In the first (and still best) “Austin Powers” film, a United Nations representative makes a faux pas and calls the film’s villain “Mr. Evil.”

“It’s Dr. Evil,” he huffs. “I didn’t spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called ‘mister,’ thank you very much.”

This is how I feel when I’m referred to as a “blogger,” sometimes with a political qualifier like “liberal” or “conservative” attached. I’m a reporter. I’ve been a reporter since high school. Like a lot of other people, I lucked into some reporting jobs that took advantage of the speed of the web — thus, I blogged. And I left the Washington Post because I was intoxicated by this medium and the privileges of reporting. The leak of my private e-mails wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago; but then, neither would have my career been possible.

Let’s go back to the start. I started in journalism in a fairly typical manner, by discovering how much I liked writing articles and doing interviews at my high school paper. I chose to go to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. It was there that I became editor of the campus’s weekly conservative paper, and became plugged into the campus conservative journalism network.

Was I really that conservative? Yes. (more…)

New York State, one of the most corrupt political entities on the planet, has long been a graveyard for aspiring African American politicians.  As Mayor of the City of New York, David Dinkins — the first and so far last black mayor — presided over the infamous Crown Heights race riot in 1991, as well as a horrific murder rate that topped 2,000 homicides a year during his infelicitous one-term administration, and was easily defeated by Rudy Giuliani in their electoral rematch in 1993.

But most black politicians never even get that far. Although demographics have shifted, the state is still largely controlled by the bastard idiot children of the Tammany Hall ethnic groups — the Irish, the Italians and the Jews — who grabbed controlled of the Democrat Party starting in the late 19th century and never let go. (Someone should write a novel on this subject!) For years, the Republicans controlled the state senate under their leader, Joe Bruno, the Democrats ran the assembly under their leader, Sheldon Silver, and the two criminal organizations split control of the state house under various hapless nonentities like George Pataki.

Until David Paterson found himself sitting in Albany in the wake of Eliot “Love Client No. 9″ Spitzer’s sudden resignation, black politicians needed not apply — as Carl McCall, the former state comptroller, found out in 2002, when he fought a bruising primary battle for the Democrat gubernatorial nomination against Andrew Cuomo, son of the former governor, and incurred the wrath of the Clinton Machine.  The sleazy, slippery Cuomo, currently state attorney general, had Paterson in his sights this year and probably would have defeated him in a primary until the New York Times did his dirty work for him and Paterson announced he would not run this fall. (more…)