Presidential Punditry

A couple weeks ago, Atrios posted this:

Shorter Candidates

Obama: The system sucks, but I'm so awesome that it'll melt away before me.

Edwards: The system sucks, and we're gonna have to fight like hell to destroy it.

Clinton: The system sucks, and I know how to work within it more than anyone.

I know that I'm probably committing political blasphemy here in the state of Illinois, but the more I read about Obama and his "post-partisan" rhetoric, the more I don't think he'll make a good presidential candidate, let alone president. You can look all over the liberal blogosphere for reasoning like this, but the long and short is that the GOP isn't going to stop being partisan, so we definitely need to keep tacking Left, and not towards the center, if the we want any sort of progressive agenda enacted. Clinton is herself much too wedded to the "centrist" mold that she and her husband created - and again, tacking to the center is exactly what this country, and the Democratic party, does not need.

This leaves Edwards, the only one of the three leading candidates to actually say that we need to do progressive things now. If only he could make enough noise to keep the media attention on him more.

Something I've Been Up To Recently

Back in early November, one of the News-Gazette's infrequently-posting bloggers, Rhonda Robinson, regurgitated a bunch of Discovery Institute talking points about the Ben Stein-narrated documentary, Expelled. A few commenters, including myself and Narci of Narciblog, take Rhonda and some other commenters to task. The thread's been silent for a couple weeks, though, so either she's decided not to follow/further the discussion on the topic, or has moved on to other things.

PS - What's the point of having a blog if you update it once every few months at best?

All Hail My Triumphant Return... Or Something Like That

Itsa me, TheSquire. It has been a while since I last blogged, and I only recently started paying attention again to blogs hosted at places other than Scienceblogs. I took the break from blogging because, well, I had a lot of other stuff I was doing with my life. I still will not be able to post as often, or as much, as when I was an undergrad, seeing as I have a job where I get paid to do things other than putz around the Web all day.

So, since I'm being upfront about things not being the same, why am I blogging at all? Basically, since the primary is about a month away (on "Super-Duper Tuesday" >.>) I decided that I should start paying a lot more attention to politics and educate myself. That, of course, necessitated me reading blogs, which got me angry, and I have to put that somewhere, hence the new blog.

Right now, besides being an outlet for my opinions, I have not quite decided what to do with this blog yet. Those who stop by when this post is fresh may notice that the template will be in constant flux. The old blog predates the acquisition of Blogger by Google, and was written in pure HTML which I had to flog in order to do anything like what I wanted. This blog, and its new template, is a lot more modular, making it easier to play with and tweak, which is what I will be doing with it for the foreseeable future.

One of the lacks in the Champaign-Urbana area is a strong liberal presence in the blogosphere. This is probably not helped by the fact that Illinipundit is a conservative group blog, while the liberals in the area are mostly students, who are both transient and not as likely to set up a group operation. If anyone expresses interest, I would be open to allowing others to post here, making this a collaborative effort. Perhaps we can do something new. Perhaps no one cares. We'll see.

In any case, look forward to more of my semi-coherent ramblings. I hope you missed them, 'cos I plan on feeding you all a steady diet.