Herewith a sampling of posts from some of my favorite blogs and bloggers:
Although much of his material is Philadelphia-centric, Will Bunch is among the top political bloggers anywhere. (And a good friend.) He writes at Attytood (which is how many native Philadelphians say “attitude”) that:
The Occupy Wall Street movement might have died on the vine were it not for the short-sightedness (and I’m being kind) of certain members of the New York Police Department. The protests in Manhattan went from little more than zero news coverage — and interest from the wider public — to moderate attention levels after a NYPD higher-up pepper-sprayed peaceful demonstrators, and it spiked to intense national awareness after police rounded up and arrested 700 people on the Brooklyn Bridge on Oct. 1.
More here.
Speaking of attitude, John Cole and his crew at Balloon Juice have plenty and sometimes a little too much, which can cloud their judgment. (John’s endless attacks on blogging giant Andrew Sullivan are, in the end, pointless.) But I digress because on balance most of what appears at BJ is a cut above the blogging norm. Contributing blogger Mistermix writes that:
The Senate already far over-represents the interests of rural states. The combination of that over-representation, plus a constant filibuster, gives some small, red percentage of the population veto power over the rest of us.
I, for one, welcome Harry Reid’s mini- or maxi-nuclear option. If we got rid of the filibuster, holds and all the other delaying tactics, Democrats might be worse off in the short term if we lose the Senate in 2012. Longer-term, however, we’re ahead of the game if the Senate becomes a majority vote body.
More here.
Booman is another Philadelphian but his reach at Booman Tribune is global. He writes of the trade bills that zipped through the Senate with . . . gosh, bipartisan support:
There’s a reason that these bills are passing with little opposition or much public debate. They just aren’t that big of a deal. There are important issues involved, and individual industries and businesses will be impacted, but none of them will be as important or damaging as NAFTA.
More here.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has become one of the best bloggers anywhere in only a couple three years. If awards were given for thoughtful posting and grace under fire, he’d have a passel of them. Writing for The Atlantic, Coates ever so gently breaks the news that the president is black:
What’s most interesting about Obama’s alleged lack of blackness, is that very few black people actually seem to agree. To them Obama is final face on that great black Rushmore –somewhere next to Harriet Tubman, Martin Lurther King, Rosa Parks, and Malcolm X. There’s a barbershop on 116th and Lennox where I sometimes go for a cut. The walls feature Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali. In the center is a picture of Barack Obama.
More here.
Lance Mannion is another thoughtful blogger and my only criticism of him is that it seems like he is fund raising every other week despite what, on its face, seem to be pretty comfortable circumstances. Writing at his eponymously named blog about his participation in the Occupy Wall Street protests on . . . Wall Street, he writes:
Nice waking up Thursday morning still a free man. Of course I really had no expectation of waking up anything but. Just about everyone I told I was going down to Occupy Wall Street Wednesday with the Teamsters made a joke about my getting arrested. Several good friends told me to call them in the event, promising they’d put up bail money. But, truth is, I felt that even considering the possibility I might end up in the slammer was self-romanticizing. How likely was it to happen? The protesters have shown from the beginning they’re determined to keep things peaceful and non-confrontational, so if things got out of hand it would have to be that cops got out of hand, again, and I figured they’d be anxious not to make that mistake again.
More here.
I am a sucker for science blogs and Ed Yong’s Not Exactly Rocket Science is one of the very best. Writing about scientists sequencing the entire Black Death genome, he says:
Sequencing the Black Death genome may not tell us about why it was so deadly, but it still reveals how the bacterium evolved. Now, [scientists] Schuenemann and Bos can look at how Y.pestis transformed from a bacterium that infects rodents to one that kills humans and how it evolved over time. That knowledge could be very important, especially since plague is rebounding as a “re-emerging” disease.
More here.
There is no other way to put it: Helen Philpot is an octogenarian pistol. Blogging irregularly at Margaret and Helen, she writes:
Margaret, what kind of moron thinks that God destroys entire towns and kills people with a hurricane because politicians in Washington are being disagreeable? What kind of moron? The kind with the bouffant hairdo and a Minnesota accent. Honestly, if God worked that way, Irene would have headed inland towards Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District.
More here.
Which brings us to that Andrew Sullivan. While he sometimes can be a bit shrill, the breadth of his posts at The Dish is colossal and I always look forward to how he applies his keen intellect to the issues of the day. Faith and religion is a favorite topic and he recently opined on whether the story of The Fall is true:
One way of looking at this is to see pluralism in our experience. Some things, most things, we experience as real, like a Happy Meal or a bike accident (yes, I wiped out badly on Sunday). Other things we experience as true – a profound musical epiphany, or spiritual calm, or unexpected joy.
More here.