Obama has millions of fake Twitter followers

I disagree with their criteria for "fake":

"Fake accounts tend to follow a lot of people but have few followers," said Rob Waller, a founder of StatusPeople. "We then combine that with a few other metrics to confirm the account is fake."

I think a lot of people sign on to Twitter for the sole reason of checking out posts by politicians, stars, musicians, etc. They aren't there to speak themselves, just to read what is being posted by others. This is especially true of politicians--where people want to see what they're saying, but aren't the politician's "friend" and will not be "liked" in return. I can easily see my 80+ year old dad signing on to Twitter for the sole reason of reading a politicians' or campaigns' feeds; but he would never write a tweet of his own, would never gather a single follower, and never go looking at anyone else's feed either.

This criteria is like saying most blog readers are bogus, because they don't have blogs themselves--there is a difference between making and consuming content. You can consume, without being a producer.

Thomas Sowell thinks we discuss sports more rationally than politics:

Sports Versus Politics

I think there is a very simple reason for this: When talking about sports, we talk about sports; when talking about politics, we talk about how people are talking about politics.

By this I mean, most political reporting is about what the two sides are saying (usually about those bastards on the other side,) and not about what they are actually proposing or have already enacted. This drives me crazy. Most reports follow a format sort of like this: Republicans say that the Democrats have raided Medicare to pay for Obamacare, Democrats say that the Republicans would gut Medicare. Missing, of course, is an actual analysis of the Republican proposals, or an evaluation of the Democratic ones. I often find myself mentally screaming that I don't care what they say, or how clever their turn of phrase was, or how good/bad their political strategy is. I want to know what are they actually doing! But the reporters never get around to such little things as that.

This is just an example from the current debate, but this happens daily, year after year. Reporters are so fixated on the game, on the horse race, on the easy reporting; that they never bother to tell people what is actually going on.

The cynic would say, they don't tell you; because they're liberals; and because, if you were to strip party identification off all of the proposals, people would usually pick the conservative ones. Better not to talk about the underlying proposals then; much better to show how mean and nasty the verbal mudslinging has gotten.

(The punctuation on the second to last sentence is seriously tricky. I'm not sure I got it right, but it took me a while just to come up with that. The proper use of semicolons is a dying art.)

Which party is more cynical? | Power Line

Mirengoff has trouble explaining McCain's pick of Palin. I think my first reaction to it, and how I explained it to my sister--who had never heard of Palin--was probably right: she was picked because she didn't have an abortion.

An incarcerated 43-year-old Milwaukee man is suspected of using a van he drove as part of a work-release program to help commit at least four burglaries of Mequon businesses on North Port Washington Road in June and July.
 
Man, on work release, accused of using jail van to commit Mequon burglaries

The Olympic tickets fiasco: Bring on the touts | The Economist

Why is it so bad to resell tickets at the price the market will bear? Because low-income people will be priced out of the market, and only the wealthy will be able to attend. So, faced with a choice between filling the stands with people who could afford expensive tickets, and having empty stands, the Olympic organizers opted for the latter.

To a leftist, it is better that we all live in poverty than for the wealthy to have any advantage. All can be equal, but only if we are equally poor.

A Creative Borrowing Boom: Poway Not Alone in High-Interest Financing - Voice of San Diego: Education

Lake Oswego Biz Owner Gets Slapped for Anti Obama Sign

Any chance this is the same Kevin Kerwin I knew as a kid? 

Vitucci's gets a write-up in the J/S:

Raising the bar - JSOnline

President Obama is popular in Washington DC:

The president is most popular in Washington DC, where his job approval rating is an astonishing 83 percent.

Wow, that's high. Still, I'm not surprised. Having returned very recently from DC, I can tell you it's a boom town. The empty storefronts you see in the towns I've lived in over the past few years are not present in DC. On the contrary, everywhere there is a feeling that businesses are doing very well. It's a heady atmosphere of wealth and growing prosperity. On street corners everywhere you can see signs advertising newly constructed homes. I think that if the rest of the nation saw how Washington is living large while the rest of the country is hurting, people would be appalled.

PJ Media » The Three Great Scams of Our Time

Quote of the day:

I have been following the ascent of Barack Obama from early in the Democratic primaries—when he surfed on a wave of clichés, bromides, plagiarisms, gaffes, promises, and outright fabrications to the nomination—up to the present moment when he began to be exposed as arguably the most disingenuous and destructive president in the history of the United States. I found it hard to believe that he had succeeded in conning the majority of his countrymen (and much of the West). True, he enjoyed the material assistance of the consensus media in what was both a massive cover-up of his dubious formative and intellectual influences and an equally massive promotional campaign. Nonetheless, how a largely unvetted nonentity with a winning manner could so effectively beguile even a dumbed-down electorate is nothing short of grotesque.

Redshirting: Holding kids back from kindergarten - CBS News

"60 Minutes" did a piece on Kindergarten redshirting. In it, they clearly illustrated the big elephant in the corner, but never overtly mentioned it: every single example they cited was of a boy being held back--not one girl.

It's very dry here in Madison:

Seriously dry conditions have developed over southern Wisconsin during June. Several stations in the south central sections of the state reported the driest June on record. Madison received only 0.31 inches of rain, breaking a 117-year record. This amount was only 7 percent of normal June rainfall. Beaver Dam (0.33 in), Ft. Atkinson (0.42 in) and Watertown (0.50 in) also experienced their lowest June rainfall totals.

I don't remember seeing anything like it. Our lawn is yellow and it crunches when I walk on it. There are tall ugly weeds popping up in the middle of lawns all over town. Our garden is doing ok. We have to water twice a day, but on the plus side the garden weeds have been easy to keep down. I hope it will end soon.

I find this story "Swiss institute finds polonium in Arafat's effects" highly unlikely:

Traces of the poisonous element polonium have been found in the belongings of late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, a Swiss institute said on Wednesday, and a television report said his widow had demanded his body be exhumed for further tests.

Arafat died at a hospital in France in 2004, after a sudden illness which baffled doctors. Many Palestinians have long suspected he was poisoned.

Darcy Christen, spokesman for the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland, told Reuters on Tuesday it had found "surprisingly" high levels of polonium-210 in Arafat's belongings.

The half life of Polonium-110 is 138.4 days.  Which means that between the day he died (Arafat died on 11/11/04) and January 1, 2012, there would have been 18.5 half-lives. Which means that for every million atoms of Polonium that might have been on Arafat's belongings when he died, only 2.5 particles would have still existed at the start of the year. I don't know the lag-time between the tests and the announcement, but if they tested it after the first of June, that would have dropped to 1.2 particles per million.

Needle, meet haystack.

Happy First Birthday to my littlest sweetie-pie.

How lucky I am to be your dad!

I think Roberts' decision is well thought out and the right one. He called a tax a tax. Yes, the administration tried very hard to present the "mandate" as anything but a tax, but a tax it is. I don't see this as any new power for the Federal Government either.  If the Feds hike everyone's taxes by $700, then provide a $700 tax credit to those who buy approved health insurance, the effect is exactly the same as putting a $700 tax on not-buying insurance.  Surely the Feds have the constitutional power to do the former.

I have seen a lot of posts on conservative blogs calling the mandate "a huge tax increase on the middle class" and saying how the mandate represents a new and crushing power of the government to run every aspect of our lives.  It's nonsense.


In a characteristically fine essay, Charles Krauthammer states:

I think the “mandate is merely a tax” argument is a dodge, and a flimsy one at that. (The "tax" is obviously punitive, regulatory, and intended to compel.)

I disagree. I find Roberts' analysis convincing. Essentially, since the tax is small in relation to the cost of health insurance, it is not punitive. See here. See also here.

The supreme court today upheld the constitutionality of Obamacare, under the power of the Federal Government to tax.

I think this is a HUGE win for the president.  Folks over at Althouse's blog though are saying that it is not, that taxes are unpopular and so this will be a political negative for Obama.  Yet very few people will end up being taxed.  If you have health insurance, you won't pay the tax.  If you are one of the 50% of Americans who pay no taxes, or pay negative taxes, I'm sure you won't be paying the tax either.  No politician will go along with a "tax on poverty."  Credits and deductions will be used to negate the penalty.

Insurance rates will skyrocket. People who have no insurance now won't buy it until they get sick. They won't pay the tax either.  The cost will have to be passed on to the people who do buy insurance before they get sick, i.e. essentially the 50% who pay taxes.

Washington Inmates Banned From Making Sexy Outfits for Female Prison Guards

These people are already in jail, under guard, and can't do much of anything until ordered to do so...so why in the heck couldn't this have been dealt with using prison disciplinary procedures? Why raise the issue to the height of a law?

An article about Obama at Occidental: Self-Made Man

This article does Huell Howser wrong! The critical point to understand about Huell's involvement in the video, is the fact that Huell can spend half an hour being absolutely fascinated and engrossed by anything! Huell is a California institution. He goes around California with a camera man, heads for sites both exciting and mundane, and spends half an hour making you think even the silliest, stupidest, most boring site is simply fascinating.

I've watched him clomp through a forest so that he could stand on the actual border between California and Oregon! Wow! And by the time the half hour is over, he's made you want to go there too.

I've seen him go to a shell factory--a place where a single family harvests shells and cleans them out for sale as decorative items--and make it sound like you'd want to invite the family over for barbecue next weekend.

 Here's the summary from a full hour-long episode of his show. Because it's Huell, he really can make this special:

California's Gold #1 - California Aqueduct Special

In this special one-hour episode of California's Gold, Huell takes a look at the California Aqeuduct. Constructed in the 1930s, the Colorado River Aqueduct is considered one of the greatest engineering projects in the world - bringing water to thirsty Southern Californians across over 200 miles of barren, remote desert. Starting at Lake Havasu, we trace the route the water follows through huge pipes, tunnels, canals and pumping plants. Along the way we meet the men and women who are carrying on the proud MWD tradition of bringing water to Southern California. 

It sounds so thrilling! And yet, if you came across it on the TV and didn't keep flipping, you would actually spend an enjoyable hour--in large part because Huell is just so gosh darn fascinated by everything!

Did I mention he's  not actually from California, and does his shows in a heavy and slow Georgian drawl? I love the guy.