Dan Bartlett: Right wing bloggers are regurgitators.

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I mean, talk about a direct IV into the vein of your support. It’s a very efficient way to communicate. They regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them. It is something that we’ve cultivated and have really tried to put quite a bit of focus on.

Actually, that’s a nicer thing than he might have said. He might have just gone ahead and used words like mindless, bigoted, unthinking, morons…but he’s just a nice guy…

How to obtain YOUR Homeland Security travel records

For the first nine months of his administration, Bush sat around and ignored warnings about a 9-11-like attack, from the outgoing Clinton administration, the CIA and from its director, George Tenet; from his daily presidential briefings, and Bush even ignored the news of the attack. The 9/11 attacks could have been prevented under existing laws. The FBI had more data than they could handle, even then. But Bush and the darker forces at work in this country have now used 9-11 as an excuse to compile massive amounts of information on you and me…travel records, phone calls, internet postings, emails, even personal mail.
Your government has way too much information on you; since you are not a terrorist, how will they use it? any way they want to. They may use it against you politically, sell it, lose it, give it away, bungle it, or in as yet undreamed of ways, screw you with it.

You can at least see the unclassified part of it.

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You have to download a couple forms, mail them in, and wait around for a month.

The history of pushbuttons, keys, etc.

Now that George W.  Bush has officially declared the end of the great American experiment in democracy, we can fool around a little.

This guy is an industrial designer, and there is more to his website than first meets the eye.  Check it out.

Zoho: free web-based office suite

I have been using this for a few weeks ; it has 15 applications, and it’s free. It really takes platform issues out of the equation.

FreeRepublic bans Giuliani supporters

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A few weeks ago – in between Hillary Clinton’s official entry into the presidential race and the first Republican primary debate of the cycle – the fiery online conservative forum Free Republic marked a decade in operation as one of the premier online forums for right-wing political discussion.

It also experienced one of the biggest internal battles to rock the site since the 2000 election of George W. Bush — a tumultuous campaign year that nearly tore the site apart, as its founder and chief administrator first cleansed commenting ranks of Bush supporters, then, later, rallied to his support.

At the heart of the latest controversy: the fight over the conservative bona fides of Rudy Giuliani.

Over the past few weeks, chaos has reigned in the “Freeper” community as members sympathetic to the former mayor’s candidacy claim to have suffered banishment from the site. They were victimized, they say, by a wave of purges designed to weed out any remaining support for the Giuliani campaign on the popular conservative web forum. Another significant chunk of commenters have migrated away from the controversial site over the action, according to a number of former site members and conservative bloggers who have been tracking the situation.

Rudy just didn’t say September 11 enough times, I guess….

Dear Keith Olbermann: Didn’t like the “Keithies”

Lose it. Seriously. Bad.

Worst people of the year would be much better. You’re welcome. Yes, you’ll get your Smokey.

Tuesday or Wednesday at the Rapture:Index not updated…can this be the Rapture?

The Rapture Index person seems to be AWOL….or…is it AWOBLB (Away with out being left behind)?

The last update of the Rapture Index was March 5.  If the Rapture occurred between then and now, then all the righteous Christians would be missing.  I’d try to call one, but I don’t know any.  I know George W. Bush is still around. But that doesn’t prove a thing.  I don’t see any empty cars in the middle of the street.  The school down the street is still full of innocent kids.  My page views are holding up.

I must say, if this is the Rapture, it’s kind of pleasant. Warmed up a bit in Northern California, still chilly at night.

Here’s my plan: let’s lay low for a week. Wait for god to give us a sign. Watch for any images of the Virgin Mary in my oatmeal.  Count on me.  I’m not goin anywhere.

The terror industry: works for Bush, works for profits

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… 9/11 was not a typical terrorist attack. Terrorists were able to capture four planes, and two huge buildings collapsed. “It’s a spectacular exception to what terrorists have been able to do,” he said. Sure enough, since 9/11, the biggest terrorist successes have been the bombings of commuter trains in Madrid and a nightclub in Bali. The death toll from each attack was about 200 people. “Outside of war zones, the amount of destruction is maybe 200 people a year,” says Mueller. “That’s 200 people too many, but that’s hardly an existential threat. In the United States, between 300 and 400 people die every year just from drowning in bathtubs.”

He says there’s a terrorism industry — I call it the “Fear Industrial Complex” — made up of the media, the bureaucracy, business, and politicians. “Politicians notice that when they hype the terrorist threat, people respond favorably,” Mueller says.

Then the bureaucracy hypes terrorism to justify its pork.

“Terror porn” is what economist Veronique de Rugy calls it. Why “porn”? “Because porn sells, [and] terrorism sells even better,” she says. “It’s great for politicians. They can campaign on the fact that they are protecting us. They also can campaign on the fact that they’re bringing more money to their states.”

Lots of small towns do get absurd grants for homeland security. Lake County, Tenn., a rural county with only 8,000 people, got nearly $200,000 in homeland-security money.

“I don’t know that terrorists will come, but I don’t know they won’t come,” Lake County Mayor Macie Roberson told us, smiling.

At least he didn’t do what Columbus, Ohio did: spend it on bulletproof vests for police dogs.

Malkin, CNN ignore fact that Walter Reed problems due to privatization

Characteristic of the Bush administration: take a good service/department, appoint incompetent cronies, privatize services, do a bad job, then say that “government can’t do the job.”

Lou Dobbs and Wolf Blitzer pontificated all day about Walter Reed and never uttered a word about the root cause: privatization.

Here’s the scoop on Michele Malkin’s dopiness.

Best Buy uses fake website in stores to fool customers into Worst Buy

Gee, I coulda sworn that TeeVee was 220 bucks on the website……

Under pressure from state investigators, Best Buy is now confirming ….that its stores have a secret intranet site that has been used to block some consumers from getting cheaper prices advertised on BestBuy.com.

Company spokesman Justin Barber, who in early February denied the existence of the internal website that could be accessed only by employees, says his company is “cooperating fully” with the state attorney general’s investigation.

Barber insists that the company never intended to mislead customers.

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ordered the investigation into Best Buy’s practices on Feb. 9 after my column disclosed the website and showed how employees at two Connecticut stores used it to deny customers a $150 discount on a computer advertised on BestBuy.com.

What is more troubling to me, and to some Best Buy customers, is that even when one informs a salesperson of the Internet price, customers have been shown the intranet site, which looks identical to the Internet site, but does not always show the lowest price.

……they threw in this interesting line: “Although we have an intra-store web site in place to support store operations (including products and pricing), we are reminding our employees how to access the external BestBuy.com web site to ensure customers are receiving the best possible product price.”

That last sentence seems to indicate that Best Buy, which is supposed to be staffed by tech-savvy employees, is putting the blame on memory lapses: that employees have somehow forgotten how to access BestBuy.com from the store.

After making sure the computer is turned on, employees should click twice on the Yahoo Internet icon and then type in BestBuy.com.

This is not the first time the giant electronic retailer has gotten into trouble misleading customers. …Attorneys general in New Jersey and Ohio have accused Best Buy of deceptive sales practices, repackaging used merchandise and selling it as new, and failing to pay rebates and refunds.

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Of course, some customers wouldn’t notice…