"Rich is right that Americans have grown cynical. But the extremists of right and left have exploited that cynicism, have raised big money by distorting the truth, have denigrated the slow, tortuous compromise that is at the heart of progress in any real democracy. Obama's is the least cynical of the seven presidencies I've covered. It is a presidency that took effective action to prevent a depression, that has refused to engage in arrogant jingoism in its dealing with the rest of the world and–most important–spent its political capital on the most important piece of social legislation, health care reform, of the past 45 years."

"More than that, it represents a rejection of the view that the solution for all problems is to cut some taxes and remove some regulations. In that sense, what’s happening now, for all the disappointment it represents for progressives, is a historic moment.

And let’s also not fail to take note of those who had a chance to join in this historic moment, and punted."

"WebSockets in HTML5 change all of that as they were designed from the ground up to be data agnostic (binary or text) with support for full-duplex communication. WebSockets are TCP for the web-browser. Unlike BOSH or equivalents, they require only a single connection, which translates into much better resource utilization for both the server and the client. Likewise, WebSockets are proxy and firewall aware, can operate over SSL and leverage the HTTP channel to accomplish all of the above – your existing load balancers, proxies and routers will work just fine."

"We can add the inadequate funding of unemployment compensation programs to the ever growing list of things that the crisis has revealed need to be fixed."