Keeping Yourself Busy

A piece of wisdom for you. (Even though most of you know this one already.) After becoming unemployed, for any reason, the one thing that is both the most important and the most difficult to do is to stay busy.

On my part, I try. I finally have time to sit and do many of the things that I want to do. Winning a game of Civilization 4 at the Hero level. Finally finish the //.hack series on the PS2. Re-read Daniel C. Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea and try to wrap my mind around the entire last section. Get started with spring cleaning around the apartment.

(You will note that I haven't started looking for a new job yet. I see this week as being unpaid vacation time, thank you very much. That and, until my last paycheck comes in the mail, I don't even have enough money to take the bus so that I can find a job. Six of one, half dozen of the other.)

Well, it looks to me that I'm not the only one that has been doing this under recent days.

All of those staffers for the former GOP congressional majorities had to turn around and do something, right?

First there was Conservapedia, which was created because we darned liberals keep editing out their changes to the Bill Clinton page that equate him with Beelzebub (However, calling Hillary Rodham the Bride of Lucifer... That one I do myself.), hence the true liberal bias of the Wikipedia system.

Setting the knee-jerk snark reflex aside, quickly take a look at the entries for the hitherto unknown controversy surrounding the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. With the Wikipedia entry, plenty of information is given. With the Conservapedia entry, however, a bare minimum of data is offered, strictly keeping to the actual description of the Amendment itself.

With this small exception. First, the sentence from the Wiki.

The United States Congress passed the amendment on March 21, 1947. It was ratified by the requisite number of states on February 27, 1951.

And the closest sentence as found in the Conservapedia entry:

This was passed by a Republican Congress in 1947 and ratified by the states in 1951.

Amazing. The political party in power when the amendment was passed is more important than the myriad details regarding precisely how the process was completed and the continued effects of the amendment to this day. I never would have thought that way.

Come to think of it, I still don't.

And now there's two more entries into the GOP Keeping Busy files:

As with Wiki, YouTube has been considered to be part and parcel of the evil systemic liberal bias, if not a true anti-conservative bias, primarily once Senator Allen's "Macaca" moment gained national prominence and thorough exploration on YouTube. Also featured prominently are such anti-conservative diatribes as clips from the Bill Maher and Jon Stewart shows. Hence the creation of a conservative response: QubeTV.

And immediately, there is a problem with their thesis. In a prominent banner ad at the top of the page, as seen in the picture below, it features a video by Michelle Malkin (My liberal readers will be more familiar with her if i use Duncan Black's racial slur of a nickname. However, this is a family-friendly blog, and I don't do that kind of thing here.) regarding the religious-based censorship that certain factions of the Islamic religion encourage.


Only one problem with this... It's not actually banned by YouTube.



Charlie and Jeff are not really off to a good start if a single registered user can get the true facts of the matter in under 4 minutes.

(EDIT: 05.31.07 0016. That embedded video was removed for, and I quote, "terms of use violations". This is what YouTube usually says when they take a video down before receiving an infringement notice from the copyright holder, just in case it does violate copyright, and Google gets a love-letter from Michelle Malkin's lawyers asking them for a court date. Still an example of sloppy fact-checking on Charlie and Jeff's parts.)

And finally comes something that I fully agree with: The Majority Accountability Project. (Side snark: The Two Mikes have their introductory video based through... YouTube. I guess someone didn't get the memo.)

The basic premise from The Two Mikes is sound. We, in the collective sense, have been merrily burrowing our way through just about everything that the GOP-led Congress did over the last 6 years. Travel records. FEC files. Obscure amendments slipped in at the last minute. Speeches. Contributions. PAC and Foundation creation. The list goes on and on as to what they were doing that we didn't like.

Now it's our turn under the microscope. Fair enough. There is a reason why the phrase "honest politician" is on the oxymoron list, and Democrats are no less susceptible to the corrupting influence of power than Republicans are. (Case in point.) And should they succeed in bringing a level of accountability to politics in general, even in a temporary fashion, I will stand there and shake their hands in broad daylight.

Unless, when the inevitable day comes that the Democratic majority fades into the sunset, they change their tune. So to The Two Mikes: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

It really is a good thing to keep yourself busy.