This news, only a little earlier than anticipated, still shocks me and greatly saddens me.

Now and then I start to write posts in which I would grapple with and, mostly for my own sake, try to account for my own transformation from a rather uninformed conservative youth to a self identified liberal. I usually gave up and never posted.

Dammit, I am actually sobbing as I read the obits.

But I can't say why I will miss Ted Kennedy without describing how my attitude toward his politics and his political skills changed over the years.

I find my savings going up in smoke and the new candidate for the arsonist party only 2% behind in the polls. NY Times, for one, mentions that we who have been saving the last 30 or 40 years for our retirement just took a hit many will not recover from.

There are a thousand things to say about the administration's attempt to use the massive screw-ups of our unregulated financial giants as a cover for taking the last bits of power from congress and the last bits of taxpayer money in the treasury and just giving it to Mr Paulson's former colleagues on Wall Street. Fortunately, these things are being said. At TPM, HuffPo, TruthOut, Brad DeLong and Agonist you will find a flood of facts and contempt for what the administration is trying to do. TPM and Agonist have nice juicy dirt on McCain's connection to the beneficiaries of the proposed bailout via his lobbyists/advisers Carly Fiorina, Phil Gramm and Rick Davis.

The phrase "The American Story", if offered as the title on a blank sheet each of us was to fill with a story might produce a decidedly motley collection. The myth that somehow there is one even vaguely unified American story is apt to find uncritical expression in some glowing pean penned over at Townhall.com. The grit, disappointment and glints of glory would more likely mingle in individual works cobbled up in a diary at Daily Kos.

You see, America, you never had one story. Or even one America.

With a separation of a few years, two privately educated sons of prominent American families each go to Yale, join Skull and Bones, enlist in the army and later work for the CIA...parallel life stories, right?

Though I was raised in a household where "Firing Line" was one of the few shows we watched and I still admire and try to model the verbal opulence of William F. Buckley, it looks like I am going to have to be the one to say a few sane words to balance the effusive obituaries.

Some of you might not have caught the hints.

Rummy and dummy part company. Someone finally got the hints. In spite of his professed confidence in Rumsfeld as Bush was campaigning out west last week [and damaging Republican election prospects], this resignation has been in hand for about a week according to Anderson Cooper, interviewing Gergen last night. That is about enough notice to give Rummy time to shred anything that would embarrass his boss even more, if that is possible.

To me, this long overdue departure seemed like the most achingly immanent requiting when I sat to write yesterday morning and there was so much good change to contemplate. I can't fairly claim "I told you so". I didn't know it was coming, I just knew it should come. But I have had an unusual vantage point from which to view this sad chapter of American history grinding up little people and making big money....

Did any of you read this article in the NYTimes?

New Telemarketing Ploy Steers Voters on Republican Path

By CHRISTOPHER DREW

An automated voice at the other end of the telephone line asks whether you believe that judges who "push homosexual marriage and create new rights like abortion and sodomy" should be controlled. If your reply is "“yes", the voice lets you know that the Democratic candidate in the Senate race in Montana, Jon Tester, is not your man.

In Maryland, a similar question-and-answer sequence suggests that only the Republican Senate candidate would keep the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. In Tennessee, another paints the Democrat as wanting to give foreign terrorists "the same legal rights and privileges" as Americans.

...

I want to illustrate what is at stake today. Its about a lot more than whether Americans will fight dirty among themselves. This is both a matter of my opinion and a matter of my experience as a GOTV phone volunteer. The kind of appeals made to undecided voters tell us what the campaigners think we are like. Now it is our turn to tell them what America is really like. [and yes, you should be apprehensive!]

The Federal Election Commission posted its "final" rules regarding blogging and the upcoming elections. You may have to be a lawyer [IANAL] to figure it all out but the worry is that if you don't, you may need a lawyer.

The document is here.

It is a draft of the final rules and its state of incompletion indicates that it has not been submitted to congress for approval, a last step before FEC can issue fines or otherwise enforce its rules. much more after the jump

I confess, I do sometimes read the right wing rags.  On February 23, Victorino Matus wrote in The Weekly Standard

Future Shock: Why the military is interested in magnetic levitation.

THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE has given millions of dollars to a company you've never heard of in order to fund something called Project M, whose aim is "The Use of Modern Sensing and Actuation Technologies Coupled With High Speed Processing to Control Complex Dynamic Systems." In English, this means three objectives: "active control of vibration, active control of mechanical shock, and active control of magnetic fields."

But for what purpose? To create an army of Magnetos capable of hurling large metallic objects at the enemy? Not quite. To find the answer, I turned to the recently retired chief of naval research, Rear Admiral Jay M. Cohen.

[I think a story like this is an ice cube in a cocktail served by the defense industry lobby. Would you like to see the whole iceberg?  ~Greensmile]

elevated from the diaries
Crime does pay if your response rate is high enough

NYTimes has an informative article on moves by AOL and Yahoo, two of the biggest providerss of email serice, to start charging bulk mailers for each email sent.

AOL and Yahoo will still accept e-mail from senders who have not paid, but the paid messages will be given special treatment. On AOL, for example, they will go straight to users' main mailboxes, and will not have to pass the gantlet of spam filters that could divert them to a junk-mail folder or strip them of images and Web links. As is the case now, mail arriving from addresses that users have added to their AOL address books will not be treated as spam.

elevated from the diaries
Science sermon: Why science isn't news.

The study warning that we cannot sustain US levels of metals consumption on a world-wide scale is news: it is the result of novel and far more complete analysis than prior work and it hints at serious consequences the next generation on this planet may face.  But it gets no coverage thanks to the usual combination of innate hurdles facing the dissemination of scientific findings to the public. I want to share my understanding of this disconnect . . .

elevated from the diaries
Who ratted me out and why are they keeping all those records about me?

Why are the search companies bothering to retain all this data?  They say knowledge is power and for marketers, these records, properly sifted and chewed up by AI inference engines pinpoint trends, demographics and ripe moments and right consumers to target with new products. That loss of privacy is a price we pay for the convenience of online seach and e-commerce. What is, to my mind, more certainly evil is that the developers of data mining services were so willingly commandeered when DOJ, stinging from 9/11 failures, wanted to find a terrorist in a haystack of data and DHS or the FBI bought the idea.

To paraphrase a question that Jon Stewart, on The Daily Show last night, put to the author of No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society, "So what you're telling me is that the same software that figures out when I should get an advertisement for an SUV is being used to figure out when the FBI should knock on my door to ask why my browsing habits match those of suspected terrorists?"

Of Eugene Jarecki's movie, Enterainment Weekly says

Before it gets around to updating how the military-industrial complex actually works (hint: It's grown a bit more powerful since 1961), Why We Fight asks us to revel in the irony that President Eisenhower now sounds like the sort of guy who would get tarred as a leader of the ''Hate America'' crowd.

The reviewer at the Boston Globe said "It is the movie Farenheit 9/11 should have been"

Its all that. Go see it.  Its just a documentary.  It clarifies a whole picture of which most viewers have only seen parts.  This movie can not be written off as a hatchet job the way Moore's movie can.  You will be angry when you leave the theatre.

What is a mystery to me is why this movie got no build up at all while Moore's movie had Moveon.org behind it 100%.  Yes, Moore's film came out in the heat of a pending election but no, the fight is not over yet.

The movie is not going to make anyone comfortable, already a plus in my book.  With jackhammer force, the movie drives its point that the growing influence of the defense industry and its unholy embrace of congress and the pentagon have overridden most of the reluctance to go to war that is innate in the American character. Interviews with people who used to be military and government insiders is woven with interviews of ordinary people in the US and Iraq who have to try to understand all the awful events unfolding.