Say someone worked in a call center.  Not a large one, but large enough.  Say they employeed bilinguals...which in call center speak means folks who speak both Spanish and English.  Say there was a pogrom going on.  What would it look like?

In Tulsa, we have a chain of convenience stores called QuikTrip.  In my opinion as a habitue of convenience stores, QuikTrip is indeed the ne plus ultra of the genre. I admit that Lacey, a diminutive red-shirted teenager with heavy black eye make up and a talent for cleaning and refreshing the expansive coffee station, plays a large part in my decision.

Pleae remember Lacey while I meander, because now I'm going to talk about Andrew Keen and his tightly constructed but ultimately foolish premise in The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture.  Because he irritated me on NPR yesterday morning before I had my coffee (ah, Lacey, how I miss you weekend mornings), I may even make fun of his pretentious accent.  

I would like to say some things that won't be very popular.  But first, I would like to tell you about Pony Tail Man.  Pony Tail Man is a security guard at the building where I work.  He doesn't make much.  For a living wage he would have to work at the Indian Casino down the street.  He has a swagger when he tells you you've parked in the wrong lot.  We laugh at Pony Tail Man, with his slightly greasy trademark.  We tell stories of his latest puff chested security theatre foolishness.  I would not expect Pony Tail Man to keep me safe in any and all circumstances.  It would be beyond his power.  It is even beyond the power of his smarter, better looking cousins in law, the local police department.

The spouse is a poet.  I am not. But you can't live with a poet with out some of the metaphor they live in rubbing off on you.  Like cobwebs they fall apart in your hands, but metaphor seems the only way to bridge the gap between people of faith and their negation: people of square root of negative faith.  People of the imaginary number.  People disabled of faith.  People lacking the faith gene.  People who have had a faithectomy.  The Hypofaithful. The faithless.  The unfaithful.  The fallen.  The broken.  The disabled. The ill.  The devil.  For People of Faith, Faith is core functionality.  The absence is a definable deficit.

For the faithless, faith is optional module.  The base product is people.  There may be some cost benefit analysis attached to aquiring a faith module.  Perhaps the cost of integration is too high.  Maybe no one sells a faith module to their liking nearby.  A few have given up on Microsoft brand faith and are trying out open source, but if people is the base module and it seems to be working fine, what's all the fuss about anyway?

Daniel Zwerdling didn't know it when he broadcast his story on returning soldiers suffering from PTSD, Soldiers Say Army Ignores, Punishes Mental Anguish, but he hit my trigger.  Hard.

You should listen to it.  Zwerdling did a masterful, understated job, speaking in that pleasant unhurried voice with just the tiniest suggestion of incredulity.  He spoke with soldiers stationed at Ft. Collins who have been kicked out of the army for "patterns of misconduct."  And he spoke with the sergeants who supervise them.

Toothpaste is not the new lighter.  Neither is lens solution.  Or that tube of anusol you would rather they didn't hold up in front of all the other passengers while someone fondles your wife because she forgot to wear a sports bra without underwire to the airport.

Toothpaste is not the new pocketknife.  After all, most of the folks that carry them are just showing off when they rip them out at the slightest opportunity.  This'll show 'em.  We're not that collectively unhappy about inconveniencing smokers either.  They should quit.  Like we did.  Up hill.  In the snow.  Both ways.

All I know about abortion, I learned from the women around me.  My education had little to do with scorched earth arguments.  Rhetorical skill never entered into it.  Everything I know, everything I believe is the result of eight pregnancies, seven uteri, seven women, countless lives. It can all be attributed to cups of coffee after midnight and cigarettes, to foolish risks and false hope, to simple impersonal tragedy and hapless personal redemption.

This is a small story, and it's the only one I know how to tell. There is no rape or incest.  There are no bad guys.  No one was a victim.  And it's true, every word.  And what isn't should be.

We're buying Armageddon because it's on sale at WAL-MART.
We're buying Armageddon because it only takes a couple of minutes in the microwave.
We're buying Armageddon because it has a three car garage and a Jacuzzi.
We're buying Armageddon because it whitens our teeth and freshens our breath.
We're buying Armageddon because it kills with one shot.
We're buying Armageddon because Jesus loves us yes we know.
We're buying Armageddon because it's made out of recycled materials.
We're buying Armageddon because we want to keep up with our Jones.

Okay, you've all been looking at the YearlyKos ad on the front page, wanting to click and yet not sure if it was time to pull the trigger...  

Bad Cheney reference.  Down girl.  This is not that kind of diary.

Where was I?  Oh, that's it.  YearlyKos. Be there or be somewhere else crying!  Now is the time in the convention planning process when we invite the more entrepreneurial of you to step up and help found the feast and fund the party.  

Know someone who wants to reach 1,500 savvy tech types?  Ardent Progressives?  Good folks like yourselves whose good sense and great taste extends to supporting candidates, products, companies and organizations who speak to our needs and our aspirations?

In honor of New Years and resolutions in general, and in time to aid you in your quest for a better answer to the worst question of that week, I offer up a small suggestion for the perfect thing to give up: the Bad Boss.  I gave up Bad Bosses in 2000.  I decided, nearly two decades into my working life that I no longer needed to work for jerks, harridans, incompetents or abusers of any stripe.  I now work only for the brilliant, scintillating, challenging or engagingly quirky.  I recommend it.

Dr. Omed is a good tipper. He carefully reviews the bill and then slides it to me.  I perform simple mathematical equations in my head and give him 15%.  He nods astutely and, often as not, completely disregards my advice. When he's had a beer or more, his established habit is to leave an origami frog made from a dollar bill which jumps when you push on its behind.  

We all have different responses to stress.  I get the 15% tip right to the penny and obsess about politics at home (national) and politics at work (very, very local).  Dr. Omed, being a poet and an artist, generally subsumes his anxiety, to the extent that he has any, into art.

Valerie Plame wasn't outed.  She was burned when the body politic decided to play with matches.   Rove called her "fair game" and Novak, like a threadbare circuit in an old house sparked the fire that changed her life forever. Even now, sitting tick-like in the bowels of the White House, I imagine Rove quietly savoring the freeper cries, the moral equivalent of pointing and laughing at the burned man.

"If the special prosecutor were honorable, he would be trying to nail Wilson and Plame and others for their scheme to bring down a wartime president through fraud ... that is, treason. ~ Coloradan

Lashaun Ternice Harris took her children for a walk.  Small children, smooth faced and open.  A blue stroller.  I imagine them as trusting as children living in a homeless shelter can be.  Lashaun took her children for a walk and carefully, perhaps lovingly undressed them and calmly, deliberately gave them to the sea.

Lashaun Ternice Harris stood there blankly while the world swirled around her, police arrived and good Samaritans, and quietly allowed herself to be placed in the back seat of the car and taken away.  I wonder if the arresting officers had stuffed animals in their back windows like they do where I live.  And I wonder if they noticed that Lashaun, with her disheveled hair and "focus on me" t-shirt, smelled of goats.

The prosecutor hasn't ruled out asking for the death penalty for this young woman who stood with one hand over her face and the other holding her attorney's hand throughout her arraignment.  But have you?  

Every morning I go to work by the same route.  A mile or so from home each day I regret my financial condition as I pass QuikTrip and the regional convenience store chain's perfect coffee bar.  I rarely stop to enjoy it.  Past that point, some mornings I day dream about winning the lottery.  As Oklahoma recently instituted a lottery in which I could actually buy a ticket...at QuikTrip... the chance of such an event coming to pass would increase exponentially.  If I ever bought one.

Two miles from work I pass a construction site where nothing appears to happen.  Until today.  When everything happened in a flash.  

Is this the smoking gun?  A conservative who takes good notes?
In his column today, John Fund says the following:

On Oct. 3, the day the Miers nomination was announced, Mr. Dobson and other religious conservatives held a conference call to discuss the nomination. One of the people on the call took extensive notes, which I have obtained. According to the notes, two of Ms. Miers's close friends  --  both sitting judges  --  said during the call that she would vote to overturn Roe.

So, do we believe it?  Does this mean we can all go nuclear now?

Is now when the conservatives get back on board?  Will this wrest page one from the all Plame all the time?

What's your take?

This is not for the Posters.  You may go on about your day, knowing things the rest of us do not.  Being certain.  Railing for justice.  Taking action or just spouting off.  Organizing Stuff and writing LTEs.  Articulating Talking Points.  Creating Frames.  Living in a world filled with capital letters and lists to be checked off.  This is for the lurkers.  The ones who want to believe.  The ones who curl up in front of the faint glow of their monitor and quietly hope or rage, but feel curiously detached.  The ones who do not know quite what to do or how to think.  The ones who live in a world of grays and see the clash of Ds and Rs, Reds and Blues, Lefts and Rights as about as accessible as Godzilla versus Mothra.  The ones who desperately wish that this is the place where all politicians aren't the same.  The ones who want earnestly to give up apathy for Lent, as long as it isn't too hard.  You know who you are.

I want an answer.  It should be neatly written and double spaced.  The margins should be 1" all the way around the page.  Please use Courier font.  

On a standard 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of paper this will yield 240-260 words per page.

Please use as many of them as you need to tell me what the fuck is going on.  You will get points for neatness.

You don't get to pick the clowns that represent you.  They choose themselves.  Neither can you always identify the coyotes -- who are always and forever playing tricks and pranks trying to fix the world, armed with the best of intentions but whose gifts come at great cost.

Jack Kevorkian was back in the news this weekend, in a small way. Eligible for parole in 2007, he told our favorite Rita the Reporter that he should have worked within the system and he's asking Gov. Jennifer Grandholm to pardon him.