Olbermann's Influence

This sounds about right, and it's great. Olbermann will mobilize progressives. However, I still worry that the Clintonite progressives, such as they are, are too poisoned to realize that this kind of campaign cannot be tolerated.

Pelosi's even started saying what we've been wanting to hear. Maybe between the two, Clinton will get the message. Now that's probably my own false hopes.

Also, this is pretty disgusting.

Wait, the police feel scared?

In this day of huge corporations and secretive government, the people's only recourse is web-based public humiliation/pressure. When the police feel that this threatens them, even with the fair solution of allowing their rebuttals, and they manage to shut down and intimidate anyone wanting to hold them accountable, we live in a police state.

From THREAT LEVEL:

Our prediction: A year from now RateMyCop.com will have won public service awards. Good cops, and clean departments, will have come to think of the site as a friend, and its founders will be sought-after speakers at police gatherings. Hosting companies that reject them on "health and safety" grounds will look like fools and cowards.

Fortunately, enough people seem to realize the dangers that there's hope to counter it through websites like RateMyCop.com. I mean, the warrantless wiretapping and Orwellian legislation names sorta had to clue us in too, right?

Ok, here we go again..

Welcome to my new attempt at consistent blogging. I made one attempt a little while back, and it failed miserably after two posts. It's called "A Hitchhiker's Travels", and I will revive it beginning when I, well, travel, for more personal blog type stuff.

But I've been inspired to create another separate blog because, as most of you probably know since you are getting the link from my gchat status, I've been essentially using that as a political blog for a year now. But here, I can actually write longer comments and give full quotes from links and stuff! It's great. Also, I figure if, as I do on some particularly angry days, I need to post a whole bunch of links, well then I can do that too! Isn't blogging great?

This won't just be political, either, but really just anything I see or think that I think either people should or would like to know. Or really anything I feel like shouting out to whoever will listen. Hopefully you enjoy. And please comment and lemme know if I sound insane, paranoid, or too doomsday-like. Though I'll admit, for now, I will likely sound very much like that.

An example from The New Republic's Jonathan Chait:

[Clinton] needs to convince the remaining uncommitted superdelegates to split for her by about a 2-to-1 margin. The only way she can get a split like that is if she can persuasively argue that Obama is unelectable. And the only way she can do that is to make him unelectable. Some people have treated this as an unfortunate byproduct of Clinton's decision to continue her campaign. It's actually a central element of the strategy. Penn is already saying he's unelectable. It's not true, but by the time the convention rolls around, it may well be.

When are the party leaders gonna step in and say "That's enough?" She's gotta be running either to tear him down or for a chance at 2012, by making sure McCain wins now. How can the remaining neutral party leaders (Gore, Dean, Edwards, Richardson, etc.) let her very obviously tear down the party's chances? Wasn't the point of them remaining neutral so that they would have the moral authority to stop this?

And one point about the new MI and FL primaries: I understand the need to seat the delegates in order to not discourage the voters in those states, but then there's the, you know, rules. But from a strategy point of view, even if Obama is saying that he'd accept a re-do for that reason, how can he, knowing that Clinton will just campaign by saying that she wanted to seat those delegates and he did not? Any changing of the rules in the middle will be a bad thing for Obama's campaign, except as a good-will gesture to the superdelegates. He has to basically believe that good will will counter the "momentum" PR that he will lose from these new primaries, or he has to believe, as many are beginning to, that he has already won. I just don't know that it's a good tradeoff.