U.S. Sen. Mark Udall is working to end the 16-year-old “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy signed into law by Pres. Clinton that requires gay and lesbian servicemen and women to keep their sexuality a secret. Udall sent a letter to Pres. Obama yesterday urging him to repeal the law and “replace it with a policy of nondiscrimination.” Udall posted his letter as a blog at Huffington Post on the same day former Colorado U.S. Sen. Gary hart posted a HuffPo blog analyzing chronic U.S. strategic policy failings.

“With our nation involved in two major wars, we need all qualified men and women – many with mission-critical skills – to be able to serve,” wrote Udall. He included the text of his letter.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Letter to President Obama

Udall’s blog fell somewhere near the middle of the page.

Former Sen. Hart, however, got top billing for a piece he wrote on the ways the country’s domestic and foreign policy are shaped by U.S. cultural resistance to long-term planning.

the United States has generally resisted strategic approaches to domestic matters or grand strategies for its role in the world. Strategy suggests planning, and planning is something centralized governments do.

The price paid for go-it-alone individualism is dependence on reaction. We are stalwart, dedicated, and resolute in reaction to adversity, especially attacks by foreign forces. We are miserable at anticipation and preparation. The latter requires centralized authority, something Americans instinctively resist.

Last month, the senator-turned author and university department chair began blogging his experience as an international observer for the Afghanistan elections at the University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs website mattersofprinciple.com. As a blogger, Hart has proven to be a craggy skeptical optimist, which makes for good reading.

We [Americans] prefer to wait until something bad happens — Pearl Harbor, economic depression, or 9/11 — and then we unite in response. That is all well and good, except a heavy price in blood and treasure is almost always paid.

There is the alternative of preparing for the future. For example, it was possible to see a new economic wave called information technology by the early and mid-1970s. We could have trained young people and retrained industrial workers for the new jobs this wave would create. But we did not. Some smart people predicted the Wall Street collapse in 2008. Regulatory steps to prevent it were not taken. And, of course, sufficient evidence of a terrorist attack, including evidence involving airplanes and tall buildings, existed in the early 21st century. No serious steps were taken to prevent it.

We had a strategy throughout the second half of the 20th century. It was called “containment of communism.” It required massive coordination of defense, foreign, and even economic policies. And, arguably, it worked, though at a total price some think was excessive. Thereafter, we replaced that strategy with one called “war on terrorism.” As a central organizing principle for the nation, that has worked less well.

We might consider a new grand strategy for the 21st century…

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“I’ve been interested in journalism for a while,” Axelrod told Kurtz. “I heard through my father that they were expanding, so I applied for it.”

The HuffPo’s new Denver site officially launches in September but already has a page up, and Axelrod has filed a few posts linking to local stories, including one about a bear shot inside a Boulder home and another about a body found in Sloan’s Lake during this past weekend’s Dragon Boat festivities.

HuffPo has already opened local sites in New York City and Chicago and plans to add another in Los Angeles after the Denver edition. (Watch an interview with HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington about her plans to open as many as a dozen local sites, conducted last month by Boomtown blogger Kara Swisher.)

Axelrod’s father was a hotshot political reporter at the Chicago Tribune before turning to political consulting, Kurtz notes. The family background “piqued my interest a bit,” young Axelrod told Kurtz. “I’ve always been a follower and admirer of news reporting.”

Gawker points out that Axelrod, who graduated in May from Colorado College after working on the college newspaper, isn’t the first scion of a famous parent (or “well-connected VIP spawn,” in Gawker talk) to land a job at HuffPo.

Nicholas Graham, a member of the family that owns Kurtz’s publication, was hired as an associate news editor for the Web site and now works as associate video editor, according to HuffPo’s masthead. And former New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer’s daughter, Elyssa, and actor Tom Hanks’ daughter, Liz, have had highly publicized jobs at HuffPo. (Full disclosure: I edited the newspaper at Colorado College and have some friends in common with Axelrod, and Colorado Independent editor John Tomasic worked at HuffPo last year.)

Mediaite parses the connections and potential repercussions of the Axelrod hire:

No doubt there will be chatter about HuffPo’s relationship with the White House, which Kurtz characterized as “largely supportive of President Obama,” as well as HuffPo’s status as the blog of the “fashionable left” (Michael Kinsley to Politico). That’s a given. (Let’s face it: This hire won’t make HuffPo less connected in D.C.) However, as the editor of the Denver local site, the younger Axelrod will be far more occupied with stories about green living, micro-brewed beer and funnily-named Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper than insidery Beltway shenanigans. Which, come to think of it, actually sounds like a pretty good prescription for the rest of us.

Closer to home, Westword writer Joe Tone welcomes the newsy colleague to town but also sounds miffed HuffPo stiffed the local alt-weekly for an interview while granting one to the WaPo’s Kurtz. Tone puts Axelrod’s arrival in the context of a town that only recently lost a major daily newspaper:

It’s not a shock, obviously; HuffPo would probably let Sasha and Malia co-write a fantasy football column if they asked. But still: Especially in the wake of the Rocky’s death, there’s a bit of a dearth of astute local news coverage in town, and some liberal readers no doubt have visions of HuffPo providing a new stop on their daily Internet-news train. That it will be manned by a 22-year-old college grad with no professional journalism experience who’s barely (if ever) lived in Denver — and who happens to be the seed of the President’s top offensive coordinator — is certainly an interesting play.

UPDATE: While the Denver edition of the Huffington Post was briefly visible during the day Wednesday — including top-of-the-page links to this story and this story from The Colorado Independent — by evening the site had been redirected to display the main HuffPo front page. The local edition is scheduled to debut in September.

Been polled? Colorado Confidential and Huffington Post’s OffTheBus want to know about it.
Now, you can finally exact revenge on long-winded pollsters who call at dinnertime and disingenuous push-polls that mangle your responses to fit their secret clients’ predetermined results.

Colorado Confidential’s parent organization, the Center for Independent Media, has teamed up with a bipartisan array of blogs, traditional media and online news networks for a first-ever national survey of political polls.

“Our aim is simple: to get a better understanding of how polling is being used across the country, said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post. We want to get to the bottom of how pollsters conduct their surveys, how they gather and build their stats, how they target who they contact, and, ultimately, how they reach their conclusions – conclusions that often fuel the very races they are supposed to be analyzing.”

Led by OffTheBus — a new media consortium of writers, photographers, video producers, campaign monitors, developers, researchers and fact-checkers — the Polling Project takes aim at the mysterious smoke-filled rooms of political polling.

Amanda Michel, project director of OffTheBus, remarked that it “is also a great example of what can happen when media organizations collaborate in working directly with the public.”

We couldn’t agree more.

HuffPost’s OffTheBus Polling Project is a crowd-sourced newsgathering effort of The Huffington Post and New Assignment.Net that taps the best of citizen journalism covering the 2008 presidential election.

In addition to the Center for Independent Media, sponsors include: BlogHer, Blue Hampshire, Concord Monitor, Instapundit, Mother Jones, My Silver State, The Nation, New West Notes, Open Left, Pajamas Media, Personal Democracy Forum, Politico, Pollster.com, Talking Points Memo, Winds of Change and WNYC.