The top 6 bloggers &/or personalities that are smart

To commemorate this week’s launch of the news blog Eye Street here at the Daily Caller, we’re ditching the blogroll for something more personal — a quick recap of some of our favorite political hotspots, and why we love them. (Note: Some readers have emailed asking whether this is an entirely exhaustive list of smart bloggers. The answer is yes.)

6. ezra klein

Why we love him: 25-year old wunderkind Ezra Klein shares more than a few similarities with The Office’s Ryan Howard. He works for a struggling paper company. Men chase him. And if you squint, he even kind of looks like Ryan Howard. Three strikes, we’re in love.

First, though, it’s necessary to get some dirty laundry out of the way. Back when he blogged in between final exams and keggers (circa 2007), Klein made waves for arguing that the Nazis, for all their bad press, did a “pretty good job” increasing economic growth. Just a year later, he tweeted that the late Tim Russert should be “f—ked with a spicy acid-tipped dick.”

We reached out to Klein to see if he wanted to clarify those comments for an unrelated hit piece we were working on, but he directed us to his already public explanation: It was a private Twitter account. Would you like it if someone revealed what was on your private Twitter account? (We had our editorial staff check their private Twitter accounts, and sure enough, there were acid-tipped dicks pretty much everywhere. Point for Klein.)

But the big reason to read Klein’s Washington Post blog is that he doesn’t work for himself. He works for you. If you’re a single-mother without health insurance, for example, just shoot Klein an email and he’ll head to an online calculator that you could probably head to yourself and tell you just how much President Obama’s recently passed health-care legislation will help you turn your life around. As anyone who’s asked Markos Moulitsas for directions knows, that’s the kind of dedication most bloggers just don’t have.

Probably the only thing about Klein that gives us pause is his almost unfailing defense of the recently passed health-care reform bill,  to the point that he overlooks flaws in some sinking ships like the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) – the “good kind of market” that he says is working as a “cost control” for federal employees. The FEHBP’s premiums have risen substantially faster than premiums in the private insurance market, and we’re not afraid to point it out.* Even if it means we’re probably racists.

*To be fair, neither was Klein. Last October, anyway.

5. glenn reynolds

One-line blurb that doesn’t really make it clear where the hell the link will take you.