This blog is mainly about the spectacular train wreck at The Sacramento Bee and its parent company, the McClatchy Company. But I also post about current events, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, politics, anything else that grabs my attention. Take a look around this blog, hope you enjoy it.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Wednesday September 9 -- Got news or an update?
If you have news or an update, leave it in comments. . . .
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What Van Jones Tells Us About President Obama (Townhall.com)
On Monday, Sept. 7, 2009, President Obama's hand-picked "green jobs czar," Van Jones, resigned. It was a week too late to prevent all the revelations about Jones:
his admitted agreement with communist philosophy;
his membership in the 9/11"truther" movement;
his racist views on environmental policy (he accused "white polluters and white environmentalists" of "steering poison into the people of color's communities");
his ridiculous ideas about school violence ("You've never seen a Columbine done by a black child … a black kid might shoot another black kid. He's not going to shoot up the whole school");
his unmitigated hatred for President George W. Bush (he compared Bush to a crack-pipe-licking cocaine addict, and accused him of using the American flag to "beat and whip and lynch" political opponents).
Now the media, which ignored all of Van Jones' foibles back when President Obama appointed him in March, has determined that there's nothing more to report here. With Jones gone, all has returned to normal.
Except that one unanswered question remains:
Why did the White House appoint Jones in the first place?
We were told during the 2008 campaign that President Obama was the most technologically able candidate in our history. The Obama campaign ran commercials targeting John McCain's ignorance of the Internet.
Obama was so connected that he wanted to keep using his BlackBerry from the Oval Office.
And yet he couldn't get a single member of his administration to do a simple Google search on Van Jones.
Every tidbit of information on Van Jones was publicly available.
There were videos on YouTube and articles at major websites. And yet just three weeks ago, Valerie Jarrett, Obama's special adviser, told a crowd of leftists at the Daily Kos conference that "We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House."
So, why did Obama pick Jones in the first place?
He picked Jones because he is deeply insecure about his racial status. Despite his repeated insistence that he is the culmination of the American dream of racial unity, Obama surrounds himself with racial radicals -- and he has for decades.
Obama's associations with black communist Frank Marshall Davis during his teenage years, his apprenticeship to Rev. Jeremiah "God Damn America" Wright during his adult years, and his continuously comfortable relationships with racialists like Cornel West and Van Jones demonstrate his commitment to racial polarization.
This weekend's resignation of President Obama's "green jobs" czar and the week of partisan frothing that prompted it beg an obvious question:
Is anyone really surprised that Mr. Obama would choose to surround himself with Marxist cronies like Van Jones?
After all, during last year's campaign, it was widely reported that Mr. Obama's pastor and spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was an America-bashing race baiter; that Mr. Obama associated with leftist radical and former terrorist William Ayers; and that he had a deep alliance with the shakedown artists of ACORN.
Barack Obama hired Anthony “Van” Jones as a special adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Jones is an admitted “rowdy Black nationalist” and “communist” who was also a co-founder of the communist revolutionary organization STORM: Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement.
Quick question: how many Marxists, Communists, Domestic Terrorists and raving racialists does the President get to associate with before reasonable people can assume that the president on some level shares their particular vision of America?
While perusing the manifesto of this now defunct STORM, several things struck me as particularly interesting.
There was of course the passionate commitment to Marxist ideals, radical feminism, gay lesbian and transgender liberation and the ardent support of the unrepentant murderer Mumia Abu Jamal.
And there was this rather innocuous looking paragraph, which I found especially fascinating.
“Storm had a closed membership. People could not just decide to join whenever they wanted to.
Instead the group invited small classes of activists to become new members. This insured more consistency and accountability within the membership.
It also allowed the group to maintain its strict demographic quota requirements; each class was required to be 75% people of color and 60% women.”
Given their expressed passionate commitment to revolution I was surprised to discover that they would sacrifice principle on the alter of race and gender.
If revolution is what one truly desires – a revolution that will deliver “true freedom for our people” shouldn’t that include liberty from being categorized by race and/or gender?
Isn’t a shared ideology – shared principles – more important than quotas? These of course are people living in the United States bemoaning the collapse of the Soviet Bloc so rationality may be too much to ask.
It may also be one reason this group or Marxist revolutionaries never saw their membership increase beyond perhaps a dozen or so members.
Progressives Look to Dan Rather for Salvation (Accuracy in Media)
If you want some indication of the disarray that the "progressives" find themselves in, consider that disgraced broadcaster Dan Rather will be keynoting a September 23 event sponsored by The Nation magazine on "What Will Become of the News?"
The Nation calls Rather "legendary," ignoring how he was put out to pasture by CBS News after he used fake documents in 2004 to smear then-President Bush.
Tickets to hear and see Rather are $200 each. Rather is a legend in his own mind-and apparently the minds of those left-wingers who appreciate his effort to defeat Bush's re-election bid and throw the election to Senator John Kerry.
However, the effort backfired, thanks to conservative bloggers who exposed Rather's anti-Bush documents as fake. If liberals want to understand "What Will Become of the News?," they first have to understand what Rather & Company did to it. They seem ignorant.
Similarly, there are many "progressives" who pretend not to understand why Van Jones had to resign.
Opposing school speech wasn't partisan -- it was just crazy
This is what happens when you amplify insanity and call it by another name.
Earlier this morning, President Barack Obama gave his planned address to the nation's schoolchildren. This caps off a ridiculous period of time in the life of our Republic, in which a number of people completely lost their minds at the prospect of Obama talking to children about the importance of education, and the media -- to its great discredit -- pointed cameras at them and treated them as if they were sane.
With the address now behind us, the claims made by opponents of the address look more absurd than ever. And yet it should have never come to this point. To suggest that it is at all controversial, let alone nefarious, for the President to address the nation's youth is clearly demented. There is no other word for it. When the media was confronted by the "Birthers" and their bizarre assertion that Obama was not an American citizen, the media -- well, at least most of it -- rightly proclaimed the absurdity. Objections to Obama's address were, similarly, evidence of a great dementia loosed upon the nation. But in this case, even with all the clarity brought by the advance publication of Obama's speech, the political press somehow woke up this morning still wrestling with how to properly define the strange reaction to Obama's address.
Already today, I have heard this matter discussed in terms of how it's a product of "hyperpartisanship" and a demonstration of a larger "polarization" of the political discourse. This is more pointless mystification of the issue.
I have no idea where the idea of partisanship, let alone "hyperpartisanship," even enters into the story. This would imply that at the root of Obama's address is a core issue on which two parties have taken sides. It's not clear what that issue is. Chuck Todd attempted to establish a narrative this afternoon that it derives from differences of opinion on whether we should have a Department of Education. I have no idea where he's pulled that from. It's not from the address! The core issue elucidated in Obama's speech is that children should apply themselves in school, do their homework, take personal responsibility, and not drop out of school. If there is a group of people who believe children should do the opposite, we need to hear from them before we call this a product of "hyperpartisanship."
I'm similarly taken aback at those who wistfully opine that all of this is more sad evidence of the "polarization" of American politics. Now, certainly, the political discourse is, at times, highly polarized. But hey, you want to know a quick and easy way to polarize a discussion? Allow the yelpings of a bunch of insane people to occupy one of the poles!
THIS is what this story was: A bunch of lunatics made a bunch of claims about this address that were stupidly premised and borne of the same stuff as Birtherism: the simple desire to abolish Obama's existence and deny that the office of the president has any authority under his hand. If the media cannot figure this out, they deserve a failing grade.
Olbermann Flip-flops, Tells Kossacks NOT to Dig Up Dirt on Beck (NewsBusters)
Want to know just how unstable MSNBC's Keith Olbermann is?
Within the course of 48 hours, he asked Daily Kos readers to send him everything they could dig up about Fox News host Glenn Beck, and then called off the dogs.
That's right.
The host of "Countdown," apparently worried about his image, posted a follow-up blog Tuesday telling his minions to stand down but remain ready to attack if he needs them in the future:
Glenn Beck: Don't Congratulate Me for Van Jones' Resignation (Fox)
In case your only source of news is ABC, CBS, NBC and/or The New York Times or, as the White House was hoping, you were out doing things with your family this long weekend and didn't check the news (which was released after midnight Sunday so it wouldn't be in any papers) the green jobs "czar," special adviser to the president, Van Jones has resigned.
But here's The One Thing: My phone, e-mail and Twitter were hammered all weekend with people offering congratulations.
First, let me say I'm not the one to congratulate. I can go on and on about this stuff, but if you don't care and it doesn't connect with the American people, what I say doesn't matter.
So let me start with the good news: You still have power and clout in Washington. In many cases, your representatives in Washington knew nothing about Van Jones.
You were educating them and it wasn't until late last week that a few brave political people began to speak out.
British Commando Killed in Raid to Free Kidnapped Reporter (FOXNews)
KABUL — British commandos freed a New York Times reporter early Wednesday from Taliban captives who kidnapped him over the weekend in northern Afghanistan, but one of the commandos and a Times' translator were killed in the rescue, officials said.
Reporter Stephen Farrell was taken hostage along with his translator in the northern province of Kunduz on Saturday.
German commanders had ordered U.S. jets to drop bombs on two hijacked fuel tankers, causing a number of civilian casualties, and reporters traveled to the area to cover the story
Two military officials told The Associated Press that one British commando died during the early morning raid.
Congressman Erupts Arrogantly; Local Newspaper Fails to Cover Blowup (NewsBusters)
A congressman from the Indiana 9th district named Baron Hill had a major league arrogant temper tantrum on camera last Saturday which has become a big hit in the blogosphere with over 100,000 viewers on YouTube.
So one would figure that the local Bloomington newspaper, the Herald Times, would cover it, right?
ABC Rues How Conservatives and Citizen Journalists Are Derailing Obama's Agenda
ABC's World News on Tuesday night bemoaned the impact of conservatives and citizen journalists in derailing President Barack Obama's agenda.
Pivoting from the reaction to Obama's address to students, anchor Charles Gibson observed “today's speech was really the latest target of some conservative groups taking on the President” and “their tactics are having an impact.”
The Mainstream Media's Temper Tantrum (davidlimbaugh.com)
With the resignation of green czar Van Jones despite their efforts to protect him, the mainstream media have finally been reduced to sputtering incoherence, as they've observed the un-deification of their anointed messiah and experienced firsthand their own diminishing relevance.
The MSM are engaging in a colossal temper tantrum over their lost news monopoly -- a monopoly they forfeited through their bias, arrogance and self-imposed insulation. (Consider Rathergate and their shameless effort to "Swift boat" the Swift boaters, to name a few.)
This is an especially hard pill for them to swallow considering that during the past year, they've been stewing in the intoxicating delusion that they were again supreme, as they appeared to be getting away with their conspiratorial enthroning of King Barack Obama.
And they're not handling rejection well.
On "Meet the Press'" round-table discussion, retired "NBC Nightly News" anchor Tom Brokaw and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman were protesting the grass roots' and alternative media's unmasking of Van Jones as a radical leftist.
Brokaw said: "A lot of people will repeat back to me and take it as face value something that they read on the Internet.
And my line to them is you have to vet information. ... It is across-the-board ... and it's something that we all have to address, and it requires society and political and cultural leaders to stand up and say, 'This is crazy.' We just can't function that way."
The ethics spotlight on House Democrats is intensifying amid predictions from political analysts that Republicans will pick up many seats in next year’s midterm elections.
Few are going so far as to say that the GOP will win back the House, but ethics controversies are key to the rise of the minority party in the lower chamber.
Republicans capitalized on Democratic ethics woes to win the House in 1994 and Democrats turned the tables on the GOP in 2006, catapulting Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to Speaker. Republicans are planning to use ethics as a weapon in the 2010 election.
Democrats didn’t need any more bad news during an unusually bruising healthcare debate during the August break, but House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) attracted more headlines when he failed to disclose at least $650,000 — and possibly millions of dollars — in assets on required congressional forms.
Newspapers across the country — including The Washington Post — have called on Rangel to give up his Ways and Means post while the ethics committee evaluates the many ethics allegations that have been detailed in various media accounts.
U.S. ‘unlikely’ to recoup auto outlay, panel finds (America, you've been PUNKED!) (Washington Post)
The federal government is unlikely to recoup all of the billions of dollars that it has invested in General Motors and Chrysler, according to a new congressional oversight report assessing the automakers' rescue.
The report said that a $5.4 billion portion of the $10.5 billion owed by Chrysler is "highly unlikely" to be repaid, while full recovery of the $50 billion sunk into GM would require the company's stock to reach unprecedented heights.
"Although taxpayers may recover some portion of their investment in Chrysler and GM, it is unlikely they will recover the entire amount," according to the report, which is scheduled to be released Wednesday.
The K Street Tax Cheat Who's Lobbying to Save Obamacare (Townhall.com)
Tom Daschle is the human toe fungus of Washington -- a persistent infection that may disappear from time to time, but always comes back with a vengeance.
Despite abandoning his secretary of health and human services nomination in disgrace in February 2009, the K Street tax cheat who evaded IRS rules for years remains a top White House confidante and policy strategist.
In fact, he's leading the drive to save Obamacare. He climbed up from under the bus back into the Oval Office and onto the sets of "Meet the Press" and "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" to offer his rescue plan.
It's Daschle's idea to morph the unpopular "public option" into nonprofit "health care co-ops" that will almost certainly receive government funding, support and tax advantages over private insurers.
Old colleagues on both sides of the Senate aisle are now promoting his alternative. Last week, he penned a Do It for Teddy Kennedy pep rally op-ed in The Wall Street Journal urging Democrats to go it alone and depend on the backroom Senate reconciliation process if necessary to get a deal done.
President Jimmy Carter once sent a note to an adviser extolling the importance of crisis to leadership.
"When a president has authority to act unilaterally (as in a crisis), his leadership can be exerted.
Otherwise, compromise, delay and confusion are more likely. It's our system. I like it."
Politicians, like the rest of us, are often victims of their wishes. Carter was eventually smacked by the waves of crisis he sought to ride.
But encouraging a sense of crisis is a traditional tool of executive leadership. And using a joint session of Congress to address a single domestic issue is the most dramatic expression of this approach.
Carter did it effectively in April 1977. He spoke of the energy crisis as "the moral equivalent of war." Energy resources were "simply running out." (Carter's CIA predicted worldwide oil shortages by the mid-1980s.)
America needed to "cope with a crisis that otherwise would overwhelm us."
The speech had immediate influence. The share of Americans who viewed the energy crisis as a serious problem jumped nine points, to 54 percent.
One congressional staffer enthused: "It's damn near unpatriotic to oppose the president right now."
But the effect was temporary. Carter's energy-reform bill passed the House, but the Democratic Senate resisted on key issues, resulting in an impasse. Eventually, the energy crisis faded in comparison to unsought emergencies such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the taking of American hostages in Iran.
Premature baby 'left to die' by doctors ...(UK)DailymailUK
A young mother's premature baby died in her arms after doctors refused to help because it was born just before 22-week cut-off point for treatment.
Sarah Capewell, 23, gave birth to her son Jayden when she was 21 weeks and five days into her pregnancy.
Although doctors refused to place the baby in intensive care, Jayden lived for two hours before he passed away at James Paget Hospital in Gorleston, Norfolk, last October.
'Doctors told me it was against the rules to save my premature baby'
She said he was breathing unaided, had a strong heartbeat and was even moving his arms and legs, but medics refused to admit him to a special care baby unit.
Daughter claims father wrongly placed on controversial NHS end of life scheme (Telegraph UK)
Rosemary Munkenbeck says her father Eric Troake, who entered hospital after suffering a stroke, had fluid and drugs withdrawn and she claims doctors wanted to put him on morphine until he passed away under a scheme for dying patients called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP).
Mrs Munkenbeck, 56, from Bracknell, said her father, who previously said he wanted to live until he was 100, has now said he wants to die after being deprived of fluids for five days.
Terminally ill patients forced to die prematurely, doctors claim Kelowna ( BC Paper )
Patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under a scheme by Britain’s equivalent of medicare to help end their lives, leading doctors claim.
In a letter to the Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.
Under National Health Service guidelines introduced in England, medical staff can withdraw fluid and drugs from dying patients and many are put on continuous sedation until they die.
But this approach can also mask signs of improvement, the experts say.
As a result, the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states.
Congress has already exempted itself from Public Option (Wash Examiner)
One of the clearest messages from the Town Hall forums during the August congressional recess was that people want Congress to be covered by the same health care reform plan they impose on the rest of us.
Members of Congress presently get health insurance coverage through the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), which offers enrollees nearly 300 choices among a variety of plans, coverages and costs.
The FEHBP covers federal employees and retirees, as well as Members of Congress, though the latter have additional perks of office that make their health coverage far better than that available - or affordable - for the vast majority of working Americans.
Public anger may explain why the White House is now insisting that Congress has not exempted itself from the Public Option, most notably in this new "Reality Check" video on the White House web site featuring former ABC reporter Linda Douglas, who now flaks for Obama as communications director for the White House Office of Health Care Reform.
The problem is, according to The Heritage Foundation's Robert Moffitt, the White House assertion is "incorrect."
Report: House health care bill would balloon deficit (Washington Times)
A new report that for the first time gauges the impact of health care reform two decades out shows the nation's budget imbalance would skyrocket after 2020.
The House bill would increase the budget deficit by $1 trillion between 2020 to 2029, up from $39 billion from 2010 through 2019, says the Peterson Foundation study, conducted by the nonpartisan Lewin Group.
For "health care reform to be fiscally responsible, it must not just pay for itself over 10 years and beyond, it should also result in a significant reduction in the tens of trillions of dollars in the federal government's unfunded health care promises," said David Walker, president and CEO of the Peterson Foundation, which promotes fiscal prudence
Democrats may be moving toward a “trigger” proposal that could implement the public health insurance option several years from now, but don’t expect Republicans to latch on to this idea as some form of compromise.
Rip up this awful plan & rewrite it in English (NY Post)
When President Obama addresses Congress and the nation tonight, he should pledge to do three things.
First, he should announce that he will discard the 1,018-page health bill drafted in the House of Representatives and replace it with a 20-page bill in plain English.
Twenty pages should be sufficient. The framers of the US Constitution established an entire federal government in 18 pages.
One reason for the rancor over the current health bill is that few people, including members of Congress, know what it says. When those who have read it point to its dangerous provisions, the bill's defenders offer vague denials, and most people have no way of knowing who is telling the truth.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 (UPI) -- A leader of fiscally conservative Democrats in the U.S. House says he's backing away from a healthcare reform proposal he supported before the August recess.
Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark., a member of the so-called "Blue Dog Coalition" said he now can't support a reform bill that includes creation of a public health insurance option, The Washington Post reported.
"An overwhelming number of you oppose a government-run health insurance option, and it is your feedback that has led me to oppose the public option as well," Ross said in a statement to constituents.
Nowhere is the fallout from Obama’s healthcare proposals more evident than among the elderly, and nothing is more dangerous permanently for the Democratic Party than their increasing disaffection.
A Wall Street Journal poll taken last week reflects a gain by Republicans in party identification, closing the gap from 40-33 in April in favor of the Democrats to a Democratic margin of only 35-34.
The data reflects that one-third of this six-point closure of the partisan gap comes from a major shift among the elderly — the only demographic group to have moved dramatically.
In April, the elderly broke evenly on their party identification, with 37 percent supporting each political party.
Now the Republicans hold a lead, at 46-33. This 13-point closure among the 14 percent of the vote that is cast by those over 65 represents two of the six points of closure nationally.
No other group changed nearly as much. Neither liberals nor minorities nor any other age group moved nearly as dramatically as did the elderly.
The Journal’s pollsters noted that “perhaps the most striking movement is with senior citizens.”
Too late for Obama to turn it around? (Salon) Camille Paglia
They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy.
* * * Affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them.
Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning?
Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible.
The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue.
Deconstructing the "Whup Ass" -Victor Davis Hanson: Obama & Jones’ lucrative anti-capitalist careers (Victor Davis Hanson)
Van Jones is the latest romantic, pseudo-revolutionary surrounding Obama to carve out a capitalist career in the field of duping liberals.
At one point, the Obama administration was bragging about bagging one Van Jones;
Valerie Jarrett, in fact, even gushed that they had been scouting the erstwhile mostly unknown Jones for quite a while.
And now? The ministry has downgraded that now inoperative statement, and insisted that Jones, after all, was not really an unexamined czar, but rather a mere informal “advisor”.
SNIP
What to make of all this, the rather insignificant firing of a rather insignificant administration official?
Barak Obama did not transcend race as promised. Nor was there a racial backlash against him as his supporters both feared and now charge.
Rather the mood is weariness. One major reason Obama’s polls have dropped is the public resentment of this spate of allegations of racism.
Ex-N.Y. Mets Pitcher Will Do Time For Tax Evasion (Jerry Koosman gets 6 months behind bars)CBS 4 (What about Rangel, Daschle and Geithner)
MADISON, Wis. (AP) - A federal judge on Thursday sentenced former major league pitcher Jerry Koosman to six months in prison for not paying his taxes.
Prosecutors say Koosman, a former All-Star who helped the New York Mets win the 1969 World Series, didn't pay federal income taxes for 2002, 2003 and 2004.
He pleaded guilty in May to willfully failing to file taxes for 2002, a misdemeanor, in a deal with prosecutors.
Lessons of the Van Jones Affair: Democrats Are Comfortable With Communists, Racists and Anti-Semites (Frontpagemagazine)
There is no more mystery about Van Jones. He was a passionate defender of cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal, a self-satisfied and described "Communist," a supporter of the destruction of the Jewish state, and a promoter of the theory that the Katrina tragedy was a white racist plot, and so forth.
That's okay with Democratic chairman Howard Dean, and Obama's Environmental Quality Council head Nancy Sutley.
This should surprise no one. The recent heads of the black caucus in the House -- part of the 120 member "progressive caucus" -- have all been Castro-loving racists -- Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee to name two off the top of my head.
Diane Watson is probably next. The Democratic Party today is a "popular front" organization (to pluck an appropriate term from the 1930s when liberals and Stalinists lined up together as well).
There are no scoundrels, America haters, racists -- that Democrats won't assimilate. One of the more obnoxious racists and crooks in public life -- Charlie Rangel -- is still chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee because Nancy Pelosi can't remove him, so strong is his support in her party.
And if you don't believe how far left the Democrats have lurched when I say it, here's authentication from Alan Colmes who, after ignoring all the evidence about who Van Jones actually is and what he believes, and pretending that it's all a Glenn Beck-World Net Daily-Horowitz plot, concludes "Van Jones is a mainstream liberal."
That's exactly right Alan. And that's exactly the problem.
How did things get to this pass? Let me just single out one problem, because it's the one conservatives can actually affect.
And that is to start calling things by their right names. The timidity and cowardice of Republicans towards Democratic Party outrages of this nature is a principal culprit.
When you call Communists "liberals," it legitimizes them.
The time has come to stop it. To stop the charade, stick your head out the window and say "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."
Maybe You People Are Just … Ummm … Racists? (radioviceonline.com)
When the media sees the popularity of their Messiah sinking like a rock … well it can’t be his policies are bad, or a lack of leadership on his key issues, an inability to effectively communicate with Americans … no …
Don’t Like Obama’s Speech? You Shouldn’t Be Raising Children PATTERICO
So said an NBC commentator (*) John Harwood on the NBC Nightly News about those who objected to Obama’s school speech:
“This is one of the ridiculous controversies I’ve ever seen, and so far as I can tell, the biggest danger to kids in this whole thing is that a lot of the parents complaining aren’t smart enough to raise them very effectively.
Because if you think that a President coming into their school and saying ‘Work hard and stay in school’ is a danger to your kids, you’ve got some problems.”
The PC is becoming the new TV, survey shows (Los Angeles Times)
If you're watching more TV on your computer these days -- and less on an actual TV -- you're not alone.
A survey by the nonprofit Conference Board released Tuesday showed that nearly a quarter of households in the U.S. now view television programs online. That's up from 20% last year.
The quarterly Consumer Internet Barometer survey found that news shows were watched by 43% of online viewers, followed by sitcoms, comedies and dramas, watched by 35%. Slightly less than 20% viewed reality shows online, and 18% took in sports.
Viewership of the Hulu online service -- which offers shows from NBC, ABC, Fox and others -- nearly quadrupled from last year, but that's not a big surprise because Hulu didn't debut until March 2007
The survey found that 90% of online viewers watch at home. The remaining 10% watch at the office.
Internet Grows 37.5%, Traditional Media Declines 30%, 2006-2009 (Media Daily News)
Media spending in the second quarter of 2009 declined steeply compared to the second quarter of 2006 -- but the same period saw an even larger increase, in percentage terms, in Internet revenues.
It's worth noting that -- with the exception of newspapers -- the percentage share of most traditional media in overall spending has remained roughly the same, according to a MediaPost analysis of figures compiled from the Newspaper Association of America, the Television Bureau of Advertising, the Publishers Information Bureau, Radio Advertising Bureau, Outdoor Advertising Association of America, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Nielsen.
The rate of decline accelerated over time, with a 0.3% decline between the second quarter of 2006 and the second quarter of 2007 (to $41.4 billion), a 5% drop from 2007-2008 (to $39.4 billion) and an 18% decline from 2008-2009 (to $32.3 billion).
Subtracting Internet ad revenue from total spending, traditional media saw even steeper declines.
The 'Internet Manifesto' bucks a trend and gets mainstream media attentionIts 17 declarations on the future of journalism in the age of the internet have been discussed worldwide
"We were tired of the fact that the discussion about the future of journalism doesn't take the reality of the internet into account, but revolves around the wishes of how the publishers think it should be,"
As soon as it came out, it was spread all over the net: 15 German journalists and bloggers wrote an "Internet Manifesto" on how journalism works today. Shortly after it was announced online, their server went offline.
The reaction was overwhelming. The 17 declarations were discussed worldwide. Guardian columnist Jeff Jarvis retweeted every declaration to his nearly 25,000 Twitter followers.
The declarations were blogged, commented upon and widely discussed. And they even gathered attention in the newspapers.
So what is it all about? Starting with the sentence "The internet is different", the 17 declarations might not be hot news, but they tie together some of more innovative positions about journalism in the age of the net.
The authors believe that the internet improves journalism if the media adapt their working methods to today's technological reality, "instead of ignoring or challenging it".
Rumor has it, Olympia Snowe might faint at the TOTUS reading by the fake messiah tonight. Some RINOs are especially susceptible to swoon moments from socialist speechifiers.
MIAMI (AP) - Arrest warrants have been issued in Miami for 11 people suspected of falsifying information on hundreds of voter registration cards last year.
The FBI and state authorities were making arrests Wednesday. The workers being sought were hired to register voters by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.
Prosecutors say they were first notified by ACORN about problems with workers in June 2008.
Republicans and conservative activists have accused ACORN of fraud in voter registration drives around the country. ACORN officials say the Florida case proves the organization is committed to an honest process.
The case involved nearly 900 fraudulent voter cards in the Homestead area.
ACORN is just offering up a few sacrificial lambs for a smoke screen so they can hide the biggest nests of fraud. The FBI should be investigating the leadership. ACORN is nothing more than than hundreds of Van Jones types.
Those who love to see how bad Fox News is beating MSNBC nightly should check out tvbythenumbers.com. They have a cable news page every day with the ratings. It's a very cool site! Glenn Beck rocks!
You can just see that deeply stupid, affirmative-action parasite, Obama, becoming more and more sullen and truculent as he experiences mass hostility for the first time. He is a natural fascist while also seeming to be a somewhat fragile spoiled brat. And like any spoiled brat when he feels that he is being thwarted he (and the rest of the left-wing bratocracy) will pitch a truly awesome tantrum. It's hilarious to me that all the things they want to do as a matter of normal, regular business are the kind of things that would warm the hearts of scum like Lenin and Stalin.
Obama and his Orcs see every abuse of power, every lie, every failure as acts of transcendent moral superiority. See how shrill they get when anyone disagrees.
When their "largesse" (in the form of cynical power grabs and income redistribution) is angrily rejected and their little feelers are hurt, the first thing that's going to pop into their offended little heads is "A State of Emergency." I am convinced we're headed for this scenario in some form.
NYT says, Van Jones? Who is Van Jones? A nobody, not worth the time of day, until the shit hit the fan, and they were forced into writing a line or two. The NYT has become a worthless rag. --- Talk to The Times: Jill Abramson, Managing Editor - “The Times was, in fact, a beat behind on this story.
Why? One reason was that our Washington bureau was somewhat short-staffed during the height of the pre-Labor Day vacation period. This is not an excuse. Another is that despite being a so-called "czar," Mr. Jones was not a high-ranking official. Nevertheless, we should have been paying closer attention.”
12:59 PM You sound like a leftist troll who does nothing but attempt to insult people. You offer nothing of use or interest to anyone. Why do you bother?
12:59 PM is just a personal attack. 12:49 wrote a good post, and I agree with him/her. 12:59 does not rebut the opinion, he/she just attacks the poster. Trolls don’t seem to get the message, and they don’t deserve space on this blog,IMO.
Rev. Wright still hates ‘Whitey’. Fox News has a brief video in which Rev. Bigot was asked about Obama and health care. He says racists and right-wingers don’t want poor people to have health insurance. So, his hatred of white people influences his every thought. It’s a good thing Obama no longer counts on him for mentoring. Twenty-one years with a bigot might have tainted Obama’s narcissist love of his white half. Who knew Rev. Wright escaped from under the bus?
What did Van Jones cost the taxpayers? Surely some media watchdog will demand an accounting. We know what it cost Alaska to replace Sarah Palin, but I would guess Van Jones cost a whole bunch more of our green-green taxpayers dollars. The Van Jones scandal has out-ed the biased media for good, just in case a few in-denial ostriches, still had their heads in the sand. There has been some speculation that Jones received a huge severance package. That should be public information, and we know the media will be scurrying for that information. The public has a right to know, Yeah right!
Funny Czar Unemployment Rate chart. == Czar Unemployment Rate Reaches 3.13% On this Labor Day a flash news update from the Glenn Beck Department of Labor hit the news wires and this is what I could call good news. As we sit now the Czar Unemployment Rate (CUR) is sitting at 3.13%. Hopefully it will reach 100% soon. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2335732/posts
TOTUS says, "We know that this is a difficult time for journalism"- TOTUS was right about that. -- Obama Laments Current State of Journalism CBS News, by Brian Montopoli
President Obama offered some critical words for present-day journalism at a memorial for legendary CBS Newsman Walter Cronkite Friday, contrasting Cronkite's personal values and dedication to getting the story right with a what he cast as a cheapened public debate. The "standard of honesty and integrity and responsibility" that Cronkite maintained, the president said, is "a little bit harder to find today." "We know that this is a difficult time for journalism,"
Obama's School Speech conspiracy theory... There were two speeches! YA THINK! He had to have a plan B in case his plan A was leaked or wasn't deemed appropriate for the (as Rush called it) "young skulls full of mush".
And tonight we present you with Chapter 112 in the continuing series "Why America needs to believe I am not a liar...er needs a health plan poorly administered by my kingdom!"
"...My Fellow Ethiopians...Um Hawaiians...I mean peons. You serfs need to listen to me...Dr. President, because I know what is best for you and you don't! Believe me when I speak because you are stupid and don't know how to vote. Now that I got you where I want you I can rule over this kingdom and make you do whatever I want. Believe me 'cause I'm the President...soon to be The grand overseer of the Universe! Bwahahah!!!!e
Hat Tip and a shout out to Joe Wilson, although he should have thrown a shoe at the lying closet muslim loving bastard. Obumbles would have understood that and there is always the chance he would have hit the one who cannot blink instead.
54 comments:
What Van Jones Tells Us About President Obama (Townhall.com)
On Monday, Sept. 7, 2009, President Obama's hand-picked "green jobs czar," Van Jones, resigned. It was a week too late to prevent all the revelations about Jones:
his admitted agreement with communist philosophy;
his membership in the 9/11"truther" movement;
his racist views on environmental policy (he accused "white polluters and white environmentalists" of "steering poison into the people of color's communities");
his ridiculous ideas about school violence ("You've never seen a Columbine done by a black child … a black kid might shoot another black kid. He's not going to shoot up the whole school");
his unmitigated hatred for President George W. Bush (he compared Bush to a crack-pipe-licking cocaine addict, and accused him of using the American flag to "beat and whip and lynch" political opponents).
Now the media, which ignored all of Van Jones' foibles back when President Obama appointed him in March, has determined that there's nothing more to report here. With Jones gone, all has returned to normal.
Except that one unanswered question remains:
Why did the White House appoint Jones in the first place?
We were told during the 2008 campaign that President Obama was the most technologically able candidate in our history. The Obama campaign ran commercials targeting John McCain's ignorance of the Internet.
Obama was so connected that he wanted to keep using his BlackBerry from the Oval Office.
And yet he couldn't get a single member of his administration to do a simple Google search on Van Jones.
Every tidbit of information on Van Jones was publicly available.
There were videos on YouTube and articles at major websites. And yet just three weeks ago, Valerie Jarrett, Obama's special adviser, told a crowd of leftists at the Daily Kos conference that "We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House."
So, why did Obama pick Jones in the first place?
He picked Jones because he is deeply insecure about his racial status. Despite his repeated insistence that he is the culmination of the American dream of racial unity, Obama surrounds himself with racial radicals -- and he has for decades.
Obama's associations with black communist Frank Marshall Davis during his teenage years, his apprenticeship to Rev. Jeremiah "God Damn America" Wright during his adult years, and his continuously comfortable relationships with racialists like Cornel West and Van Jones demonstrate his commitment to racial polarization.
A red green (Las Vegas Review-Journal)
This weekend's resignation of President Obama's "green jobs" czar and the week of partisan frothing that prompted it beg an obvious question:
Is anyone really surprised that Mr. Obama would choose to surround himself with Marxist cronies like Van Jones?
After all, during last year's campaign, it was widely reported that Mr. Obama's pastor and spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was an America-bashing race baiter; that Mr. Obama associated with leftist radical and former terrorist William Ayers; and that he had a deep alliance with the shakedown artists of ACORN.
Invoking Executive Privilege (Townhall.com)
Barack Obama hired Anthony “Van” Jones as a special adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Jones is an admitted “rowdy Black nationalist” and “communist” who was also a co-founder of the communist revolutionary organization STORM: Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement.
Quick question: how many Marxists, Communists, Domestic Terrorists and raving racialists does the President get to associate with before reasonable people can assume that the president on some level shares their particular vision of America?
While perusing the manifesto of this now defunct STORM, several things struck me as particularly interesting.
There was of course the passionate commitment to Marxist ideals, radical feminism, gay lesbian and transgender liberation and the ardent support of the unrepentant murderer Mumia Abu Jamal.
And there was this rather innocuous looking paragraph, which I found especially fascinating.
“Storm had a closed membership. People could not just decide to join whenever they wanted to.
Instead the group invited small classes of activists to become new members. This insured more consistency and accountability within the membership.
It also allowed the group to maintain its strict demographic quota requirements; each class was required to be 75% people of color and 60% women.”
Given their expressed passionate commitment to revolution I was surprised to discover that they would sacrifice principle on the alter of race and gender.
If revolution is what one truly desires – a revolution that will deliver “true freedom for our people” shouldn’t that include liberty from being categorized by race and/or gender?
Isn’t a shared ideology – shared principles – more important than quotas? These of course are people living in the United States bemoaning the collapse of the Soviet Bloc so rationality may be too much to ask.
It may also be one reason this group or Marxist revolutionaries never saw their membership increase beyond perhaps a dozen or so members.
Progressives Look to Dan Rather for Salvation (Accuracy in Media)
If you want some indication of the disarray that the "progressives" find themselves in, consider that disgraced broadcaster Dan Rather will be keynoting a September 23 event sponsored by The Nation magazine on "What Will Become of the News?"
The Nation calls Rather "legendary," ignoring how he was put out to pasture by CBS News after he used fake documents in 2004 to smear then-President Bush.
Tickets to hear and see Rather are $200 each. Rather is a legend in his own mind-and apparently the minds of those left-wingers who appreciate his effort to defeat Bush's re-election bid and throw the election to Senator John Kerry.
However, the effort backfired, thanks to conservative bloggers who exposed Rather's anti-Bush documents as fake. If liberals want to understand "What Will Become of the News?," they first have to understand what Rather & Company did to it. They seem ignorant.
Similarly, there are many "progressives" who pretend not to understand why Van Jones had to resign.
Opposing school speech wasn't partisan -- it was just crazy
This is what happens when you amplify insanity and call it by another name.
Earlier this morning, President Barack Obama gave his planned address to the nation's schoolchildren. This caps off a ridiculous period of time in the life of our Republic, in which a number of people completely lost their minds at the prospect of Obama talking to children about the importance of education, and the media -- to its great discredit -- pointed cameras at them and treated them as if they were sane.
With the address now behind us, the claims made by opponents of the address look more absurd than ever. And yet it should have never come to this point. To suggest that it is at all controversial, let alone nefarious, for the President to address the nation's youth is clearly demented. There is no other word for it. When the media was confronted by the "Birthers" and their bizarre assertion that Obama was not an American citizen, the media -- well, at least most of it -- rightly proclaimed the absurdity. Objections to Obama's address were, similarly, evidence of a great dementia loosed upon the nation. But in this case, even with all the clarity brought by the advance publication of Obama's speech, the political press somehow woke up this morning still wrestling with how to properly define the strange reaction to Obama's address.
Already today, I have heard this matter discussed in terms of how it's a product of "hyperpartisanship" and a demonstration of a larger "polarization" of the political discourse. This is more pointless mystification of the issue.
I have no idea where the idea of partisanship, let alone "hyperpartisanship," even enters into the story. This would imply that at the root of Obama's address is a core issue on which two parties have taken sides. It's not clear what that issue is. Chuck Todd attempted to establish a narrative this afternoon that it derives from differences of opinion on whether we should have a Department of Education. I have no idea where he's pulled that from. It's not from the address! The core issue elucidated in Obama's speech is that children should apply themselves in school, do their homework, take personal responsibility, and not drop out of school. If there is a group of people who believe children should do the opposite, we need to hear from them before we call this a product of "hyperpartisanship."
I'm similarly taken aback at those who wistfully opine that all of this is more sad evidence of the "polarization" of American politics. Now, certainly, the political discourse is, at times, highly polarized. But hey, you want to know a quick and easy way to polarize a discussion? Allow the yelpings of a bunch of insane people to occupy one of the poles!
THIS is what this story was: A bunch of lunatics made a bunch of claims about this address that were stupidly premised and borne of the same stuff as Birtherism: the simple desire to abolish Obama's existence and deny that the office of the president has any authority under his hand. If the media cannot figure this out, they deserve a failing grade.
Jason Linkins
Huffingtonpost.com
Olbermann Flip-flops, Tells Kossacks NOT to Dig Up Dirt on Beck
(NewsBusters)
Want to know just how unstable MSNBC's Keith Olbermann is?
Within the course of 48 hours, he asked Daily Kos readers to send him everything they could dig up about Fox News host Glenn Beck, and then called off the dogs.
That's right.
The host of "Countdown," apparently worried about his image, posted a follow-up blog Tuesday telling his minions to stand down but remain ready to attack if he needs them in the future:
Glenn Beck: Don't Congratulate Me for Van Jones' Resignation (Fox)
In case your only source of news is ABC, CBS, NBC and/or The New York Times or, as the White House was hoping, you were out doing things with your family this long weekend and didn't check the news (which was released after midnight Sunday so it wouldn't be in any papers) the green jobs "czar," special adviser to the president, Van Jones has resigned.
But here's The One Thing: My phone, e-mail and Twitter were hammered all weekend with people offering congratulations.
First, let me say I'm not the one to congratulate. I can go on and on about this stuff, but if you don't care and it doesn't connect with the American people, what I say doesn't matter.
So let me start with the good news: You still have power and clout in Washington. In many cases, your representatives in Washington knew nothing about Van Jones.
You were educating them and it wasn't until late last week that a few brave political people began to speak out.
British Commando Killed in Raid to Free Kidnapped Reporter (FOXNews)
KABUL — British commandos freed a New York Times reporter early Wednesday from Taliban captives who kidnapped him over the weekend in northern Afghanistan, but one of the commandos and a Times' translator were killed in the rescue, officials said.
Reporter Stephen Farrell was taken hostage along with his translator in the northern province of Kunduz on Saturday.
German commanders had ordered U.S. jets to drop bombs on two hijacked fuel tankers, causing a number of civilian casualties, and reporters traveled to the area to cover the story
Two military officials told The Associated Press that one British commando died during the early morning raid.
Congressman Erupts Arrogantly; Local Newspaper Fails to Cover Blowup (NewsBusters)
A congressman from the Indiana 9th district named Baron Hill had a major league arrogant temper tantrum on camera last Saturday which has become a big hit in the blogosphere with over 100,000 viewers on YouTube.
So one would figure that the local Bloomington newspaper, the Herald Times, would cover it, right?
Wrong.
ABC Rues How Conservatives and Citizen Journalists Are Derailing Obama's Agenda
ABC's World News on Tuesday night bemoaned the impact of conservatives and citizen journalists in derailing President Barack Obama's agenda.
Pivoting from the reaction to Obama's address to students, anchor Charles Gibson observed “today's speech was really the latest target of some conservative groups taking on the President” and “their tactics are having an impact.”
The Mainstream Media's Temper Tantrum (davidlimbaugh.com)
With the resignation of green czar Van Jones despite their efforts to protect him, the mainstream media have finally been reduced to sputtering incoherence, as they've observed the un-deification of their anointed messiah and experienced firsthand their own diminishing relevance.
The MSM are engaging in a colossal temper tantrum over their lost news monopoly -- a monopoly they forfeited through their bias, arrogance and self-imposed insulation. (Consider Rathergate and their shameless effort to "Swift boat" the Swift boaters, to name a few.)
This is an especially hard pill for them to swallow considering that during the past year, they've been stewing in the intoxicating delusion that they were again supreme, as they appeared to be getting away with their conspiratorial enthroning of King Barack Obama.
And they're not handling rejection well.
On "Meet the Press'" round-table discussion, retired "NBC Nightly News" anchor Tom Brokaw and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman were protesting the grass roots' and alternative media's unmasking of Van Jones as a radical leftist.
Brokaw said: "A lot of people will repeat back to me and take it as face value something that they read on the Internet.
And my line to them is you have to vet information. ... It is across-the-board ... and it's something that we all have to address, and it requires society and political and cultural leaders to stand up and say, 'This is crazy.' We just can't function that way."
Ethics spotlight burns on House Dems (The Hill)
The ethics spotlight on House Democrats is intensifying amid predictions from political analysts that Republicans will pick up many seats in next year’s midterm elections.
Few are going so far as to say that the GOP will win back the House, but ethics controversies are key to the rise of the minority party in the lower chamber.
Republicans capitalized on Democratic ethics woes to win the House in 1994 and Democrats turned the tables on the GOP in 2006, catapulting Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to Speaker.
Republicans are planning to use ethics as a weapon in the 2010 election.
Democrats didn’t need any more bad news during an unusually bruising healthcare debate during the August break, but House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) attracted more headlines when he failed to disclose at least $650,000 — and possibly millions of dollars — in assets on required congressional forms.
Newspapers across the country — including The Washington Post — have called on Rangel to give up his Ways and Means post while the ethics committee evaluates the many ethics allegations that have been detailed in various media accounts.
U.S. ‘unlikely’ to recoup auto outlay, panel finds (America, you've been PUNKED!) (Washington Post)
The federal government is unlikely to recoup all of the billions of dollars that it has invested in General Motors and Chrysler, according to a new congressional oversight report assessing the automakers' rescue.
The report said that a $5.4 billion portion of the $10.5 billion owed by Chrysler is "highly unlikely" to be repaid, while full recovery of the $50 billion sunk into GM would require the company's stock to reach unprecedented heights.
"Although taxpayers may recover some portion of their investment in Chrysler and GM, it is unlikely they will recover the entire amount," according to the report, which is scheduled to be released Wednesday.
The K Street Tax Cheat Who's Lobbying to Save Obamacare (Townhall.com)
Tom Daschle is the human toe fungus of Washington -- a persistent infection that may disappear from time to time, but always comes back with a vengeance.
Despite abandoning his secretary of health and human services nomination in disgrace in February 2009, the K Street tax cheat who evaded IRS rules for years remains a top White House confidante and policy strategist.
In fact, he's leading the drive to save Obamacare. He climbed up from under the bus back into the Oval Office and onto the sets of "Meet the Press" and "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" to offer his rescue plan.
It's Daschle's idea to morph the unpopular "public option" into nonprofit "health care co-ops" that will almost certainly receive government funding, support and tax advantages over private insurers.
Old colleagues on both sides of the Senate aisle are now promoting his alternative. Last week, he penned a Do It for Teddy Kennedy pep rally op-ed in The Wall Street Journal urging Democrats to go it alone and depend on the backroom Senate reconciliation process if necessary to get a deal done.
Obama's Crisis: Credibility (Washington Post)
President Jimmy Carter once sent a note to an adviser extolling the importance of crisis to leadership.
"When a president has authority to act unilaterally (as in a crisis), his leadership can be exerted.
Otherwise, compromise, delay and confusion are more likely. It's our system. I like it."
Politicians, like the rest of us, are often victims of their wishes. Carter was eventually smacked by the waves of crisis he sought to ride.
But encouraging a sense of crisis is a traditional tool of executive leadership. And using a joint session of Congress to address a single domestic issue is the most dramatic expression of this approach.
Carter did it effectively in April 1977. He spoke of the energy crisis as "the moral equivalent of war." Energy resources were "simply running out." (Carter's CIA predicted worldwide oil shortages by the mid-1980s.)
America needed to "cope with a crisis that otherwise would overwhelm us."
The speech had immediate influence. The share of Americans who viewed the energy crisis as a serious problem jumped nine points, to 54 percent.
One congressional staffer enthused: "It's damn near unpatriotic to oppose the president right now."
But the effect was temporary. Carter's energy-reform bill passed the House, but the Democratic Senate resisted on key issues, resulting in an impasse. Eventually, the energy crisis faded in comparison to unsought emergencies such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the taking of American hostages in Iran.
Premature baby 'left to die' by doctors ...(UK)DailymailUK
A young mother's premature baby died in her arms after doctors refused to help because it was born just before 22-week cut-off point for treatment.
Sarah Capewell, 23, gave birth to her son Jayden when she was 21 weeks and five days into her pregnancy.
Although doctors refused to place the baby in intensive care, Jayden lived for two hours before he passed away at James Paget Hospital in Gorleston, Norfolk, last October.
'Doctors told me it was against the rules to save my premature baby'
She said he was breathing unaided, had a strong heartbeat and was even moving his arms and legs, but medics refused to admit him to a special care baby unit.
Daughter claims father wrongly placed on controversial NHS end of life scheme (Telegraph UK)
Rosemary Munkenbeck says her father Eric Troake, who entered hospital after suffering a stroke, had fluid and drugs withdrawn and she claims doctors wanted to put him on morphine until he passed away under a scheme for dying patients called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP).
Mrs Munkenbeck, 56, from Bracknell, said her father, who previously said he wanted to live until he was 100, has now said he wants to die after being deprived of fluids for five days.
Terminally ill patients forced to die prematurely, doctors claim
Kelowna ( BC Paper )
Patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under a scheme by Britain’s equivalent of medicare to help end their lives, leading doctors claim.
In a letter to the Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.
Under National Health Service guidelines introduced in England, medical staff can withdraw fluid and drugs from dying patients and many are put on continuous sedation until they die.
But this approach can also mask signs of improvement, the experts say.
As a result, the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states.
Congress has already exempted itself from Public Option (Wash Examiner)
One of the clearest messages from the Town Hall forums during the August congressional recess was that people want Congress to be covered by the same health care reform plan they impose on the rest of us.
Members of Congress presently get health insurance coverage through the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), which offers enrollees nearly 300 choices among a variety of plans, coverages and costs.
The FEHBP covers federal employees and retirees, as well as Members of Congress, though the latter have additional perks of office that make their health coverage far better than that available - or affordable - for the vast majority of working Americans.
Public anger may explain why the White House is now insisting that Congress has not exempted itself from the Public Option, most notably in this new "Reality Check" video on the White House web site featuring former ABC reporter Linda Douglas, who now flaks for Obama as communications director for the White House Office of Health Care Reform.
The problem is, according to The Heritage Foundation's Robert Moffitt, the White House assertion is "incorrect."
Report: House health care bill would balloon deficit (Washington Times)
A new report that for the first time gauges the impact of health care reform two decades out shows the nation's budget imbalance would skyrocket after 2020.
The House bill would increase the budget deficit by $1 trillion between 2020 to 2029, up from $39 billion from 2010 through 2019, says the Peterson Foundation study, conducted by the nonpartisan Lewin Group.
For "health care reform to be fiscally responsible, it must not just pay for itself over 10 years and beyond, it should also result in a significant reduction in the tens of trillions of dollars in the federal government's unfunded health care promises," said David Walker, president and CEO of the Peterson Foundation, which promotes fiscal prudence
GOP rejects 'trigger' compromise (Politico)
Democrats may be moving toward a “trigger” proposal that could implement the public health insurance option several years from now, but don’t expect Republicans to latch on to this idea as some form of compromise.
Rip up this awful plan & rewrite it in English (NY Post)
When President Obama addresses Congress and the nation tonight, he should pledge to do three things.
First, he should announce that he will discard the 1,018-page health bill drafted in the House of Representatives and replace it with a 20-page bill in plain English.
Twenty pages should be sufficient. The framers of the US Constitution established an entire federal government in 18 pages.
One reason for the rancor over the current health bill is that few people, including members of Congress, know what it says.
When those who have read it point to its dangerous provisions, the bill's defenders offer vague denials, and most people have no way of knowing who is telling the truth.
Blue Dog backs off public option support (UPI)
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 (UPI) -- A leader of fiscally conservative Democrats in the U.S. House says he's backing away from a healthcare reform proposal he supported before the August recess.
Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark., a member of the so-called "Blue Dog Coalition" said he now can't support a reform bill that includes creation of a public health insurance option, The Washington Post reported.
"An overwhelming number of you oppose a government-run health insurance option, and it is your feedback that has led me to oppose the public option as well," Ross said in a statement to constituents.
Democrats losing seniors (The Hill)
Nowhere is the fallout from Obama’s healthcare proposals more evident than among the elderly, and nothing is more dangerous permanently for the Democratic Party than their increasing disaffection.
A Wall Street Journal poll taken last week reflects a gain by Republicans in party identification, closing the gap from 40-33 in April in favor of the Democrats to a Democratic margin of only 35-34.
The data reflects that one-third of this six-point closure of the partisan gap comes from a major shift among the elderly — the only demographic group to have moved dramatically.
In April, the elderly broke evenly on their party identification, with 37 percent supporting each political party.
Now the Republicans hold a lead, at 46-33. This 13-point closure among the 14 percent of the vote that is cast by those over 65 represents two of the six points of closure nationally.
No other group changed nearly as much. Neither liberals nor minorities nor any other age group moved nearly as dramatically as did the elderly.
The Journal’s pollsters noted that “perhaps the most striking movement is with senior citizens.”
Too late for Obama to turn it around? (Salon) Camille Paglia
They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy.
* * * Affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them.
Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning?
Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible.
The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue.
The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled.
Deconstructing the "Whup Ass" -Victor Davis Hanson: Obama & Jones’ lucrative anti-capitalist careers (Victor Davis Hanson)
Van Jones is the latest romantic, pseudo-revolutionary surrounding Obama to carve out a capitalist career in the field of duping liberals.
At one point, the Obama administration was bragging about bagging one Van Jones;
Valerie Jarrett, in fact, even gushed that they had been scouting the erstwhile mostly unknown Jones for quite a while.
And now? The ministry has downgraded that now inoperative statement, and insisted that Jones, after all, was not really an unexamined czar, but rather a mere informal “advisor”.
SNIP
What to make of all this, the rather insignificant firing of a rather insignificant administration official?
Barak Obama did not transcend race as promised. Nor was there a racial backlash against him as his supporters both feared and now charge.
Rather the mood is weariness. One major reason Obama’s polls have dropped is the public resentment of this spate of allegations of racism.
Ex-N.Y. Mets Pitcher Will Do Time For Tax Evasion (Jerry Koosman gets 6 months behind bars)CBS 4
(What about Rangel, Daschle and Geithner)
MADISON, Wis. (AP) - A federal judge on Thursday sentenced former major league pitcher Jerry Koosman to six months in prison for not paying his taxes.
Prosecutors say Koosman, a former All-Star who helped the New York Mets win the 1969 World Series, didn't pay federal income taxes for 2002, 2003 and 2004.
He pleaded guilty in May to willfully failing to file taxes for 2002, a misdemeanor, in a deal with prosecutors.
Lessons of the Van Jones Affair: Democrats Are Comfortable With Communists, Racists and Anti-Semites (Frontpagemagazine)
There is no more mystery about Van Jones. He was a passionate defender of cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal, a self-satisfied and described "Communist," a supporter of the destruction of the Jewish state, and a promoter of the theory that the Katrina tragedy was a white racist plot, and so forth.
That's okay with Democratic chairman Howard Dean, and Obama's Environmental Quality Council head Nancy Sutley.
This should surprise no one. The recent heads of the black caucus in the House -- part of the 120 member "progressive caucus" -- have all been Castro-loving racists -- Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee to name two off the top of my head.
Diane Watson is probably next. The Democratic Party today is a "popular front" organization (to pluck an appropriate term from the 1930s when liberals and Stalinists lined up together as well).
There are no scoundrels, America haters, racists -- that Democrats won't assimilate. One of the more obnoxious racists and crooks in public life -- Charlie Rangel -- is still chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee because Nancy Pelosi can't remove him, so strong is his support in her party.
And if you don't believe how far left the Democrats have lurched when I say it, here's authentication from Alan Colmes who, after ignoring all the evidence about who Van Jones actually is and what he believes, and pretending that it's all a Glenn Beck-World Net Daily-Horowitz plot, concludes "Van Jones is a mainstream liberal."
That's exactly right Alan. And that's exactly the problem.
How did things get to this pass? Let me just single out one problem, because it's the one conservatives can actually affect.
And that is to start calling things by their right names. The timidity and cowardice of Republicans towards Democratic Party outrages of this nature is a principal culprit.
When you call Communists "liberals," it legitimizes them.
The time has come to stop it. To stop the charade, stick your head out the window and say "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."
Maybe You People Are Just … Ummm … Racists? (radioviceonline.com)
When the media sees the popularity of their Messiah sinking like a rock … well it can’t be his policies are bad, or a lack of leadership on his key issues, an inability to effectively communicate with Americans … no …
it must be because we are racists.
Just ask Chuck Todd and Mike Barnicle.
Don’t Like Obama’s Speech? You Shouldn’t Be Raising Children
PATTERICO
So said an NBC commentator (*) John Harwood on the NBC Nightly News about those who objected to Obama’s school speech:
“This is one of the ridiculous controversies I’ve ever seen, and so far as I can tell, the biggest danger to kids in this whole thing is that a lot of the parents complaining aren’t smart enough to raise them very effectively.
Because if you think that a President coming into their school and saying ‘Work hard and stay in school’ is a danger to your kids, you’ve got some problems.”
MSNBC Analyst: Obamacare Opponents Are Racists (GatewayPundit)
When all else fails there's always the race card.
Chuck Todd explained on Hardball why Americans oppose Obamacare.
It's not because the legislation stinks. It's because they're racists.
Further, to make their plan more appealing the democrats will fine Americans up to $3,800 for failing to buy health insurance.
But, you're a racist if you oppose this.
The PC is becoming the new TV, survey shows (Los Angeles Times)
If you're watching more TV on your computer these days -- and less on an actual TV -- you're not alone.
A survey by the nonprofit Conference Board released Tuesday showed that nearly a quarter of households in the U.S. now view television programs online. That's up from 20% last year.
The quarterly Consumer Internet Barometer survey found that news shows were watched by 43% of online viewers, followed by sitcoms, comedies and dramas, watched by 35%. Slightly less than 20% viewed reality shows online, and 18% took in sports.
Viewership of the Hulu online service -- which offers shows from NBC, ABC, Fox and others -- nearly quadrupled from last year, but that's not a big surprise because Hulu didn't debut until March 2007
The survey found that 90% of online viewers watch at home. The remaining 10% watch at the office.
Internet Grows 37.5%, Traditional Media Declines 30%, 2006-2009 (Media Daily News)
Media spending in the second quarter of 2009 declined steeply compared to the second quarter of 2006 -- but the same period saw an even larger increase, in percentage terms, in Internet revenues.
It's worth noting that -- with the exception of newspapers -- the percentage share of most traditional media in overall spending has remained roughly the same, according to a MediaPost analysis of figures compiled from the Newspaper Association of America, the Television Bureau of Advertising, the Publishers Information Bureau, Radio Advertising Bureau, Outdoor Advertising Association of America, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Nielsen.
The rate of decline accelerated over time, with a 0.3% decline between the second quarter of 2006 and the second quarter of 2007 (to $41.4 billion), a 5% drop from 2007-2008 (to $39.4 billion) and an 18% decline from 2008-2009 (to $32.3 billion).
Subtracting Internet ad revenue from total spending, traditional media saw even steeper declines.
The 'Internet Manifesto' bucks a trend and gets mainstream media attentionIts 17 declarations on the future of journalism in the age of the internet have been discussed worldwide
"We were tired of the fact that the discussion about the future of journalism doesn't take the reality of the internet into account, but revolves around the wishes of how the publishers think it should be,"
As soon as it came out, it was spread all over the net: 15 German journalists and bloggers wrote an "Internet Manifesto" on how journalism works today. Shortly after it was announced online, their server went offline.
The reaction was overwhelming. The 17 declarations were discussed worldwide. Guardian columnist Jeff Jarvis retweeted every declaration to his nearly 25,000 Twitter followers.
The declarations were blogged, commented upon and widely discussed. And they even gathered attention in the newspapers.
So what is it all about? Starting with the sentence "The internet is different", the 17 declarations might not be hot news, but they tie together some of more innovative positions about journalism in the age of the net.
The authors believe that the internet improves journalism if the media adapt their working methods to today's technological reality, "instead of ignoring or challenging it".
Rumor has it, Olympia Snowe might faint at the TOTUS reading by the fake messiah tonight. Some RINOs are especially susceptible to swoon moments from socialist speechifiers.
Obama to ask for debt ceiling be raised to 13 Trillion Dollars, BEFORE paying for ObamaCare.
Too bad he didn’t bring this up with “the children” yesterday.
BIG SURPRISE - ACORN DIRTY WITH VOTER FRAUD!!!
MIAMI (AP) - Arrest warrants have been issued in Miami for 11 people suspected of falsifying information on hundreds of voter registration cards last year.
The FBI and state authorities were making arrests Wednesday. The workers being sought were hired to register voters by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.
Prosecutors say they were first notified by ACORN about problems with workers in June 2008.
Republicans and conservative activists have accused ACORN of fraud in voter registration drives around the country. ACORN officials say the Florida case proves the organization is committed to an honest process.
The case involved nearly 900 fraudulent voter cards in the Homestead area.
Anon 7:33 Great post. Plus more FBI investigations. Light is good!
ACORN is just offering up a few sacrificial lambs for a smoke screen so they can hide the biggest nests of fraud. The FBI should be investigating the leadership. ACORN is nothing more than than hundreds of Van Jones types.
The ACORN story just made an URGENT!! on foxnews.com. Wonder if the mainstream media will even bother to run it?
Those who love to see how bad Fox News is beating MSNBC nightly should check out tvbythenumbers.com. They have a cable news page every day with the ratings. It's a very cool site! Glenn Beck rocks!
You can just see that deeply stupid, affirmative-action parasite, Obama, becoming more and more sullen and truculent as he experiences mass hostility for the first time. He is a natural fascist while also seeming to be a somewhat fragile spoiled brat. And like any spoiled brat when he feels that he is being thwarted he (and the rest of the left-wing bratocracy) will pitch a truly awesome tantrum. It's hilarious to me that all the things they want to do as a matter of normal, regular business are the kind of things that would warm the hearts of scum like Lenin and Stalin.
Obama and his Orcs see every abuse of power, every lie, every failure as acts of transcendent moral superiority. See how shrill they get when anyone disagrees.
When their "largesse" (in the form of cynical power grabs and income redistribution) is angrily rejected and their little feelers are hurt, the first thing that's going to pop into their offended little heads is "A State of Emergency." I am convinced we're headed for this scenario in some form.
12:49, you sound like a raving paranoid lunatic. Get a grip.
NYT says, Van Jones? Who is Van Jones? A nobody, not worth the time of day, until the shit hit the fan, and they were forced into writing a line or two. The NYT has become a worthless rag.
---
Talk to The Times: Jill Abramson, Managing Editor -
“The Times was, in fact, a beat behind on this story.
Why? One reason was that our Washington bureau was somewhat short-staffed during the height of the pre-Labor Day vacation period. This is not an excuse. Another is that despite being a so-called "czar," Mr. Jones was not a high-ranking official. Nevertheless, we should have been paying closer attention.”
via The Drudge Report
12:59 PM You sound like a leftist troll who does nothing but attempt to insult people. You offer nothing of use or interest to anyone. Why do you bother?
12:59 PM is just a personal attack. 12:49 wrote a good post, and I agree with him/her.
12:59 does not rebut the opinion, he/she just attacks the poster. Trolls don’t seem to get the message, and they don’t deserve space on this blog,IMO.
Rev. Wright still hates ‘Whitey’. Fox News has a brief video in which Rev. Bigot was asked about Obama and health care. He says racists and right-wingers don’t want poor people to have health insurance. So, his hatred of white people influences his every thought. It’s a good thing Obama no longer counts on him for mentoring. Twenty-one years with a bigot might have tainted Obama’s narcissist love of his white half. Who knew Rev. Wright escaped from under the bus?
What did Van Jones cost the taxpayers? Surely some media watchdog will demand an accounting. We know what it cost Alaska to replace Sarah Palin, but I would guess Van Jones cost a whole bunch more of our green-green taxpayers dollars. The Van Jones scandal has out-ed the biased media for good, just in case a few in-denial ostriches, still had their heads in the sand. There has been some speculation that Jones received a huge severance package. That should be public information, and we know the media will be scurrying for that information. The public has a right to know, Yeah right!
Funny Czar Unemployment Rate chart.
==
Czar Unemployment Rate Reaches 3.13% On this Labor Day a flash news update from the Glenn Beck Department of Labor hit the news wires and this is what I could call good news. As we sit now the Czar Unemployment Rate (CUR) is sitting at 3.13%. Hopefully it will reach 100% soon.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2335732/posts
TOTUS says, "We know that this is a difficult time for journalism"-
TOTUS was right about that.
--
Obama Laments Current
State of Journalism
CBS News, by Brian Montopoli
President Obama offered some critical words for present-day journalism at a memorial for legendary CBS Newsman Walter Cronkite Friday, contrasting Cronkite's personal values and dedication to getting the story right with a what he cast as a cheapened public debate. The "standard of honesty and integrity and responsibility" that Cronkite maintained, the president said, is "a little bit harder to find today." "We know that this is a difficult time for journalism,"
Barry O is such a liar. Who is going to believe him tonight? Yawning once again.
Obama's School Speech conspiracy theory...
There were two speeches!
YA THINK! He had to have a plan B in case his plan A was leaked or wasn't deemed appropriate for the (as Rush called it) "young skulls full of mush".
And tonight we present you with Chapter 112 in the continuing series "Why America needs to believe I am not a liar...er needs a health plan poorly administered by my kingdom!"
"...My Fellow Ethiopians...Um Hawaiians...I mean peons. You serfs need to listen to me...Dr. President, because I know what is best for you and you don't! Believe me when I speak because you are stupid and don't know how to vote. Now that I got you where I want you I can rule over this kingdom and make you do whatever I want. Believe me 'cause I'm the President...soon to be The grand overseer of the Universe! Bwahahah!!!!e
Hat Tip and a shout out to Joe Wilson, although he should have thrown a shoe at the lying closet muslim loving bastard. Obumbles would have understood that and there is always the chance he would have hit the one who cannot blink instead.
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