TAKE BACK THE NEWS is a “news-sharing community.” (Via Dan Gillmor).

BACK DURING THE ELECTION, we were told that characterizations of John Kerry as the most liberal Senator were an outrageous calumny, leading me to comment: “Gosh, you’d think that being ‘liberal’ was bad or something!”

Well, I don’t know about most liberal, but the fact is that of the Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee, only John Kerry and Barbara Boxer voted against Condi Rice. And Kerry’s embarrassing performance during the hearings certainly puts him in a class with Boxer.

I agree with Kos: He would have been an “unmitigated disaster” as President. I hope the Democrats do better in 2008, because it would be bad for the country — and, ultimately, the Republicans — if they became as marginalized as the Tories have in Britain. And performances like this make me wonder if that’s not in the cards.

UPDATE: Reader MacDef emails: “I’m no fan of Kos, but the above is not only taken out of context, it’s also misquoted to the point of being dishonest.”

No, it’s tongue-in-cheek, as should have been obvious from the link. Er, and probably from the words “I agree with Kos . . . ”

LANCE FRIZZELL IS PHOTOBLOGGING AMERICAN IMPERIALISM in Iraq.

OVER AT THE CORNER, John Hillen recommends Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent as the classic guide to confirmation politics. Actually, though, I think it paints too sunny a picture . . . .

I don’t generally blog confirmation fights, and I’m not making an exception here. But La Shawn Barber has a roundup for those who are interested.

ANDREW OLMSTED has a shiny new blog design, and some thoughts on hydrogen cars.

ANOTHER U.N. SCANDAL: “Besides getting to the bottom of the Oil-for-Food scandal, it is equally vital to get the U.N. to halt its backing of recognized international terrorist groups.”

Seems reasonable to me.

BILL HOBBS HAS MORE INFORMATION on the Nashville Blog conference scheduled for May 5-7.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF has a Sarah Boxer / IraqtheModel roundup.

I DIDN’T WATCH yesterday’s Rice hearings. Other people, however, did.

SOME MEMORY PROBLEMS for Barbara Boxer.

AUSTIN BAY WRITES on the Iraqi elections: “The Iraqi people are going to deal the Middle East’s ancien regime of tyrant and terrorist a devastating political and psychological defeat. Despite the campaign of chaos and intimidation, a recent poll in Baghdad found 60 to 70 percent of the capital’s voters intend to vote. Kurdish and Iraqi Shia leaders predict a good turnout in their regions. Americans can barely manage a 50 percent voter turnout, and here, nobody lobs mortar rounds at the electorate.”

UPDATE: Craig Henry: “How are the ‘insurgents’ in Iraq different from the KKK in Mississippi circa 1963? And aren’t the nameless election workers who are dying everyday in Mosul and Baghdad heroes like Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner?”

Yes, and there were even people calling the Klansmen “patriots” and comparing them to the Minutemen.

THE BELMONT CLUB: “There are interesting points of contrast between Sarah Boxer’s speculation on the affiliations and motives of the Iraq the Model bloggers and Associated Press’ determination to protect the anonymity and refusal to judge the motives of a stringer who photographed the execution of Iraqi electoral workers at fairly close range on Haifa Street.”

And read this post, too.

THIS WEEK’S Carnival of the Vanities is up. Branch out in your blog-reading!

JOE TRIPPI on the Kos/Teachout affair.

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty comments.

SWLIP WRITES THAT Bush’s tort reform plan is a bad idea.

N.Z. BEAR: “When I telephoned a woman named Sarah Boxer in New York last week, I wondered who might answer. A DNC flack? A hack posing as a journalist? Someone paid by The New York Times to craft hatchet-jobs on Iraqis who dare to express thanks to America for deposing Saddam? Or simply a lazy writer with some confused ideas about fact-checking and objectivity? Until she picked up the phone, she was just a ghost on the page.” Heh. Related post here.

PHOTOBLOGGING: SKBubba has some beautiful photos of the re-opened Tennessee Theater. James Lileks would approve.

UPDATE: Very different, but also nice, photoblogging.

A TENNESSEE BLOGGERCON: May 5-7. I plan to be there.

THOUGHTS ON ONLINE SHOPPING, from Asparagirl: “Bezos also says that online sales ‘ultimately will be 10 to 15 percent of retail’. I may be an outlier value, being a young geeky webhead and an early technology adopter with disposable income and all that, but if Scott’s and my buying patterns are anything to go by, we’re researching and buying a hell of a lot more than 15% of our goods online, and have been for a long time now. If I had to estimate, I’d say we’re up to at least 80-90% for things like DVD’s and CD’s, and starting just last year, I’ve almost completely stopped buying the latter in favor of tracks from iTunes.”

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (free link) offers a blogger celebrity deathmatch on Social Security reform, featuring Arnold Kling and Max Sawicky. (Via Arnold Kling).

UPDATE: John Weidner comments on the debate.

MUSICBLOGGING: I’ve been upgrading my studio setup a bit lately, and since people sometimes ask about it, here’s what’s going on. I’ve just ordered this little Mackie mixer, replacing this cheap little Behringer which doesn’t suck, but which isn’t great, either. (The Mackie also has XLR outs, which lets you use it as a sound mixer with a video camera that has XLR ins, which is useful.) I bought a “blem” model from Musician’s Friend, which made it cheap (plus Musician’s Friend gives you a decent discount if you’re an ASCAP member, which I am). I don’t care if it has scratches, since nobody but me sees it.

I’ve upgraded from Cool Edit Pro to its new version, Adobe Audition 1.5, which offers good CD burning and ReWire support — and Adobe didn’t screw up the user interface, which I was sort of worried about. I got a good discount at the UT bookstore, too. I’m still using Sonic Foundry Acid 4.0 as my loop-sequencing software; there’s a newer version from Sony (which bought this chunk of Sonic Foundry a while back) but I can’t see a reason to upgrade. Tell me if I’m wrong about that, if you’ve made the move and found it worthwhile.

Of course, what I really need is a gadget that will give me more free time. I’m still looking for that . . . .

UPDATE: Michael Ubaldi emails:

I was introduced to Cool Edit in 1996; I’ve owned CEP since 1999. It’s a good thing the Syntrillium boys are still working for Adobe the last time I checked, since the audio industry’s most intuitive, user-friendly PC producing application was made twice as good with an attentive, amicable company behind it.

For mixing, I’ve moved to Cakewalk’s Sonar. The mixing engine gives me better sonic results, and some of Sonar 4’s features (which include a lot of good ideas from CEP) are just out of this world. But I still use Audition for heavy-duty splicing and single-wave editing. Better noise/click/pop reduction cannot be found elsewhere.

RME Hammerfall sound card. Mixer is an Allen & Heath. But my nearfields are good old Mackies.

Free time. Eh, it was meant to be found, used and stretched.

I’ve kept the Alesis Monitor Zeros. Our “real” studio (ADAT-based, with a Studiomaster Trilogy mixer and Alesis Monitor Twos) is in Doug Weinstein’s basement, but even Doug does most of his work on the computer now. My copy of Cubase runs on the computer there. I’ve never used it that much, now that I can host VST instruments elsewhere. It’s a very powerful program, but I never liked its user interface.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Sean Neves emails:

Glen, I love the fact that you’re looping audio, but Acid? Acid is so 2002. Really, there’s an audio looping program to end all audio looping programs. It’s name is Ableton Live (v4). It has full MIDI capabilities, but it’s focus is definitely audio. You expressed frustration with the user interface of Cubase (I can relate, I use Nuendo for my scoring and multitracking). Live’s interface is beatifull
and simple. Its’ performance interface resembles an entire screen of tape transports. Hit the play button and you’re in bidness. Much of preproduction that you’re used to in Acid are now done automaticly by Live. The arrangement side is equally simple, but the strength of Live is it’s performance capabilities, and it’ quite robust. I’ve used it in dozens of live situations, with varying instrumentation, and it has never failed me (knock on wood). A few examples can be found on my site www.singerswapp.com (although the compression I’ve used sucks–to be fixed soon). Also, check my blog INFDL.blogspot.com. There will be plenty of musicblogging in the future, in addition to my usual pontification.

Yeah, that’s me — so 2002! I’ve thought of Ableton Live, which I hear is good, but I’m used to Acid and spending money for, and then learning, a new program to do more or less the same thing is more than I’m up for. Mark Rushton, apparently, feels the same:

I’ve been using Acid Pro 4.0 since the upgrade from 3.0 Pro came out a few years ago and found little reason to spend any money to upgrade to 5.0, despite all the extras and loops that were thrown in to the package.

I’m too busy being creative to worry about new bells and whistles.

I wasn’t enticed by the Sound Forge Audio Studio 7 “mastering” software either. Maybe it’s OK. I’m not a sound engineer with years of experience, so I’d rather send my tracks to a proper studio where professional ears can do the job.

So there you are.

MORE: Ed Driscoll — who’s a happy user of Sonar himself — has much more on home recording. Here’s more on Sonar, which I’ve never used but which I hear is pretty good. (It has the reputation in my circles of being less professional, somehow, than Cubase but I think that’s probably just prejudice without any real basis). And some people wonder why I don’t use the Mackie Spike instead of the mixer. Mainly because it’s just a computer interface, while the mixer is a standalone mixer than can also do sound on video shoots; the mixer’s also cheaper. It (the Spike) got a good review in Electronic Musician this month, though.

BOLLYWOOD BEATS OUT HOLLYWOOD with on-demand streaming of first-run movies on the Internet. (Via Slashdot).

CHRIS ANDERSON: “It is, of course, not news that the Japanese have a thing for robots. It is, however, getting worse. Way worse. Like robot overlord worse.”

MORE ON SARAH BOXER AND IRAQTHEMODEL, over at GlennReynolds.com:

At the moment, the New York Times is in court, demanding constitutional protection for its sources. If they’re exposed, it fears, they may suffer consequences that will make others less likely to come forward in the future. That, we’re told, would be bad for America.

But the New York Times has no compunctions about putting the lives of pro-American and pro-democracy Iraqis at risk with baseless speculation even though the consequences they face are far worse than those that the Times’ leakers have to fear. It seems to me that doing so is far worse for America.

When journalists ask me whether bloggers can live up to the ethical standards of Big Media, my response is: “How hard can that be?” Not very hard, judging by the Times’ latest.

Not very hard at all.

POWER LINE:

Last month, in response to a piece by Thomas Friedman, Rocket Man wrote that there is a serious national debate going on but “the New York Times just isn’t part of it, because it operates at too low a level of information to be useful to knowledgeable news consumers.” This piece by the Times’ Sarah Boxer about the Iraq the Model bloggers confirms Rocket Man’s judgment. It also demonstrates both the bias and the stunning irresponsibility of the author.

Let’s start with the Times’ “low level of information” (commonly known as ignorance). As Jeff Jarvis notes, two of the Iraq the Model bloggers were in this country last month. They met with President Bush and even made it to New York where they were interviewed on WNYC. The visit was reported by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post and Dan Henninger in the Wall Street Journal, as well as by many major centrist and conservative blogs. Yet, Boxer treats the bloggers existence as a “mystery” that she discovered by searching the internet and selecting a blog that “promised three blogging brothers in one.”

A miserable performance across the board.

UPDATE: Gerard van der Leun looks at Sarah Boxer’s history and observes:

It isn’t a mystery to me how Boxer was assigned to, or pumped for, this “Blogging” article in the Times. Having been in and around the editorial types at New York newspapers and magazines for decades, I can well imagine the editor’s mindset when confronted with either Boxer’s desire to write about this or the need of the Times’ “Arts” section to get with it on ‘the blogging thing.’ Boxer is young, Boxer is “hip,” Boxer must “get it.” Except, of course, she doesn’t, but the editors at the Times have no way of knowing that, because they get it even less.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Derek Rose offers a rejoinder that seems rather weak to me. He notes that the names of the IraqtheModel bloggers weren’t secret. True, but open speculation that they’re CIA agents — and in the NYT, which terrorists in Iraq may still regard as trustworthy — seems to make that a bit different, doesn’t it?

He also can’t resist a snarky link to Arthur Chrenkoff, together with a claim that Chrenkoff thinks everything’s fine in Iraq, though Chrenkoff has explicitly disclaimed that. If this is the best defense the Times can claim, it’s in real trouble. And I think it is.

Meanwhile, reader John Friedman notes that the Times looks bad no matter what:

Hasn’t the Times either (a) outed two CIA operatives, implicating the Plame criminal issues or (b) if their suppositions are false, defamed the bloggers?

Surely in this great nation of litigators some one can make a case here!

We’ll see.

And in case Iraqi terrorists miss the New York Times art section, the BBC has picked up the story.

Meanwhile, Richard Brookhiser faults Boxer on style: “Among other things, the Sarah Boxer piece on the Iraqi bloggers is notably jejeune–college newspaper level stuff.” Ouch.