In the ‘Events’ category we must highlight the record setting snowfall that recently blanketed 49 states – all except for Hawaii, alleged birth place of your present President. The poster child simply has to be none other than the High Priest of Global Warming himself, Mr. Al Gore. The Goracle is symbolic of the complete collapse of the international Man-Made Global Warming fraud. The fraud’s inevitable collapse due to its own contradictions was given a huge push over the edge by the ever-so-unpredictable weather. Now, in the spirit of fairness and transparency, here’s the link to the Goracle’s blog. There you can find tons of trivia in support of the fraud. You can wade your way through all of it; or skip the dizzying read and take in this summary: “I am Al Gore and everything you observe in nature is caused by man-made Global Warming because I say so.” I do recommend taking a look at the photograph on the blog’s masthead. I just love how the photograph is staged to make the Goracle appear to be “The Most Learned Man on Earth.” My advice to Mr. Gore is hook up one of those giant monitors to e-trade; you’re going to need to trade out of that heavy concentration in green stocks real fast, before they completely tank.
And this is a good place to shamelessly plug my new poll. Click on the Polls ‘R Us picture and let me know which nominee for “Least Worthy Nobel Laureate” is most deserving of the (dis)honor. The Goracle is among the nominees.
The ‘Leftie Lunacy’ category heats up based on a recent NY Times / CBS News Poll showing only 6% of Americans believe the Stimulus bill has created any jobs. We know the NY Times and CBS News are in the tank for Obama, which only makes these numbers all the more startling. So, what is the administration doing about it? Why, they are treating us to an excellent demonstration of Leftie Lunacy, by sending out a phalanx of officials across the nation, including Obama himself, to convince the other 94% of us just how wrong we are.
The Looney Left often displays this peculiar mental disorder. Something in the Looney Left psyche instructs them they are capable of convincing the rest of us black is white, up is down, cold is hot, false is true – if only they explain it to us one more time a little more slowly. Team Obama was apparently nowhere nearby when the great Abraham Lincoln (R-IL) said “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” They fooled enough people to get elected. They will not fool enough people to change the perception of their Stimulus bill. This time they up against their record. A record growing worse and worse by the day.
One of my favorite morning radio talk shows – The Chris Plante Show (AM 630 WMAL in DC) – did a segment on this topic. The call-in audience was asked if the Obama Administration doesn’t know Stimulus has worked, or if they do know it and are lying to us. The better question is actually “why are they lying to us when they have to know Stimulus isn’t creating jobs.” Here’s my answer.
Stimulus is not and has never been about jobs. After interest payments are included, Stimulus will be more than a trillion of the American people’s dollars; and this gang of precinct hacks is using it as a slush fund to dispense political favor to projects of their choosing. It will go down as one of the monumental abuses of power in all of American history. The only good news is much of it has not even been spent yet (because it’s a slush fund!) – meaning perhaps we can recover some portion of the original robbery after taking Congress back in November.
Also on the brighter side, the failure of Stimulus furthers the ongoing Conservative Ascendancy. We conservatives have always said the only things a government can do to stimulate the economy is to cut taxes and reduce red tape. We have many examples through history demonstrating this, including recently the largest peace-time economic expansion in history that is credited to Ronald Reagan’s program. Governments cannot spend an economy into prosperity. Every dollar the government spends must first come out of the economy (Peter, meet Paul) or be printed as new money (which devalues everything Peter and Paul previously had). Seeing as there are zero historical examples of this approach ever working, and seeing as how Stimulus is such a monumental overreach; let’s hope this monumental disaster demonstrates indelibly and once and for all to the American public Keynsian Stimulus economics is a dead letter. When the public gets it, America’s politicians and America’s economists won’t be able to get away with foisting on the public any more of this top-down trillion dollar level central planning.
Their Thermotron poster child is Crazy Uncle Joe Biden, because, well, he’s just the funniest of the gang to watch when he says “The Stimuluuuus IS Werkinggg.” In unrelated Crazy Uncle Joe news, his motorcade actually impacted Peggy Fleming at the Vancouver Olympics. Really. Vancouver is the fourth instance of innocent civilians being struck by the sitting VP’s motorcade. Really. No calls yet for the appointment of an Independent Counsel to investigate.
The Thermotron poster child for GOP / TEA Party alignment is social media. Really.
There have recently been several gatherings of principled conservatives under various banners. No reports of food fights erupting at any of them. GOP Chairman Michael Steele met with 50 grass roots TEA Party organizers on February 16, and all emerged with clean suits and ties still neatly knotted. On February 17, Mr. Steele appeared on Fox and Friends. The transcripts seem to show comity between the RNC Chairman and TEA Party principles. On February 18, the established Conservative Political Action Committee began its annual 3-day conference which brings social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, security conservatives, and Ron Paul devotees under the same roof of a single hotel. There have even been reported sightings of “Don’t Tread On Me” flags, which can only mean TEA Party sympathizers are immediately in their midst. No reports of burning dumpsters or police in riot gear. And simultaneously in DC, the new TEA Party inspired Ensuring Liberty PAC is meeting. No sign of either CPAC or LPAC forming into an angry mob and marching on the other’s position. On February 17, a group of DC Conservative heavyweights signed something called the Mount Vernon Statement. This is a sure sign of the establishment catching up to the thought leadership now coming from TEA Party patriots.
No doubt the technology of social media has contributed mightily to the rapid sharing of ideas and coordination of agendas between these various aligned factions. More importantly, social media will continue to allow principled conservatives of all stripes to organize as a bloc behind selected candidates in individual races this November. To abuse an often abused political phrase – social media is a game changer.
I made this same point on an LA Times comment board here.
On the same day I was treated to a personal object lesson in the power of social media. A gentleman by the name of Jon Healy, self-identified as an ‘Editorial Writer’ at the LA Times, and I enjoyed a vigorous email exchange on the topic of comment board moderation – patterns and practices, policy, and technology. The most interesting portions of the dialogue are excerpted below. Perhaps some future technology historian will look back on our insights the same way we look back on the supposed statement from Thomas J. Watson in 1943 that the world might accommodate 5 mainframe computers.
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Your comments at latimes.com
13 messages
Liberty At'Stake
Healey, Jon
To: libertyatstake@gmail.com
Hey, I wanted to let you know that we have a policy against comments with URLs in them. It’s to guard
against spam and advertising bots, basically. Feel free to refer to your site, just avoid using the URL,
otherwise your comment may run afoul of the moderators. Thanks!
Jon Healey
Editorial writer
Los Angeles Times
LibertyAtStake
To: "Healey, Jon"
Thanks for the feedback, Jon.
I'll try to remember the exception.
I'm pretty sure you can deploy software that will automatically excludes comments with URLs. For example,
NY Post apparently does this. If I were in your position, and I believed in the policy, I would invest in a
software implementation. Then you wouldn't need to depend on every knucklehead like me to remember the
exception for themselves.
You probably need to have your lawyers update the LA Times Terms of Service for the sake of consistency. I found no mention of this policy. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place?
Healey, Jon
To: LibertyAtStake
Hey, you're right about the TOS. The anti-URL dictum was a decree from the head of latimes.com, not the
Times' lawyer. :-)
At the risk of trying your patience, let me share a little bit of the internal debate at the Times about comments.
The big debate internally is over whether to moderate comments. The traditional news guys say yes, the more
online-oriented folks say no. There are, of course, exceptions to that blanket statement, but the reason the
traditionalists want moderation is because they would like the comments to add something to the debate. We
get a remarkable amount of stuff that blurs the line between sharply worded observation and hate speech,
and a goodly amount that clearly crosses that line. I'm one of the folks who wants us not to moderate
comments because I think it violates the spirit of the Net, but because I read a great deal of what comes in, I
am sympathetic to the concerns on the other side. And please don't mistake this for political correctness or,
as Jonah Goldberg likes to put it, liberal fascism. We get stuff from people on both political extremes that
would curl your hair.
Anyway, a few months ago the Times started enabling online comments on the stories published in the
newspaper, not just the blog posts. This was a major step forward, IMHO; prior to that, only those of us in
Opinion had been enabling comments on newspaper pieces, and even then only on the pieces published
Monday through Friday (we didn't have anyone to moderate comments over the weekend). But the move
opened the floodgates of comments to moderate, leading to what I think is an unacceptable delay between
when comments are submitted and when they are published. It also raised a bunch of tough questions about
the proper standards for moderators. "Defamatory" is a fairly easy thing to judge, but what, exactly, is
"abusive," "racist," "hateful" or "disparaging"? The TOS was written to allow us to block *anything* that made our lawyers uncomfortable, and that's not useful guidance for the folks trying to decide what really isn't fit to publish.
{Mr. Healy goes on to describe some additional details on the internal debate at the LA Times, which I’ve deleted for the sake of brevity}
LibertyAtStake
To: "Healey, Jon" Jon.Healey@latimes.com
My firm belief is it is a fool’s errand to attempt to censor anything beyond obviously abusive
content. Are you old enough to remember George Carlin’s “7 Words You Can’t Say on TV”
routine? The rules Carlin mocked were sort of the template for the only tenable model, both
practically and per the First Amendment (assuming for the sake of argument you consider only the
prohibited words and nothing else that was going on in TV censorship).
Your “traditional news guys” sound like the usual MSM suspects who wish to use their position to
direct the debate toward their own ideological ends (almost exclusively liberal). I have observed
the NY Times to be the most hilarious example of this model. It seems like comments are generally
closed within minutes of article publication. No matter, though, only ineffectual, effete pseudo-intellectuals
read the NY Times anyway.
Internet technology enables anyone to participate in the debate. Computer bytes are cheap and
there is no practical reason to censor anything that is reasonable (i.e. not obviously abusive). The
general population and the marketplace of ideas will sort things out much more efficiently than any
biased moderator could hope to. Some of the sites I’ve visited have voting mechanisms that help
the board participants democratically identify the favored (or disfavored) posters. But this
software product marketplace does seem to be in a crude state of maturity. Overall, maybe
productizing a superior comment board software solution could be the next Internet pot of gold for
some smart entrepreneur.
Of course, the organization that runs the site has all the rights of ownership and can configure the
supporting computer hardware and software however they choose. The free market will
determine how these choices affect participation in those sites. I have noticed many boards
already use software solutions that allow abusive comments to be reported by participants. If you
have an IT department even the least bit worthy of their salaries, they should be able identify and
implement this solution in no time at all.
I have no problem with anyone including URLs in any comments. A URL in itself is nothing more
than an index the reader can choose to follow, or not. If the index leads to abusive or
inappropriate content, it does not take much imagination to implement a solution allowing the
people to report it to the organization owning the board.
Footnote 1
On February 11 and February 12, I got into a public scuffle on this blog with the Daily Caller - concerning this very topic of comment moderation. I have since figured out for myself it is apparent the Daily Caller implements software that automatically throws into moderation anything with more than one URL embedded. I find this to be a reasonable anti-spamming measure. LibertyAtStake ceases mock hostilities with the Daily Caller.
