X-Tra Rant

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Went to a cookout yesterday back home at my parents’. Took some pictures of fire and sunsets. Ate hot dogs and generally had a good time. But that day outside combined with Saturday outside at the parade gave me a sunburn on my forehead that hurts like the dickens.

The DICKENS.

Check out the whole gallery here.

Uh oh. Only one more Smorgasbord until I’m out of movie franchises for titles. Any suggestions for going past 10?

Hoosiers: Drinking Liberally: Indianapolis is tonight and there are now locations in Fishers and Lafayette. Cool. Also, there were a bunch of updates to the Indiana Democratic Club website today. One is of what I feel is the first real accomplishment of the new “young people” in the club. Go us.

Also, to Hoosier liberal/progressive bloggers. What would you think of a Hoosier Liberal blogger network?

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What Bob Says:

People have been murdered, tortured, rendered to foreign countries to be tortured at a distance, sexually violated, imprisoned without trial or in some cases simply made to “disappear” in an all-American version of a practice previously associated with brutal Latin American dictatorships. All of this has been done, of course, in the name of freedom.

(more…)

I’ve been thinking about trying to start up a Hoosier Liberal Blog network of sorts. There aren’t many of us but we DO exist and it would be good to get us linking and interacting more (and hopefully attracting more Hoosier progressives/liberals to blogging.)

Unfortunately, two liberal Hoosier blogs I know about are written by me, this one and the Indiana Democratic Club. Soon I’ll also be taking over/redesigning the Indiana Progressives PAC site and maybe make it a bit more bloggish.

But we need more than me (and I would love to invite some fellow liberal bloggers to guest blog on the Indiana Democratic Club down the line). So I’ll be sending a link to this entry to the others I know about:

• Masson’s Blog
• Taking Down Words
• stAllio!’s Way

Stay posted. I even have a name in mind.. HoosierLeft. My idea for it is to be a sort of blog aggregator for member sites. Maybe even just based on member sites’ RSS feeds. I need to look into RSS feed aggregating software or plugins for blog software to see how we could do that.

I’d prefer it to be an aggregator more than a group blog because a)two, soon to be three, websites is more than enough for me to be blogging on b) i don’t want to overwhelm members with writing commitments. I’d rather it be an aggregator so we can keep doing what we’re doing, but have a way to give a single access point to Hoosier liberal/progressive bloggers.

So leave your feedback here! let’s see if we can get this going.

Update: I’m finding some more Hoosier bloggers and will be copying them on the email.

• Cooped Up
• Commonplace Book
• Hubert Humphrey High
• Indy Pundit
• Shakespeare’s Sister
• Planet Swank
• The War Journal

While you’re here to comment if you have any other links (that are still updating in say, the last three months) post ‘em.

So this story has the Blogosphere’s liberal residents in an uproar, and I wholly agree. This is a rediculous decision by Judge Bradford and I look forward to voting against him the next time he is up for re-election.

But let me defend Marion County from the hoards of “Let’s Mock Indiana/Any Red State” lefties in the blogosphere. I see it alllll the time, especially on Kos (one of the reasons I rarely diary or comment there unless my blood pressure is low to start with) - the Kossaks, as they are called, ripping on Indiana thinking that’s the way to win the state.

First, Judge Bradford is a Republican on the GOP controlled Superior Court. Marion County is as solid blue a place in Indiana as you’ll find. The Superior Court is really the only thing the Democrats don’t yet control, and if things keep going as they have we should control it by 2008.

Second, as Representative Orentlicher (D-One Of The Two Coolest State Reps In Indiana) said in the article, getting this overturned should be a slam dunk. And from the article (although I could be wrong) it looks like this was not a decision by the whole Superior Court but just by Judge Bradford. (Someone with more law knowledge please correct me if I’m wrong on this)

via: Atrios, Indiana Democratic Club, Masson’s Blog

Amnesty International branded the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a human rights failure Wednesday, releasing a 308-page report that offers stinging criticism of the United States and its detention centers around the world.

“Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time,” Amnesty Secretary General Irene Khan said as the London-based group launched its annual report. Amnesty International called for the camp to be closed.

The annual report accused the United States of shirking its responsibility to set the bar for human rights protections and said Washington has instead created a new lexicon for abuse and torture.

So is this what we mean when we say stuff about “winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis”? Hey, at least we stopped Saddam’s torture rooms ….

…and opened torture rooms of our own.

via

Okay, I liked the “only a Sith thinks in absolutes” line as much as the next liberal sci-fi dork. And the “so this is how liberty dies…” line was wonderful. But will we please stop talking about it? It only leads to recockulousness like this from the right.

So I haven’t talked much about the “nuclear option” deal. here’s what I take from it.

• Reid wasn’t positive we had the 51 votes to defeat the nuclear option
• Without those 51 votes, we would have lost the filibuster and then Supreme Court
• The Senate Democrats are building their barracade around the Supreme Court (as they should)
• Letting through a few wingnuts to a few appeals courts already packed with Republicans won’t make that much of a difference (it would have been a different story if they were nominated to courts that were evenly split)
• It’s better to let that happen and save the ability to filibuster for the extremist supreme court judges we all know are coming
• Bill Frist was made to look like a fool. He pissed off the rabid Christianist^* base for not going far enough, and he looks really freaking creepy to alot of regular Americans who don’t like theocracies.
• As much as some Democrats are upset by the deal, all the extremist republicans are FURIOUS and cracks in the Republican Christianist/Corporate alliance may be starting to show.

In the end I think it was the best thing we could have gotten if we didn’t have the 51 votes (and weren’t POSITIVE we had the 51 votes).

^*Christianist: a radical extremist Christian who beleives in establishing a theocracy in the United States, whether outright or through erosion of the separation of church and state.

Update: Jeebus H. Crisco, Bill Frist is an asshole. He’s not living up to the deal. The 14 compromisers better stay tough when he goes ahead and calls for cloture on one of the dealt nominees anyway.

The new Batmobile (from the new Batman movie) looks horrid. What in the hell were they thinking?

A bit of history of Penguin books, celebrating its 70th anniversary. via.

Ohhh I really want one of these. Characters from This Modern World. If I had $60……