I’m down at the Brewer Library, thanks to a very late cable bill payment, and I just tried to connect to DowneastPolitics.com. The filter popped up as “Malicious site”.

Yeah, right. I submitted it to the “network admin” for evaluation, but I’m not holding my breath. (In related news, it blocks my BoingBoing mirror as an “anonymizer”. Let’s hear it for search engine caches….)

If you’ve ever tried to follow a conversation on Twitter, you know it can get a bit crazy bouncing back and forth between posters. Quotably.com has a solution: they turn people’s (e.g., Scoble) Twitter feeds into threaded discussions.

I mentioned a couple of weeks back that I was going to be doing a blog in association with the Brewer Democratic City Committee. I started that up earlier this month; you can find it over at DowneastPolitics.com, if you’re interested.

Inspired by the caucus earlier this month, I decided to attend tonight’s meeting of the Brewer Municipal Democratic Committee. (I’m front and center on their website, as I’m in the middle of a picture showing Governor Baldacci addressing the caucus.) I was surprised to learn that it was one of only about 6 in the state — the rest are county-level, I think.

After the meeting, I asked Paul Davis, the chair, if there was anything I could help with on the web or database side of things. He asked me if I knew anything about blogging. :-) They’re looking for someone to do a political blog that’s associated with the Committee, but not officially of the Committee. It would be my own independent voice, talking about things hopefully of interest to local Dems. I’m looking forward to seeing how this works out.

Two days ago, Anita Rowland died. She’d been battling cancer for quite some time, but her family thought she had 6 months to go, until last week, when it went down to a month — and then a few days over the weekend. She passed away on Monday, as her husband held her hand. He has a memorial thread over on his LJ.

She was one of the first Seattle bloggers I started following, and the organizer of the monthly blogger Meetups in Seattle and on the Eastside. I swiped many a link from her for this blog. :-) I first became aware of her, I think, when I heard an interview on KUOW about blogging. (Mine existed at the time, but I wasn’t doing much with it.) If I remember correctly, I listened to it while delivering pizzas in Woodinville.

She and Jack cared for her grandson, R—-. Ael and Erin met him once at a Meetup at Crossroads, and instantly hit it off.

I seem to be:

Matt Mullenweg.

Doug Hennig lets us know that after a long hiatus, Lisa Slater Nicholls has returned to blogging. She currently has a bunch of posts up on VFP9 reporting.

An anonymous commenter on TPMMuckraker.com has been posting lately with very detailed instructions on how to determine that the administration has been breaking the law. Since they’re anonymous, they’re hard to track, but they’re very much worth the effort.

To those who are asking for views/comments/reactions, I would encourage you to take a large perspective on this Gonzalez situation. I’m going to point you to something that may not seem related, but with time you’ll see there is something to this.

1. Enter at URL [ http://mpuc.informe.org/easyfile/easyweb.php?func=easyweb_query ]
2. 2. At the second block, “Case ID” — Enter this number [ 2006274 ]

The case file you are looking at is the backup information and messages related to the Maine Power Utility Lawsuit against Verizon. This relates to the recent ruling that the state AG’s of Vermont, Maine, Missouri, and New Jersey can proceed with the litigation on re NSA at the _state_ level. Recall DoJ threatened to sue the state AGs to dissuade them from taking action, in re Honorable Vaughn R. Walker.

There are some important things to notice in the casefile: If you go through the records, as you have with the DOJ E-mail dumps you’re going to see some interesting things.

* Disclosed Verizon E-mail Addresses Link To NSA, FISA Intermediaries [Disclosures mean Verizon cannot hide e-mails from Grand Jury]

Recall, one of the problems has been the missing RNC e-mails. There’s an answer to the missing holes. Inside the Maine PUC file for the Verizon, are their e-mail addresses for their internal e-mails. These were not supposed to have been disclosed; but one of the counsel’s memoranda lists an e-mail for the internal system. To make a long story short, once you index the e-mails for the Verizon internal e-mail system, you can then use open source information to cross-index with the outside NSA-FISA intermediaries: One of them is AMDOCS. Within the Verizon e-mail is also open disclosure of the Verizon General Counsel request for and receipt of information related to specific legal questions related to various litigation issues of interest to the FISA-NSA surveillance.

In court, once something has been disclosed, that cannot be hidden.

I got my first email from Allen’s “Blogger Connection” today.

Dear Blogger,

Hello and thank you for joining the blogger connection….

I was born in Portland, Maine, attended Portland�s public schools, and graduated from Bowdoin College in 1967. I studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar with former President Bill Clinton and subsequently graduated from Harvard Law School. I served on Portland�s city council and as mayor before being elected to Congress in 1996. In Congress, I have advocated for affordable health care, clean and renewable energy, and environmental protection. Most importantly, I have been an outspoken critic of President Bush�s handling of the war in Iraq since its ill-conceived inception.

In our decade together in Congress, Susan Collins and I have differed greatly on the most important issues. Senator Collins voted for the Iraq War in 2002, while I voted against it. Collins has consistently supported the President�s Iraq War policies throughout the course of this disastrous war.

Susan Collins also voted for all of President Bush�s tax cuts for the wealthy, which have helped to drive our nation deep into debt. I recognized the economic damage these cuts would do to Maine families, and voted against the Bush tax cuts.

Democratic control of the Senate hangs by a razor-thin margin, and Maine is widely considered to be one of the best pick-up opportunities in the nation. America needs a Democratic Senator from Maine.

I’m looking forward to seeing this play out.

I finally got Office 2007 installed, so I figured I’d take a swing at posting from Word. Let’s see how it comes out…

Ooh, my first visit from Dr. Watson! Neat. At least it properly saved my work before exiting…

Ok, it pulled down my list of categories, but it showed it in the order I entered them, rather than alphabetical. Also, it won’t let me choose multiple categories.

That’s long enough for now: let’s see if it posts.

Edited:

yup, that was pretty painless. The tags it generated are XHTML-compliant, which I consider a big plus. Oh! It un-smart-quoted what I typed. I don’t know if that was WP’s decision or MS’s, but it’s good either way.