This set of video clips calls a lie a lie in Bush’s Tuesday speech saying “We’ve never been stay the course.” It ought to be showing everywhere.

Well, it was 2 weeks ago this morning that my old host went down.  As of 5 minutes ago, they still weren’t back up.  My support ticket still hasn’t been answered.  My inquiry on their support boards still hasn’t been answered.  At this point I’m ready to declare them dead.

If anyone out there is looking for hosting, the original company was sonataweb.net, which was bought out by synergyblue.com.  My advice — look elsewhere.

One way or another, I’ve got to find a way to cancel my account.  I suspect the billing part of the company still works.

Recipe for a Cooked Election

by Greg Palast

A nasty little secret of American democracy is that, in every national election, ballots cast are simply thrown in the garbage. Most are called “spoiled,” supposedly unreadable, damaged, invalid. They just don’t get counted. This “spoilage” has occurred for decades, but it reached unprecedented heights in the last two presidential elections. In the 2004 election, for example, more than three million ballots were never counted.

Grim stuff.  Go read the rest.

The US Department of Education has just thrown us back to the 50s.  Effective November 24, school districts will be able to segregate classes, or even entire schools, by sex, and they’re doing it under the guise of promoting better education and discipline.

“Some students may learn better in single-sex education environments,” said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. “These final regulations permit communities to establish single-sex schools and classes as another means of meeting the needs of students.”

“Every child should receive a high quality education in America and every school and district deserves the tools to provide it,” she said.

Under the new regulations, classes could be offered to one sex only without a requirement that it be taught for the other.  All they would have to do is provide a co-ed version of the class somewhere.  In the case of completely separate schools, a co-ed option must be available.  That works against the notion of promoting neighborhood schools, requiring some students to travel to attend a school free from bias.

NOW and the ACLU have already spoken out against this proposal.

The problem with the single-sex classrooms, as I see it, is that it’s creating an artificial environment that encourages the idea that girls cannot compete with boys and tells boys that girls don’t belong in their sphere.  After all the ways we’ve tried to level the playing field in the last 50 years, this is a huge step backwards.  If segregation benefits some, perhaps the lesson that should be taken away from that is that more stereotypes need to be torn down rather than institutionalized.  This plan is the lazy way out.

Via the Seattle PI.

I voted this morning. 

Six months ago Spokane County adopted a vote by mail initiative.  Now, rather than go to the polls, all registered voters receive an absentee ballot in the mail.  I can see where it would save money, and would provide a paper trail missing from voting machines, but I just don’t like it.  I miss all the little rituals that go with voting.

I remember casting my first vote at 18.  I stepped inside a phone booth-like voting machine and pulled a lever to close the curtain behind me.  I was thrilled by the sense of anonymity it gave me; my vote was secret and I could ignore all outside influences while I was inside the box.  I had the option of flipping a switch for each candidate or a master switch to vote a straight party ticket.  I voted all Democrat, but I took pleasure in expressing my opinion on each individual race.  I felt such power in that, as if my opinion, and my vote, mattered.  When I pulled the lever to open the curtain, all my votes were registered by the machine, unseen by anyone, including the election officials.  I had spoken.

Those old voting machines are gone now, replaced here years ago by a ballot card and a sharp implement to punch the holes.  With this system I stood at a high carrel with a shield on 3 sides, but without a curtain.  I felt more exposed than I had with the old machines, but as I fed my anonymous ballot into the counting machine I could watch the tally of votes cast move up by one, knowing that I’d done something that counted.  I proudly collected my “I voted” sticker on my way out and wore it all day.

I stayed up all night election night to watch the returns, counting off pluses and minuses as I saw the percentage counted grow on the television screen.  By the time I went to bed, I knew exactly how it all came out.

All those little things are gone now.  I received my ballot in the mail and filled it out sitting at the table.  My power of anonymity is gone as I sign the envelope to mail it in.  The post office could discard my plainly marked envelope.   Should an unethical official wish, they could know how I voted.  They could choose not to count my vote at all and I’d have no way of knowing. 

Election night won’t be any revelation to me; it will be weeks before results are released and they’ll be reported in the paper, long after the national contests are decided.  My local elections will barely register a blip on the public consciousness.  They are reduced to an afterthought.

As I put a stamp on the envelope and put it in the mailbox, I felt a little melancholy.  This doesn’t seem like progress to me.  I used to feel important in the election process; now I’m just another little cog in a machine that would easily roll on without me.  Sadder still is the idea that my 2 youngest children will never know the feeling of power I did in casting that first vote.  They won’t get that tangible statement of signing it at the table and feeding their ballot into the machine themselves.  Voting now may have no more significance that filling out a product survey.

This may be cheaper and more efficient but we’ve given up a lot for those small gains.  Voting is now an impersonal enterprise rather than the community experience it once was.  I don’t think the “progress” was worth it.

S.910
Title: A bill to require that health plans provide coverage for a minimum hospital stay for mastectomies, lumpectomies, and lymph node dissection for the treatment of breast cancer and coverage for secondary consultations.
Sponsor: Sen Snowe, Olympia J. [ME] (introduced 4/26/2005)     Cosponsors(17)
Related Bills: H.R.1849
Latest Major Action: 4/26/2005 Referred to Senate committee. Status: Read twice and referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

A bill to end “drive-through” mastectomies.  Contact your Senator or Representative to encourage them to support this measure.  You can also sign a support petition from Lifetime TV.

I’m fond of the Mariners, but how far would I go for fandom? I’m not quite sure where the line is, but this not only crossed it but pole vaults the boundaries and lands somewhere in La La Land.

Major League Baseball has announced a partnership with Eternal Image to produce caskets and ashes urns carrying team logos. They’re beginning with Yankees, Red Sox, Tigers, Phillies, Cubs and Dodgers. It could eventually include all 30 teams. Each product is stamped with a seal attesting the deceased is a life-long fan of the game. They should be available on Opening Day of 2007.
If these products succeed, Eternal Image hopes to contract with the NFL, the NHL and NASCAR.

If that isn’t odd enough, a glance at the Eternal Image website reveals they also make products stamped with logos for Precious Moments, The American Kennel Club and The Vatican Library. Their Products page states, “For many people, plain is just fine. Vanilla ice cream, generic coffee, basic black, a pine box. For the rest of us there needs to be more – a form of self-expression that reflects a life well-lived.”

I won’t drink generic coffee, but a plain pine box is fine with me. I prefer not to carry someone’s name brand into eternity with me.

One of my first musical loves was Johnny Cash. I remember my Aunt Brick (her real name was Margaret but she had red hair) teaching me to dance to “Ring of Fire.” Many years later, I added Nine Inch Nails to my preferred collection.

I first heard Johnny Cash’s version of NIN’s “Hurt” about a year ago and was struck by how very much the band and Cash had in common. The story goes that Trent Reznor specifically asked Cash to record it — I hope it’s true.

You can listen here.

In a couple of hours, I’m off to Tacoma to pick up Meredith for Fall Break.  350 miles each way, 700 miles round trip with just an hour of downtime in the middle.  Thank goodness she has a ride going back on Sunday so I only have to do it once.  I always dread the drive in advance, but once I get on the road I enjoy it.  5 hours of listening to my own music, including the new Evanescence cd I got yesterday, instead of what my son wants.  All that quiet with only my thoughts for company is good for me.

I’m directionally impared, so the trip gets complicated once I hit the Seattle metro area.  To help, I have a printed set of directions from MapQuest, including cute little pictures of road signs with the route numbers on them.  Rather than print it off each time I go, I got a set laminated with the To Tacoma route on one side and the To Spokane route on the other.  I can glance at it quickly and never take the wrong exit, which is a good thing because there’s lot of 160-something highways in King and Pierce Counties.  I even have a block by block map to take me to the front door of her dorm.  She finds it amusing but it’s nerve-saving to me.

I’ll be back tomorrow with, hopefully, some real content.

…or as normal as I ever get. :) 

All I can say is, thank God for backups.  I started getting religious about backing up my database about 6 months ago and it’s fortunate that I did.  I only lost 1 week of posts in the move.  I can’t stress this enough — back up EVERYTHING on a regular basis and rename the backups by date rather than overwriting the old copies.  That way if one set is corrupted for any reason, you can revert to the previous one.  I had that happen with Sherry’s site but I had another backup dated just 5 days earlier that took just fine.

The one thing I didn’t do, however, was keep the images I’d uploaded in a separate directory - the local copies all sat in my catch-all directory and I had no way of knowing which version of a pic I’d actually used here.  So I had to upload all of them, leaving me with server clutter, which I hate.  I know better now. 

So now I’m trying to adjust to WordPress 2.0.4.  Ack.  I don’t do change well and I really liked 1.5 better.  In this new rich text editor my right click commands, like cut, paste and my IESpell plugin don’t work.  Those are things I depend on a lot.  I could change it to HTML view to get them back, but then my lazy “highlight and click” add a link goes away too.  I’ll get used to it eventually, but right now I’m annoyed.

It was really strange being without the blog for a week.  After a stretch of being blog-blocked, suddenly I had dozens of ideas to write about, with no place to put them.  But the worst was being without my links list.  I fell behind in reading everyone who isn’t on my Bloglines subscriptions, which I don’t update as often as I should.  I felt cut off from everything.  It surprised me how much I’ve come to depend on this online contact.

 Thanks to all of you for sticking around.

UPDATE: another thing to dislike about 2.0 - the upload and paste image function is buggy in IE.  It won’t post anything as other than a thumbnail unless you do it in Firefox.  I know, I know, I should be using Firefox for everything, but there’s not a spelling plugin like is available for IE.