News from the Myanmar cyclone seems to become more grim with each
passing hour. It now appears that the damage and suffering caused by
this cyclone may be worse than the outcome of the tsunami in the area.

Many of you may be wondering how you can help. Some of the charities
that are Charity Navigator approved that are collecting funds for
cyclone relief include:

• International Committee of the Red Cross
• World Food Programme
• Save the Children
• World Vision
• UNICEF
• International Rescue Committee

You may donate at any of these sites. These organizations are attempting to bring supplies and aid to the country, although currently they are being hampered by bad roads and visa problems.

Why the site is acting oddly this morning - well, it appears that YouTube has dropped off the Internet. At least, we can't get a route to them or their DNS servers. We'll see what happens.

Reports are that this was a world-wide outage - I don't think this looks like the February outage caused by Pakistan.  No word yet from Google on it.  But things are now back to normal. 

Since in general you'd never know that the New York Times recently wrote this article, I thought I'd point it out.  Seems that in the spin-up to the Iraq war and the early days of the war itself, many of those "independent"  military experts you were seeing on TV were being paid by contractors to represent viewpoints that the Pentagon fed them in briefings. That's right, we were getting much of our "news" from paid employees of military suppliers, many of whom now represent major corporations in the military environment. 

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon
information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to
generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime
performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

Blog Roundup - It's back after a vacation!

Thanks to Betsy Muse of BlueNC for compiling this roundup and writing the text that goes with it. -desmoinesdem  

We're down to the final days before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries.  We have a complete primer on the North Carolina primary process posted at BlueNC.  

Blue Indiana has this first in a series posted at this link.  

In North Carolina the excitement has spilled over to the down
ballot races.  It's the biggest year I can remember in my voting life.
I was 14 the last time North Carolina had a say in who would be the
Democratic nominee.  I'm almost 46.  At this rate it may never happen
again in my life, so I'm enjoying every minute of it.  I can even get
past the negative ads so that I can celebrate the unprecedented voter
registration numbers and so that I'm prepared to help the other North
Carolina races take advantage of the organization efforts once all eyes
are on to the next state.  

A memo that was released yesterday demonstrates that John Yoo had another of his "opinions" after 9/11 that various unpleasant things done to prisoners by the military are just hunky-dory. You know, "assault, maiming, and other crimes." This in itself isn't a huge surprise since we've heard that before, but a note in the memo (and where else but Washington is an 81 page document a "memo"?) alludes to another memo in the following disturbing way

... our Office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.
See Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, and
William J. Haynes, II, General Counsel, Department of Defense, from
John C. Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Robert J. Delahunty,
Special Counsel, Re: Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States at 25 (Oct 23, 2001). (emphasis added)

The returns for the state supreme court race are still coming in, but hopes are not looking good for Louis Butler. At the moment 86% of the vote is in, and Butler is behind by almost exactly 11,000 votes.

This is a great disappointment here - we'd thought that the ludicrous ads run by Gableman, the WMC, and others would have put him in the losing column at the end of the night, but that seems unlikely now (though we're still holding out hope). The idea that you can flim-flam so many voters with the notion that doing your job as a defense attorney, or using "loopholes" like the constitution in defense of a client are points of shame is appalling.

The last two supreme court elections in the state are the best argument I have seen for either removing this office from the popular vote, or for instituting complete public financing for court campaigns. Certainly anyone who needed to make their decision in this race based on the television ads would not have had any idea how to vote. The buckets of money poured into this election by WMC and other special interests assured that the advertising would be deceptive, negative, and deplorable. And the sad story of the evening is that the biggest victim in this election is not Louis Butler, but the truth.

DNCC ANNOUNCES UNPRECEDENTED ACCESS FOR BLOGGERS DURING 2008 DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION

Members of DemConvention State
Blogger Corps to Have Assigned Seats with Respective Delegations on
Floor of Convention Hall in Denver

DENVER
- Demonstrating a commitment to unprecedented access for bloggers at
the 2008 Democratic National Convention, the Democratic National
Convention Committee (DNCC) today announced that bloggers credentialed
as part of the DemConvention State Blogger Corps will be seated with
their respective delegations in the Pepsi Center during the historic
four-day event. The move guarantees bloggers with a focus on state
politics a unique vantage point to provide localized coverage of the
Convention, to be held from August 25-28 in Denver.

Last year, in a program promoted by the World Wildlife Fund and Sydney, Australia, Sydney turned off all of its lights for one hour.  The effort was an attempt to draw attention to responsible energy use and the issue of global warming.

This year the WWF is asking us to do so around the world.  An hour of darkness doesn't seem too much to ask. If you'd like to participate, turn off your lights between 8 and 9 PM on Saturday, your own local time. Learn more from the Earth Hour web site .

Just to let you all know where we were this morning -

We run in a set of servers in Minneapolis that is in a normally very reliable co-location site. This morning they seem to have had a huge power failure in the datacenter which took out almost all of their customers out. And our servers seem not to work very well without power for some reason.

Anyway, after a somewhat crazy morning of scrambling (and a LOT of coffee) out here in Cruiskeen Lawn/Uppity Wisconsin land, things are back up and running. Have at it.

The Sierra Club has started a new campaign for responsible energy policy called Power2Change . This program is an action campaign where you may sign up to promote better energy policies. Wisconsin is one of the key states in the campaign. Please go take a look and consider signing up. There will be multiple activities revolving around this campaign, culminating in events around the country on Earth Day. More on this later.