Category Archives: News

HIDE YOUR SERVER, YOU MAY BE NEXT

Politico

The federal government has seized the Web addresses of 10 websites that allegedly live stream sporting and pay-per-view events online, shutting them down just days before one of the biggest televised sporting events of the year: the Super Bowl.

The U. S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York, working in conjunction with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, seized the Web addresses Tuesday.

So that’s how they do it; they disable the addresses. Never mind the headline; they don’t even need to know where your server is.

Today’s action by the Fed may have a certain justification. It would appear it does. But it gives one a bit of a jolt to discover how easy it is for the government to shut down selected internet traffic. There has been no trial, there was no forewarning. According to what information is available this is a pre-emptive move. The website operators are expected to do something that could be deemed illegal if their anticipated acts were challenged in court and if they lost the challenge.

Scary, isn’t it.

DONALD TRUMP EYES PRESIDENTIAL RUN…AGAIN

Trump for President

The Donald is up to nonsense again. Says he may run for president. He has said this before. This time he says he is serious. Preposterous as it sounds, I suppose we could do worse. In fact, we are.

Who would he pick for Vice President? He probably wouldn’t bother having one.

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Olbermann for the Senate

A group of Democrats tried to draft Keith Olbermann to run for Lieberman’s senate seat. Well why not? If we are going to go to that place in a hand-basket we may as well go with someone who has connections.

DENIS KUCINICH SERIOUSLY INJURED

HURTS HIMSELF ON OLIVE PIT

Apparently there was no warning label on a sandwich Kucinich bought at the cafeteria. So Denis did what anyone else would do when there’s no warning label; he bit down so hard on his sandwich that he broke a tooth. The lawmaker is suing the sandwich maker. Denis wants $150,000 to buy a new tooth and to compensate him for “loss of oral enjoyment”.

If the capitalist sandwich man hadn’t been so greedy for profits he would have hired someone to take out the pits. Someone, perhaps a homeless person, could have had a job with benefits and medical insurance. It’s not skilled labor.

Apparently Sarah Palin is getting off scot-free. Smashing ones mouth on an olive pit is certainly a violent event, and yet, she is not even named in the lawsuit.

It very disturbing when we hear of tragedies like this. Lets’ be thankful, this time no one got hurt.

SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN PACKS IT IN

The Honorable Senator Joseph Lieberman will announce later today that he will not be running for re-election.  2012 will be the Senator’s last year in office.

The United States Senate is losing a man with a level of integrity all too uncommon among those with whom he shares that office. He spoke from the heart, voted his true beliefs and always remained civil in the raucous world of political debate. The Senator from Connecticut has been a good servant of the people. Never a man to play the politics of power, nevertheless, he came within a cat’s whisker of holding the second highest office in the land. Had Al Gore only been able to win his home state of Tennessee, Lieberman would have been our Vice President.

Lieberman’s loyalty was always to his beliefs, to the people he represented and to himself, for if a man  is not true to himself, he cannot be true to others. At times, those loyalties fell into conflict with positions taken by his political party. His integrity was without reward. The party pushed him out. It was not pretty. We know whereof we speak. We write from the town where he lives and where he will make the announcement at 12:30 today. Joseph Lieberman is our senator.

We have great admiration for this man with whom we so often disagreed. Sen. D. Patrick Moynihan was another. Good luck and very best wishes, Joe.

CAPITALISM BOWS TO COMMUNISM

This is not just a photo. It is an image of a solemn faced President of the United States bowing to the smiling head of Communist China as the oriental leader remains erect. Back when I went to high school that would have said a lot. I think it still does.

Later, Obama honored the communist leader with a lavish White House dinner. This is the same President who wouldn’t even share a bagel with the Prime Minister of democratic Israel. It’s the same president who found hours of time for nearly weekly White House visits from the head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) but refused to give a minute to the Dali Lama.

Barack H. Obama is also the same person he was when he ran for office in 2008, the first post-American president.

VENEZUELA’S OIL RESERVES

Reports have just been issued that Venezuela’s proven oil reserves now surpass those of Saudi Arabia. The report is official. It comes straight from the Venezuelan government. But official and truthful are not the same thing, especially where Chavez is concerned. For the claim to be true, new discoveries would have had to add 41% during 2010 alone. An increase of 10% would be extraordinary.

Furthermore, a barrel is a measure of quantity and says nothing about quality. Saudi oil is light and sweet. Venezuelan crude is thick and impure. It requires greater refining and usually needs to be mixed with sweet light crude oil in the process. Extraction is easy in flat Saudi Arabia and difficult in Venezuela because it is found in the mountainous region surrounding the Orinoco River.

The South American country’s reserves are substantial whatever the real numbers may be, but they are no threat to Saudi dominance. Chavez is pumping up Chavez, not new oil, with his claim.

AROUND THE POLLS

CBS
A CBS poll asked the public whether deficits should be reduced by raising taxes or lowering spending. The percentage response was 77 to 9 in favor of lowering spending with another 9% saying do both. But there’s a rub.

The poll made 10 suggestions for specific areas to cut and asked would you be willing or unwilling to cut in each. The results revealed the public’s attitude to be, yes, cut spending but NIMBY (Not In My Benefits Y’know).

GALLUP
Approval of Congress has increased 20% since Gallup’s last poll taken in December. The new Congress was only 10 days old when the poll was taken so the showing must be more an expression of hope than one of accomplishment. The Satisfaction Level of how things are going generally in the country rose from 17 to 19 percent, but that was not enough to break the steady downward trend line from 27 percent last May.

STATE of the UNION ADDRESS
The address this year promises to be a very interesting one. It may even provide a little healing. Certainly there will be no insults directed at the Supreme Court and we hope the President will not say anything so outrageous that a member of Congress cannot audibly control his furor.

Democratic Sen. Mark Udall has proposed a welcome change from tradition. Congressional seating is first come first served; members, however, have always elected to divide themselves by sitting strictly on their own side of the infamous aisle. Sen. Udall proposes that they intermingle this time. It was great fun to watch one side of the chamber frown while the other side clapped as the President spoke. We will happily forgo a little amusement for the benefit some unification. It remains to be seen how many of either party will actually cross the dreaded aisle.

JARED LAUGHNER EMAILS

THE CREEP

Lynda Sorenson, 52, went back to community college in Tucson in hopes of qualifying for a job. Jared Loughner happened to be one of her classmates. Here is a sample of emails Sorenson sent to her friends last summer, as provided to the Washington Post:

From June 1, the first day of class:
“One day down and nineteen to go. We do have one student in the class who was disruptive today, I’m not certain yet if he was on drugs (as one person surmised) or disturbed. He scares me a bit. The teacher tried to throw him out and he refused to go, so I talked to the teacher afterward. Hopefully he will be out of class very soon, and not come back with an automatic weapon.”

From June 10:
“As for me, Thursday means the end to week two of algebra class. It seems to be going by quickly, but then I do have three weeks to go so we’ll see how I feel by then. Class isn’t dull as we have a seriously disturbed student in the class, and they are trying to figure out how to get rid of him before he does something bad, but on the other hand, until he does something bad, you can’t do anything about him. Needless to say, I sit by the door.”

From June 14:
“We have a mentally unstable person in the class that scares the living crap out of me. He is one of those whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon. Everyone interviewed would say, Yeah, he was in my math class and he was really weird. I sit by the door with my purse handy. If you see it on the news one night, know that I got out fast…”

Jared’s rampage had nothing to do with his political ideology. It had to do with his dislike of an answer the Congresswoman gave him to a general question he asked at one of her rallies. Mother Jones magazine reports:

[A friend of Jared’s named Tierney said] the question was, ‘What is government if words have no meaning?'””He said, ‘Can you believe it, they wouldn’t answer my question.’ Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her.”

Giffords’ answer, whatever it was, didn’t satisfy Loughner. “He said, ‘Can you believe it, they wouldn’t answer my question,’ and I told him, ‘Dude, no one’s going to answer that,'” Tierney recalls. “Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her.”

The tie-ins the left are trying to make to Sarah Palin and the Tea Party are beyond ignorance. They are downright dishonest. Of course you already knew that.

FOUR OF A KIND? NO WAY, JOSE!

Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky and Bill Clinton

In case you have not heard, Hugo Chavez has rejected President Obama’s choice of Ambassador to Venezuela, entry VISA denied. The Venezuelan dictator has submitted a list of four names from which the President may choose a new Ambassador. They are Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky and Bill Clinton.

My first thought when I saw the list was, what about Cindy? But then, Cindy Sheehan is a woman of course. And then, how did Bill Clinton who believes in America and loves it to the core get on this moron’s motley list of wealthy American born, America bashing Marxists ? – two idiots from Hollywood, one brilliant misguided college professor and one ex US President. And why select Clinton and not Carter? Has Hugo no loyalty? After all, it was Jimmy Carter who personally and officially certified Chavez’s election as valid and free from fraud. Hugo owes him one for that.

I say, send Penn, Stone and Chomsky, all three. At least it will get them out of the country.

CENSUS, TAXES and CONSEQUENCES

Californians moved out. New Yorker’s left too. Texas, Idaho, Arizona and Utah grew. Population moved out from the high tax states into the low tax states. Yogi Berra would say “People don’t go there no more. Taxes are too high.” Economists have a term for it; it’s called ‘rational expectations’.

Michael Barone:

[G]rowth tends to be stronger where taxes are lower. Seven of the nine states that do not levy an income tax grew faster than the national average. The other two, South Dakota and New Hampshire, had the fastest growth in their regions, the Midwest and New England.

Altogether, 35 percent of the nation’s total population growth occurred in these nine non-taxing states, which accounted for just 19 percent of total population at the beginning of the decade.

Conservatives say “Of course.” Democrats are puzzled. Benefits are more liberal in California and New York than in Texas or Idaho. Texas is flat, Idaho is cold, why do they move to such places? (There is no need to answer, they aren’t listening).

Read more in the Washington Examiner.