High Crimes, Misdemeanors, And Venn Diagrams

Slate has an interactive chart up which maps a few of the current administration's scandals. Bruce pointed me to it in the comments section of "Evil Is As Evil Does," and although Jon noted it doesn't include the treason of outing Valerie Plame, it's still pretty useful. You can scroll over it, click on the names and get nifty little summaries along with cases for and against prosecution.

I'm linking to it because it may prove fairly handy about a year from now, when most Congress-critters should start to feel pretty secure that the dossiers on their call girls, corruption, catamites, and kinks won't be leaked to the press by the departed Bush Administration. (I'll bet the most enthusiastic piling-on will come from the Pug side of the aisle.) Note the chart position occupied by former Bush chief counsel, loyal friend, and Justice Department goat-herd Albert "Abu" Gonzales. As Slate notes, "all roads lead to Gonzales," and any future reincarnation of the congressional post-Watergate Church Committee, an event highly likely to occur, will assuredly focus on him. As Cheney explained his reasons for invading Iraq: "It's doable."

Speaking of Cheney, unfortunately he and other officials in the Bush Administration aren't particularly vulnerable to domestic prosecution for their actual crimes. I believe that pursuing them on that basis would be a very bad idea. It's very difficult to prove intent, and their predictable defense would be, "We were motivated by our unequaled patriotism." They would however seem very vulnerable to obstruction of justice charges, which in part would explain their motivation, one might say obsession, for destroying millions of their own emails and documents, and marking everything from old laundry receipts on up as Classified.

Congress just voted Karl Rove into contempt for not bothering to show up to a required hearing. Karl's response: "What are you pansies gonna do, piss yourselves?" Congress doesn't have much if any authority right now, and won't until after January 9th, 2009. It seems likely that at least a few scapegoats will suffer for their Eichmannesque conformities, and some testimony will be collected in exchange for (perhaps) getting jail time for Mr. Gonzales, who after all is a minor, not very well-liked outsider. Then I would expect blanket immunity a la post-apartheid South Africa and pronouncements that "our long national nightmare is over." And everyone will know the big fish are still swimming free. How to extract justice from them?

Civil suits, both domestic and international, will be filed. Cheney, Libby, Rove, and Armitage face at least one remaining civil suit from Valerie Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson, who have re-filed after their first was thrown out on national security grounds. They'll find the judicial environment much more favorable under a different President. Then, displaced Iraqis, friends of the environment, soldiers' families, innocent people tortured and imprisoned for years, class actions, and dissatisfied contributors can seek damages on everything from depleted uranium to wrongful death.

Probably the best, most enduring way of getting at BushCo officials is by convincing other countries to indict them for war crimes, since in international courts under those charges, outcome rather than intent is the issue. The burden of proof would be on the defendants, "crimes against humanity" covers a lot of ground, and it should not be difficult to find widespread enthusiasm for such a project. What happened in Iraq meets the UN's technical definitions of genocide, with more than 25% of a nation or ethnic group within it killed or displaced. With the right organization and marketing, it could become the international equivalent of a Yellow Ribbon campaign, only in reverse.

Donald Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and former CIA Director George Tenet have already had charges filed against them in Germany, which allows universal jurisdiction; why not include the other malefactors? No need to stop at Germany, although not all the countries of the world need to participate. Just the ones you'd want to travel to. Hmmm. Maybe some enterprising bloggers will get together and coordinate a web-based effort to make this happen. What would be a good name for it?

(Graphic credit to Mike Votes at Born at the Crest of Empire, link on right margin.)

Barack Obama's Broken Promise, Its Connection To Gay Crack-Smoking Sex, & Power To The People

The Obama campaign has gone back on its pledge to take public funding; John McCain is miffed as a mo-fo, and sharply rebuked the Illinois Senator:

"This election is about a lot of things. It's also about trust. It's about keeping your word."

Hahaa-ha-ha! I laugh like a drain! (John. Please. Stop it with writing one-liners for the Daily Show--they pay comedians to come up with this stuff at Writer's Guild rates. You're ruining livelihoods, man, taking food out of kiddie-mouths.) Umm, like we couldn't see this one coming? I tell you, after living through 30+ compressed years of fetishistic fascist fart-blasters running loose over the land, it's hard not to engage in what the namby-pamby crowd would call Schadenfreude, or joy in the pain of others. So like a good liberal, I will high-mindedly and nobly suppress evil laughs and any cackling, derisive voices threatening to part the bonds of the Good Graces. Like this one: "How ya like getting fisted, Walnuts? Take it from a Democrat, mwa-hahaha!" Uncharitable graffiti, no one knows where it came from: "Eat shit and die on your vomit, fellating corp-whore!" Or yet again: "How's it feel getting your ass whooped by a muslim-named liberal negro, McBeeyotch??"

Bear with me. I promise to get to the gay sex and coke, very soon, probably in a couple of paragraphs. I realize, almost no one actually gives a shit about campaign finance, and reading about it is like studying tetanus inoculations. It's boring, and it aches. Sure, Obama's Web 3.0, small-donor approach is a seismic tectonic event, kinda like declaring independence from King George, but it's dull-ass booooring. (Now, in my mono-maniacal voice: "You'll see. Oh, you'll all see!") In large part it's boring because both campaign finance law and practice are purposefully obscure, exist in a legal zone run on Heisenberg's Cat principles, and were written by a collaboration of John McCain's staff and his lobbyists. How does someone like me read them? By neglecting family, so you don't have to. The basics are these:

1) if you're an individual you can't give much money or buy John McCain a Patek Phillipe watch like you used to, but it's ok to lend him the indefinite use of your Ferrari, yacht, or children. You, qua you, can only give $2,300.

2) Whereas if you're a corporation, you are as Nike, an immortal being living apart from and above the rules. Simply make massive contributions to blind trust funds in off-shore tax havens in politicians' names, or set up Political Action Committees with impressive titles like Citizens Against Animal Orgies and Obscenity (CAA-OO). Then buy TV and radio air time to scare people into fetal positions.

3) If you're running for President, you can eschew direct contributions from citizens and corporations in return for a lump sum of $85 million dollars, a Door Number Three solution if there ever was one. Not bad, really, except that's only about enough for a campaign's worth of ads in the infomercial time slots and a couple of bus rides.

Political infomercials. Ha! "If you vote in the next five minutes, we will reduce your yearly income tax by $49.95 AND include not just one, but TWO repaired potholes!!" Hell, I don't even know why Haz-Mac wheezed like a militantly hypocritical old grumpy-gus; given the huge loophole in category 2 above, there's still plenty of time and corporations eligible to fund Republican Political Action Committees. There is a huge, voluptuous reservoir of anger to tap into, and they can run ads like this one:

"Hello, my name is Larry Sinclair. Barack Obama is my former lover. We mainly conducted our affair in limousines, and we usually smoked crack cocaine together before performing oral sex. On each other, numerous times. Barack now gets off presenting his white-washed version of 'Family Values' to our unsuspecting country, but in 1999, he got off with me!"

Lest you think I'm joking (which ok, I kind of am) this isn't very far-fetched. Rather, it's fetched, it's completely and wholly fetched. Larry Sinclair of Duluth, Minnesota is a concerned citizen and gay man who has been making these exact claims, as he did this Wednesday for two and a half hours on a national stage. No, really: he paid the National Press Club $3,000 to have a conference in the "Holeman Room" and a couple dozen political-beat reporters attended. I'm not suggesting a Republican conspiracy propped this perv up for later consumption in front of supermarket check-out stands, no. The country's Polar Moment of Screwed-Up Inertia is still operating at "Feral Pit Bull Humps Poodles in Westminster Dog Show" levels. Clearly, things like this can just happen on their own, and I'm barking down a different tree.

Sinclair previously posted a YouTube video which consisted of him in front of a little camera giving his Obama gay crack schtick, a capella. And then he started a blog. The vid got almost a million hits on YouTube alone, and the comments sections on any one of his blog posts might get filled with over 1,000 responses. This is blog Street Cred. (Geez. Maybe I should finally come out about my McCain affair, when he fondled me one torrid night in Tempe, Arizona.) Next, Sinclair showed up outside the DNC committee meeting on May 31st to ostensibly show support for Hillary Clinton and got some press coverage.

At this, Obama-supporting bloggers began to take more serious umbrage and scrutiny. The uber-lib Firedoglake took up a petition to bar him from holding a conference, which no one at the National Press Club dignified with a response because Firedoglake sent no cash, no wads of cash, merely generating 11,500 utterly useless signatures. However, other bloggers played investigative reporter/news outlet, and this is where it starts to get good. Whitehouse.com offered Sinclair $100,000 if he could pass a polygraph test, one which he took and failed. Others did some digging on Sinclair's past and present, finding that he has done hard time for fraud and felony forgery, has a whole shopping list of charges over 27 years of various twisted stuff, and has outstanding warrants in at least two states, Colorado and Delaware.

A couple who blog from Paris (bastards!), the Mitch and Nan Show, had been focusing on Sinclair for awhile. They even maintained a direct blog-blog correspondence, or more like what we used to call a flame-war, with Sinclair, who began threatening to hunt Mitch down and kill him every other paragraph or so. Anyhow, one of the M&N Show's readers lives in DC and tipped them off to how to get the cops to show up at the National Press Club. Using Sinclair's own blog posts about his conference Wednesday, they were able to prove his whereabouts and provide his photo to a police unit responsible for picking up fugitives. Sinclair was arrested right after his appearance, new navy-blue suit and all, hand-cuffed and carted off on a previous charge in Delaware. Having skipped bail before, his request for it was denied.

Both the campaign finance and Larry Sinclair stories are really about how the internet as we know is redistributing power as applied to political involvement in the Kentucky rifle sense of the word, and to digital journalism in the original "journal" sense of the word. It's happening right in front of our noses, so you'd think it would be obvious. It isn't. Since I've already harped enough on our shortcomings and evolutionary gaps as primates elsewhere, I won't make ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny all over again. Simply put, never having been faced with any comparable cheapness and speed of information transmission before, it's understandable we're largely missing the implications of what's going on. It's too fast. Coherent emails are really too much to expect out of humans. When McCain challenged Obama to ten "You Be Lincoln, I'll Be Douglas" (ahem) town-hall debates, someone from the McCain campaign actually flew to Chicago, took a taxi to HQ Obama, and handed over a piece of paper with suggested locations to a campaign staffer. The paper was handed over like it was an invitation to a duel, circa 200 years ago. The staffer took it, unfolded it, sighed, and said: "You know, you could've just emailed this."

McCain is pissed because Obama has tapped into sustenance he can't get at: the taproot of something akin to a participatory democracy. Traditional, credentialed "what happened?" news reporters are pissed (or would be if they had more clue about what it means for their collective future) because they showed up at a wanted felon's press conference and patiently asked him serious questions regarding an alleged affair with Obama, not realizing he was also a former mental patient. That's forgiveable, but he had a kilt-wearing lawyer in tow, a lawyer who before the conference began explained why he had to wear a kilt--in order to accommodate his exceptionally large genitalia in comfort. (Happened.) I mean, hello: McCain can't get enough ordinary people to give him money. Two dozen D.C. political presstitutes couldn't find their inner Lois Lanes long enough to figure out they were being had by a dual-diagnoisis ex-con. The system, is it much broken yet?

For campaign finance, people who have no business whatsoever making donations to politicians, as in populist pipsqueaks like me, we're fighting with huge corporations over whose asses politicians have to kiss more. In the process, even if we lose, we are redefining how laws will be written, like perhaps not by the business interests they're supposed to apply to. For what we call The Press, people who can't live without spell-check and ran away screaming from English classes are putting regular beat-downs on publicly traded reporting. Bloggers handed in their homework for free and put a criminal in jail, plucking him out from under The Press's elevated nose. Is there any telling where this might go? =)

Bad Blogger, Bad!

I played hooky for over an entire blog-week. Better to ask forgiveness, or become a lot better at lying. I'll go with forgiveness: sorry for the unannounced absence. Really, it had nothing to do with topless beaches or rehab.

The Finest Kiss

I just learned this weekend that a real-world friend links here, and that he also happens to run the best Seattle music blog in the known universe, small as mine is on the subject. Toby's a lover of indie music to the extent he can accurately be called an expert, and his local reportage of bands is even better than the professional efforts around the Sound.

It wasn't the music that got me out here, but I grew to appreciate it fast. Since the late 80s the Pac Northwest has continued to grow into one of the most vibrant and nurturing emerging music scenes, the birthplace of the grungy "garage band" sound. It was a sarcastic revolt against the glammy, over-produced metal, pop, and alternative stuff that dominated the late 70s and 80s, so it was by definition anti-corporate. It was edgy and dangerous as a snakebite, dangerous as an OD, revelling in its alienation and managed to retain that feel even after bands like Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and a score of lesser-known bands like Gruntruck were hitting it big world-wide and it attracted the trust-fund babies, who could actually afford heroin.

The originators were gone or cooled down, bands such as Green River, Mudhoney, and the Melvins (Kurt Cobain was a devoted fan and helped them out as a stage hand) were starting to pass the torch, but Seattle was as music-mad as Liverpool in the 1960s. Even my button-down friends and I in MBA School went down to the Off-Ramp every Tuesday for open mike night. We saw the worst band in history (Zeke) there. The lead singer came out wearing nothing except a gold lame' G-string, and it got worse when they started to play. Funny enough, they're a local-venue band stalwart 16 years later.

The Northwest was a perfect incubator for garage bands, and still is. You sure as hell can't play much music outside, and most parents would've rather parked their cars out on the street than have proto-punk metal/Iggy Pop fusion playing in the house. So grunge happened. Lord Running Boy had his first experience with Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath last night, which he immediately went wild over: "No, no, turn it up, it's gotta be louder," he cried, grabbing the volume knob and turning it up to Eleven, whirly-gigging and turning his cousin's living room into a mosh pit for the balance of the album. (Yes. Yes, I am terrified.)

The Finest Kiss is named for a song by the Boo Radleys, a UK group Toby heard when he was living in Caen. They have a website up now, and you can listen to the song here. By going to Toby's site, I also learned that Australian legend Paul Kelly, the greatest singer-songwriter you've never heard of, will be playing at the Triple Door in March, right where I first ran into him. We're going. And I'll be enjoying the future of music via the Finest Kiss.

Linking To Squirmelicious

I was introduced to Squirmelicious a few days back by my news filter, Psyche. He correctly, correctly so far at least, sensed the 'Gang of Four' (Gore, Dean, Kerry, Kennedy) support for Obama. He runs an astute, objective political blog mixed with some current affairs. As he describes it:

Squirmelicious is a daily jam on politics, culture, technology, sports, or whatever the hell is clogging my noodle.

After waiting a decent interval and reading more of his excellent posts, I decided to link away. Welcome, Mr. Squirmel! I'll try to come up with a more flattering yet evocative cephalopod image.

Adding Link To Chris Floyd's Empire Burlesque

Reader, sparring partner, and commenter Still Life Living suggested that I link to Chris Floyd, a former NY Times journalist who runs a high-octane blog. Generally, of course, my policy is to provocatively ignore or mock SLL's advice insofar as time allows, but in this case I simply want to go visit Empire Burlesque much more often. It's one of the best sources of international reporting and commentary, period. (SLL, you do realize, this bespeaks mere aberration, not detente. En garde.)

Sometimes we wonder if blogs do any good, if they can change anything. I suppose the ants harbor similar doubts when they're toiling along carrying grains of sand and what-not, following some trail of pheromones; yet bloggers like Chris Floyd left the New York Times, and are great reasons not to read the mouthpieces anymore. We may not yet fully glimpse the unfinished edifice, or care to know its full design, but we're building something, something large.

Weird Blogger Error

Wasn't allowing comments, not from me anyway. So Jon and Caitlyna, sorry for not answering earlier on the Law of the Sea thread. Nothing like typing into a void! Will get back ASAP.

Excused Blog Absence: Fleeing The Country

A spontaneous chance for a few days' vacation came up, and when assessing options, Lord Wife and I quickly came to the same conclusion: let's leave the country! It would provide a respite, at least until we return on Monday, from the culture of protective stupidity which reigns supreme and wraps us daily up in its sticky, chemically-treated gauze, as George Orwell expressed with such prescient exactitude in 1984:

A Party member...is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign
enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before
the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare,
unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such
devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly
induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early
acquired inner discipline...called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the
faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any
dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing
to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they
are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought
which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means
protective stupidity.

Our short time here in re-visiting Canada has been delightfully free from the harsher effects of the US Curtain of Insecurity. People seem, rather they are, so outgoing and friendly because they aren't as afraid to speak to each other, exchange addresses, or refexively treat you as an individual instead of a threat. Crossing the border is quick and friendly. Refreshing.

Orwell wasn't really prescient, he just developed a finely granulated understanding of human nature through disillusionment, betrayal, survival, and their opposites. I think he would have liked Canada very much. Naj, we will have a latte' in your favorite cafe soon--I'm at the right latitude, just on the wrong coast!

Adding 'Cat In The Bag' To The Caravan

Oh, my. It is with no small trepidation that I take this step, and an explanation is owed to the good readers of this blog. Many of you have stuck with me through thick and thin, through drug-addled but soaring prose I plagiarize imperfectly from elsewhere and through the boring rants I write all on my own. Now, you have to trust me just one more time. You promise not to freak out, ok? Alright. I'm linking to...the words won't form...a blog...with Fluffy Kitty Syndrome (FKS).

Zoey, a bona fide cat with enough hair to simultaneously clog more than one commercial-grade toilet, and a mysterious other person make up "Zoey & Me," the keepers of Cat in the Bag. They are members of the dangerously burgeoning, completely brazen Fluffy Kitty Kult, and they have linked to this blog. This was a baffling and entirely unexpected event. I am aware of no other people afflicted by Cat Insanity who come here at all other than Lord Mom, who has an advanced, late-onset form of that dread disease. Understandably, most people who link here to ABH require payment in advance, sums which are not subject to transparency. So Zoey and the Me-Person, I appreciate the free link very much. But.

It is difficult to describe how compellingly revolting, how jolting, how hauntingly Velvet-Feline-Elvis the disturbingly frequent and graphic, cat-focused posts are which appear on Cat In The Bag. The superimposed pink wigs, the Liberace piano poses, the unruly Mongolian furs and obscene props conspire to do irreparable violence to psyches unshielded or injudiciously prepared. While the political analysis provided by "Me" is undeniably brilliant, each post as short, as gracefully unsparing as a Muhammad Ali uppercut packed with the kind of content ABH is always looking to share, I have to warn you. Of possible consequences. I mean other than those which naturally come from being subjected to Animal Porn, the images of which no amount of Electro-Convulsive Therapy can completely erase.

What consequences? I'll tell you what consequences. Cat dander. Gross, strange-smelling food. Vet bills. Tumbleweeds of shedded hair across an otherwise spotless floor. Tufts which come from nowhere to glue themselves onto door casings. Possible pulmonary health effects akin to huffing asbestos. A litany of litter boxes steadily accumulating with the encrusted, unmentionable products of this takeover of humanity by a plague of feral beasts who incessantly nag and bully based upon the trivial dictates of their weirdest, wildest whims. I warn of watery eyes, sleepless nights, and fits of incapacitating sneezing. Of something in the dark trying to alight on your head with claws. If you do not own a cat, I warn that few are immune. You may become infected if you go to the new link not properly steeled against the fate of cat ownership, my real concern. Fair warned is fair armed, but proceed at your own risk.

If you take the risk and cautiously peruse Cat in the Bag, you'll notice the arrestingly garish visual aesthetic which is so horrifying in the pursuit of cat worship is transformed when once turned to political and social commentary. The graphics are sublime when constrained to matters which concern us as citizens of the world and the United States vicinity of it. In that context, I will gladly reciprocate (as I've been meaning) to prove my status as an open-minded Blogo Sapien, and to celebrate the presumed first-hand association of Zoey & Me with the newly-linked and much-appreciated View From The Moon.

So welcome, Zoey, and "Me". I'm taking my anti-allergens and have been diggin' your blog. And it must be disclosed that I am infected like you, but have apparently had access to better medical care, so the effects of FKS are not so far advanced. Nonetheless, I've allowed the impression to form in a certain cat that I am his chattel, and that my sole worthy pursuit in life is to please him. I also have been fighting the growing suspicion that I could successfully run for office in my feline-infested neighborhood on a platform of Equality for Cats. Is this how the sanity for which I've fought so hard will end?

Given that these creatures are collectively coddled like an emperor's offspring around here, I could go door to door and win enough votes (despite my manifold deficits) to get elected to the City Council of one of the most influential cities in the country on a platform consisting of little more than feline advocacy. Hey, single-issue campaigning worked for the gay marriage candidates. Why not for Cats' Rights? It's high time. Cats are natural progressives. They are the only animal in recorded human time to domesticate themselves. Was that smart, or what?? Annoying as they may be, these animals are geniuses. Consider: they are perfectly capable of feeding themselves, yet have trained us to do so. This single fact should call appropriate questions about who or what is actually running this planet to mind. Therefore, I submit that cats immediately deserve legal rights at least equal to those enjoyed by dogs. What could be more evident?

With both cats and politics, there is much which is emphatically not evident. Much is hidden, and will remain so. Perhaps cats have been the purring the Lao Tzus of progressive politics all along, controlling us far more than we know, too amused, polite, and content to end the charade.

Blogging Without Tears

In my travels early this morning I came across a blog (via Fleming at View From The Moon) called Reading Without Tears, a popular old book which teaches children how to read. It's still used, and I've heard other parents of little ones recommend it (reminder to self: obtain copy for Lord Running Boy). The blog is new but by a professional of the craft muses delightfully on writing. This post goes to the heart of why blogging is nothing less than a Cultural Revolution, and why I like it. I could have written this post. Woulda. Shoulda! But Vincent did for me:

"Twenty-five years ago, I bought The Art of Writing, a volume in the "Made Simple" series. It had been written ten years earlier and has an out-of-date feel now. So what? I feel out-of tune with the age too. Browsing through it again recently, I discovered many shortfalls, the worst being its lack of guidance on writing sentences.

You'd think that The Art of Building a House would have a chapter on bricklaying, or how to build the walls out of mud and wattle. But a book on laying bricks---or even making them---would not tell you how to build the whole house.

I have no idea how to write a book, though I have written one to someone else's order, which was not very satisfying. Long ago, I planned an erudite volume, to be called Seer and System, whilst commuting to work on London's Underground. All I had was ideas. I was defeated by structure and could not even write an attractive sentence.

I have since realised that my default style, the thing that comes naturally, is to start afresh every time and to stop after about 500 words. What seems natural is a little piece of prose that hands over to the reader's imagination very soon, after being painfully truthful about my experience---the only thing I know.

So blogging suits me perfectly. It's immediate, informal, small-scale.

In writing, every sentence can be a miniature work of art. I don't mean overwork it till you are bored, or till the reader thinks you are trying to be clever. Play with word order. The beginning of a sentence is one hotspot and the end is even hotter. Manipulate the word order to put the most significant part of your statement at the end.

Be aware of repetition, I mean use it to your advantage, as in a tune; but control any re-use of same word or phrase which jars the eye and ear.

Look at your writing critically, as soon as your sentence is complete; but also hours or days later.

Blogging is great: you get free critics.

I don't know if a writing course would truly help. Blogging is a training to write, and it could go on for life. But you need a good eye and ear, not to imitate the bad writing of others, and not to betray your own soul. You must be tuned to what delights you.

And then you have to work on delighting others too."

(Update: since starting in on this post this AM, Vincent himself of Reading Without Tears has stopped by and left a number of nice comments. Thank you very much, Vincent. I really admire your writing, and will be a regular visitor from Portlock.)

Adding CraigBlog

CraigBlog is the personal blog of Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist. Craigslist is an extremely successful way of making transactions fast and cheap, connecting buyers and sellers, employers and job seekers, renters and landlords, etc. Usually without a fee. He created it to "give people a break," and Craigslist is the 37th most-trafficked site on the web, and is so efficient that it drives newspapers crazy. Ebay keeps trying to buy it, but they're not selling. Here's an interesting article on him in the WaPo.

Craig Newmark just joined the board of the Sunlight Foundation, one of the more interesting projects for promoting transparency, good governance, and democracy in the United States. Esther Dyson, one of the most influential, smart, and socially conscious venture capitalists who walk the earth, is the head of the Sunlight Foundation.

Update: No, Esther Dyson is not head of the Sunlight Foundation. She's just the richest person on the board. Ellen Miller, who is the Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation, wrote me to correct my error, and provide me with the link to their org chart. I asked her how much money I needed to give to atone for my stupid, lazy mistake. Feeling like an ass never felt so good. Long live the 'net.

De-linking FDL

It's time to remove Jane Hamsher's FireDogLake ("FDL") blog from the Real Stream Media list. For any of you unfamiliar with FDL, it's an activist web site for liberal progressives started by the movie producer who got Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" made. I thought about doing this for quite some time, and it gave opportunity to think a little more about the future and effectiveness of blog activism. After deciding to de-link it, today I looked FDL up on Alexa, and found that while its traffic rank is still 28,000th or so, its daily reach has fallen by roughly 5o% over the past six months. Huh.

FDL was one of the first blogs which attracted me, the first one which moved me to be a regular commenter, and the first one I donated to. The activism there continues to be vibrant, the community is thoughtful and colorful, and they've been involved in some great progressive causes, such as Act Blue, Ned Lamont's campaign against Joe Lieberman, and their original, nonpareil coverage of the Valerie Plame affair. In fact they're doing live coverage of the Libby treason trial right now, the only blog to gain a press pass to the court-room.

FDL got me involved in blogging from a nap-of-the-earth perspective. Until Hurricane Katrina hit, I had viewed blogs from a technologist's top-down, cool-but-let's-not-get-too-messy-here viewpoint. FDL got me hip-deep in the swamp muck and then I took the plunge right into the slime. (Come on in, the 'gators are fine.) It was a great place to vent and share information in real time, but as guest bloggers became more numerous and toadyish, the environment started to morph into one which doesn't appeal to me. So FDL, like the punk rock movement it compares itself to, was inspirational, brave, raw, and important. Then, when they started to increasingly act a bit like profane, drug-addled punk rockers with bleary-eyed groupies, a little distance from the scene freed my time up enough to, presto, start a blog.

I asked Hopespringsaturtle over at Deep Confusion for her perspective, as she was one of many smart progressives who stopped frequenting there. She was the right person to ask, and helped me sort it out. At issue was the overt misogyny and/or racism of some posts by FDL columnists and moderators, who refused to modulate or apologize for what they wrote, and who then were backed by the blog owners. Soon, there were instances of asking for donations in inappropriate ways for inappropriate things, even donations for one columnist's dental work. All of this triggered an impressive amount of debate within the blogsphere, with a good one-stop synopsis residing here.

Much of my embryonic activism I owe to FDL, and it's a powerful template for an activist blog. We need powerful templates, and much of my free-noodling daydreams float around the beneficial transformations and unintended consequences blogs may wreak on sclerotic politics. Yet I suspect FDL's direct involvement in the Lamont campaign was ultimately harmful, and this begs a question. Is activism most effective when it's Johnny Rotten: angry, in-your-face, defies convention, and is foul-mouthed, tells fibs, and fights dirty? After all, "God save the Queen, she's not a human been," that's a catchy message. And hate-mongers like Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, and Anne Coulter are still given prized space in the Main Streem Media despite their every sordid misdeed, half-chewed vituperative spew, and outright felony. Or is activism most effective when it's delivered by Guy Lombardo: polite, showing calm even when not feeling it, attentive to organization, and striving all the while to stay on the right notes? Say what you want about him, but Lawrence Welk was around quite a while, and he ran good shows. These are honest questions.

While I don't really know which path is better, I hope the best bet for the future of progressive politics, and what this nation needs, is to find and support strictly ethical, inclusive behavior. It's how I try to live my life when I'm not beating up disabled men in public parks, and it's the type of environment I'd like to live in. There are even a couple of Presidential candidates at this time who can take us in that direction, in the forms of Dennis Kucinich (money spent on Presidential Campaign in 2006: $386.02) or Barack Obama (chomping on Nicorette gum now, because smoking as President would set a bad example).

The time for inclusive, open-minded politics may be past, and this country may well be sliding inexorably further into the politics of Homeland, to violence in the streets, various types of entrenched separatism, and the civil wars they eventually lead to. You can feel that slide right now, like a house floor gone too far un-level. But I'd like to give polite standards and the presumptions of equality a chance. Maybe we can point up this old Republic yet. Otherwise we may as well sit around like many already do, oiling up their cherished lethal weapons, relishing thoughts of shooting Ayrabic Lesbian Libruls when they finally attack.

Now, I'm not exactly in any danger of being interviewed by NPR for my blogging influence anytime soon, but I do take the links at the right very seriously. They're like recommendations, and I can no longer recommend FDL. I hope as a group they rein in some of their less admirable impulses, and don't become a mirror of what they abhor. Feeding trolls is bad. Feeding toadies is far worse.

M'sieu, Aduanon Kovershim Angam Bitte

(Translation: "Sir, please come with me immediately." From the movie 'Blade Runner.')

This is it, today's the future, I've disappeared through the skylight, sucked out into the bloggy matrix that's devouring mankind. Here's the thing: bored Muslim housewives in the UK had a huge terror plot going, and it was broken up by fantastic surveillance work this month in order to make my family's air travels even more hellish than normal. Naturally, I assumed it was mostly Orwellian hogwash. Having finally recuperated from my newly restricted airline travel experience, one which began with an "SSSS" search for my wife and went downhill from there, I got round to googling the latest terror hubbub. It took me all of 8 minutes to find, among other things, this article by Craig Murray noting the glaring inconsistencies in the official terror narrative.

That information at my fingertips, in turn, was enough to finally send me over to blogger to set up an account. I'm one more little person who knows, and who knows on the record.

Mr. Murray left his day job as Britain's ambassador to an oil-laden CIA torture-drop in the heart of Trashkanistan. Seems there was stuff so interesting going down there he had to screw up his foreign service pension and go write a book about it. Which I didn't read, of course, but my guess is he knows whereof he speaks. So, yeah. The latest terror scare is a load of crap. Why? Oh, I dunno, Let's try using brains the Almighty gave us...

Terrorists need passports if they're going to get on international flights and actually blow them up. No passport, no fly. No passport, no plot. They hadn't applied for passports, which would've taken them about a year to get. Then there's the farcical touch of pouring peroxide and acetone together...right. I'm sure that's real easy to do in the sink of a jet's privvy.

If nothing else, I wish these governments would at least lie more professionally. On his worst day, Philip K. Dick was never depressed enough to dream their shabby, banal shit up. But Ridley Scott did come up with something close:

Sushi Master: He say you under arrest, Mr. Deckard.
Deckard: Got the wrong guy, pal.
Gaff: Lo-faast, nehody maar, te vady a Blade... Blade Runner.
Sushi Master: He say you Bu-raade Runnah.
Deckard: Tell him I'm eating.