Bug Slapping, And Other in House Matters

• I finally… finally…slapped that nasty little bug in the comments section. Been a while since I’ve had the programmer’s hat on. The bug in case you’d not noticed, was the oddball time display on each comment. Bad call to the database. It’s been fixed.
• And yes, that means I’ll be keeping this design for a while, yet, though I may yet make some cosmetic changes. All the ones I like the look of, I’ve found lacking, in how they handle photos and paragraph blocking, as well as quotes and photos. I like the way this design deals with it enough that I’ll put up with the smaller issues it for now.
• Yes, Fersboo is alive. We’ve had two sightings of him recently. (Kidding, of course) We’re happy to hear from him, though.
• I’m looking at the latest WordPress update, for installation sometime over this next weekend. I’m a little leery of the update because of bug reports I’m hearing… mostly about how it screws up the Sitemap plugin I’m using. I don’t want to do without that. Except for a short outage, you shouldn’t notice anything, if I do my job correctly.
• We’re maintaining a few hundred visitors at day, of late… perhaps 20 either side of 300 hits per day, even on weekends. Interestingly, the real rise in readers has been on the weekend, to get us to that level… weekends have been a slow time for us, until now. We’re encouraged. For a while, there, we had 4000 hpd, from the Michelle Malkin link… and Red State, and Chris Hendrix and Cold Fury, and so on. My hat is tipped for them. Interestingly enough, we’re not getting a great deal of traffic directly from those sites, anymore. Where we’re getting it, is from people coming directly in. In other words, they were not referred by some other site. It looks likely we’ve become a a daily read, for a lot of new folks. As I say, we are encouraged.
• I should mention we have a huge increase in traffic coming from Memeorandum. After not getting anything from there for a while, it’s a nice change.
• I’ve got the site backup automated, now. I still have to manually trip the thing, but it does it all by itself after that. (shrug) I don’t know. I guess I just like the idea of watching the thing go through, and make sure manually that it’s getting everything it needs to. Even after full site crash, won’t take is longer than twenty minutes to restore from the files I have online, anymore. One backup at the web server, and a week’s worth stored on my big file server here at Casa de Bit.
• The sharper among you will have noticed that there’s an awful lot of external traffic coming in on the block of links just below the masthead. The headlines link is interesting, but doesn’t really serve the purpose to my satisfaction. The quality of the content leaves something to be desired, in terms of a fit for this place. Frankly, that’s going to be replaced with something that does a little better. I’m still looking at other sources. Consider what’s up there a trial run and a confirmation of concept. The “This Day in History” link and the “Today’s Birthday” link, however, will be staying. We’ve had good feedback on them already. Also, I’ve added Chris Muir’s Day by Day cartoon up there. I really wanted Chris added to the front page, but graphically I don’t see how to do that in this theme. I’m hoping the Chris doesn’t mind being shuffled to page two. I’ll be adding more stuff, up there, as I get used to the idea of manipulating that section. For one thing, I’ve had a re-code of some of it, to match some of the modifications that I made when I originally set this site up.
• Update: I’ve added a color variation for nested block quotes, for reading clarity in response to a reader’s request

Andrew “Excitable”  Sullivan rolls out the welcome mat:

 I don’t think I qualify as a Neo-Nazi or a Code Pink activist. Full Wired story here. But here’s a simple message to Ron Paul supporters. You’re welcome here. The Dish believes in expanding the range of debate among conservatives, not crushing it. And any cursory look at the degenerate state of American conservatism would not lead you to think your problem is too much diversity of opinion

I do believe that the Ron Paul supporters might improve the quality of discusssion over at the Dish.    We do what we can to help.

ANP REPEL TALIBAN ATTACK ON CHECKPOINT

Posted: 25 Oct 2007 05:50 AM CDT

ANP REPEL TALIBAN ATTACK ON CHECKPOINT

By way of the Doc Weasel Blog, we note yet another example of the arrogance of the mainstream media.  I’m not even gonna say anything about this one.  I’m just gonna link it, and let it be.  That’s all this one needs, trust me.

BBCT: Memeorandum 

I have been saying for years that the fight over health care and who runs it was a financial battle.  No, not a financial battle for the “little guy”.  Just a couple of big ones. Michelle Malkin reports on one such situation today:

The St. Petersburg Times reports on an FBI raid of WellCare, a shady Medicare insurer…initially funded by far Left billionaire George Soros and run by one of his acolytes:

For the past two years, analysts have been asking how fast-growing WellCare Health Plans of Tampa has been able to make so much money running government health plans for the poor and elderly. Now government investigators may be asking the same thing.

On a rainy Wednesday morning, more than 200 federal and state agents swarmed WellCare’s campus on Henderson Road in Tampa, forcing employees onto the sidewalk and into their cars.

Steven Meitzen, 51, who arrived at WellCare about 9:40 a.m. for a job interview, said he was initially told it was a bomb scare. “Later on, I talked to someone who said the FBI had a subpoena and were looking for records,” he said.

Wellcare serves Medicare and Medicaid customers-more than 350,000 seniors in Florida alone. The stock fell yesterday on news of the raid. Seems stories have been floating around for a while about the company enrolling dead people and such:

Thomas Carroll, analyst with Stifel Nicolaus in Baltimore, called the raid “ominous” and downgraded WellCare shares to “sell” from “hold” in a note to clients. Contacts within the company said BlackBerries, computers and files were seized from corporate, marketing and human resources offices, according to Carroll.

Carroll suspects the raid is potentially the result of a lawsuit in which an employee brought a matter to the attention of authorities.

“When the FBI and HHS raid a health care company, the outlook on earnings, legal proceedings and the entire operations of the company can be questioned,” Carroll said.

WellCare’s business practices have come under increased criticism over the past several months. Last spring, the company said independent sales agents in Georgia enrolled dead people in Medicare plans. In May and June, WellCare representatives appeared along with other insurance executives at hearings in the Senate and House into aggressive Medicare marketing practices. WellCare and six other insurers subsequently agreed to a temporary halt in marketing one type of Medicare plan, while promising to initiate consumer safeguards. In August, however, Medicare cited WellCare once again for violating several provisions of its Medicare contract, including sales practices.

WellCare, which had earnings of $139.2-million in 2006, gets all of its nearly $4-billion in revenues from state or federal governments.

WellCare’s PAC has donated considerable money to Republicans. But the company took off with a generous helping hand from George Soros:

WellCare was a slow-growing Florida company until 1992 when its owner, Dr. Kiran Patel, sold it to a New York investment group led by financier George Soros. The bankers hired Todd Farha, an aggressive Harvard MBA, to transform the company. Under his leadership, WellCare’s earnings have increased eight-fold and the company’s investors and executives like Farha have profited handsomely from appreciation in its stock.

Since the democrats are pushing for governmental health care, and since the democrats are backed by Soros, we’ve come again to a question I asked earlier today; why is it that the mainstream press isn’t picking up on this stuff?

Government health care, in the end, is nothing more than a plan to make money for George Soros and his buddies.   The American people are being suckered. I’m willing to bet the national media doesn’t touch this one.  Just like they didn’t touch the scandal at The New Republic. 

Memorandum has more.

I’m just curious;

Can it be that the reason that the legality of the “candidacy” of Stephen Colbert for the presidency of these United States is being challenged is because of the embarrassment involved with the concept of him actually polling better than the odds on favorite for the vice presidential spot, Bill Richardson?

Inquiring minds, and all that.

Think about it; Pat Paulsen made a name for himself by running every four years.  Nobody challenged him and his right to do so.  Only difference is, people are taking Colbert more seriously than they are the Democratic party candidates.  That’s never happened before. Paulsen, to my memory never showed up on the polls.  Colbert is, and is doing better than the self-knighted princes of the Democrat party.That’s got to be ticking somebody off.

And why would he be pulling better numbers than Richardson?  Can it be that the people polled see him as better representing their interests than the bald-faced political opportunist that Richardson has turned out to be?

Captain Ed says:

Those darn Puritans in New York just can’t let anyone have fun, even middle-school students. Can you imagine that people might have considered having strippers as volunteers at a Halloween celebration for Middle School 51 inappropriate? Why, they even volunteered for a task for which they have extensive experience:

The head of New York’s Puppetry Art Theatre uninvited a group of strippers from an upcoming school event in order to avoid any undue controversy.Timothy Young said that he decided to retract the erotic dancers’ invitations to the Haunted Halloween Carnival Benefit due to worries that New York’s Middle School 51 would cancel the annual event, the New York Daily News reported Wednesday. …

The strippers had volunteered to participate in the special holiday event, that includes a costume giveaway and a pizza party.

Costume giveaways?  Heck, that’s their specialty!  (via Power Line)

All I can say is;

Welcome to the People’s Republic of New York.

Interesting stuff the Cheerful Iconoclast:

Glen Reynolds links to this Christian Science Monitor article by Craig Franklin about the Jena 6 case. Franklin is a local journalist who has covered the case for the local paper, and his article is a damning indictment of the media’s coverage:

The media got most of the basics wrong. In fact, I have never before witnessed such a disgrace in professional journalism. Myths replaced facts, and journalists abdicated their solemn duty to investigate every claim because they were seduced by a powerfully appealing but false narrative of racial injustice.

In fact, Franklin contends that nearly every aspect of the popular narrative is wrong. He goes through it one-by-one. The whites-only tree wasn’t really whites only. The nooses hung on the tree were aimed not at black students but instead at members of the school’s rodeo team. The District Attorney never threatened black students. Robert Bailey was punched in the face, not hit with a beer bottle, as he subesequently claimed. (True to form, Newsweek embelished this to his being pelted with beer bottles.) Bailey and his friends did indeed jump a white guy at a convenience store and steal his shotgun. And, finally, Mychall Bell really did hit Justin Barker from behind, and he really was stomped upon by a mob of black students.

Gosh, who could have predicted that the media narrative would turn out to be a bit overstated?  Me, maybe?  In fact, my first post on the topic, back on September 7, was a call for skepticism about the media narrative. I hate to say “I told you so, but . . .” OK, who am I kidding. I LOVE to say I told you so.

Has anyone noticed any large retraction going on as regards the story?  Neither have I.

And here, again, we come to the part where I say:

” Once again, we see the press jumping in where the story matches the Liberal narrative, and their silence when it does not.”

Almost like there was something of a pattern, developing here.

Ok we have beat back the ‘rat’s latest attempt at amnesy.  Yet this is one battle, a Gettysburg, and not a surrender, Appomattox.

Fred Thompson shows that Dick Durbin’s DREAM act was really a nightmare:

After several false starts Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) continues to push the DREAM Act. What is the DREAM Act? A nightmare.

The act would allow any illegal immigrant who entered the country before the age of 16 to receive conditional residency, which could then be converted to a non-conditional residency. These illegal immigrants can apply for this form of amnesty so long as they are under 30 and they weren’t older than 16 when they came to the country. And, of course, there is no way of proving when they illegally entered our country. After all, they are undocumented. Aliens would qualify even if they received and ignored a removal order if that order was received before they were 16.

What is so damn hard about the word illegal for Durbin to understand?

Hat tip: John Hawkins, Conservative Grapevine.

(Bit comments: given how the Democrats have been systematically weakening the voting requirements over the last few years, these people constitute voters to Durbin.)

The L.A. Times this morning is reporting we’re dealing with cases of arson :

Amid worries of new blazes adding to the firestorm already afflicting the region, a man in Hesperia has been arrested on suspicion of arson, and police reported shooting and killing another arson suspect after chasing him out of scrub behind Cal State San Bernardino.

Law enforcement officials said today that they didn’t know whether either of the men had started any of the more than a dozen large fires that have devastated Southern California in recent days, including the nearby Lake Arrowhead blaze. The brush fire in Hesperia was quickly extinguished by residents.

Investigators have said that at least two of the huge wildfires, one in Orange County and the other in Temecula, were the work of arsonists.

Arsonists, generally fall into two categories:

1. They get their jollies by setting fires.
2. They get paid for setting fires.

(Photo: Dale Franks, Q&O)
What if there was a concerted effort afoot to make the current administration look bad?  Who would gain by this?  Possibly, a large number of currently illegal immigrants, perhaps?  Forgive me for saying so, but I’ve noticed an interesting dearth of fires south of the Mexican border.  Further, I’ve noticed that a good deal of those fires are within spitting distance of that same border. Further, they have less in the way of firefighting equipment south of the border, then do we.  Yet in looking at the pictures provided us by NASA this morning, which were taken from the space shuttle, it seems clear that these fires are only happening north of the border.

Then we have the press, who has been more than willing to report complaints that the whole thing was President Bush’s fault that we didn’t have the thing under control, and that they started in the first place. they have also been notably reluctant to report that the deployment of the national guard into the vicinity of those fires was not in the least affected by the number of soldiers that we currently have in Iraq.  Of course, it’s the environmental policy, it’s Iraq, you know the drill.  Normally, the left is fairly knee jerk -ish about playing such games when these events come along anyway.  It’s despicable, but there it is.  But this time, there seemed to me a level of coordination that we haven’t seen for a long time.  Almost as if this was planned this way.

This is pure speculation, mind, but it fits the events rather nicely.  And it would explain quite a bit.  And no, I would not put it beneath the opponents of the president.  Not for one split second.

I think it amazing that this Scott Beauchamp story has been met with such stony silence from the mainstream media.  It has only been twelve hours now or so since the story came out that documents and transcripts of phone conversations had been leaked to the web.  Granted, that’s a fairly short period of time , but how is it that the press has not gone into “wall to wall” mode?

Matter of fact, Howard Kurtz ends up being the biggest representative of the mainstream media to show up on my radar commenting on this subject to date.  And, yes, Goldfarb over at The Weekly Standard has been doing superhuman work.  But hardly anybody else has dared to touch the subject, from within the confines of the mainstream media.  Even the supposedly right wing stalwart of Fox news has been silent on this subject.

The question I have, obviously, is why.  Look; it’s not all that difficult a story to write up if a bunch of people in Pajamas can do it.  If every single large player in blogdom has at least caught enough of the gist of this story to comment on it, it’s not all that difficult for the average reader to understand.  So why hasn’t the mainstream press touched this story?

I suspect , though I cannot prove, that the biggest issue the mainstream press has with covering this particular story is that if represents an indictment against the mainstream media as a whole, not just The New Republic, since so many of the MSM jumped on board with this Beauchamp thing at it’s onset. Both the new Republic and the remainder of the mainstream media pride themselves on their fact checking.  We now see the accuracy of that claim. I suppose I can understand keeping silent and hoping the whole thing will go way, but that’s not their mandate.  That’s not their job.  Their job is to disseminate the news, accurately.  Without bias.  Their silence constitutes a failure in that task, of massive proportions.

I found particularly interesting the comments of Marc Steyn in National Review’s The Corner, this morning:

It has now been revealed that (a) Beauchamp declined to stand by his story, and (b) the editors spoke with him and knew this weeks ago. Presumably The New Republic‘s readers are relatively relaxed about the editors colluding in slandering the troops at a time of war: only uptight squares get hung up on that sort of thing. But they ought surely to be concerned at the abuse of trust perpetrated by the magazine against its own readers.

(Emph is mine)

Once again, we see the press jumping in where the story matches the Liberal narrative, and their silence when it does not.

I’m not sure the readers of The New Republic would view the paper’s actions as a mismanagement of trust.  After all, the paper was giving the readers what they wanted; a story which matched the narrative, that they want so very badly to believe in.  The facts, are never the issue to liberals, so long as the lean of the story is correct…. to the left.

Still, Steyn is quite correct here;

The New Republic is currently owned by my old friends and compatriots, the Asper family. Back when I toiled for the company in Canada, David Asper publicly told one of his own newspapers to “put up or shut up”. He should have said the same months ago when The New Republic was bragging about its commitment to rigorous and open investigation of the matter. The magazine is unable to “put up”, so it has shut up, and hopes that its silence will help the story die in the shadows. Beauchamp’s 15 minutes are up. The issue now is the magazine’s conduct, and the Aspers should recognize that and act accordingly.

I think, however, that it goes beyond this.

Given the silence of the mainstream media surrounding this story, it would appear that they are complicit in the silence of The New Republic, with their own silence.  We’ve been hearing from the mainstream media for years and years about how bloggers don’t have the training required to be unbiased. Etc Etc Etc ad nauseum.

Explain to me, please, what, exactly, other than bias drives their silence on the Beauchamp story. I’d really like to know.

Afterthoughts:

I wish I had thought of this, when I was originally writing this piece, but I may as well add it here;

We were told that the press was supposed to be the balance of power that would protect us against abuse.  What happens when the press is the abuser, as in this case?  Clearly, none of the rest of the mainstream media is interested in reporting this as an abuse of trust has Steyn calls it… seemingly for fear of having their own abuses outed.  Ideally, the press was supposed to be objective enough to report on its own abuses.  We see now, that idea is folly.  Perhaps that’s why they were complaining so loudly about online sources, such as this one?

Who’s in Charge? “Dream Act” Fails, Southwick Wins

Talk Left.

Jonah Goldberg:

Via H&R, we learn that The Guardian is going to offer an American version of its online operation edited by Michael Tomasky.

He’s going to attempt to bring a Brit POV about America, to America.

I dunno. I guess I don’t have a whole bunch to say about this.  I’m not overly excited about it frankly…. I’m not really convinced a Brit POV of the US will be worth much, frankly, given their political baseline since Lady Thatcher left us… I just wanted to make use of this graphic I’ve been sitting on, forever. Click on the thing… that’s the Guardian the Rodent is reading.

It’s originally from pip.rubberfeet.org, which is quite the site for this kind of thing, or used to be… the site is down, for some reason.

COALITION FORCES DISRUPT BAGHDAD CAR-BOMBING NETWORK; THREE DETAINED

Posted: 23 Oct 2007 07:45 AM CDT

COALITION FORCES DISRUPT BAGHDAD CAR-BOMBING NETWORK; THREE DETAINED

Allah says, under a headline reading:

Wildfire victims getting what’s coming to them, says Carlin

No need for grandiose outrage here. He’s been saying stuff like this for decades. In fact it’s a core part of his act, which is why he’s allowed to skate. I offer the clip not as fodder for indignation but because it’s a nice little window into Carlin’s persona: the bitter hippie, broken-hearted by the failure of the 60s, whose idealism has since decayed into a cynicism so black and weary that revanchist, schadenfreudean sentiments like this now escape his lips without the slightest stutter. And of course it’s all paired with the most touchy feely, cringemaking New Age back-to-the-land nonsense about being “in balance with nature” the way the Indians are. Thus the paradox of the malignant self-styled humanist: We need to join hands and tap into the spiritual creatures within — and if we don’t, then he hopes your house burns down.

Allah then proceeds to offer up a couple of clips to the point.

The only outstanding question about all of this, to my mind, is where are all the people who were complaining so loudly about Glenn Beck, last night?

Addendum: (David L)

I watched a bit televisiion coverage of the fires this morning, and it strikes me if you took out Carlin’s idea that the victims somehow deserved it, the old coot was not too far wrong.  They built in areas with a well known fire risk.  Fire is part of the lifecyle of a forest.  Futher, they should known that our fire management efforts have been inept for what twenty years.

So these victim were like the other idiots that build homes in flood plains or on the ocean front.  They are taking on a known risk.  It should not be my job as a taxpayer to bail out fools who build where no sane person should.

Carlin went too far, but he had the right idea.

Addendum II : (Bit)

I quite agree.  I just wanted to see if one of the regular readers year was going to be quite so stupid as I thought he was.  And, he was.