NaJuReMoNoMo Badges

National Just Read More Novels Month has gone international. Book blogger gautami tripathy from India has been spreading the word far and wide and daily more participants stream in. One point of confusion seems to be the multiple levels of winners and how to use the badges.

Every novel you read in January makes you a winner all over again, so you can win as many times as you want. Some people are content just to display the single winner badge, but others like to show off a little. For them I have multiple winner badges. Also, photobucket, being a blatant self-promoting entity, links back to the page with the badge rather than the NaJuReMoNo site. If you got the badge from there you may want to tweak the href= portion of the link to point to the official NaJuReMoNoMo 2008 page which is http://livebythefoma.blogspot.com/2007/12/najuremono-2008.html.

For your convenience, here are all the badges with cut and paste ready code. (Pardon the weird blank space, Blogger is inserting too many break tags and my skilz aren't 1337 enough to figure out why.)

	Participant – Show your intent by using this badge. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/2l3mgt"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" width="100" src="http://tinyurl.com/ywr45o" border="0" alt="NaJuReMoNoMo" /></a>
	Winner – Any novel qualifies you to proudly display your achievement. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/2l3mgt"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" width="100" src="http://tinyurl.com/2f563u" border="0" alt="NaJuReMoNoMo" /></a>
	Green Level (3x) – Three novels in January. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/2l3mgt"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" width="100" src="http://tinyurl.com/2b74vs" border="0" lt="NaJuReMoNoMo" /></a>
	Silver Level (5x) – Five novels in January. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/2l3mgt"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" width="100" src="http://tinyurl.com/2e6kmj" border="0" alt="NaJuReMoNoMo" /></a>
	Gold Level (10x) – Ten novels in a January. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/2l3mgt"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" width="100" src="http://tinyurl.com/26fag2" border="0" alt="NaJuReMoNoMo" /></a>

If the exact number of novels you read doesn’t equal any even level, feel free to mix and match. Eight novels is a Silver and a Green. Twenty-three novels is two Golds and three Winners.

And if you are html savvy, or want the original image, you can still get the direct links to the badges at the Official NaJuReMoNoMo Prize Booth.

Have at it. I am so excited to see all these badges everywhere. Read with pride.

Seeing The Light

Every now and then I have to resort to home repairs. I am usually content to let things rot and decay provided they do so slowly enough that it doesn’t draw attention. But some things demand action. For several years the ground fault circuit interrupter on the electrical outlet in our bathroom would pop. This was a result of me actually installing a GFCI protector on that outlet. Up to that point, hair dryers and shavers and other small grooming gadgets kept mysteriously shorting out. When I realized that somehow, against all building and electrical codes, the bathroom receptacle had been installed without a GFCI I went and installed one.

That was when we noticed the pattern to the tripping. It always happened during or just after a rainstorm. Clearly the two things were related. I even went as far a getting an electrician in to try to track it down. He tried to blame a dustbuster plugged into the garage receptacle. I knew that was bullshit, but not wanting to throw good money after bad, I let it go.

When we had some kitchen cabinets installed, it required relocating a couple of outlets so I picked the brains of the handyman for theories. He suggested that something outside, perhaps a light, was getting just enough water in it to short out that circuit. I filed that idea away and didn’t pursue it any further. After all, the GFCI did its job of protecting the receptacle and it was only a minor inconvenience to reset the tripped circuit once a month or so.

Then I got FIOS (which is a tale for another day once that settles down) and they plugged the network MUX or TUX or whatever they call it into the receptacle in the garage that was on the same circuit as the GFCI. Now every time the circuit tripped it took down the phone, the cable TV, and most seriously, the broadband connection. This was now a problem. I can live without a shaver for an hour to two. I can’t make it through a day without the interteat.

I decided it was one of two things. The short was either in the weatherproof outdoor receptacle or the backdoor light. There was also a suspicious bowing of the wall by the switch for the backdoor light which was just over the outdoor receptacle. Some forensic circuit breaker tripping narrowed it down to the receptacle since it was on the GFCI circuit. Rather than take chances, I told my wife that I was going to replace both the receptacle and the backdoor light. Since my boss had given the company Christmas Eve off, I was going to brave the mobs at BigBoxOfLumber and get the supplies I needed.

Old Front Door Light	New Front Door Light
Old Back Door Light	New Back Door Light

My wife, catching me in a home improvement mood and not trusting my taste in fixture, insisted in accompanying me and to pick out a new light for the front door as well. It seems all the neighbors had replaced their front lights and we had to keep up. She picked out the duplicate to the one that our more ambitious, young, home-improvement minded, childless neighbors had bought. The best feature of the replacement lights is that the bulb is changed from underneath rather than from above, thus allowing my spouse to change the bulb at will without the aid of me or a stepladder.

Once back at the house, armed with a can of foaming insulation goop and a cordless screwdriver, I went at the back door devices. Sure enough, the receptacle was rusty on the inside and the cover was fitting none too well. I got a big can of foaming insulation and squirted fizzing goo all around the electrical box. I then replaced the cover and the foam that keeps it “watertight.”

Then came the light at the back door. We hardly ever turned it on since we rarely went out back and our next door neighbors always complained if it was on while they were using their hot tub late at night. This thing was so rusted out I was amazed it hadn’t fallen clean off the wall already. It too had a gaping hole behind it that I caulked within an inch of its life. After I got the new light solidly affixed to the vinyl siding I turned back on the circuits and everything worked fine. Exhausted I quit for the day and rested on my laurels.

A few days later, after a few polite questions from my wife about the timetable, it was time for the light up front. To change it I had to stand on my trusty painters ladder and lean out over edge of the front steps and not drop anything into the bushes below. This should have been a two person job, but with only one ladder, a helper would have only gotten in the way. I got it installed with a minimum of banging, pulling, and cursing. This new light has all sorts of cool features. A light sensor turns it on at dusk and a timer turns it off after either one, three, or six hours. It also has two levels of illumination so that when I pull into the driveway or when a neighbor walking his dog goes by, it brightens up.

So for less than a hundred bucks I gained some handyman cred and made my wife happy. I may even be off the hook for another few months unless something else breaks. And best of all, the internet has not blinked out in the rain since.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What home improvement projects have you been up to?

Traffic Patterns

Comments are not the only way to measure blog success. There are dozens of ways to track all sorts of traffic patterns. And a lot of ways to goose them. Every now and then when I have a comics-related post I will link to it in the Comics Curmudgeon comments and it will generate hundreds of pageviews, but rarely any comments. It's nice to have hit and run readers, but it's better if they can be made into regulars. There are all sorts of memes and link exchanges and places to pimp your blog, but if all you are doing is tricking people to your site, it won't create steady long term readership growth.

The blog traffic generated by cheap gimmicks or weird Google coincidences is pretty ephemeral. Sometimes for some reason a particlular post will become suddenly popular. Back when my traffic was in the low single digits daily, I called them a BlogStorm. I still get them and they can be more severe now that my GoogleAuthority (however that is figured) is much higher. Usually I can figure out what site is linking to me or what current event suddenly make an old post relevant again, but sometimes it remains a complete mystery.

Last week my traffic took an uptick with lots of searches for variations on "Walker/Browne wife". And this isn't the first time such an odd search creates a flurry and then disappears. Several other times I have been inundated with people trying to find "Hi Lois drunk neighbor". My only theory is that whenever there is some web trivia scavenger hunt that relates to the Walker/Browne comic strip oligarchic dynasty, I get the benefit of it since I am one of maybe three blogs that have ever discussed the relationship between Lois Flagstone and her brother Beetle Bailey, not to mention Hi's dipsomaniac neighbor Thirsty Thurston. There, you got your damn answers. Now leave my blog alone.


I used to be addicted to Sitemeter stats and would compulsively check them 50 or 60 times a day but got discouraged when I learned that most visitors to my site were hopelessly LostGooglers search for some occasionally very prurient things. When I was polishing my template (now that would make a great euphemism) as part of National Blog Posting Month, I consolidated my blog RSS feed to Feedburner and my documented subscibers went from 5 to 82 overnight. I had a much larger audience reading my blog on purpose then I realized. From a not wasting time point of view, Feedburner stats are much better than Sitemeter since they only update once a day. I briefly hit 102 subscribers the other day only to fall back down to 92. I have no idea what pissed off ten readers in 24 hours, but I guess 300 pixel high pictures of Charles Krauthammer's mug will have that effect on folk.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: How do you track your traffic? And are anywhere near as obsessive compulsive as I am?

Exposing Myself

Thursday was Deluker Day and I missed it by that much. For some reason it didn't make Harmonica Man's list of holidays for 2008. Delurker Day was the joint brainstorm of Rude Cactus with Greeblemonkey supplying the innuendo laden graphic. As a side note, the illustration bears a strong resemblance to a famous poster titled "Expose Yourself To Art". Back in college I had a boss that was a dead ringer for the guy in the poster. This boss had a mild reputation as a dirty old man. Nobody ever believed that he had hired the future Playboy "Girls Of The ACC" model in our office sight unseen. He had a framed copy of that poster in his office and was very proud of it. Life was so much more fun when you could have a sense of humor about sex in the office.

Anyways, Delurker Day was clearly a great success, at least for Rude Cactus. He got 190 comments on that post as opposed to 41 the post before and 51 for the following post. And of course he got lots of links from other bloggers playing along with his silly game, including one or two on my blog roll. I suspect that Mr. Cactus has a fairly successful blog. It seems witty and clever enough and clearly way more popular than mine. Besides who among us is not above a few cheap traffic boosting ploys.

I assume Delurker Day has no connection with Mofo Delurker Day which I ridiculed when it rolled around back in October. Once people figure out how easy phony events are to create, we will see more of these silly semi-scams. And browbeating your readers to leave comments because of a day on the calender is pretty played out. Years ago, I declared my Lurkers Welcome Policy. I love comments. I like leaving them and I like getting them. But some people prefer to consume rather than participate. Without readers there would be no writers. Nobody should have to do what they don't want to do.

Once again, I find myself not very convincingly saying to stop worrying about what other people are doing and just do on your blog what makes you happy. If that results in thousands of readers or just a select audience of fifteen, so be it.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: The meta-ironic hypocrisy in even trying makes my head explode.

Pundits on Parade

A few days ago I laid into Bill Kristol pretty bad. I accused him of being a partisan untalented hack, which tends to be the general opinion of blogosphere pontificators not employed by The Weakly Standard. On the other hand, I wear my admiration for the Red Head of the Grey Lady on my sleeve. But in between these two extremes, there are a lot of pundits out there grinding out a lot of good work week after week even when there is nothing to say and nothing to say about it.

Let’s look at some of the syndicated newspaper and magazine columnists I love to read. This past week was a target rich environment for the talking class, so I’ve included sample quotes about Hillary Clinton to compare the styles and perspectives.

Michael Kinsley	Kinsley is the only columnist I would cross hot coals to read. And I have had to. His career has zig-zagged everywhere. Like many writers I admire, he did a long stint at The New Republic before he got sucked into being Bill Gate's lackey at Slate. His tenure at the LA Times was rocked with conflict and he briefly parked at The Washington Post before landing at Time for the time being. He always brings a fresh perspective to the table and tells something new. And rather than delve into the trees, he is always finding the forest. But being the president's spouse has to be very helpful for a future president. It's like an eight-year "Take Your Daughter to Work Day." IF it’s a question of “experience” versus “change,” change will win every time. Hillary Clinton, of all people, should have known that. Doesn’t she remember 1992? That was when her husband made “change” his mantra and chanted it all the way to the White House. "Stirred, Not Shaken", January 6, 2008
George Will	George is a little past his prime, but at one point he was the face of conservativism that dared to be intellectual, a style that like his bowties is long out of fashion. Over the years he has had some controversies like commenting on debates he coached, relying too heavily on assistants for research, and mis-explicating rock lyrics. He is now the elder spokesman of the sane Republicans. He also remains defiantly independent and steers clear of the groupthink that has plagued the latest generation of right-wing wordsmiths. Sixteen years ago, the Clintons advertised themselves as generational archetypes. How right they were. Led Zeppelin's recent reunion concert in London exemplified a tiresome phenomenon — geezer rock groups catering to baby boomer nostalgia. Speaking of the boomers' inexhaustible fascination with themselves, Bill Clinton has transformed his wife's campaign into his narcissism tour. "Start of a Marathon", January 10, 2008
Ellen Goodman	After Jules Witcover was cruelly put out to pasture, Ellen Goodman was the only columnist carried by the Baltimore Sun I missed. She looks more Erma Bombeck than Maureen Dowd, but she has a clever wit and a down to earth perspective. Her annual Equal Rites Awards column is one of the best of the year. How many women had a change of, well, heart? How many women-of-a-certain-age who've lived through vast social change remembered being told they could lead or be liked? How many had their wrinkles and cleavage and cackles and feelings dissected at every move? For that matter, do any of them still work with men like the one in Salem who yelled at Hillary: "Iron my shirt!" Status quo? Same old, same old? I don't think so. Hillary said she found her voice in New Hampshire. But she also found that very narrow line that women still have to walk. Hillary got her groove back. "Hillary's Fine Line, January 11, 2008
Charles Krauthammer	Another New Republic alumnus, Chuckie K used to be fresh and contrarian. Lately he is just the loudest and most off-key of the neo-con chorus. Only slightly less strident in his defense of war in Iraq than bandleader Bill Kristol, the Krautmeister still occasionally says something smart and fresh, but he has long dry spells. His column often comes out the day after Will's and frequently bears suspicious similarities. Check out his boomer "solipsism" with Will's "narcissism" above. Eyes on your own paper, Chuck. Was it the tears in the New Hampshire coffee shop? Whenever there is a political upset, everyone looks for the unscripted incident, the I-paid-for-this-microphone moment that can account for it. Hillary Clinton's improbable victory in New Hampshire is being widely attributed to her rare display of emotion when asked how she was holding up. The baby boomers in their endless solipsism now think they invented left and right -- the post-Enlightenment contest of ideologies that dates back to the seating arrangements of the Estates-General in 1789. "A Sneer, a Tear, a Comeback", January 11, 2008
Robert Novak	Another guilty pleasure, The Prince of Darkness is frequently infuriating but never boring. Not content to report news, he often makes it. His role in Plamegate is particularly fiendish. He starts the fire and then gets to report on the flames. He is an old school investigative columnist that has connections everywhere. You may not agree with him but he what he says reveal more about who he knows and what message they are trying to spin than anyone else in Washington. With that background, Sen. Clinton's lachrymose complaint in New Hampshire on Monday that "this is very personal for me" was widely compared to Muskie's crying jag in Manchester 36 years ago, which began his downfall. But whereas Muskie's tears were involuntary, only the naive can believe Clinton was not artfully playing for sympathy from her sisters. It worked. "The Clintons' One-Two Punch", January 10, 2008
E. J. Dionne, Jr.	The Washington Post has a whole stable of suitably liberal standard bearers, but they all tend to be far less interesting than the conservatives. David Broder is considered the pinnacle of punditry and his Clinton hatred is second to none, but I prefer the milder E. J. Dionne who seems to be a fun guy with a reassuring tone. If only he would loosen up and show more personality. Perhaps Hillary played the same trick on her critics that her husband, Bill, did in his epic State of the Union addresses that went on and on about one specific policy after another. Those speeches often got bad reviews but good poll ratings. At one campaign stop last week, as Hillary Clinton droned on learnedly about health care, family and medical leave, and global warming, a colleague in the press section leaned over to dismiss her for offering nothing but "a laundry list of wonkery." "A Shocker, in Hindsight", January 9, 2008

This list is heavily WaPo weighted because it’s my daily driveway litter, so I tend not to see other voices unless someone on the web makes a big deal of something. I hope I have proven that I am open minded and enjoy a wide range of opinions no matter how wrong they are.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Who is your favorite print pundit?

NaJuReMoNoMo Winners And Supporters

If you pay any attention to my sidebar you will see that I have declared myself a 2008 National Just Read More Novels Month winner. I finished Nick Hornby's Slam earlier this week and I thank him for writing a short youth-oriented (but by no means juvenile) novel for me to cut my teeth on. We are barely a third of the way into January and we already have some other NaJuReMoNoMo winners. Lets give some accolades to the early finishers here.

LabCat is a threepeat (sorry, I refuse to pay Pat Riley royalties for his trademarked phrase) participant who polished off The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath earlier this week. Kudos for tackling a more famous work and surviving the residual depression.

Achenblog Boodlers have jumped in the game and Sue, aka mosltlylurking, a great knitter has already declared herself a winner.

Leah finished The Game by Laurie King. Leah runs her own reading challenge for people that want some tougher year-round action if you already have NaJuReMoNoMo polished off. In the 888 challenge you read eight books in eight categories of your own choosing (or invention) for a total of 56 in one year. Yeah, I don’t get the math either, but I think you are allowed to overlap.

I also want to shout out to the many readers either new to me or hitherto lurkers that have helped spread the word. It’s embarrassing when you aren’t even the number one Google hit on your own invention. That honor belongs to Charlottesville Words which was good, game, and giving for my blatant self-promotion.

Among the CW readers that jumped in were Melissa Wiley of Here In The Bonnie Glen and Clifford Garstang of Perpetual Folly.

I don't know how DShep of ~ shep nachas ~ found me but I'm glad he did. The Deb-Log is another in-depth litblog that was nice enough to pass on a link.

Other people that have chimed in that I’m look forward to include lostcherrio aka The Harpoonist who is a writer herself. Maybe one day we'll get to read her novel.

And I would be nowhere without the support of my regular readers like Sue Trowbridge of The Conical Glass and HRH Courtney Queen of the Universe of the MSGAA (I link to her so much my wife may be getting suspicious).

Be sure to pick up your prize badges and keep reading as many novels as you can this month. This is clearly shaping up to be the best NaJuReMoNoMo ever!

BlatantForgivenessBegging™: If I haven't linked to you and you have done anything at all for me, leave a comment and I will get an update out.

Pregnant Pause

I noticed an alarming trend in my choices of entertainment lately. I seem to be drawn to works involving unplanned pregnancies. A week or so ago, we rented Waitress with Keri Russell playing the titular small town diner waitress that gets knocked up by her abusive husband. Then, based on critical acclaim, we went to see Juno, which is also about an unplanned pregnancy, this time to a smart-mouthed tom-boyish high school kid. And just the other night I finished Nick Hornby’s foray into Young Adult fiction, Slam, which is also about teenage out-of-wedlock pregnancy, this time from the point of view of the unlucky dad.

Of the three, as the parent of a seventeen-year-old, I found Waitress the least distressing because at least Keri Russell was playing a married woman as opposed to real life where she married the father of her kid a scant four months before the due date. The other two works feature characters my son’s age or younger and that is more frightening than Saw IV followed by a power outage.

Kids have been having sex in books since at least 1975 when Judy Blume published the forever-banned Forever. And teenage sexual exploits on the silver screen were old hat when I saw Porky’s back in my own teen years. These newer works are different in that they deal with the consequences of all that hormonally charged activity. And they confront the issues in a non-hysterical un-“Afterschool Special”-ish way.

Some of the concerns these kids having kids face are an inability to express emotions, trouble dealing with parents, and difficulty navigating social scenes. In other words, being knocked-up is just like regular high school except in maternity clothes. Also, in a contemporary twist, both works have the girl being the initiator of the ultimately unwise act. I think that is a smart narrative angle because it peels away the guy-bashing that would otherwise over shadow the other points of the story. Also, the actual procreative act is dealt with perfunctorily and with a minimum of prurient appeal. Neither of these is going to appeal to the Girls Gone Wild fans out there.

What they do emphasize is the absolute and total embarrassment this condition results in. In Slam, Sam and his preggers ex-girlfriend go to a birthing class only to run into one of his teachers. Similarly, Juno has to awkwardly cross an abortion clinic picket line that consists of one of her classmates. The take-away message is that having a baby is an incredibly humiliating hassle. Juno refers to her inflated self as a “cautionary whale.”

And cautionary tales these are. Depending on how you read the stats, teen pregnancy rates were actually much high a half century ago. But back then they gave out wedding rings instead of condoms. Not to throw out any spoilers, but there aren’t any wedding marches in either of these stories. That is another modern touch. Nowadays, having a kid doesn’t always lead to a matrimonial union. Some of the strongest marriages I know were conducted with moonlight glinting off a shotgun barrel, but times have changed for the most part.

And from a parent’s perspective, these stories have a strong “but for the grace of God go I” ring to them. Until my son is out of college and established in a career, I have to whistle past the maternity ward. One thing both Slam and Juno make clear is that even the dorky kids get laid. And that anyone can make a baby, but not everyone is cut out to be a parent.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Shotgun weddings – a terrible idea we are glad to be rid of? Or another fine forgotten American tradition?

Update: Ellen Goodman saw Juno too and bothered to look up facts and shit.

Kristol Klear

Little Billy Kristol is getting a part-time job at the New York Times and there is a lot of teeth gnashing in the blogosphere. I say part-time because he will be writing only once a week instead of twice like most Times columnists (Frank Rich only appears on Sunday, but his drivel is super-sized). He also gets to keep his day job editing The Weakly Standard which he cofounded because existing conservative opinion mags, including The American Spectator, were insufficiently rabid.

He will be taking the empty William Safire Endowed Chair For Conservative Folly. This will be a fiasco and an embarrassment for the Times, as if the Kristol-inspired WMD reporting wasn’t humiliating enough. And I predict this not out of any liberal sense of schadenfreude because I don’t view myself as particularly partisan. I like good writing from any position. My fear is that Kristol who has never been right (as opposed to right-wing) about anything in the past decade is determined to turn the Grey Lady into a bully pulpit for his petty politics.

If Poppy Bush was born on third base thinking he hit a triple, then Billy Boy was born in the owner’s box and thinks he should be batting clean-up. He is the son of Irving Kristol who pioneered the philosophy of lying to the public for their own good. Kristol the Younger is clearly a smart guy: prestigious prep school, Harvard magna cum laude, UPenn professor, yadda, yadda, yadda. One of his first forays into public service was as chief of staff first to noted moralist and blackjack loser Bill Bennett and then Vice President Quayle. It was while working for VP Potatoe that he earned the sobriquet “Quayle’s Brain”, a notably low bar for distinction. He has since then bounced around various think tanks and neo-con welfare positions. He was a principle architect of the theory that invading Iraq would bring never-ending peace and stability to the Middle East. We see how well that is going.

I first ran into Kristol when he was a frequent fill-in during the waning days of David Brinkley’s tenure on ABC's This Week. Streaming a river of flop sweat, he made Albert Brooks in Broadcast News seem as cool and collected as Peter Jennings. Since then Kristol has bounced around the Sunday morning screamer circuit until finding a home on Fox News Sunday where he can pass as a moderate somewhere between Brit Hume and Juan Williams.

Party apparatchiks like Kristol love to ridicule the Liberal Mainstream Media until it’s time to find a safe harbor when the rats start deserting the sinking ships of state. Karl Rove is taking his brand of crazy to Newsweek. Look for other disgraced conservative mouthpieces, lackeys, and fellow travelers to find refuge in the print media, the only industry falling faster than the Dubya Administration approval ratings. According to Radar Magazine, Kristol’s sweetheart deal was negotiated by fellow neocon scion Andy Rosenthal.

My point, and I do have one, is that Bill Kristol has never uttered a word that wasn’t complete horseshit in service of a political talking point. He has no legitimate journalistic experience and the concept of unbiased assessment is completely foreign to him. I’m sure he goes to bed every night with his smarmy grin, chuckling over the coup of infiltrating the paper of record as a Bilderberger fifth columnist. For at least the next fifty-two weeks you can judge for yourself whether he is still a front man for the “we will be welcomed with roses” crowd or whether he will eventually develop a spine or an independent thought.

His laconic and lazy first article is online and it is tepid material indeed. He mostly damns Mike Huckabee with faint praise. Here is pretty much the thesis:

Now it’s true that many conservatives have serious doubts about Huckabee’s positions, especially on foreign policy, and his record, particularly on taxes. [That pretty much sums up what usually concerns conservatives. - yellojkt] The conservative establishment is strikingly hostile to Huckabee — for both good and bad reasons. But voters seem to be enjoying making up their own minds this year. And Huckabee is a talented politician.

As a card carrying member of the conservative establishment, it’s hard to tell if his praise is genuine or if he is polishing apples for when he can influence policy again instead of just policing it from the sidelines.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Do you like your pundits fair and balanced, or from Fox News?

Update: For the Maureen Dowd/Bill Kristol connection, read this post by Mo MoDo.