3
POPS'Twas The Night Before Obamacare' With their little old driver, so wan and enfeebled, It had to be the Senate Majority Leader. Slicker than weasels his minions they came Harry coughed and he mumbled and called them by name: “Now Schumer! Now Boxer! Now Baucus and Tester! On Burris, on Durbin! On Franken and Specter! Let’s cover abortions, illegals and make A giant bureaucracy the people’s money to take. With arm-twisting and goodies they moved t’ward their goal To find 60 Senators and purchase their souls. So down to their chambers the fuglemen rallied This white Christmas Eve to determine the tally. And then in a hissing we heard on the floor, More lies and dissembling than ever before, As I pressed the remote and studied the screen At the podium appeared Harry Reid’s pallid mien. He sagged ‘neath the currency spilling from each Pocket and sleeve as he reached To dispense all the largesse in hand To every vote-bringer from all over the land.
2
POPSShe's in the kitchen: a love affair Includes a few recipes for bacon lovers and a link to the eat cheap on $30 food project @ running with tweezers. Collard greens and buttermilk biscuits ... yumm. Enjoy. :)
3
POPSClause 11 ..WAKE UP PEOPLE! On December 16, it was reported by the Financial Times that China has imposed additional restrictions on the internet. People registering a domain name in China will have to present a company seal and a business license, the China Internet Network Information Center, a government-backed body, said in a statement on Monday. “Officials said the measure was part of a campaign to rein in pornographic content, but bloggers and internet activists interpreted it as a broader attempt to enforce internet censorship more heavily,” writes Kathrin Hille.
3
POPSIs Keith Briffa The Climategate Whistleblower?
I am of the opinion Climategate is the result of someone deep in the inner circle of the climate movement who decided to take a stand against the lies and deceptions. Someone who looked at the corruption of data and the suborning of the scientific method and decided they could no longer go along with ‘hockey team’ (as the crew at the epicenter of this scandal are known). Someone who had to turn in their colleagues, but couldn’t do it out in the open. I originally thought Keith Briffa was one of the top masterminds of the alarmist mythology, a mythology built up by a core of zealots who believed so hard in their AGW hypothesis that they ended up doing whatever it took to make the data show what they wanted to see. Because Briffa’s Yamal series, with its magically selected set of trees, was the only data series to survive the destruction of Micheal Mann’s fictional hockey stick graphs I assumed Briffa was a willing and active force in the charade of AGW.
6
POPS"No Berlusconi Day" They promptly opened a Facebook group under this header: SALVIAMO L'ITALIA, SALVIAMO LA DEMOCRAZIA. BERLUSCONI DIMETTITI. LET'S SAVE ITALY. LET'S SAVE DEMOCRACY. BERLUSCONI STEP DOWN. Saturday, December 5 was designated “No Berlusconi Day (NBD)”. The campaign spread quickly on the Internet with videos, blogs, and tweets, as well as offline, through word of mouth. In little more than a month over 280,000 people pledged to host a public event on “No Berlusconi Day” via the main Facebook group, with groups formed in many cities in Italy and around the world, including San Francisco and Sacramento (California), Ottawa and Montreal (Canada), Buenos Aires (Argentina), London, Madrid, Vienna, and Istanbul - where local rallies will be held on the same day.
8
POPSUnconfirmed: Thousands Under Quarantine in Ukraine Have Been Killed by Vaccines Reports have come in of pneunomic plague following unusual aircraft activity. Doctors are reported to have been told that they cannot write down pneumonic plague as a cause of death and must write down swine flu. Nevertheless, there is complete media blackout about it except some comments I tried to verify this info, my cousin called friends in Drohobycz (also Western Ukraine) - there is nothing abnormal there. So it could be a provocation or to run false stories. Of course there is a chance that only small part of the region is affected, maybe they tried there untested vaccine and these are the results. Nevertheless, there is complete media blackout about it except some comments in my blog which for already 2 weeks confirm the fact of "thousands of victims". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtMznUZIt00
6
POPSA media orgy of rumors, speculation and falsehoods
It's worth focusing on what the major media did last night, and one can use the Hot Air compilation to examine that. I understand that in the early stages of significant and complex news stories, it's to be expected that journalists will have incomplete and even inaccurate information. It's unreasonable to expect them to avoid errors entirely. The inherently confusing nature of a mass shooting like this, combined with the need to rely on second-hand or otherwise unreliable sources (including, sometimes, official ones), will mean that even conscientious reporters end up with inaccurate information in cases like this. That's all understandable and inevitable. But shouldn't there be some standards governing what gets reported and what is held back? Particularly in a case like this -- which, for obvious reasons, has the potential to be quite inflammatory on a number of levels -- having the major media "report" completely false assertions as fact can be quite harmful. It's often th
2
POPS 5 Pregnancy Myths You Never Knew xpectant mothers are magnets for unsolicited advice. Some of the advice is rude , some is helpful and the rest is based on old wives tales. Our guest bloggers today, Drs. Shawn A. Tassone and Kathryn M. Landherr, are going to help us separate fact from fiction.
4
POPSA Southern Mirrored Window "Ms. Stockett, 40, herself a native of Jackson, said the idea for the novel came to her in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when she was living in New York. Ms. Stockett, who had another novel in her drawer that a writing coach had told her was “just awful,” said she felt homesick and “tried to comfort myself by writing in the voices of the people I missed.”
2
POPSDid you know??????????????? It’s common amongst lefty bloggers to rail Israel for what they’re doing, and I don’t think I’ll buck the trend, here. It’s not a discussion of who’s “right” in the fight, it’s fairly well established that both sides are taking hardline stances on what a proper endgame would be, but a matter of who’s doing what.
1
POPSUS Press Freedom Improves At the bottom of the list were Turkmenistan, North Korea and Eritrea "where media are so suppressed they are nonexistent," said Reporters Without Borders. Iran dropped to No. 172 from No. 166, with Reporters Without Borders saying the disputed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had fostered a paranoia about journalists and bloggers. "Automatic prior censorship, state surveillance of journalists, mistreatment, journalists forced to flee the country, illegal arrests and imprisonment -- such is the state of press freedom this year in Iran," the group said. The ranking was compiled from hundreds of questionnaires completed by journalists and media experts around the world and reflecting press freedom violations that took place between Sept. 1, 2008 and Aug. 31, 2009. The complete ranking can be seen at www.rsf.org/en-classement1003-2009.html Read more at source.
12
POPSDoes a nation's mood lurk in its songs and blogs?
“And it’s going to change the social sciences; that to me is very clear.” ... From another site, http://wefeelfine.org/ , they pulled more than nine million sentences that used some form of the verb feel — as in “I feel relieved” — from 2.3 million blogs from 2005 to 2009.They then rated the psychological charge, or “valence,” of a significant subset of the words on a 10-point scale: from triumphant (8.82) and love (8.72) down to disgusted (2.45) and suicide (1.25). Some of the findings were expected. Sept. 11, 2001, was rock bottom, for instance. Others were less so: the day that Michael Jackson died also lowered people’s mood significantly. Christmas and Valentine’s Day regularly popped as positive times, although words like “guilty” were associated with Christmas and “waste” and “lonely” with Valentine’s Day. “Now, these are bloggers, and they certainly are not representative of everyone,” Dr. Dodds said. “But the pattern is very pronounced.”
3
POPSGallup: Congressional approval drops sharply As well it should! I really hope that there's a huge change in the upcoming elections. It's easy to understand why Washington wanted to take control of "free speech" on talk radio and of bloggers.
2
POPSBig Government's Intrusion Into Blogger Content, Free Speech Decisions about violations will be made on a case-by-case basis, but if someone receives cash or an in-kind payment to review a product, it’s considered an endorsement. The government is attempting to put all website, both personal and professional, under its thumb under the guise of protecting consumers from dishonest bloggers and bloggers from dishonest companies. It shows a lack of faith in both the public and the blogging community which has been doing just fine and doesn’t welcome the bureaucracy. This is all about the Benjamins in the name of regulation. Uncle Sam saw a way to make money while controlling speech. I myself receive free items regularly and it’s always been my own personal policy to disclose this, which I have. I’ve refused offers from companies who’ve suggested that I act otherwise. I created this self-policing policy because I, like most other bloggers, realize that our reputations are virtual currency.
4
POPSUPDATE: Obama Blog Propaganda is Government-Wide of the Department of Justice, Holder and President Obama. One conservative editor recently told the Muffled Oar that they have noticed a significant increase in the number and aggressiveness of comments to stories critical of the Holder Justice Department. “There is clearly a designed effort to rebut stories that are exposing the Holder Justice Department as more political than the last. We’ve seen a change in the pattern of anonymous emails we receive and comments posted at our paper’s webpage.” One shivers at the thought of a team of Department of Justice Bloggers anonymously trolling the web to spin the message of a President. It is particularly terrifying when those same anonymous government employees at the Department attack media outlets and newspapers anonymously. How much longer before the Blog Squad operates in the open to intimidate political opponents and critics? Posted by Isaac Muzzey
4
POPSThe Kremlin’s Eeeevil New Plan to Rein in Bloggers “There should be international rules drawn up through collective effort, and the worldwide web should continue to develop as it has done so far " as a common environment. Only this way can we counter terrorism, xenophobia, and other unlawful activity on the Web.”
5
POPSACORN Founder Wade Rathke He clearly believes that the end (ACORN’s existence) justifies the means (a cover-up). Rathke still doesn’t appear to acknowledge his brother’s crime for what it was. He refers to his brother’s embezzlement as a “misappropriation” of funds. His moral calculus, while seemingly sincere, is disturbing. Another item of interest came at the end of this interview clip. Rathke talked about the “subculture of organizing” and intimated that it was much different than the broader culture we inhabit. Taking a rare jab at ACORN, he noted that “There is a different culture,” a distinction he believes ACORN doesn’t fully appreciate. Different culture, indeed. A couple weeks ago, Mike Flynn noted that ACORN’s employee manual states that, “ACORN’s lifeblood is conflicts with targets outside the organization.” by Maura Flynn
1
POPSTime's Up! for victims and their rights to be ignored. Time's Up! is a collection of bloggers who are champions for victims of crime. Through this group we hope to bring awareness to the injustices to victims and to search out solutions with an SOS to those in the capacity to make changes happen.
2
POPSDylan Ratigan Comments on Healthcare Some good ideas here. Just wanted to make note on Dylan in general. Came from FastMoney on CNBC, now brings, FINALLY, an even-handed (truly) (No, really!) presence and intelligent outlook on nearly every topic, to MSNBC, of all places. Well that is absolutely where it's badly needed the most. He can still see straight. He's on mornings and the heavy handed propaganda hosts are put off till almost lunchtime. (Then you can change from MesSNBC so you don't lose that lunch.)
3
Pops
Newest Clips
Latest Comments
Most Pops
Print
Save
Turn on live update