The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Madison Guy:

There really is a plot, the adultery stories make a great cover, and the Democrats seem to be helping. Real health care reform continues to be frittered away while we all amuse ourselves with these whack jobs and their sexual peccadillos.

By refusing to consider single-payer, Barack Obama is making the same mistake Hillary Clinton made 16 years ago. The Democrats still haven't learned anything. They're still trying to negotiate a compromise with the beneficiaries of a corrupt and broken system, one that makes Wall Street seem like a paragon of virtue and efficiency. I'm worried that it won't work, and that we'll miss a great opportunity. And then there's Charlie Gibson ...

We used to have a politician like Palin in Wisconsin: Who knew Joe McCarthy would someday be reincarnated as a moose-hunting hockey mom with an attitude?

In the war against terror, the 4th Amendment is optional. Uncle Sam has a distinctly sinister look these days.

All together now, let's fight terrorism by keeping an eye out for photographers who seem odd. An open-ended invitation to profile photographers from the Metropolitan Police of London -- as stupid as it's fear-mongering. And not just a problem in London.

Is the 50-50 split of profits actually being proposed by Harper
Collins? Doesn't that open up that wonderful old Pandora's Box of
Hollywood accounting practices? It would seem the only authors to whom
this could possibly be advantageous would be mega-bestsellers with
large legal and accounting staffs on retainer. Wouldn't everyone else
be better off self-publishing and going for 100% of the profits, if any?

Good lord. I skimmed Rich's article so quickly when I read it online
that my mind just filled in the blanks, substituting sales for profits,
etc. Yikes. And this is the NYT, the one daily that still has a large
print edition staff. But it's just a shell of its former self in so
many ways. It's all Web 2.0 now, baby, and we're on our own.

I’m still using the same fountain pen I bought in 1992. The guy
sitting next to me isn’t even using the same ballpoint he had in
January.

Me too, exactly -- a next-to-the-top-of-the-line Pelikan bought at
Pearl Paint in New York in 1992, when the brand still offered good
lifetime value at fair prices. Now they're out and out luxury products.
I hate disposables. To get me to switch, you'd have to pry my beloved
Pelikan from my cold, dead hand.

Also dislike disposable computers, which is what these necessary evils all are these days. My handheld Psion Series 5
and I have been inseparable for more than 10 years. (The screen cable
-- hard to fix -- went bad on the first one after three years, and I
bought a replacement Psion on eBay. Since then I've opened and closed
it very gently, and no problem.)

I take it everywhere, it has a cramped but real and very usable
keyboard, it's instant-on because all the software is in ROM,
rechargeable AA batteries last far longer than any laptop. Has a full
MS Office-compatible software suite, but I no longer have a Windows 98
machine to sync to for the conversion. These days I just use it to
capture keystrokes when I don't want to lug a laptop around. Upload as
text files via a card reader to my Mac. Simply one of the most elegant
computers ever made.

The world is full of terrorist threats to our security -- nipple rings and photographers apparently being among the most serious. My own photographic encounter with a security guard at a federal courthouse back here in Wisconsin resulted in my identifying myself, an odd conversation, but no deletion. I emerged with a photo of the security guard's shadow: My shadow is the one with the camera. The other one is the suspicious security guard.

Beautiful expression of Sir Arthur's unique blend of hard science, poetry and optimism. Childhood's End and Against the Fall of Night
affected my life profoundly. After a wonderful, long rich life he has
left us, but he is not really gone. I'm reminded of Auden's lines about
another great explorer, "to us he is no more a person/ now but a whole
climate of opinion/ under whom we conduct our different lives." Except
with Clarke, it's more than a climate. We literally conduct our lives under his orbit -- the Clarke
Orbit, the IAU's official designation for the geostationary orbit where
all the satellites that bind us together into one world are parked.

The seventies, when I attended primary rallies in Madison with my camera and shoved my way up front with the real (credentialed) news photographers, were a more innocent time. Security for candidates was a more laissez-faire thing than it is today. The Secret Service was there, of course, but they used their eyes, not metal detectors. When T and I recently went to the Hillary Clinton rally in Madison the night before the Wisconsin primary, some 4,000 of us faced the security line from hell. Standard airport-type security -- metal detectors, purses and backpacks searched, all metal out of your pockets (to simplify things, I stashed the extra lenses I had in my coat pocket in my wife's purse, so at least they wouldn't roll off the table). But everyone accepted it in patient, resigned good humor -- the times being what they are, and all the things that have happened in the interim, we all understood the necessity for modern security procedures. I remembered wondering how they ever processed the much larger crowd at the Obama rally.

So they started using shortcuts? I just find this incredibly disturbing. What would they say if something happened? Oops? Thanks for your post Teresa -- I've linked back to it on my blog.

Now that the dust has settled in Wisconsin, it's clear that one way Obama achieved his landslide was to bring in a large number of new, young voters. I voted my mind for Hillary, but my heart was with the kids -- including my exit pollster. Talking to a different kind of exit pollster after casting my vote in the Wisconsin primary. The young woman who interviewed me on a cold Wisconsin night was an Iraq War vet. She wasn't conducting a survey for the media but about the media.

Can't imagine the Mitten making it all the way, but in any event, please join me in a new Friday countdown to the day the nightmare ends -- this Sunday, it will be one leap year until George Bush leaves office (at the latest, if he's not impeached first). TGIF Presidential Countdown: Just 368 days and finally our long national nightmare will be over.

Anybody else thinking of 1960, or is it just me getting trapped in my bad analogies again? Deja vu all over again, or something like that, revisited once more.

Iowa and New hampshire suck. Since they're mostly about poll flogging, ad dollars, press preening, and Ordeal by Sleep Deprivation and Total Exhaustion on the candidate side, there must be a better way. Why not try this? A Modest Proposal.

I don't look anything like Guy Fawkes, but the security guard inside the Kastenmeier Federal Courthouse here in Madison seemed to think I had gunpowder in my pocket, judging from the way he hurried toward me when I approached the building with my camera. He asked me to identify myself, and I had the feeling he would not accept "Madison Guy" as an answer. Before we're through, I discover that the pillars that hold up our temple of justice aren't nearly as solid as they seem.

This is how democracy gets lost. We've got to stop them, or there just won't be much left: One of these days David Petraeus will look more closely at the light at the end of the tunnel... and realize it's an onrushing freight train surging up at him from behind (pictured). Hasn't happened yet, but it's only a matter of time. But by the time the train runs over Petraeus, he will have served his purpose. Bush will have successfully passed on the forever war to a Democratic president. Unless. We. Stop. Him.

Amazing post and amazing, rich and diverse comment thread. Sometimes I feel everything I know, I learned at Making Light. Where else would I possibly learn about spleen shrinkage in donor dogs [Stefan (38)]?

Typical of l'éminence grise Dick Cheney, operating out of his command bunker in the last refuge of a scoundrel: The patriotic pumpkin patch.

Another quote: "One day public opinion polls announce that the only reason Americans would suport a war would be to prevent Iraq from having nuclear weapons. And the next day Bush announces this as the principal reason for going to war."

This is from Sue Griffin's journal notes in November of 1990, during the run-up to the FIRST Iraq war, recounted in her classic meditation on war, A Chorus of Stones.

Spending the fifth Fourth of July that the U.S. is occupying Iraq rereading her book and thinking about impeachment. My representative in the House is Judiciary Committee member Tammy Baldwin. I'll let her enjoy the Fourth and reflect on what the holiday is all about. Tomorrow I'll call her office about starting the impeachment process.

Certainly one way to push Iraq out of the headlines, I guess: Keeping Scooter quiet. “I respect the jury’s verdict,†George Bush said, speaking oxymoronically as he announced his soon-to-be-notorious Monday Night Massacre of justice. This is no misdemeanor, it's a high crime. It's time to move impeachment to the front burner and turn up the heat.

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