I don’t have much faith in the readership numbers he gives, as OkieDoke has been shuttered for eight months. It was a really good blog, but I don’t think its was so good that it’s going to bring in 361 readers a day that long after anything was posted.

I stopped looking at or caring about stats for Peace Arena some time ago, so I can’t supply any alternative visitor numbers for this blog.

I posted a comment under Gaddie’s article about my list of Oklahoma’s “netroots” i.e. liberal/progressive blogs, which can be found here.

Oklahoma Citizen already has been getting a lot of buzz during a limited site reveal among the progressive community. You can register to comment or post content, and help make the site THE place for finding out what’s going on in terms of the values and people we care about most (you aren’t going to find that in the existing corporate media, ya know).

So check it out and help make this site a big success. It will really take all of us lefties pitching and contributing content and comment. Oh, and you can fan Oklahoma Citizen on Facebook here.

Full disclosure: I have been helping get the site started.

Although I had an account on the site for commenting, I was never a regular reader and maybe posted once or twice; still, I feel a little dirty.

I have unsubscribed from their action e-list, and though there’s no way to delete the account on the site, I did create a filter that will send any messages to the email address listed there right into the trash.

I am also removing FDL from my blogroll. It’s “open seating” but I do have minimal standards. Unfortunately, Marcy Wheeler (aka emptywheel) will have to go too, since her otherwise excellent blog has its home there.

I’m not going to go into it; if you care, there’s Google.

If you are an Oklahoma Blogger, you can vote, and should. And now, because it’s the last day you can.

I happen to be nominated, for Best Political Blog, but even if you don’t vote for me, vote for your favorites in each category. It’s a great way to get better acquainted with the incredibly large and diverse world of Okie blogs, and it helps support those who work hard at their little corner of the blogosphere.

So we link to each other — freely, wildly, irresponsibly, like the DFHs we really are. The motto is “look up, link down” that is, to show some love to blogs smaller than yours.

Skippy the bush kangaroo, who started, with Jon Swift and Blue Gal, this ancient rite in Blogtopia (and, yes, he coined that phrase) lo those many three years ago, has the rundown on how it all works, the inviolate rules (which always get violated, because size comparisons are always funny, aren’t they?), and what it all means in his most honorable 2009 B.A.D. post.

Note the first three of my five are progressive (loosely defined) Oklahoma blogs, because it is my mission daily to promote those every chance I get. They may or may not be smaller than Peace Arena, but I’ve only just come across them recently, so they may be unknown to you as well.

1. I really don’t like the word Blog
2. Green Tulsa
3. Progress on the Prairie
4. Tana-rama – Tana Hanson is a very talented designer
5. Ranting Woman Ranting Daily – Interesting writer with personal take on politics, religion and technology

So, I have a year-round open blogroll policy. You can see that “roll” — collapsed flat for spacesaving — at the bottom of the front page of this site. I call it “Open Seating,” this being an arena and all, and it includes anyone I add by choice, and anyone who asks (within a very wide range of opinion, but still within the realm of civil discourse). Elsewhere I further refine with sub-categories like “Virtual Oklahoma,” hopefully self explanatory, and “La Resistance,” being online compatriots in the struggle for peace, equality and justice, a.k.a. the netroots.

If you have a blog that you would like to be added to my blogroll, comment below with the pertinent info, and tell me if you think you fit in one of the sub-categories, because if I agree, you will get extra linky goodness. You do not have to add me back, though that would be a lovely gesture. And, it would also be good and just if you too participated in Blogroll Amnesty Day when it rolls around again on the calendar. Let us lift up and nurture one another, making the virtual reality ever more virtuous, and helping to actually realize Skippy’s vision of Blogtopia.

According to Matthews, the only thing “real people” can “see” are infrastructure projects and the jobs they create – which, as has been pointed out by Linda Hirshman and discussed by Echidne here, are jobs that will disproportionately benefit men. Funding for family planning (arguably) primarily benefits women, rendering it, in Matthews’ estimation, a pointless waste of money.

Subsequently, after Wexler explains that family planning “saves, if done correctly, an enormous sum of money down the road in the healthcare system” – Matthews ignores wholly that planned and wanted children born to non-addicted women who seek out prenatal care are generally healthier children, dismisses out of hand the importance of choice, and instead accuses Wexler (and, by extension, the Democrats) of advocating “a policy of reducing the number of births”.

[...]

“It sounds a little like China,” he notes, conflating the Democrats’ plan to provide women a breadth of reproductive choices with a state-mandated reproductive limitation which has resulted in the mass murder and abandonment of female infants.

Wexler was one of the few voices, male or female, that was allowed to even push back on this nonsense on corporate media. So I suppose good for Matthews for making that possible — but it was obviously just a way for the host to make his point, if you want to call his babbling about China and infanticide a point relative to the legislation under discussion.

It is clear that conservatives would like to set up contraception now as something controversial, even shameful. They need a new pet issue to whip up their braindead base over, to keep the coffers full and the ballots filled out as instructed from the pulpit. You wait and see.

So to all the so-called liberal boys who got right on board with the GOP’s misogynist agenda, because family planning money fills clinics instead of building them, don’t wonder later how you got played once again by the culture warriors. Just read your own archives.

Finally Rachel broke it down for Leslie — who has spent too many years in Washington to know up from down — and I can imagine she spoke especially slowly and clearly so that the long-time Villager (© Atrios) could understand:

LESLEY: But everybody thinks MSNBC is moving in that direction. That that’s exactly what the shift is — where you are — that people there are trying to make you into the un-Fox network, the liberal place to go.

RACHEL: Well, if you think about the way that Fox was founded, though – Fox was founded by Roger Ailes. It was created from his perspective as a political operative. His background was as a Republican activist of the highest order. There’s no equivalent on MSNBC. I think MSNBC is trying to find hit shows.

LESLEY: Everybody they hire to anchor their shows is distinctly liberal and encouraged to express themselves that way, wouldn’t you say?

RACHEL: At MSNBC?

LESLEY: Yes.

RACHEL: Well, I wouldn’t call David Shuster a liberal. I would barely call Chris Matthews a liberal. He voted for Bush. And I certainly wouldn’t call Joe Scarborough a liberal.

LESLEY: Chris Matthews is a liberal.

RACHEL: Well, Chris Matthews is a Democrat.

LESLEY: He’s a liberal.

RACHEL: Chris Matthews – well, you could interview him about it and find out. If Chris Matthews had an Air America radio show, he’d get torn apart by our listeners.

LESLEY: So he doesn’t go that far. I see. OK.

RACHEL: No. I wouldn’t put Chris and my politics in the same canoe.

While Matthews once in a blue moon talks sense about some policy and is at times on the right side of an issue (while still unable to discuss it sanely), he’s erratic, emotionally immature, in love with power of any kind, and thinks politics is just a game rather than about real people who can suffer as the result of bad policy, not to mention bad punditry.

Here is a prime example of how his very obvious sexual hangups destroy whatever shred of reason he wanders across in his cavernous brain, and why he most definitely is NOT a “liberal” and why real liberals and progressives loathe and distrust him more than almost any other TV news personality. (He has a special page on Media Matters dedicated to his wankery and has been named by the watchdog group as Misinformer of the Year in 2005. He also has prompted the creation of several blogs by netroots activists for the sole purpose of exposing and decrying his special brand of nonsense.)

Frankly, I was hoping that Chris Matthews was going to run for the Senate to replace Arlen Spector, something he was seriously exploring last year. That possibility got dashed when his MSNBC contract was renewed recently. Pity — I really think he would do less damage to the country there.

Voting open to Okie bloggers. Please take time to visit and read all the nominees. It’s great that we have so many compelling voices, that the Internet allows us to share them with each other so readily, and that we live in a country where free speech is one of our highest ideals.

And if you would like to start a blog so you could be considered for the 2009 awards, let me know, I will help you with the tech part. The ideas you gotta bring yourself.

Update: I think that, technically, the voting should be based on the posts of 2008, rather than current ones (the awards are happening a little late this year for reasons Mike explained a while back). Anyway, you can peruse Peace Arena’s 2008 archive, or go month by month during the year.

I’m ashamed to say I had to leave some categories blank, because I just didn’t read enough (or maybe any) blogs on that topic. I guess I have a good excuse on the “family blog” one since I don’t have young kids around. But otherwise my only excuse is the political nature of 2008 and my own obsession. Maybe with 2009 being a non-campaign year, I can broaden my horizons.

Hopefully you got around on the Tubes more.