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Yeah, about that election . . .

Ok, so what are my thoughts about this election we had?

1. The press really is in the tank for the Democrat party (with only a very small handful of exceptions). I guess it makes for better ratings.

2. In a few months we'll have a black president. Can anyone honestly call us a racist country at this point? Some folks will need to re-think their position.

3. Thank goodness, no more wall-to-wall election coverage complete with the usual asides about how the Republicans are evil and somehow caused the worldwide collapse of the financial markets even though they haven't had a majority in Congress in years and the president really doesn't have much influence over those things.

4. What will comedians do for a punchline now that they're unable to fall back on a. Bush being stupid or b. Cheney being evil? They were pretty lame jokes anyway.

5. Could have been worse. Could have been Hillary :-)

6. They better not mess with Obama while he's President. I do NOT want to have President Joe Biden damnit!

7. Since Bush was the cause of every major problem in the world, from global warming to oil shortages to Russian expansion, does that mean in January all those problems will end?

8. Tina Fey did a pretty good Sarah Palin impersonation. Will she now don black-face and wig and try Michelle Obama?

9. Well, that's one way to get Biden out of the Senate.

10. No more damn election commercials! WOO HOO!

11. Oh dear, all those Democrats who fled to Canada and France during the Bush years will suddenly be flooding the borders coming back once he's gone. Will we have enough available jobs to handle all that extra labor? I mean, what with Starbucks closing so many locations, where will all those art and humanities majors get jobs?

12. Next time around, CC will be legal to vote. She'll be a citizen of this crazy place we call the USA. How cool is that? :-)

File this under I for Irony

Currently Reading: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

You've all seen the way my wife eats right? You know she has a fairly average filipino diet which means LOTS of pork and LOTS of fat. She eats the skin off the chicken. She eats the skin off MY chicken. She likes to get KFC and crunch that batter.

Me, on the other hand, I trim the meat extra lean. I don't like fat. I eat pork, sure, but not that often because it gives me gas. I don't eat the skin off MY chicken let alone off anyone else's chicken. And when I go to KFC, even though I love the taste of those 11 herbs and spices, I still take off the skin.

This being how things are, how come MY triglycerides are elevated into the bacon area and HERS are just fine? That's just wrong. I'm on my feet 6 hours a day and usually in motion for at least 4 of those hours. My weight is holding nicely around the 130 mark and rarely pushes close to 135. In fact it's more likely to dip down to 125 instead. My waistline has only gone up an inch, maybe an inch and a half since college. And I'm the one with the one month supply of Lipofen to get the bacon out of my blood.

Genetics. The one area where it really IS ok to blame your parents. :-)

It Could Be Worse I Suppose . . .

Currently Reading: Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Well, here we are. Election day has come and gone and now the dust is settling and we're all starting to get back to work.

Fall is a great time of year. Generally I have the most sinus/allergy attacks during spring and fall but the weather is great and the fall and spring colors are a nice change from the wash of green in the summer and gray in the winter. CC and I often travel this time of year, before the prices go up. Of course, since we did all our traveling over the summer, we'll be staying home to enjoy things locally.

Over at the salon you can tell it's fall. We're starting to see the regulars come back in more often. More rain this time of year means more muddy lawns. Cooler temperatures make the grass go dormant which adds to those muddy patches. Walk outside and chances are you're crunching leaves and little twigs. Ideal conditions for groomers. Dogs get messy. Their hair gets all tangled up. They'll need to be cleaned up :-)

It's certainly a lot better than it has been the past few weeks in the salon. Actually the whole store has been depressing. People haven't been out shopping nearly as much; they aren't even browsing. On the weekends, when we usually have a crushing load of work, we've been spending far too much time cleaning and re-cleaning or reading or just sitting there staring out the window.

Good to have work again :-)

Uncle Orson Weighs In

Currently Reading: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

This is a great article by one of the world's greatest Science Fiction authors. Ironically he's a democrat too.

____________________________________________________________________

By Orson Scott Card

October 5, 2008

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

An open letter to the local daily paper -- almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor -- which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house -- along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefitting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled Do Facts Matter? "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign -- because that campaign had sought his advice -- you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension -- so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie -- that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad -- even bad weather -- on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth -- even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means. That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time -- and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter -- while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe --and vote as if -- President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats -- including Barack Obama -- and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans -- then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a daily newspaper in our city.