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.