The people seem to be responding by kicking his ass. Democracy!

Short clarification - the people have NOT yet responded by kicking his ass. TFA is an editorial by a guy who says this all of that stuff will happen. The only thing that appears to have happened so far is that Mugabe and his administration have thrown a fit.

Are you really going to adhere to your ideals when real lives are at stake?

If you don't stick to your values when tested, they're not values. They're hobbies. --Jon Stewart

it takes wikileaks reporting to expose mugabe by "triggering" him to act out his true (insane) nature, for the world to observe how inappropriate a leader he really is.

To further that argument, remember that when we uncovered abuse of tortures at Gitmo, we were told that there were terrorists who would now know what kind of interrogation techniques we use and would train their operatives to resist those techniques. We were told that we needed to keep our interrogation processes secret in the name of national security. And to some extent, there's some truth in that - if terrorists want to be arrested and made into martyrs, it helps to know how your captors will deal with you.

I don't know how I feel about this particular incident. I think there's a lot in the latest batch of WL releases that the public deserve to know, while a lot of it is just backroom chatter and face-saving things said behind doors that could've just been let there alone. But I absolutely hate this argument that we can't uncover the truth about things because TEH BAD PEOPLE will use that information against us.

Number one, the bad people will always find something that they can use to fuel their propaganda. You're not going to stop the bad people by keeping these things secret. Number two, if you give people a freedom, then some people will use it for bad purposes. You give people the right to bear arms, then some people are going to get shot. Some people will say that if you ban guns, then only the criminals will have guns, and I sympathize with that argument. I would say that if we don't have information getting out to people about how their governments are functioning, then only the government itself will know how it is functioning.

I want to quote a paragraph from TFA here: Zimbabwe's Mugabe-appointed attorney general announced he was investigating the Prime Minister on treason charges based exclusively on the contents of the leaked cable. While it's unlikely Tsvangirai could be convicted on the contents of the cable alone, the political damage has already been done. The cable provides Mugabe the opportunity to portray Tsvangirai as an agent of foreign governments working against the people of Zimbabwe. Furthermore, it could provide Mugabe with the pretense to abandon the coalition government that allowed Tsvangirai to become prime minister in 2009.

What that paragraph says to me is - Mugabe is still in control, and if Wikileaks hadn't exposed this bit of dirt on one of his rivals, then it still would have happened for the first bit of negative information he could uncover. On top of that, the author of the post isn't talking about a loss of support for the prime minister that's already happened - he's predicting everything that's going to happen in the future, so there's no direct guarantee that the whole coalition government is about to collapse. It's terrible that Zimbabwe could be back in trouble again - not new trouble, just the trouble that was already there and was simmering quietly - but I still find blaming Wikileaks for this trouble to be the equivalent of blaming a pebble for the avalanche.

While Ellsberg supports Assange and what they are trying to do, in actuality he redacted many names and even entire sections of diplomatic reports that assessed the allies of the US who were secretly supporting the Vietnam war, like Poland.

Assange (or whoever at his organization) also redacts names from the majority of Wikileaks releases, generally except where the names are of public figures.

The question is, is it worth it? To see how the bankers and the financiers and the heads of state control the world and the wealth in the world? Will it REALLY help democracy and display capitalism's flaws? Haven't we known that since Marx?

This is the most cynical, hopeless thing I have ever heard. It's essentially an admittance of defeat. You're saying, we may as well let the government and the corporations operate in secret, because we know that exposing their crimes won't do any good anyway. And the sad thing is, you might be right.

Perhaps it should be rephrased as "no misconduct that surprises anyone who's been paying attention for the last century or two"

And that's the part that really worries me - the people running the country can be engaged in criminal acts, and we don't care anymore. Either it's because we don't feel like we have the power to stop it from happening, or because we've decided it's all right for the people in charge to break the law. Either way, we're fucked.

I'm dreaming of a white Kwanzaa

I have a black coworker with a sense of humor. He would respond to this comment by saying, "Why's it gotta be white, huh?!"

Consider the MSNBC viewers; aren't they about the same in bias?

MSNBC isn't an institution with liberals like it is many for hardline conservatives, though. The very partisan left tends to resonate with certain trawls of the blogosphere rather than tie themselves to the radio or TV, I think. A lot of liberals like Olbermann and Maddow but seem most likely to watch them when someone links a clip of their shows on the HuffPo, rather than actually tuning in to watch those programs on a real television. That's also not counting some of the station's moderate conservatives, like Joe Scarborough.

If there's any show that really draws a constant audience of liberals to live broadcast, it's probably Stewart and Colbert.

The really, really sad thing is, the price, QOS and sustained throughput of the municipal wireless in Minneapolis beats Comcast, hands down. You take a small hit in latency, but that's about it.

I hear people say the same thing about WiMax service in Houston.

As advocates of Democracy and transparency, let's break the law and act in secret to take down big companies, which in turn hurts small businesses who use these payment services. Let's also inconvenience random shoppers. Let's create all kinds of random collateral damage to make a point about supporting transparency by supporting a completely secretive organization. Sorry, I'm not buying it.

Don't try to harm the major corporations, because only the little people will end up getting hurt! Wait, where have I heard that before...

Because they had a ton of leftover trade-in value at Gamestop.

I don't know mcuh about Virgin internet, but I can say that Spring / Clear have 4G-ish WiMax connections in Houston which run about $40-$60 for true unlimited data plans. I know a couple people that have disconnected their landline internet at home and switched over to wireless completely, and are satisfied with the decision.

Countries like Norway or Saudi Arabia proved that when used correctly (ie. through state-controlled companies, yes), oil brings wealth to the citizens.

You might also say the same about the American state of Alaska, to a limited extent.