Sarah Palin and Tea Party protesters target Harry Reid

 Barack Obama's first year: success or failure?A Republican and a Democrat debate the peaks and troughs of Obama's presidency a year after he took officeJames Antle and Dylan Loewe guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 January 2010 Article historyRead Article

Barack Obama is warned to beware of a ‘huge threat’ from al-QaedaSecurity officials fear a ‘spectacular’ during the transition period

 Barack Obama finds out who really holds power On both sides of the Atlantic, the same group of people decide who wins elections.By Janet Daley
Published: 9:00AM GMT 31 Jan 2010President Barack Obama delivers his State of the Union address on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 27 Photo: AP Barack Obama is in big political trouble, so he has to make an explicit appeal to American middle-class voters. Gordon Brown is in big political trouble, so he has to make an explicit appeal to traditional British working-class voters. The funny thing is that these two groups are really the same sort of people. In the US, "middle class" means "middle income" – not the rich, or even highly educated professionals, but ordinary working people in skilled blue-collar or clerical white-collar jobs, or who run small businesses (such as "Joe the Plumber", who became John McCain's most famous supporter during the presidential race). But in Britain, "middle-class" means "bourgeois", with all the Marxist connotations, and it is as much a cultural as an economic classification. It is possible to be middle-class in one's tastes and attitudes (toward education, for example) and quite poor, or to be working-class in one's tastes and attitudes, and quite wealthy – a phenomenon that the British tend to find utterly hilarious.So the constituency that Mr Obama was addressing in his State of the Union address last week would, in this country, be regarded as lower-middle-class, or what used to be called "respectable working-class". It is important to understand this if one is to avoid confusion about what American politicians are actually saying when they refer to the problems of the middle class or to the need for "middle-class tax cuts".But there is an even more significant distinction between the British and American…

   Wikipedia and the Internet grow up The Internet is not as revolutionary as those who a preach a techno utopia might claim, but at least it's growing up, writes Andrew Keen.   Andrew Keen is @ajkeen on Twitter
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To celebrate the web’s 20th birthday, the BBC – never one to miss anniversary of an insurrectionary movement – is producing a major new television series entitled “The Digital Revolution”. Scheduled to be broadcast next year and featuring interviews with web revolutionaries such as Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales as well as reactionaries like myself, this four part BBC series is intended to be an “open and collaborative documentary” on the way in which the web is supposedly "changing our lives". The media here, of course, is designed to be the message. Ask any filesharing internet revolutionary what the web has achieved between 1989 and 2009 and the two words you’ll likely hear first will be “open” and “collaborative”. They will boast that all the progressive achievements of the internet – from social networks to Wikipedia to peer-to-peer “sharing” of information to crowd-sourced creative projects – have been built upon a culture of radical openness and collaboration.   Related Articles Why are artists poor? The Internet does not spread democracy Social Media and the physical world Rock star geeks and Facebook Twitter at the heart of real-time web innovation Google, the toothless Big Brother Given the undeniably subversive impact of the internet on our culture and economy, there’s no doubt that this classically Whiggish version of history contains more than a grain of truth. But for all the grandiose transformational promise of the digital revolution, I wonder if 2009 actually represents a watershed…