Free Republic

First, here is the latest on the events today in Iran. After Ayatollah Khomeni warned against protesting today, the numbers were significantly smaller than they had been. They were NOT small or insignificant. Several thousand protesters came out all over Tehran. They were met by police that used everything from tear gas, pepper spray, and clubs to beat back the protesters. Video has begun to stream out.

CBS News reporter Mark Knoller issued a sharp retort to people on Twitter responding with derision to critics of Barack Obama's decision to go out for ice cream today while Iran is in the midst of a citizens revolt:"Surprised by the outrage at the ice cream outing. What is it you expect or want the US to do about Iran? Attack? War?"Knoller's liberal defense of Obama is not surprising. Four years ago he was Cindy Sheehan's head cheerleader when she arrived in Crawford, Texas to launch a protest against President Bush and the was in Iraq. Knoller failed to report...

Political revolutions are often closely linked to communication tools. The American Revolution wasn’t caused by the proliferation of pamphlets, written to whip colonists into a frenzy against the British. But it sure helped. Social networking, a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, has already been credited with aiding protests from the Republic of Georgia to Egypt to Iceland. And Twitter, the newest social-networking tool, has been identified with two mass protests in a matter of months — in Moldova in April and in Iran last week, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to oppose the official results of the...

It was do or die for Twitter last week. To its credit, it didn't die. Every promising new technology reaches a point in its life cycle when it either grows up and becomes part of the everyday landscape, or it flames out and becomes a footnote to history. And as history illustrates, it's a process that often repeats itself like clockwork over surprisingly long periods of time. Almost twenty years to the day since student leaders of a massive protest in China's Tiananmen Square used then-novel fax machines to bypass traditional media, organize themselves and share their message with the...