Wonkette's coming to town

Ana Marie Cox, the Washington, D.C. writer who blogs about politics with a splash of sex as Wonkette, has signed on to be the keynote lunch speaker when the Online News Association convenes in Hollywood Nov. 12-13 for its annual confab. She'll be followed by an election coverage-parsing panel to include Mickey Kaus, Joe Trippi, Arianna Huffington, Rock the Vote president Jehmu Greene and pioneer blogger Dave Winer. Cox and Kaus figure prominently in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine story (from where the picture is cropped) on political blogs that the poli-bloggers have been gabbing about this week (in part because it all but ignored conservative and war bloggers, a pretty big cluster to leave out). In the piece by Matthew Klam, Kaus hints that he might stop writing his Kausfiles blog for Slate after the election. As for Cox, who is married to New York magazine features editor Chris Lehmann, Klam appears smitten:

The Wonkette is more fun to read than Daily Kos. She's also more fun to hang out with...

Ana Marie Cox has peachy cream skin and eyes of a very bright blue, strawberry blond hair and a filthy mind; she likes to analyze our nation's leaders in their most private, ah, parts. She has been talking this way all her life. Until January, no one listened. She's the daughter of a six-foot-tall blond Scandinavian goddess and one of the bright young men who worked under Robert McNamara in the Pentagon. Her parents split when she was 12, and she was shuttled between them, and like most kids who grow up that way, she made an anthropological study of what's cool. She was a loud, pudgy kid with milk-bottle-thick glasses, and when she finally settled into high school in Nebraska, she immediately ran for class president. She was thrown out of ''gifted and talented'' camp for weaving, drunk, through the girl's bathroom one night, and when she told me about it, she described it as ''the story of my life'': the smart girl getting booted out of a place where she belonged. She dropped out of a Ph.D. program in history at the University of California at Berkeley and found happiness for a few years at Suck.com, a snarky social-commentary Web site from the first Internet heyday. She tried freelancing after that, and then spent five frustrating years being fired from or leaving one job after another, such well-meaning, highbrow institutions as Mother Jones, The American Prospect and The Chronicle of Higher Education -- plus another place she won't name, where, she says, they chastised her for raising her eyebrows wrong and for sighing too loud in meetings...

Cox quickly found her voice -- funny, sex-obsessed, self-indulgent. ''The Wonkette is like me after a few margaritas,'' she said.

Defamer, of course, is the Los Angeles sister site of Wonkette.