Rayne Today

What's it take to be a Democrat these days? Does one simply have to show up to earn a (D) after their name? The scores say they're a Dem, but they don't vote like it when it really counts. Byrd, Conrad, Johnson, Landrieu score better than 70% as Dems, but failed miserably when it came to the Alito vote this week. What will they do when the budget comes before them, clogged up with more Republican pork? will they vote against it? Their track records suggest they will, but each vote should be viewed with increasing skepticism when they can't vote as real progressives when it truly counts. I don't personally believe that an overall trackrecord is enough; there are extenuating circumstances that can make any vote substantively different from previous votes. Byrd, for example, is running for office and now has a well-funded opponent; did he sell out on the Alito vote to play to the moderate base? Or is he simply slipping? He says he believes Alito, takes him at his wo

Damn. Three years plus after I signed up for Userland's Radio and finally had it down to a nice little groove, I'm having to learn all over again how to use the bells and whistles of HTML and blogging. This site is going to look gross until I remaster what I know of HTML. I hate the orange stuff. I hate orange, in general, except in food. Just not my color. Neither is anything approaching rust. I'm trying to figure out what hexadecimal codes I should change backend to get rid of the orange and rust here, but not doing very well with my hit-or-miss approach. Oh well, change is good, time to stretch the brain again since I'm going to have to do this for a few other websites in the near future. Bear with me as I slay the HTML beast.

My Userland blog is still broken -- one heckuva way to start this new year, and late at that. Thanks to those of you who've pinged me and asked about me. I am returning, but slowly; there is a lot of work going on here in the background cutting into my blogging time. I hope I am not going to further break my other blog with this same post, but here it goes, a new Blogger blog to mirror the broken one and a post to the old one. All-consuming my resources right now is the Tea Party; perhaps we could call it another Boston Tea Party in honor of Senators Kerry and Kennedy, but whatever the title, another Tea Party it is. The subjects have greatly tired of the taxation without representation -- and by taxation I mean reductions in privacy, reductions in future prospects, assessments for a war based on lies, all the other general nastiness that comes of a neo-imperial presidency. These subjects now choose to throw the tea in the harbor, to make it clear to the powers that be that