We're all bloggers now

• As one of the few people I know without a personal Web
  site, I thought I’d try my hand at “blogging” this month’s column.
  style=’mso-spacerun:yes’> (It’s official: I’ve
  never written a sentence that made me feel older or seem more out of touch.)
  (Readers are, of course, free to refute the prior
  claim.)
• As with most of my peers, blogs constitute a large,
  growing and influential portion of my daily reading.
  I consider The Drudge Report, my home page, to be the primogenitor
  of the form. After him, I usually
  hit Andrew Sullivan, Instapundit and The Corner.
  The best blogs in my opinion aren’t personal sites, but National
  Journal’s Hotline and Opinion Journal’s Best of
  the Web. (I won’t link to any of
  the aforementioned because I assume you already read them, or at least know
  about them, and I would just end up being “that guy” who e-mails you obvious
  things like the G-File and whatever brilliance Krauthammer chose to reflect
  on that day.)
• This little exercise made me realize the
  difficulty of offering readers daily news analysis and opinion.
  It has given me even more respect for the bloggers I read every day,
  while at the same time helping me understand why there are so many awful
  blogs constituted almost wholly of recycled and, ultimately, regurgitated
  material. With that, I give you my
  own humble contribution to blogdom, beginning, of course, with a personal
  observation.
• The fact that I’m not allowed to have either my window
  shade drawn or my tray table down during take-off is, in my mind, inextricably
  intertwined with the ever-deteriorating state of the airline industry.
• Three presidentially-hopeful Democrats–in
  descending order of hopefulness: Gephardt, Lieberman and Kucinich–thought
  they could skip out on the candidate debate at the NAACP’s annual meeting
  last week.
  style=’mso-spacerun:yes’> “After all,” they likely assumed, “we already
  hit the NALEO conference and that should have taken care of ‘the minority
  thing.'”
  Boy, were they wrong.
  (Well, actually, they were right.
  Both conferences were predictably nothing more than Bush/Republican-bashing
  Leftfests. The NAACP did, however,
  showcase Al Sharpton getting a standing ovation for having served time.
  Hear that, NALEO?)
  NAACP Pres. Kweisi Mfume addressed the panel of Dems
  who did show…and also spoke to those who didn’t.
  On the stage was an empty chair for each of the Dem non-attendees.
  style=’mso-spacerun:yes’> Mfume subtly chastised the four no-shows, saying
  their “political capital is the equivalent of Confederate dollars.”
  style=’mso-spacerun:yes’> One can only imagine how a high school Mfume
  would have reacted when the cool kids inevitably skipped his party.
  style=’mso-spacerun:yes’> This leads to wondering about what kind of a
  world Mfume inhabits if Dennis Kucinich is one of said cool kids.

  In the end, the three AWOL Democrats caved to
  class=SpellE>Mfume’s delicate, restrained needling and publicly fell on
  their swords on the same stage where previously had been just empty
  chairs with their names written on hotel stationary.

  Abandoning what little dignity his “campaign” has allowed him to
  keep, Kucinich intoned, “I’m very sorry I wasn’t able to be here,
  amazing grace, how sweet it is, once was lost, now I’m found.”

  Oh, and as if that wasn’t already beyond parody:
  style=’mso-bidi-font-weight:bold’>Julianne Malveaux moderated the debate.

• 
  href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/style/071803-1v.htm?nav=hptop_tb”>WashingtonPost.com
  currently offers one of the best “online art tours” I’ve ever seen.
  style=’mso-spacerun:yes’> Such tours usually lean toward nothing more–and
  often much less–than slide shows compiled by some intern with a
  digital camera. This, however,
  is a viewable, instructive and occasionally funny review of the

  Hirshorn
  Museum–the red-headed
  stepchild of the D.C. art museum world.
  
  style=’mso-bidi-font-style:normal’>Post art critic Blake Gopnik, just delivered
  from the Art Critic Factory, moderates the tour.
• Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.)
  on C-Span’s Washington Journal, arguing that states should stay
  out of the Head Start business: “How are they to do better with
  Head Start when they aren’t doing too good with K through 12?”
• Click here to read my analysis
  of Andrew Sullivan’s
  disagreement with
  href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/politics/onlineextra/medianotes/”>Howard
  Kurtz’s critique of
  href=”http://www.public.iastate.edu/~llama/brasky.htm”>Bill Brasky’s
  use of the term “negative space” in his total
  dismembering of Dave
  Barry’s apology for labeling David
  Frum a
  class=SpellE>Cinecultist wannabe. Fascinating
  stuff.
  
• There’s a scene in the live action
  version of “The Flintstones” where Fred, played by John Goodman,
  reads the stone tablet that is Bedrock’s newspaper, “The Daily
  Slab.” The point of
  the scene is to depict Fred reading about some plot point; however,
  in the lower corner of the tablet you can clearly see the headline
  “Middle East Peace Talks Breakdown.”
• Finally, the mandatory New
  York Times correction: “An article on June 29 about enemy
  combatants in

  Guantanamo Bay,
  Cuba,
  misstated the Geneva Convention rule on interrogating prisoners
  of war.
  style=’mso-spacerun:yes’> Interrogation is indeed permissible.”
  style=’mso-spacerun:yes’> I guess that’s a minor oversight for an article
  dealing with the “ethical dilemmas” of detaining and interrogating
  captured terrorists.

Raul Damas is director of operations at Opiniones Latinas, a Hispanic-focused polling firm.