Hold Fast

There are all sorts of post-mortems on the Massachusetts Senate race today and what it means for health care reform. But Peter Daou, former Clinton internet operative, has a must-read post on the larger questions of how the Obama administration has failed to achieve its goals after one year. Daou concludes: Progressive bloggers have been [...]

[Read more →]

Just when you thought the Chinese government’s surveillance of their citizenry through technology couldn’t get any more intense, we see this: Expanding what the Chinese government calls a campaign against pornography, cellular companies in Beijing and Shanghai have been told to suspend text services to cellphone users who are found to have sent messages with [...]

[Read more →]

The Times of UK: Hong Kong’s Apple Daily reported that the state-run China Film Group had instructed cinemas nationwide to stop showing the 2-D version of Avatar from January 23 on orders from Beijing’s propaganda chiefs. It is not just the desire to entertain the masses with a Chinese movie that has prompted the censors [...]

[Read more →]

Digby, writing on the penchant for some on the left to take a BURN IT TO THE GROUND attitude about politics and the policy course in Washington, has this to say about “those of you who are inclined to spend hours in my comment section throwing around snotty remarks drenched in puerile cynicism about how [...]

[Read more →]

Adam Bink is right. What all of this says to me is that all of these aggregate vote ratings are a lesser standard of judging a candidate’s record than individual examples of merit. It’s not just Ford who doesn’t get that, it’s lots of politicians, but Ford is trying to pull a fast one over [...]

[Read more →]

Josh Schrei has a truly excellent piece on The Huffington Post about why Google’s decision to end it’s partnership with the Chinese government should be a model for all Western companies doing business in China. The whole thing is worth a read, but this passage stands out: While I applaud Google for their brave decision, [...]

[Read more →]

In an email circulating among China rights activists, BBC and Public Radio International reporter, Mary Kay Magistad reports: I’m writing this at 10:30am on Jan. 13 in Beijing, where for the past hour or more a Google search for “Tiananmen” pulls up, at the top, graphic photos and descriptions of the crackdown, a Google search [...]

[Read more →]

Much has been made of Google’s blog notice that it may soon be shutting down Google.cn, a search engine built in partnership with the censorship requests of the Chinese government.  The post cites a major targeted attack on Google and twenty other top companies originating from China, with an apparent goal of hacking into the [...]

[Read more →]

Glenn Greenwald: The Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum writes a whole column today correctly observing that many Islamic extremists — including Terrorists — are well-educated, wealthy, sophisticated intellectuals — sometimes even quite Westernized — yet, to her apparent befuddlement, remain vehemently “anti-American.” Though she calls on the U.S. to fund programs to more actively promote “counter-arguments” [...]

[Read more →]

Life is easier when WordPress doesn’t eat 1,000 word posts. Shorter Me: If New York has had a carpetbagger for a senator and a rep who moved far to the left after being appointed senator, why would a carpetbagger who claims to be moving to the left be so bad? Answer: Harold Ford Junior is [...]

[Read more →]