I DO NOT WANT YOU TO READ ME THE SPEECH OBAMA IS GOING TO GIVE IN AN HOUR.

There is a reason I’m watching the Convention on television. TO WATCH OBAMA GIVE HIS ACCEPTANCE SPEECH — not hear it from you before he’s even walked onto the stage.

You bastards are like a guy in line at the theater who loudly proclaims the ending of the movie.

Off to C-SPAN for me.

An aside: Can anyone confirm that all those little flags the delegates are waving are union-made? Can’t be shipping our flag-making to China any more!

Team:

See note below from our communications director, thanks for what you have done in last 24 hours, let’s keep it going.

From: Kevin McLaughlin
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 1:40 PM
To: Rob Jesmer
Subject: Nutroots

Rob-

2 things;

1) Our guys at the convention told us Noreiga and his out-of-state buddies spent the morning attacking Senator Cornyn

2) according to finance team, the fact that Dean and Pelosi came in to shill for Noreiga really fired up our supporters the last 24 hours. We have raised well over 10K and I think we could another 10k if we send out the email below again.

Talk soon,

Kevin

You know, it might be a good idea to hire someone (or two someone’s, since Rob Jessmer, Cornyn’s campaign manager didn’t even correct the misspelling in the e-mail) who can actually spell your opponent’s name. Especially your communications director.

As for the message . . . Noriega and the rest of the Netroots and Dem leadership who showed up bashed Cornyn!? STOP THE PRESSES! SOUND THE ALARM! TIP THE COW!

Anyway, I guess “Buck Smith”/David Beckwith must be earning his keep (and some Democratic schwag) by attending Netroots Nation.

Nonetheless, Kevin, you really need to learn how to (a) spell and (b) not make yourself look like an ass in the press (yes, I’m talking about that asinine comment about “Buck Smith” speaking for himself and all that other BS you pulled from somewhere near your nose that resembles an asshole when BOR outed Beckwith).

By the way, Kev: Since “Buck Smith” speaks for himself, why isn’t he posting on BOR any more?

In one post (referring to the “Big John” video), he commented:

“I personally believe Beckwith deserves a raise and/or a promotion for whatever role he had in that video . . .”

I want to see if recommending yourself for a raise on a blog works. So here goes:

Hey, TFN, I think I deserve a raise. How ’bout it?

Joe, same for you.

Pate got to get paid, son.

Boy, I hope it pans out well — or at least that I’m not forced to resign my positions in a few weeks when the media/blog heat has subsided.

(If this doesn’t work, I’ll try posting the request on a conservative Web site under a nom de plume.)

Next up:

An item entitled “Watch ‘Charlie Rose – An hour with General David Petraeus’” I sent myself through Google Reader on 10 SEP 2007 at 8:18 AM. I think the title is self-explanatory. The reason I want to watch it — and still save it? Because I love me some Petraeus. Link still works. Delete.

Next is a really old e-mail (17 OCT 2007 at 3:25 PM) with a link to The Blakes’ (a band) Myspace page. I’m deleting without looking further. Can’t remember why I saved it. If anyone knows if they’re any good, let me know and I’ll look into ‘em this time around.

22 OCT 2007 at 11:12 AM: Another Google Reader e-mail with a link to the Mother Jones’ issue focusing on leaving Iraq. The e-mail itself contains an interview with T.X. Hammes that was posted on the Kings of War blog, written by various faculty and research students of the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. The link still works.

Okay, I’m going to stop here again for a while. Maybe I’ll aim for getting rid of three old e-mails per post.

Does anyone else find random stuff on the Web, e-mail it to themselves and then let it sit there lingering forever?

Notwithstanding, I try to keep my mailbox to lower than 50 pieces of mail — the number that can appear on one Gmail page — every day.

So, instead of them making it difficult to achieve and maintain that goal each day, I’ve decided to post them here. When I want to use them — ift I remember that I moved/hid them here — I can come back here and find them (or not).

I’ll post when I e-mailed them to myself to show just how long it’s been since I’ve visited some of these sites.

From 12 APR 2007 at 10:47 AM, I have an e-mail titled “abu bakr,” which includes only a link to what I think was the writings of Abu Bakr (that seems logical) on the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point’s Web site. The link is now dead. Boo. Delete.

25 JUN 2007 at 3:44 PM: Saved e-mail from Joaquin to me that included a link sending one to a weird soundboard. Also a dead link. Delete.

4 SEP 2007 at 3:07 PM: An e-mail from me to a translator who was in the process of translating and posting on the Web his translation of Jaroslav Hašek’s unfinished The Good Soldier Svejk and his reply. He says that my timing was providential as he had just the night before finished books three and four of the novel and published them as an e-book. The Good Soldier is sort of the Catch-22 of the First World War whose protagonist is a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army. It’s a great book that I look forward to rereading. Link works! Yay! Delete.

More to come.

I keep telling myself I need to blog more — stretch my legs (or fingers) again after such a long hiatus from truly active blogging (a few times a week or month not counting). If we remember, I started blogging back in 1998 or earlier (this is before the term “blogging” was in use). But what’s the use in reminiscing? There’s too much to do now.

I need to start blogging again because I need to soon start blogging daily on the TFN blog (which is not open to the public yet).

Anyway, I’m doing my best, I guess. Just not forcing myself to pour out nonsense here every day of the week.

——-

So, as I was writing the last four paragraphs, the people I wanted to talk about first left Dolce Vita. They’d been sitting just next my friend Claire and me. They were discussing how Whole Foods gobbles up Mom ‘n Pop groceries (earlier they’d been talking about how we live under a fascist system and something about grammar). While I’m no great fan of Whole Paycheck, this seems to me to be a late-in-the-game argument: Mom and Pop were in serious trouble — if not already driven out of business — by larger grocery conglomerates far before Whole Foods became any sort of player. You’re about ten years too late, hippies. (Also, how can hippies afford to live in Hyde Park?)

—–

By the way, I’m apparently getting married.

—–

I’ve only been engaged since Saturday and I already hate wedding planning.

—–

Is it normal for one who becomes familiar with the intricacies of Texas politics to start voting against people just because they don’t like who works for them?

—–

Joaquin is eight to ten days away from graduating from Basic Combat Training for the Army. Then he heads to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri for AIT for his MOS (88M, Motor Transport Operator).

—–

I suppose that is all for now. It’s starting to rain a little here at Dolce.

Joe lied to me. He said parking would be a breeze on Saturday. Fortunately, there was a breeze as we walked from 7th Street to the Convention Center on 2nd.

We couldn’t get into the main exhibition hall because we didn’t have credentials (oh-so-Democratic!), so we headed over to another hall to scour all the booths and peer into the delegate registration areas looking for extra convention bags. I “stole” five or six delegate convention bags — the bags given to delegates commemorating the Convention and filled with schwag — at the Convention in 2004. This time, we either got there too late and they’d been hauled away the extras or they learned from last year not to leave them out. Either way, we couldn’t find any with which to, as Misty said on Twitter, abscond.

After failing to sticky-finger any bags, we wandered among the rows of Democratic organization tables, where they hawked T-shirts, buttons and god-knows-what-else. We didn’t see Joe, who was supposed to be manning the HDCC table, but we did see the abandoned TFN table — they took down their table prematurely not knowing that today would be packed.

We headed to the main exhibit hall entrance to try to see what was going on. A guy offered us Guest Passes, so we walked a quarter-mile through the Convention Center to get to the guest entrance only to find that it was a big-screen feed from the main hall. Motherfucker.

They started the ceremonies and then broke in with Hillary Clinton’s concession speech (finally!), but the feed kept dying, Hillary kept freezing on the screen and the audio went dead repeatedly. We finally headed home.

Now we’re drinking at Dolce Vita and considering heading to the Helio Sequence show at Mohawk.

My brain feels dehydrated.

In the news.