Libertarians are as funny as they are cranky.

DETROIT (Reuters) - Democratic candidate John Kerry blasted George W. Bush's "excuse presidency" on Wednesday and demanded that he take responsibility for the economy instead of playing victim.

What does it mean when the miserable harpies at Campaign Desk sound incredible partisan by advocating fact-checking?

Last night was WYSIWYG's IMHO panel on politics and blogs. Anyone who's thought about the topic for more than about ten minutes could predict the course of the discussion: anyone can publish, anyone can read, any editing is through a Darwinian process of competing "mindshare", the potential hazards, and so forth. There was a consensus that decentralized publishing would somehow invert the decision-making in a political campaign. This was exemplified by the Clark Network and a never-implemented DNC Convention blog network that would have allowed convention attendees to publish their own experience and ideas for the consumption of other attendees and, of course, the public. This stands in stark contrast to the traditional set of campaign messages, which are centrally planned and "broadcast" to the unwashed hoi-palloi. The populist appeal is obvious, but what is the benefit? At first blush, it's a decentralized message machine that would allow the most engaging or appealing ideas to float to the top -- a marketplace of ideas. This is blogging as polling, where messages are wrought from social networks and the politicians are informed less by his own convictions (subsequently delivered top-down) than by the convictions of the raucus social network beneath them. When the moderator turned the discussion towards the economics of blogs, things started to get interesting. There is clearly tension between the need to get paid for publishing, and thereby free up an author to continue their blog, and the obvious ethical problems of accepting advertising. At this point, David Rashikoff announced that blogging was somehow beyond "economics" and was instead an "ecology". To give him the benefit of the doubt, he may have been referring to the majority of the blogging community that diligently posts without the promise of being paid. That may be true, but the economy of blogging can't be dismissed out of hand: as in any other system, it has an economy which provides us with an understanding of the forces it employs.