I've finished parsing the 2008 Plum Book and will soon be moving on to the Library of Congress database of Presidential nominations submitted to the Senate. Minor annoyance: The inability to simultaneously select discontinuous blocks of text in a scanned PDF. As the Plum Books are scanned PDFs, the Snapshot tool only saves images, and doesn't allow one to parse individual words, so I couldn't use it - I had to individually select each name. Had I been able to use the CTRL option available in normal text selecting, parsing the 2008 PB would have taken a quarter the time. But I'm not complaining - I'm having plenty of fun.
As you can see, I've made a nifty logo for Operation EchoLand, featuring the new OE mascot, Fenton. I thought of him as Fenton because I had originally believed him to be a ferret, but apparently he's a mongoose - which is actually an even better and more auspicious mascot given the subject matter. I have also decided to give Projects their own logos:
In other trivial news, I thought it would be amusing to track the progress of the Gnomon by a rather unusual metric: The number of people named "Johnson" on the list so far. This will be called the "Johnson Index." As of right now, the Johnson Index stands at 31. That is, there are 31 people named Johnson in the Gnomon at the moment.
On a more substantive matter, I've decided I'll probably put the data in an Excel spreadsheet and share that with the Daily Kos community when I post the Gnomon. That way, it will be possible for community members, if and when they find it convenient, to look up at a glance all the people who were in a given department under Bush, or who were in the regime during a given year, or who were in a given department in a given year, etc. etc., provided they have basic skills with MS Excel. This should prove a very useful tool.
As noted in my immediately preceding diary, The Texic Axis & Empire (2001-2008), I've tentatively settled on "The Texic Empire" as the name of the Bushian state, and "The Texic Axis" as the underlying system of power blocs that comprised the government of the Empire. I further describe in that diary how I think the Texic Empire was organized, and various other hypotheses that I will be developing further as my research progresses.
Tangent to this, I've been edging toward the conclusion that there is something fundamentally different and qualitatively darker and more twisted about Texas conservatives than even their fellow Southerners. There seems to be a sense of entitlement to dominate or destroy others - an instinct for petty tyranny, if you will - that goes beyond Southern narcissism and seems almost like an eliminationist compulsion. The rest of the South is very inward-looking, and just wants to retreat into itself and not be interfered with, but Texas conservatives want to spread their malice all over the face of the Earth. The recent shenanigans with textbooks have only reinforced this impression on me.
So I've been thinking about a word for these people, these Texas conservatives, that reflects this distinction: Texites. I think it's phonemically appropriate, since the "-ite" suffix tends to sound unpleasant, and it draws a distinction with the neutral "Texans" who may be of any political persuasion. The ideology of Texites, however, is not "Texism," but "Buscism" - a concatenation of Bush and Fascism. I hold little hope for general adoption of these terms in the immediate future, but I intend to use them where appropriate in Dkos discourses.
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Status 3/13/2010:
Current Project: Gnomon
Completed Tasks:
- LOC archives: Nominations submitted to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, 2001-2008
- Parsed 2004 Plum Book
- Parsed 2008 Plum Book
Current Task: Finishing LOC nomination archives.
Future Tasks in This Project:
- Trawl Wikipedia for board memberships and independent agency postings.
- Parse Federal Yellow Books 2001-2008, inclusive.
- Eliminate redundancies in Gnomon.
- Find full names.
- Find all job titles held for each name and inclusive dates.
- Copy information in Gnomon to Excel spreadsheet and upload to file host.
- Post Gnomon to Daily Kos, in however many parts are necessary.
Future Projects:
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Previous installments in this series:
Operation EchoLand, Diary 8: Kleptonomicon
Operation EchoLand, Diary 7: Cheney's OVP - Fleet Game Afoot
Book Project Diary 6: Operation EchoLand
Book Project Diary 5: Your Mama Named You What?
Book Project Diary 4: Jackpot
Book Project Diary 3: Carly Fiorina Pals Around With Halliburton Executives (& Other Musings)
Book Project Diary 2: Feeling Like A Schmuck
Book Project Diary 1: Awed By The Magnitude