EckerNet.Com

Apparently it is necessary to remind some of my less socially skilled visitors that EckerNet does have a totally bullshitted official comment policy:

The Official EckerNet Comment Policy

1. I am barely aware that I have a comment area…and in a court of law will claim complete ignorance.
2. Once anything crosses the electronic gateway of my domain, it becomes my property. So keep your kids off the internet…I don’t want to accidentally own any, they scare me
3. I can and will ban you for any reason, or no reason, especially if you are willing to cough up large sums of cash to reverse my reason.
4. Any post that doesn’t lavish praise upon me is at risk of being heavily modified until it does.
5. Trolls will have their posts modified so that they look incredibly stupid, such as turning their comment into a request for anal sex.
6. Your email address will not be published, unless I feel like it and you are a giant a-hole.
7. And by \”not published\”, I mean I will attempt to sell it to as many people as possible.
8. Spammers will probably not even be noticed as my spam filter works wonders…so spam to your own content.
9. Your comment sucks…post something better
10. Whatever…I’m just gonna do whatever I want.

Just saying…

Thursday morning myself and a fair number of other bloggers participated in a conference call with Congressman John Kline. The conference call was about Kline\’s new effort to Stop The Pork, essentially to stop the madness and corruption that is earmarks. He\’s got a petition at the site, that you can and should go and sign. Go on now, I\’ll wait for you…….

Now I\’m not gonna give you the summary of what was discussed. If that\’s what you want, you can read the writeups by Chief, Janet, Gary, Psycmeister or the Lady Logician. I think they cover all the aspects of the call but one.

And that aspect was the most refreshing part and gives me hope that something might actually result from this effort. Partisanship while it does have value, also is a great inhibitor to causes that otherwise should have virtually unanimous support.

Now John never actually came out and said it, but reading between the lines and picking up pieces of comments it was obvious that he gets this is not a partisan issue. When he talked about building momentum from the original 12 legislators supporting this effort, to the current level of 50, he talked about how he didn\’t feel momentum until Democrats started joining in. He also pointed out that this is a problem that really started under Republican leadership, but it has gotten out of control and has to be stopped.

Rather than retreating into a partisan shell, he admits were the initial fault lies. Rather than screaming, \”but the Democrats do it too\”, he has refused to request earmarks. Rather than slinging mud, he\’s trying to bring Democrats into the fold so that this effort can take real momentum.

Bipartisanship, sadly has become less of a reality and more of a punchline. However, this is an issue that needs and most certainly deserves bipartisan support. Governmental waste and political corruption is something that should not be supported, or even tolerated, by either party. And it\’s refreshing to see that John Kline is fighting against it in a way that hopefully pulls both sides together.

We can fight and scheme each others demise later, how about we get this out of the way first yeah? So regardless of your ideology or political affiliation, head on over to StopThePork.Com and help your self out (or at least your wallet) by helping John Kline out.

[Crossposted at True North]

As a result of my last couple posts I got a couple \”Heh, you must be feeling better! Welcome back!\” comments/emails. Thank you for noticing and taking the time to wish me well. However, I\’m not really \”back\”. Basically I\’ve developed an allergic reaction to my previous medication which now means that future posts will occur during periods of questionable lucidity in between doses of Vicodin.

So fair warning and all that….and if my mono follows the course it does with most people, posting at EckerNet will return to it\’s previous questionable quality and barely noticeable lucidity by next week.

I\’d also like to point out that while I\’ve seen many in the MOB live-blogging, drunk-blogging, etc…I haven\’t seen anyone doing drugged-blogging. That\’s what you get with EckerNet….the finest blogging our American pharmaceutical industry can legally offer.

Ok so I can feel the clouds rolling in….signing off….

Which is something I\’ve become somewhat of an expert on.  I\’ve been down sick for a good week now, and my doctor has confirmed a trendy case of mono (I feel like I\’m in high school).  So blogging will take place between bouts of sleeping and napping and cursing.

What I have learned so far is that….

• Daytime TV sucks….no seriously, it\’s awful.  Much more of this and I\’ll end up watching soaps out of desperation
• Most of the internet sucks…no seriously, it\’s awful.  And it\’s completely possible to exhaust the cool parts of it
• When I was in HS mono earned you coolness points….those points were well deserved, this sucks.
• Perpetually napping makes daytime TV even worse….since everything is a repeat of what was broadcast about two hours ago.
• Considering the number of channels my dish gets, this degree of suckitude doesn\’t seem mathematically possible.

I\’m tempted to liveblog my napping schedule for tomorrow but that sounds like too much work.

Ok this weekend I finally got around to upgrading EckerNet.Com to the 2.5 version of WordPress.  I think it went pretty well so hopefully you wouldn\’t have noticed unless I mentioned it.

However, if any of you notice any peculiarities with the site, if you could please either leave a comment below, or if that is what isn\’t working for you please email me.  My email address is kevin at eckernet.com

Yeah….happy day.

Most excellent, I retain my status as a blog worthy of a Rainbow of Flavaz listing by the barely esteemed Kool-Aid Report. Not only did EckerNet make the cut, but my other site dedicated to getting Shelley Madore, one of Minnesota\’s Worst Legislators, replaced also made the cut.

I\’d like to thank all the little people that made this possible. I\’d also like to thank God for not making me a Democrat and therefore capable of independent rationale thought, which allows me to post what passes for content on those two websites. I\’d like to thank Learned Foot who apparently is still feeling some residual guilt that he borrowed my vehicle to pick up his new chest freezer.

In receipt of this honor, I think I\’m required by contractual obligation to post an Iron Maiden video as well, so here ya go….

Yeah, the day finally came!!!  We had our BPOU convention and it\’s finally over!  Now, there is quite a bit of work to be done wrapping up the data, distributing it the the people it needs to and figuring out exactly what we did, but at least there is an end to that tunnel.   Or at least I see a light that I\’m assuming is the end of the tunnel….either that or a train, either way it means there is an end to all this.

Overall, I think things went as well as could be expected.  The facility wasn\’t ideal but I think we made it work pretty damn well.  We had a LOT of new people.  Easily 75% of the delegation was people that were attending their first political convention.  Despite that, I think it went fairly smoothly, everyone was very understanding.  I sincerely hope that many of the hold onto that enthusiasm.

Another thing I noticed was the delegates were also very eager.  Typically when resolutions are debated, debates are relatively mild and it\’s the same half a dozen people making statements.  At our convention, there were lines of people I\’ve never seen before making very passionate arguments on the issues.  It was very cool to see, even if it did result in resolutions taking longer than we had anticipated.

Endorsements all went pretty much as expected, which was very nice.  It\’s better than having to deal with parliamentary shenanigans from the floor.   In fact, as far as parliamentary motions went, there were very few that weren\’t either expected or part of the agenda itself.

Selected our delegates and alternates for the next couple rounds of conventions (Congressional District and State) and once again there were alot of eager applicants.  I don\’t think I\’ve seen this number of people volunteering before.  Hopefully this desire to be involved continues on through the election season as there is always a need for more volunteers to help out on campaigns.

Perhaps the most rewarding part was hearing people brand new to the process telling me how much fun it was and how much they are glad they got involved.  That is perhaps the highest form of praise and sincerely hope they choose to remain involved.

Had a BPOU meeting that ran late so I didn\’t get a chance to write up on it.  However, there have been some big developments and some minor ones on immigration lately.  I\’m gonna try to do a roundup style post ASAP, just too much happening to go into it too deeply.

But right now,  I got a whole checklist of things to do and I\’m on like #2 of 234623467.  Later….

Kevin is being sent on temporary assignment to northern Minnesota to study this think called \”Global Warming\”. The study mostly consists of the Minnesota Militia traversing hundreds of miles of snow looking for signs of this mysterious phenomena.

Five Sleds? Check.

Five riders? Check.

Muffpots? Check.

Kidney Belts? Check.

Beer? Check. Check. Check. Check. Check.

Snow? Check.

Open Trails? Check.

Willingness to have a freaking blast? Check.

Alright, let\’s go out and check out this global warming thing. If I\’m not back by Monday, wait longer….I setup a bunch of posts to auto-publish, so you shouldn\’t miss me at all, not that you really would.

Recently had the following comment left :

Republicans are ALL Fags anyway!

Very mature right….well, guess where the comments comes from:

OrgName: State of Minnesota
IP Address: 156.98.11.252
OrgID: SOMN
Address: Office of Enterprise Technology, State of Minnesota
Address: 658 Cedar St, Centennial Office Building
City: St Paul
StateProv: MN
PostalCode: 55155
Country: US

Good to see our state government is filled with such tolerant adults.

Congrats on quoting Bill Maher buddy, but if you\’re gonna be a bigot, at least be an original bigot.