View from where we are

After a fourteen month break it's time to take a look back at the extraordinary change that's happened over this time. My last words were an epitaph for the wasted and destructive years of the George W Bush regime and now he, his party, and especially his cronies of the Eastern Establishment Republicans, have been un-ceremoniously elbowed out of the public sphere in disgrace. And, with so many squandered opportunities wasted, good riddance!

So last week Alberto Gonzales quit (read: was fired by the Pres). Following the utterly incompetent Donald Rumsfeld and the overly competent Karl Rove, one of the last of the toxic squares is gone only leaving Dick Cheney to fall on his sword. It won't happen, I know, but it would be so good for the political climate in the USA and make a statement that those with the "We had to destroy the village to save it" mentality are finished. And "toxic squares", you ask? Well there are four of them, they pretend to be uber-conservative, atavistically so in a social context. And they've done more than anyone but the Pres to simultaneously alienate useful, longtime friends abroad as well as conservative voters at home.

It seems when trouble comes it comes in spades. Some of my favorite service providers are having trouble all at once. Skype, which has worked flawlessly for 2 years (3 maybe?) has had problems seeing its own peer-to-peer (P2P) network today making logins interminable, and now Google, whose Gmail is one of the nicest free apps on the net, has fallen foul of its own spam filter!