Free Republic

Newspaper navel-gazers are having a field day writing about the death of the news industry, as newspaper circulation numbers are stable or falling, and as Internet Web sites, Web logs, talk radio and cable TV are becoming the main news sources for many people. No doubt, we are witnessing a Wild West world of journalism, a far cry from the days when Americans read the same newspapers and chose between one of three liberal talking heads on the 6:30 news. You have an opinion these days? No need to depend solely on the gatekeeper on the op-ed page to give...

OTTAWA (CP) - They dissected the political rhetoric, offered enlightening, entertaining and sometimes ill-advised insights and even sang the praises of the humble danish and stylish yet comfortable shoes. Some of Canada's political bloggers tackled their campaign duties with straight-faced aplomb, while others - notably the man behind Paul Martin's most critical public pronouncements - kept tongue planted firmly in pastry-packed cheek. Informative? Usually. Influential? Occasionally. Popular? Definitely. National Post columnist Andrew Coyne reported more than 36,000 visits Friday to his popular blog, andrewcoyne.com. Macleans columnist Paul Wells, the man behind magazine's Inkless Wells blog, saw his blog viewed an...

Wonders of wonders, the Washington Post finally but somewhat unobtrusively turned back on their blog. No doubt after getting "tons of emails" about it. But from what Jim Brady said and the recent turning on the blog back on doesn't make any sense.

But wait! All is not lost. The remaining comments are not gone where Deborah Howell tried to blink them out of existence. Surprise, surprise, surprise! (Gomer style). They just went somewhere else where you have to dig to find them. You can now find those mass-deleted comments that are now cached in Yahoo search (January 17 th- 18th WaPo blog comments) while Democratic Underground has the January 19th comments archived here, and WaPo Lies have the January 15th - 16th comments archived. Those bots really do work fast. Deborah Howell simply didn't move fast enough. And funnier still, I don't...

Paper Shutters Blog After Ombudsman Post Jan 19 7:28 PM US/Eastern WASHINGTON The Washington Post shut down one of its blogs Thursday after the newspaper's ombudsman raised the ire of readers by writing that lobbyist Jack Abramoff gave money to the Democrats as well as to Republicans. At the center of a congressional bribery investigation, Abramoff gave money to Republicans while he had his clients donate to both parties, though mostly to Republicans. In her Sunday column, ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote that Abramoff "had made substantial campaign contributions to both major parties," prompting a wave of nasty reader postings on...

Internet Explorer Sucks This study is from August, but I missed it. The researchers tracked three browsers (MSIE, Firefox, Opera) in 2004 and counted which days they were "known unsafe." Their definition of "known unsafe": a remotely exploitable security vulnerability had been publicly announced and no patch was yet available. MSIE was 98% unsafe. There were only 7 days in 2004 without an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. Firefox was 15% unsafe. There were 56 days with an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. 30 of those days were a Mac hole that only affected Mac users. Windows Firefox was 7%...

Michael Brodkorb has a state-of-the-art winner in his little media enterprise, the blog Minnesota Democrats Exposed. Brodkorb has a knack for finding stories that quickly become the political talk of the town. On Sunday, for example, he posted state Sen. Sheila Kiscaden's e-mail to her supporters announcing her decision to leave the Independence Party and join the DFL to become gubernatorial candidate Kelly Doran's running mate. The mainstream media had earlier carried reports predicting her candidacy but didn't confirm the story until Monday. A few days earlier, Brodkorb scooped the major dailies by publicizing some DFLers' concerns about House Minority...

Character witnesses by Scott JohnsonInside the hearing room this afternoon, the momentum in favor of Judge Alito seemed palpable. The Republicans know that the Democrats are playing a losing hand, and the Democrats know it as well. The Republicans are enjoying themselves, while the Democrats are grasping at straws. That's my bounce anyway.Among the straws Democrats are grasping is Judge Alito's alleged ethical transgression involving his holdings in a Vanguard fund at the same time he heard a case in which he subsequently recused himself. This afternoon the bloggers hosted by the Senate Republican Conference met with two liberal...

Attention Bloggers and Blog Commenters! Are you tired of receiving personal, sometimes libelous attacks by anonymous posters? Well last week, President Bush signed into law a bill that would make such anonymous attacks illegal. Read More... Craig DeLuz Visit The Home of Uncommon Sense... www.craigdeluz.com

Just a quick announcement of my new blog: RightWinged.comI intend to be a slightly different kind of media watchdog, in addition to covering the regular news I will be busting the omissions, spin, and lies of the liberal media in places most wouldn't otherwise find. Plus, I'll serve up news with the proper framing, comentary, and analysis when it's required. I actually enjoy this stuff a lot too, so expect a lot of humor. I like photoshopping and political cartoons, so you should expect a bunch of that included in my posts. Anyway, again, just a new blog announcement if...

WASHINGTON - Wonkette is getting a new identity. Ana Marie Cox, the voice behind the racy and gossip-filled political blog, is stepping down later this month after signing a second book deal. Taking her place will be David Lat, a 30-year-old lawyer who anonymously wrote the irreverent legal blog Underneath Their Robes. Alex Pareene, 20, who has been a guest editor on the New York-based Gawker.com, will join Lat as coeditor. Cox, 33, became known for her sometimes bawdy musings about goings-on in the nation's capital. Her first novel, "Dog Days," comes out this week, and she recently signed a...

A local lawsuit has the potential for breaking new ground in the legal issues associated with blogging. A feisty anonymous Minnesota political blogger has unmasked himself in the face of a lawsuit that claims his blog defamed a local public relations firm. The case against Michael Brodkorb and his website, www.minnesotademocratsexposed.com, could break new legal ground in the Wild West frontier of blogging. Lawyers who filed the suit say that Web logs and other new media should be held to the same standards of accountability as traditional media and journalism. Brodbkorb, a former operative for the Minnesota Republican Party, pledges...

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday confirmed that it took down the blog of outspoken Chinese journalist Zhao Jing, saying that it was complying with China's laws. Blogger Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN Beijing bureau chief now a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, first reported that Jing's blog was taken down New Years Eve by Microsoft's blog-hosting service MSN Spaces. The blog has been replaced with the message, "This space is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later." Zhao, aka Michael Anti, is among a number of Chinese bloggers that have grown in popularity...

Democrats are struggling to reconcile the differences between party leaders in D.C. and independent activists on the Net If I am hearing Simon Rosenberg right (and he is worth listening to), a nasty civil war is brewing within the Democratic Party, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton—the party’s presumptive 2008 nominee—needs to avoid getting caught in the middle of it. “It’s not a fight between liberals and conservatives,” Rosenberg told me the other day. “It’s between our ‘governing class’ here and activists everywhere else.” In other words, it’s the Beltway versus the Blogosphere. What’s interesting is that Rosenberg is himself a...

The latest imbroglio over the revelation that the government eavesdropped into the international phone calls of U.S. citizens does not set the Moose's antlers on fire. The Administration is going to have to offer a better explanation for why they failed to go to court to get authorization. And we should also have an inquiry into a leak that might have endangered national security. In the aftermath of 9/11, America learned that it was ill-prepared for this new threat. Old laws dealing with new technologies were an anachronism. The "FISA" process, if not the authorization, was often burdensome and slow...

NEW YORK - World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee has started a blog just in time for the 15th anniversary of his invention. In his first entry, Berners-Lee remarked on how the Web took off as a publishing medium rather than one in which visitors not only read but also contributed information. "WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for discource through communal authorship," he wrote. That has changed lately with the growing popularity of blogs, which are online diaries that often let visitors submit comments, and wikis, which are sites...

Please freep this vote NOW - today is the last day - go vote for Pamela's Atlas Shrugs blog - best new blog - we need to help her beat out the moonbat who has pulled ahead! Here is her blog ---> http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/

When the liberal activist Matt Stoller was running a blog for the Democrat Jon Corzine's 2005 campaign for governor, he saw the power of the conservative blogosphere firsthand. Shortly before the election, a conservative Web site claimed that politically damaging information about Corzine was about to surface in the media. It didn't. But New Jersey talk-radio shock jocks quoted the online speculation, inflicting public-relations damage on Corzine anyway. To Stoller, it was proof of how conservatives have mastered the art of using blogs as a deadly campaign weapon. That might sound counterintuitive. After all, the Howard Dean campaign showed the...

In a bow to the rise of Internet-era secrets hidden in plain view, the agency has started hosting Web logs with the latest information on topics including North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's public visit to a military installation -- his 38th this year -- and the Burmese media's silence on a ministry reshuffling. It even has a blog on blogs, dedicated to cracking the code of what useful information can be gleaned from the rapidly expanding milieu of online journals and weird electronic memorabilia warehoused on the Net. The blogs are posted on an unclassified, government-wide Web site, part...

The Hugh Hewitt Show is heard on 112 radio stations nationwide. You may obtain information about affiliates by e-mailing: johagan@hughhewitt.com. Location Call Letters Frequency Show Times Ashburn, GA WTIF 107.5 6-9 PM Sat., Sun Atlanta, GA WLTA 1400 AM 10-12 PM WNIV 970 AM 10-12 PM WGKA 1190 AM 6-9 PM - "Best of" 7-10 Sat. Bakersfield, CA KNZR 1560 AM 7-10 PM Baltimore, MD WITH 1230 AM 6-9 PM Bartlesville, OK KWON 1400 AM 7 PM Black Mountain, NC WFGW 1010 AM 6-9 PM Boone, IA KFFF 1260 AM 99.3 FM 5-8 PM Boston, MA WTTT 1150 AM 6-9...