With the top 50 political blogs getting 95% of the traffic, has a Blogosphere Establishment formed? Does the word blogger suffice to describe people who may be practicing journalism, activism or campaigning for a candidate, sometimes all at once, sometimes not? Should top bloggers practice a kind of affirmative action in who they link to or highlight? Six top political bloggers tackle these questions and others...

Salon has a very interesting article today by Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise on why she turned down the job that Amanda Marcotte briefly held with the Edwards campaign. She also addresses what she thinks is a major flaw in their online strategy: by making bloggers "official" you remove most of the value of their independent, outsider voices.

The Web on the Candidates

• AbsentCongress.org is keeping tabs on the voting records of 2008 presidential candidates in the Senate. According to the site, Sam Brownback has missed more than half of his Senate roll call votes. Compare that to Hillary Clinton and John McCain, who have been present for 94.87% of their votes.
• It's tapioca time: Jeff Jarvis laments the threat to conversation signaled by the Edwards blogger resignations: "Now every blogger hired by every campaign — in any position — will have their writing scanned for anything that could offend anyone. Tapioca time."
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John Edwards' blogger Amanda Marcotte has left his campaign staff, effective yesterday. The great deal of negative attention paid to her by the Catholic League's Bill Donohue, she says, made it impossible for her to keep serving her candidate effectively.

Blaming "Bill Donohue and his calvacade of right wing shills," embattled blogger Amanda Marcotte resigned from the John Edwards campaign yesterday.

Is Marcotte a casualty of the boring-down of campaign bloggers? Daniel Drezner thinks they're "little more than good PR stylists." Danny Glover goes further with the thread and considers Zack Exley's point about politicians writing their own blogs. However, if we're talking about the problem of boring and restrained blogging, "Exley is living in a fantasy world if he thinks politicians are going to be much more open on their blogs than their hired hands. That won't happen as long as bloggers unrestrained by campaigns parse every word for hidden (and often imagined) meanings."

John Edwards decided not to fire bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen for things they wrote before he hired them, receiving acclaim from the left and the right, respectively. "This is all being made up as we go along," said Simon Rosenberg of the New Democrat Network in the Times' wrap-up, which compared the Edwards bloggers' statements to inflammatory statements made by Patrick J. Hynes, the conservative blogger hired by John McCain.

Glenn Greenwald claims success at getting the "MSM" to balance the story: "[the blogosphere] forced into the public discussion critical facts that were being omitted and which exposed the absurdity of this story, thereby providing a counterweight to the joint right-wing/media pressure on Edwards to capitulate to these forces." John Palfrey calls the attacks on Edwards' bloggers "an extension of classic opposition research. It points to some of the risks at having people blog on behalf of a campaign in an official capacity." Phil Noble adds, "we have a new technology that's disrupting the whole political process, and we haven't figured out what the rules are."

The progressive blogosphere has been waiting with baited breath for news about the fate of John Edwards' bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen after they were criticized for writing anti-Catholic slurs before working for Edwards. Salon reported that they were fired yesterday, but TAPPED and others have heard otherwise. And Glenn Greenwald has been building an unbelievably long list of links to other blogs covering this.

The MSM has been covering the story with mixed value; for example Time Magazine does a decent job of putting it into larger context, but oddly claims that the story has an antecedent in "Democrat" John Thune's hiring of bloggers in his run against Senator Tom Daschle in "2005." Hello, rewrite? (Read our seminal story on the Thune bloggers episode here.