Maybe Someday ... Or Maybe Not

Free Phone Calls! (For $129 + $4 Monthly)

Click here for a Bob Rankin article entitled "Free Phone Calls With Ooma." It's $129 at London Drugs; taxes and fees are $4 a month. You can pay an additional $10 a month for a premium package; beats Telus, for sure.

Links To Articles In A Microsoft Newsletter

Click here for a link from Microsoft entitled Build the ultimate digital jukebox. It's information on using Windows Media Player 11. I use MusicMatch, but I'm not entirely happy with the interface, so I wanted to save this article for future reference.

Click here for another Microsoft article in the same newsletter, 6 ways to work more effectively on a virtual team, an article on group collaboration on a project.

Conrad Black vs. Jeremy Paxman

Bob Rankin - Get Free Movies On Line - Legally!

 Click here for this article from askbobrankin.com.

For example:

OpenCulture is a collection of “the best free cultural & educational media on the Web.” Its movie collection includes public domain films and indie productions that are distributed with no strings attached. There are over 500 films available, including some classics such as George Orwell’s “1984,” Gary Cooper in “A Farewell to Arms,” “All Quiet On The Western Front,” and others.

Yes, there are plenty of free movies online. They just might not be the ones you want to watch.

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The New Yorker Endorses Obama

Click here for The New Yorker's excellent summary of the case for Obama over Romney.

Are you better off than you were four years ago? Here's the New Yorker's take on the situation Obama faced at his inauguration, when the headline on The Onion read "Black man given nation's worst job":

Obama succeeded George W. Bush, a two-term President whose misbegotten legacy, measured in the money it squandered and the misery it inflicted, has become only more evident with time. Bush left behind an America in dire condition and with a degraded reputation. On Inauguration Day, the United States was in a downward financial spiral brought on by predatory lending, legally sanctioned greed and pyramid schemes, an economic policy geared to the priorities and the comforts of what soon came to be called “the one per cent,” and deregulation that began before the Bush Presidency. In 2008 alone, more than two and a half million jobs were lost—up to three-quarters of a million jobs a month. The gross domestic product was shrinking at a rate of nine per cent. Housing prices collapsed. Credit markets collapsed. The stock market collapsed—and, with it, the retirement prospects of millions. Foreclosures and evictions were ubiquitous; whole neighborhoods and towns emptied. The automobile industry appeared to be headed for bankruptcy. Banks as large as Lehman Brothers were dead, and other banks were foundering. It was a crisis of historic dimensions and global ramifications. However skillful the management in Washington, the slump was bound to last longer than any since the Great Depression.

At the same time, the United States was in the midst of the grinding and unnecessary war in Iraq, which killed a hundred thousand Iraqis and four thousand Americans, and depleted the federal coffers. The political and moral damage of Bush’s duplicitous rush to war rivalled the conflict’s price in blood and treasure. America’s standing in the world was further compromised by the torture of prisoners and by illegal surveillance at home. Al Qaeda, which, on September 11, 2001, killed three thousand people on American soil, was still strong. Its leader, Osama bin Laden, was, despite a global manhunt, living securely in Abbottabad, a verdant retreat near Islamabad.

In a nutshell, the conclusion:

The choice is clear. The Romney-Ryan ticket represents a constricted and backward-looking vision of America: the privatization of the public good. In contrast, the sort of public investment championed by Obama—and exemplified by both the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Affordable Care Act—takes to heart the old civil-rights motto “Lifting as we climb.” That effort cannot, by itself, reverse the rise of inequality that has been under way for at least three decades. But we’ve already seen the future that Romney represents, and it doesn’t work.

The reëlection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent in Mitt Romney—a first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness and integrity. A two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive imprint on political life. It will bolster the ideal of good governance and a social vision that tempers individualism with a concern for community. Every Presidential election involves a contest over the idea of America. Obama’s America—one that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice, tolerance, and equality—represents the future that this country deserves. 

Obama-Romney Debate II - Songified

Alas For the Great Zeferelli.

Click here.

Bill Clinton: "Where you been, boy?"

Can The Big Dog run for president in 2016? Hey, Putin did it.

Bad Lip Reading: Obama/Romney Debate

Vote Hedgehog.

Bryan Fischer, Radical Right, Thinks A More Moderate Romney Is Just Fine

"... liberals cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be dialogued with, they cannot be compromised with. They're not interested in compromise whatsoever. They cannot be collaborated with, they can only be defeated."

Click here for an article on Right Wing Watch by Kyle Mentyla entitled Fischer: Liberals Can't be Reasoned With, They Can Only be Defeated.

That refers to a radio broadcast by a Christian evangelical nutcase named Bryan Fischer. Fischer's bigotry was so excesssive that Romney disavowed some of his remarks early in the primary campaign. Fischer retaliated with more venom, and the two had a bit of a feud going for months.

Shortly before the Obama/Romney debate, Fischer took a poll of his listeners: Was he being too hard on Romney, and should he be more supportive of the Republican candidate even if his views were not sufficiently "conservative"? His listeners responded vehemently: Kick him even harder. They did not want to see squishiness in a Republican candidate.

Well, squishiness was what they got from Romney in the debate. I waited breathlessly for news of the vat of boiling tea that would surely inundate Romney the next morning. Surprise, surprise -- nothing. Romney was seen to have dominated a lackluster Obama, and his sliding fortunes had been reversed and his support rose steeply. Fischer decided Romney wasn't such a liberal monster after all, and that it's time for the faithful to silence their doubts and vote Republican.

You can imagine my shock and dismay at finding that the most rabid of tea partiers (Teahadists) are much more interested in winning the election than that their candidate stick to far-right principles.

Pete Peterson's 'National Debt' Curriculum For High School Kids

Ouch! Click here for an article from 2010 I hadn't been aware of. It starts out:

Teachers College has received a three-year $2.45 million grant from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation to develop a comprehensive social studies and mathematics curriculum about the fiscal challenges that face the nation, which will be distributed free of charge to every high school in the country. Titled “Understanding Fiscal Responsibility: A Curriculum for Teaching About the Federal Budget, National Debt and Budget Deficit,” the non-partisan [yeah, right], inquiry-based curriculum will teach students the facts, significance and consequences for the United States and its citizens of public policies leading to persistent deficits and a growing national debt.

Peterson is in the news recently because he's contributed $30 million to a new organization, the Campaign to Fix the Debt. Its objective is to push through a "grand bargain" in Congress's lame-duck session that would slash Medicare and Social Security spending in exchange for new tax revenue.

By the end of the year, we're going to be sick and tired of hearing the phrases "grand bargain," "Bowles-Simpson," "fiscal cliff," and "Taxmageddon."

Gimme That Old-Time Religion

This bozo's a congressman from Georgia! (That's where the Devil went down to, by the way.) He's a medical doctor, and he sits on the House Committee on Science and Technology. He's up for reelection in November -- and he's running unopposed. Read more here at Talking Points Memo.

Well Said, FDR

FDR:  "Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference."

More FDR: "“Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.” 

Sensible advice from Cher (6 seconds)