philly

The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
by Emma Lazarus

I don't think I ever read the full poem before, but after reading Paul Krugman's latest, I thought I should.

Three weeks ago ~300K marched in the streets of Chicago in protest of HR 4437: Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005.

This passed Saturday, the 25th, ~500K marched in the streets of Los Angeles in protest of HR 4437: Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005.

On Monday April 10th, there will be a similar march here in Philadelphia, San Antonio, Chicago, Denver, Las Cruces, LA, Milwaukee, NYC, Tuscon and Washington for a National Day of Action on Immigrant Rights. The Philadelphia rally will be at LOVE Park from Noon to 2p [I hope it will last longer than that].

The borders are porous, but the answer is not erecting a 700 mile long wall in haste.

If it's Tuesday, it's Drinking Liberally

Free wings and $1 off drink specials from 6p – 9p at Tangier [1801 Lombard St] tonight as always! Andy Card's resignation will surely be on the non-genda tonight along with drinking, eating beer battered fries and figuring out who the initial DL graffiti-ist was. Since the second graffiti-ist has outed himself as of yesterday. Conspiracy theorists, rev your engines.

And down the street a bit tonight is a meet and greet with Councilman Michael Nutter who is running for Mayor in 2007. It's at Ten Stone from 6.30p – 8.30p. Drink specials and snacks will be provided.

And over by Headhouse Square, candidate for the 175th District Congressional seat Anne Dicker will be holding court at 7p.

Lots to choose from all over town.

Had a bit of a computer meltdown last night while updating my ZoneAlarm [free] firewall. I was prompted to update and hit OK and the process started. Downloaded the update file. Executed it. It got up to twenty-nine percent completion. And then it just stalled. Stalled. Stalled. Stalled. I ended the process. I cranked it up again. But was prompted that certain .dll files were missing or something.

While I was fiddling around to find a way out of this mess, I must have moused over the harddrive and I noticed that something had just eated 5GB worth of space. Blech. I went through the Temp directories and unzip directories and cleaned up a bit, but I have no idea where that extra 5GB all of a sudden came from.

Restarted the comptuer.

Retried to update ZoneAlarm. Now, it was saying that the TrueVector monitor [vsmon.exe] was running and had to be shut off before continuing with the process. I opened up my Task Manager. It wasn't there. I think that within the first twenty-nine percent of the update, the updater deleted the last version of ZoneAlarm in the process.

I tried to salvage the situation by restoring my HDD to a previous date, say anyday but yesterday. GoBack tells me that there is no safe restore point. Fuck.

I was already late to my volunteer duties for the Chuck Pennacchio campaign so I just packed up my stuff and headed out.

When I got back home, I was so fed up, I just backed up my files to my external HDD and wiped the computer with a clean install. That took a few hours. Now the stupid Windows Updates are slowly being downloaded and installed. I'm up to the SP2. That'll be done later tonight and I'll re-install all of my programs and applications afterwards.

Alexander Cockburn is one of my favorite columnists. He's out there. He doesn't mince words. I've been reading his stuff in The Nation for two years now as a subscriber [subscribe here!]. His latest "Beat the Devil" column titled Why There's No Strategy to End This War takes a look at the Dems response to things like censure, the war in Iraq and little strategies from the leadership like this gem:

As reported in the Washington Times, Reid's strategy memo advises: "Ensure that you have the proper U.S. and state flags at the event, and consider finding someone to sing the national anthem and lead the group in the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the event."

Read: flags and songs make Dems strong Americans right?

Cockburn continues on listing the responses of some of the movers within the Democratic leadership to Sen. Russ Feingold's motion for censure.

Barack Obama of Illinois: "I haven't read it."

John Kerry of Massachusetts: "I really can't [comment] right now."

Hillary Clinton of New York rushed past reporters shaking her head, then trying to hide behind the 4'11" Barbara Mikulski.

Charles Schumer of New York, who would normally run over his grandmother to get to a microphone: "I'm not going to comment."

Chris Dodd of Connecticut: "Most of us feel at best it's premature. I don't think anyone can say with any certainty at this juncture that what happened [the NSA's eavesdropping] is illegal."

And let me add that Bob Casey, who is the anointed from the top "Democratic" Senate candidate here in PA agrees with Dodd as noted in jpol's diary. Progressive Dem Chuck Pennacchio [for whom I am volunteering many many hours a week] disagrees and stands with Sen. Feingold. As Sen. Pennacchio, he'd be on the floor with Sen. Feingold in support of his motion to censure.

The Cockburn essay is a good read. A good read if only to see your feelings on the printed page and not merely swirling around in your head. If you have problems accessing it via The Nation it's also here via Counter Punch.

Sometimes it seems to me like we're going to have to vote out the Dems that are there now and get in a new batch in order to remove the Republicans who are currently entrenched and festering within the three branches of government and the esteemed Fourth Estate still isn't pulling its weight. The Washington Post hiring and not firing the likes of Ben Domenech [he resigned, and WaPo basically washed their hands of it] is not helping matters either.

I saw V for Vendetta yesterday afternoon. It was way better than I thought it was going to be. I read the graphic novel a year ago and was thrilled to hear that it was being made into a feature-length film. I was initially put off by the casting of Natalie Portman as Evey. Up to this point, I thought she had peaked with her performance as a thirteen-year-old in The Professional, but she was annoyingly good in this film. Annoyingly in that I wanted her to be bad so that I had an excuse to not like the film and have her be the cause of it and accept it as such, but she was great. The film was great.

It's a bit weird to see a mask talk at you for an entire film, but I got used to it after the first scene where V appears and Hugo Weaving delivers some serious alliteration

I actually welled up a bit at the ending. I'm not going to say what it was, but I wasn't welling up because it was so sad on screen, but the implication that it would take such a large cataclysmic event to have the people wake up. When will the rest of America wake up. Will Congress ever wake up?

A couple of choice paraphrased quotes from the film that will in no way give away anything:
"The people should not fear their government; the government should fear its people" and, oh wait, the second quote does actually potentially give away some info, so, just that one.

I saw Subliminal Orphans perform on Friday night at a concert at the UArts theater at the Y on Broad & Pine, the concert was called Artists Against Apathy and Chuck Pennacchio was there to address the crowd in between sets.

I was there to see Pennacchio speak, but I was quite happy to hear Subliminal Orphans bring the crowd to their feet, literally. They called the people out of their seats into the area in front of the stage and they rocked it. They have a nice sound of hip hop with a live band. I liked them enough to grab a copy of their CD which they were selling at a table for $5. It's got some nice looking packaging too which was an added bonus on top of the great sounding disc.

Get a taste of their sound on their myspace and catch up with them at a live concert via their calendar.

Philly IMC just put up a post with a .mov of seven short interviews from the day. Download the file here. It's an 11.7MB file and you'll need QuickTime to view it, preferably QT7 with the H.264 codec.

The interviewees are: Jennifer Kronstain of PhillyBlog, Jonathan Tannenwald of The Daily Pennsylvanian, Greg Palmer of Keystone Politics, Paul Socolar of The Philadelphia Public Notebook, Amy Webb of Dragonfire, Susie Madrak of Suburban Guerrilla and Kevin Donahue of Philly.com.

Very much worth a watch. It's 7m 41s in length.

Here's a shot of the start of the day.

I was immediately overwhelmed when I walked off of the elevator into the top floor classroom in the Annenberg School. About thirty or so people were already there, an additional dozen or so would come before things got underway and after the lunch break. I recognized some familiar faces. Local people like Dan Rubin, Will Bunch, Aaron Couch, Howard Hall, Karl Martino, Duncan Black, Susie Madrak and Matt Gold.

But I'd hear so many other people speak throughout the day. People from PhillyBlog, Annenberg work study studennts, Daily News interns, someone from Pew Charitable Trusts. People from the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, the brass from PNI, columnists, writers, editors, managers from under the PNI umbrella. Harry B. Cook from Philly1. People from Philly IMC [who shot video of the day along with short interviews], the NYC Indypendent. A sports writer from the Daily Pennsylvanian. People from Dragonfire. People from the tech side of Comcast. Paul Socolar from The Philadelphia Public School Notebook, Greg Palmer of Keystone Politics, Jeff Jarvis, from Buzz Machine among other ventures and Dean of the Annenberg School Michael X Delli Carpini.

That's just a partial list of everyone who was there. I can only begin to start digesting all of this a day later. I've put up a flickr set of the first edit of seventy-four down from 300+. And I've gone through those seventy-four and whittled it down a bit to thirty-eight shots that have been edited with a little post processing and some cropping here and there.

Stories of the day to come still…

The initial edit is up in a flickr set. Culled down from about 300 to 74. The set will be edited down further and touched up for color in the next few days and posted directly here.

There they are, Will Bunch, Karl Martino, Susie Madrak and Wendy Warren, the founders and organizers of the Norgs unconference

It all started with this post on Will's blog Attytood about a theoretical concept. People from PNI management, the Inky, the Daily News, the Philly blog community and well beyond. The discussion started off online and gained steam and finally a date was decided upon and there we were at 9a this morning in the Annenberg School. Dan Rubin has a nice wrap up of the day here. I'm gonna be posting more photos tonight and tomorrow.