…at the Huffington Post. This is Arianna Huffington’s addition to the blogworld — a combination news site blog…except the bloggers are famous such as CBS news legend Walter Cronkite, comedian-writer Larry David, David Frum, Michael Isakoff. You can’t dismiss this as being all “liberal” because there are some centrists in the mix. The Huffington Post unlike blogs has people who are ALREADY well known — and for things other than their blogging. Can it...

Keep checking back but we may be a bit late and erratic today on our posts due to some emergencies here. Wed throught Friday TMV will be on the road but we should also have some guest posts, plus some of TMV’s own posts. Stay tuned…and check back.

For those who want a bit of additional information regarding the recent history of judicial nominations, along with a bit of intemperate, immoderate, and possibly injudicious commentary, then go read this: For those complaining about the Democrats blocking 10 judicial nominations… Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Nowhere is impact of today’s quickly changing, highly interactive world of communications more evident than in the news about the New York Times’ panel’s proposals to increase the paper’s credibility with readers — proposals that seem impacted by weblogs’ growing role and the growth of overall intensified media criticism in recent years. There was a moment in U.S. history when the Times was the undisputed “paper of record,” with its word journalist...

When a new medium appears it’s not unusual for the smug, old medium to need a hard lesson in the new reality — hence the saying “strike a happy medium” — and BOY is this evident in a piece by Adam Cohen in the New York Times. The piece is titled The Latest Rumbling in the Blogosphere: Questions About Ethics but it could perhaps more accurately be titled The Latest Rumbling In the Mainstream Media: Continued Misunderstanding About The Nature of Blogs and Bloggers. The...

The Moderate Voice is off to L.A. today which means getting stuck in unmoderate traffic and being tied up all day. BUT you will see a few posts done by him before his departure and (hopefully) early in the morning at his hotel. But keep checking back: this site’s highly talented and independent-minded Guest Bloggers will likely be offering you a few goodies throughout the day (and if there is a hitch with that, TMV will do some posts at the end of the day). This will be a weird week because...

Basie’s Jonathan Singer has another enterprising original interview on his site. This time it’s with former GOP Washington state Senator Slade Gorton and he did it via email. As with any of Singer’s interviews, it should be read in full. Here are a few highlights (we will limit it to the questions on the nuclear option. He also talks about Social Security reform). First, the significance: After leaving the Senate in 2001, Gorton served on the National Commission on Federal Election...

Hey, what’s going on with this name business for babies? The new list is out for the most popular names for boys and girls in 2004 and we’re shawked…just shawked…by this list compiled from Social Security card applications: GIRLS (names in order of popularity): Emily, Emma, Madison, Olivia, Hannah, Abigail, Isabella, Ashley, Samantha, and Elizabeth. Whatever happened to names like Gloria or the newly popular name Kayla? Where are names like Zelda, Claudette, Rosetta,...

…then I have two questions I need answered at Random Fate.

Pennywit follows up his original post with a response to Media Girl, who disagreed. Interestingly enough, they are both towards the left side of the political axis. More recommended reading if you are interested in the friction between blogging and the mainstream media.

Two 16-year-old Muslim girls are detained in New York and basically not allowed to talk to anyone. Only one five minute call from a mother a week. Then they’re released, with no charges. Read the details here on The All Spin Zone which feels special attention is needed for this story. Read the entire post, but here’s a small taste: My daughter turns 18 on Monday. As a parent, I inherently know how it would have affected her (and me) for life to have something similar happen to her at...

The call to prayer in Muslim-ruled areas used to be “a joy” but has since turned into a “thunderous cacophony” as mosques adopted loudspeakers and put their muezzins (announcers) on the mic at the same time, leading to such intrusive noise it has some faithful calling it “daily torture to the ears.” Some mosques even amplify the entire service, and “what should be an announcement lasting at most two minutes goes on for 45 minutes, keeping the entire neighbourhood...

OxBlog’s David Adesnik notes some particularly lacking reporting on an issue in my backyard (literally, at the school across the street): the new sex education curriculum in Montgomery County, Maryland. You might have heard local conservative parents were up in arms, but if you wanted to know what’s actually in the curriculum, the Post’s story isn’t the best place. It does include one excerpt that sheds light on what could have more than just conservative parents upset,...

The Sunday New York Times has a feature on Nick Denton and his Gawker Media blog “empire,” a compliment he doesn’t particularly like. For the man said to have taken blogging mainstream, Denton is pretty skeptical: “The hype comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing professionals and people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe,” he said. “They want to believe there’s going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to...

TMV prides himself on the fact that he obsesses and reads blogs from all over — and extensively USES his own blogroll to look at the various categories. He doesn’t always see every blog on a given day but he does make the rounds. Still, it’s hard to see how a post we just discovered about this website somehow got past us. And so we say a VERY belated but heartfelt “thank you” to Tom Watson for this post. (PS: We had many readers react to the specific post of ours that...

Faced with signs that North Korea might be making preparations for a nuclear test, the United States has basically told North Korea to “Cool it.” Of course the language is a lot more diplomatic than that. Reuters: The White House said Saturday that the United States had a “robust deterrent capability” in the face of worries that North Korea might be planning to test a nuclear weapon. “We do have concerns about North Korea,” the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan,...

President George Bush has been saying a lot of nice things these days about the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but that’s when he has been pitching his Social Security reform plan — suggesting FDR’s showpiece program was a good one and that the late President would perhaps even support his own controversial proposed reforms. But now, speaking in Europe, Bush has taken aim at one of FDR’s last big acts — the Yalta conference in 1945 which many believe gave the...

The fear has been there since 911: terrorists will somehow get their hands on nuclear weapons. That could mean an actual big weapon, a suitcase nuke (rumors have swirled around in some quarters for several years that they may already have one), or some kind of “dirty bomb” that may not be as sophisticated as one of the bigger ones, but have a huge impact nonetheless. And then there are the reports that a marketplace for nukes could be Russia or countries in that area in the world. Rumors?...

…and if you’re like millions of other Americans, chances are you’re going to church. And when you walk into your church, you focus on the spiritual. True, once in a while a pastor, priest or rabbi will deal with a political issue, but even then there are certain boundaries. Most of the time. Look at this to see how silly and extreme partisanship has gotten in this country. UPDATE: The Church has now pulled back.

There is a new Letter from Europe posted at my weblog, Random Fate: The forgetting will be their second death

Pennywit has some thoughts on the conflict between some bloggers and some members of the mainstream media. If you are interested in blogging at all I highly recommend reading what he has to say.

Interesting news from the Tri-Cities area of Washington state (the heart of a region that produces some mighty fine wines, by the way): Dead rattler may have legs This story was published Friday, May 6th, 2005 By John Trumbo, Herald staff writer Nancy McLeod of West Richland knew she had snakes in her back yard, but she had no idea one of them was a biped. The 2-foot-long reptile, which McLeod believes is a rattler, was discovered Thursday morning on her Red Mountain Road property as a friend was...

Following a firestorm of negative national reaction, a 17-year-old Georgia high school student will be allowed to return to class after being banned from the school for three days for refusing to hang up his cell phone on his military Mom who was calling him from Iraq. A major media and Internet furor was ignited when the story came to light about how Kevin Francois was suspended for 10 days due to the incident. You can read background on it in our post here — and the many readers’ response...

The U.S. congratulated Israel yesterday for the peaceful Palestinian elections — but the real story behind the vote is the strong strength displayed by the Islamic militant faction Hamas. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement won most municipal councils across the West Bank and Gaza Strip this week. But initial results indicated Hamas netted the three biggest towns in play. A harbinger of things to come? In other words: in the end, Abbas finds himself in a position somewhat...

Via Cox & Forkum