Those salivating moron bloggers, putting themselves in danger to blog about the huge earthquake off Jakarta: Blogging has fried our brains. Instead of evacuating after the tremor, we, bloggers staying in high rise apartments, sit here n blog about it, oblivious to the risk should the building topple over or collapse. I, for one, was furiously typing away as the floor swayed under me instead of making plans to leave my apartment. Should I laugh or cry at this stupidity that has befallen me? Shame...

I’ll think he’d contact Al Sharpton first, but close enough.

The Washington Times has the first comprehensive story I’ve seen looking back at the fight between Michael Schiavo and his in-laws over his brain-damaged wife. It’s quite fair to him, frankly a little too sympathetic, but kudos to a news outlet usually derided for its ownership for bending over backwards to be fair. I’m hoping it gives some impetus to other news organizations to do a historical piece on the Schiavo case. It would best suit a newsweekly.

At the risk of biting the hand that blogs me, I’ll have to express my skepticism about the poll that Joe linked showing 63 percent support for the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube. If this were a “normal” case pitting a husband against parents, fighting over a mentally disabled woman, that wouldn’t be all that surprising. Everyone has parents that they wish would butt out of their marriages (it spawned at least one sitcom that “everybody loves”)....

The Washington Post has the most complete, best reported story on the Terri Schiavo case that I’ve seen so far. I argued last week that mainstream media have failed to mention a crucial part of the story: Michael Schiavo’s treatment of his wife for the past decade, which objectively speaking is far from husbandly and should be paired with any of his claims to speak for his wife’s wishes. On Sunday I predicted another week before media jumped on the angle, which has been explored...

Why didn’t 40 percent of Iraqis vote? Friends of Democracy, which is still going strong a month-and-a-half later, polls the non-voters on why they abstained. Fortunately, only a small number didn’t vote out of indifference or lack of information.

A San Francisco superior court judge said today that prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying – under the state’s constitution, not the federal – “has no rational justification” and violates “the basic human right to marry the person of one’s choice.” Call me bigoted, but since when is marriage a “basic human right”? In the modern Western tradition, marriage is a community recognition that also promotes family stability, but it wasn’t...

If you want to know what happened on the ground in Lebanon today, start with Jeff Jarvis’s excellent roundup of firsthand reporting. And check The Corner’s posted photos (via Instapundit).

The Project for Excellence in Journalism just released its State of the News Media report and has some interesting tidbits: 1) people watch local news less than 3 times a week 2) they get news from four different types of media a week 3) a slight majority of reporting on Iraq was neutral 4) and the stat most likely to get attention, Bush got three times as much bad press as Kerry in the campaign. The big change is from the “journalism of verification” to the “journalism of assertion,”...

“Bonking Boeing boss sacked.” Can’t we send boring American headline writers to London on an exchange program? (Via Reason Express.)

Washington Post reporter Mike Allen might have stuck his foot in his mouth in describing how reporters give a subtext to the usual “he said/she said” reporting style…OxBlog’s David Adesnik has the details.

Catblogging, recipe-blogging, drunk-blogging…now we’re truly reached our lowest end. (Via Lost Remote.)

Your views on police powers after 9/11 might have been shaped not by your news consumption habits per se, but which medium you prefer.

Up to 3 years in prison for smoking pot in front of your kid? I’m not terribly averse to 3 strikes laws or similar limitations on too much judicial discretion, but once you start meting out jail time for essentially self-destructive behavior that may set a bad example for your kids, I’d say it does more to hurt than help the child’s emotional development to have a missing parent. It’s not family values in any sense of the word.

Do you ever get sick of people who proclaim how tolerant they are by telling you what they hate? It’s even worse when it’s a business describing its social conscience – in this case a hotel on the beautiful Oregon Coast, not far from where I grew up.

Why do liberals (and some old-guard conservatives) hate Paul Wolfowitz so much? David Brooks gives the intellectual hawk his due and Jeff Jarvis seconds the congratulations to a man who has been “an ardent champion of freedom” going back 25 years, often when the realists in Republican administrations were rhetorically slapping friendly dictators on the back. Jarvis says appreciate the message if not the man: I don’t even care if you don’t want to give credit to Wolfowitz...

Have antismoking ads gotten any less lame since The Truth made us hate tobacco companies more than lung cancer? I’m skeptical of the new material.

The latest stirrings of political upheaval in the Middle East are happening…where?

Steve Barnett is mildly amused at a bill proposed by an Illinois legislator to criminalize implanting a piece of jewelry in someone’s eye, a procedure offered only by a Dutch clinic at the moment: Just remember, folks, it’s okay for a woman to choose to suck a fetus out of her own body, but nobody, and they mean nobody, can choose to put something in their own eye. I tend to be a bodily-integrity absolutist, whether it’s the piercing-laden body of a goth punk or the body of a...

Egyptian blogger Big Pharaoh is excited by what he says is the first use of the word “terrorist” by Egypt’s leading newspaper to describe an attack on Iraqi civilians by the insurgents. Still he thinks it’s a typo, not a change of heart. (Via Iraq the Model.) I would add the possibility that Egypt is trying to regain some goodwill with America by changing their words if not their actions. Look at how Vladimir Putin has managed to keep a mostly cordial relationship with...

Reason’s Michael Young, also opinion editor of Lebanon’s Daily Star newspaper, point-by-point corrects a deeply confused former NSC member and Kerry advisor writing in NYT on exactly what is happening between Lebanon and Syria now. In response to the writer’s claim that Hezbollah is the largest party in Lebanon’s parliament: It is the largest single party bloc, but overall it is much smaller than several other blocs that are just as cohesive, and its overall influence is...

I wish DC’s mayor was this tactlessly fun. It would give me something to respect about him.

A shocking new development in the Jacko trial!

My former alt-paper colleague Steve Barnett, now a first-year law student, has a detailed but accessible examination of Roper v. Simmons, the case the Supreme Court just used to overturn the juvenile death penalty. He disagrees with the decision, but finds most of the reasons for disagreeing with the majority opinion wanting. For the record I’m part of that weird subset of righties who are very uncomfortable with the death penalty itself, but because it’s used relatively little (”relatively”...

A student journalist at Rutgers has set off a firestorm that might shut down the university’s investigative journalism class…find out the details here.