Inspired by President Bush’s charming and no doubt spontaneous mention of his 28th wedding anniversary in a speech at the Joint Armed Forces Officers’ Wives Luncheon in Washington yesterday — “This is the 28th anniversary of this luncheon. Laura and I happen to have our 28th anniversary of our own coming up Saturday”– today’s blog report will feature something old, something new, something borrowed and something … red.
For the old, we turn to — forgive us, Captain Ed — Captain’s Quarters, where Ed is fretting over the “vicious tone [the Harriet Miers debate] has taken in the conservative punditry and blogosphere” and wondering, “do conservatives know how to dissent?” Blogs Ed:
We got into this position of controlling the levers of power through the efforts of people like Hugh Hewitt, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, George Bush, Ken Mehlman, Tom DeLay, and the various bloggers and grassroots organizers weighing in on vital policy issues every day. Calling each other “pimps”, “shills”, “hysterics”, and other names may make for memorable rhetoric but it will undermine our own credibility in the future. We need all these same people in 2006 and 2008.
He ends his post with a noble call “for a return to civility” in conservative-on-conservative combat.
Moving on to the new: the blogosphere is at least two blogs bigger this week than it was last week with the unveiling of Broadsheet and The Plank. Who, What, Where, When and Why, you ask? The Broadsheet is Salon.com’s “cheeky new women’s blog” which exists to “cast a spotlight on news that puts women in the center, because while we’ve come a long way, a quick scan of bylines and stories in most major newspapers will show you that women are still not always being seen — or read.” (Advertisers have reason to rejoice but you, cheap reader, will have to sit through a streaming Jenny Craig ad in order to partake.) “Broadsheet will be taking the ladies seriously” but, fear not, will “also have celebrity dish and possibly fashion news.” The gals helpfully answer the fifth “W” on the blog’s left-hand corner, tag-line-like: “Why Broadsheet? Because it’s about time.” (Oh, and also because the women of Salon decided that the world should no longer be deprived of their “internal blog,” consisting of “staff comments — hilarious, angry, shocked, pleased — [that would] would zing back and forth by email chain.”) Sample post: Lori Leibovich wonders why there can’t be more strippers on the New York Times Op-Ed page.
It’s a broad-free zone so far over at The Plank, The New Republic‘s new blog, which hopes to draw readers once they “have hit refresh for the third time at Talking Points Memo, followed every Gawker link back to the New York Post, and read all the Romenesko letters” and are left “pleading with the gods of the Internet for just one more pretext for procrastination.” Sample post: Franklin Foer apologizes to readers for The Plank’s “tiresome discussion of a retired Fruit of the Loom model” (Michael Jordan).
Something borrowed? The Washington Post has borrowed Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall this week — his head shot and his blog’s content, at least — for what Marshall calls “a special guest blogging feature at the opinion section of the Washington Post Web site.” How can we, we wondered, land a similarly cushy gig? Well, the Post tells us “How to Think Like Josh Marshall” — a bonus Q&A with Marshall. What could be easier?
And finally, the something red comes courtesy of Redstate.org, where blogger Moe Lane begins a PlameGate-related post with this disclaimer: “This [post] is deliberately link-free, by the way: this is a speculation piece.” Thanks for the warning, Moe.
Now if only speculation–prone MSM reporters would provide readers with a similar head’s up.
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.