So I did my part and watched the State of the Union last night. Reading the coverage I find myself once again out of step.

• I thought that on the whole Bush's speech was nice, although he's clearly getting worn down and sort of cranky. Get the president a juice box and someone get Condi to take a nap.
• Substantively it was pretty stupid, both politically and policy-wise. Although that's been covered elsewhere, in brief by embracing themes like Health Care and Immigration Reform, Bush is alienating some substantial subset of his remaining support. He also proposed things -- like subsidized opt-in insurance -- that are terrifically ineffective.
• Did no one else see him grab Speaker Pelosi's tit at the end???
• While I liked how he started off on calling out CEO pay, and I like that everyone seems to think it was a tenacious response, Jim Webb's ditty felt stiff and boring to me, like a high school teacher giving a lecture. I like his reasoning and tough, brass-tacks bearing, but I prefer it seasoned with some passion.

Anyway, I'm pleased that Bush had to thematically go our way on Health Care, Energy and the like. That matters. When it comes to making programs happen, the President actually can't do anything. As easy as it is to forget this after the last six years, the President actually doesn't make the laws, at least not according to the Constitution.

This means his stupid proposals are just that -- empty talk -- but the subject of that empty talk bodes well for people like me who savor the notion of energy independence, universal health care, universal net access, and an economy that embraces the notion of service rather than servitude.

People call for people to be fired because they use the word "faggot" in public.

There's a legitimate case to be made if, as is somewhat implied, there was a lot of on-set animosity -- that whole "hostile workplace environment" thing, which is legit -- but it seems to be the height of Political Correctness (and I use that term pejoratively here) to agitate for someone to lose their job as a result of a public statement they made, even if it was in the context of an awards show and thus semi-official.

Which is not to defend this guy's choice of language. Poor form, and all, but do we really want to start firing people on this kind of basis? Seems extreme to me.

Now, GLADD's position -- that it's not good language to promote and that he should apologize -- is far more moderate than those expressed by the entertainment press and a the VP of the Directors Guild, which seems to be that if you're homophobic, that's grounds for dismissal. This is why people fear and loathe the idea of Hollywood, even as they lap up the products.

Without defending homophobia, I think it's well within our individual rights as citizens to dislike whoever we dislike for whatever reasons, rational or otherwise. Acting on those feelings is different, but its a very dangerous thing to try and normatively shape ideas (e.g. creating thoughtcrime).

Jerome Armstrong, who I still have to post a recap about, continues to behave like a thug on MyDD. The latest example is a popular diary written by an Edwards supporter which takes Barak Obama to task for using similar language to Joe Lieberman. Jerome put it on the front page, and edited in an image from Google News with Edwards using similar language.

The image is two and a half years old, so that's pretty weak sauce, but the point here isn't the substance of the argument; it's what Armstrong did with his admin powers.

Here you have a community site that's had a pretty good vibe to it over the past year or two. It's a community that has good things bubble up from the diaries, and has a smaller (but in many ways sharper) community of commentators than the bigger blogs.

On this community site, you have one of the admins taking a community contribution, editing it without permission to completely flip it around on the author, and putting the result on public display.

That's thuggish, bullying behavior, and it's destructive and wrong. Even if Jerome's an Obama fanboy and was hurt by the community member's diary -- or maybe as he said was the case with Dean in this post and they've put him on the payroll so now he's carrying water -- this is a shitty way to behave on a community website. It's a petty violation of what anyone would consider normal standards.

This upsets me partly because people in the campaign world think Jerome actually has good advice (highly debatable), but more because he really brings the whole tenor of MyDD down. Matt and Chris and Jonathan and the other posters have a good thing going, and Armstrong's half-bright technology posts, childish abuses of admin power, and transparent frontpage shilling muddy the waters.

Two years ago, the saintly leaders at DownHillBattle did a nice little bit of copyright and general activism by organizing screenings of the seminal Civil Rights documentary Eyes on the Prize, which has not been available for sale for some time because of all the clearances necessary for the archival footage.

Their action was called Eyes on the Screen, and it used BittTorrent to distribute the first two episodes of the video series. I participated in SF, torrenting the first two episodes and setting up a showing at this anarchist loft I had a couple of connections with.

It was probably one of the single most rewarding pieces of activism I've participated in, as it drew a very diverse crowd both young and old, and people were very moved by both the documentary (which is GD amazing) and the circumstances (internet wizardry) by which it was presented.

That event was one of the rare moments in my time as a velvet revolutionary where I really felt like my work was building on, rather than digging itself out from under, the legacy of the 1960s. It was fucking inspiring.

Holmes and Nick and Tiffany got some serious pushback from the original producers who claimed they were really working hard on getting everything together for a DVD re-issue, and that this "stunt" was putting it all at risk. In response, they took down the torrent link and instead encouraged people instead to get the video from a library for screening.