Thursday, January 27, 2005

Glutton for Punishment

Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment, but, in an attempt to better understand the mind of the neoconservative movement, I have decided to bury myself knee-deep in the Republican Noise Machine. Today, I subscribed to all of the RSS feeds offered by the Washington Times, the New York Post, and Fox News. It was a little difficult to find RSS feeds offered by the New York Post and Fox News, but I did find some on newsisfree.com via google.

From there, I decided to hit the right wing think tanks to see if I could find any more rss feeds or email alert services. I did not find any feeds or email alert services in a quick search of the heritage foundations website, although I did find a Policy Weblog. On the Cato Institute site, I was able to subscribe to the Cato Daily Dispatch, and "Social Security This Week" (That last one sounds like fun) Next, I visited the Media Research Center and subscribed to MRC CyberAlert and MRC Web News.

Next, I hit the American Enterprise Institute. To start, they require a lot of invasive personal information to allow you to create a new account. There seemed to be no validation done on this data, so I was able to get to the subscription area. This is where things start to get interesting. You can subscribe to all sorts of topics. Clicking on scholarships and Fellows brings up a list of almost 75 different individuals to follow. I went with Irving Kristol, Norm Ornstein, Newt Gingrich, and Richard Perle. I also subscribed to AEI's political corner, a series on the United Nations called "United No More?", Economic Outlook, Environmental Policy Outlook, Tax and Fiscal Policy, Culture and Society, and Social and Individual Policy.

I considered moving on to look at the Brookings Institute, Accuracy in Media, Project for the New American Century, and so on, but figured I was probably in over my head as it was. In hindsight, I probably should have used a throwaway email account, but I suppose it is too late for that now. I will keep you informed on my experience in delving into the Republican Noise Machine. If anything, I figure I will get a jumpstart into picking up the daily talking points for the neoconservatives, and further fuel my passion and motivation to point out the dishonesty of this entire operation.

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