perfidy

The Ministry is loath to admit that updates to the blogroll have been too long overlooked. Nevertheless, the Ministry is making a clean slate by severely chastising those at the lower levels of Ministry Information Management services who have been deemed responsible for gross negligence and dereliction of duty. Entirely new lackeys and yesmen have been acquired and are even now cleaning up the sticky reddish-gray gore that is the sole earthly remains of their predecessors.

Meanwhile, the troglodytes and gnomes chained to the rock face of the Ministry's proprietary HTML mines have been working even harder than their usual twenty hour days to bring you a slew of hand crafted links worthy of your perusal.

To wit, a summary of the changes that have been made:

• EDog, long an aspirant to Ministry Crony status, has been granted his fondest wish and added to that august body. Ministry combat auditors deemed that his constant emailing of links was a major factor in his elevation, but his crowning achievement was suckering Minister Buckethead into joining the National Novel Writing Month. Anyone capable of this sort of trickery deserves a seat by the fire at the Ministry bunker and catastratorium come the end of days.
• The Ministry's crack legion of combat auditors noticed, whilst approving EDog's supplication, that there was in fact a great deal of dead weight on the cronies list. Two blogs, whose authors have been assimilated into the Ministry, were still occupying valuable real estate. Henceforth, Spiral Dive and Opinion8 are stricken from the list.
• Seeing that so much had been left undone on the Cronies list, a high level review was instigated at the highest levels of the Ministry. It was quickly determined that three members of the Top Five list were no longer actively blogging. Intolerable! A Small Victory, Porphyrogenitus, and The Spoons Experience were immediately placed on injured reserve status.
• Of course, this swift action left three open slots on the Top Five list. Such messiness being intolerable to the clean and orderly minds of the Ministry, three candidates were propelled into the most selective blogroll in the sphere: Gary Farber, Ezra Klein, and Naked Villainy. The Maximum Leader probably owes Buckethead a beer, now.
• Swiftly, like fire or unrest in third world capitals like Paris, the random purges and unfair promotions unfolded. Next to be hit was the Ministry Legion of Merit. Determined MIA or on Hiatus were the Airborne Combat Engineer, The Allah Pundit and Rachel Lucas. Receiving the seven-orbed, five spiky-thinged copper-plated medallion of the legion are: Hubs and Spokes, Austin Bay Blog, Scrappleface, The Unpopulist, Hell in a Handbasket, The Fourth Rail, and Froggy Ruminations. James of Hell in a Handbasket received special consideration because he lives in Columbus, Ohio. Froggy gets on because he could likely kill us all. Marc gets the nod despite living in Michigan.
• Lastly, the links to Protein Wisdom and the Belmont Club are finally the correct ones. And though the link to Allah Pundit's old site now goes instead to a pathetic pr0n site, the Ministry includes it for mawkish and sentimental reasons.

This Message from the Ministry of Minor Perfidy
Thank You for Your Co-operation