And a couple other people thought so, too.  Last night, Josh Chernila (of the soon to be closed Raising Kaine) announced BlueCommonwealth.com, essentially as the continuation of Raising Kaine.  Serves me right for both being a little slow on the development, and for not buying the .com of the name earlier this year.   Unfortunately, it didn’t serve those who have been working with me on this right at all.  My fault, and my apologies.  And I wish Josh & crew the best of luck.

Not entirely sure how I’ll be moving forward with the (almost ready) BlueCommonwealth project, from a domain/branding standpoint, but it may well turn out that there will be two BlueCommonwealths (the irony of which is . . . well, it just is.).   Any ideas are welcome and appreciated.

On Saturday, December 6, four local, non-profit bike programs are joining forces to bring more bikes to DC streets. The programs, Phoenix Bikes, Renaissance Community Youth Bike Project, The Mount Rainier Bike Coop, and the Rockville Youth Bike Project, use bikes to help young people get active, have fun learning, and serve their communities. There’ll be 20 - 30 road, hybrid, single-speed, kids, and mountain bikes, refurbished by youth, volunteer, and staff mechanics. Best of all, proceeds go to keeping these programs and their cyclists moving. Come by the Bike Sale, running from 10am – 3 pm at Big Bear Café (1700 First St. NW, DC) to find a new ride for 2009!

If you’re looking for a solid bit of transport, this will be worth checking out.

This really isn’t complicated. President Bush was not being “blunt” or showing “candor” when he told ABC News in an interview published yesterday that his biggest regret was the failure of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Rather, he was whitewashing away his own role in the fisaco by promoting the demonstrable falsehood that there was no available evidence or information that argued against war and that he was merely fooled into invading Iraq solely by the bad intel.

The big news orgs seem eager to help Bush do this. Not a single one of their reports on the interview that we can find bothered to tell readers that there was plenty of good intel — ignored by the Bush administration — saying that Saddam wasn’t the threat Bush was claiming he was. Nor did any of them bother mentioning that the weapons inspectors in Iraq were saying the same thing — something that also went ignored.

These facts are absolutely central to understanding Bush’s efforts to falsify history in yesterday’s interview. Yet they went unmentioned in reports by Reuters, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, CNN, and The New York Times.

Or maybe losers get to write history, too.

Excitement to the North!  Who knew?

Related: Here’s a very good background article on the mechanics - and possible problems - involved.  Note that it was written before the NDP and Liberals inked the deal.

In what can only be seen as a major coup for those of us who have been hoping that the Obama Administration would embrace a saner and more sensible thinking on questions of copyright than is the norm in Washington, Change.gov has swapped a strict copyright policy for among the liberalist of Creative Commons licenses.

And for those of you who have being playing the copyright game along at home, and are thinking “Wait, isn’t everything prepared by the Federal gov’t in the public domain already?”:

As a rather strange government-private hybrid entity, the Obama-Biden Transition Project doesn’t appear to be covered by government copyright rules which presume that what the government creates should be freely useable by the public.

I’m still not used to these flashes of sanity emanating from DC.

Holly Doel-Mackaway, adviser with Save the Children, the largest independent children’s rights agency in the world, said educating kids and parents was the way to empower young people to be safe internet users.

She said the filter scheme was “fundamentally flawed” because it failed to tackle the problem at the source and would inadvertently block legitimate resources.

Furthermore there was no evidence to suggest that children were stumbling across child pornography when browsing the web. Doel-Mackaway believes the millions of dollars earmarked to implement the filters would be far better spent on teaching children how to use the internet safely and on law enforcement.

It’s amazing how quickly India appears to be falling into the terrorists’ trap.

It seems obvious that Pakistan’s civilian government, led by President Asif Ali Zardari, has no interest in stirring up trouble between the two nuclear-armed neighbors. And it seems equally obvious that any elements of the ISI, Pakistan’s notorious intelligence service, who might have been in some way involved in the attacks in Mumbai would have done so in order to undermine rapprochement between Islamabad and New Delhi.

[ . . . ]

Yet one can already see public anger in India leading political developments in a direction the terrorists wanted. Some Indian politicians have been less than careful in saying the terrorists were sent by Pakistan, the state, rather than that they came from Pakistan, the country (which hasn’t even been confirmed yet, anyway). India is considering halting talks over Kashmir and ending the five-year cease-fire along the Line of Control. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has vowed to “go after” those responsible for the attacks, which could box him into the dangerous step of taking action against Lashkar-e-Taiba within Pakistan-held territory.

The whole thing is worth a read (as is his earlier penned piece on the contradictory accounts of the attacks themselves).

Update: Juan Cole offers a good companion piece to the article above, focusing on what Pakistan needs to do (and putting it in useful historical context).