A San Francisco native, Yuri grew up in a labor family and spent much of his childhood standing on hotel picket lines with his organizer father who worked for the Hotel & Restaurant Employees union, Local 2. He is currently a Legislative Assistant in the office of Congressman Anthony D. Weiner of New York, assisting the Congressman with his work on the Energy and Commerce committee. Yuri also currently serves as the Chair of the Congressional Jewish Staff Association, a bi-partisan cultural and educational group of staff members. Prior to working for Congressman Weiner, Yuri worked in the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and as the Field Director for Congressman Frank Kratovil – one of the most competitive races in the country during the ’08 cycle.

Yuri graduated from CSU Monterey Bay with a degree in Global Studies. During his time at CSUMB he served as the student body President and as an officer with the California State Students Association.

Rebecca Bell-Metereau, a professor of English and Film at Texas State University, is the Democratic nominee for the District 5 seat on the Texas State Board of Education. Prof. Bell-Metereau has a Ph. D. from Indiana University and has received the Faculty Senate Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Alumni Association Teaching Excellence Award, and the Presidential Award for Excellence in Service while at Texas State University. She also taught English and American studies in the Peace Corps and served as a French interpreter for U.S. Air Force relief flights in Chad, one of the ten poorest countries in the world. She was a Fulbright scholar and teacher in Senegal. Prof. Bell-Metereau won her March Democratic primary for the District 5 SBOE seat against four opponents without a runoff. Her Republican opponent in November is incumbent Ken Mercer.

Russ Belville is the Outreach Coordinator for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). NORML is America's oldest non-profit organization fighting for an end to adult marijuana prohibition and is based in Washington DC.

Russ lives in Portland, Oregon, working with NORML by internet. As Outreach Coordinator, he writes The NORML Stash Blog, hosted at stash.norml.org, a daily news and commentary blog for all topics concerning cannabis.

Russ also hosts NORML’s daily live internet podcast, NORML SHOW LIVE. As his radio persona, “Radical” Russ, he streams a one hour show every weekday at 4pm Eastern at live.norml.org. The show features the day’s cannabis-related headlines, music from independent artists, and informative “Radical Rants” about the history, science, and politics of cannabis. Every show also features an interview with important figures in marijuana law reform, including figures as disparate as Rep. Barney Frank, comedian Doug Benson, medical marijuana pioneer Dr. Lester Grinspoon, and actor/musician Tommy Chong.

Russ began his work in marijuana law reform by volunteering with Oregon NORML back in 2005. Within three months he was producing and hosting their cable access TV program. By 2007 he was elected Associate Director. In 2008 NORML contracted with Russ to record their daily podcast, NORML Daily Audio Stash. In 2009, NORML hired him on full time to continue the podcast and to take on Outreach Coordinator duties.

Russ also has experience in the progressive blogosphere. In 2003 he began blogging at his own site, radicalruss.com, and in 2006 was invited to be a front page blogger at the influential LGBT blog, Pam’s House Blend. In 2007, Russ won a nationwide talk radio contest, The Search for the Next Great Progressive Talk Radio Star, hosted by Washington’s Bill Press (The Bill Press Show) and judged by talk radio pros including MSNBC’s Ed Schultz, which led to a two-year show on XM Satellite Radio, The Russ Belville Show. In 2008 Russ was a credentialed blogger for Pam’s House Blend at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Russ also contributes currently to Daily Kos and The Huffington Post.

Sara Benincasa has been called a lot of things. Some of the nicer ones are "utterly hilarious" (NYTimes.com), "freaking hilarious" (Newsweek.com) and "delightfully loopy" (ChicagoTribune.com). She's a Webby Award-winning comedian, blogger, and radio host who recently began spewing propaganda daily at Wonkette.com and Comedy Central's IndecisionForever.com. She's writing a book for William Morrow/HarperCollins about panic attacks, agoraphobia, and her many other liberal weaknesses. Check out SaraBenincasa.com for more info.

Rich Benjamin is author of Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America, winner of a 2009 Editor's Choice Award by Booklist and the American Library Association.

As a journalist-scholar, Benjamin tackles issues surrounding the nation’s middle class, demographic change, democracy, immigration, economic inequality, and race. Benjamin’s work appears regularly in the media (MSNBC, CSPAN, Fox, NPR, USA Today, The New Yorker, Salon, Alternet, and Huffington Post).

Currently, Benjamin is Senior Fellow at Demos, a non-partisan national think tank with offices nationwide.

Max Bergmann is a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Policy Analyst for American Progress. He works on nuclear nonproliferation, military affairs, and other related U.S. foreign policy issues.

Bergmann was formerly the deputy policy director at the National Security Network. Prior to joining NSN, Bergmann was a Research Associate for National Security at the Center for American Progress from 2004 to 2007. Bergmann authored numerous reports on military affairs and has been published by the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The New Republic, The American Prospect, The Washington Times, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, World Politics Review Journal, and Issues in Science and Technology.

Bergmann received his master’s degree from the London School of Economics in comparative politics with a concentration on ethnic conflict regulation and the European Union. Max is from Gainesville, FL and received his B.A. from Bates College.

Ben is the Chief Disruption Officer and Co-Founder at SeeClickFix.com - a platform for citizens and their governments to connect around geo-specific issues that need improving in the public space. SeeClickFix is responsible for many innovations in the civic web space including geo-dyanmic smartphone reporting applications, watch areas that send alerts by geo boundaries and social voting on civic problems.
Ben is an avid New Haven lover, makes t-shirts for things he loves/supports and plants trees with his neighborhood association in his free time. He can be found doing absolutely nothing at a Farmer's Market he helped found on Saturdays in New Haven.

Michael Bérubé is the Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University, where he holds appointments in the Department of English and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. He is the author of seven books, most recently The Left at War, published in 2009 by NYU Press. Prof. Bérubé has also written for a wide variety of academic journals such as American Quarterly, the Yale Journal of Criticism, and Modern Fiction Studies, as well as more popular venues such as Harper's, the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and the Nation. His book Life As We Know It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 1996 and was chosen as one of the best books of the year (on a list of seven) by National Public Radio.

Deepak Bhargava is Executive Director of the Center for Community Change, a national nonprofit organization whose mission is to develop the power and capacity of low-income people, especially low-income people of color, to change the policies and institutions that affect their lives.

During his tenure as Executive Director, Mr. Bhargava has sharpened the Center's focus on grassroots community organizing as the central strategy for social justice and on public policy change as the key lever to improve poor people's lives. He conceived and led the Center's work on immigration reform, which has resulted in the creation of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM), a leading grassroots network pressing for changes in the country's immigration laws. He has spearheaded the creation of innovative new projects like Generation Change, a program that recruits, trains and places the next generation of community organizers, and the Community Voting Project, which brings large numbers of low-income voters into the electoral process.

Mr. Bhargava has provided intellectual leadership on a variety of issues including the future of the progressive movement in the United States, poverty, racial justice, immigration reform, community organizing, and economic justice. He has written on these issues for a range of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, and The American Prospect. His groundbreaking article co-authored with Jean Hardisty, "Wrong About the Right," influenced how many progressives think about the strategies necessary to achieve lasting social change.

Prior to his appointment as Executive Director of the Center in 2002, Mr. Bhargava served as the Center's Director of Public Policy. He also directed the National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support, a coalition of grassroots groups established in 2000 to give low-income people a voice in the reauthorization of the federal welfare law and other areas critical to poor people.

Mr. Bhargava currently serves on the boards of the Discount Foundation, the League of Education Voters, The Nation editorial board, the National Advisory Board for the Open Society Institute, and Democracia Ahora.

Adam Bink blogs and organizes e-action campaigns at the progressive political blog OpenLeft.com. At OpenLeft, Adam principally writes about progressive and LGBT movement strategy and infrastructure. He provided on-the-ground coverage from the No On 1/Protect Maine Equality campaign to protect the state's marriage equality law, and wrote extensively about movement strategy questions around the National Equality March. He also co-organized the OpenLeft/Freedom to Marry Blog 4 Equality contest to send marriage equality organizers to Netroots Nation. Since 2007, Adam has managed OpenLeft's advertising and collaborates on design, technical work and action alerts.

Adam is also the Online Strategy Manager for Progressive Strategies LLC. He specializes in online communications and social networking strategies including new media outreach and using internet tools for creative action. While at Progressive Strategies, Adam coordinated the research, editing, fact-checking, and publishing process for The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be by Mike Lux. He also planned and executed the 60-event, 29-city national book tour and traveled extensively to promote the book with Mike.

Prior to joining Progressive Strategies and OpenLeft, Adam produced reports on women elected to local governments and coordinated event logistics while working at the Susan B. Anthony Center for Women's Leadership at the University of Rochester. Adam also interned with the HELP committee staff of Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) and at campaign finance and public affairs firms.

Adam holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Rochester and an M.A. in Political Management from the George Washington University. He hails from Buffalo, N.Y. and, yes, actually enjoys the record-setting snowfalls featured on cable news. In his free time, he enjoys cooking, playing ultimate frisbee around town, and relaxing at quirky lefty independent coffee shops. He can be reached at adambink at gmail dot com.

Duncan Black is known as "Atrios" on his blog, Eschaton.

Julie Blitzer developed her passion for voter outreach and grassroots politics when she volunteered with Rock the Vote and Music for America at concerts around New York City in high school. Soon after, in 2004, Julie began working in New York politics. She has experience in local, state and congressional offices, including the Manhattan district office of Rep. Jerrold Nadler (NY-08). Julie worked on the technology team for Mark Green for Attorney General in 2006, where she managed one of the first campaign video blogs, MG-TV, coordinated e-mail messaging and updated the campaign’s website.

Julie joined Advomatic in June 2008. She specializes in user experience design, online communications strategy and social media. As part of the Advoteam, Julie helps clients translate their ideas into complex web applications and communities designed to achieve strategic goals, whether they be winning elections, passing a key bill or promoting a non-profit's success.

Julie is the Director of the New York City Chapter of the New Leaders Council and was previously Institute Co-Chair and a 2009 Fellow. She was the Social Media Strategist for the YDA 2009 Local Chapter of the Year Manhattan Young Democrats. At MYD, she managed online outreach and social media for New Yorkers for Marriage Equality. Julie has a B.A. in Government from Claremont McKenna College, where she wrote her thesis on the relationship between technology and political campaigns.

Julie has been quoted by Mashable, The Huffington Post, DailyKos, Care2's FrogLoop, Future Majority and appeared on CNN.com's Blogger Bunch. Past speaking appearances include SXSW Interactive, IPDI's Politics Online, YDA's Biannual Convention and Organizing 2.0.

Matt was born and raised in rural Iowa and first got involved in politics at the University of Iowa. In 2001 he managed his first campaign in an attempt to elect a UI student to the Iowa City Council. Not long after he was elected Vice-President of the student body where he fought against radical tuition hikes, corrupt apartment management companies and police harassment on campus.

After graduation Matt moved to Madison, WI and spent the 2004 election cycle fundraising for the DNC and doing GOTV for MoveOn.org. In 2006 he was selected to join Russ Feingold’s Patriot Corps program and was deployed to Montana where he did Field Organizing for Senator Jon Tester.

For the last four years Matt has managed a national training program for Democratic activists and candidates at Democracy for America. Since joining DFA he has organized over 72 campaign trainings in 34 states, training over 5,000 people to become better activists, campaign staff or candidates.

Andy works with the Poker Players Alliance in their grass-roots effort to protect the freedoms of poker players both on-line and live. Their efforts have implications for Internet freedom far beyond poker.

Although Andy holds two degrees from MIT and a JD from Harvard Law School, his real job is poker, with over $4,300,000 in tournament winnings.

Jen has spent almost fifteen years in the political, non-profit, and media sectors. Prior to joining EMILY's List, Jen spent four years at Teach For America, leading a team that created a culture of political action and civic engagement among Teach For America's more than 30,000 corps members and alumni, inspiring and preparing them to run and serve in elected office and take on leadership roles in policy and advocacy throughout the country. Teach For America is the national corps of outstanding recent college graduates who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools and become leaders in the effort to expand educational opportunity. Jen's team inspired corps members and alumni in more than 35 regions -- from rural towns in the Mississippi Delta to cities like NYC and Los Angeles and everywhere in between - to see politics as a critical lever for ending educational inequity, and brought a new group of committed young leaders, armed with their experience in classrooms, into politics. Jen's team grew the number of alumni in elected office from 6 to 41, more that quadrupled the percentage of alumni who plan to run for office, built a national program customized in each of 35 regions, trained more than 200 alumni, and supervised the launching of Teach For America's related 501c4 organization, Leadership for Educational Equity, which to date counts one-third of the alumni base as members.

Jen served as a spokesperson for the NY State Democratic Committee and held leadership roles on numerous campaigns, including Newark, NJ Mayor Cory Booker's nationally recognized 2002 campaign and former US Secretary of Labor Bob Reich's Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign; prior to joining Teach For America, she supervised communications, press, policy, research, and advance for Fernando Ferrer's NYC Mayoral campaign. Bluestein has served in strategic roles for non-profits including The National Council for Research on Women and the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, consulting on national outreach, communications, and advocacy strategies.

Janeé Bolden is Senior Editor at popular urban culture website Bossip.com. Her work has also appeared on VIBE.com, SOHH.com and in The Source and XXL Magazine. Janeé holds a B.A. in English and Africana Studies and an MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction from NYU. She currently lives in Atlanta, GA where she is working on her first novel.

Robert L. Borosage is the co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future. Previously, Borosage founded and directed the Campaign for New Priorities, a nonprofit organization calling for post-Cold War reinvestment in America. He is the author of The Next Agenda: Blueprint for a New Progressive Movement. Borosage’s work has appeared in a number of mainstream and progressive publications, and he is a frequent television and radio commentator. In 1988, he was senior issues advisor to the presidential campaign of Rev. Jesse Jackson. He has also served as an issues advisor to many progressive political campaigns, including those of Senators Carol Moseley Braun, Barbara Boxer, and Paul Wellstone.

Mary Bottari, Center for Media and Democracy and BanksterUSA, is an experienced policy wonk and communications professional. When “too-big-to-fail" financial service institutions collapsed the global economy, like most Americans, Mary was steamed. When financial reform legislation started winding its way through Congress, Wall Street wizardry put too many of the policy debates out of reach of average Americans. Mary quit her job and started a project at CMD, where she has worked hard to demystify complex issues and give average Americans a role in shaping the policy solutions being debated in Congress.

To engage the netroots, she launched the BanksterUSA.org site where folks urged the FBI to “Book the Crooks” and Congress to “Repo the Dough” in the form of a financial transaction tax. At Bankster she gained a following for making complex banking issues simple and fun and for poking fun at the big banks and government officials for their weak reform proposals and outrageous efforts to spin the financial crisis. When the big banks tried to tidy up their images with ridiculous PR campaigns she coined the term “greedwashing.” She blogs for multiple sites including Campaign for America’s Future, Huffington Post, and the Nation Magazine.

Her project publishes the only monthly tally of the Total Wall Street Bailout Cost ($4.7 trillion with $2 trillion outstanding) in the Sourcewatch wikipedia, CMD’s flagship publication with over 6 million visitors a year. Wall Street has the Dow Jones ticker so Mary created the Finanical Crisis Tracker, which gives you a snapshot of the real economy including monthly unemployment, housing foreclosure and bailout numbers. This work has been used by CNN, Bill Moyers Journal, MSNBC, and is featured in this month’s Dollars and Sense Magazine.

Prior to coming to CMD, Mary worked for ten years as senior analyst in Public Citizen’s Global Trade Division publishing many studies on financial services, health care policy, toxics regulation, food safety and the environment. She worked in politics for many years, most recently as press Secretary to U.S. Senator Russ Feingold. She lives in Madison, WI with her husband John Nichols and daughter Whitman.

Chris Bowers co-founded Open Left in July of 2007. He was a full-time editor at MyDD from May 2004 until June 2007, and has been the Treasurer of BlogPac since March of 2006.

He has worked as a consultant for MoveOn, Media Matters, SEIU, Progressive Strategies, and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. The latter allowed him to work on new media for Joe Sestak for Senate. Chris was also recently a fellow at the New Organizing Institute, which allowed him to work with Americans for Financial Reform.

Chris is 36, and recently moved to Washington, D.C. with his wife Natasha Chart.