Your Favorite Political Weblogs? 785
worm eater would like to know: "As the mainstream media is coming under closer scrutiny from the 'blogosphere,' and is having to actually respond to these journalists in pajamas, I thought I'd ask Slashdot: what are your favorite political blogs? Lately I've been reading Talking Points Memo, a liberal weblog by Joshua Micah Marshall, and a blog by Andrew Sullivan, a conservative writer. Where do you go when you want to see the mainstream media dissected and poked at?"
Informed Comment (Score:2, Insightful)
DailyKos (Score:5, Insightful)
politics.slashdot.org is rapidly turning into one of my least favorites because I've noticed that the moderation system is running amuck! Never before have I seen such a split in moderations where a single comment can be rated "informative" and "troll" numerous times in the same story. And many moderators with a chip on their shoulder start using "offtopic" and "overrated" to try to protect their own karma during metamoderation. Here's an example [slashdot.org] of where it happened to me recently. And it's not just the political posts (though I suspect it happens there most often), but in a Star Wars story. I still can't believe this post [slashdot.org] got called a "troll"! I'm sure many others can come up with their own examples.
It seems that there may be too many people moderating these days, and little accountability, a single person doesn't have to have an agenda [slashdot.org]; you can have a group of likeminded people who want to squelch dissenting opinions pummel a relatively decent post down into the noise of hot grits posts.
DailyKos has a better system where moderations aren't anonymous, so you can see how people are moderating. Then again, if DailyKos had the same traffic as Slashdot, maybe its moderation system would get corrupted too.
Maybe the ultimate problem is that people don't respect others' views, or they prize too highly the views of people that they may agree with but use bad logic or specious reasoning. It's probably indicative of the growing polarization in our country. As people start migrating to sandboxes where only likeminded people congregate (which blogs, especially political ones, can lead to), they become less tolerant of opinions that challenge their own.
Re:Drudge Report (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Drudge Report (Score:2, Insightful)
My favorite political weblog? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Drudge Report (Score:4, Insightful)
As with anything, be critical of what you read, but Drudge has proven himself right more times than the elite media cares to admit.
Re:michaelmoore.com (Score:3, Insightful)
They'd be even funnier if the aforementioned link contained Moore's opinion, rather, it is him linking to other news articles hosted by various news agencies.
Re:michaelmoore.com (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:DailyKos (Score:3, Insightful)
And it happens from both directions - I've seen some perfectly rational discussion by some clearly right wing people get buried as Flamebait or Troll for no apparent reason. However, that said, I've noticed that the people who get the shortest end of the stick are Greens and Leftists, especially when they go poking holes in Republican and Libertarian balloons.
The political spectrum on slashdot runs the gamut, but it has several nodes that are crueler in their moderation than others when criticised, mostly being Libertarian Capitalists and Neocon Republicans. Sometimes a Green gets a feather up his butt about a post, and I'll see something oddly moderated.
What I have also noticed is that if someone posts "under their name", i.e., not as an Anonymous Coward, and it still has a positive number value but the condition is "Troll" or "Flamebait" it often indicates that the post is neither a Troll or Flamebait, but is simply the victim of some overzealous moderator with an ax to grind. And I don't see how metamoderation fixes that.
I'll probably get moderated by some thinskinned overzealous moderator as Flamebait or Troll, but I hope not. I think this is a very important discussion that needs to be had.
RS
Andrew Sullivan != Conservative, but here are some (Score:5, Insightful)
If you really want to read a high-quality conservative blog, here are two from National Review Online [nationalreview.com]:
- The Corner, [nationalreview.com] a braided-blog with constributions by many of NR's writers, run by Kathryn Jean Lopez, and
- The Kerry Spot [nationalreview.com], penned by Jim Geraghty, whichs follows Kerry and his campaign closely, as well as related subjects. (The Kerry Spot was one of the best sites to follow for updates on Rathergate.
Speaking of Rathergate, a seminal blogsphere watershed that Slashdot has not chosen to feature on its front page, here are some of the key blogs which helped break open the Rathergate story:Well, that should get you started. in truth, except for the NR blogs, I was only an occasional readers of the others before the Rathergate story broke, but now I'm much more of a regular reader, much to the detriment of my productivity...
Re:Drudge Report (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:DailyKos (Score:5, Insightful)
sentence #1 It is completely ridiculous to suggest that the press has spent more time investigating Bush than they did giving free press to the lying SBVT group.On the other hand, Bush has gotten a free pass for
a) Using political connections to get in to the National Guard, when he was far from the best candidate to get in
b) Not fulfilling his duty once he was in there
c) Lying about his service and claiming he flew with his unit for years
a) You assume some political connections were used? What were they? Who alleges this? Did Bush himself do anything? Do Bush's FATHER do anything? Who is to blame for this. Unsubstantiated FUD. Troll.
b) Not fulfilling his duty...who knows, I'll give you that one.
c) "Lying about his service and claiming he flew with his unit for years" Show me that he didn't fly? Probable troll.
Official National Guard records, including those released by the White House, contradict Bush's statements. Others in the National Guard corroborate the fact that Bush did not fulfill his duty. To this day, Bush has been incapable of naming a single person who saw him in Alabama when he was supposed to be training there. Bush claims he signed up for a unit up north (Connecticut, I think), but he never showed up to that at all.
Guess you haven't been watching the news recently when Staudt and others in the guard and of the guard went on TV. Troll.
The national media ignored Bush's stint with a champaign unit in the National Guard during Vietnam, with small exceptions, during the 2000 campaign. I know many Bush supporters would like to believe otherwise, but it's fact.
It hink the bigger point is "who cares at all?" and if anyone cares, is there any evidence to prove it? There is not, as the extremely poorly forged documents of this last month show, most recently. That's how fast the liberla media jumped on this story once they thought they had something they could run with--did no basic fact checking (re, Staudt) and couldn't even realize that the documents were CLEARLY forged on MS Word.
Then I did a search for "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" and "John Kerry" and "Vietnam" in the past six months. How many hits? 248!
I'll take this slow for you. How many times did Bush say that he should be president because of his experience in the guard? How many times did Bush campaign on ANYTHING he did in his youth? Never. Quite the contrary, Bush is a man reborn and he was not running on his record of 30 years ago. Kerry on the other hand "Reporting for duty!" (DNC) based his entire campaign on his Vietnam experience and rarely faield to mention Vietnam in his speeches. IT's only natural that he comes under attack for this stance.
Is Bush's Vietnam record (or lack of it) relevant to today? To some extent, no. The war was more than 30 years ago. But for a president who calls himself the "war president", who insists he was for the Vietnam war, who started an elective war under false pretenses and shifting reasons, and who is dangerously stretching our military resources, it is important to know what that person was doing when it was their time to serve.
He's a war president because the country went to war, not because he fought in some war 30 years ago. Were Eisenhower or Grant war presidents? No? Roosevelt? Who? Troll. False pretenses? THe pretenses were false only in that the CIA, British intelligence and others dropped the ball. Is there any evidence Bush himself knowingly lied? Troll. And you're absolutely right, it is important to know what did when they were called up to serve--thus the Swift Boat Vets. You can't say it's important and try to suppress them at the same time. Troll yet again.
Does anyone else find it distasteful when a draft dodger calls into question the medals of a war hero?
and that is why you were trolling (lies!)
Re:Drudge Report (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, no. I don't waste my time with his site anymore. I get my news from outside the US, like a mirror I find it's a very revealing reflection of how others view us as well as exploring news topics commonly overlooked on home ground because we tend to be too fascinated with scandal and innuendo to pay attention to what's really happening. Learn to spot high profile political issues as the sucker bait that they really are.
I'd rather read the Onion than Drudge.
Re:Propaganda (Score:2, Insightful)
That's funny, if you replace "Moore" with "Bush administation", your statement is just as true. I guess they have more in common than most people would like to admitt. I really wish I had the time to do a synthesis report and intersect each of their opinions. I bet when all is said and done, it would be the most accurate story around. After all, when you add 1 and -1 you get 0. I'll leave it to the reader to decide whom is the negative and whom is the positive.
Re:Jerry Pournelle (Score:3, Insightful)
--
Evan
Re:Drudge Report (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? If you think that, then you must think that Fox News has no idea what is going on in the Middle East.
As if the left is the bastion of truth. get real (Score:1, Insightful)
Anger : One of the first reactions of those without facts to back them up.
Name Calling : Second to the first. If you cannot refute the message call the messenger names.
Re:Drudge Report (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Drudge Report (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, you mean like that "bimbo eruption" he tried to pin on Kerry [politicalwire.com] back in the primaries that turned out to be such a load of hooey he ended up apologizing [cyberjournalist.net] to the woman he pointed the finger at?
Yeah, he's a real Beacon of Truth, all right.
Note to moderators: (Score:2, Insightful)
You're mistaken, Fox DID say the photo was fake (Score:5, Insightful)
Merely repeating a lie doesn't make it true. Fox has said several times the photo was false, as did National Review and several other conservative sources.
Re:Kos, WaMo... (Score:3, Insightful)
Kos suffered from a case of "Baghdad-Bobia", a rare condition where their shear willingness to believe blinds them to facts that are evident to everyone else. To the Kos, the CBS forged memos were real and still are. During the debate over typesetting, it was enough to show a typewriter with proportional spacing while everyone else was performing technical analysis on different spacing technologies.
The Washington Monthy seems alright though. Chomsky suffers from being Chomsky. And no one suffers from it more than him
Re:Not exactly "favorite", but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Bush acts like recovered alcoholics usually act. (Score:3, Insightful)
"... Bush is now alarmingly clean and sober..."
In my opinion, Bush acts exactly like recovered alcoholics usually act: The psychological effects of alcoholism provide a framework for understanding the Bush administration. [futurepower.org]. See points 1 through 13.
My guess is that you don't recognize the symptoms because you are not an alcoholic and don't know any. I'm not an alcoholic, but I had a friend who is. He taught me a lot, and then I asked numerous other alcoholics.
There's a saying at AA meetings: "Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic". But, of course, not always a problem drinker. A person's personality does not change just because he or she stopped drinking.
Re:The most arrested President and VP in history. (Score:1, Insightful)
Let me explain myself using a short sentence of one-syllable words: NO ONE CARES.
Bush has acknowledged many times that he wasn't a very good human being at an earlier stage of his life. By all accounts, he has changed: Even his political enemies in Texas acknowledge that he made a remarkable mid-life turnaround. He seems to sincerely believe that he was saved by turning to Jesus. Now, that might make you gag, and that's fine. But the point is, HE believes it, and there's simply no evidence of insincerity on this point.
The difference between him and Kerry is that Bush is not running based on who he was or what he did as a young man. On the other hand, Kerry is, and for good reason: That's all he really has to offer. Beyond his four-month service in Vietnam, he has a twenty-year record of relatively undistinguished service in the U.S. Senate, representing a small, liberal Northeast State. This is not a particularly harsh critique, but it neither is it a a recipe for electoral success, and he and his advisors know it.
Incidentally, I DO count Kerry's service in Vietnam as a small plus. It's just not enough to constitute the majority of his campaign platform.
To sum up:
Bush: No one cares about his actions as youth, because he a) has already acknowledged his failings, and b) is not basing his campaign on them anyway.
Kerry: People do care about his actions as a youth, because he a) is basing his campaign on them, and b) has not been forthcoming when parts of his record have been questioned.
- Alaska Jack
Re:Annenberg FactCheck (Score:4, Insightful)
MensNewsDaily.com [mensnewsdaily.com] collects pretty good commentary from a number of contributers on a number of issues that aren't forefront on the MSM. Their articles are short and poigniant. They have a forum you can discuss the articles in, so I would call that a blog.
Powerlineblog.com [powerlineblog.com] is pretty reasonable for commentary and was one of the big players in Rathergate. INDCJournal might be less reasonable but they have the quickest footwork in the business. They'll be the ones to call the sources, call experts, etc... Footwork that is a lost art in journalism. But their commentary is a bit off-balance and can often trip themselves up.
Little Green Footballs is often misunderstood, but I like them. They do their job very well. Even better though is Watch [windsofchange.net] which is devoid of the sophmoric commentary.
But then there is an upper eschelon, which FactCheck belongs to, as does Belmont Club [blogspot.com]. When Belmont treats an issue, you've got gold.
But the absolute MOAB of the blogosphere is Bill Whittle. He posts seldomly, and when he does it is incredibly long. But there is no better writer on the Internet that I've found. As it says on his website: If Steven den Best is Spock, he is the Captain Kirk [ejectejecteject.com]. Seriously there is no finer work on the internet than his "Strength" series, followed closely by "Empire".
For humor, Scrappleface and CoxandForkum are great. They not only give you the humor but they give you the stories that inspired it.
Re:Drudge Report (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as we are choosing between a Republican and a Democrat for every single office, we do not get such a meaningful choice.
Re:Not exactly "favorite", but... (Score:3, Insightful)
He wasn't, because he never said that the documents were genuine; he simply pointed out that the people who were arguing that they were forgeries were, frankly, full of it. In the long run, they may have been right, but their arguments weren't -- their arguments involved a great number of claims about what was and wasn't possible with contemporary machines, and most of those claims were simply wrong.
It may not seem like a big deal in retrospect, but there's a reason why we tell our students to show their work on word problems.
Re:Drudge Report (Score:3, Insightful)
I would argue the exact opposite. People outside the U.S. are far more likely to understand the positions of the presidential candidates (to take an example) than are Americans who are only exposed to media from their own country. The BBC, for example, is one of the most credible sources for American politics. The Canadian papers are good too. In the U.S. the press went downhill after they ditched the Fairness Doctrine. Now the sole objective of news programming is to make money, and you make money by telling people what they want to hear- and by telling them what you want them to hear so that you can make even more money. You can have it all. You can elect whoever you damn well please with no consequences. No matter how arrogant or incompetent he is, the world will still respect you and your country will still be #1 because you don't have to live with your decisions. People love to hear spin marketed as truth, especially if it avoids challenging their beliefs.
All the world sees of Bush is his speeches on Iraq or from F/911. They rarely get to see him as a human being while he's compaigning or mingling.
And irrelevant crap like that should influence your vote because...?
What he says about Iraq (for example) is exactly the sort of thing any voter would rightfully need to hear. Anything else- like how he mingles as a human being, or hunts, or fishes- is noise. Although it's interesting how Americans have become heavily indoctrinated into thinking that they're electing a fishing buddy here. It's what they're told is important. Do a Google News search for "Kerry" and "wind surfing", and you'll see why a proven incompetent like George W. Bush is still even in the race. The entire press minus CBS is gunning for him, and CBS just handed him a free pass on his festering Guard issue.
These are the people who think they should have a right to vote in the US elections.
Americans would make a better electoral decision- and probably vote more in line with their own interests to boot- if each one of them were assigned a random foreigner to tell him how to vote. Americans simply don't know what is going on in their own country.
I spoke to someone just back from the U.K. today at work. According to him, everyone across the political spectrum- practically without exception- is livid about this election. They believe it will affect their lives in the U.K. almost as much as it will affect Americans. But none of them can cast a vote against Bush. And until the campaign started, they had blithely assumed over there that Bush would surely lose the election because of Iraq.
Re:The most arrested President and VP in history. (Score:3, Insightful)
BUT. If Bush has lied in the present about his past; if he used his powers as governor of Texas to cover up embarrassing details of his TXANG service and "scrub" his record, Then I do care about it.
The misleading statements about TXANG aren't big lies Bush has told, but they're lies. And the coverup is a bigger deal. Both the coverup and the lies speak about Bush's character. Since Bush has made his character such an issue in the campaign, the lies and coverup matter.
Re:Instapundit hands down (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Drudge Report (Score:3, Insightful)
As a matter of fact I do read the DrudgeReport and it is not unbiased. Few organizations really are unbiased--bias is what reporting is mostly about today. In the case of the DrudgeReport it was fueled primarily by leaks from the conservative movement and as such has right-leaning tendencies. Nothing wrong with that at all--just isn't my taste.
My biases tend to make the DrudgeRETORT more entertaining and a better read. Your biases may push you toward the REPORT. So be it.
Now if you want to talk about partisan politics look no further than your own labels. It's this kind of mean-spirited debate that has fueled this most-concerning divide in our country. If you want to really discuss flip-flopping we can talk about our candidates. You say it's indecision while I say I'd rather have someone who can admit when he's wrong and made a mistake. I prefer someone who can listen to arguments and perhaps even change his opinion after a reasonable debate. I do not like a course of action that considers only one point of view and leaves no room for dissent. One candidate would have you think that there is only one answer to every question when we each know there often are many. You boil this quite complicated matter down to simple labels and name-calling. Is this what our national debate has been reduced to?
Re:Not exactly "favorite", but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. You seem to have misunderstood what I meant and read it as an equivalent to "when did you stop beating your wife". I meant that if the order had never been given, and I don't believe any such order was (it would have been redundant; it was already a requirement of pilots), shouldn't Bush have been able to say "that never happened"? I don't expect the president to deny every crazy allegation that gets cooked up, but I also don't expect him to hand them out to everybody in the press core, either. My point was that they knew it wasn't true, but didn't mind helping to further muddy the waters (which is what I think). But that is just speculation. And perhaps based on a false assumption, if you can provide a source for your "press corps policy." That would be new to me.
Actually, yeah, it is. If you want to be cleared to fly, you have to take a physical. If you aren't going to be required to fly (as Bush wasn't) and you don't want to hang on to your status for some other reason, you just don't take the physical. Common practice.
Look, just because you say it over and over doesn't make it true. It was a mandatory requirement and if a pilot failed to take it, a commander had to conduct an investigation and either convene a Flying Evaluation Board or forward a detailed report up the chain of command. See this document [nytimes.com], page 18. If you can actually site a source that is more credible, please do. Also, "common practice" isn't a defense. It may be common practice to cheat on your taxes, but you are still cheating on your taxes.
He didn't. When Bush requested a transfer to Alabama, he was told that he would be welcome but that due to a surplus of pilots who had rotated back home, there would be no place on the flightline for him. More pilots than aircraft, you see. More pegs than holes. Ergo, he would not be flying in Alabama. Ergo, no need to maintain flight status.
Here, read this [nytimes.com]. Bush first tried to transfer to a standby reserve unit, one that wasn't required to meet or train. He had signed up for ready reserve, so this was of course rejected in July (after he had already "transferred" himself to Alabama). He missed his physical in May. Also, although you present the most recent story, Bush has told many over the years.
In his "autobiography," he doesn't even mention the physical and instead says "I was almost finished with my commitment in the Air National Guard and was no longer flying because the F-102 jet I had trained in was being replaced by a different fighter."
Then, it was that he had missed his physical because he was going to get examined by his personal physician.
Now, it is because Alabama units weren't using the F-102.
As for the transfer itself, he didn't apply again until September.
Yet another untruth spread by you for purposes unknown. We have service and pay records indicating that not only did Bush show up for duty in Alabama, he fulfilled all of his requirements for service. In both 1972 and 1973, Bush earned 56 points, more than the required 50 points. You don't get points if you don't show up.
Whether or not he earned the required 48 points in a year has no bearing on whether or not he missed five months. The payroll records are for the last weekend in October. Look, the facts as released by the Whitehouse are that he missed five months, from the end of May to the end of October. The question is whether he ever showed up in Alabama as the payroll records show or not, because a bunch of ot
Re:Newbies: The major conservative/libertarian blo (Score:2, Insightful)
I skimped through the page, picking up this gem:
This should convince me of the "other side" not being moronic how? This is fascism, pure and simple.
Just being interested and morally high-horsed at the moment