Viva Maxspeak!

By Kathy G.

Blogging here for the past week has been a blast -- I'm going to miss it. For some reason I got my dates confused and thought I would be doing this for a few more days, so I never did get around to posts I'd planned about mine safety, the economics of unions in theory and practice, and Arthur Miller and his Down syndrome son. (All I will say here as to that latter subject is that I strongly recommend you read the stunning article about it in the current issue of Vanity Fair. It will break your heart, but in a completely unexpected way it's inspiring too, because oddly enough it does have a happy ending of a sort). Oh well . . .

Thanks to all of Ezra's readers and commenters for sparking such great discussions and for keeping me on my toes, and a special heartfelt thanks to Ezra for inviting me to do this. I had no idea this blogging thing could be so much fun (or so scarily addictive)!

Finally, I didn't want to leave without saying how sad I am that Max Sawicky is ending his wonderful blog, Maxspeak. Since its inception, Maxspeak has been one of the three or four indispensable blogs for me. I was considering doing my own follow-up post to Ezra's earlier one about five blogs that make me think, and if I had, Maxspeak would have topped the list. Here's what I've loved about Maxspeak:

1. I've admired the way Max brought economic logic to bear on a host of public policy questions, yet never succumbed to the extremely conservative politics and pinched, distorted moral vision that, alas, plagues so many professional economists.

2. I appreciate Max's politics, which unlike so much of blogosphere I inhabit are not merely liberal but left. That has made for some important and salutary differences. Max has always been much more critical and distrustful of the U.S. foreign policy establishment than most liberal bloggers, and man oh man has time proven him right about that. The very interesting and potentially extremely productive conversation that's occurring in the liberal blogosphere these days about the foreign policy community owes a lot to him, I think.

It's true that Max sometimes likes to piss all over the netroots in general, and Kos in particular, but although I'm a lot more optimistic about the netroots than he is, I always welcomed his skepticism. I agree with him that there's a danger of the netroots becoming too much of a cheerleader for the Democratic Party, and that netroots-ers put too much of an emphasis on winning and tactical sophistication, and not enough on developing a coherent and compelling political vision.

3. I admire Max's prose style. The man says a whole lot using few words. I wish my own writing had that kind of pith and punch.

Max hasn't yet spelled out the details about why he's abandoning the blog, but it sounds as if he's entering a new employment situation that precludes him from blogging. I wish him all the best in his future endeavors, and I hope he'll consider a return to the blogosphere at some future date. Viva Maxspeak!

Does the Internet Need Fixing? Sadly, Yes.

By Deborah Newell Tornello a.k.a. litbrit

How could I have missed this bit of lovely on Tuesday?  Oh yeah, it was the first full-day of school.  No matter--is it any less relevant today?  Sadly, No.

One, Two, Three, Four, What Are We Blogging For?

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

I hope everyone will forgive another round of soul searching on the function of the blogosphere. When we last looked at the state of Presidential campaign blogging three weeks ago, we saw that both partisan and intra-party attacks generated significantly more coverage than any other news events. No speech or public statement by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John Edwards warranted as much attention as the David Geffen-induced spat between Clinton & Obama staffers, which the candidates largely ignored (except for Obama publicly chiding his campaign) or Amanda Marcotte's firing. Nothing any candidate said about Iraq, Iran, economic inequality, or health care mattered more than whether Joe Biden used the words "clean" and "articulate" in a situation where they might be construed as racially insensitive (and very little mention of Biden's civil rights record came up in these posts). And this was during a time when Obama made his first public statement supporting universal health care as a goal for the next presidential term, and Hillary's campaign events frequently featured voters asking her to apologize for voting for the Iraq war, or to say it was a mistake.

 

Today, the story is much the same. Ann Coulter's CPAC outburst against Edwards, followed by Edwards being the first to decline an invitation to Fox's debate, generated far more coverage than, say, his March 15th speech in Manchester—a speech that was a great return to '07 or '03 vintage Edwards, but generate no sizeable amount of coverage (Neil's valiant efforts notwithstanding). The end of the Fox News debate included a lengthy post by Markos himself (!!) which does nothing but declare campaign winners and losers. The only hard news event to generate a sizeable amount of coverage was the Al Gonzales meltdown, which let Clinton put her name in the paper alongside calls for his resignation.

It's possible that crude metric of "number of blog posts mentioning topic X" isn't a very good barometer of what's catching the interest of the blogosphere. After all, while Markos spent a whole post declaring winners and losers on the Fox News debate, he also pointed the 'sphere to articles to Clinton's non-apology on the Iraq war vote. But I am doubtful that that's the case.

From my vantage point, the DC pundit class has two major problems. First, it doesn't accurately reflect the spectrum of political beliefs of the public or even the two major parties (borderline crazies are overrepresented; serious advocates of single-payer health care are underrepresented). Second, the cable news networks and Sunday morning talk show guests too frequently allow what can best be described as gossip (or perhaps "Dimwittery"), usually but not always originating in bits of the Republican partisan machine (e.g. Drudge, the Catholic league, etc.), to hijack the news cycle. The blogosphere has done yeoman's work correcting the first problem, but now seems content to be part of existing political machinery rather than fix the second. That's ... dissapointing, since if the trend holds, it means the blogosphere will not put any competitive pressure on TV news to change its bad habits, leaving the vast majority of Americans who don't read political blogs with mostly the same quality of infotainment as they had before.

So, is this it? Is the blogosphere destined to widen the span of political professionals and quasi-professionals to balance conservative house organs, but fail to provide a new outlet for more hard news and less campaign/partisan fluff? I'd like to think it's possible to do both at the same time; am I being naive? Discuss.

Once More into the Breech

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Matthew Yglesias counters that the health care industry in Pittsbrugh requires lots of low-wage workers, which is true. But in addition, any hospital needs lots of nurses, who make decent middle-class to upper-middle class wages and are certainly not considered blue collar. Meanwhile, someone has to keep the buildings clean at Boeing and Microsoft, though there certainly isn't as much cleaning to do in an office park as there in a hospital. And it's not clear how we should count call center workers, internal tech support, and other tech-sector jobs that pay wages somewhere middle-class and "working class". But we can argue about it, or we can look it up. Returning to the Census employment survey, the percentage of workers describing their job as "service" in Pittsburgh is 16%, and in the Seattle is ... 14%. Perhaps lots of staff workers, billing professionals, and research assistants at Pittsburgh's medical centers count themselves as having "managerial, professional and related occupations" despite not making that much money; perhaps to the huge barista population in Seattle is raising the city's service number. The data seems inconclusive; we could use better information on the income distribution for workers in the health care sector.

The Steelers' real proletariat cred comes from the surrounding areas, which include the coal country of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Southern Ohio, as well as various Rust Belt towns that are outside Pittsburgh's offical metro area (Erie, PA; Youngstown, OH; etc.). If we play this game, however, the Seahawks get to include the Tacoma metro area, whose education profile matches Pittsburgh's quite well.

As for football, problem here is the gratuitous overuse of the term "West Coast Offense", which carries the perception of 6-yard slant routes, quick outs, short-yardage drag routes, and dinky passes to the fullback or tailback [things that the Seahawks don't do, according to the eggheads at Football Outsiders]. This image comes from Holmgren's 1996 Green Bay Packers, who didn't run very often after an injury to Edgar Bennett, as well as other pass-wacky WCOs such as the current vintage Eagles and various recent incarnations of the Rams. And of course there's the original WCO, the 1983 49ers, who played a different brand of football than their competition; they had a noticeably higher completion rate and lower yards-per-completion than other quality teams of their era. But when Holmgren has a feature running back, such as Shaun Alexander today or Dorsey Levens in 1997, he's shown no fear of the running game. The 'Hawks do retain the other primary characteristic of the West Coast Offense, which is the release of all five receivers on passing plays; traditional offenses explicitly leave the tight end and/or running backs as extra blockers in many cases.

Either way, the Emerald City's presence of heart will be proved (or disproved) within the next few hours. Go 'Hawks.

Who 'You Callin' "Frou Frou"? The Fuzzy Math of Matthew Yglesias, Part II

Posted By Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math. See also Part I.

It's time for another round of our guessing game, this time with mystery football teams. Here's a table of various egghead measures of how "tough" a football team plays (setting aside questions of whether or not catching a pass in middle of the field when the Strong Safety is about to pounce requires toughness), with the team's rank within the NFL in parens:

                                               

	Team A	Team B
Rushing Attempts per Game	34.3 (1)	32.4 (7)
Rushing Plays/All Plays	57.2 (1)	50.1 (6)
Passes over 20 yards	44 (T-10)	44 (T-10)
Passes over 40 yards	14 (1)	11 (T-11)
Yards per Completion	12.8 (1)	11.8 (11)
% Receptions Resulting in 1st   down	69.6 (1)	68.0 (3)
Weenie pass percentage	9.6 (27)	9.4 (31)

[In the "weenie pass percentage" category, a lower ranking means the team makes fewer passes of five yards or fewer. In this case, this mean team B makes fewer dink-and-dunk tosses than team A.]

Any guesses?

  Your intuition is right this time. Team A is the Pittsburgh Steelers Health Care Workers, while team B is the Seahawks. The point here wasn't to surprise anyone; it was just to show that while they're not the league leaders in running the football and passing Only When It Matters, the Seahawks are at least top third of the league.

No, the Seahawks do not run as much as the Steelers. But that's because no one runs as much as the Steelers. In the past few years, no one has  ever really come close to running as much as the Steelers. If the Steelers are ahead in the second half, Bill Cowher simply refuses to pass the ball in situations where other teams would put it in the air. If people are going to call the Seahawks a bunch of nancy boys because they run the ball 32 times per game instead of 34 times per game, that's their right, but I think their desires for a run-only offense are highly unrealistic. After all, even the Steelers in the past few years have needed a high-octane passing game in order to advance in the playoffs.

To go along with their top-tier (though not as top tier as the Steelers) defense, the 'Hawks run an extremely effective vanilla offense, with lots of 3-7 yard runs and 9-16 yard passes. This is not an offense that looks like this year's Eagles, Patriots, or thid 1996 Green Bay Packers, all of which would count as "West Coast Offenses" that run slants or quick outs instead of handing the ball to a running back. There's no shame in what Holmgren has put together this year.

Personally I think there's no shame in the 1999 or 2001 Rams offense, but my views on that subject are clearly outside the mainstream, which demands that Real Men play football by having large guys run up the middle for four or five yards as frequently as possible, and win games through Defense and Running The Football. How the pass-wacky Patriots have avoided being called "soft" is beyond me.

Who 'You Callin' "Frou-Frou"? The Fuzzy Math of Matthew Yglesias, Part I

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Matthew Yglesias has thrown down the gauntlet with a David Brooks-esque dismissal of the Seahawks, [UPDATE: Oliver Willis earns himself a reeducation followed by CBS], so I think to defend the honor of my current home city and its football team, I'm obliged to pick it up. I'd like to play a little guessing game. I'm going to describe two American cities and their suburbs, and you try and guess what they are [employment data courtesy of the BLS]:

The metro area of City A employs 10.9% of its workers in manufacturing, 8900 of them in metal production. Its largest employer is a manufacturer of durable goods. 80% of the people who live there are white. 10.3% of its workforce is employed in the "education, health, and social services" sector, 6.3% in "professional services", and 6.7% in "financial activities".

The metro area of City B employs 9.1% of its workers in manufacturing, 14,600 of them in metal production. Its largest employer is a medical center attached to a major state university. 90% of the people who live there are white. 18.3% of its work force is employed in the "education, health, and social services" sector, 5.5% in "professional services" and 6.1% in "financial activities".

They look pretty similar. If anything, City B is the more white-collar town, with a few more professional-class workers moving towards the education and health care industries instead of working in real estate agencies or insurance. But in press coverage one of these cities is constantly referred to as the lunch-bucket, working-man's (and woman's) middle America, while the other is by reputation chock full o' wine-and-cheese costal liberals. Which is which?

At this point, the ruse is probably obvious. City A is Seattle, where the largest employer is Boeing, while City B is Pittsburgh, where the largest employer is ... wait for it ... University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (second largest? The University itself. Third largest? Mellon Financial Corp]. US Steel provides a whopping 1800 jobs in the area; Carnegie Mellon University has twice as many workers on its payroll. There are roughly 5000 mining related jobs in the region compared to less than one thousand in Seattle.

That's it. Less than ten thousand jobs in metals production [the metalworking jobs in Seattle are in aluminum, if you're curious] and five thousand jobs in mining represents the difference in blue collar work between the two cities. Pittsburgh's image rests on its legacy as the center of the once-vibrant steel trade and coal mining in the region, which is, to say the least, less vibrant than it once was.

On exactly one measure does Pittsburgh out-blue-collar Seattle, though it's a big one: education. 38% of Seattle metro residents hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and only 54% have an education level of "some college, no degree" or lower. In Pittsburgh, those figures are 27% and 65%, respectively. Nonetheless, Matt's been in a self-correcting mood lately so perhaps when the weekend is over he'll use his much larger microphone to point out that yes, we're not all a bunch of Volvo-driving, latte-sipping, eyebrow-piercing, whatevers. Then maybe he can mention his experience to the San Jose Mercury News.

Listmania

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Though I've missed out on the Meme of Seven (and the Meme of Four), I can still provide a bit of end-of-the-year frivolity. The start of the new year was as good a time as any to wipe out ratings and playcounts in iTunes. But before I eliminated them, I put together a highly embarrassing list of the 50 most played songs in the collection.

Let the mocking begin ...

Clarity of Purpose

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Tale a look at what Josh Marshall has to say about the New Year.

All evidence points towards the 2006 midterms being another campaign where the gloves come off early and often. It's acceptable to tell the world why Republican budgeting and foreign policy are bad for the country. And it's time to stop bringing a knife to the gun fight.

Saturday Koufax Blogging

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

As Ezra points out, the Koufax awards have their own built-in biases that make it a less-than-optimal way to find new blogs. They also make it hard to find great posts from early in the year, simply because those posts aren't in the forefront of readers' thoughts. That's part of the reason that I picked  "Patriotism and Nationalism" for Best Post, so that we wouldn't forget some of the wonderful insights that writers made earlier in the year.

There are, of course, plenty of other quality choices. Two pathos-laden entries with excellent writing are "Monday Afternoon in the Welfare Office" and "Life and Death". There's a trio of posts that exhibit the "oh my God real life has started to imitate The Onion just a little too much" sensation in "The Real Fake News"  "The Talent Show is Dead; Long Live The Talent Show", and "NBC, CNN Announce Merger". Digby's "Genie in a Bottle" is excellent. In the Katrina sub-category, we have "Black Bodies Remain Still", "And Then I Saw These", "Potemkin Photo Op", and "skynyrd did what they could do" . Our own Shakes has received props for "Liberals Will Save America" along with Billmon's "My Back Pages". And I love The Kung Fu Monkey's "Learn to Say Ain't"; it's both witty and insightful.

Still, I am hard pressed to change my vote from "Patriotism and Nationalism". As I've started to spend more time in the political arena, I find myself increasingly aware of how easy it is to build up false confidence in the popularity of liberal belief system. "Patriotism and Nationalism" was the best reminder that there's another world out there that has tangible reasons for disliking the Democratic brand.

Things Worth Reading

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Peter Levine, my Favorite Blogger that Nobody Reads but Everybody Should, has posted the text of a speech he gave called "Education for Democratic Citizenship". I'm not much of an education wonk, but it sure looks to me like we've become caught up in the rush to improve our children's reading, math, and science skills, without stopping to ask whether our school system is helping children become good people. Peter is part of a band of folks who are concerned about such things.

As they say, Read The Whole Thing.

Pepper 2.0 Tomorrow

By Pepper of the Daily Pepper

Now that I have your attention, I'd like to make an announcement.

Arnold, you'd better run, because the Pepper Posse is coming after you.

That's right - a Pepper Posse. As of tomorrow, the Daily Pepper will become a group blog, featuring the writing of Poverty Barn and Pell-Mell.

We are a "Go Fug Yourself" for the culture, politics and otherwise, applying our snark to anything and everything that gives us offense.

Please do head over tomorrow to visit the site. Plus, as of today, I've spruced up the Pepper homepage. Check it out - and let me know if it looks, well, fugly.

Right On Time

C'mon, you had to know it'd happen.  Sooner or later, at least.  It's not as if Shakespeare's Sister could keep writing impassioned posts that made you want to run for something, organizing massive coalitions that left you ready to believe in something, and running the sort of blog that made you want to do something all without ever around an inkling of awareness from the higher-ups.  Total Information Awareness has long kept an eye on her and now, as a warning strike, they jacked up her property taxes and forced her out of her job. 

Man.  That's some bullshit, yo.

So head on over there, buy her some nice things, drop her some cool bucks, or, if you're in the Chicago area, give her a sweet job.  You can use me as reference -- there's no one I'd recommend more highly.  And that dadgum guv'mint better get off her back.  Otherwise, we'll have to take a page out of Shakes's book and organize, forming a fund to send Matthew Lesko out to get some of money back.

The Triangle

Peter Daou's written a really interesting piece on the media triangle that blogs are now a part of. It's a good corrective to some of the blogosphere's more fantastical boosters, but beyond that, it's a really good analysis of the interplay between blogs, the established press, and the political mainstream.

Looking at the political landscape, one proposition seems unambiguous: blog power on both the right and left is a function of the relationship of the netroots to the media and the political establishment. Forming a triangle of blogs, media, and the political establishment is an essential step in creating the kind of sea change we’ve seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Simply put, without the participation of the media and the political establishment, the netroots alone cannot generate the critical mass necessary to alter or create conventional wisdom. This is partly a factor of audience size, but it’s also a matter, frankly, of trust and legitimacy.

Give it a read.

Ask the Audience: What Should We Call Ourselves?

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

I'll add some substantive material soon enough, but for now, we need your help. As Ezra mentioned, he's turning over the reins to several of us on weekends, or at least slowing down from his weekday pace of seven or eight posts a day. I'm super-psyched for this arrangement, but our intrepid team of guest bloggers is missing a key ingredient.

We need a nickname.

Number-themed nicknames (like "the Far-Flung Five" or "The Dirty Half Dozen") are probably not a great idea, since it members will come and go during vacations, finals, dissertation defenses, etc. But other than that there are no rules.

Put your suggestions in the comments.

Where, O' Where, Have My Essayists Gone?

Jay Tea, over at Wizbang, is getting some attention for a silly post wondering why the right holds all the intellectual firepower in the blogs. I went to some of the "thinkers" he mentions and found, not rigorous thought, but remarkable word counts. Fair enough. Dylan offered him some left-wing thinkers (a list on which he kindly included me), but Jay Tea, in his comments, was non-plussed. None of us wrote long enough pieces for him. I would caution, as Jesse has, that length is no substitute for thought, but if what Jay Tea wants are lengthy essays, I figure a few others might also be in the market for a prose stylist. So here are a few I know of:

• Digby, of course, is your starting point. Achingly perfect prose with some of the most original commentary on the left. His sociopolitical stuff, in particular, is as insightful I've read. A fellow Angeleno, he "gets" the Hollywoodization of politics, and how that explains the current group running the country.

• Jeanne D'Arc has to ping high here as well. The hardest thing in writing is to inject your words with emotion and humanity without losing your analytical knife. She doesn't just walk that tightrope, she does tricks on it.

More? Okay, Billmon, a bunch of the contributors at The Next Hurrah, PZ Meyers, Shakespeare's Sister, etc, etc.

We can go on, but there's no reason to. One thing you should never do is underestimate the intellectual acuity of your opponents. Just because you don't read the right writers, doesn't mean they don't exist. I think that John Kenneth Galbraith is significantly more interesting than Milton Friedman, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is much sharper than William F. Buckley (whose writing, though not his vision, is overrated), and any number of leftish writers makes Victor Davis Hanson look like the overhyped historian he is. But I don't underestimate the intelligence of these people. Not my cup of tea, sure, but they're out there, they know how to swing a pen, and they have powerful minds churning through complex problems. Their value structures lead them to conclusions I find blindingly myopic, but that's why I'm a Democrat and they're Republicans. It's not why I, or those I like, are smarter than they are.

And, as a last note, Steven Den Beste should never, under any context, be held up as an intellectual role model. The guy could wring a thought into so many words that it fairly screamed under its own overstretch, but that's not a skill we should encourage others to emulate. Brevity may not be the soul of all great writing, but it's got enough of a role that Den Beste should be punished for throttling it like that.

Down For the Count

Posted by Nick Beaudrot

It looks like I'm finished for this weekend now. You can find more of my Reality-Based content at Electoral Math. 'Hope you've enjoyed everything!

And I'm Spent

Posted by Nick Beaudrot

Well, I believe our time here has come to an end. Sadly, it's been a slow weekend for news with something of a numerical bend to it; really, the most recent thing I've had to say on the subject of polling is that the more the right to choose is threatened, the more people support it. If you find this sort of thing interesting, you can find my regular postings at Electoral-Math.com;but just as a heads up, I have a day job and I don't use web-based blogging software, so I consider posting once a day to be a success.

Speaking of which, anyone who tells you regular blogging isn't work doesn't know what they're talking about. Try come up with something insightful to say, and then condensing that thought into two or three paragraphs, and then try doing that three or more times a day. It's not easy, even with practice, no matter what the outcomes of all those conferences on blogger ethics are.

Perhaps I'll see y'all again here some other time. But for now I'll hand things back to Ezra and leave you with my attempts to subvert the dominant link hierarchy.

Cheers,
Nick

er

When The Life of the Mind Becomes the Size of the Pecs

This is crap.  A travesty.  A crime.  Nick Confessore, of TAPPED, The Washington Monthly, and now The New York Times, is down to 4th place in Gawker's "Hot Men of the Times" contest.  He deserves better.  And you can make it happen.

Incidentally, where's the "Hotties of the blogosphere contest?"  Matt Yglesias v. Josh Chafetz.  Josh Marshall vs. Andrew Sullivan.  Kevin Drum vs. John Derbyshire.  Michael Berube vs. Daniel Drezner.  Roxanne vs. Malkin.  Jeralyn Merrit vs. Eve Tushnet.  Me vs. Someone Like Me.  All proceeds go to charity.  Then we can make a calendar, travel to America, have a big fight, return, make up, and sell the movie rights.  This is gonna be great.

And, in case you forgot the original point here, go vote.

Blogospheres

This week, the biggest blog on the left and one of the largest on the right decided to purge their comment threads of disruptive influences. Kos's smiting was aimed at conspiracy-theorist leftists who were blaming Blair and Bush for the London bombing. RedState.org, for their purging part, is declared jihad on leftists in their comments.

Enough has been said about the right's distaste for comments that I'll not waste your time by charging that trampled ground, but it's nevertheless interesting that one of the few prominent sites in the conservosphere consciously attempting to build community and foster discussion is rapidly lifting the drawbridge and ejecting liberals into the moat. I've got conservatives on my blog. I've got conservatives in my e-mail. And while it's not always pleasant to read their rebuttals and rejoinders, I've always figured it's part of the conversation. Why hasn't the right done the same?

Matt thinks it's because of our parents. Atrios and Kos always had vibrant comment threads, so those who came after retained the tradition. Instapundit and Powerline had no space for discussion, so their successors were similarly dismissive of conversation. On the other hand, Josh Marshall, our most prominent professional blogger, has always floated far above the medium's amateurs, descending only occasionally to link to important posts on the largest blogs. Conversely, Andrew Sullivan enthusiastically promoted, applauded, and pushed those below him. The result? The right loves to promote its own, the left is more closed at the top.

I'm not sure I buy that. Josh Marshall, though much admired and emulated, wasn't so much a pacesetter for our side, if for no other reason than he eschewed involvement with the blogosphere. Looking to him for online etiquette would've been akin to asking an ascetic for advice on table manners. The left's inattentiveness to its young is just that: an absent-minded tendency to not spend time searching blogger's newest recruits. The right's doting character is similarly not Sullivan's fault, it's much more the example of Reynolds, who's a linkbot posing in humanoid form (presumably for take-over-the-world purposes).

But more than mere duplication of bloggers atop Technorati, I think the two sides have evolved as they have to support the sort of activism they favor. The right's activism is command-and-control stuff. By elevating a set of generals, they let a few at the top (and sometimes higher, as when directives from the RNC blast into their inboxes) decide the topic, and all those below begin hammering the message. Having comment boards, which by nature dilute messages and criticize ideas, would be less than helpful. More, this helps explain the right's love for promoting its young: smaller conservative bloggers know that Instalinks and Hewitt-mentions come from launching venom at the day's bete noire, and so they do. That incentive, plus the legions of like-minded blogs conservative writers have previously chosen to promote, creates the perfect structure for message dissemination and outrage coordination.

The left's activism, in contrast, is much more involvement based. It's coordinated. How many e-mails can we channel into Lou Dobbs' inbox? How much dirt can a thousand keyboard jockeys dig up on Jeff Gannon? How much money can we donate to Jon Tester? The bloggers (often) choose the goal, then turn it over to their commentors. Kos's self-sustaining, on-site blogosphere was the perfect setup for this. he doesn't need to give the order more than once or offer threads for updates and further discussion. It can all be sustained independently in the diaries.

RedState's purge is just inexperience, they don't trust the comment boards yet. The right doesn't delegate, they disseminate. As for the left? Our general ignorance and inattention to young bloggers is a symptom of trying to build our own sites into action centers, what happens outside the domain's boundary is of only limited use.

Have the Marketers Won?

Business Week has a fun article on corporate America's triumphant co-option of hipster culture.  A movement whose original uniform was peppered with "Corporate Rock Sucks" stickers now sends their bands on tours sponsored by malt liquor, grabs refreshments in tents sponsored by Levi, and has proved most successful at gathering a hard to reach demographic into the areas where advertisers can get them:

Marketers, like parents, might spend sleepless nights worrying about not understanding youth. But they miss the bigger story. Formerly hostile subcultures -- yesteryear's punks and hippies and snowboarders -- now welcome them. Whether they've noticed it or not, marketers have won. Like Brickman, the hipsters are all buying in.

True that.  And the blogs, which evinced the same anti-establishment ethos as they grew are following closely behind.  Kevin Drum once told me that he didn't buy the big talk about our independence and detachment from advertisers.  Corporate America always gets in sooner or later, the question is just what sort of influence it has.  And that's turned out to be right.  Hugh Hewitt publishes books under a major imprint, Glenn Reynolds writes for MSNBC, Markos does (did?) Democratic consulting, is a fellow at a think tank,  and is writing a book, Duncan works for Media Matters, scores of bloggers from the left and right regularly descend on the cable channels to talk about the blogs and/or the issues they're discussing, Matt Yglesias is a rising start journalist, I've been hired by the American Prospect, Newsweek has a "blogwatch", The National Journal has a "blogometer", ABC's The Note links to blogs, CNN has "Inside the Blogs", and on, and on.

Blogs, like extreme sports, hippies, and hipsters before them, gained their currency and following by attacking the inequities of the MSM, but have decided that maturity, in large part, comes from acceptance.  And blog readers, who grew attached to their scrappy favorites, are glad to see the writers they've followed finally finding recognition.  That's how it always is, the establishment is hated because it doesn't notice.  Once it does notice, it's benign, ready to be condemned or celebrated on a case-by-case, or story-by-story, basis. 

The establishment, of course, doesn't walk away unchanged either.  As it welcomes in writers and reporters weaned on online sensibilities, those ethos find a home in the newsroom or the editorial desk.  The channel opens, with representatives able to bridge the divide bringing a synthesis approach to their work on both sides.  Whether that changes one or all mediums in a good way, I don't know, but it's never a one-way street. 

So have the marketers won?  Yes, in the sense that it's brought its attackers into the fold.  But that's a fairly small definition of victory.  If bloggers, hipsters, punk rockers, or extreme sport jocks can open what they do up to a wider audience without radically changing how they do it, I have to judge that a victory for the upstarts, even while it's a win for those signing the checks.  These young movements have an action they want to propagate, the establishment, as it is, just wants to make money.  The two aren't mutually exclusive and so the tension isn't zero sum.  The marketers may win, but that doesn't mean we can't, too.

Just a Thought

As a fellow attendee of the Edwards dinner, I'd argue that revoking the posting privileges of folks who criticize him on your site is probably not the best way to look as if you exited the meal with integrity intact.  Even if Stirling had other reasons for banning BOP News poster RJ Eskow and deleting all his old pieces doing it directly after RJ posted something critical of John Edwards is about as bad as optics get. 

When Stirling tipped Garance off about the dinner, she wrote:

Gaining the loyalty of bloggers...is not that hard to do if you just talk to them

In my eyes, that made us all look bad, in addition to being a load of crap. But who knows, maybe Garance put her finger directly on the problem.  As bloggers begin to get courted by more pols and bigger names, we're going to have to figure out some way to deal with the attention without looking -- without being! -- hopelessly compromised.  Maybe that means full disclosure of every meal and conversation, though, like in journalism, I fear that won't work.  After all, how many bloggers, if asked to an off-the-record dinner (which the Edwards dinner wasn't, by the way) with Hillary Clinton or Brian Schweitzer would cheerfully decline, citing online ethics?  We want the access too much to deny it.  Indeed, it's happpening now.  The Edwards dinner was by no means first, there have been a slew of meet and greets, meals, drinks, conventions and conference calls that various groups of bloggers have attended, and it'll only get worse from here.  How to deal with it, I don't know.  But Stirling's actions, innocent or not, reflect badly on all of our credibility.

This Word Blog...

Apparently, Duncan was on C-SPAN the other night and got nailed with the "where are all the women bloggers" question. Lance Mannion undertakes the now-rote deconstruction here (although what exactly is this dichotomy between "wonks" and "writers"? Which is James Wolcott, for instance? Digby?). What seems to pop up in his post, though, is that the definition of blogger varies in context. To the political world, a blog is an unabashedly, overtly, conventionally political opinion site. Think Yglesias or Kos or Drum or Willis. And so when C-SPAN wonders about women bloggers, the question isn't so much about women with websites as it is about women who write like, well, political savants. And when the swift and harsh rejoinders from female bloggers hit, they're not pointing to women who spend all day poring over the Washington Post, they're aiming at a larger variety of blogs with broader topic choice that zig-zags along that fuzzy line separating the personal from the political.

The problem, however, is that neither side quite wants to redefine their question into the other's terms. C-SPAN does want overtly political bloggers, Lance Mannion is sincere in his preference for wide topic choice over electoral minutia. Think back to the recent scuffle over where the female op-ed writers were. Pointing to a bunch of female style or arts columnists wouldn't have answered the question because, in that case, both sides were talking about the political sort of op-ed. Not so here. But neither can the two worlds shake hands and ignore each other. The central trouble, as it happens, is that the beltway blogs -- by which I mean the deeply, obsessively political sites -- have attracted an inordinate amount of attention. When the outside world asks about blogs, more often than not they're wondering about James Joyner, Duncan Black, and their many imitators. As a result, the blogs that keep getting promoted, and thus garnering larger and larger audiences, are the beltway blogs, and they keep linking to their brethren because that's what they're interested in, and the cycle spins on.

So when Atrios gets asked where the female bloggers are, the correct answer is all over, but not in the way that interests the interviewer. And because of that, the subset of blogs that males write in larger numbers keeps growing in recognition and influence without bringing the other, less well-defined but more equally-gendered blogospheres with it. It is thus only a matter of time before the first serious work of philosophy comes out about how to create a "just" blogroll. Do we need to retreat to the Original Position and recognize the role of chance in sensitizing us to topics or are all individuals autonomous and informed enough to freely compete for publicity? Crooked Timber, we're waiting...

Serendipitous

Two unrelated stories today dovetail quite nicely.  John Aravosis takes issue with some who have apparently criticized him for the awful sin of actually making a tolerable living fighting the good fight for liberals.  His post and the comments, are all worth reading.  Steve Gilliard and Digby both have interesting things to say on the topic as well.  I'm not going to excerpt any of the posts; click through and read them.

Then, at Confined Space (which should be a daily stop for labor news), Jordan Barab notices who crisis manager Chris Lehane works for when he's not working for Democrats:

Chris Lehane, 37, helped the Clinton White House spin the Whitewater investigation, spoke for Vice President Al Gore on the 2000 presidential campaign trail and advised former Gov. Gray Davis during the 2001 energy crisis and 2002 gubernatorial campaign.

Now he's working for KFM Joint Venture, the contractor building the Bay Bridge's new eastern span. The Oakland Tribune has reported welders' accusations that many of the project's welds are defective and that unsafe working conditions existed on the job site. An FBI investigation is under way, and lawmakers are calling for probes of their own.

And it's not just the incipient construction fiasco that Lehane is helping KFM manage, but also the dispute between KFM and former KFM employees alleging unsafe working conditions and manganese poisoning.

Now, I've heard it said many times that a lot of the Democrats' PR, marketing, and advertising types worked for corporations in non-election years.  I took those assertions on faith, but never had it brought home just this way. 

Talented liberals should not have to choose between (a) working for corporations full or part time, instead of working for a better America full time, or (b) living well below the means that their talents would otherwise afford them.  When talented liberals are dependent on large corporations for a good part of their income, they have a hard time advocating fiercely for the people the rest of the time.  And that's how you get the DLC.

The Republicans, of course, have no such conflict.  Republican apparatchiks work for corporate interests 100% of the time, whether they're working for corporations directly or working for them indirectly by working for a Republican organization or at one of the many Republican foundations funded by plentiful corporate donations.

I don't have a clear answer to that structural asymmetry, but certainly those of us who actually care about the people of the country should not criticize leaders like Aravosis, Gilliard and Atrios for making a decent living working full time at liberal advocacy.  Poverty should not be a test for sincerity.

- paperwight

News About News

According to Singer, the leading lights of the right-leaning blogosphere are setting up some sort of professional news service. And believe you me, Matt's not the only one anxiously awaiting dispatches from the Iraq correspondent stationed in Toledo, Ohio. More exciting yet will be the Social Security expert who spends half the year on Chile's website and the political columnist reporting directly from Peggy Noonan's hypothalamus. That sound you hear? That's the AP's knees knocking...

Yawn

Via DC Media Girl, Hindrocket's having an aneurysm over this. Not the bankruptcy bill that targets -- and fires on -- the poor, not the leave-the-money-on-the-nightstand ethos that produced the energy bill, but this. A T-shirt. That's what made him wonder "HOW SICK CAN THE LEFT GET?" A T-shirt on CafePress.com. If I had the energy to sign up for CafePress, I could create one saying, for instance, "Hindrocket Loves Big Trunk -- Pass the FMA Now!" and it'd still just be a kid playing with a website, not an official expression of the left's depravity.

These right-wingers, it's all vapors and delicate constitutions with them. Call 'em a name and they cry. Meanwhile, I know exactly how sick the right can get. That's why I don't read Little Green Footballs. Because depravity isn't a kid with a naughty T-shirt design, it's a community with a thirst for blood.

Update: Seems like as good a time as any to link to revive this post...

End of the Powerline

With the Schiavo memos proven to be from a Republican source and Powerline not apologizing for their truthless innuendo and slander, it's time to break out the popcorn and see if Big Trunk and Hindrocket can clear the shark. Odds are on massive carnage, but they might just end up laughing stocks. For that, see August Pollack on "Powerline-was-completely-fucking-wrong-gate" (Best. Gate. Ever.). It's not just that they have no shame, it's that they once met shame on a street, beat the shit out of him, rolled him up in a carpet, and threw him off a bridge. And don't even ask me about the nightmare they put truth through. To paraphrase Marv in Sin City, after what they did to poor honesty, hell must have seemed like heaven.

Powerline, we must begin to understand, has no fucking idea what they're talking about at any given moment. Once upon a time, some GOP operative sent by the Ghost of Nixon got something right for them in the Free Republic comments section, and ever since then the homo-erotically named bloggers over there have thought his success their own and tried to get a bunch of other Important Stories About Treasonous Democrats right too. But they don't. Reading their site is like watching a blind child in a dog park -- you keep trying to warn him not to step in the piles of shit, but you're never able to get there quite quick enough. They want to make a point on Carter and end up calling him a traitor -- ooh, all over your shoe! They want to attack the AP but end up proving themselves utterly ignorant of how cameras work -- damn, you got it on your sock! They try to accuse Democrats of faking the Schiavo memo until an aide to current Republican Senator and Bush's former HUD Secretary Mel Martinez admits to writing it -- Agh, it's all over you!

They get nothing right. Their fact-checking skills are atrocious. They neither report nor call experts, it's just whatever they invented twenty seconds ago. Watching them work is like attending a high school debate match in the impromptu event. Arguments are created on the fly, accuracy is unimportant so long as the product accuses the "MSM" or Democrats of some cardinal sin that'll leave Powerline's sycophantic readers moaning with the exquisite pleasure that comes only from having one's biases expertly stroked. The plausibility of their claims ranges from pathetic to laughable (has Big Trunk debated PZ Myers on the biological uncertainty of evolution yet?) and their traffic and credibility is entirely predicated on the work someone else did, success they've been totally unable to replicate. They have failed.

So enough's enough -- can we please stop taking them seriously? They've exhausted their purpose, which was proving that the blogosphere isn't self-correcting and, in fact, offers rich rewards to opportunists with a polygamous relationship to the truth. Powerline's not useful anymore. They're not funny, like Glenn, or intellectually interesting, like Tacitus (old school Tacitus, anyway), or rhetorically talented, like Sullivan. They're just there, hopping up and down and begging someone to take their latest theory -- thought up seven seconds ago on the can -- seriously. Don't oblige them.

Another Annoying Panel

Over at Sean-Paul's place, I'm undersigned on a letter protesting The National Press Club's strange lineup for their upcoming "Blogger? Journalist?" event. Slated to discuss the issue are Wonkette, Congress Daily's John Stanton, and Jeff Gannon. Yeah, that Jeff Gannon.

It's such a laughably silly slate that you can't be mad, just amused. Nevertheless, in an event that bills itself as having bloggers and journalists attending to discuss what they are, you'd think they could add in a representative blogger or two. Ana Marie-Cox is not, so far as I can tell, a blogger anymore. I mean, maybe she is, but whenever I click over to Wonkette, which I rarely do, it seems someone else is writing the site. BoiFromTroy, or, right now, Greg Beato, or "Joe Klein" -- but not Cox. One of the defining traits of bloggers is that they, well, blog, and Cox doesn't seem to do that. I don't blame her, all these panels eat up the workday, but it's time for her to turn in the blog decoder ring and become a professional guest panelist if she's going to drop off her site and become ubiquitous at breakout sessions and buffet lines.

In addition, it's kinda weird to represent political blogs, which are overearnest, highly wonky things, with Cox. It'd be like using gossip-queen Liz Smith as the standard representative for political reporters. It'd embarrass the media, which is why it wouldn't happen and, I guess, why they use Wonkette to represent us -- we're eminently embarassable. But this time, at least, the jokes on the media. The guy they've chosen to accept as a legitimate halfway point between online media and respectable journalism is a partisan hack who sold his body by the hour. They could've picked Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, Josh Marshall, or any of the other blogger/writers who populate the net, but no, they chose the male prostitute and paired him with the blogger obsessed with anal penetration. Says something, doesn't it?

Nominations

So the Deserves More Attention category of the blogroll is stagnating, I think it's time to update. I'm probably going to take four or five of the folks there out and move them into the normal categories -- any traffic help they've gotten from that spot has probably exhausted itself. But who to put in? That's where you come in, rational blog consumers. Nominate your favorite smaller blogs in the comments and I'll go take a look. Remember too that these are the folks I draw from for weekend guest posters.

Color Me Puzzled

Kevin takes another dive into the why-women-don't-blog waters and surfaces with some theory-backing mermaids from the op-ed pages. He also catches this from Dahlia Lithwick:

And so a clutch of women are left on the pink margins of the page, to wring our hands and, well, discuss among ourselves. The subtext will thus remain that anyone choosing to speak out on this is somehow hysterical or overemotional; that this is not a "serious" problem since serious people (i.e., men) aren't addressing it. All of which practically guarantees that nothing will be done about defining, measuring, or redressing the issue in the long term. Claims that no man wants to step on the landmine of political correctness, gender stereotyping, and identity politics should not justify bowing out of the conversation. Maureen Dowd, Deborah Tannen, and Anne Applebaum are smart, serious people. They have taken the time to initiate a conversation. They deserve serious responses from men and women alike.

It's striking, however, that the blogs are just the opposite. You never see women bringing up the dearth of female bloggers (to be clear, it's not that there aren't many, it's that there aren't as many), it's mostly men who publicly scratch their heads, glance into their comments, and find they're being hung in effigy. That's a bit odd, because even the studies cited in defense of women's numbers, like this one from Meryl Yourish, admit to a 14% differential, and that's not restricting the pool to political bloggers.

Now, assuming we're talking about top op-ed pages (and since this conversation is being held in the Washington Post, the LA Times, the NY Times, and Slate, we are) and top blogs, which we often are (though nothing I've seen shows the disparity easing much as we travel down the list), there's not a major difference in the number of female bloggers/writers occupying the slots, it's about 10-20% in each of the venues. So why is the conversation being entirely driven by women in one medium and men in the other? It makes no sense.

Citizen-Journalists

Well Garance knocked that one out of the park.

Bloggy Blog Blog Blog

Daniel Munz, who I've always found really excellent and thought-provoking, has got himself a new blog. Go say hi. And while you're there, tell him to make the banner atop the site smaller, it'd be nice to see a post or two when I first land on the page.

On a related note, I've been thinking a lot about link hierarchies and new blog promotion. In comments, Brian Jennings made the point that it makes more sense for a few writer to put his energy into posting diaries at DailyKos, rather than stick his flag in some unknown backland in cyberspace. Kos's place boasts a huge audience who will look at your work and, if they like what you do, ensure more folks read it. At the top levels of diary promotion, more eyeballs will land on it than will see any other blogger that day, save Kos himself. That's a much more rational and direct reward system, particularly in the lefty blogosphere where our interest in promoting our brethren fluctuates between "nil" and "eh". Unfortunately, and I wish it were different, I can't see that as a good thing, no matter how I try. Though Kos is benevolent and far-sighted and walks on water and speaks to birds, confining so much new energy to his site can't be good. It'll only choke off the vibrancy of the progressive blogosphere in the long run. Now, I don't blame Markos for any of that, this has been a pretty surprising occurrence that grew out of some great moves (like the switch to Scoop), but it's a problem nonetheless. Wonder what the folks at Next Hurrah think about all this?

My only conclusion -- and what a weak one it is! -- is that I need to spend more time promoting young bloggers. I'm not the biggest hitter around, but I generally tip 6K by day's end, and that's worth throwing around. My best idea for doing so is to expand my use of gtuests. I prefer not to blog on weekend's -- it gives me time to recharge, time to think, time to read books...and I've been really happy with the guest bloggers who've taken over during the time. So I'm thinking of making that a regular thing, wherein each weekend I'll turn the site over to one, maybe more, young bloggers. That way you guys get a great writer, great writers get more exposure, and I get to "have a life". What say you, readers? I mean, Shakespeare's Sister really kicked the ass, didn't she?

Girls With Keyboards

I wasn't planning to step into Kevin's not-enough-women-in-the-blogs fluff, having been on the receiving end of it a few times myself. But Avedon Carol dropped me into the fray, and I'll use her mention as an excuse to post some thoughts:

• First, on Avedon's point that I got linked on TAPPED despite being a new blog while some excellent women bloggers did not, I don't think that's fair. The situation was more akin to updating an address book. I've been blogging for about three years and been on their blogroll for the better part of the last, so it's not as if I emerged out of nowhere, proved I had a penis, and was admitted to the list o' links.

• This argument follows a very similar pattern each time it surfaces. Guy wonders why there aren't more female political bloggers, girl(s) list 500 female political bloggers and wonder why he's not aware of them all, guy lamely protests that that wasn't his point, guy eventually gives up and cheers when post drops off the page. As I said, I've some experience with this. But it should be noted that the question isn't whether or not there are hundreds, even thousands, of excellent female political bloggers -- there are! -- it's why there seem to be quite a few fewer female political bloggers than men. It's a proportionality thing. Often, the answer is that we're only looking at the top ranks, which is a pretty closed club (true, though it's not out of some desire by Drum and Josh to keep out the estrogen-producing riff-raff). So last time this happened, I checked that. I clicked all around the TTLB ecosystem and went to 10 blogs in a row here, 10 there, at all levels of popularity. The numbers stayed heavily male. So my sense is that despite the scores of excellent female political bloggers, there are more male bloggers. Meryl Yourish points to a recent Pew Study that found 57% of bloggers are men. That alone is a large difference and, while I haven't seen data on this, I think the difference is larger when the sample is restricted to political blogs. But even if you're unwilling to grant that, we've still got a 14% difference there. The real question, I think, is what accounts for the differential.

• Again, there are truckloads of excellent female political bloggers out there and I'm listening to Ani DiFranco as I type this (true, actually -- her new cd has been pretty constant in my iTunes). My point isn't to malign nor offend them, but to wonder what accounts for the comparative difference. My end, here, is that I want even more truckloads of excellent female political bloggers to read.

• Blogs, particularly the lefty blogs, are a clubby lot. The top guys (and gals) link to each other, perpetuating higher intragroup hits, but not doing much to help those outside the popular circle. The right is much better at this -- Instapundit exists to drive traffic to young blogs and Hewitt has made it a pet cause. On their side of the aisle, they've created established routes for recognition, not to mention habituated their readers to bookmarking new folks. We've not done that. This partially has to do with who leads our charge. Kos and Marshall basically don't link, Atrios links but mostly to a certain type of post, Kevin doesn't link all that much; the only one I'd say does a really good job of nurturing young bloggers is Yglesias, who gave me my start and has done the same for others (including the excellent Julie Saltman, whose absence on the sidebar I'm about to rectify, and whose take on this stuff should be read by all). When I was a "big boy" at Pandagon, I tried to do some of this, mainly with Brad Plumer and Here's What's Left (half female, though Heather almost never posts).

But, and I hope Brad doesn't mind becoming an example, his case proves the point. I drove him as much traffic as I possibly could, thousands of readers. Indeed, he was soon all over the blogs, appearing on Kevin's site more than I ever did and becoming a common actor in Matt's posts. But his sitemeter still barely cracks 250 a day. Now, Brad is absurdly talented, knowledgeable and fun to read, he's certainly one of the best bloggers around. So what's happened? Why hasn't his readership soared?

Blog readers, I think, are creatures of habit. They come to a couple top sites day after day, and adding on to that routine is a tough sell. With Insty and Hugh, adding new sites to their reader's daily trawl is the expressed purpose of many of their posts, they've created an environment where that's an expected response. We've not done that on the left, so though sites like Kos boast a much higher readership than anything the right's got, our blogosphere isn't as healthy, there's nowhere near the same level of upward mobility. And while I don't think that accounts for the male/female differential, I do think it creates a problem for anyone trying to move into the high ranks, and that means the gender gap on that level wouldn't change even if the numbers under it shifted. That's a problem for both genders.

Update: Per the discussion here, tried to add a promotion component to my blogroll. Check it out and tell me what you think.

Blogroll Update and Liberal Philosophers

Finally put up a long-overdue permalink to the excellent Shakespeare's Sister. Helpful readers are encouraged to head over to her site and apologize for my tardiness.

Also, you guys should read Tomasky's piece on progressivism's estrangement from philosophy. One thing I think he omits is that, in addition to talking strategy, we talk a lot of policy, and we generally mistake the latter for philosophy. I think that has something to do with empiricism becoming a stealth philosophy for liberals, but that's a side issue.

More to the point, I've already sent in my critique and suggestions for The Prospect's magazine, so I'll put this one here. Tomasky is completely correct that liberals don't have a strong grasp of their own ancestry. He's also one of the few people in the country able to do something about it. I'd love for his magazine to feature a monthly history lesson, zooming in on an important progressive person or event. By the time I became conscious of politics, the Clinton years were basically over, so my only connection to my movement's foundations come from the books I read. That generally works out okay -- I'm pretty excited to read Parker's biography of Galbraith (so excited I put it in my wishlist, hint, hint), even though that Plumer kid has beat me to it -- but trying to stay current on Iran and Iraq and Social Security and the EU and Medicare and elections and every other crisis developing right this very second only leaves so much time to engage books on the past. If the Prospect offered a short dose of history each month, I doubt I'd be alone in finding it a major help.

For that matter, I wonder if they couldn't partner with some historical societies and policy groups and give the history of an issue more attention in their Special Reports. Seeing the genesis of something like Social Security or Health Care or voting laws is, in my opinion, much more powerful than simply getting a briefing on it.

Update: While I'm talking about the Prospect, I should mention that this month's cover image is very, very cool. Between this and the Missing Donkey cover, it looks like the days of stock photos are dying their rightful death.

Give A Warm Welcome

As I've alluded to a couple times, the last two weeks have been crazy/insane for me. Applications, midterms, book reviews...it was a perfect storm of deadlines. As of this morning, the craziness is over. Nonetheless, I'm going to take the weekend to chill out and conduct a Harding-esque return to normalcy. Your host here will be Chris Rasmussen, a longtime commentor and all around smart guy. He also, incidentally, sent the e-mail suggesting I review Hewitt's book, so blogging during my recovery is his penance. But be nice to him anyway.

Horrible Hugh

So I thought it was a good idea. You know, a fun one. I'd write a review of Hugh Hewitt's new book, Blog, get a byline and a check, go home happy. I mean, the book isn't really long or anything, is it?

Well, no, it's not. But it certainly the most distasteful piece of waste I've handled since maturation imbued me with the good sense to stop handling garbage. I think I was three years old, then. Why is Hugh so bad? Well, aside from the towering egotism and the blistering partisanship, the guy is constantly lying. Here are three, just from the introduction:

On October 1, 2004, more than 130,000 internet users visited HughHewitt.com. They did so because the first presidential debate between George W. Bush and John Kerry was conducted on the night of the thirtieth, and folks wanted my take as well as my continually updated analysis of the debate that took place.
I believe George W. Bush had won the debate, and that John Kerry had committed incredible blunders. Very few pundits agreed with me. I was right.

As you may remember, Hewitt spent the day of the debate screaming at the media for ignoring the "mantan" story, wherein John Kerry would appear on television looking bright orange. John Kerry didn't. Hewitt then watched cartoons for a couple hours and declared Bush the winner. Pundits and voters disagreed overwhelmingly.

The Blogosphere is about trust. CNN lost the trust it once had and its fall has been sudden and shattering. FOX News is trusted by millions, so its numbers have shot up, much to the dismay of lefties who don't understand why viewers would trust Fox News.

Here Hewitt didn't even need to do research (or be particularly sane), he just needed to watch commercials. That "CNN: The Most Trusted Name in News" tagline? That comes because CNN still beats FOX by 7% in trustworthy ratings, 32%-25%.

[John Kerry] never recovered from an August spent hiding from the Vets, their ads, and a relentless inquest conducted fairly and with lawyerly thoroughness within the blogosphere.

Italics mine. And, I should note, those aren't the only three (and they're just from the introduction!). FOX's viewership shot up during the convention not because Republicans watch Fox, but because nobody wanted to see the RNC on the DNC's television outlet. Hugh's book will "have a huge impact across many fields." "What is really going on is an internet reformation similar in consequence to the Reformation that split Christianity in the sixteenth century." This is what I'm slogging through. This and Hugh Hewitt's enormous, uncontrollable ego, which threatens to reach out from the book and throttle me every time I turn the page. All because I wanted to defend the fine folks in the blogosphere.

You see what I go through for you?

Update: I really can't believe we're arguing over who won the first debate. On one side is Hugh's contention that Bush owned it. On the other is this:

Early polls indicated Americans felt Kerry had won the debate. Fifty-three percent of Americans polled in a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup poll said Kerry had won, compared to 37% for Bush. Kerry also was ahead in polls taken by CBS News and ABC News.

And this:

Newsweek's post-convention poll had Bush leading among registered voters 54 percent to 43 percent. Its post-debate poll had 47 percent choosing Kerry-Edwards, and 45 percent for Bush-Cheney. Two percent said they would vote for Ralph Nader and his running mate, Peter Camejo.

Must we play such boring games?