As freedom blooms in the East, it's withering in the West

[CHIMO]

So there's a little girl somewhere in Egypt named Facebook. According to the Al-Ahram newspaper, Jamal Ibrahim named his daughter after Mark Zuckerberg's electronic baby as a way of paying tribute to the role Facebook played in the triumphant uprising in his country.

As a name, it's not bad. It certainly beats Jermaine Jackson's modest offering for his own son, Jermajesty, and it honours the immense power of social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook and that Niagara Falls of information, Google. All three of those workhorses of nascent democratic movements are American inventions. That's what America's good at, right? Invention and democracy.

Or it least it used to be. One of the great ironies of watching the uprisings across the Arab world and Africa is witnessing them struggle and bloody themselves to achieve basic human rights, while across the U.S. and Britain hard-won liberties are shrinking like a bar of soap left in a shower.

I can't remember the last time anyone mentioned Wisconsin outside the confines of football or various cheese-producing activities – before this month, that is. Now it's a battleground, where the Republican governor, Scott Walker, is attempting to severely restrict the collective-bargaining rights of public-sector unions. He says the measure is necessary to patch over the state's deficit; the thousands of people protesting in the streets of Madison say that he has created the deficit himself through unnecessary tax cuts to corporations and that the whole thing is camouflage anyway, the thin edge of a (cheddar-shaped) wedge: Republicans want to disembowel unions because unions traditionally support the Democratic Party.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/elizabeth-renzetti/as-freedom-blooms-in-the-east-its-withering-in-the-west/article1921209/

[ellenrr]

1. I've been thinking this too. n/t