May 24, 2006  |  By: KATHERINE VOLIN  | COMMENTS     

some people who are professional bloggers, and the professional bloggers tend to be more informed when they write because they don’t write to say this is what I had for breakfast today or this is who I’m going out with,” Boykin says. “They’re writing to say this is what’s going on in the world.”

The matters of the world have Spaulding concerned, particularly with regard to personal freedoms.

“I just see a terrible swing in this country where the government is intruding on those rights and freedoms and by and large the public is asleep at the wheel,” Spaulding says.

Despite her belief that Americans are suffering from blindness, Spaulding says that she has no aspirations for her blog to alter the course of contemporary American thought.

“When I see something outrageous I have to post about it,” Spaulding says. “I’m not looking for publicity or anything of that sort. I’m just typing what I feel and putting it out there and if people read it, fine, and if they don’t, fine.”

Nonetheless, Spaulding says she finds herself learning from the people who do read and respond to her blog.

“I find that I gain a lot of knowledge from people who comment,” Spaulding says. “I think without a commentary, a blog is nothing more than a diary of personal thoughts.”

SPAULDING LEANS LEFT politically and says she’s particularly interested in blogging about “LGBT issues, race, women’s rights issues, reproductive freedom and the religious right.”

Rogers says Spaulding’s reporting and posts about conservatives set her blog apart.

“She is the predominant blogger who is blogging on the radical right,” Rogers says. “She is the one out there finding all these little stories on [anti-gay conservatives], their little arrests and all that.”

Spaulding says she strives for justice in her pursuit of the unjust.

“I don’t want to call it ‘fair and balanced’ because it’s never fair and balanced, but I think I give equal heat to both sides,” Spaulding says.

Her identity strongly shapes the politics she analyzes in her blog postings, Spaulding says.

“Politics today in terms of gay and lesbian rights affects me directly, affects me profoundly,” Spaulding says. “There are people who are working to make my life hell. They see me as an enemy when I’m just a neighbor, a tax-paying citizen minding my own business, when I just c