Saturday, February 02, 2008

A pollywog of a poli-blog

My bloggy--and real-life--friend Joel Mathis, late of Cup o' Joel and an editing job at the Lawrence [Kansas] Journal-World, has a new gig now: he's a co-moderator at a brand-new political blog called redblueamerica.com. Its slogan is "Best Thinking. Both Sides." The idea is to provide a space for civil, smart, impassioned political debate from all across the political spectrum. The main feature is the moderators' posing of a question and presenting their respective takes on that topic via their own or other people's writing. In addition, visitors can register and start their own blogs there, which Yours Truly has done as of today. My first post there is a re-posting about the Obama rally, so it's not new to most readers of this blog. Anyway, I've unilaterally decided to keep good old Blog Meridian free of politics--whatever its subject(s) is/are, it's certainly not my intention for it to give off the whiff of a political blog. Still, I'll post links here to my posts at redblueamerica on the off chance anyone might be interested in reading them.

redblueamerica is just getting started. It officially launched only last month and could really use some eyeballs and, even better, some bloggers to draw even more eyeballs. I hope you'll consider visiting and maybe even register a blog there.

I'm John B., and I approved this message.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the support, John! And thanks for your first blog at RBA. It got conversation started, didn't it?

Raminagrobis said...

Re: 'I approved this message'

I've been following the coverage of the primaries (at a safe distance), and it seems to be the convention that the candidate parrots this formula at the end of every political broadcast/advert/propagandist smear. It wouldn't seem such a strange thing if the main part of the ad was voiced by someone else, but sometimes it's just the speaker approving his own message!

Presumably this is precisely what you're satirizing here...but I don't get it.

Tell me please, why do they do this?

John B. said...

Grobie,
Thanks for asking--it does seem a bit meta, now that you mention it.
Because of changes in campaign finance law, in theory anyone can produce political ads; thus, ads originating with a campaign have to indicate explicitly that they originate with them. So, the candidate has to read the tag-line.

Raminagrobis said...

Ah, I thought it would be something like that. Still, it comes across sounding pretty ridiculous, dunnit?