CNN's subtle lie

CNN's web site betrays their editorial bias with this headline, screen capped here for posterity just in case they change it. The headline accompanies this article, which manages to contradict the headline right in the first paragraph:

P.J. Crowley abruptly resigned Sunday as State Department spokesman over controversial comments he made about the Bradley Manning case.

So, over what issue did Crowley resign? Was it a principled protest over Pvt. Bradley Manning's treatment as the headline implies, or was it in disgrace over his comments about his treatment? Clearly, CNN would prefer you believe it was the former, and hopes you won't actually read the article which makes it readily apparent that Crowley was fired.

The labor debate, before the invention of lying

Not long ago, there was a Rickey Gervais movie called "The Invention Of Lying", which took place in an alternate universe in which people were incapable of telling anything but the unvarnished truth.

Let's superimpose that alternate universe on today's debate over public sector unions and their deathgrip on the public fisc. Our intrepid reporter is cruising labor demonstrations, statehouses, and Chicago hotels filled with Democrats subverting the legislative process in their home states.

SCENE: Big labor rally with lots of people dressed in red, waving their fists in the air.

Intrepid Reporter (to stout 40-ish woman): Excuse me, ma'am...are you a public school teacher?

Stout Woman: Yes, indeedy!

IR: And what are you demonstrating about today?

SW: Well, duh! Those terrorist Koch Whores who are trying to destroy our very way of life!

IR: Oh, you mean the Republicans?

SW: Exactly!

IR: And how are they doing that? Destroying our very way of life, that is.

SW: Well, they want us to work and contribute reasonable amounts of money to our medical benefits and retirement plans, without the right to dictate to the taxpayers how much is reasonable.

IR: Just like private sector workers, you mean?

SW: Exactly!

IR: Oh. So tell me...why did you become a teacher?

SW: Pretty obvious, really. I wanted employment for life, a decent salary, and a nice, fat pension when I retire at an absurdly young age.

IR: Just like private sector workers, you mean?

SW: Exa-- aw, I see what you did there! A regular comedian, you are!

SCENE: Cocktail lounge of a Chicago hotel.

IR (to a distinguished-looking 50-ish gentleman): Excuse me sir, but aren't you Senator Fleebagger from Wisconsin?

Sen. Fleebagger (glancing around furtively): Uh, yes...yes I am.

IR: Why are you here in Chicago instead of back in Madison representing your constituents?

SF: If I had any real interest in "representing my constituents", as you so quaintly put it, do you really think I'd be here? I can get martinis every bit as good as this one at home.

IR: Well, if you have no interest in representing your constituents, why did you run for election to the Wisconsin state senate?

SF: Stepping stone. You see where a state senate seat got our current president, don't you?

IR: Uh, OK. But aren't you just the least bit afraid that this stunt might jeopardize your reelection chances for the next term?

SF: Oh, hell no. I'll be running for the US Senate before this term is up, and my ill-informed and short-on-memory electorate won't let me down.

IR: Right, then. So tell me...why are you so strongly opposed to Gov. Walker's proposal to repair the state's budget?

SF: Look, I'm a Democrat, right? We Democrats depend on unions not just for campaign cash but for campaign workers. Without large, powerful unions that are flush with cash we'd never have a chance against Republicans in any election.

IR: So for you and your Democratic colleagues, this has nothing to do with workers' rights, then?

SF: Bwahahahaha! No.

SCENE: Wisconsin State House, hallway.

IR (to attractive, mid-30s woman): Pardon me, Senator Pachyderm...can you take a few questions?

Sen. Pachyderm: Sure, if you make it quick.

IR: What do you make of your Democratic colleagues' absence from debate on the Governor's budget repair bill?

SP: Well, clearly, they're subverting the democratic process for their own political ends.

IR: But don't you think they have the right to make their position known in the most forceful way possible?

SP: Of course, and the place do that is right here, on the senate floor. That's what they were elected to do.

IR: I assume you're in favor of the Governor's bill?

SP: Yes. We simply can't afford the continued high costs of pay and benefits and we have to prevent future extortion by the unions. And if it levels the playing field in the next election, then booyah!

And there you have it...the interviews we'll never see.

UN furiously wringing its hands over Libya

For over a week now, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi's loyalists have been murdering protesters in the streets, and going so far as to bomb them from the air. There are even reports that funeral processions for protesters are being attacked by Qaddafi's thugs, as are emergency medical service crews when responding to calls for help. Italy's foreign minister puts the death toll at north of 1,000 and Qaddafi's son promises to fight to "the last bullet" and threatens "rivers of blood". And what's the UN action been so far? They can't agree to boot Libya off the UN Human Rights Council or to even investigate the Libyan government's actions.

I realize that these guys are mainly career diplomats given to weak speech, but this is ridiculous:

The Thai ambassador also said he hoped that any resolutions against Libya would be taken seriously by Tripoli.

"If there is a unity... with members, observers of the council speaking with one voice, I think concerned countries will have to listen and I hope, be cooperative," he said.

He also spoke out against precipitous action to exclude Libya

"Let's address this situation first, then other issues of course we'll have to discuss in the council if members are going to discuss," he stressed.

The Thai ambassador is not alone.

But with a majority of Asian and African nations -- backed by Russia, China and Cuba -- declining to support a draft resolution, diplomats said it was likely to be heavily watered down and perhaps not passed at all at the emergency meeting.

A text tabled at the 47-nation Council condemns "extremely grave" rights violations as forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi moved to crush a revolt against his 41-year rule over the past week.

[ ... ]

The only sign of a break in the normally solid bloc of Islamic, African and Asian states which -- with Russian, Chinese and Cuban support -- effectively controls the Council came with Jordan, Qatar, Senegal and the Maldives backing the draft.

But diplomats said this would not be enough to prevent the majority -- who work to shield each other from public criticism on their rights performance -- from blocking any meaningful action by the Council.

Un-fucking-believable.

Update: UN HRC finally gets around to booting Libya.

I just cut $258 billion from the federal budget...

...and I haven't even touched Defense spending yet.

The first thing I heard on the news this morning when I got up was how gosh-darned hard it would be for Congress and the White House to cut the budget by $100 billion. Given the size of the federal budget, I figured that just had to be a load of crap.

A quick Google search turned up this set of PDFs summarizing the executive branch budget for FY11. Most department and agency budgets break down to discretionary outlays, mandatory outlays and "credit activity", which I take to mean lending programs of various types. When considering an agency or department's total budget, I disregarded the credit activity, so cuts would clearly be even larger if I took those into consideration.

I basically ignored those budgets that were very small (under a billion or so) and looked at these:

• Agriculture
• Commmerce
• Education
• Energy
• Health and Human Services
• Homeland Security
• Housing and Urban Development
• Interior
• Justice
• Labor
• State
• Transportation
• Treasury
• Veteran's Affairs
• Corps of Engineers
• EPA
• National Science Foundation
• NASA
• Small Business Administration
• Social Security

When a corporate CEO is serious about cutting spending, he or she will go to the various business units and direct their respective heads to cut, say, 10% of their budget. In other words, do it or be fired and replaced with someone who will. So, let's do the same with the federal budget. Granted, the exercise would be nowhere near as straight forward as cutting a private sector budget. Those "mandatory outlays" are mandatory because they're required by law, so a process would be needed to fast track legislation to amend public law as needed.

The bottom line is that an across-the-board cut of 10% of the budgets listed above yields a savings of over $258 billion. If one includes the $719B Defense budget, an additional savings of $71B is realized. Note that this doesn't even take into account the budgets for the various intelligence agencies.

No, finding $100 billion to cut from the budget isn't that difficult.

The failure of PC, multi-culti thought

I've related the anecdote before here of a conversation I had with a very liberal friend of mine. I'd asked my friend first if he believed it was possible for one culture to be objectively superior to another, to which he emphatically replied "no". I then asked him if he believed in the existence of universal rights, those rights to which all human beings are unconditionally entitled. He saw the contradiction and said I'd "worked him into a corner". Indeed.

We're exhorted over and over again to "celebrate" all cultures and hold them in equal esteem. Yet in certain regions of Afghanistan, it's an accepted practice for grown men to take young boys as sexual playthings. In Saudi culture, women have a social standing roughly equivalent to that of breeding stock. In parts of Pakistan and elsewhere, women are routinely stoned as adulteresses for the crime of being raped. In Iran, homosexuals are hanged in public. And hardly a week goes by without a story in the news of a Muslim male killing a female family member to restore the family's honor.

Are these just cultural oddities that are to be laughed off so we can get on with the more lofty goal of celebrating those cultures? No. To claim that all cultures are on an equal moral footing is to deny the existence of universal human rights.

The logic here is simple and unassailable. If one believes in such universal rights then one cannot believe that all cultures are equal and worthy of being "celebrated". To believe both betrays not just a complete failure of logic but a despicable moral dishonesty.

The statement Obama will never make

If President Obama has any leadership qualities at all, he'd put a stop to the narrative currently running rampant that Tea Partiers, Sarah Palin and meaningless rhetoric caused Jared Lee Loughner to go on a rampage last Saturday. He might even come out with a statement something like this:

We were all shocked, horrified and deeply saddened by the events in Tucson over the weekend. In addition to the loss of six innocent lives, the life and future of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords hangs in the balance. We, as a nation, grieve for the lives lost last Saturday and offer our prayers for their families.

An attack on a member of Congress and a Federal judge is an attack on us all. It threatens the public's right to full and open access to their elected representatives, which is the lifeblood of our system of government. But just as damaging to our nation are those who would use such a tragedy to further their political ends and to silence the voices of their political opponents. That is not what we as Americans are all about and these actions only serve to divide us further.

We cannot know what drives a disturbed mind to such atrocities, but we can keep them from doing us further harm.

But Obama is first and foremost a politician and as long as the libel coming from the left serves his political purposes, he'll let it fester.

I'm not holding my breath.

Update: A version of this post was published in today's (1-11-2011) Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star editorial letters column.

On inflamed rhetoric, media hypocrisy and unhinged gunmen

These are facts and are indisputable:

Fact: Far-left bloggers like Markos Moulitsas blame Sarah Palin's "targeting" map for the 2010 midterm elections for making Jared Loughner pull a gun and shoot 19 people, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). Rep. Giffords was one of the Congressional seats targeted for takeover on Palin's map.

Fact: Markos Moulitsas' own Daily Kos blog used a similar targeting metaphor to target Giffords in 2008, presumably for not being reliably liberal enough.

Fact: In 2009, when Major Nidal Hasan gunned down fellow service members at Ft. Hood while screaming "Alahu Akhbar", we were lectured by the media for days not to jump to conclusions about Hasan's motivations.

Fact: Before Jared Loughner's spent shell casings had time to cool, the media jumped all over the Giffords shooting as inflamed Tea Party rhetoric coming home to roost, implying Loughner was connected to the Tea Party movement.

Fact: What little information there is about Loughner's political inclinations indicate he leaned left. (@caitieparker on Twitter attended high school with Loughner and played in a band with him.)

Given these facts, how can one not conclude that there is a systematic and deliberate effort by Democrats and their collaborators in the media to use this horrific incident to smear their political opposition? If these facts don't convince you, maybe this Politico piece will:

“They need to deftly pin this on the tea partiers,” said the Democrat. “Just like the Clinton White House deftly pinned the Oklahoma City bombing on the militia and anti-government people.”

The Democrats and their allies on the far left are intellectually dishonest, morally bankrupt and undeserving of any claim to leadership of this country. Meanwhile, their media lapdogs betray their bias beyond a shadow of any doubt.

I'm done with the whole lot of them.

Update: Another fact...Loughner set his sights on Giffords in 2007, long before Palin's map came about. But don't expect any such inconvenient facts to stop the narrative.

Gadget review: Nook Color

After nearly clubbing me to death over my indecision, Mrs. Poolbar got me a Barnes & Noble Nook Color for my birthday to replace my Sony Reader model PRS-300 which I'd purchased earlier in the year somewhat impulsively. The Sony is a good entry-level reader at a low price point. I knew it lacked any kind of wireless connectivity, but I was OK with that. But I found I was a bit disappointed in its lack of any kind of text search capability or even highlighting. Still, it served me well enough in its primary purpose of carrying lots of books around without, you know...carrying lots of books around.

My indecision revolved around what to replace it with. The Nook Color was a front runner early on once I found out it was an Android-based device, but then I saw the Velocity Micro Cruz tablet at Borders, which gave me pause. While the Nook is Android-based, B&N has locked down the OS so that it is still, first and foremost, an e-reader, with a couple of games and a web browser thrown in. At $249, the Cruz is the same price as the Nook Color, but offers a more full Android experience with the Borders book store/reader app just another app running on the tablet. But then I saw some negative reviews on the Cruz and it was indecision time again. I briefly considered the Samsung Galaxy Tab but just about gagged on the $500+ price tag, not to mention that at present it's only available with a monthly subscription with a cell phone carrier. A WiFi-only model is due out soon, but will still cost around $500. In the end I finally decided that since I'd use such a device about 80% of the time as a reader, the Nook Color made the most sense.

The Nook Color sports a 7" capacitive touch screen and offers a most impressive display. The Nook reader app manifests itself on the home screen with a scrollable bar of recent titles on the bottom. Titles (displayed as book covers) can be dragged from the bar onto the home screen.

Upon opening a book, you're taken to where you left off, or the title page if you're opening it for the first time. You can turn pages either by swiping right to left (forward) or left to right (back). You can also turn pages by tapping on the right side of the page (forward) or the left side (back). Tapping in the center of the page brings up a menu for browsing the title's contents, text searches, sharing (more on that later) and adjusting text size and display brightness.

The reader also has a "Lend Me" feature which allows you to lend a book to another Nook owner. Not only is this a nice feature for the consumer, it's smart for B&N. I'm seriously considering getting Mrs. Pool Bar a Nook simply because we read many of the same authors and this solves the problem of buying duplicate titles.

Now, about the sharing features. You can link your Nook Color to your Facebook, Twitter and Google Mail accounts. You can tweet or update your Facebook status with quotes from a book. The update or tweet will include the quote, plus a link to the B&N store for the title you're reading. Here's an example. You can also rate a book and post reviews, which I believe (since I haven't tried it yet) post to the B&N e-book store under that title.

The web browser is the standard Android browser, and runs well on the Nook. Web pages, particularly when viewed in landscape mode, are rendered very well, with only Flash content unavailable. While there's no YouTube app as found on standard Android devices, YouTube clips are viewable. When you click a YouTube link the video is played through the Nook's media player. The media player plays MP3 and AAC audio files, and MP4 and M4V video. I loaded an MP4 file I'd recorded onto my Nook and the media player rendered it very well.

Under a menu category called "Extras", you'll find a few games (Sudoku, chess and crossword puzzles), as well as Pandora Internet Radio, your Google contacts, the media player and your media gallery (photos, videos and music).

Having used the Nook for a few days, I've encountered absolutely ZERO issues. Performance is snappy and so far at least, I couldn't be happier with it. The docs for the Nook Color say that the unit won't charge while connected to your computer via USB. The docs lie. While the charging indicator on the display doesn't come on, the unit IS charging. What you can't do while connected to the computer is actually use the device, except for transferring files between your computer and the Nook. The Nook Color is fully functional when connected to outlet power.

Now for the best part...the Nook Color is rootable, and it's a very simple root procedure compared, for example, to my Motorola Backflip Android phone. Locked inside the Nook Color is a pretty awesome Android tablet just raging to break free. The current stock Android 2.1 implementation on the Nook lacks nearly all the standard Android apps, and doesn't allow access to any Android market apps. It's not even possible to sideload apps. Word on the street is that B&N is releasing a software update in January which will be Android 2.2-based and allow some very limited access to market apps, so I'll wait for that update before deciding to root. But I'll probably root it at some point, regardless. It'll be awesome to have nearly Samsung Tab power at half the price.

Update: I went ahead and rooted it without waiting for the update from B&N. Rooting took me all of 5 or 10 minutes, including the time it took to create the bootable SD card. The folks at xda developers who created the custom ROM and the root procedure and scripts did a bang-up job and everything went flawlessly. My Nook Color is now one bitchin' Android tablet. :-)

The ugly truth about my dog

My dog sleeps about 20 hours a day. He has his food prepared for him. He can eat whenever he wants, 24/7/365. His meals are provided at no cost to him. He visits the doctor once a year for his checkup, and again during the year if any medical needs arise. For this he pays nothing, and nothing is required of him. He lives in a nice neighborhood in a house that is much larger than he needs, but he is not required to do any upkeep. If he makes a mess, someone else cleans it up. He has his choice of luxurious places to sleep. He receives these accommodations absolutely free. He is living like a king, and has absolutely no expenses whatsoever. All of his costs are picked up by others who go out and earn a living every day. I was just thinking about all this, and suddenly it hit me like a brick in the head...

My dog is a Democrat!

(Thanks to my buddy AB for e-mailing this to me. And yes, that's really my dog up there.)

More Christmas humor

Yeah, I'm way too lazy to be bothered with posting content of substance, so here's another Christmas joke...

An international chess club was holding their annual meeting at a hotel. During a cocktail reception several of the attendees were gathered near the entrance bragging about their mastery in various chess tournaments. After several minutes of this, the hotel manager threw them out.

When a bellhop asked the manager why, he explained, "I can't stand chess nuts boasting by an open foyer."

Christmas humor

Santa had just finished loading up his sleigh and was climbing on board for his annual flight around the world when a man with a large hunting rifle hopped into the right seat.

Startled, Santa asks the man, "Seriously? You're gonna rob ME on Christmas Eve?"

"Sorry to give you a fright, sir", the man replies. "I'm Bill from the FAA. The powers that be decided earlier this year that you must be subject to an annual check ride so that we can certify your airworthiness and emergency handling procedures."

Santa, looking a bit puzzled, asks Fred, "Well, OK, but what's with the .30-06?"

Fred leans in and whispers, "Well, I'm not supposed to tell you, but you're gonna lose one on take-off."

The latest TSA abuse outrage

Well, maybe not the latest because of the age of the incident, but it doesn't seem to have been widely publicized at the time.

Yeah, I know. Everyone's sick of hearing about TSA enhanced pat-downs and such, but this story is a bit different. This seems to have occurred in February of this year so it took place before the junk-touching policy went into effect, and in fact has nothing to do with junk-touching or full body scans. Rather, this is about the mindset of some TSA security screeners who, out of pure spite, wield their petty authority over a citizen with the audacity to challenge them to follow their own published policy.

The video below weighs in at over 11 minutes, so here's the gist of it:

A new mother evidently pumps her breast milk while away so that she can feed it to her son upon her return. Armed with a printed copy of TSA's policy, she asks that her breast milk not be x-rayed and that TSA follow their alternative inspection policy on medical liquids, which applies to baby formula and breast milk.

Thus challenged, the TSA screener sets her belongings aside and confines her to an inspection holding area for nearly an hour, resulting in the young mother missing her flight home.

Here's the clip:

Now, here's what the Transportation Security Administration's own web site has to say about breast milk (emphasis theirs):

When carrying formula, breast milk, or juice through the checkpoint, they will be inspected, however, you or your infant or toddler will not be asked to test or taste breast milk, formula, or juice. Our Security Officers may test liquid exemptions (exempt items more than 3 ounces) for explosives.

Now maybe, just maybe, the TSA screeners here gave her a hard time about it only because she wasn't actually traveling with her baby. Maybe. But that doesn't negate the petty vindictiveness of the TSA employees shown here.

Shiva Obama

According to a Foxnews.com piece, Americans of Indian descent are a bit rankled over a recent Newsweek cover depicting Barack Obama as the Hindu god Shiva. (Cue obligatory jokes about media deification of Obama!)

The article to which the cover refers, though, is more of an apologia for Obama, rationalizing his administration's utter ineptitude in terms of the job being too big for any one person - even a deity! - to handle:

Can any single person fully meet the demands of the 21st-century presidency? Obama has looked to many models of leadership, including FDR and Abraham Lincoln, two transformative presidents who governed during times of upheaval. But what’s lost in those historical comparisons is that both men ran slim bureaucracies rooted in relative simplicity. Neither had secretaries of education, transportation, health and human services, veterans’ affairs, energy, or homeland security, nor czars for pollution or drug abuse, nor televisions in the West Wing constantly tuned to yammering pundits. They had bigger issues to grapple with, but far less managing to do.

I guess I must have missed all the sudden changes that must have occurred during Obama's inauguration in January last year, because I don't recall a single Newsweek article laying blame for George W. Bush's supposed failures on the size of the presidency. So I guess Bush must have served during a completely different era when things were so much simpler.

Oh, and I'd be derelict in my duties if I didn't point out that Shiva is known in the Hindu religion as the "destroyer of worlds". Heh.