schachterrific!

I LOVE to go drinking with Bob!

…here it comes.

The Associated Press is appearing to lead the way among the MainStreamMedia in discovering that our new President is just shy of reality on the proposal side of things. In this article, writers Calvin Woodward and Jim Kuhnhenn point out eight areas in the President’s speech last night that appear to be no more than wishful thinking. Here’s a sample:

OBAMA: “Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.”

THE FACTS: This may be so, but it isn’t only Republicans who pushed for deregulation of the financial industries. The Clinton administration championed an easing of banking regulations, including legislation that ended the barrier between regular banks and Wall Street banks. That led to a deregulation that kept regular banks under tight federal regulation but extended lax regulation of Wall Street banks. Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, later an economic adviser to candidate Obama, was in the forefront in pushing for this deregulation.

Take it or leave it.

The words of the late Dr. Adrian Rogers say it all:

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

Violinist Endre Balogh speaks about how the US is rapidly rolling down the road of socialism and what this will do to the American will and the American people.

Read it all here. Then take it or leave it.

You find it on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on MySpace. Its there with every online purchase you make, with almost every social network you join. It’s slapped across every survey you take, and it sits in the shadows of every doctor’s appointment you make.

Data Collection. Well, privacy is dead.

Data collection has come home to roost, folks.

In today’s Sarasota Herald Tribune, Noam Cohen puts the nails in privacy’s coffin with a look at how information about A-Rod’s steroid abuse found its way from a “blind” survey to the front page:

The way Mr. Rodriguez’s positive steroid test result became public followed a path increasingly common in the computer age: third-party data collection. We are typically told that personal information is anonymously tracked for one reason — usually something abstract like making search results more accurate, recommending book titles or speeding traffic through the toll booths on the thruways. But it is then quickly converted into something traceable to an individual, and potentially life-changing.

In Mr. Rodriguez’s case, he participated in a 2003 survey of steroid use among Major League Baseball players. No names were to be revealed. Instead, the results were supposed to be used in aggregation — to determine if more than 5 percent of players were cheating — and the samples were then to be destroyed.

It is odd that most of the news coverage described the tests as “anonymous.” If the tests were truly anonymous, of course, Mr. Rodriguez would still be thought of as a clean player — as he long had insisted he was. But when federal prosecutors came calling, as part of a steroid distribution case, it turned out that the “anonymous” samples suddenly had clear labels on them.

Read this story and weep, not for Mr. Rodriguez, but for your own privacy… gone like milkweed in the wind.

Makes me want to return my EZ-Pass….

Weeks after the story of an Israeli attack on UNRWA schools in Gaza made its way around the world, the truth begins to come out that it didn’t quite happen that way.

John Ging, the director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, spoke to the Toronto Globe and Mail last week and agreed that no shell had actually struck the school building. Ging said he had never claimed that the school itself was hit, and he blamed Israel for confusion over where the strike took place.

Shortly after the alleged attack, Ging harshly criticized Israel for firing near the school, saying he had given the exact coordinates of the compound to the IDF and suggesting they had failed to avoid hitting the building.

While admitting that Israeli fire had not hit the school compound, Ging insisted it made little difference.

As the story was spread by UNRWA administrators, staff were told not to speak to the media. Wouldn’t want the facts to come to light, eh?

Back in 1981, TV news covered this oddball idea: The concept of getting news from your computer instead of your newspaper. What could they have been thinking?!?!?