i'm at my mother-in-law's home in lake saint louis, missouri. one of the drawbacks to being here is the lack of high-speed internet connectivity. or so i thought anyway. i spent all day yesterday working at a friend's house so i could take advantage of their DSL line to get some work done. i get home to said mother-in-law's house last night, flip on the powerbook, and find that a neighbor is running an unsecured linksys network access point, and that they are getting their connectivity via WDSL. long story short: i've been on the net since last night free-of-charge getting about 40-50k/sec downloads. hilarious. my geeky brother-in-law was tres impressed. i think he's ordering WDSL soon. he's been on dial-up modem all this time.
Ryan Lizza writes in the latest web-only dispatch to the New Republic that Al Gore should be the next head of the Democratic National Committee. He offers some very good reasons:
Gore could be the anti-McAuliffe. One close Gore associate said a few weeks ago that the rigors of fundraising were a big obstacle to him getting in the race. The next DNC chairman won't have to worry about that. Gore is also hugely popular with the party's African-American base. Gore could help heal some of the racial tension at the Democratic headquarters that marked McAuliffe's appointment, and he could help energize black voters during the campaign. Maybe Gore isn't the most compelling television surrogate for the Democrats, but he's a famously good debater, and the party should have someone who can alternately play the role of partisan and statesman when it faces off against the reserved and high-minded RNC Chairmain Marc Racicot.
Go, Al, go!
The rumour is, if Trent Lott doesn't survive the vote on January 6th, he has threatened to resign altogether, allowing Misssissippi governor Ronnie Musgrave to appoint a new senator (and presumably a Democratic one at that). Speculation has it that former Secretary of Agriculture (and African-American) Mike Espy would be his choice. Very interesting...
While doing my daily web crawl of conservative opinion, I ran across a little nugget of bullshit courtesy of the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes. Barnes writes in his column, Al Gore Exit Stage Left:
"In any case, with the first 2004 contest in Iowa, where the Democratic rank and file are heavily isolationist, the pro-war side of the debate might have been snuffed out entirely."
Note how Barnes uses the news of Gore's decision not to run in 2004 to mischaracterize those opposed to war with Iraq. He calls them "isolationists".
Now the last time I checked, most of the Democratic rank and file were not against toppling the Taliban, or bombing Milosevic into submission. They do, however, seem to be against the unprecedented action of a "pre-emptive" strike by a Western democracy against a sovereign nation.
To mischaracterize this principled opposition to war with Iraq as an "isolationist" stance is yet another example of how the right will say anything, no matter how inaccurate, to stain and misrepresent opposing ideas.
It looks like Trent isn't stepping down just yet, but interestingly enough, Kissinger is.
It looks like Trent Lott is about to go down hard. He won't be stepping down as a Senator, but he's about to step down as the Senate Majority Leader. As a progressive Democrat, I'm feeling some schadenfreude at Lott's predicament. The ole boy has long been in direct opposition to my views.
But on the other hand, his most excellent imcompetence has played to the advantage of Senate Democrats in most cases, and having him as majority leader has the potential to be particularly damaging to Bush's re-election chances in 2004. This more than any outrage is going to be the reason he resigns as majority leader.
i'll be the first to admit: for someone who's been as a big enthusiast of the web as i have, it's a damn shame i haven't put more work into my own little neck of the woods. let's hear it for fresh starts and fun, easy-to-install technology. now i only have to figure out how to customize it.
i hope this site can reflect the regular exchange of ideas, images and sounds i find myself running across on a day-to-day basis. i do a lot of exploring -- might as well as document it along the way.