Memo to AP: F Y

The Associated Press does not believe in the War on Terror, but they do believe in their war on bloggers, Tim Conneally, BetaNews

The AP’s disharmony with bloggers may have only just begun, as the alternative it’s now offering to being served with takedown notices involves paying an up-front sum for excerpting online articles — as few as five words.

A meeting between the Associated Press’ Vice President for Strategic Planning Jim Kennedy and Robert Cox, who heads the Media Bloggers Association, is now planned for Thursday of this week. The subject at hand is the AP’s attempt to find a new way of sharing AP content, which now involves a fee per excerpt based on its word length.

No Associated Press reporting was used in the development of this article.

• Twice this week we’ve started with a Bruce McQuain post. Unusual, but worthy. Bruce notes AL Gore’s endorsement of Obama, yesterday and says If Al wants him, I sure don’t … Interestingly, Fox has been running a headline reading: Gore Fuel Added to Obama Fire But what about Global Warming?
• LGF has been reporting explosions in the houses of terrorists on the west bank, and wonders if they’re storing explosives in their homes. I’d say it’s a sure bet, but more, given the upswing in this kind of thing, I can’t help but wonder if we don’t have these animals setting up another mass attack. Such accidents would be consistent with bomb building activity. I wonder if they’re hiring Jimmy Carter to speak at the kick off…
• Whoa, hold it. Don Henley endorses John McCain? Well, not really. Henley’s still an idiot. But one showing signs of eventual sentience.
• Hey, Martin; Saw your reply. Look, man… Don’t get the idea I’m overtly praising Russert. I think our disconnect is your under-estimation as to how low I hold the status of most ‘journalists’ to be.  As in: Think whale poop and start digging. Perspective, man… perspective. Russert, for all the faults which I freely agree he had,  was truley the one eyed man  in the blind kingdom… and yet mediocre at best. Still, that placed him several levels above the vast majority out there. As I said last night… and perhaps you missed it for the placement… Russert, in short, was a standout only insofar as nobody else at NBC was/is.  To that degree, he was worth remarking about… That’s all I’m saying.
• John Hawkins has been having mail issues since a server switch.
• I’m finally catching up on my reading surrounding the USSC’s rendering of Boumediene v Bush. Fred Thompson shows he still has a firm handle on reality, here:
  

  Upon reading the opinion in Boumediene v Bush, one must conclude that the majority knew where they wanted to go and simply had to figure out how to get there.

  Well, yeah, that is about the size of the thing, no question.

• By way of Glenn, I wonder what Billy thinks of this
• All the morons so offended by the Obama Sock Monkey…. stop and ask yourself why you’re offending by Obama’s Sock Monkey, but not by this. Get back to me when you actually have the courage to face this one. So to speak.
• Speaking of such matters, I note with some degree of pleasure over this fight with AP, the number of right-side blogs leading the fight. All in support of, at least ostensibly, a left wing smear site, the Drudge Retort. The question I’ve seen nobody ask is if it were a right-wing site being chased by AP, would the Drudge Retort and others on the left join the fight? I wonder. I wonder about that rather a lot.
• Did you know that we are now at the lowest level of casualties in Iraq since the invasion back in 03? Funny, how we never were told about this.
• The WaPo advises, today in what has to be the schtoopid headline of the week…: Poll Finds Independent Voters Split Between McCain, Obama   Which of course leaves us here at Bitsblog to wonder who else they think is involved in the race. Can’t get much by those newspaper types, can you? Which I guess goes back to what I was saying to Martin just now, doesn’t it?

The Washngton Post, today:

Sen. John McCain called yesterday for an end to the federal ban on offshore oil drilling, offering an aggressive response to high gasoline prices and immediately drawing the ire of environmental groups that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has courted for months.

The move is aimed at easing voter anger over rising energy prices by freeing states to open vast stretches of the country’s coastline to oil exploration. In a new Washington Post–ABC News poll, nearly 80 percent said soaring prices at the pump are causing them financial hardship, the highest in surveys this decade.

“We must embark on a national mission to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil,” McCain told reporters yesterday. In a speech today, he plans to add that “we have untapped oil reserves of at least 21 billion barrels in the United States. But a broad federal moratorium stands in the way of energy exploration and production. . . . It is time for the federal government to lift these restrictions.”

This sudden turn is McCain showing that he can in fact be affected b reality. There is hope for the man after all.  Now, about ANWR, nary a peep. But if McCain is smart, that’ll be the next move.

However that might be, this call for increased offshore drilling and exploring is a surefire winner with the American voter. He needs to hammer on this one, now.

An interesting post at OTB yesterday, caught my eye:

The cover story of the current Atlantic (Monthly) is an interesting piece by Nicholas Carr which asks, Is Google Making Us Stupid? It begins with the standard “the Internet is giving us short attention spans” meme but eventually gives us much more than that.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

[…]

Reading, explains [Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University], is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Much, much more at the link.  It’s worth a read, presuming you have the attention span.

Oh, cute.  Remind me to forward you my IQ scores for when we have that discussion again. James obvious giggle aside, he says:

My own experience closely mirrors Ezra Klein’s. I can still sit down with a stack of books as efficiently before if I’ve got a major research project or book review due. But, increasingly, the Internet is my source of first resort for looking up facts, keeping up with the news, and the like. It’s simply a much more efficient means of accessing current information than combing the stacks at the library.

Indeed. Add to that the idea that it offers a number of sources of information that you’d likely not have considered even looking at, were you restricted to the printed page. And therein lies something which I think goes missing from a lot of these “woe is the human race, nobody reads books anymore” memed bits… We’re actually getting smarter than books ever allowed us to.

Look, I admit there is a certain art level in doing the kind of book-based research that James describes… an art that is disappearing, certainly, and I can see where some would see a loss in that. It takes a fair amount of smarts to do research in that fashion. But what is the purpose of the book? What is the purpose of the printed page?  It is to impart information.  We humans have evolved our information gathering and dissemination ability to the next level. I refuse to see this as a bad thing.

And yes there are historical examples of genius at dealing with the printed page… but they are considered both a rarity and more than a little freakish.

The Futility Closet, passes long one such example:

I have to wonder, if Magliabechi would have dealt well with a computer. Certainly, Google would have had more information to hand than would Magliabechi’s entire library, vast though it was.

There’s this, too; Wisdom suggests that real genius is not knowing it all, but knowing where to look it up. If that’s true, then I submit to you all that the number of geniuses in our world has gone up on an order of scale in the last 20 years.

As an example of the way things are going; I have an entire wall of my home office covered with various computer publications. A glance through their titles suggests that there is no realm more affected by time, then the realm of technology.  Books I spent literally hundreds for, just a few short years ago, “Lantastic 5.0”, a complete collection of Novell networking and training books, for versions 3 through 5. MCSA books for Win2000, The inner workings of DOS 6, and so on. A collection of books written by James Martin for the Bell labs is particularly amusing in that way: Systems Analysis for data transmission, Telecommunications and the computer, and transmission systems for communications.  While very technical, and while very good at passing along basic theory, Martin’s books were a primer on getting data and digital connectivity in an analogue world.

All these books, on the open market are nigh on worthless, today.  I keep them as a reminder of how quickly investments sour. They stand as mute proof that things in the technological world have been changing so quickly as to make the printed word not only worthless, but six months away from publication, counter-productive for being woefully outdated.

Don’t misunderstand; I don’t see books as a bad thing. But if the single most efficient way of obtaining information and spreading it around, is what you’re after, the printed word ain’t it anymore, sorry.

At the outset, I had to wonder in James’ comment section if this thing wasn’t Atlantic trying to wrap a plausible excuse for their own dwindling print sales… an excuse that they themselves could accept. In short, print media’s dying because we’re all a bunch of idiots. Such arguments have certainly graced the pages of other publications, previously. The New York Times, for example, used it recently in an attempt to explain it’s ever tighter drain circling of late. What then, is the cause of the obvious angst… nay, anger, really… in the Atlantic article?  Well, for one thing, it’s that publishers like The Atlantic aren’t nearly at the top of the informational food chain… and they’re not making dime one off of it. The future is not with the printed medium… the one that’s made them all that money for all those years.  They see the web as a paradigm shift…(Use of the phrase is a nod to the paper worshipers) … away from them, and they’re not happy.

Understandable. It’s costing them money. Rather like my book collection did.

Jason Horowitz at the New York Observer this morning:
(Warning: NSFW)

A former bundler to Hillary Clinton just called in to tell me that Barack Obama’s selection of Patti Solis Doyle as chief of staff to the campaign’s eventual vice presidential nominee is the “biggest f*** you I have ever seen in politics.”

The donor, speaking on background, said that everyone in Clinton circles knows the two have hard feelings towards one another and haven’t spoken since Clinton removed Solis Doyle as campaign manager, and that Clinton loyalists view her with deep suspicion and believe that she is shopping around a book deal and acted as a background source for an extremely harsh Vanity Fair piece about Bill Clinton.

“Either one of two things happen,” said the bundler. “Hillary is selected as vice president and they fire Patti, or Hillary is not going to be the vice president.”

The bundler said that Clinton loyalists were livid over the pick.

Look, Clinton’s people are all upset, saying in effect that Solis-Doyle screwed up Hillary Clinto’s chances for POTUS. They may be correct about her adding to the problem, but she most assuredly didn’t act alone. Let’s also be fair and remember that the Clinton camp’s job was the application of lipstick to a pig.

The point the Hillary Clinton supporter is missing….that’s not just Solis talking, folks. That’s Obama talking, sending that message to Hillary Clinton. Essentially, the message is “You wanna be VP? When hell freezes over, lady.”

Which kinda answers that one, doesn’t it?
Heh. So much for party reconciliation.

Addendum:  (David L)

Does BO plan on lettting Patty Solis-Doyle anywhere near the campaign checkbook?   Solis-Doyle’s primary qualification is the ability to spend unlimited amounts of money.   I think S-D is mere window dressing.  Who knows?

Further, I predict BO will settle for second tier canidate for his vice president.  Campaign Obama is intent on runnig a top down Polit Bureau campaign.  What kind of poltician will BO be able to recruit as his veep when BO will not even allow his veep to bring in his own chief of staff.

The BO campaign wants to run everything and given they they are on a massive losing streak.   Their elephant sized egos don’t match their minature poodle sized track record.

I’ve gotten several questions over the years about how to get traffic on the blog. We’ll file this under FAQ. Here’s my response;

•  You can post an article called “How to get huge traffic for your blog”  Hey, it got YOU to hit my counter, right?

Seriously…

• You can read Stacy McCain’s post on the question. He’s got some prety good advice.
• So does Seth Godin

I know that’s not the whole deal, but it’s enough to get you started. 

See, the deal is that BitsBlog gets the traffic it does because we’ve been around as a blog since 56kb modems were considered ‘fast’. Over that period of time, we’ve managed to build up a respectible if not overhwleming following.  So, there’s another tip… you’re in it for the long haul so act like it.

Good luck.

I commented last night on the differences between what we see in Iowa and what we saw in Democrat-run New Orleans following Katrina. This vid is likely the best description of New Orleans I’ve seen yet, in it’s description of people’s tragic unwillingness to help themselves.

[wp_youtube]PFkNV6j6KsM&NR=1[/wp_youtube]

This is a grammatically valid English sentence:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

It was discovered/invented in 1972 by University of Buffalo linguist William J. Rapaport. It means “Buffalo from the city of Buffalo that are intimidated by other buffalo from the city of Buffalo themselves intimidate a third group of buffalo, also from Buffalo.”

Find this and more at the Futility Closet

• I note Bruce McQuain pointing out yet another obvious case of anti-oil bias, this time from the AP. Well, big freakin’ shock, eh? I have long since become convinced that most of the anti-oil hysteria we see from the left and the press (A redundancy of the first order, that) is really anti-American hyteria, looking for a more politically poitically palatable means of desroying the United States.  And I told yo three months ago that the Polar bear nonsense was simply a part of that effort. Boortz has more on this, too.
• And while I’m on the subject of the global warming nutcases, I see where the founder of the Weather Channel has some harsh words for them. What have they done to your creation, though, John?
• I see Fybush has a worthy series of notes on Tim Russert. Nice job, Scott.
• And speaking of which, Look, Martin, and Billy, too… We enjoy it also, at some level or we wouldn’t be maintaining or own sites.  I mean com on…. spare me the holier- than- thou- presumption that this is supposed to be a bad thing. True enough, he worked for Moynahan, and Cuomo, and on that basis, you can take a few points off the ‘positive’ side.   One, after all, doesn’t come from the Southtowns as a full-on conservative, after all. I speak as one who knows the area fairly well. But frankly, what made the man remarkable at all, was that he never let that history invade his role as a news person.  Which is perhaps why the left had such problems with him, as I discuss here at Q&O. There was a better sense of balance in the man than most of the media today, which is why he retains a certain level of my respect today. Did the coverage go overboard, Heck yes, I think that’s a fair statement.  I’d be amazed, if for example, we get more than a byline from the death of the great Paul Harvey, whose reputation and influence is far more positive and far greater… and I think Russert would agree on my Harvey assesment.  And that’s sad.  It also makes me wonder how we make our choices, for example how much time to spend on such things.
• As for Russert’s replacement, there’s a bit of a horse race going, on that point, just now. Personally, I can’t imagine that anyone currently on Staff at NBC could fill Russert’s shows. Russert, in short was a standout only insofar as nobody else at NBC was. Follow?
• This Obama “knife to a gun fight” comment; Has it occurred to any of you that had John McCain… or any Republican, for that matter, made such a comment, the left… and yes, the press… would have been all over the man for his ‘insensitivity’, given the Dems have been expending a lot of effort to position Obama as the Next JFK. ™? And BTW; Is this Obama’s version of ‘New Politics” that he promised us?
• Yes, I’ve seen the issue with the AP quotes. AP’s stepped in it, here with the schoolyard bully tactics that they called ‘policy’.  Damn it, they have no problems quoting entire posts from BitsBlog, and I can’t imagine the traffic we’ve driven their way over the years. The relationship seemed reasonably stable…   This stuff was supposed to have been settled by means of the law some time ago. “Fair Use”, you know.  AP wasn’t happy with that arrangement, apparently. Greed? I don’t know, but it would seem to explain rather a lot.  I am annoyed, but I am nothing if not reasonable.   I have yet to determine our response at BitsBlog. That response is dependant on them, at this point.  My instinct is to ban such quotes going forward from AP, in much the same way I ignored the New York Times as a source for a few years. If they chose, they will become a non-entity.   But I’m a reasonable guy, and I’ll wait to see this played out. Your move, AP.
• Next one under Obama’s Bus? Eric Holder. That’s my read on the matter, anyway.
• I’m watching the business out in Iowa, the last week or so, much of it by way of Art Smith, who lives in the middle of that mess. One thing that I’ve noticed that you may not have, is that we’re not seeing people waiting around for the federal government to do soemthing.  This observation is of a peice with the remarks I had on charity over the weekend.  These people do not consider the federal government to be the center of all things. And they’re doing it themselves.
• Did you see this blinking idiot, Alicia Keys? She is on record saying Gangsta Rap was an invention of White people, invented for the purpose of getting black people to kill each other off. Need I say that this sounds like Screwy Louie Farrahkkkahn? Need I say that she’s an Obama supporter?
• Sister Toldjah notes the Obama campaign’s efforts to smear conservatives, on a site called “Fight the smears”.  Funny, how that works. Apparently, Obama supporters have never even heard of Larry Johnson.

Evidently the New York Times must pay John Heilemann by the word, and gee I thought piece work was illegal.   Heileman attempts to explain “The Fall and Rise of Hillary Clinton:”

The victor and the vanquished are standing in a cluttered hallway backstage at the Washington Convention Center, conducting a conversation short and sweet-for one of them, at least. It’s just around noon on June 4, less than twelve hours after Barack Obama crossed the finish line ahead of Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination. Obama and Clinton are here to speak to the annual conference of the influential Jewish lobbying group AIPAC. I am here to meet Hillary for what will be the final interview of her campaign-and, apparently, to clock a little history in the making

While Heilemann gets paid by the word, I don’t.  Mrs. Clinton lost because B.J. Cinton’s coat tails can only only bear just so much dead weight.   Mrs. Clinton’s accomlishments a stellarly lacking.  For her much proclaimed thirty five years of experience, Mrs. Clinton had no accomplishment outside of managing bimbo eruptions.

Info copy:  Taylor Marsh.

?

The New York Times reports:

Tony Schwartz, a self-taught, sought-after and highly reclusive media consultant who helped create what is generally considered to be the most famous political ad to appear on television, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.

That would be LBJ’s Daisy ads.

I was about to say there was a certain level of irony his death occurring so deep into election time. Yet, since Bill Clinton, we’re ALWAYS in election mode… so, never mind.

From the LA Times this morning:

In 2006, John F. Kerry explained the Senate’s 77-23 passage of the Iraq war resolution this way: “We were misled. We were given evidence that was not true.” On the campaign trail, Hillary Rodham Clinton dodged blame for her pro-war vote by claiming that “the mistakes were made by this president, who misled this country and this Congress.”

Nearly every prominent Democrat in the country has repeated some version of this charge, and the notion that the Bush administration deceived the American people has become the accepted narrative of how we went to war.

Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House “manipulation” — that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction — administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.

In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it “did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments.” The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found “no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

Nothing short of amazing that Jim Kirchick, the author, still has a job at the Times. Better yet:

In 2003, top Senate Democrats — not just Rockefeller but also Carl Levin, Clinton, Kerry and others — sounded just as alarmist. Conveniently, this month’s report, titled “Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information,” includes only statements by the executive branch. Had it scrutinized public statements of Democrats on the Intelligence, Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees — who have access to the same intelligence information as the president and his chief advisors — many senators would be unable to distinguish their own words from what they today characterize as warmongering.

Wll, yes, there is that. And these are points we’ve been making here since that time.  Not that these facts are going to put a dent in Democrat ranting.  Consider that the chief purvayor of Democrat rants, Barrack Obama has the nomination based on an accomplishment list so thin as to be laughable, and you begin to understand that facts bother Democrats not at all; Facts are by no means what Democrats base their bumper-sticker positions in.

 As an example: Boortz, today:

Have you seen this delicious little quote from Pennsylvania Democrat Congressman Paul Kanjorski? Even better, watch the video.Why it would seem that Mr. Kanjorski is admitting that the Democrats lied about what was going on in Iraq during the 2006 mid-term elections? Here’s his quote:

“I’ll tell you my impression. We really in this last election, when I say we … the Democrats … that if we won the Congressional elections we could stop the war. Now anybody was a good student of government would know that wasn’t true. But you know … the temptation to want to win back the Congress … we sort of stretched the facts, and the people ate it up.”

How nice.

Ain’t it real.

More; Memeorandum

I don’t envy Steve Capus’president of NBC News task. .   Capua has a big set set of shoes to fill, no qualified replacenents on salary and no time to lose.    This is election season and Capus needs to fill the moderator chair on Meet the Press.

Gary Levin,  Useless Toady:

[Iim] Russert also proved a reliable balance, aggressively questioning political figures of both parties in a TV-news climate increasingly populated by opinionated journalist/commentators. “He was one of the last remaining honest purveyors of television news without having an attitude,” Grossman says

Capus should shun star power, for work ethic.  Find a reliable, honest, balanced newsman somewhere, any where.   Raid Cleveland if need be.

Addendum:(Bit) I suspect and suppose some raiding of some other entity will be needful. As I explain in tonight’s Ramble,  I am unconvinced anyone currently on staff at NBC can do the job.

From the Daily Mail:

George Orwell once wrote that politics was closely related to social identity. ‘One sometimes gets the impression,’ he wrote in The Road To Wigan Pier, ‘that the mere words socialism and communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, nature-cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England’.

Orwell was making an observation. But today a whole body of academic research shows he was correct: your politics influence the manner in which you live your life. And the news is not so good for those on the political Left.

There is plenty of data that shows that Right-wingers are happier, more generous to charities, less likely to commit suicide – and even hug their children more than those on the Left.

This is a shock to me not at all, except possibly that someone did get charged under hate crime laws for printing it in what’s left of the UK.  The writer, Peter Schweizer, continues from there:

In the Sixties, we saw the beginning of a narcissism and self-absorption that gripped the Left and has not let go.

The full-scale embrace of the importance of self-awareness, self-discovery and being ‘true’ to oneself, along with the idea that the State should care for the less fortunate, has created a swathe of Left-wing people who want to outsource their obligations to others.

Outsource it to where? Why, to government of course. The left feels it’s doing it’s part if they’re paying into a system ostensibly designed to maintain the poor at a minimum standard of living and solve all their problems. The fact that the government systems the left think so highly of does not do so, matters not at all. Don’t bother the left with mere facts.

The statistics I base this on come from the General Social Survey, America’s premier social research database, but they are just as relevant to the UK, as I believe political belief systems drive one’s attitudes, regardless of where you happen to live.

Those surveyed were asked: ‘Is it your obligation to care for a seriously injured/ill spouse or parent, or should you give care only if you really want to?’ Of those describing themselves as ‘conservative’, 71 per cent said it was. Only 46 per cent of those on the Left agreed.

To the question: ‘Do you get happiness by putting someone else’s happiness ahead of your own?’, 55 per cent of those who said they were ‘very conservative’ said Yes, compared with 20 per cent of those who were ‘very liberal’.

It’s been my experience that conservatives like to talk about things outside of themselves while progressives like to discuss themselves: how they are feeling and what their desires are. That might make for a good therapy session but it’s not much fun over a long dinner.

There’s a lot more of course, and I will advise you to go and RTWT.

But a few more points for us to bounce off of:

Studies also indicate that those on the Left are less likely to give to charity or to volunteer their time to charity

Well, why should THEY get involved? After all, there’s government for that kind of thing.

Uber-progressive Barbra Streisand gives lots of money to charity but the largest recipients are not organisations that feed the hungry – the cash goes to advocacy organisations such as The Bill Clinton Foundation.

Similarly, Michael Moore gives to film festivals and elite cultural institutions such as the Lincoln Center – but barely a penny goes to needy people.

The ideas of the left surrounding charity are completely nihilist. Supporting the poor and the needy is government work, to the left. Charity, they view not as supporting non-government engines that actually help the poor, but rather to these, charity is supporting political groups that support their own worldview. As we’ve pointed out often enough previously in these spaces, government isn’t charity, it is force.

Stossel over at Townhall said recently:

But the idea that liberals give more is a myth. Of the top 25 states where people give an above-average percentage of their income, all but one (Maryland) were red — conservative — states in the last presidential election.

“When you look at the data,” says Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks, “it turns out the conservatives give about 30 percent more. And incidentally, conservative-headed families make slightly less money.”

Researching his book, “Who Really Cares” , Brooks found that the conservative/liberal difference goes beyond money:

“The people who give one thing tend to be the people who give everything in America. You find that people who believe it’s the government’s job to make incomes more equal, are far less likely to give their money away.”

Conservatives are even 18 percent more likely to donate blood.

Pretty much confirms what Schweizer says, doesn’t it? And Brooks, for that matter:

You find that people who believe it’s the government’s job to make incomes more equal, are far less likely to give their money away.

Ann Coulter gives us a whuge example of what we’re talking about::

“George Soros is worth $7 billion! Couldn’t he get by on, say, $1 billion and donate the rest to the tsunami victims? If gun owners have to explain why they ‘need’ a so-called ‘assault rifle,’ shouldn’t Soros have to explain why he ‘needs’ $7 billion? Last year, Soros announced that the central focus of his life would be removing Bush from office. Would that Soros could refocus that energy on alleviating the suffering of tsunami victims”

If Soros’ chairty given came up as far as 10% of his poliical activism, and his current meddling in the oil markets, think it might have made an actual dent in poverty? But where does Soros, other than the above mentyioned places, spend his money? Front magazine points out one such place, and it’s one that at the time was identified closely with John Kerry and his wife.  Front Page said at the time:

“The Foundation replaced the 9/11 Fund with the “Democratic Justice Fund,” which was established with the aid of George Soros’ Open Society Institute. (Currency speculator and pro-drug advocate Soros is, like Teresa Heinz Kerry, a major contributor to Tides, having donated more than $7 million.) The “Democratic Justice Fund” seeks to ease restrictions on Muslim immigration to the United States, particularly from countries designated by the State Department as terrorist nations.

Tides has also given grant money to the Council for American Islamic Relations. Ostensibly a Muslim civil rights group, CAIR is in fact one of the leading anti-anti-terrorism organizations within the Wahhabi Lobby, with links to Hamas. CAIR regularly opposes and demonizes American efforts to fight terrorism, claiming, for instance, that Homeland Security measures are responsible for an undocumented surge in ‘hate crimes’.”

Says the article:

“CAIR officials have reason to fight Bush’s anti-terrorism measures: all too many CAIR officials are on the record supporting terrorism. CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad openly stated in 1994, “I am a supporter of the Hamas movement.” Community Affairs Director Bassem K. Khafagi has been arrested for visa and bank fraud. Randall Royer, a Communications Specialist and Civil Rights Coordinator at CAIR, was arrested along with a group of Islamic radicals in Virginia for allegedly planning jihad. CAIR has defended terrorist “charities” shut down by the Bush administration. Every few months some CAIR campus official is arrested for aiding and abetting terrorism.”

Now that we’ve got a handle on how low the left can go in it’s ‘charity’, let’s examine once again, the principles involved with real chairty: As a Christian, I see the line drawn rather clearly that we are under a scripturally ordained responsibility… we as individuals….not the government. Not even as one church or another. As individuals. Christ himself said:

” Give unto Ceasar that which is Ceasar’s and give unto God, that which is God’s.”

There’s a rather thick line being drawn between charity and government. Confiscation, is not charity, and it is certainly not the act of an individual. Charity is the realm of God, and the individual….not of government….  Charity is people taking personal responsibility to helping their fellow man… not dumping it into the arms of government. The basics apply here…the government taking my money and spending it on someone else… even someone who arguably needs it, does not constitute ‘Charity‘. Then again, the left isn’t about charity, and actually helping people. Peter Schweizer from the mail comments again:

Progressives see economic equality as the highest form of social justice, so they have become obsessed with questions of income inequality.

Can there be any surprise then that those on the Left tend to be more envious and jealous of successful people? That’s what studies indicate.

Now, you have a fair idea what Barack Obama is talking about when he talks about using taxation not for the purpose of funding the government, but for the purpose of ‘fairness’.  Now we see why the next few months of Democrat sales pitches is going to surround what amounts to class war rhetoric, as the far left has always done.

Bit notes: Yet another father’s day is upon us. In looking over some of the stuff I’ve written in the past, I find that the thoughts and emotions that caused me to write this ai few years ago, have not changed in the last, except perhaps that they’re layered with a bit of understanding that I didn’t have in previous years.  Far from changing my perspective, though, I find those years have done nothing but confirm what I wrote years ago:

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I’ve always considered it something of a cruel, ironic joke, that he should have passed on, so close in the rolling year, to the day we’ve come to know as “Father’s day”… A hair longer than a week before it. There seems no particular significance to the relationships between the dates, but there’s no denying their closeness has always left me vaguely discomforted for reasons I’ve never fully worked out. Anyway;

I’ve come to understand quite a bit about my father in the last 15 years, or so. Oddly, most of my understanding came after he’d died a few years ago, and most of the revelations have been as a result of my having lived life. He’s never far from my thoughts, and so as life events unfold, I always have his guidance nearby to lean on, and his guideposts to measure by. And, as I go though this process, I’m leaning more about both who I am, and who he was.

And, oh boy has a lot ever happened since his death. Think about the changes in the last five years, in your own life. I suppose it could be fairly said that nothing has happened to me, though, that he hadn’t prepared me for. The funny part is, I didn’t know I was being prepared for it, at the time. I think he didn’t know what the future would bring, either. All he could do is impart the basic values, and hope I was able to apply them correctly. Apparently I have, for the most part.

What amazes me is how well I can hear his voice now that he’s passed on; in many ways, better than I ever could while he was alive. Those of you who have lost a parent will understand what I’m saying, here, I think. It is yet another cruel irony, I guess, that his voice seems to ring louder in my ears, in my head, now that he’s gone…. This is particularly true when value judgments come up. I suspect this is as it should be… Those being his most important lessons… But I still marvel at it all.

I also, within the last several years, find myself dimly aware that I’ve managed to pick up some of the traits he had, without trying. These are not things I’d picked up consciously… In fact, when I was seventeen, I think I might have made the choice to avoid these traits. Now at nearly three times that age, I have begun to regard adopting these things as the natural progression… That all is as it should be.

Dad was a product of his times. This is a crucial point to me of late, is the understanding of that one fact, because I still catch myself judging how I’m doing as a father, with my two boys, using his methods, and his… (what I will call for simplicity, though I mean nothing so flippant)… Style points…. As guideposts… And usually, in my estimation, coming up well short of that ideal in the judgment. It’s taken me quite a while… More time than most, I tend to think… To understand that those style points are nigh on useless given the difference between the times in which we live now, and the times then… That I have to look deeper than this. It’s something like allowing for inflation in an adjusted income figure over time, one adjusts the perception through for the times of each of us, there are more traits we share than we don’t.

I am reminded of this, today more than most days, as my two boys spend their day trying to make me feel special. I can see myself doing this at their age, and I marvel as history repeats itself. They tell me “Happy Father’s Day!” and mean it, and other than “thank you” (and a hug) I find myself unsure how to respond.

If you really want to know the truth, I’ve never been fully comfortable in the role of ‘father’, because I’m never sure I can fill the role I knew as father… Being, inside, the same scared- to- death twelve year old kid I was all those years ago. In thinking on this, I guess we, none of us, ever really grow up to the point where that small scared child is ever completely silent. We’d better hope not, anyway… That twelve year old kid is needed to keep us from falling into the Scrooge-like insanity, I think… as I wrote last Christmas. Still, we try to balance that twelve year old inside us with reality… A hellish task I don’t wish on anyone, but one we all face, I think.

An old Moody Blues tune comes into my mind, unbidden. It seems to speak to this situation rather clearly.

All my life, I
Never really knew me
’till today
Now, I know why;
I’m just another step
Along the way

…

I don’t know what I’m searching for
I never have opened the door,
Tomorrow might find me at last,
Turning my back on the past,
But, time will tell, of stars that fell,
A million years ago.
Memories can never take you back, home, sweet home.
You can never go home anymore.

That’s the reality that twelve year old inside us, doesn’t want to hear. But… And I don’t care if you’re a hundred and five years old; that twelve year old is still inside us, and still of a mindset that he’s waiting for his adult life to begin, and that mindset dims our vision to the reality that our adult life has ALREADY, long past begun. In many ways, I finally see this is a conflict we play out internally, all our lives. Implicit in that understanding, however, is the recognition that, for all that I held him to be when I was a child, Dad still had that twelve year old in HIM, too. Like the milestone of five years gone… Like the waking up in the morning, through the aches and pains and understanding that the grey-bearded guy in the bathroom mirror really IS me…it’s a startling discovery.

Its amazing, if you think on it for very long… All our childhood, we champ at the bit like race horses spoiling for a race to get started. Even at the very young ages, we yearn for adulthood…(“I’ll do it MYSELF, Daddy…”) When we finally do get to adulthood, we end up spending a lot of our young adult lives in this in-between stage, not fully understanding that the green flag has dropped, the race is on, and the turtle’s already got a 30 length lead, Mister Rabbit… And some of us never do make it beyond this stage at all, on ANY level.

It’s what Hayward of the Moodies was talking about in that same song I quoted before;

I lie awake for hours, I’m just waiting for the sign

When the journey we are making has begun,
Don’t deny the feeling that is stealing through your heart,
Every happy ending needs to have a start.

Perhaps I now have a working definition of a mid-life crisis; the feeling that I need to get going on things, because I’m running out of time.

Such are my thoughts this Father’s day.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. This is me saying “I get it, now… at least part of it… better than I did. We were more alike than I knew.”, and it’s my Father’s day gift. More of you survives than either of us knew… and is with me every day.

And yet, I miss you.

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It’s interesting, and a little disturbing, that the words I wrote years ago, still right true today. perhaps there is something of greater prominence there, then I was aware of, what I wrote those words originally a couple of years back. Given the feedback I received when I first posted it back in 2005 perhaps there something more in terms of universality, as well.