Sunday Potluck: BYOBlog

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In addition to the usual dishes, we're going to try to bring in more home-baked blogging from our readers. If you've got a blog of your own (or contribute to one) please post a link in the comments -- and if you've written something this week you'd like for us to read, please give us a taste of it too!

janinsanfran at Happening Here posts a letter from a woman she met a few months back in Jordan, now in Baghdad
"I have been in Baghdad for three weeks, it looks not three weeks but it looks like years. The situation is so bad. Not safe at all.

Baghdad looks like graveyard of hell. The US military close all the streets -- no cars pass through. No one can go from city to city in Baghdad. No people go to work for 4 or 5 days. The tanks everywhere and the police cars in front of every street and the fear in all eyes from the USA military and the police. Also from the killers and the thieves.

The weather is too hot: my skin burns and hurts me so much because of the sun and the heat. The killing everywhere; it's the real hell."

Eric at Total Information Awareness on the US response to the British terror plot and its timing
"But get this: the means to protect the public from these potentially volatile liquids (whose destructive powers only accrue when mixed) is to either force all travelers to dump their liquid containers into trash cans (were the potential for mixing is, ahem, somewhat increased) or, alternatively, actually empty the contents into giant receptacles.

Let me repeat that: Passengers pour the contents of their liquid containers into one giant mixing bowl of potential explosive agents that only become dangerous...when mixed!

Feeling safer? "

Barbara O'Brien at The Mahablog rounds out an accomplished series of posts on how the Democratic Party got where it is, and what to do about it (see also parts 1 | 2 | 3 | 4)
"Dems in Washington are so insular they barely know what to make of demands from the grassroots. At first they seemed to think that if they ignored us, we would go away. Now some of them are catching on that we’re not going away, and they’re becoming more responsive. But conventional wisdom tells the Dems to stick with the Clinton triangulation approach, because we liberal activists have burned the party before, in the 1960s and 1970s.
[...]
The national Democratic Party came to be the way it is in response to the nation’s political environment, which has been so fouled by the Right that real political debate and discourse are damn near impossible. And it came to be the way it is because no coalition of citizens and interest groups support it and defend it, the way the New Deal coalition supported the Democrats from the 1930s until the 1960s. Instead, our myriad single-issue advocacy groups hang back until an election is looming, then issue endorsements. Like anyone cares. And the rest of us tend to focus on favorite issues and candidates, as Dionne says.

I cannot emphasize enough that the Democrats in Washington won’t change until we change. That’s the whole point of the netroots uprising, and I believe we’re having an effect."

Sara Robinson at Orcinus on how to help your Fox-News-watching neighbors return to reality, step by step
"All these issues, and others, provided ripe openings for the disciplined organizers of the authoritarian right. It's like they've slapped stick-on hot buttons onto all of us -- and now keep pushing them for all they were worth to activate a Pavolvian fear response. ("Abortion! Faggots! Affirmative action! Brown people! Flag-burning!") There has always been -- and probably always will be -- a hard core of natural authoritarian leaders and followers in any society. But their numbers have almost certainly been swelled (my non-supportable guess is that it's been at least doubled) by tens of millions of "soft-core" authoritarians who've been shanghaied onto the authoritarian bandwagon over the past three decades.

John Dean tells us that we are not likely to change the hearts of the authoritarian leaders. And their hardest-core followers may be lost causes, too: most of them grew up with that model, have lived their entire lives by it, and in many cases have been so damaged by it that getting them to accept any other way of viewing reality is likely to be futile.

However, those two factions probably don't comprise even half of the current horde that's commandeered our country. And the rest -- the "normal folks" who got swept up in the right-wing hysteria of the past three decades -- have already demonstrated a certain fluidity: many of them have crossed the Wall once already and have at least some memory of life on the other side. Not all of them will return, of course (though it's always surprising to see which ones decide to make the jump) -- but bringing a good slice of this group back may not be as hard as we've been prone to think."

Finally, kid oakland at k/o turns over his site to fifty-state blogging, with an outstanding list of resources for you to keep up with every race. It's always at the top-right corner of his site. Check it out.
"I'm going to break down the critical races in this country where Democrats are fighting vulnerable GOP incumbents and for each race I will:

o identify one local blog that covers that race relentlessly
o provide links to google and technorati searches for that race
o provide a link to the dailykos TAG for that race
o provide links to the Campaign website and an ACTBlue page when possible."

Comments

[emptypockets]

I'd stopped watching Sunday talk shows, so for all I know this kind of outright racism replaced the usual night-is-day gibberish some time ago, but I was surprised just now to catch a moment of George Will talking about civil war in Iraq, quoting something from Churchill and going on to say "..so gratitude isn't exactly a strong suit over there." oooh, those congenitally ungrateful Iraqis -- and after all we've done to them for them.

[janinsanfran]

Thanks for picking up what Amal wrote us. In one sense, we "know" this is happening in Iraq -- and in another sense, it is almost impossible for us to "know." Direct communication helps bridge this a little.

[Undeniable Liberal]

As has been noted here, the threat of liquid explosives is nothing new. And technology has been developed to detect them. Did ya know that? Faux spews doesn't consider such a story newsworthy but here at undeniable liberalism, it's quite pertinent. And did you know that not only does our government know about it but they use it? Good enough for the cheney menstruation, but not good enough for you.

"Since the early 1990s, AS&E has made SmartCheck, a $50,000 low-intensity X-ray scanner that can spot a bottle of organic compounds in a passenger's pocket.
But is the liquid an explosive, or a batch of baby formula? Ahura says its $30,000 handheld laser scanner, the First Defender, can answer the question. The device can ``see" through glass or plastic bottles and identify any of 2,500 different chemical compounds in about 15 seconds. The FBI and New York City police already use the Ahura system, which went on sale about a year ago.
Joe Reiss , AS&E's vice president of marketing, said his company's SmartCheck systems are used at the White House and the US Supreme Court. But they're not widely used in airport security. TSA agreed last year to conduct tests of the system. But Reiss said those tests had not yet begun."

So ya see, the system isn't "tested enough" for airport security, but it's used at the whitehouse and supreme court. How does the bullshit smell? TSA needs to conduct tests......ok....suuuuurrrrrrre. One would think that if the detection system is good enough for the whitehouse and supreme court, it would be good enough for all of us, without any testing. Did the whitehouse decide to use a liquid explosive detection device without knowing if it is effective? Kinda doubtful doncha think?

95% effectiveness sounds a hell of a lot better that Cheney's One Percent Doctrine , in fact there is an oxymoron in there somewhere.
Don't the wing nuts from the facist right side always scream better safe that sorry? Especially when they try to defend the Patriot act . Sure the cost to implement this system would be high, but with hundreds of billion of trax cuts for the wealthy, and a quagmire that's costing 5 billion a month, the undeniable liberal thinks that there just might be a few corners to cut, like WE THE PEOPLE all do. Obviously, the companies that have developed this technology aren't big republican donors.

[Friendly Canadian]

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