Year: 2005

  • Blake Ross's 10 predictions for the new year

    Tired of end-of-the-year top ten lists and predictions? Try Blake Ross’s Ten predictions for the new year. Here’s my favorite: > Yahoo, acclerating its bid to dominate the social space, will announce that it is buying the actual societies of 32 cash-strapped governments. Citizens will be allowed to link their existing names to their Yahoo…

  • Rameses the first war blogger?

    David D. Perlmutter writes in his Policy by Blog weblog, in an entry called Blogs of War: Then and Now: > In c. 1300 BCE, the pharaoh Rameses II and his army fought a battle against a Hittite army at Kadesh, in what is now Syria. The battle was a draw; in fact, the Egyptians…

  • All politics, still local

    Ron Fournier, political writer for the Associated Press, put an article on the newswires on Christmas Eve summing up a trend over the past few years: Internet Fosters Local Political Movements. Sound like a familiar premise? The examples he cites include MoveOn, Meetup, and BlogsforBush.com. Not sure what prompted the article, but there’s no time…

  • Kingly prerogratives

    Perhaps I’m humorless or old-fashioned but I’m still not over the cavalier way the President and all of his men are defending their decision to spy domestically without seeking warrants. Last week Christopher Brauchli put it thusly in a post to Spot-On called Presidential Prerogatives: > When asked by Jim Lehrer of “The NewsHour With…

  • Basic Facts as a Wondrous Surprise

    There are so many basic facts about the world that we, as grownups, take for granted, yet to a child are matters of wondrous surprise. Living here with my eight-year-old grandson Seaney has really brought that home to me. The process of opening up the wider world to him has been an inspiration and a…

  • The madness of kinging George

    The capacity for Bush defenders (I can’t call them conservatives — not even sure they’re really Republicans anymore) to argue that up is down and black is white and violating the law is not violating the law has reached a crescendo. Glenn Greenwald explains cogently just how far out of line the defenses of warrantless…