Our top story on Netscape last night and this morning was this op-ed from left-wing blog SmokingPolitics, predicting a nasty political fight for Al Gore once his new book, The Assault on Reason, is released next week. Bloggers Dave Johnson and James Boyce say this event will give the Left the perfect opportunity to draw attention to "the mechanism of the smear":


With an excerpt from The Assault live on TIME.com (and at the top of buzz-generated news aggregator Memeorandum) as of this morning, let's take a look at the first responses to Gore's tome. Because bloggers like to talk about themselves debate the nebulous laws governing the Web, let's focus specifically on Gore's statements about network neutrality.

That's the query posed by this story from Politico.com, submitted this morning by Netscape Scout Tim A. Loftis. The most damaging quote in the story comes from none other than the most visible female in the political blogosphere, Arianna Huffington. "Hillary Clinton's problem with the blogosphere is that she has been so calculating that you can smell it," Huffington told Politico's Sam Stein. "Every thought has been processed through multiple channels in her and her consultants' brains. It's so fabricated."

One thing that could be hurting Hillary is her sheer visibility. Good bloggers thrive on making discoveries just off the mainstream radar, and no current candidate has been on the radar for longer than Hillary Clinton. Case in point: the number one search term on Technorati for the past couple of days has been Ron Paul:


The Republican candidate (who ran for President under the Libertarian banner in 1998) likely impressed bloggers at last week's debate with his traditional fiscal conservatism and opposition to the Iraq War. Over the past week, Paul's official YouTube page has outpaced those of his Republican rivals, with 2,199 subscribers to Mitt Romney's 1,899.

The Politico piece is specifically concerned with the upswing of anti-Hillary sentiment. But perhaps a bigger issue is the fact that, according to Technorati, the overall number of mentions of the female candidate by bloggers is on the downswing:


So for today, Paul is up and Clinton is down. But it's best to remember that bloggers are fickle. It's early enough in the race that we'll almost certainly see a Ron Paul backlash, and a backlash to the Hillary backlash, before the first primary.

One of our top stories on Netscape today is a Newshound takedown of Fox News stalwart Bill O'Reilly, who has blamed MSNBC's "far left" slant for the poor ratings of last week's Republican debate. Since the Newshound site exists for the sole purpose of slamming Fox News, its take on the story doesn't exactly come as a shock. "You need to face some facts," Newshound tells O'Reilly. "You've peaked and Keith Olbermann is coming up behind you and MSNBC considers him a great asset."

But do they? According to an AP story circulated by Jossip and The Huffington Post, MSNBC did have to contend with flack from conservatives regarding Olbermann's debate night commentary, particularly concerning Rudy Giuliani, whose team actually called MSNBC to complain. AP's David Bauder suggested that "having Olbermann anchor [a political news event] is the MSNBC equivalent of Fox News Channel assigning the same duties to O'Reilly." In other words, news guys should take care of reporting news, and commentary guys who get paid to ruffle feathers should only be brought in after the fact.