Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Think about the following when you VOTE today

Iraq
Iraq
Iraq
Abu Ghraib
Guantanamo
Unwarranted Phone Taps
Unprecedented Powers
Unmatched Incompetence
Unparalleled Corruption
Governor Bob Taft
Representative Tom Delay
Representative Roy Blunt
Representative Ken Calvert
Representative John Dolittle
Representative Tom Feeney
Representative Katherine Harris
Representative Jerry Lewis
Representative Gary Miller
Representative Marilyn Musgrave
Representative Richard Pombo
Representative Rick Renzi
Representative John Sweeney
Representative Charles Taylor
Representative Curt Weldon
Representative J.D. Hayworth
Representative Don Sherwood
Representative Bob Ney
Representative Duke Cunningham
Representative Tom Reynolds
Representative Chris Cannon
Jeff Gannon
Representative Mark Foley
Representative Dennis Hastert
Senator George Allen
Senator Bill Frist
Senator Conrad Burns
Senator Rick Santorum
David Safavian
The Vice Presidential Energy Task Force
Three bucks a gallon
Record oil company profits
Anwar Pipeline
Anbar Province
Adelphia
Merck
Halliburton
Arthur Anderson
Qwest
Tyco
WorldCom
Global Crossing
Global Warming
Global Boiling
Exxon
Enron
Abramoff
Adam Kidan
Timothy Flanigan
Ralph Reed
Rita
Katrina
Fema
Terri
Condi
Harriet Miers
The Supreme Court
Diebold
John Bolton
Florida, 2000
Ohio, 2004
North Korea
Iran
Darfur
Stem Cell Research
Scooter Libby
Valerie Plame
Golden Parachutes
Shrunken Pensions
Bernie Kerik
Eminent Domain
Social Security
Habeas Corpus
Ahmad Chalabi
The Baghdad Museum
Tora Bora
Taliban Resurgence
Iraqi Insurgents
General Eric Shinsecki
General Anthony Zinni
Mission Accomplished
Illegal Immigration
Intelligent Design
Kenneth Tomlinson
Claude Allen
Swift Boat Hit Squads
Ari Fleischer
Scott McClellan
Tony Snow
Ann Coulter
Expiration of Assault Weapons Ban
John Ashcroft
Alberto Gonzales
George Tenet
Paul Bremer
Paul Wolfowitz
Richard Perle
Kissinger Redux
Duck Cheney
Donald Henry Rumsfeld

And finally, the Uniter-Decider-Reader of Camus, Shakespeare and “My Pet Goat,” who describes the party that successfully prosecuted two world wars as people who “cut and run”.

Breaking news!

Republicans will give US juries a brand-new new option–to find a defendant “Not guilty by reason of sounding sincerely sorry. ”

Rove’s latest PowerPoint playbook (leaked yesterday) tells GOP lawmakers it’s getting too hard to play on the heartstrings of people who find out you’ve been abusing their trust.

“I want to make it very clear I am remorseful. I accept the responsibility. There’s no way that I can turn back the clock. And I’m not that individual that I was years ago.” (Statement to the court by yet one more wealthy defendant, quoted in the NYT.

Until the new law gets passed, Rove urges his new crop of GOP felons-to-be to avoid the over-familiarity of “I take responsibility.”

There’s even an online playbook, Rove points out, of less hackneyed ways to say “I don’t want anything bad to happen to me as a result of the bad things I already did to you”:

It was a very very bad thing to have done and I’m really very ashamed of myself. I can only say it won’t happen again. To have murdered so many people in such a short space of time is really awful, and I really am very, very, very sorry that I did it, and also that I’ve taken up so much of the court’s valuable time listening to the sordid details of these senseless killings of mine…

Yep, that’s Episode 27 of Monty Python.

Elsewhere in the leaked file, Rove suggests a new law requiring judges to hand out probation, not prison, when a defendant’s lawyer uses this magic formula:

“Hasn’t my client already been punished enough?

From the top of the Empire State Building, everyone says, people walking around on the street look like little ants.

I’ve been wandering in Manhattan today, and you know what? The people don’t really look like little ants.

They look like people, who have their own public charms and warts, and private hopes and anguishes, just like the ones that you have, the ones that I have.

But don’t you think that, from the White House, we just look like little ants?

“GOP Trying to Blacklist Rosie O’Donnell“?

Yeah, right–Republican strategists want “The View” to fire its new co-host just the way Republican fundraisers want Hillary Clinton to disappear.

The RNC heads its new anti-Rosie rant with

DEMS’ “ROSIE” VIEW ON WAR ON TERROR

Cut-And-Run Defeatocrats Across The Country Take Their Cues From Hollywood Friends And Advisors

The RNC perfectly understands that its base can’t get enough trash-talk about uppity women. So, when Hillary-hating gets stale but cheers won’t start for “Down with Nancy Pelosi,” Rosie O’Donnell is a perfect new target.

And commenters over at FreeRepublic are thrilled:

• The only woman worse than Rosie is Hitlery because Sen. Cankles actually has some power.
• Someone change Barbara Walters’s underwear. she does own a piece of “The View”, doesn’t she? How’s that decision to hire Rosie working out Babs?
• Rosie’s presence back in the national spotlight could not have come at a better time for Republicans. She puts quite a face on hatred and meaness towards God and country. Cindy Sheehan is a lightweight, but Rosie is a heavyweight on a broadcast network surrounded by air headed shills like Barbara WaWA. Lots of voters do not know who Nancy Pelosi or Maxine Waters is, but when Rosie spews her venom, it gets attention.
• Gee, an outspoken leftist dyke with an eating disorder who hates the President and Christianity. Well, that takes care of the female half of Moveon, ACT, NARAL and the World Workers Party. I would run commercials every day of Rosies rant. At the end, say, “This is todays Democrat Party.”

For RNC spinners, the future looks very “Rosie.”

When I remember that day five years ago, I remember the sorrow that drew even strangers together.

And I remember the warm-hearted way that people in Canada, France, England, and elsewhere reached out to to show sympathy for America’s pain.

Think back there now–didn’t you then wake up every morning, determined to go forward as a better person?

Those are a few things from that black time worth remembering.

On September 11, 2005, I also remembered the day.

Who’s coming to Wikimania and to my talk?

Everything that anybody’s Web 2.0 startup is suddenly struggling with has been under construction at Wikipedia since 2001….

For example, coping with the ups and downs on your site triggered by stories in the media.

I’ve been looking at edit wars and vandal waves until I now see Excel spreadsheets in my dreams. (Aside from a few days off at beautiful and intense BlogHer 2006.)

Much more to say next time that I’m not messing with spreadsheets….

“I need some strong dudes to hang drywall,”
yells the truckdriver. A mob of eager workers rushes forward; soon the
rickety truckbed is full of strong dudes who’ll hang drywall all day
and go home with minimal pay.

Many of our brightest young college graduates will be facing career
choices like those of the “strong dudes,” as bigcos redistribute jobs
to the lowest bidders around the globe. More than one startup is
already figuring out how to broker web-based piecework so that jobless
people who trained for “good jobs with computers” can compete for the
privilege of getting
paid much, much less than the value they generate.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of this story, I read in
Scobleizer
that Jason Calacanis is taking heat for wanting to pay Digg’s best
diggers to come do for him what they’re now doing for free at Digg.

Jason Calacanis retorts, “You know what the difference between the so-called “elite” and
the top users in the masses are? One group gets paid and one
doesn’t–that’s it.”

You don’t have to be at a conference full of great women to understand
that lots of valuable work in this world is underpaid or unpaid.
But…offering to pay even the top 12 people a tiny fraction of what
they’re worth–what a revolutionary idea!

My dad never talked about World War II or the Purple Heart he came home with. My mom told me the story, once, so he must have told her. My dad captained an ship in the Pacific, carting US soldiers around to various islands that were occupied by soldiers from Japan. One day my dad was with his two first officers when shell fragments swept the bridge. The other two men died instantly, my father survived with a tiny wound on his cheek. My brother Mark was named for one of the men killed by the shell that spared my father. The shell didn’t leave any physical scar on my father. The military makes no distinction about the severity of a wound when setting the standards for a Purple Heart. If you are wounded in action, you get a Purple Heart. It’s a way to distinguish people whose service puts their lives at risk.

Before they started sneering at Representative Murtha’s Purple Heart, Republicans mocked John Kerry in 2004 with Purple Heart bandaids, and CNN explained that Purple Hearts like my father’s were fair game for mockery:

Although he was grievously wounded in a later battle, [Senator Bob] Dole wrote in a 1988 biography that the first of his two Purple Hearts was the kind of wound the Army treated “with Mercurochrome and a Purple Heart.”

Maybe the military should add a warning label to Purple Hearts:

Caution: This decoration can and will be used against you by people claiming to “Support Our Troops.”

Congressman Bob “Freedom fries” Ney (R, OH) no longer heads the powerful House Administration Committee–for years now the graveyard of Congressional efforts to mandate a verifiable paper backup for US elections.

Diebold voting machines are used in 80% of US elections–but (I’m sure you already know this) they aren’t safe from hackers.

Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) has introduced H.R. 550, a bill that requires voting machines to create a paper trail, with a mandate to get it in place before the 2006 elections–but

• despite the departure of Bob “Friend of Diebold” Ney,
• despite the high stakes for democracy,
• despite being co-sponsored by close to one-third of the members of Congress,

Holt’s bill is still (unbelievably!) stuck in committee:

“.. it was stalled in the House Administration Committee for two years by its chairman, Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio. Rep. Ney stepped down from that post in January after being subpoenaed in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, but so far the new chairman, Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers, R-Mich., has shown no inclination to move the bill.” (Editorial from the Trenton (NJ) Times, April 4, 2006)

What can we do?

• Sign Rush Holt’s online petition.
• Check out the Bill’s list of 187 (bipartisan!) cosponsors–is your Representative on the list? Either way, let that Representative hear from you!
• Write your own blogpost or letter to the editor.

Free and fair elections are everybody’s business.

(Green Day version)
I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don’t know where it goes
But it’s home to me and I walk alone

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Where the city sleeps
and I’m the only one and I walk alone

I walk alone
I walk alone

I walk alone
I walk a…

My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
‘Til then I walk alone

Ah-ah, Ah-ah, Ah-ah, Aaah-ah,
Ah-ah, Ah-ah, Ah-ah

I’m walking down the line
That divides me somewhere in my mind
On the border line
Of the edge and where I walk alone

Read between the lines
What’s fucked up and everything’s alright
Check my vital signs
To know I’m still alive and I walk alone

I walk alone
I walk alone

I walk alone
I walk a…

My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
‘Til then I walk alone

Ah-ah, Ah-ah, Ah-ah, Aaah-ah
Ah-ah, Ah-ah

I walk alone
I walk a…

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Where the city sleeps
And I’m the only one and I walk a…

My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
‘Til then I walk alone…