Found on the Internet

25 Things I Trust More than Hillary Clinton and her minions:
• Mexican tap water
• A wolverine with a 'pet me' sign
• A mixed drink made by Bill Cosby
• A straight edge shave from Jodi Arias
• An elevator ride with Ray Rice
• A night out with Aaron Hernandez
• Brian Williams memory
• Pete Carroll coaching decisions
• Loch Ness monster sightings
• Pinocchio
• The Boy that cried Wolf
• Browns going to the Super Bowl
• A Nigerian inheritance email
• A pilot alone in the cockpit
• Harry Reid's exercise equipment
• Tying Anthony Weiner's shoes
• A fart in an automatic car wash
• A factory packed parachute
• A kiss from Judas
• An Afghan wearing a backpack
• A Supreme Court decision
• Keeping my healthcare plan
• A North Korean trial
• A BIC pen that doesn't leak
• A week old tuna fish sandwich found on a city bus

Does Flickr Censor User Content Over Blatantly Fake DMCA Notices? | Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

Many bloggers and news outlets accused Flickr of censorship and political bias in the removal of what was seen by many as a clear fair use parody image critical of the President. The case made the national press and with an EFF attorney adding that Alkhateeb indeed had a very strong fair use defense. After a substantial amount of critical press over the image, Flickr Community Manager Heather Champ finally came out defending Flickr over the issue saying that Alkhateeb’s image had been removed from Flickr due to a “a complete Notice of Infringement as outlined by the DMCA (Digitial Millenium Copyright Act)” In the same breath Champ accused the press and blogosphere of being “makey uppey.” Shortly afterwards, the thread where Flickr users were complaining about this image deletion was shut down by Flickr staff.

People need to read 1984 and Brave New World again (along with a history of the Soviet Union in the late 20th century).

A state does not need to be all-powerful in order to be oppressive. They simply need to convince enough people to act as spies and censors on their behalf so as to intimidate or throttle dissent.

Knowing Yahoo's history as I do (as a former customer) I am quite willing to chalk this one up to incompetence, coupled with a good dose of political bias. Don't expect the Yahoo's to fess up to either. Their efforts to reinforce the illusion that they have done no wrong, and can do no wrong only adds to my contempt for the company. Eventually everyone will figure out that their ability to deliver falls far short of their promises. My only regret is that the primary beneficiary of Yahoo's demise will likely be Microsoft.

Cheney Responds to Panetta

So, Panetta was for a truth commission so Obama's "ambitious political agenda" would not be derailed? Imagine the reaction if say, Porter Goss had said something like that.

GOP 99% Socialist | Cato @ Liberty

My point in the New York Post piece is that the GOP needs to challenge Obama’s big spending agenda at a more fundamental level. They need to do some careful research, pick out some big spending targets, and go on the offense. Why not propose to eliminate the Departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development? Why not sell off federal assets, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, in order to help pay down the federal debt? Why not open up the U.S. Postal Service to competition?

Obama won’t agree to these reforms at this point, but they would hopefully open a serious national debate about reforming our massive and sprawling federal government. Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the congressional Republicans in 1994 didn’t win by splitting hairs with the Democrats over 1% of spending. They offered a more fundamental critique.

Conan O’Brien: Class Act and Worthy ‘Tonight Show’ Successor

"Comedy has gotten coarser today, as has society in general. This can be seen in the failed attempts at humor over Barack Obama. Too many liberal comedians will not mock him, and too many conservative comedians just echo the viciousness that liberal comedians directed at George W. Bush (although with much less ferocity and drool.).

Conan O’Brien has stayed above the fray. He is silly, and sometimes sophomoric, but he simply refuses to be mean. Even Triumph the Insult Comic Dog just wants somebody to poop on."

Whitacre Vows to ‘Learn About Cars’ as Chairman of New GM Board - Bloomberg.com

June 10 (Bloomberg) -- Edward E. Whitacre Jr. built AT&T Inc. into the biggest U.S. provider of telephone service over a 43-year-career. By his own admission, he becomes chairman of General Motors Corp. knowing nothing about the auto industry.

Not to criticize his selection (I don't know enough one way or the other), but if you look at the history of AT&T you will see that it was for most of it's history a monopoly until roughly 1984 when it was busted up into several smaller regional monopolies providing local phone service. AT&T then proceeded to flounder around either merging with other companies or spinning off parts of itself in a desperate struggle to survive as a non-monopoly company.

The regional bells, continuing to rake in unearned profits wisely sought to diversify themselves, going into publishing, cable TV, cellular, and even the furniture business. It would be at least very difficult to catalogue where all the monopoly money ended up, except to say that some of it, if not most of it, ended up wasted on dead-end products and projects. In the process all the baby-bells as they cam to be called went on wild rebranding sprees yielding meaningless names such as Verizon, Qwest and SBC (which might have stood for Southwest Bell Corporation at one time but just stands for SBC (nothing ) now).

I certainly don't know what Whitacre's real resume would look like, but he was at least NOT with AT&T during most of this time, but when AT&T re-merged with SBC in 2005 (AT&T as the company being acquired) he was head of SBC, not AT&T.

Someone else can figure out to what extent he was responsible for the success of what was still a mini-monopoly, I'm more interested in the principle than the individual.

The principle being, as someone put it recently, that most of these companies are not too big to fail, they are in fact too big to exist. I personally think that busting the AT&T monopoly was a good thing, particularly as it wasn't just a big company it was almost an extension of the government in its monopoly powers.

Now, in saving GM (and some banking and investment businesses), we are moving in the opposite direction, that of combining more and more businesses into government run monopolies (including offloading of Chrystler to the Italians so that we at Government Motors only have one remaining private company, Ford, to deal with). Of course we are told that all of this is only temporary. Problem with that is that temporary can turn into a very long time.

The two most likely outcomes are that GM will succeed, at the expense of the only other large American car company, ending real choice, or that through gross mismanagement, it will fail, leaving taxpayers with a big bill to pay and also leaving Americans with only one company to chose from.

Very little that is good can come from this, but our die has been cast, and I will not let those around me forget who (which voters that is) are the responsible parties. Before anyone protests, no, the Obama administration didn't cause it all, they have just provided the "punch line" that shifts our course from heading toward simple socialism to something much much more sinister.

For the real punch in the gut, we should all remember that none of these recent course changes can be corrected during most of our lifetimes, assuming we start correcting them in 2010, which is still doubtful considering new high school graduates know almost nothing about this country's history or how its government was designed to work. Congratulations to all of you who "won".

The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree | The Real Revo

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

FT.com / US / Politics & Foreign policy - Obama promises bipartisan action on deficits. zzzzzz

"Although Lawrence Summers, head of the National Economic Council, fell asleep on the podium, most attendees, including Republicans, appear to have appreciated the exercise. There was even some light-heartedness."

A good nap was had by all.

From Wikipedia:

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 30, 1954, Summers is the son of two economists, Robert Summers and Anita Summers, who are both professors at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the nephew of two Nobel laureates in economics: Paul Samuelson (sibling of Robert Summers, who, following an older brother's example, changed the family name from Samuelson to Summers) and Kenneth Arrow (Anita Summers's brother). He spent most of his childhood in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, where he attended Harriton High School.

Maybe proclivity for economics (as well as narcolepsy) should be treated as an inheritable disease.

Also:

Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of controversy over a talk in which he speculated that women may have lesser aptitude for work in the highest levels of math and science. Summers has been criticized by some liberals for the centrist economic policies he advocated as Treasury Secretary and in later writings.

Only if you know the right people can all sins be forgiven. For people with "R" after their name this (and shuffling your feet in the bathroom) are career ending.

The Numbers

"Bush was a frying pan, Obama is a fire. Aren't there any fools in DC willing to be responsible with my money?

Who is John Galt?"

(From the comments section of the ABC News "The Numbers" blog.)

Huffpo Red in the Face Over Fox News Hoax - Portfolio.com

"This is, without a doubt, the best correction of the week. Okay, the month. Aw, hell, I'll say it: Best. Correction. Ever. From the Huffington Post:"

The Long Retreat - HUMAN EVENTS

"America's relative decline since 2000 of some 30 percent represents a far greater loss of relative power in a shorter time than any power shift among European great powers roughly from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to World War II. It is one of the largest relative declines in modern history. Indeed, in size, it is clearly surpassed by only one other great-power decline, the unprecedented internal collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991."

Paul Allen May See Stimulus Windfall - WSJ.com

Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft and owner of the Portland Trailblazers basketball team, might save hundreds of millions in taxes over the next few years thanks to a provision in the economic stimulus legislation signed by President Obama Tuesday.

The provision is aimed at helping companies who are trying to restructure their debt, by delaying taxes that would otherwise be due when debt-holders agree to forgive a portion of the debt.

Rove: Is the Administration Winging It? - WSJ.com

"The president, a bright and skilled politician, has plenty of time to recover. The danger is that what we have seen is not an aberration, but the early indications of his governing style. Barack Obama won the job he craved, now he must demonstrate that he and his team are up to its requirements. The signs are worrisome. The world is a dangerous place. The days of winging it need to end."

George F. Will - Hosed by the Stimulus - washingtonpost.com

"Never," Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said when voting against the stimulus, "have so few spent so much so quickly to do so little." Three of his contentions are correct. The $787 billion price tag is probably at least two-thirds too low: Add the cost of borrowing to finance it, and allow for the certainty that many "temporary" programs will become permanent, and the price soars far above $2 trillion.

But Cole's last contention is wrong. The stimulus, which the Congressional Budget Office says will, over the next 10 years, reduce GDP by crowding out private investment, already is doing a lot by fostering cynicism in the service of opportunism.

Barack Obama's Afghan 'Surge' May Need Support From Republicans and Neocons - WSJ.com

Among other useful things, Mr. Obama's surge may help to educate his friends on the political left about Islamist terror. The National Security Network, an outfit that never missed an opportunity to bash President Bush, has quickly come into line behind the new President. The group says Mr. Obama's strategy must be focused "first and foremost on preventing the Afghanistan-Pakistan region from becoming a staging ground for terrorist attacks against the U.S. and other nations or a source for instability that could throw Pakistan into chaos."

Sounds good to us -- and sounds a lot like the Bush strategy. America's goal isn't to turn a backward Central Asian country into the next Switzerland, but to keep al Qaeda and its Taliban allies from using it as a safe haven. Toward that end, the U.S. and its allies can help build Afghanistan's institutions and army and help a weak Pakistan government flush out the terrorists in its wild west.

EDITORIAL: Obama's outrageous oversight

"White House Counsel Greg Craig, often seen whispering in the president's ear during question periods, admitted later to Ms. Burlingame that the chief executive was getting the facts of the law wrong during the discussion with the families. Craig asked her if CIPA covers a case in which terrorists defend themselves, noting that 'this is something we hadn't contemplated.' If nothing else, this admission of ignorance is more evidence that the decision to rush ahead with closing Guantanamo and shutting down the military tribunals was ill-conceived, poorly planned, and may ultimately be injurious to our national security. The president may talk a good game about 'swift, certain justice,' but it is becoming clear that justice will not be swift, is highly uncertain, and in the end may not even be just."

WHY BERNIE GOLDBERG HAS IT RIGHT at DickMorris.com

"In 2004, the media did a bad job of covering the campaign impartially. But by 2008, it had abandoned that goal. By 2008, we had become a British system with some media dedicated to the Republicans and others to the Democrats. Each newspaper and television station and radio program had a partisan affiliation. There were no longer any neutrals. MSNBC courted the liberal vote as surely as Fox News did the conservatives. Media that pretended to play it down the middle were shown up for what they were: closet fans of one side or the other (usually of the left) who disguise themselves as impartial."

YouTube - Nancy Pelosi: Dumber than Soap

Now if this isn't worthy of a Saturday Night Live sketch, I don't know what is.

Obama Is “Failure” At Google & “Miserable Failure” At Yahoo

"I told you so. Or I told anyone who cared. I even tried to reach the Obama administration in four or five different ways. Do a search on Yahoo right now for miserable failure, and you’ll find President Barack Obama’s page ranking either in the top spot or the second spot. Given a redirect that Obama’s web team has put into place, he should solidify into that number one spot over time. Eventually, Microsoft’s Live Search should reflect that, as well. And over at Google, Obama will likely gain a top page listing for a search on failure.

I know. There are bigger issues Obama has to deal with. But then again, this is supposed to be the tech-savvy presidency. It should be search engine optimization savvy, as well."

I may have linked this before.

But clearly Google deserves some sort of special payback from the new administration.

They now say they have a special utility they can run to fix their database. They have now run the utility so as not to label Obama a miserable failure.

Only they've known about this since 2005, so presumably they simply didn't mind having Bush labeled as such.

It's good to have friends in high places. Things haven't changed and it's not what you know, but who you know that really counts.

Judge Obama on Performance Alone - WSJ.com

"Yet there is fear, especially among black people, that criticism of him or any of his failures might be twisted into evidence that people of color cannot effectively lead. That amounts to wasting time and energy reacting to hateful stereotypes. It also leads to treating all criticism of Mr. Obama, whether legitimate, wrong-headed or even mean-spirited, as racist.

This is patronizing. Worse, it carries an implicit presumption of inferiority. Every American president must be held to the highest standard. No president of any color should be given a free pass for screw-ups, lies or failure to keep a promise.

During the Democrats' primaries and caucuses, candidate Obama often got affectionate if not fawning treatment from the American media. Editors, news anchors, columnists and commentators, both white and black but especially those on the political left, too often acted as if they were in a hurry to claim their role in history as supporters of the first black president."