With a platform that has something for everybody, David is a shoo-in!

Frank’s favorite planks:

End the current superstitious rituals at airport security that any fifteen year old could figure out how to get around. Instead, require every passenger to rub a lucky rabbit foot.

Pass SHANANA: Stop the Hilarious Absurdity: No Acronyms Naming Anything act.

New policy about gays in the military: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Care. Be Fabulous.”

Printed newspapers by law will have to backdate themselves one day.

Increase national curiosity.

Government offices will use open source software unless they’re being punished.

Marijuana would be as legal as alcohol, but only until you’re 35. Frankly, after that it’s time to grow up.

Secretary of the Internet becomes the first wiki-based cabinet post.

Dick Cheney goes to jail, even if we have to plant something on him.

There’s already a groundswell of support. Hell, I’m gonna write-in Weinberger in 2024. 2024 may be too late.

Glenn Reynolds, adept right wing propagandist, says today that “the now famous lurid AOL Instant Message exchanges that led to the resignation of Mark Foley were part of an online prank that by mistake got into the hands of enemy political operatives….” He says he’s quoting Drudge then goes on to fatuously observe that whether or not this is true, “it certainly complicates things.”

heh

Hi Frank,

I’m sorry, but I’m gonna kill all links to American web sites or
blogs in the next installment of Shutterclog. Your country has turned
fascist and you and your fellow Americans have allowed it to happen.

So excuse me if I can no longer take your blog seriously…

Niek

http://www.niekhockx.nu/ [UPDATE - content at this address may ironically not be safe for work, if you work in the US where Ashcroft draped the nude breast of the statue of Justice because he and his repressive ilk find beauty intolerable. -fp-]

I’m sorry you feel that way Niek. I certainly haven’t been doing enough to stop it from happening, but many American bloggers and web publishers are working hard every day to turn the tide of fascism. I have two books to review on my desk right now. One is Cross-X and the other is The God Delusion. Neither speaks directly to the political/economic realities of global fascism, but each addresses a facet of mindfulness and concern that I think will be valuable to illuminate. So while I understand your principled exclusion of American web-links, I hope you will find a way to survey Listics from time to time and make personal use of anything valuable you may find here.

There are dozens and dozens of American sites that don’t deserve the boycott… off the top of my head (and with some concern that I will leave out someone close to me and be embarrassed by it): The River, Mystic Bourgeoisie, One Good Move, PRWatch, Tom Matrullo, Kombinat, UFOB…

Hell, that’s a small sample of mindful and aware American bloggers that I read during each month. (UFOB remains mysterious, and if they’re a canuck conspiracy, my apologies since I deliberately tried to leave the Canadians like Moffatt - who shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush - out of my quick-links. And I left out the artists and the poets, arguably a stupid omission… people like Ray. And I left out the techies, from Shelley to Dean and in between… mindful and aware politically but not publishing darts aimed at the heart of the fascist beast. And I left out a raft of personal and professional and personal/professional people publishing on the web from Grace Davis to Jeneane Sessum to Ronni Bennett to George Kelly to Jon Lebkowsky to Tamarika Jacobson… and I left out all kinds of friends who I believe would help me hide a body or get out of town in the dark of night… some named above and others like jr and Winston and Ken who probably wouldn’t want to discuss it, but whom I feel I can trust on so many levels.

I can appreciate the need for people to take a stand against American fascism, and your boycott is a good one, a personal statement that says “when they turned away from freedom and democracy I stood up.” But I refuse to take it personally. I’ve been making these gestures myself for the last five years (and of course on and off since Vietnam when I began to understand some of the terrible choices global corporate capitalism forces on its flagship states). I think you know that. And on one level I am terribly disappointed because people offshore like you and Golby are people I think we will need to count on when things get even darker.

So cut off our links if it helps you draw a clear bright line against the fascist evil that has replaced American democracy, but don’t cut yourself off from us.

Read Mark LeVine’s essay and while you’re there, drop a few bucks in the cup to keep truthout solvent…

The American republic died last week…. Is there any other way to understand the meaning of the Military Commissions Law passed by the Congress and soon to be signed by President Bush? Without any serious opposition from Democrats (twelve of whom actually voted for the bill, while none offered a serious threat to fillibuster it), President Bush has signed into a law a bill that guts the right of habeas corpus, legalizes the use of secret and coerced evidence, “clarifies” the Geneva Conventions to allow torture on the his command, prevents future war crimes prosecutions, and arrogates to himself the right to declare anyone - including American citizens - enemy combatants who can be dragged from their families, thrown in any prison he chooses, anywhere on earth, for however long he chooses.

By the way, any conspiracy theorist with a hair on his ass knows that outing Foley’s pedophilia now was the Cheney/Rumsfeld post-modern Nazi end-run around popular opposition to the elimination of habeus corpus.

The junta doesn’t need a three day a week do nothing congress in these last few years of democracy before martial law. It’s time for them to ditch “the base,” the know nothing christian fundies who so faithfully voted them in… yes, sweep away the base and reveal the corporate foundation. Foley’s just another media event covering up the news. The same could be said about the wave of school shooting tragedies, but even I’m not willing to point an accusatory finger at Rumsfeld and the looney-toons American christian madrassa movement for these sad events. Not yet.

Just an observation that gormless seems to have replaced feckless as the mot juste at UFOB recently.

There is no immunity for war crimes. Read what Dana Blankenhorn has to say about this.

G-L-O-R-I-A

Whenever I get depressed about the advances we made, and the ground that we seem to have lost to the right wing pseudo christian fascist insects who prey upon the life of the people, I am reminded…

Stowe Boyd points to the Attention Profiling Mark-up Language experiment and Josh Marshall gathers information on Republican Mark Foley’s homoerotic email advances toward an underage congressional page boy. Until his resignation Foley was Chair of the Republican House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. These people give irony a bad name.

As fun as it is to watch the likes of Reynolds and Hinderaker acknowledge the shame of it all while pinching their noses and ignoring the stink of corruption that rises from their party like a dead mouse rotting in the forced air vent, I’m more interested in this APML thing and how we might have used that to head off the Republican child abuse. What if public servants provided attention logs so the public could review their interests, their foibles? At worst this would keep them on the job and away from the Internet. At best it might provide a correlation between inner lives and outer lives of political figures, a way to cut through the public relations bullshit and see the real people. I guess we’d need some kind of RFID authentication so we could be sure the keyboarding wasn’t passed off to an intern. Or a page.

Foley was returned to office six times, a remarkable record that shows the public makes little connection between private behavior and public utterance. APML could give us the data we need to make that connection.

More on the christian madrassa movement…

Check out the itinerary Amanda posted! Memphis to St. Louis to Kansas City and back to Louisville? A few hundred miles this way and a few hundred miles back! I’m happy they’re coming through Madison. I’ll try to get my fat face in a few shots, ever angling for another 15 pico-seconds of fame. Better, I’ll try to get a few pictures of Amanda and her entourage. She’s doing good work, you gotta admit it.