I'm sick and woozy, so I will not be able to check the comments (if any) very often.  My apologies.

Let's talk a little about backups.

For a long time, e-mail was untrustworthy as storage, since the available space you had was limited.  This was what you call "a situation guaranteed not to last."   As more and more communication began to take place over e-mail, more and more legally significant communication especially, it became imperative to maintain a record of it.  An example:

I've been on the fence about him, wanting to hear his policy statements in more detail before I made a decision based on charisma alone.  The terrorism speech provided the information about his proposed policies that makes a decision  possible.  Let me just answer the appropriate parts of his speech, and leave it at that.  Crossposting at howme, MLW and dKos.

Al Qaeda terrorists train, travel, and maintain global communications in this safe-haven. The Taliban pursues a hit and run strategy, striking in Afghanistan, then skulking across the border to safety.

We made the same excuses in order to justify our actions against Cambodia.  That didn't work out so well now, did it.

This is the wild frontier of our globalized world. There are wind-swept deserts and cave-dotted mountains.

I sense a summoning of the "taming the Wild West" entitlement to force in the service of America.

Added one sentence to the second-to-last paragraph in a fit of cynicism.

     Let's talk about the big ugly elephant in the middle of the living room, and why it's there.  Maybe even how to get rid of it.

     Not the Republicans, not the fact that the Democrats have been successfully painted as the party that can't get their act together, not the fact that the real reason the Democrats look so disorganized compared to the GOP is that the Democrats at least pay lip service to consensus, rather than being run as a top-down heirarchy, and not the fact that the lip service the Dems give to consensus is marginal at best.

Crossposted at My Left Wing and at home.

Crossposted at MLW

How many of y'all remember Schoolhouse Rock?

How many of y'all still get chills reading the preamble to the Constitution, and hear that song in your head?

How many of y'all can still sing it? Here it is, right off the top of my head and you bet I'm singing right along with a huge grin.

We the People,
in order to form a more perfect union,
establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility,
provide for the common defense,
promote the general welfare, and
secure the blessings of liberty,
to ourselves and our posterity,
do ordain and establish
this Constitution
for the United States of America

Now look at how close it is to the real thing:

Crossposted at MLW

Methuselah lived nine hundred years,
Methuselah lived nine hundred years,
Say, but what's good o' livin'
When no gal'll give in
To no man what's nine hundred years?

I'm preachin' this sermon to show
It ain't nessa, 'tain't nessa,
'tain't nessa, 'tain't nessa,
'Tain't necessarily so.

from Porgy & Bess

Time to take on that demon of the right, the feminazi, and show her what's what. Or in point of fact to show you that she is a construct used to bash a large and wonderful group of people. I don't plan to spend much time on Limbaugh's straw woman, because somewhere in here I hope to throw in just enough truth about what feminism is to make you curious and find out for yourself what's really going on. Of the two goals, I'd much rather spend time devoted to people reading what I write as opposed to Limbaugh's sound-bites. Knowing me and knowing Limbaugh, however, it will take longer to do the former than the latter. Without further ado, I present an excerpt from Limbaugh's book, The Way Things Ought To Be:

[When considering whether to crosspost this, I thought of some of the flamewars we've seen. How to handle yourself when faced with the fact that you can not reason with the unreasonable is a problem that will only grow more serious with the spread of fundamentalism. This is my answer.]

[Update II: Thanks to Paul Rosenberg for catching the fact that I'd cited the wrong title for Ocavia Butler's novel.]

Front paged at My Left Wing. *happy badger dance*

In the novel Adulthood Rites by Octavia Butler, the central thematic conflict addressed in the story is the paradoxical existence within the human mind of both intelligence and a need for heirarchy. Simply put, when a need to fit into a structure and reason conflict, reason is not always going to win. When the heirarchal impulse dominates, the effect is almost certainly destructive to anything outside that group, and probably to any inside the group who do not sufficiently acquiesce to its control. The larger problem is that there is always more than one heirarchy, and heirarchies by definition seek to embrace and control as much as possible.

I've been to two kinds of funerals. Some were for those who brought us stability.

Such a funeral is a stately progression of somber faces, each person contemplative of the world the survivors have found themselves in. Sometimes this contemplation is personal, sometimes it is political, but it is always private. It is a hallowed, neutral ground, on which a gathering convenes in the spirit of "there, but for the grace of God, go I." It is a time for understanding and embracing continuity and balance, of considering the moments spent with the deceased, and the memories of them we carry forward. It is a celebration of tradition, of family, and of the culture in which we live. A quiet celebration, but one dedicated to continuity, and the hope that when our time comes, the voices that speak of us in remembrance are kind. It is fundamentally political; it is a monument to the status quo.

Then there are the funerals for those whose lives brought us change.

[Update: 11:31PM] Okay, bluntly, people: Organized churches already possessing great secular power in a nation that is veering rightward have great incentives to support those in power, and often do. I am not talking about a belief in god resulting in facism. I am not talking about the laity (though a considerable segment of the laity must at the very least not resist for it to happen). I am not talking about people with consciences (obviously). I am talking about the large organizations that, as I put it below, benefit from acting as the moral "blessing" upon the "patriotic" unifying of corporate and government interests.

This is not a radical contention people, this is part of the established history of the Western world, if not the entire world.

[Original post follows]
This is in response to a comment that was put out waaaaay back that I didn't bother to go back and check on.

My contention was that "You're drinking the Scalito Kool-aid...

Religion was a powerful supporting force in Germany at that time, at least the rich churches."

  One could say that the history of liberal democracy in general, and the United States in particular, is a melange of ennobling and corrupting efforts that arguably has resulted in the institution and nation becoming more and more egalitarian over time.  The high ideals that form its base, spoken of from democracy's very inception in Greece, are only slowly being brought into real practice. At times they are cast aside in favor of expediency or the particular ideology of one group.  One of our challenges, as people committed to the process of democracy, is to note the closest we have come to these ideals, where we have fallen from what is our best, and how to renew and enliven the living social contract that enables this slow growth of the United States' moral and ethical character.

I seriously believe that the means and the ends are intertwined... the means our nation uses in Iraq defines what the nation(s?) of Iraq and we as a nation will become.  Which will, in turn, define the means we apply for the purpose of achieving still other ends.

I so very much wish I'd been wrong.

Update [2005-9-10 21:23:20 by Stealthbadger]: I feel better... spiderleaf's diary on the same subject has 127 comments and is in the reccommended block. I should have looked there before freaking out.

Okay.  Won't post this again, just letting everyone know its here.




website and bumper-sticker sized, both black and white backgrounds.

Use 'em in good health.

I've had a lot of time to wonder whether this is a crappy thing to do, and whether I'm just feeding the flames of intolerance and simple-minded criticism.  A LOT of time, being kept awake with a toothache gives you a lot of time for self-doubt of all kinds.

Then I had to go read a flashback in CommonDreams to the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan, and how the GOP's response was so much better when there was a political motivation cough*election*cough involved, and thought about how the poor are in even worse shape now than they were then.

That's when I decided that this little bit of snippiness is not only mild, but well-deserved.

Found on Reuters:

U.S. vows to end New Orleans' violent crime wave

By Jim Loney

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (Reuters) - With thousands of troops pouring into New Orleans, law enforcement officials vowed on Saturday to retake the swamped city and halt a crime wave that erupted after Hurricane Katrina's destruction.

Saying he was carrying a message from President Bush, New Orleans U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said police and prosecutors were ready to hunt down a small group of criminals responsible for "horrendous" crimes in the stricken city.

I realize we're mostly focusing on the results of Katrina and Hurricane Bush, but I had this sitting in the back of my head and decided to get it out:  a side by side listing of some of the staggering similarities between Viet Nam and Iraq, most specifically, how we are handling them.

The way I look at it, consistent examination is the surest way to get these people out of office.

Just heard from my roomate that WTOP had announced that Lisa Van Sustren (Greta Van Sustren's sister) had announced her candidacy for the Senate in Maryland (not sure if that's the U.S. Senate seat, or the State Senate.)  Anyone know anything about this? o.0

Supposedly she's running as a Democrat, but I can find no confirmation of it whatsoever.

Darth Chertoff had this to say:  '"It's a team effort," said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. "The head of the team is the president, and the president has, of course, the ultimate responsibility for all the federal effort here."'

And not one goddamn word about the responsibility for the lack of preparation.  

Y'all are political vampires, every damn one of you.

Mr. Bush, I gotta check something.  I know you're busy, but I reeeeally reeeeeally gotta know.

You've asked us to believe:

1.  That the exit polls went one way and the vote went the other in all the critical states in 2000...
   
2.  That every single human being in the armed forces and law enforcement screwed up right until the moment that the airliner went down in Pennsylvania, and then suddenly everyone started doing everything right...

(but wait, there's more)