If You Ever Wonder Why I Don't Blog Much Anymore....

....here is exhibit #7688:

That link takes you to a website called "The Moderate Voice" [sic], which these days apparently believes the KKK style hate ravings of one Hart Williams qualifies as "moderate."

Unbelievable.

Thank Goodness. I've Been Delisted.

There is something kind of quaint about "blogrolls" in this day and age. Those of us who have been writing these sorts of things for awhile can certainly remember a time when getting added to this or that blogroll was viewed with a generous amount of satisfaction.

As the technology has changed so has the need for hyperlink collections diminished. I still use my blogroll to quickly jump to sites, but even I largely use Twitter and aggregators like Memeorandum to see what is new. Still, I try from time to time to clean up my links. You will notice I break the links up into two groups. The first group, the "Roll of Honor" included those site which reciprocated with a link back to The Iconic Midwest. The "Link We Life (Mostly)" section includes sites that have not reciprocated.

Today, I am rather relieved to remove The Moderate Voice from my roll of honor. Once upon a time this would have been a melancholic occasion, but those days have long since passed. Whatever TMV was back in the day, it has become the kind of site I feel like I need to take a shower after visiting. The kind of tin foil hat wearing conspiracies you would expect to find only in the bowels of The Daily Kos have become the everyday fodder at TMV. They have become so warped that they consider places like Little Green Footballs and Kiko's House as "centrist voices." Look, I link to Kiko's on my blogroll, but I wouldn't call "centrist" a blog that routinely has posts such as "America's Most Dangerous Organized Crime Family: The Republican Party". (As for the hate-fest that is LGF, the less said about it the better. Rank partisanship of the Kiko's House variety is fine. The dehumanizing rhetoric of LGF is not. It's more than a little scary that TMV sees no distinction worthy of making here.)

Ah well...sadly it is the way it is these days.

Look! Something New & Shiny!

Why do bloggers jettison their own past? I ask because from time to time I look back at posts from the not all that distant past here at the Iconic Midwest and discover that the things I linked to simply don't exist anymore. At some point the sites have been "updated" to the latest and the greatest thing and as a result much of what had been on their site has been discarded. I know in many ways this is ephemeral stuff, but it does give us a unique perspective on just what we were thinking way back when. So the loss of so much material is a shame. Even when sites, like The Moderate Voice, have kept all of their posts they almost always lose user comments, which is a shame as some of my best work (and most fun arguments) took place in the comments section on those early days of TMV.

The Iconic Midwest won't ever change, as long as Blogger is still around. Every post and every comment ever posted here will remain, as long as I can keep myself from being distrac....

Hey! Look at THAT!!!!!!!

"Sic" 'em

I noticed this from Hot Air:

[quoting from Politico] Voters in Wisconsin strongly agree with the working families at the state capitol [sic] and oppose Governor Scott Walker’s anti-worker agenda. Moreover, since the protests began, Governor Walker has seen real erosion in his standing, with a majority expressing disapproval of his job performance and disagreement with his agenda. Strong majorities disagree with eliminating collective bargaining for public employees and believe that if workers agree to concessions on pensions and healthcare benefits that the Governor should drop his plan to eliminate collective bargaining.

“Working families at the state capital”; “anti-worker.” Any guess who funded this particular survey? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

I'm not sure what the "sic" was doing in there. Very obviously Politico was referencing the protests at the state capitol - i.e. the building where the legislature meets, you know Ed, the place where all of these types photos were taken:


Given the news coverage for the last week it should have been pretty difficult to miss the connection between the protests and the capitol building where the protesters spent so much time.

Difficult, but not impossible it seems.

As for the substance of the Hot Air posting, shading doings in a big labor inspired survey, there is more meat there. It's too bad Hot Air undermined their own message with pointless, and inaccurate, carping.