If you came to this piece thinking it would be about Sarah Palin, well, it's not. But now that you're here, there is a scathing post from Shannyn Moore that blasts Palin for enough things to make it hard to see the lipstick on a blushing pig. Unlike the heavyweights of the Republican establishment β Rove, Huckabee, Kristol, and countless others have opined on what Princess Sarah is up to - Moore is based in Anchorage and has something to say about how Palin laid waste to the state's governance and finances with her abrupt resignation.
Before I move on to the real story, Hendrik Hertzberg steals a line from Cyndi Lauper when he writes of Palin in the forthcoming New Yorker that "this is one girl from the north country who just wants to have fun." His comparison of statements on political change made by Thomas Jefferson and Governor Palin show how far she has to go before a sixth-grade grammar teacher would give her credit for uttering a complete sentence with a subject, verb and predicate. She may be "crazy like a fox" as Bill Kristol tried to argue β or she may not be so foxy after all.
Continue reading "Lipstick On A Pig: How Memes Make The News" »
The power grid is down. The Internet is dark; web sites are gone, internet banking and all online resources have disappeared. No lights, no power, no traffic control. Airports are running on backup systems with limited capability, talking down airplanes one by one. Hospitals, military bases and public safety facilities are humming on backup power, hoping their emergency generators are resupplied by fuel companies they can't reach. No phones, no texting, no twittering.
Military communications are disrupted under the pressure of a flood of attacks of many different kinds, exacerbated by the loss of civilian network capacity. Some computers have stopped working, their guts eviscerated by electronic attacks. And this is just for ground-based systems. So far no direct attacks have been mounted on satellites.
Continue reading "Black" »
News flash: Iran's authoritarian regime steals an election; populist candidate defeated.
OK, maybe the results will hold up and Ahmadinejad really won. There wouldn't be much of a story if it ended there. Tom Friedman points out that a number of surprising developments are bringing democratic initiatives to the forefront throughout the Middle East. People are pushing back against both authoritarian governments and Islamist groups seeking power in a number of countries.
Continue reading "All A-Twitter over Iran" »