He hasn't declared yet, but that hasn't stopped Project Vote-Smart from putting up some useful information on the Senator, including links to transcripts of interviews (including the Sputtery and Colmes interview I mentioned earlier,) biographical info, and eventually position statements.

Also, Salon has an article today about the Senator's proposal last fall for a reasonable resolution of the situation in Iraq.  It was ignored by the Democrats, leading to the mess they find themselves in today.  I think it provides a good view of his position on the war.

Lastly, don't forget that tonight is National Gary Hart Meetup Day.  If you're interested in talking with other Hart supporters and especially if you are interested in volunteering, be sure to check out your local Meetup. 

Savage seems either incredibly dim or just plain nuts. Or just really, really terrible on television. Without any opposition, he still had a hard time scoring simple political points.

Salon weighs in on MSNBC's new show.  This guy is the biggest chump I've ever seen.

"No one in the administration embodies this bottom line mentality more than Dick Cheney. The vice president is one of those ideological purists who never let little things like logic, morality, or mass murder interfere with the single-minded pursuit of profitability.

His on-again, off-again relationship with the Butcher of Baghdad is a textbook example of what modern moralists condemn as "situational ethics," an extremely convenient code that allows you to do what you want when you want and still feel good about it in the morning. In the Cheney White House (let's call it what it is), anything that can be rationalized is right.

The two were clearly on the outs back during the Gulf War, when Cheney was Secretary of Defense, and the first President Bush dubbed Saddam "Hitler revisited."

Then Cheney moved to the private sector and suddenly things between him and Saddam warmed up considerably. With Cheney in the CEO's seat, Halliburton helped Iraq reconstruct its war-torn oil industry with $73 million worth of equipment and services -- becoming Baghdad's biggest such supplier. Kinda nice how that worked out for the vice-president, really: oversee the destruction of an industry that you then profit from by rebuilding.

When, during the 2000 campaign, Cheney was asked about his company's Iraqi escapades, he flat out denied them. But the truth remains: When it came to making a buck, Cheney apparently had no qualms about doing business with "Hitler revisited."

And make no mistake, this wasn't a case of hard-nosed realpolitik -- the rationale for Rummy's cuddly overtures to Saddam back in '83 despite his almost daily habit of gassing Iranians. That, we were told, was all about "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

No, Cheney's company chose to do business with Saddam after the rape of Kuwait. After Scuds had been fired at Tel Aviv and Riyadh. After American soldiers had been sent home from Desert Storm in body bags.

And in 2000, just months before pocketing his $34 million Halliburton retirement package and joining the GOP ticket, Cheney was lobbying for an end to U.N. sanctions against Saddam. "

Nothing groundbreaking or new here, but Arianna puts together a nice summary of why I have a hard time taking the "It's all about the Evil" arguments seriously.   The fact that Saddam is evil just makes a nice pretty package in which to wrap the money.

[via BoingBoing]

"Today I woke up in a Dictatorship. Up to now Hugo Chavez and his hoodlums had been using the law to "hide" the repressive and intolerant nature of this Government. Last night they detained one of the two most important leaders of the opposition and an order is out to capture the Head of the Federation of Unions (CTV) the other visible leader of the opposition. The charge: treason and inciting rebellion. This is political, this is repressive and coupled with assasinations last Monday indicates to me that Chavez has decided to step out of Democracy. The charges against the two most important leaders of the opposition are just an excuse to neutralize them and silence others. The Government quickly charges two political opponents on these charges, but assasins from April are still free or not charged, no investigation has been made of other gunmen on Dec. 6th. and many other political and violent crimes have yet to be investigated. But this one has, with efficiency. Maybe the world will now understand what is going on here in Venezuela."

Venezuela takes another turn for the worst.  Maybe those on the left who are screaming that we're living in a dictatorship should take a look at Chavez and Company to see what one is really like.  Stay tuned to The Devil's Excrement for further developements.

"I know it's easy to read our latest financial filings and assume, as some correspondents have, that Salon's tragic fate is already a done deal.

Here's the situation: We are a public company, I am an executive of the company, and as such there is no way I can sit here and go into detail about all the steps we're taking to secure Salon's future. Our SEC filing, upon which all the coverage has been based, specifically stated that Salon would run into trouble if it fails to raise new funds. Somehow that conditional clause seemed to drop away from most of the press reports. Sure, nothing in business is certain, but Salon also has a long history of raising the money it needs to survive.

This is the quote from our CEO, Mike O'Donnell, in our press release:

"We are in active, continuing discussions with potential investors to complete an equity financing that would give the company financial stability for 2003. Salon has reported the issuance of notes with equity conversion features in recent months and believe these will become part of a significant round."

Unlike the AP, which didn't even bother to call us for comment before running its imminent-death notice, this CBS Marketwatch report tells more of the story from our side."

Scott weighed in on the Salon blogger's mailing list yesterday reassuring everyone that the end was not so nigh.  Today he reiterates on his blog.

"Online magazine publisher Salon Media Group Inc. on Friday warned that it may not survive beyond this month if it can't raise more money to pay its rent and other bills.

The San Francisco-based company painted a grim financial picture in a quarterly report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Things are so bad, Salon said, it stopped paying rent for its San Francisco headquarters in December, prompting the landlord to issue a Jan. 29 demand for a $200,000 payment."

Put up or shut up folks.  If you think Salon is worth anything, they need your support now.

[via Drudgereport]

" CPACers exemplify what historian Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style in American politics" in the 1964 essay of the same name. "Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated -- if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention," Hofstadter wrote. "Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes." And George W. Bush has harnessed their obsession and rage for his own political gain. "

CPAC - The right's answer to A.N.S.W.E.R.

"Record companies are not logical, righteous entities. They are ramshackle, profit-driven enterprises. They act in their perceived best interests, and they act ruthlessly and, in many cases, irrationally. The people who run them still have their e-mail printed out by their secretaries. We have to wait for the next generation to take over, the "software" generation, the generation of people who don't remember growing up without a computer around. I would argue that the future of music is multimedia, the future of multimedia is DVD, and the future of music companies is software. In five years, record labels will be software companies and I don't think they know that yet. The music business will be saved by someone from the software business who can impose a new business model on music assets.

In the future there will be no record stores as we know them, no tangible product as we know it. The CD is going the way of the 8-track and the cassette. Soon there will be no need for the tangible thing. Consumers have made their choice. They want to listen to music while they're working at their computers, on a portable device like an iPod or MiniDisc player, or on a home theater jukebox (similar to a feature of Microsoft's Xbox). Digitally available music has given the consumer choices, and they like those choices. They don't want music just from commercial radio. They also want it from their hard drives and from the Internet. Yet record companies still want to force tangible, overpriced media on consumers who want to obtain data files and temporarily store them on their hard drives or on cheap, disposable discs (CD-Rs). If record labels don't start trying to be part of the future they will be bought up and converted to it by someone who is. "

A call to reason - and arms - from within the music industry.  President of a record label, the author discusses the changing nature of intellectual property, the death of the CD, the rise of downloadable music, why people hate the music industry and not other content industries, and how the music industry (specifically NARAS, aka the Grammy people) must reconcile all of this to avoid death and possibly even thrive.

The Total Information Awareness program may have removed its ominous logo from its Web site -- but you can still get your TIA-insignia T-shirts, teddy bears, mugs and thongs! Hurry, though, they're going fast (into detention)!

I want the greeting cards in hat form.

[via Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]