NEW BLOGS, AND WHY I'M NO LONGER A LIBERAL: I'm adding the Politburo and David Horowitz's blog to the perma-links. Go check 'em out.

The Poliburo is a well-organized, wide-ranging discussion of many different issues. It's edited by Michael Moynihan. Horowitz, of course, is a writer and political commentator who has recently jumped on the blogging bandwagon. I don't always agree with David, and sometimes I think he goes too far on racial issues, but his writing is enjoyable (especially "Radical Son," "Destructive Generation" and "The Politics of Bad Faith") and his position as a former radical faintly echoes my own left-to-right conversion.

Emphasis on faintly. My youthful "radicalism," such as it was, never came close to Horowitz's lifelong involvement with leftist politics. When I was 17, I tried to write a novel about a small-scale communist revolution led by poor blacks in my dad's hometown in South Carolina (which I quickly abandoned after about 10 pages; even at that young age I was embarrassed by it) and I made inquiries into joining the American Civil Liberties Union. In college, I used to read "In These Times" and "The Nation" and "Mother Jones" regularly. I signed some no-nukes and anti-Contra petitions and got into many bitter arguments with my Republican-leaning friends. (This was the height of the Reagan era, after all.) I voted for Clinton in 1992, but I had been feeling The Doubts for a couple of years before that because of some personal experiences. By 1996, I considered myself a conservative. (This was before I discovered Horowitz's writings.) Now, I'm a full-fledged member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.