Republicans face off in their first debate.:

“For a guy who is supposed to be pandering to the right wing, McCain sure does a lousy job of it. For the first time, he said that he would fund embryonic stem-cell research, which would require reversing a high-profile Bush executive order, and he said he believed in evolution (Sen. Brownback, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo said they did not).”

Nuh uh! For real!?

Sullivan: McCain Won:

“As for foreign policy, very little nuance, very little subtlety, almost no fresh thinking. Conservatism now means simply projecting something called ’strength’ rather than articulating something called strategy.”

*swish*

My happiness is a golden poem!

Spider-Man 3 reviewed.:

It’s odd to think of Spider-Man 2 as a small movie, but next to the clanking, wheezing contraption that is Spider-Man 3, that $784 million-grossing megahit feels like some little Sundance indie. In an attempt to break opening-weekend records and justify this movie’s much-disputed price tag, director Sam Raimi has piled on so many villains, subplots, supporting roles, and production numbers (Kirsten Dunst sings! Tobey Maguire dances!) that a news anchor is brought in at one point to help distinguish between two separate black-Lycra-clad superdudes who are terrorizing the city at the same time.

They say that like it’s a bad thing.

G.O.P. Contenders Ponder What to Say About Bush:

It is hardly a coincidence that none of the Republican presidential candidates have appeared in any high-profile public settings with Mr. Bush in recent months.

A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted April 20-24 found that 76 percent of Republicans said they approved of Mr. Bush’s job performance. That was down notably from March 2001, when 94 percent said they approved of his performance.

But the fact that so many rank-and-file Republicans still side with the president suggests the kind of headwind Mr. McCain is flying into when he expresses disapproval of the way the White House responded to Hurricane Katrina, for example, or when he calls for the resignation of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, or when he questions how the war was executed in Iraq.

Emphasis mine.

I’d like to suggest another interpretation of those polls:

Any arguments I made about the Republican Party being salvageable in the wake of its hijacking by authoritarian loonies were dangerously naive.

What parts of Bush’s performance are those 76 percent approving of?

• A disastrous war, incompetently executed by political hacks who created a failed state, bred terrorists, then marched us further into the quagmire?
• The destruction of the DoJ’s credibility as anything other than the RNC’s political attack cadre?
• Utter and devastating failure in New Orleans?
• The formulation and execution of flatly un-American policy that holds truths we once found self-evident and universal, as enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and as protected by our Bill of Rights, do not apply to anyone who didn’t enjoy the happy accident of birth on U.S. soil?

76 percent of Republicans approve, evidently, of the attempted ruin of this country at the hands of an incompetent lightweight I’d hesitate to call a “fascist” primarily because it’d grant him too much intellectual heft.

Once I was called to an explosion site. There I saw a four-year-old boy sitting beside his mother’s body, which had been decapitated by the explosion. He was talking to her, asking her what had happened. He had been taken out shopping by his mom.”
— Saad, a young humanitarian worker from Baghdad, quoted in the International Red Cross’s 4/11 report, “Iraq: civilians without protection”

Are 76 percent of them all for that, too? The man they approve of is responsible for that.

Sometimes something suddenly catches up to you, maybe even years after you first knew about it, and it hits you just so. I’ve known about Yahoo’s nasty habit of handing information over that helps convict Chinese dissidents for a just over a year, and I’ve never been comfortable with it.

At the same time, I guess I was rationalizing the whole thing by noting that other companies over there, Google and Microsoft for instance, haven’t exactly distinguished themselves as exemplars of courage. The difference, however, is that Google and Microsoft don’t offer services that would involve being put in the position of giving up a user’s information.

So my answer to anyone who asks ‘where do you draw the line?’ when it comes to cuddly Internet companies crawling into bed with despots is:

“As for Yahoo’s responsibility, the World Organization for Human Rights says that the company ‘knowingly and willfully aided and abetted in the commission of torture and other major abuses violating international law‘ by turning over the messages.”
— Ars Technica, 4/19/07

Yahoo’s leadership says it’s doing more good by being in China than not. Here’s their conscience speaking:

“The arrests ‘are never things you go home and feel good about,’ Yang said. “We feel horrible about that…We have no way of preventing that beforehand….If you want to do business there you have to comply.’

“We feel horrible about that.”

“You have to comply.”

So, as I said, late to thinking about this much in the concrete, but it hit me this evening that I don’t like what Yahoo does and I don’t feel compelled to take a “realistic” view on Yahoo’s behalf. I don’t care what its market realities are. Not my concern.

I don’t care to give Yahoo my money in the form of my annual flickr subscription. I don’t care to give Yahoo my time with the occasional ad impressions Yahoo News or other properties may gather from me. I don’t care to invest in other Yahoo services, even if that’s something as trivial as adding a bookmark to del.icio.us. So I downloaded any information I contributed to Yahoo sites and axed all my accounts this evening.

That was a very small thing to do. Sometimes something just hits you:

We live in a complex world, and it’s hard to always know what the right thing is, but Yahoo abets despots who seek to torture their citizens, and it does so because the money’s too good to ignore.