While pissing and pokin' at the new site may still be done, right now is not the time.
Neither is it time to conjecture about what mischief might be  done with superdelegates or credentialing.  The guantlet has been thrown down.

I'm referring to Olbermann's special comment.

A mere two years or so after I called BushCo a bunch of corporatizing fascists, Mr. Olbermann voiced it in a better language (which is why he gets the big bucks and I...well), one that finally should make sense to John and Jane Voter.

After a day when the House got their long awaited testicle drop and finally told Mr. Bush to put up or shut up, the silence is deafening.

So now is the time, Senator Edwards, to exercise your better angel.  Call Dr. Dean.  Ask him to help you persuade Senator Obama and Senator Clinton to really make a change to the system.  Get them in a room and convince them to join forces.  No Democratic cream-your-jeans Dream Team.  But the vision of change working with the one that loves to work the levers of government.  Present the voters with unification and start the race now.  McCain has signed on to the evil side of Amerika, the lesser angels.  Give the people of that endangered other half the reason to believe that we can find our way out of the second Dark Age.

I don't think the Democratic electorate is so selfish, self-absorbed or sick as to require the next round of bloodletting that will go on with our candidates if conventional wisdom is allowed to prevail. 

So I appeal to your better angel for leadership.  I know deep down that Americans are too good for that fate and would not choose it for themselves.  The only way that it will happen is if the notions of change and hope are abandoned, and we give up the right choice for the "security" of the status quo.

<B>Alphonse (Al) Kada</B>
<I>The Iranians are fighting the Americans in Baghdad so they won't have to fight them on the streets of Tehran</I>

A quick HTML Primer

OK, we'll make this short for those that already know a little bit about HTML tags.

A "tag" is any command that is interpreted by a browser and performs a display function.  It can also delineate a

condition that will display a variable (input) from a user in a particular way.

A tag is read by a browser when the "<" and ">" symbols (less than, greater than, or Tom Wright's avatar) surround

the command.  The tag is turned off when there is a forward-slash "/" inside the trailing tag.  The quotation marks

are only used here to keep the tags from being read.

For a paragraph, the starting code is "<P>" with user text input going in between, and the paragraph ends with

"</P>".
For a line break, the tag is "<BR>" by itself, no end tag needed.

For quotations, the tag is "<BLOCKQUOTE>" (copy and paste the citation in here) and end with </BLOCKQUOTE>.

For emphasis, italic text is headed by "<I>" and ended </I>.  For bolding text, "<B>" and "</B>.

With this little bit, you can create a template in Windows Notepad that can be copied and pasted into either the

blog or comment input boxes.  REMEMBER to save only as a .txt file!!!  Using MS Word will probably substitute too

many random character artifacts, but I will be testing some things later....

So, here's a full comment for you to play with- just copy and paste it off the page into Notepad, delete the quotation marks and experiment:

"<P>" (insert text here) "</P>"
"<P>" (insert text here) "</P>"
"<P>" (insert text here) "</P>"
"<BLOCKQUOTE>" (paste in here) "</BLOCKQUOTE>"
"<P>" (insert text here) "</P>"
"<P>" (insert text here) "</P>"

"<P>""<B>" Your Name Here "</B>""<BR>"
"<I>" Your Tag Phrase here in italics"</I>"</P>

The site will not take color, font face, size, (and probably many more) conventional HTML tags, but I have located
the javascripts from the unlocked directories (also the avatar (picture) files from the site filing structure), so
who knows what evil lurks....the shadow knows....!

<P><B>Alphonse (Al) Kada</B><BR><I>The Iranians are fighting the Americans in Baghdad so they won't have to fight them on the streets of Tehran</I></P>

<TABLE WIDTH="50%" BGCOLOR="#FFCC66" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0">
        <TR>
          <TD COLSPAN="2">&nbsp;
             <P></P><MARQUEE BEHAVIOR="SLIDE" LOOP="10"><FONT
             COLOR="#CC0000">Let's test the html parser</FONT></MARQUEE>&nbsp;</TD>
        </TR>
        <TR>
          <TD COLSPAN="2">&nbsp;<MARQUEE><FONT COLOR="#CC0000">Let's test the
             html parser</FONT></MARQUEE>&nbsp;</TD>
        </TR>
        <TR>
          <TD COLSPAN="2">&nbsp;<MARQUEE BEHAVIOR="ALTERNATE" DIRECTION="LEFT"
             LOOP="10"><FONT COLOR="#CC0000">Let's test the html
             parser</FONT></MARQUEE>&nbsp;</TD>
        </TR>
     </TABLE>

In the Ap piece on the confirmation of a double-secret probation camp called Camp 7, there were some rather odd remarks from a Col. Vargo quoted:

"Not everybody, even within the Joint Task Force, has access or even
knowledge of where Camp 7 is," said Army Col. Bruce Vargo. As commander
of the military's Joint Detention Group at Guantanamo, Vargo is
responsible for the camps holding 260 detainees. But not for Camp 7.

For his part, Vargo said he is preoccupied by the possibility of an al-Qaida attack on Guantanamo.

"Although we are trying to be open, security is paramount," he said.
"I mean, if you can fly a plane into the towers, you can attack
Guantanamo if that's what you choose to do. It's something I think
about on a day-to-day basis."

What the F*** was that?  Do you mean to tell me that several thousand sailors and Marines on an isolated corner of an island have to worry about Al Quada?  As opposed to the Cubans??????

Further down in the article, an even more troubling quote from an up and comer.....

"While some military personnel have reportedly grumbled about being kept out of the loop, others don't mind.

"Army Col. Larry James, whose team of psychologists assists interrogators, said he does not want to know where Camp 7 is.

"I learned a long, long time ago, if I'm going to be successful in the intel community, I'm meticulously _ in a very, very dedicated way _ going to stay in my lane," he said. "So if I don't have a specific need to know about something, I don't want to know about it. I don't ask about it."

Wow.  That's the Nuremburg defense on THX 1138-quality mood altering drugs.  I'm just going to keep my nose clean- if they want to cut the nuts off these guys, who f****** cares what  happens to them.  As long as "it" (torture, that is) can't be traced to the rest of my prison population reports, I can look forward to a rapid series of promotions and maybe some "contract" work when I get out.  Certainly easier than working on treatments for PTSD or TBI and sadly, more lucrative.

So tell me, Dem candidates, where do you stand on torture?  On this kind of double-secret probation prison torture, most specifically.  I know John McCain doesn't think highly of double-secret probation prisons, but I'm not going to vote for him.  I would have preferred him as a Republican candidate in 2000, but I could not tolerate another "Bush Legacy" presidency.

You see, the Bush administration has pretty much come out and said it.  Yeah, we waterboarded some of 'em.  So what?  Piss off, it saved lives.

Prove it.

I feel pretty good about calling them out on this.  Take a look at all the "terror" plots foiled that have actually ended up with a court verdict.

But again, it's not about Republicans.  I want to know what "hope" I can have that not just this double-secret nut-cutting operation will be halted, but that the candidate can purge the thought programming that has infected these true believers like Col. James.

I don't doubt there were many with that same rationale in every one of 20th century man's ugliest affronts to the sensibilities.  It's way easy to rationalize when there is an everlasting enemy that is determined to attack an island.  I put the chances of such an attack at odds that, well, favor the lease running out on Gitmo first.

Notrol