Blogs play critical role in campaigns

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the real pulse of the campaign can be felt.

Most of these sites are maintained by people unaffiliated with either campaign, but who wear their political beliefs proudly on their sleeves. Some site operators say this open ideological affiliation is more honest than the approach taken by the mainstream media, with its avowed ethic of nonpartisan balance, and often more complicated than a simple right-left breakdown.

"Our ideas flow from a wellspring that is not easily constrained by simple patterns of predictable dogma," wrote one blogger under the handle "Bleeding Heart Conservative," in describing the generally anti-John Kerry Little Green Footballs blog. The site's operator "espouses policies that might fall under the rubric 'right wing,' but then you would have to explain how such an idea has no place on the left."

The bloggers have proven most influential as fact-checkers, providing hundreds or thousands of eyes critical of a news story or a candidate's assertion, in much the same way that legions of independent programmers often quickly find and fix bugs in open-source software.

It took conservative bloggers barely 20 minutes to raise serious and ultimately valid questions about the authenticity of National Guard memos relied on by CBS News that were ostensibly critical of President Bush's service.

Similarly, Vice President Dick Cheney's debate assertion that he had never met John Edwards before was contradicted in minutes by liberal bloggers, who posted photos of the two men together.

Blogs have also helped propagate conspiracy theories, such as the idea that Bush may have had a transmitter on his back that allowed him to be fed answers during the first debate.

But are they ultimately effective in moving votes? Media analysts and bloggers alike say they aren't as widely seen as are the newspapers or television. But they help mobilize potential volunteers and provide rhetorical fodder for people who will be talking to blog-deprived undecided voters.

"My blog doesn't really speak to undecided voters," said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who runs the liberal DailyKos blog from Berkeley, Calif. "I want to talk to Democratic Party activists. I want them to become active participants and to use the site to get information that they can use to convince undecided voters. That's my job. Their job is to convince people to vote for Kerry."

[angrybulldog]

Rove & Freepers Unholy Alliance

Yes, indeed, the conservative bloggers, remarkably discovered the inauthenticity of the memos acquired by CBS in a miraculously swift 20 minutes. In fact, the so called infamous "buckhead" of freepers had the skill set to attend a GOP fundraising event the night CBS broke the story, then research 20 year old IBM typewriters, Microsoft Word, compare them, and post a story that debunked CBS' claim.

Truly, that was remarkable. How on earth did that happen so quickly?

Its almost as if they were provided information on the story from the White House itself.

Gee, could that be possible?