Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly confesses grudgingly to reading the following list of (allegedly) conservative blogs:

The Volokh Conspiracy

Professor Bainbridge

Dan Drezner

Andrew Sullivan

Bull Moose

Joanne Jacobs

Instapundit

Asymmetrical Information

Obsidian Wings

Marginal Revolution

Outside the Beltway

Ann Althouse

The Corner

Belgravia Dispatch

Begging to Differ

Just One Minute

Unqualified Offerings

Winds of Change

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A list of conservative blogs overlooking

(among others) is an unsatisfactory list, since it omits all of the most important conservative blogs with a single exception (Instapundit).

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Some people do think that Andrew Sullivan, Belgravia Dispatch, and Dan Drezner are conservative blogs. We do not.

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Claiming that Bull Moose and Obsidian Wings are conservative is just delusional.

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We did not know Marginal Revolution, which seems to be an Economics blog with a Free Market perspective, and which looks very good, or Begging to Differ and Unqualified Offerings, which we will make a point of looking in on.

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Hat tip to Ann Althouse, who says I’m not conservative, but who seems mistaken about that to us.

The Hotline published yesterday its year-end review of activity in the political blogosphere, titling it The Year of Blogging Dangerously.

Profile of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga aka Kos:

Moulitsas was born in Chicago to a middle class, ethnically-Greek family from El Salvador (his uncle, an architect, had briefly been that country’s education minister). The family moved back to El Salvador when Moulitsas was four and was on the right-wing side of the Cold War proxy fight there. But as that war’s intrusions became unbearable—Moulitsas talks about stepping over dead bodies—the family returned to Chicago, where he grew up, in his own words, “a loudmouthed nerd.”

After high school, Moulitsas, then a Reagan Republican thanks largely to the White House’s support of the Salvadorean government, spent four years as an army artillery scout, mainly in Germany. He had begun to gravitate leftwards while in the military—its diversity had incubated in him a kind of nascent identity politics liberalism—and when he was discharged and enrolled at Northern Illinois University, he became active in campus politics, writing a column for the school paper and helping to lead the college’s Hispanic student group. After he graduated, he took another degree, from Boston University’s law school, and then, in 1998, moved out to San Francisco to try his luck in Silicon Valley. A couple of years later, now married, he moved again, to Berkeley, exasperated at the realization that he wasn’t going to make a fortune in the high-tech boom. “Maybe at some time, Silicon Valley really was this democratic ideal where the guy with the best idea made a billion dollars, but by the time I got there at least, it was just like anything else—a bunch of rich kids who knew each other running around and it all depended on who you knew,” Moulitsas told me. Unemployed, Moulitsas, started posting comments on a site called MyDD.com, the most insidery of the emerging liberal blogs. During late 2001 and early 2002, he developed a following, for the strength and clarity of his denunciations of the Bush administration. Moulitsas started his own blog, and, in the summer of 2002, Daily Kos opened for business.

Tas laments:

Allow me to illustrate the differences in attitude that the left and right sides of the blogosphere have towards small bloggers.

On the right, Instapundit shows how small bloggers are embraced.

CHRISTMAS/HOLIDAY ADVICE to blog readers: Don’t do this here, as I don’t need it, but go to one of your favorite blogs and make a donation or send an appreciative email. Especially one of the smaller blogs, where the attention is especially likely to be noticed and appreciated. There are a lot of blogs out there, and the bloggers with low traffic often work just as hard as the ones with big numbers. Let ’em know if you like their work.

And on the left, Atrios lobs F-bombs at us if we dare to question the authority of our side’s larger blogs.

While fully acknowledging that nothing and no one is beyond criticism, that people have perfectly valid complaints about things, that with great power comes great responsibility, and that the world is not the perfect meritocracy we all imagine it to be, at some point I have to say – get the fuck over yourselves and ask yourselves why you’re doing this.

Longtime Mouth readers know that I’ve always had problems with the lack of recognition that members from our side give to each other. I think it leads to important stories and commentary to be buried, and the talents of those being buried could help our side score political victories. Yet if I or somebody else complains about this, we’re labeled as whiners and those who feel like their being eregiously attacked morph straight into martyr complex mode.

And on the right…? Hey, small bloggers are welcome! No insults thrown.

Does anybody else see a problem with this? With our sides seeming lack of openness?

All this has implications which Tas is probably going to continue to overlook.

This morning, I find Glenn Reynolds (one of the leading bloggers in league with Satan, at least according to Blogosphere alarmists in a tizzy over the possibilities of corporate influence intruding into blogging) advertising books and (Hurrah!) absinthe in his PJM ads. Libertarians, like the author of this blog, approve of books and absinthe.

Meanwhile, Power Line is running Blog ads, and is shudder advertising memberships in Greenpeace, which are telling us the polar bears are all going to drown, if we don’t give up driving our SUVs.

If PJM is selling absinthe, and Blog ads are selling Greenpeace memberships, I suggest every blogger wanting to do ads should run, not walk, in a PJM-wards direction.

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Those Greenpeace Polar Bears grabbed PJM’s Absinthe and both vanished by late morning Pacific time.

What on earth is the admirable, highly respected, and politically sound Power Line blog doing running ads for…. Greenpeace? Ads selling memberships in the moonbat organization by promoting fears of Global Warming, no less. I’m as much in favor of capitalism as the next fellow, but really, guys.

Never Yet Melted’s author was interviewed today by Blogasm.

Some prominent PJM blogs began sporting cool new sidebar logos, featuring rabble-rousing slogans embodying hard-core “we bloggers vs. the evil MSM” rhetoric. I meant to grab both examples, and put up this post praising them, but the text could not be cut and pasted, and while I was typing out Number 2 below, that sneaky Charles Johnson went and switched ’em all over to Number 2.

You couldn’t have a starker contrast between a system of checks and balances, and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks. — Jonathan Klein, former CBS executive.

Go, PJM. Up the Revolution!

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Found it. That earlier one read:

The core of the American people has manifested itself most purely in blogs because elites for so long controlled all avenues of communication. Those days are over now. — Tammy Bruce, Editorial Board.

If anybody has doubts about the Blogosphere constituting a serious form of media expression these days, I would point to the Sunday New York Times turning to Iraqi blogs for response on the recent election.

I found the Times’ choice of blogs interesting.

The first blog quoted was: A Star from Mosul, written by “Aunt Najma,” a 17 year old school girl, who has been posting from war-torn Mosul, deep in Sunni Iraq. It is impossible not to like this charming young girl (proud of recently becoming an aunt), who posts fairly regularly concerning the dangers and inconveniences the war has brought to her life. When I began reading her, she was apolitical, but in recent months as the fighting neared her home, her postings became anti-American. Najma reports that a Mufti informed residents of Mosul this time that voting was a religious duty, and Najma’s family responded enthusiastically. Her election post ended on a patriotic note.

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The Times’ second blog was predictable. It was, of course, Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning. Its author describes Baghdad Burning as a “girl blog,” and uses as an epigraph: I’ll meet you ’round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend. But Baghdad Burning consistently features a lot more strident and inflammatory anti-Americanism than it does healing and mending. This one was a dead certain cinch for NYT selection.

Riverbend tells us in the Times:

Many Iraqis went to vote because the current situation is intolerable. It’s not so much with high hopes for drastic change that people went to the polls as it is in the national aspiration of putting an end to the occupation, and to the tyranny of the last year in particular….
In my opinion, elections in Iraq cannot be democratic under a foreign occupation – especially when the election lists were composed largely of the same people who supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq. We are recycling the same names, faces and ideologies of sectarian and ethnic divide.

Even so positive a concession as the admission of a large electoral turnout was reserved by Riverbend for the Times. Baghdad Burning has not been updated with the material appearing in today’s Times, and sits sullenly without new postings since Thursday, December 15, just before the election. Riverbend is refusing to acknowledge the news she doesn’t like, news of the size of the turnout and the election’s success. I used to consider this blog worth a regular look. Its author was obviously a passionate America hater, but I thought the blog worth reading as an effective voice for a particular point of view. This little exercise in self censorship shows just how honest a voice Baghdad Burning really is. Chances are “Riverbend” has a great big, bushy mustache, and is really the nephew of “Baghdad Bob,” aka Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the former Iraqi Minister of Information.

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No. 3 was an Iraqi blog I didn’t know, titled: Eject: Iraqi Konfused Kollege Kid. “The kid himself” brought an apolitical youthful rocker’s perspective to the election:

IRAQ’S first Election Day last January was another Anyday for me. As a so-called Sunni who would rather be identified as “Iraqi,” I wasn’t really into politics… Now, I’m not the kind of person who simply gets up and does whatever his ayatollah tells him to do, but I was rather fed up with all the bad blood that resulted from American-installed sectarian policy, and I felt that voting would restore much-needed balance….I chose List 618 (the so-called Sunni list), not because I want an Islamic government, but to restore the balance between Sunnis and Shiites. I considered the secularist Allawi list (731) for some time, but something told me that guy’s going to win anyway. Besides, Ahmad Radhi, Iraq’s most famous soccer player, is strangely supporting 618.

“The kid himself” is not a high volume blogger. He hasn’t posted since Monday, December 12, and his posts have nothing to say about politics. Way to go, Times, there’s a great job of journalism, really getting the real inside dope on the Iraqi point of view on the election.

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No. 4 was Hassan Karuffa, a civil engineering student, and the author of A Star from Mosul‘s cousin, who writes An Average Iraqi. Hassan, like his cousin, was much more enthusiastic about this election. He does describe some of the electoral slates who were running in a recent posting. Alas! for the Times, Hassan too strikes a positive note:

Looking back at the things we achieved since the war, I feel very proud. Although we hear shootings and bombings every day. We reached this far, and we are going on, on and on to the finish. Yes, I am optimistic about the future. Life in Iraq has been so bad so far, but I see a bright future. I see an Iraq with full-time electricity, full-time water and full-time security.

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Studiously overlooked by the Times were Iraq the Model and Hammorabi, both pro-American, and both far more more widely read, and much more politically substantive than the Times’ choices: three nice kids plus Baghdad Bob’s hairy nephew.

Dennis the Peasant, while we weren’t looking, produced reams of anti-PJM postings. No, I’m not going to read, or count all of them, but he has come up with a logo which beats PJM’s by wide margins.

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Steve H. writes (12/12):

I love these guys. They can’t write their way out of a wet Kleenex, so they whore their way to 15,000 measly visits per day, and suddenly they think they know how to dance? Standing up in your high chair may make you feel just as tall as Daddy, but that doesn’t mean it’s so.

and on 12/13:

Wizbang is an undistinguished blog that gets 15000 visits per day, half of which are search engine accidents, which means it’s about as important as one of the bigger condo newsletters. There are high school papers that have readership of the same order of magnitude.

This aroused my curiosity, and I found that his own hit score on 12/15/05, at 9:00 PM PST looked like:

Average Per Day 2,781
Average Visit Length 2:45
Last Hour 229
Today 9,249
This Week 19,467

He gets better on 12/14 with We Will Bury You!, which –for the curious– provides some speculation on the economics of PJM.

Helo at Drumwaster writes:

That has been my biggest gripe about blogs such as Instapundit for quite a while. Glenn Reynolds can browse the various news sites faster than anyone in the world and post a quick link that looks something like “THE PRESIDENT’S APPROVAL RATING is down, but I predicted this in my sleep sixteen months ago to the minute…” and be considered a prophet by the vast majority of the blogosphere. LGF does much of the same, and outside of proving that Dan Rather’s documents were fake, hasn’t been known for much of anything outside of that since that day (with the exception of the failed Pajamas/OSM media venture, but we won’t bring that up). The reason I chose to post about this is because the blogosphere has turned into a K-12 playground; there are the cool kids who get fame and look down on the regular guys who bust their asses, and there are those of us stuck somewhere in the middle who are here to have some fun, yet get jerked around and trashed because we don’t take the “blogging industry” seriously enough for those who want it to be the next MSM.

Wizbang is a great blog with great insight, and they have at least two posts a day that I learn something new from. What keeps them from becoming an Instapundit or a LGF is the fact that they grab snippets of an article and then create their own points and perspective from it. Wizbang editorializes and creates content, versus Instapundit and LGF who merely link like an e-mailed crawler gone haywire. But, the blogs will always be on top because of the fanatical blogging crowd who wake up each morning hoping that their posts will be linked by one of the two.

Does this make them bad? Not at all. The wonderful thing about the blogosphere is the fact that we can do what we want and not be forced to worry about a profit margin or angry advertisers. When the Pajamas/OSM debacle was occurring, I read from one pundit who equivocated it to the bossy girl up the street who wants to become the leader and organizer of the local baseball game, which subsequently took the fun away from the whole process. When people take blogging too seriously, or when the little cliques are created that demonize and demoralize others in the blogosphere by shunning them and trashing them because they’re not the “cool kids,” it ruins exactly what made the blogosphere fun to begin with.

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Liberal Avenger kisses up to Hog on Ice.

Moxie has nothing interesting to say, but that doesn’t stop her.

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John Cole finally gets sick and tired of the relentless (and mostly pointless) bashing.

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I have to agree with John here. An awful lot of electrons were spilled to very little substantive, and no positive, purpose this time. I think it is more than a little churlish to abuse Glenn Reynolds and Charles Johnson. I read them daily, as most of us do, for good reason. If the PJM critics could do anything half as well as those two gentlemen, whatever it was, we’d all be reading them too. But this unutterable waste of bandwidth demonstrates why we don’t read some of them at all, and read others infrequently. Trying to report PJM bashing is becoming both overly laborious and a crashing bore. If you can’t feud amusingly, don’t feud, say I. This is it. No more rubbish about PJM will I waste my time on.

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As to PJM: well, I wouldn’t give it a Best Site award this year, but Roger Simon borrowed no money from me, and they don’t charge me to click on it, so I am not demanding a refund. It would not surprise me if it got better over time. Suggestion: how about a longer page? There could be more features, more major stories. Maybe throwing more darts per diem would produce more bullseyes.

Happenings in the PJM Wars have been slow lately, and we had been planning to post soon jesting about starting a PJM Death Pool Death Pool, but to our surprise several new postings (about PJM ads) have actually appeared.

Meanwhile, Ann Althouse has not laid aside her wrath. NYM’s author inclines to the opinion that Roger L. Simon would be well advised to send flowers, and apologize to the nice lady for hanging up on her. The role of Ms. Althouse in the Blogosphere is not unlike that of one of the female Olympians in the Homeric epics, and Mr. Simon, at the moment, looks a lot like Odysseus who managed to get more than one of the wrong gods and goddesses annoyed with him, and consequently had a very rough trip home.

Anechoic Room believes that Rick Moran of Rightwing Nuthouse has sold his soul to the forces of darkness. So recognizable is the instantaneous taint of corruption, in AR’s eyes at least, that AR is striking RN from his blogroll, and is telling readers that he henceforward looks upon that blog as dead. AR is consequently (with somewhat hypertrophied rhetoric) accusing PJM of “killing a blog.” Ms. Althouse, with a graceful air of detachment, did manage to link this one.

Riehl World View also takes a poke at the afore-mentioned lackey of the nefarious Si Fan, predicting censorship, and rhetorically disbelieving RWNH’s owner’s statement that he’s gone with PJM even though he could make more from other advertising.

Steve of Hog on Ice promises to be fair:

I’ll try to speak up if they ever do anything right. In its current incarnation, PJM is a dumb idea conceived by the greedy and clueless, but a fair person, while watching a lifeboat sink, will be honest enough to say something when he sees an occupant bailing particularly well.

But then, he immediately proceeds to machine-gun the imaginary life-boat, agreeing with the just-a-bit-exaggerated thesis that PJM has “killed” RWNH, and –reaching even further into fantasyland– asserts that “it killed Instapundit, too.” We’d say ourselves that rumors of Instapundit‘s death are greatly exaggerated.

Jim Hu of Blogs for Industry identifies a geographical mistake by Gateway Pundit, and faults some of PJM links’ coverage of the Dongzhou story, to which he brings special interest and expertise. Interestingly, it seems that somebody at PJM read his criticisms and did effect some corrections.

Sortapundit, speaking from the left, finds the current state of affairs wanting, too:

Based on nothing more than a cursory glance at the site I’m left wondering if I’m missing the point. What are they trying to be, apart from a fairly poor right-leaning facsimile of the Huffington Post? Why should I, the reader, visit a disappointingly dull, soulless blog whose posts are written by someone named Compiled by Pajamas Media Staff in Los Angeles? I can get the same information, presented in a much more entertaining format, on any number of blogs in my favourites list. Hell, I can get this information from a freakin’ newspaper. At least they usually tell me who’s writing the articles. And I get the sports.

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That the OSM, soon PJM, launch proved an anticlimax seems to be established history at this point. As Horace used to say: Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus [the mountain laboured, and a ridiculous mouse was born], but it is still early days.

Sometime about a week ago, we dropped by PJM, and actually found a useful link. We looked around startled. The world was changing, the PJM site, still no thing of beauty, was recognizably becoming actually useful, and we realized with some surprise that a subtle watershed of performance had been reached.

It may be that corporate influence will actually someday impact, and adversely influence, bloggers involved with the PJM project, but get real, guys, the time to start blogging about it is when something of the sort actually happens. Obviously, the corrupting influence of corporate gelt has nothing to do with any perceived deficiencies of format or content to-date, and bloggers who carry on hysterically about PJM, or who wage irrational vendettas (not actually personally having been hung up on by Roger Simon) are merely going to convince the rest of us that they are prone to premature judgements, and –in extreme cases– that they are complete whackjobs.

John Cole has been moving left recently, sharing his blog with moonbat Tim F., and sobbing big, salty tears over American abuse of the poor widdle terrorists, so I reluctantly moved Balloon Juice down to Unsound Blogs to repose with Democratic Underground and Daily Koz. But every now and then, you can look in and find the old John Cole at home. John observed the democrats’ response to the Republican Party white-flag video, and responded thusly today:

Once again, Democrats are furious with the Republican party for ‘misrepresenting’ them and portraying them as wanting to ‘cut and run.’ How has the GOP done this? By taking direct quotes from the DNC Chairman, the House Minority Leader, and the Democratic candidate for President and standard-bearer just a year ago and putting them over top of a person waving a white flag.

Having lobbed that grenade nicely, John climbs back out of the trench and goes home to the enemy again. Poor chap can’t really make up his mind. He’s too smart to be a liberal, but I think he is responding to some kind of social pressure and trying his best.