Welcome to the 131st of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (16th August – 22nd August 2009), together with a hand-picked quintet, partly courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.

Don’t forget, by the way, you can now sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox – just click here – ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging.

As ever, let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down:

1. Mark Oaten does the dirty on the Liberal Democrats from Jonathan Calder at Liberal England.
On the news that Mark Oaten’s book will be published earlier than expected – on the eve of Lib Dem Conference.

2. Roundabouts, swings and squeezes….. by Darrell Goodliffe at Moments of Clarity.
Darrell says it’s time we held our own.

3. Liberal Democrat Voice – just like a big, extended family by Mark Valladares at Liberal Bureaucracy.
Mark feels right at home in the Lib Dem Voice Forum.

4. Who picked the Lib Dem target seats? on Irfan Ahmed’s blog.
Another learning opportunity for Irfan, which leads us to:

5. Target Seats were Based on Evidence at the Time Irfan by Stephen Glenn at Stephen’s Linlithgow Journal.
Stephen gets out his electoral calculus for an object lesson.

6. Why are the Taxpayers’ Alliance quoted so often? Mark Thompson reckons that the TPA have disproportionate influence.

7. Unpleasant Tory campaign vignettes by Alex Foster at Lib Dem Voice.
Alex highlights a review of the book True Blue: Strange Tales from a Tory Nation, including how Tories tried to smear Susan Kramer.

And now to the five blog-posts that come highly recommended regardless of the number of Aggregator click-throughs they attracted. As is now traditional we’re using the LibDig widget to select some of the posts from the seven days in question which you’ve most ‘dug’. But, remember, if you want to highlight a Lib Dem blog article published in the past seven days – your own, or someone else’s – using the steam-powered method of e-mail all you have to do is drop a line to [email protected] (providing the web-link and author, and any tagline comment you care to have published).

8. The failure of joined up Government by Peter Black on Freedom Central.
“Peter Black on an unintended consequence of regulation. Credit unions are being made to help bail out failing large institutions- or else.”
(Submitted by scmjerram via LibDig).

9. Setting the Record Straight: Labour and the NHS by Seth Thévoz on Lib Dem Voice.
Seth lances the boil: “We’re so used to Labour politicians churning out the line that Labour gave us the NHS, that we’ve begun to unthinkingly accept it.”
(Submitted by helenduffett via LibDig).

10. Aberdeen Students Stand Up For Free Speech from Lamp of Liberty.
Students at the University of Aberdeen launch a new independent free speech newspaper to compete with the Students’ Association paper “Gaudie” and show that student journalism can be of a high standard and must not be censored.
(Submitted by alexanderryland via LibDig).

11. The Real Tory party by Paul Walter on Liberal Burblings.
“Almost everyday (indeed several times a day, sometimes) we are reminded that David Cameron seems to be very unsuccessful at taming the beast which is the Tory party.”
(Submitted by Stu via LibDig).

12. Esther Rantzen’s first major political speech – exclusive by Linda Jack at Lindylooz Muze.
“The atmosphere was electric – her first political engagement. Would she tell us what she would do for us hapless constituents were she to be elected as our MP? Errrrrrr……………..NO.”

And that’s it for another week. Happy blogging.

Featured? Add this to your blog post!

<a href="https://www.libdemvoice.org/top-of-the-blogs-the-golden-dozen-131-15943.html"><img src="https://www.libdemvoice.org/images/golden-dozen.png" width="200" height="57" alt="Featured on Liberal Democrat Voice" title="Featured on Liberal Democrat Voice" /></a>