19 Comments - Daniel Darling - Wednesday, Jan 18, 06 @ 10:47 am: I tend to agree with Christopher. I’ve been looking for right-leaning blogs that focus on state politics and have not found very many. Perhpas we could be enlightened. - Anon - Wednesday, Jan 18, 06 @ 11:40 am: Why bother? Republican conservatives only know how to (1) engage in mopey, self-pitying complaints that they are getting picked on and excluded; (2) malign and defame Republicans that are not “one of us”; and (3) concoct fantastic politcal schemes to “take power” in the Illinois GOP and impose their “superior” values on us all. Hence, Illinois is a blue state, when it should be a battleground state. You can lay that right at the door of our “rule or ruin” conservatives. - why bother - Wednesday, Jan 18, 06 @ 12:20 pm: Great post Anon 11:40…your wisdom is truly amazing…I look forward to your next nugget of insights…Illinois needs you! - 6 Degrees of Separation - Wednesday, Jan 18, 06 @ 12:57 pm: To actually answer the question that was asked… One should run down the list of Illinois Blogs at the right, and pick out the right-leaning and libertarian-leaning ones. Some that come to mind are Angry Jolietan, OneMan, IlliniPundit, Respublica, Cirque Du Democrat, Concealed Carry, Bill Baar, Random Act, Reagan Review, Tom Roeser, Jill Stanek, Rhodes School. Some of these are more moderate Republican than right wing sites. All in all, far more blue and centrist blogs than right wing, at least in this listing. - Anon 2 - Wednesday, Jan 18, 06 @ 1:01 pm: 11:40, You’re right on the money. - insider - Wednesday, Jan 18, 06 @ 1:01 pm: Perhaps that’s because Republicans aren’t very good at governing. It’s been 40 years since a Republican president balanced a federal budget. The current occupant of the office has presided over the worst terror attack in American history, a completely bungled hurricane relief effort, a smear campaign against a covert CIA operative, and an illegal wiretapping program. Meanwhile, the GOP-controlled Congress has produced such legislative abominations as the Medicare Part D drug (non)coverage, bankruptcy bill, “energy” bill, etc. etc. etc. Actually, I’m wrong. We do need some GOP state blogs. It’s very hard to keep track of their screwups at the state level. Some blogs would help. - Anon. - Wednesday, Jan 18, 06 @ 1:58 pm: Some of the aforementioned are no longer active. In fact, many on the list at right aren’t (I know Rich doesn’t have time to personally police whether they’re up-to-date - maybe a blog entry topic). - Tweed - Wednesday, Jan 18, 06 @ 2:26 pm: No one has mentioned Illinois Leader yet? I’m amazed. - gopartisan - Wednesday, Jan 18, 06 @ 3:07 pm: Insider, it seems that the only thing you’ve been inside is Howard Dean’s talking-points file. To imply that 9/11 happened because of anything George W. Bush did (or didn’t do) is completely outrageous. Until the actually seize control of the airplanes, the 9/11 hijackers had committed no crimes. How was the CIA/FBI supposed to thwart their plot? Wire taps that you’d later cry are unconstitutional. Oh, and let’s not forget that under the previous occupant of the oval office presided over the first World Trade Center bombing, the Oklahoma City bombing, the attack on the USS Cole, the attack on the US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya….not to mention the bulk of the period during which 9/11 was planned. I won’t even get into Katrina…..I think an reasonable person has to agree that between Blanco, Nagen, and Bush, there is (as with terrorism) enough blame to go around between the parties. Oh, and the Plume affair was quite a smear. Someone told a reporter something was completely true and violated no laws, in an effort to discredit a partisan hack. I’m still trying to figure out where the scandal is on that one. Criticize Medicaid Part D all you want, but its still more coverage than seniors got out of Congress when the Dems controlled it and Clinton was in the White House. I know that this argument really boils down to, “we may be bad, but you’re no better,” but that’s the point. Glass houses, throwing stones and all that jazz. - insider - Wednesday, Jan 18, 06 @ 4:20 pm: Valiant try, gopartisan. The Democrats are a far cry from perfect, true, but your party is demonstrably worse. Where to start? So much ripe fruit for the picking. Katrina. Bush hired a total incompetent to run the nation’s emergency management agency. Did Blanco and Nagin hire total incompetents to run their cabinet agencies? The Plame affair. Um, just because it was true that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent does NOT mean it was legal to disclose her identity. In fact, it was illegal. We know this because the CIA referred the case to the Justice Department, which has been investigating for several years now. Sure would be silly for the Justice Department to waste all that time and money investigating a non-crime! Wiretaps. No one is arguing against wiretapping. However, many people, including many influential conservatives, are arguing against warrantless wiretaps, which are FORBIDDEN by the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. As no one in this country is above the law, the president cannot claim the freedom to act outside of its strictures. His admission that he violated FISA is essentially a confession that he committed a felony under federal law. You can scream “Monica” all you want, but I’d much rather have a president lying about sex than attempting to subvert the Constitution. 9/11. Reading the August 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing which warned about al Qaeda’s determination to attack inside the US might have helped. Listening to the outgoing Clinton administration’s dire warnings about the seriousness of the al Qaeda threat and focusing on it instead of ignoring the issue for 6 months while the chickenhawks worked on their pet project, Iraq, might have helped. No, we can’t know what, if anything, might have been the key piece to stopping the 9/11 attacks. But the historical record shows us that the Bush administration was remarkably disinterested and disorganized. Oh, and by the way, you neglect to mention that Clinton signed an order authorizing bin Laden’s assassination and in fact retaliated for the USS Cole attacks by bombing a bin Laden owned factory in Sudan–something that GOP “leaders” accused him of doing for political reasons. I guess it wasn’t treasonous to criticize the president back then, huh? Medicare Part D. Um, dude–there are already countless horror stories about elderly people whose medications were previously covered in full or in part by Medicare being turned down for Part D coverage. Explain to them how this is better for them than the situation under Clinton. It’s your program, you own it and all the inevitable blowback. And let’s not forget the GOP money laundering and influence peddling scandal associated with Jack Abramoff! Zero, count ‘em, zero Democrats received money from him. I am really going to enjoy watching the GOP implode in 2006. You guys sure have earned it! - Captplaid - Wednesday, Jan 18, 06 @ 4:42 pm: Small Newspapers? They need to take their liberal pushing carpetbagging propaganda back to Kankakee. They shamelessly promote an agenda promoting bigger government at the local, state, and federal level. Like the family name implies, it is becoming SMALL and irrelevant. I do enjoy the editorials about Springfield. It is one of the few independent opinions. - gopartisan - Wednesday, Jan 18, 06 @ 4:45 pm: “Did Blanco and Nagin hire total incompetents to run their cabinet agencies?” - um, I’m going to go ahead and say YES. Do you remember the pictures of the entire fleet of school buses parked in a lot underwater? Was that the work of a competent local agency director? There is PLENTY of evidence that the incompetence was just as, if not MORE, rampant at the local level as at the federal. If you can’t admit that, you are hardly worth responding to…..but I will continue….. “…it was illegal. We know this because the CIA referred the case to the Justice Department, which has been investigating for several years now…” - so, you are saying that Bill Clinton WAS guilty of everything that he was accused of? After all, the allegations against him were all referred to the Justice Department, which spend several years investigating them! It is hardly a foregone conclusion that revealing Plame (who was not an ACTIVE agent at the time) was actually illegal….try again! “Wiretaps. No one is arguing against wiretapping. However, many people, including many influential conservatives, are arguing against warrantless wiretaps” - Under what grounds would the government have been able to obtain wire taps of the 9/11 hijackers? They were Arabs who took flight lessons? And, it is important to remember that the wire taps in questions are not domestic calls….they are not citizens-to-citizen communications….there is plenty of precedent for the government conducting warrant-less surveillance of citizens communicating with suspected foreign/enemy combatants. “You can scream “Monica” all you want, but I’d much rather have a president lying about sex than attempting to subvert the Constitution.” - I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again….I’d rather have a president breaking the law in the hope of saving my (and every other American’s) butt than simply cover his own. Let’s try and keep it in context my friend, Bush is accused of being TOO aggressive in trying to keep America and Americans safe. Why are you surprised that he was so quick to plead guilty, so to speak? Oh, and by the way, you neglect to mention that Clinton told Sudan to let bin Laden out of custody because we didn’t have enough evidence to indict and extradite him. That might have helped more than an assassination order he knew could/would almost never be carried out. And the GOP criticizied him for bombing Iraq for political reasons, not factories in Sudan. “Zero, count ‘em, zero Democrats received money from him (Abramoff)” - well of course, because Abramoff himself was a Republican. But Democrats sure took PLENTY of money from the clients and special interests that Abramoff represented (which would count as influence peddling, wouldn’t you say???) I am really going to enjoy watching the Democrats fall short AGAIN in 2006. This country is never going to entrust power to a party led by Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid. And you pathetic talking points demonstrate why. - Truthful James - Wednesday, Jan 18, 06 @ 5:19 pm: Here we all sit together, sliding down the razor blade of life, and politics has become bitterness. We have been warped by politicians on both sides of the aisle in relentless pursuit of reelection. Elder statesmen are no more. We face a set of 21st century crises that are larger than anything we have faced since the Berlin Wall fell down. Bi-partisanship which organized our foreign policy has fallen by the wayside, Electoral victory costing in the millions every two, or four or six years makes otherwise good men place their consciences in the icebox and become prisoners of one or meore set of special interests. We used to send our elected officials to Washington or Springfield and trust them to use their best judgment to vote in our best interests. We knew that not all issues on which they voted reflected our desires, but integrity carried the day. We respected what was being done although we might not have liked it. Now we, and our representitives are prisoners of focus groups and polls. Integrity no longer matters. Civility has gone out of our political life. Our appetitite for the scurrilous has reached epic levels. And the state and the country are worse for it. Our place at the top of the heap — the unipolar power — is slip sliding away. - nickname - Wednesday, Jan 18, 06 @ 9:56 pm: gopartisan writes: Until the actually seize control of the airplanes, the 9/11 hijackers had committed no crimes. What do you call obtaining state-issued drivers’ licenses under false pretenses? (Or do you not buy into one of the main conservative talking points for passing the REAL ID Act?) As for the actual topic of this thread — Let me guess, Swope is going to go off in search of some false equivalency in the name of “balance” … trying to find the relatively few conservative state-focused bloggers in order to match up against the relatively greater number of state-focused progressive and liberal bloggers. That’s like comparing giving Concerned Women for America a series of interviews in order to “balance” the viewpoints of mainstream American women (oh yeah, that actually happened during the right-wing’s Harriet Miers filibuster)… False equivalency in the name of “balance”. Has anyone stopped to consider that the right-wing doesn’t actually need blogs when it already has so much media saturation in talk radio, newspaper columnists and editorial boards, and even tv with social-conservative religious programming? Besides, right-wing groups like ALEC and Manhattan Institute (among others) already focus on conservative issues for states, even providing boilerplate bills for conservative legislators to introduce. Or perhaps the real reason the vast right-wing “conspiracy”* has run out of cranky dittoheads and not enough of the ones left are interested in blogging (since so many traditional media conservatives, not the least of which are Kathleen Parker and Bill O’Reilly, have already practically burned bloggers at the stake)… (* It’s hardly a conspiracy since the groups like Hoover, Heritage, CWA, PTC, Heartland, etc, etc, etc all right there in our faces. A quick Internet search will turn up a sizeable portion of the right-wing institutions out there plying their trade day in and day out. Most folks — including, sorry Rich, journalists — just aren’t paying attention to all the connections.) - 6 Degrees of Separation - Thursday, Jan 19, 06 @ 12:18 am: 15 comments, and I was the only one on topic. Rich should give me a medal. - Anon - Thursday, Jan 19, 06 @ 1:57 am: 11:40 Anon- AMEN!!!! I’m glad someone finally said it. - Cal Skinner - Thursday, Jan 19, 06 @ 1:02 pm: My McHenry County Blog probably would be considered Republican-leaning by some. - insider - Thursday, Jan 19, 06 @ 3:06 pm: gopartisan, Your last post indicates that you do not respect facts, the rule of law, or the Constitution. In this country, government does not have the power to detain people without charging them with a crime–EVEN SUSPECTED FOREIGN TERRORISTS. Nor should it have that power, though you are apparently so scared by the prospect of future terror attacks that you are ready to give up your civil rights on the off-chance that this keystone-kop administration has the competence to protect the country. I know you probably think anything published on right-wing blogs is true, but I prefer actual, you know, news sources, like the Washington Post, in which the following appeared on Oct. 2, 2001: The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries. The Clinton administration struggled to find a way to accept the offer in secret contacts that stretched from a meeting at a Rosslyn hotel on March 3, 1996, to a fax that closed the door on the effort 10 weeks later. Unable to persuade the Saudis to accept bin Laden, and lacking a case to indict him in U.S. courts at the time, the Clinton administration finally gave up on the capture. So, to paraphrase, the Clinton administration tried very hard to get him in custody–remember, this was 1996, BEFORE the USS Cole or 9/11. Let’s contrast that to Bush’s actions, from a report by Lisa Myers of NBC News: Shortly after taking office, President George W. Bush ordered a new, more muscular policy to eliminate al-Qaida. Helping draft that policy: Roger Cressey, a terrorism expert in both Democratic and Republican administrations and now an NBC News analyst. Now Cressey is speaking out for the first time. He says in the early days of the Bush administration, al-Qaida simply was not a top priority, “There was not this sense of urgency. The ticking clock, if you will, to get it done sooner rather than later.” Cressey and other witnesses have told the 9/11 commission of long gaps between terrorism meetings and greater time and energy devoted to Russia, China, missile defense and Iraq than al-Qaida. I don’t have unlimited time, or I’d happily demolish all of your other weak arguments. - insider - Thursday, Jan 19, 06 @ 3:09 pm: P.S. Truthful James, perhaps you’d be interested to know who is chiefly responsible for the increasingly toxic nature of politics in this country? Sorry, comments for this post are now closed.