No matter how many blog URLs you stuff into Google Reader, there are always going to be gems that you miss.
Fortunately, Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar has collected these hidden jewels and each one's best post of 2010 in one convenient place.
Start off the New Year by discovering the best of the blogs you may have missed.
It's a damn good thing I'm not in Vegas at Netroots Nation, because I'd be cooling my heels in jail right now after busting Van Jones right in the mouth.
Former White House green jobs "czar" Van Jones told progressive activists and bloggers today that, rather than bash President Obama for not changing the country as fast as they'd thought, they should maintain hope and help him with his agenda.
"I can't stand it. President Obama volunteered to be the captain of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg," Jones said at Netroots Nation while being interviewed by journalist Ari Melber of The Nation.
Jones, who resigned last year after conservatives targeted him as an extreme leftist, refrained from any Obama-slamming of his own. Speaking to a large second-day crowd, Jones reminded the group that he quit and wasn't pushed out. "I resigned. I did not want to be the banana peel that the president of the United States slipped on trying to win on health care," Jones said.
He cautioned bloggers from despairing and going after Obama. "This is harder than it looks. Having spent six months in the White House, it's a totally different experience when you're sitting there and the missiles are coming over the horizon at you," he said.
There's a pyschological phenomenon of interpersonal relationships that seems counter-intuitive: it is easier to forgive someone who has mistreated you than to forgive someone you have mistreated.
Maybe it's just the reluctance of human beings to admit when we're wrong, but we're seeing a vicious example in the way the mainstream media is reacting to the growing stream of evidence that it has been dead wrong about defending Smirky/Darth and the repugs against those Dirty Fucking Hippies on the InnerTubes.
Far from apologizing, the MSM is attacking Left Blogsylvania for the capital crime of having been right all along.
Gene Lyons in Salon:
Indeed, the most fascinating aspect of the Ridge revelations has been a flame war that's broken out between establishment Washington pundits and less-reverent bloggers. The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder started it by observing in smug inside-the-Beltway fashion that he and like-minded colleagues were actually right to be wrong about fake terror warnings.
People who smelled a rat, see, "based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence." Whereas, sober-sided thinkers like him credited the Bush administration's good intentions.
Confronted with ample contemporaneous evidence of Bush administration flimflams by Salon's Glenn Greenwald and the scholarly Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake.com, Ambinder apologized for the "gut hatred" part. But he alibied: "Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned
lessons about giving the government that benefit."
Yeah, sure. Purely with regard to terrorism and national security, by 2004, Bush/Cheney had already gotten caught deceiving the public about having "no warning" before the 9/11 attacks, not to mention about Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. If skepticism was still inappropriate, would it ever be warranted?
Yet people who found the timing of terror alerts suspect, such as then-Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, were dismissed as crackpots.
SNIP
But here's the big thing about "mainstream" journalism and what Ambinder calls "information asymmetry." Upton Sinclair said it best: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
SNIP
Long under siege for "liberal bias," media careerists now find themselves confronted with people they see as passionate amateurs. True, fearless scrappers like my friend Joe Conason have always been around, and somebody like Paul Krugman -- a world-class economist who doesn't care what, say, MSNBC's Chris Matthews thinks of him -- can be
very annoying.
But what's really driving these jokers up the wall is economic and intellectual competition from the Internet: people with first-class minds and a passion for truth that some of them can barely remember.
If you're reading this at work - on your lunch hour or break, of course! - count your blessings and do something nice for your boss.
You're better off than Kentucky state employees, who cannot read this, or any other blog that republican Governor Ernie Fletcher doesn't like, at work.
Yeah, yeah, they shouldn't be reading blogs at work, blah, blah, blah.
That's what Fletcher officials said. AFTER they got caught blocking a particular blogger who was exposing their crimes and stupidity several times a day.
For 2-1/2 years, from his inauguration in December 2003, Ernie had no problem with state employees reading blogs at work. State computer techs blocked porn sites, of course, and if your blog reading interferred with your work, your boss would call you in for a little chat about productivity, but if you wanted to spend your break reading the latest on Daily Kos or Little Green Footballs, nobody cared much.
But in May 2006, a grand jury indicted Fletcher on charges of violating state merit law by firing civil-service-protected Democrats to make room for his republican cronies.
And Mark Nickolas attacked.
Nickolas, who managed the campaign of Ben Chandler, who lost the governor's race to Fletcher, operated a blog called BluegrassReport.org. For two years, he'd been posting news and snarky commentary about Fletcher's Keystone Kops administration - along with strong criticism of the state's cowardly and incompetent Democrats.
But after the indictment, Nickolas moved into overdrive, and BluegrassReport became the don't-miss, refresh-all-day, multi-commented Blog Everybody Reads.
And Fletcher couldn't take it. One day, state employees checked out BluegrassReport.org and found only a full-page message: "This Site Has Been Blocked by the Commonwealth Office of Technology."
WTF?
That first day, you could still get on Kos, and LGF, and TPM, and Drudge, and all the rest.
So by lunchtime, it was pretty obvious what had happened. Fletcher had specifically blocked BGR because Nickolas - and his many bright, funny, well-informed commenters - hurt his tiny widdle feewings.
Emails flew between Nickolas and his state employee informers, and by close of business, Nickolas was accusing Fletcher of targeting BGR in political retribution.
The next day, all the liberal/progressive blogs were blocked, but state employees could still spend all day soaking up the vomit spewed by LGF and Drudge and the rest of the bush-fellators.
Nickolas cried foul again: Republican blogs were fine, but Democrats and liberals need not apply.
Fletcher officials blustered and lied and stalled, but in the end, they had no choice. To cover up their un-Constitutional gagging of BGR from state computers, they had to block all blogs.
Elephant-footed, they blanket-blocked everything on the Internet, to the point that people who needed information couldn't access even federal government websites.
Over the course of months, COT refined its blocking techniques, lifting the block on specific web sites if an employee could justify it as work-related.
It's still highly suspicious: FOX gets a pass, despite being news-free, as do Amazon and most shopping sites. Right-wing and Christian religious sites get through, but the Flying Spaghetti Monster is blocked.
It's also somewhat arbitrary: Talking Points Memo, TPM Cafe, TPM Election Central and TPM Horse's Mouth are blocked, but TPMMuckraker is not. Salon's War Room blog is blocked, but its Broadsheet blog is not. Kevin Drum's Political Animal blog at washingtonmonthly.com hung on for a few months, but was gone by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Nickolas filed a federal First Amendment lawsuit against Fletcher and kept beating Ernie senseless on his blog.
In June, Nickolas moved to Montana and shut down BGR. But the lawsuit continues, and last Friday former Fletcher technology commissioner Michael Inman dropped a bombshell:
Robbie Rudolph, Fletcher's running mate for lieutenant governor and secretary of the executive cabinet, directly ordered Inman to block BGR.
"It was apparent that the state had intentionally targeted BluegrassReport.org and had blocked the category of blogs and other categories of Web sites in an attempt to disguise that fact," Inman said in a sworn statement.
No shit.
The Blocking of BGR is small potatoes compared to the wholesale burning of the U.S. Constitution perpetrated by Smirky and Darth Cheney. But the testimony of Inman - whom Fletcher stupidly fired - is a crack in the Right-Wing Authoritarian Wall.
It gives me hope on two counts: That republicans with integrity are not a myth, and that they will, when pushed hard enough toward the Dark Side, do the Right Thing. And that blogs like BGR and Watching Those We Chose can, indeed, Make A Difference.
Mark Nickolas and BluegrassReport contributed enormously to the 2006-2007 rebirth of the Kentucky Democratic Party, not least by flaying moribund and corrupt Democrats as raw as he flayed Fletcher and other republicans. Nickolas and BGR strongly supported Steve Beshear's gubernatorial candidacy and played a significant role in Beshear's 20-point drubbing of Fake Democrat and Convicted Criminal Bruce Lunsford in the May primary.
The new chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party is State Treasurer Jonathan Miller, who staunchly opposed Fletcher's Internet blocking. Miller was the Voice of Reason, pointing out that Indiana, Ohio, Illinois and other neighboring states manage to get the work of the people done without denying their employees access to anything on the Internet except porn.
Miller's withdrawal from the governor's race ensured Beshear's victory, so Steve owes him big time.
If Beshear wins the election in November, state employees will be able to read political blogs at work again by Christmas.
BGR is gone, but several other progressive Kentucky blogs are working hard to fill its shoes, including Bluegrass Roots, Kentucky Democrat, Drinking Liberally Louisville, Hillbilly Report, Kentucky Woman and Ditch Mitch Kentucky.
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