Best of OTB – May 20, 2003

As part of a continuing series, I'll be highlighting material buried deep in the OTB archives that I still find interesting. From four years ago, today: "LEVEL ORANGE" is a fisking of the color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System which has, to this day, varied only between Yellow and Orange. In "INTELLIGENT DESIGN," I mediated a debate on the evidence for ...

Best of OTB – May 19, 2003

As part of a continuing series, I'll be publishing excerpts and re-posts of material buried deep in the OTB archives. Some will be profound and some silly; some will demonstrate keen insights and others painful errors. While I would have personally been in favor of the war simply to eliminate the threat of Saddam’s acquiring WMD and ...

Best of OTB – May 18, 2003

As part of a continuing series, I'll be highlighting material buried deep in the OTB archives that I still find interesting. Four years ago today was a Sunday and blogging was light and the pickings slim. Nonetheless, I'll carry on: "JEFFORDS DENOUNCES DNC" pondered the mind of Jumpin' Jim Jeffords. "MUSIC IS HELL" was one of OTB's first ...

Best of OTB – May 17, 2003

As part of a continuing series, I'll be highlighting material buried deep in the OTB archives that I still find interesting. The blog started in January 2003 and there have been over 16,000 posts; some of them have to be good! "GAY STRATEGERY" takes a look at a Kevin Drum proposal to make gay marriage the centerpiece of the ...

Free Speech Includes Offensive Jokes!

Big Tent Democrat rightly excoriates Frank Rich for hypocrisy in denouncing Don Imus only after he could no longer benefit from using his show for self-promotion. His conclusion, however, is troubling: And to call this a free speech issue is a joke. We're supposed to worry about the freedom to tell racist and sexist jokes? Hell yes. Indeed, if "free speech" ...

Professionalization of the Blogosphere

Conn Carroll believes the blogosphere is increasingly moving away from its amateur roots: Looking at the top 10 most trafficked blogs, only DailyKos, Crooks and Liars, Michelle Malkin, and Instapundit started out as lone blogger-hobbyists. The other 6 (including The Huffington Post, The Corner, and Think Progress) are either planned business enterprises, outgrowths of existing MSM pubs, or online presences of ...

Those Rich, Crazy Americans

Reacting to the contrast between Karl Rove's purported campaign strategy of emphasizing "terrorism and turnout" and Brad DeLong's hope that the GOP will begin "building pragmatic technocratic policy coalitions from the center outward," Kevin Drum responds, Over the past 30 years the Republican Party has gone from Gerald Ford to Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich to Dick Cheney — i.e., ...

Declaration of Independence: A Fisking

Today marks the 230th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Jim Lynch sent out an email to several of us asking us to blog the event as if we were there. Thus, the following Fisking of the Declaration. When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the ...

Congressmen Question FBI Raid on Jefferson’s Office

This weekend's raid on the Capitol Hill office of Rep. William Jefferson, who the FBI filmed taking bribes last summer and whose freezer was full of the proceeds of same, has lawmakers on both sides of the aisle screaming about Separation of Powers. WaPo fronts a story by Dan Eggen and Shailagh Murray. An unusual FBI raid of a Democratic congressman's office ...

Blue Nation

Chris Bowers, long irritated by the Red-Blue maps that came out after the 2000 and 2004 elections that "over-emphasized large, thinly populated expanses of land" is pleased to turn the tables with these county-by-county and state-by-state maps based on President Bush's popularity levels. "It is a blue nation. I'd love to see these map on television and in newspapers for a ...

Abolishing the Electoral College by Stealth

A group called Campaign for the National Popular Vote has been pushing a plan to essentially do away with the Electoral College without amending the Constitution. I read about it in The New Yorker a while back and it's apparently gaining some steam. Basically, they want the president to be the winner of the most votes nationwide rather ...

Blogging, Red Meat, and Reasoned Debate

In his discussion of the Michelle Malkin-SAW contact information kerfuffle, Dan Riehl makes a point that I wanted to address separately Still, only faulting Michele isn't really fair. I believe she's the most frequently read conservative politics only blogger. Things like that happen for a reason. What it ultimately speaks to is the current state of blogs, blogging and blog readers ...

Reading the Other Side

Jane Hamsher takes John Cole to task for attributing to the "Jane Hamshers of the left" things that Jane Hamsher herself never wrote. Glenn Greenwald emails congratulating her for "shocking, relentless (and appropriate) tenacity" and argues this incident is emblematic of those who "hate the blogosphere because it holds them accountable." While I suspect it's more an example ...

Our Loonies Versus Their Loonies

John Aravosis contends that liberals are much less angry and nasty than their conservative counterparts. They have terrorists - pro-lifer murderers. Who do we have on the liberal side who outright murders their political opponents? Well, there are various ecoterrorist groups like the Animal Liberation Front, the Animal Rights Militia, Greenpeace, and others. The various groups that spike trees to injure loggers. ...

Bloggers, Public Relations, and Full Disclosure

Glenn Reynolds (here and here) points to a budding controversy about bloggers running with stories based on tips from public relations firms without disclosing the source of the tip. The apparent spark for this is an impending story by Michael Barbaro, who writes anti-Wal-Mart stories for the NYT and is apparently steamed that he is getting slammed by some ...