Alan Munde Gazette -- Deep Ellum Blues

Snow

We woke up this morning to a bit of snow on the ground. Dez got to stay home from work for a while because the Hartman Bridge was closed, and Jameson got to see real snow for the first time. Actually, he saw some in Sweden a couple of years ago, but he won't remember it.


Dez and Jameson had their first snowball fight. Jameson won. We took advantage of the morning by going to IHOP for pancakes.

Christmas Parade and Santa Breakfast

Jameson and his buddies got to ride in Chevron Phillips' Firetruck for the Baytown Christmas Parade. The grownups sat in back, and the boys sat up on the center console. That's them looking out of the front window in the first pic. Jameson sang his versions of "Jingle Bells" and "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" over the intercom for the crowd. He was a big hit. He also got to press the button that operated the "snow" machine on the front bumper. It sent suds flying all over the crowd, which was surprisingly large.


Can you see the "snow"? While we waited for the parade to start, we blasted the people on the float in front of us for a good thirty minutes.




Jameson asked Santa for the "Cars" movie, despite all of our coaching. Dez took pics of all the kids on Santa's lap, and Jameson was a champ while we waited.

Granddad & Grandma Ryals

Aunt Janice gave me Granddad's Masonic ring when we saw them recently, so I started going through some memories. He loved to keep busy, and he loved his garden. I believe those are tomatoes he's got in the basket. He liked a platter of sliced tomotoes for just about every lunch and supper. The main entrance to his and grandma's house was through the back door, and they had a sort-of pantry/coat-room you had to go through to get into the kitchen. He had a metal shelf stocked with "canned" (pressure cooked in mason jars) veggies and jellies. The kitchen had an old formica table where we ate all of our breakfasts and lunches.


He didn't like messes. That's the side of the garage. Every visit started with two things. First, he would tell me the story about how he drove all night across the Texas panhandle singing "Little Brown Jug" to me. I was holding onto his finger, and everytime he thought he had me asleep, I would shake his finger and say "More Grandpa." He told me that story about once a day. Second, he gave a tour of the garden. "Look, I've got grapes this year. Muscadine." Every visit ended with complex driving directions, complete with biographies and genealogies of the people who lived in the houses he hoped we would be driving past.

When I was a kid, he loved to pull a turnip out of the garden, rinse it and peel it with a pocket knife, and get me to eat it like an apple. I was into it. Every summer we would sit in front of the tv, watching Grandma's soap operas, and shell peas for hours. He would get mad at Uncle Wilson for going into the water melon patch, cutting just the heart out of melon, eating on the spot, and pitching the rest of it.

Grandma did not love to keep busy, though she loved to feed us, and was proud of her chocolate pie. Her favorite games were Liverpool and Uno, and she wanted to win. She always had a good time, and liked to beg us not to take the cards she wanted. "Don't you wuv me?"

She ran a drug store with a soda fountain when they lived in Whitedeer, Texas. The sugar helped ruin her teeth. She always gave us a big thrill by taking out her false teeth and chasing us around to kiss us. Although she loved to laugh, she could not abide being tickled. Lots of stories about pans and other dangerous items being thrown in self defense. She was a knick knack collector, and liked little blown glass animals and porcelain figurines.

Still hanging out

This is right outside of Jameson's window.

In the backyard today

It stayed in the same spot until it got dark, then took off. Jameson got a good look at it after he woke up from his nap.

Wednesday update: Saw it again early this morning. I opened the blinds in the bedroom when I got out of bed at twilight, and it was on the fence right outside the window. The bedroom light seemed to annoy it. I didn't see it again the rest of the day. Dez wants to name it Hoot. Jennifer suggested Gandolf.

November photos

I had a conference in San Antonio, so we took in some sights. This pic is at the Mission San Jose on the Mission Trail.

Janice and Elliot drove down from Driftwood and we hung out on the riverwalk. We took the riverboat tour and ate Mexican food.

Uno mas

The dragon had a few of these wipeouts.

Halloween vids

Pumpkin Carving

More October Pics

What to do whent the pool is too cold? How about floating in the bathtub with the spiderman tube from Anne and Mark.

Tumbling Class

Jameson started tumbling class a couple of weeks ago. He and his buddy Lance, from across the culdesac, are the only kids in his group right now.

October

September

New photos at the side.

Hey

I've decided to stop posting non-family related stuff here. I joined facebook recently, and have started posting links and thoughts there. I get feedback, so that seems to be the more appropriate outlet. I'll have some pics of Jameson up later today or tomorrow. It is almost October (costume month) and he will be styling.

Kaptur

When is it time to panic?

Billmon on the problem.

Megan McArdle on the money market near-collapse

Bonddad on Congress responding to Paulson's plan.

It is starting to look like both dems and repubs are willing to go along with a bad deal for taxpayers as long as both parties do it.

Newsflash: the press

is dysfunctional.

On the Ike front, I am tired, sore, and scratched up. My neighbor, Mike, rocks. He helped me move my fence out to the curb for pick up. Dez went to work today. I may go tomorrow, but HCC is being stingy with info. Even if my campus has power, most of my students don't. They need computers to write essays (and electricity, water and food, to care about writing essays). My online classes are supposed to start this coming week. That should be interesting. The server is currently down. BTW, if you've sent me email, I can't get it right now. The server is down.

Meanwhile, the kids in the neighborhood are living it up. They love being out of school. Dez took a bunch of water guns and an elmo sprinkler out in the culdesac yesterday. Pandemonium. Kids ring our doorbell all day asking if Birgitta's (my mother-in-law) dog, Bella, can come outside. They walked her around for hours at a time. Today is tree-chopping day for me. I was able to stand up a few of them.

Ike

We were lucky. Our home didn't flood, the roof and windows are intact, and we got power back quickly. The back yard took a whack. No big deal. There's roof and window damage around the neighborhood. An SUV is in one of the ornamental lakes. Rumors are starting to pour in from friends and neighbors about the death toll in Galveston. Hopefully they're just rumors. Thanks to Brad and Ruben, and Anne and Mark, for letting us stay with them, and to everyone whose been calling and texting.



Update: Just tried to make a run to HomeDepot, about a mile from here. The water is receding in the little neighborhood lakes, and a couple of more cars emerged. Boats are still in the streets. A construction trailer-home office was upside down. The army is camped out in the grocery parking lot.

Hurricane Ike

Hey all,

We had a mandatory evac from our home. We live about a mile from Kemah, just inland from the west side of Galveston Bay. Our neighbor told us we are about 17 feet above sea level. We don't think our house flooded, but there are flash flood warnings all over because there was heavy rain last night. Many areas are flooded already. We have heard some roofs in our area had shingles blown off, so we are also a bit concerned about leaks. I boarded up the whole house, so broken windows shouldn't be an issue.

We spent the night with our friends, Brad and Ruben, in their high rise condo Thursday and Friday night. They lost power during the storm, so we spent the night with my sister and brother-in-law, Anne and Mark, last night. They have power, but very little water pressure. We're hoping to get a look at our home soon, but really don't know when that might be. Hopefully tomorrow. Some of the roads and highways are flooded and blocked with debris, and branches and power lines are also a concern. I think cops are also blocking entrance to some of the neighborhoods in our area. So, we are HUNKERING DOWN until further notice.

Andrew Sullivan

"The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person."

Tracy

Dez's friend, Tracy, came out from Los Angeles and spent a few days with us. Jameson fell in love.

A couple of speeches you might want to watch before the one tonight

Martin Luther King
"I Have a Dream"
August 28, 1963

Part I of JFK's Acceptance Speech at the Democratic Convention, 1960.

Part II. As John Harvey reminded me this morning, he gave it at a large stadium, the Memorial Coliseum, in Los Angeles.

Blackberry Trellis

Just built the blackberry trellis, finally. My fingers hurt from training the stalks along the cable. Thorny boogers. I've got the plants too close together, but I'm just that kind of guy. According to the experts, blackberry stalks can grow 100 feet long. This setup is seven feet high, and they should fill it up in a couple of months. We got a few blackberries this year, but we should have loads next year, even after the birds have their share.

RateMyProfessors.com

I have been pwned by many disgruntled students at RateMyProfessors.com

This teacher is the most boring teacher i ever taken he only gives u 5 essays to do. however he grades hard so make sure ur essay is good. i wont ever take him again too too boring all we did was read at home and go to class and talked about the story we read i don't recommend him at all.

Maybe I need to wear more flair. I am sarcastic (see previous sentence), professional, cruel, easy-going, too hard, easy, I return papers slowly, and I return papers quickly. I have a zero rating on my Hotness Total.

My online students are particularly peeved, and have more to complain about. I got into the Distance Ed thing after other profs had established turf rights to the regular semester fiction (2342)sections, so I teach what's called second start. It begins six weeks later than the regular semester, so students don't get their first grades back until close to the "drop" deadine. I teach three of these sections, which means I begin with 96 students in just those three classes. My other three classes (1301 comp/1302 rhetoric) are face-to-face and begin during the regular start date. I usually have about 60-70 students in those at first. I spend about 20-30 minutes grading each essay (which is slow), so I am slow to get essays back. The online students are justified in being frustrated. The only ways I could get them back more quickly would be to pull all-nighters (not going to happen) or to grade each essay more quickly (not going to happen). Online enrollment numbers, for me, drop substantially after a few weeks.

The hand written EOI's (evaluation of instruction) I get routed back to me from my f-t-f students are, oddly, all positive. Every single one of them. I think my department chair must be weeding out the bad ones to boost my self-esteem.

George Will on Education

"Where Paternalism Makes the Grade"

Paternalism is the restriction of freedom for the good of the person restricted.
. . . . . . .
Unfortunately, powerful factions fiercely oppose the flourishing. Among them are education schools with their romantic progressivism -- teachers should be mere "enablers" of group learning; self-esteem is a prerequisite for accomplishment, not a consequence thereof. Other opponents are the teachers unions and their handmaiden, the Democratic Party. Today's liberals favor paternalism -- you cannot eat trans fats; you must buy health insurance -- for everyone except children. Odd.

All we need to do, you see, is to apply this administration's philosophy of the unitary executive (greater empowerment of a benign and protecting leader at the expense of civil liberties) to the classroom. This authoritarian model will make up for what Will sees as an epidemic lack of qualified teachers in the country. In his example, he suggests mandatory uniforms, the prohibitions against jewelry, makeup, slouching, holidays, etc., are responsible for student success, and casually notes that the teachers at this school are from places like "Harvard, Dartmouth, Oberlin, Columbia, Berkeley, Brown and Wesleyan."

I've been in the dysfunctional high schools of inner-city Houston, especially those in the low-income northeast side, and the campuses look like prisons. The kids wear uniforms. There are plenty of security gaurds, assistant principals walk around with bull horns, and the teachers' main priority is discipline. The teachers are not from Harvard and Dartmouth. Just maybe, more capable teachers than those we have could be drawn into education by paying them salaries comparable to those of other valued professions.

Most educators, even while they quarrel among themselves, will agree that a genuine commitment to any one of a number of different solutions could help enormously. Most agree that although money can't by itself solve problems, without money few problems can be solved. Money also can't win wars or put men in space, but it is the crucial facilitator. It is also how America has traditionally announced, We are serious about this!

If we were serious, we would raise teachers' salaries to levels that would attract the best young professionals in our society: starting lawyers get from $70,000 to $80,000 [in 1993]-why don't starting kindergarten teachers get the same? Is their role in vouchsafing our future less significant? And although there is evidence suggesting that an increase in general educational expenditures doesn't translate automatically into better schools, there is also evidence that an increase aimed specifically at instructional services does. Can we really take in earnest the chattering devotion to excellence of a country so wedded in practice to mediocrity, a nation so ready to relegate teachers--conservators of our common future--to the professional backwaters?

George Will is not serious. Barber's essay is a classic, and worth a read.

Molly Ivors on Distance Ed

"I've Got My Notebooks And I'm Going Back". Her husband, Thers, teaches English, like me. He and his wife share that Whisky Fire blog. He's hilarious, and you should check him out.

Anyhow, I teach DE for half my classes.

Jameson's Birthday

Russia, Georgia, and the USA

Billmon

Zuzu and Grandpa are bringing Jameson home today

We are happy. While he was gone, we took down his crib and put a big boy bed in his room. The next few nights should be interesting.

Starting to Get the Idea

Byron York: The Left and Plans for "Nuremberg-Style" Tribunals for Bush Administration Officials

He shouldn't just be worried about what kind of accountability an Obama administration might pursue. International law was broken.

It just keeps coming

EXCLUSIVE: To Provoke War, Cheney Considered Proposal To Dress Up Navy Seals As Iranians And Shoot At Them

I guess the surprise is that they decided not to do it. Instead, they've gone with supporting what are essentially Al Qaeda groups inside Iran. Which plan do you find more absurd?

Anthrax, Iraq Propoganda, and ABC

Glenn Greenwald.

We now know -- we knew even before news of Ivins' suicide last night, and know especially in light of it -- that the anthrax attacks didn't come from Iraq or any foreign government at all. It came from our own Government's scientist, from the top Army bioweapons research laboratory. More significantly, the false reports [anonymously "leaked" to ABC] linking anthrax to Iraq also came from the U.S. Government -- from people with some type of significant links to the same facility responsible for the attacks themselves.

Surely the question of who generated those false Iraq-anthrax reports is one of the most significant and explosive stories of the last decade. The motive to fabricate reports of bentonite and a link to Saddam is glaring. Those fabrications played some significant role -- I'd argue a very major role -- in propagandizing the American public to perceive of Saddam as a threat, and further, propagandized the public to believe that our country was sufficiently threatened by foreign elements that a whole series of radical policies that the neoconservatives both within and outside of the Bush administration wanted to pursue -- including an attack an Iraq and a whole array of assaults on our basic constitutional framework -- were justified and even necessary in order to survive.

ABC News already knows the answers to these questions. They know who concocted the false bentonite story and who passed it on to them with the specific intent of having them broadcast those false claims to the world, in order to link Saddam to the anthrax attacks and -- as importantly -- to conceal the real culprit(s) (apparently within the U.S. government) who were behind the attacks. And yet, unbelievably, they are keeping the story to themselves, refusing to disclose who did all of this. They're allegedly a news organization, in possession of one of the most significant news stories of the last decade, and they are concealing it from the public, even years later.

They're not protecting "sources." The people who fed them the bentonite story aren't "sources." They're fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood. But by protecting the wrongdoers, ABC News has made itself complicit in this fraud perpetrated on the public, rather than a news organization uncovering such frauds. That is why this is one of the most extreme journalistic scandals that exists, and it deserves a lot more debate and attention than it has received thus far.

Billmon

Before he mysteriously quit a few years ago, Billmon was one of my favorite bloggers. He popped up on the radar screen today: "The Great White Hope".

If you get anti-Obama emails from folks you know (like Dez does), here is a nice link to send in a reply. Scroll down the the second video clip. There is also a link at the bottom that has more of same.

And, I made an eggplant parmesan with a couple of eggplants from Dez's garden last night. It was good.

Serving at his Pleasure

Rape and pillage. Pulitzer Prize for Journalism winner, Charlie Savage:

WASHINGTON — On May 17, 2005, the White House’s political affairs office sent an e-mail message to agencies throughout the executive branch directing them to find jobs for 108 people on a list of “priority candidates” who had “loyally served the president.”

“We simply want to place as many of our Bush loyalists as possible,” the White House emphasized in a follow-up message, according to a little-noticed passage of a Justice Department report released Monday about politicization in the department’s hiring of civil-service prosecutors and immigration officials.

The report, the subject of a Senate oversight hearing Wednesday, provided a window into how the administration sought to install politically like-minded officials in positions of government responsibility, and how the efforts at times crossed customary or legal limits.

Tighty Whiteys

Garden

Bill Moyers

Is the Fourth Estate a Fifth Column?
Corporate media colludes with democracy’s demise
I would quote, but every word is worth reading. The corruption of public discourse is the fundamental problem of our nation. On the one hand, we need a functioning public educational system to provide a people with reasoning skills, and on the other, we need media that serve the public interest and provide basic information for public consumption. All of our problems are symptoms of our dysfunctional public discourse.

And last night on PBS's Bill Moyers Journal, he hosted a terrific example of televised rational discussion. He had on two leading conservatives, Mickey Edwards and Ross Douthat, and they discussed the fall of the Republican party. It's excellent.

Friday Links

War Crimes:

WASHINGTON — Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book [The Dark Side] on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law.

Saturday Morning War Crimes Update:

Greenwald writes a good one, and . . .




4th Amendment:

Feingold: "I sit on the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, and I am one of the few members of this body who has been fully briefed on the warrantless wiretapping program. And, based on what I know, I can promise that if more information is declassified about the program in the future, as is likely to happen either due to the Inspector General report, the election of a new President, or simply the passage of time, members of this body will regret that we passed this legislation. I am also familiar with the collection activities that have been conducted under the Protect America Act and will continue under this bill. I invite any of my colleagues who wish to know more about those activities to come speak to me in a classified setting. Publicly, all I can say is that I have serious concerns about how those activities may have impacted the civil liberties of Americans. If we grant these new powers to the government and the effects become known to the American people, we will realize what a mistake it was, of that I am sure."

When the day comes that the mistake is painfully obvious to everyone, we will get a replay of the "no one said we shouldn't go into Iraq" game. There was significant public opposition to invading Iraq, but it was kept out of the press. Now the primary voices on TV are those that were wrong in the first place, and they say we shouldn't talk about the past. They say "if only they had prosecuted the war" the way I thought they should have, everything would be great. Bill-friggin-Kristol has been hired at the NYT. Dems that voted for the AUMF said they were duped, yet it was clear the claims were bogus then. Expect the same with this FISA law.


Anthrax: Incredible exchange here.

Leahy: "We're paying Hatfill millions of dollars, the indication being the guy who committed the crime went free."

Don't forget: the anthrax was linked, via ABC's dishonest anonymous source, to Iraq. Powell had a vial of it at the U.N.. It was a central part of the WMD propoganda, right up there with the bogus yellow cake.


Non-Internet Media:

This is the week that should have effectively ended John McCain's efforts to become the next president of the United States. But you wouldn't know it if you watched any of the mainstream media outlets or followed political reporting in the major newspapers.

During this past week: McCain called the most important entitlement program in the U.S. a disgrace, his top economic adviser called the American people whiners, McCain released an economic plan that no one thought was serious, he flip flopped on Iraq, joked about the deaths of Iranian citizens, and denied making comments that he clearly made -- TWICE. All this and it is not even Friday! Yet watching and reading the mainstream press you would think McCain was having a pretty decent political week, I mean at least Jesse Jackson didn't say anything about him.

Dark Day for Civil Liberties

Congress Erodes the 4th Amendment.

With their vote today, the Democratic-led Congress has covered-up years of deliberate surveillance crimes by the Bush administration and the telecom industry, and has dramatically advanced a full-scale attack on the rule of law in this country.

Obama fails his first meaningful test since winning the nomination.

In Obamaworld, apparently wrecking the Fourth Amendment is roughly equivalent to ridiculing some obscure rapper. The only thing more depressing than the conceit that supporting unconstitutional measures is a way to “signal” to swing voters that you are not a radical loon bent on “ideological purity,” which is basically to make defending the Constitution a position held only by radicals and extremists, is the dishonest representation of support for the compromise legislation as being a pro-civil liberties position.

DDay

The Title II provision of immunity sets an extremely dangerous precedent that undermines the rule of law and expands executive power. From now on, the stated law of the land will be that corporations, small businessmen or even individuals must comply with illegal orders from the state if they are given a piece of paper telling them they must. That won't be how the statute is written, but it's undoubtedly the implication.

Just a little reminder of a post from a few days ago about Hersh's article: the Democratic leadership also went along with the idiotic covert ops currently going on in Iran.

Beets

Dez just harvested some of the first beets. These are chioggia beets, which have a ringed pattern, alternating white and red, when you slice them open. When these started growing, they popped out of the ground a bit, and the sun bleached them where they were exposed. When she sliced them open, they were mostly white with a bit pink, where we had expected dark red rings. We were worried we had screwed up somehow and that they would be tasteless, but they were the sweetest beets either of us had ever eaten. The greens were delicious too, even better than the kale and collards.

Flowers

Fire School

I just found these pics on a camera we don't use much. Dez went to fire school in College Station last summer. It counts as pro. dev. for her job as plant nurse at Chevron/Phillips (Cedar Bayou).

Uncle Steve

comes bearing gifts. Speed Racer and the Mach V. It's now the most prized car in the collection, even faster than Lightning McQueen.


Uncle Steve has a secret: it's tickle time.



Jameson has decided that Aunt Beth is coming tomorrow. It would be nice, and we hope to see her soon. In the mean time, we are thinking about you and sending our love.

Iran: here we go

Seymour Hersh's "Preparing the Battlefield"

My forehead hurts. Hersh describes a Presidential Finding in regard to the funding of covert operations inside Iran.

The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. “The oversight process has not kept pace—it’s been coöpted” by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.”

It's also remarkable given the reason for the Democratic landslide victory in the 2006 midterms. Fallon, no DFH, resisted (thus his "resignation") because he, like the Dems, was kept out of the loop, and it was interfering with his command.

“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”

The purpose of these covert operations is to gather intelligence on Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program, to perform assassinations (wink wink, nudge nudge), and to work with opposition groups in order to bring about regime change. These opposition groups include, wait for it, Al Qaeda types.

The use of Baluchi elements [did we give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?], for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

I seem to recall McCain recently saying something about Iran supporting Al Qaeda inside Iran. We (Dems included) are giving money to one of the terrorist groups that is responsible for 9/11. Hersh runs through more examples. These groups, big surprise, lack much influence inside of Iran, and their increased activity, with our support, is rallying Iranian public opinion behind the current regime. It's also pissing off Iraq and Pakistan. The main point is to set up a bombing strike. Sweet.

Update: DDay, Ackerman and Emptywheel.

Greenwald who?

Olbermann slowly begins to get it, though there are still big holes in his take. He doesn't realize that FISA does not need to be amended, and that the bill erodes the fourth amendment. It's as simple as that. As an aside, he gives Greenwald the high hat.



At just after the six minute mark, he mentions John Dean has been "comparing notes" with lawyers at the ACLU. Greenwald is a lawyer for the ACLU.

Update: Greenwald's response. He and Texasyank have a surprising amount in common on Obama's flips.

Here's what might, hopefully, flip Obama back.

Jameson sings and plays

Our pride and joy.



It's never too early to encourage anti-social behavior.

And in other news, Texasyank officially wins the most active commenter award. It's nice when folks stop in and say hello.

Summer Gardening

Bell peppers


Banana peppers


Eggplant blossoms

Zuzu comes for a visit

Updated to add some photos.








More pics available in the june photo album at the side.



It's always such a pleasure. Wish she could have stayed longer, and maybe Grandpa will come next time.

Glennzilla vs. KO

Greenwald calls out Olbermann:

It isn't that difficult to keep the following two thoughts in one's head at the same time -- though it seems to be for many people:

(1) What Barack Obama is doing on Issue X is wrong, indefensible and worthy of extreme criticism;

(2) I support Barack Obama for President because he's a better choice than John McCain.

Olbermann counterpunches:

I think John Dean is worth 25 Glenn Greenwalds (maybe 26 Keith Olbermanns).

I am sure Greenwald will respond later today. My take is in the post below. I'm happy Olbermann is up to at least engaging in discussion, even if he is currently flaming, and even though he's being an idiot. If you want to read esoteric legal discussions of issues like this one, go to Balkinization.

Update: And here is Greenwald's response. It's a knockout. It is never a good idea to get into the ring with Greenwald, as he always makes you look foolish. I never expected to see someone like Olbermann going at it with him. The question now is whether or not Olbermann will retract his statements, apologize, and go on record, on Countdown, calling Obama's failure here what it is. I think he will. If he does, it will be an interesting footnote in the history of the relationship between internet and tv.

Update II: And the crowd applauds. Balloon Juice, Talk Left, Firedoglake (with a Dean response) and Buck Naked Politics. An amusing comment:

This is one argument Olbermann ain’t gonna win. It’s sort of like fighting a starving Rottweiler for a rib bone—with your bare hands. You might get the bone….but it’s extremely doubtful, and you’re definitely going to end up with something bleeding.

Erosion of the 4th Amendment

Here is Dodd's speech against the FISA bill. It's worth your time.

Here's a video clip from Rick Noriega, who's the dem running for Senate against John Cornyn here in Texas. It is hard to exaggerate the difference between Noriega and Cornyn.



Obama, on the other hand, is triangulating, moving to "the center", playing politics, selling out. It's as bad as Hillary Clinton's vote for the AUMF. Her vote there is what lost her the primary.

Non-profit media

Here is an interesting NewsHour story.

The story mentions ProPublica, Center for Investigative Reporting and Center for Independent Media. The first two are especially worth bookmarking.

This tweaking of the media structure has potential, and it appears to be off to a good start. The NewsHour guests argued the model will have to become commercially sustainable and yet keep its independence. This move is really dangerous, though I see their point. The problem is that independence goes out the window when the medium becomes an asset. News rooms fired their investigative journalists in the first place because they were expensive, not entertaining, and often in conflict with commercial and political interests. The direct link between this type of independent investigative journalism and TV/Print/Radio is vital, as the first priority of public discourse should be public interest. The failure of our public discourse is the cause of all of our problems.

A couple of firsts

Our plumeria bloomed


and one of our avocado trees decided to produce.