Nothing But Words

A couple weeks after Eidan was born, I posted a comment from a friend of mine who already had two kids. He said “…to deal with Child 1, you took all the slack out of your schedule. With Child 2, there is no blood left in the turnip. You either do less or sleep less.” Foolishly, we’ve tried to do more, which means we just don’t sleep much. But one of the things I had to give up was my political commentary. The timing is a bummer, as these are probably the most intense political times so far in my life (I was only 4 when Watergate happened, so I don’t count that…). With the start of the semester next week, things get even more hectic, as I’ll be taking a class again (but this one will be harder than last semester’s), and Maria will be teaching 3 classes instead of 2 (she’s teaching her usual classes at Villanova, and she’s teaching a class at Penn for a friend who’s on leave). So I probably won’t be writing about politics again until the summer, at the soonest.

But I’m still keeping up with everything, and I thought I’d share some of my favorite blogs, in case you’re looking for a substitute for my own ramblings.

• Unclaimed Territory: Glenn Greenwald, who is a 1st Amendment lawyer, has only been blogging for a few months, but he’s become my new blog hero. I like him because he takes an approach similar to mine, but does it much better: he doesn’t assume that you already agree with him, he does his homework, and he makes logical, persuasive, and insightful arguments. His posts tend to be long but are well worth reading. His recent posts on Bush’s wiretapping scandal are the best I’ve seen anywhere.
• Talking Points Memo: Josh Marshall’s blog is the flagship moderate-left blog. What makes his blog compelling is that he will intensely focus on just one or two stories at a time, and he’ll follow them for weeks or even months. You’ll find a depth of coverage on these stories that is head and shoulders above anything you’ll find in the mainstream media. Josh’s site is unique because it’s an interesting experiment in citizen journalism: he has a large readership, including some very well-placed people, who ferret out information he’s looking for and feed it back into the site. Over the past few months, his coverage of the Jack Abramoff scandal, and the Niger/Uranium document forgeries, have been second to none. He also regularly has high profile contributors, such as John Edwards and Russ Feingold, contributing to the companion site, TPMCafe.
• Informed Comment: Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, blogs almost exclusively about Iraq. He provides a daily news roundup that includes Arabic-language news sources (he provides summaries and partial translations). His deep knowledge of the Middle East allows him to provide analysis that you won’t find anywhere else. He’ll occasionally descend into shrillness when analyzing whatever the latest blunder is from the Bush Administration, which tends to put me off, but if I had dedicated as much of my life to the Middle East as he has, I suppose I’d be awfully angry too. One thing is for sure though: reading his blog will make you realize just how deeply misleading all the Fox News happy talk about Iraq is.
• The Washington Note and Political Animal (the Washington Monthly blog) are both good sources of moderate-left analyses of daily politics.
• DonkeyRising: political scientist Ruy Teixeira’s blog is a great source of poll data analysis, and information on where the country is headed politically. It can get wonky at times, but since studying voting behavior was one of my specialties in grad school, I can’t get enough of it.
• ArmsControlWonk: this is even more wonky than DonkeyRising, but I also can’t get enough since this was my other specialty in grad school. It stands out because of its sense of humor, and because of the depth of knowledge the authors bring to topics such as the negotiations with North Korea (and the Bush administration’s astonishing talent for screwing them up). Check out the video clip they posted the other day of Kim Jong Il’s bodyguards – it looks like something out of a Jackie Chan movie.

I’ve been looking for a decent center-right blog that I could recommend to you for balance, but I haven’t found one yet. The flagship right-wing blog, Powerline, is nothing more than a Bush administration propaganda mill, so I’m not even going to link to it (I’m still dumbfounded that Time Magazine found it worthy of a Blog of the Year award). RedState is sometimes interesting, but like it’s counterpart on the left, DailyKos, it all too often descends into self-righteous shrillness (both are also guilty of not fact-checking their contributors). A big part of what’s made it hard for me to find a good right-wing blog is how all the major ones march in lock-step with each other: they all pick up the same talking points and push them out into the blogosphere. In contrast, the blogs on the left tend to be all over the place, and spend as much time disagreeing with each other as anything else. I think this is one of the reasons the right is so much better at influencing the media than the left, but that’s a topic for another day…

So until I once again have the time and mental energy to start my political blogging again, I hope you find these sites to be good, if not better, substitutes.