Fed up with the conservative “monlogue” on national talk radio, a group of $$ libs is tryong to create its own network starring Al Franken: The group, led by Sheldon and Anita Drobny, venture capitalists from Chicago who have been major campaign donors for Bill Clinton and Al Gore, is …

Brendan I. Koerner writes in the Washinton Monthly that Democrats are smooching entertainment industry glute to their own and the country’s detriment: These proposed laws are bad enough for consumers. But the greater evil is their long-term impact on economic growth. By yielding to Big Entertainment’s every whim, Democrats are …

Charles Paul Freund concludes in Reason that reports of American cultural imperialism are greatly exaggerated: mounting evidence suggests that all this fulmination has been entirely pointless, and that cultural pessimists have been as clueless about the processes shaping the world as were their social, economic, and political forebears. In January, …

So you haven’t made your mind up yet about Iraq, or your conviction has faltered? Steamroll through the illogic and excessive emotion of both sides with the Cross-Blog Iraq Debate. Questions and answers pro-war here, and anti-war here. Now is the time for reason.

TV streaming for cell phone coming in Korea: Local press in Korea has confirmed that Korea Telecom will beam 9 TV channels to 3G phone users this month. The channels are believed to include a music channel and a news channel. The phone inset is the Samsung V3000 which is …

In a judo flip, EMI is looking to acquire the much larger Warner Music Group: The world’s largest independent music entity, EMI was previously considered a target for purchase by one of the other four media conglomerates that own its major record company competitors. The Post reports this deal, valued …

Smithsonian Folkways saw its sales jump 33% last year, part of which comes from burning rare recordings on CD-R for customers: And in doing so, the label best known for dusty recordings by Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly is taking initial steps toward creating a 21st-century “celestial jukebox,” where nothing …

Google has agreed to acquire Pyra Labs, developer of Blogger software and Blogspot, home to a million bloggers: Word of the deal spread after Pyra Labs Chief Executive Evan Williams confirmed on his personal Weblog that his team of six developers would join Google. In typical blog fashion, the news …

If I had to pick a single collection as an introduction to the glories of American jazz, I would have to go with Ken Burns’s Jazz collection, a remarkable greatest hits of jazz that functions as an Official History. But an exemplary Alternative History, especially of the period from the …

I finally broke down and got a subwoofer for the surround-sound system. Damn, what a difference: it ties the whole thing together like the final adjustment of the microscope that brings everything into focus. You don’t realize how much sound you feel rather than hear: there’s a lot of rumbling …