JK has been holding a series of dial-in blog conference calls with Massachusetts bloggers and others of his online supporters who post about JK and about MA-centric issues on some of the larger group blogs such as Daily Kos, Democratic Underground, etc. He's done this sort of thing on a one-off basis in the past, but is planning to make this a regular online event in the johnkerry.com community in the coming months.

Longtime JK supporter Susan Radovsky wrote about the previous conference call in this series on her personal blog in a post she titled "The Grassroots Senator." This time, Bob Neer of Blue Mass Group live-blogged the call; David Eisenthal of The Eisenthal Report wrote a post about it, as did the intrepid videobloggers Kerstin and Faith over at KerryVision.net (who even went to the extra trouble of transcribing it in text form on their site); and the Marry in Massachusetts blog used this week's call as a springboard for a post comparing JK's stands on their key issues to those of his competitors for his Senate seat in 2008.

Karen Corbman, who is now a guest contributor to the johnkerry.com blog in addition to her other online activities, also wrote up her first impressions of this week's blog conference call with JK in a post that she made to Democratic Underground, which we're happy to repost here as well:

I was very lucky to be on a conference call with Senator Kerry with other bloggers. Here's my summary of the issues that he covered. Hopefully, the other DU people on the call will fill in the gaps. He was extremely detailed in his answers and covered a huge amount of subjects.

To start out, Kerry spoke of his re-election race, saying that he was engaged and was taking nothing for granted. He spoke of a signature drive, where he is working to get the needed signatures across the state. He said there were no short cuts to this. He said that there will be a Boston event in Dorchester this Saturday where they will meet, go out to get signatures, then return for food and drinks.

Kerry then spoke about the many many votes they were casting in the Senate today on the budget. He spoke of how they were attempting to give the tax breaks to the middle class that deserved them. He also spoke of the new version of the AIDS bill that provides $50 million. The original bill was written by Kerry and Frist in 2002 -- and Kerry sounded very proud of it.

The first question was on re-election, where his opponent, O'Reilly has positioned himself as the more leftist, more progressive alternative. Kerry said that he won't change his positions and will keep working hard at his job. He then listed some of the issues that he has been working on:

He spoke of leading the fight to end the war in Iraq, speaking of bringing Kerry/Feingold to the floor in summer 2006 -- getting 13 votes then for what is now the majority opinion in the Senate, due to his efforts to gain support, that we need a deadline for leaving in a responsible way. He talked about how he is considered the leader in the Senate on global climate change by all the environmental groups. He ended by saying he will let the record speak when it comes to his career in the Senate.

The next question was on whether there was a geographic area in MA he was concerned or worried about for the election. He said he will work everywhere in the state and does so even when it is not an election year. Asked about the major challenges to MA, he spoke of the economy where they needed to create more jobs and worked to make them pay better. He spoke of how the cost of housing, energy, tuition, etc. have gone up and wages haven't -- squeezing many people.

He spoke of having fought for the White House to include something to deal with house foreclosures and spoke of how his amendment was included in the Senate Finance committee's alternative that the Republicans defeated. He did say the amendment would be added to another bill -- and that now, a month and a half later the White House was in favor of it. He was definitely ahead of the curve here.

There were several questions on science and technology funding. He mentioned that he chaired the Science and technology subcommittee of the Commerce committee, which just had hearings the involved the Bush science adviser and the heads of relevant organizations. The hearings dealt with the fact that Bush cut money to science in this budget. There are amendments, among those voted today, to put money back -- from this committee and from Kerry's small business committee.

He also spoke of amendments for a study to look at ocean acidification and to provide communities with aggregate science information on adapting to global warming. He also spoke of the "America Competes Act" that he was a co-sponsor of, that was a commitment for education in science, technology, engineering and math.

He sounded very positive on Cape Wind, referring to a very positive environmental report and saying if the remaining reports continue to be positive, he hopes to be very happily in favor of it. He said he is a strong advocate of alternative energy, but also strongly in favor of process.

The last thing he talked about was how a Democratic president -- either HRC or Barack Obama -- would make so much difference in what could be done, calling the Bush administration unfriendly.

One last note -- at one point he left the call for one of the votes. When he returned he said that he had restored sanity to the nation. (I suspect that will need to wait until January 2009 in reality, though.)