So I got a call yesterday from the California chapter of NOW. They were looking for donations to help them lobby against conservative judicial nominations for the Supreme Court by the Bush administration. Now, I’m a single female living in one of the most better-dead-than-red1 areas of the country. I have a more-or-less solid Democratic voting record, and have been known on occasion to contribute to charity. I’m pro-choice and against the Bush administration’s attempts to get the Christian right a stronger foothold in the highest court in the land2. They should have had me in the bag. Instead, the NOW representative began by reading some inflammatory and blatantly false anti-Republican rhetoric about the “false election” and “losing Roe v. Wade“. And within 5 seconds, she lost me. I was disgusted. I don’t want to keep harping on this, but here it is again. Even given my demographic information, I think it’s folly for these far-left political groups looking for my money or my vote to assume that I agree with them. It’s the complacency that kills me. If they are so good at alienating someone who is pretty close to exactly ideologically aligned with them, how will they be at getting the support of someone who’s more moderate than me?
1 A clever turn of phrase borrowed from this Rolling Stone article mentioned in a post I linked earlier.
2 For the record, I’m against the far left getting more of a foothold in the Supreme Court, also. Most of America is solidly between the two extremes and I think that ideologically, the Supreme Court justices should represent that. Besides, ideology should not make much of a difference when getting into the nuts and bolts of interpreting law.
my blog posting frequency in the last six months has dropped off drastically. This is mostly due to a significant reduction in my web-surfing time, some intentional and some not. As a result, I am getting ever further behind in my monitoring of my favorite RSS feeds. Why am I telling you this? Because it’s my excuse for posting on old stuff. Here’s an interesting post on the increasing influence MoveOn wields in the Democratic party, and why it can only be bad news for the left. It harmonizes quite nicely with my liberal-disgusted-with-the-Democratic-party song.
Flowers template so that it works in the latest Windows and Mac OS versions of Internet Explorer.
I made some minor changes to the Spring template. One was a redesign of the banner graphic, which I felt was too busy. I opted for something more stylized, and in my mind at least, much more attractive. The second thing i did was to lighten the top and bottom blocks of color on the sidebar. To update your template, you can either re-download the source, or if you’ve made customizations and don’t want to mess with them, do the following:
In the style descriptions for the .sidebar-top and .sidebar-bottom classes, change the background image from leaf_green_bg.png to lt_leaf_green_bg.png. It’s that simple.
I Like Your Colors! is a web tool that will extract the colors from the CSS of any website you specify, and display swatches thereof.
Where am I finding all these cool links? From What Do I Know, a design-oriented blog I found from the links section on squidfingers. Make sure to check out the links in the Enjoying section, especially this and this. Jieun, you especially will like this.
Check this out. Very sexy.
even if it doesn’t much benefit Mac users:
Beginning in 2006, Microsoft says it will ship with its operating system and other software products six brand new typefaces created especially for extended on-screen reading.
This is especially timely for me, since as you know I’ve recently been redesigning/restructuring my various websites for cleanliness and user-friendliness; I have spent much of the past few days worrying about font choices and ease of reading for users, since most of my content is written and long.
here’s a pretty neat blog/website: Cooking for Engineers. It’s cool not just for its content, but the way the website is programmed.
While we’re on the subject of cooking and geeks, I have to admit that I am a Good Eats junkie. It appeals to the engineer in me. If you don’t watch this show regularly, you should.
Blogger has fixed the timestamping bug.
early mid-life crisis, here’s a link to Bowling for Soup‘s hilarious video for 1985 (Quicktime required; go here to select another format).