Watching CNN this morning I have had several thoughts come to mind.( Read more... )

Sarah Palin...Throwin' The Horns!
(Or not?)


Now that the political crap is more or less over...I'll show you a bit I did for fun:



No, this isn't Sarah Palin.( Read more... )

From the blog of Todd Lockwood and the Illustrators Partnership.

( Read more... )

Orphan Works Part II: The Legislative Blueprint
Excerpted from Todd Lockwood's Blog Behind the Water Heater

FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP

Orphan Works: A Lame Duck Countdown:
Part II. The Legislative Blueprint

12.02.08

The “legislative blueprint” for the Orphan Works Act was not drafted by the Copyright Office after their year-long Orphan Works study, but before it, by law students at the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic.

Their Copyright Clearance Initiative (CCI) is the document that first proposed the “limitation on remedies” that would radically change international copyright law. From page 5 of the CCI proposal:

“Under no circumstances will Sec. 504(c) statutory damages, attorney’s fees, damages based on the user’s profits or injunctive relief relating to the challenged use be available against a qualified user.” http://copyright.gov/orphan/comments/OW0595-Glushko-Samuelson.pdf

This is the premise the Copyright Office adopted with only slight modifications: where the law students had proposed capping infringement fees at $100, the Copyright Office proposals changed that to an ambiguous “reasonable fee.”

And how did the student authors describe their study of the orphan works issue?,( Read more... )

From the Blog of Todd Lockwood:
http://www.tolo.biz/2008/12/01/liitle-known-facts-about-the-orphaned-works-act-part-i/

"It is ridiculous and yet terrifyingly appropriate that the Republican Party is holding up Joe the Plumber as an example of their position.

Ridiculous because he is uninformed, can't articulate his positions, and yet incredibly biased.
Terrifyingly appropriate because there are SO many people like him and he is the perfect example of voting on feelings rather than thinking, voting against something rather than for something, and voting because of fear.
Sean K Reynolds

I'll be glad when this election is over. I'm tired of the divisiveness. I place a lot of this on Karl Rove: his political advise has moved a lot of people in a direction that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime.

I'll be glad when people start thinking like Americans again instead of Democrats or Republicans. I'm tired of the ignorance, the racism, the people so willfully blind that they will sacrifice their principles in order to WIN. So many people forgetting that to fight for freedom also means that you fight for the right to disagree and that you still need to deal with the other side after the elections are over. The lack of respect for people is staggering. People seem to believe that their side is right and the other side deserves only disdain...forgetting that regardless, at the end of the day, goddammit we're all Americans and if one side loses an election, we have an obligation, a duty to work together for the greater good, not just our own political agenda.

I hope in a day or three, a week when this is over and it is decided who will be president, that people will relax a little, let their dander down, and remember these things instead of holding to a grudge. We've been divided enough by all of this.

In lieu of an alarmist version of the story, I'd read the following:
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_homeland_090708w/

The 1st BDE, 3ID has been deployed to Iraq more than any other Infantry unit in the army...deploying to the Balkans before that.

They've done their deployment time and are returning to a job that guarantees they aren't deploying outside the CONUS for a long while.

1st BDE 3ID is about 5k men and women, many of which are friends of mine whom I have served with on deployment overseas. (when I got out, all my army buddies went to 1st BDE, 3ID.)

We all know that the National Guard is tapped heavily for overseas deployments. The National Guard is USUALLY the ones tapped to help in the face of disasters...like Katrina. They are also tapped in case of an attack on our soil (like the Pentagon and WTC attacks).

In light of these facts, it's easy to see largely why this is happening.

Of course...it's ALSO possible that GW Bush plans to take over as the First Emperor of the US...but that would end up in a HUGE revolt, from within the US Military as well as without. I'm talking full-scale revolution. The likelihood of this is negligible though as even GW couldn't even hope to pull that off.

Reality is usually not in either of the extremes, but somewhere in-between. I don't expect the US Army will be taking over as a new Praetorian Guard nor do I think the US Military is coming back to the states to simply chill out.

The most reasonable expectation is that they will be here taking over much of the load from the National Guard, as well as rotating spent units away from OCONUS deployments. In light of the deployments of the past ten years (the Balkans as well as Iraq and Afghanistan) and retention for the whole military being in the toilet and AWOL and desertions as well as suicides at an all time high...the decision to rotating units back home makes a LOT of sense.

(CONUS=Continental US, OCONUS=Outside the continental US)