The Daily Brief

From Politico:

Fox News anchor Brit Hume, reflecting on his 12 years at the cable news network, recalled that during its formative stages, a New York Times television writer said the news division of Rupert Murdch’s network was like an “imaginary friend.”

So it was “quite amusing,” Hume said in a interview this week, to see the same Times writer liken the network’s current line-up to the New York Yankees — a testament to how much Fox has grown in influence and acceptance in the media world.

It’s hard to imagine such a quick ascent without Hume, who just two months after Fox launched in October 1996 took a roll of the dice, dumped his 23-year career at ABC News — the industry’s gold standard — and cast his lot with Murdoch, the super-rich, conservative media tycoon. Hume became the fledgling network’s chief Washington correspondent and managing editor.

Now, he’s stepping aside from those roles after this year’s election. And predictably, that’s cause for hand-wringing laments among colleagues and fans on the right, and fist-pumping cheers from his critics on the left.

Now that I’m working and in Mountain Time again, I’ve been missing his “Special Report” but seriously, the first half hour is worth any three hours of any other news broadcast in the country. 

On the other hand, I saw something the other day where that “sick twisted freak” Glenn Beck is moving to Fox this spring, again, at a time when I’m at work.  So CNN has who else now?

From SB7

Here’s a doozy of a non sequitur from Hege123l:

I don’t want a for profit company making life and death choices for me. Government healthcare seems to work fine for government workers, the military and our politicans…

Seems to work fine. We might imagine that Hege123l has never talked to anyone in the military.

Fort Ritchie, Maryland, 1989. It’s wet and rainy and cold in Maryland in the winter, and my nearly year-old son has chronic ear infections. Fort Ritchie has a clinic, so to the clinic we go. Sensibly (for the Army) dependents must wait until active duty soldiers are seen. Including the Light Duty Brigade showing up to get just one .. more .. day on their Work Avoidance Chit. Also, sensibly, unless you’re about to die you are seen in the order in which you show up. Appointments are for sissies.

What this really means is that if you want to be seen for anything you show up early and wait in a crowded room until after lunch time.  If your kid is in a lot of pain, you show up early .. and wait in a crowded room. This is actually less fun than it sounds with a one-year old doing a lot of crying and vomiting.

The Clinic from Heck has two doctors. One doctor has the bedside manner of a brick and while you’d like to avoid the bastard, you can’t because it’s luck of the draw. By the fifth visit my son has learned the diff between Doctor Asstard and The Good Doctor. By the tenth visit he whimpers when we’re in the wrong examining room and cries when the guy shows up.

The doctors – over the course of eighteen months – managed to miss that B. was going deaf and has a whole lotta scar tissue on his eardrums. His ear infections didn’t really go away until we moved to North Carolina, where the Navy farmed their dependent care to civilians who looked at B, said ‘wow, he’s deaf, no wonder he can’t talk well’, popped tubes in his ears and .. lo, he could hear.

Now, mistakes happen and anecdotes are only that.  Also some of the finest care I’ve ever gotten has been from Navy corpsmen, dentists and PAs.

But – from my experience – saying that ‘it seems to work fine’ is to ignore a whole lot of experience that says there are some pretty serious problems with ‘government health care for the military’.  To me, government health care will always be that small clinic at Fort Ritchie with one good doctor and one bad doctor and waiting in a ‘first come first served line’ with a baby in a lot of pain.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Sorry ’bout the broken link in my previous post – I’ve been playing around with Google Chrome and, although I think it loads pages much faster, it still has some beta issues. Here is the crux of the story:

“The Air Force is creating a new command to manage the nation’s nuclear arsenal better after a series of embarrassing missteps in the handling and oversight of its most sensitive materials.

Donley said the latest shuffle would be a “new starting point” that would reinvigorate the service’s nuclear mission. He also said it would help the Air Force focus on the arsenal’s management, no matter how small it might become under future international agreements.”

The last paragraph is interesting. Those of us a little older might remember the humorous story about “What the Captain Meant To Say” which transposed an official Viet Nam era account of a dog fight with what the pilot actually said, F words and all.

I wonder if, in this instance, what the captain really meant to say is that after 4 November 08 the new Commander in Chief will give us just slightly more confidence in the security of our strategic arsenal than what we have in, say, Pakistan’s. Just thinking out loud.

Maybe I missed something when I read this, but isn’t that why we had SAC?

I live in real America.

I was born in Oregon, most of my family still lives there. I was raised in Oklahoma, then joined the Marines, saw a bit of the world. Now I live in a medium-sized town in Wisconsin.

It’s nice here.

We’ve got some manufacturing, some light industry, some business. We’ve got a river and a lake. We’ve got a park called ‘Riverside Park’ – the river sweeps by the place in a gentle curve. There is a World War One cannon there, looking over the river, pointing at the boat house on the other side. A flagpole with lights. A pavilion.

There is a new playground there with a giant plastic rocket as a centerpiece – a businesses in town donated most of the money to build it.

I take my kids there some Saturdays. There are always a lot of kids in and around it.

All of the parks here have purpose built sledding hills.  We don’t have any natural hills you can sled on. So the city built them for the kids.

That’s pretty nice as well.

There are some things that are not so very nice.  They’re the same things that everyone else has problems with, everywhere: the economy, politics.

Those things come and go. Thirty, fifty years from now, people will still bring their kids to Riverside Park, just like their parents and grandparents did. They’ll sit on the same bench I sit on, and watch their kids do what mine do: run around, play, have fun.

That’s pretty nice.

What about your Real America?

Idea from Bard Bloom.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Wait .. a what? SMB vulnerability?  As in directory shares between windows computers?  Whoops!

If you take a peek over at the National Vulnerability Database, we can see this article Here is the overview:

Buffer underflow in Microsoft Windows 2000 SP4, XP SP2 and SP3, Server 2003 SP1 and SP2, Vista Gold and SP1, and Server 2008 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a Server Message Block (SMB) request that contains a filename with a crafted length, aka “SMB Buffer Underflow Vulnerability.”

This means this vulnerability could be exploited to create a worm. Further it means if one PC gets infected on your network, then quickly all of them will.

After doing some more research it seems there is already an exploit in the wild – it is set to “go off” during the Thanksgiving holiday here in the states.

Aw – that’s okay Microsoft.  I wasn’t planning on getting any actual work done today.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Well dang ..

Barack Obama raised more than $150 million in September, a stunning and unprecedented eruption of political giving that has given him a wide spending advantage over rival John McCain.

I expect – any day now – a chorus of outrage from the Usual Suspects about how money is buying an election and kvetching about how money is ruining the race and how it just ain’t fair.

Any day ..

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

John Scalzi

Dear Republican Party:

You’re aware that to the rest of us, your transparently insincere whining about voter fraud every time you’re about to get your ass handed to you in an election makes you look like that second place runner who mysteriously gets a leg cramp as soon as it’s clear he’s got no chance to win the race, right?

AP

(Ohio) Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner estimated that an initial review found that about 200,000 newly registered voters reported information that did not match motor-vehicle or Social Security records, Brunner spokesman Kevin Kidder said. Some discrepancies could be as simple as a misspelling, while others could be more significant.

200,000 potential fraudulent registrations.  In one state.  That’s a pretty serious mysterious leg cramp, all-righty.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

As I’ve written before, economics is something of a black box to me. You’ve got your gozinatas and your gozoutas and beyond that .. well that’s why you have experts who can explain the hard words to dummies like me.

But when guys at the Wall Street Journal explain it in 9th grade English, I can understand it: Obama’s Tax Cuts aren’t and in the end we’ll get screwed.

It’s a clever pitch, because it lets him pose as a middle-class tax cutter while disguising that he’s also proposing one of the largest tax increases ever on the other 5%. But how does he conjure this miracle, especially since more than a third of all Americans already pay no income taxes at all? There are several sleights of hand, but the most creative is to redefine the meaning of “tax cut.”

For the Obama Democrats, a tax cut is no longer letting you keep more of what you earn. In their lexicon, a tax cut includes tens of billions of dollars in government handouts that are disguised by the phrase “tax credit.” Mr. Obama is proposing to create or expand no fewer than seven such credits for individuals:

• A $500 tax credit ($1,000 a couple) to “make work pay” that phases out at income of $75,000 for individuals and $150,000 per couple.
• A $4,000 tax credit for college tuition.
• A 10% mortgage interest tax credit (on top of the existing mortgage interest deduction and other housing subsidies).
• A “savings” tax credit of 50% up to $1,000.
• An expansion of the earned-income tax credit that would allow single workers to receive as much as $555 a year, up from $175 now, and give these workers up to $1,110 if they are paying child support.
• A child care credit of 50% up to $6,000 of expenses a year.
• A “clean car” tax credit of up to $7,000 on the purchase of certain vehicles.

Here’s the political catch. All but the clean car credit would be “refundable,” which is Washington-speak for the fact that you can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer — a federal check — from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this “welfare,” or in George McGovern’s 1972 campaign a “Demogrant.” Mr. Obama’s genius is to call it a tax cut.

It’s harnessing Boxer to the plow until the day he’s sent off to the ‘hospital’ and rendered for parts.

You, me and about 90% of the people reading this are Boxer, and that ain’t no shit.

George Fuckin’ Orwell knew his stuff, that’s for damn sure.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

The real lesson from Trooper Gate? 

You can use a taser on your kid, shoot game out of season while on duty, drink while on duty, treat your wife like a speed bag … and keep your job as a law enforcement officer.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Hawkfist wrote . . .

I find it hard to care about Bill Ayers, but if we’re going to dredge up the past, lets look at Palin and her sense of “Our America”

Full Article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/alaskan-independence-part_b_133261.html

Now – if Michelle Obama had belonged to an equivalent organization, imagine how the GOP would howl in outrage!

I’m not ‘the GOP’, I’m just this guy.  But he’s right – caring about what Michelle Obama did back when would be lame. 

Now about Senator Obama’s membership in an organization called the ‘New Party’ in 1996 … that might be another kettle of fish, hunh?

The ‘New Party’ was a political party established by the Democratic Socialists of America (the DSA) to push forth the socialist principles of the DSA by focusing on winnable elections at a local level and spreading the Socialist movement upwards. The admittedly Socialist Organization experienced a moderate rise in numbers between 1995 and 1999. By 1999, however, the Socialist ‘New Party’ was essentially defunct after losing a supreme court challenge that ruled the organizations “fusion” reform platform as unconstitutional.

For all of me – it’s not terribly damning.  We all make mistakes: you own up to them, you say “well I done messed up” and you move on.  Redemption, forgiveness – that’s what its about.

After allegations surfaced in early summer over the ‘New Party’s’ endorsement of Obama, the Obama campaign along with the remnants of the New Party and Democratic Socialists of America claimed that Obama was never a member of either organization. The DSA and ‘New Party’ then systematically attempted to cover up any ties between Obama and the Socialist Organizations. However, it now appears that Barack Obama was indeed a certified and acknowledged member of the DSA’s New Party.

Unless you’re not fessing up to your mistakes.  Then the rest of us might be forgiven for wondering what is going on inside your brain-housing group.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Senator Obama: Vote for me – you’ll get a tax break plus we’ll stick it to those no good dirty rich folks.

You ever try to get a job from a poor person?

from http://flickr.com/photos/livenature/256934977/

Yeah.  Good luck with that.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

There is one nice thing about providing tech support over the phone for your family . . .

Put the CD in then ..

It is in.

.. shutdown the computer . .

You mean turn it off

.. yes turn it off, count to three turn it on

I’m doing that

… and boot from the CD ..

How do you do that?

Shut up – I’m trying to tell you that.

They (or at least the Older Monkey) takes ‘shut up’ to mean ‘let me finish’ and doesn’t get all ‘he’s being rude and I must go have a hissy fit’.

Also .. thank God for my wife. My boys started the school day off with a spirited wrassling match in the living room: I can’t imagine what it would be like without her around to impart a civilizing influence.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.