Year: 2005

  • The limits of open-source campaigning

    Micah Sifry wrote up a Rasiej Campaign Post-Mortem analyzing how Andrew Rasiej’s campaign for Public Advocate in New York City managed to fall so short of success despite its embrace of open-source philosophies, techniques, and themes. Gregory Heller responds in Thoughts on the Sifry Postmortem of the Rasiej Campaign, suggesting that Sifry may be blaming…

  • Subscribe to an email digest of RFB

    Bloglet is dead, long live FeedBlitz. I’m trying out a new email-subscription service on this blog. If it works right I’ll probably add it to all my blogs. It seems pretty straightforward. If you’re interested, scan down the sidebar for the section called “Subscribe to RFB” and submit your email address. Then let me know…

  • Fest Lives!

    I’m not sure bigger is always better, but I’m glad to hear that Festival Productions is committed to making Jazz Fest happen on schedule next year: Planners promise bigger Jazzfest We may need to get our plane tickets soon!

  • wonderful

    what a lovely night to be a Democrat. I’m just sitting here, watching the proposition results come in over on the CA secretary of state’s site. And those two Ys have switched over to Ns. And we’ve got the floor all set up for a clean sweep. And there’s Virginia! What a great state, Virginia.…

  • A novel a day keeps the doctor away

    So far, so good. B and I went away for the weekend to celebrate my birthday but I’ve posted two installments of my daily NaNoWriMo effort today to make up for it. There’s a lot to be said for writing fast without fear or favor.

  • Bush Team on a Busman’s Holiday*

    2002 was a busy year for the Bush Team…. January 9: Douglas Feith (OOSP) calls Lt. Gen. Jay Garner on the phone…. Feith: Garner, I got a job for you. Garner: Hello? Who is this? Feith: Directive from da Man himself Garner: The president?! Feith: Rumsfeld, you idiot. Da Man. We need you to put…

  • Yellowcake Shake and Bake

    As the NY Times finally gets its ass in gear and finds some reporters who aren’t owned by their sources to get on the Yellowcake Papers story…we continue with our little tale of aging spies, Italians in love, and the Bush administration’s Alternative Reality Operations (AROs). The Story, Part II: Recipe for a W-r (classified)…

  • Yellowcake Goes to America

    To continue the story of how an aging Italian spy called Rocco, for purposes all his own and not related to Dick Cheney’s need to find the goods on Saddam Hussein in order to justify a war on Iraq, concocted a phony “dossier,” also known as The Niger Papers (or Yellowcake as I like to…

  • Rocco and the Rome connection

    The U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee inquiry may be going nowhere but thankfully we have the Italian Parliament to help us in our journey to enlightenment in the Yellowcake! story. And I have Nur-al-Cubicle to thank for providing a lucid summary of La Repubblica‘s reportage on the government investigation of “The Niger Documents”. The Story,…

  • Reports of Pentagon Official’s Bloodying Greatly Exaggerated

    I should hope it was an exaggeration! And I hope that “ate him for lunch” was also greatly exaggerated Detainee Policy Sharply Divides Bush Officials NYT A central player in the fight over the directive is David S. Addington, who was the vice president’s counsel until he was named on Monday to succeed I. Lewis…

  • Yellowcake!: a journey back from ignorance

    Hey, the Democrats are finally getting mad about something! (Harry Reid shut down Senate business today saying, “… this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions…”) I feel for them. I’m just working up a head of steam…

  • MIT blog survey results now two months overdue

    What’s up with the MIT Weblog Survey?

  • Happy NaNoWriMo

    I took the plunge this year and signed up for National Novel Writing Month. I’ll be “doing it” over at A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I’ll Never Read. I also have a profile page over at the nanowrimo site. The novel I’m working on is called For You, The Stars Wish me…

  • In which I predict the future again!

    I predict that in just a few hours it will be proven once and for that I cannot in fact predict the future!

  • How the War Has to Compete with the War-Profiteers

    Especially when it’s only mere Iraqis who die. From the NYT Lack of Armor Proves Deadly for Iraqi Army “The Iraqis put quite a few more people in their trucks, and those trucks aren’t armored,” Major Warren said. “No armor plus more people in the truck equals a substantially higher casualty rate.” The Army unit…

  • Eight years before the blog

    One thing about starting my first online journal on my birthday back in 1997 is it makes it pretty easy to keep my blogiversary straight.

  • These US soldiers in Iraq present such an excruciating paradox.

    These US soldiers in Iraq present such an excruciating paradox. On the one hand, we have seen how, with the right (i..e., wrong) people and setting, the slippery slope of prisoner abuse plummets deep into the abyss. But then there is the astonishing generosity, altruism, self-sacrifice that can show up, something that they almost take…

  • A Sweet Old Baseball Rivalry

    The Chicago White Sox’ unexpected sweep of the Boston Red Sox in this year’s World Series calls to mind the mostly forgotten early years of the game, when Baseball franchises were owned mainly by the major cookie companies, and the classic rivalry was between the Baltimore Oreos and the Chicago Hydrox.

  • Alternatives to Meetup

    I meant to post a link to Free Alternatives to Meetup back in September: Meetup is a Ghost Town I checked out the list of largest vegan meetups on Meetup.com and over half of the once active groups are now inactive for lack of an organizer. Meetup seems to recognize this as a problem. I…

  • What planet is Hugh Hewitt phoning it in from?

    From Why the Right Was Wrong: … tactics previously exclusive to the left – exaggeration, invective, anonymous sources, an unbroken stream of new charges, television advertisements paid for by secret sources … Wha? Excuse me. Project much?

  • Who leaked to Novak beside ‘Official A’?

    OK, so the indictment says that Official A leaked to Novak. But didn’t Novak say that he was leaked to by (at least) two people, one of whom was “no partisan gunslinger.” Assuming that Official A is Rove and that Rove cut a deal and rolled on Libby, thus keeping his shit clean (for now),…