Saturday, June 14, 2003

Zell Redux

I don't know why I didn't know mention this before (I guess I never really thought about it), but let us all take a second to remember that Zell Miller voted to confirm Ted Olsen as Solicitor General.

Every bad thing I said about Miller in this post?

Double it.
Even Their Ads Don't Work Right

Thank God American Express is sponsoring Salon today, because I nearly killed someone last week when Microsoft was sponsoring the "Day Pass." The damn thing absolutely would not play for me, instead popping up a little window that said "the designated file needs a codec to run, but does not specify which one." And so, there was no way to proceed, because the damn thing wouldn't play without the codec, and wouldn't continue without playing. Extremely frustrating, but so very typical of the boys in Redmond.
Caught

Talking to my mother today-

Mom: Your father tells me you have a website now.

Me: Well, it's really not particularly exciting. I just yell about politics and such on an irregular basis.

Mom: You aren't swearing on it are you?

Me: Um...

Mom: Christian! You weren't raised that way!

Me: Okay, mom, seriously-

Mom: I'm telling the Pastor! You'll be kicked out of the church and go to hell!

Me: Well, fair enough.

It Must Be Nice To Be The InstaPundit

Calling the French troops in the Congo cowards on his deck via wireless, while sipping a Redhook IPA and grilling steaks.

What an asshole.

Thursday, June 12, 2003

President Zell Miller

That three-word phrase, if it ever became true, would be unquestionable proof that God does not exist.

Via the Wyeth Wire, I see that the Senator from Georgia is putting out feelers for a Presidential run.

Let's just clear this out of the way right now:

If the Democratic Party nominates Zell Miller, it means that the Party is well and truly dead, with no hope of revival. It's over, go home; or better yet, go to Canada, because the Right has won and will reign supreme forever and ever, Amen.

Why? Because he's a Republican. While technically not one of those bastard Blue Dog Democrats, he is just as far Right as any of them, and he has betrayed the Democrats more times than I can count. And when I say betrayed, I mean betrayed. As in sold out, cheated on, stabbed in the back.

Zell Miller's brand of "bipartisanship" fits Grover Norquist's definition of it. How many times has Miller voted not just with the GOP but against the Democrats?

It's not just that he is a conservative. Joe Lieberman is a conservative. Zell Miller is Judas.

A particularly egregious example of this is the Estrada filibuster.

Not only did Miller join Majority Leader Bill Frist in attempting to rejigger the judicial nomination process so as to prevent a filibuster like the one the Democrats are still carrying out, but he submitted an amendment to the Senate Rules which would effectively end the filibuster as a parliamentary tool by reducing the number of votes neccessary for cloture upon each successive cloture motion.

These two actions were directly aimed at screwing the Democratic leadership -- not to mention the Left in general -- by dealing them a huge blow in their struggle against the administration and the Republican majority's attempts to pack the judiciary with Rightwing idealogues who will warp the judicial landscape for generations to come.

The only good thing about Senator Zell Miller is that he is leaving the Senate when his current term comes to an end.

I don't really have any fear that Miller would get the nomination even if he was deluded enough to run. The base hates him too much - Joe Lieberman looks like a shining example of liberalism and party loyalty next to him.

But just the idea is enough to give me shivers...though remote, the possibility is just too horrible to contemplate.

Go home, Zell. No one wants you here.
Shite

Well, it seems that the nice people who were hosting my images finally decided that since I wasn't using their (free) service for online auctions, I suck and deserve to have my account disabled.

Oh well. I'm grateful they allowed me to use it as long as they did.

Unfortunately, I now have to find someplace else that will host my (very small) images. I don't really care about the picture of myself (although I do think that a small pic on one's blog is a nice touch...an added bit of familiarity, yes?), but I do want to get the email address back on the site (in case you never noticed, my email address was displayed as a tiny .gif file, to keep it from being snagged by spamcrawlers). Also, my FAQ was a tiny HTML document that was hosted at the same place.

So, does anyone out there have any suggestions as to where I can host a few small files (at least 20K, preferably 150K so I can [very rarely] use an image or two in a post) for free? By my rough calculations, I use about 250 megs of bandwidth per month (although as readership increases, that will of course get bigger).

Ideas?
A Suggestion

Go check out Terry Pinder's site, The Storm.

When I first stumbled over his corner of the internet, I thought to myself, "My, he's an angry young man."

Then I realized that, hey, so am I! We could be twins!

Well, fraternal twins anyway. We don't look exactly alike...

Recently, he's been keeping a close watch on events in the Congo, a region that gets largely ignored by both politicians and the media despite conditions that make Iraq under Saddam look good.

It's important to remember that, despite the fact that we've captured Osama Bin Laden Saddam Hussein Hussein's sons Mullah Omar Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, we haven't quite eliminated evil from the world.

Tuesday, June 10, 2003

Solidarity

I'm a liberal. Fuck you.
We Are Most Certainly Less Crazy Than Them

Like all the cool kids, I've been reading The Clinton Wars, and the effect it has had on me is very similar to that of Blinded By The Right.

I was never really a huge Clinton fan. To this day, I'm somewhat ambivalent about him and his presidency. He did good things, and he did bad things. He was undeniably brilliant but he did some really stupid things. He was a liberal, but he made too many concessions to corporate interests. He was a big kick-ass Democrat who brought the party out of the doldrums of the Reagan/Bush years, but his name is a bigger liability than it is a strength in large portions of the country.

What's funny is the fact that the more I read about the years of his presidency, and the years immediately preceding it, the more I like Mr. Bill.

There is some merit to the idea of judging a man by his enemies, and going by that standard, Bill Clinton was a truly great man - after all, if charlatans and scumbags, liars and thieves hate you, you can't be all bad.

There have been a lot of attempts in recent weeks to compare the behavior of the GOP during the Clinton years to that of the Democratic Party since Bush took over (most notably Jane Galt's reasonable-sounding but ultimately self-serving Jane's Law: "The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane"). A lot of these attempts have been by Righties who, in light of information emerging about those years during the 90s, cannot with a straight face deny that the GOP and its allies perpetrated some astounding abuses of power and resorted to the dirtiest tactics since -- maybe -- Nixon. In order, then, to distance themselves from "that element" and allay whatever guilt supporting such a Party entails, they try to muddle the issue by saying, in effect, "Hey, both Parties do it, get over it and move on."

Aside from snarky comments about "moral equivalence", the idea that the Democrats have been equally devious in attacking Bush is ridiculous on its face.

Until a Left-leaning Supreme Court Justice clears the way for a viciously partisan Democratic Special Prosecutor to take control of a high-profile, endlessly-funded investigation that has already cleared Bush of wrong-doing and extend said investigation into areas that aren't covered by its mandate (and are, indeed, being manufactured and promoted by Hard Left lawyers with funding from wealthy Leftist crackpots) in order to force Bush to perjure himself so that the inherently totalitarian House of Representatives -- controlled by insanely partisan Democrats -- can draft and pass embarrassingly weak Articles of Impeachment (but only after illegally presenting waffling moderates, outside of the House chamber in a Democratic headquarters, with "evidence" that wouldn't hold up in any court that Bush was a rapist) - all enabled by some of the most factually-impaired reporting since Hearst's heyday and a television pundit corps that skews heavily to the Left, I think we can safely say that the "Devious Shit" award goes to the reigning champion GOP.

"But Hillary is a bitch!"

Mm-hmm.
France Is Our Enemy

Those bastards are helping unarmed American civilians make a cowardly retreat from the civil war-wracked capital of Liberia.

Will their villainous behavior never end?
Hillary Clinton Is A Paragon Of Virtue, And A Luscious Babe To Boot

Actually, I don't really care much about her one way or another. But the way I see it, if that sentence can thin out the GOP electorate by causing a few heart attacks and perhaps a cranial implosion or two, it is my Solemn Duty to write it.
Random Thought

What is Al Gore doing these days? We haven't heard much from him since he declared himself a non-candidate.

Also, it occurs to me that one of the most important things he can do over the next year is get whatever political networks he has in Tennesee working overtime. I'm not sure how helpful he can be on the national scene next year, campaigning for the Democratic nominee, but he damn sure still has pull in the Volunteer State, and those eleven electoral votes are going to be very, very important.

It's going to be a close one next year...