Published on Sat, 2006-09-30 16:16

Stoller Speak

The Republican leadership is a group of psychotic Office Space type banal tyrants, and the right-wing media chamber is composed mostly of decrepit greed-driven whiny losers who follow them. That's why they can't make this country work. They are immoral, and they bring immorality and corruption everywhere they go.

I know there's a lot of bitterness out there about torture, and unlike Chris [Bowers], I'm not really mollified with 75% of Democrats voting against torture. They should have spoken out early and often, and they did not. But at the end of the day, I'm not fighting for these Democrats, the ones in the House and Senate. These are followers, not leaders. We are the leaders. The Democratic Party is millions of people around the country, millions who don't like our direction, and it is up to us to change the direction of the country and the party. We can do it.

For those who wish I would post more often about politics, I strongly suggest MyDD for a wonky fix down the home stretch of election season. They're closer to the game than me, but they're good kids really trying to make it happen.

Update: for a little more pep-rally spirit, check out this post by Digby.

One more update: If you're in the mood for a searingly-rendered dose of GOP hypocrisy nobody serves it up better than Glenn Greenwald.

Published on Fri, 2006-09-29 20:38

Dead Girl or Live Boy

That'll do it.

Florida Republican Rep. Mark Foley has resigned today after it was discovered he was having sexy internet chats with teenagee boys working as congressional pages.

Read some Icky IMs. Gross.

And here's the kicker: Denny "the Fat Man" Hastert and his GOP House Leadership knew about this almost a year ago. They did nothing.

When are people going to realize that sexual moralizers -- Foley was an anti-internet-porn crusader -- are often compensating for something, and should be taken with a dose of salt? That goes for just about any moralizer, really.

So, in spite of our recent shame on torture, it's probably still a good idea to vote Democrat come November 7th. Why, if we send some brash young pups into congress, we might even get that whole "moral clarity" thing sorted out. The ship of state handles like a supertanker, and it's bound to take some years to turn right.

Published on Fri, 2006-09-29 11:17

Of Site Plans And Politics

This weekend in addition to writing three critical documents for my job, I plan on re-launching this site and beginning to ride the Rebel Unicorn. That probably means another weekend in Westhaven, but with a trip to NYC looming next week I don't have much desire to try and run all over town.

I've been thinking through the nitty gritty of how to structure a community blogging page. The technical details are pretty easy thanks to the power of Drupal. It'll give me all the flex I need to set it up, and room to grow going forward (identity services being top of my pipe-dream wishlist).

But the bigger question is: how should it be set up for users? How about visitors? I've got ideas. I might draw pictures, or I might just do it and see what happens.

Politics
It's fuckin' ugly out there, folks. The US congress just passed a law legalizing <a href="http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/2006/09/this_is_what_wa.php'>torture, and stripping "unlawful enemy combatants" of their right of any kind of day in court. Who are these "enemy combatants?" Anyone the Decider decides they are.

My own appetitie for writing about this remains, and I still have an optimistic outlook on the situation, but I don't want to inundate my own page with this. I think what I may do is create a politics section on the Rebel Unicorn that can collect this (and others') posts about matters of state. The same content would be optionally viewable on individual users' pages too, of course, but I sorta want my own blog to go back in the autobio direction, and try to create a slightly more polished and thinky political section that I and others can use to try and say something meaningful.

Anyway, it's 8:30am now and time to get to real work. More soon, my pretties.

Published on Thu, 2006-09-28 23:07

Bow Down Before The One You Serve

I've finally gone and done it.

I am now a senior partner... in a company I just created with Zacker and this distant-cousin of the Veep named Matt. We're going to be rich like Saudi Princes, peddlers of influence like Casper Wineberger. We dress like Republicans, talk like Anarchists, and our impact on the industry will make spiking the water cooler with LSD look like casual friday.

How web 2.0 are those GD pictures? Just my little digicam and some photoshopping to crop out the background. Oh yeah.

Next thing you know I'll have medical insurance.

Published on Wed, 2006-09-27 00:50

I Was Wheeling And Dealing...

Pretty drained after a long day of meetings and hand-waving and rental-car-driving in the fair and sunny metropolis of San Francisco, but it looks like we'll have a company.

Stay tuned for the website launch. After that, this weekend is all about the Rebel Unicorn.

...

Oh man. I forgot how addictive this stuff is. It's weird. I've been on this web-publishing gig straight since November 2001 except for my recent hiatus. I'm pretty damn accustomed to this digital literary outlet for my oddball thoughts and occasional feelings. I hadn't missed it all that much when I put it down, but now that I pick it back up I feel the pressure of untold stories (would you like to hear about my dinner with an old lady friend here in San Francisco tonight?) unrecorded thought (quick! get down that bit about how worrying about the appocalypse is a waste of your time!) and the draw of wrestling with big ideas over time...

Yes, so this is fun and interesting. I've decided there are several flaws with this site layout. I'm also mulling over how to hang with a "front page" that collects the good/big/substantive/promotable posts, and some kind of sidebar that lets me do my thing here and just blog all that I want to blog without getting too much in the way.

Indeed. We shall see.

How Often Do You Think I Should Post?

On Tue, 2006-09-26 00:45

* Two or three times a week\n* Once a day\n* More than once a day\n* All the friggin' time!\n

Read more about How Often Do You Think I Should Post?

Published on Mon, 2006-09-25 14:24

Donation Time

C.R.E.A.M.

Fiscal year 2006 is drawing to a close, and it's election season. It's a big mid-term year here, with a real chance for the Democratic Party to pick up seats in the House, make Bush a lame duck, and start shifting the national focus away from more war and towards a better tomorrow health care, energy independence, and an end to the occupation of Iraq.

I've probably got some expertise volunteering to do at some point, but the most basic action in supporting a campaign is throwing them cash, so as the fundraising quarter runs out, I decided to crack open my wallet.

Here's the list of people I looked at to pick from. You might want to first check and see if there's anything going on in your home district worth getting involved in. NorCal is pretty sleepy as far as the national picture is concerned, so I looked to the NetRoots list for inspiration.

My Contributions:
I split up $100 for four folks:

Eric Massa (NY-29) 	$25.00
Jerry McNerney (CA-11)  $25.00
Larry Grant (ID-01) 	$25.00
Gary Trauner (WY-01) 	$25.00
ActBlue Tipjar		$5.00

Eric Massa is an ex Navy Officer running in a close race against a weak GOP rubberstamper in upstate NY. I met him at the yearly Kos and he gives a good big-hearted progressive navy guy/catholic speech. I also met the young woman -- Samara Barend -- who ran for this seat in 2004. She lost, but her effort as a ~~28-year-old~~ 26-year-old (thanks Frank) opened the door here I think, so I feel a little connection to the district.

Jerry McNerney is a PhD in Math and an expert in wind power. He's running in part because after 9/11 his kid joined the Air Force. He's already beat out establishment candidates in the Democratic party primary and is now running against the odious Richard Pombo, a GOP party-line stooge deep in the oil-industry's pockets. 'Nuff said.

My last two picks are a nod to the 50-state-strategy, people who are running deep in GOP territory: my boys Larry and Gary.

Larry Grant is running in Idaho, and seems to have an improbably good chance due to the incumbent's personal abrasiveness and unpopularity even among Republicans.

Gary Trauner is running quite well for the single "at large" congressional seat in Wyoming. He's looking good so far, and if we can win in Wyoming, Montana, and Indiana, that's enough of an edge to run the table in '08.

I also tipped ActBlue 5% because they're doing a bang-up job as honest brokers and red-tape cutters on this stuff.

So these are my horses. I'll follow them down the stretch. Pick some of your own?

Published on Fri, 2006-09-22 11:31

¡En Fuego!

Chavez en fuego
My dog, callin' Dubya el Diablo, getting laughs from the crowd. It's inflammatory rhetoric, but that's politics. On substance, his critique of Bush's "Freedom is on the March" rhetoric and foreign policy is actually dead-on.

For those of you who are new to this, understand that 95% of what you read about Hugo Chavez in the english-language press is propaganda. He's won solid majorities thrice in internationally certified elections, which is more than I can say for most leaders these days, including our new boy down there in Mexico.

Meistro? A little history, please.

So why the propaganda? Well he's a socialist who uses his country's natural resources to provide infrastructure, medicine and education to the poor, and he's building stronger regional economic ties outside of any of our fancy funds like the IMF or World Bank.

Apparently we're still so afraid of communism that we can't handle this. He's showing us up, so fuck 'em, he's a dictator! Coup d'etat his as, or get someone down there with a poison cigar or something...

Chavez is up for re-election this year, which he does seem likely to win, but it also looks like his opposition won't boycott the political process (as they did in the 2005 parlimentary elections, to ill effect for them). That's good. Instead, they've adopted Chavez's rhetoric of helping the poor, and are critiquing his foreign-aid and military-acquisition programs as unnecessary diversions.

On the downside for them, the Un Nuevo Tiempo (A New Era) party doesn't have much credibility -- still closely tied to the economic elite -- so in spite of the fact that Chavez is vulnerable on just about every issue except education, they probably won't be able to capitalize, this time. But if they keep at it...

The point is, you can hardly call the man a dictator. He may be inheriting Castro's place as the regional champion of socialism, and setting him self up in opposition to US Hegemony, but he's not running a police state or anything, and frankly it's a little embarassing that our media and political elites can only see a Red Menace.

Castro y Chavez

Keep on rockin' in the free world.

Published on Thu, 2006-09-21 02:36

This is all temporary

I'm still figuring things out. I hope to spend some more hours and really "launch" this weekend. In the mean time I don't see anything wrong with giving y'all a sneak peek.

My goals here:

Get my own thing back on track: gonzo blogging of a life less ordinary.
Restoring the old-style book-like pages that I started with back in 2001: "Josh's take on such-and-such"
The Rebel Unicorn platform: my blogging empire, no tribute required.

Slowly but surely.

Published on Tue, 2006-09-19 20:47

International Solidarity Through Software Development

A practical example.

Right now in Hungary, there's serious civil unrest because of a bad economy and a president who admitted lying about it. Who cares, right?

Well, as I'm working on this site (and getting my job done for a client) I had to ask a Drupal security question, so of course I had to ask chx, the undisputed heavyweight champion on such issues.

He's Hungarian, and in and around answering my question he mentioned how glad he is to get away from mounted police beating the shit out of people and off to Antwerp for the Drupal conference (where, incidentally, my business partner Zack will be, along with some other friends).

Global projects shrink the globe.

Outlandish Josh

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