I have great respect for Hillary Clinton and supported her over Sanders in 2016. I also supported Biden because we needed to win in 2020.

But we could have had a campaign team like the one we saw yesterday and today, with some very impressive presenters who've yet to take the stage, we could have had it in 2016. We didn't have to go through the tragedy of Trump.

The Democrats are stage managing perfectly now. I never really thought we'd see this day, but here it is.

Timothy Snyder: "If JD Vance really were a normal midwestern guy he’d be very respectful of someone like Tim Walz."

When I see a reference to an evil NYT piece, I RT it a simple message: Ignore the NY Times. It's relaxing. You don't have to do something about it, in fact it says the opposite. Do nothing. It works on all social nets, and for any news org that's promoting lies, ignoring relevant facts, against the interest of the US. Find new ways to get informed. And if you can't find them, start one. And we can find each other.

The Bruce Springsteen mention at last night's rally was no accident. Boomers are now of the age where we vote in great numbers. So our feeling like there's something here for us might make the difference in one or more of the swing states.

Last night's Democratic rally was wonderful. I was laughing and sobbing all the way through it. What an emotional release. We needed and deserved this. Beyond hope, we're finally going to fight. I hope President Kamala is really up to it, because we have a pretty substantial cleanup job to do here.

A roadmap for the campaign is coming into view. Harris has her knee on Trump's neck, and she won't let up. There won't be time for anyone to get tired of her. The campaign rallies should get bigger and bigger, and more rambunctuous. Trump was a comedian, a cross between ...

Walz is Harris' choice. Picking Shapiro would have been leading with her chin because of Netanyahu. Walz looks older than her but they're actually the same age. And he figured out the right word to get under Trump's skin, so there's that. He just has to say weird in campaign speeches to bring down the house.

When reporting massacres, imho we should cite the number of people who were shot. It measures of how much violence there was, and how excessive the gun tech used. Many who were injured but not killed have their lives ruined. Their suffering can go for decades.

If you want to keep up on political news, esp at a time when so much is happening so quickly, the best resource I have at this time is the politics tab on news.scripting.com. Here's a screen shot.

I asked ChatGPT to illustrate this idea: "JD Vance is a punchline."

We're depending on big companies that are nuzzling up with Trump, at best hedging their bets, to let us use their networks to organize ourselves politically. That's never worked for us, in fact it's worked against us. Trump's election in 2016, for example, could he have done...

Every time I solve a Wordle puzzle, I'm allowed to switch over to ChatGPT and narrate a new scene for the Wordle Kitty. Here's today's installment.

The cute and adorable Wordle Kitty, Democratic VP candidate, got tired of waiting for the Republican, so she took a few of the reporters with her back to the presidential suite at the Plaza Hotel on 5th Ave and had a drunken night of debauchery with the reporters and totally trashed the place. The next morning the story appeared in The NY Times. Headline read “Adorable kitten trashes suite."

Wordle Kitty is rumored to be the VP choice for the Dems. She is at the Carnegie Deli in NYC to meet the Republican VP candidate, to talk about a debate, but the Repub is a no-show! Weird. Meanwhile the press is having fun asking her embarrassing questions about a cat in the White House. They want to know if the WH has a litter box. What if she gets pregnant? Stuff like that.

For some reason I don't like writing user-level docs for my own software, but I don't mind narrating a draft with voice. Now that I have a voice recorder that creates transcripts exactly where I need them, I can feed the narration to ChatGPT and ask it to write docs based on...

Saw a video where Elon Musk talks about climate change, no snark, didn't call it a hoax, was intelligent and serious. Also heard that he's backing Trump for president, who says it's a hoax and one of his major campaign promises is to "drill baby drill." Maybe they could discuss this because there seems to be a disagreement here.

Blogrolls, in the 90s, were the beginning of the social web. In the 20s, they can bring today’s social web into blogs.

I was trying to find Tony Kahn on the web for a friend doing a documentary on the origins of podcasting, and came up empty. I just stumbled across him on Facebook and that led to this autobiographical site where he tells his story of podcasting. Tony was the person who brought NPR into podcasting in 2004. A major contributor who isn't often credited. He was at WGBH at the time.

Best podcasts for Democratic voters?

There isn't a whole lot of love in this 39-year-old man. I worry for his kids, esp if either of them don't have kids.

Where is the AI-based meme maker for Kamala. I'd like to have her flying in the sky with a cape, like SuperPresidentLady, going from town to town, finding out what they need, and churning it out for them in an efficiently run government meme factory in the nation's capital. Like we were doing with the kittens earlier this summer.

OPML archive for July's posts on Scripting News.

Heather Cox Richardson: "When President Joe Biden announced just a week ago that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president, he did not pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. He passed it to us."

The blogroll on scripting.com has more features today. Screen shot.

A note to anyone making a twitter-like system. If you supported outbound RSS, I could use your system as a note-taking tool. I know Bluesky does, and I should use it that way, but these days I'm more drawn to Threads, even though I know it's really Facebook under the covers.

Someone in charge at the NYT needs to take a step back and view events, and the NYT role in those events, from the point of view of an ordinary non-NYT-employed citizen, bewildered at the enormous risks journalists are taking with the system of government of the United States.

In the context of who we are as a country, what the Repubs do and say is to be very mild about it "weird." What word would you prefer the Democrats use? Imagine William Safire were here, the great linguist who was a Republican, of the 60s, 70s and 80s, write that column.

And to the Democrats, no matter what the NYT says, keep using the term. This is where you get to speak out about what they're doing over there, and how it's not journalism. One of the rare things you agree with Trump on.

Podcast: 3 minutes.

People who get their sense of self-esteem from having procreated are placing a heavy burden on their children. What if the child doesn't live up to their expectations? How will they treat the child then! Creating a new human is not an accomplishment. Treating that new life as a full person starting at birth, and through their whole life, that's an accomplishment. For a man to father a child just means they have a functioning reproductive system. It's not anything to be proud or to expect to be rewarded or respected for.

The Podcast0 project had taught me how to read the archive of my own blog. Until now I had not carefully read the story I tell on my blog more than a few days after it happened. Here's I'm learning to reconstruct the summer of 2004, maybe the most creative period of my life, at least that's viewable in such a public and preserved way. Am I the first to do this for any blog? If you know of an example of historic research done using the archive of a blog, please send me a note. I'd love to learn about what you learned! :-)

I said on Thursday that Biden's speech last Wednesday had the potential to be a Gettysburg speech, if it the United States turns back toward democracy and government of the people, by the people and for the people. Biden has the potential of being as great a president as Lincoln. Let that settle in for a moment. I get goosebumps when I think about it. If he hadn't taken that stand, he could have become known as the US equivalent of Kaiser Wilhelm.

I keep a solid line between my personal life and blogging, learned the hard way. When I started blogging in 1994, I didn't have such a solid line, and found that I couldn't have a personal life if I made it public. But now I want to reveal something. I am "childless" which i...

Like 193K others I tuned into White Dudes For Harris last night. Please, let that be the last time we do that. I felt like it might as well have been Slave Owners for Harris or Reformed Republicans for Harris. I don't have anything against people of my gender and approximate...