Thursday, March 10, 2005

Improved Google News

The Google News page has improved. Users now have the ability to easily customize their page to add their own search terms. Cool.

Friday, December 10, 2004

Zogby finally flips out

Pollster John Zogby still insists that he had the election right as his company performs "damage control" in the wake of his ridiculous predictions. Zogby predicted a Kerry win with 311 EC votes. So what went wrong? How is Zogby International explaining the error? Simple: It wasn't an error; it was rightwing fraud.

According to Zogby International, "We have received thousands of letters and phone calls regarding irregularities - many of which center on early exit polling results that were uncharacteristically inaccurate in several battleground states; questionable practices at polling stations that may have resulted in votes not being counted accurately; and in Ohio, as with other swing states, the automated Diebold machines were particularly disturbing because they offered no voting receipts".

In other words: IT'S BUSH'S FAULT!!

John, lighten up on the Kool-aid!

Thursday, December 09, 2004

It's not PEST, but...

...it's something close!

I've been dragging since the election. I haven't posted a bloody thing here and I've done precious little over at our NRA-MC blog. I haven't done much more than crack jokes on FreeRepublic. I feel like I'm overloaded with tryptophan after a huge, Thanksgiving meal.

Maybe I had one too many servings of Democrat angst!

I've been content to sit back and watch the Dems implode. Comment hasn't been necessary; nor have they required any pushing to go off the deep end. Nothing to do but crash with a bowl of popcorn and watch the fur fly.

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Monday, October 18, 2004

In the "nice to know" column...

It's nice to know that someone out there is using the Blogger nom de plume pajamapundit.

Sunday, October 10, 2004

Drugs from Canada, eh

Are you confused about this talk of "allowing re-importation" of drugs from Canada? So am I. Good thing for all of us that someone slightly less lazy and slightly more interested than me decided to look into the Canadian drug thing. (Actually, Jeff at ShapeOfDays.com was only energetic and interested enough to ask others to "spoon feed" the answers to him; more than I can say for myself!)

A long story made short:If you suspected that it's a stOOpid idea, your suspicions prove correct. It is a stOOpid idea. While this risky scheme, to borrow a phrase from Algore, might, might, lower costs of name brand drugs by 1% over the next decade, H.R. 2427 could also increase the cost of non-imported drugs by $1 billion in the first year alone. StOOpid!!

(Did I over use "stOOpid" in this post? Perhaps.)

Thursday, October 07, 2004

Mo' Haileygate

Staci D. Kramer at Wired.com news reports that Prof. Hailey is being pursued by mob of bloggers. Curiously, there's no mention of the Photoshop files the Prof. left on the school server.

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

AP: Iran Converts Uranium Into Gas

AP: Iran Converts Uranium Into [Uranium Hexafluoride] Gas

Not good.

bortaS bIr jablu'DI' reH QaQqu' nay'

Michelle Malkin is annoyed at the AP's description of Dick Cheney's performance at the debate as having a "cold efficiency". One must remember, however, that "Revenge is a dish that is best served cold".

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

The most memorable post-debate line

The award goes to Dennis Miller who said that Edwards' handlers "wisely chose to number his body parts so they could put him back together after Cheney finished slicing and dicing him".

Friday, October 01, 2004

The Bushies and the Swifties

Jim Lindgren at The Volokh Conspiracy wonders about connections between the Bush campaign and the Swift Boat veterans For Truth ads. He cites this exchange between George Bush and Bill O'Reilly...
O'REILLY: You didn't know anything about the Swift Boat ads before they went on the air, did you?

BUSH: No. I didn't.

O'REILLY: Did Karl Rove know anything about it?

BUSH: I don't think so. In other words, you're asking if anybody coordinated this in our campaign?

O'REILLY: No, whether they'd give you a heads up they were going to do it.

BUSH: Not to my knowledge.

...and then describes Pres. Bush as looking "awfully sick to his stomach".

I don't see anything sinister here. So he didn't say "Absolutely not!!"; he knows better than to vouch for the actions of people he can't watch 24/7. When you don't know the answer to a question, the correct response is "I don't know". The stupid response is to speak of things you cannot know about. Bush knows better.

Ya gotta love this. (Unless you work at CBS.)

The remodeled romper room

No, your monitor isn't broken; I made some changes. I was getting bored with the old template.

More on "Haileygate"...

Wizbang reports that the Hailey report may have been done at the request of Utah State University. There are lots of interesting links on the Wizbang page. The report site is down and University authorities are investigating the situation.

Thursday, September 30, 2004

The Rathergate saga won't go away

This is just too funny!

In the ongoing Rathergate melodrama, another defender has stepped forward to safeguard Dan's virtue. This knight in shining armor claims to have proof that the See-BS memos are, in fact, the product of a typewriter. However, Wizbang has got the goods on him!

David Hailey of Utah State had rallied the hopes of Dan's peeps at the Boston Globe with his analysis of the infamous memos. But he made a mistake or two. The first was failing to look at his published handywork at high magnification. It becomes obvious that characters were added to his "typewriter" samples with Photoshop. Why would one say that Photoshop was used? That leads us to his second mistake: Leaving his Photoshop files in a public folder on the university server. Word is that the Boston Globe has stopped returning Hailey's phone calls.

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

No, I didn't feel it

...But I imagine that the folks at the Parkfield earthquake observatory are quite excited about today's quake. Preliminary magnitude is 5.9.

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Well... Let's try to look on the bright side of this whole Rathergate disaster.

It's kinda neat to know that MS Word can so faithfully reproduce documents across platforms and defaults printers. I remember back when changing the default printer on a document would wreak havoc on the formatting. This made working on a document from multiple networked workstations difficult. Changing workstations might mean changing printers. The word processing program would then change the fonts to match the new default printer and scatter your formatting to the winds. Those days are long gone. Now, you can create a document on Word and know that when you send the file to someone else, they will see the formatting just as you intended.

This is pretty cool... Unless you're trying to forge a document that was supposedly written on a typewriter 30 years ago!

What's the font size, Kenneth?!?

Monday, June 07, 2004

I have been thinking for the last three days about what to write on the passing of Ronald Reagan. He was the first President I had the priviledge of voting for in 1984. (I missed being able to vote for him in 1980 by a little over 1 year.) He set into motion a chain of events in this nation that has yet to play out. The "Reagan Revolution" continues to this day.

In thinking about what Reagan did during his Presidency, I began to think about how history would have changed without him. And when I began thinking about what the world would have been like, I realized that I had already seen this movie: Red Dawn. Red Dawn is an alternative history where the plot's "what if" is "what if Ronald Reagan had never been President".

Without Reagan, Jimmy Carter is re-elected in 1980. Abroad, Carter continues his anemic response to Soviet aggression. At home, the Malaise continues; there is no economic boom in the 80s and 90s. Where Reagan aided the Afghan people in their struggle against Soviet tyranny, Carter does nothing more than his boycott of the Olympic games. Nicaragua stays under Soviet control. Grenada becomes even more firmly entrenched as a Soviet satellite. Communist rebels in El Salvador succeed. Honduras falls. Costa Rica falls. Panama falls. Communist revolutions spread through South America like a cancer. Mexico begins to bend under the pressure of refugees fleeing north.

Without Reagan, there is no SDI. Without SDI, the Soviet Union is never pushed to the breaking point. Eastern Europe stays in Soviet hands. There is no Glastnost. Without Reagan's aid to the Afghans, the Soviets hang on and defeat the Mujahadeen. They are left in a position to threaten Pakistan. If they succeed, they can threaten the West's oil supplies in a way that Saddam could only dream of.

Without Reagan, there is no tax cut. The top tax rate stays ridiculously high and the boom of the 80s and 90s never happens. Economies all over the world depended on the Reagan boom to get started. From Asia to Europe, economies would have stagnated. There would be no Internet and thus no "eCommerce". Without Reaganomics, the economies of the West would have been weakend and thus more vulnerable to Soviet aggression.

In short, all of the set-up from the opening minute of Red Dawn would have had a chance to come true. America's allies would have dwindled, one by one, until we would have been left standing alone. And that weakness would have invited aggression from the USSR. Reagan's policies of strength detered aggression and lead to peace.

In 1980, freedom and democracy were on the decline. Today, those ideas are spreading. America is leading that advance rather than a retreat into darkness. The world is getting better; not worse.

Thank God for Ronald Reagan.