And so outside of Hot Air <\/em><\/a>and Power Line <\/a>– <\/em>neither of which have ever been primarily Minnesota blogs – and Lileks<\/a>,\u00a0who covers everything in the universe, sometimes simultaneously – the “thousands lights” of Minnesota local\u00a0blogging have shrunk to a fairly manageable number.\u00a0\u00a0 Some – like the great Sheila Kihne – have taken their talents out into the corporeal world of activism (with a little Twitter to keep people up to date).\u00a0 Others – the essential Gary Miller, long of Truth Vs. The Machine<\/em>, has moved is oeuvre <\/em>to Facebook as his politics have moved toward the libertarian.\u00a0<\/p>\n (It’s odd that the solid Big-L libertarians never really developed any serious bloggers in Minnesota.\u00a0 My observation; most of them don’t seem to believe they need <\/em>to convince anyone outside the club, and many of them are pretty terrible at it.\u00a0 Opportunity missed, in my book).\u00a0<\/p>\n But many of them are still at it – putting out superior material monthly, weekly, or even more often.\u00a0 And they’re worth visiting a lot more than you likely do.\u00a0<\/p>\n And as one of the ones that has been getting consistently, surprisingly high traffic for better than a decade now, I feel a little remiss in that I haven’t always spread as much attention around as I should have.\u00a0<\/p>\n I’m going to try in my tardy way to fix that today.\u00a0<\/p>\n Of course, my NARN colleague Brad Carlson has been cranking away pretty non–stop for a long, long time now.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n And Mister Dilletante is still writing superior stuff, on the average more than daily<\/a>, which is how often you should be visiting The Neighborhood.\u00a0<\/p>\n Brad and D are pretty eclectic – music, religion, politics, home and family life, Wisconsin high-school football (or maybe basketball – given the scores D writes about, it’s kinda hard to tell) – which is in fact one of the things I like about the better Minnesota proto-conservative blogs; in contrast to Minnesota’s little collection of herniated-sounding, self-righteous, self-referential, usually\u00a0shrieky leftyblogs, most of the the conservative-blog holdouts have more than one topic.\u00a0 In some cases, many, many of them.<\/p>\n Along those lines – Joe Deal’s\u00a0Red Squirrel Report <\/a>is all over the map.\u00a0\u00a0 And Ryan Rhodes has \u00a0been writing longer than me, and has covered a dizzy range of subjects<\/a>, from politics to intestinal chemical warfare to the trials and travails of owning a small business to, a few years back, the gut-shot heartbreak and slow, miraculous inspiration of the story of his preemie twins.\u00a0<\/p>\n If Ryan Rhodes contributes no more than this meme to western cultural life, his life will have been well lived. But there’s so much more at his blog.<\/p><\/div>\n And while family and career have slowed down the writing at Fraters<\/a>\u00a0to more of a weekly thing, they still cover the waterfront.\u00a0<\/p>\n As does one of my favorite low-key reading pleasures, Mary Louise Pivec’s wonderful Casual Sundays with Mr. Curry<\/a>.\u00a0 What can I say?\u00a0 Casual and low-key?\u00a0 Yep.\u00a0 And always worth the visit.\u00a0 I’m always happy I clicked over.\u00a0<\/p>\n I’ll never mix up Casual Sundays <\/em>with Minnesota Hockey Mom <\/a>– <\/em>who usually writes about hockey, and, well,\u00a0 being a mom, but has branched out all over the place – but I read it as regularly as I can as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n Of course, there are bloggers who cover shorter stretches of the waterfront with a more focused passion.\u00a0 Katie Kieffer has slowed down to roughly weekly <\/a>\u00a0on her “business for\u00a0 young adults” blog, as she works on a very different writing project – but she still sounds off, and is always a delightful read.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Gary Gross has been at the business of covering Central Minnesota politics for almost nine years now at\u00a0Let Freedom Ring, <\/a>and his biggest days are (I have this on very good authority) just in front of him.\u00a0 As in, over the next few weeks.\u00a0 Seriously – stay tuned.\u00a0 And Tea Party stalwart Walter Hudson is an essential read at Fightin’ Words<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Of course, John Gilmore at Minnesota Conservatives\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/a>\u00a0is sort of a rhetorical daisy-cutter; he’s had his occasional\u00a0ready-fire-aim <\/span><\/span><\/a>moment, along with his\u00a0home runs with bases loaded<\/span><\/span><\/a>.\u00a0 Which will his next post be?\u00a0 It’s always fun to wait and see.\u00a0<\/p>\n And the big new event has been Bill Glahn’s blog<\/a>, perhaps the most essential new political blog in Minnesota since Sheila Kihne was killing giants, 3-4 years ago.\u00a0 His entire series on following the trail of money among Minnesota’s liberal political “non-profits”<\/a> is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what’s wrong with Minnesota politics today – and stuff I’d say Minnesota’s mainstream media doesn’t have the balls to write about, except the problem is more a matter of “financial independence from big lefty money” than “courage”.\u00a0<\/p>\n Anyway – if you’ve been feeling the need to broaden your horizons, your assignment is clear.<\/p>\n UPDATE:\u00a0 I knew I’d forget one.\u00a0 Andy Aplikowski has been doing superior analysis at Residual Forces <\/em>for roughly forever, and I can’t believe I neglected him when I first wrote this.\u00a0 My apologies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Twin Cities’ conservative blog scene has been at it for over a decade now.\u00a0 And it was inevitable; from its high point in the mid-oughts, where there were dozens and dozens of bloggers scratching away at all corners of Minnesota’s body politic – from international megablogs like Power Line and Ed Morrissey’s Captain’s Quarters […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39837"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39868,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39837\/revisions\/39868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ramblingrhodes.mu.nu\/archives\/failandaids.jpg\")