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Article here: GOP Unveils Its Convention Stars

It's mid-August, which means the tropics are starting to heat up.

Here's the latest: the storm is supposed to make landfall as a category 1 hurricane south of the Bay, moving due north, Tuesday afternoon. If that scenario plays out, I'll have to skip my chiropractic appointment, but otherwise it won't really affect us seriously (we could really use the rain, to tell the truth). If the path stays the same but the intensity increases, things could get dicey.

Of course, I'm scheduled to fly out of TIA at 9am Thursday, so I'm crossing my fingers that that doesn't happen!

So for now, we're in wait-and-see mode.

For those of you wondering where I'm at on the maps...

If you want to follow the latest news on TS Fay, the best thing is to go right to the source: National Hurricane Center. For news about my area specifically, try Bay News 9.

I was just eating lunch, watching CNN cover a live McCain town hall event which he began by giving a brief review of the situation in Georgia. (I'll try to find a video or transcript after posting.)

I'm blown away by the extent to which he painted the conflict in black-and-white terms. No mention of Georgia's refusal to grant independence to the breakaway provinces, no mention of Russia's allegations that Georgia provoked the hostilities with military incursions into S. Ossettia.

Now don't get me wrong: Russia is clearly in the wrong here. I do not buy for a moment Moscow's claim that this is all a big humanitarian effort, nor do I doubt that they were waiting for this opportunity to invade Georgia. Russia has become increasingly imperial during the last decade, and it clearly has intentions on any of the satellite states who harbor pro-Western sympathies.

That said, nothing - nothing - in international relations is as simplistic as the Bush administration would have us believe, and McCain seems to be following the same script. He emphasized an applause line about Georgian troops serving in Iraq alongside Americans, and he relayed a earlier conversation with a Georgian representative in which he claimed to have said something along the lines of, "I speak for all Americans when I say, 'Today, we are all Georgians'" (which recalls the "We are all Americans" international sentiments after 9/11).

This scares me, not just because of the current situation, but because it perpetuates the "with us or against us" mentality. The world is too complex, we are too interdependent, for this "cowboy diplomacy" to continue.

This is, of course, about the election: by setting it up in these terms, McCain gets to paint Obama as weak when he tries to draw out the shades of gray. But no election is worth the damage done to our country's standing in the international community.

From CNN: Bush speaks of free expression at U.S. Embassy dedication - CNN.com

So economic prosperity is contingent upon "free expression"? Not an illogical conclusion... particularly if our dear leader has been reviewing his own administration's treatment of the Bill of Rights, plus the latest economic indicators.

Glass houses, etc.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

From the HuffPo: Topless Women, Kid Rock, Bikers, And John McCain

http://gobecky.net/images/Topless_Women%2C_Kid_Rock%2C_Bikers%2C_And_John_McCain-20080803-195844.jpg

Ah, August...

Am I weird for being really upset that Bennigans is dead? It was my favorite restaurant growing up in Gulfport (I loved the fried cheese); in high school, my group of friends often celebrated birthdays at the one in Clearwater (the broccoli bite years); and at Eckerd... well damn, Jenn and I ate there constantly, and happy hour before Ford was legendary (country chicken salad and Bass ale, respectively). It makes my brain hurt that this huge backdrop to so memories is no more. Sniff.

Except for the franchise over in Channelside... anyone want to have lunch Saturday?

As recently as this month John McCain has voiced opposition to the Community Choice Act. His record on disability issues has been focused almost exclusively on veterans; he's repeatedly voted to cut IDEA funding; and he did not respond to the AAPD's questionnaire.

So of course it makes perfect sense that yesterday, in remarks given to the National Forum on Disability, he vowed to support ADA restoration legislation and said he supports the spirit of the CCA.

Wha? The only universe that this makes sense in is one where a presidential candidate could face such overwhelming failure as to suddenly start adopting all his rival's positions while hoping no one notices.

Oh wait.

If he's sincere, this is a great. I don't like being a cynic, really. And anything to raise awareness of our issues is good.

But still, McCain? Pro-gimp? Pro-ADA? I think I'm going to suspend judgement until I see him put his money - or vote - where his mouth is.

Via HuffPo: The scope of John McCain's geographic dyslexia widened considerably this morning on GMA. Note his reference to the "Iraq/Pakistan border." This man wants to be president, folks.

For future reference:

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I first started thinking about email encryption when I read Cory Doctorow's excellent YA novel Little Brother (grab it for free under Creative Commons over at craphound). Then the Dems caved on FISA. At that point, I realized that in a very real way, we can never again assume that email (or other forms of electronic communication) isn't being monitored (or at least collected) by the government. In fact, we have to assume that it is. Fucked up, but that's where we're at.

So from now on, all of my outgoing email will be signed with my brand-spankin'-new GnuPG key...

Amazon's got a sale on in its Business & Finance magazine store today. That mostly elicits a big yawn from me, with one notable exception: Fast Company (website), which straddles the line between bleeding-edge business reporting and futurism, and is one of only four magazines I love enough to get in print (anybody want to guess the other three?), is available today for $7 for a one-year subscription.

If you're at all interested in the future of, well, the world, you should definitely check Fast Company out.

I've decided to start a video blog on vimeo. I probably won't post every vlog here, but I figured the first one deserved a shoutout. /grin/

001: Hello, world! from Becky Blitch on Vimeo.

Want more? Bookmark my vimeo channel. This weekend I'll add a sidebar to this blog listing the most recent videos, too.

I was expecting a confirmation email this morning, and when it didn't arrive, I thought I'd scan my spam folder just in case. Hilariously, while I did not find the email I was looking for, I did find a legit John McCain campaign email from the GOP. I have no idea how my email address made it into their hands, but how awesome (or, alternatively, creepy) is it that Gmail figured out it was junk?! (Particularly given, or maybe because of, the fact that I receive campaign emails from the Obama list every day and never junk them.) Rock on with the Obama-lovin', Google!

Headers and screencap after the jump.

Doing some Sunday shopping? Amazon always has some great deals in its DRM-free MP3 Store. I try to keep an eye on their bargain bin, and this morning came across one of the best jazz albums ever: Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane Live at Carnegie Hall for just $5. This is definitely in my all-time Top Ten, and whether you're an acolyte or newbie, for $5 you can't pass it up. Listen to the samples below, then go buy the album. It will be the best $5 you'll spend all year.

The brilliant Mark Fiore has done it again, sending up the twisted world of the Bush Administration & all its lawlessness, fearmongering, and propagandizing in one fell swoop. So follow along, class, as Snuggly the Security Bear teaches us all about how the new FISA law will be the end of all our loneliness and fear...

The Spies Who Love You! by Mark Fiore

The Obama campaign has put together some of the best pix from Pride around the country into a slideshow, and are also now offering an official Obama Pride t-shirt when you donate $30.

Show Your Support: Obama Pride

From an article entitled As Afghanistan boils, McCain keeps focus on Iraq in the Christian Science Monitor:

In a remark that sparked controversy, [Obama] said he would not rule out a unilateral strike in Pakistan.

"If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will," he said in a Washington speech last August.

McCain later highlighted the statement as a sign of Obama's lack of foreign-policy experience. "You don't broadcast that you are going to bomb a country that is a sovereign nation," McCain, who has endorsed a cooperative approach with Mr. Musharraf, said in February. "It's just fundamentals of the conduct of national security policy."

Unless you're George W. Bush. In that case, you publicly announce that Saddam Hussein & Co. has 48 hours to turn over the reigns of their (apparently un-sovereign) country or else you'll bomb the living daylights out of it; you then start firing missiles in targeted attacks even before he 48-hour deadline is reached; after the 48-hour warning period, you treat the citizens of Baghdad to a special fireworks show, eliciting shouts of "shocking!" and "awesome!" /smirk/

Since John McCain clearly has a strong grasp of the "fundamentals of the conduct of national security policy," as evidenced by his stellar academic background and ability to crash fighter jets, we can only infer that Iraq never was a sovereign nation, making Mr. Bush's actions perfectly legitimate and even worth emulating for another four years. Ha.

I repeat, for emphasis:

Charlie Crist is a dickhead.

The man's political ambitions have always been transparent, but in the past two weeks he has crossed the line.

It took me the better part of the week to recover, but this was nonetheless one of the best and most memorable days I've had in a long time! (And check it out, Eileen's sign gets some immortal YouTube love! Ftw!)

*Obama! '08! Be a part of something great!

I randomly stumbled on this 2-year-old rant (even more valid today) that perfectly sums up why I never log in to MySpace. Awesome.

Is your MySpace page ugly?

So I totally get the people who were squicked out when Google Street View first rolled out. At the time, I was all, "privacy, schmrivacy." Now Google Street View has come a-knockin' in my little subdivision, and, yeah, I feel a bit weirded out by it, to tell the truth.

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The data was collected on a Friday (recycling day) 6-8 weeks ago (neighbor's construction) around 1 PM (sun position & cloud patterns). All of that, plus the fact that I can now give you a virtual tour of my daily walk with Sydney (but won't)... it's cool, yes, but very, very creepy.

Dan Abrams uncovers an interview on FOX during which McCain said, "I didn't really love America until I was deprived of her company." Will the right-wing idiots smearing Michelle Obama over her "really proud" comment realize their hypocrisy?

The context wars rage on...

This is very, very cool: Spell with flickr

Tomatoes are fruit.

Via CNN