So from the dKos, I caught a link to this, which is a really nice plugin I traced to here.

I like this way of sharing audio. I'm gonna translate it for Drupal.

We were told they'd be financing their own reconstruction by now. Huh. Things fall apart.

The attack in Samarra began at 7 a.m., when a dozen men dressed in paramilitary uniforms entered the shrine and handcuffed four guards who were sleeping in a back room, a spokesman for the provincial governor's office said. The attackers then placed a bomb in the dome and detonated it.
...
No group claimed responsibility for the attack, but some Iraqi officials pointed a finger at Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the terrorist group believed to be responsible for many of the attacks on Shiite civilians and mosques over the past two years.

This sounds more like the work of old-school Ba'athists than Qaeda to me, though maybe they're all part of the same network at this point. It's a cold-blooded move, destroying a holy site, designed to provoke maximum outrage after years of instability, hardship and violence. It's working:

Later, the Basra police took 10 foreign Arabs who had been jailed in connection with terrorist attacks from their cells and shot them to death, apparently in retaliation for the shrine bombing, a police official said.

Sistani issued another statement on Wednesday warning the faithful not to attack any Sunni holy sites. But the angry mobs had already begun shooting, firing rocket-propelled grenades and setting some mosques on fire. Imams at three Baghdad mosques - Al Sabar, Al Yaman, and Al Rashidi - were killed, the Interior Ministry said. A fourth imam, Sheik Abdul Qadir Sabih Nori of the Amjed al-Zahawi Mosque, was kidnapped, officials said.

More than 25 Sunni Mosques have been attacked in Baghdad, some of them totally destroyed. There have been additional acts of reprisal throughout the country. If the political and religious leaders are unable to quiet the storm, US forces are going to be in a very complex and dangerous situation.

As long as this violence doesn spill over to our people, it'll remain a minor story. If violent civil disorder persists and Americans are caught in the crossfire (or worse, pinned into their bases and then attacked by opportunists there), it could be the bloody beginning to a new chapter this saga of misfortune, malfesance and incompetance.

I think it's going to continue getting uglier. Brace yrself.

UPDATE: it's going to get increasingly politically tricky too... when you've lost O'Reilly, you've lost a lynchpin of support.

Booyakashaaa!

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Stop squinting at tedious web videos-- sit back and watch big, high resolution videos one after another. It's so easy to use that you'll be watching interesting videos in moments.

These kids are smart. I'll start publishing some feeds you might want to add pretty soon.

Not an administration firing on all pistons:

President Bush knocks over some lab samples as receives a tour of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory... in Golden, Colo. Bush's trip to the site is part of a two-day, three-state trip to promote the energy proposals he outlined in his State of the Union address. Along the route, Bush has touted longer lasting lithium-ion car batteries and solar roof panels that can turn homes into mini power generators. Bush's visit to the government lab comes as his administration scrambled over the holiday weekend, just before he arrived, to restore the jobs of 32 people laid off in budget cuts.

That's a photo caption, by the way. Emphasis mine.

Energy is an issue nexus I care about quite a lot because I believe it's central to our ability to maintain a good standard of living, rebuild the American middle class, and also to raise up people around the world who are less fortunite. Sort of pathetic to see it made into a complete political shell game by the Republicans.

The Hotline is a very expensive subscription newsletter that covers Washington DC politics. It defines itself as being for insiders. For a certain set of people, if it wasn't in the Hotline, it didn't happen. William Butler has been covering blogs for the Hotline, and recently wrote an op ed for the Washington Examiner that was a little bit sloppy, for which Blogospheric Young Turk Matt Stoller took him to task. The details there are interesting if you're into the mechanics of party politics, but I'll skip them for now.

The point is that Butler took the opportunity to respond in a more open (e.g. longer than 700 word) format on MyDD with In Defense of Hotline's William Beutler (By Hotline's William Beutler). It's getting digested in various places, but here's the quote (and bolded money-line) I want to riff on:

Markos is fond of saying that the neroots aren't about ideology. That may be so, although I wonder if Matt [Stoller] disagrees, as he criticizes me for saying "woe to" a Dem politician who misreads the blogosphere -- it's not rocket science, he says. Not to him, to be sure. But he might consider the fact that a lot of smart people find the blogosphere particularly inscrutable.

William's post is a Good Thing™. It's far too rare that journalists take the opportunity to engage with their Public, and that's really what all this is about. Now, about that bit I bolded...

To the degree that the Blogosphere is "about" anything, it's about a redistribution of power engineered through rather radical changes in how (and to whom) information flows. This is pretty simple, but it means doing business differently. It means working more openly, and dare I say more honestly.

This is true on both the right and the left, and I actually think it's more of a political problem for Republicans. Openness naturally cuts against the monolitic "message discipline" they've come to rely on, and it will make it harder and harder for them to hold on to their more unsavory (crypto-racist, homophobic, misogynist, corpulently corporatist, etc) coalition members.

But back to the Hotline. It's a bit of a simplification, but it seems like there really is an establishment out there which is typified by Hotline's brand of journalism -- an expensive, insiders-only, limited distribution channel of information. The blogosphere is pretty much the opposite: free (as in beer and as in freedom), open, publicly distributed networks for filtering and distributing facts and opinions.

This all seems like the most natural thing in the world to me and mine. What other way could you possibly want to be? I'm only realizing lately the extent to which there are intelligent people who have been working in another fashion for years and years for whom these ideas are utterly terrifying and/or completely inscrutable.

It's not an age thing -- there are plenty of student body presidents younger than me just itching to start climbing the old-school ladder -- but there is something akin to a generation gap here.

Interesting stuff to ponder.

The Hotline is a very expensive subscription newsletter that covers Washington DC politics. It defines itself as being for insiders. For a certain set of people, if it wasn't in the Hotline, it didn't happen. William Butler has been covering blogs for the Hotline, and recently wrote an op ed for the Washington Examiner that was a little bit sloppy, for which Blogospheric Young Turk Matt Stoller took him to task. The details there are interesting if you're into the mechanics of party politics, but I'll skip them for now.

The point is that Butler took the opportunity to respond in a more open (e.g. longer than 700 word) format on MyDD with In Defense of Hotline's William Beutler (By Hotline's William Beutler). It's getting digested in various places, but here's the quote (and bolded money-line) I want to riff on:

Markos is fond of saying that the neroots aren't about ideology. That may be so, although I wonder if Matt [Stoller] disagrees, as he criticizes me for saying "woe to" a Dem politician who misreads the blogosphere -- it's not rocket science, he says. Not to him, to be sure. But he might consider the fact that a lot of smart people find the blogosphere particularly inscrutable.

William's post is a Good Thing™. It's far too rare that journalists take the opportunity to engage with their Public, and that's really what all this is about. Now, about that bit I bolded...

To the degree that the Blogosphere is "about" anything, it's about a redistribution of power engineered through rather radical changes in how (and to whom) information flows. This is pretty simple, but it means doing business differently. It means working more openly, and dare I say more honestly.

This is true on both the right and the left, and I actually think it's more of a political problem for Republicans. Openness naturally cuts against the monolitic "message discipline" they've come to rely on, and it will make it harder and harder for them to hold on to their more unsavory (crypto-racist, homophobic, misogynist, corpulently corporatist, etc) coalition members.

But back to the Hotline. It's a bit of a simplification, but it seems like there really is an establishment out there which is typified by Hotline's brand of journalism -- an expensive, insiders-only, limited distribution channel of information. The blogosphere is pretty much the opposite: free (as in beer and as in freedom), open, publicly distributed networks for filtering and distributing facts and opinions.

This all seems like the most natural thing in the world to me and mine. What other way could you possibly want to be? I'm only realizing lately the extent to which there are intelligent people who have been working in another fashion for years and years for whom these ideas are utterly terrifying and/or completely inscrutable.

It's not an age thing -- there are plenty of student body presidents younger than me just itching to start climbing the old-school ladder -- but there is something akin to a generation gap here.

Interesting stuff to ponder.

On a whim I p2p'ed a bunch of Rage Against the Machine mp3s. I remember when they hit and I was maybe 15. Seemed like good music then; blows my mind today. This was pure rock and roll revolution if anyone cared to notice, but it was the '90s at the time so... It's slightly shocking that they let these cats put out a bunch of albums, really without too many constraints.

I guess it didn't (doesn't?) really matter back then if your chorus is, "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me." How things change.

But it's an open question now, who is reaching these kids. There's a constitency out there for this. Could be anyone, really.

I need a new cellphone.

This is an area of technology that I find kind of infuriating because of the lack of standardization and the desire to "productize" the ability of users to move different sorts of data. But anyway...

What I think I want is a phone that's really a phone (not a PDA) that has the guts to connect to the 3G data networks and which I can use thusly as a cellular modem for my lappy, which I'm rarely without in any kind of work-potential situation. Any pointers?

A blog with a story!

Awesome.

This is the Right Idea. Francene Busby is trying to replace Criminal War Profiteer Duke Cunningham, and she gives a decent stump.

This is a big part of what makes politics work online. You have to build a relationship with the Public. Media is a big part of this. I wouldn't have gotten so hard into Dean if this hadn't been one of first things I saw. Creating compelling candidate media and then supporting it with an active team of talented writers who can create compelling campaign message on an hourly basis is the new-media two-step that's proven to work. It's kind of surprising to me that more people haven't done this.