What's the Matter with Liberals?

"For more than thirty-five years, American politics has followed a populist pattern as predictable as a Punch and Judy show and as conducive to enlightened statesmanship as the cycles of a noisy washing machine. The antagonists of this familiar melodrama are instantly recognizable: the average American, humble, long-suffering, working hard, and paying his taxes; and the liberal elite, the know-it-alls of Manhattan and Malibu, sipping their lattes as they lord it over the peasantry with their fancy college degrees and their friends in the judiciary."

Context needed on Kerry's botched joke

Context is everything, except when its not.

Cursive writing rapidly becoming passé

Justification?

How the Republicans Can Win

How the Democrats Can Win

End of the Revolution

Every revolution begins with the power of an idea and ends when clinging to power is the only idea left. The epitaph for the movement that started when Newt Gingrich and his forces rose from the back bench of the House chamber in 1994 may well have been written last week in the same medium that incubated it: talk radio. On conservative commentator Laura Ingraham's show, the longest-serving Republican House Speaker in history explained why he would not resign despite a sex scandal that has produced a hail of questions about his leadership and the failure to stop one of his members from cyberstalking teenage congressional pages. "If I fold up my tent and leave," Dennis Hastert told her, "then where does that leave us? If the Democrats sweep, then we'd have no ability to fight back and get our message out."

A Guide to The Political Herds

Elephants and Donkeys of different colors, stripes, and locations.

The Inside Agitator

Howard Dean Profile.

Of Party Dues and Deadbeats on Capitol Hill

On paying the tab for the party.

Lost Horizons

The article on Ken Mehlman I mentioned in class today.

Updated Blog Roll

The list of class blogs on the right menu should be fully updated now.

No excuses not to comment.

It's On!

It looks like a number of you have started blogging. This pleases me.

How to add members to your Blogger blog

Some tips. Look for the email with the list of email addresses.

A List of Blogs

Here is a best guest list of your blog URLs. I say guess because some of you never provided a proper URL and others seemed to have messed-up the format.

If you managed to create a blog with a URL in the form http://polsci421-xxx.blogspot.com AND tell me about it, you are better than at least a third of your peers. Congratulations.

In any event, let the posting and the commenting, and the grading of the blogging begin.

sdb

josecazares

jfc

JesseThePorcupine

james-downey

jake

tracyholmes

halley

gmcca6109

new-gal

will

jeff

alexander

cherylsthoughts

lindsey0324

dana

derek

maskemp

andrewsmith

timwalsh

Updates will likely follow. The official listing will be in the sidebar.

To Hold Senate, G.O.P. Bolsters Its Most Liberal

Here is the link to the New York Times article on Lincoln Chafee that will be discussed today.

Food for thought (or blogging as the case maybe): how is the Chafee situation like the Joe Lieberman case, and more importantly, how are they different? Think about the roll of the national parties in each election.

Getting Started

Ok Jin has blogged her initial thoughts about the US party system.

New York Times Election Guide

Here is the New York Times Election Guide. It is a good way to get up to speed about the upcoming election.

Welcome

This is a blog for POL SCI 421 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We are going to use blogs to carry class discussions out of the classroom.

The primary function of this blog will be to organize the blogs of the student participants taking the course.