Al-Qaeda is on the Ropes. Keeping Them There is the Issue.

AJ Strata has been watching with some interest the demise of al-Qaeda.  Today, he remarks:

It is alarming even to me how drastically al-Qaeda’s future as changed recently.  After 9-11 they were the future hope of Islam after they struck America a savage and deadly blow. But since then, mostly through the war front in Iraq and the atrocities committed there by al-Qaeda, killing tens of thousands of Muslims, al-Qaeda has become the enemy of Islam, now being chased from Iraq by a fighting force of Muslims numbering in the 100’s of thousands.   The fact is al-Qaeda is deadly, it just cannot topple any nations:

This assessment is supported by a little-noticed reference in the UK’s new national security strategy, published in March: “While terrorism represents a threat to all our communities and an attack on our way of life, it does not at present amount to a strategic threat. But it is qualitatively and quantitatively more serious than terrorist threats we have faced in the past, and it is likely to persist for many years.”

What this means, and the Muslim street knows this, is that any attack on the West will bring quick and deadly justice from the West.  It is why there are many who think al-Qaeda dare not attack this year or else ensure another 4 years of strong leadership in McCain.

Well, exactly. They know Obama being elected is an advantage to them; it’s that simple. Keep someone in the White House who will respond correctly to threats and they have no chance. Time and again, their support for Obama has shown through the cracks.

A campaign of terror is the only chocie possible for al-Qaeda. Such an enemy can never be fully defeated, because like any other brainwashed devotee, they can never be convinced to quit. What must be done, therefore is keep beating them back, beating them down, and controling that situation. The reason for the support from al-Qaeda for Obama is simple; They know he will not continue beating them down.

I’ve posted this before, but I think it bears revisiting… here’s how to raise fuel prices should you want to do it…

* Create shortages in the oil markets by ensuring domestic oil supplies can never be used. This will force us to get oil from the least stable spots in the world, thus forcing not only higher prices, but forcing us to fund people intent on destroying us.
* Regulate domestic suppliers out of business with NIMBY, and enviro-whackjob policy, and regulations and of course, the great leveler, taxes.
* Make sure that no new refineries are built over a period 30 years, to meet the need.
* Mandate that everyone buys only governmentally mandated formulations of gasoline, thus creating shortages of the ingredients.
* Make sure that each area of the country has it’s own mandated formulation, which will strain the already over-strained existing refining infrastructure, thus raising prices.
* Create even further price increases by ensuring that each area of the country moves to seasonal blends, which will create even more havoc on the refiners, thus raising prices even further.
* Mandate that all these regional blends contain MBTE, which is a creation of one of your biggest contributors. Make sure it’s added in the name of saving the environment. don’t tell anyone how this raises the price of fuel.
* Mandate that all these regional blends do not contain contain MBTE, which is a creation of one of your biggest contributors. Make sure it’s removed in the name of saving the environment, but also, require that the removal of MBTE does not affect tailpipe emissions… regardless of the cost. Don’t tell anyone how this raises the price of fuel.
* When product shortages cause increased prices at the pump, blame the refiners, and increase their taxes as punishment, which can only have the effect of raising pump prices still further.
* When pump prices go up again, raise taxes again, as indicated, even to the point of taxing 60% of their total profits… and nearly 70% of the puump price is the result of taxes and mandated nonsense…. while continuing to blame oil companies for the prices.
* Make lots of noise… most notably from the aforementioned enviro-whackjobs and pols about how we need to get off oil, which has the effect of minimizing investment in new sources of oil, creating even further shortages.

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Note that in each case, the problem is government, which thinks itself at each turn, the solution.

Update: Welcome, Econopundit readers.

Dennis Kucinich, as we have said here many times, is one of the very few people on the planet who can make Ron Paul look sane. We have yet another example of that. Raw Story:

Thirty-five articles were presented by Rep. Dennis Kucinich to the House of Representatives late Monday evening, airing live on C-SPAN.

“The House is not in order,” said Kucinich to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), upon which Pelosi pounded her gavel.

“Resolved,” Kucinich then began, “that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate.

While the story takes on a self-congratulatory tone (thus raising questions about the sanity of the Raw Story gang) it does show clearly that Kucinich is still stuck on stupid.

But please, Democrats keep holding this idiot up as an example of your brightest and best. It’s the fastest way I can think of to push Democrats even further into irrelevance.

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Gasoline is at four dollars a gallon and raising.  The drooling idiot from Illinios, Barack Hussien Obama, proposes a really radical idea, a windfall profits tax on gasoline:

RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) – Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Monday he would impose a windfall profits tax on U.S. oil companies as he sought political gain from Americans’ pain over high gasoline prices.

Windfall profits tax, a page out the Jimmy Carter and Teddy Kennedy playbook.  I remember the gas lines of the ‘Seventies.  i quess it is just more history that BO has ignored.

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• I see KSM says he’d welcome being a martyr. I would suggest burial…alive… face down down… under a pig farm. Being in a place where the pigs crap on him all day, for years and perhaps decades on end, would seem appropriate to the situation. Of course, such a solution requires being informed of where he will be buired, a week prior to execution, to allow it all to sink in. And no, there are some situations which mercy is neither a requirement, nor is it desired… and this is one such case.
• Speaking of pigs, Oprah was doing a happy dance for Obama the other day? Gosh, I hope the stage was reinforced.
• I know I mentioned the other day that the sixth Marine supposedly involved at Hadditha  was exonerated. What I failed to mention, though was that so far every single one has been so exonerated.  And once again, Jack Murtha has no comment.
• Uh-oh…. Maybe CO2 isn’t such a bad thing, after all.
• A fire at the Texas Govenor’s mansion? Arson is suspected.
• Yet another Democrat defector. This is not as I said yesterday, due to the strength of John McCain, but the weakness of ALL the candidates, particularly Obama.
• I’ve been mentioning the Bakken Oil formation the last couple of months now. Here’s a great article on the subject, and it certainly looks good.
• I don’t accept that Big Brown  was suffering from the heat. Did the other horses all have air conditioners? Something screwy about all this, and I don’t suppose we’ll ever really understand exactly what.
• Henke seems annoyed: “”Why does the Right side of the blogosphere have less traffic, a smaller audience, than the Left side of the blogosphere?” Mostly, Jon, it’s because those on the right have actual lives, and don’t spend all day and night on the web. Your source for hitcounts seems a problem, as well. Traffic around here is up for the last several weeks… by a couple thousand per week. Not taht we’re doing anything differently, here, but it does seem that traffic is far from a uniform problem.
• Ya know, Billy, perhaps the first problem you should address is how each of you defines the two words in ‘common sense’.  After all, in reality, it’s the ‘common’ sense that has driven us to such depths of stupidity. Freedom being the uncommon sense, anymore.
• Speaking of hitcounts, why does Memeorandum play like Bitsblog doesn’t exist? Getting a little tiresome.
• So, Maria Cantwell, the Democrat from Washington state comes out the other day and says the fix for Gasoline prices is more government regulation. Next day, prices skyrocket in direct reaction. Cantwell, and her party’s nominee, Obama say added taxes are the way, though they don’t mention that the government by wide margins, are already the ones making the most money on the sale of gasoline and Diesel.  Remember, folks, anyone who wants to raise your taxes or raise your fuel prices, is not your friend. Democrats want to do both.
• So Franken got the Dem endorsement? Well, what do you expect from the party that nominated Obama?

Tiger Hawk answers a question I quoted VDH as asking earlier today, when he said:

And why are Republicans, who voted in overwhelming numbers for off-shore drilling, ANWR, nuclear, shale, tar sands, liquid coal, etc—and were opposed by Democrats on grounds of wanting to enrich energy companies—not appealing to the country to develop domestic supplies on the basis of fairness (the poor have the least access to energy efficient homes and hybrid, fuel efficient new cars), the environment (the US can extract oil, in a fungible market, far more cleanly than Russia or the Middle East), and national security (most of OPEC, Russia, Venezuela are belligerents and becoming more dangerous the more trillions of dollars the West, China, and Japan transfer to them in their hard-won national wealth)?

It is a ready-made issue for them, and with skill can appeal to Americans of every persuasion who are starting to snicker when Obama soars in pie-in-the-sky sermons about wind, solar, and millions of new jobs in green energy. Maybe—but back on planet America until we get there the working class is going to be paying a day or two per week of their wages to fuel their second-hand cars, while the environmentalists will buy new Priuses and an on-demand water heater for their tasteful homes. One would have thought the President, who was on right side of these production issues, would give a national address calling for a bipartisan effort to produce energy to get us through these hard times, or Republican senators would now be reintroducing energy legislation almost daily.

So, here comes Tigerhawk, who says:

First, the New York Times devotes front page space to the impact of $4 gasoline on working people in rural parts of the country, many of whom have to drive long distances in inefficient vehicles to jobs that do not pay well by urban standards.

Across broad swaths of the South, Southwest and the upper Great Plains, the combination of low incomes, high gas prices and heavy dependence on pickup trucks and vans is putting an even tighter squeeze on family budgets.

Here in the Mississippi Delta, some farm workers are borrowing money from their bosses so they can fill their tanks and get to work. Some are switching jobs for shorter commutes.

People are giving up meat so they can buy fuel. Gasoline theft is rising. And drivers are running out of gas more often, leaving their cars by the side of the road until they can scrape together gas money.

The story includes this interesting graphic that shows gasoline expenditures as a percentage of disposable income, by county. I hope that in November somebody smarter than I am runs this map against electoral results to see whether it had a systematic impact on the election.

Sooner, it is to be hoped, since it would help to prevent a disaster. The poor need to be reminded continually that the Democrat Party is not their freind, and stuff like this demonstrates this point amply:

Then there is an article in the Wall Street Journal about how “leaders around the globe fumble attempts to temper oil prices.” The main point, of course, is that rising oil prices have confounded politicians all over the world, in no small part because policies that would reduce demand for oil and boost its production conflict with other domestic political requirements. In China, for example, maintaining stability just before the Olympics is the top priority, and the leadership is concerned that a big increase in the (now controlled and subsidized) domestic price of gasoline would put that at risk. In the United States, the Democrats oppose policies that would boost production, or signal to markets that more production is on the way:

In Washington, meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats are at odds over what is causing the spike in oil prices. Democrats, who control the U.S. Congress, blame a combination of speculative trading and what they view as price-gouging by OPEC members and oil companies.

Republicans, including Bush administration officials, tend to argue that the problem is a shortage of supply needed to keep up with rising demand from industrializing countries like China and India. With encouragement from the oil industry, Republican lawmakers are pushing to allow drilling in areas of the U.S. that have been off limits, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

Although higher prices have meant record profits for oil producers, there was little evidence that industry executives were celebrating Friday’s spike. In recent months, representatives of major oil companies have been repeatedly dragged before Congress to answer charges of price manipulation and profiteering.

The companies have consistently said they don’t control oil prices — an argument supported by most experts — and are using their profits to find and produce more oil. At a forum in Russia on Saturday, executives from major oil companies said they are facing political challenges not just in the U.S. but around the world.

Chevron Corp. Chairman David O’Reilly called restricted access to new developments “the biggest risk in expanding production,” while Exxon Mobil Corp. Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson said concerns about access to new supplies are fueling the surge in prices. “Just a signal that such access will be granted would have an immediate effect on the market,” Mr. Tillerson said.

There is some evidence that the industry’s arguments are having an impact on public opinion. A recent Gallup poll showed 20% of Americans blamed oil companies for high gasoline prices — down from 34% a year earlier.

Democrats in Congress have shown little indication that they are ready to open up large new areas for drilling, at least in the short term.

Now, go back and look at the New York Times graphic. Virtually all the states where gasoline represents a low percentage of disposable income are Democratic strongholds. The voters in those states are not suffering nearly as much from high gasoline prices, which remain a small proportion of their income. Not a terrible price to pay to avoid oil platforms in sight of the beach house.

I wonder if McCain has the courage to take this one on?

See, that’s the problem here; The truth is there and easily proved… but our leadership doesn’t want to spread this truth, for fear of being seen as ‘too confrontational’… and thus becoming party to not only the defeat of the Republicans, but the defeat of the truth. Hey RNC, time to come out swinging.

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This post made Real Clear Politics Best of the Blogs

(Bit: Link repair)

Barack Obama, 3 June, courtesy of Breitbart:

The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth. This was the moment—this was the time—when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

Maybe in BO’s fervid little mind, American history began on 3 June.   Not in my world. Not in the real world.   Americans, such a Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross, have been caring for the sick long before BO’s sorry self dragged himself on to the national stage.  Don’t insult the intelligence of Americans by pretending we have no history and no national ach prior to June 3.

Hat tip photo:  Wikipedia.

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Interesting questions from Victor Davis Hanson, this morning…

Why is the U.N. holding conferences about rising food prices, but not spiraling oil prices that in various ways account for them? Somehow in the globalist mindset the agricultural producing world is more culpable than the non-productive OPEC world. But we should remember that it requires skill, ingenuity, and a certain craft to produce enough food to feed one’s country and export the surplus, and none of the above to pump oil, an accident of nature that it is beneath one’s feet, and, in the case of most of OPEC, a commodity and infrastructure that someone else found, developed and currently mostly maintains.

The left.. and in this I include the UN, whose bias toward socialism knows few bounds has always had an anti-oil bias… a self-destructive anti-oil bias.  No, perhaps that’s wrong. I wonder if a case can be made, that the left actually has an anti-energy bias? It might explain why alternative energy progress has never been all that great. Perhaps it’s as I’ve been saying all along; If problems are actually solved, Democrats have no more to run their campaigns on.

And why are Republicans, who voted in overwhelming numbers for off-shore drilling, ANWR, nuclear, shale, tar sands, liquid coal, etc—and were opposed by Democrats on grounds of wanting to enrich energy companies—not appealing to the country to develop domestic supplies on the basis of fairness (the poor have the least access to energy efficient homes and hybrid, fuel efficient new cars), the environment (the US can extract oil, in a fungible market, far more cleanly than Russia or the Middle East), and national security (most of OPEC, Russia, Venezuela are belligerents and becoming more dangerous the more trillions of dollars the West, China, and Japan transfer to them in their hard-won national wealth)?

It is a ready-made issue for them, and with skill can appeal to Americans of every persuasion who are starting to snicker when Obama soars in pie-in-the-sky sermons about wind, solar, and millions of new jobs in green energy. Maybe—but back on planet America until we get there the working class is going to be paying a day or two per week of their wages to fuel their second-hand cars, while the environmentalists will buy new Priuses and an on-demand water heater for their tasteful homes. One would have thought the President, who was on right side of these production issues, would give a national address calling for a bipartisan effort to produce energy to get us through these hard times, or Republican senators would now be reintroducing energy legislation almost daily.

Yeah, well, about that. These are not conservatives, these Republicans you question, Victor, are centrists, and are thereby too eager to get along with their opposition, at the expense of actual progress.  Long-time readers will recall I issued a warning about Bush 43 over just this, even prior to the 2000 election. Similarly, I issued similar warnings over John McCain. However, then as now, the prospect of the Democrat gaining office was even more  gruesome to contemplate.

But given the current conservative ineptness, $5 a gallon gas will be blamed on the war, or lack of federal subsidies to solar, or the oil companies, and not the elite agenda of utopians who were not willing to do what was necessary for the collective good to help us transition through to new fuels.

Hanson is slipping here, I think. He does not allow for the idea that the transition is not needed for at least another 100 years, given recent finds, at least insofar as transportation is concerned. There is comparatively little, after all, in fixed energy use that is directly derived from oil, save for those homes still on oil heat. So the biggest focus is, and should be, on energy for transportation, which is the lifeblood of our economy.

There is something to be said for the war causing some  of the increase. But this is as Hanson suggests,  a fungible market… and had we had the foresight and political testicular mass to tell the Gaia worshipers to grab the cone hat and sit in the corner and shut the hell up, we’d have had ANWR online by now… and the world market would have had a balance against the problems if middle-eastern oil, and the politics and religion tied to it. However, political courage is a thing we have lacked since Reagan left office.

And let’s consider the national security angles of all of this. If someone wanted to cripple our economy, one could hardly do it better, than doing exactly what we have done by limiting our sources of transportation energy, both by forbidding ourselves to drill for it domestically, and by allowing those with large sums of money to invest, to manipulate the remaining oil markets against us.

George Soros, anyone? Does anyone happen to recall that this is exactly what he said he’d do, given the chance, all to make Republicans look bad?

Nift little post at the Barack Obama official website about How the jewish lobby works.

Oh, wait… they’ve removed it… AFTER Memeorandum had it in the number one slot.

Gee, can you imagine why that might be? For all the abject boot licking Obama did at AIPAC the other day, take a look over at LGF who has a capture of the post running. Michelle Malkin has it as well.

How long until we get the denials, I wonder?

Addendum:(Bit)
Glenn gets it right, here:

Reader Martin Shoemaker emails:

The Community Blogs at Obama 08 are no more â??officialâ? than the rantings of BDS sufferers at an Obama rally. I have a blog there, just to prove how easy it is to get one, and Senator Obama has ZERO chance of getting my vote. You could have one. Itâ??s as simple as signing up. Thereâ??s no vetting process of any kind.

Any nut with an axe to grind can post any offensive material on the Community Blogs, and the Obama campaign will be unaware unless someone raises a stink. In fact, itâ??s entirely possible that a McCain operative could go on the site, create a blog, post offensive material, and then leak the URL to LGF to â??proveâ? how disreputable the Senatorâ??s supporters are. Shades of Dan Rather!

Or of Canadian “Human Rights” investigators. But the Kos-style open diary thing seems like a highly unwise approach for a Presidential campaign, even one that expects Big Media outfits to protect them on issues like this, as isn’t done for others.

Just so. This stuff is entirely predictable, and avoidable. That they did not avoid it shows a lack of judegment I want nowhere near the White House.

Perhaps of greater import; what does this say, when this kind of antisemitism is shown so clearly among Obama’s supporters?

The paper callled for a high the low 90’s today, but it only reached a mere 87,   Hiked several miles on the Erie Canal Towpath, a/k/a  the Canal.   I was struck of distinct lack of dogs, too hot for Fido.   Saw an assortment of hikers and bicylists.   However nobody, myself included, seemed in a hurry.   Just a lazy, hazy day on the Canal.

Hat tip photo: History Rochester.

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Better late than never. aFter a quarter of century, the World Health Organization has quit promoting the hoax of hetersexual AIDS, Jeremy Laurance, Independent (UK):

A quarter of a century after the outbreak of Aids, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has accepted that the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic has disappeared.

 In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head of the WHO’s department of HIV/Aids said there will be no generalised epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside Africa.

Wbile AIDS is impossible to cure and difficult to treat, it remains easy to prevent.

I remarked a while ago:

Clinton is now looking for a scapegoat, and Penn seems a likely enough target. Penn’s job, after all, was putting lipstick on a pig…. Hillary Clinton is a product that is about as popular as raw sewage. Granted that Penn didn’t help that image, but what could?

Of course, that was when Penn got canned because Mrs Clinton wasn’t getting the wins she needed to achieve her goal of world domination.

As of this morning, Penn offers a different take on why that effort failed… and, big shock… Penn says it’s not his fault. No shock that this should show up in the New York Times, is it?

The conventional criticisms of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign are these: she had no message; she ran just on experience; she should have shown more of her warmer side; she was too negative; President Clinton’s campaigning hurt her; and she presented herself as inevitable. It is amazing she got any votes at all.

Notice, please, that Penn ignores the biggest problem of all; Mrs Clinton herself.

She did show her warmer side, and campaigned often with her mom and with her daughter. But it was her strength as a warrior that voters saw — as they had in New York — as she won primary after primary against the odds.

President Clinton tirelessly served as her adviser, fund-raiser and relentless campaigner. He drew enormous crowds and gained significant votes for his wife. In Pennsylvania, for example, she won by almost double the typical margin in the rural and suburban counties he visited.

The Clintons have spent their lives fighting as much as any leaders in their generation for greater equality across racial and gender lines. I believe nothing they said was ever intended to divide the country by race. Any suggestion to the contrary was perhaps the greatest injustice done to them in this campaign.

…

While everyone loves to talk about the message, campaigns are equally about money and organization. Having raised more than $100 million in 2007, the Clinton campaign found itself without adequate money at the beginning of 2008, and without organizations in a lot of states as a result.

Why would Penn write such now? Two simple reasons…

1. Self-Justification
2. He’s not too keen on a visit to Ft. Marcy Park.

Notice; he mentions a lack of cash, but fails utterly to mention why that was a problem… why the justifiably vaunted Clinton money machine couldn’t get it done… Mrs Clinton had far too much history to overcome. Democrats didn’t want to spend another four and possibly eight years defending her again, apparently sensing that at the end of that time even stalwart Democrats would no longer want anything at all to do with the party.  At the bottom line, and Penn’s attempts at smoothing feathers not withstanding, Mrs Clinton lost because of one reason and one reason alone: Mrs Clinton.  She has far too much animosity built up against her from the Clintons first rise to power, to be taken seriously as a candidate for having such power again. Indeed, let’s be honest enough to say that in sane times, with candidates who were actually worthy in the running, her attempt at the office would have been met by the derisive laughter it deserved. That she did as well as she did only shows how weak those running against her are.  Obama, being the obvious example, here. As I said a couple months ago, after Obama lost Pennsylvania:

How bad does someone have to be, to lose to a known liar with negatives as near as 50% as no matter, while spending twice as much as she does?  Such a candidate is Obama.

Eventually, of course Obama would win the Democrat primary… I say again… eventually, (What other primary has run so close for so long?) …but by margins close enough to raise serious doubts about his attractiveness to all but his most devoted of followers… who, frankly don’t appear to be to be all that bright, and look to be more about hero worship and Beatles- to- America-like euphoria, than about actual accomplishments.

It’s really that simple. No matter what message gets tied to it, and no matter how much money gets tied to it, what we still have in Mrs Clinton is someone who the people want nowhere near the White House. Truth to tell, most people… even most people from New York… don’t want her in the Senate, but we’re stuck with her.

So, we have Obama as the Democrat nominee.  (Sigh) … Not that John McCain is much stronger a candidate, mind. The only advantage McCain has is that unlike Obama, McCain isn’t a full-on Marxist, and thereby is less damaging to us than Obama.

That’s what we’re down to, folks… who will cause the least damage. It’s all enough to cause serious doubts about the future of the country. What a change from the days of Reagan, where we had nothing but the optimism, and we actually had the ability to make things better rather than merely the hope of survival until the next election.

The high was projected in the 90’s for today.  Ok so the temperature only reached a mere 89.  The local television statioin gives a warning for the youngsters, WHEC-TV:

With the heat and humidity the risk for heat related illnesses goes up. It can be dangerous for people exercising or playing sports outside. “It’s really hot, everybody is sweating right now, it’s really hot,” said soccer player Liam Farnnung.

I mean is all well and good to worry about the young squirts, but this is National Trail Days.  Some of use old types, spent some of the day doing trail work.  As for this old part, I was spreading pea gravel.  Don’t we get a bit of worry as well?

James Joyner, this morning:

Aaron Brazell is doing some research on the evolution of blogging in recent years and has asked for my input. I started OTB in January 2003 and have seen a lot of change. I should note at the outset that my experience is almost entirely with the political blogosphere, a tiny fraction of the whole enterprise, and that my observations mostly apply in that realm.

I’ll advise you to go and read James interesting and rather complete read of the sphere, as it has evolved. HIs comments, all of them, are valid. I add these comments:

It should be noted that only a relative handful of the millions of blogs out there are making serious income.

No particular quibble, here, just using this as the springboard. I’ve been at it for somewhat longer than you, and personally, I’m not making piles of cash, though I am making more than enough to keep my ISP and my webserver hosts’ bills covered with perhaps enough left over to buy myself lunch, so I’m content. As a result of that modest income, it’s a hobby that doesn’t cost me all that much, that I’d not be spending anyway.

I wonder, though about the point of optimizing content for added dollars. Personally, I’ve been working on that from the standpoint of bringing in additional people. Everyone, even if they’re not about making money, tries to make their site the biggest success if can be. The dollars are a secondary concern, if that. They do go hand in hand, though, so again, I have no major quibble with your point.

Now, most regular readers are keeping up with blogs through some sort of feed reader and clicking in to the site itself only to participate in the comments section discussion or (in the case of partial feeds) to finish reading entries that interest them.

I find about 25% of my traffic coming in for single hits from such sources.

A more recent phenomenon is the rise of “splogs,” auto-generated blogs that are created by stealing material off of RSS feeds for popular blogs. The splogs make money from unearned page impressions generated by search engines, drawing traffic and money away from sites that actually created the content. Even worse, the splogs often wind up ranked higher in the search engines than the original sites, since the splogs tend to micro-focus on a handful of keywords, and the original sites actually get penalized in the rankings because of “duplicate content.”

A real problem, this. I recently, as you, added a copyright notice to my RSS feeds to clamp down on that kind of nonsense. Trouble was, that feeds I’d signed on for…(Blogburst, for example) had some problems running those feeds with the copyrights in them, and that was costing me serious traffic. (One blogburst in the Chicago Sun-Times… a place I appear with some regularity… generated several thousand hits for me a few weeks ago)
I ended up removing the copyright notice. I don’t really know what can be done, with this problem.

Just about every presidential, congressional, or gubernatorial candidate now has an effort to court bloggers for favorable coverage.

I do get a lot of that kind of thing in my feedback bin. So far, I’ve been mostly ignoring it. You state yourself, my exact reason for ignoring most of them:

Bloggers who work briefly for a campaign, especially for a controversial candidate, tend to be forever tarred with that association and readers naturally wonder whether they’re getting unvarnished views.

I’ve seen it happen with Henke, for example. He’s still catching hell for work he did years ago. It comes, at the end, down to long term credibility.

While there are more thoughtful, moderate tone blogs now than ever, the trend has been toward harsh polemics. Many of the top political bloggers have come on to the scene since I started and almost all who have risen to the top have been more Ann Coulter or Michael Moore than George Will or David Broder.

This is reflective, not a driver, of what’s already out there, James. People are beginning to understand, possibly for the first time in decades, that, as a friend says, ideas have real consequences in real lives, particularly when set out as policy. This is not a matter of intellectual gamesmanship, this is not the Harvard debate society… These things affect real people. This increase in anger is a reflection of the anger already out there, and is why often the ones who shout louder get more traffic.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this topic as things occur to me, and as the discussion over there, (and at Aaron’s) develops.

From ESPN:

Jim McKay, 86, a longtime television sports journalist, has died of natural causes in Maryland, according to a statement from the McKay family.

McKay is best known for hosting “ABC’s Wide World of Sports” and 12 Olympic Games.

McKay won numerous awards for journalism, including the George Polk Memorial Award and two Emmys — one for his sports coverage, the other for his news reporting — for his work at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which were tragically affected by the Black September terrorists’ attack on the Israeli athletes in the Olympic Village.

“There are no superlatives that can adequately honor Jim McKay. He meant so much to so many people. He was a founding father of sports television, one of the most respected commentators in the history of broadcasting and journalism,” ESPN and ABC Sports president George Bodenheimer said in a statement.

“For more than 60 years he brought sports into the homes of Americans on Wide World of Sports, the Olympics and many other programs that captured the essence of the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

Well, I guess I can’t say any better, except of course that his is a voice I grew up with…. hell, that most of us grew up with.  One of the great ones, certainly.