So I wrote a tutorial on how FireFox users can quickly stop getting tracked by google here.

I'm surprised stopwelfare.com was even available.

Anyway, if you like this then go ahead and hit the recommend button and pass on the link on. Suggestions to change the text or add content? Then just post a comment. This is my opening salvo in the culture war. Enjoy.

Update: Wow, the hits keep on coming. I would like nothing better than to get an email from my ISP telling me I hit my monthly quota in a week.

Dear CSH Supporter,

Tuesday's election was not about John Kerry or George Bush.  The news is much bigger than a candidate.  The election was about a certain fundamentalist view of a Christian God.  Specifically, all indications are that self-described evangelical and born-again Christians already make up 42% of the American public, and made up a major voting bloc at yesterday's polls.

This is further proof of the Metro vs. Retro theory of why the US is bitterly divided.

From the book Retro vs. Metro

By the time I had gone to bed, the chorus of pundits had fixed on a single tune, as they always do, and remarkably quickly, too. (Do they watch one another's feeds in the green room?) They had dusted off the old theme that the Democrats need to "reach out" more to the "heartland." Reach out? How, exactly?

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1103-28.htm

Ten Reasons Not to Move to Canada
by Sarah Anderson

Ready to say screw this country and buy a one-way ticket north? Here are some reasons to stay in the belly of the beast.

1. The Rest of the World. After the February 2003 antiwar protests, the New York Times described the global peace movement as the world's second superpower. Their actions didn't prevent the war, but protestors in nine countries have succeeded in pressuring their governments to pull their troops from Iraq and/or withdraw from the so-called coalition of the willing. Antiwar Americans owe it to themajority of the people on this planet who agree with them to stay and do what they can to end the suffering in Iraq and prevent future pre-emptive wars.

Well, I went to my brother's place and checked his Tivo and guess what? Here's proof:

You can read the original diary entry here.

They own the media and abuse it as they like.  This should be a wake up call to the dems and the FCC when the adults are back in office. Also this is mirrored at my blog.

Pass this around, this story might have legs. Being forced to record and waste disk space on mindless Democrat bashing because the owner of the directv network is a GOP operative is something to take seriously.

http://www.everythingisnt.com/archives/00002010.htm

I hope this makes you as angry as it does me.  I hope this helps the GOTV.  I mean, its not even about winning an election anymore, its about protecting our Republic.

Someone said that if fear wins, then Bush wins. If anger at the status quo and a wish for a better tomorrow wins then Kerry will win.  Lets do it.

If America had 10 Tim Ryans, Bush would probably have been impeached by now.

Mr. Ryan perfectly sums up every major lie from this administration and with righteous indignation.

"Why are people believing this internet hoax?"

"Because its the same people who...."

You can guess the rest.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041101&s=alterman

At the opening of the Democratic convention, long before Dan Rather put a big bull's-eye on his back, Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy hosted Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw, together with Jim Lehrer and Judy Woodruff, to discuss the state of network news coverage before an audience of political and media luminaries. They had some interesting admissions to make about the effect of conservative media pressure on them, offering fresh evidence of the right's effective campaign to "work the refs."

Speaking of conservative media activists like L. Brent Bozell III, for instance, Rather noted that they are "all over your telephones, all over your e-mail, all over your mail," and it "creates an undertow in which you say to yourself, 'you know, I think we're right on this story, I think we've got it in the right context, I think we've got it in the right perspective, but we better pick another day...'" Next thing you know, the CBS anchor continued, "your boss or somebody on your staff will say, you know what, if we run this story we're asking for trouble with a capital T. Why do it, why not just pass on by? That happens--I'm sorry to report that happens. Now you can say that it is the result of fear, it's the result of not wanting to deal with the trouble of all those e-mails."

Tom Brokaw likened the pressures created by Bozell's "pressing of a button" to "a kind of tsunami.... He's well organized, he's got a constituency, he's got a newsletter, he can hit a button and we'll hear from him."

Peter Jennings concurred, adding that he sensed a degree of "anxiety in the newsroom, and I think it comes in part from the corporate suite." He identified "the rise, not merely of the presence of conservative opinion in the country, but the related noise being made in the media by conservative voices these days" and their "effect in the corporate suites." Jennings professed concern that the media were "perceived to be, I think, infinitely more liberal, by the way, than the newsmedia establishment is," and as a result, "this wave of resentment rushes at our advertisers, rushes at the corporate suites and gets under the newsroom skin, if not completely into the decision-making process to a greater degree than it has before." Jennings observed that "what the conservatives in this country have learned in the last ten years especially, is they feel they have to go to war against the networks every day.... Our job then is to be resistant to that--we should have been more resistant."

The anchors declined my invitation, issued from the audience, to ruminate on their own responsibility for the fact that a President of the United States was able to mislead the people of the United States based on what, even then, were demonstrably false arguments. Eventually, however, they did respond to the polite prodding of Patrice Arent, my favorite Utah state senator and the body's entire female Jewish caucus. Rather explained, "Look, when a President of the United States, any President, Republican or Democrat, says these are the facts, there is heavy prejudice, including my own, to give him the benefit of any doubt, and for that I do not apologize." Addressing himself directly to the question of the networks' unwillingness to ask tough questions of Bush and his advisers before the war, Rather admitted, "When I referred to fear before, that's one of the specific things I had in mind."

Brokaw chimed in, "I think the big failure on our part was that we didn't connect enough dots on our programming.... I think we didn't raise enough questions about the political process.... it was our responsibility to at least put up more caution signs than we did. And I think, in fact, we didn't live up to that responsibility, in terms of generating more of a political debate about it." (Peter Jennings declined to offer any second-guessing of ABC's coverage on this score.)

Watching and listening, a part of me actually felt a bit of these multimillion-dollar babies' pain. Network news is getting hit from all sides. Their corporate owners are squeezing them at every opportunity to increase profits by simultaneously skimping on costs, pushing for "tabloid" stories and dumbing down what's left. Viewership is declining both in numbers and demographic desirability. The future is clearly with narrow-cast networks, like Fox's right-wingers and Jon Stewart's fake-but-truer-than-the-real-thing news, and these dinosaurs are hanging on to the Cronkite/Sevareid tradition by their magnificently manicured fingernails.

But they are doing so by offering surrender after surrender. While the above admissions do begin to scratch the surface of the networks' collective failure to live up to their democratic responsibility to hold our leaders accountable, they did not go nearly far enough. Jennings, for instance, proudly cited ABC's coverage of Colin Powell's February 2003 UN speech without noting that the speech, and hence the uncritical coverage, has been entirely discredited. And none of the networks were willing to take on the Swift Boat liars and the President's unwillingness to repudiate their slanderous untruths. In the wake of its momentous foul-up regarding Bush's still-unexplained absences from the National Guard, CBS decided to sit on a big breaking story it had about the President's false claims of Iraqi nuclear ambitions, lest its broadcast be perceived as helping the Democrats.

Meanwhile, following the Cheney-Edwards debate, for instance, Jennings & Co. were so eager to pronounce a winner that they went on the air with an instant poll that contained a 38 to 31 percent bias in favor of Republicans, a figure nobody believes to be credible but that allowed them to call Cheney the winner. None of these journalistic lapses would have gone unanswered if the left had matched the right's decades-long campaign to pressure the networks to report the news their way. Remember, this is not Fox News we're talking about here. (Fox declined the Shorenstein Center's invitation to the discussion.) These are the guys who are supposed to be the last defenders of media civilization against the barbarian invasion.

Welcome, Theodoric the Ostrogoth.

Its like they're on this mission to re-elect Bush. Kerry hasn't even defined himself in the press yet, has not picked a VP, yet Nader is quick to tear him a new one and call him, over and over again, indistinguishable from Bush. This is an obvious lie as they (and the parties they represent) are polar opposites on social issues and the dems are much more pro-labor and pro-consumer than the GOP. I would prefer it if Nader fessed up to reality and came up with his own practical ideas as opposed to just making attacks.

In this interview Nader is asked about abortion, he claims he's for it and against it.

    RN: I believe in choice. I don't think government should tell women to have children or not to have children. I am also against feticide. If doctors think it is a fetus, that should be banned. It is a medical decision.

    PB: Between the woman and her doctor--

    RN: And whoever else, family, clergy.

And this is the guy who is supposedly 'speaks plainly' to us and show us the follies of politicians. Heck, most politicians wouldn't even try a non-answer like that regarding abortion.

That said, it's a good interview. Its Pat Buchanan asking Buchanan-esque questions to Nader. It's almost a parody of these two. Pat's big on questions about immigration, jews, isolationism, etc. Wow, I didn't know Nader had such anti-immigration policies in mind, he's practically conservative. The irony is both his parents were immigrants, but I guess when you're Ralph Nader, star of the progressives, you can get away with this kind of thing.

In some ways this interview is a depressing look into the mind of an egomaniac. Yes, Ralph has some excellent ideas which would be good, if you know, he could actually run for an office to win, but in general he's got nothing. He talks about how the easiest way to bring down a congressman is to take jobs out of their district. No shit. How would Rep. Nader handle that? If a business threatened to pull out of one of your towns if you didn't make some concession? Real life involves compromises, that's something Nader doesn't want to talk about and why he could never hold a real office. He's so much about theory it blows my mind he's actually running. The real world of politics is very different than the Nader-esque fantasy vision of an absolute perfect moral system. The guy has much more in common with the GOP in this regard, they sell the absolute moral positions to their supporters, yet it always leads to hypocrisy when real life intersects with theory. The interview ends with a very self-delusional note. I mean, does Nader really believe conservatives are voting for him? They're supporting him to hurt Kerry.

I guess that's the real allure with Nader. He'll talk the talk, make you smile and nod, and he'll never be wrong because he'll never hold office. It would be nice if he could accomplish his goals without throwing the election to Bush and working shamelessly with the GOP.

Lastly, this is not the year for theory; this is the year for action. Hell, Clinton almost got universal healthcare going if it wasn't for the GOP and Bob Dole. Yet, one of Nader's big positions is UH, and he's working for the very people who killed it ten years ago? This is madness. I hope Nader supporters are doing more than just wishing for pie-in-the sky solutions and realize that Bush has to go ASAP. If that means voting for Kerry, so what? Its not like Nader is going to win anything. Even if he could he's too pure to get his hands dirty with real world politics.

I'll admit it, I lost my temper.  To be fair, he was trying to cut me off many times when I was talking about how Nader spoils almost every poll when he is added as a third option. The kid had his "counter poll" disinfo ready. Perhaps too ready. It became a shouting match of sorts and he wandered off to get rejected by two other guys.

I really don't feel too bad about yelling at some kid. But I do feel bad about not saying the right things. First off, always let the person you're arguing with finish. Secondly, he's simply doing something wrong. Terribly wrong.

This is what I should have said:

I voted for Nader in 2000, considering it was a blue state and we were working for third party matching fund status, we at least had a goal. That's more you can admit. We tried hard, put up signs, talked to people, etc.  We just didn't get the 5%.  We knew Nader could never be president, he had no one to caucus with, was a curmudgeon of the highest order, a hypocrite about paying his own employees, and was really just a celebrity face to help us build a real and viable third party here in the states.

Now its 2004. Nader is running just to run. There's no goal other than to turn a very valuable vote in a hotly contested election into a meaningless protest vote.  What are you fighting for? You talk to me about morality, yet we both know there's a slim chance you and Nader can spoil this election.

Imagine four more years of Bush.  Perhaps another couple of wars. Do you think they're above restarting the draft? In a lame duck GOP presidency, especially after another terrorist attack?  I can tell you are either 18 or 19 years old.  You're going to be drafted, but I can also tell you're a nice educated white boy. You'll test into an administrative or tech position. You won't test into the front lines. That's for the minorities on the southside here in Chicago.  How does it feel to be, indirectly, part of the war machine?  What will you tell the family of the kid who will die for you? Will you admit youthful ignorance? Will you claim he died for for your right to run a spoiler candidate? Do you really think these excuses will fly?

Why aren't you here with us in the Democratic party? We're trying hard to get Obama into the Senate. Yes, a black man into the Senate, whose name rhymes with Osama.  That's a challenge. That's work. That's real.

What you're doing is fantasy.  I understand at your age it is very hip and popular to dismiss the two major parties.  But there are real differences, and regardless of all the rhetoric you have picked up from people like Nader, LaRouche, etc you know the differences are real. You know the GOP is strictly anti-abortion, pro-theoractic elements in government, wants to limit speech (flag amendment being the most famous), wants to give goverment less power over industry, etc.  The Democrats are far from perfect, but they are the national party that is against these things.  They stand for equal rights, free speech, protecting the wall of separation between church and state, protecting women's rights, etc.

So what is it? Are you going to bust your ass here in the cold night for more signatures or will you work for real change. Its not as hip, nor is it as quick as a hypothetical Nader presidency, but it is real. It is progressive.

Right now as we stand here, you are my enemy as much as any Republican.  You are doing nothing but attacking the only chance we have to get rid of Bush. The rights of myself and everyone I know, especially the women in my life, are at stake. The lives of everyone I know between 18 and 25 are at stake.  You should be ashamed of yourself.  Youthful ignorance only gives you so much leeway and right now you are taking more than your fair share.

You could join us. You could help us get rid of Bush and put Kerry in.  You can help us stop the warmongering and the lies.  You can help protect our rights.  Instead you attack us with rhetoric, angst, and a limited understanding of national politics and the electoral process.

You. Are. Wrong.

You should think about that.

Thoughts? Post em.