[An A.P. executive] said the company was going to meet with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association, a trade group, and others.

Web hosting provider DreamHost has recently given its customers the rather unusual advice of choosing Google's Gmail over its own email service, telling them that "it's something Google ... can do better."
...
"Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn't add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into 'simple' old email. And that's kind of funny, because as far as I can tell, almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features[.]

I actually support government-imposed net neutrality because these backbone companies (AT&T, Comcast, etc.) were spawned by the government in the first place.

Government-chartered monopoly = government rate regulation.

(The fact that they are no longer rate-regulated does not change the fact that it was the original monopoly charters that gave them the backbone in the first place.)

But if, e.g., Google were to build its own pipe with its own money — as it has threatened to do — then it should be free to price it however it sees fit.

The notion, meanwhile, that the backbone companies need more revenue to build more capacity is all well and good, but you can still get that revenue from one end of the pipe exclusively — the subscriber.

If I use twice as much bandwidth as you do, then I can pay twice as much as you do. No objection there. But leave whence I'm getting all that content (e.g., Netflix, iTunes or YouTube) out of it.

The idea that NetNeut will "choke the pipe" is a Chicken Little canard spread by its opponents, pure and simple.

At around 2 p.m. yesterday, a Zimbabwean police unit raided the York Lodge, a Harare hotel being used by several foreign reporters covering the elections. Five journalists were arrested. Three of them were later released, but two are still being held at Harare police headquarters. One of them is New York Times correspondent Barry Bearak.

Their lawyer, Beatrice Mtetwa, said they would be charged ... with working without accreditation in violation of a 2002 press law known as the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, under which journalists can be sentenced to up to two years in prison for working without a permit from Media and Information Commission (MIC).

The inner circle of President Robert G. Mugabe of Zimbabwe met Friday to decide how to handle the outcome of elections that the opposition contends the president lost.

The options that confront the senior leadership of the ruling party include having the president step down, holding a runoff vote later this month or prolonging their control over the country, regardless of the outcome national elections last Saturday.
...
Before the election, Mr. Mugabe repeatedly said he would not allow the opposition to take power, and since then his aides have said that he "is going to fight to the last."

The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place as it has for almost two centuries and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every-4-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.

Mr. President, I want our fellow citizens to know how much you did to carry on this tradition. By your gracious cooperation in the transition process, you have shown a watching world that we are a united people pledged to maintaining a political system which guarantees individual liberty to a greater degree than any other, and I thank you and your people for all your help in maintaining the continuity which is the bulwark of our Republic.

When it comes, it comes, so you have to seize it, tame it or trick it, beat it into submission, break its neck, take it, hang it upside down, gut it, remove its hide, tan its hide, carve out the post from the tanned hide, submit the carved-out post to the Wordpress, hope people like it, and then, if they don't, well fuck 'em.

For all the talk of "freedom" that the Paulbots claim to believe in, they sure as heck have been silent on the horrible FISA bill we're fighting to fix in the Senate right now. Same for Ron Paul. Why the silence? And the CATO people and the libertarian publications like Reason, where are they?

Here we are engaged in a huge civil liberties issue, and progressives are being forced to fight this thing alone. It's easy to talk about "liberty". It's much more impressive to actually do something about it.

--Why do Libertarians care so much about liberty from taxes, but not from oppression or government interference in one's private affairs? If they genuinely gave a crap about civil liberties ... well, they wouldn't all be Republicans, anyway.

--The truth is that many so-called libertarians just don't really give a damn about civil liberties.

--A libertarian is mostly a Republican who supports gay marriage and wants to smoke pot.

--I'll say it again — "libertarians" are simply wingnut Republicans trying to describe themselves in more fashionable terms. That's all they are.

--There is no such thing as a libertarian. It's simply a fictional concept put together in the abstract for purposes of argument, but there are no actual, real senitent [sic] beings who actually believe in classic "libertarianism", as we academically understand the word.

--The majority of Libertarians I've run across seem to only believe in liberty for themselves. The rest of the world can go to shit so long as nobody tells them what to do, takes their money, or interrupts their masturbatory fantasies of being rich by expecting them to do anything that is not ultimately self-serving.

--Libertarians just hate taxes and minorities and want to live in gated communities.

--Libertarianism is Pre-School for Republicans.

--This goes to the very heart of the libertarian philosophy. Not the one they profess, but the one they actually hold: Not giving a shit about others.

George Bush was the libertarian that the Randoids dreamed about, I mean he was the John Galt who cut taxes, got rid of regulations and hell, he is doing a heckavajob with New Orleans and Baghdad so some future Howard Roark can do some work there.

Head of State and a crafty pragmatist who believes everyone is open to compromise. When his goons capture Galt, Mr. Thompson tries futilely to persuade the inventor to take charge of the collapsing economy, tempting him with money and the trappings of power. When that fails, Mr. Thompson finally agrees to use torture.

Those political mainstreamers who do not share in this movement-that-Paul-did-not-create, the liberals and conservatives who prior to this presidential campaign had barely heard of an "isolationist / neoconfederate / 95% of all blacks are criminals / bring back the closet / Lincoln started the Civil War / the WHO invented AIDS / conspiracies everywhere" fervor now have — thanks to Ron Paul — a name for it: libertarianism.

The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life. By teaching that 'greed is good,' strict free-market ideology holds out the promise that private vices can be public virtues.

the principles espoused in Madison's Federalist Number 10: namely that factions (aka "interest groups") cannot be controlled or eliminated without unacceptable effects on liberty. The best that can be hoped for is for government to permit as many factions/interest groups as possible so that no one faction ever gains too much power.

Register an account with OpenCongress using your e-mail address and you'll receive a profile page — "My OpenCongress" — that provides a personalized view of all the information you want about the laws being made in Washington. Users can track any bill, senator, representative, or issue area on the site, simply by clicking "track this" at the top of any page. Back on your profile, you'll have assembled a one-stop platform of everything you're watching in Congress, with a continually-updated stream of their latest actions.

[G]iven the ongoing sex offender mania and its premise of permanent recidivism as the basis for lifetime registries and prohibitions on residence and occupation and such, one wonders whether some activist legislature will now jump the shark and propose extending Samson to a lifetime forfeiture of Fourth Amendment protection for convicted sex offenders, even after the term of the parole has ended.