doit, doit now!

You go, girl. Smack those propagandist bitches up. Yeah, I know it’s a canned response. What matters is that she is on it.

Dear Mr. Hodulik:

Thank you for contacting me to request my support for legislation now pending in the U.S. Senate.

I hope you will be happy to know that because I share your support for this measure, I have signed on as a cosponsor.

Because California is such a large and diverse state, it is especially important to know the concerns of my constituents. Please be assured that your opinions have been recorded, and that I will certainly do all I can to move this issue forward in the coming months.

For additional information about my activities in the U.S. Senate, please visit my website, http://boxer.senate.gov. From this site, you can access statements and press releases that I have issued about current events and pending legislation, request copies of legislation and government reports, and receive detailed information about the many services that I am privileged to provide for my constituents. You may also wish to visit http://thomas.loc.gov to track current and past legislation.

Again, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with me.

Barbara Boxer
United States Senator

The Bush Administration is finally getting theirs.

The press seems to have their backbone again and we now have ample and obvious evidence that the Bush Administration not only lied to justify the war in Iraq, but that it willfully broke the law in doing so. Rove is probably going to be indicted. Libby has already been indicted.

Why has this taken two years to figure out? Why do we have an independent prosecutor in place to find out what a simple question from the man in charge could have answered? Why didn’t the President just call in his staff and say, “Okay, people, who did this?”

He never did that because he has known all along.

• He was planning on invading Iraq before 9/11 and he lied to the citizens of the US and to the people of the world about the reasons for doing so. (And this ridiculous bull about “We’ll fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” is quite obviously a lie; the terror attacks on London and Madrid prove this. We have only served to add fuel to the fire with the war in Iraq.)
• He’s responsible for the deaths of over 2,000 American soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis.
• He kowtows to the Religious Right and their attempts to shove Christian fundamentalism down all of our throats, and yet he says that Muslim fundamentalists are bad.
• He taxes the poor and gives to the rich and the corporations.
• He took money from New Orleans and various other domestic programs and put it towards the war in Iraq, and destroyed a city in the process (as the Catholics say, this was a sin of omission, not a sin of commission, but it leaves him no less culpable).
• He sold out America’s seniors to the pharmaceutical companies.
• He sold out America’s youth for no apparent reason whatsoever.
• He has rolled back the advancement of science with absurd positions on stem cell research and intelligent design.
• He has trounced civil rights in the name of “protecting” America.
• He has trampled gay rights and rolled back decades of progress that we’ve made.

The list goes on. Fill in some more things, if you’d like.

I honestly try to see the good in everybody, but I have a hard time doing it with this man. I fail to see one truly good thing he has done for me personally or for anybody else except the rich and powerful. He lies through his teeth and people die as a result. All I see is evil. I don’t mean meanness or spitefulness or anything weak like that — I mean real evil, real wrongdoing done by choice and scheme.

George Bush is just a very bad man.

This is so dumb. I can’t believe how dumb it is. Rocco over at I Always Say Stupid Shit has rightly pointed out that this gay reality TV pilot is just about as stupid and stereotypical as could possibly be. The host is kind of hot but simultaneously needs to never open his mouth and even more so should never appear on camera or in any position of pseudo-authority. I hope his bedside manner is better than his cameraside manner. Granted, it’s not entirely his fault: the writers blow.

Ugh.

I write my elected representatives all the time and have decided to start posting my letters to them. I urge you to do the same. Feel free to copy my letters in their entirety and send them to your elected representatives. Their contact info can be found here. For Californians, Barbara Boxer is here and Diane Feinstein is here.

Dear Senator Boxer/Feinstein:

A September 30 Government Accountability Office report makes it clear that the Bush administration violated federal law by using taxpayer funds to create “covert propaganda.” This is not the first time that the GAO found the administration in violation of the publicity and propaganda prohibition.

Previous GAO investigations found other instances where the White House broke federal law prohibiting the use of “fake news.” A separate report by members of the House Committee on Government Reform found that the administration has set aside a quarter billion in taxpayer dollars for similar publicity campaigns.

These reports suggest that the executive branch is siphoning taxpayer money to covertly manipulate the Fourth Estate. It’s our money. We have a right to know how it’s being used.

Perhaps more importantly, I ask that you support The Truth in Broadcasting Act (S 967) in its original incarnation. Businesses that produce covert propaganda for our government have managed to get members of the Senate to alter the language in the original bill to favor not disclosing the source of every single “fake news” video news release (VNR) that they produce.

The original bill mandated that companies that produce VNR’s must put clear notification across the entire VNR that the “news” was actually cooked by the government, and that this notification cannot be removed. The VNR industry has managed to change the language of the bill so that only a short notification of being “cooked” would be mandated. Since many cash-strapped newsrooms use only short clips from the VNR’s, the American people are oftentimes not notified that they are being fed covert propaganda. The VNR industry would obviously like it to stay that way.

This cannot be allowed to happen. The American People should unequivocally know whether or not the “news” that they are watching is real or is being fed to them by the government. How can we have a Free Press when the government is doing its own reporting on itself?

Please support the original spirit of the bill and use your influence to urge other Senators to do so as well.

Sincerely,

Nick Hodulik

This all has to do with these obnoxious PR companies that produce propaganda for our government and send out the “video news releases” to television stations. The stations often show the VNR’s unedited and with no indication that the release is government propaganda. More info can be found here on PRWatch.

Without being glib, this is precisely what Hitler did during WWII, except that by that point the government owned all of the media outlets, as well. Germany didn’t have a so-called “Free Press” and thus no expectation of truth from their news. Even in the era of Fox/Faux News I still expect to know when our government is using our own tax dollars to lie to us through the media. The Truth in Broadcasting Act requires it.

Please write your elected reps today.

I love it when developers come up with tweaks to augment software that should be in the original software in the first place. Dashboard Starter does nothing more and nothing less that load up all of your Dashboard widgets under OS X 10.4 immediately upon login rather than forcing you to wait for the 5-10 seconds it takes to after a reboot. It’s a small, silly thing, but it eliminates much grumbling and gnashing of teeth.