Thursday, February 10, 2011

Casey Corr: Egypt's Mubarak proves that dictators tend to want things their way

Pharaoh falls. Now what? Glad Rumsfeld not around to tell us democracy is messy.

UPDATE: If Mubarak had told people he in fact was leaving, he changed the script. Now what? Rumsfeld could say even dictatorships are messy.

Let's all raise a shoe for democracy and hope in Egypt.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Casey Corr: Arianna Huffington: genius or artful shapeshifter? The debate goes on

There's a palpable sense of envy around coverage of Ariana Huffington staggering payoff in AOL's purchase of Huffington Post. You detect it here in this Slate piece. 

So she doesn't pay her writers and now is rich. So she's been accused of writing best sellers lifted from other people's work. So she was a conservative before she became a liberal. So Huffpo was a literate platform for big thinking celebrities before it became a search-optimized Google gooser that boosted search hits that drew advertising cash? Let me try: Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin. Twitter, you can have this blog for $100 million.

She figured it out.

And to think AOL once was so powerful that it bought the world's greatest communications empire, Time Warner. Now the super blogger assumes command of AOL's future.