Bolton and the Bloggers

There is a strange assymetry when it comes to politics. On the one hand we can have John Bolton engage in tacky hijinks:

In 1995-96 Bolton served as president of the National Policy Forum (NPF), which, according to a congressional investigation, functioned as an intermediary organization to funnel foreign and corporate money to Republicans....

When John Bolton became NPF president in 1995, the forum began organizing “megaconferences” as a hook to raise money for the party. These conferences brought together Republican members of congress, lobbyists, and corporate executives to discuss matters that were frequently the object of pending legislation. An NPF memo laid out the funding strategy: “NPF will continue to recruit new donors through conference sponsorships. ... In order for the conferences to take place, they must pay for themselves or turn a profit. Industry and association leaders will be recruited to participate and sponsor those forums, starting at $25,000.”

This is so obviously against the spirit of the campaign finance laws as to be laughable. These are the same clowns who want to make sure that bloggers can no longer post freely on political issues:

The End of the Internets
I do think there are ways that some campaign finance law provisions can be reasonably extended to the internet, but what they're talking about now would essentially put an end to all political speech on the internet, with the exception of "established" media organizations.

You know, eventually the worm turns. Eventually all of this Bush, Negroponte, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz nightmare will be a thing of the past. The problem, as I see it, is what kind of country is going to come out the other end of the tube, and whether the change will be a revolution.

We are about due for a breakthrough scientific discovery. No one can predict what this will be anymore than someone in 1900 could have predicted antibiotics, atomic weapons or space travel (there were some glimmerings in the writings of Verne and Huxley). I guess I could imagine a breakthrough in fusion research or gravity.

What if any country, using some technology we can't imagine, could challange the United States and its hedgemony? In addition to chaos, we would be in for a bad time. Many people out there cannot forgive us for our arrogance. Its not just Al Qaeda that has it in for us.

And Bolton continues to throw things in the international face. He dislikes the UN, the International Criminal Court, and all the treaties that have produced so much of the real progress that our planet has made.

I think we are in for a few hard years.