To say that the slogan "America First" has a checkered past in the United States is an understatement of epic proportions. Launched in the spring of 1940 on the eve of Hitler's conquest of France, Belgium and Holland, the America First Committee was an isolationist crusade which grew to 800,000 members who sought the keep […]

Back in my days as a denizen of Silicon Valley, we start-up types used to joke that Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California was the single most important street in the world. After all, for almost five decades that one-mile mecca of the venture capital world has helped fund every high-tech transformation of the […]

Over the last few weeks, the U.S. media have hyped the growing love affair between Republicans and the ride-hailing service, Uber. The reasons why are no mystery. Extolling the virtue of Uber and its ilk in the "sharing economy" lets the GOP seem hip, offer the façade of a future looking economic vision and accelerate […]

"Reality," Stephen Colbert famously lamented to President Bush in 2006, "has a well-known liberal bias." It is conservatives' perpetual fear that the truth will not set them free that is the driving force behind two House Republican proposals announced this week. For starters, Lamar Smith (R-TX), the GOP chairman of the House Science, Space and […]

Back in February 2006, Texas Senator John Cornyn led Congressional Republicans with his famous defense of President Bush's regime of illicit NSA domestic surveillance, "None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead." Now, as the New York Times revealed today, one of those illegal targeted was apparently one of Cornyn's Capitol Hill colleagues. […]

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican John McCain famously acknowledged "I'm an illiterate" when asked about his use of personal computers and the Internet. Then as now, McCain's ignorance is reflected in his public policy. After laughably extolling online auction giant eBay as the cure for what ails the American economy, John McCain now opposes […]

Throughout the 2008 campaign, John McCain has proclaimed online auction giant eBay the solution to recession and poverty in the United States. But on Monday, McCain's already laughable vision of eBay as the future of the American economy took another hit. By announcing it was slashing 10% of its 16,000 person work force, eBay revealed […]

Over the course of the 2008 election, Barack Obama's campaign has leap-frogged John McCain online. As CBS, ABC and Politico (among others) have documented, Team Obama has far out-paced McCain in deploying web technology to fundraise, establish social networks, advertise to targeted audiences, build email lists and otherwise facilitate grassroots organizing. Now, with the release […]

As the Senate Judiciary Committee prepares to debate the renewal of FISA revisions made in August, President Bush and his Republican allies in Congress are endorsing a unique double-standard when it comes to immunity for telecommunications firms. Within the United States, they argue, service providers such as AT&T and Verizon must cooperate with U.S. government […]

In Washington Tuesday, members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee savaged Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and General Counsel Michael Callahan for the company's involvement in the 2005 jailing of a Chinese dissident. But if their bipartisan criticism of Yahoo's behavior - cooperating with a Chinese government "subpoena-like document" to supply information about journalist accused of […]