It’s just that by idolizing The One as a secular savior, they’ve sold their birthright for pottage.

I have yet to meet any liberal, Democrat, or POC who refers to Barack Obama as “The One” (as opposed to “That One”) or “Obamessiah”. 

“Obamessiah” really pisses me off.

The only ones who seem to think of Barack as a “savior” or a cult leader are conservatives, who found themselves roundly thrashed the last election despite using every means to tar Obama.

The rest of us are really happy that someone with a brain and a heart and respect for the Constitution is actually running the country again.  Some of us were afraid the nation had been permanently busted by idiots in codpieces.

It isn’t going away.  Not really.

As long as somewhere in the world, somebody is getting a dickslap to the face—Protein Wisdom will still be with us.

I have a long piece about this over at my pad: Conservative Pajamas Media shuts down ad network, righty blogs hopping mad. It’s starts off with a good bit of schadenfreude, but also I go into why lefty blogs should be concerned about sustainability post-election and given the economy in the sh*tter. A snippet:

Only a very few top-tier, mega-traffic blogs (think DKos, HuffPost) can afford to survive on ads alone. The vast majority of popular political blogs are run by folks, like myself, who need unrelated day jobs to support our work, and run ads to help out on blog-related expenses. And even more common are talented bloggers who make little or nothing on ads and do it as a labor of love. There’s also a slice of popular bloggers who are absorbed into or come from traditional media (think Andrew Sullivan). All will likely be affected by the natural ad contraction post-election and even more so by the economic downturn.

That the conservative blogosphere is now on the lookout for wingnut welfare to prop them up to make it to the next election cycle isn’t surprising. What’s surprising is that I haven’t noticed the lefty blogs discussing the issue of sustainability now that we have regime change and a different mission—holding a more friendly administration accountable. Maybe that’s the price you pay for political “success”—as things shake out, there will naturally be fewer voices contributing to the discussion. Maybe that’s ok, or maybe it’s not, but I think we’ll find out how the economy will affect the political discourse—and the players in it—quite soon, and it we won’t just be discussing the fate of the wingnutosphere.

I also emailed Dan Collins @ Protein Wisdom (read my post for the context on that) and told him I expect the fall from economic grace will be less precipitous for the big guns/big names on the left, and they’ll try to hang in there without acknowledging the bleeding for a while, but eventually the party will be over and the hangovers will be painful. It will be interesting to see how the dust settles re: “new media.” I’m just glad that I have a relatively safe day job (fingers crossed for now)  that’s completely unrelated to politics or the blogosphere.

Thinking about my own situation, I publish a full-time blog in terms of frequency of posts and hold down a FT job, and used nearly all of my PTO covering the election, going to conferences, or doing original reporting. All you get is fatigue and a tidbit of glory—and lots of requests for the rest of the little free time you have left from the very organizations who send endless press releases but don’t advertise. For most of us blogging is a labor of love, but for those regular readers (among them the influentials who absorb, even appropriate our work) our work is taken for granted to a large degree.

That’s the breaks in 2009; the conservative blogs are just getting a taste of the Bush economy sooner.

Excellent points, Pam.  I’d be curious to know the whole story about the collapse of financial backing for PJM and if it is a purely business decision or if the conservative powers that be think that the right wing nutosphere hurt more than it helped.  Regardless there are plenty of reasons to be worried about the sustainability of the left blogging network.  Wish I had some good ideas.

Hooray; maybe we’ll be invaded by the acolytes of the Nanometer-Thin-Skin Twins.

I don’t think it was a “collapse of financial backing” so much as it was that they used up all their seed funding just paying bills and failed to create an actual working business model. Protein wisdom doesn’t have to go away mad, hell, he doesn’t even have to go away. what he has to do is give up what roger simon so cruelly called “the dole.” But that should be no problem. Bet he’d like a mess o’ that pottage now, though.

aimai

egardless there are plenty of reasons to be worried about the sustainability of the left blogging network.  Wish I had some good ideas.

I’m not sure why.  Blogging is cheap and scales with its base.  A guy running a blog with a hundred person readership doesn’t need the bandwidth of an operation like DKos and a team running a blog like DKos can - if necessary - fund raise from its massive reader base with relative ease.  Content takes time to produce, but it often cares increased readership, so a “full time blogger” with a successful blog gets a bigger share of the eyeball pie than a “part time blogger” that only produces a couple of posts a week.

It is no more lucrative than the rest of the entertainment industry - which is to say, you’ve got a handful of “winners” in a sea of has-beens and never-will-bes - but if you’re eager for the work, there’s always a job for you somewhere.

Left-wing, right-wing… at the end of the day, I see blogging as far more sustainable than any old media outlets.  Unless you’re trying to overpay an under performing set of talent.  If PJM shoveled buckets of money at a select group of bloggers that never performed like they were meant to, we’re looking at a bad business model, not a bad business.

And for those who do it for love of the game, bloggers will come and go, but I don’t see this practice ever actually dieing away.

My guess about the wingnut welfare is that we’ll find that conservatives aren’t really as good at playing the long game as all the history about think tanks and pet newspapers might suggest. It’s easy to do invest for the long term when you’re winning and there’s lots of spare cash floating around the economy. Harder when you just got creamed both at the polls and in the market. (There’s also a big change when the corporate money starts being divided 50-50 rather than 90-10.)

I’d like to suggest that progressive bloggers have already been working on a shoestring, so not much will change, but that’s probably not true. What is true is that a good chunk of the upcoming stimulus is going to go through the pockets of people who aren’t reflexively opposed to progressive causes (as opposed to, say, the hundreds of billions for Iraq, which all went through the pockets of people predisposed to support rightwing causes). So that might produce some interesting fallout.

Makes you wonder if Madoff has put a huge dent in Wingnut Welfare?

I’ll be really surprised if Protein Wisdom actually shuts down. It might undergo a change or five, but it won’t disappear.

And seriously, this guy was making enough on his blog to not have to work elsewhere until PJM pulled out? I have hopes that one day—and I expect it will be a long time off—I’ll actually get a check from google ads for the ads I’ve been serving for the last 5-6 months. I can’t imagine expecting to get paid enough to live on. Maybe that’s because I’m a poet and I already expect that my writing isn’t going to pay the bills.

I don’t think it was a “collapse of financial backing” so much as it was that they used up all their seed funding just paying bills and failed to create an actual working business model.

Indeed.  They never made money off the ads.  Essentially PJM was a giant exercise in parting fools from their money by talking about “investing” in sticking it to Liberals.  Who’d have thunk?

But do not despair - there is now PJTV, which will save the Conservative movement by charging more than your average soft porn cable feed to show wingnut bloggers interviewing each other…

(I find this very amusing - the excuse Jeff gave for banning me from PW was that I was unfairly accusing him of being racist.  Speak up if you too are on PW’s persona non gratia list.)

I’ve been banned from Red State on a couple of occasions.

Because Godlstein knows way batter than black people about what black people should think. And he’s a conservative. And he’s got a penis and he’s not afraid to slap someone with it. And it can’t do much damage because he’s got size issues.

Corporate welfare queens having to find new jobs…. Sweet poetic justice!

I should have said, ‘real’ jobs.

“The only ones who seem to think of Barack as a “savior” or a cult leader are conservatives, who found themselves roundly thrashed the last election despite using every means to tar Obama. “
And that’s when they’re not implying he’s the Antichrist. Or WHILE they’re doing it. Or both…

I actually enjoyed Protein Wisdom now and then.  It’s sometimes funny, usually wrong, but never boring.  Sure I got tired of all the Obama-bashing that was supposed to make me feel like his Administration was an epic fail before he even got elected, but I didn’t really expect much more from a site that first caught my eye for its absurd Martha Stewart in Jail exclusive coverage.  (If he wants to make some money, he could write that up in book form.)

Never got banned, though I was accused of being a commie, dickweed, anarchist, pussy, a victim of oatmeal pissing, an asshole, a drugged-out wastoid, a conspirist, a treehugger, and a troll.  I can’t say I’ll miss them if they go away, but it was far more entertaining than many lefty blogs where I can usually agree and move on.

Never got banned, though I was accused of being a commie, dickweed, anarchist, pussy, a victim of oatmeal pissing, an asshole, a drugged-out wastoid, a conspirist, a treehugger, and a troll.

Post a lot of links to facts disagreeing with their fantasies, did you?  That tends to drive the wingnuts wild.

Actually, PiatoR, I agreed with them in much of their premises.  But not 100%, which is what drives nuts of all stripes wild.

Making enemies of allies is a skill found in all sorts of true believers.  But without the true believers and the assholes like myself who snark, the world would be a boring place with no change.

Antigone wrote:

People make money from blogs?  Huh, this I did not know.  I figured that ads did enough to cover costs and that was about it.

Hey, I made $10.63 in January on my one measly text link ad.  That’ll cover the domain name renewal.

Actually, if I can make $10.63 every month, it’ll also cover my hosting service, which is incredibly cheap at $6.95 a month. 

I was lucky: I got an $1,100 royalty from a publisher somewhere in the British Commonwealth last July, which was something I never expected; it just came, out of the blue.  For me, this is a hobby.

That’s the breaks in 2009; the conservative blogs are just getting a taste of the Bush economy sooner.
Pam Spaulding on 02/02 at 08:18 AM

“Of silver and gold I have none, but such as I have, I give to thee!”

We love you, Pam. (And Amanda, Jesse, and Auguste!)

Someday, when I actually have some money (and right now I really don’t, I’m lucky to have my job and practically all my wages go to pay back taxes and student loans) I’ll have to start donating to you guys.

Because advertising—I don’t actually buy much these days, so I’m sure not helping there.

But if any of y’all ever have to shut down for money reasons before some of us turn the corner—well, that would be catastrophic as well as very sad.

Pandagon went down for a few hours last night (I think so, anyway, I couldn’t load pages and got some scary script on a white page, but no one else seems to have been bothered by it—but there were no new comments appearing in the gap either) and I was on the verge of panic.

Don’t let anyone guilt you into extending yourself beyond what you can sustain, either financially or in terms of life time and energy. I hope Pandagon will be around a long long time to come!