one of the lingering questions in the local blogosphere is "what now?" before the election, some of the city's highest-profile right-wing blogs had the express function of ranting frothily about the peterson administration and his fellow democrats. now that peterson is out and republicans control the city-county council, what happens to those blogs?

indy undercover seems to have no purpose if republicans control city government (unless the FOP turns on ballard and the council), and the blog may be shut down. or it might continue on as a ballard-boosting law-enforcement blog and simply shut down its controversial comments section. if the blog dies, the mystery surrounding the identity of its author "joe friday" will likely die with it.

in contrast, the fringe "bart lies" site brought about its own obsolescence by using such a specific name. that site will surely die, though if the site's second splash page is any indication those folks will be teaming up with the "fair tax" folks, who promise they aren't going away. once they fail to get property taxes repealed, they plan to move on to harrassing local school boards.

meanwhile, sir hailstone is taking a break. presumably he intends to return to blogging, but we all know that in the blogging world "taking a break" sometimes means "no new posts for months if ever". hailstone's "digital farmers" blog has been getting a lot of kudos from other right-wing bloggers recently for his role in the ballardosphere. this may be a surprise to longtime readers, who might remember him from his failed primary campaign, his multiple blog purges to remove embarrassing material, and that time he put out a "hit" for gossip about "that tdw bitch".

as the anti-bart blogs die off, new species of blogs are being born. the wave of the future is the anti-ballard blog. at least two such blogs have been spotted in the wild. one is keep indy honest. there isn't much to this blog yet other than righteous anger and two single-paragraph posts. another, the wonderfully named accidental mayor, is a bit more substantial, with a suprising amount of quality content considering it's only been up for four days. the accidental mayor blog feels like a marion-county-focused taking down words, but that might just be because they're both typepad blogs with similar designs. at any rate, it's off to a promising start.

and speaking of TDW, a few trolls on various blogs have been suggesting that that TDW would die off following this year's election failures. don't believe it. as TDW has repeatedly pointed out, she works for the state party, not the county democrats, and overall democrats did pretty well in indiana this year.¶

I'm launching a new effort as well

http://www.indycouncilwatch.org/

The basic idea is that any local Indy bloggers can contribute by having a blog category called indycouncilwatch and an rss feed directly to that category. the ICW website can then aggregate those feeds intoa sort of "community blog" without anyone needing a new blog login.

This started as a plan to go to as many CCC meetings as possible and just write about what they are doing/saying/voting on. put in some opinion, etc. We can still blog on our own sites but ICW would grab the right categories.

If you're interested let me know. Not sure if blogger handles category-specific feeds but we can probably figure out a way to jimmy it if you are interested.

contact me via ICW or my site (xtra-rant.com) if you're interested and pass the word to other local bloggers you think might want to be in on the effort as well. ¶

An interesting admission from an associate in the law firm of the GOP County Chair:

I freely admit to reading Indy Undercover (the police blog) and I know some of the guys who do it. I’ll even admit it was my idea over lunch one day.

That was Abdul-Hakim Shabazz ... ¶

Wilson? You got a problem with FREEDOM OF SPEECH? You were criticizing a poster on TDW for possible freedom of speech infringement and were defending freedom of press too?

Isn't Abdul entitled to suggest to the cops that they write a blog to freely express their points of view?

Or doesn't freedom of speech and press apply to Abdul and the cops too? ¶

i have to say, i'm not thrilled that wilson trolls are starting to show up in my comments... ¶

That's the price you pay for letting Wilson on your blog. Like attracts like. ¶

It seems the anonymous nobodies are the nastiest ones... ¶

some very interesting discussion here on ruth holladay's blog, where they strongly suspect that abdul is "joe friday" from indyu. abdul has repeatedly denied being joe friday, yet there is growing evidence to suggest he is. ¶

Re: Abdul. I've been reading Ruth Holliday's posts about the Abdul/IndyU connection. I don't really know where to ask this...

Say it is revealed that Abdul is IndyU and used that persona to hold Peterson and his council up to public scorn, based upon the lie that the blog is a mouthpiece for the IMPD... would there be ethics violations involved, since Abdul is alledgedly a member of the Illinois bar, and is named as an associate for an Indy law firm? Or is that too far of a stretch? ¶

he might be a member of the bar, but how much of his income do you think he gets from that stuff? i imagine he gets most of his money for being a radio host/political commentator. so even if he were to be disbarred (which is probably unlikely), in the real world that wouldn't mean much if WXNT etc were still willing give him a paycheck. ¶