L'Affaire Scozzafava

The Dede Scozzafava affair in New York's 23rd district is a perfect example of how political parties no longer build political platforms based on ideology and instead serve only to keep loyal party apparatchiks in power. The obvious questions in the aftermath of Scozzafava's political meltdown are (1) why did the local Republican committee pick someone to run for the special election whose every position is diametrically opposed to just about every mainstream Republican, and (2) why did she even identify herself as a Republican in the first place?

I'm not familiar with the area or the recent history there, so I obviously don't know the answers to those questions. But these things generally happen when a party completely loses sight of any foundational beliefs and views its mission as one of simply gaining and maintaining power. The same is true of individuals, and Scozzafava likely enrolled as a Republican as a matter of convenience; it was the easiest path to election. This is what happens when we have a political class whose sole interest is continued employment as elected officials.

But the GOP bit off more than it could chew with Scozzafava. In years past, she'd have encountered little resistance from an under-informed electorate, and the majority of Republican voters in a majority Republican district would have sent her to Capitol Hill just by virtue of having an (R) after her name. Not so any more. In the wake of last year's general elections in which legions of star-struck voters bought a pig in a poke in the form of Barack Obama, voters are taking a harder look at their candidates. They want to know how they've voted in the past and what their positions are now.

There's a new game afoot, and Doug Hoffman - and the citizens of NY-23 - just may be the first winners in the game.

Update on freaky "ghost" picture

Image taken at 12:10pm

Image taken at 12:11pm

Second image taken at 12:11pm

Update on the earlier post.

Something I learned today is that uploading pictures to Blogger will result in reduction in size, so here are fresh images uploaded directly from the CD. They're still reduced, but at least they're all consistent.

For clarification...the first picture I put up (the one with the "ghost") in the original post was the one Rick e-mailed to me last night. The two I later added came from my wife's PC, which I uploaded to Blogger, and then later downloaded from my blog to my PC. That's where the differences in the file sizes originated...Blogger reduced the images.

Adding to my earlier suspicions were slight differences in the EXIF data. My wife uses Picasa for image management, which apparently modifies the "Creation Software" EXIF attribute to read "Picasa 3.0". The one Rick e-mailed me simply said "V.1.0". That's how all three of these read, taken directly from the CD.

So, the mystery of the "ghost" of St. Peter's Basilica remains, and I'd certainly appreciate someone who actually knows something about digital imagery taking a look and giving me their opinion.

If you want the original image files from the CD, just leave a comment with your e-mail address, and I'll be happy to send them along. To avoid your e-mail address getting picked up by a spambot, just put it in "name at provider dot whatever" format, e.g., jsmith at yahoo dot com.

Freaky Halloween post

Last March, Mrs. Pool Bar went to Italy with her friend June. While there, they toured Rome, Pompeii, Florence, and a bunch of other places I'm still jealous over not seeing. They traveled with June's ex, Rick, and his wife (not at all awkward) and made the obligatory stop at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. At the end of the trip, Rick burned the pictures to CDs for June and my wife to bring home.

Tonight, seven months later, June was flipping through the pictures on her computer and saw something that startled her. She called Rick and told him to look through the pictures from St. Peter's and look for one with an "angel or ghost" in it. When Rick saw the image above, he called me, and since we were out of the house, I told him to e-mail it so I could see it on my BlackBerry. Mrs. Pool Bar and I were sure that both Rick and June were putting one over on us.

So, when we got home we pulled out my wife's copy of the disc and sure enough, there was the same image on the picture. There were several other pictures of the same scene taken at the same time, and none of them showed the ghostly image you see in this one. I opened up the picture and zoomed in 400x and to my untrained eye, I could see no evidence that it was photoshopped into the original.

I post the image here in the hope that someone with expertise in image manipulation might be able to take a look and tell me if the photo has been doctored in anyway.

Despite the timing, this is NOT a Halloween prank. The only thing I myself have done to the image is to rotate it 90 degrees for proper orientation.

You can grab a copy of the picture by clicking on it, then right clicking on the full-size image, and then select save. EXIF data will be intact.

Update: As I promised in the comments, here are a couple more shots of the same subject, without anything weird. Check the EXIF data to confirm the times they were taken.

Update 2: But wait...something's fishy here. The file size of the picture with the "ghost" is four times the size of the pictures without. I'm calling BS. I know jack about Photoshop. Do such alterations usually significantly increase the file size like that?

Update 3: Back to the drawing board. I found the CD with the original files my wife brought home from Italy. All the files are of similar size. I guess some compression occurred when I uploaded from my wife's computer to my blog, then downloaded the images from my blog to my computer. Bottom line, the source of the "ghost" is still a mystery, and I can't get hold of Rick until tomorrow. Working strictly from the original files on the CD, I can't find any evidence of tampering. Rather than try to clean up this post with the images directly from the disc, I'll put up a new post with all three.

See update to this post here.

Give it up, suckahz!

I was traveling all week, so I'm late to the party here. Project Valour IT is running its periodic fund raiser to provide technology to wounded vets. I've enrolled this site with Team Air Force (natch), and we're running behind on hitting our goal.

Please consider a donation in any amount!

Speaking truth to power, Obama-era version

I knew we were in for, er, change when Obama took office, but I didn't think that change would include changing the definition of some relatively simple words.

Obama administration hack Valerie Jarrett insists that their jihad against Fox News is a simple case of "speaking truth to power". This reminds me of the guy I see at open mic night every now and then who sings Dylan-esque "protest" songs...about Bill O'Reilly.

Just a reminder to the lefties...you won! Your guy is in office, and you've got nothing to protest about. If you want to speak truth to power, tell Obama what a dilettante he is.

The clock is ticking

Karl Munchausen left a comment about this great blog widget he came up with. Unfortunately, it's too wide for the side bar of my blog template, so I'll just put it in a post until he can come up a smaller one (200 pixels wide would be just about right, Karl!).

Update: Karl e-mailed me to let me know he's got a second, narrower version of the widget up now. Run along now and get one for your blog, too!

Fact-checking as it's supposed to be

CNN thoroughly beclowned itself a few weeks ago when Wolf Blitzer fact-checked a Saturday Night Live sketch poking fun of Barack Obama's near-total lack of achievement since his inauguration in January. Today the AP partially redeems the mainstream media with a pretty tough fact-checking of the left's demonization of the health insurance industry.

Quick quiz: What do these enterprises have in common? Farm and construction machinery, Tupperware, the railroads, Hershey sweets, Yum food brands and Yahoo? Answer: They're all more profitable than the health insurance industry. In the health care debate, Democrats and their allies have gone after insurance companies as rapacious profiteers making "immoral" and "obscene" returns while "the bodies pile up."

Ledgers tell a different reality. Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That's anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones.

This is similar to the demagoguery the Democrats indulged in last year to smear Exxon-Mobil as another "rapacious profiteer" by tossing around the amount of their "obscene" quarterly profit, which was only around 8% of their revenue at the time.

The ability to turn a profit is a good thing. When companies are making healthy profits they're able to expand and employ more people. When profits are anemic or non-existent, they contract and lay people off. It's really pretty simple. Democrats are the enemy of a good business climate and a healthy economy.

Yes, Madam Speaker, the question of individual mandates IS a serious one

First, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) asserted that nobody questions the consitutional authority of Congress to impose individual mandates on citizens to purchase medical insurance. About a day later, it was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) turn to say that asking whether Congress has such constitutional authority was not a "serious question".

Set aside for a moment the supreme arrogance exhibited by our congressional Democratic leadership with these statements and consider the constitutional question: Can Congress compel citizens to purchase something they may neither want nor even need? All the Democratic health care reform proposals before Congress include individual mandates requiring citizens to carry health care insurance. Failure to do so is punishable by a hefty fine. It's not clear to me what the penalty might be if one refuses to pay the fine, but that's not important. What IS important is that this legislation would require you to purchase something you may not otherwise have purchased.

The easy argument is that it's in everyone's best interest, so it falls under the general welfare clause of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. If that's the case, then where does it end? It would clearly further the interests of the "general welfare" if every adult volunteered 20 hours of community service each month. Does that give Congress the Constitutional authority to compel every citizen 18 and over to spend four or five hours every week working in a homeless shelter or picking up trash on the side of the road?

Now, extend this exceptionally far-reaching Congressional authority to an America with a national health care system in which the bad habits of broad segments of the population increase the health care costs for all. Promoting the "general welfare" might then mean outright bans on tobacco and alcohol, mandatory exercise regimens...who knows what else.

Yes, Mr. Leahy and Ms. Pelosi, many people question the authority of Congress to impose individual mandates, and yes, it is a serious question.

Obama: The musical

Sure, you loved the school kids singing paeans to Barack Obama (Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm!), but are you ready for...Obama On My Mind?

Obama on My Mind takes a humorous look at the whirlwind and wonderful world behind the scenes of an Obama campaign office in small town America. A passionate group of larger than life oddball characters start to panic when Sarah Palin enters the race and Obama falls 20 points in the polls. Pop, gospel, jazz, and soft rock come together in a politically inspired comedic romp featuring a motley crew of loyal, obsessive and downright peculiar personalities, striving to get their candidate into the White House.

Those bolded parts suggest they can go ahead and put "Based on actual events" on the advertisements. I wonder if anyone would miss me if I went into hibernation until 2012.

Hat tip to AB, who lives in the Seattle area and is considering building a moat.

Best GOP logo yet

Contrary to popular belief, I'm not a Republican. I just have a tendency to vote that way for lack of any better options. But if I were a Republican, I'd insist - nay, I'd demand - that the logo be modified as shown here.

Via IMAO, which is getting clobbered at the moment due to Hot Air linking the article.

Drawing parallels

My brother retweeted this link earlier today and now I forget from whom, but it came originally via the Investor's Business Daily Twitter feed. Svetlana Kunin, a Russian immigrant who remembers the bad old days of the USSR, draws parallels between the Soviet Union circa 1959 and the United States, circa 2009.

USSR, 1959: I am a "young pioneer" in school. History classes remind us that there is a higher authority than their parents and teachers: the leaders of the Communist Party.

The story of young pioneer Pavlik Morozov is required reading. Pavlik reported his father to the secret police for disobeying government regulations. His life exemplified the duty of all good Soviet citizens to serve their government.

From the first year in school, all of us are made aware of our ethnicity (ethnic Russian, Jewish, Asian, etc.) and class (proletariat, intelligentsia), around which society is structured. This inherent divisiveness makes it easy for the government to stir ethnic and class tension and in this way distract from economic failure.

[ ... ]

USA, 2009: "Progressives" control the government. Children in some public schools sing songs about the president and study his directives.

Progressives view people not as unique individuals, but as groups. They play on class envy, or divide people by ethnicity (African-American, white, Hispanic, etc.). From early childhood they remind children of their ethnic identity. The idea of a color-blind society united under the American flag is not politically correct.

There's more there. Much more. You go read...now.

Musicians concede their music is torture

Twitter user @IKIDYOUNOT tweeted a link to this HuffPo article this morning, which brought me a chuckle.

A group of prominent musicians are joining a campaign to close Guantanamo Bay and demanding the release of records about what music was used during the potential torture of detainees there and at other facilities.

Seriously...if you were a musician would you really want to know that your music was used as an instrument of torture?

A war on three fronts

The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star's Clay Jones gets in a poke at Obama's ill-considered war on Fox News with this cartoon. Clay's a friend of mine and a I know his political sentiments lie to the left of mine, but he's, er, fair and balanced in his observations.

Is it possible that Obama is even more Nixonian than Nixon?