Too little, too late

Oh, now the Republicans come out of hiding...

The chairman of the Republican Party on Monday called President Barack Obama’s plan to overhaul health care “socialism...” - Associated Press story posted at Breitbart.com

Which is yet another demonstration of why the national Republicans remain useless for defending liberty.

Via:  DP

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 21:14:43 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Hey RINOs, how’s that “stimulus” workin’ for ya?

Robert Samuelson:

The program crafted by Obama and the Democratic Congress wasn’t engineered to maximize its economic impact.  It was mostly a political exercise, designed to claim credit for any recovery, shower benefits on favored constituencies and signal support for fashionable causes.  As a result, much of the stimulus’s potential benefit has been squandered...

Whatever the virtues of these programs, the effects are diluted and delayed.  The CBO estimated that nearly 30 percent of the economic effects would occur after 2010.  Ignored was any concerted effort to improve consumer and business confidence by resuscitating the most distressed economic sectors.

Just a reminder:
(Samuelson via IP).

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 19:38:11 GMT | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Best comment (so far) on the Amazon reader mess

Amazon has positioned the Kindle as just a vastly more convenient way to own books.  Once a customer has purchased and received a book, Amazon must under no circumstances ever meddle with the customer’s possession of that book or its content.  If they cannot promise to do this, then the premise of the Kindle is a lie; you do not own the books - they are Amazon’s to do with as they wish.  If that is the model Amazon chooses to adopt, fine - I will continue to make do with paper.  You may mock the “Chicken Littles,” but one day you will go back to reread a novel and discover that Greedo shot first. - commenter “hymie” at Volokh

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 17:55:02 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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How to put your “favorite” Blogspot blogger off the air

Have been watching this one develop for a day or so.  Friday night it made Instapundit:

Sure enough, if you click on Glenn’s link, you get...

If you’re willing to give Blogger a cookie and click the “Continue” button, you finally arrive at...

which (aside from the gray-on-black typography - hard for these old eyes to read - and the plethora of images - the page takes 5 minutes to load on my creaky dialup) includes such NSFW posts as The Libertarian Case For Judicial Activism (’cause that’s the path to Second Amendment incorporation- a good thing, right?), Social Security Administrators’ $700,000 Party (team building at the Biltmore Resort in Phoenix), Beware of Googlers Bearing Gifts (this one about the privacy implications of Google’s Chrome operating system and the company’s mounting stack of knowledge about each one of us) and The Victimization of Sarah Palin (no explanation necessary).

The only risqué or objectionable items that I saw were this a couple of images that accompanied the Palin post:  The risqué (NSFW, provided your employer is Pecksniff & Grundy):



...and the objectionable (news photo, language, not safe for animals or children, eye bleach required after!):

WARNED YOU!

Oh yes, there is a post about Greening Up the World's Sex Life (Yeah, gw’an and clickit, ya pervert!), which turned out to be much less sexy that a lot of what’s available on daytime television.

Oh, she also doesn’t like Barak Obama’s programs and proposals very much.  And she’s pro-life.  And a self-described “recovering attorney” and “post-modern neo-feminist disrespectful dyke”  (NTTAWWT).

So whats going on?  Appears to be another case of “the enlightened” making use of Blogger’s “Flag Blog” button to punish another wrong-thinker.

You know, this button...

Because all it takes is for enough people to click it, and the blog gets flagged... automagically!

This blog chugged along for two and a half years without any problems, but with the Dawn of the Age of Obama—nothing but trouble.  The blog has never changed, and it certainly has not changed since May—the last time this happened, and Google, after an avalanche of complaints from my readers, decided that I am not really a purveyor of smut and removed the content warning splash page.
...
[The Flaggers] are offended that I do not worship the water that Barack Obama walks on—but when I was a pretty severe critic of George Bush these types could not get enough of me.

Liberals can be such spoil sports.

For those who aren’t aware of it, Blogger’s content-warning page will break search-engine spidering and also disconnect the blog from aggregators like Technorati.  And it adds a warning to any remaining Google links.  So being flagged can do horrible things to a blog’s visiblilty.

In fact, the only way word of my posts is getting out, on a regular basis, is through Culture 11—a social conservative site that snags my feed and it is picked up by some of the news wires—including Google News.

I must say, I find it rather amusing that a website started by folks like Bill Bennett, is more tolerant, and less prudish, than the enlightened New Age Yuppies of Mountain View.

And the blog stays flagged until someone at Google/Blogger decides to rescind it.

What’s more dismaying, this go-around is a repeat of a similar one that took place - and was supposedly resolved - one month ago.


As I mentioned at the top, I had noticed this a couple of days back, when I’d been trying to run down the answer to a problem I’ve had making comments on a couple of Blogger-hosted blogs.

Of course there’s no way to contact a real person at Google/Blogger.  So one must be content with its posted documentation, or, failing that, its support forums, where confused and angry users try to help each other.  Turns out that in the Something Is Broken forum there are a lot of questions (with not many answers) from people having problems posting comments.^[1]  But there were also several threads about the GISS blog, including one with this snippy reply from a “Top Contributor,” (preserved here for your amazement, hilighting mine):

There are now a dozen threads taking up space in BHF, with everybody whining about this one blog that had an interstitial warning (and does not have, right now [wrong - o.g.]).  The soonest anything might even possibly be done will be Monday of next week, yet we have dozens of your readers posting daily.

If Blogger is to retain any control over the spam and pimping here, they will most likely have to ignore the whining, and leave the matter unresolved for several additional days, as “punishment”.  Otherwise, every blog that gets graced by an interstitial warning will engender the same amount of bitching and pimping. BHF will become nothing more than a forum of “xxxxxxx blog should not have an interstitial warning!”. We saw this last year, with The Daily Coyote.  [Guess they didn’t fix that problem, did they? - o.g.]
...
If you care about GISS, you will convince your readers to shut the fuck up, and wait until next week.  Either Blogger may remove the interstitial, or they will delete the blog and give you something to really whine about. I am inclined to recommend the latter, right now.

So there we are.  (Real class.)

There are ways to get out from under Blogger’s warnings.  Blogs can be hosted on the blogger’s own server (even using Blogger’s software), or the blogger can obtain a custom domain address.^[2]  Either moves the blog out of the “Blogspot” domain (which seems to be Google’s major concern^[3]).  And, of course, there’s always the possibility of moving somewhere with more liberal terms and conditions guts.^[4]  But any of those options take time, and, if your old site just disappears, your readers will be left wondering what happened.

Which is something that anyone who posts on Blogger and might create (or have) some enemies ought to think about.

UPDATE 090724 20:02:  Google Product Manager Rick Klau tries to spin it as purely a “nudity” issue:

We simply responded to the fact that a number of posts there do, in fact, contain nudity.  Visitors to the site flagged the blog as containing objectionable content, and as set out in our TOS, blogs that contain nudity may contain an interstitial to let readers know what they will find when they click through.

Challenged to address the practice of using “objectionable content” complaints to game the system for ideological suppression, he says

I can’t see how us subjectively applying our standards helps anyone.

Related:

-----

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 23:29:28 GMT | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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All you need to know about Obamacare

The Wall Street Journal:

...If it’s good enough for the middle class, then surely it’s good enough for the political class too?  As it happens, more than a few Democrats disagree.

On Tuesday, the Senate health committee voted 12-11 in favor of a two-page amendment courtesy of Republican Tom Coburn that would require all Members and their staffs to enroll in any new government-run health plan.  Yet all Democrats -- with the exceptions of acting chairman Chris Dodd, Barbara Mikulski and Ted Kennedy via proxy -- voted nay.

In other words, Sherrod Brown and Sheldon Whitehouse won’t themselves join a plan that “will offer benefits that are as good as those available through private insurance plans -- or better,” as the Ohio and Rhode Island liberals put it in a recent op-ed.  And even a self-described socialist like Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, who supports a government-only system, wouldn’t sign himself up.

Of course, they also qualify now for generous Congressional coverage...

Look for that amendment to “mysteriously” (as in “Geegollywow, we can’t figure out how that happened!”) disappear before the bill’s final passage.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 14:54:06 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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A tale of two companies

CIT Group, a primary lender for small and midsize businesses, faces bankruptcy because it can’t get government loan guarantees:

[CIT] received a $2.3 billion infusion from the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program in December, after winning approval to become a bank holding company.  But CIT has so far been unable to access another federal program, one that helps banks and thrifts sell debt with government guarantees...

One problem with getting more federal aid is that the government has made it clear it doesn’t see the company as a systematic risk to the financial system...

While CIT has so far missed out on winning the FDIC’s aid, competitors like GE Capital and GMAC have been able to sell debt with the backing of the government’s top credit rating. - “Major Lender Faces Crunch • CIT Hires Bankruptcy Adviser as Payment Looms; Financier to 1 Million Businesses” by Jeffrey McCracken and Serena Ng, The Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2009, page A1 [not found online]

And small businesses are already feeling the effects...

For much of the past decade, CIT was one of the country’s top lenders to enterpreneurs and small businesses, many of which were shunned by traditional banks.  CIT was the country’s top lender to small businesses under a Small Business Administration program, making $770 million in loans last year.  But since the credit crunch... CIT’s small-business lending unit made just $59 million in loans between October 2008 and May 2009.
...
David Marcantonio, who runs... a commercial- and business-loan broker... said CIT often was more willing to work with small businesses... “We would do 20 CIT loans for every one GE [GE Capital] loan, and they [CIT] are still much more active than GE ever was... If they go away, banks are not going to be able to fill that gap...” - “Business Owners Ache as CIT Scales Back” by Serena Ng, The Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2009, Page C4 [article preview here]

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s quintessential “insider” firm, is expected to report record profits tomorrow, nine months after it got $12.9 billion in bailout money.

So, as usual, Wall Street gets taken care of while Main Street gets screwed.


(Goldman story/links via R.S. McCain.)

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 16:04:41 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Mr. Congressman, sir! I have a question!

Found in the comments, here:

In the name of HOMELAND SECURITY we have to have passports to go to Canada and come home. Funny thing though, if an illegal sneaks across the border, it is a misdemeanor and will get said illegal a trip back to the border. If a U.S. citizen tries the same stunt, it is a felony that could get him/her twenty years in Leavenworth.

I have two questions.

1. Why does an illeagal alien have more freedoms in this country than a citizen?

Because illegal aliens don’t have any assets for the government to steal?

2. How does this make the U.S. safer?

Oh, snap!

Via: Dustbury (sort of)

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 19:54:13 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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She must be out of the loop

It’s obvious that Peggy Noonan didn’t get the memo.


UPDATE(s) 090711 17:26:

Credits:

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 15:10:31 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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New miracle cure?

(Spotted at Tam’s.)

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 14:32:49 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Dr. Jekyll, call your office

Spotted on the car in front of me on the way home from last night’s fireworks:

The upper sticker:  “Over-Taxed Small Business Owner.”
The lower sticker:  “Hamilton County Republicans for Obama ’08.”

(Well, there are some strange folks in Carmel.)

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 20:07:09 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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