Looking for feedback from DailyKos users.

The biggest upset this year wasn't the Giants beating the undefeated Patriots in the Super Bowl. No, it was a freshman senator from the South Side of Chicago who beat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primary. This is my take on why she lost.

Ok, this will probably get torn to shreds, and my feelings will not be hurt.

The point I hope to make in this diary:
Due to advances in technology and culture no matter who is president their actions will be attacked/and viewed as an impeachable offense by 1/2 the population.

It started with Nixon and has gotten more pronounced as time has gone on.

I doubt it is because the quality of the presidents has gotten any better or worse. I mean they've always been pretty constant, I would think.

<More after the break>

Getting past all the meaningless political talk it gets hard to really make sense of what just occurred in the Georgia-Russian war. We all know the superficial details as they have been presented, Georgia first invaded Ossetia to re establish it's dominion over what was originally a part of its sovereignty. Ossetia is on record stating its preference to Russian rule. So Georgia invades and things are going as planned when Russia counter invades with an over whelming force. A force apparently waiting for a Georgian invasion of Ossetia. The USA has been reported to have actually encouraged the Georgian incursion. The USA, Israel and a few other nations have been training and supplying arms to the Georgian military. Russia after repelling Georgian troops in Ossetia then continues on into Georgia itself.

We all remember when that crazy Al Gore claimed he invented the internet:

Electronic Case Filing can be a very substantial tool to advance democracy. It is cost effective and runs on laptops.

(I read "Netroots Platform: Civil and Human Rights by Chacounne 8/14/08, too late to respond. I  am sorry that I have been slow to pick up on the complexities of Daily Kos and so distracted.  This diary is meant to respond to the Access to Courts mandate in the platform)

Real Access to Court requires just that --access. ECF is computerized access and it is great.  It should be universally available to  all citizens and businesses.

The latest news in the Ted Stevens/VECO bribery case is quite possibly the most shocking.

According to the federal government, in addition to the house additions, Ted Stevens accepted a free generator from VECO CEO Bill Allen.

Ted's reason for wanting a generator is shocking enough.

a new court filing from the federal government suggests that Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, was one of the people who was concerned that the transition from "99" to "00" would wreak havoc on the nation's electric grid.

But the real shocker is that Ted Stevens requested the free generator via e-mail

Last month John McCain said that Americans are tired of the Internet. It's highly unlikely that he was actually speaking for all Americans, or even anything more than a small brood of Luddites. It is more likely that he himself is tired of the Internet, or perhaps just tired, period. He has never been particularly fond of it, even as he chaired the Senate committee responsible for regulating it.

Brought to you by...
News Corpse, The Internet's Chronicle Of Media Decay.

Like you, I know how insidious John McCain is, and how he must be defeated. I know the narratives that need to be built around him, and that the netroots must do it. As such, I'm putting together LOLJohnMcCain.com, because why not use the two hottest internet phenomenons (LOLCats and DailyKos) to do it?

UPDATE:  Also, please Rec so we can get this on the recc'd diaries and get more people looking, creating and spreading LOLJohnMcCain picz! I don't want to be shameless, but I think we can really make a mark! kthxbai!

I understand Exclusivity. But, if NBC wants to be 'the' source for all Video coverage of the Olympics, please dump the idea that you create a new untested at full capacity platform, and expect it to function.

After the slightly annoying process of downloading and installing a specific video player from Microsoft, I saw some video sans sound. Almost like watching the soundless Chaplin of a  bygone era. And if you are thinking, at least it was color, let me reassure you the quality was so poor it might as well have been black and white. The advertised features of multiple videos, screen within a screen are a joke. The player and/or their servers can't even handle streaming a single video without constant breaks every five seconds.

I spent over an hour and eventually gave up frustrated. My only options being to use a proxy server to access videos from another country - because for some reason they can legally block my access to Olympic video from a more competent foreign site. Ironic that China has exported more of its modus operandi via these Olympics, instead of the games bringing more openness to China.

With Barack Obama, we likely have the most technologically-savvy candidate for President in the history of the country.   He's revolutionized campaigning and fundraising with his web-based system.    He  even has his own personal iPod playlist.   Google CEO Eric Schmidt and numerous other leaders in the technology sector have endorsed him.  More importantly, Obama has an innovative series of technology policy proposals on his campaign website under the heading, "Technology and Innovation for a New Generation."  

In contrast, John McCain is technologically illiterate and his campaign's web page barely even mentions any technology issues.

... sometime within the next 10 years.

I don’t know about anyone else but I cannot imagine waking up one day and finding myself totally cutoff from the world of Dkos and other progressive sites that I depend on every single day to find out what’s really happening in the world. That said, our government (at least how it stands right now) is bound and determined to control the free flow of information in and out of this country. They've already decimated the tv and radio airwaves and the print media; the tubes are next.

In fact, they’re so determined to control the collective narrative of this country, our government is said (by a very credible source) to have already drafted a Patriot Act-type document to enact (sound vaguely familiar?) in the case of a major terrorist attack on the internet.

Tech visionary and 2008 NetRoots Nation panelist Lawrence Lessig made a sobering prediction Tuesday at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech Conference.

I am passing along a information release from Mr. Babson on Maui that I think is an important story that does not get enough play not only in Hawaii, but also nationwide.  Now when reading this long essay, some information hungry people will jump to the conclusions at the end which are pretty radical according to some folks, but if you read the whole essay, you will find the conclusions are more than justified.  All legislators and candidates should read this because it affects them directly as well as every voter that votes for them.  At the very least we need an honest election guaranteed.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve grown increasingly weary of John McCain’s negative and often dishonest attacks on Barack Obama.   Among other things, McCain has often accused Obama of lacking “the knowledge and judgment” to be President.   This past week’s ad depicting Obama as a vacuous celebrity akin to Britney Spears or Paris Hilton is the most recent example of such sophomoric absurdity coming from the McCain campaign.   In reality, Obama is one of the brightest and most knowledgeable candidates for President to come down the pike in decades.  

But in this blog I want to focus on McCain, not Obama.  It’s high time that McCain is revealed as the one who is truly ignorant and uninformed on a wide range of issues. Despite his vaunted “experience,” it is painfully obvious that McCain is not only unknowledgeable about many important domestic and international issues facing the country, but lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the economy and foreign affairs.  

John McCain thinks that a "tech freak" is someone who reads emails on a computer, rather than having them printed out on paper by staff.

GOP presidential candidate John McCain, fundraising in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the nation's technology capitals, acknowledged Monday that he isn't a "tech freak" or entirely comfortable with the Internet, BlackBerrys or e-mail. But he strongly disputed criticism that he is "out of the loop" as unfair.

As former head of the U.S. Senate Commerce committee, McCain said, he has been a driving force to oversee legislation that helped the Internet flourish - even as he is still learning to get comfortable with it himself.

"Am I a tech freak? No," he said in an interview Monday with The Chronicle. "And I don't like to text message because I'd rather call somebody on the telephone."
. . .
"It doesn't mean that I have to e-mail people," he said. "Now, I read e-mails," he added, saying his staff is "constantly showing them to me as the news breaks during the day."

"Meghan!  Ask the Google whether Ted Stevens is gonna screw me over in Alaska, and print out its answer for me!"

Via LiveJournal:

Today, I discovered that RealClimate is blocked. Exactly how is a climatology site objectionable? Of course, the propaganda information sites they do allow are equally interesting. There has never been a day that drug abuser Rush Limbaugh or felon G Gordon Liddy has been blocked, to my knowledge. Comedian Al Franken’s Senate campaign site - blocked. Air America was blocked, then allowed, then blocked, and now it’s allowed again I believe. For the longest time, Little Green Footballs was allowed, while DailyKos was blocked. Now, they’re both blocked.  I can get behind that - neither of those sites is official use, I’d wager. Drudge Report and WorldNutDaily - always accessible.  Slate’s Video News - blocked. Go figure.

Seriously, RealClimate? Frack.

I can't speak to the veracity of this specific claim. No doubt there may be concerns with certain sites loading on local networks that have nothing to do with political content. But the general problem outlined, and more importantly, the political bend of the lucky sites that seem to effortlessly escape notice of sysadmin time and time again, is surely familiar to all. It's time to compare notes. Are you on a government or government related network? What sites are blocked and which are allowed? Who makes those decisions at the local and national level?

They finally got him, two years after his famous speech announcing his opposition to tubes and trucks. Not much more to say than what follows:

Stevens Indicted for Clogging Series of Tubes

Ted Stevens, the longest serving Senator in Republican history, was indicted Tuesday by a Federal Grand Jury in Washington, D.C. for, among other charges, six counts of conspiracy to clog an important series of tubes. The 84-year old Senator from Alaska, serving his seventh consecutive term in office, the former chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee and now the ranking minority member, was also charged with one count of trying to dump things on a truck.