Hugh makes a great point. Filling your local offices with acceptable people is easier than state or national positions. I deal with county commisioners quite a bit and replacing just one of them could seriously affect our community.
Also, supporting a local candidate financially or through one’s own efforts can result in a grateful state-level official years later.
Moving this to Great Debates.
Remember, if you die, La Resistance lives on! 
Choose your next battle carefully. What are Progressives really up against? Christian/Evangelical Fundementalism? No. They have a place in this country just as much as we Progressive/Liberals do. What we are fighting is ignorance of our agenda bred of deliberate misinformation via the popular mass-media. Changing the media-bias is where the battle should be joined. The media is large, entrenched, and well armored. But there is an Achilles heel. It is still relies on corporate advertisement dollars, and that is where we need to take the battle. Almost 56 million of us voted for Kerry. It is safe to assume more than half of these people have strong Progressive/Liberal leanings. That is over 28 million people that can be organized into a strong economic bloc. With the same savvy and energy of the Kerry campaign, we should pressure the corporations that advertise during the highly-rated and deliberately skewed FOX news and CNN programs to pull their dollars or face product boycotts. At first, these spots will be immediately filled by other corporate ads, but we can keep the pressure on by adding them to a regularly maintained list. Coordination and perseverance will eventually begin to affect the bottom lines of the networks. They will have to eventually lower the cost of commercial spots so that corporations can advertise and still absorb the loss of our dollars, or they will need to begin to “clean-up their act” so that we will stop targeting their advertisers. There are a lot more specifics and logistics that need to be worked out, but as an answer to your question,
“Who gets that portion of my hard-earned middle-class dollars that I’ve earmarked for advocacy?”
I think organizing along these lines would be the way to go.
Thoughts.
P.S. - My apologies for the unintended hijack.
You could try some New Age meditation, chant “Ohm” a lot.
[sub]get it?[/sub]
A few organizations that I like:
Civil liberties: The afformentioned ACLU. And, in answer to a follow-up question, they operate on both national and local levels.
Environmental issues: As a scientist, my favorite organization is Union of Concerned Scientists, which does a great job in injecting good science into environmental issues and also some global security issues (like missile defense). I also contribute to NRDC, the Sierra Club, and League of Conservation Voters (LCV). Note that the latter two groups are not tax-deductible organizations and thus they can and do endorse candidates.
Family planning / abortion: Planned Parenthood. I know there are other organizations like NARAL fighting specifically for abortion rights but I like Planned Parenthood best since they have a holistic approach to the issue of family planning that goes well beyond (but still includes) fighting to keep abortion safe and legal.
Inequality: Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) does a great job at looking at the effect of various tax cut proposals, particularly their distributional consequences. Remember when Al Gore said that XX% of Bush’s tax cuts would go to the top 1% (and Bush said that was “fuzzy math” by which he meant that he couldn’t argue against it because it was true), that was on the basis of CTJ’s study. Then there is United for a Fair Economy who does a great job of educating on inequality and has some offshoot projects likes Responsible Wealth (whereby wealthy people like Bill Gates Senior have voiced their opposition to the repeal of the estate tax and other tax code changes to benefit the wealthy).
Media: FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) does a great job of looking at the bias in the newsmedia from a left-wing perspective. They are sort of the left-wing equivalent of the right-wing Media Research Center (MRC) but they apparently operate on a much smaller budget and yet, IMHO, come up with more compelling documentation of bias.
Once you join some of these organizations and give them your e-mail address, you will have no shortage of e-mails coming to you that give you an opportunity to write your elected representatives and other decision-makers on various issues.
Keep up the good fight!
That “Amadou” guy (Amadou Dialou) did not get “pounded” by the cops. He got massacred. The NYPD stopped him because they thought he resembled a suspect they were searching for. He was a recent West African immigrant and didn’t quite understand what was happening. He went to reach for his wallet (presumably to give them his ID) and the cops opened fire. Forty-one shots.
The cops went on trial in Albany (because their lawyers said they couldn’t get a fair trial in NYC) and were acquitted.
Justice for all…
I tried doing all those right things for years. Stopped now. Realised a long time ago the vast majority of people just don’t give a damn about the environment, social problems or even right and wrong as long as they’re getting theirs or the right wing press have pointed their noses at a handy scapegoat.
Leading by example = being a mug.
Nobody gives a damn anyway so why make your own life uncomfortable.
I’m feeling bitter in case you haven’t noticed. 
2004 USA reminds me so much of 1992 UK.
Not to sound too grim here, but tagos is right. Grassroot, local activism is a start, but it does not compete with the “700lb gorilla” delivery system of the right-wing press. Lets face it, they have the ratings which directly translates into hearts and minds. We will meet with limited success trying to undo their damage one small community at a time, when they have full access to a nation-wide delivery system. The infastructure for the mass and rapid distribution of ideas is in place. We need more access to it.
About the last thing we need right now is a “resistance”. The goddam fuck-witted Weather Underground, for instance, did enormous damage to the cause they purported to fight for. I still hate their guts!
The tighty righties will overreach. They always do. Remember John Mitchell? “We’re going to take this country so far to the right you won’t recognize it”. That was before his jail term. Remember Newt Gangrene? About how the woman who drowned her kids was a direct result of a liberal administration?
Hunker down, keep your powder and your sense of humor dry. We ain’t dead, we ain’t leaving, and 3% is a piss poor “mandate”. The pendulum always swings back.
What reason do you have to believe that?
I don’t know elucidator’s reasons, but the weight of history seems like a good enough guide.
Gosh, Brainy, I assumed you knew this stuff! In the process of the dialectic, thesis reacts to antithesis, and invariably produces synthesis, thus rendering the process of history inevitable. Didn’t you get this in your daycare center?
Ah, go to Hegel, elucidator.
“…and Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as shloshed as Hegel…”
Vogons
Well, you might have to ask Tat.
& R:
Cool link! I love this from that site:
One short-term suggestion is looking into http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ (I’m not affiliated with them in any way). They’ve been working to warn about and document voting problems. If we don’t get our voting system problems corrected, we’ll never again have a democratic election.