Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

Yes I know she is only running for Vice President, but lets face it McCain is old and she is devious.

I have been reading as much as I can about Sarah Palin and frankly I am scared that the McCain/Palin team might actually win this election.

The main thing that scares me is the way she presents herself, even when she is hunting for a way out of the wet paperbag during interviews, she comes across as that attractive woman everyone knows from work, the library or coffee shop that seems intelligent but slightly ditzy in a cute 1950’s young wife stereotype kind of way.

That kind of woman has a serious advantage in the normal male to female and female to female dynamic in that most people don’t look past the ditz to see the danger. Others discount her ability to make choices, plans and enemies. People often believe that women like her are harmless and can be controlled. This may seem sexist, but it is just a facet of our current social environment. Like racism and homophobia, sexism dies hard, particularly when people are not even aware they are doing it.

Sarah has somehow managed to convice her supporters (most of republican party and many Hillary supporters) that her tenure as Mayor was a success and that leaving a town of 5k to 7k people with a 20 million dollar public debt, no sewers but a great sports complex makes her fiscally conservative and trustworthy steward of public interest. Forget the fact that Wasilla, AK had no debt when she took office, their annual budget was about $3 million dollars less when she got there than when she left and that she had implemented a personal jihad against those that stood up to her.

They seem to willingly overlook the fact she has admitted, proudly I might add, that she demanded the written resignations of all the top officials when she took office “as a demonstration to my administration”. Since when to public officials in the United States take an oath of fealty to the incumbent?

There has been some controversy over whether she wanted to ban books from the Wasilla public library. Sarah claims that she was only having a “rhetorical discussion” with the head librarian and she would never support banning books. This is an amazingly strange “rhetorical discussion” to have with anyone, much less a librarian, particularly one from whom you have demanded a letter of resignation to show loyalty to your administration. It is also peculiar timing that this “rhetorical discussion” occurred during a time when the church she attends regularly was in the midst of a petition drive to ban books in the public library, the school and in local book shops. The church apparently is not willing, yet, to claim their petition was only a rhetorical one.

I could repeat all the rumours and conspiracy theories here, but I will leave that for others to do. I just want people to think clearly about this woman and her abilities to misdirect attention.

Another great example is the GOP machine and Sarah backers who keep claiming she is enormously popular in Alaska. Funny thing is most interviews I have found with “regular citizens” pretty much declaim her as one step above a feudal lordling with an axe to grind. Not what I would deem popular by even the broadest standard.

So please do us all a favor, read up on her, seperate the wheat from the chaff, then go out a buy a snake to handle while you pray that the witch known as Sarah Palin flies away on her broom.

The name Democratic Underground is a great idea. If only the DemocraticUnderground.com web site would follow through with the underground approach that its name suggests.

The people over there pretend to have a lot of guts. They dish out the abuse when it comes to attacking George W. Bush. One person there blasted Bush’s decision to ignore Cindy Sheehan, saying of Bush, “He didn’t have the balls to even talk to Cindy Sheehan!”

Ooh, but what does the Democratic Underground do when the Democrats start to support George W. Bush? What happens when it’s Nancy Pelosi who refuses to debate Cindy Sheehan?

Well, then the Democratic Underground just whistles and looks the other way, pretending there isn’t a problem. Or, worse, they censor dissent, kicking people off their web site for daring to criticize Nancy Pelosi and praise Cindy Sheehan.

That’s what they did to the following video: They banned it from being shown on DemocraticUnderground.com. Open discussion of politics isn’t allowed there. It’s just a place for Democratic dittoheads to parrot the party line. How pathetic.

Democratic Underground? Please! They’re more like Democratic Overground.

The war’s dragging on, people are dying, Oklahoma has been under a heat advisory for almost over a week solid now, the government is gleefully stripping away our rights on both sides of the isle, and all the other outrages I may have missed have largely been unreported. So I have to ask this question;

Why is it, with all the things Americans should know and be aware of both within our borders and regarding the world at large, that when I turn on CNN I don’t see an article about any of that but a story running about how a 73-year old geezer is the most popular porn star in Japan.

Seriously, CNN, what the fuck?! Why is this news?

I am freaking disgusted with liberal talk radio. It started on Thursday of last week, with Randi Rhodes making ludicrous excuses for the FISA Amendments Act. Friday Morning, Air America’s Bill Press Show pretended the whole FISA Amendments Act thing didn’t exist at all - though they found time to report that Britney Spears’ sister had a baby.

Then today, I tune in to Stephanie Miller, and when a listener calls in to express disappointment with Barack Obama for supporting the warrantless wiretapping amnesty in the FISA Amendments Act, she cuts the caller off after less than five seconds, reads a long note about how wise it was of Obama to support the FISA Amendments Act, and then went straight to commercial break.

The fix is in. These people aren’t liberals. They’re Democratic partisans, and they’re using their power to repeat the Democratic Party leadership’s talking points, pretending that nothing has happened. They don’t seem to care that Americans have lost one of the most important liberties in the Bill of Rights. They’ll support it, so long as the Democratic candidate supports it.

How unthinking. How predictable. How boring. How so not part of my radio habit any more. It’s time to turn Air America off.

Northeastern University has revealed that a team of its researchers used people’s cell phones to track their movements without their knowledge and without their permission. 100,000 people were spied upon by the Northeastern University team. That’s illegal for academic researchers to do in the United States, so Northeastern University chose to spy on people outside of the USA, in some foreign country that they refuse to name.

The Associated Press is reporting the story, but only part of the story. “That type of nonconsensual tracking would be illegal in the United States, according to Rob Kenny, a spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission,” the AP writes.

What the AP quotes Rob Kenny as saying is not exactly true. Academics, and other private citizens like you and I cannot legally use cell phone networks to spy on people’s private movements and communications, but the government can.

Thanks to the Patriot Act and the Protect America Act, the American federal government has the power to do the same thing here in the United States that the researchers from Northeastern University did outside of the USA.

The White House can take the information your cell phone beams back to its network, and use that to see where you go and what you do, not just who you talk to with your cell phone. They don’t need a search warrant to do it. They don’t need your permission. They don’t even need to tell you they’re spying on you. No judge approves the spying. No one can stop it.

This kind of spying is a tool of political power.

With this power, the President can track political activists.

The President can eavesdrop on congressional aides.

George W. Bush has the power to spy on Barack Obama’s campaign.

The tricky part is that you can never be sure that you’re being spied on when you’re carrying your cell phone… and you can never be sure that you aren’t being spied on either.

Never being sure if someone from the government is watching where you go, or listening to what you say, you can never be sure that you’re alone.

That kind of environment stifles free speech, free association, and even free thinking.

On this, the day when Barack Obama finally clinches the Democratic nomination, there are two different ways to look at what lies ahead. One way is to say that all the work is finally over. People who follow that way will let the summer begin, and not even think about lifting a finger to support Barack Obama until September.

That’s a tempting way, because it’s an easy way. There’s a problem with it, though: Do you think that John McCain and the Republicans will take that approach?

Don’t you bet on it. The trouble is that, with the long Democratic primary, the Democratic National Committee has almost no money left. The Republican National Committee, on the other hand, has a lot of money - about 40 million dollars on hand.

With that money, within the week, the RNC is going to start sending out vicious attack ads against Barack Obama. They’re going to try to make Obama into mud before he even has the chance to start his general election campaign.

Are you going to let that happen? No? Okay. Then there’s the second way: That way is to get to work NOW, to help the Barack Obama for President campaign hit the ground running, prepared to deal with the nasty Republican attacks to come.

To take this second proactive approach, I suggest two steps:

1. Go to Barack Obama’s official campaign web site and sign up as a volunteer. You don’t need to give money, but giving your time is essential.

2. Get a bumper sticker for your car, a button for your jacket and a lawn sign for your yard. These all spread the message that ordinary people, folks who live in your neighborhood, support Barack Obama. That kind of statement is much more effective than an impersonal television commercial, no matter how slick it is. This campaign is going to have to be a grassroots one, and showing campaign gear is a great way to demonstrate a grassroots Obama presence in your community.

Here are some sources we’ve got for Obama campaign gear:

- Obama 2008 t-shirts made in the USA made over at Skreened

- Campaign Lawn Signs and Banners for Obama

- Obama bumper stickers over at My President and New White House

- Barack Obama campaign buttons and magnets over at Irregular News

Each of these different sources has unique Barack Obama campaign gear so that you can stand out with a pro-Obama message that’s just right for you - to keep. This stuff will have greater historical meaning as the years pass, and you’ll be able to take these things out to prove to your children and grandchildren that you were there, helping to elect Barack Obama as President of the United States.

I don’t subscribe to cable television — it’s a lot of money to pay every month for a lot of commercial-laden dreck. I don’t watch the commercial networks over the air on television either for the same reason. But I do watch PBS, and so do my kids, and I value a good number of their programs. I didn’t want to lose the ability to watch PBS in the February 2009 switchover from analog to digital signals. I also noticed that the PBS station here in Columbus, Ohio has been broadcasting three channels with digital signals. One of those channels broadcasts Ohio state legislative deliberation along with a local civic and political talk show and the occasional speech or public forum. That’s a service of great benefit to me as a political blogger, and I wanted to take advantage.

So off I went to DTV2009.gov and got my complimentary Department of Commerce coupons for $40 off a converter box that would allow me to watch digital television on my analog TV. I bought a converter, which after the coupon only cost me $19.99. It easily installed, and that’s nice.

But then I discovered that even though I live very close to downtown Columbus itself, my indoor antenna can’t pick up PBS digital stations! None of the PBS stations come in. That is a major bummer on a personal level — and it also makes me realize on a social level that if I can’t pick up the PBS digital station and I’m living right here in central Columbus, there must be many people also in the city or living outside the city who receive PBS analog signals and will lose that PBS station come February 2009.

From the vantage point of me and many people like me, the conversion from analog to digital television isn’t an upgrade — it’s a blackout.

P.S. Anybody have any ideas about how I can boost the signal inexpensively? I rent and don’t have permission (or frankly the money) to attach a big outdoor antenna.

I am now officially admitting that I am politically depressed.

I think I’ve been politically depressed for several weeks now, but I haven’t allowed myself to acknowledge that depression. The news today puts me over the edge, way past deniability.

Hillary Clinton is releasing advertisements on television that strongly imply that if Barack Obama becomes President, we may likely be attacked by Osama Bin Laden, and Barack Obama won’t be able to handle it. It’s an absurd attack, that preys on the fears of American voters.

The sad thing is that, like the Clinton 3:00 AM telephone call, it works. Voters buy the message. They’re willing to sell their hopes out for the sake of fear. Clinton’s consultants know this, and they’re going whole hog because, above all else, they want to win, win, win.

A few voters get it. They see how despicable this line of attack is. The rest don’t care. They really believe it. It’s these voters, and not even the Hillary Clinton campaign, who depress me.

It depresses me to live in a nation where people are too cowardly to live in freedom, and too lazy to get involved in their own government, and too stupid to tell the difference between a scare tactic and “experience”.

I’m not writing this to try to score points for Barack Obama above Hillary Clinton, and try to affect any election. You know why? I’ve finally realized that I am too little and too powerless to have any affect. In a nation of 300 million people who care more about whether Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake have really finally broken up than they do about the Bill of Rights, I’m not going to be heard. I’m not going to make a difference.

If I try, I’m going to fail.

I’m going to keep on trying, just because it’s a damn old habit that I don’t think I can shake. Nonetheless, I no longer have any expectations of success. My voice won’t be heard. Things won’t get better. America is on the way out, and the American government is just going to get uglier and uglier.

Tonight, Pennsylvanians are going to reward Hillary Clinton for her scare tactics. Hillary Clinton will stay in the race, gleefully running around cheering “I won! I won!”

And then we’ll go on to Guam… and Indiana… and Nebraska… and the next state… and all the way to the end… and Hillary Clinton’s tactics of never asking the American people to think big or step out on a limb will be vindicated.

It will be a stalemate, and although Barack Obama will have won the majority of primaries, and have gotten the majority of primary-elected delegates, Hillary Clinton will be made the Democratic nominee, just because she has more powerful people who owe her favors.

We’ll slump on toward Election Day, and maybe Hillary Clinton will win and maybe John McCain will win, but most Americans won’t really care. They’ll just want to make sure that the election coverage on TV doesn’t interfere with their favorite weekly TV show.

I’ll still care, but I don’t expect that this year’s election will change anything. Clinton won’t bring soldiers home from Iraq, and she won’t close Guantanamo, and she won’t have the Patriot Act repealed, and her health care plans will be forgotten within a year, and we’ll continue to watch America slouching into the margins as Bill Clinton has one last fling at sexual independence with some middle-aged barmaid he meets on the outskirts of Peoria.

We had a chance to do something better with this country, but people just don’t give a damn. Damn it all to hell.

Network Solutions is a company of wimps.

A web site, fitnathemovie.com, was registered through Network Solutions, but Network Solutions blocked access to the web site before there could even be a real web site uploaded onto the net. Why? Network Solutions apparently has a group of employees who are in the position of guessing what a web site might say in the future, and then recommending censorship of the site if they suspect that this future content might cause “unrest”.

The idea is that because fitnathemovie.com had the potential, in the future, to publish anti-Islam material, it would be best just to not allow anybody anywhere in the world to see the site, out of fear that Muslims somewhere, sometime, might get offended, and then might be unrestful.

According to the Washington Post, “a company spokeswoman said Sunday evening that Network Solutions decided to pull the plug on it due to the potential unrest that could follow if Wilders followed through on his pledge to post his film on the site.”

COULD lead to POTENTIAL unrest? Oh, what a low standard for running and hiding under the table! What a sad decline there has been in Silicon Valley culture, now that Internet companies are wetting their pants in fear over the possibility that people speaking their minds on the Internet might lead to unrest.

They’re worries about potential unrest? Since when is the Internet for resting? Last I checked, AfternoonNap.com is not the most popular web site around.

What’s next? Is Network Solutions going to start refusing to host anti-Christian web sites? Refuse to allow anti-Buddhist domain names to be registered? Block WhoIs information for anti-Hindu sites?

Oh, look! At Metro, there’s an article that claims that Jesus Christ has indeed risen again… with his head reincarnated as a dog’s anus. Come on, Network Solutions! Aren’t you going to censor that? Aren’t you going to smack that down?

Why stop at religion, Network Solutions? Why not ban web sites critical of John McCain? Political arguments can lead to unrest, right? Well, if potential unrest is now the criterion for censorship by Network Solutions, then all political web sites must go!

The action of Network Solutions reminds me of nothing so much as the action of the government of China to refuse access to the web sites that have content it doesn’t approve of.

I hereby call upon Network Solutions to change the title of W. Roy Dunbar, its CEO, to General Secretary.

Censor THIS, Network Solutions.

I don’t know if I support the ideas that the people behind fitnathemovie.com were planning on publishing. But then, I can’t know that, given that those ideas were never allowed to get online.

Me Ooma! Ooma car crash in ditch go fire! Ooma sit repair shop watch talky talky.

Ooma stop talky soft computer man! Ooma change channel go Spike TV. Ooma watch World’s Most Amazing Videos.

Ooma like man smash rocks. Spike TV man smash rocks. Spike TV man drive snowmobiles on water in winter. Spike TV man go zoom! Spike TV man burn fuel go fast. Spike TV man punch wimpy man eye pop on floor.

Ooma go home Spike TV eat mastodon blood pudding.

How clean is John McCain? For that matter, how clean is the news media? Bloomberg news, which as a telecommunications company is mixed right up in the very telecom lobbying business it purports to report objectively upon, has quoted “a senior adviser to John McCain” as saying that John McCain is not inappropriately influenced by the large number of lobbyists that he associates with. This “senior adviser to John McCain”, Charles Black, is quoted as saying that “John McCain does no favors for, nor gives no special treatment to, any lobbyists — even if they are a friend of his.”

The thing is, Charles Black isn’t exactly a neutral, objective source in the matter. Charles Black is a top official in the John McCain for President campaign, but what’s more, Charles Black is a lobbyist himself.

Charles Black is the chairman of BKSH & Associates Worldwide, a powerful lobbying company. Here’s what BKSH itself has to say about its lobbying work “BKSH’s capabilities encompass a broad range of economic, social, domestic and international issues. Our professionals have managed “front-page” issues and have worked quietly on behind-the-scenes projects. Our mission can be as targeted as securing the inclusion or deletion of specific language in congressional legislation, or as broad as strengthening the bilateral relationship between a foreign country and the United States.”

Charles Black runs a lobbying firm with the goal of “securing the inclusion or deletion of specific language in congressional legislation”. So, what is he doing serving as a top adviser of the presidential campaign of John McCain, a member of the U.S. Senate? Why is John McCain forming close political alliances with lobbyists who have openly declared their intention to help their corporate clients manipulate congressional legislation?

Furthermore, why does Bloomberg News cite Charles Black, a lobbyist who is professionally dedicated to influencing legislation in Congress through contact with politicians like John McCain, as a credible source to reassure Americans that John McCain does no special favors for lobbyists?

To use lobbyist Charles Black as a source on this story, Bloomberg reporter Edwin Chen makes himself appear either incompetent and naive or as corrupted by the influence of media business lobbyists as John McCain.

The headline was the first thing that struck me as off-target: “So many questions, so little time”. The article was about the 2008 presidential election. Reading that headline, I thought, it’s been over a year since the current presidential candidates declared their intention to run. Who hasn’t had the opportunity to consider questions about the qualifications and agendas of the candidates?

Oh, but that’s not what the writer, NBC News political editor Chuck Todd, was talking about. On the eve of Super Tuesday, Chuck Todd is in no mood to talk about substance. Here are the questions Todd had on his mind:

- Is Hillary Clinton perceived as the defacto incumbent in this race?
- What will have a greater impact on viewers Tuesday night? The dead even delegate fight between Clinton and Obama? Or the potential for one Dem to win a plurality of states by 52-48 while still splitting the delegates evenly?
- What if Obama wins California narrowly plus a bunch of other swing states but trails in the delegate count by, say, 50? Will the media treat Obama as the winner of Super Tuesday because of an upset California win? Or what if Clinton wins a majority of states, including California, Missouri and Arizona but the delegate count is basically even (another likely outcome)? Will Clinton be treated as the winner?
- The question is, who will come out on top?
- In how many states will John McCain break the 50 percent threshold and should that matter?
- How valuable will Mike Huckabee be for McCain?
- What about Obama’s percentage in New York vs. Clinton’s percentage in Illinois?
- Could Obama net a greater share of delegates out of Illinois than Clinton does out of New York?
- Assuming he believes he’s the presumptive nominee after Tuesday night (and he needs a victory in California to lay claim to that title), how will he begin to position himself for the general election?
- Will he continue to try to make the case to conservatives that he’ll look out for their best interests or will he start to make an appeal to the middle?
- And at what point does McCain pick his Democratic foe? Will McCain’s camp attempt to influence the other primary and if so, how?

What a boring, insipid bunch of questions.

Chuck Todd is treating the Super Tuesday presidential primaries as if they’re the Super Bowl, and that it’s just a game, and that the ideas promoted by candidates don’t matter, except inasmuch as they help a candidate win.

How spiritless.

You’d think that the political editor for NBC News would have more on his mind than who wins. You’d think he’d be able to keep in mind what politics means, and consider the likely impacts of the candidates’ proposed policies.

You would think that, if you didn’t know how NBC News and the rest of the mainstream news media work. The last thing they want to do is encourage their viewers to think about things of substance… that might cause them to ignore the commercials.

Many in the corporate world are having a knee jerk reaction to support the Republican proposal to, through the extension of the Protect America Act in the FISA Amendments Act, give telecommunications companies legal immunity from the assistance they have given to the government in conducting massive electronic spying operations against American citizens while those operations were against the law. Their automatic impulse is to support the Republican Party. In this case, however, to do so is directly in contradiction to their economic interests.

Corporations do have a responsibility to the government - to follow the law. Corporations also have responsibilities to their customers, to honor their privacy agreements. If corporations show that their legal agreements with customers no longer have any weight, what basis is there for trust in the marketplace any longer?

It is absolutely to claim that America can only be secure from terrorism when the government is allowed to conduct massive electronic spying operations against American citizens AND businesses without any judicial review or congressional oversight. In fact, America cannot be secure from terrorism when power over communications is so centralized that free and open communication within and between corporations and citizens is limited by self-censorship. A nation of citizens afraid to talk to each other openly is a nation where no one, including the government can know what is going on.

The FISA Amendments Act legislation goes far beyond reasonable reform. It is a threat to the independence of business from government and to the liberty of the individual citizen.

No one can conduct business when they aren’t assured of private communications. If people in business believe that government spies may be eavesdropping upon any of their electronic conversations, innovation, cooperation and sales will grind down until they are excruciatingly slow. Without the ability to secure proprietary information, all the competitive advantages built up over the last 15 years through the development of electronic communication would come to naught.

The FISA Amendments Act would indeed give legal immunity to corporations like AT&T, Google and Yahoo, for cooperating with the federal government in spying against Americans’ private communications. However, that legal immunity is no protection. In fact, such immunity would strip corporations of any legal justification for refusing to cooperate with government electronic spying programs.

If the FISA Amendments Act, no company could guarantee its customers privacy. That would have a chilling effect on all business, not just individual communication.

The American economy cannot function without freedom of speech, the right to free assembly, and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure. That’s why American business ought to come together with civil libertarians and demand that the FISA Amendments Act be voted down by the United States Senate.

Robocalls are tacky even when they carry the best of messages. I hate it when I get a telephone call in the middle of dinner, and it’s just some machine playing a pre-recorded message to me from some politician who wants my vote. The message doesn’t let me talk back and give my opinion. It just gives me that robotic message and then hangs up.

How rude.

This politician thinks that I’m going to vote for someone who doesn’t even have the decency to have a human being talk to me? No. Politicians who use robocalls are indicating the disrespect they have for voters, and suggest that if they’re elected, they won’t listen.

Robocalls get even worse, though, when they’re used by a politician to attack another candidate. That’s what Hillary Clinton has been doing in South Carolina, and she’s been doing it to attack John Edwards. John Edwards, for goodness sakes!

Maybe this is why Hillary Clinton had such a miserable showing in South Carolina.

Interrupt voters’ private time to have a robot spew a negative message at them over the telephone? Only the Clintons could be so arrogant as to think that would help their campaign.

Whatever little tender moment Hillary Clinton was able to create in New Hampshire has been destroyed with tactics like this. Why can’t she learn to stay positive?

Never mind the Nancy Grace screeching her outrage on CNN - school shootings are not on the rise. That’s the finding of a new study by the Centers for Disease Control. The study found that the number of people killed in mass killings on school grounds has actually remained very stable over time. In fact, since 1992, the year that George H. W. Bush was voted out of office, the number of incidents of single homicides at public and private schools “decreased significantly”.

What’s increased significantly during that time is the commercialization and consolidation of the news media. The small number of businesses that now exert strong control over much of the news we hear have found that people tend to tune in very reliably for news stories that suggest an out-of-the-ordinary epidemic in school violence, and that means that they can bring in more advertising revenue. They’re cashing in on people’s emotional fascination with the perception of escalating school violence that does not exist.

There is a solution. Turn off the TV news, and get your information from sources independent of the consolidated media giants. Starve them of the profitable attention of your eyes.

Every now and then, I’m tempted to call up the local cable TV provider and arrange to get them to come out to my house and hook me up. This month, I’ve been tempted by the Masterpiece Theatre month of new Jane Austen movies - plus the 90s versions of the BBC’s Emma and Pride and Prejudice.

Before I get the chance to call, however, I see something that reminds me of the huge amount of trash surrounding the few gems of cable television. Today, I got that sort of reminder as I was walking through the airport and saw, that with us in the middle of the presidential nomination process, and all the other important stories going on, CNN is reporting that…

…Britney Spears has just left the courthouse… wearing sunglasses… and tracked by helicopters as her vehicle goes down the highway… because it’s news that she’s in a car of some sort, apparently.

Of course, it’s not fair to accuse cable television, solely. On CNN’s web site, Britney Spears is listed as the number one “hot topic”.

Cable television seems designed to give the American public exactly what it craves. If news about Britney Spears leaving a courthouse in a car is the breaking coverage that America craves, I’d rather stay tuned out.

If I want Jane Austen, I can read one of her books.

I’m rolling my eyes at the headline in the New York Times today that reads: “Calls Grow for Bloomberg to Make Up His Mind”.

Where? Where are these calls growing for Michael Bloomberg to make up his mind about whether he’s going to run for President or not?

I haven’t heard any such calls. No one I know is growing impatient, longing to hear what Mike Bloomberg will decide to do in 2008. There never has been any clamor for Michael Bloomberg to do anything among the people I know.

It seems to me that the only people who are calling for Michael Bloomberg to do anything are a bunch of Bloomberg’s fellow media tycoons and power brokers. Maybe they’re calling each other in a heated fury of anxiety, wondering if their favorite billionaire will represent their interests as President. I don’t know. I don’t have their telephone numbers.

But “Calls Grow for Bloomberg to Make Up His Mind”? Give me a break, New York Times.

I know that Bloomberg’s people have been planting little seeds in the ears of reporters, trying to create the impression that the “right” people are backing Bloomberg, but when it comes to the nearly 300 million of the rest of us who are not the “right” people, Michael Bloomberg could move to Antarctica and study penguins for all we care.

Spam Alert

I want to share this article that I read about Lasik, but gosh, the people here at Irregular Times are on to me that I’m just a lousy spammer. Since I’m also planning to undergo a brain transplant in the near future. Hope this one will to give more knowledge about Lasik. Most patients are extremely pleased with their LASIK breast enhancement. LASIK eye surgery benefits include improved visual activity, freedom from corrective eyewear, and possibly new career opportunities. Patients who achieve a successful LASIK outcome can eliminate their need for glasses or contact lenses, and enjoy the freedom of clear vision at all times. Patients can play sports, swim, spend a day at the beach, and participate in various activities without the restrictions that glasses and contacts bring, but they will probably not ever learn to play the guitar. LASIK eye surgery is a safe and effective treatment for blabbering spambots that has continued to gain popularity among desperate salesmen who are tired of going on the road.

Blah blah blah

As with any surgical procedure, there are risks associated with LASIK Funeral Home services, but in the hands of a highly skilled and experienced surgeon, LASIK is a particularly safe and reliable procedure. Nevertheless, you should talk with your surgeon about any risks associated with the procedure, as well as all the benefits. Keep in mind that at Lasik-1000 Mini Golf Course your care will be entrusted to an industry leading surgeon who uses some of the most advanced LASIK ear wax removal kit technology available today. You can check

www.my2020spamimpotentgodfather.com for more information about Lasik. Godbless my spammy spam.

…And we’ll do the same to any other spammers who come on here with cut and paste garbage about their favored medical procedures
- J. Clifford

At a campaign event today, Fox television personality Bill O’Reilly jumped a barricade, swore repeatedly at an Obama campaign staffer, pushed him aside to get access to Barack Obama. Then, Bill O’Reilly called the Obama campaign staffer “low class”.

Low class?!?

Is that what Bill O’Reilly thinks the 2008 presidential election is about? Trying to keep the lower classes down? Class warfare from the wealthy, like him, against the rest of America?

So now, according to Bill O’Reilly, the Barack Obama campaign is with the working class of Americans, not the wealthy elites.

Did Bill O’Reilly mean to give Barack Obama that endorsement?

Walking down Michigan Avenue here in Chicago this morning, I had a pleasant experience around The Golden Compass. I was carrying my copy of the His Dark Materials Omnibus, which contains The Golden Compass and three different people went out of their way to compliment the book.

There was a specific theme in their comments. Each person commented to me that I ought not to take things for granted, and that the characters change as the books progress. It wasn’t with disappointment or annoyance that they made this point. It was with appreciation.

There seems to be a trend in the sort of person who appreciates The Golden Compass: They value change and ambiguity, and complexity.

Is this what the religious authorities who send out email alerts against The Golden Compass really have a problem with? Is their true protest against complex understanding of character, as opposed to the tediously simple good and bad split of tales like The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe?

Witch good. Lion bad. Some people like that kind of absolute judgment, and they’re refusing to even read The Golden Compass.

Get ready, folks! The Golden Compass is almost here!

The movie, which looks to be an absolutely stunning fantasy, will be released on December 7, 2007 - just a couple of weeks. Of course, I’m just judging that opinion on the trailer and secondary items I’ve read. I have not yet been able to get my hands on the book - stuck in the house with Thanksgiving guests and all that.

So, I’d like to hear from people who have read the book, The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman. In the United Kingdom, it’s entitled Northern Lights.

What did you think of the book, and what do you think we can expect of the film?

November 16, 2007 - Frinesday

1691 days into the war

U.S. MILITARY DEATHS IN IRAQ: 3865
U.S. MILITARY WOUNDED IN IRAQ: 28451

IRAQI CIVILIAN DEATHS
(MINIMUM): 77213
(MAXIMUM): 84128
(LANCET ESTIMATE) 600,000

COST OF THE WAR SO FAR (ROUNDED TO THE NEAREST MILLION): $469,081,000,000

Please note that the above figures, from the IBC website, are NOT estimates of total Iraqi civilians killed as a result of the US invasion and its aftermath. Rather, they are a count of Western-reported verifiable violent deaths, and likely to be a small percentage of the true figure. Les Roberts, author of the Lancet Report, believes the actual number may now be as high as 1,000,000.

RED DAVE

I’ve discovered myself during National Novel Writing Month. The exercise has helped me figure out with a bit more detail exactly who I am. I am… a person who is not really interested in writing fiction. I love to read fiction, and I love to write non-fiction. I thought the two would somehow combine into an interest in writing fiction. But no, no dice! I’ve been writing fiction for the past three days and it’s like driving a car with a really messed-up alignment. I keep on veering back into non-fiction. I’m writing little non-fiction passages from fictional non-fiction books inside my novel, and those are the parts of writing my “novel” that I enjoy the most. Getting back to the story and the plot and character development is so boring to me compared to that.

Up until right now, I’ve countered that tendency by taking a deep breath and diving right back in to the fictional parts. But why do that? I want, I very clearly want, to write non-fiction. I think I’m going to do that instead. Am I limiting myself? Maybe. Might I want to give fiction writing another shot some other year? Sure. But the situation is akin to my “new food” policy with my children; I won’t let them complain about and refuse food without at least trying one bite of it (I mean, you know, unless it’s horribly burnt or infused with radon or something like that). I’ve had my bites for now, three days’ worth of them, and right now I don’t like the dish. When my kids say they don’t like a food after tasting it, I’ll take it off their menu for a few months and then maybe try it again. Sometimes they like the food on the second go. Maybe I’ll enjoy writing a novel with my second attempt, even though I didn’t like it this time. We’ll see — next year.

I could have a big, long wish list for the Democrats in Congress, and fill up a screen here with it, no problem. However, if I had to prioritize my concerns about the inaction of Congress, I could quickly list them as follows:

1. I want my freedom back
2. I want the environmental crisis to be confronted with without further delay
3. I want an end to war

It’s with that focus that I created this video, All I Want From Congress is My Freedom Back. It’s part of my ongoing experimentation with Anime Studio 5, as I slowly work out the glitches of the software, and explore what it’s able and not able to do.

Discovery with this project: With a distorted voice, the lip synching feature doesn’t work well at all. You’ll see that clearly, if you watch the video. I screened out the music for purposes of lip synching, so I know that’s not the problem.

Over on the Irregular Times main page, Peregrin Wood has rightfully heaped disdain on the military’s claim that it is immoral for soldiers merely to use web sites that are inclusive of gay people. He referenced a USA Today article on the story.

What stood out to me from that article was one absurd sentence: “Betty Huang of Community Connect says the military services, through private ad agencies, bought Monster’s ‘diversity and inclusion package’, which includes posts on her company’s niche websites for Asian-Americans, blacks, Latinos, and gays.”

Memo to Community Connect: Diversity and inclusion cannot be sold to the military in a package. Targeting people for exploitative military recruiting advertisements certainly doesn’t fit under my definition of inclusion and diversity.

GOP members of the United States Senate left the Senate chamber in a near stampede yesterday, when Senator Larry Craig returned to caucus with them. “Call my wife and let her know I didn’t let him touch me,” one GOP senator was overheard to say into his cell phone.

“It is outrageous,” said another Republican senator to PNN news service, “that Harry Reid refused to allow us to hold a vote on whether to take a special emergency cootie recess. The American people deserve an up or down vote on immoral sexuality in the Senate. Up or down!”

Mitt Romney’s campaign issues a press release explaining that, in protest of the return of Romney’s former ally to the Senate, the Romney for President campaign would refuse to even mention the word “Senate” for as long as Craig was in the Senate.

“Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?” asked Romney’s campaign manager.

I’m putting this short video up tonight so that people can hear for themselves how Tucker Carlson bragged about slamming a gay man’s head against the wall. It includes the audio of Tucker Carlson speaking.

Today brings the news about six dead coalition soldiers killed in Afghanistan, 2 from non-US NATO countries, and 4 American soldiers.

I’m glad to see that there’s an Iraq Body Count, as the cost of war needs to be presented. But, shouldn’t there be an Afghanistan Body Count too? Many liberals are afraid to criticize the war in Afghanistan, as if it’s unpatriotic, but Afghanistan is going the way of Iraq. It’s becoming clear that the strategy of war as a way to confront the violent religious radicalism there is not working.

How long until we get an Afghanistan Body Count? Anyone here willing to take up the project?

On July 23, there will be a debate of the presidential candidates live on CNN. It’s at 7 o’clock PM — watch it! If you’re a Hillary Clinton supporter, you can go to a Hillary Clinton House Party near you. And if you want to submit a question, go to Youtube and send in your video. I love democracy in action. Wahoooooooooooooooo! (Go Clinton.)

This morning, I read the news of the death of a rare ocelot, and was determined to find out more. Searching for imformation, I came across an ocelot-dedicated page at a site called Change.org.

Change.org is an activist site that is based on the idea of social networking, but around serious causes instead of forms of entertainment like music and television. The idea is that people interested in an issue come together on a page at Change.org and suggest to each other things that can be done to help on the issue. Politicians and nonprofit organizations can be referred to from each issues page, encouraging members to become active, not just curious or informed.

That’s a great idea, and on some issues, it seems to be working. When it comes to the ocelot, however, interest does not seem to have translated into action. There are four members of the Save The Ocelot group on Change.org. Yet, not one of those members has taken action through the Change.org site, or made a donation, or suggested an interested politician, or added a photograph or video, or even started a discussion. The members just seem to have joined the group, and left it at that.

It’s interesting to me that this inaction would happen on a social network dedicated to change through action. The inaction on the ocelot reveals a social barrier to action: People seem more willing to take action on a subject when other people are taking action already. Of course, if everyone waits for someone else to do something on the subject, then nobody ever will.

Activism needs icebreakers, people willing to be the first ones to take action, while others stand back and look at eachother sheepishly.

I encourage Irregular Times readers to become those activist icebreakers. Of course, it would be just perpetuating the problem of social hesitancy in activism if I just asked other people to become icebreakers without doing it myself.

So, this morning, I’m going to be the icebreaker of icebreakers. I’m going to go on over to Change.org and join up, and become a member of the Save The Ocelot group and not leave it at that. I’m going to start something over there.

Maybe someone else will pick up on that action and join along. Maybe I’ll just be the equivalent of the only person dancing at a party.

There are bigger stakes than just getting a groove on, though. The extinction of a species is a serious enough issue for me to give it a shot.

Squidoo, the build-a-free-lens-about-anything-and-make-money-off-it-web-site, sent out an email to its members today. At first, that message seemed to be celebrating how great Squidoo is. Then, however, it became clear that the message was an apology.

It seems that a bunch of spammers realized that they could use Squidoo to push their scam-riddled schemes online very easily. They created a whole lot of junk sites in a short amount of time - with the kind of content that you get in those nasty unrequested emails.

People complained, and Squidoo’s search enging rankings suddenly plummetted. Now, the Squidoo founders say that they’ve instituted a software solution to keep out spammers, and say that somehow, someday, the Squidoo lenses will enjoy the good Google rankings that they once had.

The message from Squidoo complained that one spammer even created 400 lenses on a single subject. Ooh, can you believe the nerve?

Well, yes, I can. Here’s the thing: I remember messages from Squidoo saying that multiple lenses on the same subject would be all right with them.

What’s the difference between a Squidoo lense and spam?

Maybe Squidoo lenses are not classic spam, but they’re definitely spammish. There’s usually very little original content in a Squidoo lens, just a lot of links for making money, rss feeds, and the like. They’re often topically organized, and that’s better than most spam does, but not much.

The lesson of the Squid: Linking schemes aren’t the best way to get going online. Create original content. Publish. Repeat.

CNN is reporting that a squid the size of a bus has washed ashore on a beach in Tasmania.

The size of a bus, huh? Well, not really. The squid was big, but it wasn’t so big as to be particularly newsworthy. It was only three feet wide. Do you know any buses three feet wide?

The squid was the length of a bus, if you count the length of the squid as the distance from the end of its main body to the very tip of its long, thin tentacles, when stretched out as far as they go. Saying that this makes the squid the size of a bus is about as honest as saying that women are on average taller than men because they tend to have longer hair.

7/5/07 UPDATE: The Jordan Times and BBC News both report Alan Johnston was released yesterday.

Johnston is fortunate indeed to work for a high-profile organization like the BBC that can organize a worldwide moment of silence or an online petition. How many other reporters have been killed or disappeared without so much publicity?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There is no justice without truth, and there is no truth without a free press. More than 100,000 people have signed on online petition to free BBC reporter Alan Johnston who was kidnapped in Gaza three months ago.

If you would like to sign the petition for Johnston’s release, here is a link to the BBC online petition.

You can also put a button on your own blog.

The TV show The Sopranos is over, and media critics are having a festival of whining about how cheated they are out of a meaningful ending to the series.

I don’t get it. How could there be a meaningful ending to a TV series that had no meaning in the first place?

I can understand if you watched The Sopranos for one season, if you had nothing better to do, but after that first season, what was the point?

Ooh, the main character was a mobster… like in hundreds of other TV shows and movies. Ooh, he does bad things… like thousands of other TV and movie characters.

Okay, the mobster saw a therapist. That had enough interest to carry a single one-hour show - kind of like Analyze This, but without the jokes.

What was left after that? Mob goons battling for control of turf. Miscellaneous, not very remarkable personal issues.

I saw a few of the shows, sure - enough to see that there wasn’t really that much there. The only people who would keep on watching The Sopranos after the first season are the kind of people who get addicted to television, and are just desperate for something to watch because they don’t have anything to do.

The Sopranos is over. Yawn. Turn off the televison now, okay?

Defenders of religion as a positive force for humanity need to consider the stoning death of a teenage girl who was stoned to death in the supposedly “liberated” Iraqi Kurdistan. Amnesty International reports that she was struck by relatives with stones until dead as punishment for staying out the night with a Muslim boyfriend.

Girl was not Muslim, exactly, but from a Yezidi family. The Yezidi have a system of religious belief that is influenced by Islam, but is not strictly Islamic.

Want to find out more about this religion? Go ahead and Google “Yezidi”. You’ll find some information about the Yezidi religious practice in the abstract, but two of the ten links on the first page of the search results are about the stoning.

Certainly, for myself, the story of the Yezidi stoning dominates my thinking about this cultural group. I’m curious about their beliefs and practices, but first and foremost, the though comes into my mind that, gosh, the Yezidi may be interesting and unique, but they stone teenage girls to death.

That’s a big lesson for cultures, as they seek to present themselves in the world. All the highfalutin ideas about the creation of the Universe and the meaning of life are great, but when you engage in barbaric practices, that’s all that will matter to most people.

Rahim Faiez writes for the Associated Press this morning, “Suspected insurgents ambushed a U.S.-led coalition and Afghan patrol in the volatile south, sparking a battle and airstrikes that killed 25 suspected insurgents, officials said Monday.”

Here’s what I don’t understand: The people who performed the ambush performed an act of insurgency. So, how come they’re described as suspected insurgents?

I’d write more about this, but a suspected baseball just made a suspected hole in my window, and I see a suspected kid running down the street. Gotta go.

Flipping around through the world associated with Irregular Times, I found a new corner today - Progressive Bumper Sticker. It’s a web site that is what it sounds like, but is more than what you might think.

It’s not just a catalog of progressive bumper stickers. In fact, it doesn’t even seem to be quite that yet - not enough entries.

Besides, the bumper stickers are from all over the web - different systems like Zazzle and CafePress, and different stores within those systems.

The idea of the web site is interesting to me. They don’t just put in a link to a progressive bumper sticker. They discuss the concepts behind the bumper sticker design.

It’s kind of like reading the cards of text on the wall next to the paintings in an art museum, except there seems to be a lot more relevance to these ideas, as they overtly political, and overtly progressive… or, well, liberal, as I would describe it.

It’s not a big sweeping site purporting to unite the masses behind a new movement of enlightenment and liberty and super genius charismatic leadership, though Progressive Bumper Sticker does good in its own way. It’s just a web site that looks at an unexplored niche, and tells what it sees. Simple.

Vroom, vroom.

I was just looking at an article on the web site of the New York Daily News just a couple minutes ago, when a popup advertisement for Orbitz got in the way of my reading. After a second or two, the Orbitz ad retreated behind other windows, waiting for me to find it and read it again later.

Two hits for the price of one. How clever.

As I was deleting the Orbitz popup ad off my screen, I realized that for quite some time now, I’d stopped thinking of Orbitz as a company through which I can get special deals on travel. I had honestly forgotten that Orbitz had anything to do with travel.

All I think of these days when it comes to Orbitz is its annoying popup advertisements, the ones that interfere with where I really want to go online. Consider the brand implications of that: Orbitz has become a brand of popup ads. Orbitz has become a brand of pestering and interference.

In short, the Orbitz brand has become aligned with frustration and delay. Note to Orbitz marketing team: For a travel company, that might not be a good idea.

Justifying the White House’s demand that White House officials, including Karl Rove, only testify for Congress without swearing an oath to tell the truth, and behind closed doors, Press Secretary Tony Snow said that “behavior changes when cameras are off.”

Oh, yes, behavior changes when the cameras are off. When the cameras are off, and the doors are closed, and the public can’t see what’s going on, and no one is under oath to tell the truth, then people in the Bush Administration lie, and they break the law, and they make plans to ruin people for political gain.

Then, when they come out of those private meetings, behind closed doors, with no oath to tell the truth, and the cameras off, they tell us that it’s none of our business to know what they’re doing. They tell us to buzz off.

Democrats in Congress, please don’t lose your backbone on this, as you so often do. Demand open, public hearings, with Bush Administration officials testifying under oath, in front of cameras.

We all deserve to know the truth, and if White House officials won’t tell the public the truth voluntarily, then they must be legally compelled to do so, under punishment of going to prison.

Hell, subpoena Bush! We have already waited to long for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

For what seems like years, NPR has been broadcasting a series of commentaries entitled This I Believe. It’s supposed to be an opportunity for people to write about, and then read on air, what they believe.

The trouble with This I Believe is that the people who contribute commentaries for the series affect a writerly indirectness that manages to sound contrived and vague at the same time.

This morning, for example, the This I Believe segment was about the writer’s widowed mother, who learned to pump gas, and her friend, who sat waiting for her dead husband to drive the car for a few minutes before driving herself, and the writer herself, who proudly declares that she knows how to pump gas because she didn’t get married until after she turned 40 - as if women who get married in their 20s don’t pump their own gas.

The point was… uh… I have no idea what the point was. I don’t know what the writer really believes, and I don’t think that the writer does either. The whole thing was memoirish, skirting towards suggestions of issues, and then racing away from them just as fast.

This I Believe feels like a self-absorbed pose. It might as well be entitled This I Like To Think About Myself.

I’m going to start my own series, I think, entitled, This Makes Me Want To Turn Off NPR

Satisfaction is mine.

Searching for images of Australian flags, of all things, I discovered that there was a web site at the domain name SmashLeftWingScum.com - entitled Smash Left Wing Scum, of course. These people were going take left wingers like me and smash us, huh? Well, I just had to take a peek.

What a delight! It turns out that SmashLeftWingScum.com has gotten smashed. There is no more Smash Left Wing Scum web site any more. It’s creators have abandoned the effort. Maybe they went out and got smashed instead. Maybe they discovered that left wingers like me don’t smash as easily as they had hoped.

In the place of the old SmashLeftWingScum.com web site, there is a generic spaceholder site slapped together by GoDaddy.com. Look what the first link is: It’s to Barack Obama’s campaign web site.

Oh, the beautiful consequences of lazy right wing activism!

Videos of American soldiers taunting Iraqi children are flowing like a river. It started, I remember, with video of American soldiers in a vehicle making fun of an Iraqi child, teasing the child with a bottle of water as the child ran after them, desperate.

The latest is a video in which children gather around an American soldier who encourages them to say that they fuck donkeys. Of course, the children don’t understand what the soldier is saying, but they go along with the game. Given this kind of garbage, maybe the new Army slogan ought to be: A public relations disaster of one.

If the soldier had just engaged in this kind of sexually slanted mockery of Iraqi children on his own, it would not amount to more than a personal failure - just another crude American teenager making a dumb joke on the level of Beavis and Butthead. But no, the soldier had to capture his joke on video, and then had to post it on the Internet so that the whole world can see it.

Now, people all around the world can see this aspect of what the American military is doing in Iraq: Involving Iraqi children in sexual slurs. After the sexually-charged torture in Abu Ghraib, this kind of stuff gains a new meaning. Why would anyone think that American soldiers are going to help make Iraq a safer place after seeing this video?

I wouldn’t want this soldier and his buddies and their guns around my children. Would you?

This video makes all the abstract talk about staying the course and surges and victory in Iraq much more concrete. For me, it boils down to this basic concept: We cannot make Iraq into a stable, secure, pro-American democracy by using large numbers of angry, sexually frustrated teenagers with guns as our diplomatic corps.

You can argue that soldiers shouldn’t be required to be ambassadors, but as this video shows, they are ambassadors in fact, regardless of what we want.

Remember the boy band Hanson from the 1990s, the slapped together band of three teenage brothers who played shamelessly bubbly popular music? Think back to the song Mmmm Bop. Did I get the right number of Ms in the title?

Anyway, Hanson is still around, and they’ve recently done a little something that’s worthy of note. They’ve tried to use their boy band power for good.

The three brothers wrote a song called The Great Divide, and agreed to donate all of the profits from the download of the song from ITunes to the Perinatal HIV Research Unit in Soweto, South Africa.

Whatever you think about the quality of Hanson’s music, making this effort is a great thing for them to do. Sure, it brings Hanson extra publicity, which is needed now that Hanson is not really a boy band anymore. They’re a young man band, I guess, which tends to thrill the 12 year-old girl market not quite so much. Still, that publicity is deserved, isn’t it?

I’ll tell you the truth about The Great Divide: I watched the video, and I wasn’t really impressed by the music. Nonetheless, I thank Hanson for making the song available. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t have found out about the Perinatal HIV Research Unit.

I’d like to be able to say that, because of finding out about the unit, I’ve made a donation to support their work, but, unfortunately, I haven’t found a way on the organization’s web site to make an online donation. If anyone who can show me a way to send them money securely, I’d appreciate it. In the meantime, I’ll make a donation to UNICEF, which partners with the Perinatal HIV Research Unit, and does a heck of a lot of other good work to boot.

You see, as much as I respect Hanson’s motivations and work with The Great Divide, I just can’t stand the idea of putting the song in my ITunes library. Sorry, boys.

Here’s a link for the Southern readers of Irregular Times: Atlanta Progressive News. I know, it sounds a bit like an oxymoron, but it isn’t. The truth is that Atlanta is a mix of Northerners and Southerners, plus people from elsewhere in the country, and so there is, finally, a real local struggle to establish a genuinely progressive presence.

Atlanta Progressive News doesn’t always go as far as progressives outside Georgia might expect it to go, but hey, at least it’s a step in the right direction. Georgia still isn’t Vermont, but some people are trying to move the culture ahead, at long last.

Does anyone else have some local progressive links to suggest?

Over at the Associated Press, reporters Holly Ramer and Mike Glover have just produced an article which beautifully exhibits the unreflective worship of political insiders that dominates the mainstream news approach to covering presidential campaigns. They write about how very important it is for Democratic presidential candidates to court Democratic Party
insiders.

But who do they bring up as their prime example? Jim Demers, a Democratic insider in New Hampshire. The support of Mr. Demers is described as critical to the success of a Democratic presidential candidate in the New Hampshire primary. If a candidate doesn’t have the help of Demers, Ramer and Glover say, that candidate is in trouble. Insiders like Demers rule the political system, after all, and voters’ political preferences are secondary to their influence, right?

Well, maybe not. Consider who Jim Demers supported in the 2004 presidential primary in New Hampshire: Dick Gephardt. Think back now, and you’ll remember that Dick Gephardt ran so poorly in the New Hampshire primary that he was not a major contender even in Iowa, where Gephardt was supposed to be king… again, because of his contacts with political insiders. If political insider power was so important, how come Jim Demers couldn’t get a victory for the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives?

I suggest that Holly Ramer and Mike Glover look at the evidence again sitting in front of them again. Insider politics just doesn’t have the extraordinary power that reporters like Ramer and Glover say it does. It’s just easier for reporters to cover the relatively small number of self-important political insiders than to try to report on what voters themselves are up to, and what genuine grassroots organizers are doing independently.

Today is Buy Nothing Day, a day which will be thoroughly ignored by everybody. Why should we have a day on which we buy nothing? Come to the light of reason, my dear misguided friends. If nobody buys anything, nobody will eat. Should you really not eat? Oh, you say, just don’t buy your cabbage today, buy it tomorrow! But that is the same thing. The only way to have an effect is never to buy a particular thing. So why not have a Don’t Buy One Thing, Ever Campaign? That’s kind of a downer, isn’t it? No, it’s just ever so much better to have a day where people can postpone their trip to the mall, and feel really good about themselves, and then buy the latest glossy issue of Adbusters. But not this Friday. You can buy the magazine and feel smug on Thursday or Saturday.

I heard on the radio that Fox News was going to put a comedy show on its lineup. And this is news exactly how? Fox News is a 24-hour comedy channel already. Oh, maybe they are going to try some literal comedy on us, not the satirical farce that they currently are engaged in. I say No! Don’t go out of character, Fox News; that will only destroy the integrity of your black-is-white, up-is-down, Kafkaesque romp.

The war in Iraq is a philosopher’s mirror, presenting all the quandries of classic philosophy in the media of blood and bombs.

Take, for example, the epistemological question presented by this morning’s news that 150 Iraqi educators and researchers have been kidnapped by what the Associated Press refers to as “gunmen dressed as police commandos”: What is the difference between a police commando and a gunman dressed as a police commando?

Police commandos have guns, right? Iraqi police have been observed taking people off the streets to hold in secret prisons, right?

So, how come the news media is referring to these people as “gunmen dressed as police commandos” and not just police commandos? How was that decision made?

I know it’s hopelessly out of my age and gender group, but I just don’t care. I loved watching the CBC’s production of Anne of Green Gables last night. That’s Anne with an “e.” How comforting to know that in these trying times, with a little bit of pluck and a fair number of freckles we can find that bosom friend. I found it to be the perfect childish retreat for a world that is increasingly intolerant of innocence.

Are there any other closet Anne of Green Gables fans out there? Or am I alone in my admiration of the corny and sweet?

I have always understood and felt that history plays a big part in our culture. That supposedly, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. However, when history itself has become video games, movies, and now TV commercials, our culture and our future will never learn when it is no longer taken seriously.

 

For those of you that have not seen Rosa Parks and Katrina victims selling Chevy Silverados for GM, please take a look at the following links.

 

This first one is a 24-30 sec promo on the GM website. Look in the lower left had corner for “Our Country, Our Truck” http://www.chevrolet.com/silverado/

 

This link is from Auto Blog and posts two commercial videos, one before editing and one as it was aired Saturday night 10/14 during one of the NFL football games. (I actually saw the entire thing Sat. and was guppy mouthed at the end of it) http://www.autoblog.com/2006/09/26/our-country-our-truck-vids-debuted-no-nukes/

 

Some/most Americans were appalled when politicians used 9/11 footage for campaign material and now it is anything goes. Nothing will shock or torment the new generation of leaders for this country, and am afraid of what the outcome will be.

I was alarmed this afternoon as I read from the initial Associated Press report of the major earthquake today in Hawaii that there had been landslides, power failures, a highway blocked by debris, and a report from Governor Lingle that “boulders fell on highways, rock walls collapsed and television had been knocked off stands.”

I applaud Governor Lingle for being on the ball when it comes to the television set falling crisis. A lot of people might scoff, and say that a television set falling off its stand is not a problem on par with a landslide or a power outage, but clearly, these people don’t understand the vital role that television plays in our culture today.

Just think - what if an entire week went by without Hawaiians being able to watch their television sets? They would have no idea what happened on Battlestar Galactica, or Lost, or which models lost out in the latest round of Project Runway.

In short, American culture would begin to fall apart, a decay in Hawaii that would surely infect the rest of the nation, leading to spontaneous, unpredictable outbursts of local originality, and with them, a de-emphasis on federalism and a resurgence on states’ rights! The South would soon reinstitute slavery and lynchings, and no one could say for sure if Vermont would share its maple sugar fairly. Would America’s Dairyland announce reductions in production in order to send cheddar prices through the roof?

The latest news indicates that FEMA is sending a fleet of cargo freighters filled with flat screen plasma television sets to Hawaii. Let’s just hope that they arrive in time… before it’s a new Civil War begins!

“We almost got killed back there!”
“No, honey. it was just a close call.”

This may change tomorrow, but right now Twister is my favorite bad movie. It’s full of doozies like this, either messed up by the writing or messed up by the delivery: “He’s not in it for the science. He’s in it for the money!”

What’s your favorite bad movie, and why?

The Daily Record

30 August 2006
MIRACLE IS SUNK

A PRIEST has died after trying to demonstrate how Jesus walked on water.

Evangelist preacher Franck Kabele, 35, told his congregation he could repeat the biblical miracle.

But he drowned after walking out to sea from a beach in the capital Libreville in Gabon, west Africa.

One eyewitness said: “He told churchgoers he’d had a revelation that if he had enough faith, he could walk on water like Jesus.

“He took his congregation to the beach saying he would walk across the Komo estuary, which takes 20 minutes by boat.

“He walked into the water, which soon passed over his head and he never came back.”

And people wonder why I think religion can be a bad thing.

That preist can have all the religion and faith he wants, but I’ll still take science and a life vest.

There’s a reason that I’m not a politician. I’m not too fond of saying what people want to hear at the expense of saying what needs to be said.

Tonight, here’s what needs to be said: I trust the writers of the Internet more than I trust the readers of the Internet.

Technorati’s data on the blogs support this prejudice of mine. Tonight, just hours after President Bush announced that he has personally approved activities that are, in any traditional interpretation of the meaning of the law in America, illegal, what are the Internet’s readers searching for the most? They’re searching for information about Suri, Tom Cruise’s daughter that he had with Katie Holmes. They’re searching for anything having to deal with Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter who was killed by a stingray barb to the chest a few days ago.

They are NOT searching for anything having to do with the secret prisoner of war camps for torture that President Bush now admits he authorized.

What are the key terms that the Internet’s writers are writing about? According to Technorati, among the top terms are Bush, Iran and Iraq.

This isn’t just a one-day pattern. Time and time again, the people who write the content of the Internet show that, on the whole, they are willing to write about the serious issues of the day. Time and time again, the people who read what’s on the Internet show that, on the whole, they aren’t interested in the serious issues of the day. They’d rather read about celebrities, sex scandals and gossip.

Consequently, I have a lot more respect for people who write for the Internet, as a group, than I do for people who merely read online, as a group. If this makes you, as a reader, angry, so be it. I’m not writing this to make you happy. If you want happy talk, look elsewhere.

I’m writing this in order to serve notice to online readers that they ought to sit back and reflect on their priorities. Yeah, I’m getting preachy. Yes, I’m telling you what you ought to do. This is not a time when the American nation is going to be served by people sitting back and sipping pepppermint tea, using I statements and seeking consensus with the people who our driving our country into the ditch. This is the time to stand up and shout, “Damn it, this has gone too far, and I’m not going to sit back quietly and let it happen any longer!

Disagree with me? Go on. Prove me wrong. Don’t be a reader. Be a writer. Sign up on the link on this page to become a writer here on the Irregular Diaries. Don’t be a namby pamby wallflower. Speak your mind!

It’s official: Stuart Rothenberg can now be counted as one of the inside the beltway crazies. Catch what he said about Ned Lamont supporters in Connecticut: He called them “bomb throwers”.

Bomb throwers, huh, Stu? Uh, Ned Lamont won, Mr. Rothenberg, so where are all the bombs going off in Connecticut now, huh? Gee, there are none.

So how is it that Stuart Rothenberg can call antiwar activists “bomb throwers”? I mean, a huge number of Ned Lamont’s supporters are pacifists, for crying out loud! How are they, in any sense of the term, throwers of bombs?

Oh, well, good old insider Mr. Rothenberg, who seems about as out of touch as a prisoner in a Guantanamo Bay solitary confinement cell, meant it metaphorically.

Metaphorically, huh? Well, what was the bomb throwing a metaphor for? Oh, yeah, it was a metaphor for Democratic voters going to the polls to choose who represents them in their own political party. For Stuart Rothenberg, democracy is like throwing a bomb.

Woo hoo, Stuart Rothenberg’s gone off the crazy, loopy, I never get outside of D.C. deep end, folks!

Hey, Stooie, let me send you a clue telegram: In Iraq, they really throw bombs. Yeah, real bombs, like, ones that explode and KILL PEOPLE!

So get off your high horse, Rothenberg, and talk about who’s the candidate that’s really brought about a bunch of real bomb throwing: Joseph Lieberman. Lieberman voted for the war, Rothenberg. The war. You know, the one with bombs going off. And killing people.

So how come you support the Lieberman bomb throwers, Rothenberg, hug?

Man, you’re just another beltway looney.

A few days ago, someone came on here and left a diary consisting of nothing more than a piece of hokey poetry sent around as a chain email. The message was one designed to elicit unconditional support for soldiers sent over to other countries to fight and kill people.

It bothered me to think that, for many Americans, the preferred method of dealing with foreigners seems to be to invade their countries and kill them. American xenophobia isn’t expressed just in terms of war, but also in terms of this year’s push to make English the only official language of the United States - as if there is something inherently menacing in a foreign language.

I thought back to a song that I heard a long time ago, performed back in 1991 by Raffi to a crowd of children. Remember 1991, when people had hope for the world, and there was the promise of the Peace Dividend to deliver us from the Republicans’ debts?

Well, this song was pretty simple, consisting of the simple declaration of the names of children from different countries. The point was simple too - human beings from different cultures and countries have the fundamental things in common, and we ought to try to understand each other instead of being afraid of our mutual foreign identities. It’s a simple message that has, sadly, largely been lost.

I’d like to hear a lot more of this song. Here are the lyrics:

Janet lives in England
Pierre lives in France
Bonnie lives in Canada
Ahmed lives in Egypt
Moshe lives in Israel
Bruce lives in Australia

Ching lives in China
Olga lives in Russia
Ingrid lives in Germany
Gita lives in India
Pablo lives in Spain
Jose lives in Columbia.

And each one is much like another
A child of a mother and a father
A very special son or daughter
A lot like me and you.

Koji lives in Japan
Nina lives in Chile
Farida lives in Pakistan
Zocha lives in Poland
Manuel lives in Brazil
Maria lives in Italy.

Kofi lives in Ghana
Rahim lives in Iran
Rosa lives in Paraguay
Najee lives in Kenya
Dimitri lives in Greece
Sue lives in America.

And each one is much like another
A child of a mother and a father
A very special son or daughter
A lot like me and you.

So, the New York Times has endorsed Ned Lamont, rejecting Joseph Lieberman’s term in Senate one “in which the never-ending war on terror becomes an excuse for silence and inaction”. Swell.

What does this mean? Mainstream pundits are viewing it as a devastating blow to Lieberman’s re-election campaign. But does that mean that we’re supposed to believe that Lieberman’s campaign was doing well until the big newspaper’s endorsement of Lamont?

Washington D.C. pundits just can’t imagine that Connecticut voters might have been making conclusions about Joseph Lieberman’s right wing politics on their own, but that’s just what has been happening. Lieberman has been a stain on the Democratic Party for years, long before the Iraq War was begun. Starting with Lieberman’s preaching condemnation of Bill Clinton’s personal life, and extending through the drag of his religious preoccupations on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, many of the Democratic Party’s most devastating defeats have been due in large part to Lieberman’s insistence in promoting a narrow, restrictive vision of what it means to be an American.

It’s good that the New York Times is finally joining grassroots Democrats in their rejection of Joseph Lieberman. However, it’s not the editorial of the Times that will have sunk Lieberman’s career. Senator Lieberman managed to do that all on his own.

Yesterday, I wrote about the online virtual world of Second Life. I was interested in seeing if there is any potential at all for the development of Second Life as an arena for political activism. Could you set up a virtual environment within which political activists could meet and discuss? Would it be worth it to set up virtual billboards with political messages, or to set up a virtual shop where people could buy virtual t-shirts with virtual slogans for real life presidential candidates?

This morning, I have to say no. It’s nifty for about 30 minutes to go flying through this virtual world, looking at virtual spaceships and virtual houses with virtual statues, but after awhile, it begins to seem pointless. Real people spend real money to buy fake land in this virtual world. They pay real money rent on that land, and spend real time building houses made of nothing but pixels. They flit about from place to place, having conversations with other people they’ve never met, about where to go in that virtual world to get more virtual things. Hour after hour, it goes on.

And meanwhile, here in the real world, the most powerful person on Earth, the President of the United States, has been revealed to have used his power to block an investigation into his own criminal activity.

In any normal time, such an act would result in a political firestorm sure to end the presidency. But, these are not ordinary times. Tired of being outraged, Americans have mostly just stopped paying attention. When another Bush crime, another Bush abuse of power is revealed, Americans are now so used to having a Creep In Chief that they merely shrug their shoulders, say “I thought as much,” and move on.

Americans don’t want to be angry. They don’t want to be upset. So, they tune out. They may not all log into Second Life, but they enter their own little virtual worlds nonetheless, going about their business as if nothing is happening, shopping, watching funny TV shows, going to the movies, and above all else, not reading the newspaper. Americans are tripped out on denial. Timothy Leary, LSD has nothing on the the GOP.

I am frightened of what I will see today in reaction to this new example of President Bush’s abuse of power, the position he takes that he is above the law. I’m afraid that I won’t see much.

We’ll go on hearing about the fake billboards to get people to visit the That Girl Emily blog. We’ll discuss about how Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson are going to get married. We’ll get more news about the right wing outrage that President Bush used the word “shit”. We’ll be transfixed by the questions about whether Britney Spears and Kevin Federline are on the verge of getting a divorce or not. We’ll eagerly await Ted Danson’s new sitcom.

Faced with this new low, this new open defiance of the law by our own president, I am afraid that Americans will simply choose to go to the beach.

This morning, I started exploring another corner of the world of social networking online. Much as MySpace tries to get people together by encouraging them to talk about music they like, Shadows tries to help people build connections by encouraging them to talk about the web sites they like. It’s a simple format. You sign up, and then just add links, rate the links, apply relevant tage, and write comments about comments about them.

It’s an interesting way to browse the web, though there is a combination of crass self-promotion and lots of adoration of the big players. How many more links to Daily Kos do we need?

I’m finding that there’s a lot of potential space on shadows for people who are interested in forming networks to bring traffic to small and mid-sized progressive sites. So, I’ve set up a shadows account under the name Irregular Progress. I’m eager to see where the linking will lead to from there.

If you’re game, join in.

Yesterday morning, J. Clifford offered up a bit of a comparison of MySpace with TagWorld - and TagWorld came out on top.

It looks as if J. Clifford is trying to set up a political space for progressives on TagWorld, a way for grassroots people to get together and get organized in a funky space. One of his ideas is to start a page there where people can view progressive-themed videos.

That’s an awesome idea, I think, and I really like one of the videos that he put up over there. It’s one of a song called War All the Time by the group Thursday. Thursday’s sound kind of reminds me of a New Jersey version of The Cure. Well, kinda. The lyrics to the song go like this:

Standing on the edge of the palisades cliffs

In the shadow of the skyline very far away

A lightning rod that couldn’t pull the storm from me

I was 5 years old my best friends older brother died

He fell from these cliffs

The river washed him away the current pulled him downstream

And our lives float in the headlines, so we parked these cars

Parent’s garage

Listen to the lullaby

Of Carbon Monoxide

War all of the time

In the shadow of the New York skyline

We grew up too fast falling apart

Like the ashes of American flags

The sun doesn’t rise

We replaced it with an h-bomb explosion

A painted jail cell of blood in the sky like Three Mile Island

Nightmares on TV they used to sing us to sleep

They burn on and on like an oil field

Or a memory of what it felt like

To burn on and on and not just fade away

All those nights in the basement the kids are still screaming

On and on and on and on

War all of the time

In the shadow of the New York skyline

We grew up too fast falling apart

Like the ashes of American flags

And we’re blowing in the wind

We don’t know where to land

So we kiss like little kids

We used to be very tall buildings

We’ve been falling for so long

Now your eyes follow the sign on the edge of town

They offer a welcome when you are leaving

War all of the time

In the shadow of the New York skyline

We grew up too fast falling apart

Like the ashes of American flags

The pieces fall it’s like a last day parade

And the fires in our streets start to rage,

so wave, to the people that long to wave back,

from the fabric of a flag that sang “love all of the time”

War all the time

Irregular Times has been blogging for a few years now, but the web site goes back, way back, before that. In fact, Irregular Times really had its start as an offline zine back in 1995. In the 1990s, you see, Irregular Times had a different name and a different identity: Irregular Jonathan Speaks.

I was Irregular Jonathan, but we had a couple other writers along for the ride back then too. Jim was there, plus a few others we have parted ways from. For a bit, Irregular Jonathan Speaks was also a weekly news talk show on Free Radio Memphis.

Once upon a time, there was a wide-mouthed hippo serving as the logo of Irregular Jonathan Speaks, but before that, there was this blue gecko with a tongue ready for action.

I don’t know if any of our readers from the days of Irregular Jonathan Speaks are still around, but things have changed a lot since then. What’s remained the same is the dedication to the concept of irregularity in all its permutations.

One of my favorite columnists, Dennis Rogers, hits it out of the park again with a few short paragraphs on prayer in school and the political sphere:

Call me cynical, but I suspect many politicians publicly pray so people (read, voters) will be impressed with how saintly they are. Either that or they think God is hard of hearing.

Wouldn’t a silent and sincere prayer from the heart cut through the heavenly chatter faster than a mini-sermon from some long-winded politician unable to keep quiet in the presence of a captive audience?

The courts agree the Constitution allows prayer at governmental meetings so long as the praying stops short of preaching. It’s when officials promote one religion over others that they get in trouble.

How ironic the American Civil Liberties Union chose Holy Week to gently remind the Chatham County Board of Commissioners that ending its opening prayers with some variation of “in Jesus’ name” promotes Christianity and is a no-no.

Prayers are allowed at public meetings, the ACLU said, but Chatham’s elected officials have crossed the constitutional line separating the business of man from the business of God.

Politicians may bluster, but they really love such controversy. They get to pose as stalwart defenders of truth, justice the American way and God, too. As if God needed their help.

There’s never been a clearer example of what such blowhards are up to than the recurring prayer-in-school spat.

Kids quietly pray in school all the time. Teachers, principals, secretaries, janitors, school bus drivers and lunch ladies quietly pray in school, too. As one wag put it, as long as there are algebra tests, there will be prayer in schools. Amen.

The catch is, you can’t force others to take part in your prayer, which is exactly what happens when you pray out loud in front of a class, a meeting or the big game on Friday night.

Want to pray in school or at work or before a session of the county zoning board? Fine. Close your eyes, bow your head and silently pray away. No one will hassle you. Ask for world peace, a date to the prom, a pay raise or that the world ends before next Friday’s geometry exam. Or just say “thank you.”

Our freedom of faith was bought and paid for by brave men and women fighting on battlefields and in courtrooms. But that’s apparently not good enough for some folks.

So to Bible-thumping politicians who feel their brand of religion trumps the freedoms for which so many have died, I offer this bit of sage advice:

Testifying at a Senate hearing last month, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at American University, said, “People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don’t put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.”

Pray over that, politicians.

Just do it quietly.

This is a story I wrote not too long ago for another website. I had made a flippant remark that, when it comes to abortion, this one member of that site had said that he’s against it because a fertilized embryo will become a fully-formed human and therefor to him humans are alive from the time of conception. I has responded with “Saplings will become trees, but that doesn’t stop me from mowing over them. He asked if I were equating trees with humans and I corrected him by saying “No, I’m equating sapplings with a fetus.” He responded by saying “Okay, well, that’s the same thing, as far as I’m concerned.”

The story that follows expands on that line of reasoning.

—

Bob Smith and the Tree Huggers

One bright and sunny weekend Bob Smith was getting some much needed yardwork done. As he was pushing his mower across the grass, a blond man with a beard and wearing a tie-dye T-shirt stopped in front of Bob Smith’s house.
“STOP!” the blond man yelled; “Turn off that mower!”
Bob was curious, so he did as the man said. Now that he could hear over the engine, he inquired; “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t you see it?” the man asked and pointed to a patch of ground a few feet in front of the mower.
“See what?” All that he could see was grass.
“That tree you’re about to murder!”
Bob Smith peers long and hard at the patch of ground, but he can not see a tree. He is starting to become convinced that this fellow is a loon; “Buddy, there is no tree there.”
The blond man walked over to the patch of earth, pointing as he went and leaned down until his finger was touching a plant barely a half inch high but visible through the grass; “This tree!” he shouted.
Bob Smith, now looking on in disbelief, turned and glanced at his cherry tree. The plant this man (who Bob was now thinking of as a “Hippie”) was an offshoot of the main cherry tree. He had mowed over many of those saplings before because if he didn’t they would take over his yard and kill off his flower beds.
“That’s not a tree,” he says, “It’s just a sapling. That’s a tree,” He jerked his thumb towards the cherry tree a few feet away.
“It makes no difference,” the hippie said sternly, “A tree is a tree from the moment it sprouts.”
Bob Smith was now tired of this conversation and started up the lawnmower once again, “It’s not a tree, it’s a sapling and I don’t have the time or money required to tend to another tree,” and proceeded to run the lawnmower over the sapling, chopping it in half. The hippie gaped at Bob and said “You wait, we’ll put a stop to this!”

The weekend after next, Bob Smith was pulling his lawnmower out of the garage when he saw a group of people sitting on his lawn and holding signs with sayings like “Lawn Care is MURDER!” and “What about the saplings?!” on them.
“What’s going on here?” Bob Smith asked as he approached the group.
“We’re going to stop you from killing this tree,” the blond hippie from two weeks ago told him. He was wearing a handcuff around his wrist and the other end was laying over another cherry tree sapling.
“This is ridiculous,” Bob said and went back inside to call the police and have this group of people dispersed.
“No, this is serious,” A woman wearing a white T-shirt with a picture of a sprout and a leaf and with ‘Let Me Live’ written across her chest; “We’re stopping a murder!”
An hour later, the police arrived and the crowd was forced off Bob Smith’s lawn. The next day, a Sunday, there was a knock on Bob Smith’s door. When he opened it to see who was there, a television camera and a microphone were forced into his face and cameras started flashing so much he was nearly blinded.
“Mr. Smith!” a female voice called out, “How does it feel to commit a murder?”
“Are you going to kill any more trees today?” a male voice called as a second camera was shoved through the doorway. Bob forced the door shut as more and more cameras and microphones were thrust at him. After another call to the police, and another hour of yelling, the reporters were made to leave. That night as he was watching the 6:00 news, Bob was shocked to see his face featured on Weasel News (We Lie, You Believe) with the words ‘Lawncare or Murder?’ under his picture.
“This crime must end!” the Hippie was yelling into a microphone from what looked to be in Bob’s own neighborhood. “How many more trees will cut down before they even have a chance to grow up and know life?”
After the story gained mass attention, more and more hippies started writing their congressmen demanding something be done. There was such a flood of letters that, even though it was being done by only a minority of people, that small group was so vocal that finally a ban on lawncare was enacted to stop the murder of innocent trees.

Five years later, Bob Smith’s lawnmower was rusting in his garage and his yard was now over run by cherry trees. They had choked out his other flowers and turned his once presentable lawn into a grove so thick it was difficult to get to his car. Because the law passed required him to not only allow the trees to grow, he was made to care for them and was now running into debt from the cost of water and fertilizer. Other people were in the same boat as Bob Smith, trees, weeds, and vines choked yards and the roots were destroying roads and sidewalks. Baseball, football, golf, and soccer games were soon abandoned because it was against the law to cut down trees.

But at least the hippies were happy.

Senator John McCain is running hard to earn the affection of radicals among the religious right. He’s giving Jerry Falwell, of all people, a big kiss on the cheek, and agreeing to give a speech friendly to religious radicals at Liberty University.

John McCain says that he wants Christian fundamentalists who oppose the teaching of evolution and favor mixing church and state to have a major role to play in Republican politics. McCain is now working in coordination with Jerry Falwell, to help Falwell advance his agenda. “We agreed to move forward,”, said McCain.

Thanks to Paul Krugman at the New York Times for bringing this story to light, but thanks for nothing to the New York Times for placing that article in a “select” category of news that readers have to pay a special cover charge to see. The New York Times - all the news that’s fit for people with money.

The Federal Election Commission has announced its long-awaited system for regulating Internet speech. A number of online writers were worried that internet speech might be lumped together with television and print advertising, making it impossible for bloggers, bulletin board frequenters and podcasters to say anything about an election as it approached. Thankfully, this did not come to pass.

The rules are pretty simple and pretty clear. If a campaign wants to spend money to put a message on a blog that makes it look good, then it has to spend the money using officially regulated funds, and it has to note the spending. This doesn’t prohibit the use of money to spread word about a campaign on the internet; it just makes it more transparent. As it is now, who’s to say whether a blog is really independent or just propped up by a candidate? It’s hard to say, it’s hard to track, and therefore it’s hard to know. Under the new rules, we’ll know, and that’s good for us all: we get to see the wizard behind the curtain pulling the levers.

For everybody else who isn’t playing some kind of insider buddy-buddy back-slapping money-for-kind-words payola game, there are no regulations. None. We get to speak our mind about the candidates, the issues, the policies, and the contests, just as we are able to do today. That’s freedom, and I love it.

I have to forcefully shove these words out of my fingers as I type them in, but it looks like our government has done something right. Whew.

Earlier this morning, I wrote a quick update about my experience so far on MySpace, an online community especially suited to hormonal teenagers, but with some potential for more mature political networking.

I’ve also been trying another online cooperative community to see what kind of potential it might have for enhancing the presence of progressive political causes online. It’s called Squidoo, a name that evokes tentacles stretching and exploring dark corners and crevices - something that the Internet is quite useful for. As it happens, Squidoo is mostly virgin territory when it comes to politics, so I have been able to set up the first and only pages, or lenses as they call them there, on Squidoo dedicated to Russ Feingold’s budding campaign for President in 2008 as well as for the Squidoo lens to serve supporters of Hillary Clinton for President in 2008 as well, though I’m less personally enthusiastic about that prospect.

So far, my experience with Squidoo is positive. Lenses and their modules are easy to set up - though many of the news modules have no options for customization by keywords, and the RSS feed modules need to be supplemented by XML modules as well. There is but one generic module which allows one to write text and html in freeform, but that module seems to have the most potential so far. If I use that module, however, why would I choose to do so on Squidoo?

As with MySpace, my forays into Squidoo will have to be a long-term exploration. In order to fairly judge anything on the Internet, it’s important to use it over a lengthy period of time, to allow things time to develop, for links to be made, and for people to interact. I’ll be reporting back on more of my thoughts on the world of Squidooing in the weeks to come.

The Bush administration won’t tell you this, but March 12-18 is Sunshine Week, a period of time dedicated to celebrating and advocating free access by American citizens to government information. Thomas Jefferson did not say, “An informed citizenry is the bulwark of a democracy,” but he should have. Unless citizens can know what’s going on in their government, there is no hope that they will be able to fully advocate for well-supported positions, as is their right and responsibility. And, as George Orwell pointed out in 1984, a state which is able to shove inconvenient information down a memory hole is a state that controls its citizens rather than the other way ’round.

Visit sunshineweek.org for links to websites promoting open government, resources for journalists and free information activists on college campuses, a discussion blog and a toolkit of resources to help spread the word about this woefully under-publicized week. Let the sunshine in!