Thinking Blogger Award

Special thanks to Carol Moxley at She Lives and “DragonLady” at DragonLady’s World for selecting me as one of the top five bloggers who make them think. The Thinking Blogger Award meme was started at The Thinking Blog.

If you want to participate and tag other bloggers, make sure you link to The Thinking Blog blog as originator of the meme.

I’ll update this post later with my top five bloggers, but let’s get the discussion going now. “Thinking Bloggers” can be bloggers you agree with, or better yet, those you may not agree with but who challenge your assumptions and prejudices.

I’ve gotten loads of e-mail from people telling me that although they “don’t agree with everything I write” or they “disagree with almost everything I write,” I challenge them to rethink their long-held positions. I consider that the ultimate compliment, whether or not they end up agreeing with or even liking me. I want people to look at and discuss issues in ways they’ve never considered before.

Name five bloggers who make you think and why. Don’t be shy about dropping links.

(Side note: A few bloggers responded on their blogs to my recent faith-based posts. I send shout-outs to Glenn Lucke, Bob Bixby, Julie Neidlinger, a blogger I “know” from my early blogging days, Gene Redlin, and Between Two Worlds.)

Unrelated Update: Hugh Hewitt’s got the 411 on a leftist blogger’s link envy. I’m named among “right-wing” bloggers whose “worldview is so narrow, intolerant, exclusive, and hateful” and who are “so much better at supporting their ideological soulmates than we on the left.” Whatever, envious lefty blogger woman.

As I said before, the “big” left wing bloggers don’t link to smaller left wing bloggers as often as “big” right wing bloggers link to their smaller counterparts.

I haven’t been linked by bigger bloggers lately because I tend to avoid the loudest and latest political news stories. I couldn’t care less what the candidates on either side are doing or saying. I used to join blog swarms, but I grew bored with them and prefer doing my own thing.

Here’s some advice: if you want to get linked by bigger bloggers and quoted disparagingly or otherwise by leftist bloggers and journalists, start blogging about the 2008 presidential race and hot-off-the-presses stories and scandals, and make sure your posts are controversial. Add your own unique spin. Send links to the bigger bloggers; if they link to your post, lefties and journalists will pick it up. That’s how I became widely linked. But this is a new era for me. I’ve been to the mountaintop, so to speak, and it was good. But these days I prefer strolling in the valley.