Links for later

Gleaned from today's readings...

" Last night was therefore a revealing night for me. I watched a Democrat at a GOP Convention convince me that I could never be a Republican. If they wheel out lying, angry old men like this as their keynote, I'll take Obama. Any day."

--Andrew Sullivan

Taking the five highest profile speakers at the convention -- President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Senator Zell Miller, Governor Schwarzenegger, and former Mayor Giuliani -- we get this breakdown:

Mentions of Osama bin Laden: 0
Mentions of John Kerry: 42
Mentions of Saddam Hussein: 21

Must just have been an oversight. Let's check, as the pols say, the internals. Let's look at President Bush:

Saddam: 10
Kerry: 2
Osama: 0

Must have been an oversight. How about Vice President Cheney:

Kerry: 14
Saddam: 4
Osama: 0

I sense a pattern.

--Functional Ambivalent

Recession. Unemployment. Corporate fraud. A war based on false premises that has cost us $200 billion and nearly a thousand American lives. They're all hills we've "been given to climb." It's as though Bush wasn't president. As though he didn't get the tax cuts he wanted. As though he didn't bring about postwar Iraq and authorize the planning for it. All this was "given," and now Bush can show up, three and a half years into his term, and start solving the problems some other president else left behind.

-- Slate

Plus, Guiliani lies but so does the whole damn GOP. And TalkLeft points out the dramatic and depressing contrast between what the President says about how the war on terrorism is going and, er, how the war on terrorism is actually going.

And finally...

You realize there are far, far too many people, and events, and movements and divine underground alternative superlative surreptitious energies already out there, right now, combating the rank dank demons of hate and homophobia and homeland security for you to possibly wallow in hopelessness or lame sitcoms or Bush's vacant, stupefied, sad little eyes.

You realize that, far from being a threadbare tattered fractured scattershot hodgepodge of diminishing hope and lost possibility, the resistance is actually alive and thriving and pulsing all around you, constantly, all the time, everlasting and unstoppable and eternally refreshed and well lubricated and smiling like the divine trickster. You just gotta know where to look.

And, perhaps more importantly, where not to.

--Mark Morford