Joined Up Blogs, coming soon

Later today there should be a guide to other blogs that I work on or at least a diagram as part of my learn9 website. This is about learning so one current idea is to make the blogs at least appear more coherent. I have tended to just start another one and then not continue.

United Nations needs some support sometimes

The recent remarks about the UN by John Bolton are disturbing for many people around the planet. I am not sure if people in the USA realise how this appears.

I have now found the list of questions that Dan Froomkin has suggested should be asked of someone at the White House. they are based on suggestions from readers-

Uniting the Country

* The nominations that the president has made, be it for the Supreme Court or elsewhere, have been by most objective accounts highly partisan (John Bolton, John Roberts, etc.) Why can't the president, for the good of the country, make it his priority to nominate candidates to major government posts who will win the strong support of the majority of both parties? (Doug Jeffery, Medford, N.J.)

Obviously Froomkin is not allowed to ask a question directly. so far as I know there has been no answer yet on this one.

comment on White House press approach

Another search on Google blogsearch. There is nothing new attacking the liberal media for reporting Hidatha and related events.

However I did find a link to a report on the nature of reporting from the White House press corps. Keep scrolling down to the William Powers gets it subheading.

For someone outside the USA it certainly is hard to understand how Clinton came under so much investigation while the way in which the Iraq war started seems not to be on anything like the same level of press interest.

The William Powers report states that US citizens are asking some questions. Maybe the Froomkin tactic of publishing questions online will have some effect even though he is not allowed to ask any questions in person.

link to Haditha report

The most recent Froomkin post has a link to this report.

Presumably there will be more comment later.

blogosphere sampling

There is an opinion from Bertrand Pecquerie that the blogosphere in the USA is mostly about targeting liberal journalists. He seems to think the claims about citizen journalism as a force for democracy are hard to sustain given the evidence of sustained projects to wreck the careers of solid journalists.

A quick check on Google blogsearch shows that such blogs do exist. Lex E. Libertas repeats a text from Jed Babbin who was a deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration. Is this typical of blogger opinion? Is it likely to be rported as such in some other media?

As print journalists would say, only time will tell.

Pressure on Murtha

Found this story about pressure on Rep. John P. Murtha. This shows the climate in the USA. Dan Froomkin has yet to cover the response from the White House as far as I can find it. From the coverage so far on the BBC there is a strong probablity of international response when the details on Haditha are officially stated.

The report states that Michelle Malkin attacked Murtha and "media outlets" for "calling the alleged massacre a massacre before all the facts are in," and for "serving as al Jazeera satellite offices."

This response of blaming the messanger seems quite usual. al Jazeera represents opinion in many parts of the world. Froomkin is one of very few journalists who thought it worth following up the claims that Bush thought about, maybe as a joke, bombing al Jazeera around the time of their reporting on Fallujah.