Free Republic

PSYCHO RUMOR GOING AROUND... ...that Cheney is resigning tomorrow. Remember: I said psycho.

Iranian blogs debate nuclear row Iranian bloggers are commenting extensively on the nuclear row between Iran and the West. A significant number of bloggers seem to blame President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in particular for the crisis and suggest that he has taken Iran to the brink of war. The sports lovers are worried that the Iranian team may be expelled from the World Cup because of the nuclear issue and Mr Ahmadinejad's comments on Israel and the Holocaust. Below are some blog entries: (goto story for more)

Newsvine.com, a new type of news site created by four former Disney/ABCNEWs.com employees, is now up and running in beta. CyberJournalist.net has been invited to join the beta and is impressed with what it's seen so far. The site is a slick combination of some of the trendiest news-related tools online now, incorporating news aggregation, social networking, citizen journalism, blogging, user ratings and online discussions. Think of it as one-part Slashdot, one-part del.icio.us and one-part Google News, with a few other neat features thrown in. The site is built around four general actions: reading, discussing, writing and seeding the news....

Dave Barry is one funny guy. His column, which has run in the Miami Herald for more than 20 years, has appeared in more than 500 newspapers. He's written more than 20 books, all of them big sellers. So when he came to town last Friday to promote his latest effort, "Dave Barry's Money Secrets -- Like: Why is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar?", and to speak at the Commonwealth Club, I made an appointment to chat with him at his downtown hotel. I figured I'd write down his clever quips, repeat them in a column and make...

Blogging from Death Row An American blogger answers questions from readers around the world on his death row blog from a Baltimore prison. But with his execution date now set for the first week of Febuary, his Internet Q&A site may be short-lived.Vernon Lee Evans has been sitting on death row in Baltimore, Maryland for more than 20 years. He doesn't have a computer or Internet access in his prison cell, but he's still managed to become one of the most-talked about people in the blogosphere. His Web site, meetvernon.blogspot.com, describes his final days on death row before his planned...

*** Free Republic member 'JustAWoman', Lores Rizkalla *** I have some very exciting news, my friends! In about two weeks (on February 5), I will be on the air at KRLA 870AM in Los Angeles. The show will air on Sunday nights (into Monday morning) midnight-2am. I am thrilled and am in the process of planning programming now. So much to talk about. My biggest problem right now is what to talk about on the FIRST show. I'm open to suggestions :) P.S. For those outside the Los Angeles area, you can listen to the show online at http://www.krla870.com/ Lores...

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...