Blogs Then and Now

Aaron Brazell is doing some research on the evolution of blogging in recent years and has asked for my input. [Update: The result, "Political Blogging 2.0," is now up.] I started OTB in January 2003 and have seen a lot of change. I should note at the outset that my experience is almost entirely with the political blogosphere, a ...

Public Transit Up, Driving Down as Gas Prices Increase

Proving that basic economic concepts like elasticity of demand and substitution of goods are not outmoded, the American public is responding to increases in gas prices by driving less and taking public transit more. Soaring gas prices are pushing more Americans to take public transit, with streetcars, trolleys and other light rail experiencing a 10.3 percent increase in ridership for the ...

Supreme Court Upholds Virtual Child Porn Law

The Supreme Court today upheld, by a 7-2 vote, controversial provisions of a child pornography law that made it illegal to promote material presented as child pornography even if the material in question isn't actually child pornography. Or involve actual children. The ruling upheld part of a 2003 law that also prohibits possession of child porn. It replaced an earlier ...

Journalism in a Post-Literate Society

In a recent speech at Harvard, TPM founder Josh Marshall argued that the competition from the Internet is killing newspapers but improving journalism. Stacy McCain, though, contends, "iIt's not the Internet that's killing journalism, it's illiteracy." Rather than former print consumers switching to digital media, "There is, instead, a shrinking readership of news, period, regardless of whether the news is ...

InstaPundit Moves to Pajamas Media

Pajamas Media has announced that Glenn Reynolds' InstaPundit blog has moved to their servers. Today Pajamas Media shook the blogosphere with a major site development announcement: InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds is becoming a part of the PJM main portal. Reynolds, who averages more than six million page views per month according to Nielsen, was recently named one of the Forbes Top ...

Pope Benedict Our German Shepherd

Henry Farrell recounts getting stuck in pope-security-related traffic, contrasts the differences between this trip and John Paul II's 1979 visit to Ireland, and takes this photo: Henry muses that it "seemed to me to have dark undertones that were presumably not intended by the person who was waving it about." Personally, I find the canine overtones amusing enough.

Michael Chertoff Interview - Border Fence, RealID, and Alert Levels

As mentioned earlier, I had the opportunity to interview Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff this afternoon on his ordering environmental waivers to expedite construction of a fence along the U.S. - Mexico border and other issues. The summary below is a description, not a transcription, of the conversation, unless quotation marks are used. Noting that these issues have been known ...

Britain’s Most Outrageous Parking Tickets

The Daily Mail has compiled a list of Great Britain's ten most unreasonable parking fines of all time. Here's a sample:It was a terrifying ordeal for Fred Holt, 77, when he went to the bank and two masked men burst in brandishing an axe and a machete. The robbers held the axe to a young cashier's throat while money ...

Building Democracy, One Warlord at a Time

The Washington Post has a heartbreaking article which might as well be titled "The More Things Change..." regarding our current "progress" in Fallujah:[Col. Faisal Ismail al-]Zobaie, 51, knows the nature of the men in black masks. He is a former insurgent. Now, as the police chief, he has turned against the insurgency, especially al-Qaeda in Iraq. The U.S. military showcases ...

Public Financing of Professional Sports Stadiums

Megan McArdle argues, not unreasonably, that "if the Yankees want a $1.3 billion stadium, they should pay for it themselves." Instinctively, I agree. Practically, however, it's not that simple. Big league sports franchises are an incredibly scarce resource and municipalities are willing to bid for the advantages, psychic and real, that attach to having one. I examined ...