Pink versus some shade of red

When it comes to blogs, there are only three I manage to really keep up with: Amelie Gellete’s The Hater, Dan Savage’s Savage Love and Eileen Smith’s In the Pink Texas. I depend on them to keep me up-to-date and entertained on entertainment, sex issues and Texas politics. I know I need to peruse the Web a little more, and I'm getting around to that.

I find the above three of the most intellectual and humorous people on the blogosphere. On the otherhand, I easily make the assumption that most of the blogs on the Web are too boring to bother with.

Since the most recent post on inthepinktexas.com, titled “Cover Girl,” is about Hillory Clinton revealing her universal healthcare plan, I will compare that to a blog called Cato-at-liberty.

Cato-at-liberty is an official blog of the Cato Institute and the latest post is title “Hillary Clinton’s Health Plan.” It’s important to note that the Cato Institute is a Washington D.C.-based libertarian think-tank. Of course, the organization commonly collaborates with right-wing groups.

The Cato blog is briefly recaps the issue (let’s say one sentence) and gives its opinion. The blog has links, such as Michael D. Tanner’s full statement (He’s a Cato scholar), Son of HillaryCare, featuring Tanner (a Sept. 17, 2007 MP3) and “Hazards of the Individual Health Care Mandate,” by Glen Whitman (maybe Eileen Smith would call him some . The blog is posted by Cato editors, not a named human being. It also provides an opportunity to Del.icio.us, Digg or reddit the post.

Both blogs mention that Monday Clinton announced her plan for universal healthcare, in which she proposes that all Americans to carry health insurance and offer federal subsidies to help reduce the cost of coverage. Clinton added tha anyone who is content with their healthcare coverage can hold onto it under her proposed plan.

Cato quotes its so-called scholar as saying “Once again her plan, which would cost $110 billion per year in new taxes, calls for greater government control over American health care. If her plan were to pass this time, it would mean higher taxes, lost jobs, less patient choice, and poorer quality health care.” It doesn’t prove how or why, just socks on the anti-liberal gloom and doom.

That’s the main problem I have with this blog. It’s just propaganda that provides no real insight to any issue. There aren’t too many blogs that can see the faults concerning all sides of the issues, even if Smith is rarely showing herself as a serious political junkie, and she does generally lean toward the left.

But she doesn’t put divide everything into a left and right category. Smith is just as ready to poke fun at Hillary Clinton as she is any other politician. Though in this blog, she asks what could possibly be worse that today’s American healthcare system, and the answer isn’t Clinton’s proposal.

Smith also incorporates links, images and videos in her blog. This one includes a YouTube video of the right wing response to Clinton’s plan.

I haven’t found a political blog that can match the self-deprecating humor of Smith’s. In her post, Smith writes that she likes to promote Clinton’s candidacy in order to start bar fights.

Smith writes: “Last time that someone told me that Rudy Giuliani would kill her in the general, I threw my pinot in his face and broke a bar stool over his back. Needless to say, my husband brought it up with our marriage counselor the next week.”

Smith even carries more credibility than she lets on. She recently became the first online editor for Texas Monthly. And there is something cool about the Eileen Smiths, Naomi Kleins and Molly Ivins of the world, the women who have been influential in political journalism.

Anyway, I don’t know how much I can trust a right-leaning blog from an organization that receives money from oil companies and calls global warming “junk science.”