October 2008

Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear

In the past week, we have heard Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) call for an investigation of whether members of Congress are “pro-America or anti-America.” As a first-term representative she can perhaps be dismissed as fringe, but we’re hearing similar language from Sarah Palin on the campaign trail, and some are beginning to see this as a pattern on the part of the McCain campaign.

Fifty-eight years ago, Senator Margaret Chase Smith — the first woman to be elected to the US Senate — had the courage to speak out against fellow Republican Joe McCarthy and his unconscionable debasement of the US Senate “to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity.”

“The nation sorely needs a Republican victory,” she said in her Declaration of Conscious, “but I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.” As a first-term Senator, speaking out against not only a member of her own party but one of the Senate’s most powerful and vindictive members was hardly a career-advancing move, costing her a key subcommittee appointment and almost costing her her reelection.

It would be another four years before the Senate would finally censure Senator McCarthy and bring his witch hunt to an end, four years in which countless careers were destroyed, our leaders were distracted from addressing more pressing issues, and paranoia and division gripped our nation. It would be many more years before the damage done during that period would be repaired. History now remembers Senator Smith as being the first to speak out against this nightmare, before it became safe or popular to do so.

In the coming months and years we will be asking our elected representatives to lead us out of a global financial crisis, climate change, two wars and a severely tarnished reputation abroad. To address these problems we will need to draw on the strengths and ideas from all the diverse backgrounds, faiths and ideologies our great nation has to offer. We can not afford to waste time with hatred and division in our government or in the population at large.

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View the ‘real source’ of a webpage

One great thing about the web is that you can tell your browser to “View Source” whenever you want to figure out how the page managed to get all those hamsters to dance like they do. Or at least that was how it used to be — nowadays most interesting pages are dynamically generated, which means the source you see often little more than .

When I was writing dynamic pages for a project a little while back I got tired of not being able to see what my page looked like after all the JavaScript got done with it, and eventually I tracked down this cute little bookmarklet:

javascript:if (window.document.body.outerHTML != undefined) {''+window.document.body.outerHTML+''} else if  (document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML != undefined) {''+document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML+''} else if  (window.document.documentElement.outerHTML != undefined) {''+window.document.documentElement.outerHTML+''} else {alert('Your browser does not support this functionality') };

Just copy it all into one line (remove the linefeeds, they’re just there for readability) and put it as the URL of a bookmark. Then whenever you want to see the real source of a page, it’s just a click away.

(I wish I could remember where I found this little gem, but from a quick search it looks like it’s been floating around for a while…)

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