• Is the Vietnamese government blocking Facebook and its more than 1 million users in that country? "A technician at Vietnam Data said government officials had ordered his firm to block access to Facebook and that VDC instituted a block on the site Nov. 11. He declined to give his name because he was not authorised to speak to the media."
• I'm sure you've seen the clip of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show calling out Sean Hannity's show on FOX News for trumpeting the size of the crowds at a Thursday afternoon anti-healthcare rally in D.C. ... by mixing in footage from a larger, Saturday-afternoon rally from two months earlier. If not, it's here. A few days later, Hannity apologized, but in a non-mea culpa, ham-handed way. The mistake, he claims, was not intentional. That'd be pretty tough to pull off. News shows don't just mix in two-month-old footage with today's footage. It's not like all the ingredients are on the countertop and they just happened to, oops, grab the wrong one. But things got better after Hannity's apology. To be precise, the attack on Hannity got more pointed. Here's a link to both Stewart's reaction to watching all of Hannity's show and Andrew Sullivan's attack on both Hannity and FOX News in general as enemies of conservatism. He writes:

Yes, I've tried [watching Hannity] as well. It's like listening to Hugh Hewitt. Or reading Pravda in the old Soviet Union. But somehow watching a human being so brainwashed and engaging in conscious brain-washing makes it worse. Hannity is a pathological level of propagandist, because his entire reality, his entire mindset is programmed for ideology and partisanship. There is no world for him but politics; and no perspective within politics except conflict and warfare. He greets views that do not comport with the opportunistic ideology of the moment as threats to be extinguished, not ideas to be engaged.

Whatever else this toxic, shallow and brutal perspective is, it is not now and never will be conservative - unless that word has now been so corrupted it has no meaning at all.

• This is really sweet, and already a YouTube favorite. A soldier returns home and is greeted by his dog, Gracie, who is happy to see him. To put it mildly.
• The Webbies post their 10 most influential Internet moments of the decade that just whizzed by. You start out astounded that Wikipedia launched only nine years ago then become more astounded that the iPhone only debuted 2+ years ago. The new is becoming established in the blink of an eye; the established is disappearing even faster.
• Just in time for Xmas: Paste Magazine unloads their top 12 music books of the decade. I've read #s 11 and 8—the Minnnesota books—and even interviewed the author of no. 11. His books's out in paperback. Get it if you didn't in hardcover.
• And here's more of Paste Magazine's best of the decade. memes, TV shows, live moments on TV shows, album covers. Album covers? Do we still count those? The only time I see them anymore is when they're the size of postage stamps.

All previous entries