As a blogger, respect and appreciation that come easily. So, it’s always nice to get a little of both. With the announcement of the annual Best of the Bay Awards in the SF Bay Guardian today, Calitics gets a little of both.  (And hey, we’ll even forgive the minor error of our locations. I’m in SF, and Robert is in Monterey, but we both think the East Bay is a great place nonetheless.)

BEST POLITICAL SHIT-SIFTERS

Political websites are full of crap. Cranks, crooks, straight up sensationalism … We love it all, of course. But when we want to know what’s really going on in the down and dirty, smoke-filled backrooms of California politics, we click our way to progressive open source news site Calitics.com. East Bay keyboard-clackers Brian Leubitz and Robert Cruikshank stay well abreast of Sacramento’s whiz-bang wool-pulling, and you can get a bead on the biggest stories all around the state from the site’s open threads and links. Yet Calitics offers a lot more than shit-sifting: these folks understand what the news really means. Their analyses and interpretations are far more acute than those of the state’s lumbering daily newspapers. And Cruikshank is one of the few writers of any political slant who actually understands economics. Now, can they please work on getting some visuals up there? Photos, people, photos!

I’ve been clacking on this here keyboard (well, not this specific one, but one just like it) for nearly 5 years.  It’s not for a profit motive, that much I can assure you. Both Robert and I, and all the front pagers that have come and gone, do this out of a commitment to make our state a better place.  We all saw the problem of a lack of attention to that in-between layer of governance, and wanted to do what we could to correct that problem.  Along the way we’ve had an up-front view of a slow motion disaster, a few moments of historical significance, and the day-to-day drama of Sacramento.  

As we said at our panel at Netroots Nation last week, everybody knows that Sacramento is dysfunctional. After all, it was designed to be inoperable.  But California can be better, and one way or another, we’ll break through the downward spiral.  And, you know, hopefully, we’ll be there to chronicle that as well.

And just to give the people what they want, how’s about a photo of Robert and I with Assembly candidate Melissa Fox.

UPDATE by Robert: This is a pretty damn awesome award. (And in fairness to the Bay Guardian, I was an East Bay resident in 1997-2001, so I’ll take the honor!)

The Bay Guardian played a formative role in shaping my own politics when I was a young pup just starting out at UC Berkeley in the late ’90s after spending my first 18 years in the middle of then-conservative Orange County.

One of the reasons I went to Berkeley was to search for a workable left-wing politics. I didn’t really find it in Berkeley itself. But I did find it in the pages of the Bay Guardian, where writers like Tim Redmond and, later, Steven T. Jones laid out a progressive agenda (and they were one of the first to use the term “progressive” to mean “anti-neoliberal politics”) for the city of San Francisco and for the greater Bay Area. Their writing helped me formulate my own social democratic thinking, which I now return to you all in the form of Calitics.

While working on my still-unfinished dissertation on SF politics in the 1960s and 1970s, I had the pleasure to read every issue of the Bay Guardian from their first one in 1966 up to November 1980, and saw that they played a crucial role in pushing SF to the left and helping position the city’s left to survive the crises of the 1980s, including Dianne Feinstein’s terms as mayor.

So this is pretty damn meaningful to me. It’s great when people whose work I respect say we’re doing something of value here at Calitics. So I think I’ll just keep on doing it!