And the Obama-nations Just Keep on Comin'

Looks like Obama loyalists ordered the illegal use of government files to check out Joe the Plumber, whose crime was to question The One. Read more here.

Meanwhile, Obama has said that anyone who doesn't want higher taxes under his plan is selfish. But he's demonstrated just how selfish he is; not only is his brother living in squalor overseas, but his aunt is living in a slum in Boston, and Obama has done nothing to help her out.

And speaking of Obama selfishness, howsabout this look at Obama's charitable gifts for the past seven years?







It appears that Barack was giving 1% or less of his income to charity until he decided to run for President in 2006 (remember, his 2005 income would have been filed in 2006, after the point where Obama began to launch feelers for his Presidential run). And even now, his charitable donations are much lower than those greedy Republicans he so condemns (Bush, Cheney, or McCain).

Then there's the Obama hubris: he has exiled from his plane reporters who work for newspapers that didn't endorse him. This is, of course, in keeping with the petty vindictiveness of the Obama machine (as Joe the Plumber knows all too well).

What a dismal choice for a potential president.

My earlier analysis saw Obama as 1/3 Gatsby, 1/3 Babbitt, and 1/3 Stark (Willie, not Tony). I'd reduce the Gatsby ratio to about 5% (at least Jay tried to better himself), and increase the Babbitt and Stark to about 47.5% each.

Oh, and in reference to the whole Rashid Khalidi thing? One person who was there reports that there were comments made to Israeli genocide and the need for continued Palestinian terrorism, and that Obama never said one thing to disagree with any of this. Had it been McCain at the same rally, do you suppose for a moment that the LA Times would be burying that video?

More Obama-nations

Here's a great story about how, under Ayers and Obama, the Annenberg Challenge and Woods Fund distributed money to (among others) ACORN (the group that Obama has claimed to have little to do with), Obama's own church (with no reasons given), and the South Shore African Village Collaborative, a group who condemns American values and whose ideologies are more in line with the racism that was an inherent part of Jeremiah Wright's teachings. (Notice the usual Obama evasion--rather than deal with the issue, attack the news source. Maybe they can ban them from future interviews as well... it seems to be the other standard practice of Obama's propaganda machine.)

And speaking of Barbara West, the reporter who was banned from future interviews by Obama's Ministry of Propaganda--you'll notice that McCain and team had no problems with her for asking them hard questions.

And if you'd like to learn a little more about the radical extremism of the SSAVC and its radical racism, here's an insightful piece by Stanley Kurtz.

Meanwhile, even strongly pro-Democratic voices like Linda Bloodworth-Thomason recognize the bigotry and vitriol behind some of the pro-Obama media venues' assaults on Sarah Palin and its totally unbalanced pro-Obama propaganda.

And even Politico finds it hard to defend the LA Times' refusal to release the potentially damaging videotape of Obama at a gathering reportely rife with anti-Israel sentiment.

If a combination Babbitt-Gatsby-Stark like Obama wins this election, it'll be in large part because the media worked to make it happen.

Journalistic Integrity - 2008 Oxymoron

Here's a great piece by Michael Malone about the erosion of journalistic standards, particularly in regards to coverage of the 2008 election.

Why the Bailout Was a Bad Idea

So remember that $700 billion figure that someone at the Federal Reserve just made up on the spur of the moment? Remember how it became the holy grail of the bailout, and how that $700 billion given to banks was going to help them restore credit to American consumers and make it easier for the economy to recover?

Well, not so much.

It appears, according to this article citing an executive at Chase Bank, that the main purpose of all that money is to allow banks to use our money to buy other at-risk banks.

Read it for yourself.

And let's see if it's too late to get our money back...

More News You Won't Hear Much About

Did you hear that there's a video of Barack Obama attending and participating in an event in honor of radical Islamist Rashid Khalidi (an event that reportedly was strongly anti-Jewish)--but because the public dissemination of such video would work against Obama, the LA Times is refusing to release it or tell where they got a copy? (Do you think for a moment they'd hold back on a video if it showed John McCain at the same gathering?)

Or that tough questions regarding Barack Obama's socialist tendencies in fiscal policies not only don't get answered, they get the questioning reporter banned from any further interviews with the Obama-Biden media coup... err, campaign?

Or that within hours of Joe the Plumber's talk with Barack Obama, government computers were illegally used to access supposedly private information... and that information was leaked by Obama politicos in an attempt to discredit and/or smear Joe Wurzelbacher, the man who dared to question Obama?

Or that while people are arguing about the cost of Sarah Palin's clothes, no attention is being given to the $5+ million spent for the Greek Temple of Obama constructed for the Democrat's convention?

Or that Obama volunteers decided to withdraw their fraudulent Ohio ballots when they were told that they would face felony charges for voter fraud if they cast ballots without meeting the requirements?

Or that, in order to raise maximum funding while circumventing FEC regulations regarding overseas donations and untraceable funding, Barack Obama's donation website has purposely disabled all credit card security, allowing people to process credit card charges under false names and false addresses--the sort of thing that would result in a business's credit card processing account being shut down in days?

Unfortunately, you don't hear much about any of these things, because widespread national dissemination of this information might work against the media's attempted coronation of Barack Obama as the country's next President. But it's important for people to know that this is the modus operandi of the man who may become our next President.

As Orson Scott Card said, "would the last honest reporter please turn on the lights?"

Taxing the Rich, Huh?

The Democrats haven't won the election yet, and already they're looking to commit the largest middle-class theft in government history: they want to nationalize all the revenue in private 401k accounts, and turn these tax-free retirement accounts into huge sources of tax revenue. Read all about it here.

A few years ago, I heard someone who insisted that the next time a Democrat moved to the White House, this would be among the first sources of funding they would target. I thought for sure that he was wrong; surely they would never do anything so brazenly anti-middle class, something that would remove billions of dollars from the very people they claimed they were trying to help.

Guess I was wrong.

Let's hope that the word gets out on this in time for people to run some numbers and see just how much this would cost them. It appears that "spreading the wealth" isn't just a casual aside from Obama: it's the new Democrats' mantra, and no revenue is off limits.

Card Deals It Out

Here's a great piece by Orson Scott Card about the media's totally shameless attempts to present propaganda in place of news in order to influence the results of an election.

Had the news media exerted even a small percentage of the effort to investigate ACORN and Obama, or Ayers and Obama, that they've exerted in attempting to smear Joe the Plumber for his legitimate questions regarding Obama's socialist fiscal beliefs, then we might be able to call these guys reporters. Unfortunately, the purported news sources (major newspapers, television, and even news suppliers like AP) have abandoned any pretense of neutrality in this election; they're part of the campaign team now.

Daysed

I'm 20, 143 days old.

Ever figured out exactly how many days you've been alive? Ever since my brief death, I've calculated how many post-heart-attack days I've lived. Recently, I calculated backwards to the date of my birth, and now I have a script that updates my age by one day each time the clock hits midnight.

20,143 days. I remember so very many of them--some vividly, some in fragments and mental snapshots.

And there's something about a precise count that makes you want to avoid wasting a single day. When you're more than 55 years old, as I am, a day may not seem like much. But when you're 20,143 days old, a day seems more significant.

Think of it this way. Most of us make more than $20,143 a year. But I don't think there's a single one of us who'd pass up a free dollar, or who'd be willing to throw a dollar away for absolutely no purpose. So why should a day be less valuable than a dollar?

The Buck Stops Here

Remember a couple of months back, when I mentioned that I had let my TV Guide subscription lapse, leaving our home TV Guide-less for the first time in thirty-five years? Well, apparently I'm not the only one who decided the new guide-less, larger-size gossipy format was unnecessary--TV Guide has become a massive money-loser, and as a result the publisher has sold the magazine to another investor for $1.

That's right--TV Guide the publishing venture, once the second most profitable magazine in the US, has become such a money loser that the entire operation sold for 1/3 the price of a single issue. Don't take my word for it--read all about it here. I'll wait...

Even better, they get a $9 million-plus loan at less than current market rates in exchange for paying a buck. And when you consider how tough loans are to come by right now, that's doubly amazing.

It's also sort of sad. I remember a time when TV Guide was so integrally linked to my entertainment that the new issue was the first thing I grabbed from the stack of mail when it came in. We usually got our TV Guide on Thursday for shows starting on Saturday, giving me a scant two days jump on the first listings. Bear in mind that we had no VCRs at this time, so actually planning our schedule around must-see TV shows not only made more sense, it was necessary. There was no other way to see them, other than hope they'd be rerun at some point in the future.

When VCRs did come along, TV Guide made it possible for us to plan our schedules for viewing and for recording; I'd spend an hour or so scanning the lists for rarely-seen movies so that we could record them and watch them without having to sit up until the wee hours of the morning.

Back then, TV without TV Guide seemed only half as enjoyable. Now, TV Guide seems less useful than a number of media websites. Oddly enough, the one site I never visit is... tvguide.com.

I wish the new owners lots of luck. But until they can find a way to convince former diehards like me that the magazine has any value in today's world, there isn't a chance that they'll turn it around. I suspect that there will be no TV Guide five years from now... but I hope these guys can prove me wrong!

Random Thoughts

You may remember, if you've been reading my ramblings for a while now, that I had one problem with the Hyundai Genesis' Lexicon 17-speaker stereo system: they took off the random button, but they forgot to add a random feature to the software to compensate. So you can hook up an iPod just fine, and it'll play back wonderfully--but it wants to play back in alphabetical order and steadfastly refuses to randomize. I tried randomizing through the iPod itself, and it would work on a hit-or-miss basis on an "all song" basis, but nothing I tried would randomize songs in individual playlists.

Then someone suggested that I quit focusing on the two most obvious elements in the equation--the Lexicon system and the iPod--and instead turn my attention to the third element--the iTunes-running computer that puts the music on the iPod to begin with.

Turns out that iTunes' "smart playlist" feature allows you to create pre-randomized playlists; you can specify how many songs you want and set all sorts of qualifiers, then click once. The result? A totally randomized list built to your parameters.

Needless to say, once I verified this I spent a half an hour or so building Genesis versions of all my playlists, randomized and ready for listening. Hoorah!