Among the offending powers the government seeks to grant itself are the power to ban newspapers, to jail journalists for writing unfavourably about it, and to ban foreigners from owning media companies in Zimbabwe.ZANU has a solid majority in parliament, not least because Mr Mugabe appoints a fifth of the members.
As with Snapchat, she doesn't use an Android device because one more device would be too much, though she tried to avoid offending any power users in the audience by stating that those with more than two phones must be doing real work.
Though Mr Livingstone has a high profile in the city partly thanks to his talent for offending people his powers are limited.
Then he swallows almost uncritically the conventional hogwash of partisan critics on both sides: that "the media" (as accused from the right) work in tireless pursuit of a liberal agenda, and that they have (as accused from the left) become docile house pets of the Bush administration because they fear offending the powers that be.
The blunt Hagel, a plain-spoken Nebraskan, has long exhibited a striking nonchalance about offending the powers that be: as the second-ranking official of the Veterans Administration during the Reagan administration, Hagel, a decorated Vietnam veteran (two Purple Hearts), brushed off warnings that he might lose his job if he refused to attack Maya Lin's stark Vietnam Memorial.
Most of all, however, they are the product of an art world in which people too often don't want to offend the powers that be for fear that they might not be invited back to the party.
Ms Zhang had apparently offended the powers-that-be with her previous writing about the sufferings of intellectuals, including her father, in the 1957 campaign.
Some hate the routine, many more love it, but even in as brash a sport as football it offends the powers that be.
Debbie Schlussel, the Michigan-based blogger and movie critic, was left to wonder whether she had offended the powers at Paramount Pictures when she learned last month that she had been cut from the studio's screening lists.
But your laid-back-ness and refusal to offend the powers that be in Washington can make us cringe--as it did last week when you redacted the United States from your torture manual.
