Saturday, August 07, 2004

It's breaking my heart...one of my favorite bloggers is leaving town. frograbbitmonkey is funny, smart, profane, and her opinions on local restaurants and bars are devastatingly accurate. She and her man are headed for Chicago, where she's due to start law school. I actually met them once, at Hoggard's Derby party, and it was the same experience so many of us have when we meet blog-friends -- I felt I knew her, or had a real head start on knowing her. Good luck, my friend, and please, keep writing. 7:41:10 PM    comment []

Matt Stoller has a long, detailed post about what it is that Michelle Malkin actually does for a living, and why she cannot engage in an honest exchange of ideas: "Regardless of whether she is debunked, she can't relent, because the right-wing superstructure won't let her, and it is those people who are selling her books and making her career." 2:52:57 PM    comment []

So far, August is the bloodiest month for US soldiers in Iraq since May on a daily average basis. But now that we're no longer officially in charge over there, it doesn't seem to be news anymore. On the other hand, the losses reported for Iraqi fighters in the same period can't be sustainable, so maybe this spike will not last that long. 1:38:51 PM    comment []

Bloggin' Guilford County commissioner Jeff Thigpen says he'll keep writing if he's elected Register of Deeds. Commissioner Mike Barber tells me the same thing about the weblog or public forum he's preparing to launch -- if reelected to the board in November, he'll keep the channel to the public open. Thigpen writes that work of substance got done at the most recent meeting of the boisterous board, and explains his strategy for tuning out the bad behavior of his fellow commissioners: he goes to the back room and gets a cookie until the silly-storm passes. "When my colleagues are wrangling about issues that make no sense, takng positions for political leverage, or they are just bashing each other with rhetoric, I choose a different path...If you see me bust a move to the cookies, you will know it's my own form of political yoga." 1:18:32 PM    comment []