Since I've been trying to include more Wisconsin bloggers in my links section, I also started clicking through a few of them, just to have a looksee. Found a new bunch of (probably) liberal links on The Vast Dairy Conspiracy, a blog I linked to a long time ago.

Also found some interesting stuff there. Stacie, the curator, has also done a little writing for Fighting Bob, Ed Garvey's website.

A sample: her take on the "controversy" over certification of the election results.

The Vast Dairy State Conspiracy: Certified

"I'm glad Barbara Boxer (who voted for the Patriot Act, remember?) and Stephanie Tubbs Jones challenged the electors. A dialogue about fairness in democracy is long overdue. But even they said the purpose of the challenge wasn't to change the election results, but to get that dialogue started.

Let's keep that dialogue going, OK? Truth is -- barring something extrordinary -- Bush will be President of the United States for the next four years. There's really nothing we can do to change that fact (especially with a Republican Congress -- unless we catch Bush with a dead girl or a live boy, as the saying goes, he's going to be there for awhile). Protest, investigate, campaign against -- all good things. But be realistic about it.

Otherwise, we just look stupid."

I agree that it makes them look stupid. Where she and I disagree is: I think that's a good thing.

Stacie also bemoans the ideological purity, which she believes permeates the left today, and lists some of the reasons she would never be elected.

• I really don't think we need more gun control. The assaut-weapons ban should have been renewed in some form (I don't know enough about the form it was in to know whether it was worth renewing as-was). Beyond that? Eh.
  
• Free Tibet, Free Mumia, Free Leonard -- these are movements in which perhaps 10 percent of the activists are sincere. The other 90 percent put the bumper stickers on their cars to look cool. While a free Tibet would be nice...and honest prosecutions of crimes would be doubly nice...I am not active in any of these movements, nor am I gonna be. Sorry.
  
• Fois gras is tasty. Veal is tasty. A lot of things are cruel but tasty. Tasty's going to win.
  
• I think government should get out of the marriage business altogether...no same-sex marriage, no opposite-sex marriage, no triad marriage, none of that. Leave marriages to the individuals (and perhaps their clergy), create business-type partnerships if you must. (Ask me about this when my divorce is final and I have no more hoops to jump through and I may have something different to say.)
  
• Pornography in the abstract doesn't offend me. Bad pornography, on the other hand...
  
• I'm not really boycotting a whole lot of anything, although I don't go to Wal-Mart unless I have to. I don't "shop blue." I don't jump on the "ooh, the backup singer for Hilary Duff just said something anti-Bush so I need to buy all of her albums and movies" bandwagon. I don't care that Starbucks is good to their employees -- well, that's great for the employees -- but their coffee still sucks. I believe you can be a total bastard but still produce good writing, music, art, whatever. The opposite is also true.
  
• I think Eminem is a gifted songwriter. This includes songs in which he slits his estranged wife's throat.
  
• I do not believe Eminem is going to make young men want to slit their estranged wives' throats.
  
• Poop jokes, dead baby jokes, sexist jokes, racist jokes, Hitler jokes all can be funny in the right context. I've been known to tell a few. I might shock you. But you'll be laughing on your way out, even if you don't want to admit it.
  

All right, I'll stop for now...but I'm sure there's more where that came from. My point is that we all have our differences, and that's one thing the Right gets, well, right -- they tend to not eat their own over a few disagreements. As much as I'd love to see a Religious Right/Neocon -- Moderate/Classic Conservative schism, it's not going to happen.

I'm not saying we on the left have to abandon our principles -- but we do need to respect some diversity of opinion, as long as we have this two-party system and an electoral process set up to keep the two-party system in place. (As for the two-party system itself? That's a subject for another post.)

Actually, I think some of those - the Eminem and pornography points - are more likely to keep her from being elected on the Right, but hey, maybe that's someplace the sides cross paths.

Jib at the Badger Blog Alliance is also trying to compile a comprehensive list, so at some point I may dump all this and just link to them.