The “Progressive” blogosphere is all a flutter about the fact that ThinkProgress founder and former Hillary Clinton research director Judd Legum is running for the House of Delegates in Maryland, targeting conservative Republican incumbent Delegate Ron George. This of course has the folks at Kos, MyDD, HuffPo and other places tripping all of themselves proclaiming Legum as the next big thing and the “first national blogger to run for office” (never mind the fact that RedState’s own Erick Erickson ran for and was elected to the Macon City Council two years ago).

Like most activists on the fringe left, Judd Legum is a big believer in campaign finance reform and public financing of campaigns. This of course would require a whole new bureaucracy and funding source just to fund campaings out of the public trough here in Maryland. It would also require campaigns to follow to a T a whole slew of new filing and campaign finance requirements in order to comply with the public funding plan the Legum and his ilk want to see.

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Following up with yesterday’s post about Maryland, labor, and the O’Malley Administration comes more complaints from the left regarding the O’Malley’s Administrations dealings with the labor movement. Adam Pagnucco at Maryland Politics Watch has a long post discussing the topic. Be sure to read the entire thing, but here’s a sample of the grievances big labor has with O’Malley and the Democrats:

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Let’s start with a recent kerfluffle in Maryland’s liberal blogosphere, which FSP’s been all over. Basically, the left was in a tiff because the state had an “anti-union website” that highlighted that Maryland has a “very favorable labor climate” and goes into detail about why Maryland is (allegedly) a good state for labor relations for businesses in Maryland. The left got in a lather, emails got sent, the Secretary of DBED responded and the O’Malley Administration folded like an accordion basically in less than one business day.

Now, I’m not going to really give the Administration or FSP a hard time about that. The Administration responded to its base, they had something which was contrary to administration policy, and they fixed it. And it also shows the influence that bloggers can have on government and policy. But that’s not the story here.

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