Blog posts for Friday

OK--so the deal for Friday's blog post is, spend no more than about 45-60 minutes on it, but you MAY use info others have linked to in the class to complete it, since linking and commenting are the life's blood of the blog world. This means reading and commenting on each other's blogs is something I want you to do. This will be easier soon, since Regina is compiling everyone's blog address and is going to tell us how to insert them on our blogrolls (the list of links). For now use the links on blackboard to find your classmates' sites.

First, read the piece on finding common ground I sent this morning by email. Then read the Althouse piece in hard copy and mark up everything you didn't understand, looking up stuff in Wikipedia and Google and Google news and on the right- and left-leaning political blogs like instapundit.com, nationalreview.com and dailykos.com, eschaton.blogspot.com. Then hopefully you will have a better idea who she is and where she fits in the political spectrum. There are also already letters to the editor about her piece, which is another way to get context.

Is she a political hack? (Someone who just parrots the party line?) Or an ethical and independent thinker? Or somewhere in between? Is she hated by anyone? What kind of readers read her blog? What are her credentials? etc.

Then figure out the op-ed. What is her argumentative purpose, who is her specific audience for this article, what common ground does she find with her opponents, and what strategies, observations, appeals, words, in the article itself, does she deploy to convince them?

Bonus extra hard question: Can you figure out where conservatives and liberals differ on the legal and constitutional issues she discusses?