USS Mariner blogger Dave Cameron fell about 7,000 votes short of winning an online competition for a $10,000 college scholarship.

Cameron managed to pull in a whopping 13,000 votes, but it just wasn't enough to overcome the massive flood of traffic generated by Daily Kos for their own David Mauro, who ended up with about 20,000 votes.

While some Kos bloggers turned into giant fucking assholes during the competition, it appears the commie pinko political site is trying to make good, and has posted a link to USSM, which is now holding its own fundraiser to get Cameron a well-deserved scholarship. So far, USSM has raised about $500.

If you're completely baffled as to why anyone would give money to a sports blogger, check out a few of these comments left on my earlier post:

Uh, Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com was a stupid baseball blogger until this year. Now he's probably the most insightful and original progressive blogger on the planet. I don't even like baseball but I've been following Cameron and Silver for years because they're a couple of the best thinkers I've ever read.

Posted by jrrrl

If you just ignore the content of the two blogs (for a sec) and consider what the two have accomplished, you have to go with Cameron. His analysis of the product the Mariners sell to their fans has made the very stubborn (and sometimes woefully dumb) franchise to change their ways (see Cameron's report on the coaching of Felix Hernandez a couple seasons back). In a way, he's somewhat like Ralph Nader leading a consumer's movement to install protective dashboards in cars(somewhat. don't go crazy). I can't think of anything the Daily Kos has been directly involved in any change towards what it writes about.

Posted by Shoot me down, I dare you

The thing is, Dave Cameron is a really, really good baseball blogger, one of the best in the entire field, while David Mauro is an extremely pedestrian blogger on local Texas politics. Cameron has a much greater impact on the community at large; his readership is extraordinarily high, and (unlike Mauro) his entries generate hundreds of insightful comments. Mauro's entries typically get two or five comments.

It also deeply annoys me that the Kossacks have taken a stupid joke about getting the Freepers and other right-wingers to vote en masse for Cameron as if it was a serious expression of Cameron's true fan base. That's ridiculous. I honestly have no idea where Cameron fits on the political scale, because he zealously avoids even passing mention of it — and he's deleted comments of mine at USSM that inappropriately brought it up. He was right to do so.

Cameron is actually advancing the state of the art at USSM, and making advanced ideas of analyzing baseball comprehensible to many, many people. He's made something like six thousand posts there, and with few exceptions they've been brilliant.

So, yeah: vote Cameron.

Posted by Fnarf