Lisa Rein has links/info on the recent Nightline broadcast on the Patriot and Victory Acts.

The men who drafted our constitution, who framed our civil rights and protected our various freedoms under the law would, I suspect, retch at some of the bone headed, self-serving, misinterpretations of their intentions that they so often use these days to undermine the very freedoms they pretend to safeguard. The miracle of American Law is not that it protects popular speech, or the privacy of the powerful, or the homes of the priviledged, but rather, that the least among us, those with the fewest defenses thoses suspected of the worst crimes — the most despised in our midst, are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

That remains as revolutionary a concept now as it was in the 1780s. It makes protecting the country against terrorism excruciatingly difficult, but we cannot arbitrarily suspend the rights of one catagory of suspects without endangering all the others.

A recent /. post quite artfully expresses:

… The Bush administration is not comprised of conservatives.

They are statist reactionaries. They want a very powerful state, a huge state in fact, a violent state and one that enforces obedience on the population. There is a kind of quasi-fascist spirit there, in the background, and they have been attempting to undermine civil rights in many ways.

Weekend Todo:

  • Set up multiple Apache instances on muffins
  • Set up dotproject
  • Finish Scrub rewrite
  • Start putting all code lying around in single CVS repository

Classic:

Ernie: …so in conclusion, this p-p-project parses strings
taken from the MS-XML object and on a user interface level, mimics
Microsoft Excel f-f-functionality using DHTML functions.
Web Dev #1: But your function uses a method that’s IE exclusive.
Ernie: That’s because the client only used Internet Explorer.

(Insert sound of crickets chirping here.)

Web Director: So, show us some of your other projects?
Ernie: I created a accessibility focused, DHTML project that
supports web-standards that dismantles all nuclear weapons worldwide.
It also cures cancer and and sings your children to sleep.

Web Dev #8: I did that once. But mine also worked for Mozilla.

(Insert image of a tumbleweed, rolling through the conference room.)