State Political Blogs

In the last month, some new resources have come online to help state-level libertarian and conservative bloggers. The most important one is Righty Blogs, which is sponsored by Redstate.

The hardworking libertarians and conservatives who cover state and local politics have long needed a blog aggregator like this, and now we have it! If you’re not signed up yet, go over there right now and sign up.

Another resource in development for local bloggers is Red State Leader.

A new website, LeftSurge is about helping local and state bloggers build the picture of where the Democracy Alliance (George Soros, Peter Lewis, Tim Gill, etc.) is putting its money at the state level.

GOP internet strategist Patrick Ruffini says what needs to be said:

Re-framing activism vs. punditry.

Blogs can have a mission and action steps for their readers. It has to be about more than just punditry.

Conservative Web 2.0 Marches Forward.

Not fast enough but in the right direction.

Investors Business Daily did a good review article earlier this week about the political projects George Soros is funding:

The Soros Threat to Democracy.

Soros is not, it appears, big on transparency. State-level bloggers can keep up with Soros-funded projects in their state, and compare notes across state lines.

This article from October 2006 says:

State-based donor collectives modeled after the Alliance have started in Washington, California, Ohio, Wisconsin and Colorado.

Have state-based blogs in those states dug in and covered what exactly that looks like in their state? If not, what a great service that would be.

Most of us think of Montana as a hardy frontier state where the wild buffalo roam, surely filled with many more conservative than liberal blogs.

Not so, but that might be changing, with the addition of Montana Pundit, The Scoop, The Hardliner, Missoulapolis, and Conservative Cowgirls to a stable that already included, among others, the Montana Misanthrope, The Hammond Report, Dave Budge, Electric City Weblog and Montana Headlines.

I wouldn’t pretend to be authoritative on this, but it seems like a larger number of Montana’s GOP/conservative bloggers are anonymous than in other states.

That might be because there’s a high incidence of rattlesnake-mean lefty bloggers in Montana.

One lefty blogger in Montana recently accused the Montana GOP/conservative blogs of:

…showing a much greater tendency to belittle and revile based on ideas that he finds personally demeaning, and not so much on the merit of the idea.

In two posts last month, the same lefty blogger used the following phrases to describe some members of the Montana rightroots:

“wingnut-o-sphere”

“the aging players of the Montana fantasy-based community”

“clever little weasel”

“pathetically weak logic, though sinister”

“the wingnuttiest of the wingnuts”

“the true enemy of anyone rational”

“We should flee these people as lepers were shunned in the middle ages. They’re more toxic, and vastly more barfy to be around.”

“completely freaking ugly”

“write like poorly schooled 5th graders”

Props to our conservative friends in Montana who probably put up with this kind of abuse regularly.

Update: Excellent example of blog reporting from The Scoop.

Apart from this one, the two I’m most familiar with that serve as resources to the libertarian/conservative state-level blog communities are Ft. Hard Knox and Conservablogs.

We’re planning to write about meta-questions on the state-level political blogging scene.

By that, we mean we’ll be talking about the balance of right versus left blogging in the individual states, and the strategies the hard-left blogging scene is using at the level of state political blogs, and other fun subjects.

Alyson and Jeff have been building a wiki to help grassroots libertarians and conservatives get up and running with a blog.

Voices: A Guide to Impactful Political Blogging.

It aims to be a complete how-to resource for bloggers just starting out, with advanced sections for advanced skills.

State Political Blogs has been a gleam in our eyes since the beginning of 2007. We plan to use this blog to cover the state political blogging scene. There’s lots to say about it, but it tends to fly under the radar.