Partisan warriors may love our polarized political culture. Everyone else is turned off, and tuning out.

Closing of the American Mind

ONE of the great ironies of living in a consumerist culture is that, in pursuit of success, so many of us unwittingly surrender our freedom. We confuse career and consumer choices with personal liberty, when in fact they all represent the same underlying decision: to buy into the system that produced them.

Escape from Consumerville

Why have novels become the new screenplays?

They came from Hollywood

The one forecast we can safely make for 2008 is that the consensus will prove to be wrong.

Swan Song | Economist

The 2007 IPO market has had the highest volume and largest proceeds since 2000, with 231 offerings raising $53 billion as of Dec. 17. The IPO market's performance was driven by Chinese companies and some blockbuster U.S. technology deals. VMware is now the fourth-most-valuable software company in the world, behind Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.

The Strongest Year for U.S. IPOs Since 2000

For fans of the Real Estate Roller Coaster:

Inflation adjusted analysis of mainland U.S. same home sales shows a cooling across Michigan and Massachusetts. For your enjoyment I have generated an animated heat map indicating the states that are burning above (red) and below (blue) the historical price trend for that area. The chart runs from 1975 through September 2007.

For every region I have done a regression analysis to determine the long-term historical growth rate. When local prices are way above sustainable long-term averages for that metropolitan area they contribute to a state being colored bright red. When home prices have fallen to be far below what they should be, they contribute to their state being colored deep blue.

US Home Price Heat Map, 1977-2007

The New French Resistance.

Few things agitate French winemakers more than other winemakers' unspeakable irreverence towards the terroir, the mix of soil and climate found in the place where a vine is grown. The strength of feeling is so great that the country even has its own breed of, er, terroiristes. A group of masked, militant French winemakers has attacked foreign tankers of wine, bricked up a public building and caused small explosions at supermarkets.

Now France's balaclava-clad winemakers have a new horror to see off: transgenic wine.

Unleash the war on terroir; Genetically modified wine

Howard Zinn has called Robert McChesney “one of the nation’s most important analysts of the media,” and Mark Crispin Miller describes him as “the greatest of our media historians.” Now McChesney brings both his authoritative analysis and unparalleled historical knowledge to bear on the growing but only fitfully successful field of media criticism and scholarship.

In this sharply argued book, McChesney explains why we are in the midst of a communication revolution that is at the center of twenty-first-century life. Yet this profound juncture is not well understood, in part because our media criticism and media scholarship have not been up to the task. Why is media not at the center of political debate? Why are students of the media considered second-class scholars?

McChesney’s concise history of media studies shows how communication scholarship has grown increasingly irrelevant in recent years, even as media became a decisive issue of our times. Now the burgeoning media reform movement, in which McChesney has been a key player, has made it even more clear that the revolution in communication calls for a transformation in the way we think about media.

"Communication Revolution" by Robert W. McChesney

It is absolutely true that yesterday's victory in forcing Harry Reid to pull the FISA bill from the Senate floor is temporary. Allies of the administration and lawbreaking telecoms will spend the next several weeks plotting to overcome the obstacles thrown in their path yesterday and, like a weed that has been cut but not uprooted, will return in January to try again.

Opponents of telecom amnesty and warrantless surveillance ought to and likely will use that time, too, to strengthen the opposition and improve the strategy. There will be ample time for all of that. But yesterday's victory, while limited, is still very significant in several key respects, particularly in understanding how and why it happened -- i.e. the source of the successful opposition -- and it is worth taking a step back to chronicle what took place.

Anatomy and significance of Monday's FISA victory

The current legislative and oversight activity with respect to electronic surveillance under Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has drawn national attention to several overarching issues. This report briefly outlines three such issues and touches upon some of the perspectives reflected in the ongoing debate. These issues include the inherent and often dynamic tension between national security and civil liberties, particularly rights of privacy and free speech; the need identified by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Admiral Mike McConnell, for the Intelligence Community to be able to efficiently and effectively collect foreign intelligence information from the communications of foreign persons located outside the United States in a changing, fast paced, and technologically sophisticated international environment, and the differing approaches suggested to meet this need; and limitations of liability for those electronic communication service providers who furnish aid to the federal government in its foreign intelligence collection. Two constitutional provisions, in particular, are implicated in this debate — the Fourth and First Amendments.

Congress currently has before it several bills that, if enacted, would amend certain FISA provisions, among them H.R. 3733, which was passed by the House on November 15, 2007; S. 2248 (as reported out of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence); and S. 2248 (as reported out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with an amendment in the nature of a substitute). Two other bills regarding FISA were introduced by Senator Reid on December 10, 2007, and have been placed on the Senate’s legislative calendar include S. 2440 and S. 2441. S. 2402, introduced by Senator Specter on December 3, 2007, was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. In Committee markup on December 13, 2007, an amendment in the nature of a substitute to S. 2402 was adopted by unanimous consent. Then, by a vote of 5-13, the Committee rejected S. 2402, as amended. The proposal would have permitted substitution of the government for electronic communication service providers in law suits where certain criteria were met.

FISA: A Brief Overview of Selected Issues