Blogging and podcasting pioneer Dave Winer nails it in the Huffington Post.

It was an interesting election until the Clintons started calling Obama the nice young African-American candidate. Yeah, I lived in the south long enough to understand what that means. When I went to Tulane I was often explained as soandso’s Jewish friend Dave. It meant that I could come over for dinner, but there would never be a marriage.

Read on.

Winer can be controversial in the tech world, sometimes brilliant, sometimes infuriating. He’s never been afraid to call them as he sees it, probably made serious enemies with this, probably doesn’t care, and this is one of the best pieces he’s ever written.

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This was the worst drop since records began in 1963. Also, the median price of a home dropped 10% from Dec 2007 vs. Dec. 2006.

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A-list tech blogger Robert Scoble asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, why the lousy PR and lack of response when problems happened, something which has severely impacted Facebook. The answer was quite unexpected.

I asked him why he doesn’t like going on video and seems to have difficulty dealing with the press and bloggers. He said he was shy. Asked me not to video him “I freeze up,” he told me. He did promise to meet more with bloggers and to give me a video interview when he’s back home.

It was an amazing admission.
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Imagine what’ll he get done when he gets over his shyness.

Yes, sometimes seeming arrogance and aloofness is, at heart, shyness. Scoble, a friendly, fair blogger who is also quite capable of calling people on things, came away impressed with Zuckerberg.

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Squirrel Communism looks at the horrors of Stalinism and the sometimes tendency of the socialist left to say this occurred outside of or was a perversion of the revolution.

If we are to deal with this problem and eventually overcome it, we shall have to go beyond calls for a “return to Lenin” and a rejection of “Stalinism”. We must accept Stalinism as a historical part of our movement, its horrors as our horrors. Only then will we actually try to find some real solution to our (get it?) contradictions and give capital a final kick in the butt.

A primary force leading to such horrors is the dictatorship of the proletariat. In theory it is supposed to be aimed only at the recently deposed bourgeoisie, and a temporary situation as well. In practice, it becomes  an entrenched system run by a few with vast powers and no way to replace them.

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 On January 31st , thousands of students on every campus, millions of students nationwide, participate in workshops and panels, brainstorming global warming solutions.

Over 1600 institutions have signed up for Focus the Nation, and they’ve gotten endorsements from Obama and Schwarzenegger, among others. Many more projects are planned too.

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With a focus on Cleveland, where that city is suing 21 large banks and financial institutions for dumping subprime mortgages on the market they knew could never be repaid.

Key quote from the mayor of Clevland. “To me, this is no different than organized crime or drugs. It has the same effect as drug activity in neighborhoods. It’s a form of organized crime that happens to be legal in many respects.”

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