Political blogs are not subject to FEC regulations, unless they’re paid for by candidates. So, there is a First Amendment. I’m not impressed that the FEC is ruling on these matters at all. I mean they could just as easily rule the other way.

CNN is reporting that Idaho Sen. Larry Craig will likely resign soon. More on that at Nixguy and from Ryan at Buckeye State Blog, who’s got a well-considered post:

I find it quite sad that this man, because of societal pressure feels unable to come out of the closet and admit to himself that he is gay. It is a sad state of affairs when people feel this boxed in because of what they do or who they are that they have to resort to the kinds of activity that Senator Craig engaged in.

I think that’s the only reasonable take on the situation. Think Brokeback Mountain. And it’s very different from the Jeridian glee on the matter.

In somewhat related news, the Columbus Police and park people are working on cutting down lewd behavior in the city’s parks:

The Columbus police vice squad said that secluded areas attract the wrong sort of crowd, like the woods that line the parking lot of Rhodes Park.

Officers are working closely with the city to get thick brush cleared in problem areas.

In addition, the city’s recreation and parks department has begun putting new facilities in the parks that promote positive activities and increase traffic.

I’m glad they’re promoting positive activities, whatever they are. 100 people have been arrested so far this year.

From It’s a Paul World:

It is only a matter of time before Idaho republican senator Larry Craig resigns. I see a tearful entering rehab speech in his future also. That’s usually how these things go.

SNL had a Peter O’Toole skit that addressed that kind of thing. Of course we don’t know yet if Craig is going to take that route.

Todd Hoffman writing on the ODP blog:

So the Ohio GOP are now scraping the bottom of the barrel and calling for all GOP Dog Catchers living in the 15th District. If you are a Dog Catcher that would like to run for Congress, please email dogcatcher4congress@ohiogop.org.

Does that strike anyone as rather inept? Of course the dog catcher cliche has been going on forever, but does the Ohio Democratic Party really want to say “scraping the bottom of the barrel and calling for all GOP Dog Catchers”? They’ve even got a cartoon of what I guess is supposed to be a typical dog catcher:

It strikes me as a bit anti-blue collar: “scraping the bottom of the barrel” for someone who wears a uniform and, you know, works for a living. Frankly, we’d all be better off if more of such people ran for office.

(And sure Jerid, Todd Hoffman’s position is not a political one.)

From an article in the Cleveland Free Times:

Online, ODP Web master Todd Hoffman defended the firing [of Megan Pappada] in his own letter to a local blogger. “As an employee of ODP, any statements, past or present, in the public domain reflect upon the Party so we let her go within hours of learning of the situation,” he wrote.

Speaking of public domain, Mr. Hoffman, the Free Times discovered some online court documents your employers might have overlooked. In 2001, you got two OMVI’s (operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated), a hit/skip, and a resisting arrest charge that was pleaded down to disorderly conduct. Damn, that was one crazy summer, huh?

But the ODP apparently is less interested in dangerous actions than it is impure thoughts.

Hit/skip is a very serious offense. Not that OMVI’s aren’t. Anyway, Matt Naugle wrote a post in response: “Todd Hoffmann… Another Democrat Criminal Boozer“. There’s a crude photoshop. (Go see.)

And then Buckeye State Blog’s Jerid Kurtz posted:

In my opinion, Matt seems to take sexual pleasure out of inflicting pain on individuals personally - it’s a far cry from anything even minutely related to politics. And as long as Republican candidates are frequenting RAB and/or taking out ads at RAB, it’s going to reflect poorly on the Ohio GOP. And trust me, the chickens are coming home to roost on this one very soon. If I were the Republicans, I’d be distancing myself and denouncing Matt and RAB as soon as possible - he gives decent folks on the right a bad name.

Helpfully, Jerid gives us the definition of “sexual sadism”, and does the old psychiatric diagnosis from a distance schtick, long favored the left. It’s pretty funny.

A I have a couple of points on this. First, unlike a few other of Matt’s posts that I disagreed with, this one is totally fair game from a political standpoint. Hoffman’s a player, this stuff is on his record, that’s all there is to it. And the photoshop is fair, though again crude, as well. Whether or not it’s wise is another thing. OMVI’s are non-partisan, and there will be a Republican busted on one pretty soon, I’m sure. The hit/skip thing though is more serious.

Secondly, Jerid seems to be suggesting that Todd Hoffman isn’t political:

Last I checked, none of these folks entered into the political fray personally to warrant these types of attacks. It might be fair for folks to point out a hypocritical point with a staffer not synching up to a party’s platform which they work for, but in Todd’s example Matt’s post is entirely mean spirited spite topped off with an awful picture - there’s nothing political at all.

Hoffman is id’d as a mere “ODP staffer”, sort of like the person who answers the phone over there. I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. Isn’t one of Hoffman’s jobs to put out the ODP message to the Ohiosphere and keep the Democratic blogs in line? Seems like a political role to me.

Whatever it is, Hoffman apparently has a close relationship to BSB. Jerid ought to have disclosed it in his post defending Hoffman and attacking Naugle.

Following on yesterday’s story about Open Left’s targeting conservative Democrats, Cadillac Tight has an interesting response to Matt Stoller’s response.

Matt says:

And of course, the wingnuts are freaking out, it’s always a nice bonus to hear them squeal and defend conservative Democrats.

Now I don’t use the term “squeal” in this manner as it strikes me as a bit homophobic, but if anyone’s squealing it’s Democrats. Republicans are squealing with delight, maybe. Here’s what Stoller has to say to the two Ohio Dem bloggers who complained:

(By the way, Left in Ohio and Buckeyestate Blog, there’s nothing stopping you from writing a positive profile of Charlie Wilson and Zach Space putting their Bush Dog votes in context.).

Note that he gets both blogs’ names wrong- on purpose? Anyway here’s Joe at Cadillac Tight (a great blog name by the way):

I’ve never been a liberal or a progressive, and much as Stoller might hate it, neither are many other Democrats. If resisting efforts like this one from OpenLeft equates to “squealing” and membership in wingnuttia, then let me tell you, there are hosts of squealing, wingnutty Democrats out there today — At least as many as there are members of the “progressive movement”. Being liberally inclined in social policy matters certainly doesn’t obligate me to support the current antiwar, hard left proposals of OpenLeft or the netroots. In fact, I’d argue that in terms of electoral reality, I’m doing the Democratic party a much better solid than Bowers and Stoller are.

That’s pretty much how I see it.

(Previous post: National lefties telling our lefties what to do.)

Reason magazine, the daddy of online libertarianism, has picked up the Not-So-Secret-Voting in Ohio story. My post is here. On that post, co-author Jim Cropcho plugs the team’s blog, The Public Ballot. So check it out.

Jeff Coryell at the Ohio Daily Blog had a post up a little while back on Ohio’s mayoral elections and the difficulty of finding information on them:

Bonobo at Blue Bexley has an intriguing post up today, listing the people who have pulled petitions for Bexley mayoral and city council races. Coincidentally, I spent some time yesterday visiting county party and board of elections web sites, and googling for media stories, trying to assemble a list of significant mayoral elections on the ballot in Ohio this year….

Unfortunately, I find that the info isn’t so easy to compile! The county party and BOE sites are very inconsistent and not necessarily up to date.

I’ve found that that’s frequently the case, and not just concerning elections. That’s one reason why I’ve set up OhioWiki- to be a good source of information on Ohio. One that will drill down to a much more local level than Wikipedia does.

So I’ve taken Jeff’s list and put it in a table on a page in the wiki I’ve called Ohio elections 2007. I’ve also started a page on the Columbus mayoral race- it’s bare-bones at this point.

Hopefully the wiki can be become a good place for information on Ohio’s elections. If you have something to add, go right ahead. Registration is optional.

Bill Sloat on a possible blogger-MSM marriage of sorts:

Quiet talks are underway between four independent Ohio bloggers — two on the left, and two on the right — and The Plain Dealer, which is courting them to become featured commentators of a sort on its branded Website, Cleveland.com….

According to whispers The Daily Bellwether has overheard, the bloggers who are in talks with the PeeDee are Writes Like She Talks, Ohio Daily, NixGuy, and Bizzyblog. An editor from the PeeDee, Jean Dubail, approached Jill Miller Zimon of Writes Like She Talks recently with a proposal that set in motion the discussions. Nothing has been structured yet, and Dubail reportedly plans to place something on the negotiating table this week with more details.

Interesting. And there’s this:

So far, there is no financial package, nor have any compensation arrangements been offered — and there may never be. Instead, the bloggers might simply choose to be affiliated with Cleveland.com for prestige and leverage that would increase their influence as members of the digital commentariat.

If there’s no money, what does it all amount to? It’s hard to say at this point. Will the blogs be hosted at Cleveland.com? Linked to from there?

Not to queer the deal or anything- and I hope those four bloggers can get the best that they can out of it- but one of the best things a newspaper outlet can do doesn’t require negotiations at all: just engage the public in conversation. Link to citizen media, like blogs, Flickr photos, Facebook profiles, etc. Talk about what’s hot on Digg and Technorati. It’s simply a matter of ending the fiction that the only voices out there are professional ones.

Bill Sloat on newspaper websites:

Harvard University has studied news site traffic on the Web and the findings are grim for most of the nation’s big city newspapers, which appear to be attracting fewer visitors this year than last. They are losing audience share to blogs, aggregators, major national news sites such as the Wall Street Journal, Google and Yahoo. Local TV Websites also have rising trendlines. The report is by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. It is called Creative Destruction, and it is must read because it covers the entire spread of Web-based news sources.

Here’s that report.

I have no idea where the Dispatch might fit into this. As far as I can tell, they don’t publish their numbers. But I’d be surprised if they were any different from the national averages. Here’s more at Reflections of a Newsosaur:

“The overall traffic level…hides important differences within the newspaper sector,” says the study. While the leading newspapers have been gaining traffic, “the websites of most other newspapers — whether in large, medium-sized, or small cities —have lost audience and their sites on average have substantially fewer visitors now than a year ago.”

Traffic fell in most mid-size markets in the period from April, 2006, to April, 2007, according to the study. “The sites of small-city dailies also are not growing,” said Thomas E. Patterson, the author of the study. “Although two of the nine [small-city] sites we sampled had a traffic increase of 20% or more from the previous April, five sites suffered a decline, including one that lost 20% of its web audience.”

I’ve mentioned before how the Dispatch website is broken. I have the impression that the thing is held together by scotch tape- not even duct tape! They can’t even get their new podcast into a feed so people can subscribe with iTunes or some other aggregator.

This is not generic slam at the MSM. As I’ve also said before, no one else can do what the Dispatch does. But that site needs to be rethought from the ground up.