I'm not ashamed to be from GA. (the real Georgia, not Atlanta)

But, I am ashamed to have a Senator as ignorant as Saxby Chambliss. God, he gives us all a bad name.

Then again, I like my dentist and he actually is interested in helping me.

And he gives you novocaine so you won't feel the pain. Fortunately, the populace has stopped being susceptible to the novocain Bush peddles.

He just said "the Constitution means what it says"

Keep the faith. Did you see the look on his face when the Dem side of the aisle broke into applause at that line? It's the little unexpected gifts like that one that keep me watching.

You say, tomato, I say, bull shit. Let's call the whole thing off.

http://thinkprogress.org/

I don't have a television. I'm thirsty enough without it. The RNC talking points are more than usually nauseating, but I have some difficulty imagining that such horseshit is effective anymore.

Is it over yet?

but Faith's been hard to come by lately. I faxxed and faxxed today, on the topic at hand. Am pleased as we all should be at our (our?) efforts. eh, walking away with hope from that is about all I can do but it's not bad, not really.

Nice of you to say, & I feel like echoing the b-man, what planet are we on. YAWN stretch the jaw.

Here is he talking about the expiration of February 1st.

LIAR. He is a liar. LIABILITY PROTECTION.

Listening to this man talk and these people applaud is enough to make one think they are insane. It is amazing that anyone can function in this country considering the absolute dissonance between the reality inside and outside of that room and the utter refusal of anyone in that room to even recognize the dissonance exists.

dismissing thoughts of suicide at any moment for all to watch?

contemplating murder? divorce? burping? beers? or admitting he's ballistic, hellbent, and wondering if he is going to be reborn in Bangladesh as a maggot...worried.

Pelosi?

browsing via her high school yearbook...worried.

Occasionally I quickly flick to see if Dubya is done so as I said earlier I can watch the Dem response. Worse than seeing Dubya is having to see The Dick behind him. It has been fleeting enough that I have kept from throwing up. I hope I can hold out.

looking forward to her date afterward's with dick...

RNC -

Barack Obama wants to sit down and negotiate with terrorists, but he is not willing to give our intelligence agencies the tools they need to prevent future attacks.... If Senators Obama and Clinton were serious about national security they would realize that while our ability to monitor terrorist communication expires in a matter of days, the terrorist threat against our families will not.

Senators Clinton and Obama worship demons in the woods, dancing in circles wearing berries and the entrails of small woodland creatures. If they were serious about the safety of citizens, they would realize that driving really fast increases one's chances of flying off the edge of the Earth. These are the words of a credible political organization. God Bless 911. And the Easter Bunny. Riding a glitter pony.

as GWB approaches Cocktailhag for a sip from her glass...

she dips her hand in a peanut jar and shakes his hand...

Lard jar

Can anyone honestly recall anyone ever talking about the USA as the or a "homeland" before 9/11?

Jawohl. I remember the chill I got when that term first reared its Teutonic head in 1996. IIRC it was Gary Hart who proposed merging the CIA with the FBI in the panicky aftermath of OKC, so that spying and police work would become the same thing. I remember thinking that these people would be back after the next disaster.

It was about a year later when I read some mainstream coverage of the Ramzi Yousef trial that said that "top US law enforcement and intelligence officials" were "very concerned" about evidence gathered in the Philippines regarding Ramzi's uncle. These brave protectors of the realm didn't give their names, and I still wonder who they were, because at the time, they said they suspected that "foreign-born terrorists" were already training at US flight schools and conspiring to fly hijacked airliners into the WTC, the Pentagon, and maybe also a nuclear plant. They also said that they suspected some of them were training and living at "secure US military bases." It occurred to me that the team who prosecuted Ramzi Yousef were precisely the people who most needed to know about the plot, and now it was public.

Well, those bases weren't very secure if "foreign-born terrorists" could live there, looking for gaps in US air defenses. But now that the plot had been exposed, creating the danger of copycats, I knew that NORAD and the FAA would begin preparing for such an attack. Nonetheless, I expected we'd never hear the end of the story until it resulted in some arrests. For the next two years I scoured the papers every day. Nothing. Those officials who had been "very concerned" were surely not growing less concerned as years passed with no arrests.

It wasn't until Shrub announced that I remembered what a classmate had told me about the Bushes in 1980. I'd asked her whom she liked in the campaign. She was horrified. "That's a very personal question! I can't believe you asked me that!" I reassured her that I only wanted to make a more informed choice, and would likely vote the same way as her once I knew her reasoning. The word genius is often too loosely applied, but she was a genius. She failed to persuade me, though.

She explained that all she cared about was having nice things. She said she hated Reagan because he was stupid, but now that he had broken his promise not to run with Bush, she would vote for him. Congress, she explained, was the problem, because members of Congress just want to be popular so they can be re-elected. (Would that it were so!) They couldn't be counted on to do the unpopular things necessary to maintain our standard of living, but with the CIA in the White House, they wouldn't pose much of an obstacle. "Let's face it," she said, "sometimes you have to move fast."

"Bush will use his CIA connections to become president, and when he does, there will be three Supreme Court justices who will be too old to continue in their jobs. And that's the beauty of this plan," she said, "because when he replaces them, those appointments are for life, and that leaves his mark for the next generation, when one of his sons might be eligible. Let's face it, if I were starving, and Lenin promised me food, I'd fight for him, too."

Clearly, one voter could not make it so, but I watched Iran-Contra unravel, and when a certain element began praising Ollie North for lying to Congress and the nation, it was clear my friend was just one member of a voting bloc. It was also clear that with no real penalties imposed on the gang, they had no incentive to stop, and that the terrorist tactics they supported could not be kept out of this country forever.

However, when Shrub announced, I looked at his record in Texas, and it was clear he had no record on which to run. With such long-range plans at stake, and a lot of skeletons to hide, it might be worth it to try to rig or steal the election. If that happened, it would be exposed within the first year. As long as Bush could count on a well-timed disaster, a stolen election would become moot. We'd already been told what the targets and the methods would be, and it might be possible to determine the date by logic and strategy. I had a hypothesis to test.

In these innumerate times, cashiers at McDonald's no longer count change. The US doesn't produce many math geniuses. There was only one number with emotional resonance for all US citizens regardless of age, gender, class or ethnic background. It also fell before the anniversary of the election, and in the first year of the new millennium.

This all came together for me on July 2, 1999. I couldn't find a good argument against it. Someone had already gagged the officials who had exposed the plot, or we would have heard from them again. The media didn't want to touch this sensational story. Why not?

I know, I know. I posited a conspiracy theory. It's only a theory now because my hypothesis had predictive value. Let's hope it's not repeatable. As it happened, the networks' analysis of the popular vote was scheduled for release on 9/11/2001.

Some of this embrace of spying power is driven by technology. All leaders have enemies, so it is only natural for them to want to spy on their subjects. The temptation only grows stronger as technology makes it easier to monitor everything we do. Nonetheless, it would take a special kind of leader to take on the role. It's been twenty-eight years since an insightful and amoral teenager told me who was being positioned for it.

The 9/11 cOmmission report defined the "Homeland" as comprising the entire planet.