iPundits

WITH NEVADA'S PRESIDENTIAL caucus nearly upon us, the partisan screaming is again raging from all corners. Republican vs. Democrat. Conservative vs. progressive. Red vs. blue. Once more, the two competing, cash-heavy divas of American political theater are striking familiar poses, belching out the same, tired lines.

But while punditry always intensifies the nearer an election draws, some of today's most effective political debate isn't flying from talk radio or cable news shows. This election cycle, in Nevada as in the rest of the country, those pulling the strings of the Internet blogosphere are helping raise the curtain on the stormiest political show on earth.

Call them insta-pundits, the chattering class or the vanguard of modern political debate, if you like. Regardless of labels, these online orators are throwing the heaviest blows in the bloodiest fight for political power in decades, with most of them swinging from the left.

Hugh Jackson, former CityLife senior editor and one of this paper's regular columnists, has used the power of his popular Las Vegas Gleaner blog (www.lasvegasgleaner.com) for about the last two years to mercilessly attack both Republican Gov. Jim Gibbons and the handful of presidential candidates who personify America's mainstream political machine. He agrees, for now, that "blogs are just another ring in the ever-expanding media circus ... Hopefully, over time, they'll evolve, get better, more comprehensive, more useful and more entertaining."

Jackson's quick-fire analysis filters this presidential race through another lens that some in politics and the media still refuse to eyeball: Election 2008 is not just about two tribes knifing each other to snag the reins of political power. This electoral battle is also being fought between the withering, increasingly cash-strapped "old media" of once-powerful daily newspapers and broadcasters and the guerilla-like bands of politically motivated bloggers who strike hard and fast from behind their keyboards -- before slipping back into the gauzy anonymity of cyberspace.

More is at stake in this election, say many Nevada bloggers, because the failed, corporate-driven policies espoused by both major parties -- and endlessly trumpeted by mainstream media outlets -- have brought Islamic terrorism stateside, have again given license to banking schemes that threaten the entire economy with a recession (or worse, according to forecasts from Federal Reserve officials) and have cemented a culture of fear that's convinced many Americans to look away as the federal government gobbles ever more of their civil liberties. Blogging represents the purest form of democratic revolution, say its practitioners, because the "everymen" (and women) jumping into the fray fill the need for media voices that express what citizens of all political stripes are thinking.

"Blogs develop organically and gain readers because they address a niche ... I'm glad that the Nevada blogging scene is just starting to see this kind of thing develop ... " says Myrna "the Minx" Minkoff, the brains behind the crowd-pleasing Reno and its Discontents blog (www. renodiscontents.com).

Although most political blogs are just a few years old, some mainstream journalists long ago saw their intrinsic power and were among the first who bit the corporate hands that fed them. Former Baltimore Sun op-ed writer Bob Somerby is widely credited with standing up America's first purely political blog, the Daily Howler (www.dailyhowler.com) in 1998 after, he says, "Concern about press corps patterns and practices had grown throughout the 1990s. Lazy thinking and careless habits were producing increasingly vacuous work."

Conversely, other prominent American writers began blogging to countermand the digital discourse -- only to eventually enlist in the ranks of the original online true believers. Renowned conservative journalist and thinker Andrew Sullivan started The Daily Dish blog (www.andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com) in 2001 to defend President George W. Bush and his neo-con cohorts against a rising blogosphere backlash. Ironically, both Sullivan and his little slice of cyberspace publicly, even painfully, evolved, eventually bemoaning and berating Bush & Co. for their incessant stream of what he calls "slack-jawed" lies.

The anonymous, North Las Vegas-based pundit who goes only by the name Nevada Scandalmonger, says he was an early home-grown advocate of the power of the blog, plugging in his Vote Gibbons Out page in 1999 after he "had discovered I was stuck in Jim Gibbons' congressional district, and I just couldn't stand it." His motivation? "A Democratic governor in 2010, or sooner, indictments permitting."

Regardless of who they are, why they started or who signs their checks, bloggers are here to stay. Today, more major news organizations on the planet now blog (an attempt to reclaim the format and its expected revenue stream for big media), and major presidential contenders like Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani pay close attention, and often respond, to many postings.

As for bloggers bringing old media to its knees? It hasn't happened yet, but the online times, they are a-changin'. Will blogs supplant daily papers and cable news as the sole, go-to reliable source for cogent, comprehensive political coverage? Bloggers like Jackson are hopeful, but wary. "... I've been hoping that about TV news for decades ...," he says.