Semi Truths A highly irregular weblog dedicated to Truth, Justice, and American Cheese…!

August 25, 2006

Impeachment “Black Out” Day on September 1

Filed under: Charlottesville,Politics — semi @ 11:00 pm

Last month, I attended an Impeachment Teach-in sponsored by my favorite local activist group, the CCPJ. To be honest, I was just there to lend technical support. I really thought that discussions of impeachment were a waste of time because there is no way Bush or Cheney or any of the rest of them could be impeached.

I was wrong. I was seriously wrong.

After listening to the presentation that evening, and watching a video, I am now convinced the impeachment is the only thing we can do, and that we have a moral obligation to do it. You can read my reasons here, but I want to tell you now what you can do to help.

On September 1 (that’s a mere week from today) and for 24 hours, we want thousands of websites and blogs to replace their front pages with a single banner that reads Impeach. You can see a sample at Impeachnet.net.

The inspiration for this idea came from the actions of The Freeway Blogger, the great outlaw artist who has posted over 2500 freeway signs protesting the war. Our hope is to bring this word back into the public lexicon, grab the attention of the media, and get everyone talking about the one tool guaranteed by the Founders to restore our Constitutional Democracy.

If you run a website or blog, then on September 1 2006, replace your home page with the single word Impeach in bold Times New Roman white text on a black background. Feel free to help yourself to the code here (getting a single word to display in the center of a page in all browsers is a little trickier than you might think). Back up your existing home page first (often index.html) and display this new one for 24 hours, from noon September 1 to noon September 2. If you use the provided code, the “period” is a link which you can customize to allow visitors to enter the rest of your web page.

If you don’t have your own webpage or blog but still think that this is a good idea, then please send this information to your favorite sites and convince them to participate (click here for a sample message). Additionally, please feel free to leave a comment on the blog. Just as important as replacing your home page for one day is letting your website visitors know why, so please publicize this both beforehand and afterward. Also, contact the site and let them know that you plan to participate and we will include a link to your site in the blogroll.

This is more important, and more possible, then you may now realize. Go. Make history.

Highway Robbery

Filed under: Charlottesville,Politics,Virginia — semi @ 7:03 pm

gallen.jpgThe Washington Post, as well as other news outlets, reported today that the Secret Service asked the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) to shut down the HOV (that’s High Occupancy Vehicle, for those reading outside of VA) lanes on I-395 from 1:00 to 7:00 PM on Wednesday so that “President” Bush could drive to a presumably urgent fund-rasier in Mt. Vernon for Republican Senator George Allen.

If you’ve ever driven on that stretch of road anytime between, say, 7:00 AM to 8:00 PM, you know that it is already a slowly-moving parking lot. The HOV lanes are the only relief as that is where the commuter buses travel, as well as the cars with three or more drivers. Shutting down those lanes would have been — what’s the word that Bush recently used to describe pulling out of Iraq? — oh yeah … a disaster!

My favorite part of the story: the VDOT turned them down. They are now my heroes.

Actually, I secretly wish they hadn’t. I personally would have loved to see all those red brake lights and tens of thousands of fuming motorists hearing that they’re stuck so Bush could attend a $200 a plate fundraiser for the putative Republican presidential candidate whom many describe as “Bush without the brains”. (Okay, I made that last part up; I’m sure the dinner was much more than $200 a plate…)

August 4, 2006

Penal Violation

Filed under: Crime and Punishment,Humor — semi @ 4:39 pm

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I’m not a golfer, but this strikes me as a little extreme…

July 24, 2006

Putting the “Pseudo” back into Pseudonymous

Filed under: Charlottesville,Personal — semi @ 1:35 pm

On July 20th, I was honored to be a guest on Coy Barefoot’s Charlottesville – Right Now to talk about this blog and thus shredding any remaining pretense of pseudonymity. It was a great experience. Coy is just one heck of a nice guy and very smart. In the late 70’s, I worked in college radio, often the only person in the studio on the midnight shift. I’d be pushing carts (cartridges), spinning LPs, answering phones, and being both the talent and the engineer. It was great fun, but I envied professional DJs who had engineers to do all that for them. Well, technology has come full circle. I sat in a studio with Coy while he interviewed me and watched him launch PSAs and commercials from his computer console, play intros and outros, dash around the station during commercial breaks looking for material that he needed, all without an engineer. Technology really hasn’t made our jobs any easier, just more productive.

Podcast courtesy of Sean Tubbs and the CVille Podcast Network.

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