Credit Where Credit Is Due
For those who don’t know, I rarely agree with our erstwhile savior on much of anything. I have been known to call him silly names like “Dear One,” ” Messiah” and other such veiled epithets. However, one cannot be critical of somebody’s policies, without sometimes admitting that, on occasion, the person in question actually did something well. To do otherwise would be nothing more than demonstrating what a snickering baboon one is (Rush).
So it came to pass that Barack Obama gave a pretty decent speech on the occasion of his acceptance of a Nobel Peace Prize awarded for what one presumes is possible future action. Much printer ink has been spilt on the vagaries of how such an unaccomplished man (at least at the point he was nominated in late January) won such a prestigious honor and I am not going to rehash it here. Rather, in focusing on Obama’s remarks we see a man that actually admits the necessity for war. Obama, waxing on the imperfections of man, states that in some instances, it behooves the good people of the Earth to destroy those forces of evil that seek to enslave and terrorize the innocent. Needless to say, it was a welcome change of pace from his continual bashing of the US insofar as he also recognized the need for the US to step in and fight evil from time to time (presumably when it is not tyrannizing Native Americans and African Americans).
Obama further counseled that the US must use its great power wisely, and that though we do have the power to obliterate, we should guard against such wanton use of power ensconced in blatant moral chauvinism. We are not always right, and I suppose we shouldn’t always act as if our proverbial shit doesn’t stink.
As leaders of the free world, it is incumbent upon us to actually walk the walk as well as talk the talk. Why on Earth the Bush administration never fully disavowed torture is beyond me. It is common sense that leaders set an example. Why should others follow us when we can’t even forgo a practice that is abhorrent, vile and mostly ineffective? Even from a RealPolitik standpoint it is much wiser to assert a no-torture policy and lie about it than spend years denying water-boarding is torture (it is).
So what does this all mean? Has Obama actually turned the corner and come down from the heights of cloud cuckoo land? Or should we take the more cynical approach and snidely remark that he was simply trying to throw starch into his poorly received, and defeatist speech given at West Point? Who really knows at present.
So, like Josey Wales, our beloved Dear One gave the world our words of life and our words of death. But will those words, like his vacuous promises of Hope and Change, ring hollow by his lack of action?
Coverage from the Code Red Rally
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it to the ‘Code Red Rally’ in Washington, DC today, however I have been following it closely. To help anyone looking for coverage of the event, I’ve put together a small archive of some of the coverage received. If you come across something that I’m missing, simply leave a link in the comments section and I’ll add it as soon as possible.
Links:
Politico: Tea Partiers rally: ‘Kill the bill’
Dakota Voice: Code Red Rally Today Against Gov’t Health Care
The Washington Independent: Nervous About Health Care, Tea Parties Look to 2010
Christian News Wire: Concerned Women for America Joins ‘Code Red’ Rally on Capitol Hill
Courthouse News Service: Right Wingers Dress in Red to Protest Bill
CNN Political Ticker: Dean: Time to ‘kill the Senate bill’
CBS News: Conservatives Rally to “Kill the Bill”
CNN Political Ticker: Conservative ‘Code Red rally’ hits the Hill
The Hill: Tea Party supporters, conservative groups rally outside Capitol
Video Coverage:
Video: UPS vs. FEDEX: Ultimate Whiteboard Remix
Here is a great video from the creative geniuses at Reason TV.
You may have heard the UPS is in quite the political fight with FEDEX. Though both are package-delivery companies, they’re governed by totally different federal labor rules. As a result, UPS’s workforce is much more heavily unionized than FEDEX’s—and more than twice as expensive.
So now UPS is trying to get FEDEX reclassified under federal law as a way of screwing a competitor. That’s horrendous, but it also makes a sick kind of business sense. And it also reveals the real villain: A government that is big enough to absolutely, positively guarantee it can screw any business. Overnight.
“UPS Vs. FEDEX” was produced by Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie (who also hosts). Approximately two minutes long.
This video is based on “Using Unions as Weapons,” by Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy, which appeared in the October 2009 print edition of Reason. Read that article at http://reason.com/archives/2009/09/28…
For downloadable version of this and all other Reason.tv videos go to http://reason.tv
SARAH INVICTUS: The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Sarah Palin.
I was distraught and anxious in ways I couldn’t articulate. In some ways it was like a dream that wouldn’t end, not a nightmare per se, but not exactly a romp in the sheets with Megan Fox either. It was the discomfort of person well aware of the old adage that one should be careful of what they wish for. In their wisdom the ancients gave warning that many still fail to heed….Yes, I was watching the rise, fall, casting off, redemption of, implosion of and rebirth of the phenomenon that has become Sarah Palin. A year long agony that may never end.Like pandora’s box I had helped unleash a pox (of sorts) upon the land. For before John McCain made his momentous decision I had been actively lobbying for Palin’s consideration as VP candidate. I wrote, I lobbied my friends and generally pined for an option that few took seriously and I wasn’t the only one. My logic was simple, she was new, she was fresh, she was a reformer and she was a MILF. What more could a public starved for heroes want (or junor officers looking for someone in their chain-of-command to fantasize about)? Of course, I knew that the selection of such a newcomer would come with a price of its own insofar as it would be necessary to continue the defining of Palin well after the fanfare of her entrance. History proved me correct as what followed the perfect introduction was the most imperfect handling of a candidate since Josef Stalin ran on the Green Soil ticket in 1896.
The weeks following the GOP convention were nothing short of a savaging so brutal that few could watch without feeling lurid, shameful and unclean. Distortions great and small abounded, and lies were treated as the gospel. The media whispered openly of salacious and pornographic fantasies so revolting that to replicate them here would send children, nuns, kittens, Mormons and people from Nebraska fleeing to the hills (well, not the Nebraskans, they have no hills). The press howled and leftists jeered and conservatives either rallied around the outraged woman or cast her off for the media wolves to feed on. In the end there was little more than a bloody stain of a candidate, a smear, little more than a caricature and Tina Fey’s well honed delivery. Thus ended Sarah…or did it? It wasn’t over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor and it certainly wasn’t over for Sarah either.
Flash forward a year. Far from being irrelevant Palin is now a force in her own right. A whirling dervish of political power and folksiness leaving destruction, puzzled pundits and insanely incontinent liberals in her wake. Palin rewrote the discourse on the proposed Obamacare overhaul with the infamous and pertinent “Death Panel” speech. She up-ended the special election in New York’s 23rd district (though not to the GOPs advantage). Her every action sees legions of would-be GOP nominees scurrying like rats to mimic her every move. In many ways she is the standard bearer and lightning rod that those seeking the Republican nomination must win over, or supplant, if they are to be successful.
With the publication of her autobiography,“Going Rogue,” Palin’s approval numbers now out-pace that of the Messiah Obama. Whereas the clueless and weak Dear One vacillates on Afghanistan, stumbles to and fro on Health Care and meekly watches as the world laughs at his personal diplomacy, appearances on Oprah and other high-profile shows have largely rehabilitated Palin’s image and have convinced many that she is not the monstrous jezzebel that the media had painted her as.
Once a joke, the thought of Palin running successfully in 2012 is no longer a laughing matter. At the very least, she will play the role of the ersatz king-maker for the GOP in 2012 and, perhaps, far beyond. Where the jackals once sneered and mocked her they now cower and urinate on themselves unsure of what they have done.
Indeed, the very process in which she had been destroyed, the unending and manic misogynistic attacks on her and her children, have strengthened her like the tempering of the blade of a samurai sword. Now rather than believing the attacks on her intelligence and character, more people than not see the media and the hateful Left as bullies, wilding a paragon of American womanhood whilst draped in the illusion feminist clothing. Finally good people everywhere have become sick to the stomach of the truly barbaric and savage attacks that have been par for the course regarding Palin. Robin of Berkeley, an avowed feminist and renounced liberal, writes:
“And so the Left must try to destroy her. And they are doing this in the most malicious of ways: by symbolically raping her…Liberals do this by calling her a c__t, ogling her legs, demeaning her with names like “slutty flight attendant” and “Trailer Park Barbie,” and exposing her flesh on the cover of Newsweek. And from Atlantic Magazine’s Andrew Sullivan “Sarah Palin’s vagina is the font of all evil in the galaxy.”
Read more here: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/the_wilding_of_sarah_palin.html
They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned…that is true, though they can now say that hell hath no fury than feminists turning on their own for the crime of ultimately rendering hollow their twisted view of what womanhood can and should be. Nothing so ugly, so rapacious and so vile ever made it more clear that the cretins on the far Left were far from being on the side of women.
Things change. What worked before will not again. Like Count Dooku after Master Yoda casually swatted aside his burst of force lightning in Star Wars Episode II, the bullies in the media are now at a loss as to how to proceed. The radical leftists and all efite, elitist liberal snobs everywhere are at loggerheads of how to treat this whirlwind. Where once they gloated over brie and anti-American slogans on the misery they had inflicted on Simple Sarah, Caribou Barbie of the North, they now quake at the juggernaut that they helped create. After all, how does one destroy a politician that has absorbed every projectile within the Left’s smarmy arsenal?
Only time will tell. She defies explanation. No other politician has ever been so defiled and yet managed to survive and in many ways propser. Some theorize that like all sensations, she will disappear, forgotten like so many Rueben Studdards. But then again, maybe not. After all, hasn’t her fifteen minutes run their course? Will there come a day when the Left rues the day they attacked and sexualized Palin’s minor children? Will there come a time when they regret the horrifically graphic and sexually disturbing slurs and barbs they once defamed her with? Will there be a reckoning when everyone that ever dimissed Sarah Palin as a slutty, trailer trash rube will realize they sowed the seeds of their own destruction? I gleefully await, as should all God fearing men and women, the day that providence punishes those savages in a manner best befitting their worst outrages by electing her President.
Just how popular is TaxDayTeaParty.com?
There have been many on the left who have been diligently trying to discredit the rapidly growing Tea Party Movement as nothing more than a few angry activists.
Well, I guess in terms of web traffic, these few angry activists are more energized than the ever-so-famous Barack Obama army.
What this link shows is the increase in traffic rank, as calculated by Alexa.com.
Of course, any computer geek will quickly rush in and discredit Alexa’s ranking system. However, if you look at some of the other metrics presented here, TaxDayTeaParty.com comes up strong in every category, bringing to question the real power of the post-election Obama machine.
For those of you who don’t follow this stuff regularly and may be confused, let me just walk you through the more important metrics.
While traffic rank is an interesting number to follow, most techies are more concerned with things like pageviews, as shown on the “pageview” tab here.
Now Alexa doesn’t provide you with the exact number pageviews, but instead displays the data as a percentage of overall online activity.
Even so, TaxDayTeaParty.com comes out strong again.
Using another metric, bounce rate, you can easily see how engaging a particular website is. Basically, bounce rate represents nothing more than a percentage of people who come to a certain page on a site and then leave without clicking to other internal links. This metric is important because if a site has content that isn’t relevant or interesting, they’ll leave.
Looking at the two sties, TaxDayTeaParty.com wins another round. Since this metric is based on a percentage of those who exit the site, it’s better to have a lower a number, which TaxDayTeaParty.com does, with a bounce rate of around 35% versus Obama’s 45%.
Yet they’re still trying to discredit this movement?
While I could easily stop there, I might as well finish this out by examining the “Time on Site” numbers.
This metric is self explanatory, it represents the average amount of time visitors spend browsing a particular website. If you’re a web developer, this is an important metric because the time spent on site will often reflect the quality of your sites content, structure, and interactivity.
So looking at the two sites, once again TaxDayTeaParty.com is the victor, with an average time on site of just under 3 minutes, versus Obama’s, which is right around 1 minute and 30 seconds.
While it’s easy to understand why TaxDayTeaParty.com is doing better than the Obama site at present, it’s important to note that in the weeks following the election, everyone was worried about what Obama was going to do with his “massive grassroots army.”
While he may still have a massive email list and a flashy website, in terms of measured attention, it looks like it’s become a model that can be (and is being) replicated by other organizations and movements successfully.
Just for kicks, here is how TaxDayTeaParty.com does against other sites:
TaxDayTeaParty.com vs. MoveOn.org
Winner: TaxDayTeaParty.com
TaxDayTeaParty.com vs. Democrats.org
Winner: TaxDayTeaParty.com
TaxDayTeaParty.com vs. DailyKos.com
Winner: DailyKos.com (for now)