Outside the Beltway

In a decision released yesterday. the New Jersey Supreme Court clarified the journalist/blogger distinction somewhat.

Business Week has a fascinating profile of Dietrich Mateschitz, whom they dub “Red Bull’s Billionaire Maniac.”

Is lunch necessary? It’s not really where the conversation is.

The Navy is considering allowing its chaplains to perform same-sex marriages once “Dont ask, Don’t tell” ends.

Local newspapers in Belgium inexplicably don’t want to be linked by Google and are using copyright law rather than a robots.txt file to enforce their wishes.

Sunday’s announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden was the latest example of how Twitter has become the go-to source for “Breaking News.”

The photographs of President Obama that appeared in the papers after the Osama announcement were staged.

You thought the birther insanity was over? Silly you.

In all honesty, much of what is coming out of the mouths of self-described conservatives is actually pretty darn radical.

Ann Coulter says its time for Birthers to shut up.

“Internet addiction” is a made-up malady.

Donald Trump, who may or may not be running for President, is continuing his strange obsession with the birther myth, and reminding Republicans that two years of silence in the face of lunacy may come back to bite them.

While complaints that there’s too much information for intellectuals to sort through, much less read, are constant, they’re not new. Harvard historian Ann Blair argues in her new book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age that this stress goes back at least to Seneca’s time.

While there are doubtless flaws with the journalistic values and culture of the New Media, we too often contrast today with a Golden Age of Media that never existed.

Shirley Sherrod’s lawsuit against Andrew Brietbart promises to be an interesting test of the boundaries of defamation law in the political blogosphere.

Mob Boss Tommy Shots Gioeli Blogs From Jail

New York Times writer Adam Liptak discovers that a Supreme Court decision protecting “corporate speech” might not be a bad thing considering that he works for a corporation.

Twenty-five years ago today, the American space program came crashing to Earth in a horrible accident.

The political firestorm that has erupted in the wake of the shootings in Arizona is drifting, inevitably, into calls for more government control over the content of speech.

The lawyer who argued The Pentagon Papers case points out how Julian Assange is not Daniel Ellsberg, and how prosecuting him could have disastrous results for press freedom in the United States.

Is calling Côte d’Ivoire “Ivory Coast” linguistic colonialism? Where do we draw the line when English names for countries go out of vogue?

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, who may end up running for President in 2012, has reopened wounds that finally seemed like they were closed.

Unless you paid close attention, you probably missed most of the coverage of the war in Afghanistan in 2010.

Is the West’s string of luck about to end?

Has WikiLeaks changed journalism forever?

Mike Brown, who discovered Xena, decided he could not in good conscience allow it to be made a planet. And killed off an old favorite in so doing.

Michael Wilbon departs the Washington Post after more than 30 years to work full time at ESPN. Here are his last — and first — columns.

The Obama administration is banning hundreds of thousands of federal employees from calling up the WikiLeaks site on government computers because the leaked material is still formally regarded as classified.

The Pentagon could have taken down WikiLeaks but decided not to. Out of kindness, I suppose.

The two English language newspapers who have been Julian Assange’s accomplices in disseminating stolen secrets defend themselves.

Israelis and Palestinians don’t agree on much these days, but they do agree that Barack Obama hasn’t helped the peace process at all since coming to office.

The Washington Independent goes dark in December, failing to find profitability in three years.

Is the current media environment a problem for proper political discourse?

After three months, Rupert Murdoch’s strategy of walling off the Times websites isn’t looking so smart.

If the polling is anywhere close to accurate, a Republican wave will come crashing down today, repudiating the first two years of the Obama administration. What does it mean?

Responding to the rant that got Rick Sanchez fired, Slate’s Brian Palmer investigates the question, “Do Jews Really Control the Media?” His short answer, “Maybe the movies, but not the news.”

It’s getting harder and harder to tell blogs from newspapers.

Both the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, impressive as they are, must be understood in terms of not just applied political philosophy, but practical politics as well.

Most people who record television shows skip the commercials. Despite that, TV remains by far the most effective form of advertising.

Rand Paul is apparently taking heat from some of his more socially conservative supporters after FEC reports indicate he received a donation from the owner of an Adult web site. People need to get a life.