I suspect Brin got into some hot water with the board over his surprising remarks earlier in the week that bordered on an apology for betraying the company’s principles with its censored China search engine. Here’s what they’re saying now.

Google Inc. is committed to doing business in China despite criticism the company has faced for abiding by Chinese government censorship restrictions, co-founder Sergey Brin said this week.

On Tuesday, after a session with several U.S. senators to discuss telecommunications legislation, Brin made comments that prompted some journalists to speculate Google intended to change or eliminate its operations in China.

In fact, he reiterated Google’s intention to move ahead with its google.cn site — a version of the leading Internet search engine that censors thousands of sites according to Chinese standards — as well as its global google.com site.

Brin told a small group of invited journalists: “I think it’s perfectly reasonable to do something different. Say, OK, let’s stand by the principle against censorship and we won’t actually operate there”.

But he then added: “That’s an alternative path. It’s not the one we’ve chosen to take right now”.

Brin, who serves as a co-president of Google, said users in China have two options — slower speed search which is uncensored at http://www.google.com, or faster search, with limits set by Chinese authorities at http://www.google.cn/.

“If you are a normal Chinese user and you want to use Google, just go to google.com and you actually won’t get good service. Eventually you will go to google.cn,” Brin said.

Bad choices, I’m afraid.

Thank God that both the Hammer and the move to repeal the estate tax are now history. Krugman’s column underscores the folly of both.

The DeLay Principle
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 9, 2006

The federal estate tax had its origins in war. As America moved toward involvement in World War I, Congress — facing a loss of tariff revenue, but also believing that the most privileged members of society should help pay for the nation’s military effort — passed the Emergency Revenue Act of 1916, which included a tax on large inheritances.

But today’s Congressional leaders have a very different view about wartime priorities. “Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes,” declared Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, in 2003.

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Lisa writes about her (and my) excellent adventures in a post that I should have pointed readers to earlier. Please check it out, and sorry I’ve been too lazybusy to write much about it myself.

Ripped off from this blog, which also has some great commentary on the Coulter sickness. The real question is, why are our media putting pornography like Coulter on the airwaves?

That’s what they say. Maybe this is the great turning point (like the taking of Baghdad, the capture of Saddam, the new elections, the new constitution, the new government, the new new government, etc., etc.) that’ll launch us to victory.

In any case, I’m glad the fucker is dead. Good riddance. A shame we didn’t do it years ago when we had plenty of opportunities.

Some were speculating it was a June 4 thing, but it’s apparently more sinister than that, at least according to RSF. (I’ve had some issues with RSF in the past exaggerating the role of Cisco and other Internet companies in architecting China’s censorship machine, so I’ll take with a degree of caution.)

Chinese authorities have blocked most domestic users from the main Google.com search engine, a media watchdog said. Internet users in major Chinese cities faced difficulties accessing Google’s international site in the past week, Reporters Without Borders said.

But Google.cn, the controversial Chinese language version launched in January, has not been affected. The site blocks politically sensitive material to comply with government censorship rules.

“It was only to be expected that Google.com would be gradually sidelined after the censored version was launched in January,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.

“Google has just definitively joined the club of Western companies that comply with online censorship in China,” the organisation said.

Google.com, the search engine’s uncensored international site, had previously been available to Chinese web users, but problems accessing the site had been reported across the country recently. It was blocked nationwide on 31 May, the statement said.

The blocking was also being extended to Google News and Google Mail, Reporters Without Borders said. A spokeswoman for Goggle in Beijing said that the problem was under investigation.

What’s Google’s incentive to stay in China if its products are blocked there? Maybe Google Ad revenues from google.com.cn justify it, I really don’t know. Even so, Google must feel betrayed after bending over backwards to please the party censors. If things don’t turn around, I’ll start taking bets for when Google ends the deal and stops offering the censored site.

Savagery in Iraq is the theme of both neo-con Brooks and liberal Herbert (below). The juxtaposition of these two articles is intriguing, because it’s obvious that at this point even Brooks sees the situation as hopeless. The theme he keeps returning to is the triumph in Iraq of savagery over decency He points out how the bad guys – both the insurgents and our “allies,” the Shia militias – now hold all the cards, and we hold none. Brooks paints a picture almost as bleak as Herbert’s, and then, inexplicably, ends it with his usual “let’s stay the course” canned message:

A dissenting minority is furious that so many Americans are willing to betray the decent Iraqi majority in order to preserve some parlor purity. And the terrorists no doubt look at our qualms not as a sign of virtue but of weakness, and as evidence that savagery will lead to victory again and again.

Dave, you just spent 90 percent of your colum presenting Iraq’s situation as nothing short of apocalyptic. And then you chide those who, in essence, are saying the same thing as you, except for their conclusion that we’ve gotta get out of there. What’s the point of reciting tales of the insurgents sawing off fingers and gaining the upper hand, if you’re going to conclude we should just keep at it, offering no thoughts on how we might actually win? Whether you know it or not, this column can only serve to underscore the contention of many (and increasingly, most) Americans that there can be no victory, because no one can define what victory is and how it can be attained. not even a die-hard neo-con like David brooks.

Savagery’s Stranglehold
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: June 8, 2006

We have all been raised on stories in which good triumphs over evil, and in these stories good does not triumph by chance. It triumphs because honesty, virtue and decency pay off in the long run. Evil, meanwhile, contains the seeds of its own destruction. Those who lie, torture and kill eventually become entrapped by their own sins.

In Iraq at the moment, however, savagery seems to be triumphing over decency. The insurgents and the militias — who kill and maim with abandon — appear to be wearing away the morale of those who seek a decent, democratic nation.

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It’s really simple, Bob: denial is not only the easiest antidote, it at times seems to be the only antidote. If you don’t partake in denial, you’ll literally go insane, the truth in Iraq is so impossibly awful. Either we deny it and put on MTV, or our heads explode in a fit of impotent rage. There are no good choices and no solutions. “Mission Accomplished” has morphed into “Voyage of the Damned,” and we the people can only sit back in horror as our hopes and dreams for America disintegrate.

Other People’s Blood
By BOB HERBERT
Published: June 8, 2006

For the smug, comfortable, well-off Americans, it doesn’t seem to matter how long the war in Iraq goes on — as long as the agony is endured by others. If the network coverage gets too grim, viewers can always switch to the E! channel (one hand on the remote, the other burrowing into a bag of chips) to follow the hilarious antics of Paris, Britney, Brangelina et al.

The war is depressing and denial is the antidote. Why should ordinary citizens (good people, religious people, patriots) consider their role in — and responsibility for — the thunderous, unending carnage? Enough with this introspection. Let’s go to the ballpark, get drunk and boo Barry Bonds.

(more…)

Damn, this is absolutely amazing. The GOP is literally going to prevent American citizens from voting, and they’re doing it without a trace of shame. Read this short piece, and then tell me you find this behavior acceptable. This is America; this kind of shit is supposed to happen in banana republic dictatorships, not here. Amazing. ((I guess I must be a card-carrying member of the “loony left” to object to such blatant criminality.)

For a long time, I’ve felt that of the most visible right-wing bloggers, Rick Moran of the ill-named blog Right Wing Nut House speaks with the most sincere, even admirable voice. (Everything’s relative.) I almost always disagree with him, but there’s no mistaking the man’s integrity. Now, he has written a blistering attack on the toxic toothpick Ann Coulter that will surely ruffle some right-wing feathers.

First, the history. Coulter hit a sickening new low earlier this week when she proved just how bad she is (yes, again). From the interview with Matt Lauer that should (but probably won’t) seal Coulter’s fate:

LAUER: On the 9-11 widows, an in particular a group that had been critical of the administration:

COULTER: These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9-11 was an attack on our nation and acted like as if the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing bush was part of the closure process.

These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much.

(That’s just scratching the surface – you really need to see the video or read the transcript to believe it. The rabid chihuahua is ready to be put to sleep.)

Anyway, I have to applaud Moran for taking off the kid gloves, and for pointing out the obvious – that Coulter is the worst thing going for the right, someone who will say absolutely anything for attention and book sales, and someone who has thrown even the pretence of human decency to the winds. Please read and savor every one of Rick’s eloquent words.

She has descended into a black hole of necessity from which there is no escape; where she is forced to please her rabid base of red meat conservatives usually by going beyond the bounds of decency and proper public discourse in order to make a point that could have been made without resorting to the kind of hurtful, hateful, personal attacks that have become a hallmark of her war with liberals.

Make no mistake. Ann Coulter is a brutish lout, a conservative ogre who should be denied a public platform to spout what any conservative with an ounce of integrity and intellectual honesty should be able to see as unacceptable. To descend to the level of your opponents in order to criticize them is not an excuse. And for such a gifted wordsmith, Coulter does not have the excuse of ignorance….

There are ways to criticize the widows without saying something so wrong, so hurtful. And what do you think their children would think if they heard Coulter’s remarks? Are they to be in the line of Coulter’s wildly off target fire as well?

This rhetoric is not designed to advance debate or even make any kind of a salient point about the political activism of grief stricken parents like Cindy Sheehan and the anti-Bush September 11 widows. The remarks were designed to hurt other people’s feelings in a deeply personal and entirely inappropriate way. Can you imagine some liberal commentator making similar remarks about Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles F. “Chic� Burlingame, III, captain of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed at the Pentagon and who is fighting to keep the 9/11 Memorial from being hijacked by the anti-American left? We would be all over that worthy and deservedly so.

The anti-Bush 9/11 widows are not immune from criticism for their political positions nor even for the tactics they use to advance those positions. But to say that they are “enjoying� their status as widows is so far beyond the pale that anyone who makes such a statement deserves the most severe censure possible. And the networks who use Coulter as some kind of “Spokesman� for the right should be told in no uncertain terms by as many of us as possible that she doesn’t speak for any conservatives that we want to be associated with.

Coulter owes those women an apology. Failure to give it only reveals her to be a shallow, bitter, bitch of a woman whose hate filled mouthings will eventually lead to her destruction.

Bravo, Mr. Moran. I still think you’re wrong about most things, but I have respect for you. Thank you for being honest to your readers and to yourself. It’s obvious that in your heart there is at least a streak of the liberal spirit that made America great, and that one day will make us great again.

Ann, I have no words for you, other than to say you should bow your head in shame, apologize, and then disappear forever. You are a disgrace to true conservative ideals.