Top 100 Lib Dem blogs

F&M is 29th... despite us not posting very often (blushes all around).

On a personal note, I'm hoping this changes very shortly since on Thursday I'm booked to submit ~ 46,000 words of badly written, poorly justified speculation cobbled together last minute, linked together by an utterly contrived theme and liberally illustrated with numerous incomprehensible diagrams that are referred to in passing without being elucidated further.

LibertyCat has read (poor soul) more than 1/2 of it at various times and doesn't *seem* to think it's as bad as I do... but I think he's being nice.

Miaow

Hello again, everyone. This cat has spent too long curled up in a basket sniffing catnip while the world around him went to the dogs. This stops now - please pull my tail if I don't post regularly in future.

A red letter day for F'n'M

Just before we rushed off to Harrogate, I noticed F&M was in the Telegraph. There are also mentions of the blogging MPs sites as well as Hot Ginger and Dynamite, Liberal Bureaucracy and The Apollo Project.

Bon Voyage

LibertyCat and I are heading to Harrogate for the Liberal Democrat Federal Conference this weekend. Am hoping to blog live from conference, but if I don't manage it then fear not! It's entirely possible you may be enlightened, stimulated and entertained by our new group blogger, GoodLiberal.

If you're on the libdemblogs network and are heading to Harrogate yourself... if you can recognise us from our cartoons then feel free to pop over and say "Hi".

Gagging the blogosphere

We are the leading link on Google for 'femme tied up'

What in heaven?

As of now, we are the number one hit returned by an MSN search for forceful sex.

This doesn't appear to be a reference to Mark Oaten either.

House rules

During our last 'blog strategy' discussion, LibertyCat and I decided we probably needed a comments/content policy. Results of the discussion so far as I remember were the following. LibertyCat - if you disagree with my recollection or want to add anything, I'll combine your remarks and mine into a single post and sidebar it.

PLOG POLICY/STRATEGY

• The plog will be political discussion of national and international current affairs (including politics but also science, etc.) from a Liberal but not necessarily partisan perspective
• The plog will not mention any 'lifestyle' stuff with two exceptions - first if we get personally (rather than bulk) 'memed' and second if we are 'journaling' from an event (e.g. a party conference)
• Since LibertyCat and I enjoy debating politics with each other then some of our discussions will doubtless spill out onto the plog. Readers should not be surprised if LibertyCat and Femme-de-Resistance end up disagreeing with each other in the comments box. Feel free to join in!

COMMENTS POLICY

• Off-topic comments will be removed. LibertyCat adds that any comments on Israel/Palestine will be removed because he believes there are very few people who can discuss this subject intelligently and if you think you are one then you most certainly aren't. This is included in 'off-topic' comments because since neither of us will be blogging about Israel/Palestine (I will happily admit to knowing nothing about this topic) then no comments about Israel/Palestine will be on-topic. LibertyCat will leave any comments that do manage to be on-topic about Israel/Palestine since the person commenting will have demonstrated great innovation.
• If a plog author removes off-topic comments then you can (apparently) be held legally responsible for any libellous comments. Thus, libellous comments will be removed.
• Apart from that, the plog runs a free speech policy on comments in the great tradition of that quote spuriously attributed to Voltaire. If you feel the need to Holocaust deny and can do it without being libellous then feel free, although since neither of us are likely to be blogging about the Holocaust then you are very likely to have your comment removed for being gratuitously off-topic. If you do somehow manage to be on-topic, we will respond by researching your remark until we can throw facts/statistics at you to demonstrate that you are not only deeply offensive but also incorrect.

Why I am not blogging about Hamas

I don't really give a damn about the Palestinian elections. Israel is a country of 6.3 million people with no important natural resources or strategic significance. Palestine doesn't have accurate census data, but the best guess is that 2.5 million people live in the occupied territories. In the wider scheme of things, the Israel-Palestine conflict is about as important as the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, or the conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers.

Yes, the Israelis are occupying Arab land in violation of international law. Yes, the Palestinians blow up babies on busses. Yes, both sides abuse human rights. None of this is unusual in global terms. Stupid people, mainly American Christian fundamentalists and Arab Muslim fundamentalists, have taken sides in a way which makes achieving peace a lot harder. The rest of the world seems to have piled in as a way of proving how earnest they are in support for or opposition to the American foreign policy. If you look at who is running street-level campaings on foreign policy, you would think that the situation in Israel is the most important issue facing humanity.

Those who are paid to make foreign policy have to care what stupid people think about unimportant issues. I don't. I think we should butt out of Israeli and Palestinian business (subject to the normal provisions about selling arms to both sides being the act of ethical weasels but something the British Foreign Office will probably try anyway, even if you tell them not to) in the same way we butt out of other small unimportant countries' business.

Some housekeeping

I've extended my links list from a combination of:

• Iain Dales' top 25 blogs
• Plogs I remember from last time I was plogging
• People who've left comments in my comments' box

AND

• People they've all linked to

My method of categorising (left/right/foreign current affairs/libertarians) is rather problematic since some ploggers fall into more than one category and I didn't find anyone I felt was authoritarian above and beyond any other political affiliation. Although the top 3 categories are likely to be relatively valid, the 4th involved a lot of guess-work over which category particular ploggers should be in.

Please feel free to inform me of anything 'must read' that I've missed or if I've put any plog in completely the wrong place.

[NOTE: Most of the 'lefties' are on bloggers4labour so I haven't listed them separetely]

LibertyCat says hello

Hello everyone. I'm Femme-de-Resistance's mysterious co-blogger whose delayed appearance has apparently invited comparison to Simon Hughes MP, and whose reassuringly deep (or was it deeply reassuring voice) is considered Chris Hughe-like.

Many thanks to Femme-de-R for providing me with such a high-traffic platform for my rantings and ravings - and thanks to you for reading them. I hope not to disappoint.

I like cats. I support Chris Huhne for the leadership. Those who know who I am will know the rest, those who don't don't need to.

It's back!

After great deliberation I've decided to restart Forceful and Moderate. I haven't been doing F&M for about 2 years now so it amazed me when an unknown gent at the Cambridge Lib Dems christmas party immediately recognised me as the editoress. I started thinking about taking it up again but devising new jokes about 'Sun, Sea and STV' takes a lot out of you. Eventually my desire to commentate on the ballet that is the Lib Dem leadership contest became too great a temptation... So I'm back to F&M several nights a week (and sometimes during the day if I'm especially keen).

There are some changes. Main change is that I've had someone interested in doing F&M with me. He's been the brains behind the funky (in my modest opinion), intellectual (again, in my very modest opinion) projects I've been doing in Lib Demmery over the last few years, especially Young, Free and Liberal (more about later). He has far too much of a literary resemblance to P.J. O'Rourke to remain hidden under a metaphorical bushel... well, P.J. O'Rourke writing "The Parliament of Whores" if he were about 20 years younger and didn't get all hot and bothered about surface-to-air missiles. I've never been on a two-person blog before. I've done a bit of group blogging over at Gold Horizons but I'm imagining having a co-blogger could be like having a guy move in with you - it's very entertaining and you don't have to do everything yourself, but before you know it they're leaving links about US politics just where you're likely to fall over them. Anyway, enough rambling... watch this space...