I can watch football in Sunday night again.

Kief lost his weekend gig.

This is not letting me cut-and-paste. NBC had no comment whether or not Olberman being a race-baiting SOB was a reason for letting him go. I don't care about the reason, but now I can watch Football Night in America and keep my dinner down.

I know what you're thinking

You've had a few, but you're fine. You had more to drink last Saturday, and you made it home okay. You even joked about opening the car door and feeling your way home with your foot. Just crank up the AC and the radio to keep you alert and drive about 10 miles under the limit and you will be fine.

Really, you will.

She says she is, but she isn't

Shirley Sherrod told the National Association of Black Journalists that she was planning to sue Andrew Breitbart for posting that video clip that gave the impression that she hated whitey.

She is not going to sue Andrew Breitbart. When she does get around to talking to a lawyer, she will be told of a 1964 Supreme Court decision called NY Times Co. v. Sullivan. This ruling set very high standards for a public figure to sue for libel. A good example of how this ruling works today is the National Enquirer-style tabloids (George Bush is drinking again! Oprah is on her deathbed! John Edwards cheated on his wife! - wait, that last one is true.) get away with publishing absolute fiction.

What would make this worth the price of admission is when Breitbart's lawyer gets Sherrod under oath during discovery. The more Sherrod appeared on cable the week after her firing, the more apparent it became that she does hate whitey. Which is why she wasn't on any of the Sunday news shows. After her performance on CNN the media didn't want to give her any more rope.

Why I didn't renew my subscription to the Tampa Tribune.

My two weeks without Internet access at home was eye-opening. Without cable for Fox News, I was totally in the dark when it came to national news.

Local news also has blind spots as well. When was the last time your local news did a story on drug and alcohol abuse among the homeless? When was the last time your local news had a story which portrayed minorities as being racist?

For example, a Google search would show that the only Tampa Bay news organization which covered this was the local FOX affiliate. Do you think that if it were a local mosque or black church that got vandalized like this would only be covered by one station and none of the two newspapers? How many news decisions are made influenced by fear of the NAALCP and La Raza?

I already had a dim view of the Trib for ignoring this story. The day after I was lucky enough to see the vandalism story on Channel 13 I got my renewal notice from the Trib. And that day's Trib missing this story. I chose not to renew.

The NAALCP has already designated me a tea-bagging racist. I may as well speak my mind.

Judenrein: an update

On June 5 I wrote: "Obama could bomb Tel Aviv and make the eating of pork mandatory and still not lose the Jewish vote. Most American Jews have long abandoned the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for the god of FDR, JFK and BHO".

I offer this evidence as Exhibit A.

Maybe Mr Senturia should talk to a few Jews who actually live in Israel.

Not so fast

Andrea Harris has a favorite stop of mine in blogworld.  (You can see her off to the side there in the Pantheon.)  This post of hers, about tourists having mental meltdowns when their real trip abroad destroys their romantic notions of the destination, brought brought out a comment that is making me scratch my head a bit:

Pity they didn’t bother to read about Paris (especially material not put out by the travel industry) rather than rely on a medium intended and designed to transmit lies.

I object to this, and I will explain why.  (At length - lucky you!)  Movies are not a medium intended and designed to transmit lies, any more than television, or novels, or plays, or art, or video games. All these are media intended and designed to transmit IDEAS or STORIES. Some of those may well be outright lies; some of those are excellently-crafted. There are also truthful stories, and beautiful ideas, and nobility and kindness and grandeur.

Since images and feelings are more immediate, most art aims for those instead of thoughts. No argument on that point. I do think that to simply call the whole thing "lies" by design is to miss the point, however. One of the earliest moving pictures was in fact used to truthfully answer a question: does a horse pick all four feet off the ground at once while galloping? (Turns out that they do.)

Look - I'm a storyteller by nature, if not by profession.  (And there's a long post brewing about that conflict: stay tuned.)  This is my passion.  I would be willing to go on a limb and say that for most creative community, that passion is a primary motivation.  They have turned that passion into a job.

Once you turn a passion into a means of commerce, things change.  As long as I'm just writing, I can just write.  Once I am also selling, then the writing has to meet the demands of those to whom I wish to sell.  It's a dilution - not much of one, since an audience wants a compelling story above all, and storytellers are nothing if not compelled.  Still, they may have no taste for the story struggling to free itself from my mind.  At that point it's the old familiar choice: give 'em what they want or say what I need to say?

Here's the thing, though: that tension exists in EVERY business.  Some people's passion is food.  They become amazing chefs.  They also have to consider: will people pay money to eat this?  How much?  Again, the dilution is slight.  People want great food, chefs want to cook great food.  But people can scarcely afford $100 meals every night, not in great enough numbers to keep the chefs themselves fed.  So ingredients are swapped, flavors change, and viola - Chili's.  Or Wendy's.

I won't pretend that line cooks at a chain restaurant give two shakes of a rat's patoot about Great Food in the abstract, but they care at least about how the particular food they're actually cooking, that it should be done properly and please the customers.  And the people who develop the menus care much more about that abstract, the ideal of flavors.  Even Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy's, cared a great deal about it, even if it was just burgers and fries.  He may not have been a chef on the par of a Gordon Ramsay or Julia Child, but he cared.  He had to.  Ultimately, if you make too many changes for commerce - too much dilution - then one loses both the passion and the commerce.

You will find the same tension in every walk of life: in education, in politics, in construction, in sports.  There is a perfect ideal, that drives everyone with a passion, and then there is the economic reality.  It would cost too much to make every teacher an Ivy League-quality professor (and not every one of them could be, anyway), though the children would benefit.  It costs money to campaign, money to run a government - too much to run unelectable candidates no matter how great they may be at governing.  Should my house get obliterated by meteorites or something, it would cost twice as much to construct the way it was originally built vs. using modern materials like sheetrock.  And the greatest players in the world command a great deal of money, more than any one franchise could pay (even the Yankees or Red Sox); so they make do with affordable players rather than pursue the perfect ideal of 162-0.

Yet those ideals exist.  Those passions are real.  Every teacher wants to teach as well as possible, every politician hopes to govern, every housebuilder (and homeowner!) wants the home to endure, and every team wants to win every game, or at least their league's chamionship.  Without those ideals, that passion, there would be no point in even starting.

That's why I say again that filmmaking is about ideas and stories, not lies.  Based on some of the loopier things that movie-folk say and do, it's easy to believe that Hollywood is full of narcissists who dictate What is Acceptable to the rest of us, when in fact they are full of crap.  There is some justice in the claim, perhaps, in certain examples.  Certainly Tim Robbins and Sean Penn have done more than their share of loopy lefty proselytizing.  But they didn't become actors to be able to dictate What is Acceptable, they did it because their passion is in the stories they tell.  Those who have lost that passion are usually the worst at their profession, and again, this holds across all walks of life.

Not surprisingly, when singers and athletes and kindergarten teachers also lose that passion, they become fairly useless in their fields as well.  That doesn't mean that music, sports, and knowledge itself is intended and designed only to convey lies, does it?

(Funny how this comes up when I'm working on a story that indirectly touches this idea - that of the storyteller as a professional liar.  Reality keeps anticipating me.  Bad reality!  No cookie!)

Judenrein

If Glenn Beck would have said this, MSNBC would have devoted three days of programming on it. The US Senate would have sent a letter to Fox demanding they fire him. But Helen will get a pass, and we all know why.

While I'm on the subject, Obama could bomb Tel Aviv and make the eating of pork mandatory and still not lose the Jewish vote. Most American Jews have long abandoned the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for the god of FDR, JFK and BHO.

This is starting to become embarrassing

The "I never was a maverick" John McCain wants to build the fence. Three years ago he was calling people who made statements like this racists. But that was before he had to pretend to be a Republican for a contested primary.

Why would Senator McCain embarrass himself like this? For senators, 70 is the magic number. If your senator is 70 years old, the only way he is leaving is in a box. And if you have to change parties (80 yr-old Arlen Spector) or legislate from a nursing home (92-yr-old Robert "Sheets" Byrd) you will puke up whatever principles you had in order to save your spot in D.C.

Straight Talk Express. Puhleeeese!

The difference between Deepak Chopra and God..

.. is that God doesn't think He's Deepak Chopra.

The U.S. Geological Survey is blaming day-to-day seismological changes for Sunday's 7.2 earthquake along the U.S.-Mexico border.

But Deepak Chopra, the famed alternative-medicine practitioner and transcendental meditation guru, is pretty sure he knows what really happened."Had a powerful meditation just now -- caused an earthquake in Southern California," Chopra wrote to his nearly 179,000 Twitter followers shortly after the quake.

And then, to clarify: "Was meditating on Shiva mantra & earth began to shake," he tweeted. "Sorry about that."

The epitome of humility!

C'mon guys, make up your minds!

Christian Science Monitor (3/6/2010): John Patrick Bedell: Did right-wing extremism lead to shooting?

John Patrick Bedell, whom authorities identified as the gunman in the Pentagon shooting on Thursday, appears to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent antigovernment feelings.

Christian Science Monitor (3/6/2010): Political extremism: Not so easy to categorize.

Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell was an anti-Bush registered Democrat who believed 9/11 was planned and carried out by the US government, so he must be left-wing, right?

The truth here is way beyond such facile political analysis.

The truth is that it wasn't his politics that caused him to do this, but the fact that he was a nutjob. But what explains this first article? Wishful thinking on the part of the writer?

And these people wonder why their industry is dying.

Fun with goalie numbers

In a long-distant post, I remember discussing goalie stats, and how the standards changed historically from the old, pre-expansion NHL, through the expansion and scoring boom of the 70's and 80's, and into the "dead-puck" era and beyond.  I can't find that post at all, sadly - it's not tagged.  But I do remember that in the comments, someone suggested that links to the pertinent numbers and goalies would have helped.

Well, this is that... kind of.  (I'm full of met expectations in this post, aren't I?)

The NHL's official stat pages for the keepers is a great resource for tinkering with numbers and comparing/contrasting.*  The guys I found and linked below, I've picked for particular reasons.  For example, you'll have heard that Martin Brodeur has won more regular-season games than any other goalie to play in the NH, and that he tied Terry Sawchuck's all-time-best mark for shutouts.  You may also know that after last night's game against Montreal, he is tied with the former Canadien, Patrick Roy, for most regular-season appearances by a goalie.  (If you click that first link above, you'll see it for yourself - at least if you click before the Devils play Ottawa on Friday, when Brodeur will pass Roy.)

*With one exception - they don't sort the career numbers based on any minimum number of games played, so the "all-time leaders" for the rate stats are pages of guys who played one game in net for their careers.  It can be a hassle to page through those and try to find the actual career guys.

Brodeur got his 103 clean sheets by allowing 2.21 goals per 60 minutes (the goals-against average is the goalie equivalent to a pitcher's ERA).  Sawchuck permitted 2.51.  Does that make Brodeur clearly better?  Is that more a function of the Devils' excellent system?  It's hard to say.  No complete records exist for the numbers of shots Sawchuck faced; we can't be sure what percentage of those he saved.  And from there, it's another step to compare his average to the league average.  Carl Yaztremski hit .301 in 1968, which sounds terrible to us, but he led the AL that year; it's possible that's more impressive than anyone who hit .335 in Coors Field during the steroid era.  To take Roy as an example: he led the league in GAA in 1991-92.  He saved 91.4% of shots against him, and surrendered 2.36 goals per full game; the league averaged 3.48 per team, per game.  Bob Sauve led the league twelve seasons earlier with an identical GAA (save percentage not recorded), with teams averaging 3.52 goals per game.  But nearly overnight, the game changed - in 1999-2000, Roy's 2.28 GAA (and identical .914 sv%) was only good for ninth, in a league where teams only scored 2.75 goals per game.  Was Roy actually better in 2000, or in 1992?

But the data get better every day, as do the tools used to understand them.  Tom Awad at Puck Prospectus has developed something called Goals Versus Threshold, for example.  In brief, it takes offense, defense, and goaltending, separates and quantifies each, and translates it into how many goals that contribution is worth to a team.  It's not easy to calculate, but it's a substantial move forward.  Folks also like the Corsi rating, named for its inventor, former goalie coach Jim Corsi, though like any stat, it's not perfect.**

** I have a book on goalkeeping which has contributions from Corsi, and it's excellent, much like the article on Corsi you can reach by clicking his name above.

As far as the basics?  Start with the unassuming, yet wonderfully-named, Doug Soetart.  Soetart finished his career with a winning record... but his GAA was 3.97.  It's the largest GAA I could find for any keeper who won at least 100 games, and more than he lost.  Even during the superball scoring of his time, it was rare for a guy with much worse numbers to keep playing.

You'll notice that in the few years Soetart's sv% was recorded, it was fairly unremarkable.  Ken Wregget, the longtime Flyer and Penguin (among others), was one of the first keepers who played an entire career with shots and saves officially recorded, and you'll see that he never reached .900 until 1995, and never got under 3 goals per game until three seasons after.  Not coincidentally, these were the beginning of the lower-scoring environments following the loss of half the '94-'95 season.  Wregget only recorded 9 shutouts for his career, and six of those were beyond this cutoff.

There's a lot of examples like this that suggest that a goalie is often dependent on the team in front of him to put up the sorts of statistics that catch attention; it's also part of why a number of people don't automatically call Brodeur the best goalie in history, just because he tops so many all-time lists.  Had the Islanders drafted him in 1990 instead of the Devils, for example, he wouldn't have played behind Scott Stevens, Scott Neidermeyer, Ken Daneyko, and Colin White, but behind Kenny Jonsson, Scott LaChance, Rich Pilon, and Radek Martinek.  Jonsson was a fine defender, but I don't think there's much of a comparison.  (Didn't pick those names at random, either - they're the four defenders who played the most games for those franchises since 1993, when Brodeur came up for good.  And fifth/sixth are Brian Rafalski and Tommy Albelin vs. Eric Cairns and Roman Hamrlik.  Oy.)

The most stark example I could find was old-time Charlie Gardiner, a Scotsman (aye!) who finished his career way back in 1934 with a 2.02 GAA... and a career losing record.  He was one of the last goalies to be named a captain (the NHL forbade it for many years, but recently permitted Vancouver's Roberto Luongo the honor); and won the Stanley Cup his last year while suffering from an illness that eventually killed him; he was named to the Hall of Fame in 1945.  That 2.02 is eye-popping, but the league's teams only scored 2.41 times per game in his last season.  He began his career before forward passing was permitted.  He also played for the so-called "goalless wonders," the Chicago Black Hawks.***

*** The 1906 Chicago White Sox were known as the Hitless Wonders... the '59 AL pennant winners weren't much better.  Maybe it's the city?

At least Gardiner won a title.  More modern (and less successful) examples include:

Doug Favell - 123-153-69, 3.17 GAA.  Started with the expansion Flyers, moved to the dreadful mid-70's Maple Leafs, and ended with the expansion Colorado Rockies.  Played from '67-'79.
Gary Smith - 173-261-74, 3.39 GAA.  A victim of one of the worst squads in NHL history, the late, lamented Oakland/California Seals.  Went 19-34-12 in '69-'70 despite a respectable 3.11 GAA; moved to Vancouver and went 32-24-9 with a 3.09 GAA and six shutouts in '74-'75.  Played from 1965-1980.
Tommy Salo - 210-225-73, 2.55 GAA.  Favored whipping boy of his own GM, "Mad" Mike Milbury (may his name be razed).  Won a gold medal in the 1994 Olympics, then moved to the Islanders, and eventually the Oilers; good enough to shut out 37 NHL opponents from 1994-2004.
Jamie Storr - 85-86-23, 2.54 GAA.  Seventh-overall pick in the 1993 entry draft, and tossed into action too soon behind some mediocre LA Kings squads.  Went 0-8 in his last NHL season to sneak under .500, and now plays in Germany.  Played exactly the same years as Salo.
Ron Tugnutt - 186-239-62, 3.05 GAA.  Another fine example of how the game changes: in 1990-91, Tugger had a 4.05 GAA in 56 games for Quebec; in 1998-99, in the midst of the dead puck era, he led the NHL with a 1.79 GAA in 43 games for Ottawa.  During that 1991 season, he faced 73 shots in a single game against Boston, stopping 70, for one of the greatest ties in league history.  Played from 1987-2004.

On the other end, there's Michel Larocque, who backed up Ken Dryden on the Montreal dynasty teams of the 70's.  He finished 160-89-45 with a 3.33 GAA from 1973-1984; but more accurately, he had two careers: Montreal ('73-'81: 144-48-31, 2.83 GAA,17 SO) and everywhere else ('81-'84: 16-41-14, 5.56 GAA, 0 SO).  Nobody could blame Larocque for playing second fiddle to Hall-of-Famer Dryden, but he failed to beat out Denis Herron in 1980; was supplanted by Richard Sevigny in 1981, and was moved to Toronto.  There he was outdone by backup Vincent Tremblay (out of the NHL by age 24!) and then lost his job to the underrated Mike Palmateer.  His last year was as the third goalie for St Louis, who had Mike Liut and Rick Heinz (who only played 49 games in his career, but now runs a goalie school).  At every stop Larocque was usually a half-goal or more worse per game than his fellow keepers.  The W-L-T record is wildly misleading when compared to his other stats and his teammates.

Two other notables are John Vanbiesbrouck, the all-time winningest US goalie, and Oilers/Sabres/Blues stalwart Grant Fuhr.  Both Hall-of-Famers from the 1981 draft class, with numbers which may pale next to modern keepers, but which were considerable when measured against their peers.  VBK played for mostly forgettable teams and won 30+ games only once, leading the league with 31 in 1985-86; Fuhr was the keeper for the Oilers dynasties in the mid-late 80's, and thus won more often; but his career GAA and sv% were worse and he had fewer shutouts (3.38, .887, and 25 SO against 2.98, .889, and 40 SO for Beezer).  He also had two fewer cool nicknames, though that wasn't his fault - "Grant Fuhr" is simple and memorable, and no reporter wants to spell "Vanbiesbrouck" five times, especially in the days when "cut and paste" involved an X-acto knife and Elmer's glue.

Sharp-saving

This started ten days ago... I read about Hawerchuk's quick item here at Tango's site.  It's devoted mostly to baseball and sabermetrics - excellent for fans and students alike.  The art of recording and analyzing hockey data is jumping forward, and Tango posts a couple of times a week on it.

In any case, I stuck a comment out there... and, like most of my comments in places like this, it made no visible impact.  I don't mind that, actually, since what I don't know about advanced statistics could fill a typical introductory textbook on the subject, no matter what the real standings posts may say.  But I do find it interesting to follow the topics as they develop and see other people who may have thought along similar lines, and see what they post about it.

It is not surprising that winning teams tend to have higher save percentages, but this save percentage split is much larger than normal (this year goalies have averaged .939 in all wins and .873 in all losses). Even though these teams outshot their opponents by a 2-to-1 margin on average, they still lost 40% of the time. This indicates that often a goalie does not have a low save percentage because of a low shot total, but rather that he has a low shot total because of a low save percentage.

Emphasis mine, just to highlight the similarity to what I'd written last week:

Those two trends seem to suggest that stopping a high percentage of shots is what pushes the totals higher, not the reverse. In his four worst save % performances of the year, [Cam] Ward was yanked every time, meaning that he didn’t play well enough to be allowed the chance to face a lot of shots - in much the same way as a pitcher getting smacked around doesn’t get a lot of IPs.

Incidentally, the author of that Puck Prospectus piece, Phil Myrland, blogs at the provocatively-titled Brodeur is a Fraud.  Many of his sidebar links go to other worthy, puck-oriented writers (haven't checked them all).  At this rate I may need a separate hockey section of the blogroll.

If all this puck talk bores you, I do apologize.  I haven't the energy to risk much more right now.

Just in Time for Weinachtstag

Yes, folks, that's a little swastika cookie-cutter.

While some of us can grumble about the secularization of Christmas (whoops, I mean the holidays), there was a time when it was much worse.

Nazi Germany celebrated Christmas without Christ with the help of swastika tree baubles, 'Germanic' cookies and a host of manufactured traditions, a new exhibition has shown.

The way the celebration was gradually taken over and exploited for propaganda purposes by Hitler's Nazis is detailed in a new exhibition.

Rita Breuer has spent years scouring flea markets for old German Christmas ornaments.
She and her daughter Judith developed a fascination with the way Christmas was used by the atheist Nazis, who tried to turn it into a pagan winter solstice celebration.

Actually, the Nazis were returning it to the pagan party which it was before Christians tried to compete with it by celebrating the Lord's birth on December 25.

No one knows the date of Jesus' birth. Celebrating it on 12/25 works for me. The only downer is that the season sneaks up on you here in Florida because Jack Frost hasn't nipped at my nose since I visited New Hampshire in Feb of 2002.

Even my short-term memory isn't this bad.

Endorse the stimulus bill? Moi?

During a CNN appearance on Wednesday, Charlie Crist said of Obama's stimulus package:
"I didn't endorse it. I didn't even have a vote on the darn thing. ... But I understood that it was gonna pass and I wanted to be able to utilize it for the benefit of my fellow Floridians."

Charlie Crist during a February 23 TV interview on the White House lawn:
Q: You've broken with some in your own party to back this stimulus; tell me why.
CHARLIE CRIST: "Because Florida needs it frankly."

What am I going to believe, Charlie Crist or my own lying eyes? Was that a Crist impersonator sucking face with Obama down in Ft Myers last February?

It isn't his moderation that honks me off. It's the fact that he has absolutely no core beliefs whatsoever. There isn't a single issue that Crist hasn't flipped on. And if he didn't have to pretend to be a conservative until the primary, his head would be back up Obama's orifice as soon as the president's approval ratings hit 60%.

You folks in Virginia and NJ have done your part. We in Florida will try to do ours.

One bi product of NY-23. The National Republican Senatorial Committee will not be sending any cash to Crist. They also seem to be backing away from their endorsement of Crist.

Rush, one more time.

I'm going to try and keep this short, because I'm trying to think happy thoughts and not use any of those words that I picked up in Germany that Frau Fineberg never taught us at Absegami High.

Rush website has a full compilation.

Checketts approached Rush as a partner in buying the Rams. Rush warned him that this would happen. Checketts said he could deal with it. Well, Checketts couldn't.

The One's fingerprints are on this. The NFL Players Union head is DeMaurice Smith, who used to work for the current attorney general and was on his lordship's transition team.

But this was just a dry run for next year. The labor agreement between the players union and the NFL expires in 2010, and the owners are thinking about locking out the players as leverage. On the players side will be Revvums Jesse & Al, the Congressional Black Caucus and The One. What has transpired was a test to see if the owners can be mau-maued. Take a look at General Motors Mr. Goodell. That's your future.

This race-baiting crap really gets the Sisko angry. Think happy thoughts.

Rush to Judgement.

It seems that the potential purchase of the Rams by an investment group which includes Rush Limbaugh has driven the libs in both regular media and sports media crazy. The usual suspects in the usual places are focusing on two alleged quotes attributed to Rush.

I'll take them from a recent column by Jason Whitlock, who just lost the last shred of respect I once had for him:

Here are two quotes attributed to Limbaugh in a 2006 book, "101 People Who Are Really Screwing America," by Jack Huberman.

"You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray (Dr. King's assassin). We miss you, James. Godspeed."

"Let's face it, we didn't have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: Slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back. I'm just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark."

I received an e-mail from Limbaugh or one of his employees Tuesday morning somewhat disputing the authenticity of the quotes.

The e-mail reads: "We've sourced the quote," then cites a wikiquotes entry: "These quotations are currently being disputed because the author of the book did not provide air dates for the original source material quoted."

Limbaugh claimed on his radio show Monday that his staff could not find any proof that he ever joked about slavery. I'm sorry. Limbaugh doesn't get the benefit of the doubt on racial matters.

In an earlier version of this column Whitlock doesn't give a source for these quotes. The column was updated to give legal cover to his slanderous hide.

Let me tell you how a rational person can conclude that these words have never come out of Limbaugh's mouth.

Rush has 20 million listeners each week. At any given time during the show, 4 million people are listening. One of those 4 million is a poor intern from an organization called Media Matters. This tortured soul's task is to listen to the show every day in hopes of catching Rush making the career-ending blunder.

A Media Matters intern ratted out Don Imus in 2007. Later that same year the poor intern thought he scored against Rush with the "phony soldiers" story.

The point is this: Here are two quotes allegedly made before 2006 which would have put Rush out of business and they are only coming out now? The Dems didn't use these quotes during the 2006 campaign? In 2008? I find that hard to believe.

But in Jason Whitlock's world some of us don't get the benefit of the doubt.

And these people wonder why there are more 25-54 year olds watching Fox News at 3am than CNN at 8pm

This explains everything

H/t Powerline

A Brief Confession

The Sisko has been angry recently. Maybe I need to quit listening to the voices calling me a teabagger, extremist, racist. Even Jew-hatin' Jimmah Carter passed judgement on me and millions that he has never met.

Here is where the long-term damage will come from. I always vote for some Democrats in county and city elections. It seems that the further away from Washington the more sane they are. My county commissioner was a minister and a God-fearing man. The Public Defender does a good job.

(How do you campaign for this? "I got more criminals off than my predecessor?" She ran on cutting waste in her budget and has done that.)

I voted for the old sheriff (a Dem) till he retired and endorsed the Republican, who also got my vote.

That is until today. These folks better thank Jesus that the local elections aren't tomorrow because right now I wouldn't pee on a Democrat politician if one were on fire.

I need to open my Bible and talk to Jesus and let Him talk to me.

Because the Sisko is very angry.

I'm a proud Rutgers grad today

The guy who made these videos ( here and here) busting ACORN is James O'Keefe, recent RU grad and founder of the conservative student publication The Centurion.

It looks like this Scarlet Knight also freed the census.

The Census Director has sent a letter to the National Headquarters of ACORN notifying the group that the Census Bureau is severing all ties with the community organizing group for all work having to do with the 2010 census.

"Over the last several months, through ongoing communication with our regional offices, it is clear that ACORN's affiliation with the 2010 Census promotion has caused sufficient concern in the general public, has indeed become a distraction from our mission, and may even become a discouragement to public cooperation, negatively impacting 2010 Census efforts," read a letter from Census Director Robert M. Groves to the president of ACORN.

"Unfortunately, we no longer have confidence that our national partnership agreement is being effectively managed through your many local offices. For the reasons stated, we therefore have decided to terminate the partnership," the letter said.

The news follows the firing Friday of two more ACORN employees after new hidden-camera footage showed workers for the group advising a couple posing as a pimp and prostitute how to subvert the law.

Can I get an RU RAH-RAH?

Col. Clarke Gable....

....sent me an email. Here it is:

Hello,
My name is Col. Clarke Gable of the 27th Infantry Brigade, 10th Mountain United States Army in Feluga, Iraq. I'm contacting you on behalf of my team here in Iraq peacekeeping service. We honestly need your assistance to move Allocation {Funds} into your custody for safekeeping pending our final dismissal any time this year...

However, I wish to remind you that I’m a soldier and I have no time to come over the internet for a child play, so please if you are not able to handle this transaction with utmost confidentiality please Do Not Reply.

If somehow you are interested in this proposal, kindly leave a message with your most confidential telephone numbers and I will get back to you with details.


Yours Respectfully,
Col. Clarke Gable
27th Infantry Brigade
10th Mountain
United States Army
Feluga, Iraq.
Email: col.clarkegable AT terra DOT com

Where to start? Col Clarke Gable? Do you think he serves under General Homer Simpson? Does this read like it was written by someone whose native tongue is English? Does "come over the Internet for a child play" sound like it comes from an Army officer? And what GI calls his DROS a "dismissal"? How about discharge or rotation back to the States? And I would hope an Army officer dodging bullets in Fallujah would know how to spell it.

I guess the "widow of the former Nigerian finance minister" scam was losing steam.

[slight edit - I took out the HTML code so the "email" link wasn't clickable. Part of me enjoys the thought of a spambot picking up a scammer's email and sending the same scam back at him; the larger part of me doesn't want anyone clicking through, even by mistake, and possibly getting a nasty virus or trojan horse. -nf]