Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Big day today... gonna spend money!
And not on food or booze!
No... not on travel...
Nope... gonna pick up a wireless duel band router and a Blu-Ray player so that when the cable guy comes over tomorrow to install my "Triple Play" everything can get set up properly for me to fully embrace 21st century entertainment norms!
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http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/20586125/cnet-reporter-quits-over-cbs-interference#axzz2I3BAIoDM
Technology reviews by website CNET have long been respected for their thoroughness and integrity, but that reputation has come under scrutiny after a top reporter quit over what he says is editorial interference by its parent company, CBS Corp.
* OVER WHAT CLEARLY WAS EDITORIAL INTERFERENCE!
The dispute centers on CNET's choice of best gadgets from last week's International CES show in Las Vegas.
CNET voted Dish Network Corp.'s "Hopper with Sling" the best home theater and audio product.
Because CBS is in a legal fight with Dish over the Hopper's ad-skipping capabilities, CBS vetoed the selection, saying the product couldn't be considered "Best of CES."
Instead, CNET's official selection was a sound bar from TV maker Vizio.
Reporter Greg Sandoval tweeted on Monday morning that he was resigning, saying he had lost confidence that CBS is committed to editorial independence.
* GOOD FOR SANDOVAL!
"I just want to be known as an honest reporter," he tweeted, adding "CNET wasn't honest about what occurred regarding Dish."
* THANK YOU, MR. SANDOVAL!
In an apparent response to the resignation, CNET Reviews Editor-in-Chief Lindsey Turrentine posted a story on the site a few hours after Sandoval's tweet saying that around 40 CNET editorial members voted, and Dish's Hopper won the designation because of "innovative features that push shows recorded on DVR to iPads." She said "the conflict of interest was real" and said she contemplated quitting as well, but stayed on to explain the situation to staff and prevent a recurrence.
* SHE STAYED ON TO CONTINUE RECEIVING A PAYCHECK!
(*SNORT*)
Turrentine said CNET staff was asked to re-vote after the Hopper was excluded, and regretted not revealing at first that it had won.
* SCUMBAG...
"I wish I could have overridden the decision not to reveal that Dish had won the vote," she wrote. "For that I apologize to my staff and to CNET readers."
* WHAT A PIECE OF SHIT! SHE COULD HAVE OUTTED HER BOSSES. SHE CHOSE NOT TO. PERIOD.
A spokesman for CBS, which also owns such marquee journalism properties as CBS News and 60 Minutes, declined to comment on how a similar situation might be handled if it occurred at its other news properties.
* ANOTHER SCUMBAG...
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324081704578237722576889786.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Like many people whose houses were badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy, my family and I have been living in a rented house since the storm. Unlike some whose houses were totaled, we could have repaired things and been home toasting our tootsies by our own fireplace by now.
What happened? Two things: zoning (as in "Twilight Zone") and FEMA.
Our first exposure to the town zoning authorities came a couple of weeks after Sandy. We'd met with insurance adjusters, contractors and "remediation experts." We'd had about a foot of Long Island Sound sloshing around the ground floor of our house in Connecticut, and everyone had the same advice: Rip up the floors and subfloors, and tear out anything — wiring, plumbing, insulation, drywall, kitchen cabinets, bookcases — touched by salt water. All of it had to go, and pronto, too, lest mold set in.
Yet it wasn't until the workmen we hired had ripped apart most of the first floor that the phrase "building permit" first wafted past us. Turns out we needed one. "What, to repair our own house we need a building permit?" Of course.
(Frank Kafka would have liked the zoning folks.)
Before you could get a building permit, however, you had to be approved by the Zoning Authority. And Zoning — citing FEMA regulations — would force you to bring the house "up to code," which in many cases meant elevating the house by several feet. Now, elevating your house is very expensive and time consuming — not because of the actual raising, which takes just a day or two, but because of the required permits. There also is a limit on how high in the sky your house can be. That calculation seems to be a state secret, but it can easily happen that raising your house violates the height requirement. Which means that you can't raise the house that you must raise if you want to repair it. Got that?
There were other surprises.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
A woman in our neighborhood has two adjoining properties, with a house and a cottage. She rents the house and lives in the cottage. For 29 years she has paid taxes on both. The cottage was severely damaged but she can't tear it down and rebuild because Zoning says the plots are not zoned for two structures, never mind that for 29 years two property-tax payments were gladly accepted.
Kafka would have liked FEMA, too. We've met plenty of its agents. Every one we've encountered has been polite and oozing with sympathy. Even the lady who reduced my wife to tears was nice. The issue was my wife's proof of income. We sent our tax return to FEMA, but that wasn't good enough. They wanted pay stubs. My wife works as a freelance writer and editor. She doesn't get a pay stub. Which apparently makes her a non-person to this government agency.
In "The Road to Serfdom," Friedrich Hayek noted that "the power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionary possesses who wields the coercive power of the state on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work."
(And how!)
But what makes the phenomenon so insidious is that many of the functionaries are as friendly as can be. It's just that they're cogs in a machine whose overriding purpose is not service but self-perpetuation and control.
It is, as Alexis de Tocqueville saw, a recipe for a form of despotism peculiar to modern democracies. It does this, wrote Tocqueville, by enforcing "a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules" that reduces citizens "to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd." The sobering thought is that we're all complicit in that infantilization. After all, we keep voting for the politicians who put this leviathan in place.
Just before Christmas, our 5-year-old daughter had an encounter with Santa. What did she want for Christmas? "My house back."
It's not only us, of course. Thousands upon thousands have been displaced, but the bullying pedantry of the zoning establishment never wavers. While our house stands empty, the city authorities even showed a sense of humor by sending us a bill for property taxes. For a house they won't let us repair!
We've spent a few thousand dollars on a lawyer to appeal to Zoning, many thousands in rent, and hundreds getting a fresh appraisal of our house. The latest from our lawyer: Because of our new appraisal, we may be able to "apply for a zoning permit."
("Apply," mind you.)
I used to think that our house was, you know, our house.
The bureaucrats have taught me otherwise.
But then I also used to think that Franz Kafka wrote a species of dark fantasy.
I know now that he was turning out non-fiction.
http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2013/01/14/jack-lews-signature/
* BY PEGGY NOONAN
I’ve been thinking about Jack Lew’s famous signature, which looks like the squiggles on the top of a Hostess cupcake.
A series of O’s is an odd way to write the words Jack and Lew, and I actually hope some good-natured senator asks him about it, good-naturedly, at the end of his confirmation hearings.
Maybe Lew will have some interesting thoughts. Maybe he decided some years back that scrawling a series of O’s is, when you sign a lot of things, one way to save time. Maybe his signature started out as a way of subtly spoofing the institution in which he’s spent his life, government, which some think tends to be staffed by a bunch of zeros.
(Maybe the signature is Proustian: Those cupcakes were his Madeleine, and replicating the squiggles makes him happy.)
(Maybe he is a little eccentric, or a little hidden — if you didn’t want people to think they can read Jack Lew, you could start with having them not be able to read Jack Lew’s signature.)
There is the practical question: Is he going to scribble those O’s on the dollar bill when he is Treasury Secretary? Or is he going to give us a new Jack Lew signature that looks like it’s saying something like Jack Lew?
He should do that.
Half of America thinks the country is broke, with only zeros in its bank account. Why have something that reminds people of that fear, or seems to underscore it, on your currency? From this high-spending government it may seem like a taunt. Or an admission.
In general I think the bigger the ego the more indecipherable the signature. Modest people write their names, others give you swirls and squiggles you’re supposed to make out. The signer is so big he doesn’t have to be named, even by himself. In my mind this connects to something about the signatures of those now in politics.
I have on the wall of my office something that means a lot to me, a framed presidential commission from 1984 that named me a special assistant to President Reagan. It’s about 20 inches top to bottom, 24 inches wide, with black script on ivory colored paper. The commission bears the embossed seal of the president, and is signed by him and his secretary of state. Everyone who’s ever been an officer of a White House has one, and some old Washington hands have three, four or five of them, from different administrations, given pride of place on the office wall.
Underneath my Reagan commission is another, same size, almost identical, signed in 2011 by President Obama. That was the centennial year of Ronald Reagan’s birth, and the Obama White House graciously and generously appointed some old Reagan hands to be part of planning its celebration in the Capitol, and elsewhere.
The two commissioning documents, which haven’t changed in style over the years and are almost identical in script and format, are different in one big way. On the Reagan document, the president’s signature is small, clear, modest—rising about half an inch at its highest point. The signature of the secretary of state, George Shultz, is clear, and about the same size.
The Obama commission is startling in that the president’s signature is so big, more than an inch and a half high at the B, which is an inch and a half wide. Reagan’s first and last names could fit in the B alone.
Obama’s signature is dramatic, even theatrical: The O is cut almost exactly in two by the elongated b of Obama. Even in his signature he starkly divides.
(The signature of the secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is clear, unslanted, and also big, an inch high and five inches long.)
Almost always when people come into my office and look at the commissions they notice the signatures and note the change in size from one era to another.
To me it’s a metaphor for the growth in the power and size of the federal government the past quarter century and, frankly, the more flamboyant egos — or, a nicer way to say it would be the bigger personalities — that populate it today.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/01/15/fitch-downgrade-us/1835385/
The United States could lose its top credit rating for the second time...
* THIS IDIOT AND HIS/HER EDITOR MEAN THAT THE UNITED STATES FACES FURTHER DOWNGRADING OF OUR CREDIT RATING - WHICH WAS FIRST DOWN-GRADED UNDER OBAMA AND NOW MAY BE DOWN-GRADED YET AGAIN UNDER OBAMA.
...Fitch Ratings warned Tuesday.
Congress has to increase the country's debt limit, which effectively rules how much debt the U.S. can have, by March 1 or face a potential default.
* WRONG. (AND WE'VE BEEN OVER THIS TIME AND AGAIN... IT'S BEGINNING TO GET A BIT RIDICULOUS.)
* THE GOVERNMENT COULD EITHER INCREASE TAXES TO FINANCE IT'S IRRESPONSIBLE SPENDING... OR SELL FEDERAL LANDS OR OTHER FEDERAL ASSETS... OR... IT COULD CUT IT'S IRRESPONSIBLE SPENDING!
There are fears that the debate will deteriorate into the squabbling and political brinkmanship that marked the last effort to raise the ceiling in the summer of 2011.
* YES... BY ALL MEANS... END THE "SQUABBLING" IN ORDER THAT WE CAN INCREASE THE DEBT... UH-HUH... (ME? I'D RATHER THE SQUABBLING!)
The U.S. Treasury Department warned then that it had nearly reached a point where it would be unable "to meet our commitments securely."
* SO LET'S START SHEDDING "COMMITMENTS" JUST AS ANY INDIVIDUAL OR FAMILY WOULD IF FORCED TO BY FINANCIAL NECESSITY!
If Fitch does move to downgrade the US, it will join Standard & Poor's, which was so concerned by the dysfunctional 2011 debate...
* AGAIN... FOLKS... WHAT'S REALLY DYSFUNCTIONAL - THE "DEBATE" OR ADDING DEBT TO DEBT AD INFINITUM...?!?!
...that it stripped the U.S. of its triple A rating for the first time in the country's history.
* UNDER OBAMA! WITH A DEMOCRAT SENATE FIRMLY ALLIED WITH OBAMA'S IRRESPONSIBLE SPENDING POLICIES AND THE BOEHNER REPUBLICANS UNWILLING TO DRAW A LINE IN THE SAND!
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
Another major ratings agency, Moody's, also has a negative view on the U.S. outlook.
* OF COURSE THEY HAVE NEGATIVE VIEWS ON THE U.S. OUTLOOK...!!! THE OUTLOOK IS MORE OF THE SAME! THE OUTLOOK IS DOUBLING DOWN ON EVERY FAILED POLICY SET IN PLACE BY BUSH AND OBAMA... BY REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS...!
"The pressure on the U.S. rating, if anything, is increasing," David Riley, managing director of Fitch Ratings' global sovereigns division said at a London conference. "We thought the 2011 crisis was a one-off event …. if we have a repeat we will place the U.S. rating under review."
* BULLSHIT! BROWSE THE USUALLY RIGHT ARCHIVES! I KNEW THIS WAS COMING...
Fitch already has a negative outlook on the U.S. as the country's debt burden has risen to around 100% of its gross domestic product and has said it will make a decision on the rating this year, regardless of how the debt ceiling discussions pan out.
* LISTEN... AGAIN... THE NUMBERS ARE THE NUMBERS AND THE TRENDS ARE THE TRENDS AND OBAMA HAS BEEN RE-ELECTED AND DEMS CONTROL THE SENATE AND WHO KNOWS... THEY MIGHT RECAPTURE THE HOUSE IN 2014 THE WAY THINGS ARE GOING!
Riley's comments come just two weeks after U.S. lawmakers agreed a budget deal with the White House that avoided the so-called "fiscal cliff" of automatic tax increases and spending cuts that many economists thought could plunge the U.S. economy, the world's largest, back into recession.
* FOLKS... THIS IS ALL BULLSHIT! ALL THEY'VE DONE IS WRAPPED ANOTHER BANDAID ON THE PROBLEM WHILE THE SPENDING CONTINUES TO INCREASE... THE DEFICITS CONTINUE... AND THE DEBT GROWS EVEN FURTHER OUT OF CONTROL. YEAH... THEY'VE "FIXED" IT AS A JUNKIE USES THE WORD "FIX."
Relief that a deal was cobbled together, albeit at the final hour, is one of the reasons why sentiment in the financial markets has been buoyant in the first trading days of the new year. Many stock indexes around the world are trading at multi-year highs.
* BASED UPON DEBT...!!! THE OLIGARCHS FEED OFF THE COMMISSIONS FOR SELLING THE DEBT AND "INVESTING" THE DEBT AND THEN PAY THE 15% HEDGE FUND LOOPHOLE TAX ON THEIR PROFITS! HOW FUCKING STUPID ARE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE...?!?!
"The 'fiscal cliff' bullet was dodged …. (but it's) a short-term patch," said Riley.
* FOLKS... THE "FISCAL CLIFF" WAS SUPPOSED TO ACT AS A ROADBLOCK TO FUTURE DEBT! THE DEMPUBLICANS AND REPUBLICRATS CRASHED US RIGHT THROUGH IT! THIS IS NOT GOOD... THIS IS BAD!
Riley warned that the different arms of the U.S. government still have a number of issues to address. As well as increasing the debt ceiling, they have to agree to spending cuts that were delayed as part of the 'fiscal cliff' agreement and back measures to avoid a government shutdown, potentially in March.
(*HEADACHE*)
http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2013/01/15/long-term-unemployment-highest-level-wwii/
Long term unemployment under President Obama is at the highest level since at least the end of World War II, threatening to create a permanent underclass of workers who will find it difficult or impossible to obtain jobs in the future.
What’s more, Obama’s insistence on repeatedly extending long term unemployment benefits may be fueling the unemployment problem.
* OF COURSE IT IS!
* BUT, HEY... IT ISN'T JUST OBAMA...
Since 2008, Congress has voted to extend unemployment benefits ten times at a cost of more than $500 billion. The latest extension raised federal spending by $30 billion.
* IRRESPONSIBLE PANDERING SCUMBAGS..
According to data recently released by the St. Louis Federal Reserve, the average duration of unemployment is now at about 40 weeks, double the previous highest level of about 20 weeks that prevailed during the last three recessions.
A separate paper released by the Boston Federal Reserve paints a pernicious picture of the problem: Employers seem to be throwing out the resumes of the long-term unemployed and only hiring those who have been without a job for less than six months. Meanwhile, with the guarantee of benefits rolling in, the long term jobless might not be looking aggressively enough for work, the paper states.
* YA THINK...?!?!
This suggests those who just had their unemployment benefits renewed for another year under this month’s fiscal cliff deal may need the benefits renewed again next year. And since the failure to get jobs is related solely to the length of unemployment – age, education and worker type do not seem to be a factor – Obama’s ambitious plans for funding worker training programs may have little effect.
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