Moving

Please note: Apparently many of my fellow swingers have begun to find this site through Google. It is now the top link for "travelling rings" so I guess that's to be expected. I have moved the regular posts about the travelling rings to my other server. Please make this change in your bookmarks.

Noam Chomsky

The leftist who keeps Glenn Reynolds awake at night, Noam Chomsky, has put his toe into the blogosphere wading tool. He has apparently opened a blog. Unfortunately it is still a bit half baked as you can't link to any particular post yet (otherwise I'd make scathing comments about how deluded he is to think that Bxxx had a mandate from 2000—sorry but no Noam that's just not the case).

Great Leader Takes Spain to School

Presdient's Message to the Socialist Kingdom of Spain Regarding Its Fraidy-Cat Decision to Rejoin Old Europe and Flip America the Bird.

Unequal Protection

WE AMERICANS need to rethink whether CBS and its parent company Viacom should continue to be trusted to broadcast on our publicly owned airwaves. First, CBS turned down an ad by MoveOn.org discussing the budget deficit because it was too controversial for the Super Bowl. Then it proceeded to air an obscene halftime show produced by MTV. The show included Nelly urging women to take off all their clothes, and Janet Jackson performing with dancers wearing leather fetish outfits and lingerie, and then closing her performance by exposing her breast. MTV's website promised on Jan. 28 that Jackson's performance would include shocking moments, so it is clear that this was planned.

CBS deliberately suppressed and censored political speech and public discourse, the core reason behind the First Amendment, yet saw fit to air sexually exploitive performances during a family event. We cannot tolerate such failures in judgment.

Christine Bolzan Beverly, MA

My Travels

Dedicated Server

I have finally broken down and secured my own dedicated server. I am currently serving pages to over 75k unique visitors per day. This doubled in December. Now I can handle the traffic up to 250k. I've had to put several projects on ice while this gets sorted out. I had a redesign planned at the new year. It's been put off indefinately now as the delay has pushed back several other projects. It looks like I'll have this all sorted out in the next few days as DNS rolls over but there may be some major disruptions or this site may go down altogether for a few days. No worries I'll be back. If you send me email and it bounces just resend in a few days.

"Letters to the Editor" as Blog

Daniel & his brother produce an excellent site of their father's Letters to the Editor. This O'Neill fellow is very talented.

Brilliant & Illegal As Sin

This mashup of the Peanuts gang and Outkast is simply inspired. In a truly fair and just world the "don't sue us" at the end would be un-needed.

This is Phat!

Jay writes, records, and mixes a blog-to-blog call out. It's damn good. And if you listen real close you'll hear tha latest hip sample running around the net: the oh so famous Dean Barbaric Yawp!!! Very cool! Watch this one to climb the Daypop charts with a bullet. With street cred like this and bad ass rhyming chops such as these he has the nuts to go all the way! Watch for Jay as next years MC at the Emerg'n Tek Conference & if things go well I suspect he'll be shootin porn with Snoop before the year is out.

Why Painfully Obvious?

Anush, thanks for the props. I'm not so sure about the optimism though. If the election were held today then yes. But a lot is going to change between now and November. here's a few of my suppositions:

1. The transition to sovereignty in Iraq will not likely go Bush's way. I maintained before the war their were no WMD. However his election campaign has been predicated upon their being such weapons in Iraq. That would have been a coup for his reelection and he was quite clearly relying upon that. Since he was not given such a boon he has to figure out a way to get us out of there both in boots "off" the ground and in the political sense by November. This is a Herculean task that I do not believe any leader would be able to accomplish much less our "great leader." If there are dead guys coming back daily come November and the news has good videos of rocket attacks, etc within Iraq and involving our soldiers Bush will lose. That seems increasingly likely. Enmeshed with this is the issue of money. If my calculations are correct we will run out of allocated money for Iraq sometime in the early summer. I would be very surprised if Bush is not forced to either ask for more money from Congress before the election or drastically slow down spending in Iraq in order to drag things out to wait until after the election before asking for more funds. He's in a big pickle.

2. The Republican party is shooting themselves in the foot by starting a cultural war in the midst of all of this. The gay marriage issue is going to become a huge civil rights issue if the Amendment to the Constitution is pushed hard. It does look as though they are going to use this as a wedge issue to divide the Democrats. I think in the end this will strip the moderates from the Republican party. If Bush actually were a fiscal conservative and our policies had reason vis-a-vis the economy this probably wouldn't be the case. However lacking that issue the moderate wing will lose 2 important reasons for being part of the Republican party. I think this is a huge issue that will prove insurmountable to Bush. Amercians as a whole are generally fair people. Bush's agenda is not fair and by pushing it he will get many more people involved in the political process who will oppose him.

3. There are several legal storms that are about to hit the administration. He will have to purge several power players before the summer is over: Plame affair, Halliburton corruption, spying at the UN, Cheney's legal problems with France, 9/11 commission, take your pick. one or more of those will be dominating the headlines come fall. I suspect they will be coming one after another. It will probably be quite impressive to see and will prove crippling to governance.

4. I did not say he was easily beatable. It's more like it's his election to lose. I don't put much stock at this point that the election is Kerry's or Dean's or Edward's or Clark's election to win. Hopefully there will be a strong contender but all the cards for the election are in play. Bush has already laid down his cards and we just have to watch as the chips fall. It seems pretty apparent that barring another terrorist attack between now and November that his goose is cooked and the Tidy Bowl man could beat Bush with ease.

Of course I could be wrong. Maybe all the legal smoke is not actually a fire. Maybe Iraq with transition to soveriegnty with grace, we won't be asked to pay anymore money, and OBL will turn himself in to the police station in Mosul. Maybe the people of America really are unfair and want to make damn sure that queers know their place. I've been wrong before.

Painfully Obvious

It has become painfully obvious over the last week that the establishment media intends to "delete" the Howard Dean campaign. I suspect they are overplaying their hand.

BONUS LINK America as a One-Party State by Robert Kuttner

I say this again: any one of the aspirants to the Democratic ticket can easily beat George Bush. He will be defeated by his own arrogance and by the economy and by Iraq. He was defeated the moment we invaded Iraq.

Post Iowa Dean Interview

I really like Judy Dean. Judy Dean has all the body language of someone who is truly in love with Howard Dean. Notice how every time she laughs and expresses amusement she turns her body towards him. That's a sign of a very strong relationship body language betweeen them.

He is a kook. And she is adorable. Great interview!