Roll Out the Blogroll III

So I haven't been on this every day... I'll get there, I'll get there.

Hullabaloo- More lefty News, analysis and opinion. Digby posts on at least one of the other blogs I read (Whiskey Fire), so I often see the same posts in different places through the day. In addition, as one of the great commentators of Left Blogostan, he's excerpted everywhere- so he seems kind of omnipresent. The only problem I have is that he block quotes at great length, sometimes very great length. When he gets to the comments, they tend to be sharp and concise, but I really didn't need to read two pages of text to get the point. I want to read mostly his stuff, not the material he's criticizing. Molly Ivors' rants on Dowdy show up here too. So overall, I tend to skim over the long quotes here, and focus on the juicy bits of analysis.

The Daily Howler- If you really want to be depressed about the state of the media in our country, this is the site for you! On the other hand, if you really want to understand how laziness, bias, illogic, self-serving image-making, and sheer incompetence from media types is warping our ability to make informed judgements, then this is the site for you. Bob Somerby is the wonk of wonks when it comes to drawing and quartering the logic of so-called journalists. There are times when I feel like he's driving home carpet tacks with a nine pound hammer, but there are other times I just want to jump up and shout "Hallelujah!" This one is not daily for me, simply because it can be some real work sometimes. But I will admit that as a general rule, if I make the effort, he makes it pay off. This was another blog that I started reading early on: Somerby has archives going back ten years.

The Realty-Based Community- Lots of shorter posts compared to the last two. Mark Kleiman, another major name in liberal analysis, does an excellent job of getting to the point, providing enough context to set up the situation, then targeting the flaws (or strengths) that jump out at him. He is also notable for providing plenty of embedded links to relevant, supporting, or background articles, and even to clarify terms that the less savvy of us might not know. For example in a post today, I learned what IOKIYAR means. LOL.

TomDispatch- I'm not sure if the format here is exactly considered "blog," but this is a great one, whatever it is. Three to four times a week, a mid-sized essay is posted, either by Tom Engelhardt or by another author, with Tom writing an intro piece to set the context. The three blogs listed above are very much "right now this minute" oriented- that's not a bad thing, as long as you remember what happened yesterday (and they do, believe me, they do), and tie in the news from yesterday and last week to today's events. That is a great failure of MSM to me- readers (and especially watchers) are not expected or encouraged to remember what happened an hour ago, let alone last week. In contrast Tom Dispatch tends to look carefully at systemic issues- things that,yes, are going on right now, but have also been evolving and getting more pernicious over the last months and years. These tend to be exactly the sorts of things MSM misses entirely. It requires the reader to remember some of the obscure mid-to-late-Section-A articles from last year and the years before that. Case in point: the current introduction is about the trans-Afghanistan oil pipeline proposed to bring petroleum to the Indian Ocean from the Caspian Sea/Aral Sea Basin- importantly, without passing through Russian satellites or Iran. As it happens, I've been aware of this since the early 90's because I tend to glom onto any geology info I encounter. That area has been known for at least a couple of decades as an enormously important exploration target; after the collapse of the Soviet Union western oil companies couldn't wait to get in. And they still can't. The problem though is that there's no good way to get the stuff out once you've got it. So at any rate, that's just the background that Englehardt addresses in setting up for the main essay. News is great, intelligent liberal criticism makes it better, but sometimes you just feel like curling up with a book. These essays are not book-length, but they work toward that level of analysis.

Jesus' General- One of the great satirical blogs out there. Some of the posts are serious, but more than half are great fun. Many are faux missives written in the style of a social conservative, ending with "Heterosexually yours..." The War of 1812 video I posted yesterday was found here. If you're a fan of The Colbert Report, you'll like this one too. Another tip o' the hat: July fourth is the one holiday that I really have an inviolable personal tradition for: I find a copy of the Declaration of Independence and read it. As I mentioned on the 5th, the Interzone closed early, so I didn't get a chance to post the text as I had intended. I found a copy and read it, but JG posted the text. And hot linked each of the signatories to short biographies. Now I don't really "celebrate" the 4th, but I do reflect on it, and how profound that event was. JG not only shares this attitude with me, he can craft sincere-sounding lines that are so absurd, yet so similar to what we hear from the right, that the resulting cognitive conflict will blow out your skull unless you burst out laughing. This one is a precious resource, up there with oil.

Followup: For some reason I can't get the daily howler to "take" in my blogroll. I'll try again some other time, but the hotlink should get you there for the time being.