I find it funny how sometimes I write something, have someone else fervently disagree with it, and then within hours get real-life confirmation that I was right all along.

The left is an anti-intellectual movement, but with the ironic twist that they believe they are completely rational

Juan Cole raising money for radical Islam-->

Case in point--the moonbats have been completely and utterly humiliated by actual events. Not to put too fine a point on it, but basically they've been wrong about everything. Not surprisingly, they'll never admit that, in spite of the evidence of their eyes. This is how the left rolls.

Juan Cole is decrying all the neocons he's forced to compete with in the 2008 Weblog Awards for Best Middle East or Africa Blog. He thinks Helena Cobban -- a deranged Hezbollah supporter -- should have been nominated instead of someone like me. He's worked his leftist readers into a tizzy, and they're putting him over the top. I don't really care if I win this award; I won it last year. But Juan Cole certainly doesn't deserve it.

Michael Totten, like Michael Yon and several others, actually went to Iraq and Afghanistan, to report first hand what they saw, yet Cole thinks some whack job with the right, or rather "left" ideology should get the award. Consequently, he's started a moonbat swarm to rig the vote.

You know what they say about the value of turnout at the polls.

Vote for Mike here.

I recall when I saw my first fax machine. I was at the offices of a Japanese distributor in Chicago and couldn't identify the odd piece of office hardware, so I asked. My host patiently explained that he could convert a document into electronic form and send it over telephone line to his home office.

I didn't get it. I couldn't understand how this was an improvement over telex or telephone. Yeah, I know--stupid.

Twitter was like that fax machine when I first heard about it--I didn't get it, but I was chastened by the fax machine experience, so I've been playing with it for a couple of months, and now--you can too.

Lemme 'splain.

Twitter is essentially a short instant message that you can get by email, text on your phone or instant message. Its no more that 140 characters long, which is too long for bloviating, but long enough to get the gist of something.

Originally designed for social networking purposes, its a great way to get breaking news or a heads up on what's happening right now. With that in mind, I've set up a Twitter account that you--our dear readers, can subscribe to for terse, informative, and selective updates--usually about one a day except in exigent circumstances.

All the cool people are doing it...

I was surprised to log into MovableType (the software this blog is written with) and not see any comments. A little closer look made it clear that there were comments, but that they remained unpublished or junked.

At first I thought there was a problem, so I tested the comment system, which allows your comments to be instantly posted (or nearly so) if you can prove that you are human by answer the question at the bottom of the comment text box.

It works fine folks, so I have to assume the question is too hard. What do cows drink?

Water.

Nevermind, I'll change the challenge question...

As my spouse would say, a Radcliffe day in Chicago--bright but cold:)

Walking the dog has some compensations, a beautiful pine or two.

For an essentially conservative enterprise, Pajamas Media most closely resembles the defunct Air America network. Politically-motivated funding in search of a business plan.

Bush end-of-days capitalism I guess.

I've always found it amusing that since 2005, PJM has had no less than three distinct operational plans. The first was reasonably interesting--a coop of top blogs that would sell advertising as a block. The obvious question, which no one inside the inner circle ever seemed to ask, is why would anyone want to advertise on conservative political sites? As it turns out, no one really except T-shirt and book sellers.

I posted last year (sorry, that post is lost to posterity in the hosting change...) about Glenn Reynolds aggressive linking to Amazon blogs, to which he responded in the comments but missed the context of my remarks (not a regular reader is my guess). Reynolds is on the board of PJM, and it seemed awfully strange to me that he would be jonesing for Amazon while being such a prominent part of PJM. Alas, the mystery has been revealed. Roger L. SImon, PJM CEO:

We disbanded the ad network part of our business for a simple reason: it was losing money and we couldn’t see how in the reasonable future that would change.

Actually that part of our business has been losing money from the beginning, so the people getting their quarterly checks from PJM were getting a form of stipend from us in the hopes that advertisers would start to cotton to blogs and we could possibly make a profit. Didn’t happen. No wonder those people are kicking and screaming now that they are off the dole. I might too.

Seems Glenn wasn't getting the "welfare check" (Simon's words, not mine) and got on his bike. Good for him.

The Pajamas Media site is a copy of the Huffington Post, complete with celebrity blogger (Ron Silver). Now Simon is betting the farm on PJTV--and regular readers will know what I think about that fiasco.

This is going to end badly.

I got an email from John Hawkins about Michael Steele's requests for ideas on how to create an effective grassroots communication network to rival what the left has done with meetup, moveon.org and blog communities. Lorie Byrd's echo of that request illustrates what I consider to be the major problem.

Your ideas and comments will be considered and shared with the people who will be making the decisions for the future of the Republican party. To join the effort you can start by commenting here, then you can join one or both of the two groups launched by the GOP this week. One is the GOP TechSummit Grassroots group. The second, for Facebook users, is the GOP Tech Summit Facebook group which in three days has grown to over 2,000 members.

Gee, a grassroots movement run by Republican elites. Think it'll work?

Right Wing News was almost the first blog I read. (I think Normblog was the very first.) I enjoyed John Hawkins' directness and the man can write. Lately RWN has dropped off my daily tour. It's grown into a less pithy, slightly snarkier, group blog which is plenty meaty but less flavoursome. Don't get me wrong - I like what they say and they say it well, but vita brevis and all that. Hawkins is still a good read after all these years. Sometimes he sounds like me:

The Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, is a tax cheat. Let me repeat that: Timothy Geithner, the guy who is the head honcho of the IRS, is a tax cheat. One more time, Tim Geithner, the guy who will be in charge when the Obama administration institutes what will probably be the single largest tax increase in American history, later in Obama's first term, is a tax cheat.

I can be a bore on this Geithner thing. It doesn't take a holistic view to condemn Geithner. There's no nuance required. It's black and white. You can't appoint a tax cheat as Tax Chief. One more time. You can't appoint a tax cheat as Tax Chief. It destroys consent and taints the whole Administration.

Further to 'Scoops and scalps' below, Daniel Hannan well expresses how the smeargate scandal here in the UK has crystallized the plight of the elite media:

A blog has just done something that I thought no one could do: elicited an apology (or as close as we'll ever get to an apology) from Gordon Brown. Indeed, according to The Guardian, the McBride-Draper scandal might cost Labour the next election. If so, Guido Fawkes would have succeeded where his baleful namesake failed 404 years ago: he would have brought down a government. Even if you think the Guardian story is a bit de trop, the idea that one man with a laptop could do so much damage would, until very recently, have seemed risible.

Yet, even now, a number of print and broadcast journalists dismiss, disdain and depreciate internet-based news. Read the Guardian's own Michael White responding to the way my attack on Gordon Brown spread online. Read Peter Wilby's reedy complaint that the internet "lacks quality control". It is difficult not to sympathise with journalists of their generation. They can see local newspapers dropping all around them, and know that some nationals will soon follow. Every newsdesk is shedding staff, and journalists' are having to work longer hours for lower salaries. The Whites and Wilbies perceive, even if they do not properly understand, that amateurs are driving out professionals. It makes them frightened and bilious.

What irks them most of all is that bloggers refuse to apply Leftist filters. Until very recently, few people could watch a politician's speech or read his statement in full. They relied, instead, on the Whites and Wilbies to select, précis and interpret stories for them. Now, the masses can make up their own minds without bien-pensant intellectuals telling them what to think.

Janet Daley, Brown apologist and Daily Telegraph columnist with a grudge, attempts to belittle Guido Fawkes:

In the US, the power of the political blog was transformed when Matt Drudge made Monica Lewinsky the most famous intern in White House history, and nearly brought about the impeachment of a president, by publishing his sensational story on the Drudge Report. Why did Mr Staines not follow his example? Perhaps he would like to tell us.

He replies in the third comment:

Perhaps I will eventually. Not to the Telegraph though. Your paper has behaved reprehensibly. To breach a confidence, reveal a source, tip off Downing Street and break a signed non-disclosure agreement is hardly honourable. The bitterness you and Pierce demonstrate is manifest to all your readers.

Claiming today that the Telegraph discovered that Draper lunched at Chequers days after setting up the Red Rag site without attributing that "scoop" to me two days earlier is revealing.

You have one of the weakest political teams around. The paper has lost its way and is reduced to taking scraps from my blog for its front page, day after day.

I've been running an experiment for the past several weeks, facilitated by the work load of a few projects I'm trying to close out.

I've been living like the vast majority of Americans; the "lifestyles of the low-information voter" where there is no CNN or Fox News on the tube, no talk radio in the car, no newspapers perused for national and world events. If I get a glimpse of Barack Obama, I change the channel, preferring to amuse myself with the antics of Dr. Gregory House or Ray Barone instead.

I gotta tell ya, its not bad. I can see why people prefer to live uninformed. The lovely bunny--unaware of the process, remarked off-handedly that I've been in a remarkable good mood in the past few weeks, and consistently so. Gone is the seemingly unexplainable irritation that affected me after thirty minutes on the laptop. I'm not grinding my teeth at night anymore either. Ignorance IS bliss.

I don't intend this as a permanent lifestyle, because as Edmund Burke observed, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Yet paranoia over the antics of evil politicians isn't actually the same thing as acting assertively to oppose evil.

The Tea Party movement has been very interesting from this perspective. I've associated this kind of protest with the silly and ignorant people on the left for decades at this point, but its like a light came on over my head all of a sudden when I realized that the people who attend these protests are "doing something", and doing is infinitely preferable to talking. Attending a protest is something ordinary people can do to participate in the political process, and as it stands, it may well be the most meaningful thing someone can do at this point.

There is of course still a need for "information", but we clearly have to come up with a new strategy for delivering it to people who don't want to be assaulted with hair-on-fire rhetoric about ultimately meaningless events.

...I'm thinking...

I've heard some snorts of indignation over the revelation than Andrew Sullivan, now an Atlantic blogger, uses a couple of ghost-bloggers to produce his quota of postings each day. I frankly don't care what Andrew Sullivan does; he bores me. Yet some commentary on the matter by Ann Althouse piqued my interest.

You know, I have had my run-ins with Sullivan. He mocked my engagement announcement. He's given me Sarah-Palin-related assignments. I have paid a lot of attention to these things on my blog. (Here and here, for example.) I seriously believed I was interacting with Sullivan, a writer I have respected for maybe 20 years. I wouldn't have bothered with Patrick (or Chris). I really don't care what they think. If they insult me, they are to me like any number of bloggers who insult me and whose bait I don't take. I would always take Sullivan's bait, because Sullivan is important. Not to know whether it's Sullivan or one of them makes a mush out of the whole blog. I'm not wading through all of this ghost-generated verbiage and guessing about what might be the real thing.

There is was, crystallized into server-stored ASCII text--the triumph of notoriety over quality. Why is Sullivan important? Because he's famous, and famous people can write and say all manner of dreck and someone, somewhere will accord it importance.

The late Tim Russert used to host an amusing little interview show in which he and one or two other people of alleged eloquence and intellectual depth would sit around a little round table and discuss a subject for an hour or so. Obviously, not a show for everybody, but it was refreshing to see something high-minded on television, but I digress. I watched once as Russert's guest where Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan--archetypes of British classical education and post-war arrogance (sorry Mark...I call 'em as I see 'em). What I noted was that Sullivan was out of his league. While I find Hitchens deplorably pedestrian in some of his opinions, he always manages to elicit a satisfying coherence and entertaining wit in his views. Sullivan? Just plain addled.

Nevertheless, he is famous, and celebrity makes people interesting even when they're not. The lovely bunny subscribes to a local paper (for the ads...) and I just happened to glance at a column by Ellen Goodman. She was complaining that Ashley Dupre, notorious for exchanging sex for money with Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, has been hired as a columnist for one of the New York dailies. The irony was thick on the page--an columnist promoted on the basis of gender balance is complaining about the qualifications of a hooker to write a newspaper column.

Meanwhile, back in the democratic bastions of bloggerdom, gloriously talented nobodies like Varifrank, have stopped the apparently pointless exercise of writing a blog.

Why should anyone read what you have to say if you aren't famous?