I'm an intern in Barney Frank's DC office. Below the jump is a post from my blog about

• An utter rejection of GOP leadership that happened today
• My chat with Barney about the Federal Reserve

I don't usually advertise on Kos, but I thought you might like to read this one because while it won't make headlines, the vote cast today demonstrates serious disunity in the GOP.

Yesterday, Lindsey Graham, who wants a constitutional amendment to remove habeas corpus from people on American soil, said this:

...he is concerned that detainees will shop for sympathetic judges while challenging issues including their treatment, food and lodging.

"I thought habeas corpus was just the right to demand to know why you're in jail," my dad said to me after reading that article.

"Yup."

"So why is he saying this stuff about demanding better food?"

Remember Hillaryis44.com? How could you forget, with posts like this?  

   curiosityhasme Says: [   May 11th, 2008 at 6:47 pm ]
   While BHO is working toward one-size-fits-all Burkas, he can let rap music that denegrates women be the anthem, since he has no patriotism anyway.

   pulchritude Says: [   May 12th, 2008 at 12:08 pm  ]
   Imagine spending Mothers’ Day with Michelle Hussein Obama

SONIA4HILLARY Says: [  May 12th, 2008 at 12:13 pm ]

   she will be busy talking to pastor wright

   and begging him not to be mad and to saty quiet till obama is elected and then they will call him to whitehouse for party with –rezko–farakhan-ayers-larry-oprah-al sharpton-jesse-donna-martin-and gorrilla faces

But this sort of illucid nonsense has nothing to do with the actual people involved in the election, right?

Wrong! A blogger who has been tracking Hillaryis44 recently got a tip pointing out that Ann Bilyew of Boston, MA is a regular poster on Hillaryis44... and a Clinton bundler who has raised over $250,000 for the campaign.

I watched the Daily Show and Colbert Report tonight, filmed at 5PM in the midst of the New Hampshire brouhaha, and in light of the results we've now seen, I was cringing at the sheer arrogance of the pundits Stewart summarized and the blogger Colbert interviewed. "I don't think she was sincere," this Salon guy said, talking about one of the stupid things we were riled up about just hours ago. I was cringing not just because their arrogance had come into sheer contrast with reality, but because they had fooled me into going along with it, and all the shame was squarely on my shoulders.

Like so many other people, I'm beginning to feel fed up with the echo chamber. And I have abnormally high tolerance. I have watched every debate, Republican and Democratic, in the past year, and suddenly I am utterly fed up. It's only a week after the first actual election and already the high-pitched punditry has reached levels I've never seen before. It's taken a tough hit for me to realize how terrible it is, but it was a well-needed hit. It's only going to get worse from here on in, so it's time to get serious.

What's happened to politics in this country?

A big surprise on Ann Coulter's website today! (although the site might be hard to reach right now)

An Open Letter to Readers
by Ann Coulter
October 15, 2007

Dear Readers,

I've been participating in a charade for nearly eleven years, now. Quite frankly, I'm sick of it. You have all been a part of a sick joke that I began considering shortly after first getting on the air. At first, it was quite interesting to see how people would react when I would use twisted logic and poorly masked bigotry.

So guys, in case you didn't know we are apparently occupying some sort of foreign country, in the Middle East or thereabouts. Today a story popped up on al-Jazeera that I couldn't make any sense of. So, if you helped vote in the Congress that continued this occupation, join me in figuring out what exactly is going on?

1. Who is Muqtada al-Sadr?

2. Who is Abdul Aziz al-Hakim?

3. What did Sadr and Hakim disagree about today?

4. Who took which position?

5. By the way, what have Sadr and Hakim's buddies been doing recently?

6. What sort of national government does the Iraq constitution call for?

7. What sort of national government did the U.S. Congress recently call for?

8. Who sponsored the U.S. Congress bill?

9. What did Maliki think of the U.S. Congress bill?

10. How long have the people of Iraq wanted U.S. forces to leave?

BONUS: If you wanted to know what happened in Iraq today, which American newspapers could you read?

A two hour Republican debate in Dearborn, MI finished just now. I have about an hour to kill so I'm going to go through the FreeRepublic comments and pull out some of the most characteristic.

The defining element of FreeRepublic right now is confusion. While they were united under Clinton, Bush's dismal reign has exposed the fact that the Republican party is just as diverse as the Democrats, and they have a wide variety of ideas as to what makes a conservative. So, while we may look at Obama, Edwards, and Dodd and see three great candidates who all have the strength and courage to do the job, they are looking at Romney, Thompson, Huckabee, Brownback, and Hunter and getting very angry with each other over which of these are True Conservatives, which are unelectable, and which are "RINOs".

The minute I got the news about Gonzales, I went to CNN to see their take.

How am I not surprised?

2008 is still an open playing field and I'm betting even DKos readers might not know as much about the candidates as they think they do.  So: quiz time! Checking Wikipedia is cheating!

1. Only one candidate does not explain their positions at all on their campaign website. Which one?

2. Only two candidates voted against the USA PATRIOT Act. These same two candidates are the only two who would repeal NAFTA. Who are they?

3. Three candidates would abolish the income tax. Who are they?

4. What federal program would all the Democrats, except Biden and Dodd, create as president?

5. Four candidates would legalize medical marijuana. Who are they?

6. Which candidates are known to be widely disliked by the citizens they served in some of their previous jobs?

7. Which Republican candidates have a plan for leaving Iraq, ever?

8. Which Democratic candidate is not a current or former Congressperson?

9. Which candidates would be a "first ever" if elected?

10. When's the next Democratic debate?

The following anonymous message was posted to craigslist by a soldier and widow in San Francisco.

One thing people have noted about this is that she refers to herself as a Marine but calls the armed forces in general "soldiers". However, since she's been out of action for six months she may have gotten used to lay terms for the armed forces.

I'm having the worst damn week of my whole damn life so I'm going to write this while I'm pissed off enough to do it right.

I am SICK of all this bullshit people are writing about the Iraq war. I am abso-fucking-lutely sick to death of it. What the fuck do most of you know about it? You watch it on TV and read the commentaries in the newspaper or Newsweek or whatever god damn yuppie news rag you subscribe to and think you're all such fucking experts that you can scream at each other like five year old about whether you're right or not. Let me tell you something: unless you've been there, you don't know a god damn thing about it. It you haven't been shot at in that fucking hell hole, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Dear Daily Kos: I have never made a political contribution in my life. Sure, I've done things like tell my parents to vote for Kucinich for me when I was 17 (they obliged), but I haven't seen any reason to throw time or money on the pile. Well, all that's changing in two weeks. 2008 is the most promising election in a long time, and I've discovered something I can fight for.

The title of this diary might be a little confusing, but jump into There's-Moresville and I'll explain exactly what I'm going to do and why.

Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?

The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.

So, yeah, I woke up this morning with a severe headache and found this on the front page of the Times.

I guess NYT has officially stepped up its policy from "Then they laugh at you" to "Then they fight you".

The Internet and my life are moving so fast these days that this seems like old news, but Ford's funeral was only yesterday. I was heading to Minnesota for my second semester of school, coming back from a wonderful Christmas vacation with my family. I arrived at the airport early in the morning, looking forward to the plane ride but worrying way too much about the Homeland Security officials who waved me through. I headed towards my own space like everyday business, but then I saw a man sitting in an otherwise empty cafe. He wasn't drinking coffee, or eating breakfast, or reading the newspaper. He was watching Ford's funeral on CNN in reverent silence.

I joined him.

(Feel free to ignore this diary if you don't care about Barney Frank or MySpace. It is not exciting.)

The other day, I wrote to Barney Frank, my representative and  (IMHO) an extremely honest person with the best interests of the nation in mind, to protest the way he voted on the sneaky, MySpace-banning bill called the Deleting Online Predators Act, which I considered to be anti-free speech. I opened up my mail today and was surprised to find that the great man wrote back to me personally! There are no surprises, but he defends DOPA in a rather peculiar way. The full letter, after the jump.

In the United States, a hash (a string of numbers and letters like csb78ef89sb897cb) is illegal if it allows you to verify the integrity of a copyrighted file. In Sweden, they don't believe such a thing should be illegal. So, the RIAA and MPAA have successfully badgered the executive branch into threatening Sweden with trade sanctions if they don't change their mind.

In this context was mentioned threats of blacklisting from the WTO by the USA, and that such threats had been received directly from the US government.

Seen this on the American news? Neither have I! What business is it of ours to know our own country's foreign policy? Anyway, it seems that Sweden will soon be joining the Axis of Evil with Cuba and Iran, as a home for dastardly international piracy rings. Arrr! Leave no crappy Hollywood film unplundered!

FreeRepublic was really partying hard over the pick of Tony Snow for White House press secretary, and not just because he's a Fox News commentator. Snow was a bona fide Freeper-- he posted frequently to political debates, prayer sessions, and of course live threads about his own show on Fox.

Unfortunately, someone at the White House saw fit to get Snow's account deleted as soon as the story broke. I've extracted a small sample of his posts from the past year from the Google cache, and an old news story by FAIR quotes some of his posts from 2001. That, and the fond memories of the other Freepers, is all the evidence you'll have that Snow spent a sizable amount of time on an Internet forum.