Well, it's a new day, and already everything looks better. There's no malaise so deep that morning masturbation can't cure :-)

I'm pretty excited to be going back to New York. I haven't seen people there for several years, and I miss the city. I still can't get used to how Oakland and SF roll up the sidewalks at 6 p.m., or how the BART trains late at night actually stop running. We found a place to stay in the lower East Side, which makes this trip seem even more like some schnazzy vacation.

I'm starting to count the time til I leave by the number of trainings and meetings I have left. I think it's two trainings and ... zero meetings. Can it really be zero? Woo hoo!

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It's a lazy cold day in Oakland, perfect for lounging at home with my housemates and watching yet again the movie "Dick". So we did. It's as smart and funny and sometimes heart-wrenching as I remember.

But it left me wondering: where is our generation's happy ending? When both Bush and Kerry are committed to the use of crushing military might abroad, when both would impose ever more surveillance and restrictions at home in the name of national security, when do we wake up to find that our national nightmare is over?

In today's news, a federal official warns of possible suicide car or truck bombs beings used against corporations in New York. In the aftermath of such attacks, what would we do to feel safe? What laws would we condone, what interrogation tactics, what roundups, what imprisonments, in the hope that we would forestall further terrorist acts?

Back in the here and now, New York City is beginning a new program of sweeps aimed at clearing out the homeless and other undesirables from prime spaces, such as the WTC and Times Square, before the convention. A soup kitchen will be closed because their clientelle won't have the IDs needed to pass into the security zone. A small thing, perhaps, when weighed against the threat of terrorism. But if you are one of the hungry or homeless, not so small...

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It's probably a mistake to write anything before 9 a.m. But I need to test some security tweaks I'm making to the blogging software, so you, the reader, get to suffer with me.

I fell asleep with radio news in my ear, which was a mistake. I woke up to hear that Obama, if he gets elected, will be the third African American in the Senate in the last 100 years. That reminded me that, once again, we will have a white guy for President and a white guy for Vice President, no matter what the outcome. How can we be so self-congratulatory about our freedoms when our political system produces these results?

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In the mid-90's, I was a staffer at Columbia University, watching and waging the crypto wars. There were no blogs then, but I often posted updates on the Web about the FUD of the day, since there was so much FUD to go around.

Now FUD takes a new form, in this post-9/11 era. Welcome to RNC 2004...

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