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Gone, But Not Forgotten? What The Internet Will Look Like Under SOPA Fearsgiving Week Jesus Approves of Waterboarding Beware of Asteroids 
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Keep Your -Book Out of My FaceWednesday, Nov. 26, 2008 4:00 AMI understand the impact of a struggling economy on the Christmas shopping season, but here's my annual Bah! Humbug! about the ever increasingly early 'Christmas season': Let's observe Thanksgiving - not just glutting ourselves with turkey and stuffing, but the concept of giving thanks - before we run about gog-a-wolly with the gimme-this and buy-me-thats. Let's throw some cold water on the Bush Administration not spending all $700 billion of bailout monies before Bush leaves office. That's not leaving a surplus of anything for the Obama Administration; it's still pissing away our tax dollars with a strategy that the Treasury Secretary admits was wrong, then does the same thing with Citibank - writes them another check drawn from our collective pockets. In the meantime, corporate executives are holding posh retreats and awarding themselves million-dollar bonuses. While I blog and certainly spend a fair amount of time grousing about the political landscape, I've got no illusions that my little slice of opinion is forcing the ship of state towards a better course. The folks who are all gosh-a-golly over their 'netroots' activism via Facebook, YouTube, and Wikis need to get over themselves. Dan Froomkin, over at the Huffington Post, went so far as to imagine a Wiki-based White House website. Like I really want the puerile discourse that passes for rational discussion on the net to become part of the official record. Because you'd have to keep every last drop, from people who can't spell, can't compose grammatical sentences, or formulate arguments - otherwise, you're defeating your purpose of being open and honest. What matters is what President Obama and members of his administration say and do, not the egotastical pronouncements of the neterati. And don't overlook that your private opinion, entered onto a government website, would become that much less private. Your ISP would be logged, your posting history would be pored over by the FBI and Secret Service, and - as long as idiocy like the USA PATRIOT Act exists, anything remotely connected to you and/or your ISP is also subject to review.
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