Democrats Are Concerned Over Stimulus Plan Delays - WSJ.com

"WASHINGTON -- Democratic leaders are increasingly concerned that they won't be able to offer an economic stimulus package for congressional debate until late January because they haven't received a plan from President-elect Barack Obama's transition team.

Democrats initially had hoped to unveil details of the economic recovery package this week and to pass it by Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, so it would be ready for Mr. Obama's signature soon after his swearing-in. Estimates are that the plan will call for spending as much as $850 billion over two years."

Honeymoon is over and the wedding ceremony hasn't even concluded.

Washington Times - EXCLUSIVE: RNC draft rips Bush's bailouts

"We can't be a party of small government, free markets and low taxes while supporting bailouts and nationalizing industries, which lead to big government socialism and high taxes at the expense of individual liberty and freedoms," said Solomon Yue, an Oregon member and co-sponsor of a resolution that criticizes the U.S. government bailouts of the financial and auto industries. Republican National Committee Vice Chairman James Bopp Jr. wrote the resolution and asked the rest of the 168 voting members to sign it.

2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved - Telegraph

"Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects."

A Lesson in French Capitalism | WallStreetOasis.com

"The thing that bothers me most about socialism is not the lack of reward for achievement, but the lack of punishment for incompetence. In an American store she'd have been fired on the spot. Not here. She'll probably get a raise for pissing off another American. Unfortunately I don't think America is too far behind anymore. After electing a socialist President who wants nothing more than to 'level the playing field', can capitalism truly survive? Accountability is dead."

Good News: Nov. Real Consumer Spending Increase Sets 3-Year Record; Biz Press Stays Downbeat | NewsBusters.org

"The one positive report that I saw was written by the New York Times's Jack Healy; the headline is actually 'Consumers gain more purchasing power.' The only place I could find it was in Google cache; the Kansas City Star, which originally published it, no longer has it. It appears that Healy's employer, the Times, never ran it.

It's hard not to think, especially based on the preceding paragraph, that optimism is forbidden -- until, oh, maybe a week or so after after Barack Obama's stimulus package passes."

U.N. Push to Stem Misconduct Flounders - WSJ.com

'The U.N. isn't serious about cleaning up its act,' says James Wasserstrom, a former U.N. official in Kosovo who, after becoming a whistle-blower himself last year, was placed under investigation by the U.N. A 25-year veteran of the U.N., Mr. Wasserstrom, an American, was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing and recently filed a retaliation complaint with a U.N. appeals panel.

The U.N., says Mr. Wasserstrom, 'uses the whistle-blowing program to get its most ethical staff to stick their heads above ground in order to chop them off.'

WSJ's Annual Christmas Editorial - WSJ.com

"Along the road to Damascus the light shone brightly. But afterward Paul of Tarsus, too, was sore afraid. He feared that other Caesars, other prophets, might one day persuade men that man was nothing save a servant unto them, that men might yield up their birthright from God for pottage and walk no more in freedom."

On the Death of Deep Throat - HUMAN EVENTS

"In the early '60s, Robert Kennedy authorized Hoover to bug and tap Dr. Martin Luther King. When the FBI turned up film of King with loose women, LBJ's White House moved the photos to the Washington press.

Felt knew of this. The Post knew of this. The Washington press corps knew of this. Why didn't Felt and the Post blow the whistle on this squalid deed? Was it not so egregious as sending pizzas to Muskie's rally?"

New York Times Blames Housing and Financial Crisis on Bush | NewsBusters.org

"And what was this heinous catastrophic philosophy that caused all our nation s problems 'Americans do best when they own their own home.' Oh the humanity. Sadly much as the Times and its liberal colleagues conveniently forgot and or ignored all American history prior to March 2003 in order to blame the nation s problems on Bush and the invasion of Iraq the authors of this disgrace omitted and or skirted over virtually all the relevant pieces of legislation and issues that led to our current financial crisis -- as well as articles on the subject published by their very paper"

500M PROBLEMS FOR MADAME SECRETARY at DickMorris.com

"Pardon us for looking such generous gift horses in the mouth, but it is hard to imagine so many governments, monarchs and businessmen in the Middle East giving money unless it was with some hope of a political return. Will that return now come with the appointment of Sen. Clinton as secretary of state?

How can Hillary Rodham Clinton mediate and negotiate conflicts in the Middle East impartially when her husband’s library and foundation - over which he has total control - have been bankrolled by the very nations with whom she must negotiate?"

No it isn't!

Another Clinton Retread Joins Obama Administration

Browner also has an ethical cloud hanging over her head from her previous job in the Clinton Administration. On her last day in office, she oversaw the destruction of agency computer files in violation of a federal judge’s order to preserve its records. The Landmark Legal Foundation had been pressing Browner to disclose any special interest groups that may have influenced her last-minute regulatory actions at the EPA. Her solution to the problem was to delete files.

After two years, the federal judge held the EPA in contempt of court, but Browner avoided any punishment.

In her first term in the EPA, Browner was caught using taxpayer funds to send out illegal lobbying material to more than 100 grassroots groups.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich Says He's Innocent, Won't Step Down - cbs2chicago.com

Translation: My job prospects are nil, my credit cards maxed out, and if you don't leave me alone I'm taking some of you down with me.

Online Jihadists Plan for 'Invading Facebook' | Danger Room from Wired.com

"The al-Faloja poster suggests seven 'brigades' work together within Facebook. One will distribute videos and writing of so-called 'martyrs.' Another will spread military training material. Most of them will work in Arabic presumably. But one of the units will focus just on spread English-language propaganda through Facebook."

It couldn't happen to a nicer company.

Field Guide: Paul Pelosi, Jr., the fresh green prince of San Francisco

Read about the new American Aristocracy at Valleywag:

"# InfoUSA is best known for peddling lists of seniors with gambling addictions and serious diseases like Alzheimer's or cancer to opportunistic telemarketers. Gupta resigned as InfoUSA's CEO in July 2008. Pelosi is not listed on the company's investor-relations website as an officer of the company.

# Which raises the question: What was a former investment banker doing working as a mortgage loan officer, anyway?

# Pelosi is currently working as an advisor to NASA on environmental issues, and he's joined the board of Blue Earth Solutions, a recycling outfit. So basically, he dabbles in a lot of green work, but isn't holding down anything resembling a full-time job at the moment, as far as we can tell."

With economy in shambles, Congress gets a raise

"A crumbling economy, more than 2 million constituents who have lost their jobs this year, and congressional demands of CEOs to work for free did not convince lawmakers to freeze their own pay. [SURPRISE! Must be all those evil Republicans eh?]

Instead, they will get a $4,700 pay increase, amounting to an additional $2.5 million that taxpayers will spend on congressional salaries, and watchdog groups are not happy about it."

Emanuel talked directly to gov: source :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Gov. Blagojevich

"President-elect Barack Obama's incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had a deeper involvement in pressing for a U.S. Senate seat appointment than previously reported,[SURPRISE!] the Sun-Times has learned. Emanuel had direct discussions about the seat with Gov. Blagojevich, who is is accused of trying to auction it to the highest bidder."

And the winner is...

Journal of smitty_one_each (243267)

Sometimes I back-and-forth on Slashdot's Journals. Maybe because the articles themselves are so poorly chosen. This one (click the title) is about government deficits or something, and someone implied "oh just raise taxes!". (My remarks here have been extended and revised)...



I know people that call themselves "conservative" because they believe in raising taxes however much it takes to eliminate deficit spending. Such people I gather don't know much about how the government's budget process works nor how the funds allocated get sub-allocated within departments.

Conservatives (real ones that is), here there and everywhere increase deficits because it simply isn't possible (politically) for them to go to every department (or even a single one in most cases) and say "Fire half the staff, and auction off their office contents." Oh sweet Jesus if such a thing were only possible! Cutting taxes without reducing spending explicitly is called "starve the beast", and it helps to slow down increases in government spending (which we absurdly consider "inevitable"). Ironically, cutting taxes often results in increased government revenue for at least a while. But that's a topic for another day.

During the Clinton administration the government was closed down for part of a month so that he could engage in a pissing contest with the Republican Congress. Go read up on all the disastrous consequences of that shutdown...

Back yet? The only thing that was a disaster was the the Republicans gave in. Government workers who I spoke with were at first enjoying their free time off. They lost no vacation time and eventually got paid for staying home. But some of them worried that things were going a bit TOO well without them, and indeed it was. "Critical services" were exempt from this political farce, but the building I worked in was near emptied nonetheless. The group I worked in were not on the "critical services" list, but we contractors didn't want to go without pay for the duration (got that?: government workers were paid for staying home, contractors were not, even though it was contractors that mostly did the work while government people stood around and watched) so one of our bosses found a loophole regarding how we were funded (not taxpayers money as it turned out) that allowed us to continue working. In fact we probably got more work done in those few weeks than ever before or since without all the babbling interruptions from our government taskmasters.

Obama claimed during his campaign that he would approach government waste with a scalpel rather than a hatchet. I'm not going to let anyone forget that.

Clinton claims to have balanced the budget not only be increasing taxes again, but by cutting government. What he means by that is that he didn't reverse course on a military base closings plan that was set into motion by his predecessor. God bless him for that. As far as I know that was the last foreign policy decision that Clinton made before launching some cruise missiles somewhere far far away from Monica Lewinski.

Obama will receive a windfall in the form of (once again) savings on our military budget as we withdraw troops from, well pretty much everywhere I hope, and not because I'm an isolationist, or anti-military. I think the world needs to grow up and stop waiting for us to come in and save the day all the time. Let Germany and France become yet again fearful of what Russia (or Iran for that matter) might do to them if they get into a bad mood. In the process we will learn that former military people don't necessarily make good social workers, there are no farm or factory jobs for them to go back to and our police forces are already well supplied with people who think they are occupying a foreign country (hey did you read about that?!).

I'm just dying to see that Obama scalpel at work. I think he'll wish he had promised to use a hatchet after all.

Thomas Sowell in his book "Basic Economics" starts out with this definition of the term:

"Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses."

Every ten or fifteen years we apparently need a refresher course (or at least some people do).

I hear the school bell ringing now.

Apple CEO Jobs absent from Macworld lineup - Yahoo! News

"A senior vice president of marketing will deliver the opening keynote instead. And the computer and iPod maker says it won't attend the Macworld Expo after 2009.

Apple shares dropped nearly 4 percent in after-hours trading."

AIEEEE! | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD

Big Government Breeds Big Corruption - HUMAN EVENTS

The idea that big government is inherently corrupting is as old as America itself. It was part of the Founders’ case for casting off the chains of the British monarchy.

More recently, the principle that big government breeds big corruption was perhaps expressed best by humorist P.J. O’Rourke, who said:

“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”

The 168-Hour Work Week | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD

"If the line between your work and home life hasn’t yet been blurred by near-ubiquitous Internet connectivity, just you wait. Because by 2020 it’s likely to have been erased entirely."

The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry

This surely has to be the longest blog post ever, by anyone, on any subject.

A good read too.

Yellowstone Test

Posting Youtube

ICECAP: "Proof" We Are Causing Polar Warming Melts Away in the Cold Light of Reality

"The climate industry relies on alarmism to maintain a steady flow of research grants and financial contributions but none of its apocalyptic visions are coming to pass. Politicians should take note. See letter here. Note the ice extent in the arctic increase in October was the greatest in history."

Ex-Yahoos Weigh in on Their Choices for New Yahoo CEO | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD

"Perhaps therein lies the problem–it is still hard to define precisely what Yahoo is and is not, even for its ex-employees."

As I’ve often predicted, Yahoo and others (AOL, Facebook and Microsoft predominantly) are developing hernias trying to keep up with Google.

AOL is discontinuing XDrive (a free 5 Gig storage area) and as I had created an account there for testing I decided to now test the process for offloading your data. It doesn’t work. At all. Further investigation showed that there are forums filled with pleas for help from users of this “product” going back more than a year. OK, little known product anyway, who cares eh?

So, while I was at it, I decided to check on my 5 gig (now 25) area on Microsoft live. While they haven’t outright lost my data, the tools for unloading or even checking on it only work intermittently, time-outs, data errors, files said to have been downloaded (as JPEGs in my case) only to find the files are actually snippets of HTML (great security!). I was able to request that entire folders be downloaded as zip files, and this worked.

Finally, long ago I had “deposited” some photo laden e-mail messages to my Yahoo e-mail address just to try out the “unlimited” capacity of their latest effort. Not surprisingly (at this point) the oldest of these messages were “unreachable” leading me to wonder if Yahoo hasn’t broadcast them out into the interstellar depths for safekeeping.

All of these products are offered as free (with some restrictions) or as paid services with the restrictions at least partially lifted (I’ve read that Yahoo’s POP service doesn’t even work well if you pay for it; paying XDrive users were treated no better than the free accounts from what I could see).

So my point is that many of these new web services have turned out to be as much houses of cards as have some of Wall Street’s accounting practices.

As in that case, I’m against a bail-out. For providing services that bear little resemblance to the hype, companies should expect only one outcome, and Yahoo is the first of many to realize this outcome.

If they survive, I would definitely prescribe that they attempt no further heavy lifting.

Rahm ducks reporters' questions on Blago :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: 44: Barack Obama

The way they get when they're caught:

“You’re wasting your time,” Emanuel said. “I’m not going to say a word to you. I’m going to do this with my children. Dont do that. I’m a father. I have two kids. I’m not going to do it.”

Asked, “Can’t you do both?” Emanuel replied, “I’m not as capable as you. I’m going to be a father. I’m allowed to be a father,” and he pushed the reporter’s digital recorder away.

NBC's Lee Cowan: Blagojevich 'Fell Victim to History' | NewsBusters.org

"DICK SIMPSON, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, CHICAGO: Every other city just about in the United States has gotten rid of their political machines. We've only updated and modernized ours."

Questions Arise About the Obama/Blagojevich Relationship

"But there remain questions about how Blagojevich knew that Mr. Obama was not willing to give him anything in exchange for the Senate seat -- with whom was Blagojevich speaking? Did that person report the governor to the authorities?

And, it should be pointed out, Mr. Obama has a relationship with Mr. Blagojevich, having not only endorsed Blagojevich in 2002 and 2006, but having served as a top adviser to the Illinois governor in his first 2002 run for the state house."

Isn't there an old saying: "If you swim in the sewer you're going to get shit on you."

If not there should be.

Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements - Wikipedia

I just found a reference (click title link) to this info in a Slashdot posting:

System/370

All sensitive instructions in the System/370 are privileged: it satisfies the virtualization requirements.

Motorola MC68000

The Motorola MC68000 has a single unprivileged sensitive instruction:

* MOVE from SR

This instruction is sensitive because it allows access to the entire status register, which includes not only the condition codes but also the user/supervisor bit, interrupt level, and trace control. In most later family members, starting with the MC68010, the MOVE from SR instruction was made privileged, and a new MOVE from CCR instruction was provided to allow access to the condition code register only.

IA-32 (x86)

(Main article:X86 virtualization)

The IA-32 instruction set contains 17 sensitive, unprivileged instructions[3]. They can be categorized in two groups:

* Sensitive register instructions: read or change sensitive registers and/or memory locations such as a clock register or interrupt registers:
o SGDT, SIDT, SLDT
o SMSW
o PUSHF, POPF
* Protection system instructions: reference the storage protection system, memory or address relocation system:
o LAR, LSL, VERR, VERW
o POP
o PUSH
o CALL, JMP, INT n, RET
o STR
o MOV

The Slashdot article here, concerns a new Google initiative to allow direct execution of X86 code from within the browser (and most likely the end goal would be a faster web based desktop replacement (which is a good goal). My comment:

Thanks for your comment and the links. Every time I run across an article like this and sigh, wishing I had the technical cojones to explain why it is that we were doing things like this on mainframes in the 80s with complete safety... and continuing to wonder why Intel couldn't just COPY the damned concepts if they can't figure out how to implement them from scratch.

Our world continues to be saddled with a half assed operating system running on a third rate architecture and for no other reason that technology takes a back seat (or maybe it's more like back of the bus) to marketing, bribery and collusion (with an unhealthy dose of buyer ignorance thrown in for good measure).

I continue to hope that good technology will win out eventually, although I'm almost convinced at this point that it will have to come from some country that hasn't been bought out by the Borg.

I wonder though, and maybe you know, why isn't the Power-PC mentioned in the Wikepedia article. I would assume because of its origin that it is closer to the 370 than to the Intel architecture in being fully virtualizable, a concept apparently not on the "roadmap" that Steve Jobs kept referring to in his rationale for Apple's switch to Intel. The Power-PC represented our best hope of escaping the Intel monoculture and I'd like nothing better than to once again have a mainstream non-Intel (and non-Intel-like) choice when I pick my next laptop.

Of course if Intel had a deserved (I'm being generous) third of the market then what Google is doing with this initiative would be dead in the water (as it probably should be).

FT.com / Columnists / Gideon Rachman - And now for a world government

"But this “problem” also hints at a more welcome reason why making progress on global governance will be slow sledding. Even in the EU – the heartland of law-based international government – the idea remains unpopular. The EU has suffered a series of humiliating defeats in referendums, when plans for “ever closer union” have been referred to the voters. In general, the Union has progressed fastest when far-reaching deals have been agreed by technocrats and politicians – and then pushed through without direct reference to the voters. International governance tends to be effective, only when it is anti-democratic."

Google Online Security Blog: Native Client: A Technology for Running Native Code on the Web

"Here at Google we believe you shouldn't have to choose between powerful applications and security. That's why we're working on Native Client, a technology that seeks to give Web developers the opportunity to make safer and more dynamic applications that can run on any OS and any browser."

Hit & Run > Me Am Part of Dumbest Generation! Is You Too? - Reason Magazine

Obama: Don't stock up on guns :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: 44: Barack Obama

"I believe in common-sense gun safety laws and I believe in the second amendment" Obama said at a news conference. "Lawful gun owners have nothing to fear. I said that throughout the campaign. I haven't indicated anything different during the transition. I think people can take me at my word."

But National Rifle Association spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said it's not Obama s words — but his legislative track record — that has gun-buyers flocking to the stores.

C-SPAN Replay of Obama on Meet the Press

Emphasis has changed from health care etc. to job creation initiatives. Still no specifics, just platitudes. I'm still trying to figure out how exactly we do a major re-work of the Interstate highway system. Just build more big roads from new points A to B? I can just picture the bribes flowing now.

Brokaw asks about the notion of having an "Automobile Czar". No straight answer. Asking the question again, Brokaw at least got this out of him:

"We don't want government to run companies, government doesn't do that very well."

So Obama gets a B+ in economic reality checking from me.

To get an A+ he should have added:

"Government doesn't do a very good job of running government. We need to set a level playing field and then get out of the way, letting the American economy work for us, instead of us trying to work against it."

The good news is that Obama is putting his "team" (he uses the word a lot) together now rather than waiting until mid-way through his first term as Clinton did. The bad news is that his "team" is mostly Clinton retreads. For anyone who thought that Clinton (and his team) were actually responsible for the good economy that Clinton was blessed with, you are about to get an education.

On Iraq, the obfuscation continues. Success in the war (after the "surge") is being falsely characterized as a move by Bush toward an Obama draw-down policy. Hilarious.

Elgan: Why you can't trust 'friends' on Facebook

"Facebook represents a perfect storm of fraud factors. The whole 'friend' system creates trust but the reality of social networks prevents verification that people are who they say they are. How to meet new people and rob them blind While some Facebook fraud involves strangers posing as existing 'friends ' other types involve making new 'friends.'"

Auto aid still uncertain, job losses feared - Yahoo! News

"Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee, said the economy would be devastated if an automaker were forced into bankruptcy or shut down."

Dat's Fwank to you buddy!

The photos of these congressmen holding their heads and grimacing as though they are actually capable of a coherent thought process is priceless. Oscars to all!

Microsoft Online Goes Extra Crispy"

"WSJ: Qi, what are your first priorities for helping Microsoft improve its competitive position on the Internet?

QI LU: I haven't started yet, but looking from outside, at the fundamental level, product quality, user experience is the key to being competitive in this space that we're in. Focusing on fundamental areas such as talent, core infrastructures, basic processes of doing things will be very important areas for me to focus. The way I do things I usually always prefer to have a very clear strategy and be very focused. At the same time to be very rock solid, and crisp in execution."

DispatchPolitics : Worker says 'Joe the Plumber' cover-up was forced upon her Columbus Dispatch Politics

The state worker who unwittingly ran an improper child-support check on the man known as Joe the Plumber told lawmakers yesterday that a deputy director later "dictated" how she was supposed to cover it up. Vanessa Niekamp an administrator for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services Office of Child Support and a 15-year state employee said that when Deputy Director Doug Thompson came into her office "He appeared very upset his neck was bright red and he was shaking. He closed my door." Thompson told her she must write an e-mail to the agency s information-security officer and then 'dictated word for word' what she wrote Niekamp said. He also reminded her that she could be fired at any time she said.

...

"Both Doug and Carri can access the (child-support) system and could have accessed a file without my involvement," Niekamp said. "To this day, I do not understand why they asked me to look at this information when they could have easily done this themselves."

One More Question...

Incoming Obama administration director of speechwriting Jon Favreau (L) and a friend pose with a cardboard cutout of incoming Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a party. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

Welcome to Idiocracy. As sponsored by, and now exposed by, your Washington Post.

Business is good.

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | China 'faces mass social unrest'

"'The redistribution of wealth through theft and robbery could dramatically increase and menaces to social stability will grow ' Zhou Tianyong a researcher at the Central Party School in Beijing wrote in the China Economic Times. 'This is extremely likely to create a reactive situation of mass-scale social turmoil ' he wrote."

IBM Creates 'Microsoft-Free' Desktop - WSJ.com

"Deploying your technology this way is going to save you something more than 50% of your total costs," says Jeff Smith, IBM's vice president for open source and Linux. "As customers face an increasingly challenging economic situation, they're looking at everything they're spending money on."

After I noticed this all over the place as news I also noticed that the original announcement was in August.

A Perfect Introduction to Congress (Cato @ Liberty)

"Take, for example, spending. What was proposed as a $71 million project in the early 1990s became a $265 million endeavor a decade later. By the time work got underway in 2002, the price tag was up to $368 million. Tomorrow, the ribbon will be cut on a $621 million project." (Orig: WaPo)

Reid: We won't smell the tourists anymore

"My staff tells me not to say this but I'm going to say it anyway" said Reid in his remarks. "In the summer because of the heat and high humidity you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol. It may be descriptive but it's true."

Web 2.0: The bubble that wasn't

"Web 2.0 was a bubble that never inflated — a shimmery illusion that popped well before we stopped talking about it. Precious few people got rich from the notions its proponents championed, such as user-generated content and social networks."

It's hard (for me anyway) to not spend a lot of time trying to rationalize what in the long run turns out to be irrational behavior in others.

Facebook, Myspace and others have to be given credit for providing a clustering point for users without actually providing much in the way of services. Twenty megs of photos are converted by Facebooks homegrown version of Flickr into a few hundred K of postage stamp images. Users can spam their friends inboxes with messages, but Facebook (Myspace, etc) provide no means to receive e-mail nor do they have to worry about where to store it.

YouTube on the other hand (and Flickr, Picasaweb, Google Docs, etc.) provide tons of value (in terms of bandwidth, disk space, complex programming) and in most cases no monetization mechanism.

I have to think that eventually value will prevail, if only after Flickr, Picasaweb, and other storage sites shut down or are severely limited and all the things that make money off of simply linking to such things must either provide their own facilities or become suddenly less useful.

Google's success has caused Microsoft to invest many millions in data centers that they haven't yet figured out how to use. Eventually the muscles (at Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to name the largest of the well known ones) that do the heavy lifting of the Internet will represent valuable assets, even if they have to change hands a bit to get actually paid for.

The irony of course is to look back on media of ten to fifteen years ago where "expensive" mainframes were being replaced by inexpensive commodity PCs. The realization of these predictions is almost unrecognizable in today's world.

Which Media Mogul Would You Rather Be Right Now: Arianna Huffington or Jim Cramer? | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD

Internet properties that mainly point to content (and there is a very long list of these) melt down pretty quickly when they put the underlying providers of content out of business (or throttle them to the point of bankruptcy).

But you don't have to think too hard to find other inequities that don't involve the Internet... Like the thousands of PBS affiliates in the 70's that relied on government funding to pay for content mostly originating from the BBC (also government funded). Today we have "hundreds" of cable channels most of which are devoid of any original material, and most local papers consist largely of "wire stories" augmented by regurgitated police blotters and high school sports results.

It's easy to see where we need to be with a 100 percent on-demand system, but it's hard to see how we get there with so many hands out expecting to be paid for somebody else's work.

Will the tyranny of the middleman never end?

Douglas Adams had it right in his extended story line where all such people were convinced that they needed to be sent on the first space-ship to found a new planet... I won't give away the rest of it, but it accurately portrays the predicament we perpetually find ourselves in.

Colonizing Mars, or the Moon, for God's sake anywhere fairly out of reach would certainly at least provide us with some short term relief.

Bon voyage Arianna!

Microsoft is hugely profitable - just not where Google rules - Nov. 26, 2008

"A different Microsoft executive responded testily when approached at an industry event in San Francisco with the query that is the headline of this article. He argued that Microsoft is all that stands between Google and the destruction of ad-supported media as we know it. 'We re doing this for you ' he snapped jabbing his finger into the sternum of a startled Fortune writer."

Microsoft trying to save us from a monopoly? Oh puhlease! Pull the other one.

Banks Sued No Matter What They Do

"Banks get sued for discrimination no matter what they do. If they don’t make enough loans in low-income, predominantly minority neighborhoods, they get accused of “redlining,” and are subject to sanctions under politically-correct laws like the Community Reinvestment Act, which contributed to the financial crisis by pressuring lenders to make risky mortgage loans."

Rubin Defends His Role at Citigroup - WSJ.com

Its troubles have put the former Treasury secretary in the awkward position of having to justify $115 million in pay since 1999, excluding stock options, while explaining Citigroup's $20 billion in losses over the past year and a government bailout of at least $45 billion.

Mr. Rubin's salary made him one of Wall Street's highest-paid officials -- and a controversial figure among Citigroup shareholders and some executives, who questioned whether his limited duties justified the big paydays.

"Even though he has no 'operating' responsibilities, he still has a fiduciary responsibility as a board member," said William Smith, a New York money manager and frequent critic of Citigroup's current management and board. "He has overseen the entire meltdown, yet been compensated as an operating employee while bragging about having no operating responsibility." Mr. Rubin can't "have it both ways," Mr. Smith added.

Switching Off Standby Mode - WSJ.com

"The cumulative result is huge. A study by the European Commission found that Europeans waste €7 billion ($9 billion) a year paying for appliances in standby mode, which account for about 10% of total energy use. The drain can be higher. A study by the University of California, Berkeley, found that such snoozing machines consume as much as 26% of electricity used in gadget-stuffed homes in California."

Growing a Language, by Guy Steele

Beware the church of climate alarm - Miranda Devine - Opinion - smh.com.au

"Plimer says creationists and climate alarmists are quite similar in that 'we re dealing with dogma and people who when challenged become quite vicious and irrational'. Human-caused climate change is being 'promoted with religious zeal … there are fundamentalist organisations which will do anything to silence critics. They have their holy books their prophet is Al Gore. And they are promoting a story which is frightening us witless using guilt and urging penance.'"

Obama's Rich Revelation - WSJ.com

"The vote in the Senate was 82 to 13. Mr. Obama missed the roll call issuing a campaign statement saying that the bill was 'far from perfect' and would have preferred 'tighter payment limits.' However he added that 'with so much at stake we cannot make the perfect the enemy of the good.' And he then went on to rake Mr. Bush and John McCain who opposed the bill for 'saying no to America s farmers and ranchers no to energy independence no to the environment and no to millions of hungry people.' In other words given the chance to support cuts in farm subsidies for the rich Mr. Obama chose instead to attack his Republican opponents for doing precisely that."

Socialist Republic - HUMAN EVENTS

"Barack Obama and George W. Bush seem to have come away from their study of the Great Depression with similar conclusions:

To wit: After the Crash of 1929, the Federal Reserve did not move fast enough to save the banks and inject cash into the economy. Second, the New Deal, far from being wastrel deficit spending, was not bold enough. So it was that America wallowed in depression for a decade until the unbridled spending and mammoth deficits of World War II pulled us out.

Bush and Obama seem determined not to make the same mistake.

We are all Keynesians now."

YouTube - Jimmy Kimmel goes to black barbershop to see how to properly joke on Barack Obama

Despite Bells and Whistles, 'Office of President-Elect' Holds No Authority - FOXNews.com Transition Tracker

"President-elect Barack Obama is looking very presidential these days. When he makes an announcement he is ringed by American flags and stands behind a lectern that has a very presidential-looking placard announcing 'The Office of the President-Elect.'

But the props are merely that. Under the Constitution there is no such thing as the Office of the President-elect. Technically Obama will not even become the president-elect until the Electoral College convenes after the second Wednesday in December and elects him based on the results of the Nov. 4 general election as stated in the Constitution."

Musical Chairs at MSN: Here’s a Partial Scorecard of What’s What | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD

And Macbeach kicks Microsoft in the gonads. Again.

What Happened to the Digital Music Boom? Ask Apple. | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD

"Big music ignored digital music for a long time. But over the last few years, that’s changed. Now the industry is hoping that fast-growing digital revenue can help it overcome slumping CD revenue.

That has yet to happen."

Some apocryphal points:

I have an Apple computer with iTunes, and a Linux based machine. I’ve used iTunes in the past to download music, and then go through a two step (burn to CD and then rip to make files to play on my Linux based machine). Amazon now makes it easy to download unencrypted MP3 files directly (Apple has this option for some things too but at a premium).

I gave an iPod to a Windows user who loved the device, but hated iTunes. While I like it just fine on my Apple machine, I can see why it might not quite fit in with everything else for a Windows user. They made iTunes for Windows simply to tap into the large non-Apple marketplace. It shows. If Amazon can make a downloader for Linux, so can Apple. They need to
stop trying to make Apple computer users out of iTunes, iPhone and iEverything-else product users.

Bundling a dozen tunes into an “album” is a dead concept, just as justifying higher ad rates for a magazine based on the cost of lumber is a dead concept.

While it is true that our youth have been purged by our school systems of any basis for ethical behavior, they are also too too lazy and too spoiled to steal an MP3 file when they can more easily pay 99 cents for it. Hidden behind industry claims of losing money to theft is the reality that they are losing $15 off the sale of an “album” with three good songs on it.

Music production equipment is dirt cheap compared with what it used to be. Nobody is fooled by the notion that the middlemen in this industry are earning their keep. Someone needs to tell them that continuing to wear those party hats simply makes them look like dunces.

Op-Ed Columnist - Admit We Don’t Know - NYTimes.com

"So I hope the best and the brightest who will be joining the new president will at least entertain the possibility that a lot of what they think they know is wrong. I trust they’ll remember that successful economic policies in the past have pulled together elements from unlikely sources, and that they’re as likely to find wisdom from reading political economists like Friedrich Hayek or Joseph Schumpeter, or Keynes himself, as from poring over the latest academic paper in a peer-refereed economics journal."

Start-Up Takes on 'Patent Trolls' - WSJ.com

"RPX, in response, plans to become what it calls a 'defensive patent aggregator,' buying patents to keep them from firms that might use them as the basis of lawsuits or to press for licensing payments. Companies that pay a fixed annual fee receive licenses to the patents purchased by RPX, which pledges never to assert them."

Spamhaus: Microsoft Now 5th Most Spam Friendly ISP - Security Fix

"'We have been notifying Microsoft about this for some months now at a high level that the abuse at livefilestore.com we believe now exceeds any genuine use of that service that may exist,' Cox said. He added that while Spamhaus has not yet listed any major Microsoft properties on its block list, it has listed a couple of smaller Microsoft domains to get their attention."

UPDATE 1-New York Times cuts dividend, 'reevaluates' assets | Deals | Mergers & Acquisitions | Reuters

"The company is under increasing pressure from declining advertising revenue and circulation as more people get their news online. It also is under pressure from Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp (NWSa.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) international media conglomerate bought The Wall Street Journal with a mission of knocking the Times off its perch as the U.S. newspaper of record."

Better than the story are the comments, sampled:

In what may be the most difficult year in the past 50 or so, the one bright shining light may be the demise of the New York Times. Let's just all hope this worthless rag goes under, wipes out the family financially, and leaves the sarcastic, miserable Maureen Dowd looking for some two bit blog to spew her liberal trash. A fitting end to a piece of garbage.

Cancelled our subscription after 20 years due to the over-the-top bias in this election cycle. Happy to have done our part in bringing the NYT to heel!

What!? You mean people aren't willing to pay for the exact same liberal bias they get bombarded with everywhere for free? Astounding![On the green side think of all the trees saved and the tons of CO2 not dumped into the atmosphere when the NYT presses finally grind to a halt.]

I couldn't have said it better.

Judge orders release of 5 terror suspects at Gitmo

"The Justice Department last month backed off the embassy bombing accusations, but said the six men were caught and detained before they could join terrorists' global jihad. The Justice Department said it needed to be proactive against threats, especially in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

The detainee's lawyers denied the men ever planned to join the battlefield. Even if they had, the lawyers argued, they did not fit Leon's definition of an enemy combatant because they never joined the terrorist fighters.

The cases of more than 200 additional Guantanamo detainees are still pending, many in front of other judges in Washington's federal courthouse."

Think very carefully about this. It means we are going back to a system of treating terrorism like just any other crime, mainly in that the crime has to be committed before any law enforcement action can take place. It's very rare in this country or elsewhere that you read about people jailed for planning to commit a murder or robbery. While there are laws that could be brought to bear in such situations, it just isn't practical to do so. Why? Because doing so would in almost every case involve law enforcement people "spying" on the populace. Since 9/11 not so much the law has changed, but the methods and emphasis have been changed to give law enforcement people a bit of wiggle room. It may well be that thousands of lives and millions of dollars worth of infrastructure have been saved in the process.

Clean Energy 2030 - a knol by Jeffery Greenblatt

"The energy team at Google has been analyzing how we could greatly reduce fossil fuel use by 2030. Our proposal - 'Clean Energy 2030' - provides a potential path to weaning the U.S. off of coal and oil for electricity generation by 2030 (with some remaining use of natural gas as well as nuclear), and cutting oil use for cars by 44%."

I'm not sold on this carbon as devil concept, except in that cutting carbon cuts a lot of other what might be called "real pollution" along with it. If it can be done, AND save money, I'm all for it.

It remains to be seen whether we are saving ourselves from "global warming" while our world is actually entering another ice age. We may yet see a day where pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere becomes yet another government mandate.

Google Public Policy Blog: Homes with tails

"The idea of customer-owned fiber may seem odd at first, but it is important to remember that many items that consumers buy today would have seemed very strange not long ago. Until the personal computer, a computer was something that only large companies owned. For decades, telephones were available only for lease, not for purchase. Fiber to the home could be the next technology that moves into the realm of consumer property."

EtherPad: Realtime Collaborative Text Editing

"The perfect way to collaborate on a text document and keep everyone literally on the same page."

Alberto Vilar: A villain of the last boom convicted

"What brought Vilar down ultimately, was the dotcom bust. He rode big bets on Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo in the '90s to make billions of dollars, and his net worth peaked at $950 million. After the Nasdaq crashed in 2000, though, investors say Vilar promised to put their money in safe interest-bearing accounts — and instead, kept investing it in hopeless tech stocks. All the while, he kept giving away money to charities that he didn't have."

Techdirt: Microsoft Realizes No One Wants To Pay Microsoft To Fix Its Own Security Flaws

"Maybe a few years down the road Microsoft will simply move on to option three, and make software that doesn't require separate security software."

NAH!!

PC Magazine Goes 100% Digital - Ziff Davis Media by PC Magazine

"The January 2009 issue (Volume 28, Issue 1) of PC Magazine will mark a monumental transition for the publication. It is the last printed edition of this venerable publication. Of course, as with any technology-related enterprise, this is not the end, but the beginning of something exciting and new.

Starting in February 2009, PC Magazine will become a 100-percent digital publication."

Official Google Blog: Lively no more

"That's why, despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year."

We hardly knew ye!

(actually never knew ye, as I don't have a Windows machine)

Cubicle Culture: Facebook less like a college dorm than you'd think

"One imagines Facebook as a geek utopia, where hackers who dropped out of college play Rock Band all day, then stay up all night coding. The reality: It's as depressingly Dilbertian as any other company — and COO Sheryl 'No-Fun' Sandberg is making sure it keeps getting more boring every day."

The Monty Python Channel on YouTube

YouTube - How Obama Got Elected

Official Google Blog: LIFE Photo Archive available on Google Image Search

"The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s; and the entire works left to the collection from LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen. These are just some of the things you'll see in Google Image Search today."

Gartner: 85 percent of enterprises using open source | The Open Road - CNET News

"I think it's more likely that Gartner's biggest concern is that open-source software firms (and communities) pay it little money for its research. The biggest danger from open source may actually be to Gartner's P&L statement, not to the enterprises that adopt open-source software."

Howard Kurtz - Journalists, Glorying in Obama's Moment

It is hard to find a precedent in American history. Ronald Reagan was a marquee star because of his Hollywood career, but mainly among older voters, since he made his last movie 16 years before winning the White House in 1980. Jack Kennedy was a more formal figure after winning the 1960 election -- "trying to look older than he was, because he thought youth was a handicap in running for president," Beschloss says -- but quickly took on larger-than-life dimensions.

"The Kennedy buildup goes on," James MacGregor Burns wrote in the New Republic in the spring of 1961. "The adjectives tumble over one another. He is not only the handsomest, the best-dressed, the most articulate, and graceful as a gazelle. He is omniscient; he swallows and digests whole books in minutes; he confounds experts with his superior knowledge of their field. He is omnipotent."

Soon afterward, Kennedy blundered into the Bay of Pigs debacle.

‘Intellectuals’

"How have intellectuals managed to be so wrong, so often? By thinking that because they are knowledgeable— or even expert— within some narrow band out of the vast spectrum of human concerns, that makes them wise guides to the masses and to the rulers of the nation.

But the ignorance of Ph.D.s is still ignorance and high-IQ groupthink is still groupthink, which is the antithesis of real thinking."

Spitzer as Victim - WSJ.com

Suggested alternate title: The Audacity of Arrogant Asshats

"Spared a criminal charge, Mr. Spitzer is now re-emerging to offer advice on how to reregulate Wall Street and to assert that he was right all along about everything (save the call girls). The man who forced new management on Marsh & McLennan and AIG, to the great detriment of their shareholders, now points to AIG's failure as evidence of his success. But of course no one knows what would have happened to AIG had Mr. Spitzer not forced the company's board to fire Hank Greenberg as CEO on dubious grounds; what we do know is that the managers who replaced Mr. Greenberg three years ago, to the pleasure of Mr. Spitzer, had no idea what they were doing."

The Forces Driving Women Out of Computer Science - NYTimes.com

"What’s particularly puzzling is that the explanations for under-representation of women that were assembled back in 1991 applied to all technical fields. Yet women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor’s degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys."

Murdoch to media: You dug yourself a huge hole

"My summary of the way some of the established media has responded to the internet is this: it's not newspapers that might become obsolete. It's some of the editors, reporters, and proprietors who are forgetting a newspaper's most precious asset: the bond with its readers," said Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive officer of News Corp. He made his remarks as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Australian Broadcast Corporation.

SC priest: No communion for Obama supporters

"The Rev. Jay Scott Newman said in a letter distributed Sunday to parishioners at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greenville that they are putting their souls at risk if they take Holy Communion before doing penance for their vote."

It's for sure we all are at risk. Catholic or not.

Chandrayaan-I Impact Probe lands on moon

"Joining the US, the erstwhile Soviet Union and the European Union, the 35-kg Moon Impact Probe (MIP) hit the moon exactly at 8.31 PM, about 25 minutes after the probe instrument descended from the satellite in what ISRO described as a 'perfect operation'."

Microsoft: Office Web will be available from Mac, Linux, iPhone

"Microsoft has not set a launch date for Office Web -- Office 14 is expected to debut in late 2009 -- nor has it said whether it will be available to users free of charge, as is Google's Docs, and if not, how it priced the service.

A private technology preview of Office Web will begin later this year."

The Matrix Runs on Windows - CollegeHumor video

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

It Must Be True, I Read it on the Internet!

"And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times."

Crichton's Wisdom - WSJ.com

'As the 20th century drew to a close,' he warned, 'the connection between hard scientific fact and public policy became increasingly elastic. In part this was possible because of the complacency of the scientific profession; in part because of the lack of good science education among the public; in part because of the rise of specialized advocacy groups which have been enormously effective in getting publicity and shaping policy; and in great part because of the decline of the media as an independent assessor of fact.'

YouTube - Aftermath

Nothing Innovative in Federal Education (Cato-at-liberty)

"Ultimately, to think the feds could effectively promote true educational innovation would be to conclude that the Department of Education — and any office within it, such as Rotherham and Mead’s proposed Office of Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation—would not be staffed with human beings who have preconceptions, opinions, or experiences that bias them toward one thing or another, and that educators don’t have biases that tend to be skewed in particular ways. They do, and that is why having a single entity try to pick innovative winners just results in “the status quo with a new name.” People know what they like, and when you make just one set of them into innovation gate keepers, what you tend to get is what they would have given you anyway."

coaps.fsu.edu | Ryan Maue's Seasonal Tropical Cyclone Activity Update

Fact: There has been one Category 5 Tropical Cyclone in the Northern Hemisphere in 2008 (Jangmi in the WPAC). A total of 8 Category 4+ developed in 2008 (winds > 114 kts+)
Record inactivity continues: Past 24-months of Northern Hemisphere TC activity (ACE) lowest in 30-years.

Still, it seems the NOAH people were working overtime to assign names to gusts of wind in the Atlantic so as to prop up predictions of increased activity made in the last few years.

Wynton Hall : Karl Marx is Not the Father of Capitalism - Townhall.com

"Sen. Barack Obama won for a simple reason: historical amnesia.

I once asked a room full of college students who the father of capitalism was.

Crickets began chirping as blank stares shot my way.

“Oh, come on,” I prompted. 'Does anyone want to take a guess?”

Finally, one bold student blurted out, “Isn’t it Karl Marx?”

(That creaking sound you’re hearing is Adam Smith rolling over in his grave.)

Sadly, this is a true story. And sadly, this kind of economic and historical amnesia goes a long way toward explaining how the most far-Left candidate in American presidential history wound up in the White House."

Great article. I couldn't' bring myself to quote any less.

To the Future: Good Advice from Jeff Flake (Cato-at-liberty)

"In some respects, raising a new standard was made easier by yesterday’s rout. The Republican Party is not bound by election-year promises made by its presidential nominee. More important, the party is finally untethered from the ill-fitting and unworkable big-government conservatism that defined the Bush administration."

If, that is, we as a country don't become used to yet bigger government as we always have in the past. From higher property taxes, sales taxes that started as a penny and are now in some places looking like a second income tax, to taxes taken out so many places most of us can't keep track of them all.

I'm skeptical that there is any going back, simply because there have been so few times when we have gone back except in token ways. And the left still has so many new ideas for growing government that they'd like to try. There isn't much to stop them now.

Change (again)?

As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. [Proverbs 26:11]

OpenMarket.org » Archive » The Boring EU: Sending Itself Into Space

"If you go to Brussels you see how seriously the Eurocrats take their mission to bureaucratize the entire continent. It is as bad as Washington, D.C. Worse, actually, since at least the U.S. is a country and most people view themselves as Americans. But the only way the Eurocrats can consolidate a government in Brussels is by preventing anyone from voting on it. Only Ireland out of 27 European Union members allowed its people to vote on the treaty/constitution, and they voted no. So now the Eurocrats spend half their time dreaming up strategems to force the Irish into line."

YouTube - Shocking: Obama's Attack Ad On Himself

Lundquist`s Guide to Not Getting Fired for Losing Your Laptop, the Saga Continues

"I guess I’d expected to see something like 80 to 90 percent of companies engaged in encrypting laptops, databases, file shares, backup tapes and removable media. I was really wrong. Here are the percentages of survey respondents that have implemented these technologies: laptop encryption: 50 percent; database encryption: 55 percent; file share encryption: 48 percent; backup tape encryption: 47 percent; and removable media encryption: 40 percent."

Online uproar in China as drunken official grabs girl

"The girl's father challenged a drunken Lin, who offered to pay him off.

'Yes I did it, so what? How much do you want, just tell me. I'll give you the money,' Lin said according to footage shown on the sina.com website.

'Do you know who I am? I am from the Ministry of Transport,' he goes on to tell the father, according to the website.

Lin, who was only identified after appearing on the Internet, lost his job and is now the target of a police investigation."

Obama's '$4 Billion for Exxon' Myth

"In the U.S today, the combined federal and state tax on corporate profits averages 40%, which is increasingly out of line with the rest of the world. The average corporate tax rate dropped to 25.9% in 2008 from 37.7% in 1996 among 97 countries surveyed by KPMG, and to 23.2% from 38% in the European Union. Corporate tax revenues typically increased as a share of GDP after tax rates were reduced. Countries with corporate tax rates from 12.5% to 25%, such as Ireland, Switzerland, Austria and Denmark, routinely collect more corporate tax revenue as a share of GDP than the anemic 2.1% figure the Congressional Budget Office projects for the U.S."

Keep Virginia Red? (Cato-at-liberty)

"It was very clever of the TV networks back in 2000 to insist on red for Republicans and blue for Democrats; it had often been the reverse in earlier elections. David Brinkley spoke of Ronald Reagan’s “sea of blue” in 1980, and Time wrote in 1984, “On NBC’s national map, a spreading sea of blue represented Reagan’s triumph, and little islands of red symbolized Mondale’s meager winnings; on ABC and CBS maps, the color symbolism was reversed.” NBC that year — like other networks in previous years — was in keeping with the worldwide use of political colors, where typically red represents communism, socialism, and social democracy and blue is associated with conservative parties. But when the dominant U.S. media all decided to paint the Democrats blue and Republicans red, they got rid of that pesky, lingering association of red with socialism."

'My Heart and My Values Didn't Change'

'Would he like to be more popular?' Fleischer added. 'Of course he would. Of course it bugs him. But it doesn't guide him or drive him.'

There is little outward sign of irritation from Bush, who has maintained a sense of good cheer in many of his less-formal public appearances this year. During a celebration honoring Theodore Roosevelt's 150th birthday last week, Bush joked: 'People ask me, 'Do you ever see any of the ghosts of your predecessors here in the White House?' I said, 'No, I quit drinking.'

Casualty List

Discontinued Product	Status	Transition Plan	User reaction
AOL Journals	Dead	User allowed to automatically transfer content to Google Blogger	What users?
MSN Groups	February 2009	Point users to Multiply	Lynch Mob
AOL Pictures	December 31, 2008	American Greetings® PhotoWorks®	What users?
Yahoo Live (whatever that is)	December 3, 2008	Everyone go home and mope	We hardly knew ye!
AOL XDrive	January 9, 2009	Screw You	???
Google's Lively	December 31, 2008	What 3D technology?	???

Official Google Docs Blog: Online petition for an organic farm at the White House

If things go as predicted there will be no shortage of fertilizer.

Search Google Profiles

Google recently published a Sitemap file containing the URLs of public Google Account profiles. Now, they've also started to offer a special profile search.

The next thing that needs to happen is for more people to be comfortable actually being found on the Internet using their real name (as I am not).

The more you connect these things up the more likely it is at some point that you reveal everything about yourself by one slip of a setting somewhere.

Is there a guru at Google making sure that by posting my blog or photos under a pen name I don't in some way make available my medical records, even if I think I've isolated the two things?

I have yet to see evidence that someone at Google is minding a barrier of privacy between what I am willing (and should be willing) to share and that which I am not willing (or should not be willing) to share.

It looks muddled to me, and of course it isn't only Google making it so.

The question isn't one of intent (are they evil?) the question is one of competence, and in this arena they need to be almost infinitely competent. Passwords having gotten out can be changed. Much less easy to change your home address and impossible to change your medical status or criminal record. What possible upside can compensate for all the possible downsides? And I say all this as a longtime supporter of Google. I just don't see evidence that they are paying attention to where these things could go.

USA.gov Redux - Reimagined as under the Obama Administration

Worth a visit. (Before Tuesday)

Design View / Andy Rutledge - The Design of (the wrong sort of) Dissent

"Based on the unsolicited yet copious response to my design dissent effort last month, the clearest lesson I learned was that the vast majority of designers have no respect for political dissent; only for Leftist political dissent. Further, the vast majority of designers respect criticism only when we’re all criticizing the same thing in the same way. In other words, hypocrisy and jingoism are far more fundamental design values of our “community” than intellectual honesty or individual objective evaluation. Apparently, designers are required to either run with the pack or get run over by the pack."

Microsoft bribes again? | Computerworld Blogs

"But, if as appears may be the case Microsoft is letting people have Dell XPS M1330 laptops with 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processors and 3GBs of RAM on 'indefinite loans (wink, wink) then it's a bribe in my book. What do you think? If you knew someone had been given a PC with a list price of $1,956 and then wrote nice things about the operating system that came with it would you be inclined to think that they might be just a wee bit influenced by the almost two grand worth of computer?"

How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever - O'Reilly Broadcast

At first glance, I have a USB data acquisition driver in the kernel that originally some company in Germany created and they wanted to get it in and we realized that about four different companies' drivers all do the same thing, so we all merged into one. Now none of those companies have to maintain it; they all get their support for free. Users benefit in the fact that they all have one tinier code base and so the original German company is very happy about it, so they're ecstatic. They don't have to worry about it anymore and it just works for them. Actually there's another company here in Portland that uses that same driver and they're very happy about it too, so it makes people realize over time that the Linux development model has benefits but it's really hard to convince them until they've gone through that.

Hidden Audio: Obama Tells SF Chronicle He Will Bankrupt Coal Industry | NewsBusters.org

"Imagine if John McCain had whispered somewhere that he was willing to bankrupt a major industry? Would this declaration not immediately be front page news? Well, Barack Obama actually flat out told the San Francisco Chronicle (SF Gate) that he was willing to see the coal industry go bankrupt in a January 17, 2008 interview. The result? Nothing. This audio interview has been hidden from the public...until now. Here is the transcript of Obama's statement about bankrupting the coal industry..."

OpenMarket.org » Archive » Top Obama Adviser Blames America for 9/11, Says America Is Racist

"Top Obama adviser Charles Ogletree says that America is to blame for 9/11 and that Americans are stupid. He also says that America is a racist country, and that Americans will only vote for Obama because he is half-white."

DE: Foreign ministry: 'Cost of Open Source desktop maintenance is by far the lowest' — Open Source Observatory

The Foreign Ministry in 2001 began migrating its back-end IT systems to Open Source in order to provide all embassies and consulates with Internet access and email. 'Our strategy was to use as far as possible Open Standards and Open Source. Reduction of costs was the main reason for this decision.' Upon completion of this project, the ministry decided in 2004 to also migrate the desktops.

The biggest hurdle proved to be to convince the two hundred IT workers a the ministry. 'Their issues were not technical. They just did not know anything about Linux and Open Source and we had to change their views. We took all of them on a crash course of using Linux servers and configuring Apache. There they discovered that it works.'

The Columbus Dispatch : State employee says she was ordered to check out Joe the Plumber

About 3 p.m. on Oct. 16, Niekamp said Carrie Brown, assistant deputy director for child support, asked her to run Wurzelbacher through the computer. Citing privacy laws, Niekamp would not say what, if anything, was found on "Joe."

On Oct. 23, Niekamp said Doug Thompson, deputy director for child support, told her she had checked on "Joe the Plumber." Thompson "literally demanded" that she write an e-mail to the agency's chief privacy officer stating she checked the case for child-support purposes, she said.

Thompson told her that Jones-Kelley said Wurzelbacher might buy a plumbing business and could owe support. Thompson said he replied that he "would check him out."

Niekamp, 38, a senior child-support manager, said she never heard any discussion of politics amid what her supervisors told her about the checks on Wurzelbacher.

OpenMarket.org » Archive » The Road to Serfdom–Illustrated!

"Thanks to CEI colleague Gary Howard for sending along The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons; I’d forgotten all about this capsule version of Hayek’s masterwork."

California Cities Cut Police Budgets - WSJ.com

"Those full-natured benefits created a bidding war among Northern California cities, and Vallejo negotiated lucrative wage increases with police and firefighter unions to stay competitive. Three years ago, the city agreed to a 20% pay increase between 2007 and 2009; an average police officer now makes $121,000. When benefits are included, the number rises to more than $190,000. By 2007, 80% of Vallejo's budget was dedicated to police and firefighters.

As tax revenue plummeted, Vallejo's finances buckled under the pressure of the labor contracts. Retired Vallejo employees are owed almost $220 million in unfunded pension and retirement-health benefits.

'We did a bad job of long-term forecasting,' said Craig Whittom, Vallejo's assistant city manager. 'We made agreements that were beyond our means.'"

Translation: We didn't think ahead at all.

Duh.

Think that lack of planning is going on anywhere else in government?

Commenter Of The Day: macbeach

This guy is smart!

The Markets Are Weak Because the Candidates Are Lousy - WSJ.com

"To state the obvious: The valuation of an individual stock reflects the collective expectation of investors about a company's future profits, dividends and appreciation, and the same is true of the market as a whole. These profits, in turn, are greatly influenced by government policy on taxes, spending, subsidies, environmental and other regulations, labor laws, and the corporate legal climate. Investors have heard enough from both candidates in the last month or two to conclude that prospects for a flourishing, competitive, growing and reasonably free economy in a McCain administration are bad, and in an Obama administration far worse. (In fact, the market's bearish behavior over the last couple of months pretty closely tracks Barack Obama's gains.)"

Lorne Gunter: Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof - Full Comment

"Prior to the past decade of climate hysteria and Kyoto hype, the MWP was a given in the scientific community. Several hundred studies of tree rings, lake and ocean floor sediment, ice cores and early written records of weather -- even harvest totals and censuses --confirmed that the period from 800 AD to 1300 AD was unusually warm, particularly in Northern Europe.

But in order to prove the climate scaremongers' claim that 20th-century warming had been dangerous and unprecedented -- a result of human, not natural factors -- the MWP had to be made to disappear. So studies such as Michael Mann's 'hockey stick,' in which there is no MWP and global temperatures rise gradually until they jump up in the industrial age, have been adopted by the UN as proof that recent climate change necessitates a reordering of human economies and societies.

Dr. Loehle's work helps end this deception."

OpenMarket.org » Archive » Turning Responsible Citizenship into a Sucker’s Game

"Some people are hopelessly boring. They save money, live within their means, don’t buy too much house, pay their bills, and contribute to the community. Then there are wastrals, who spend and borrow wildly and expect others to clean up after them. The U.S. government is funded by the former but obviously spends an increasing amount of its time catering to the latter."

Motorola Speed Dials Cell Overhaul - WSJ.com

"New Mobile Chief Plans to Slash More Jobs, Focus on Google Software to Simplify Design and Cut Costs"

Ned Desmond: Reorg costs Time Inc. Web chief his job

I used to get a dozen specialty publications which I directed to work where they (mostly unread) filled a corner of my office until I'd shovel them into a dumpster we'd roll around for just such trash.

With transitions to the web, I'm fairly certain that more articles are getting read (in sum total) than ever before, and this should (and to some extent has) translate into more targeted advertising than has ever been possible.

I hope someone has calculated the number of trees not being cut down due to this change, and while it has obviousy been disruptive to some people I can't help but think it is for the better in the long run.

Meanwhile, purely online media is still looking for the magic formula, combining authoritativeness (my spell checker is satisfied that that is indeed a word), reader interaction/feedback, ease of use and other factors that may not be well understood at all at this point (short/memorable URLs, etc. come to mind).

To my way of thinking, there should have been revolutionary changes to AOL/TW print publications at the time of that merger. The two parts of the company should have been rendered indistinguishable by now.

If they don't change, they may soon be indistinguishable in their absence.

Google LatLong: How US has voted since 1980

"In the final days of this captivating presidential election season, are you interested in knowing how US has voted in the past? Together with the Digital Scholarship Lab at University of Richmond, the Google Earth team has mapped historical election results in Google Earth and Google Maps. These maps show how the population has voted in past presidential elections from 1980 through 2004, and include election results at both the state and county levels. The maps also include demographic information derived from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 US Census."

Obama and the Politics of Crowds - WSJ.com

"On the face of it, there is nothing overwhelmingly stirring about Sen. Obama. There is a cerebral quality to him, and an air of detachment. He has eloquence, but within bounds. After nearly two years on the trail, the audience can pretty much anticipate and recite his lines. The political genius of the man is that he is a blank slate. The devotees can project onto him what they wish. The coalition that has propelled his quest -- African-Americans and affluent white liberals -- has no economic coherence. But for the moment, there is the illusion of a common undertaking -- Canetti's feeling of equality within the crowd. The day after, the crowd will of course discover its own fissures. The affluent will have to pay for the programs promised the poor. The redistribution agenda that runs through Mr. Obama's vision is anathema to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the hedge-fund managers now smitten with him. Their ethos is one of competition and the justice of the rewards that come with risk and effort. All this is shelved, as the devotees sustain the candidacy of a man whose public career has been a steady advocacy of reining in the market and organizing those who believe in entitlement and redistribution."

What we learned from 1 million businesses in the cloud

"So how does greater than 99.9 percent reliability compare to more conventional approaches for business email? We asked some experts. Naturally, the normal caveats apply for on-premises solutions, since each individual business environment will vary, depending on server reliability, staff response time, and actual maintenance schedules for each application.

According to the research firm Radicati Group, companies with on-premises email solutions averaged from 30 to 60 minutes of unscheduled downtime and an additional 36 to 90 minutes of planned downtime per month."

Archaeologists report finding oldest Hebrew text | Science | Reuters

"Archaeologists from the Hebrew University said they found five lines of text written in black ink on a shard of pottery dug up at a five-acre (two-hectare) site called Elah Fortress, or Khirbet Qeiyafa.

Experts have not yet been able to decipher the text fully, but carbon dating of artifacts found at the site indicates the Hebrew inscription was written about 3,000 years ago, predating the Dead Sea Scrolls by 1,000 years, the archaeologists said."

Pajamas Media » Eyewitness to the Ayers Revolution

Pajamas Media: Was this merely an academic matter to them, or were they serious about killing 25 million Americans that would not bend to their political will?

Larry Grathwohl: I suppose you could consider this a purely academic discussion in that the Weathermen never had the opportunity to implement their political ends. However, I can assure you that this was not the case. There was an absolute belief that they, along with the international revolutionary movement, would cause the collapse of the United States and that they would be in charge. Nixon was of great concern and how his end would be conducted. This may sound absurd in today’s context, but the Weatherman believed they would succeed.

Novell Turns Linux Desktop Setback Into Victory | The VAR Guy

"When Lenovo de-emphasized Novell SUSE Linux on ThinkPads, some skeptics thought it was a serious setback for desktop Linux and Novell’s own open source efforts. The VAR Guy knew better. Fact is, Lenovo was bolstering its Novell relationship in two other areas. Here’s the scoop."

The 'dictator' label - The Boston Globe

"When the National Rifle Association produced a radio ad last month about Obama's shifting position on gun control, the campaign's lawyers sent letters to radio stations in Ohio and Pennsylvania, urging them not to run it - and warning of trouble with the Federal Communications Commission if they did. 'This advertisement knowingly misleads your viewing audience,' Obama's general counsel Bob Bauer wrote. 'For the sake of both FCC licensing requirements and the public interest, your station should refuse to continue to air this advertisement.'

Similar lawyer letters went out in August when the American Issues Project produced a TV spot exploring Obama's strong ties to former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Station managers were warned that running the anti-Obama ad would be a violation of their legal obligation to serve the 'public interest.' And in case that wasn't menacing enough, the Obama campaign also urged the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation."

Found in a rundown Boston estate: Barack Obama’s aunt Zeituni Onyango - Times Online

"Zeituni Onyango, the aunt so affectionately described in Mr Obama’s best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father, lives in a disabled-access flat on a rundown public housing estate in South Boston."

AH, now I've figured out Obama's economic policy:

Get the country to care for all his relatives so that he doesn't have to.

Time Inc. Plans About 600 Layoffs - NYTimes.com

"Power within Time Inc., which through many mergers over the decades became the modern Time Warner, has long been diffuse, with individual publishers and editors essentially running their own shows. That distinct culture is coming to an end."

Sources: Sarkozy views Obama stance on Iran as 'utterly immature' - Haaretz - Israel News

"Sarkozy has made his criticisms only in closed forums in France. But according to a senior Israeli government source, the reports reaching Israel indicate that Sarkozy views the Democratic candidate's stance on Iran as 'utterly immature' and comprised of 'formulations empty of all content.'"

Campaign workers attacked

"Two people were arrested Monday afternoon after an altercation led to five Republican campaign workers being sprayed with Mace at their headquarters in Galax.

Galax Police Chief Rick Clark said officers were dispatched shortly before 1 p.m. to the Galax Republican headquarters on East Grayson Street when a caller reported someone had sprayed office workers with Mace."

Do people not realize?

"Do people not realize that if you have a million dollars in the bank that you make (at least when the economy isn't having real problems) $40k a year doing nothing? How is that accumulation of wealth without adding to productivity into the system good for society?"

Oh my God.

Here is someone supposedly well educated and old enough to know how the basics of our system work. But he seems to think that putting money in the bank is like growing yeast in a little container next to the cook-stove.

This is why Obama is doing so well. We are a nation of retards.

At some point you wear your fingers out trying to educate folks like this, and at the same time keep yourself from throwing something into your monitor.

When progressivism (current euphemism for socialism) is tried here and things go bad (worse than now) as they inevitably will. I guarantee you this guy will be one of the ones crying the loudest.

ABC News: Stevens Jury Catches Indictment 'Typo'

"The jury has correctly found that after reviewing Stevens' forms, the senator did check the 'yes' box. The error is on page 6 of exhibit 884.

'These items do not correspond. What do we do?' the note from the jury read."

What indeed. I don't know whether this guy is nice or honest or what. But I do know it's been open season for small things on Republicans for the past few years and it seems Democrats are getting away with as much or more.

Are people who have conservative views going to have to go into hiding during an Obama administration?

Apple Could Also “Figuratively” Take Over the Laptop Market if MacBooks Were Free | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD

And if a few other things were true.

The Obama Temptation [Mark R. Levin]

"I've been thinking this for a while so I might as well air it here. I honestly never thought we'd see such a thing in our country - not yet anyway - but I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places. I can't help but observe that even some conservatives are caught in the moment as their attempts at explaining their support for Barack Obama are unpersuasive and even illogical. And the pull appears to be rather strong. Ken Adelman, Doug Kmiec, and others, reach for the usual platitudes in explaining themselves but are utterly incoherent. Even non-conservatives with significant public policy and real world experiences, such as Colin Powell and Charles Fried, find Obama alluring but can't explain themselves in an intelligent way."

Microsoft Battles Low-Cost Rival for Africa - WSJ.com

"Some of Africa's poorest countries also have discovered that they can't meet the terms of a special $3 Windows package for 'underserved' students around the world, announced last year by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. For governments to be eligible, they have to buy at least 10,000 computers that students get to keep -- an expensive proposition for cash-strapped countries. To date, Microsoft says only four countries have qualified -- Libya, Egypt, Russia and Mexico."

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: What Tim O'Reilly gets wrong about the cloud

"The fact that my neighbor uses Google's search engine, rather than Yahoo's or Microsoft's, does not increase the value of Google's search engine to me, at least not in the way that my neighbor's use of the telephone network or of Facebook would increase the value of those services to me. The network effect underpins and explains the value of the telephone network and Facebook; it does not underpin or explain the value of Google. (Indeed, if everyone other than myself stopped using Google's search engine tomorrow, that would not decrease Google's value to me as a user.)"

Meltdowns: The layoff lie

"To paraphrase Tolstoy: Successful startups are all alike. But every unsuccessful startup is unsuccessful in its own way.

And so with all the startups whose managers have jumped on the firebus. If they had run their businesses efficiently, they wouldn't have needed to fire anyone. They are laying people off now not because of an economic imperative, but because they have a convenient excuse to cover their mistakes."

It used to be much easier for a company to fire (or to be kind in some other way to dismiss) workers who were not top performers.

While being let go in times like this is no indication you are a slacker, you can bet companies are packing the lay-of lists with as many of those as they can manage.

Media's Presidential Bias and Decline

"No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side -- or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so."

Obama Shuns Press Conferences, Sits With 'EXTRA!'s' Mario Lopez

"On Oct. 24, 2007, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said that as president he would hold regular press conferences and 'not just call on my four favorite reporters.'

But the Democratic presidential nominee hasn't held a full press conference -- submitting himself to more than a handful of questions from his whole press corps -- in more than a month, since Sept. 24, 2008, in Clearwater, Fla."

Russia military offers Cuba air defence aid - Yahoo! News UK

"'The Russian and Cuban military will exchange experience in organising tactical air defence and in training officers,' Interfax quoted Russian Land Forces spokesman Igor Konashenkov as saying.

The two sides will 'discuss the prospect of training Cuban servicemen at the tactical air defence academies and training centres in Russia, using upgraded Russian-made military hardware,' Interfax quoted him as saying."

You have to wonder, with Castro and Chavez publicly supporting Obama (as all of America's 20th century foes apparently do) why do they need to step up defense readiness? Who are they going to be defending against?

Does it sound like 1962 all over again to you too?

World Community Grid - 'I Dedicate' Short Video

YouTube - the intro to idiocracy

Is it about time we started thinking about this as a documentary rather than a comedy?

Thomas Sowell : Obama and "The Left" - Townhall.com

"Some people take solace from the fact that Senator Obama has verbally shifted position on some issues, like drilling for oil or gun control, since this is supposed to show that he is 'pragmatic' rather than ideological.

But political zig-zags show no such moderation as some seem to assume. Lenin zig-zagged and so did Hitler. Zig-zags may show no more than that someone is playing the public for fools."

Report: Iranian president has fallen ill

"TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has fallen ill due to exhaustion brought on by his heavy workload, a close associate has told the Iranian state news agency."

Proof that running your mouth can consume great amounts of energy. I've always suspected as much.

Venezuela's Chavez wants to jail rival | International | Reuters

"Chavez provided no specific evidence for the charges against the main leader of a fragmented opposition who has solid support in the oil-producing west of the OPEC nation.

Human rights groups say Chavez has increasingly exerted control over branches of power such as the judiciary and become intolerant of critics in almost a decade in power.

The former soldier typically takes to the offensive to stem a rise in support for potential rivals."

The Point Of No Return - Forbes.com

"You can trace the constrained vision back to Aristotle; the unconstrained vision to Plato. But the neatest illustration of the two visions occurred during the great upheavals of the 18th century, the American and French revolutions.

The American Revolution embodied the constrained vision. 'In the United States,' Sowell says, 'it was assumed from the outset that what you needed to do above all was minimize [the damage that could be done by] the flaws in human nature.' The founders did so by composing a constitution of checks and balances. More than two centuries later, their work remains in place.

The French Revolution, by contrast, embodied the unconstrained vision. 'In France,' Sowell says, 'the idea was that if you put the right people in charge--if you had a political Messiah--then problems would just go away.' The result? The Terror, Napoleon and so many decades of instability that France finally sorted itself out only when Charles de Gaulle declared the Fifth Republic."

Thomas Sowell : Do Facts Matter? - Townhall.com

"Unfortunately, the future of this country, as well as the fate of the Western world, depends on how many people can be fooled on election day, just a few weeks from now.

Right now, the polls indicate that a whole lot of the people are being fooled a whole lot of the time."

...

Facts don't matter much politically if they are not reported.

The media alone are not alone in keeping the facts from the public. Republicans, for reasons unknown, don't seem to know what it is to counter-attack. They deserve to lose.

But the country does not deserve to be put in the hands of a glib and cocky know-it-all, who has accomplished absolutely nothing beyond the advancement of his own career with rhetoric, and who has for years allied himself with a succession of people who have openly expressed their hatred of America.

Election 08: Galt Gulch, or Canada Here We Come?

"it might be time to start thinking about the mechanics of Galt's Gulch. Actually, this is probably a great time to buy property in the Rockies. Love to see the video for that..."

But in the mean time, fantasize with me that McCain wins...

The Rosenbergs: case closed - The New Criterion

"We say “now,” but in fact the Rosenbergs’ guilt has been established “beyond a reasonable doubt” at least since Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton published The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth in 1983. It has taken until now, however, for the news to penetrate the carapace of leftist denial. The Rosenbergs were spies for one of the most brutal tyrannies in history. Their treachery collaterally aided in blighting the lives of those nameless millions who suffered under the jackboot of Soviet Communism. Yet the Left adamantly denied the Rosenbergs’ guilt almost as vociferously as they did Alger Hiss’s. But just as it has been incontrovertibly demonstrated that Hiss was guilty of espionage, so it is with the Rosenbergs. Last month, Morton Sobell, co-defendent with the Rosenbergs, finally came clean at the age of 91. Sobell had been sentenced to thirty years in prison for his role in the case. He had always protested his innocence. Now, fifty years on, he finally acknowledged that he and Julius Rosenberg were both Soviet agents."

Dr. Sanity: LACK OF CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT

"I remember a really excellent Mark Steyn piece that came out in The New Criterion in 2007. This article discussed the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind.

Bloom's controversial exposé of the shallowness and meaninglessness of American pop culture was a bombshell when it first was published in 1987; and, his analysis seems even more prescient when one considers the evolution of that pop culture over the last 20 years.

Bloom was the quintessential academic and a true liberal intellectual (in the traditional meaning of that word), and he could not help noticing that the university--which used to see its mission as the maintainence and transmission of civilization and learning--was failing in that mission. Instead of countering the pervasively vapid 'pop' psychology that passed for deep thought about the meaning and purpose of life, it gave credibility to the emptiness and facilitated and celebrated the shallowness."

Orlando Sentinel - Obama campaign cuts off WFTV after interview with Joe Biden by Hal Boedeker

"'I don't know who's writing your questions,' Biden shot back.

Biden so disliked West's line of questioning that the Obama campaign canceled a WFTV interview with Jill Biden, the candidate's wife.

'This cancellation is non-negotiable, and further opportunities for your station to interview with this campaign are unlikely, at best for the duration of the remaining days until the election,' wrote Laura K. McGinnis, Central Florida communications director for the Obama campaign."

The left can dish-out media bias, but they can't take it. As demonstrated here. Clinton campaigns of the past have been guilty of similar things... you either ask us softball questions like the David Lettermans of this world, or you are cut off. Fortunately for them, 90 percent of the media are fawning sycophants and will line up for the abuse.

Woman admits making up McCain sticker attack, police say - CNN.com

"A Republican campaign worker who told police she was assaulted by a man angered by a John McCain sticker on her car admitted she made up the report, the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, assistant police chief said Friday."

As they say: "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"

Woman Attacked At ATM, Assailant Carves Letter Into Her Face - Pittsburgh News Story - WTAE Pittsburgh

"Richard said the robber took $60 from the woman, then became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim's car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter 'B' into her face, Richard said."

Would it do any good for the Democrats to officially call of their dogs?

No. Didn't think so. Nor do I suspect they will make the effort.

Study: Coverage of McCain Much More Negative Than That of Obama | washingtonpost.com

"Fifty-seven percent of the print and broadcast stories about the Republican nominee were decidedly negative, the Project for Excellence in Journalism says in a report out today, while 14 percent were positive. The McCain campaign has repeatedly complained that the mainstream media are biased toward the senator from Illinois.

Obama's coverage was more balanced during the six-week period from Sept. 8 through last Thursday, with 36 percent of the stories clearly positive, 35 percent neutral or mixed and 29 percent negative."

DUH!

Radical Loon When Obama Was Only 47 - HUMAN EVENTS

"'When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the living room of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. They were launching him -- introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.'

The Times has now stripped this item from its Web page, but the great blogger Patterico has preserved it for posterity on his Web page."

Dr. Sanity: AYERS IS DEAD SERIOUS ABOUT HIS 'SOCIAL JUSTICE'

"This is the final destination on the collectivist [psycho]path. Ayers and his crowd, in their quest for what they call 'social justice' are dead serious about it--even if they have to kill 25 million people or so to make that 'justice' come about. Oh yes, they are kind, they are compassionate, they are benevolent (with other people's money, particularly); but don't you dare oppose them because in their ethical system, your life isn't worth spit to them, compared to their ideology.

And that is why their atrocities on the world stage make even those originating from the grandiose self of some two-bit dictator pale in comparison. Both are malignant, but the Ayers and Dohrns subscribe to the warm, fuzzy utopian variety of malignant narcissism; and their psychopathy always ends in the coldly calculated death/sacrifice of literally millions of human beings on the altar of their ideological god.

Unrepentant? You don't know the half of it."