To my #1 favorite political Web site: thanks for the (unrequited) love!

The time has come for me to address the small matter of the unheralded hiatus of Crib From This from its former pattern of experiencing updates on a somewhat frequent basis. Which specifically was...uh... at-least-bi-weekly (and five times a day during the months leading up to the presidential election!).

I shall shortly unleash upon an unsuspecting world a statement, of sorts, expounding the new and -- I hope -- more narrowly focused mission (intellectually, rhetorically, aesthetically, whateverly) to be pursued in the future incarnation of this blog.

And speaking of how out of touch I have been with this blogging crap, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my all-time, number-one (#1) favorite political Web site and blog PhuckPolitics.com -- formerly the one significant connection between this blog and the outside (cyber-) world -- for dropping Crib From This -- without ceremony and without fanfare -- from its list of links to featured blogs.

Were I in PhP's position, I would surely have done the same thing, probably....***adopts 'wounded-dog' facial expression***...

Let's face it. Given the rocky road that the present blog has traversed -- its fickle, fluctuating and comment-averse readership; its restiveness as regards politics and the sordidness of saying things within political frameworks; its contempt for the concept of typing one's opinions on the Internet generally; its frequently overlong sentences, paragraphs and articles; its pretentious, plodding and sententious syntax, betraying all of the vanity and narrowness of a petit bourgeois sensibility; its tendency to discuss contemporary political questions using the metaphors and wisdom lifted carelessly and out of context from whatever book the blogger happens to be reading at the time, like William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or The Thrill of It All: The Story of Bryan Ferry & Roxy Music or some half-comprehended essay by Friedrich Schiller -- it's a minor miracle that Crib From This survived as long as it did in its coveted position in PhuckPolitics.com's Hall of Credibility.

So, anyway, umm. In sum, this blog has been silent for a few months principally because I have been:

1. re-conceptualizing this blog's mission, to be explained in the aforementioned soon-to-be posted ...uh..post,
   
2. helping a friend with the writing, editing and designing of his interesting new Web site,
   
3. doing lots of stuff unrelated to blogging.

Crib From This will be back soon. And how, might you ask? With a vengeance, Good Sir.

(And -- we can only dream tearfully as of yet -- with enough élan to merit the blog's eventual re-inclusion -- parable-of-the-Prodigal-Son-like -- in the PhuckPolitics.com universe.)

Stay tuned, Gentlemen and Ladies, for the new Crib From This mission statement.

Hyperlinks to items of interest.

• Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's "stonewalls and prevarications."
  
  
• Down With Tyranny's Ken ponders signs that prominent members of the House of Representatives -- including "corporate stooge" Steny Hoyer -- might be contemplating reversing the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (1933).
  
  
• Naked Capitalism's pseudonymous guest contributor George Washington on why the effort to "audit the Fed" (supported by 79% of the American population) is justified and why the Fed's protestations that this would constitute interference with its "independence" are "false."
  
  
• FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver on "Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate [Health Care] Bill."
  
  
• PhuckPolitics.com on why he opposes the Senate health care bill and why Joe Lieberman might be "doing the right thing for the wrong reasons."
  
  
• Thomas Frank in a very intelligent piece addressing why "Newsrooms Don't Need More Conservatives" and also laying out a general argument against treating "ideological diversity" as though it were the same as racial or socioeconomic diversity.