A Live Journal blogger got a knock on the door from the Secret Service after someone who found her remarks about George Bush in a post and her comment section inflammatory.

The ‘visit’ put anniesj on an emotional rollercoaster ride, which of course she blogged about.

via the Blog Herald

Florida photographer arrested
Apparently Florida put a law in place Friday that prohibits reporters from photographing or talking with voters waiting outside polling stations. A free lanceer was tackled and arrested in Palm Beach country yesterday afternoon.

Political Blogs
The Toronto Star takes a basic look at US political blogs, their effect on others, on each other and on media.

Political bloggers are on a high. Their credibility once questioned by traditional journalists, they now find an audience among an estimated 20 per cent of newspaper readers, who appreciate the bloggers’ self-styled role in correcting the factual errors and biases of the mass-market print and broadcast news media.

The reporter, David Olive points out that a paper like the New York Times has 12 hundred reporters at it’s disposal. The usual long time bloggers are named, with a critical eye to their own estimate of their influence.

Bloggers revel in holding pols’ and their media peers’ feet to the fire, and were delighted last week to hear Newsweek chief political correspondent Howard Fineman acknowledge that the bloggers’ criticism was often “hurtful,” and Tom Brokaw’s assessment that the “Rathergate” piling on amounted to a “political jihad.”

Glenn Reynolds, whose conservative Instapundit blog qualifies as a grand-daddy of the phenomenon, dating from the late 1990s, is chuffed by the Big Media backlash.

“Many journalists were unhappy with the fact-checking — as, I imagine, the armoured knights of the Middle Ages were unhappy to encounter longbows, crossbows, and pikes — technological innovations that meant their dominance of the battlefield was at an end.”

Reynolds, not alone in his blogger exuberance, is jumping the gun, however. Political bloggers make their own mistakes, as when ABC’s influential The Note conflated some minor personnel changes in the Kerry-Edwards camp into a full-blown and desperate overhaul.

The majority of the piece is taken up with US blogs, however, David Olive does mention the grapevine of Canadian political blogs briefly, starting the the Toronto Star election blog. Echo chamber, googling monkeys, grapevine…the grudging praise is mixed with doses of reality.