BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

My blogger sista Layla, wrote such a good post in July 2007 about a subject which I have discussed with many bloggers during the last 7 years which I have been fiddling around with blogs. Blogging was a great way to keep my mind active, now that I am unable and diagnosed unfit to work. I am teaching myself CSS and other coding little by little. Old horses do learn new tricks! When I started blogging I refused to talk politics.  According to my therapists I still lack a lot of self-esteem. Over the years I was told by far too many people I was stupid, ugly, worthless, too intense, had a big mouth and ended up saying 'yes' to things any rational person would have said "NO WAY" too.   Undiagnosed PTSD had me doing irrational things that no one would accept an apology for.  I went out of my way to make people happy, to my own detriment. So my blog was a mishmash of this and that. Stuff I had written on a good day and so on. I helped out 2 websites for a ...

The Mobosphere Unveiled Ever since Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act giving immunity to interactive service providers for publishing the defamation of others, a wide range of characters has arisen and infiltrated the mainstream blogosphere. Instead of becoming a source for obtaining reliable information, the blogosphere, and user generated content, is at risk of becoming a less credible information source. Dozier Internet Law defamation lawyers are constantly battling these “black hat” forces and over the past several years we have acquired quite an insight into this underworld; an anonymous and covert society bent on terrorizing businesses. These are our internal thoughts on the matter, and not scientific analyses. We are not psychiatrists; just defamation lawyers and trial lawyers trained for almost fifty years to figure out the human nature of clients, witnesses, and juries. All too often blog attacks are simply protection rackets and extortion schemes i...

I was alway trim until 11 years ago. Not thin. I had a figure. But when I finally conceived my kids I put on 120lbs over the pregnancy. I have lost some of that. Others tend to look at fat people and assume their eating is out of control. Mine wasn't however, my OB had to put me on a nutritional supplement and called me weekly to remind me to eat more. I had pregnancy cravings - broccoli and cottage cheese. Go figure. I grew up in a home with a Polish grandmother where food was love & comfort. Bread was often spread with schmaltze. But I still never ate that much. However, after I gave birth, all the years of fertility drugs were withdrawn and my body went into a state of shock. I bled out for 4 months after the birth... not a few weeks - months. I practically stopped eating altogether for a while but was yelled at because I was breastfeeding. But the weight was piling on. Something was very very wrong. My OB sent me to one specialist who handed me a Weight Watche...

by Joseph Farah I don't like to spend my time chronicling the lies of the Barack Obama media machine. But sometimes it is imperative in this ugly age of derivative, copycat, gotcha-style, blame-the-messenger pseudo-journalism – where anyone sitting in the comfort of their easy chair thinks he has license to smear the few who actually take boots-on-the-ground reporting seriously. This is one of those moments. It's no secret to anyone that much of the establishment press in the U.S., and even worldwide, is little more than an amen chorus for the man in the White House. And there is a concerted effort under way, among some armchair pundits, to defame one of the most courageous young journalists in the world who happens to work for me. His name is Aaron Klein and he serves as Jerusalem bureau chief for WND. In that role, he has set a new standard of daring and bravery, interviewing in person some of the most dangerous terrorists in the world. He even wrote a book about his experien...

cross posted from Joe.My.God.: NYPD Sued Over Blogger Press Credentials Room Eight, the NYC politics site founded by Politico's Ben Smith, reported this weekend on a federal lawsuit filed against the NYPD regarding their refusal to grant press credentials to online journalists. “The system of granting press credentials in New York City has run amok and needs to be changed immediately,” said Norman Siegel, a prominent civil rights attorney who is leading the lawsuit. “We cannot allow the City of New York, the police department, to trample on the fundamental rights of journalists.” The lawsuit is challenging the NYPD’s “unconstitutionally vague” criteria for defining who is qualified to carry city-issued press credentials. According to the NYPD’s Office of Deputy Commissioner for Public Information, an applicant must submit three articles that have been published in print media within the last six months and a cover letter from a news director or editor. For individuals publishi...

Ellis Henican has always been a favorite reporter & columnist of mine. In this editorial he refers to the "Bathrobe Boys" - which is his term for Bloggers. I have to agree with him. I know of far too many bloggers who pinch articles without credit, bloggers who post stuff that has nothing to do with their blog (like revealing or sexual pics on a political blog that has NOTHING to do with the story) just to drive gawkers to their site or those plain out plaguarize others... or even themselves. (I had a professor in undergrad school who would do one production a year and put her name up on top - example: "PROFESSOR'S NAME PRESENTS" - HAMLET - in teeny tiny print: by William Shakespeare.) Then there's those who beg for money to go to blogging conferences or some event that they have plenty of money to pay their own way for, so they can share their oh-so-very-special viewpoint with " their readers ." These people believe they are so import...

Lawsuits Against Bloggers Seen Rising Since 2004, 159 Court Actions Have Targeted Citizen Journalists for Libel and Other Charges By HUMA YUSUF When Christopher Grotke answered a late-night knock on the door, he did not expect to find the deputy sheriff on his doorstep serving notice that he was being sued. Nor was he prepared for the charge: libel. Someone had posted a comment on his citizen-journalism Web site, iBrattleboro.com, stating that a woman in Brattleboro, Vt., was having an extramarital affair. The accused woman then sued Grotke and his Web site co-founder for failing to edit or delete the comment. The blogging community increasingly is subject to lawsuits and threats of legal action running the gamut from subpoenas to cease-and-desist notices. Since blogging became popular in about 2004, there have been 159 civil and criminal court actions involving bloggers, according to the nonprofit Media Law Resource Center (MLRC) in New York. Seven cases have resulted in verdicts agai...

I was accused a while ago of putting someone's blog on a "porn aggregator." Heck, I wouldn't know how even if I wanted to. And I dislike porn; its very upsetting for me to see. But now I do know how that other site got on a porn aggregator -- and that I had zero to do with it! FROM THIS SITE Security on the Internet means more than just protecting your personal computer from online predators and viruses. If you own a domain or have a website you may need to protect your online reputation as well as your content. The web pages you see when you browse the Internet with Internet Explorer or Firefox is not all there is to see out there. Your web browser reads pages written in a language called HTML and interprets instructions for formating, placement, and file retrieval. The web browser shows you the interesting, full-color, animated, graphical version of a file of text references. The text and images you see are not the whole story. Hidden within the HTML pages are keyw...

If this doesn't scare the pants off you and get you to rethink drinking the NObama Kool-Aid and voting McCain... then I declare you hopeless!! ('no surprise' on the mass exodus of bloggers over to wordpress.com...) Blocked anti-Obama blogs spur Google probe Does Google Inc. violate the same "neutrality" principles that it wants mandated for Internet providers like Comcast Corp.? That's the argument being made by some who accuse the search behemoth of hypocrisy when it comes to free speech on the Internet. Here's the deal: Mountain View, Calif.-based Google recently drew the ire of several authors of anti-Obama blogs, hosted on the company's Blogger platform, whose posting rights were temporarily suspended after Google identified as them "potential spam blogs." "You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog ... Sincerely, the Blogger Team," Google said in an e-mai...

by Sheila Gibbons The general election hasn't even begun yet but already we're getting early snippets of retrospection on the campaign coverage so far. In a look at the public's news interests over the past year the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that while women and men might not be on different planets, there's still plenty of statistical daylight between them. Women consistently express more interest in stories about weather, health and safety, natural disasters, crime and celebrity news. Men tend to be more interested in international affairs, Washington news and sports. However, men and women often express comparable levels of interest in the top news stories of the day, the study found. The presidential campaign, for instance, has attracted only modestly greater interest among men than among women. In five weekly news interest surveys in 2008, 37 percent of men and 32 percent of women say they have followed campaign news very closely. Inter...