Comments on: Eternal Vigilance

By: Bruce

Bruce — Fri, 07 Dec 2026 02:09:22 +0000

Ronni, I don’t know you and you don’t know me, so it’s a bit presumptuous of you to get personal. Fatigue can do that.

Fight the good fight, but be the change you want to see as well. If someone is with you, good. If they’re not, move on. You waste your energy trying to guilt trip them into something.

By: Ronni Bennett

Ronni Bennett — Fri, 07 Dec 2026 00:20:21 +0000

And Frank - thanks for a terrific post.

By: Ronni Bennett

Ronni Bennett — Fri, 07 Dec 2026 00:17:57 +0000

Bruce: If not you, then who? The obvious to you is not obvious to everyone else. It is bloggers like you - oh, so fashionably cynical - who are the problem.

Frank: I’m too tired right now to track down the link (you’re right, Frank, I’m really, really tired), but Jay Rosen of PressThink did an excellent piece a couple of months ago at HuffPost laying out real changes the blogosphere has made. Not many yet, but inroads and changes.

At my blog, elders have jumped on S.1959. They’ve written blog posts, to their representatives and to local newspapers and continue to do so. One got her letter published in a local paper. And after I’ve been pounding away at this frightening bill for weeks, two or three a-list bloggers have done so: DailyKos and The Left Coaster among them.

Bruce: I know that doesn’t sound like much and it hasn’t made a dent yet, but few more thousand people are aware and maybe moving against the bill themselves. The work moves forward incrementally and when people like you opt out, we lose momentum.

The fight may, in the end, have been futile, but when they pull the plug on my blog and send me to the gulag, I want to be able to hold my head high and say, I did everything I could.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Thu, 06 Dec 2026 21:01:03 +0000

This one has been on my radar, but I’ve long since given up kidding myself that posting about such attrocities means anything, even to my conscience. Besides, I’d rather not have the experience of the stating the obvious, albeit in high-quality blogrant form, only to have it confirmed again that the government is going to do what it wants and the people are going to let it. It gets old.

On the other hand, I’ve succeeded in opening my own eyes, had some good times, and found great writing. So it’s a wash.

Good post. I wish I’d written it.

By: Scruggs

Scruggs — Thu, 06 Dec 2026 15:26:07 +0000

Frank, there is no way this bill is going to be defeated. The Vichy Democrats have the bit between their teeth. It’s their turn to play war on terror and they’re going to play it their way. This bill is their opening move for the next round, President Clinton II’s round. By itself, the Homegrown bill does nothing more than set up an office for merit scholar focus groups, euphemistically called a “Center of Excellence”, dedicated to detecting affinity for evil and finding ways to sell subsequent anti-evildoer legislation. It’s a terrible, crackpot idea, proposed in bad faith, but at this time it’s mainly control freak psychological warfare. It’s not in the same league as the Jim Crow War on Drugs, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the Patriot Act, the Patriot Act renewal, the Military Commissions act and the FISA capituation. The really bad legislation will come after the merit scholar focus groups do their little studies. Then you’ll be investigated and checked for evildoing tendencies.

Unlike the foolish Chimperor, President Clinton II will want to make sure every victimization has a solidly intellectualized basis and is explained in full, grammatical sentences. Change is coming. The waterboarding will be outsourced again and the CIA kidnap/enema squad will be retired, or go to work for Blackwater. People who make an effort not to be black, Muslim, black and Muslim, who make an effort not to be associatated with Greenpeace, the Friends and other haters of America have nothing to worry about.