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Meet Joe Blog
theodp writes "According to the new issue of Time, we may be in the golden age of blogging, a quirky Camelot moment in Internet history when some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician. Amateur scribblers posting on the Web are becoming the tails that wag the media, says Time, citing an underperforming undergraduate at a small Christian college in Michigan as an example." Hey, if Circuits can discover USB, I don't see why Time can't discover weblogs.
would you call that a 'log blog'?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Time mentions Wonkette (wonkette.com) a little diity from an ex-editor at Suck.com. Lo and behold, she is a beltway insider-wannabe who had too much attitude to keep a corporate button down job. Now she dishes on politics with something approximating an attitude on her site.
Ostensibly, she should be interesting to read. But she's not. Despite agreeing with her politics, I find her "cute bitchy" tone to be sort of dull. But she is the kind of person who got sick of corporate types editing down her stuff.
Andrew Sullivan, at his blog of his own name, also mentions the same thing. Slate editors kept him in a tight little sandbox, and any real bombshell he could have set down would have been edited.
I find sites like Counterpunch and maybe an article on Slate by Hitchens to be the farthest left you can find off a university campus. Unless you subscribe to Mother Jones or something, it's a bit of work to find intelligent left of center content on the web. Blogs are mostly dominated by right-wingers, with their rah-rah military sites or their weak Rush limbaugh or Jim Rome imitations. Dittoheads and clones galore.
The UK's register and sometimes the BBC (although it's been hit by scandal like the NYT) will sometimes publish stuff that corporate controlled US media will shut down. Stuff like how halliburton was paid BEFORE the war started to file a secret plan how to rebuild Iraq. The stuff Cheney refuses to disclose.
Anyhow, keep reading Hitchens. His reformed Marxism now turned to supporting Bush and nation building (and now backing away from it), is fun to read. The guy is a wacko poli sci professor on steroids, but his take on Reagan was spot on. "An ugly lizard who was as dumb as a tree stump." will keep you believing in the power of free speech. When he reduces nancy reagan to how she got where she was - "a 2nd rate actress who needed to get off a hollywood blacklist, and ronny was the man to see, since he was ratting out the alleged communists during mccarthyism." - it makes you laugh with glee.