Yesterday, President-Elect Barack Obama received his first deep intelligence briefing, also known as The Bad News. Here is what he learned:

1. Chief source of carbon emission: Printing money for the bail-out.

2. The jobless rate counts looking for work as a full-time job.

3. Loose nukes now available only...

If John Kerry had won in 2004, I would have woken up the next day smiling because we had wiped the smirk off America's face. The long snarl of the Bush administration would have been over.

But this morning I woke up weeping with joy. As I had gone to...

From Martin Varsavsky:

On November 5th Americans will discover that the world did not hate them. That they just hated Bush.

(Knocking wood.) And (knocking entire old-growth forests) maybe we'll discover that we don't have to hate ourselves. May the war between the Red and the Blue begin to...

10. Suspicious Russian tourists spotted across the Bering strait in Dezhnevo

9. Wrasslin' a bear

8. Learns Tina Fey will be watching

7. When taken on tour of White House by McCain handlers, is "inadvertently" locked in Cheney's man-sized safe

6. Schedule for memorizing state capitals thrown off by need...

I hope every independent voter watches the ad that the McCain campaign released even before the last radio waves of the debate escaped earth orbit:

So, McCain believes in crossing partisan lines, but when his opponent agrees with...

I want to propose a hypothesis.

Suppose our new president -- let's just call him "Obama," for simplicity's sake :) -- gets serious about using the Internet as a tool of governance. So, he takes his email list and uses it to kickstart a new e-gov social network. In fact,...

The tag line at the Canadian Conservative Party's Web Site, attacking Liberal party candidate Stephane Dion seems oddly 19th century:

"Canada cannot afford risky experiments at a time of uncertainty."

It's as if Obama were to say, "My opponent's steadiness of purpose is challenged by recent announcements seemingly...

Care to predict Obama's memes for tonight?

For example:

• John McCain will undoubtedly use images of this very event against us. That's because when he sees tens of thousands of Americans eager to participate, eager to pick up the tools to build a better America for themselves and for...

If McCain hadn't become Karl Rove's sockpuppet, this is what he might have said in response to the selection of Joe Biden as OBama's running mate:

I congratulate my friend and colleague Joe Biden on his being selected as a vice presidential candidate. Joe and I have disagreed frequently over...

1. I took an extra napkin from a Taco Bell for unspecified use "later."

2. I sat on a bench on a hot day, enjoying the breeze as the man next to me fanned himself.

3. I read the headlines of a newspaper that was for sale in a kiosk box.

4. I...

Barack Obama has promised to tear down the stone wall and dense bushes with which the current administration has barricaded the White House. Good. Democracy without transparency is at best an assumed democracy.

And, Obama has promised to take advantage of our new connective technology -- the Internets and all...

Jeff Jacoby, a conservative columnist for the Boston Globe, is angry at Obama and at those who cheered his speech. We (I not only cheered, I wept) are guilty of accepting a double standard because, says Jacoby, if our clergyman had said the hateful things that Wright did, we...

With its new advertising infrastructure, Facebook is being careful to protect privacy of information. But they are bucking — and perhaps helping to transform — the norms of privacy. At its most basic, Facebook is getting the defaults wrong.

The new ad infrastructure enables Facebook to extend their...

Andrew Keen's book, The Cult of the Amateur, is a media heat-seeking missile. How could they not feature an author -- a former dot-com guy no less -- who says that the Internet is killing our culture, as his subtitle puts it? Even better, the culture the Internet is...

In case you missed it, here's the narrative of last night's YouTube/CNN debate. Ordinary folks got to post grainy videos that beforehand were hyped as posing the sort of questions journalists never ask. Instead, the questions were either the same-old- same-old or were quirky, eccentric and marginal. It was...

[NO SPOILERS AHEAD: I haven't seen or read anything about what's going to happen in the final season, which starts on Sunday. There are spoilers about the previous seasons, though.]

The Sopranos, certainly one of the greatest series on TV ever, has always been a comedy. I don't just mean...

It is hard to read Saving Graces and not fall in love with Elizabeth Edwards.

In it, Edwards tells how in the deeply dark times in her life, including the death of a son and a battle with breast cancer, she found "solace and strength from friends and strangers," as...