James Krawczyk

He asks a basic and important question. If Obama campaigned on “change” and harsh criticism of the war, why will he soon announce that he is sending in more troops?

If Obama is continuing Bush-era war policies, where is the public outrage?

Specific direction on how to make some of your online personal information more Google-proof.

upsider:

“…At least six things have come together to fracture [the U.S.] public space and paralyze our ability to forge optimal solutions:

1) Money in politics has become so pervasive that lawmakers have to spend most of their time raising it, selling their souls to those who have it or defending themselves from the smallest interest groups with deep pockets that can trump the national interest.

2) The gerrymandering of political districts means politicians of each party can now choose their own voters and never have to appeal to the center.

3) The cable TV culture encourages shouting and segregating people into their own political echo chambers.

4) A permanent presidential campaign leaves little time for governing.

5) The Internet, which, at its best, provides a check on elites and establishments and opens the way for new voices and, which, at its worst provides a home for every extreme view and spawns digital lynch mobs from across the political spectrum that attack anyone who departs from their specific orthodoxy.

6) A U.S. business community that has become so globalized that it only comes to Washington to lobby for its own narrow interests; it rarely speaks out anymore in defense of national issues like health care, education and open markets.

These six factors are pushing our system, which was designed to have divided powers and to force compromises, into the realm of paralysis. To get anything big done now, we have to generate so many compromises — couched in 1,000-plus-page bills — with so many different interest groups that the solutions are totally suboptimal.” (Thomas L. Friedman, NYT)

Some reports of fake bloggers and other seemingly-controlled videos posted to the internet lead some to believe Microsoft is faking/failing/engineering the viral buzz for Windows 7.