Jonah Goldberg outlines what the problem is with blog commenters in an interesting discussion with Peter Beinart.

As it happens, I am toying around with the idea of doing a Peaktalk redesign and was again contemplating introducing a 'comment' feature on this site. Whatever doubts I had about it, Goldberg has laid them to rest, convincingly.

Publius Pundit has been revamped and it all looks pretty cool, well organized too. Check'em out.

Who passed away earlier this afternoon. Again, I hope her daughter, family and friends will be able to deal with the grief and emptiness that will be part of their lives from hereon.

Please note that the link I provided earlier for donations to support lung cancer patients and help fund research was not the correct one. It should be the Lung Cancer Alliance, and you can donate here. I just made a contribution in memory of Cathy and suggest you do to.

It may be a redundant comment but I will say it anyway: this terrible disease is increasingly affecting lifelong non-smokers like Cathy at a significant rate.

Cathy Seipp's health is deteriorating. There is little any of us can do but think about her and wish her and daughter Maia strength and courage during these very difficult moments.

NOTE: Well, there is one thing we can do and that is to donate to the American Lung Association, here.

Here is a spectacular time waster. Try and name all 50 US states in 10 minutes. I scored a respectable 48, missing only Ohio and Oklahoma which leaves me worried about having some inability to properly remember names starting with an 'O'.

Trickier is naming all 53 African nations in 10 minutes, here. I got 45 and missed the following: Burkina Faso, Comoros, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Malawi, Sao Tome and Principe, Uganda.

(hat tip: Darren Barefoot)

Jef Jarvis pays a visit to Iain Dale at 18 Doughty Street, a new internet channel with political chat shows and he files his report, with video, here.

And yes, these are the guys behind 'A World Without America'. They have lots of other video campaigns going as well, the one on London mayor Ken Livingstone in particular is worth your while:

Earlier this week Peaktalk reached its four-year anniversary mark, quietly, without much ado. When I started out, the blogosphere looked very different in those early days of 2003 and many well-known names that helped shaped the online debate - remember Steven den Beste - disappeared from the scene while some opted for a much lower profile. One of them, Norwegian 'warblogger' Bjørn Stærk, an old friend of this site, came back earlier this week with some retrospective thoughts on Iraq, terror and Europe’s cultural conflict in an essay entitled What Went Wrong? He notes:

What we did was the opposite. At every level, from the lowliest blogger to the highest official, war supporters set up filters that protected them from facts they did not want to hear. We saw what we wanted to see, and if anyone saw differently, we called them left-wing moonbats who were rooting for the other side. We defined the entire mainstream media establishment as irrelevant, leaving more biased, less experienced "new" media as our primary source of facts. We ignored reasonable critics, and focused on the crazy ones, so that we could tell ourselves how incredibly smart we were.

I for one have always argued that the idea of the blogosphere replacing the old media was ludicrous to begin with and that independent online forces would rather complement and enrich the daily dosage of news and editorials coming from the entrenched players. And we’re in the middle of that process where certain individual blogs have carved out a permanent niche and others – Huffington, PJM – have been able to establish credible venture backed journals. At the same time the ‘old media’ have become much savvier about participating in the online environment and have also opened their doors to blogger-talent. That, and the passage of time, have contributed to a re-evaluation of the near-certainties as they were propagated by the conservative blogosphere which have now come under some sort of reverse-scrutiny if you like. That is also why we have seen such an increase in recent blogger and pundit ‘mea culpas’.

There are different ways to go about this of course and Stærk is in too much of a hurry to cleanse himself of the fact that he ever supported the war in Iraq. And in doing that he goes as far as arguing that he was part of the very group that helped create the framework for invasion:

Every war must have a war party, a group that actively tries to sell war to the government and to the public. For Iraq, that war party was us - neo-conservative intellectuals, and pundits and bloggers who were sympathetic to them. Without all these people arguing for war, legitimizing it, begging for it, an invasion would have been difficult.

The building blocks for invading Iraq were in place long before intellectuals and bloggers gained the prominence that would allow them to legitimize wars, if they ever did wield that sort of power which I doubt. What Stærk means to say is that one particular segment of opinion making in the post-9/11 world was able to push public opinion in a direction that supported war in Iraq and that may have helped the events as they unfolded. What Stærk subconsciously is saying however I think, is that he was one of those that limited his daily newsgathering to emerging right-of-center blogs and thus constructed a world view that was overly influenced by one source of information. More in particular, by one source of sentiment. Now that is a conclusion that warrants some cleansing and self-examination, not a retroactive assessment of what went wrong with regards to Iraq which is a different matter.

Stærk does however bring up a few valid points about the response to terror and I certainly agree with this part:

The British CCTV system, built partly in response to IRA attacks, shows how eagerly people may trade freedom for security. All it takes is a permanent climate of fear, and the calm, soothing voice of authority telling you it knows how to make you safe. I'm not saying that we've become unfree, or are about to. But I think the path towards it is open. The only response to terrorism we can imagine is to give more power to the state, and once given, that power will be hard to take back.

We continue to underrate this phenomenon and many writers on the right have been derelict in discussing the steady erosion of our freedoms while cheering the 'war on terror'.

The essay ends with some thoughts about Europe and its current predicament and - without using the exact term - the sort of Weimarization that is raising its head in certain European polities. Overall, it is a worthwhile piece, but I am somewhat taken aback by the overenthusiastic self-flagellation that our Norwegian friend has opted for.

UPDATE: Bjørn responds as follows:

It wasn't my intention to say that I - or other bloggers - caused the war as such. We were probably more of a symptom, while the real causation took place in established media and political circles. My point was rather that we were all part of the same current, and also that bloggers made the same mistakes that pundits, influential intellectuals and officials made: Arrogance, armchair speculation, labelling of critics, ideological filtering of facts. This is precisely what seems to have happened at the top, except they filtered intelligence data, while we only had access to the news. So it's absolutely relevant to point out the mistakes bloggers made, even if we might not have made much of a difference. And then again maybe we could have. This was during the warmup of the blog hype - imagine if political blogs had emerged as a force of reasoned debate and critical thinking, instead of just a wilder form of old-fashioned punditry.

As for "self-flagellation", I don't feel guilty, and I am aware of the danger of excessive remorse, and I don't think I made that mistake here. I realize that there were a lot of intelligent and well-meaning people on our side, and a lot of stupid people on the other. It wasn't all bad vs all good. What I do feel is that I've been part of something rather stupid, and that it is only natural to point this out. And I'm also somewhat tired of people who say "yes we made a mistake, _but_". No, we made a mistake, period, and that needs to be said, without excuses. Of course there are valid excuses to make, and valid criticism to make of the other side, but it's somewhat pathetic to never be able to admit a mistake without ending it on a "but". This needed to be said like it was.

This month we will mark four years in Iraq and I will definitely try and be part of the debate about it. The most recent post I wrote about Iraq and the rationale for the invasion can be found here.

To The Atlantic Online was completed earlier today and the Daily Dish can now be found here. As always I would be interested to learn more about the business deal behind this move and why Time didn't extend his contract. Anyway, The Atlantic seems like a fine home to me. Congrats.

Or rather a blogger's diversion. Blogger Tino Buntic is collecting photos of 2000 bloggers and you can see them all here. Of course, it is another game for some to increase their Technocrati rankings - I actually discovered this through Dr. Helen - and I just couldn't resist participating in this one. It took me a while to find my photo on the dense mosaic, but eventually I figured it out. I am stuck between one Rob Edger, of all two thousand an active Stéphane Dion campaigner, and an obsessed video gamer. So, the fun is not so much in boosting your rankings, but in discovering new blogs. Enjoy.

The end-of-year, holiday nonsense continues, and at GayPatriot you can vote for your Favorite Grande Conservative Blogress Diva. Although she's good blogger I've never really understood the Althouse-mania, so maybe you can throw in a vote for Tammy, Michelle or - like I did - for Virginia.

For those of you who frequent the Vodkapundit and wondered about his absence, do read Stephen Green's account of his recent health issues.

And, while we're on the topic, Cathy Seipp is recovering from lung cancer surgery.

Stephen and Cathy - both of whom I had the pleasure of meeting in NY last year - are dealing with diseases that will never really go away. The word 'strength' is actually a misnomer here, stoic perseverance and ignoring the disease's presence is - judging from my own experience - the best and only way forward.

It's always a guess as to who ends up being Time's Person of the Year and almost every year the choice is both surprising and accurate. This year - it will come as no real surprise to blogreaders - it is you:

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

It has been in the making for a few years, but 2006 marked the end of the century of 'big'. We're now into the age of 'small', open source, do it yourself, whatever you want to call it. Whenver I get asked (or ask myself) why I keep blogging, this revolutionary trend is essentially the answer.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey is unimpressed:

At least, however, they made a decision and selected someone. The entire point of a Person of the Year is to acknowledge that some people play larger roles in history. Naming all of us may make us feel good about our anonymity, but in the end it's either pandering to millions of readers or a refusal to take a stand on anyone. Choosing everyone is an abdication on the entire purpose of the project.

They didn't choose everyone, they picked a phenomenon that allows everyone to generate content. Looking around the blogosphere I get the impression that no matter what Time would have picked they would have received a gratuitous bashing from the 'unimpressed' crowd. More instructive is Paul Kedrosky's warning:

" ... from a financial perspective this has to mark some sort of near-term market top for user-generated content, blogs, social networks, me-media, etc "

Probably.

Michael Ledeen, a longtime favorite here, has started blogging at PJM. The name for the blog has been aruond for a while, and I have no doubt that it will develop into an enduring brand name for Ledeen inspired commentary.

Professor Bainbridge is back with a sort of three-layered blog venture, designed to address the conundrum of general punditocracy vs. expert blogging. He may have resolved this particular issue, but it seems to me that the effort level to keep his three blogs up to date has increased considerably. Of note is his wine blog, although the professor may consider to start rating some wines at the lower end of the budget spectrum, there are days that we don't open a 1997 Silver Oak to accompany the take-away pizza. Other than that Bainbridge is quite good.

Yes - The Economist has entered the blogosphere with its own blog, Free Exchange.

You know, the Dutch are going to Australia, Canada, and New Zealand and some of them, no doubt, would have liked to have gone to the U.S., but the U.S. doesn't really have a legal immigration program. So, if you need to get out in a hurry, it's no good going to the U.S. embassy.

This and many other worthwhile comments come from Mark Steyn who is interviewed over at RWN by John Hawkins. As I have noted here before, Steyn sometimes embellishes his demographic numbers in order to get his point across, so they should be taken with a grain of salt. Yet, his basic message about the bleak future for the West and for Europe in particular stands.

NOTE: The latest demographic tally from The Netherlands can be found here.

Last week Arthur Chrenkoff's debut novel, Night Trains was in the mail. Most of you will remember him as the prolific Australian-Polish blogger whose claim to fame were the "Good News from ... " series. More than that, Arthur understood the importance of building networks across the globe, something for which blogging is an excellent platform. Now he is leveraging that to pursue his career as a writer and I suggest we all support him by buying the book.

The Mark Steyn interview on Hot Air continues today. Note how Steyn describes the recent emergence of sharia in the Muslim world and how absent it was in many regions only decades ago. Here is a good example of that:

Mr Musdaruddin is the overseer of something that for the time being remains unique in Indonesia. Aceh - where more than 160,000 people died as a result of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami - has in the past 18 months become the only one of Indonesia's 33 provinces to enforce Koranic law, or Sharia. Some people fear that makes it the potential vanguard in a movement to bring Taliban-style law to the world's largest, and still overwhelmingly moderate, Muslim nation.

It is believed that the Indonesian government has allowed the implementation of sharia as part of its settlement with rebel forces from Aceh, an area which has through the ages always been quite restive. So, the question now is if with this form of domestic appeasement the Indonesian government has created a beachhead for an ideology that runs counter to the moderate way in which the nation has historically been practicing Islam. There are enough regional differences within Indonesia to thwart any rapid spread of this phenomenon, but the vigor with which sharia is now being enforced in Aceh is reason for deep concern.

Andrew Sullivan is promoting his new book, The Conservative Soul which I haven't read as yet, but the many reviews so far tell me we all should.

If you have the time I recommend the interview Sullivan did with Hugh Hewitt yesterday. Transcript here and audio here. Not sure if it is all that enlightening, but it is a highly entertaining debate.

Don't miss Michelle Malkin's video interview with Mark Steyn. Again, demographics, Europe and US-European relationships feature prominently.

UPDATE: And for Steyn aficionados, here is another interview with him at Human Events. Yes, he is promoting a book.

Great blogside chat between Dan Drezner and Ann Althouse. It is fairly long, but it comes in separate installments and this one is of particular interest as it discusses Professor Bainbridge’s decision to re-brand his blog by departing from the general punditry format and return to ‘expert-blogging’. This issue is close to my heart as I have always believed in the general pundit approach, my broad interests no doubt support this format, and both Althouse and Drezner serve up some solid rationale for running a bog in this fashion. Having said that, at times I sense this blog veers too much towards Europe and its immigration and economic woes. It may undermine the broader brush that I would like to apply by discussing everything from American Idol to Kyoto to Lebanon and beyond. Let me know what you think.

A very worthwhile podcast interview by Ed Driscoll with Mark Steyn on TCS.

Michael Totten is driving across the US back home to Oregon and reporting from the road with a series of fascinating photos and brief commentary, here and here. Highly recommended, and yes, he did a bit of talking during his trip while he stopped over in Knoxville.

Any idea what a "flat daddy" is, or what "redshirting" means? Check out Wordspy, a site that tracks new words and phrases.

While many were cheering its rocky start and predicting its early demise, few were willing to acknowledge its potential and eventual success. Since I know a thing or two about early stage ventures I was confident that persistence and trial-and-error would at some point yield results for Pajamas Media. That is also Michael Malone's take at ABC News Silicon Insider:

That's why, longtime readers of this column will remember, I cheered the arrival of Pajamas Media, the first real aggregator of the blogosphere.

Pajamas got off to a shaky start — stumbling just enough to satisfy those who had predicted it to fail but eventually finding its legs.

Now that the mainstream media have moved on to other stories, Pajamas is pulling in hundreds of thousands of readers each day, all drawn to its attractive mix of stories, viewpoints and, increasingly, videos.

Right now, especially on the big international stories, nobody covers events from more perspectives and with greater nuance than Pajamas Media.

More endorsements to come, no doubt.

And there is another good debate about Europe and its challenged future on the Blow Week in Review, this week featuring Mark Steyn, Glenn Reynolds and Austin Bay.

Paul Kedrosky has taken a look at the fact that guestbloggers are not able to stem the sharp declines in blog traffic during the month of August. His conclusion is that even before the temporary hosts took over a site, traffic declined. That appears to be a correct analysis, look for instance at Peaktalk's 2005 numbers when I continued to blog throughout most of August:

Together with January/December when I do actually take a real break, August is just a terribly slow month. And not just in the blogosphere, business in my experience too suffers from the summer heat. Enjoy it while it lasts. The heat I mean.

Yes, there is little Dutch news to report on this summer, but expect that to change when the election campaign will switch into gear early September. In the meantime, check out the impressions and photos from this Portland blogger who is visiting Amsterdam. Keep scrolling.

The new Pajamas Media site went up earlier today and it is looking much better and stronger in terms of lay-out, content, links and contributions. Note that Victor Davis Hanson is part of the new team.

Richard Landes was one of the first to meticulously analyze media bias and manipulation and he has just written a comprehensive and must read essay-post on this week’s Reutersgate. It needs to be read in its entirety to be really appreciated, but as a teaser here is one of the better excerpts which essentially explains why Pallywood is, well, Pallywood:

The media and the liberal establishment more broadly, have taken even-handedness to an extreme. If you criticize one side, you criticize the other; if you talk about Muslim religious extremism, you talk about Jewish religious extremism. This attitude is widespread among liberal Zionists, whose almost totemic phrase is, “we too…” Again, such an approach is generous and can lead to reconciliation. But if it doesn’t work that way, it’s important to call a moratorium on such moral pretenses: Jewish religious extremism is not in the same league, nay the same universe as that of Islamic Jihad.

Even-handedness plays a big role in the shutting down of information favorable to the Israelis. One of the more common refrains I heard for MSM folks when I offered them Pallywood and al Durah: “We couldn’t do it just on that.” “Why not?” “We’d have to do something on ways the Israelis manipulate the news.” People often urge me to put up something about Israelis doing some Pallywood-like stunts as a way to show “objectivity and balance” at Second Draft. My answer: When I have a real example.

And while we are at it, more real-life examples come pouring in, here is the most recent one.

Good news for the Huffington Post:

A group led by venture capital firm Softbank is investing $5 million in the Huffington Post, an online news site and political blog owned by the pundit Arianna Huffington, The Post has learned.

The investment comes a little over a year after the launch of the Huffington Post - which then was billed as a celebrity-filled blog but has since evolved in to its own news brand.

And very good news for all other group/news blogging efforts, especially for Pajamas Media/Politics Central which not only serves as an ideological counterweight to the HuffPo but also is establishing itself as a solid provider of news coverage and blog commentary. It should only be a matter of time before the PJ team can access the venture pool again for a decent chunk of change to enable further growth. Of course, I would like to know how Huffington will actually spend this new round investment (more live reporting, more hiring of established commentators?) and what sort of valuation Softbank has given her venture.

It took a day or so, but the story of altered war photos published by Reuters – sourced from freelancer Adnan Hajj whose work is now purged by the news organization – is now getting traction in the mainstream media. I have very little to add to this other than expressing some relief that longtime suspicions about Reuters’ biased reporting can now can be substantiated with some tangible evidence. And although Reuters will try and shift the blame to the various sources it uses in aggregating the news, it has to be very clear that any major news organization like Reuterscan expect to be held to a very high standard of integrity. Even simple negligence can be taken to imply gross negligence or willful manipulation of the facts and Reuters will have to work very hard at recovering from the extensive damage that this affair has inflicted upon its credibility.

The Pajamas team has a comprehensive round-up of the whole affair here and it includes an 18 minute video from my friend Richard Landes about how reports from especially the Middle East are often engineered in order to get a certain point of view across. Remember that the negative attitudes towards Israel and the endless replay of the ‘disproportionate use of force’ argument are fed and being kept alive and kicking by this kind of newsroom manipulation.

UPDATE: Some useful insights from Dan Drezner.

John Hawkins at RWN has organized another edition of Right-Of-Center Bloggers Select Their Favorite People On The Right. Of course, it is hard to attach any far reaching significance to this informal poll, but if you compare the outcome to last year’s results it is pretty evident that George Bush’s star is beginning to wane and that Rudy Giuliani and Condi Rice are on the move. It is no doubt foreshadowing the nomination process for 2008, but it is probably also a yearning for hands-on managerial skill in the White House. Also on moving up on the list, no doubt helped by his recent trenchant commentary on the Israel-Hezbollah war is Charles Krauthammer. Here is my submission to the poll, in random order:

Rudy Giuliani
Victor Davis Hanson
Andrew Sullivan
Michelle Malkin
Charles Krauthammer
John McCain
Peggy Noonan
Condi Rice
David Frum
Glenn Reynolds
Mark Steyn

And to those who argue that Malkin and Sullivan can not possibly be on the same list I say, yes they can. They have more in common than they would both care to admit.

Pajamas Media has been on top of Middle East events and commentary over the past few weeks, here is the latest. Co-founder Roger Simon makes an important point in a PJ news release:

"We are increasing our podcast program overall," states Simon. "We had recently published podcast interviews focusing on US issues with Senator Rick Santorum and through Instapundit's Glenn and Helen Show, with Senator John McCain. When the Middle East conflict started to expand we wanted to get access to an Israeli official. We weren't sure we could, but we tried and were able to land an interview with the Israeli US Ambassador Daniel Ayalon. Our interview lasted 14 minutes compared to cable news organizations of perhaps 3- 4 minutes. This flexible timeframe is one of our advantages compared to the more sound bite oriented mainstream media approach"

Personally, I believe that mainstream cable news coverage of the conflict has become totally unwatchable. In the past week most Canadian news outlets have started their top-of-the-hour news reports with endless and meaningless updates of the evacuations of foreigners from Lebanon’s shores as if it were a crucial and defining issue, a feat enthusiastically replicated over at CNN. Some of that coverage approached Katrinaesque levels of hysteria while the key purpose of tuning in - at least for me - was to get some solid battlefront coverage and possibly updates from the diplomatic front. None of that, and if you got it was often highly biased and devoid of any direct relevance. News and commentary, including raw footage are now sourced almost exclusively on the net.

Another interesting development is that blogs are proving to be an incredibly useful tool to go beyond enemy lines and try to forge relationships where they previously had been impossible. My friends at Augean Stables have been in a lengthy discussion with Omar, a Palestinian based in Jordan, and Lisa Goldman notes the following remarkable thing:

The internet has also been offering some surreal experiences, like the ability to have a Beirut-Tel Aviv online IM chat in real time while the missiles are falling. That's what happened to me and this blogger a few nights ago. We chatted while he was sitting on the roof of his apartment building in Beirut, watching missiles from Israeli planes fall on his city and describing it to me. He was carrying on an online conversation with another Israeli at the same time. And he was able to describe his feelings and the atmosphere in a human, personal way that no newspaper article or television news segment could achieve.

Extraordinary.

There is a lot of controversy and debate around Andrew Sullivan’s latest column where he launches the concept of ‘Christianists’. It brought back some memories about the issue.

Maybe some of you recall that Sullivan linked to my piece about a radical Muslim who was arrested for trying to bomb Amsterdam’s red light district? The idea of the post was to contrast jihadism with tolerance, but I couldn’t resist slipping in the comment “I guess Christian fundamentalists would equally cheer such an attack”. Well, the traffic deluge from Daily Dish readers yielded a lot of e-mail in particular about this one sentence. And they weren’t all that complimentary. They fell apart in roughly two groups: one chastising me for having the temerity to soil my otherwise good post with such a controversial comment, and the other educating me on all the good work churches and religious groups do in actually helping and rehabilitating (rather than bombing) sex industry workers. The latter group is absolutely right, the former I am not to sure as I do think that many Christian fundamentalists - and in The Netherlands there continues to be a particularly strong and highly intolerant Calvinist strain – would, in silence, approve of the beginning of the end of the sexual tolerance and loose morals that have become an integral part of free societies.

It doesn’t mean that Sullivan’s theory about ‘Christianists’ is sufficiently clear to delineate groups, ideologies and political platforms. For instance, I am highly supportive of legalizing prostitution and decriminalizing drugs, while at the same time I defended Terri Schiavo’s right to remain on life support and yes, I continue to be fearful of any attempts to legalize euthanasia as both private and public healthcare facilities may end up with a tool to further streamline and economize their business.

So anyway, socially liberal positions do not necessarily exclude accepting positions that Sullivan considers ‘Christianist’. The boundaries that separate these opinions and ideas are often unclear and remain blurred, thankfully. I guess that is what sets our free and open society apart from those that are actually governed by religious fundamentalists. We can combine, we can debate, we can find some common ground in order to define and shape moral dilemmas.

NOTE: An interesting example is The Netherlands, one of the few countries in the west that actually has a number of political parties whose platform is based on biblical values, most notably the Christian-Democrat Appel, which is the largest party and has routinely lead coalition governments for most of the past 150 years. Are they Christianist? No, but neither are they on the left. The have successfully captured the center while always ensuring that their religious base remained comfortable. Therefore, same-sex marriages as well as euthanasia legislation were all enacted during the brief interlude (1994-02) when they were out of power and now that they’re back they would not have a hope of nullifying any of these laws. But that is also the result of coalition-style government, prompted by proportional representation.

Jonh Hawkins has posted the results of Right-Of-Center Bloggers Select Their Favorite Columnists. For the third consecutive time Mark Steyn takes top honors.

For bloggers: The Truth Laid Bear, the unmissable link and traffic tracker, has had a spectacular makeover. Check it out.

A little late, sure, but here is my link to Cato's new blog, Cato@Liberty. Recommended piece from their initial offering is Radley Balko's Politics of Pain where the strange case of Rush Limbaugh is contrasted with the sad story of Richard Paey. Common thread: painkillers.

Some of you may have been following the spat between Christopher Hitchens and Juan Cole, to some extent mediated by Andrew Sullivan. It was a revealing discussion on a number of levels, both on the subject matter, Iran, and the way in which Cole resorted to a low level personal attack on Hitchens. Hugh Hewitt wraps it up in a very engaging interview with Hitchens, here.

Absolutely necessary and a key pillar of online discourse. Support and endorse it here.

Is one of the core topics of Pajamas Media’s second Blog Week in Review podcast, also more on United 93. Listen to the whole thing.

And you don't want to miss this one, Pamela is made for this new genre.

I've been out most of the day, but upon returning home I discovered that this site and many others that are hosted by Hosting Matters were down for a few hours. Apparently, this was a Denial-of-Service Attack the kind of which we've had before. Details of today's disruption over at Michelle's.

Michelle’ Malkin’s productivity as a writer and blogger is pretty amazing, but she has now added video blogging to her growing little media empire and you should definitely make Hot Air one of your regular stops, today disgraced Democrat Alan Mollohan is the subject of some trenchant Malkinisms. Initially, I was a bit skeptical about this venture as we are being deluged by a never ending stream of online content, but there is absolutely room for short video commentary. It competes directly with blogposts as opposed to the podcast which tends to be lengthier and more analytical.

Last week some of her critics termed Malkin to be a ‘Coulter understudy’ but I find her far more persuasive that Ann. She gets her facts right, is not afraid to criticize Bush and to take a swipe at Republicans, and she has a genuine and hilarious sense of humor.

It's a busy day, so there is little time to get any meaningful posts up. More later.

Austin Bay, Eric Umansky, Tammy Bruce and Glenn Reynolds discuss events of the past week in Pajama Media's first podcast: The Blog Week in Review. Lots of interesting stuff: Iran, Iraq and Scott McLellan. But also some worthwhile comments on Wenyi Wang, Hu's heckler, who herself is part of an organization that may not be all that democratic. Listen to the whole thing and do fill out the short survey once you're done.

Matt Welch alerts me to his new blog over at the LA Times which will serve as a sort of round-up of local media and blogosphere news or "The best in Southern California opinion journalism" as they modestly put it.

One big conspiracy, according to the online version of Der Spiegel.