NICK DENTON’S NEW BLOG VENTURE, KINJA, is up and running. Here’s Nick’s explanation of what it’s about. Excerpt:

Kinja allows even casual internet users to browse topics, explore the latest weblog writing, and then choose favorite authors to track. A personal Kinja digest contains excerpts from a user’s favorites, whether they’re friends who blog, or experts on a particular topic. Kinja is a blog of blogs.

I’m still hoping to be replaced by a robot. Maybe this is a start!

HERE’S A DELIGHTFUL PHOTOBLOG FROM AUSTRALIA: It makes me wish I were going back there sometime soon.

AUSTIN BAY:

The world has had a week to chew the sound bites from two days of 9-11 commission public testimony. Media masticators and political grinds have concentrated on “gotcha” allegations, personalities and finger-pointing aimed at the November presidential elections.

Mincing sound bites, however, misses the large, determinative and most fundamental questions, like the one that should be the center of any pre-9/11 counter-terror policy critique: How much “political will” — and we can parse that as both individual presidential will to act and “public” or national will to act — does an American president require in order to take action to defeat a threat to the United States?

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, here’s an unsympathetic assessment of media coverage of Fallujah, from military blog The Mudville Gazette. Best catch is this bit from news media discussion of their own coverage:

“War is a horrible thing. It is about killing,” ABC News “Nightline” Executive Producer Leroy Sievers said in an unusual message to the program’s e-mail subscribers discussing the issues posed by Wednesday’s killings. “If we try to avoid showing pictures of bodies, if we make it too clean, then maybe we make it too easy to go to war again.”

So shaping the war debate, and hampering future military efforts, is the central focus of decisions about news coverage. Nice to see them admit it. Read the whole thing — which is full of damning stuff like this — and follow the links to see what other Milbloggers think.

UPDATE: Ken weeks emails: “The angry Sunnis in that mob were playing to the camera. Showing their actions on TV encourages their behavior. This guy’s zeal for showing us the ‘true horror’ of war is causing more of the same.”

Yes, terrorism is, in a very real sense, a creature of the mass media. But what strikes me is that after 9/11 they didn’t want to show graphic images of dead Americans for fear that it would make Americans want to go to war. Now they are proud of showing graphic images of dead Americans in the hopes that it will discourage Americans from going to war.

Now that they’ve admitted that they’re not neutral on this stuff, you have to wonder what side they’re on.

MORE: Ed Driscoll has more thoughts (and quotes) on the double standard here.

HERE’S A REVIEW OF FRANKENRADIO from the Atlanta Journal Constitution. I’m not surprised that it’s off to a “shaky” start — radio is hard — and I’m sure it will get better.

I’d like for Air America to succeed, actually — I think that the pressure of putting forward ideas in the open marketplace of talk radio will be good for the left, and for the country. I am disappointed with the loss of broadcast diversity associated with Air America’s rollout, though.

APRIL FOOL’S DAY: A problematic holiday at Yale.

GENOCIDE IN THE SUDAN: Nick Kristof cares, but sadly not many other people seem to.

For all the talk of “never again,” genocide hasn’t seemed to upset the international community much. The UN seems to have contributed to genocide in Rwanda — while various other people obstructed action or did nothing. Noam Chomsky’s support for the Khmer Rouge is famous. And the response in the Balkans was dreadfully slow, while the looming genocide in Zimbabwe is largely ignored.

If the Israelis killed all the Palestinians the world would care — but only because the Israelis did it.

More on this problem, and what to do about it in the grander scale, here.

THIS SURE LOOKS LIKE AN APRIL FOOL to me. But if it is, is the New York Times an April Fool, or is it in on the joke?

SUGGESTED CAPTION: “Hey, these Kerry mannequins aren’t that heavy!”

CABLE NEWS IS LOSING VIEWERS: I used to be a cable-news junkie. Now I get most of my news from the Internet. I wonder if a lot of other people have made the same shift?

I DIDN’T LISTEN TO FRANKENRADIO TODAY, but here’s a review from Josh Fielek. Meanwhile Bryan Preston notes that the “Air America” programming is displacing urban black radio talent in favor of white liberals, leaving the displaced folks unhappy. Oops.

UPDATE: SF DJ Big Rick notes that Air America is displacing Chinese and Korean radio programming in the Bay Area.

Meanwhile, in New York:

Starting tomorrow, WLIB will scrap its daytime Caribbean programming and become the New York home for Air America Radio, the new, liberal talk-radio network.

Al Franken and Air America: “Silencing Minorities Since 2004!”

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader says that in LA Air America is replacing this Korean radio station. There may be something about it on the website, but I can’t tell, since it’s in Korean.

Meanwhile, reader Gerald Dearing emails:

Air America. Haven’t heard it. Won’t seek it out. Think it’s a stunt that won’t last beyond election day.

But has anyone said exactly WHY they named it after a C.I.A. operation?

Not that I’ve heard.

MORE: Doc Searls has lots of background, and observes: “Anyway, you’d think that Al Franken and his buddies would have done a little lookup on this thing.”

And for you Howard Stern flipflop conspiracy theorists, there’s this: “All the ads on the network are for XM satellite radio.”

YESTERDAY I NOTED that Joe Biden was talking tough to Europe.

I really think that it would help if world leaders would read this post by Steven Den Beste on how they misunderstand America.

I HAVEN’T BEEN BLOGGING THAT MUCH TODAY: My server was down for a few hours (okay, not down, exactly, but I couldn’t post), and I’ve been doing other stuff. But the folks over at the Volokh Conspiracy have been blogging up a storm. There’s a surprisingly large amount of sex, too.

TIMOTHY PERRY points to an interesting Boston Globe story, noting that the Kerry Campaign is having money problems, and that the need for cash may be leading to campaign-finance violations as some charge that “independent” groups are really part of the Kerry campaign.

More reason why the campaign-finance laws are dumb, of course, but still awkward for Kerry.

READING RICHARD CLARKE’S BOOK, Greg Djerejian of The Belgravia Dispatch points out examples of “rapacious partisanship.”

GAS PRICES: Back in 2000, R.E. Finer and the Sportutes released Gas Hog Blues during a temporary spring/summer spike in gas prices. Unfortunately, the spike didn’t last long enough to make the Sportutes rich and famous. (Any resemblance between me and R.E. Finer is purely coincidental, I practically swear).

Now John Kerry’s singing the same tune, and Nick Schulz doesn’t think it’ll fly this time, either. There’s more on gas prices from energy analyst / blogger Lynne Kiesling, and Mike Giberson, too.

CRAZY COPYRIGHT WARS: Larry Lessig continues his guestblogging over at GlennReynolds.com.

RON BAILEY WRITES THAT THE BEST BIO-DEFENSE IS BIO-OFFENSE: Well, sort of. I agree that the solution to the problem is more research, not less. Here’s a column I wrote on that a while back.

BAD DAY IN FALLUJAH: I don’t have a lot to say about this: it seems clear that the bad guys are still trying for a repeat of Mogadishu, unaware that the script has changed.

Perhaps we should consider an end to infrastructure and services repair in Fallujah for a while. And maybe some Kurdish security units. . . .

UPDATE: Best of the Web observes:

It’s worth emphasizing that the four victims were civilians working for an American company (which company the news reports have not yet told us). Like America’s soldiers, these civilians are putting their lives on the line to enhance America’s security and help build a better Iraq.

John Kerry and other Democrats have been vilifying American contractors in Iraq, especially Halliburton. This seems a fitting time to point out what a despicable bit of demagoguery this is.

Ouch.

DEFENDING KERRY: I agree with Hugh Hewitt that this photo of John Kerry is unlikely to strike fear into the hearts of our enemies. But I’m pretty sure that the oversized yellow daisy he’s wearing is a ski-lift ticket, and not a ’70s-revival sartorial accessory chosen by Sen. Kerry.

UPDATE: In this discussion thread on the Kerry flower (nothing’s too trivial for Web discussion!) it’s reported that the flower is not a lift ticket. Go figure. (More here, though I think the photo associated with that blog entry has been photoshopped.)

I would suggest that it’s an obscure hip-hop reference, but if so it’s too obscure for me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a different photo of Kerry with the daisy. Note the Secret Service agent, who appears to be looking at it with a “WTF?” sort of expression. . . . And here’s another. It’s a campaign mystery that must be unravelled! (More bloggage here.)

Message to the Kerry Campaign: Release the Daisy Records! America wants to know.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Powerline’s John Hinderaker emails with a report from the photo-analysts:

Glenn, my post on Kerry’s flower power zipper pull, inspired by my wife’s observing the photo that we reproduced on Power Line, has generated more mail from readers than almost anything we’ve done. For what it’s worth, based on a careful review of all photographic evidence–including photos of Kerry actually snowboarding on the same day, without the yellow flower, and a photo of Kerry snowboarding with the yellow flower, when the other snowboarder visible in the picture is not wearing a yellow flower–I’ve concluded that it isn’t a lift ticket.

America really does want to know!

MORE: I don’t think Kerry is referencing this group.

STILL MORE: “Deflowering” Kerry? I guess I couldn’t have resisted that headline either. . . .

MORE STILL: Eric Scheie is following a daisy chain of associations.

AND IT KEEPS COMING: Reader Lennie Smith writes with a new explanation, and an unfair slur:

I’ll agree with the conventional wisdom the Kerry flower is not a lift ticket. Way to hard to print all the legal disclaimers on the back of a die-cut like that. But, look at the snowboard he¹s holding. That the kind of sticker they put on rental boards for inventory/tracking purposes.

He’s worth millions. He could keep a board in the million dollar cabin the family owns. Yet, a rental board? Man, no wonder there are so many photos of this. Because, he is a poseur.

That’s not fair. Maybe he’s just frugal. This could feature in his campaign, like Michael Dukakis’s snowblower.

MY ESSAY ON THE WEB AND DICTATORS, mentioned below, is now up at The National Interest. This direct link seems to work, but they warned me that it might not be stable. If it doesn’t work, just go to the first link and scroll down.

GIZMODO HAS POSTED MY REVIEW of the new Nikon D70. It links to a gallery of sample images, too.

UPDATE: Reader Ron Mitchell wants to know if I can recommend something cheaper. I’ve never used it myself, but as I noted earlier, Sony’s 5-Megapixel DSC-F717 is selling for a bit over $600 (and it was $499 on Amazon for a little while, which could happen again, I guess). It has an excellent lens and a good reputation. For that matter, this Toshiba, which I own, is surprisingly good. (Pictures taken with it can be seen here and here.)

FRAGMENTS FROM FLOYD is yet another cool Appalachian photoblog, this time from Virginia.

Speaking of photobloggers, Fletch of SmokyBlog actually noticed something different about my photos lately. He was right — thanks to the timely arrival of an honorarium check (and your tipjar donations), I bought a Nikon D70 last week. Perceptive guy. I’m very pleased with the camera so far.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES IS UP, with an April Fool theme. Don’t miss it — even if you’re not Alex Beam!

MICKEY KAUS has more on Richard Clarke’s contradictions.

My prediction: Now that it’s obvious that this story isn’t moving the polls against Bush, it will fade from the radar screen.

GOOD DRUGS: My TechCentralStation column is up. Rand Simberg also has a column today, on hype and hypersonics.