We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
We here at the (insert name of paper here) are a fair, open-minded, tolerant bunch, as you would expect given our elevated social status. So, when an unknown, inexperienced politician named Willard Mitt Romney had the audacity to run for president, we decided to give him a chance and hear what he had to say about his "qualifications."
One intriguing thing that happened while I was out of touch with humanity for a week was that three mainstream news sites completely changed their format. Much for the worse, I might add. They essentially stopped being 'news sites' by conventional definition.
First is CBS News, which has gone to what might be called a 'news blog' format. That is, the format small blog sites like Power Line switch to when they want to appear more relevant and 'newsy'.
And check out the 'social media' influence in the right sidebar. Most Popular. Most Shared. Most Discussed. Follow us. Screw the news — we just want to hear what you have to say!
And then ABC News gets into the act, also going with the 'lotsa big pictures' format, but at least they still carry some of that pesky 'news' stuff down at the bottom.
But — speaking of 'social media' having an influence — check out the jaw-dropper that USA Today has become. If you have a tablet, notebook or smartphone, USA Today is the site for you! What do you mean, "web browser"? What's that?
And notice what's missing from the bottom half of the page. Yep, that pesky news stuff. Why bother!
It strikes me that there's a flaw in the logic of dumbing-down news sites to appeal to the "Ooh, lotsa pictures!" crowd. They're thinking they'll tap into this market, but my contention would be that the social media crowd doesn't read standard news sites to begin with, and, when it does, it reads the news off Google or Yahoo or MSN or AOL.
The good news is, while half of those abandoning these three digital train wrecks will end up on the left-leaning CNN or NBC sites, the other half will end up on Fox News. So I'd call it a net plus for our side.
And one thing I personally found interesting with these three particular sites going the social media route is their placement on my page of links. I have the links listed in the order I stop by every morning, first reading Fox to get the right-wing side of things, then CNN for the left side, then (formerly MSNBC) NBC News for the ultra-left. Then I look over the right- and left-wing Washington papers, then skim through the three lesser news sites:
Fox CNN NBC WashTimes WashPost ABC CBS USA
I find it interesting that the three news sites I find least consequential are the three that decided not to be news sites anymore.
... it was the first time in his career that he shared a debate stage with a serious opponent.
Think about it: John McCain was feeble. Alan Keyes, whom Obama beat in his 2004 Senate campaign, was crazy. All the Democrats who ran in 2008 were preposterous except Hillary Clinton, and she, as a beneficiary of nepotism, was highly overrated as a politician. He used Chicago-style dirty tricks to dispatch his original opponent in 2004, as well as the state senator he replaced back in the 1990s. The test he failed last night is one to which he had never been put.
Two more of the Obama administration’s crony corruption cheats are crumbling. These are but two of the lower profile Obama crony enrichment schemes that will need to be eliminated should we get a Republican administration after next November, and indicative of schemes we must be sure to expose should any Republicans try their version of crony capitalism.
I’ve often written about the scheme to tax tourists to the US to subsidize the highly profitable US tourism industry, companies like Disney. My exposes led to a 7,000 word expose in the Washington Post that scuttled the legislation, that is until President Obama and his heavily Democrat Congress took power after the 2008 elections. Then, the legislation was passed and signed. The leaders of this tourism travesty were heavy contributors to the Obama campaign. I last wrote about this boondoggle here (with links to earlier reporting.) The Washington Free Beacon has been keeping up with the story. Here’s its latest (with links to its earlier reporting).
The federal government’s latest taxpayer-funded effort to promote U.S. tourism is dogged by lavish spending, cronyism, and questionable accounting, according to a report released Thursday by two U.S. Senators.
Thermal windows can often add quiet or temperature moderation. But, exaggerated claims for the economic payback of energy efficiency are getting increased Federal Trade Commission attention. What a surprise! Several of the leading offenders are significant Obama contributors who received significant subsidies from the Obama administration’s so-called stimulus and at least one is now a failing business. McClatchy news service:
The FTC actions shine a spotlight on an industry that benefited from millions of dollars in “green” tax credits offered as part of the 2009 economic stimulus, and they reveal some of the pitfalls of zealous marketing, in business and in politics.
For all the caterwauling by Democrats about Bain, there’s no indication of corruption. That finger, actually, points at the Obama administration. But, it is a fair question to candidate Romney what he will do to end crony capitalism within his administration. And, then, let's hold his administration to transparency.
Obama has never been the nation’s most forceful debater, and he makes no secret of his disdain for the theatrical side of politics. If his conduct on the debate stage with Romney seemed oddly passive, it was in some ways just another manifestation of the president’s restrained approach to communicating with the electorate, whom he seems to believe — in the face of all existing evidence — are not swayed by electoral artifice.
Heck, in my area, I just paid $4.239, and that's for regular.
How're prices in your neck of the woods?
Update: YIPES! I just refilled the gas tank for a camping trip tomorrow, a day after than the above post, and the regular gas price jumped to $4.689 !!!!!!! And, reports say that the California price is expected to jump again. Looks like prices are high everywhere, with California now even topping Hawaii. But, Hawaii is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with high transport costs. What's California's excuse? Ordinary maintenance of local refineries removes some capacity, which can't be filled in with gas from neighboring states due to California having its own different higher cost fuel composition standards. So, on top of California and some other states not allowing new refineries to be built, on top of gas prices driven up by mandating corn in it, and world food markets driven up by our diversion of corn into the gas tank, and the dollar being devalued by debt so it costs more to buy oil, California wants to be Hawaii! I know, many of you say, set California adrift. Thanks to envirocrazies, California is adrift, in high costs, high debt, shortages, middle class bailing out, companies leaving. -- Steven Hayward, another California resident, at Hot Air, hopes without real expectation that California voters will wisen up.
This map, found by Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, neatly sums it up:
Mitt Romney was in control from the beginning. He was the alpha male, while Barack Obama was weak, hesitant, stuttering, often apologetic. The visuals were great for Romney and awful for Obama. Obama looked small, tired, defeated after four years of failure, out of ammo.
Romney was having fun. The O just wanted to go home and turn on the TV.
Best line from Romney: “I’ve been in business for 25 years. I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Romney said in the most devastating understatement of the night.
Obama was totally uncomfortable in the debate forum. As Tom Stemberg, Co-founder and former CEO of Staples said to Neil Cavuto, following the debate, “President Obama is terrific on his feet when no one is challenging him to the facts.”
What viewers saw last night was the real Obama — slow-witted, unable to think effectively on his feet, desultory in his pre-debate preparation, and thoroughly unimpressive without his beloved teleprompter.
My email from Barack at 12:42 am:
Bird Dog --
I hope I made you proud out there explaining the vision we share for this country.
Now we need to go win this election -- the most important thing that will happen tonight is what you do (or don't do) to help in the little time we have left:
It is a signal event when even some from the political left who has long sided with pro-Palestinian assertions wakes up and recognizes the horror that is Hamas.
In 2005, Israel unilaterally removed its military and residents from Gaza, leaving behind the infrastructure and commercial ventures Israel and Israelis had built. Muslim Brotherhood's spawn, Hamas, then took control over Gaza away from the Palestinian Authorities Fatah. Since, Gazans and Hamas have destroyed that inheritance and live off the charity of others, mostly Western. The thousands of rockets fired into Israel are excused by Western apologists.
But, the human rights abuses by Hamas against Gazans is finally being recognized by some in the anti-Israel camp.
In general, I thought of myself as someone who harbored few delusions about Hamas. Unlike an alarmingly large contingent of self-proclaimed leftists, I’ve never been willing or able to ignore the Islamic fascism that is the lifeblood of the group’s ideology, and that makes ridiculous any notion of it as a “resistance”. I confess, however, that I used to suspect there to be a degree of exaggeration and/or Zionist propaganda in the stories I would read about its moral policing.
Not so anymore. After meeting last weekend in Jordan with a group of Palestinian journalists that included three arrivals from Gaza, I was appalled to discover the reality is worse than I had dared imagine. Without me even mentioning the subject, they would almost tremble with rage as they described the party’s thuggery, palpably relieved at the opportunity to unload an intolerable weight off their chests.
…How “leftist”! How “revolutionary”!
The Middle East section of Human Rights Watch has long often carried the Palestinian meme as a major critic of Israel. Yet, Human Rights Watch’s latest report on Gaza is summed up in its release headline: “Gaza: Arbitrary Arrests, Torture, Unfair Trials.”
The 43-page report, “Abusive System: Criminal Justice in Gaza,” documents extensive violations by Hamas security services, including warrantless arrests, failure to inform families promptly of detainees’ whereabouts, and subjecting detainees to torture. It also documents violations of detainees’ rights by prosecutors and courts. Military courts frequently try civilians, in violation of international law. Prosecutors often deny detainees access to a lawyer, and courts have failed to uphold detainees’ due process rights in cases of warrantless arrest and abusive interrogations, Human Rights Watch found.
“After five years of Hamas rule in Gaza, its criminal justice system reeks of injustice, routinely violates detainees’ rights, and grants impunity to abusive security services,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Hamas should stop the kinds of abuses that Egyptians, Syrians, and others in the region have risked their lives to bring to an end.”
Human Rights Watch doesn’t let the Palestinian authorities in the West Bank get off lightly either:
Hamas’s rival in the West Bank, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, arrests and detains Palestinians arbitrarily, including Hamas members or sympathizers, and similarly subjects detainees to torture and abuse. The intra-Palestinian political rivalry remains a significant factor behind many Hamas abuses against detainees in Gaza, Human Rights Watch found.
Western funding, and Western apologists, keeps these two parasites on humanity existing, with little incentive to either decently treat those under their rule, stop siphoning away aid funds into leaders' foreign bank accounts, end hate propaganda among their residents, and cease attacks upon Israelis.
I don't remember it, but, according to the doctor, the first words out of my mouth when I woke up were,
I've had pleasanter experiences.
That sounds like me.
When I next woke up, I delivered a line I had practiced just for the occasion:
¡¿Dónde están las chicas calientes?!
That's "Where are the hot babes?", for those of you scoring at home. It's much funnier in Spanish because caliente literally means 'hot', so what I was really asking was, "Where are the women burning up with fever?"
Scoring in the clinic, however, proved more difficult. I couldn't believe the nurses didn't find my swollen, drooling, tube-laden body sexually appealing. I was also hampered by having to use a walker, which allowed the little vixens to scamper merrily away, dagnabbit.
What I'm saying is, my visit to the clinic was utter hell!
They also did some kind of operation, as I recall. The doctor said it was "just like a tonsillectomy — except at the other end." It turned out, however, that he told a blatant lie. I did not get a bowl of ice cream after it was over, like I did when I had my tonsils out when I was 12, so I'm still a little miffed about that.
As for my relatives in Georgia, I must have met 20 new blood relatives and about 3,000 new in-laws. We're a prolific bunch here in the South. While they were in sheer awe of being in the presence of a real, live Californian (granted, it's a small town), I don't think it was until I knocked out Pink Floyd's 'Celestial Voices' on the piano that they realized something different was going on. That piano looked a hundred years old and unquestionably had been played by ten thousand different hands, but somehow I doubt any Pink Floyd had ever been played on it.
I also doubt any Deep Purple had ever been played on my cousin's mandolin, but that's a different story.
Physically, I'm doing okay. Just weak, but that was expected. There's some residual pain but I have a veritable cornucopia of painkillers out there to choose from, lucky me. Besides costs, there are a few other advantages to having an operation in Mexico. One of them is that the doctors aren't hampered by all of that silly 'regulation' stuff and can ladle out the painkillers by the bucketful. I smuggled home dozens of 'samplers' from ten different brands. I'm currently going with Pain-B-Gon™, a finely-tuned mixture of Vicodin, OxyContin, various psychotropic drugs, all laced with the strongest caffeine allowable by law. It really hits the spot!
And let's not forget the real lesson from all this: that it was getting a complete physical that revealed the badness in the first place. As I said in the original Big C post, I was this close to skipping the colonscopy because it is, after all, a pain in the whatsis and takes extra time and money, but I'm obviously glad I didn't. I'm still facing some steep post-operative costs (expensive drugs + 3 visits to the Miami hospital), so if you missed out on the Save-Our-Doc campaign before and would like to help out, you can toss a few clams into the pot here.
Next up? Well, there seems to be some kind of debate going on tomorrow night, although I'm not sure of the details yet. I presume the GOP has exercised its right to use the Substitute Clause and have Newt Gingrich take Obama down a few notches in the warm-up round, but we'll have to see. I'll have a post on it tomorrow.
Again, my deepest thanks to everyone who helped out.
"The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact."
Conservatives mount strong efforts to undo the damage from media bias, but there is no serious talk in conservative circles about long-term strategies for gaining control of the media and using the media to build the conservative base. Left-wing bias in the media is just accepted as a constant, as immutable, almost as if it is a law of physics. The option of having conservative moderators hitting Obama with hard questions never even seemed to be an option. For the Romney-Ryan campaign, the key questions in the current election are how to point out Obama's record without being accused of negativity by Obama's protectors in the media and how to present their positions so as not to get painted as extremists.
The left's political strategy, on the other hand, has been to gain control of the sources of information that shape the culture and, in so doing, to determine the long-term direction of the nation.
The article is at Ricochet. The comments are good.
For young docs these days, it's about paying off $200,000 in loans (not to mention 3-4 years after that as an intern and resident on a pittance), the incredible burdens of paperwork and new regulations, conflicts between wanting to be independent and the security temptations of getting a salary.
The big change in the past 20 years is women becoming 50% of medical school students. When I went to med school, it was around 25%. Many of the women, I have observed, are happy working limited hours, do not mind being salaried, and do not welcome the burdens and risks of private practice, taking full personal responsibility for patients, being on call, etc. They want to have babies, with work as a sideline. It's a big change from the independent cowboy medical practice of the past. Those cowboys were my role models.
Without wanting to sound sexist, I do have to observe that women are more comfortable following the rules than men are.
A history of bankruptcy puts a nice ding on a person's credit rating and future employability. Even so, sometimes it's the only way to get a second chance in life if one has been highly irresponsibe and, hopefully, learned from it. Zero Hedge had this last Spring: Student Loan Debt Slaves In Perpetuity - A True Story Of "Bankruptcy Hell".
Naturally, cancelling out loans via bankruptcy will make lenders more cautious about lending to any student. But who is the biggest lender? Us, the government. Who is the biggest beneficiary? College administrations. Do you hear gripes about college administrator salaries? Nope, but college presidents make about the same as greedy CEOs.
Is this all simply about fear of Muslims, or do they really believe what they're saying? Regardless, their speech is offensive and should be banned. So should offensive Jihadist speech and the speech of all crazed Left-wing moonbats.
Killing some time before preparing my last meal........that is, the last meal before fasting for Yom Kippur until tomorrow night, I looked for videos about fasting at Youtube. I came across this parody video about the semi-fast imposed on our school children by Michelle Obama. Her "brainchild" is the national school lunch policy, limiting calories and pushing foods that children often don't care for.
Children protest that they are being starved. OK, a bit of exaggeration from the younguns, but not too far off the mark for growing kids and teens' needs. Here's their video:
The creation of a massive diversity bureaucracy to police the faculty for bias against women and URMs can be justified only if there is evidence that the faculty need such policing. No one has yet presented a single example of UC San Diego’s faculty discriminating against a highly ranked female or URM candidate because of skin color or gender. The opposite is of course the case: female and URM Ph.D.s enjoy enormous advantages in the hiring market at UCSD and everywhere else. A professor in the Geosciences Research Division of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, whose wife is a UCSD “faculty equity advisor,” sent me a self-righteous rebuke for my initial criticism of the new VC for EDI. I asked him if he knew of any instance where a UCSD hiring committee had merely overlooked a top-notch female or URM candidate because the department was not trying hard enough to “diversify.” He responded that the supply of qualified “diversity” candidates was “so low that the policing of faculty . . . is virtually irrelevant.”
Hall Monitors, at $250,000/yr. It reminds me of how every Russian vessel used to have a Political Officer on board.
One intriguing thing that happened while I was out of touch with humanity for a week was that three mainstream news sites completely changed their format. Much for the worse, I might add. They essentially stopped being 'news sites' by conventional definition.
Cover image from 
Trash Cams May Monitor Discarded Federally Imposed Vegetables
Chris Matthews: 
Damn global warming!
George Orwell, via 
Big Harvest Moon last night and tonight
