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Sunday, December 11, 2005
A wide five from across the divide 
| | Conservatives, by contrast, skillfully use the Web to provide maximum benefit for their issues and candidates. They are generally less interested in examining every side of every issue and more focused on eliciting strong emotional responses from their supporters. |
| | But what really makes conservatives effective is their pre-existing media infrastructure, composed of local and national talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, the Fox News Channel and sensationalist say-anything outlets like the Drudge Report - all of which are quick to pass on the latest tidbit from the blogosphere. "One blogger on the Republican side can have a real impact on a race because he can just plug right into the right-wing infrastructure that the Republicans have built," Stoller says. |
| | Still, Matt helped Corzine win in New Jersey anyway. |
| | My own take is that moderates, moderation, and neither-extreme blogs have a major influence too; though not necessarily in elections. In any case, nobody will ever look into that. |
Wholly grail
| | Qumana: Give personal publishers the means, and the supporting raw material (comprehensive and well-defined inventory, less intrusive formats, ways to *pay* for clicking through such as receiving discounts if completing a transaction after clicking on an ad) and they will use it, and introduce further efficiencies into the online advertising business. |
| | Among other things, the post is a response to what I wrote here in response to what Nicholas Carr wrote here. |
Insiderness corrupts, and absolute insiderness corrupts absolutely
| | Jay Rosen: I don't think Bob Woodward is going to uncover what really happened during the two terms of George W. Bush. |
| | Peter Viereck, from his last lecture before retiring as a professor at Mount Holyoke: |
| | I can think of nothing more gallant, even though again and again we fail, than attempting to get at the facts, attempting to tell things as they really are. For at least reality, though never fully attained, can be defined. Reality is that which, when you don't believe in it, doesn't go away. |
| | Who are the unadjusted among us? One clue: |
| | The Unadjusted Man is the final, irreducible pebble that, sabotages the omnipotence of even the smoothest-running machine. His refusal to adjust is a gesture beyond the need; of colossal rhetoric; he is a hero partly because without heroic pose. Indeed he is no hero at all in the eyes of the majority but a laughable Quixote, too unadjusted to settle down with a steady, productive windmill. His values are not determined by a democratic plebiscite; he may even be arrogant enough to retort, "One man and God make a majority," when accused of being undemocratic for not joining the majority in filtering his reading through the roughage-removal machinery of the digest magazines. |
| | Viereck wrote that in 1956. Now almost ninety, he's still at it; still unadjusted. |
Ending the tales of two great men
| | Richard Pyror, the most truthful comedian who ever lived, is dead of a heart attack a quarter century after joking on stage about his last one. He was 65. |
| | Eugene McCarthy, the most successful failed presidential candidate who ever lived, is dead now as well, at the age of 89. |
| | Richard Pryor made comedy more real and raw and tender and funny than it ever was before. Or since. |
| | Eugene McCarthy took the antiwar movement to a presidential campaign that knocked the incumbent president of his own party, Lydon Johnson, out of the white house. McCarthy was also a funny guy. One of my favorite lost books on politics was one of cartoons and witty text co-written with by James K. Kilpatrick and Jeff MacNelly, the funniest political cartoonist who ever lived. All three of those men are gone now. |
Okay, now who's faking Jesus?
| | Oddity... This post was written and appeared yesterday, as the only thing I blogged that day, all of which has disappeared from the blog. |
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