Richard Bennett

— This new blog shows promise. He’s a former legislative aide and long-time newspaperman, with interesting insights an impeccable taste in blogs.

— Steven Den Beste’s common-sense observation that bloggers link blogs they like has the Font Kiddiez’ knickers in a bunch. See this pretentious crap:

SDB suggests that webloggers cluster themselves into like-minded groups, and cross-link accordingly. Disagreements (including here) are what he calls “religious” in nature: “A-list” vs. warblogger, “E/N” vs. “A-list”, etc. Does Steve’s structuralist argument hold up? Are his characterizations fair or accurate? Do you slot yourself into a group? Are the blogs you link to in a similar vein as yours?

Later on in the comments they get huffy about some of my trollish remarks on the content-free faux pioneers of the blogosphere. It’s actually kind of funny, in sad sort of a way, especially the calls for MetaFiltration Unity.

— Happy Fun Pundit Steve hosted a great party for war profiteers at his palatial digs in San Leandro. We immoral philistines feasted on pheasant tongues, shark fins, caviar, and Dom Perignon provided by the bounty of our hawkishness, served to us by liveried servants as we basked in the hot tub and disco-danced in camos with live ammo. OK, not exactly like that, but between Mr. and Mrs. Random Jottings, the keeper of Plato’s cave, the erudite Craig Schamps, the brilliant Peter and Christina, and the formidable Joanne Jacobs, we pretty well solved all the world’s problems once and for all. I hope everybody got home safely.

Steve was at the recent Media/Blogger conspiracy summit in Los Angeles sponsored by the founding editors of the Right Wing False Consciousness Collective, and Joanne was just in London conferring with the Samizdata, so we all have our marching orders from WarBlog Central Command now, and new insight into the true nature of Antiwar.com, so the juggernaut is unstoppable. Peace-loving types had best quake with fear.

Warbloggers are clearly some of the best-read and smartest people in the planet, which must have something to do with why the Prison-Industrial Complex has chosen us to do its dirty work.

Update: John took pictures.

— I’ve updated my bio page with links to an essay, some press quotes, and letters to the editor that I’ve had published. Have I said that Blogs have made the editorial pages of newspapers obsolete? Well, if they haven’t, we’re at least on equal footing.

— For the past few days, I’ve been doing some tit-for-tat in e-mail with Geoff Nunberg over his quick survey of elected-official labeling in newspapers. Numberg’s major errors are the most obvious ones: Goldberg said the Big Three nightly newcasts identify conservatives as out-of-the-mainstream more than liberals. Nunberg’s survey, while interesting, doesn’t address the charge, because he examined print media instead of the Big Three. The language of television is very different from the language of print, and you don’t learn much about one by studying the other. He also limited the published study to a handful of elected officials with very well-established ideological credentials, people for whom labelling is redundant.

In a more extensive survey on his web site, Nunberg publishes results on Supreme Court justices and lobbying groups that support Goldberg’s claim. It seems to me that the effects of labeling are most pronounced when the media labels or doesn’t label the people that it interviews as experts on various political subjects. Most of these people — and I’m one of them, with a long list of interview credits in print and broadcast — are partisan lobbyists and consultants.

It was my experience that the L. A. Times always identified me as a “fathers’ rights lobbyist” while identifying people who lobbied for the other side as “child support analyst” or some similarly neutral-but-authoritative-sounding-title. I have examples. There are no neutral parties in the political process, but you wouldn’t know that from watching network news.