Reading Material

This hairy week marches on. I’m hoping to get to MTB with John Corlett tomorrow. Meanwhile, the kids are having a great week, but not a lot of time for the blog. Plus, there’s lots of interesting stuff to read out there during a relatively slow news week. I hope at some point to break down the latest Blackwell flip, but aside from that, it’s the sleepy season for politics junkies.

So here’s my reading list until I can drop a real post.

Bill Callahan has a great editorial about how the COPE Act represents a big fungoo from the Dems to urban areas. Bill has been one of the only bloggers, even among the nationals, who writes about the policy implications of COPE beyond the net neutrality angle.

Ryan Lizza has a riotous write up of the YearlyKos convention. Here’s a sample:

But there is still a discomfiting sense among the bloggers here that, as with
Armando, nothing in their world will be the same after this weekend. They are
moving from faceless writers talking in what sometimes seems like an echo
chamber to a national movement courted by presidential candidates and covered
seriously by the press. They are finally meeting the politicians they bash and
praise from the safety of their basements. Las Vegas could be the beginning of a
new era of blogger influence and authority. Or it might just be the weekend they
all sold out.

PoliSci prof. Alan Wolfe has an excellent piece in the current Washington Monthly called Why Conservatives Can’t Govern. As Kevin Drumm notes, its an antidote to the Conservative Apostacy Meme that has been going through the righty punditocracy. Given that our own J. Ken Blackwell has been running on the a platform of conservatism as it has never been tried before, it’s a must-read.