So the other night I was writing in my paper journal, and I noticed that I was talking about my own life the way I do about work when I have my Project Manager hat on. My first reaction was that this was pathetic, but then I checked that and I remembered that actually this is natural, and I do the same thing when I'm in an "actor" or "activist" mode as well.

So I decided to embrace it, started an open-ended todo list that started with "California drivers license" and "medical insurance" and ended up at the bottom with: wife, land, kids.

Heady, brah. No doubt influenced by my thinking a lot about Frank and Laura's wedding this weekend.

But I'm embracing this exercise and so I start to try and build a timeline around these things, because that's what you do when you're a project manager. If I'm doing it, I gotta do it.

So the upshot is that I figure I should have met and started a relationship with my wife by 2009, after which I've got five years or so to wrangle the land and kids bit. Prior to that there's getting a car and a dog to consider.

All this is assuming I stay on a track to remain in California. This is far from certain, but it seems to be the direction I'm headed for the moment, so I figure why not take it as far as it can go.

Now that I've got a five year plan, all I need is to meet some of those college girls that would ask you about that sort of thing. With 2009 as a milestone, why, my wife could still be in High School. Ho ho ho.

Kidding aside, meeting the women is perhaps the greatest challenge/unknown up here. I'm single again after almost a year of relationshipping. At the moment I'm not quite ready to really get back out there and mix it up, but it's going to have to happen sooner or later.

1) Wow... I went right back into a politics binge, eh? Big week for that. I also posted something on Future Majority about how the NetRoots negative campaign against Kinky Friedman is probably a bad idea.

2) HFS: N. Korea to conduct Nuclear test. This is a bad thing, will have unpredictable results.

3) I've been writing a lot in my paper journal lately. Liking that. I'm still working on a better design for this site, and I should be putting up a page someday in the next couple weeks for the Rebel Unicorn, but right now I've gotta get some serious work done.

Theocrat Leader James Dobson is soft on Foley. Matt Drudge blames the "16-year-old beasts" How's that for moral clarity?

Can you imagine what the response would be like if it were a liberal Democrat, maybe Barney Frank, who had this sort of scandal surface?

There would be calls for blood. People would mean it.

Now, it's to the credit of progressives that we've matured beyond enacting or calling for mob justice on Rep. Foley -- and people who point out that this behavior eminates from repression (which we're also past, at least on the Gay thing) have a strong point -- but whenever I feel a twinge of guilt about this, I think about the fact that this guy is a world-class crepazoid, and I think about what kind of heaven-rattling bile Matt Drudge, Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly and all their little Leutenants would be spiewing if the shoe were on the other foot.

And then I think: go get 'em.

I recently hit the 10.4.8 update and it unded my SSH patch. Had to re-apply. Annoying: the update overwrote my old /etc/rc. There must be a better way to issue startup directives as root during boot in OSX.

Just FYI, y'all I've started blogging my work.

No real progress on Rebel Unicorn over the weekend (wah-waahh), but more potential takers for the service: maybe shouterdauter.com reports from Alemania? Also, a site with the pirate radio from the house: Keep Westhaven Wild dot com.

The empire expands...

Oh man. FBI is investigating. ABC News:

"There's a chance that Foley could be prosecuted under laws he helped pass."

This is almost Greek in its scope. Foley is toast and his seat is probably going to go Democratic. The ballots have already been printed with his name on them.

From a political standpoint, the important thing now is to press the advantage. John Laesch is running against Denny "The Fat Man" Hastert, speaker of the GOP House, who is ultimately accountable for the fact that Foley wasn't disciplined, taken out of touch-range, etc. In a just world Hastert will lose his job.

For fuck's sake, they warned Republican pages, but not Democrats. Nothing I can think of goes further to illustrate the kind of tribal "us vs. them" mindset that prevails amongst the GOP these days. By their reasoning, it's more important to hold on to power than to deal with a potential child-predator in their midst. They'll also warn their own young boys -- gotta look out for our own, given the circumstances -- but if some sons of Democrats get in the way, well, that's just collateral damage.

I met Laesch in Vegas this summer and he's a good guy. Young and hungry. Under a normal establishment political calculus, this race would be seen as a fool's errand, but now we see the power of the 50-state strategy. It's not going to be pretty, but if Laesch runs with this in the next month, he could put Hastert's political future in jeopardy.

You listen:

The Republican leadership is a group of psychotic Office Space type banal tyrants, and the right-wing media chamber is composed mostly of decrepit greed-driven whiny losers who follow them. That's why they can't make this country work. They are immoral, and they bring immorality and corruption everywhere they go.

I know there's a lot of bitterness out there about torture, and unlike Chris [Bowers], I'm not really mollified with 75% of Democrats voting against torture. They should have spoken out early and often, and they did not. But at the end of the day, I'm not fighting for these Democrats, the ones in the House and Senate. These are followers, not leaders. We are the leaders. The Democratic Party is millions of people around the country, millions who don't like our direction, and it is up to us to change the direction of the country and the party. We can do it.

For those who wish I would post more often about politics, I strongly suggest MyDD for a wonky fix down the home stretch of election season. They're closer to the game than me, but they're good kids really trying to make it happen.

Update: for a little more pep-rally spirit, check out this post by Digby.

One more update: If you're in the mood for a searingly-rendered dose of GOP hypocrisy nobody serves it up better than Glenn Greenwald.

That'll do it.

Florida Republican Rep. Mark Foley has resigned today after it was discovered he was having sexy internet chats with teenagee boys working as congressional pages.

Read some Icky IMs. Gross.

And here's the kicker: Denny "the Fat Man" Hastert and his GOP House Leadership knew about this almost a year ago. They did nothing.

When are people going to realize that sexual moralizers -- Foley was an anti-internet-porn crusader -- are often compensating for something, and should be taken with a dose of salt? That goes for just about any moralizer, really.

So, in spite of our recent shame on torture, it's probably still a good idea to vote Democrat come November 7th. Why, if we send some brash young pups into congress, we might even get that whole "moral clarity" thing sorted out. The ship of state handles like a supertanker, and it's bound to take some years to turn right.

This weekend in addition to writing three critical documents for my job, I plan on re-launching this site and beginning to ride the Rebel Unicorn. That probably means another weekend in Westhaven, but with a trip to NYC looming next week I don't have much desire to try and run all over town.

I've been thinking through the nitty gritty of how to structure a community blogging page. The technical details are pretty easy thanks to the power of Drupal. It'll give me all the flex I need to set it up, and room to grow going forward (identity services being top of my pipe-dream wishlist).

But the bigger question is: how should it be set up for users? How about visitors? I've got ideas. I might draw pictures, or I might just do it and see what happens.

Politics
It's fuckin' ugly out there, folks. The US congress just passed a law legalizing <a href="http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/2006/09/this_is_what_wa.php'>torture, and stripping "unlawful enemy combatants" of their right of any kind of day in court. Who are these "enemy combatants?" Anyone the Decider decides they are.

My own appetitie for writing about this remains, and I still have an optimistic outlook on the situation, but I don't want to inundate my own page with this. I think what I may do is create a politics section on the Rebel Unicorn that can collect this (and others') posts about matters of state. The same content would be optionally viewable on individual users' pages too, of course, but I sorta want my own blog to go back in the autobio direction, and try to create a slightly more polished and thinky political section that I and others can use to try and say something meaningful.

Anyway, it's 8:30am now and time to get to real work. More soon, my pretties.

I've finally gone and done it.

I am now a senior partner... in a company I just created with Zacker and this distant-cousin of the Veep named Matt. We're going to be rich like Saudi Princes, peddlers of influence like Casper Wineberger. We dress like Republicans, talk like Anarchists, and our impact on the industry will make spiking the water cooler with LSD look like casual friday.

How web 2.0 are those GD pictures? Just my little digicam and some photoshopping to crop out the background. Oh yeah.

Next thing you know I'll have medical insurance.