This makes me wonder…

woodward… How many more lies the Obama administration is selling and just how compromised the media is when it comes to the Obama White House.

This morning I caught a couple of Tweets about Bob Woodward being under attack from the Media and one tweet said he’d been threatened by the White House over a story.

I thought Whoa!!!! Something is up.

In this case Woodward is at the center of a journalistic feeding frenzy of his so called colleagues.Woodward is famous for breaking the Watergate story and I’ve always enjoyed his writing, so I started trying to track down what the whole story is.

Mr. Woodward’s crime is that he pointed out, the Emperor has no clothes.

He caught the White House red handed in a bald lie. Then he published what he found.

In this case contrary to the White House spin, Which has been saying  that Congress and specifically the Republicans are responsible for the upcoming sequester

According to Woodward, the truth is that the Sequester was suggested and approved by the Obama administration.

This isn’t the first time Mr. Woodward has caught the White House in a lie… I seem to recall President Nixon resigning as a direct result of a Woodward story. At least Mr. Woodward is non partisan!

The whole article from The Washington Post is Here.

An interesting analysis of the feeding frenzy and comments from the “Balanced Media” can be found on Breitbart Here.

The upcoming cuts, according to Breitbart represent only 2% of the Federal budget.

Yet the Federal government is asking it’s employees to take furlough days that will account for a loss in their paychecks of as much as 5%.

I’m a “whats good for the goose is good for the gander kind of guy” and think if the Government expects their employees to accept a 5% cut in pay, then the government shouldn’t be bitching about a lousy 2% loss in theirs.

It’s a foregone conclusion that the people furloughed are folks can least afford a 5% pay cut.

They’ll be used as poster children demonstrating the evil that the bastard Republicans have caused. It will be the secretaries, clerks, phone operators, and maintenance people.

The management and the politicians themselves will not be losing at all.

Why would the furloughs be concentrated in those areas? So that the American people have the false impression that the sequester really is doing something that’s hurting average Americans.

I’d bet you that 2% of the Federal budget is toilet paper and office supplies. ( I might lose that bet but I wouldn’t be surprised with all the waste in govt. if the cost was that high. I’m sure they’re using $10 rolls of TP in Congress.)

Unfortunately, the story has become Woodward, instead of the lies and misrepresentations from the White House.

According to this NPR piece  Woodward has described a contentious conversation he had with a White House aide wherein the aide yelled at Woodward for a half hour, then followed up with an “Apology” email that said, “You’ll regret staking out that claim”.

Woodward said, “I mean, it makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, you’re going to regret doing something that you believe in,”.

And he’s right.

It may be overstating it to say that this was a direct threat from the White House with the full backing of the President.

But in times like these, when the President can make you a terrorist by simply calling you a terrorist, and when your travel can be impeded because your name or someone with a similar name appears on a no-fly list.

Woodward’s discomfort may have more basis in fact than paranoia.

I think it’s very unfortunate that the real story has been eclipsed by the sidebar.

On the positive side of the scale is that we clearly can see just how deep the color yellow of “Yellow journalism” in America has become.

I find myself asking if this had been a Bush Administration gaffe… Had Mr. Woodward caught former President Bush in a similar lie, would Mr. Woodward have been a hero?

Sadly, I think the answer is that he’d have been a media darling.

President Obama and his administration are just as likely to lie, misrepresent, and abuse power as any other administration.

The old saying, “Power corrupts…” is just as applicable to a Black President as it is to a White one.

I  often find myself asking, Is President Obama getting special treatment because of racism? Is the media still laboring under some misguided guilt that an African American needs “Special” treatment?

If the people who are supposed to be the publics watchdogs are in fact spinning the news, if they’re reporting only one side of the Obama Presidency – that President Obama can do no wrong… We lose objectivity.

With that loss of objectivity we also lose our ability to question, formulate, or even express differing opinions.

It’s ironic as hell that the first amendment could in fact be undone by the very people operating most under it’s protections. Bundled in that irony is that journalists will devour their own for exercising freedom of speech.

Bad habits

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I used to smoke. 

Yeah, I was a smoker. I was the evil puffing bastard everyone has come to hate! I put your children at risk! According to the nanny state I should have been taken out and shot.

Not to put me out of my misery but out of yours.

I quit years ago and I still miss it.

Now theres an un-PC admission in this day & age!

I’m glad I quit and everything, but I liked the nicotine rush! I also liked that it killed my appetite and it was a lot easier to stay skinny.

The health benefits outweighed the desire to smoke and so I was able to leave it, albeit with regret in my past.

I quit because my best friend asked me one day how it was that I could justify going to the gym 4 days a week and still smoke when I came out of the gym?

It was a good question and as usual his logic was completely irrefutable.

I quit that day…

I still miss it.

I miss smoking when I’m drinking at a bar. You can’t smoke at bars in California anymore but I still miss it.

I miss smoking after sex. I miss the ashtray on my belly, the red cherry of my cigarette glowing in the darkness and me thinking quietly about what I’d just done and knowing that I was going to do it again when I stubbed out my smoke. I miss having my arm wrapped around my partner, their head on my shoulder while I smoked that in between fuck cigarette.

I doubt I’m the only man who feels that way.

I miss getting up from my desk and walking outside to have a smoke and bitch with my co-workers about the boss or the latest political fuck-up in the company.

I smoked because I enjoyed the taste, and the hit. Not because I was lured into it by unscrupulous corporations. (Their ads were enticing, who didn’t want to be the Marlboro Man?)  I knew damn well what I was doing.

My Dad smoked. It killed him, you’d think that I wouldn’t wax lovingly about cigarettes.

I didn’t start smoking until I was 18. Near the end of my smoking days, I was doing almost a pack a day.

The nicotine was one thing. I think I was self medicating a bit. Nicotine acts as a stimulant and because it’s a stimulant it has a very specific effect on persons who happen to have been treated in their childhood with drugs like Ritalin.

The child may have outgrown the reasons they were put on Ritalin but their bodies will always have an affinity for stimulants in general.

I’ve known more than one smoker who had been on Ritalin in their childhood, of those more than a few who really liked pharmaceutical grade stimulants. 

Interesting thing is that if their Doctor was smart and recognized certain traits they’d end up back on Ritalin and suddenly they’d stop smoking.

But sure… Ritalin is completely safe for your unruly child, we’ve been using it for 50 years on kids just like yours… (with no or generally undocumented, unproven ill effects.)

Moving on…

I recently had the opportunity to try one of those e-cigarettes. For those of you that don’t know, these are things that look like cigarettes and that provide a nice flavor and optionally a selectable hit of nicotine without the tar, and other nasty chemicals associated with combustion in a “real” cigarette.

It was nice…

Not exactly like smoking a cigarette, but it was pleasant.

Since then, I’ve done a lot of reading and investigation The jury is out about the negative effects of these devices.

About the only consistent thing is that they’re less unhealthy than a cigarette. The “Smoke” is essentially water vapor, there’s no smell, but there is a good taste (at least in the one I tried). You can choose the nicotine leveNewImagel and they’re also a lot cheaper than cigarettes. 

I’m not sure that I’m ready to start up with one of these things all the time but I do like the option.

The only problem I could see is that unlike a real cigarette you don’t know when you’re done. 

I’d smoke a real cigarette in about 10 -15 minutes if I wasn’t in a hurry. These e-cigs don’t burn down so you could find yourself completely losing track of time if you weren’t paying attention.

For someone like me that really enjoyed smoking even when I quit… these things might be a neat option. I could also see how they might assist in quitting for some people.

But I suspect that there will be a larger number of folks who switch over to this option. At least until the government starts to regulate them and drives the prices up to normal cigarette levels.

There’s also the fact that cigarettes used to be, and e-cigs still are cheaper than a monthly prescription of Ritalin.

I don’t know if that’s still the case. I haven’t looked into Ritalin in a very long time.

The last Paraprosdokian

This Fridays Paraprosdokian was the last one queued.

20130222-092710.jpgIt’s funny, when I created all of them last year I though “dang it’s going to take forever for these to be used up. I hope they don’t bore people.”

Yet here we are, they’re done and I don’t really have a good idea about what to use to replace them, or even if they should be replaced.

It’s been weird, the last few weeks, I’ve been less & less interested in doing anything. I feel really bored and yet I should be pushing hard on a couple of fronts.

It’s like my drive has left me and even succeeding at things like securing insurance brings me no satisfaction.

Arguably, obtaining insurance should have made me feel better because it represented a victory against what I had come to feel was an unfair system.

The system is still unfair and it should be burned down and replaced with something that is more fair. Obamacare is not the replacement I think is appropriate but that’s another story all together.

I’m sorta thinking that I’ve been cooped up in the house too much and that’s given me a real bad case of cabin fever.

The problem is that with gas prices soaring I don’t really want to drive anywhere that I don’t have to. I guess it’s going to come down to me deciding that driving someplace to assuage the cabin fever is a “necessary” trip.

Spring and Fall are my two favorite times of year I should be getting happy about the coming Spring. Yet I’m feeling disconnected about it.

I suppose I should bite the bullet, pay for the gas and shake off the late Winter blues with a couple of short day trips. Changing the view might help.

Who’d have ever thought that I could get to a place where I took a view from my mountain for granted?

Who do you trust?

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I was reading Twitter last night. (I have no idea how else to say that. You really don’t read twitter you scan it.) Anyhow… while scanning the hundreds of tweets, several started jumping out at me.

The strange part was that these tweets were from Anonymous, or someone claiming to speak for Anonymous.

I thought to myself “whats Anonymous doing reporting the news?”

Not that it’s inconsistent with their charter, but most of the time you think of them as making news by hacking into governments or corporations that have drawn the ire of Anonymous.

These tweets were reporting meteorite explosions over Russia.

I went to the first link thinking I was probably going to get infected by some kind of virus.

But no, there was a great video all in Russian showing a really bright streak with a glowing head. thick smoke trailing after it.

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I thought “wow” I wonder if it’s real? Call me suspicious of Russian websites.

There are so many Russian sites that seek to infect your computer with malware, I’ve gotten very wary of anything in Eastern Europe.

It’s a pity too, there are some excellent English language sites that report on world wide events with a lot less bias than the American media.

However, because I’ve been infected too many times from Eastern European websites I’ve stopped visiting any of them at all.

I’d forgotten how straight-up the Russian reporting usually is. 

The first video I saw was impressive and at first I thought it was a promo for some new SciFi movie.

The next videos dispelled that thought. It was amazing, there were obviously cell phone videos pouring into a Russian YouTube site.

They were all taken of the same event from different angles, it was obvious that this was a real event. Then the photos of the damage appeared.

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I flipped on the TV in time to catch the 11 O’ Clock news. 

I was disappointed, not one word of the event.

We could see the overflowing toilets from the Carnival Cruise ship, when the cabin Christopher Dorner was occupying was still burning the local news was saying that his body had been removed and identified.

But in a situation where something “REAL” was happening and it was ever more obvious that the event could be verified… Not one stinking word.

This might have simply been a local news phenomenon but even CNN was silent.

This morning of course, the American news agencies are all abuzz, probably because of the damage and the fact that 900 people were at last count reported as injured. 

Anonymous, has been reporting other things too.

Things like contrary to the official police statement the cabin in the Dorner case was purposely set on fire.

Like most people, I dismissed the Anonymous report at first, but now even the local news is saying the police might have intentionally used weapons known to cause fires.

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The Anonymous news items have been pretty egalitarian, and unbiased. They simply point to information and leave it to the reader to make up their own mind. No spin, just “hey, have a look at this.

Does anyone else think it’s strange that a group of hackers is ahead of the curve on news stories and they’re publishing those stories reliably?

Our media tries to portray Anonymous as criminals, or disgruntled technology people. The network news makes Anonymous sound like a bunch of nerds hiding out in a basement creating problems and chaos for their own purposes.

Is that a true representation? I’m inclined to say no, maybe not.

I’m not willing to take everything Anonymous says and does as honest and true. But I’m willing to look at them in a different light. Perhaps Anonymous is just about information being free, unbiased, and presented to everyone.

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It’s funny. I hadn’t paid any attention to anything that Anonymous said or did until recently when I kept seeing their tweets retweeted by others. I saw time and time again their uncanny accuracy in reporting so I started following them.

It’s been an education. If nothing else, Anonymous has made me think and question. 

Perhaps that’s their point.

Keep questioning, keep thinking, keep an open mind, keep learning, just because the TV or the computer says something is true doesn’t mean that it is.

You don’t have to trust anyone or anything just because they’re “Authorities” or authoritarian, you can make up your own mind.

Before you decide the world is flat, do the research! You owe it to yourself. 

After all “There be monsters here…”

Nice day even with a heck of a drive

Had a dental appointment today. The last under my current insurance plan.

Thankfully I’ve got good teeth. Otherwise I’m sure that insurance would decline to cover me calling it a “pre-existing” condition.

My teeth, and gums are a bit sore. But I’m going to be fine even if I just want soft food tonight.

I barely missed all the excitement coming home, I passed a sign saying that “all the mountain roads were closed” it was a bit of a concern.

As it turns out CALTRANS was overstating the issue. The mountain roads into the Big Bear area were closed. Not all mountain roads.

The police say that they’ve cornered Christopher Dorner. Apparently, Mr Dorner has been killed in a fire in a cabin.

I’ll wait until the forensic report comes out.

I’m amazed that the Dorner issue has preempted the POTUS State of The Union Address on some of our local TV stations.

This is the first time I’ve created a blog post on an iPad. So if there are any really goofy typos… I’m blaming the iPad!

Signing off to watch the State of the Union.

Should be interesting.