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Not only did we come to regard political speech as manipulative, but ... They called themselves poetic politicians, and the rhyme scheme went something like: Me-Me-Me-Me-ME; but MEdia Dragon hopes to link to stories about all of us especially the powerless...

Winans advises Stewart to scrub prison toilets with gusto
Winans, who did time for his WSJ misdeeds, advises Martha Stewart not to pay someone else to do her prison tasks:
Immerse yourself in humility. It's good for the soul. ALSO: Offer to host or appear on 'Saturday Night Live.' Your situation, in the context of all the horrible things that can happen to people, is a tempest in a teaspoon. Poke fun at yourself!
If another journalist uttered this line, the assessment might smack of moral indignation, sprinkled with a dose of the Schadenfreude evident in much of the proselytizing about the tawdry affair. But out of the mouth of Foster Winans, it sounds like the insight of a man who has walked in Blair’s shoes
· Felon's Recipe for Martha Stewart's Prison Living
· If I were Jayson Blair, I’d have a real hard time finding a reason to live right now
· See Also Cautionary Tale: Feeding Elizabeth Smart case gossip

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Vaclav Klaus is not most Presidents
A year after rising from the political ashes to become president, Vaclav Klaus and his critics pause to reflect
· He tries to tell people what they want to hear [ courtesy of PP ]
· See Also Fugitive financier and EU parliamentary candidate Viktor Kozeny's website design was stolen lock, stock and barrel from US Presidential candidate

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When you bury a person, the pain is that it is the last moment when you have that person next to you and when the ceremony ends you hand that person over to God. You don't lose them, but you stop having them at your side through everything

These guys want to kill us anyway
In his penultimate public appearance, the late Osama bin Laden, broadcasting from his cave in the early hours of the Afghan campaign, listed among his principal grievances "the tragedy of Andalusia" – that is, the end of Muslim rule in Spain in 1492.
· Madrid
· A SAD POSTCARD FROM SPAIN
It is true we are all Madrileños,
we are all New Yorkers,
it is true we live in al-Najaf and Baghdad,
it is true we bleed the same red, the same black.
Federico García Lorca Translation

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Watercooler Exchanges
W hen was the last time the government forced a very, very senior public official – one we trusted – to sign a false statement to protect the government’s lies?
· Mick Keelty
· See Also Keelty retreats on terrorism remarks

Passengers on the NSW rail system are being sealed into trains, leaving evacuation procedures entirely in the hands of the driver or guard, despite the lessons of last year's Waterfall disaster.
· Passengers put at risk by sealed train doors
· See Also Mother sent home to her death

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Maybe it's just ego, but I like to think of myself as an Internet power user after all I use Onfolio and even Netsnippets ... Yet ironically, I am not a supernetman because if I enter Cold River in Amazon search engine Cold Mountain gets the primary link....How powerless is that!

Book Babes
Under his guidance, Grove/Atlantic found that perfect blend of literary values and commercial success several years ago in Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain."
What's more important is that, from top to bottom, the book world has become a marginalized medium, fighting to be heard above the din of a mass-market, TV-obsessed world. Every publisher must cope with the reality that, because the chain stores are so powerful, distribution and marketing are now one and the same. Critics are a conduit between publisher and reader, but it's an open question whether they exercise their clout effectively enough.
· Literary Profiling
· See Also Writer spins intrigue of web
· See Also Google News Creator Watches Portal Quiet Critics With 'Best News' Webby
· See Also China Was Top Jailer of Journalists in 2003
· Deep Web Research site [link first seen at Invisible ]
· See Also Deep Web Research site has a useful overview though many links are old or dead [ via Barista]

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One of this country's founding principles is the right to free speech...

Conspiring to act as a spy for the Iraqi Intelligence
Daily Kos provides the headline you didn't see, describing the arrest of Susan Lindauer, a former journalist and Congressional aide, and a self-described "anti-war activist," on charges of being a paid Iraqi intelligence agent.
· Spies, but just noting the Big Media dog that so often doesn't bark at passing Democrats [ via Daily Kos]
· See Also Instapundit filled with Comments
· See Also In virtual one-party state, accountability goes out the window

Washington has been channelling hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund the political opponents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - including those who briefly overthrew the democratically elected leader in a coup two years ago.
· Chavez

Salon features a long piece by veteran Texas journalist Lou Dubose on an investigation into House majority leader Tom DeLay's vaunted fundraising machine. This is potentially devastating stuff...
· DELAY, DECEIVE - AND SELF-DESTRUCT?

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This group of Sydney inner suburban newspapers has struck on an idea so simple and lucrative, somebody in there must be wondering why every paper in Australia doesn't put together a 'know your candidate' feature like theirs, every time an election rolls round
NSW Premier Bob Carr doesn't need to buy editorial space. When he wants to get his message out say about saving the grey nurse shark - he organises a media event.

Australian electoral systems: how well do they serve political equality?
In this audit Graeme Orr assesses key aspects of Australia’s electoral systems against the ideal of political equality. Political equality means formal equality (treating people equally as electors), and it requires systems that are representative and inclusive, accessible to all and competitive (so that elections are open to outsiders and newcomers, not just to incumbents).
· Labradors of the oceans: Democratic Audit of Australia, Australian National University (PDF file) [link first seen at APO ]
· See Also Democratic and electoral shifts in Queensland
· See Also Queensland coalition of broken hearts
· Sydney: Clover manifesto
· See Also South Korean parliament votes to impeach President Roh Moo-hyun for illegal electioneering and incompetence charges
· Big Bad Ballotssss: Poll workers struggling with a new electronic voting system in last week's election gave thousands of Orange County voters the wrong ballots
Lakatoi: Electoral Hevean & Hell of Daring devils

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Hate to say I told you so a long time ago I had a fixation on political divisiveness in Amerika. I swear the New York Times is reading ME... But it is not just Amerika's love affair with strong biases. Political prejudices are always on its deathbed, but never seems to die!

Amazon-derived network map
An article in New York Times features this Amazon-derived network map by social network analyst Valdis Krebs.
· Nation of polarized readers
· See Also MSNBC.com has a useful polarized map of the Murdoch empire as a kind of birthday present to the evil master of the universe
· See Also Speaking of evil masters... West against Russia: Should we laugh or cry?
· See Also Russia's love affair with strong leaders
· Soros: Media Freedom across Eastern Europe

Beware the ides of March! That was how the soothsayer warned Caesar and so I warn you too. Hopefully, you wont end up the same way Caesar did.
Of course, if Caesar had the ability to read ebooks, hed have been able to avoid his fate, since all of Shakespeares works are easily obtainable in ebook format. Hes have gone and looked at the ending of the play "Julius Caesar", hed have known he was going to be betrayed and hed have stayed Emperor of Rome, instead of dying and having a salad named after him. The moral of the story?
· You never want to be caught without the right ebooks, and Double Dragon Publishing is just the place to get em! Czech out what we have this month

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Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist.
- Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX), House Majority Whip, during a debate on increasing the minimum wage, Congressional Record, H3706, 04-23-96
· See Also A few are also up for re-election in 2004. Bear that in mind

The ACOSS better family incomes package
ACOSS proposes reforms to family assistance payments estimated to cost $2.5 billion. Over one million families would benefit from the plan which. is designed to ease financial hardship, help families with young children juggle jobs and care, and reduce poverty traps.
· Australian Council of Social Service
· Low-income working families are forced to go without Meals
· See Also More help with the cost of caring for babies and toddlers
· Clearer funding responsibilities would strengthen federalism, says John Quiggin

On the job front, Things aren't as bad as they seem; they're worse, Paul Krugman:
· No More Excuses on Jobs
· See Also It’s the Economic Team, Stupid, according to former Clinton speechwriter David Kusnet
· See Also Oil-for-Food

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I have studied many times the marble which was chiseled for me— a boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor. In truth it pictures not my destination but my life.For love was offered me, and I shrank from its disillusionment; sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid. Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances. Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life ... I hate myself, but I can’t stop this addiction Nothing like an abusive headline to grab your interest, eh?

Acts of Rights & Responsibilities
AUSTRALIANS have debated the merits of bills of rights on and off since before Federation. More recently, proposals were put forward by the Whitlam and Hawke governments for federal bills of rights. None of these proposals has succeeded. This has left Australia as the only western nation without such a law. Indeed, among all nations, only a few such as Brunei and Burma lack a bill of rights, with Afghanistan gaining a bill of rights when its new constitution came into force earlier this year.
· Finally, Australia’s Maiden Bill of Rights
· See Also Democracy - Not "The Free Market" - Will Save America's Middle Class...
· Creating a Genuine 'Opportunity Society'...
· Though they couldn't prove it, blackballed bohemian talent knew why their telephones had stopped ringing. I'm checkmated!

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Do as we Say, Not as we Do: Capitalism as we used to know it is no more
Do you know where your money is? If you have placed your investments with Parmalat, the Italian food behemoth whose bosses have been indicted for fraud, or with Martha Stewart's company Living Omnimedia, whose stock has dropped as Stewart was sentenced to jail last week, or with Royal Dutch Shell, whose chairman quit last week after he was caught lying about the size of the company's oil reserves - then tough luck.
· Znet: Making website a mass medium in a fragmented market · The Collapse of Capitalism as We Know It

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Local News
No matter what your beat is, the site I'm about to tell you about likely covers it. Topix.net takes the idea of news aggregation one step further than sites like Google News and 1stHeadlines.com , categorizing news stories on the Web into more than 150,000 pages.
I was impressed that Topix.net even has a page dedicated to news in my neighborhood (even though it included a story from halfway across the state!).
· A Local Google News
· Emedia [ via GoogleDork ]
· See Also Utility called Xpdf converts PDF documents into text files: available for Windows, Linux/Unix and OS X

Julianne Schultz gives an overview of the way the internet and information society has changed the way we understand the network society and the development of community level politics and activism.
· Networks: mates, nodes and cells
· See Also Graeme Hugo argues that much of the thinking and research on immigration in Australia neglects this new reality

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Publishers strive to monopolize distribution and commoditize talent. But blogs commoditize distribution, restoring the writer's monopoly on talent.

Kos Kudos: Turtleneck is an Internet-only celebrity
He runs a hugely influential website called "Eschaton," at atrios.blogspot.com. It's a "blog" -- a sort of news junkie's online diary. He started the site back in April 2002, because it's better than yelling at the TV set. These days, he says, 40,000 viewers visit Eschaton every day, including bigwigs like columnist Michelangelo Signorile and New York Times attack pundit Paul Krugman.
· Atrios specializes in scoops that reporters should be digging up but don't
· Steve Outing gets credit for scooping everyone but Glenn Reynolds by reporting that Instapundit is now selling blogads
· Hey Bloggers -- Especially You Popular Political Types -- Why the Hell Don't You Accept BlogAds?
· See Also Weblogs
· See Also Blogads

Don't dismiss blogs as the online rantings of B-list writers. Interlinked and meritocratic, seething with fierce debate and rivalries, they're the best thing to hit journalism since the rise of the political pamphlet. If Adison and Steele, the editors of The Spectator and The Tatler, were alive and holding court at Starbucks, they'd be WiFi-ing into a joint blog...
[ courtesy of All kinds of people at the keyboards are blushing now ]
· See Also Joshua Marshall: The indispensable political blog

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Media Dragons spot the beginnings of a trend: Creating A Marketplace of Ideas
Do we get the culture we deserve? William Osborne takes a look at the way America and Europe promote their cultures. There is, he reports, an obvious reason why Europe has more orchestras, operas, and dance companies and why the citizenry seem more culturally literate.
· But First, The Bill... How different the American and European economic systems are ...
· See Also German Angle

Twenty, thirty, at the outside forty years from now, we will look back on the print media the way we look back on travel by horse and carriage, or by wind-powered ship...

Inevitable Trend
But the real power of the [printless] business model resides in the potential of digital advertising. Except for direct mail, until the Internet came along no advertising medium existed in which the advertiser could be sure his message was received by his targeted audience. We go to the bathroom during commercials...
· The Death of Print?