Month: October 2004

Keeping America Scared…

The other day, someone e-mailed me and said that I shouldn’t vote for Kerry just because I won’t vote for Bush. He went on to tell me that Bush deserved credit for keeping the USA safe, for keeping me safe.

I wrote back and told him I don’t agree. We have now lived under a rather constant cloud of fear since 2001. Three years. I don’t feel safe. Thanks to things like Homeland Security, I feel that we are all at risk of losing a lot of our civil liberties. I had no problems travelling overseas, but before I left, I was afraid that I would be under attack for being an American. I feel like every time we start to let our guard down, the government reminds us that we might be attacked. Terrorists. Terrorism. Global war on terror.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot for the past two days – politics, the upcoming election, all of my fears tied to it. Maybe that’s part of why I’ve been so quiet. It’s just really sad when you think about it.

I agree with TJ – the link below should be the latest Republican ad campaign. Because when you listen to them, it seems like this is all they can talk about. (You need Quicktime to watch it.)

George W. Bush – Keeping America Scared.

Know the Code

Stop the Insanity!

I’m under attack. In the past 2 hours or so, I have received over 700 spam comments. In the time it takes me to delete 20 of them, another 5 arrive. Earlier, they were from a variety of IP addresses; now they are the exact same comment coming from the same IP. Over, and over, and over again. I have comment moderation turned on in WP, but it’s going to take forever to delete all these comments. Bigger issue, I want to stop them from coming in at all.

Back in MT, I could enter an IP address and tell MT to not accept comments from that IP. I can’t find an option like that in WP anywhere.

Any WP gurus out there with suggestions? Anyone? Help? I need to stop the flood!

UPDATE: As soon as I posted this, I realized that because they are running a script to leave so many spam comments, that means they are hitting the server. When they are hitting the server, you can stop them on the server level. Doh! So there is an IP deny in place on the server itself for their IP right now. Meanwhile, it seems I have some plugins to install tonight. Jenn responded to my panic e-mail and let me know that there is a plugin at ScriptyGoddess that will allow me to delete all comments in moderation mode. I’ll be installing that in a few minutes.

Update 2: In the time it took me to write that last update, Jenn put the plugin in place for me, and let me tell you … wow!!! That is so cool! When you have a lot of comments stuck in moderation mode (or even just a few) and you want to zap them all away, the best thing in the world is her Comment Moderation – Select All For Delete plugin! Jenn ROCKS!!!

I’m all nice and calm again now. Thank you to everyone for your support!

BlahBlahBabble

Grumble… Grumble…

I have freakin’ hives. Again. I itch all over, although the spots themselves are better than they were last time and I don’t have as many. Claritin has helped some, but not enough.

Last time the hives were followed by me being sick as a dog for over a week. I really, really, really hope that is not the case this time.

Grrr… freakin’ hives.