Mrs. Dr. J. Explains it All...

For those not getting the reference, there was this show called Clarissa Explains It All with Melissa Joan Hart...

Mrs. Dr. J. is getting geared up for the November election. She bought signs supporting the GOP state senate candidate, 5th district opponent of Jim Cooper ('So-Called Soooo Intelligent D-TN-5'), and two Romney/Ryan signs. She's also been seen around New Atlantis sporting an R-squared t-shirt, or her Romney/Ryan baseball cap. 

Mrs. Dr. J.'s also signed up with the Tennessee GOP to help with election efforts. Dr. J. suspects we will be feeding the folks making phone calls, and Mrs. Dr. J. may be putting a few hours in with the campaign effort. 

Why is she so passionate about this election? She explained it all the other night:

"I'm supporting Romney and Ryan because the current administration is clearly and deliberately making it harder for those who worked hard for everything they've earned to keep and enjoy the fruits of their labor."

Yeah, her carefully chosen words encompasses both those sucking at the teat of government, and the trustafarian liberal elites who are progressives in order to keep upward mobility down. Dr. J. knew a couple of those folk back at Ivy U. and they were real SOB's. 

No Free Lunch

Our royal archivist, MBernadetteE, came up from the Castle basement the Friday morning, which was a source of great relief because nobody has seen her for three weeks. If you didn’t know, she has been diligently archiving, indexing, and filing our historical artifacts—in exchage for Australia or something, whenever we take over—and she is probably up to about 180 BC by this point.

Anyway, she wrote the Czar a wonderful letter and handed it to us at the lobby bar. The Czar asked why she bothered, since we were standing right there, but she went on for a bit about the dying art of epistemology, and went on to order a Bosco and Rumplemintz and we enjoyed watching Sleestak as the bartender try to open one of those cocktail umbrellas with his oversized claws. But here is what she wrote:

Sir,

Excellence. I commend thee, and such. While attending public schools (preK - 12), I did not qualify for a subsidized school lunch. Many students in my school district did. (I can tell you that state of Ohio has determined that 42.5% of students in my former school district are "economically disadvantaged".) It's relatively easy to find such information about school districts, and even individual school buildings within districts, from the state's department of education. I wonder if your readers are aware of this! For example, Ohioans can conduct a simple search by district here and gain access to standardized test reports, passing rates, graduation rates, etc. NY residents (of which I am currently one) can access similar information here and I happened to find that NY tends to report demographics in much more detail than OH. Moving on....

I recently discovered (for a class assignment) that a local school close to my place of residence has nearly 80% of students who qualify for a free lunch, and also a free breakfast. That's a pretty high number. Then this news emerged: Turns out a new federal government pilot program means that every student in the city school district gets a free lunch (caveat: we all know there ain't NO SUCH THING).

Here is an excerpt from the piece linked above: "Last year, the district’s food service budget was roughly $11 million, all but $600,000 to $700,000 of which was reimbursement from federal and state governments." Continuing on... "(Note to Syracuse parents: Warner said the district is still asking families to fill out the free- and reduced-cost meal eligibility applications. The district needs that information to report to the state and it is important because much government funding for the district is based on its student poverty level, Warner said.)"

Thought I'd throw this to your attention. I hadn't heard of the e-rate nonsense 'til you wrote about it, so thanks for the enlightenment!

As always, archivally and alliteratively,
@MbernadetteE

Well, now you see why. The Federal government is encouraging schools to game their own system—the Fed wants the kids eating their approved gruel and whey, and the schools need the money. To them, it is a free check—all you have to do is get the poorer kids to sign up, and more and more even the unpoor kids will count, too. No one cares.

But some of us are watching.

Doctor Cthulwho?

Did you get Dragon Magazine™ back in the day? You know you did. And where did you go first? The Dragonmirth section with all the funny cartoons. You know you did.

Well, Dork Tower was one of those cartoons, and has continued online since.

In honor of today's fall finale of Doctor Who, Dr. J. brings you this, the best combination since chocolate and peanut butter...

Jelly-babies and souls, two great tastes that taste great together!

Great Minds Think Alike

Dr. J just noticed this now.

Apparently Katrina Trinko was on the same track earlier today.

Check out her spin on where $18,000 can take you...

What Hath The Boomers Wrought

GorT is miffed. Peeved.  Ticked off.  GorT and family live in a great community that is centered around our Catholic parish.  Over 70% of the kids in our parochial school walk to school each day.  Sure, there are the enabling parents who allow their children to dictate the course of action for their family ("Mommy, I want an iPhone for my 12th birthday", "Daddy, I need a Facebook account now!!!",  "Ma,  Ma,  Ma,  I want to wear this strapless number to the next parish dance").  And there are the helicopter parents that crazy-go-nuts as the expression goes over whether their child gets a B for poor work (heaven forbid they get a C), or that their star athlete (not so much) isn't on the top team for the parish.  But in general, the community is solid.  And it is centered around our parish and its activities.

Well, over the course of the last few years, lawyers have infiltrated the Archdiocese.  And, largely due to the priest sex-abuse scandal, the lawyers are making sure every nook and cranny of each and every parish is covered in triplicate by the appropriate statues and regulations.  This goes double for us as we're in the People's Republic of Maryland and Montgomery County where you might need a county permit to cut your grass shorter than 4".  So this past summer, the Archdiocese of Washington (ADW) has issued updated guidelines and regulations for parishes that include an alcohol policy, a fundraising policy, a contracts policy and a facility usage policy.  While I can understand the need to have some risk management elements in place, particularly for events where alcohol is present, what I wasn't prepared for was the anti-lemonade stand stance that the ADW is taking.

Consider for a minute that the families who send their child(ren) to the parish school already pay state taxes that go towards a public education from which we do not benefit (granted a personal choice).  We pay a decent tuition each year to cover the cost of our child(ren)'s education at the parochial school and where it doesn't cover it, I would be confident is saying that our donations to the church who covers some of the cost, are sizable (maybe not Mitt Romney sized annual donations...but a fair amount).  Now, the ADW is saying that an individual fundraiser event on parish property cannot have individuals preparing and selling food unless they possess a license to prepare and sell said food.  Our parish has a number of events where it would make sense - both from a fundraising perspective and from a benefit to those attending - to have food sold.  No more grilling of hot dogs and hamburgers.  No more ice cream socials by the field.  The lawyered-up ADW has severely impacted our ability to help defray the costs of our Catholic education and experience.

We have become a litigation-crazy state where many people's first course of action is to sue almost without regard to the personal responsibility leading up to the incident.  Picture, if you will, running around on parish grounds in the late 1970s when you're 8, 9 or 10 years old and you slip or trip over a melted ice cream cone.  Your parent would have likely told you to brush it off and move along.  Now, it's I'll have my lawyers contact you next week...move aside while I take a picture of the scene.

While I'm not against lawyers and having some degree of protections for ourselves, we have clearly allowed our society to go to extremes over this.  Where is the sanity?  I lay the blame on the baby boomers who, by and large, were permissive parents. The increase in the "I deserve this" or "it's only fair" reactions is indicative of the problem.  Our former principal was bold, gracious and crazy enough to host an 8th grade field trip to New York City.  It was a wonderful experience for the three classes that were able to do it.  He retired last year and the new principal is not interested in undertaking such a challenging task...at least not yet.  One of the parents complained to another, "It's not fair, they owe us this trip."  Excuse me?  Owe us a trip to New York City where the principal slept in the hotel hallway to ensure no monkey business took place in the wee hours (chaperones were in many of the rooms but still....) of the morning.

GorT is in the process of authoring a letter to the ADW to point out these issues.  I'll let our dear readers know what I hear, if anything, in response.

Math is Hard - Obama '12 Edition

This is one of the e-cards available on President Obama's campaign site:

This probably includes to cost of a smoke afterwards. 

$18,000?!?! That's a whole lot of birth control.

So let's break it down.

Let's assume that the young lady in question, and we will call her Julia, goes on the pill when she's legal and enters college at the ripe old age of 18. Let us also assume that she is destined to go through 'the change of life' as Mama J. would call it at the ripe old age of 58. Lastly, let us assume that she is taking oral contraception during the interval 40 year period without break to produce offspring (she is a Democrat after all).

This lands her at $37.50 month for her oral contraceptive needs. Given that the least expensive pills are $9, you would be paying more along the line of $4,320 for 40 years of contraceptive bliss.

How much do other forms of birth control cost?

Well, an IUD lasts 5 years, and if Julia doesn't mind the abortifantastic aspects of its mechanism of action (and you know she doesn't), one can imagine paying $1,200 cash pay at a reliable OB-GYN. Less if you prefer the butchers at Planned Parenthood who subsidize the cost with your Susan B. Komen charitable donation and tax dollars. Again, worst case scenario, Julia would be out $9,600 over 40 years. So, if Julia is into polyamory, she, her gal-pal and her man can be covered for the duration going that route.

Then there's sterilization. Dr. J. will spot Julia the $37.50 to get her from age 18 to age 26 where by state law she can then undergo sterilization, and that will amount to $3,600 plus $2,500 for actually getting her tubes tied. Alternatively she could fork over $400-600 for her committed male partner to get snipped. Given that he's dating Julia, he's probably been already castrated, but still.

None of this gets into the fact that no one taking oral contraception should take it for 40 years straight. Julia would probably get a deep venous thrombosis, pulmonary embolus, malignancy or something else after such a chronic exposure to synthetic estrogens and progestins.

Dr. J. believes that birth control like all other health matters is a personal and private matter. However, once an individual demands that others pay for that product, or a related service, it becomes the payor's business. This is how we got into the mess we are in with Medicare/medicaid and HMO's. They want to know where their money is spent, and doctors and nurses sacrifice a significant number of man-hours documenting everything little thing to prove they did what they said they did in order to get paid. They have coders to help insure compliance, etc.

Dr. J. is amazed how far to the left sheeple have drifted in the last four years in the name of free stuff.
This has been a challenging concept for individuals to grasp as when Dr. J. has discussed the HHS mandate with employed individuals, including a fellow doctor who makes $300,000+ a year, they think that their employer should be on the hook for the pill even if they work for a Catholic Hospital. Their sex life is none of their employer's business, yet the employer must subsidize it. The employee is far better off subsidizing it themselves and it being none of the employer's business. Honestly, no Catholic school ever screened its kindergarten teachers for ethinyl estradiol metabolites in her urine. Nor will it ever. It just doesn't want to pay for said compound.

By way of comparison, Dr. J.'s work-morning latte habit costs $36,000 over the same 40 year span.

uʍop ǝpısdn sllod ƃuıuɹnʇ

People want to know how we’re going to vote...run!

Mitch H., proud owner and operator of Blogfonte, sung by the Castle and had a barside chat with us on the Czar’s wonderful piece on the weirdness of recent polls.

The thing is, my experience doesn't map to this supposed shortage of undecideds. I've been doing the GOTV thing in Pennsylvania the last couple weeks, making calls and knocking on doors, and I've encountered a significant number of self-described undecideds. Maybe as many as a third of the respondents who don't just tell me to take a hike (although it's usually phrased over the phone as "I'm just on my way out the door"; if you took these people at their word, Pennsylvanians almost never stay at home for more than five minutes at a time before they're heading back out the door again) claim they're undecided.

Now, a lot of those people probably aren't going to vote, and the calling lists are probably tilted by the party programmers towards persuadeables and low-interest punitive Romney voters, but from the worms-eye view of the campaign, there's a fair number of them. More than in 2008 and 2004, I think - but maybe that's an artifact of better screening by the campaign programmers - you shouldn't be pestering strong supporters of either party, right?

Probably not. But Mitch touches on something the Czar has been hearing a little bit about: the fake undecided.

This theory has been espoused by a desultory few, perhaps most notably by Dennis Miller. Basically, when the phone rings or when the doorbell chimes, quite a percentage of people get tense when it turns out to be a political survey. They have an aversion to polls: what if it is some crazy Democrat looking to threaten you for voting Republican? What if it’s some right-wing lunatic who will lecture you on letters of marque if you lean toward Obama? You have no idea who this person is—or what will follow in this day and age—so you say you’re undecided. Or independent. Or whatever will get this person away from you.

Polling is different from political GOTV contact, or at least it ought to be. The scripts they hand us are phrased as "surveys", and that's something I'm uncomfortable with to be honest. I try to be straightforward as to who I am and whom I'm calling for, from the jump. It helps me get over my disinclination to invade the subject's privacy.

Anyway, the independent/undecided gambit is peculiarly designed to *invite* unwanted attention and further contact - if he's "undecided", I pretty much am obliged to hit him or her with the reasons why I think he oughtn't be. There's not much I can say that will get a firm Obama supporter off her resolution over the phone, and agreement with a Romney supporter (aside from making sure they're getting to the polls/have an absentee ballot form/finding out if they're interested in doing volunteer work) is morale-boosting but not particularly fruitful. But talking issues with an undecided? Yeah, that takes precedence - and if they're just shamming to get out of a confrontation, they just backed themselves into a minor sort of one as I try to talk them off the fence.

That’s exactly right: undecideds and independents paint a bullseye on themselves by declaring themselves thus for two reasons: first, as you state, they confess to being a possible swing vote, and two, as the Czar believes, everyone knows they’re lying. They already have a good idea or at least a sneaking hunch for whom they’ll be voting all along.

An interesting study was done a couple of months back asked “How do you think your neighbors will vote?” With the pressure of confession gone, people suddenly answer more honestly (and use transference) to reveal their actual thoughts. “Oh, around here? They’re all Republicans around here.” The psychology there is pretty simple: ”don’t blame me if I vote against your guy; we all are around here and I’m just going with it.” By the way, Romney had a commanding lead in that poll.

"How do your neighbors vote" is more likely to reflect the subject's fear/love/anger towards their fellow-man than true knowledge, I think. Are you an optimist? Are you a doom-swallowing Derbyshiresque pessimist? Are you Pauline Kael?

Certainly the methodology would not be a good substitute for actual polling data—but then, lately, no one is sure good polling data is any better a methodology. The idea behind the study, as we understood it, is that Romney-over-Obama leads open up right in line with other models when the subject is asked how others would be voting. As you know, it is a short step from should to would.

What a crazy election.

Where has Volgi been of late?

 孔夫子 a.k.a. Confucius, our Œcumenical Volgi (the Notorious ŒV) has been conspicuously absent of late, especially given that he wrote the first post on our esteemed website. Well, the first in a wibbly, wobbly, timey-wimey sort of way, anyway. 

Well, Dr. J.'s dark agents have discovered the truth (Thanks #ninjababe). As we are now six, he has been asked to round out another occult organization's rec basketball team...

Dr. J. would like to thank the Cheezburger Network for exposing Volgi.

We still have GorT to dunk on his ass...

Force Feeding

Shut up and eat your food. Or no more SmartBoards.

In 1946, the Truman administration—as part of the Progressive Health, Education, and Welfare trifecta— began the national school lunch program (NSLP). In 1966, LBJ extended that to include breakfasts as well (NSBP). And in 2011-2012, the Obama administration is introducing dinners to students. Yes, a child in America can now eat federally approved meals three times a day, five days a week (some programs offer weekends as well).

US taxpayers cough up over $11 billion per year in school lunch programs, more than double since 2005. The NSBP is over $2 billion per year; as far as the dinner program, no real dollar amounts are available since this program is still technically prototyped, and our Senate has not exactly passed a budget in years. Let us say the total cost is around $15 billion—when you factor in milk programs, et al., the real cost may be $20 billion, but let us say $15 billion. With about 62,100,000 tax payers in the US, that‘s somewhere around $245 per taxpayer per year. Such a bargain.

If you look at the Department of Education statistics, you seem to get a lot of interesting information. 95% of public schools participate in the NSLP, with about 31 million children participating each day. 85% participate in the NSBP—with about 11 million children participating each day. Because, as you know, kids do better in school when they have a nutritious breakfast and lunch!

Of course, if you have ever spent time in the schools, you see something quite different: you see kids throwing almost all of it away. No kdding here: the typical school lunch, for example, consists of a slice of pizza, an apple, a carton of milk, and carrots. The kid eats the pizza, drinks the milk, and pitches the rest. You can verify this for yourself easily at your own school.

Okay, but forget about the waste. Let us talk money.

$245 seems like a pittance to feed all these kids. But with 31 million kids participating, are there that many starving kids who cannot bring a meal from home? In other words, if the NSLP stopped tomorrow, would we have 31 million malnourished kids? No, because according to the National Poverty Center, only about 16.4 million kids are in the poverty category. Of course, that number is based on 22% of the poverty threshold, which is itself based on single parent or dual parent income levels, weighted by the number of children you have. Given that many single parents receive child support, have assistance from other family members, and so on, the actual number is likely less.

But if we did have 16.4 million kids who cannot afford $245—about the price of an XBox 360, which it turns out 29% of them own—that still would be a lot less than the 31 million getting a school lunch on your dime. Malnourished? Actually, the average poor child is as well nourished as an upper middle class child. Damn statistics.

So in reality, very few participants actually need you and us to pay for their breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. Therefore, you might suspect, the government could well afford to cut it back.

In fact, they are not planning to cut it back; indeed, they want more and more and more kids participating. In fact, the cost to you is much higher than $245 a taxpayer. You just don‘t know it.

Because the Department of Education has something called the e-rate program. You can ask your principal about it, and you will get all sorts of glowing responses. Basically, the federal government will give a school nine dollars for every dollar the school spends on technology. This includes computers for the students, obviously. It also includes iPads for the teachers, high speed wireless access, LCD projectors, SmartBoards, videoconferencing, network switch gear, audiovisual systems, whatever. So if you can cough up $10,000 and a technology plan that describes the stuff you want to buy, the Department of Education might award you an additional $90,000. If you can scrape up a million, you get nine million, and so on.

Here is where it gets even sweeter. You pay for that 90% matching fund through your income taxes. Ouch. Oh, we should also mention you also pay for that 10% initial fund through your property taxes. In essence, this is costing you everything.

And you still have to pay the $245. Why do we bring this up? Because there is a small catch to the e-rate program. One you would never imagine.

To get that money, your school’s kids have to participate in the NSLP. Further, there is a sliding scale: if your school’s participation drops off, so too does the e-rate money. What ridiculous right-wing, paranoid, spittle-spewing website did the Czar find this chart on, you wonder:

If the percentage of students in the school qualifying for the National School Lunch Program is...	...and the school is in an URBAN area, the E-rate discount will be...	...and the school is in a RURAL area, the E-rate discount will be...
Less than 1%	20%	25%
1% to 19%	40%	50%
20% to 34%	50%	60%
35% to 49%	60%	70%
50% to 74%	80%	80%
75% to 100%	90%	90%

So what is the Czar’s beef with this? Don’t we want our schools to have the latest and greatest technology?

Yeah, Johnny’s teacher can get an iPad, but only if he eats his federal meat loaf first.

These programs are bribing schools to make kids participate. Didn’t get 188 kids to eat their spaghetti? Looks like you only get an 80% discount this year toward your e-rate IT plan. If you want that new HD projector in Mrs. Upholstery’s first-grade room, better luck next year with the meals, eh?

Drink your milk or no touchscreen tablet for the gym teacher.

You might ask yourself—why is the Department of Education so damned determined to feed our kids that they will dump nine times the amount of money a school can raise on additional technology systems?

Health. Education. Welfare. You can connect the dots.

Some folks did. A large school district outside Chicago offers a breakfast and lunch program, entirely paid for by the students with minimal subsidies from property taxes. They offer really good meals, and the program is quite popular. Why? According to one of the administrators, the district refuses to suck the teat of the Department of Education—because once you accept their money, you accept their meal program—and other conditions regarding your curriculum. This particular district refuses to have the feds burrow into their schools. God bless ‘em.

If you have kids in a public school, and if the school offers students meals, check into things at the next curriculum night. Simply ask if the school participates in the e-rate program. If they say yes, and point out all the wonderful SmartBoards, you know the Progressives are in your school. Whether your school knows it or not.

The Poll That Matters Most

The Czar must say he is quite confused by the media on this election.

Okay, there are so many stories “correcting” the polls that there is no point in providing a link to one of them. By and large, you fall into one of two categories: you are astonished that Mitt Romney probably is ahead of Barack Obama, or you don’t care. Odds are good you fall into the latter category. The Czar will talk a bit about both.

First, the media seems awfully determined to show Barack Obama ahead or at worst tied with Mitt Romney. Republican and independent analysis doesn’t agree with the presented data, and yes, the results can be challenged with equal parts analysis and sophistry.

Second, most people don’t care because by this point they have pretty much made up their minds. There cannot be many people who are chewing their fingernails wondering whether they will pull the lever, tap the screen, or color in the circle for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama.

So who are these polls for? Seriously: if you discover that Barack Obama is up by two points in your state, are you really going to say “My God, I have to vote for that man! He’s ahead!” No, you’re either going to vote for him because you want him re-elected, or you’re going to vote for Mitt Romney. Unless you are a real whackjob, in which case, Gary Johnson is likely to get your vote. And he will thank you and the other nine Americans in return.

If such a scenario were even possible, you would see it: each time Barack Obama was called a point or two ahead, the next poll would show him three or four points ahead, and so on. This does not happen with any regularity because there is nothing realistic about that. Results vary from polling to polling only because methods of data collection and sample pools differ.

Instead, we see exactly that: candidates are hovering around the 48%-48% mark, with about only 4% undecided.

We know why polls continue to be taken: it’s the campaigns who want a daily pulse check on where they might be surging or weakening. We get that. But the intesity of reporting on Gallup, on Harris, on ABC, on CNN—none of these results will matter to the voter. No voter is going to change his or her eventual vote because Gallup showed a one-percent shift.

The media seem to want to project only good things about President Obama. They appear to be behind the promotion of these poll results, and might also be behind the alleged manipulation of the data. Why? The end result might be part of that ridiculous feedback loop that Axelrod and Friends seem to require: give us good news about the President, and we’ll let you in on his inside plans. The more good news they give Axelrod, the more access he grants.

This of course is a stupid practice, if true. If anything, you are more likely to energize Republican voters and encourage Democrats to stay at home on election day. The best thing the media could do—if there is truth to the stories—is alternate between Romney and Obama being ahead, and thereby stir up voters on both sides.

Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be much sense to these poll results. The Czar agrees that the numbers seem more than suspicious—so many other indicators contradict them—but cannot fathom why the media or the pollsters would bother manipulating them.

And the problem with the 2012 election is that any ridiculous explanation might actually be true.

Ah well, the only real poll that matters, Mandarin reminds us, is the one you participate in on Tuesday, November 6, 2012.

Jap Anus Relations*

'Puter perused the Wall Street Journal this morning, as he whipped up a batch of lard-boiled narwhal pancreas for breakfast, as is his wont.  Somewhere in the middle of the A Section, 'Puter stumbled upon the photo, above, illustrating an article on joint U.S. Marine Corps - Japan Defense Forces island defense exercises. 

'Puter was about to nonchalantly move on to the next article when it struck 'Puter that were his Grandad still alive, his reaction to the photo would have been markedly different than 'Puter's. 'Puter's grandfather was a World War II United States Navy veteran who served for the . 'Puter's grandfather died at 66, when 'Puter was only 6 years old. 

One of 'Puter's few memories of his grandfather, a most serious German gentleman, fond of his cigarettes and after-work scotches, was when 'Puter accompanied him to Andrews Air Force Base, where Grandad had commissary privileges. If 'Puter recalls correctly, Grandad used his commissary privileges to stock up on tax free scotch and cigarettes. 

On one of the commissary trips, Grandad took 'Puter to the Officers' Club. 'Puter recalls it being dimly lit, smoke filled, upholstered in red pleather and unusually full for early afternoon.  Grandad greeted a few of his friends, briefly introduced me, ordered a quick drink and lit a cigarette.  'Puter scurried about the club as Grandad had his scotch and cigarette, while the men at the bar talked and laughed.  'Puter recalls hearing only snippets of the conversation, or maybe it's simply 'Puter's memory playing tricks on him again, but 'Puter recalls hearing the words "Japs" and "Nips" bandied about. After about half an hour, Grandad collected 'Puter, and out we went into the blinding mid-summer sun, climbed into his mustard yellow Chrysler New Yorker and headed home.

'Puter's a simple man, with limited capacity for higher reasoning, but 'Puter's fairly certain of this much.  Grandad and his companions at the bar that early 1970s summer day had no love for the Japanese.  And 'Puter's relatively certain that even though Japan-US relations had dramatically improved by the early 1970s, Grandad still wouldn't know what to do with cooperative military drills aimed at offsetting China's rising territorial aspiration.

There's no point to this post, really.  It's simply a "my, how the world has changed" post, a "time heals all wounds" post.  But most of all, it's a "I wish I had had the opportunity to know my grandfather better" post.

For what it's worth.

*The title is from the genius Saturday Night Live Will-Ferrell-as-Alex-Trebek skits, in which Darrell Hammond, playing Sean Connery, mocks Alex Trebek incessantly.  If you have not experienced these skits, you should use Teh Googel and find them on The U Toob. The title references Hammond's "Connery" requesting Ferrell's "Trebek" read an answer from the category "Japan-US Relations," which Hammond's Connery pronounces "Jap Anus Relations."

Math Fun, Gormo-style!

GorT, Sr. enjoyed this earlier post and GorT has been busy so I've been lax in posting these.

First, let's show how 2 equals 3:

and now, -1 equals 1:

Witness the mighty power of the Gormogons!!!

Dept. of State's "Unmitigated" Failure

Mr. Philippe Reines, who evidently has no idea how to manage himself, let alone the media. No, you didn’t elect him.

The news about the Libyan attack keeps getting worse. The Czar was particularly troubled at an emerging story that shows how dimwitted the State Department is, and wonders why on Earth the President is doing something to stop this disastrous lack of competence.

All right, you obviously know how Ambassador Stevens was brutally attacked and killed by al-Qāʿidah. And the administration now admits that, yes, they had very specific warnings about the Benghazi attack in particular.

You might have heard that CNN reporter Arwa Damon went to the embassy and found it more or less unsecured. While there, she noticed Ambassador Christopher Stevens’ personal journal (somehow this is being called a diary, but technically it is a journal) laying out among the wreckage and mess. She didn’t know what it was; she just started flipping through it and was shocked to find it contained significant information of a very secure nature.



Damon also realized there was some personal information in there, and asked the Department of State whether she could send it to Stevens’s family, as there was presumably much in there the family would appreciate knowing.

Not so fast, the State Department replied: there is considerable national security information in that journal, and they need it back. By the way, how did she even get hold of it? Damon basically replied that she walked through the front door and found it laying there. There was no security at the embassy; it was a processed and now abandoned crime scene open to the public.

This is where CNN looks bad. They turned the journal over to the Department of State—but not before they read it. CNN discovered that Stevens was aware of the impending attack, knew al-Qāʿidah was coming for him, and worried that no one was taking his security concerns specifically. This part became evident when Anderson Cooper broke that story—and the only place it could have originated was the diary. Two days later, Cooper explained on air that indeed CNN read it, but revealed neither classified information nor personal information that would upset the ambassador’s family. Either way, the journal was back in the family’s hands, likely after sensitive information was redacted.

CNN claims the information was newsworthy, and defends their actions accordingly. After all, once Damon read the contents, she couldn’t very well unread it, could she? And the bit about the ambassador knowing what was coming was certainly not classified nor revealing anything—it merely corroborated claims by other sources that the administration knew about the attacks beforehand. Nothing more.

That may be the case. But you have not heard what happened next.

Secretary Clinton’s senior advisor, Philippe Reines, issued a statement that CNN acted improperly, stating that:

What they're not owning up to is reading and transcribing Chris's diary well before bothering to tell the family or anyone else that they took it from the site of the attack. Or that when they finally did tell them, they completely ignored the wishes of the family, and ultimately broke their pledge made to them only hours after they witnessed the return to the United States of Chris's remains.

Whose first instinct is to remove from a crime scene the diary of a man killed along with three other Americans serving our country, read it, transcribe it, email it around your newsroom for others to read, and only when their curiosity is fully satisfied thinks to call the family or notify the authorities?

Well, okay—now CNN is going to go the extra step.

CNN did not initially report on the existence of a journal out of respect for the family...but we felt there were issues raised in the journal which required full reporting, which we did. We think the public had a right to know what CNN had learned from multiple sources about the fears and warnings of a terror threat before the Benghazi attack which are now raising questions about why the State Department didn’t do more to protect Ambassador Stevens and other US personnel. Perhaps the real question here is why is the State Department now attacking the messenger.

In other words, CNN wasn’t going to go there, Mr. Reines, but since you decided to get nasty, let us ask the question why the State Department ignored his concerns despite credible evidence he was going to be killed? How do you explain this tremendous screw up?

A good question, thought Buzzfeed reporter Michael Hastings. He emailed the following to Mr. Reines:

A few quick questions for you. Why didn't the State Department search the consulate and find AMB Steven's diary first? What other potential valuable intelligence was left behind that could have been picked up by apparently anyone searching the grounds? Was any classified or top secret material also left? Do you still feel that there was adequate security at the compound, considering it was not only overrun but sensitive personal effects and possibly other intelligence remained out for anyone passing through to pick up? Your statement on CNN sounded pretty defensive--do you think it's the media's responsibility to help secure State Department assets overseas after they've been attacked?
Let me know if you have a second.

Mr. Reines offered back a lengthy response stating that he found the email’s tone rather antagonistic, suggested Hastings ask CNN if they took anything else from the ”crime scene” (though most of us would call it the scene of a terrorist attack), and asked whether CNN had any sense of responsibility to the family—or did they just take what they wanted first? Reines asked the following legitimate question (but put it in an astonishingly whiny way):

I realize that the way this works is that you only you get to ask me questions, but I have one for you: if you were in Benghazi, went to the scene of the attack, found the ambassador's diary, read every word of it, would you have called them and asked their permission to use it, then when you weren't granted that permission agree that you wouldn't use it in any way, and then a few days later just change your mind?

If the answer is yes, then you obviously agree that CNN handled this perfectly fine.

If the answer is no, if you would have decided its contents demanded reporting immediately, how would you have handled this differently then CNN?

And you should feel free to use every word above, in its entirety. Though I suspect you won't.

Hastings wrote back to say he found the State Department’s press release offensive, and that serious questions need to be answered about national security: how was a reporter able to walk freely into an embassy, pick up a sensitive journal that was sitting out, and why the Department believes it should attack CNN who followed ethical rules of journalism and quite frankly did the US a favor by getting hold of that journal before al-Qāʿidah did. The only organization who is having trouble with the facts, Mr. Hastings concludes, is the Department of State.

Reines responded:

Why do you bother to ask questions you've already decided you know the answers to?

To which Hastings replied quite unprofessionally but, let us be honest, something three-quarters of Americans are asking:

Why don't you give answers that aren't bullshit for a change?

To which Reines represented current State Department protocol with:

I now understand why the official investigation by the Department of the Defense as reported by The Army Times The Washington Post concluded beyond a doubt that you're an unmitigated asshole.

How's that for a non-bullshit response?

Now that we've gotten that out of our systems, have a good day.

And by good day, I mean Fuck Off

Hastings, knowing a junior high school muscle pumping when he sees one, replies:

Hah--I now understand what women say about you, too! Any new complaints against you lately?

Knee slapper. And Reines needs to get the last word in:

Talk about bullshit - answer me this: Do you only traffic in lies, or are you on the ground floor of creating them?
And since Fuck Off wasn't clear enough, I'm done with you. Inside of 5 minutes when I can log into my desktop, you'll be designated as Junk Mail.
Have a good life Michael.

Well, now. And lest you dear readers think we are using satire, we are not. This indeed happened: feel free to check any of these quotes out on the link we provided above. Or, if you scrolled down already, click here.

Two questions:

First, do you begin to understand the intense loathing that the Czar has for the media? No, not CNN so much: they appear to have followed the few rules journalism still has. But the way Hastings went about it was intentionally provocative. Yes, Hastings was right to ask the questions: there is no longer any question that the Department of State is just as incompetent as the rest of the Obama administration. Sigh, and we had such high hopes for SoS Clinton. But Hastings is a tool: he could have come out on top of this exchange, but wound up looking like a jerk. Which is really too bad; he could have gotten the same response with a lot more class.

Second, do you begin to understand how a tragic lapse of security could occur at the Department of State, when the Secretary’s own senior adviser has such a tenuous grasp of the scandalous nature of the situation? There are hundreds of perfectly good canned responses he could have used to calm down Michael Hastings, but he chose to underscore how woefully amateurish and inexperienced the Department of State is. When the ambassador notifies his superiors that he is in grave danger, and when those same superiors have word of the attack in advance, you see a comment like “Now that we've gotten that out of our systems, have a good day. And by good day, I mean Fuck Off.”

Yeah, talk about an unmitigated asshole, Mr. Reines. Quadruple down on this incompetence if you must, but do not be surprised when people suspect you have little idea what is going on, no clue how to handle it, and that you cannot even manage yourself.

Imagine what We the People will hear about when the Obama administration is removed from power. Imagine the stories that are going to come out across the board. We cannot wait.

Sage Advice for Romney

Could Romney be planning a major policy dump during the debates? Wow, that might be a great idea, if he is conniving enough.

Just a thought.

Democrats and an increasing number of Republicans have been pressing Mitt Romney to release more details of his overall presidential strategy. The reality is that Romney has indeed had details available—why, the Czar himself has poked fun at the Mitt Romney 591.73-point plan, in seventeen parts, organized into systems and subsystems.

But no, what has been frosting people lately is the Romney approach of discussing five simple points to his presidency. Okay—five is good. People get five. And he will name them for you. But ask for details beyond that, and you don’t get much in the way of specifics.

Further, Democrats and Republicans are almost united on Romney’s foreign policy. Besides getting a little tougher on Iran, what on earth does Governor Romney propose to do differently than Barack Obama? And let us be blunt: even Democrats are increasingly convinced that an administration that capped Usâma bin-Lâdin and has done nothing else is not much of a foreign policy. But while Romney has been criticizing Obama (and rightly so) for the debacle raging across Africa and Asia, what the hell has Romney proposed?

You might suspect Romney has no idea. You would be wrong, actually: in fact, Romney might be among the most painfully detail oriented candidate in decades. Seen his campaign’s response to the scientific debate? Romney provided clear and concise steps for revitalizing science and math in the United States, and turned that into a profit-making venture again.

Paul Ryan is discussing plans to revitalize space exploration again. Days ago, he slowly won over an openly hostile crowd of AARP members into reconsidering their hatred of his plan.

Details are out there. But why not on the big tickets? Well, here is the Czar’s thought: he has learned.

So far, the Romney campaign has released detailed items on things the Obama campaign already knows and either rejected out of hand on policy differences, or on things that they could not or deigned not to debunk.

The big details are coming in the upcoming debtates: Romney has already announced his plan to expose Obama in the debates, which triggers this thought.

Rather than dump a ton of ammunition into the Obama campaign’s hands for them to pick apart, Romney will wait and surprise the President during the debates. It would be a great strategy: we have already seen that Romney knows Obama’s arguments and positions better than Obama knows Romney’s, and surprising the President live on stage will give Obama little time to do anything but react—effectively driving the President off his track.

The goal isn’t to make Obama stumble and sputter, Biden-like, and look like a goof. No, the Czar would recommend the challenger force Obama to do what he does best: make a self-damaging comment off-the-cuff—look at how well the Romney campaign milked the “You didn’t build that” quip, which we now know was technically unscripted. Imagine how much Romney can get Obama to damage himself by forcing him to respond without preparation—which we all know suits Romney’s sit-back approach to negative campaigning this time around.

This might not be quite the gamble you think it is. Reagan did it with “there you go again,” and Romney should know he has never had a better opponent to say something horrifying to the electorage. McCain, for example, made it all too clear what his policies were before the debates, and Obama smacked him around with it during.

We will see. You will, of course, stay with us to get the post-debate analysis, right? Thought so.

Be Inspired

Hast thou heard of this yet?

At a petting zoo, a baby goat falls into a pond. It panics, and begins to drown. Before the people can react, the goat is saved—by a most unlikely assistant. Watch and be amazed.

Or better yet, be inspired.

Because Time Travel Has Consequences

Hey GorT,

Remember when you let those whackjobs from 2113 borrow your time machine, because they wanted to go back to a simpler time and live out a nice pastoral utopia?

Guess who just turned up?

Explains why they never wrote back.

And wait until the archaeologists have to explain the DNA does not match any Filipino. Or why they were found with all that NASCAR memoribilia.

Gathering Strength

The other day, the Czar opined a bit on the poll numbers seem stagnant. Other media outlets are similarly realizing that the poll numbers might not have much to do with what either Obama or Romney are saying.

Other outlets are openly questioning whether the poll numbers mean very much. There are perhaps three dozen links the Czar would recommend you read about why—but he knows you won’t because (a) your time is valuable and (b) you know we’re going to summarize it all for you, right?

Basically, many polls are using registered voters instead of likely voters. Because voter turnout is usually a small percentage of total voters, using registered voters often skews the poll in different directions. Also, most poll analysts are seeing fundamental problems with oversampling in this election. There are also strong suspicions of people lying to pollsters—not a whole lot, but a couple of percentage points—who announce support for Barack Obama but will likely and secretly vote for Mitt Romney because they need a job more than they need to look popular.

Earlier today, Borepatch hit on something that we were going to mention a couple of days ago. Borepatch mentioned that the main stream media is actually harming Obama by trying to inflate his popularity. Indeed, there is good evidence that the glowing appraisals the media offer are fueling Axelrod Inc.’s over-confidence, and that this is encouraging the Obama campaign to make bold claims that stoke the media’s fires. As a result, the two are in a feedback loop that long ago divorced them from critical assessments.

But what the Czar wanted to mention was something else. There is a strange fever out there the Czar has never seen before.

Starting two years ago, the Czar began to notice people in restaurants kvetching about the President. Not in whispers, but in loud who-cares-who-hears rants about the President. Sure, we were used to this at shooting ranges, Cub Scout events, NASCAR, and other right-wing fansites. But restaurants? Strange that someone would be so bold.

But it has happened dozens of times, from two sweet old ladies fearful that Obamacare would destroy their federal medical benefits, to a restaurant manager that came over to the table at which Mandarin and the Czar lunched to complain bitterly about how Obama’s regulations were killing his ability to make a profit to the guys at another table at another eatery growling about the administration’s incompetence. No—these people had no idea who the Czar was; they just didn’t care who heard.

Priests and bishops are openly talking about politics in their sermons—that Catholics, for one, have a moral duty to vote Republican. Even though the Church stayed largely quiet about politics for generations, the openly pro-infanticide Obama administration with its blatant condemnation of Catholic beliefs changed everything. The message is clear: if you’re a Catholic and you vote for Obama, you may be betraying your faith. Wow.

lllinois is often seen as a Democratic Eden; Chicago even more so. Actually, you could wander all over Illinois and never see a donkey logo...until you come to Chicago, Rockford, Peoria, Springfield, Joliet, or Champaign. But now, all around those heavily Democratic communities are Ryan and Romney signs, as if the collar communities are trying to build a fence. Did you know that the long-blue suburbs of Chicago are largely pulling for Romney? He enjoys a wide lead in the polls. Even within Chicago itself, Romney has double-digit support! Unfortunately, if you add up all the Obama votes remaining in those cities, there is little doubt he will win Illinois. But Romney will get plenty of Illinois electoral votes.

Like GorT, the Czar has attended some conferences and speeches lately that were ostensibly unrelated to politics. And the speakers keep coming back to the same topic: Obama has done incredible harm to this country and he doesn’t know it or doesn’t care. No, that isn’t the Czar’s interpretation—various speakers are stepping up and declaring that President Obama must not be re-elected. In all cases, they say this before mixed audiences: and the result is invariably spontaneous applause.

During the Chicago teachers’ strike, the Czar found himself in an elevator with a red-shirted striker. Another passenger asked how things were going. He advised her that if she is fed up with this, she should vote for Romney. This produced a gasp from some people; the teacher replied that while CPS teachers are to remain politically neutral when asked, he said he’s voting for Romney because this sort of overt abuse has to stop. As he exited the elevator, the teacher told the woman he wasn’t kidding. Even he thinks things have gotten out of hand.

Two days ago, the Czar was speaking with a 32-year-old recent Polish immigrant who works as a physical therapist. Having just met, the two of us were speaking about how much the Polish language has changed in just one generation when she suddenly blurted out:

It scares me how much this country is going to socialized medicine. I came from socialized medicine; I saw it and lived in it. You do not want this. And no matter what Obama calls it or how he says it is different, it is not. American peoples have to know that the Communists said exactly the same things about how we would like it. And Obama is doing exactly the same things they did, whether or not he knows it. But the end is always the same. Scary. He needs to go.

Now what would prompt a woman with a limited American political experience to suddenly deliver that plea to us? Fear. Experienced fear, at that. She was like a small kid who blurts out a terrible secret to a total stranger because it became overwhelming.

The reason, of course, is that America has had it to a remarkable degree. The polls, which show the two men tied and never far enough from each other to inspire confidence, do not capture the disgust people have with our President. Other polls do show it: how is that 47% of the country appears to support the President, but more than two-thirds think he is doing a pathetic job? Or that three-quarters think our country is headed for disaster? Or that almost two-thirds believe that Americans need to get off the dole?

The polls say the election will be close. But those that predict a Romney victory seem to have much better evidence. Whatever: the point is that everywhere we go, we are seeing open, blatant defiance of the Obama philosophy. People are tired, angry, and worn-down by this President, and while most Americans evidently think he’s probably not a bad guy personally, they realize he’s made things terribly, terribly worse.

Look around. You might also be shocked at how many people are lining up against him. And in all sorts of surprising places.

An accurate statement or a precise statement?

Borrowed without permission from Grey Ops. 

Dr. J. can't stand lawyers, other than 'Puter and perhaps one or two others here in New Atlantis.

That is probably one of the reasons he doesn't like President Obama. He sometimes lies when telling the truth. 

A terrific example is the other night when he was on Letterman. 

Letterman: Now do you remember what that number was? $10 Trillion? 

Obama: I don't know what the number was precisely. 

Now let Dr. J. be clear. President Obama chose his word carefully. 

Dr. J. learned the difference between accuracy and precision back in 10th grade chemistry, and it equally applies here.

Think of an archery target. 

Accuracy represents how close you are to the bullseye. 

Precision represents reproducibility. So, if you hit the blue ring between 11 O'Clock and 1 OClock you are very precise but not very accurate (assuming you are aiming for the bullseye). 

By way of contrast, if you hit the target near the bullseye, but in a scattered manner, you are accurate, but not very precise. 

If you are the Green Arrow, and split your arrow in the center of the bullseye, you are both accurate and precise. 

Given that spending is going on continuously, it is difficult to know the national debt precisely. By the time you carry the answer out to the penny, we've spent another million dollars. 

We can be fairly accurate when we say the debt is $16 Trillion, and he's wracked up quite a bit of it in only 3.5 years. 

President Unable to Pull Ahead in Polls

That headline seems so strange, but put Mitt Romney’s name in there, and everyone agrees with it.

Yet, for months now, the President and Mitt Romney have been in a statistical tie for the most part. We keep hearing that Romney seems to be woefully unable to pull ahead of the President; yet, isn’t the opposite also true?

One of our liberal tweeters acknowledged this, but fairly pointed out that the onus is on the challenger to pull ahead of the incumbent, not the other way around. Perhaps this is more than true from a news standpoint.

But the reverse cannot be denied: President Obama is in no condition to win the election based on poll numbers any more than Mitt Romney. So a little fair play is in order, and we elected to present an alternate theme to circulate around the web today.

Even so, there is a curious phenomenon going on with Mitt Romney.

The media attacks him for saying something unseemly about the President in regard to the present foreign policy crises. Never mind what he said—how terrible for him to have said it! Yet his poll numbers stay the same, for the most part.

The media presents Mitt Romney telling some fundraisers that 47% of the electorate is never going to vote for him anyway, so forget about trying to convince them on the sanity of tax reformation. Mitt Romney gives up on half of the country! Yet his poll numbers—many of whom mathematically must fall into the 47%—remain unchanged, for the most part.

The President and Vice-President hit Romney with all sorts of negative press, issuing corrections on Romney’s behalf to David Letterman, or quoting from Chinese sources, or having various groups write up scathing commentaries in the press. Yet, again, the poll numbers are staying put.

The Democrats put on a convention that the popular media declares was much better run and more appealing than the Republicans; Bill Clinton delivers a speech that allegedly resonates with Americans struggling to accept or understand the Republican positions. The poll numbers tick up, but then tick right back down.

The last time they changed to stay was when Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan as his running mate. Before that, it was winning the nomination. And that leads us to our next point.

Talking isn’t going to win the election. This is bad news for the President, who prefers to talk.

Doing seems to be way to pull ahead. This is bad news for Mitt Romney, who seems to be sitting back and waiting for the Next Big Thing. He needs to realize he should make himself the Next Big Thing. Do something. It worked before, and it will work again.

Romney needs to realize that speeches and ads are not going to win him more than 48% of the vote. He needs to demonstrate that he can lead, and stop issuing proposals.

Romney Is Correct: The Democrats' Voters Are Largely Moochers

When 'Puter writes his musical version of
the 2012 election, Bye Bye Barry, he's
signing the young, hot Ann Margaret to
star as him.  Dang, what a fine looking woman.

"What's the story, Morning Glory? What's the word, Humming Bird? Have you heard about Hugo and Kim?"

Or, if you're listening to the media today, it goes more like, "ZOMG!1!!! TEH ROMNEEZ HATE U CUZ U R TEH POORZ!1!!!eleventy!!!! WHUT A IDJUT!1!" This media statement is usually closely followed by, "N OBAMA IZ TOTULY GOODER CUZ HE GIVEZ US FREE GAS N MORGIDGEZ!!1!! DONT VOTEZ FOR TEH ROMNEE!1one!! HE WIL TAK UR FREE STUFF UHWAYS!!11eleventy!!1!"

Rather than resort to histrionics, hyperbole and hyperventilation like many liberal outlets (see, e.g., the quickly fading into irrelevancy and hyperpartisan Morning Joe hard leftists), let's look at what Mitt Romney actually said in that edited and leaked snippet of tape.

'Puter cites to the Washington Post's "Post Partisan" blog, where frequent Morning Joe contributor Jonathan Capeheart cites the following as an accurate transcript of the offending language:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.

And, I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49 [percent], he starts with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. So he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every four years.

And so my job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the five to 10 percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon, in some cases, emotion, whether they like the guy or not . . .

So, to my intellectual superiors in the media, I ask this question.  What specifically is inaccurate or offensive or both in anything Mr. Romney said?  Please let 'Puter know, for his a simple, Upstate country lawyer, dependent on those smarter than he to tell him what he needs to know and how he should vote.

Poor simple 'Puter reads Mr. Romney's words and sees only the following non-controversial statements:

1. About 47% of Americans are going to vote for President Obama no matter what.

2.  The 47% of Americans who pay no income taxes are largely dependent on involuntary taxpayer largess for their maintenance and upkeep are probably statistically overrepresented in Mr. Obama's voting base.

3.  The 47% of Americans who pay no income taxes and are largely dependent on involuntary taxpayer largess for their maintenance and upkeep who comprise Mr. Obama's voting base firmly believe that they are entitled to their monthly check regardless of the financial state of the country, the long term sustainability of the government handout program or the impact of increased taxes on the 53% who do pay income tax.

4.  People who don't pay income tax don't care about tax policy, whether Republican or Democrat, unless such tax policy either requires them to start paying taxes or such tax policy cuts their handouts benefits.

5.  People who have never taken personal responsibility for themselves are never going to vote for Mr. Romney who is calling for everyone to shoulder their fair share of the burden.

Whether you agree with Mr. Romney on policy or not, there is nothing controversial or offensive in his remarks.  Takers take from the makers.  Takers don't care about the aggregate impact of their taking on the makers.  Takers vote Democrat.

Duh.

'Puter would like to think Mr. Romney's press conference last night was a first attempt to push back on the Democrats' ahistorical notion that government can do all things for all people for eternity, without harm to anyone.  'Puter, however, harbors deep doubts.

Mr. Romney and Paul Ryan would be well served to embark on a smiling, polite and confrontational campaign of defending Mr. Romney's remarks.  But they should unleash a surrogate to deliver the following message loud and clear:

What part of Mr. Romney's statements were wrong?  Which part?

The part where he said America has a multigenerational permanent underclass living solely on government handouts?  Look around you.  America's welfare system has destroyed the poor family, damning generation after generation to addiction to government benefits, which provide just enough to keep them hooked.

Or the part where he said most Democrats who voted for Mr. Obama last time aren't going to vote for me?  Is this really at issue?  Show me one piece of evidence, just one, indicating that Blacks are in play.  Or gays.  Or the poor.  Or the press.  Look, Mr. Romney believes his polices are pro-people, pro-empowerment and pro-American.  His policies are good for everyone.  But let's be realistic.  You're going to vote for Mr. Obama again, aren't you Mr./Ms. Reporter?

Or maybe it's the part where he said he'd like to peel off the 10% or so of voters in the middle who think that maybe government dependency isn't a great way to go through life?  Gosh, that's horrible.  A politician looking for votes.  I'm certain if you actually asked Mr. Obama this question, you'd get the same answer.  Mr. Romney wants to win the election.  Mr. Romney knows he's the best man for the job.  And yes, horror of horrors, Mr. Romney would like to convince the 10% or so of moderate voters that Mr.Romney's program is better than his opponent's.

If it wasn't any of those parts, there's not much left.  Which part has your undies in a bunch?  Be specific.

 Anyway, that's 'Puter's two cents, which is likely two more of 'Puter's cents than you wanted. 

Debunking the "Trickle Down" Attacks

Thomas Sowell is a favorite of a number of the Gormogons and GorT came across this online interview with the columnist and author.  He discusses his essay, "'Trickle Down Theory' and 'Tax Cuts for the Rich'".  While I'd love to cut and paste just about everything in there (the fluff in it is limited to the page numbers), it is 12 pages long and deserves a careful and considerate read.  Let me highlight a few points just to incentivize you, our dear readers:

1. "For the first 150 years of this country, the federal government did not intervene when the economy turned down.  And all that time the downturns all corrected themselves..."
2. He provides historical-based evidence that high tax rates, particularly those aimed at the higher income brackets, do not necessarily bring in as much revenue as lower tax rates that, in the end, more people end up paying.
3. "...the weight of the evidence is on one side of the argument [lower taxes begets economic growth] rather than the other but, more fundamentally, that there was no serious engagement with the arguments actually advanced but instead an evasion of those argument by depicting them as simply a way of transferring tax burdens from the rich to other taxpayers."
4. "Implicit in the approach of both academic and media critics of what they call "tax cuts for the rich" and a "trickle-down theory" is a zero-sum conception of the economy.

If these aren't substantial enough teasers as to why you should go listen to the interview and read the 12-page essay, I might recommend some re-education by The Mandarin.  His techniques don't hurt....too much.

Stop the Presses! And Leave 'Em Off!

Remember a couple of days ago when the Czar was really annoyed with the Main Stream Media, and how this was the beginning of the end?

One of us, probably Volgi (because he often forgets to sign his tweets), tweeted the following graphic that shows just how freaking awful it is in the newspaper business.



Click on it for a bigger version, but what you see is how newspaper advertising revenue—which is based on how many readers you actually have, as opposed to your general circulation numbers—has changed over the last 60 years.

Yeah, see that big plunge after 2000? The news print industry blames the internet, but that is taken into account as well. The red line shows how online news media spiked a bit around 2003, and actually generated more revenue than printed news.

No, the Czar maintains, the tremendous plunge cannot be explained by the internet alone. The reality is that printed news sucks. There; we said it. And the Czar loathes the use of the word “suck” in that context, but there it is.

Back in the day, when news stories were written by people who knew how to tell a story and reviewed by editors who spoke English and understood writing comprehension, there was an obvious trend upward, especially in the 1980s. Today, the cretins have taken over, and there are very few people who can write a story. Compare:

1975: Mr. Cliff Hanger, of the 320 block of Himmler Avenue, reported that three unindentified juvenile deliquents were spotted around the southwest side of the park in the evening hours of September 15th. “My wife and I had just finished a late dinner and were sitting down for the Art Carney movie on television when I spotted movement out by the playground. I called the police, and they came in about eight minutes. However, the kids ran North, toward the old paint cannery before the police could park; that’s when I went outside and Officer Masher and I saw the vulgarly-worded graffiti on the kids’ slide. Don’t these kids have any realization that little children play there? What kind of parents do these kids have?” This is the fourth incident involving juveniles loitering on or about the cannery premises; however, the City Council refuses to condemn the property.

2012: Teenager’s continue to vent their frustration at Mitt Romney, who cannot provide any details about his economic plans. Teenager’s, statistically more likely to be under the age of 20, lack adequate afternoon activities due to shrinking government funding from the Republican-led House. The lack of vital federal funds has forced some forward-thinking teenager’s to start their own youth center in the old cannery where they take to mural painting and decorative calligraphy at the nearby park on Himmler Avenue. One future leader, who goes by the name MuthaPhoque, said that he would be happy to learn video game programming, but the library won’t teach it since they lack federal funding resources. The old cannery is remembered by some as a source of intense local pollution before essential environmental regulations forced its closure in the 1960s. Today it sit’s testament to the necessity of the EPA. In recent weeks, Mitt Romney has been inexplicably critical of the EPA, and has been unable to articulate why the cannery should reopen.

You may also have noticed that newspapers are now little more than pamphlets these days, in weird 15-inch by 9-inch sizes. This is not because there is less news today, but because the ads are effectively gone.

In their place is editorial and opinion fluff. And why not? By the time a story breaks, a reporter covers it, and editor messes it up, the paper is printed, distributed, and purchased, the entire affair is already over. Nothing like hearing about a major news story, and the morning paper still has whispers that something big might be imminent.

Look, ya can’t predict the future (well, some of us can), and you cannot seriously expect the news media to write the ending to a story hours before it transpires. So rather than write news that will be hours old the minute it lands on your driveway, the news media has found a solution: go with analysis and spin doctoring.

Why not? A feature columnist can write an anti-Romney screed on Monday, and the same nonsense will still be in circulation by the time it winds up in your hands on Friday. Heck, a clever editor can write a whole piece on how stupid he thinks George W. Bush was, and they still will run it days later, even though that ship sailed almost a half decade ago.

And how successful does this work? Allow us to refer you to that graph upstairs.

What Dr. J. has learned from The Doctor

The site will be Dr. J. lite in all likelihood for the next week or so as Clan J. moves out of the urban flat which we occupied for the last four months, and into the palatial 'J. Abbey.' Dr. J. is fully occupied with packing and unpacking in addition to trying to be a good employee. 

Credit this to Dr. J.'s spooky witchy Facebook friend, but it sort of resonated with the Castle's resident Who-ligan. 

Referees

I thought I'd spend a few minutes today on a total side-topic from our regular federal budget woes, Obama's complete amateurism in foreign policy* (and claiming that Romney & Ryan have less experience), sequestration, and all that other nonsense to talk FOOTBALL!

GorT is a fan of a number of professional league sports Football, Soccer (particularly English Premier League and the Euro Cup...although I've been known to flip on a Women's College game here and there), and NHL Hockey.  We can save the debates over which sports is the &#@@AWESOMEST#!@!@ and for the sake of the remainder of this post, let's leave out the your-team-sucks types of dialog.

In each of these sports, and many others, referees generally bear a brunt of complaints - missed calls, favoring one team or the other, etc. and in some cases this is well justified.  GorT was a certified referee in college for a major university's intramural program.  I refereed flag football, basketball, and soccer.  As part of the certification training you learn quickly that you need to make a judgement call quickly and with conviction.  Refs who take too long or are weak-kneed when challenged about their call tend to be discounted and not believed.  At the pace of the games, particularly football and basketball - but even soccer for an offsides call - the referee has about 1.5 seconds to evaluate what he or she sees, determine the proper call, and signal/flag the call with the appropriate action (whistle, flag, arm gesture, etc.).  I continue to referee to this day in our kids' school's intramural flag football program and the same rules apply.

I present all of this solely to focus on the Redskins vs. Rams NFL game from yesterday afternoon.  Excerpts from this game should be required watching for referee training.  Look, I know that these are replacement referees but they have experience refereeing football games.  The league should have provided them resources, maybe to include consultants available on headsets, for making the appropriate calls (not in real time, but if a procedural question arose).  These referees let the game get out of control and made some terrible calls against and for both teams.  I wouldn't argue that one team or the other benefited from their performance but rather, their performance was just plain poor.

It was clear from the players on the field - especially London Fletcher, Steven Jackson, and Josh Morgan, among others - that they were feeling the frustration with the referees.  Rarely have I seen referees allow the kind of contact, pushing, etc. on touchbacks - particularly by the Rams players against the Redskins.  By not asserting control with simple things like this, it escalates into the various frakases (fraki ?) that erupted throughout the game.

I'm not educated enough on the referee strike and the demands that are being set forth, but much like the Chicago schoolchildren are the ones being hurt by the CTU strike, the viewers and even the players are the ones getting hurt by the NFL Referee strike.

More Mandarin Experiments

The Mandarin is releasing some more of his weird experiments on animals. Note for the squeamish: this is almost two minutes long, but the minute oughta give you a sense of the whole thing.

This Better Be The End

Know who really had a bad week?

“Today, Mitt Romney admitted to ThoughtCrime against our great and glorious supreme leader, who forgave Romney in all his benevolence. Also, we’re getting the poop sued out of us.”

Not Barack Obama, who saw a bona fide international crisis unravel under his watch last week, coupled with an announcement that we would do a third round of quantitative easing (which we have explained in simple terms) certain to lower our country’s credit rating again, right before an election.

Not Mitt Romney, who expressed dissatisfaction with the President’s handling of the North Africa crisis while the calendar technically still said September 11—after he promised to forego any political challenges on that day. While our embassies burned and our foreign staff raped and murdered, the pressure was inexplicably on Romney to explain why he quoted State Department statement accurately.

No, ‘twas the moronic Main Stream Media who had a really bad week. The Czar has been warning you about the intellectual and moral poverty rampant in these organizations for years, and now you finally got a great chance to see how bad it is. Or did you?

The MSM deliberately downplayed the story of the North African crises (plural!), spinning this as some localized outrage against a publicized trailer for an anti-Muslim movie made in the United States but financed by Jewish money (whatever that is; shekels, one guesses). Little if any mention was made about Yemen, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Australia (yes!), or any of the several other places our embassies were attacked in an orchestrated fashion.

Why? Because the MSM wanted to protect the Lord and Saviour Barack Obama (PBUH) from taking this disaster on the chin. Stories were actively suppressed, sugar-coated, or spun by the media so badly that even the State Department had to issue clarifications to correct some of the weirdness.

The irony of course is that the President needed none of their help. Look, this is a fundamentally stupid part of the world. Problems there, including various mistakes and gaffes by the State Department and/or intelligence community, have happened under Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama—the reasons why we keep doing it are out there as well. And while we can all cheerfully point the finger at who is responsible, the fact is Americans by a large majority want the President to go in there and stop the attacks on our people. We’re pretty well united there. And the President has been responding both with some of his strongest rhetoric as well as ramping up the armed presence at our embassies. Local governments have suddenly realized that they can do something to stop this, and indeed have an obligation to do so; most of the recent suppression of protestation has been because the local governments began sending armed response teams to the sites and dispersing crowds.

The point is that the President was challenged and responded; you will see no rise or dip in the polls for him over this. The MSM, however, revealed that they are fiercely protective of this guy to the point that they are well past satire and fully into disgusting public displays of affection. Americans will not like this.

Mitt Romney was openly targeted for insult and ridicule by the MSM, who seemed to be the only ones who gave a crap what he said or when he said it. Most polls have Romney tied, and a couple of respected ones have him ahead. The MSM took it upon themselves to lower Romney in the polls by harping about his criticism. Once again, this backfired—it called attention to the actual criticism of the President (which the Obama campaign should have been annoyed with), and revealed that Romney was accurate in his quote and survived the fact-check quite well.

You will see no rise or dip in the polls for Mitt Romney over this. The MSM, however, revealed they have never been fair-minded or honest in their promises of impartial balance. Americans will not like this either.

And good luck finding any coverage over Quantitative Easing. The MSM has heard of this, doesn’t think this will help the President, and is suppressing the news.

But the week got much worse, and neither Obama nor Romney are involved in this fiasco. No, this one is about hamburgers.

A South Dakota-based meat processing plant, Beef Products International, is like every other American facility that handles meat: you want to use as much of the animal as possible to prevent waste. When you remove all the nice tenderloins, filets, and choice cuts, you tend to be left with a lot of miscellaneous meat and smaller pieces. This is carefully collected, placed into a grinder, and made into ground beef for burgers, hot dogs, and meat loaves.

And Beef Products International also uses smaller pieces of muscle tissue called LFTB (large, finely textured beef)—it is little more than the meat carefully pulled out of the fatty tissues area. This can be added back into the ground beef to add to its protein content while reducing the toughness of the other ground beef. There isn’t much wrong with it.

This is why many people freak out over hot dogs. But LFTB is edible, and hell, the Czar would even be able to grill this for you.

Except of course it looks like chewed bubble gum. And this caused one USDA microbiologist to nickname it “pink slime.”

Apparently, ABC News needed nothing more. Reporters Jim Avila and David Kerley decided to repeat the notable hoax-based reporting strategy so popular at ABC News, and issued a series of reports that pink slime was composed of low grade scraps, waste products, tendons and sinews, and all sorts of weird stuff even the reporters did not understand, and you were feeding it to your kids in the form of hot dogs.

Public reaction, unsurprisingly and to the delight of ABC News, was intense. Stores pulled BPI products off their shelves, and many other meat processors found their LFTB products dumped and orders cancelled. Other news agencies, who cannot be bothered to fact-check a goddamned thing if it broke somewhere else first, covered the pink slime controversy with Upton Sinclair-like breathlessness.

BPI was forced to close at least three plants, and almost 1,000 workers were let go. Of course, if you are a meat processor, it is not like you can just pop across the road and work for the competition—you really are out of a job.

Well...turns out...there isn’t anything wrong or shady with LFTB. It is not made of low-grade meat, it isn’t scrap or waste product, and is made solely of lean muscle. Turns out the additives aren’t bad for you, but in fact help ensure the meat is good for you. It isn’t even slimy; about the only things ABC News got right is that it is pink, and it is added to beef.

BPI has launched a $1.2 billion dollar lawsuit against ABC News, Diane Sawyer, and Avil and Kerley for slander. This will be a tough case for BPI to prove, but they do have significant evidence on their side, and no doubt other beef processors will be seeking actions against them as well. The Czar hopes BPI wins big, because this is really getting to be a trend with ABC News in particular.

It turns out the only discolored slime is the MSM. You know, if the Czar falsely claimed that American confidence in the MSM was at 4% right now, not only would no one contradict it, but polling companies would probably link to it as a fact.

And when your polls go that low, you aren’t going to turn it around. High time indeed for the MSM to fold up their tents and just go away. No one is buying this stuff anymore.