog last fall, the NYT’s Paul Krugman remarked, “I trust Joe Romm on Climate.” I agree with Mr. Krugman: when it comes to climate change — whether you are interested in either the science or the politics — Joe Romm’s Climate Progress blog is the single best source of information on the web. He’s blunt, extremely knowledgeable and solutions-oriented, a rare combination of attributes that leave him particularly well-suited to cover the scientific and political context of climate and energy policy.

Mayhill Fowler, formerly with the Huffington Post’s OffTheBus program, has crossed the line from gossipy blogger to citizen journalist covering the war in Afghanistan. She’s advocating for a radical policy like military aggression in Afghanistan and Pakistan in complete ignorance. And she admits it!

Time and again, I get sucked in to doing some panel on “the death of journalism” and I wind up saying the same thing: journalism isn’t dying, it’s just changing. Which winds up pissing everyone off, because the room is usually full of dead tree journalists who are either unemployed or scared about losing their jobs. Which I understand. But their emotional response to the very idea makes it almost impossible to communicate the point that Glenn Greenwald’s post this morning on Afghanistan reporting makes so clearly.

I’ve said many times that it’s impossible to expect progressive members of Congress to hold together if they don’t have the backing of their natural fiscal constituencies — the liberal interest groups and the unions. Without that support, they’re left to raise money from PACS and other corporate sources to sufficiently fund their campaigns. That’s why they take turns championing progressive bills that ultimately fail so they can pretend they do something, and then voting for bad bills that ultimately pass so someone else can be the failed hero. When Tammy Baldwin votes for one PhRMA-friendly bill after another, progressives can say “hey, but she’s so good on LGBT issues!” Which never actually pass either, but the kabuki keeps activists sufficiently docile and donating to large organizations who fundraise off amping up outrage.

But it’s also worthy to note that it’s hard for them to withstand the assault of liberal “pundits” who sneeringly derided their efforts as naive, futile and “purist.” They should be proudly taking credit for their role in delegitimizing progressive opposition to the bill in liberal intellectual circles, much the same role that the same people played during the Iraq war.