America Has Spoken and The Next American Idol Is Barack Obama
@ Sat 30 August 2008 10:00 AM HKT by Tom LeggWow! And this doesn't include viewers of PBS, CSPAN or internet streamers, but Obama's viewership sets records.
Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention was seen by more than 38 million people.
Nielsen Media Research said more people watched Obama speak than watched the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, the final "American Idol" or the Academy Awards this year. Obama talked before a live audience of 80,000 people in Denver.
This can't be good news for Rupert Murdoch and Fox, because those sort of ratings will likely be going to their competitors for the next 4 years rather than Fox, due to Fox being a right-wing propaganda shop for the last 8 years.
And this really can't be good news for Jacques Rogge's ego as his sports entertainment empire built on TV revenue may have seen its product value slashed. Why should American television networks bid such huge numbers for a product that simply cannot deliver the eyeballs, even with a 40+ billion dollar spectacular spectacular?
The Threat To Obama? Would A Loon Want To Kill The Anti-Xrist?
@ Wed 27 August 2008 5:36 PM HKT by Tom LeggSo on a day when the courts rule against Team GDumbya on withholding testimony and evidence from Congress on the politicisation of the US Attorneys, one of GDumbya's recent politically appointed Federal Attorneys has come in to the media focus due to what was originally just a routine traffic stop.
The arrest of 4 in Denver seems to be causing mixed emotions. The Reuters article by Matthew Bigg reminds us of past assassinations of US leaders. Also Reuters goes beyond the immediate actors and talks to one of the experts.
Some white supremacist groups would like to see Obama killed, according to Mark Potok, an expert in neo-Nazi groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center based in Alabama.
Threats against Obama circulate on the Internet, said Potok, whose organization has developed an international reputation for monitoring and opposing hate groups.
He cited a threat posted on the Center's website in April that read, with a misspelled word: "ATTENTION, IF OBAMA BECOMES PRESEDANT I WILL KILL HIM MYSELF MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT."
White supremacists overwhelmingly believe the Colorado case was a setup by authorities determined to smash their groups, argued Potok, who based his assertion on information gleaned from neo-Nazi websites.
Given the paranoia of neo-Nazis about one world government, it isn't surprising that they might imagine this is a setup by the FBI. But that would mean you'd have a Federal prosecutor interested in pursuing this. And it sure doesn't seem that Troy Eid is interested in pursuing this further.
Eid said authorities determined there was no firm plot to harm Obama. Asked what else they could plan to do with the weapons, Eid said, "I don't know what they were for."
"A bunch of meth heads get together, we don't know why they do what they do. ... People do lots of stupid things on meth," Eid said. "If you're talking about a true threat, there has to be some evidence they're not just talking about it or thinking about it, especially in a drug-induced state."
Obviously the fact that they've driven to stay in a hotel close to the Convention isn't evidence. (Diarists from the Daily Kos moved to a different hotel partly due to the disruption of the arrest across the hall from their room. Newsweek's staff also were in that hotel.
Also the presence of wigs and bullet-proof vests aren't a sign of ill intent. Don't you go hunting the wily prairie chicken and quail with wigs and bullet-proof vests on?
As for the mindset of folks on the far right with respect to Obama, hit the google for "obama" "antichrist" that even has CNN asking if Obama is the anti-christ after John McCain's ad "The One" with all of its Biblical shadowing.
As for US Attorney Troy Eid, who is downplaying any sense of threat, you might check out his history for a possible motive to downplay anything that might invoke sympathy for Barack Obama. From February 2005, you can check out the Colorado Political News blog discussion of Eid.
Eid left his job as Governor Owens’ counsel to become a shareholder at the national law firm of Greenberg Traurig, for which he was an aggressive rainmaker.
If the Greenberg Traurig firm rings a bell for political newshounds, it's because of the influence and cash scandal of Jack Abramoff. No news if Eid was connected personally to Abramoff, but Eid's career speaks loudly that he's a politically connected Republican aparatchik who's climbed the ladder of success due to who he knows. And in the realm of Team GDumbya that requires ultimate loyalty to the Party and its maintenance of power above all else.
Cone Of Silence
@ Tue 19 August 2008 9:24 AM HKT by Tom LeggI don't get CNN at home, so I had no way of listening to Rick Warren's Faith Forum with John McCain and Barack Obama. My contact with the events came via the crack den live blogging of the event.
The big question that has come about is whether John McCain cheated. His campaign has hit back at NBC, due to comments by Andrea Mitchell on Meet The Press that John McCain was outside the "cone of silence" that was to prevent McCain from hearing the questions in advance and hearing what the opponent said. For those that don't follow US political journalism closely, you might be more familiar with Andrea Mitchell's married name, Mrs. Alan Greenspan. So obviously we're talking wild-eyed radical leftists here out to destroy the Republican Party.
The opening of McCain's section of the forum went like this. CNN transcript of the event
WARREN: My first question, was the cone of silence comfortable you were in just now?
MCCAIN: I was trying to hear through the wall
As Secret Service officials have confirmed, Sen McCain wasn't in a cone of silence at all and had left his hotel right as the forum had actually begun. So we have the first lie from Sen McCain. But the exchange that set off the alarm bells at the crack den was the following:
MCCAIN: Could I -- are we going to get back to the importance of Supreme Court Justices or should I mention --
WARREN: We will get to that.
MCCAIN:
WARREN: You're jumping ahead (inaudible).
The Rick Warren News site has pulled their transcript and linked over to CNN's. But here was what Rick Warren's transcript said of the same exchange
12 ARE WE GOING TO GET BACK TO THE IMPORTANCE OF SUPREME
13 COURT JUSTICES.
14 Q WE'LL GET TO THAT.
15 A ALL RIGHT. OKAY.
16 Q YOU GOT ALL MY QUESTIONS, GOOD.
Can you figure out from that last statement why Rick Warren would prefer to have his last response become (inaudible)? And if you go off and check YouTube for this section (at 4:36 - 4:47 or so in the video), it's cross talk, but you can hear Rick Warren say "you're jumping ahead, you got all my questions, good" and the two had not discussed the Supreme Court yet, so it seemed very odd that McCain was asking if they would "get back to" discussing Supreme Court Justices unless he'd previously heard a discussion of that with Obama.
As a bonus, this part of the debate also contains the McCain homily about the Vietnamese guard scratching a cross in the dirt, which has set off all sorts of alarm bells for plagiarism from the recently departed Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Good thing this debate was a in prosperity gospel ministry, because a snake might have bitten both McCain and Rick Warren on a night like this in a house where bearing false witness was grave and unacceptable.
7th Month
@ Sat 16 August 2008 12:37 AM HKT by Tom LeggWe have reached the full moon of the 7th lunar month according to the Chinese calendar. Across a lot of Hong Kong Cantonese Opera stages are being built and paper offerings are being burnt on the sidewalks. Peng Chau's Cantonese Opera season is held closer to Tin Hau's birthday due to the fishing history, so the local drama is a little different.
Hungry Ghost Festival 2008 on Peng Chau
There is no lip syncing. There is no extra smoke from digitally superimposed fake fireworks. There are no PR Consultants telling us that truthiness is okay.
There are Taoist monks chanting and gongs clanging. There are paper offerings being burnt and there is lots and lots and lots of smoke from incense.
Night View of Full Moon of Hungry Ghost Festival 2008 on Peng Chau
Property Business In Hong Kong
@ Fri 15 August 2008 10:36 PM HKT by Tom LeggSo why does this story about Leung Chin-man keep making me flash back to the Jake van der Kamp column following the ICAC corruption findings concerning Centaline agents. Given that SCMP is still a pay only site, I'll send you to the Ordinary Gweilo's comments and excerpts of van der Kamp's column.
Unfortunately Chris overlooks one of the paragraph's from Jake's piece. That was the option of putting enough money in to the ICAC to undertake the proper staffing and investigative energy to clean up Hong Kong's property transaction industry. It's obvious that Donald Tsang Yam-kuen and the HK SAR government can't really clean out the property industry in the way that the British HK government cleaned out the HK Police Force in the late 60s/early 70s. Cleaning out all of the corruption in the property transaction industry would be a political death wish for a HK government. Without that industry's support for the government, the HK government would topple in days. And as van der Kamp points out, corruption is endemic in the property transaction industry.
I'm of the opinion, in fact, that in some businesses, particularly property and construction, there is only rarely such a thing as a straight contract with no extra payment under the table.
So when the press publicised the involvement (apparent collusion) of former Buildings Director Leung Chin-man in New World Development receiving a sweetheart deal on property in Hung Hom, it was necessary for the Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen to intervene in the approval by the head of the civil service of New World's post-retirement hire of Leung.
Between the options laid out by Jake van der Kamp, there is a middle way. There is no way that the CE will move to seriously dent the collusion between the government and the property developers. There is no way that the CE could just tell the public to accept that the government colludes with the property development industry in Hong Kong and that everyone should just get over it. Instead you might get a few people thrown to the wolves for a short period of time and wait for the press to blow over and then we all get back to the collusion as usual in Hong Kong.
Properly Inflate Your Tires: Just Git 'er Done
@ Tue 5 August 2008 2:20 PM HKT by Tom LeggOh Lordy, the McCain camp with the aid of the Sean Hannity's and Red State's of the right-wing media cesspool have piled on Sen Barack Obama's comments about properly inflating your tires saving more oil than can be produced by increased offshore drilling as proposed by Sen McCain.
First, let's head over to Talking Points Memo Election Central for a word about McCain's sponsors.
Ten senior Hess Corporation executives and/or members of the Hess family each gave $28,500 to the joint RNC-McCain fundraising committee, just days after McCain reversed himself to favor offshore drilling, according to Federal Election Commission reports.
Nine of these contributions, seven from Hess executives and two from members of the Hess family, came on the same day, June 24th, the records show. The total collected in the wake of McCain's reversal for the fund, called McCain Victory 2008, from Hess execs and family is $285,000.
This is in addition to other money drawn from oil company execs by the McCain team, which is way behind Obama in the cash column, after McCain's switch to supporting offshore drilling.
Now how much can be saved by keeping your tires properly inflated? According to CarCare.org on tire inflation and gas mileage.
Proper inflation can also improve gas mileage by more than 3%, when maintained regularly. Keep this in mind: Under-inflated tires can lower gas mileage by 0.4 percent for every 1 psi (pounds per square inch) drop in pressure of all four tires.
But is tire under inflation really a problem? Checking out NASCAR on tire safety
Under inflation is the leading cause of tire failure. Improper tire-inflation pressure can cause severe internal tire damage, which can lead to sudden tire failure. A tire can be as much as 50 percent under-inflated before it is visibly noticeable. Not only are under-inflated tires more prone to damage and failure, but they can lead to higher fuel costs by as much as 3 to 5 cents per gallon.
Pressures should always be checked when the tires are cold on a monthly basis. Under normal tire operation, approximately 1 psi of tire pressure will escape every month. Also, for every 10 degrees F change in ambient temperature, tire pressure will change by approximately 1 psi.
So how does this all add up? About the same or a little more than offshore drilling in the zones currently prohibited. Michael Grunwald at Time does the math. And John M. Berry at Bloomberg calls Offshore drilling claims are a political hoax.
So why would the Republican Party and the McCain Campaign and the Hannity's and Red State's prefer offshore drilling to rolling up their sleeves and checking their tire pressure? The Republican Party in the last 30 years have become the party of out of touch elitists getting fat off big corporate handouts rather than the party representing the good ol' fashioned American git 'er done attitude.
And since Red State was one of the original sources for this smear campaign, I had to laugh and roll my eyes. How can you forget this debacle of git 'er done at Red State.
You see, when we started RedState in May of 2004, we used a website program called Scoop — the same program a lot of similar sites on the left used. But, as the number of visitors to our site grew, Scoop kept crashing on us.
If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us. We kept crashing and were out of money. We had to close down or take drastic action.
Well, we didn’t close down. We ditched Scoop and moved to the best alternative at the time, a program called Drupal. But, in accomplishing the switch, budget constraints forced us to sacrifice some popular site features in order to alleviate the strain on our overused servers.
Needless to say, we always regarded those “downgrades” as temporary, and we hoped to restore the eliminated features – and to add new and even better ones – as soon as we could afford to.
You see the online left community has competent people that roll up their coding sleeves and git 'er done. The right wing media cesspool whinges a lot and begs for welfare to bail them out of the problems they've made for themselves. And it's even funnier since as FireDogLake pointed out at the time:
But the real question is -- how limitless is their contempt for their own readership? RedState is now owned by Eagle Publishing, the parent company of Human Events, Regnery, Evans-Novak Political Report, the Conservative Book Club and other conservative publishing enterprises.
According to Hoovers, Eagle Publishing had $8.3 million in sales in 2006.
So even companies that are doing well in the wingnut welfare racket are willing to beg for welfare rather than rolling up their sleeves to git 'er done.
But what's really interesting is this stat from How Stuff Works (one of the ultimate git 'er done sites) found while looking at fuel efficiency tips. Listening to Al Gore and those dirty f'ing hippies might just save you some money.
Bringing your car's emissions down to within specifications can improve gas mileage as much as 15 percent. And your engine will last longer, too. The oxygen sensor is a key part of your emissions system, and some estimates suggest that a faulty oxygen sensor can reduce fuel economy by as much as 40 percent.
So stop whingeing about needing some brazillionaire oil guy to rescue your sorry ass from the brazillionaire oil guy taking all of your money. Just get out there and get 'er done and save yourself some cash by keeping a few dollars from the greedy hands of the brazillionaire oil guy.
A Quick T1 From The Observatory
@ Mon 4 August 2008 12:44 PM HKT by Tom LeggIt'll move too fast to worry the Olympics here in Hong Kong, but a tropical depression, still unnamed, has started to organise south east of Hong Kong. It's predicted to move directly towards Hong Kong and get real close before taking a sharp Western turn towards Hainan on Wednesday.
The question for the moment is how strong and how well organized the storm can become in the next 36-48 hours. Apparently the water is warm and there isn't a lot of upper level wind shear, so a lot could happen in a short amount of time.
Now This Is How The PRC Does Information Control!
@ Thu 31 July 2008 10:28 AM HKT by Tom LeggSince the death toll at Tiananmen in '89 is disputed because of a lack of definitive photographic and hospital records, the PRC has learned that ensuring a lack of a photographic record of events is the best path to information control. Rough up and detain Hong Kong photojournalists if necessary to maintain the Party Line on information control. Pictures speak a thousand words.
Under the CCP though, taking photos that might defy the Party Line are worth a year of "re-education through labour".
The HRIC press release on Liu Shaokun.A teacher from China's earthquake-hit southwest was sentenced to one year of detention after photographing some of the schools that toppled, killing thousands of children, a rights group said.
Human Rights in China said Liu Shaokun was sentenced to ''re-education through labor'' on charges of "inciting a disturbance''. Labor re-education is a form of imprisonment that does not require a trial and is not open to usual court appeals.
Liu was detained on June 25 at his school. At the time, authorities informed his school’s principal that Liu was being held for “disseminating rumors and destroying social order.” Authorities later told Liu’s family that he was being investigated on “suspicion of the crime of inciting subversion.” (煽动颠覆国家政权) However, the family did not receive formal notification for his detention as required under Chinese law.
On July 23, 28 days after his detention, Liu’s wife was informed that there was a letter from her husband to pick up at the Guanghan City Public Security Bureau. When she arrived, she was given a “Reeducation-Through-Labor Notice” (劳动教养通知书), which had Liu’s signature and fingerprints, but not the length of time he would serve. After Liu’s wife demanded to know how and why he was placed in RTL, she was told that Liu would serve one year for “inciting a disturbance.” (煽动闹事)
Under RTL regulations, public security authorities may issue an order to anyone to serve up to four years of RTL without trial or formal charge.
IOC and Olympics Only About The Money
@ Thu 31 July 2008 9:57 AM HKT by Tom LeggHow many people are really surprised that the IOC sold out to the CCP on censorship? Perhaps you're not cynical enough to accept the reality that most folks at the top of money-making schemes/scams would sell their own mothers to make a dollar.
As I've said before, since at least 1984 the Olympics are solely a marketing/sales scheme/scam designed to provide great profits for the corportate underwriters and a certain level of jingoistic chest-thumping nationalism for host nations.
The provision of the 2008 Olympic Games to Beijing was to drive the Olympics brand and the brand name of the corporate underwriters in front of a potential 1.3 billion consumers. No more, no less. All of the crap about the glory of the human spirit and the Olympic dream and the sacred flame are just diversionary propaganda in a vain attempt to humanise the crass commercialism and crass jingoism that lines the pockets of the IOC members and Coca-Cola and Lenovo and Samsung with cash cash CASH! For the folks that wrote the crap, it was an opportunity of a lifetime (or at least until the next Olympics). It was their moment to strut their best Leni Riefenstahl in the name of corporatism and jingoism. Now show me the MONEY! Cha-ching!
Believe The Government Not The Data Or Your Own Lyin' Eyes
@ Mon 28 July 2008 12:39 PM HKT by Tom LeggOne could have read the lengthy pieces last Friday from Peter Kammerer or Stephen Vines to find well-written critiques of the current bumbling of Donald Tsang Yam-kuen's HK SAR government. Personally I would have directed the readers to page A3 and the investigative article by the SCMP staff on the local air quality.
As per usual when the air seems relatively clean, the HK SAR administration is quick to grab credit for themselves. When the air is a turbid brown haze (as it is today), the HK SAR administration will throw up their hands like 3 year olds and blame the wind and weather and anybody and everything but themselves and their own policies.
So after the SCMP staff checked the air quality data at the EPD's site and actually found poor air quality days have gone up over last year, the EPD responded.
"The department said the public should interpret air pollution data cautiously because it only revealed a partial picture of air quality, which was affected by various factors."
When you can't accept the data your own instruments collect and your own formulas crunch in to public talking points, it's clear that your government has strayed away from accountability to reality.
UPDATE 8:17pm
Speaking of which... RTHK reports today was the worst air pollution in HK since they started keeping records in 1995. I haven't confirmed this by checking old data. But check out the rationales provided by the EPD spokesperson.
A Principal Environmental Officer, Dave Ho, said there were two main reasons for the horrendous air quality: the intense heat; and because Typhoon Fung Wong trapped high levels of ozone around Hong Kong.
Bad air is always the fault of the weather and good air is the product of the fine actions of the EPD.