Okay, technically this isn’t council liveblogging, but creating a “state of the city” liveblogging category seems a bit pointless.

So far there’s me, IT director Webb Warren, and city manager administrative assistant Tammy Bowen. And plates of food. With great discipline, I have avoided the impulse to sneak a cookie.

A letter we received today told me that instead of being so critical of Bush, I should give him credit for keeping us safe the past eight years.
Eight years? Hmm, can the writer remember one very unsafe incident that happened oh, 6.5 years ago? Around September of 2001, say? Then followed by anthrax attacks that killed five people, with the perpetrator never identified or captured?
I’m sure if she thinks about it, the memories will kick in.

“Men may be divided into those who are in favour of life and those who are against it. Among those who are against it there are sensitive and wise and penetrating people who are too offended and discouraged by the shapelessness of spontaneity, by the lack of order among human beings who wish to live their own lives, not in obedience to any common pattern”—Isaiah Berlin

“Secularism teaches us to be good here and now. I know nothing better than goodness. Secularism teaches us to be just here and now. It is impossible to be juster than just. Secularism has no ‘castles in Spain.’ It has no glorified fog. It depends upon realities, upon demonstrations; and its end is to make this world better every day — to do away with poverty and crime, and to cover the world with happy and contented homes.”—Robert Ingersoll

“It is the business of little minds to shrink.”—Carl Sandburg

“The ultimate evil is the weakness, cowardice, that is one of the constituents of so much human nature. When, rarely, unalloyed nobility does occur, its chances of prevailing are slim. Yet it exists, and its mere existence is reason enough for not wiping the name of mankind off the slate.”—John Simon

“Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to.”—Hilary Bok.

Colorado Republican U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard:”And the House has just simply said, we’re not going to accept this, because we want to have, you know, terrorists be able to sue phone companies if they’re listening to our conversations. It’s insane.”

Not that Republicans play politics with terrorism and domestic security, of course.

(both this and the previous post made liberal use of Glenn Greenwald’s blog which is an excellent source on the Bush administration’s disregard of the law.

In a letter to to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and Attorney General Michael Mukasey, make the usual fearmongering complaints that if the House doesn’t pass the new warrantless eavesdropping bill Bush wants, America Is Defenseless.

When Reyes pointed out that the administration can still carry out warrantless surveillance for 72 hours in emergencies, McConnell and Mukasey wrote: “You imply that the emergency authorization process under FISA is an adequate substitute for the legislative authorities that have elapsed. This assertion reflects a basic misunderstanding about FISA’s emergency authorization provisions. Specifically, you assert that the National Security Agency (NSA) or Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ‘may begin surveillance immediately’ in an emergency situation. FISA requires far more, and it would be illegal to proceed as you suggest.”

Right. An administration which was conducting warrantless surveillance from 2001 - 2006 in defiance of the law and has repeatedly illegally used “national security letters” to obtain information is now claiming that its respect for the law is tying its hands in fighting the terrorists?

Of course, if this represented a change of heart from the White House, rather than another rationalization for increasing Bush’s powers (because if the government refuses to break the law, Islamofascists could yes, break in and kill us in our sleep!), that would be a welcome thing. But I find myself oddly skeptical. Go figure.

The latest on the wireless eavesdropping bill that expired last weekend — the one without which, according to Bush, we’re blind and deaf to terrorist attacks — is that Republicans refused to let their staffers meet with Democratic staffers on a compromise bill this week.

The reason? Bush says he won’t accept any compromise on giving telecommunications companies immunity from lawsuits over allegedly breaking the law by giving the government Americans’ phone records: “I would just tell you there’s no compromise on whether these phone companies get liability protection.”

But I thought our survival depended on passing this bill? The Heritage Foundation even put up a clock on its Web site showing how long it’s been since this vital legislation expired. And yet Bush would sooner let this life-saving tool of surveillance die, sooner let us be murdered in our beds by terrorists, than let AT&T get sued?

A number of Republicans grumbled when the bill expired that the “Islamofascists” must be cheering. I guess now they’re cheering Bush, huh?

Columnist Kathleen Parker, on National Review’s blog: “Both HRC and Obama say they’re ready on Day One to be commander-in-chief. That’s such an interesting thought. I try to picture HRC saluting the troops. I try to picture Obama doing same. And then I try to picture the troops saluting back. Will they have their fingers crossed behind their backs? I don’t have this problem with McCain. Just sayin’.”

Which is saying America’s military — the guys people like Parker pretend to respect for their heroic devotion to duty — wouldn’t do their duty and accept the elected leader of our country as commander in chief if the country elected the “wrong” person.

Wrong presumably meaning either black, female or a Democrat? Obviously it has nothing to do with military records since Parker has never suggested the troops would have a problem with George W. Bush, a draft-dodger (by his own admission) who blew off his National Guard service (during 2003’s “Mission Accomplished” speech, Parker gushed about how Bush was an authentic manly jet pilot at a time he’d been grounded from flying for 30 years).

Just sayin’.

Bill O’Reilly: “I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that’s how she really feels — that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever — then that’s legit. We’ll track it down.”

In other words, if O’Reilly decides there is “evidence, hard facts,” he will lead a lynching party?

OK, I realize he’s not literally going to lynch her, but that’s still a creepy turn of phrase, given how many “uppity” African-Americans have indeed been lynched since the Civil War. As journalist David Neiwert put it, it’s like referring to a Jewish politician’s comments and saying “Well, I wouldn’t send him to a concentration camp unless there was hard evidence …”

Lisa Schiffren, a former Dan Quayle aide, writing on the National Review blog, on how being mixed-race proves Sen. Obama must be a Communist:

“For a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics. (During the Clinton Administration we were all introduced to then U. of Pennsylvania Professor Lani Guinier — also a half black/half Jewish, red diaper baby.)… Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from persuing the questions which might arise about how Senator Obama’s mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate student. Love? Sure, why not? But what else was going on around them that made it feasible? … It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution.”

But of course, she’s not biased over his racial makeup or anything like that. Or playing on the old segregationist line about how all those uppity you-know-whats fighting for civil rights were just pawns of Commies and outside agitators.

Just think, Obama’s not even the nominee yet, just the front runner. Makes me wonder how much uglier the right wing attacks are going to become.

On an ordinary night, I’d have wrapped up once the meeting adjourned. But as soon as I returned home I went on line to post one last story, about Holiday Isle beach restoration.

And then I took more time to write this. Silly me.