Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Onion: "Freshly unearthed public documents, ranging from newspapers to cabinet-meeting minutes, seem to indicate large gaps in George W. Bush's service as president." 5:36:05 PM    comment []

Backwards City: "We're clearly Boingboingesque." Agreed. 4:11:28 PM    comment []

"Can Islam change? Beslan and 9/11 are leading millions of Muslims to search their souls. Even clerics now question the harshest traditional laws and look for a more humane interpretation of their faith." (via Monkeytime, who also takes on the issue of Alan Keyes' gay daughter, which I would find more interesting if Keyes had not already marginalized himself and was pulling more than 20% in the polls.) 4:01:42 PM    comment []

Business blogging: Greensboro's Michael Dougherty, CEO of Kindermusik, is using a weblog to help build a branded sales channel for musical instruments, products, and instruction. 3:52:21 PM    comment []

Howard Coble's Democratic opponent, Will Jordan, on the issues. Dude says what he believes. "Will Jordan believes Social Security should never be allowed to be privatized. It's also essential that the prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients be overhauled to provide a true benefit." "I am adamantly opposed to any efforts by the right wing to limit the jurisdiction of our federal courts. Efforts such as those promoted by my Republican opponent would eviscerate the protection of the checks and balances put in place by Hamilton, Madison and the other Founding Fathers and delegate an over abundance of power to Congress." Jordan tells me he would like to write with some regularity, in his own voice, at his webpage. Bring it on. 3:22:25 PM    comment []

E&P: "Eight months after launching his own Weblog, Doug Clifton of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland has called it quits. The veteran editor admitted that the online effort took more time than he expected and drew less interest than he’d hoped." Link via a sympathetic John Robinson. Let's hope JR sticks with it. 11:32:27 AM    comment []

"John Kerry's campaign is a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida," says Christopher Hitchens, "unless he conclusively repudiates the obvious defeatists in his own party." The war sometimes unhinges Hitchens. He's confusing Democratic party politics with the dinner-party politics he cites in the article. Hitchens feels that "We can't remain silent about the way policy has been messed up and compromised and even lied about," but then he clams up on the subject.   He attacks the "subliminal need for bad news" among Democrats who "calculate that only a disaster of some kind can save your candidate," as if bad news and rumors of disaster were possibilities, not realities. "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi...is trying to take a much more important country into the orbit of medieval fanaticism and misery," he warns, forgetting just who put the country in play via those "messed up and compromised and even lied about" policies. "What will it take to convince these people that this is not a year, or a time, to be dicking around?," Hitchens asks. A good question, especially as applied to "these people" who have "messed up and compromised and even lied about" this war. 11:21:41 AM    comment []

Zero comments so far at Blog 4 Burr about last night's debate. The Bowles' blog has nine, including some sharp criticism of Bowles for his stance on gay marriage. 8:06:06 AM    comment []

Henry Copeland and his pioneering, Chapel Hill-based company, BlogAds, didn't get due props in the NYT mag blogging article. "As portrayed in the mag, money seems to flow magically into blogger pockets...It's some kind of virgin birth, no mechanism described or even imagined." That's OK. They've got the print, but he's got the numbers. Sez Henry: "Bloggers selling blogads are on track to do 75 million impressions in September. (That's up from 5 million last December.) To put that number in perspective, that is 1/6 NYTimes.com's total monthly impressions and 1/3 of monthly traffic for WashingtonPost.com." 8:01:43 AM    comment []

"(W)hen it comes to hammering away on a noisy subject that ultimately distracts from more important issues, the Blogosphere can make cable television look like a 1950s debating society. Judging by its dominance in the blog world...you'd think that Rathergate was bigger than Watergate, Iraq and Britney's putative wedding combined." Newsweek's Steve Levy says blogs are at risk of becoming "a nation of ankle-biters." Glenn Reynolds, a blogger Levy calls out by name (and quotes out of context), disagrees. 7:56:15 AM    comment []