The “DREAM Now Series: Letters to Barack Obama” is a social media campaign that launched Monday, July 19, to underscore the urgent need to pass the DREAM Act. The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, S. 729, would help tens of thousands of young people, American in all but paperwork, to earn legal status, provided they graduate from U.S. high schools, have good moral character, and complete either two years of college or military service.  With broader comprehensive immigration reform stuck in partisan gridlock, the time is now for the White House and Congress to step up and pass the DREAM Act!

This post will mark the completion of the first week of the DREAM Now Letters.  This social media campaign has been an immediate success, which is in large part due to the historic actions of DREAMers this week. 

Major bloggers from across the net, which I will link to below, have already cross-posted both Mohammad Abdollahi’s and Yahaira Carrillo’s stories.  The letters even made a brief appearance on memeorandum, a news aggregator that I’m addicted to.

Wasilla Alaska’s foremost quitter and cult compound developer, Sarah Palin, has issued a very predictable, ghost-written, facebook response to the illegal seizure on early Sunday, of a flotilla of vessels attempting to bring humanitarian supplies to the 1.6 million people being illegally besieged in the Gaza Strip. In it, she criticizes the U.S. media for “reporting one side of the story,” something we’ve also been doing a lot of at firedoglake. Sarah’s take is different from ours, though. Allow me to walk us through hers.

Just as the Tea Party itself is a faux populist movement, subsidized behind the scenes by a combination of hidden corporations, represented publicly by discredited figures like Dick Armey, or greedy bastards, exemplified by the organizers of many of their most highly touted events, so the news organizations now covering their first annual convention in Nashville, are combinations of various bizarre business models that pretend to represent some new paradigm.