Well, well, well….

On Sunday, Scholars and Rogues marked one million hits since our humble blog began last year. Some fun facts:

* S&R’s first day on the Internet was 15 April 2007.

* We had 23 hits on that day.

* Michelangelo’s statue of David was the masthead image (though he’s not officially recognized as our first “Scrogue”; that dubious honor belongs to Lord Byron).

* 10 days later we had our first 1,000-hit day.

* As of midnight last night we have 1,001,852 page views.

* We’ve had almost 700,000 hits since moving to our own domain name in October 2007.

* Some of the names we mulled before settling on S&R: Babylon Ballroom, City of Rain, Cultural Compass, Digital Shepherds, enCompass, Golden Spike, Ministry of Ideological Purity, Off-World, Sanctum, Signal2Noise, ThinkWest, What Rough Beast among many others.

* Charter member Jim Booth came up with “Rogue Scholars” on 11 April 2007 and over the course of the next few days it morphed into Scholars and Rogues and became our official name.

Thanks to all of our many readers and commenters–some of whom have become members of our crew–over this first year of S&R’s life. We’ve accomplished many things so far and we still have lots to do. So hang on for the ride… you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

— from “The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule” by Thomas Frank; p. 39; emphasis added.

— statement from Republican presidential candidate John McCain after the Labor Department reported that the national unemployment rate rose to a five-year high of 6.1 percent last month as American companies cut about 84,000 jobs; Sept. 5.

— statement from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama following the jobs report release; Sept. 5.
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Long-time readers know that S&R has always scrupulously avoided money, and we’ve done so for lots of reasons. However, lately some realities have begun asserting themselves.

When you have a certain degree of success in this game you reach a point where it starts costing more money, mainly for the bandwidth and security required to handle a growing readership. If you don’t ramp up, bad things happen - like a couple months back when one of our stories hit the front page of Digg and the ensuing traffic explosion caused our ISP to turn us off for several hours. Full Story »

I’m a recent addition to the S&R line-up since my first guest appearance at the DNC, and I hope I can run with these clever, yappy dogs. I’ve been worried that I’m not enough of a pitbull – unlike Sam, whose ‘reality check’ radar functions more forcefully than mine, or Brian, whose critical slant isn’t compromised by pesky emotions. I, on the other hand, found myself inspired by the multitude of earnest political conversations buzzing around Denver last week (even while ABC reporters were getting arrested trying to unveil connections between lobbyists, big money and Dem lawmakers), and moved deeply while listening to Barack Obama energize 80,000 people inside Denver’s football stadium last Thursday night.

I felt like I’d been to church. Full Story »

Pro Tip: When a convention organizer comes up to you and asks if you would like to get up behind the podium, you say Yes.

Here's House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and DNC Secretary Alice Travis Germond going state by state through the roll call vote.

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All links go to photos.

Our little outfit was issued one hall pass and one perimeter pass at the beginning of the convention. Our esteemed leader Sam was able to fandangle an extra hall pass for Thursday and we heard that our perimeter pass was now upgraded to an arena pass.

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Four. Five. Seven. Six. Four. These five numbers represent the total number of recognizable press in each of the five different energy and/or global heating panels I’ve attended over the last three days of the DNC. Supposedly it’s a big deal that DNC08 is the greenest convention in history. There’s been some small amount of uproar in environmental circles that ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy are two of the major donors to the DNC. So where was CNN or even Fox News when the CEOs of Xcel Energy, Dow Chemical, Arch Coal, the founder of gas giant The GHK Company, and a senior vice president of Peabody Energy faced off against former congressman Richard Gephardt, former senator Tim Worth, Jerome Ringo of the Apollo Alliance, and peak oil activist Randy Udall?

Apparently, the major news outlets all had better things to do. Like wondering aloud ad nauseum if Clinton supporters will be able to hold their noses and vote for Barack Obama in a gesture of party unity. Full Story »

Today’s discussion on the alleged conflicts between the mainstream media and the blogosphere (Who’s Driving Whom: the Blogosphere vs. the Mainstream Media) ranged widely across a variety of topics that could have used several hours of discussion each. By its very nature, it was topical at best, distracting in an interesting way at worst. But by the choice of moderator and panelists, it was clear that the point of this panel was not to address how bloggers and the MSM are at each other’s throats, but rather how they could, and should, work together in a symbiotic fashion. Full Story »

So I’ve just finished a full day and evening roving around Denver on Day One of the Democratic Convention, ducking into the inviting Lime Cantina for a round of nachos and margaritas to restore my flagging energy and mellow my overwhelmed mind before I tackle reporting on the massive dose of information I got at the events I attended today.

First, however, some personal reflections from a first-time Scrogue guest blogger. I’m feeling a bit like a political Pollyanna confessing this, but being here in this hyper-stimulating setting refreshes my faith in the whole enterprise of politics. Full Story »

Photo enhanced directions from Lime to the Nugget’s exercise room (Henceforth referred to as the Blogger Lounge).

And away we go. I just did an interview with Brendan Gage of CNN Radio, so you’ll be able to hear my voice emanating from a radio near you starting here in about an hour.

The reporter asked me about the role and impact of blogs and what we at S&R hope to accomplish in the coming days, and I tried to speak intelligibly. However, if I sounded like I had only been awake for ten minutes, it’s because I had only been awake for ten minutes.

He reached out to me, Crooks & Liars and Daily Kos. How in the hell S&R found itself running in the same pack as those big dogs I have no clue. But it can’t be a healthy sign for The Republic….

 Zhang Linsen, the 44-year-old founder of a media and graphic design company in Songjiang, China; he owns a black Hummer H2; July 28; emphasis added.

 Herve Kone, director of a group that promotes development, social justice and human rights in Burkina Faso, quoted in the Washington Post Foreign Service’s Kevin Sullivan story about the impacts of the African food crisis on women and children; July 20.
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Not exactly breaking news, I know. His campaign manager, Mike Tibbles, sent an attack email to supporters the other day which indicates exactly how clueless they are.

Fortunately, his opponent, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, has Matt Browner-Hamlin working to keep the Stevens campaign honest. Here is a snip of the epic smackdown, but be sure to read it in full as well.

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Part 1

In a post titled “Why Johnny Can’t Google,” Rafe Colbun blogs about John McCain’s indifference to computers: “It’s tempting to. . . assume that. . . old guys just aren’t computer users. [But] in 1997 I worked for an IT consulting firm [among whose] clients was the George [H.W.] Bush Presidential library. [Part of our job was] setting up email accounts for President Bush and his friends (folks like Brent Scowcroft), generating PGP keys, and teaching them how to use them. President Bush has a good 12 years on John McCain, and he had his own laptop, email account, and PGP key ten years ago.” Full Story »

As the season known as The Most Important Presidential Election Ever nears its apogee (or nadir, depending on your opinion of politics), news organizations ought to be putting as much time, treasure, and talent as possible covering the non-horse race aspects of the campaign  important stuff beyond “who’s gonna be veep,” such as whom the candidates would appoint to what, legislative initiatives they’ll champion, Supreme Court litmus tests, energy and tax policies and the like.

The stakes in this election, pundits say, are the highest ever. (I heard that when Richard Nixon first ran for president.) So what does the Associated Press do to reliably keep us informed of the ins and outs of the really important stuff in presidential politics?
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Short-sighted bloggers are calling for a boycott of the Associated Press because it deigned to define for bloggers with an overly heavy hand clear standards as to how much of its content they can excerpt without infringing on the AP’s copyright.

Such boycott talk misunderstands the AP and its journalistic breadth if not depth, and amounts, frankly, to pure hissyfits ’cause some bloggers can’t have their way.

How, exactly, does one boycott the almost omnipresent AP? And what would replace it? Reuters? Hardly.
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Periodically, it seems, to those who now have bought back into the concept of history, humans begin to think that their great works of literature are insufficient. This is not necessarily a bad thing. New literary movements grow out of this perceived insufficiency, and new masterpieces appear that eventually become, for some insufficient - and so new literary movements….

Unfortunately, we humans also seem to have a propensity to look on the great works of art we have and see their “flaws.” This has caused us to make some interesting and even laughable “improvements” to our masterpieces - Moby Dick has had the entire whaling section expurgated for “easier” reading for American students; 18th century stagings of Macbeth had the Thane of Glamis survive and repent his evil ways.

Now it seems that Jane Austen, our most brilliant analyst and most insightful critic of women’s roles in society and the institution of marriage, has been deemed too unromantic.

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