Howard Dean, who wasn’t even on the ballot of Louisiana’s presidential primary, is now the DNC chair and this makes me very happy. Hope remains when an ex-candidate doesn’t throw in his towel, but continues to fight for his country in another incarnation. Zephyr Teachout has some good advice for Dean with respect to internet campaigning:

” … while the ‘net is disrupting some old channels for political power and offering new kinds of connections as well … without an aggressive effort, I worry that most of this energy will go into fundraising, list-building and maybe some online community building.”

Sure, these aren’t bad things, Teachout says, “but in the face of the Great American Loneliness and the Great American Powerlessness, I hope that the disruptive power of the internet might serve to create a new form of voluntary association: offline communities based on online connections but rooted in public places.”

Today’s Earth Science Picture Of The Day is beautiful! This planet never ceases to amaze me.

Teddy Scares reminds me of my teddy bear, Brandon, whom I lost to the ransackers of my home during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. My wishful thinking says that Brandon ended up in a better place like the loving arms of some Arab kid.

Great, now his ghost is all over the place. I’m sorry, Brandon, I thought I was going to see you again.

Vacillating between being alright and not ok at all with HST’s passing. The feeling would be the same even had he died of natural causes. D summed it up well last night, “It feels like I’ve lost a member of MY team.”

The remembrance turned into a discussion on suicide once the end is near anyways. There is dignity to taking oneself out of the picture while still possessing the ability to, say, pee on one’s own. We already understood this, but continue to be shattered by the brutal honesty that such a death entails.

In the end, he wasn’t answerable to anyone. The beauty of life is that it doesn’t always revolve around you.