In the spring of 1980 in Boston there was a murder trial of a notorious pair of thugs, ghetto low-lifes who had raped, murdered and robbed a young nurse in her own home. At the trial, the prosecutor asked one of the murderers about a certain boombox, proved to be the nurse's, that was in the man's possession when he was arrested. The exchange went something like this:

Prosecutor: You took that boombox from her apartment.
Murderer: Yeah.
Prosecutor: But when you were arrested, you said that it was your boombox.
Murderer: It is mine.

Now that is what the absence of shame looks like.

For a more recent example of brazen shamelessness, we have the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents Association.

So yesterday morning over coffee I was doing what most people do over their first daily cup o' joe, which is bring up technorati and see if anybody's talking about me. That process took me to Joho's page, from which I learned that the FCC was to be holding an hearing on why Comcast sucks, I mean Net Neutrality broadband network management practices only hours thence at Harvard, a mere 90 miles from my home on Martha's Vineyard.

Cross-posted in a slightly different form at Wetmachine.

Who of these will stand with Chris Dodd in defense of the Constitution? Will Obama and Clinton actually execute their oaths of office? And how about Edwards, who could force them to take a stand?

You know what I'm talking about. The FISA bill, with its retroactive immunity for the corporate/state telecom panopticon.

Will any of our candidates lead? Or will they merely keep crybabing that we should make them president, and then they'll lead?

If any of them returns to Washington D.C. for the Fisa debate and joins Chris Dodd -- and for Obama and Clinton, that means participating in the filibuster -- then he or she or they can have my support.

If not, they can go to hell, as far as I'm concerned.

Those of you following the "net neutrality" debate are probably aware of the shenanigans of Comcast with regard to throttling Bittorent, as originally reported by the Associated Press. Today, advocacy groups took it to the FCC, filing a complaint against Comcast and a petition that the FCC enforce its own stated Net Neutrality principles, or explain why they're not going to do it.

The petition was filed by Free Press, Public Knowledge, Media Access Project, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Barbara von Shewick of Stanford Law School and the Stanford Center for Internet & Society.

By the grace of God I don't get TV in my house, and, modulo the occasional exception of a cable intermezzo of a few months' duration here and there, haven't for nearly twenty years. But I'm not a Puritan, and so, when I'm on a business trip as I am now, I sometimes put on the tube, and if there's no baseball to be found I check out what's up with hoi polloi. And so it was that tonight I saw for the first time, on TV, the legendary salonista Sally Ann Quinn.

My Dear Wife Betty runs the evening lecture series at one of the libraries here on Martha's Vineyard. She sends out copies of her press releases to friends and family far and wide just to keep them apprised of what she's up to.

Yesterday she sent out a press release announcing an upcoming art exhibit and talk to be given by members of COLAGE, Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere, a group which, as you might imagine, deals with issues that come from being a child in a family whose members are sometimes subject to misunderstanding and abuse because of the sexual orientation of one or more of the parents.

'Round midnight last night I got a "joke" homophobic response from a friend on my wife's mailing list.  Below the fold, the press release, the "joke", my reply to the "joke", and other rambling.

Two good causes, actually: The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) and the Help Pay j sundman's Mortgage, Please, I'm in a Bit of a Jam, Fund."

The book in question is my Acts of the Apostles, a well regarded nanotech thriller, ostensibly about Gulf War Syndrome, which I wrote between 1995 and 1999 and published in 1999.  As a quasi-science-fictiony book I think it's held up pretty well, with much of what I predicted about the direction of nanotechnological research coming true. But the eeriest thing is that in it I conjectured that the USA would be tricked into sending its armed forces back to Iraq to finish the job left undone in the first Gulf War, and that the army would be enveloped. I hope I'm not proved entirely right about that part.

After the fold: the deal to help IAVA, my Dkos bonafides, and more about the book (which you can download for free.)

Over on wetmachine, veteran First Amendment/media access/telecommunication/internet lawyer-advocate Harold Feld has a great in-depth analysis of what the new Congressional lineup might mean for Net Neutrality, media consolidation, municipal wireless intenet, low-power FM radio, and similar areas of policy.  Feld knows the voting records and policy concerns of many of the people voted out and many of the people voted in, and I think his tea-leaf prognostications are fascinating. Disclosure: wetmachine is my site.

After the fold, some snippets from Harold's article and a report on "What is America" night at the local public library.

This diary entry is little more than a comment, but I'll allow myself to make it because I don't diarize much & I think this Carville-traitor business needs to be addressed right now, so I want to add whatever visibility I can to it.

Dr. Howard Dean is a true Democrat, a courageous man, a leader, an articulate spokesman for our party's principles and history, a successfuly governor of one of the fifty states of the United States of America, a physician, and a winner who is committed to democracy.  James Carville, who has just declared war on Dean ONE DAY AFTER OUR TSUNAMI-LIKE VICTORY is a media grotesque. He has demonstrated time and time again that to him this political enterprise is merely sport, like jousting or something. He cares about James Carville, about the thrill of the game, and about winning. Mainly, he is a has-been.

Well, fuck him.

Yesterday kerrygoddess wrote this account about comments by Jonathan Kaplan, reporter for The Hill, who said on a reporter's conference call "screw that and screw him" in response to a suggestion that reporters were not truthfully reporting what Kerry had to say. Kaplan refused to identify himself, although he later was identified by his boss.

I listened to all the audio provided in the various diaries on this topic and decided to write a letter to Kaplan and The Hill, which appears below the fold.

As I say in my letter, I don't have problem with a reporter who has the attitude "screw that and screw him" about a political figure.  That was Hunter S. Thompson's attitude about Nixon, for example, and I'm a big fan of Hunter S. Thompson's writing about Nixon.  The thing is, Thompson did not do so anonymously. (The context of my other comments will be clear if you have read the relevant diaries.)

Please take a moment to read up on the latest Net Neutrality shenanigans.   As you may recall, the vote in the house has come and gone, and the action is now in the Senate, and the outcome is uncertain.  The vote will take place next week, but the action is going on this week in the "mark-up" of the Stevens Bill in committee. The lastest sneak attack is a provision to give the most right-wing, pro-corporation court in the country jurisdiction over the FCC.

Once again, a key voice of sanity and careful reading is Harold Feld, a public-interest lawyer at the Media Access Project who writes a column called Tales of the Sausage Factory in which he minutely disects policy and politics of electronic discourse.

The horrible COPE bill, which serves up our Internet as a nice little garnish on a fat juicey meal of money and power to the Telephone & Cable companies (who have become, not incidentally, another arm of the authoritarian regime now in power), passed the House last night. The Markey amendment, which would have protected Net Neutrality, failed by 117 votes, of which 58 came from Democrats. Eleven Republicans and one independent voted with the good guys on this one.

Call me a pessimist, but I think this is a bigger story than YearlyKos or Coulter or Al Zaquari (?spelling?).

Hey, ever hear this one?

Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?

Over on my site wetmachine I've posted the beginnings of my new illustrated novella The Pains.

It's set in a universe that's kind of an amalgam of Orwell's Oceana in 1984 and Reagan's USA in 1984 (as well as some other whacky universe from who-knows-where), and I hope you'll find that it resonates somehow with our world today. As Kos did, I'm accepting pre-orders.

All my books are available for free download, though I hope of course you'll buy printed copies.

At the "contagious festival" at Huffington Post there's a contest:

"Each month, the Contagious Festival features original work by talented designers, activists, filmmakers and comics. You determine who wins the contest by deciding which entries to forward to your friends and which ones to ignore."

My favorite is Don Hopkin's "SimFaux", a simulation of Fox News. It features the disembodied heads of Dick Cheney, George Bush, Arianna Huffington and Bill O'Reilly spouting nonsense; meaningless graphs that are updated "in real time"; scrolling text that distracts and disorients while conveying no useful information; loaded polls and lots more, all under viewer control.

Following in the self-promotional footsteps of BostonJoe, to whom I send my heartiest congratulations, I think I'll dare to point out that another Kossack, namely me, has also published a novel-- viz, a nanotech thriller about Gulf War Syndrome-- that's gotten rave reviews, including, for example, this one on Salon.com.  Like BostonJoe, I self-published my novel; in fact it won the Writer's Digest National Self-Published Book Award.  Manifold other reviews are available; ask google.  Last time I looked there were a few dozen on the web, not including 59 on Amazon.com.

This book, entitled Acts of the Apostles, is available for free download from my website Wetmachine--as is its companion novella Cheap Complex Devices-- although I do hope you'll consider buying a copy.  This is the gift-giving time of year, and if y'all will buy a few as gifts for your loved ones, then I might actually have the wherewithal to buy some gifts for my loved ones.  And as I said, you can try before you buy, so be my guest!

I write for Salon.com from time to time.  Last night in NYC there was a big bash to celebrate Salon's 10th anniversary, and along with all the big celeb journalists, little peons like me got to attend as well.

Walter Shapiro has just signed on as Salon's Washington correspondent. I ran into him at the bar & introduced myself.

Then I said, "Hey, let me ask you something.  Strictly off the record. Won't tell a soul.  What's the real story on Gannon/Guckert?  What's the buzz? What's the rumor mill say?"

And Walter Shapiro said. . .

[Here's a draft of an essay I'm working on for my website, presented without links on the assumption that most Kossaks will know what I'm talking about.  I would appreciate any suggestions for improving its tone, facts, or logic. Sources to support or refute this analysis also welcome.]

George Bush attempted a military coup in Louisiana last week, and Governor Blanco foiled it. The television network CNN buttressed her position and forestalled a counter-putsch. But we're not out of danger yet.