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This bill doesn't legalize every part of Bush's illegal warrantless eavesdropping program but it takes a large step beyond FISA towards what Bush did. There was absolutely no reason to destroy the FISA framework, which is already an extraordinarily pro-Executive instrument that vests vast eavesdropping powers in the President, in order to empower the President to spy on large parts of our international communications with no warrants at all. This was all done by invoking the scary spectre of Terrorism -- "you must give up your privacy and constitutional rights to us if you want us to keep you safe" -- and it is Obama's willingness to embrace that rancid framework, the defining mindset of the Bush years, that is most deserving of intense criticism here.

Beyond that, this attitude that we should uncritically support Obama in everything he does and refrain from criticizing him is unhealthy in the extreme. No political leader merits uncritical devotion -- neither when they are running for office nor when they occupy it -- and there are few things more dangerous than announcing that you so deeply believe in the Core Goodness of a political leader, or that we face such extreme political crises that you trust and support whatever your Leader does, even when you don't understand it or think that it's wrong. That's precisely the warped authoritarian mindset that defined the Bush Movement and led to the insanity of the post-9/11 Era, and that uncritical reverence is no more attractive or healthy when it's shifted to a new Leader.

In an interview last week, Powell asserts that issues like Network Neutrality in Obama’s agenda are “in the weeds,” because “[a] lot of the FCC’s issues aren’t ‘president of the United States’ issues.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Reasonable minds can differ over the right policies to preserve the open Internet, promote next-generation broadband, safeguard online privacy, and create a connected digital democracy. Supporters of Obama (like me) can think he made a mistake in his handling of the FISA telecom immunity legislation (as I do). The absolute worst approach is to label these as insignificant technical matters that the President need not address. That’s been the mindset, with disastrous results, the past eight years. As chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, John McCain was exposed to a wide range of tech policy issues. On the other hand, he admits he’s “computer illiterate.” Ask yourself how you’d feel about working for a corporation where the CEO doesn’t know how to use a computer. No matter how smart, someone who can’t open a web page, type a letter on a word processor, or compose an email message, is going to be fundamentally out of touch with the daily experience of every member of the knowledge economy.

Dr. Yu started his remarks by underlining how Hu Jintao, only a year after he was made vice-president, made his national debut in 1999 following the Belgrade bombing—at the height of anti-American protests—and urged for calm and reason from the angry mobs when then-President Jiang Zemin was at the height of his power. Hu’s show of grace, which stood in strong contrast to the often crass measures descriptive of Jiang’s leadership, has led some notable China watchers to predict that Hu is a visionary leader. However, Dr. Yu argues that Hu is not visionary, and the hysteria against the Dalai Lama is an example of Hu’s pedantry of the traditional Chinese political psyche.

Apparently, America's president-elect is a Mac user, and a fan of sticking stickers on one's laptop. I dig the pac-man eating the Apple logo. Commenters: let the Apple/Obama fanboy flamewars fly! Our moderators have firehoses at the ready.

Kai-Fu Lee, co-president for Google Greater China told us there will be no GMail in the foreseeable future, because Google would be unable to protect user data from the government.

Maidan was a group of tech-savvy pro-democracy activists who used the Internet as a tool to support their movement. Maidan in Ukranian means public square and Maidan’s website features the slogal “You CAN chnage the world you live in. And you can do it now. In Ukraine.”

The main activity of Maidan was election monitoring and networking with other pro-democracy organizations around Eastern Europe.

“websites cannot produce an activist organization.”

As a key element of the revival of Chairman Mao Zedong's "people's warfare," Beijing and a number of other cities have revived the vigilante and spying functions of neighborhood committees. Municipal administrations along the coast -- and in the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang -- have recently earmarked additional budget to maintain the "spying" functions of neighborhood committees and similar vigilante outfits after the Olympics. Moreover, the Politburo's Central Political and Legal Commission, China's highest law-enforcement agency, has urged the courts and prosecutors to do more in fulfilling the party's priority task of thwarting anti-Beijing conspiracies and upholding sociopolitical stability. That the courts will comply in this is evident from a just-released article by the President of the Supreme People's Court, Wang Shengjun. Writing in this week's edition of the official Seeking Truth journal, Mr. Wang said: "We must pay more attention to maintaining state security and social stability. . . We must boost our consciousness of [safeguarding] the power of the regime . . . and fully develop our functions as a department for [proletarian] dictatorship."

It would be a good strapline for the 60 Minute interview with Gao Xiqing, president of the Chinese Investment Corporation. Give the man a PhD in giving reasonable responses under hysterically motivated questioning.

He points out that to withdraw funds for political reasons would hurt everyone: the fund, the Chinese government, the US, the company concerned. It’s therefore highly unlikely to happen. In other words, the business and investment ties between the two countries could help to dissipate and moderate political spats rather than exacerbate or be used as a weapon in them.

在这场骚乱中，有一个人一直在默默的保护希拉里的维基百科条目。Jonathan Schilling，一位住在新泽西的53岁的软件开发者，从2005年6月开始，他平均每周要花上15个小时去编辑希拉里条目，保持它的清洁和公平。攻击希拉里条目的人采取的是粗暴的形式，这和奥巴马条目很有大的区别，他的粉丝充满热情，心中不满的人也很聪明，这反映出一种事实，奥巴马自己仍然在被公众认识中。最近一段时间奥巴马条目编辑的频繁程度远高于希拉里，也许是竞选的危险信号。但希拉里条目编辑的减少或许更令人不安。希拉里条目有点冷清，已经解除了保护，而奥巴马的条目仍然处于保护中。

Illinois Senator has captured the Democratic imagination with his charisma, his silver tongue, and most of all, his claims to transcend the partisan and racial animosities of the day.

Mr. Obama's fault, rather, was to maintain a two-decade entanglement with Mr. Wright without ever seeming to harbor qualms about the causes espoused by his mentor and spiritual guide.

Under rules of public financing, a candidate has access to $85 million from a taxpayer-financed fund for the general election, a substantial amount to spend for the roughly two months after this year’s conventions. But this election cycle has shattered fund-raising and spending records and upended expectations.

The setting, which has the feel of an Internet start-up, is emblematic of how Mr. Obama, of Illinois, has been able to raise so much money.

Mrs. Clinton’s operation has also been pushing to improve its efforts online, with her campaign saying Tuesday that it brought in $15 million over the Internet in February, with donations jumping after news broke that she had lent $5 million to her campaign.

I will never forget my first visit, in 2003, to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing. I was welcomed by Wang Luolin, the academy's vice-president, whose grandfather had translated Marx's Das Kapital into Chinese, and Huang Ping, a former Red Guard. Sitting in oversized armchairs, we sipped ceremonial tea and introduced ourselves. Wang Luolin nodded politely and smiled, then told me that his academy had 50 research centres covering 260 disciplines with 4,000 full-time researchers. As he said this, I could feel myself shrink into the seams of my vast chair: Britain's entire think tank community is numbered in the hundreds, Europe's in the low thousands; even the think-tank heaven of the US cannot have more than 10,000. But here in China, a single institution—and there are another dozen or so think tanks in Beijing alone—had 4,000 researchers. Admittedly, the people at CASS think that many of the researchers are not up to scratch, but the raw figures were enough.

China, according to the new political thinkers, will do things the other way around: using elections in the margins but making public consultations, expert meetings and surveys a central part of decision-making. This idea was described pithily by Fang Ning, a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He compared democracy in the west to a fixed-menu restaurant where customers can select the identity of their chef, but have no say in what dishes he chooses to cook for them. Chinese democracy, on the other hand, always involves the same chef—the Communist party—but the policy dishes which are served up can be chosen "à la carte."