Now, here’s something I thought I’d never see:  Andrew Sullivan has nominated Hugh Hewitt for an Yglesias Award for his defense of Sonia Sotomayor.

For those who don’t keep up with such things, “The Yglesias Award is for writers, politicians, columnists or pundits who actually criticize their own side, make enemies among political allies, and generally risk something for the sake of saying what they believe.”

What’s particularly ironic about this is that there’s also an award named after Hewitt:  “The Hewitt Award – named after the absurd partisan fanatic, Hugh Hewitt, is given for the most egregious attempts to label Barack Obama as un-American, alien, treasonous, and far out of the mainstream of American life and politics.”

This is not to be confused, incidentally, with “The Malkin Award – named after blogger, Michelle Malkin – [which] is for shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric. Ann Coulter is ineligible – to give others a chance.”  It’s a counterpart to “The Moore Award – named after film-maker, Michael Moore – [which] is for divisive, bitter and intemperate left-wing rhetoric.”

Will this require that the Hewitt Award be renamed?  Will Sullivan nominate himself for an Yglesias Award for nominating Hewitt for one?  Truly, the mind boggles.

Timothy Sandefur is embarrassed:

So I was watching this insane video of Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie discussing the War on Terrorism with Mos Def. And it’s amusing to laugh at the utterly hapless ignorance of “Mr. Def,” as he is repeatedly called—until you stop and wonder. Why is the black community not outraged by this? Bill Maher hosts a talk show to discuss the threat of Islamic terrorism and the Middle East, and he invites two world-renowned white male intellectuals and Mos Def? If this show had been choreographed by the Ku Klux Klan it could not have been more infuriating. Did Maher not have the phone number of a black intellectual? Were Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Orlando Patterson, Julian Bond, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter all busy?

Here’s the video:

While I agree entirely that this is an absurd pairing, it’s most definitely not a racist one.  Sandefur has apparently never seen “Real Time with Bill Maher.”  The premise of the show, from its inception more than six years ago, has been to pair politicos and pop culture figures in discussion.  (Whether the point of the exercise was to demonstrate that the latter are morons or that their opinions are equally valid, I could never determine.)

Here are the seven season openers.

February 21, 2003. Guests: Author Ann Coulter, actor Larry Miller, writer, radio host and professor Michael Eric Dyson, comedian Sarah Silverman, comedian Chris Rock.  Topics: The UN, Affirmative Action.

January 16, 2004. Guests: Ret. Gen. Wesley Clark, artist Moby, Rev. Al Sharpton, actor Ron Silver, Rep. Darrell Issa. Topics: American values, Iraq, MoveOn.org, environment.

February 18, 2005. Guests: Correspondent Lesley Stahl, actor Robin Williams, former H&HS Sec. Tommy Thompson, Sen. Joe Biden, and actor Don Cheadle. Topics: On protecting sources, Jeff Gannon, on Interrogating prisoners, Iraq elections, Darfur.

February 17, 2006. Guests: Sen. Russ Feingold, commentator Fred Barnes, actor Eddie Griffin, reporter Helen Thomas, Iraq advisor Dan Senor. Topics: Cheney shooting, on the Patriot Act, Bush, Mohammad cartoons.

February 16, 2007. Guests: Fmr Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, fmr Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, TV host Craig Ferguson; via satellite, fmr Sen. John Edwards and basketball player John Amaechi. Topics: Developments in North Korea, Iran, and Iraq; global warming; Mitt Romney and Mormonism; Al Franken Senate campaign.

January 11, 2008. Guests: Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, fmr Court TV anchor Catherine Crier, fmr Bush Press Secy Tony Snow, Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi (election correspondent); via satellite, humorist P.J. O’Rourke. Topics: New Hampshire primary, electronic voting machines, Iraq troop surge, subprime lending and prospects for economic recession.

February 20, 2009. Guests: Financial Times editor Chrystia Freeland, journalist Tina Brown, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA); via satellite, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), journalist Brigitte Gabriel The economy, President Obama’s first month in office.

See the Wikipedia episode guide if you fear the season openers are not representative.

The pairings are, in most if not all cases, patently absurd. They include plenty of famous white guys who would, on the face of things, seem to be woefully out of their elements and plenty of black guys who would seemingly mop of the floor with the competition.

For what it’s worth, Mr. Def was really good in this week’s “House.”

Megan McArdle calls for an extension of Godwin’s Law that would put an end to “using the word fascist to apply to the current, or indeed previous, administration.”

How is this helpful?  Has clarifying the distinction between fascism and socialism really added to most peoples’ understanding of what the Obama administration is doing?  All this does is drag the specter of Hitler into the conversation.  And the problem with Hitler was not his industrial policy–I mean, okay, fine, Hitler’s industrial policy bad, right, but I could forgive him for that, you know?  The thing that really bothers me about Hitler was the genocide.  And I’m about as sure as I can be that Obama has no plans to round up millions of people, put them in camps, and find various creative ways to torture them to death.

I agree with her conclusion but not her argument.

Last things first: The Final Solution was possible because Nazi Germany was a fascist state and therefore no one dared question Hitler’s orders.  Genocide is, however, not a necessary outgrowth of fascist ideology nor have most genocides been carried out by fascist governments. Benito Mussolini, the Founding Fascist (if you will) wasn’t a mass murderer and Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Omar al-Bashir aren’t fascists. The genocide was what made Hitler evil, not what made him a fascist.

With that out of the way, I completely agree that dubbing American presidents and their policies fascist is not a helpful way to advance the debate.   See, for example, my previous decisions of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism and the Obama cult of personality.  While there may be aspects of the Bush or Obama policies that have something akin with Communism or Nazism or Fascism or whathaveyou, those terms have so much extraneous baggage that the discussion invariably strays from the actual thing being criticized.  [As Dave Schuler points out in the comments, there's a name for this: "poisoning the well."]

We should be careful here to differentiate name-calling from the actual substantive argument.  It’s a very different thing to argue that bringing up the idea of nationalizing health care makes you a Marxist/Socialist/Communist than to argue that enacting a given policy will naturally lead down a road to ever-more-powerful government.   So, Friedrick Hayek’s Road to Serfdom is a different than Ann Coulter’s Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism or even Al Franken’s Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.

Meghan McCain, daughter of John, has managed to extend her fame into a 16th minute by antagonizing the likes of Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, the latter of which retorted that Ms. McCain was “too plus-sized to be a cast member on the television show The Real World.”

McCain then sent out a Twitter alert: “To all the curvy girls out there, don’t let anyone make you feel bad about your body. I love my curves and you should love yours too” and went “The View” to tell Ingraham to, “Kiss my fat ass.” Nice.

McCain’s stance against the ad hominem is dead-on:

Why, after all this time and all the progress feminists have made, is weight still such an issue? And in Laura’s case, why in the world would a woman raise it? Today, taking shots at a woman’s weight has become one of the last frontiers in socially accepted prejudice.

Beyond that — and I’ll be delicate here seeing as how I’m married and McCain was born a few months after I graduated high school — Meghan McCain is, um, not fat and, er, not particularly bad to look at.

GQ Photo

Jeff Bercovici notes Ann Coulter’s declining book sales:

Coulter’s latest book, Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, is something of a misfire by Coulterian standards. Of course, what constitutes a disappointment for Coulter would be a mega-hit for most authors; in its two months on sale, Guilty has sold 100,500 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan (a number that only reflects around 70 percent of actual sales).

But with it moving steadily down the best-seller list, it looks certain that Guilty will fall far short of matching her earlier results. Her 2006 polemic, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, sold 279,100 copies in hardcover, according to BookScan; Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror, published in 2003, sold 396,600 hardcover copies, and 2002’s Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, sold 333,100 copies, plus another 108,300 in paperback. (The two other books she published over that period, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) and If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans, are both collections rather than original works, so I left them out for the sake of apples-to-apples comparison.)

Bercovici muses, “Could it be that Barack Obama’s America has a smaller appetite for Coulter’s brand of take-no-prisoners, obey-no-logic conservatism?”  To have any basis for analysis, I’d have to know how other public affairs are doing in this economy as well as the trendlines for liberal and conservative polemnics.

Looking at the best-seller list above, I see that A BOLD FRESH PIECE OF HUMANITY, by Bill O’Reilly is at number 9; A SLOBBERING LOVE AFFAIR, by Bernard Goldberg is at 13; and Coulter’s at 18.   Judging by the authors and titles, no left-leaning polemnics are on the list at all.

To be sure, there are some books that should be popular with liberals: LAST LION, edited by Peter S. Canellos (Ted Kennedy’s career, with contributions from a team of six Boston Globe reporters) at 7;  OBAMA, with an introduction by Bill Keller and biographical text by Jill Abramson at 8; THE INAUGURAL ADDRESS 2009, by Barack Obama at 10; and THE RETURN OF DEPRESSION ECONOMICS AND THE CRISIS OF 2008, by Paul Krugman at 20.  But these are certainly of a different piece.   (Books by Bill Maher and Al Franken, for example, would be comparables.)

My guess re: Coulter, for what it’s worth, is that people are tired of her schtick.  Not right-wing screeds, necessarily — I predict plenty of success for those in the Age of Obama — but rather variations on the same theme by the same author.  It’s a rare author who can crank out a book every few months that’s worth reading.  Rarer still are authors who can do it using the same subject matter.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan, from whom I got the link, uses the news as an opportunity to  slam Coulter as a “cynical drag queen posing as a fascist.”

Former Texas congressman and minor Reagan administration official Mickey Edwards claims his old boss wouldn’t recognize the modern GOP were he alive today. He believes modern Republicans are simply reflexively anti-government with no agenda otherwise.

What would Reagan think of this? Wasn’t it he who warned that government is the problem?

[...]

Reagan, who spent 16 years in government, actually said this:

“In the present crisis,” referring specifically to the high taxes and high levels of federal spending that had marked the Carter administration, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He then went on to say: “Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work.” Government, he said, “must provide opportunity.” He was not rejecting government, he was calling — as Barack Obama did Tuesday — for better management of government, for wiser decisions.

But which Republicans are trying to do away with government?   Certainly, we didn’t see any attempt to dismantle any cabinet departments under the eight years of the Bush administration.  And the federal budget skyrocketed.   And we got the first installment of the almost-certainly-wasteful bailout boondoggle under Bush’s signature.

The Republican Party that is in such disrepute today is not the party of Reagan. It is the party of Rush Limbaugh, of Ann Coulter, of Newt Gingrich, of George W. Bush, of Karl Rove. It is not a conservative party, it is a party built on the blind and narrow pursuit of power.

Hmmm.  But I thought all Republicans cared about was making government smaller?  How do you do that while simultaneously undertaking a “blind and narrow pursuit of power”?!

And, um, Bush was twice elected president of the United States.   Promptly at the stroke of noon on January 20th, he turned over the keys to a successor from the opposition party who had pledged to undo many of Bush’s signature policies.    If that’s a “blind and narrow pursuit of power,” Republicans really suck at it.

Stacy McCain notes, too, that the faces of the party Edwards names are a disparate lot, indeed.

So, on the one hand you have two politicians and a political strategist — people directly involved in the politics and policy of the Republican Party — and on the other hand you have a radio star and an author. Between these two groups, a vast chasm exists. Much that President Bush did, with the advice of Rove, was adamantly opposed by Limbaugh and Coulter, and sometimes opposed by Gingrich as well.

Trying to lump these five very different characters into a single category is not an answer to the question, “What’s wrong with the GOP?” Rather, it is a response to the question, “Can you name five famous people hated by liberals?”

Quite.   Edwards continues:

One who listened to Barry Goldwater’s speeches in the mid-’60s, or to Reagan’s in the ’80s, might have been struck by their philosophical tone, their proposed (even if hotly contested) reformulation of the proper relationship between state and citizen. Last year’s presidential campaign, on the other hand, saw the emergence of a Republican Party that was anti-intellectual, nativist, populist (in populism’s worst sense) and prepared to send Joe the Plumber to Washington to manage the nation’s public affairs.

Umm, no, Joe the Plumber was a desparate symbol grasped by a desperate, floundering campaign to demonstrate elitist Democrats who didn’t understand how their policies would impact the little man; he was never going to be put in charge of anything and turned out to be a rather ridiculous symbol to boot.

As for Goldwater and Reagan, they were outsiders railing against the system.  And Goldwater’s philosophy was soundly defeated at the polls by a lifelong machine politico.   Because Republicans had been in the ascendency since Reagan, they’ve been running on his fumes ever since.  (Yes, Bill Clinton won two elections but he did it as a “New Democrat” who promised that “the era of Big Government is over” and to “end welfare as we know it.”  Further, Newt Gingrich — another one of those conservative intellectuals with Big Ideas — led a resurgence in the party’s fortunes in Congress two years after Clinton’s election.)  It’s a good bet that the next Republican president will be a leader with a convincing message that speaks to the future.

The hottest story at memeorandum today is a remake of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” with Barack Obama in the Sidney Poitier role and George Will as Spencer Tracy.  Or something like that, anyway.    Obama had supper at Will’s Chevy Chase manse and Bill Kristol and David Brooks were on the guest list.   As John Kennedy might have observed, this was the greatest assembly of political minds since Jefferson dined alone.  The menu and details of the conversation were not disclosed.

Most commenters are not surprised and some, like Dan Riehl, is surprised that anyone’s surprised.   As Marc Ambinder observes, “establishment opinion matters to the Obama communications team.”    As well he should.  He’s never going to get good press from Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh but Will, Kristol, Krauthammer, Brooks and others who make their living as quasi-academic pundits can be counted on to give him a fair hearing.  And, besides, it’s harder to write mean things about people you’ve actually met and like.  And, as Steven Taylor notes, the tone the chattering classes take “is really going to matter in the coming weeks and months as the stimulus package is constructed and sold to the public.”

Sam Stein, debunking rumors that Limbaugh was in attendance, observes, “Obama has pledged to be a uniter once in office. He’s also said he is willing to take policy suggestions from any source, regardless of ideological affiliation, as long as they work. So far, he’s living up to his word.”

Riehl’s, right, too that, “If you believe Right versus Left down here on the Potomac is at each other’s throats the way the base sometimes is, you probably think professional wrestling is real, too.”   Dan thinks that’s why nothing ever changes, which is perhaps true.  But it’s also the only way anything gets done.  The Framers devised a system precisely aimed at making it very hard to do much of anything without consensus.

Indeed, even kos himself is fine with it.

Why wouldn’t he talk to conservative writers? It’s not as if he shied away from the other side during the campaign, even going on Bill O’Reilly to get yelled at by that old gasbag. Let him try to work his charm with that crowd. There’s little downside.

If highly educated elites can’t even have a civil dinner conversation across the political divide, we’ve got a problem.

Photo: Think Progress.

It never fails that, as Election Day draws close, the supporters of the candidate trailing in the polls start telling us that the polls aren’t accurate.  Part of this is Pauline Kaelism, with most people associating with likeminded people and therefore floored that more than half the country could possibly prefer the other guy when everyone they know supports their guy.   Part of it is selective memory of past polling.

RealClearPolitics, a Republican-leaning site which popularized the aggregation of polls to minimize variation among individual surveys, shows Obama with a wide national lead and leading each and every battleground state.  Further, every single national poll shows Obama ahead; the only question is by how much.

The new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the public survey I most trust (both because I know Neil Newhouse personally but also because both he and his Democratic cohort, Peter Hart, make their living doing survey research for high level political candidates and therefore have to get it right) has Obama up 10 among registered voters and up in every category that decides elections:  “Obama’s current lead is also fueled by his strength among independent voters (topping McCain 49 to 37 percent), suburban voters (53 to 41), Catholics (50 to 44) and white women (49 to 45).”  A new Pew poll also has Obama’s lead widening and, more importantly, showing increasing doubt about McCain’s age, judgment, and campaign style.

Ann Coulter recently argued that national polls historically undercout Republicans, an argument I’ve seen echoed in my comments section of late.

Reviewing the polls printed in The New York Times and The Washington Post in the last month of every presidential election since 1976, I found the polls were never wrong in a friendly way to Republicans. When the polls were wrong, which was often, they overestimated support for the Democrat, usually by about 6 to 10 points.

The trouble with that is she then demonstrates her conclusion by cherry picking individual polls that understated the final Republican vote count, choosing a Gallup poll here, an AP poll there, and a NYT poll elsewhere.  When, though, was the last time that the aggregated polls were significantly off in a presidential election?

Michael Barone, a Republican-leaning analyst who’s nonetheless much respected for his insights, argues that yes, we can trust the polls but that we have to understand what we’re looking at.  He’s right that polling is more art than science in close elections.  There are always judgment calls to be made and this contest brings up several known unknowns.

• Are the likely voter screens any good? This is perhaps the hardest job professional pollsters have.  It’s very difficult to distinguish attitude from action.  Everyone who says they’ll vote for a given candidate won’t.  This election, with it’s “enthusiasm gap” makes it especially difficult.  Usually, we figure that if people have voted in previous elections, they’ll vote this time and, if they haven’t voted before, they won’t do it this time, either.

• Will Obama’s young supporters actually turn out? They usually don’t but they seem unusually enthusiastic this go-round.

• Will people actually vote for the black guy when it comes down to it? All indications are that they will and serious analysis of the “Bradley effect” seems to undercut the idea that it ever existed.

• Will the polls themselves affect the outcome? Will would-be McCain voters sit out the election, depressed by the conventional wisdom that their guy has lost?  Will there be a bandwagon effect with undecidededs swinging toward Obama so they can be on the winning side?  Will Obama supporters get overconfident and not show up?  Will these factors cancel each other out?  We honestly don’t know.

• Will early voting impact the race? I voted last Friday in Virginia, a battleground state.  There was a short line.  Many states now allow early balloting, either in person or by mail.  We really don’t know what this means for the dynamics of the race.  The conventional wisdom, though, is that it helps the Democrats.  First, Democrat-leaners are less likely to show up on Election Day and wait in line.  Anything that makes it more convenient to vote, then, should help the Democrats.  Second, Obama has been ahead for a while.  People who vote for him now can’t be affected by McCain’s advertising or his next “Hail Mary” play.

These factors and others are hard to calculate.  The bottom line, though, is that Obama has a significant lead both nationally and in the state-by-states.  For McCain to win, the pollsters are going to have to be wrong in quite a few states — or voter attitudes are going to  have to change significantly in less than two weeks.

UPDATE: Rick Moran argues, in a post titled “THE GOP AND THE ‘DEAD PARROT’ SCENARIO,” that the best bet is that the polls understate Obama’s numbers.   For those looking for a more upbeat assessment, D.J. Drummond provides it with “Gallup and New Coke.”  I share Andrew Sullivan’s assessment of the latter, unfortunately.

Aaron Brazell is doing some research on the evolution of blogging in recent years and has asked for my input. [Update: The result, "Political Blogging 2.0," is now up.]

I started OTB in January 2003 and have seen a lot of change. I should note at the outset that my experience is almost entirely with the political blogosphere, a tiny fraction of the whole enterprise, and that my observations mostly apply in that realm.

Blogging for Dollars: When I started, even the likes of Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit and the then-independent Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish were hobby blogs. People put up PayPal “tip jars” and, in Sully’s case, held periodic “fund drives” but there was no way to make a living at the enterprise unless you were Mickey Kaus.

Henry Copeland introduced BlogAds in 2002 but it would be some time before it came to fruition. Others would follow. Additionally, dozens of bloggers have “taken the Boeing” and been hired by magazines, think tanks, and other organizations as bloggers or, in some cases, had their blogs absorbed outright.

There’s even a cottage industry, exemplified by Darren Rowse at ProBlogger and Brian Clark’s Copyblogger, of How to Make Money Blogging blogs.

It should be noted that only a relative handful of the millions of blogs out there are making serious income. Then again, those are (mostly) the blogs that have a wide audience. Many have speculated that monetization of blogs would turn us into nothing but small-staff versions of mainstream press, introducing fears about alienating potential advertisers and bringing pressure to write about things that will generate pageviews. Some of that has happened, I think, although indirectly. Certainly, many bloggers (following advice from Rowse, Clark, and others) are altering content to maximize search engine traffic for purposes of driving ad revenue. Then again, people were doing a lot of that even in the hobby blogging days because high SiteMeter numbers were a status symbol and there’s a competitive aspect to the blogging “game.”

Blogging Communties Daily Kos was already one of the more popular blogs when I started. Then, though, it was just Markos doing his takes on the issues plus an interwoven group blog called Political State Report. Soon, though, he introduced his Diaries, allowing readers to set up blogs-within-the-blog. His site traffic exploded and others have followed. This was the basis of what would be dubbed “The Netroots.” Diarists that distinguished themselves moved to the front pages and graduated to their own blogs.

Blogging Activism In early 2003, most of the top tier blogs were right-of-center opinion and observation blogs. Within a year, that had changed radically. Through a combination of the Left forming communities much earlier and with much more success than the Right and the fact that Republicans controlled the White House and Congress and thus energized an angry opposition, sites supporting Democrats — and, mostly, more staunchly “progressive” candidates — began to dominate the political blogosphere.

Blogs, especially on the Left, started raising money — serious money — for political candidates and seeing themselves as major players in the process. An increasing number of the most popular blogs saw themselves as leaders in a Movement rather than as mere commentators on public affairs.

Polarization of the Blogosphere While there are more thoughtful, moderate tone blogs now than ever, the trend has been toward harsh polemics. Many of the top political bloggers have come on to the scene since I started and almost all who have risen to the top have been more Ann Coulter or Michael Moore than George Will or David Broder.

Syndication and Aggregation While Real Simple Syndication (RSS) technology existed when I started OTB, almost no one was actually reading sites that way. Most people were still reading sites via bookmarks or following blogroll links from one site to another. Now, most regular readers are keeping up with blogs through some sort of feed reader and clicking in to the site itself only to participate in the comments section discussion or (in the case of partial feeds) to finish reading entries that interest them.

A related development, which applies mostly to bloggers rather than average readers, is the rise of sites like Memeorandum, which aggregate the stories and blog posts generating the most buzz. This has pushed bloggers away from their old reading lists and into a more homogeneous “Story of the Day” mode. While convenient, it has made the medium more similar than it once was to the mainstream press.

Blogging Goes Mainstream After several years of being a curiosity, people have finally stopped asking “What is a blog, anyway?” Media stories about blogs and bloggers have finally stopped defining the term (usually badly). Further, aside from a hardcore audience of regular visitors to a site, most people read blogs in the same way they read other Web content, accessing individual pages via search referrals or hyperlinks on other pages, and don’t necessarily even understand that they’re at a blog.

Blogger Outreach Bloggers, especially those with a relatively high profile, have increasingly become targets for PR firms, political operatives, and even major media outlets eager to cash in on the buzz. Just about every presidential, congressional, or gubernatorial candidate now has an effort to court bloggers for favorable coverage. We’re also the target of lobbying in a way that the mainstream press isn’t, since we’re in the opinion business.

One outgrowth of this is the hiring of established bloggers, especially activist bloggers, as campaign staff and blogger outreach directors for PR firms. While providing another avenue for bloggers to make a living with their writing skills, it’s a development that has some potential ethical complications. Bloggers who work briefly for a campaign, especially for a controversial candidate, tend to be forever tarred with that association and readers naturally wonder whether they’re getting unvarnished views.

Blog Parasites: Spammers and Scrapers A more insidious way that non-bloggers are trying to cash in on the rise of blogs is using technological means to make money.

The most longstanding is spamming of comment sections and trackback links to game the search engines, getting unearned links to their sites and thus increasing their rankings. This has gotten more sophisticated over time and created a spy-vs-spy game in which the spammers invent new technologies to counter ever-better spam filters. OTB gets thousands a day, almost all of which are caught by our filters. The price we pay, though, is wasted time policing these activities and ever-more-cumbersome measures that make commenting more difficult for site readers.

A more recent phenomenon is the rise of “splogs,” auto-generated blogs that are created by stealing material off of RSS feeds for popular blogs. The splogs make money from unearned page impressions generated by search engines, drawing traffic and money away from sites that actually created the content. Even worse, the splogs often wind up ranked higher in the search engines than the original sites, since the splogs tend to micro-focus on a handful of keywords, and the original sites actually get penalized in the rankings because of “duplicate content.”

UPDATE: Bill Quick, who coined the term “blogosphere,” alludes to another big change in the comments below:

The Rise of the Group Blog: In early 2003, the number of multi-author blogs was tiny. Winds of Change was perhaps the only one wide a wide audience at the time. Now, a large percentage of the top blogs have multiple posters even if, like Daily Pundit and OTB, the blog founder still does most of the posting. Not done well, this can dilute the quality of the blog, especially if the other members are not good writers or there’s no coherent voice. Done well, though, it can provide synergy, bringing together many talented writers who might otherwise not produce enough content to keep a blog viable. Crooked Timber is perhaps the best example.

Mark Halperin reports that John Edwards “has real questions about [Barack] Obama’s toughness, his readiness for the office. He has real doubts about Obama, not just as a president, but as a general election candidate.” Apparently, Edwards summed this up with a one-word epithet that is also used to describe kitty cats and female sex parts.

Halperin has subsequently apologized for his “lack of judgment” repeating said word on live radio but Ace thinks he should instead apologize for “a stunning lack of irony.”

If nothing else, this should give Ann Coulter some new material.

Ann Coulter’s speech this year wasn’t on the official CPAC docket but was instead sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation and others. Still, there was a packed house with long lines that I wouldn’t have bothered to stand in were I not able to bypass them with press credentials.

As is her shtick, she threw plenty of grenades and said things that were outrageous for their own sake. Still, nothing that rose to the level of her recent CPAC bromides. Indeed, the whole thing seemed rather tired. She needs some new material.

Presumably, her attempt to make news by being “bad” this year was her recycling of the “B. Hussein Obama” bit. She referred to him as “the least dangerous Hussein I know.”

Her opener was a reprise of her John Edwards “faggot” line from last year, saying that Hillary Clinton had to change her campaign theme song because “I Am Woman” was already taken by Edwards.

The most clever line of the afternoon, repeated with a handful of variants, was her reference to Clinton with “Now that I’m on her team.”

Also on the Obama front, she said that he’s been “Coasting on his record” of his “greatest achievement,” that of “being born half black.” Contrary to the media nonsense about how Americans wouldn’t vote for him because he’s black, she observed that he wouldn’t even be a candidate otherwise. “He’d be Dick Durban without the experience.”

She spent most of her speech attacking John McCain and explaining why she’d prefer Clinton. She wonders who it is that would vote for McCain who didn’t vote for Bob Dole, the last war hero to run against a Clinton. (Of course, Hillary lacks much of her husband’s charisma.)

Her best line in this regard is that McCain would consult with his good friend Teddy Kennedy on issues while she’s “pretty sure Hillary won’t be listening to Teddy Kennedy anymore.”

Her nastiest line in that regard was that McCain would spend his term worrying about his “New York Times obituary.” That got mostly groans.

She allowed that she might vote for McCain if he chose Romney as his VP.

Overall, though, she views McCain as the “return of the Rockefeller Republicans” and says “it’s as if 1964 never happened.”

UPDATE: Others who were there give their takes: Ace O’Spades, John Hawkins, Dan Riehl, and Think Progress.

Event co-sponsor Townhall has the video.

I’ve been invited once again to be an official blogger at CPAC, the premier gathering of American conservatives sponsored by the American Conservative Union. I’m swamped with a project at work but hope to be able to make it to a few sessions; thankfully, it’s only a couple miles away from the office.

Among the speakers on the conference agenda are President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and all four of the remaining Republican presidential contenders. Surprisingly, a person not on the list is Ann Coulter, a regular headliner who has been given a prime speaking slot the last several years.

As many will recall, Coulter called John Edwards a “faggot” at least year’s convention, prompting condemnation from the presidential candidates who had attended the invention and a letter from the official bloggers urging ACU not to invite her back in the future.

Justin Elliott of Mother Jones interviewed ACU president David Keene about the decision:

“We just decided that, given the agenda and all that we had going on this year, there was not a reason to invite her.” Asked if the decision was related to the uproar Coulter’s remarks caused last year, Keene demurred. “The cosponsoring groups decided she was not high on their list,” Keene said. “She wasn’t suggested this year. That doesn’t mean she won’t be invited again next year.”

As I learned yesterday afternoon via a CPAC bloggers listserv, Coulter will in fact be around CPAC, attending an invitation-only event sponsered by Young America’s Foundation and the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute at the Omni-Shoreham, the conference hotel. Elliot suggests this is hypocritical and quotes someone claiming that CPAC was essentially organized around Coulter’s speech to let attendees go. The problem with that, though, is that there’s pretty much always an end to the formal festivities at 5 to allow various pre-banquet cocktail parties sponsored by various groups to take place. One of those is a CLP Reception which will host a Coulter book signing.

Is CPAC having it both ways? To some extent, yes.

Declining to give Coulter the CPAC microphone is a commendable move. Would I have preferred that they also declined to allow affiliates to sponsor her book signings? Or at least keep said event off the official schedule? Sure. But Keene is in a tricky position.

CPAC’s attendees are overwhelmingly very young — college kids and others in their early 20s. Coulter is undeniably appealing to that group. Indeed, her red meat, bomb throwing style would have been much more appealing to me twenty years ago. Many of these people are traveling across to country to see and hear all the famous conservatives that they usually only get to see on television. They’d have been very disappointed to miss out on one of the biggest stars.

Goldberg, Kevin Holtsberry, and Steve Dillard take exception to the assertion in my recent post on The Conservative Minority that “the modern Conservative Moment seems to be dominated by the shrill nonsense of Coulter and Jonah Goldberg and Michael Savage and Neil Boortz.”

First, it’s a good sign that conservatives at least recognize that being associated with these people is counterproductive.

As for Goldberg, the inclusion is perhaps too broad. He’s taken over as editor of NRO’s The Corner and he’s one of the more temperate voices there. Stylistically, he’s not a bomb thrower in the mold of Coulter, let alone a flaming nutbag like Savage.

He’s on the list almost exclusively by virtue of his book, Liberal Fascism, and the recent controversy over it. While I get the desire to rebut the notion that Fascism is right-wing phenomenon and therefore somehow comparable to American mainstream conservatism, the argument that American liberals are proto-Fascists is quite silly. The use of inflammatory titles, while an excellent publicity vehicle for selling books, is decidedly unhelpful if one’s purpose is to advance serious argument.

There is, however, a stark difference between Coulter, who seriously argues that liberals are traitors, fascists, or whathaveyou, than cutesy publicity stunts.

I feel like I’m beating a dead horse on the issue, but the continued high pitched battle between conservative Republicans who have rallied around conservative-come-lately Mitt Romney in hopes of defeating Teddy Kennedy’s Good Friend John McCain remains the most interesting story this election cycle.

Conservatives Love Romney

The most recent Rasmussen poll shows that “Romney leads by sixteen percentage points among conservatives while McCain has a two-to-one advantage among moderate Primary Voters.” Of course, Rasmussen shows Romney and McCain tied nationally, whereas Gallup and Fox show McCain leading by 20 and 28 points, respectively. Even Michelle Malkin acknowledges that the poll is “the anomaly.”

Still, that Romney is outpolling McCain among self-identified conservatives is a consistent trend. We’ve seen it time and again in the exit polls.

John Hinderaker asserts that, “as the primary season draws to a close, most conservatives are coalescing around Mitt Romney.” Bill Quick believes we are now engaged in “the War for the GOP” with the “GOP establishment attempting to remake the party in its preferred liberal-conservative image – an image in which the ‘conservative’ part is mostly window dressing for the suckers.

Republicans Voting for McCain, Not Romney

Yet, for reasons Eric Kleefeld lays out nicely, McCain is likely to emerge Tuesday night as the prohibitive favorite to win the Republican nomination. AllahPundit, who strongly prefers Romney but maintains a realistic outlook, concurs.

So, we have two countervailing trends:

• Conservatives prefer Romney over McCain, hands down

• McCain is winning Republican primaries against Romney

This, incidentally, despite Romney having outspent McCain by ridiculous margins in television advertising.

What is one to conclude from this?

Perhaps “conservatives” are now a minority, even among Republican primary voters? If so, given that there are virtually no conservatives remaining in the Democratic Party these days and that voters who aren’t aligned with either party are almost by definition non-ideological, that would mean that conservatives are a small minority, indeed, among the American electorate.

Alternatively, perhaps the definition of “conservative” has become so narrow and esoteric that it’s become virtually meaningless?

When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 and again in 1984, he did it by putting together a coalition of small government conservatives, social conservatives, and anti-communists. He famously engendered the support of blue collar folks who were dubbed “Reagan Democrats.” Most of that group simply became Reagan Republicans.

Has the country gotten that much less conservative since then?

In some ways, yes. We’re much more tolerant on lifestyle issues, notably the role of women and acceptance of homosexuality, than we were a generation ago. Abortion has now been legal for 35 years, not a mere seven. We’re also much further removed from the days of the military draft, which means fewer of our menfolk have served.

But, fundamentally, we’re the same country we were in 1980. We’re still the most religious country in the developed world and probably the most patriotic. We’re more citified and more homogenized than we were but we still cling to the John Wayne rugged individualist mythos to a large degree.

The conservative majority has become a Conservative minority.

The Conservative Movement has morphed from a handful of intellectual true believers trying to shape the debate into something approaching a civil religion with loyalty tests and a clericy that has the power to excommunicate.

John McCain was part of the 1980 wave that rolled into Congress on Ronald Reagan’s coattails. Indeed, McCain was among those Reagan was honored to stand with at 1974’s CPAC convention. But someone with an 82 percent lifetime ACU rating is considered a traitor to the cause. Much better, apparently, to flip 180 degrees on election eve and spout the right Party Line talking points.

As I wrote last year from CPAC, when throngs of so-called conservatives lined up for Ann Coulter’s autograph moments after she referred to John Edwards as a “faggot,” “Somehow, I can’t imagine Ronald Reagan being pleased.” Yet, the modern Conservative Moment seems to be dominated by the shrill nonsense of Coulter and Jonah Goldberg[*] and Michael Savage and Neil Boortz. In short, the Conservative Movement is no longer particularly “conservative” at all.

_______

[*] UPDATE: See Goldberg, Coulter, and Savage for a follow-up to this point.

Judging by the enemies he’s making, I’m liking John McCain more with each passing day.

Ann Coulter says she’d “campaign for” Hillary Clinton, who she thinks “is more conservative.”

Meanwhile, Glenn Beck is railing against “Juan McCain” for his outreach to Hispanics.

Thankfully, this over-the-top stuff is being rejected by most conservatives.

AllahPundit calls Coulter’s statement “Madness” and Sean Hackbarth, late of the Fred Thompson campaign, says she is “officially an idiot.”

RedState’s Leon H Wolf warns commenters that they may “complain vociferously about McCain, Bush, or anyone else’s position on immigration” but they will be banned from the site if they do so in racist terms.

Even Jonah Goldberg, hardly the voice of rational discourse while hawking a book about how American liberals are Fascists, thinks “the notion that, variously, conservatism, the country or the party are doomed if he’s the nominee or the president is pretty absurd.”

Moreover, he makes an interesting point:

I think both the GOP and the conservative movement could benefit from a slightly more adversarial relationship. George W. Bush moved the party leftward and/or damaged the image of the GOP in many respects precisely because he was given the benefit of the doubt by conservatives who saw him as “one of us.” It’s not obvious to me that having a more transactional relationship with a Republican president would be altogether bad for the country, the party or the conservative movement.

As I’ve noted many times before, the mainstream of both major American parties would fit comfortably within the British Conservative Party. Indeed, within its right wing. So, the choice between Hillary Clinton and John McCain, if it comes to that, isn’t one between extremes. Contra Victor David Hanson, the “gulf” between them is hardly “Grand-Canyon like.”

That’s not to say, however, that the election is unimportant or that there are not significant differences. Clinton isn’t Barack Obama, the most liberal senator in a recent National Journal survey, but she is #16. The full chart apparently is available only to subscribers, so I can’t find a comparable score for McCain. We do know, however, that his lifetime conservative rating using the same index is 71.8. This compares favorably with Tom Tancredo, a darling of the Borders Are Our Only Issue conservatives, who rates 75.9.

Additionally, from a conservative perspective, there’s another advantage to voting for McCain: You know that he actually agrees with you on the issues where he says he agrees with you. Whether he’s 71.8 percent conservative or 82.6 (American Conservative Union), it’s hard to accuse him of pandering. With Clinton, conversely, one can be excused for wondering if she’s just positioning herself for maximum political benefit.

UPDATE (Alex Knapp): Regarding the National Journal survey naming Obama “the most liberal Democrat”, Steve Benen has an excellent post explaining exactly why this is a ridiculous finding (since I don’t think anyone seriously thinks that Obama is more liberal than, say, Russ Feingold):

What’s more, Obama was the 16th most liberal senator in 2005, and the 10th most liberal in 2006, before racing to the front of the pack in 2007. National Journal suggests this has something to do with Obama moving to the left to curry favor with Democratic primary voters.

But there’s a more logical explanation: Obama missed a whole lot of votes in 2007 — he’s been on the campaign trail — but was on the floor for many of the biggest, most consequential votes. In nearly every instance, he voted with the party. And with that, voila! The most liberal senator in America.

Except that’s not much of a standard. The rankings use an amorphous meaning of the word “liberal,” and the percentage doesn’t take missed votes into account at all (which also helps explain why Kerry nabbed the top spot four years ago)

Brian Beutler further elaborates:

Yes, passion is hard to gauge. But instead of trying (by, say, logging hours spent speaking at hearings, from the chamber, etc., and assigning those a value to be paired with voting records) National Journal relies instead on a weird system by which a senator who takes the “liberal” position 95 times out of 100 is somehow less liberal than his colleague who takes the liberal position 48 times out of 50.

Most of these types of “voting guides” are dubious, and tend to say more about the groups promoting them than they do about the politicians they are ostensibly describing.

UPDATE (James Joyner): Fair point on the various rating scales. There are all manner of problems — What counts as “conservative” vice “liberal”? What to do with missed votes? — but they have the advantage of being independent measures. National Journal or ACU or whathaveyou have a system in place and it serves as a means of comparison. It’s not perfect, by any means, but it’s preferable than basing one’s view on two or three controversial votes, which is what campaigns seem to focus on.

UPDATE II (James Joyner): Sociologist Kieran Healy endorses Lewis and Poole’s Optimal Classification ranking as a better alternative. By this measure, Obama is merely the 21st most liberal senator and Clinton is 25th. McCain is 94th.