I wonder what the media and the left would be saying if George W. Bush had needed a TelePrompTer installed in order to survive a press conference? Would the left and the media have declared that this was additional proof of how inept he is on his own and is really being controlled by smarter men behind the “curtains”?

I wonder what the media and the left would be saying if George W. Bush had destroyed your retirement plan’s holdings of GM stock by 90% and then given the unions a majority stake in GM?

I wonder what the media and the left would be saying if George W. Bush had given a world leader, Gordon Brown, a set of cheap DVDs (with the incorrect formatting for DVD players in the UK) after Gordon Brown had given him a historically significant and thoughtful gift?

I wonder what the media and the left would be saying if George W. Bush had decided to spend hundreds of thousands of tax payer dollars to take Laura Bush on a date to see a play in New York City?

I wonder what the media and the left would be saying if George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia?

I wonder what the media and the left would be saying if George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of people with special needs who participate in the Special Olympics?

I wonder what the media and the left would be saying if George W. Bush talked about the “Austrian language” (which doesn’t exist) during his trip to Austria?  I’m sure the left would have dismissed it as a simple minor slip of the tongue.  Or if George W. Bush had talked about “Cinco de Cuatro” while meeting with the ambassador from Mexico during “Cinco de Mayo“. I’m sure they would have dismissed it as a simple mistake.  Or maybe if George W. Bush had mis-spelled the world “advice”, the media and the left would have NEVER hammered him for years like Dan Quale got hammered for the potatoe incident.

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I wonder what the media and the left would be saying if George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod loaded with videos of his own speeches? There is no way the media and the left would consider that narcissistic and tacky.

I wonder what the media and the left would be saying if George W. Bush had decided to surround himself on his cabinet with people who struggled to keep their income taxes current.

I wonder what the media and the left would be saying if George W. Bush decided NOT to send relief aid to victims of flooding throughout the Midwest that killed and and made homeless MORE people than in New Orleans? I’m sure the media would never have claimed that there was claims of racism and incompetence.

I wonder what the media and the left would be saying if George W. Bush had put forth a plan to double the national debt, (which took longer than two centuries to achieve), in one year?  And then announced that he would double the debt again within 10 years.  I’m sure the press wouldn’t even care.

I wonder what the media and the left would be saying if George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so?

So what is it that actually makes Obama so brilliant and impressive? Are you having trouble thinking of REAL reasons… Obama did all the above in only 9 months, you’ve got 3 years and 3 months to think up an answer.

I wonder what the media and the left would be saying if George W. Bush…

I know I’m a bit late to the party with this one, but I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard.  Here are some of my favorite “literal videos”.

1. Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler

Click here to view the embedded video.

2. Separate Ways by Journey

Click here to view the embedded video.

3. Under the Bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers (This one is probably as literal as you can get. Some say that “DustoMcNeato”, who put this video together, is credited as the father of the literal video genre.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

4. Take on Me by Aha (A great music video to start with, the remix brings it to new heights.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

5. Head over Heels by Tears for Fears (Gotta love the monkey in the music videos.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

6. Just a Friend by Biz Markie

Click here to view the embedded video.

7. With Arms Wide Open by Creed (The Lion King rises again.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

8. I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For by U2

Click here to view the embedded video.

9. White Wedding by Billy Idol

Click here to view the embedded video.

10. Anything for Love by Meat Loaf

Click here to view the embedded video.

What are your favorite “literal videos”?

The dev team working on the next version upgrade of Wordpress is getting closer to releasing the first beta version for 2.9.  They have been busy putting a bunch of new features into the release.  You can find the full list at the Wordpress codex.

I thought I would take some time and focus on a few of the new features:

Trashy Features

New ability to place a post into the trash area with the ability of restoring it or deleting posts permanently at a later time.

Once you click on “Move to Trash” in the publish area of a post, it will create a new “Trash” tab at the top of the “Edit Posts” page.  From that tab, a user will be able to Restore or Delete Permanently via the Bulk Actions.

Play with your images

Simple modifications to images uploaded into the Media Library are a great addition to the workflow inside Wordpress.

Every post in WP 2.9 will now have its own separate thumbnail image attribute.  There is now an option to “Set thumbnail” in the new Post Thumbnail section at the left of the post edit screen.

While this might be welcomed by some users, there’s not much use unless theme developers rework their themes with the following PHP code (’the_post_image()‘) in their themes.

In the image below, you can see one of the most anticipated features in WP 2.9.  The ability to crop, rotate, flip, resize images from within the WP admin area.

What features are you looking forward to in Wordpress 2.9?

Its amazing how quick the left gets whipped into a frenzy anytime the name Rush Limbaugh comes up in conversation.  It almost rises to the extremes of the BDS or “Bush-Derangement-Syndrome” and seems to shut down the brain and make the liberal, who heard the word “Rush or Bush”, incapable of any rational thought.

Over the weekend the news broke that Rush Limbaugh was one of many financial partners that was looking at purchasing the struggling St. Louis Rams.  But what quickly followed was a massive rush to judgement and seemed to be based on zero reality.  Let me also back up and say that I believe that the criteria for owning a professional sports team should rest on whether or not an owner or owner group has the financial means to improve the teams financial situation.  With that being said, lets take a look at the loud voice now booming across the airwaves tonight.

NFL Players director DeMaurice Smith has decided that financial means have no bearing in being able to own a professional sports team, but rather politics need to be brought into the arena.  (Please remember this for the future… Rush didn’t bring any politics to the table, it was the loud mouth Mr. Smith who brought it, along with a few other persons who have far outlived their 15 minutes of fame.)

DeMaurice Smith wanted people to know this weekend that Limbaugh should be barred from owning a team (both now and forever) because he doesn’t bring people together…. Huh????   Let’s take a closer look at his quote:

I understand that this ownership consideration is in the early stages. But sport in America is at its best when it unifies, gives all of us reasons to cheer, and when it transcends. Our sport does exactly that when it overcomes division and rejects discrimination and hatred.

Is it just me, or is he trying to tell us that the NFL is paradise or the Utopia we’ve all been searching for? When someone mentions the NFL, does that make you think of harmony, peace, and brotherly love?

Wait, maybe DeMaurice Smith is talking about people within the organization who promote such brotherly love and nirvana experiences like…

• Donte Stallworth (Cleveland Browns) who hit and killed something while driving drunk in his car.  He somehow cut a deal and served 24 days of his 30 days sentence.  It’s okay, Donte hit and killed someone with his car (while drunk) in a brotherly love way.
• Michael Vick is now more famous for cruelty to animals than for things he’s done on the playing field.
• Plaxico Burress was so filled with harmony and utopian bliss that he decided to take an unlicensed loaded weapon into a nightclub/bar and then thought it would inspire and bring people together when he pulled the gun out before he shot himself in the leg.  And it gets better, because the same DeMaurice Smith who is speaking out against Rush Limbaugh fought FOR Burress to keep his millions in bonuses even though Plaxico broke the law.

I could go on and on about this amazing utopia that DeMaurice Smith believes is the NFL but when it comes down to the root issue the NFL is a meritocracy and NOT an affirmative action soapbox.  The NFL is about competition and NOT about politics.

Over the weekend at a Beijing Media summit, both CEOs of the AP and News Corp (Tom Curley & Rupert Murdoch) declared that it was “time to demand payment for online use of their content”.  This isn’t the first time these two news leaders have said this.  One of the participants in the summit mentioned that if News Corp actually wanted to block sites like Google News from “stealing” their news it would be a very simple process with a basic robots.txt exclusion.

So I started to think, just how much value does News Corp and the AP place on their content.  I wondered to what lengths do they currently go to block Google News and other search engines from reproducing their content.  What I found was a bit revealing…

Not only are they not excluding these search engines and indexing sites from using their content in the robots.txt. They are specifically telling Google what stories to index.

This is taken from foxnews.com’s robot.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /printer_friendly_story
Disallow: /projects/livestream
#
User-agent: gsa-crawler
Allow: /printer_friendly_story
Allow: /google_search_index.xml
Allow: /google_news_index.xml
Allow: /*.xml.gz
#

So even though the public relations face of the company says they don’t want people to “steal” their content and want to demand payment, it seems that they are not even performing the most basic attempts at protecting their content.  What do you think?  Does the AP and News Corp really want to start charging for online use or are they just angry that other groups like Google News do a better job of aggregating content?

On Friday morning, I wrote a post answering the question of who did Obama beat for the Nobel Peace prize? That post generated quite a bit of traffic and buzz.  But as the weekend wore on, several left-wing hacks decided that I had made it all up because Wikipedia told them that the Nobel committee keeps the records of all nominees sealed for 50 years.  So I need to respond.

Any person with half a brain and the ability to read news reports and press releases will be able to find the majority of nominees for the Nobel Peace prize.  HOW CAN THAT BE? Simple.  Many of the people who nominate a person or organization for the Nobel prize tell not only the nominated person that they have been nominated, but they also tell many news outlets.  For example:

Nicolas Sarkozy, Barack Obama’s counterpart in France, was nominated by people in the French government.

The Macedonian humanitarian and artist Zivko Popovski-Cvetin was nominated by the Macedonian government.

The Australian children’s charity SOS-Kinderdorf International was put forward by the Austrian government.

American Greg Mortenson was nominated by six members of the US Congress for his Asian school building charity.

Vietnamese religious leader Thich Quang Do was put forward when a campaign recruited lawmakers to nominate him.

Even American musician Pete Seeger was nominated after he ran a campaign for nomination.

So for those of you who like to drink the Kool-Aid, maybe you should pick up a newspaper or learn to use Google.  Because accusing people of “making up names of people” just because you don’t think anyone is worthy of even being in the same “prize pool” as Obama is just plain ridiculous.  Because while it is true the 5 person voting committee for the Nobel Peace prize doesn’t reveal the nominees, many other people reveal their nominees voluntarily.

It’s been twenty  years ago now
And the days
Well
They have flown by in a
Rush of headlines and
Violence.
In my mind:
The day John Lennon faced Death
And lost.

That day some crazy named
Chapman
Played shooting star
And our last hope for
Peace
Fell to the ground, bleeding onto the
Cold Gotham cement.
It started with an assassin’s bullet and
Ended with a run on Beatles’
Souvenirs:
Towels dipped in drying blood;
Scraps of cloth from a poet’s body;
Torn

I took the subway to
Dakota
To see for myself:
A fallen star.
There were no Marys
Speaking hushed words of wisdom,
No way I could let it be.
But the blood stains made my memories come to life,
A private jerky Zapruder film in black and white.

I remembered their invasion.
Though I wasn’t in school yet.
I asked my father if I could let my hair grow long
Like theirs
As I ate a shiny new apple.
He laughed, said
Well
Those boys with their electronic guitars and
Mop top locks
Will get what they deserve
Which is nothing.

I guess my father was half right.
But he didn’t change the channel
That night.
Now I know he was
Aching for a hand to hold
Instead of the booze that had become his wife.

I also remember Eleanor Rigby…
And Abbey Road, and Sgt. Pepper’s crazy drug maze.
Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy, even Rev. King faced death
And they lost.
But when Paul died
(Paul is dead)
He rose again three days later.
And as the world seemed ready to explode with
Ghetto riots and babyfaced babykillers
The Beatles told us
We could
Let it Be
And then, of course,
Ringo would ring us again
And we’d all go for another psychedelic ride
On the Yellow Submarine

And then I remembered
The final concert on the arching rooftop
Red-faced rumors of arrogant rage
Yoko getting back to where she belonged
And the tragic bulletin:
We have fulfilled our potential.
Well
Vietnam lef the stage and
Nixon did too
And before long
The Beatles were a memory–
As distant, yet as close
As November in Dallas–
Four gifted egos
And a world with a hole in its heart.

Finally it’s December 1980 again and
The long, winding road ends at a barred Gotham gate.
I weep
In front of the Dakota
Where he lived his last days
And somehow all I can taste are rotten apples.
Well
I’m trying to come together,
Trying to image a world
Without Lennon.
(John is dead)
But the clouds up in the sky
Say it’s time to go.

The film jerks to a stop
Though the days still fly by
Seems like only yesterday
I buried my best friend
And now I know he won’t rise again
In only three days.
He faced death
And now we’ve all lost.
There’s no more Marys
And no more words of wisdom.
But today, twenty years later,
I can see the Beatles’ message
Is still for me
Let it Be.
Let it Be.
Let it Be.

–We miss you John–

(I wrote this a number of years ago.  I haven’t updated dates, I’ve just left them as i wrote them.)

Sima Samar, women’s rights activist in Afghanistan: “With dogged persistence and at great personal risk, she kept her schools and clinics open in Afghanistan even during the most repressive days of the Taliban regime, whose laws prohibited the education of girls past the age of eight. When the Taliban fell, Samar returned to Kabul and accepted the post of Minister for Women’s Affairs.”

Ingrid Betancourt: French-Colombian ex-hostage held for six years.

Dr. Denis Mukwege: Doctor, founder and head of Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo. He has dedicated his life to helping Congolese women and girls who are victims of gang rape and brutal sexual violence.

Handicap International and Cluster Munition Coalition: “These organizations are recognized for their consistently serious efforts to clean up cluster bombs, also known as land mines. Innocent civilians are regularly killed worldwide because the unseen bombs explode when stepped upon.”

Hu Jia, a human rights activist and an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, who was sentenced last year to a three-and-a-half-year prison term for ‘inciting subversion of state power.’

Wei Jingsheng, who spent 17 years in Chinese prisons for urging reforms of China’s communist system. He now lives in the United States.

For any rational thinking person, it’s easy to see how Obama won this award.  Preview on tomorrow’s awards.  Obama wins the NL & AL Cy Young Awards as well as the MVP of the NFL.  I guess this means that my Aunt Bertha’s 1st Place Prize for her Peach Cobbler now has more credibility and prestige than the Nobel prize.

Does anyone remember what was going on in the early part of October 1991?  This event took place in a small little school here in Washington, DC and then was broadcast to many other schools.  That’s right, President George H.W. Bush spoke to students at Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, DC.  The only thing he spoke to them about was to stay away from drugs.  That speech was broadcast to schools nationwide after letters were sent to schools around the country encouraging them to allow students to watch the President’s speech.

Do you remember what was getting all the press coverage? The Democrats were angry and not pleased at all with the speech.  Even House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt said, “The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students.  And the president should be doing more about education than saying, ‘Lights, camera, action.‘”

And taken from the Washington Post on Friday, October 4, 1991:

House Democrats criticized President Bush yesterday for using Education Department funds to produce and broadcast a speech that he made Tuesday at a Northwest Washington junior high school.

The Democratic critics accused Bush of turning government money for education to his own political use, namely, an ongoing effort to inoculate himself against their charges of inattention to domestic issues. The speech at Alice Deal Junior High School, broadcast live on radio and television, urged students to study hard, avoid drugs and turn in troublemakers.

“The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students,” House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said. “And the president should be doing more about education than saying, ‘Lights, camera, action.’ ”

Two House committees demanded that the department explain the use of its funds for the speech, an explanation that Deputy Secretary David T. Kearns provided late in the day in a letter to Rep. William D. Ford (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander was out of town. [...]

Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), chairwoman of the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families, said it was outrageous for the White House to “start using precious dollars for campaigns” when “we are struggling for every silly dime we can get” for education programs.

Rep. Martin Frost (D-Tex.) said that if Bush feels obliged to use government funds to hire outside consultants “to make him look good,” then he should fire some of the public relations experts on the White House payroll. “Then the president might be more sympathetic to unemployment benefits,” Frost said, referring to Bush’s threat to veto legislation to extend benefits.

And today it seems that Democrats now want to vilify people who are objecting to the president’s speech to children next week?

I think we can all admit that what is actually going on here is politicians are always backing their own party and will flip-flop to accommodate their party.  But the one thing I wasn’t able to find and maybe some of you can help me.  I couldn’t find anything about PUBLIC backlash against George H.W. Bush’s speech.  I couldn’t find anything about parents threatening to keep their kids home from school when they found out President George H.W. Bush was going to speak to their children.  Why is it that there is such a public outcry against the upcoming President Obama speech to the children, yet only the politicians were crying foul when President Bush spoke?

I’ve always considered myself a strong libertarian who values less government and fiscal responsibility.  Someone who believes strongly in personal responsibility and accountability.  A person who has conservative views when it comes to financial issues but also has a heavy heart that desires actions when it comes to social issues.  And for most of my life, I really didn’t care what adults did to or for each other in their bedrooms or private lives as long as they weren’t trying to take away any rights of mine.

Over the past few months many of my friends think that I’ve moved farther to the right.  But in reality, I haven’t moved.

My analysis and views of President Obama haven’t changed since he first started giving Hillary Clinton a run for the money in the primaries. And what might be a surprise to many of my friends, I have read both of his books. (They are quick reads.) And one of my friends brought up an interesting point.  The audio version of his first two books leave out many of his more radical views. One might be generous in thinking that between writing his books and reading them in the recording studio some of his views might have calmed down.

BUT, what the entire world is seeing in his administration today is perfectly aligned with the views he wrote about in his printed book AND were strangely left out from the audio version. (Do his advisors actually believe people no longer read and just accept what is spoken to them?  That may be a moot point since it seems most of our Congress men and women don’t even read the bills they are passing.)

President Obama is a marxist.  There’s no way to dance around that fact. There’s nothing wrong with that and there’s no law against being a marxist.  And as a country, we can survive this issue.  People all over are starting to wake up and say, NO to the many radical parts of his agenda.  And the truth will be revealed in the next election cycle.

So, even though several of my friends believe I’ve moved into the arena of being a radical right wing extremist and deserving of extreme punishment, in reality it is the world around me that shifted to the left when President Obama started pushing the country that way.  I’m still right where I was before.

Oh, and I still don’t care what you do in your bedroom.