Tag Archives: Twitter

Where’s Waldo ?

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Our relationship with Saudi Arabia has always been complex. We depend on the Saudis to continue trading oil in American dollars. If they decide not to continue doing that, the worth of the American dollar sinks rapidly. Sometimes our relationship with the Saudis results in some really strange events.

After the Boston Marathon bombing, Abdul Rahman Alharbi was named as a person of interest. I reported some of the details of this at rightwinggranny.com in April. Abdul Rahman Alharbi was originally named as a ‘person of interest’ and was scheduled to be deported. Then, after a number of ‘secret’ meetings, he was declared totally innocent of anything and not scheduled to be deported. The mystery deepened–no one seemed to know where he was or what the real story was.

Well, we found him–he was at the White House celebration of July 4th.

Yesterday GlennBeck.com reported:

Abdul Rahman Alharbi, once a person of interest in the Boston Marathon bombing, turned up at the White House for July 4th festivities. He was at one time placed on a watch list and was at one point labeled a threat to national security by the State Department. What in the world was he doing there?

As reported by TheBlaze, Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi appears to have been in attendance at the White House’s 4th of July celebration for military leaders and their families. A Twitter account from a person claiming to be Alharbi’s father posted photos of the Saudi national at the event, and a Arab newspaper claims he was invited to attend.

Curiouser and curiouser.

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Coming To An Electric Company Near You

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On Friday, Investor’s Business Daily posted an article about a change quietly made to energy efficient appliances that could eventually impact all of us.

The article reports:

In a seemingly innocuous revision of its Energy Star efficiency requirements announced June 27, the Environmental Protection Agency included an “optional” requirement for a “smart-grid” connection for customers to electronically connect their refrigerators or freezers with a utility provider.

The feature lets the utility provider regulate the appliances’ power consumption, “including curtailing operations during more expensive peak-demand times.”

So if you are endangering the planet by keeping your beer too cold, the Environmental Protection Agency can save you from yourself.

The article further reports:

So far, manufacturers are not required to include the feature, only “encouraged,” and consumers must still give permission to turn it on. But with the Obama administration’s renewed focus on fighting mythical climate change, we expect it to become mandatory to save the planet from the perils of keeping your beer too cold.

“Manufacturers that build in and certify optional ‘connected features’ will earn a credit towards meeting the Energy Star efficiency requirements,” according to an EPA email to CNSNews.com.

We are both intrigued and bothered by the notion that a utility company, the regulated energy sock-puppet of government, could and probably will have the power to regulate the power we use and how we use it, as long as we’re paying our electricity bills, even to the point of turning these devices and appliances off at will.

This is another really bad example of the nanny state thinking that one size fits all. Have you ever been in a nursing home? It’s generally pretty warm–the senior citizens don’t always have the body composition to stay warm in cooler temperatures. What about people who are sensitive to heat due to a health condition? Will the electric company allow their air conditioners to function at a capacity that will keep them safe?

The appliance manufacturers need to tell the government to go pound sand on this requirement.

Abuse Of Power As A Way Of Life

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Yesterday the Examiner posted an interview with Tom Francois. “Who is Tom Francois?” you ask. Tom Francois is a carpenter who has been making cabinets for 38 years. When his business declined during the Obama recession, Mr. Francois began making twitter and facebook posts critical of the Obama Administration. That’s not all that unusual–I’m not on twitter, but there are a lot of people on facebook who are not fond of President Obama. To be fair, there are also a lot of people who like the President and think he is doing a good job.

However, the Secret Service chose to visit Mr. Francois. They also visited his daughter and ex-wife.

The article reports:

In an exclusive interview with the Examiner, Tom Francois said that the Secret Service acknowledged that there was no threat, but were concerned over Tom’s ‘large Twitter following.’ The bizarre rationale leads one to believe that Tom must be holding something back. But in speaking with this gentleman personally, he comes across as an articulate and rational person who simply dared to voice his outrage about the Obama administration over social media.

…The Secret Service agents asked Tom about his weapons, and whether they were loaded. This law-abiding gun owner was then delivered a thinly veiled threat that they might be taken in the future. The agents told Tom that they would hand over his ‘file’ to Eric Holder. Tom said, ‘I have been critical of Holder, as well!’

Please note that the story says that the Secret Service acknowledged that there was no threat. Then why were they visiting this person and talking about taking his guns away? I have no problem with the Secret Service following up on a possible threat, but this is simply harassing political opposition–similar to the misuse of the IRS.

This is simply wrong. So what is the solution? We have an election next year. The only way to stop this sort of abuse of power is to elect people who will hold the Obama Administration accountable. Any Democrat who does not protest this behavior should be resoundingly voted out of office. That is the only way this behavior will be stopped.

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We Might Eventually Get Answers To Benghazi

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Breitbart.com posted an article today stating that whistle blowers are speaking to Congressional investigators about the attack on Benghazi.

Power Line posted the following tweet from CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson:

Finding out the cause of this tragedy and the reasons America left people there to die will not bring the dead back to life, but contrary to what Former Secretary of State Clinton said, it does make a difference.

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When Did Watergate Become Legal?

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We have all been hearing about the bugging of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell‘s meeting with his campaign staff on February 2. Evidently it is now okay to secretly tape someone’s campaign meetings and not face consequences. I am not going to bother with the details of the story since it has been in the headlines and you can pretty much read the details anywhere.

However, I do want to quote the last line from an article posted at Power Line today:

James Taranto has been following the affair on Twitter and derives an edifying judgment of public policy: “So post-Watergate ‘reforms’ led to the creation of super PACs, which are now committing Watergate-like crimes. Brilliant.”

Further proof that generally speaking, when Congress attempts to fix a problem by creating more laws, they only make things worse. I am sure there are laws that were broken in this taping, It is truly a shame that no one chooses to enforce those laws.

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How To Drain The Fun Out Of A Fun Event

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CNS News is reporting today that the White House Easter Egg Roll has been turned into a “Let’s Move! Social.” Good grief.

The article reports:

An e-mail from the “Let’s Move!” campaign says the Easter Egg Roll has been turned into a “Let’s Move! Social”:

“We’re excited to announce that our next White House Social will be a Let’s Move! Social here, at the White House. On Monday, April 1st, 2013, the First Family will host the 135th annual White House Easter Egg Roll with the theme ‘Be Healthy, Be Active, Be You!'”

The First Lady’s “followers” will be there to preach to kids about their eating habits:

“We are inviting Let’s Move! followers on Twitter and Facebook and their children, ages 5 – 13, to join the fun on the South Lawn and of course to share their experience with their followers!”

Easter itself is not a Christian holiday–it is a pagan holiday, so I can’t accuse the White House of messing with Christianity. However, I can accuse them of messing with tradition. To me, the arrogance here is to think that what they are doing is so important that they are going to preempt a tradition to preach to innocent young children who only came to roll Easter eggs on the White House lawn.

Sometimes it is just amazing to see how self-important our current first family is.

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Class Warfare Backfired

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One of the tenets of the Obama presidential campaign was the idea that we needed to tax millionaires and billionaires to fix our budget problems. A lot of voters who were not really paying attention decided that ‘the rich’ should be punished for their success and should contribute more. No one bothered to explain to them that even if you took all the money from the wealthy, it really wouldn’t help with the deficit because the problem is spending–not taxing.

The truth of who pays what is a little different. The Heritage Foundation reports:

The top 10 percent of income earners paid 71 percent of all federal income taxes in 2009 though they earned 43 percent of all income. The bottom 50 percent paid 2 percent of income taxes but earned 13 percent of total income. About half of tax filers paid no federal income tax at all.

Just for the record, in case anyone assumes I have a vested interest in this battle, I am not in danger of entering the top 10 percent of income earners. However, what I have learned over the years is that when the taxes go up on the rich, the rest of us suffer.

Meanwhile, Examiner.com reported today on some interesting tweets from Obama voters. These voters have received their first paycheck of the new year.

Some sample tweets posted in the article (please excuse the language, but some of these people are upset):

Twitter user Dave Cardenas15 tweeted, “Obama is the biggest f**king liar in the world why the f*ck did I vote for him.”

Another Twitter user said, “Idk why but I feel like I’ma regret voting for Obama.”

Some of the users wish they had voted for Mitt Romney as expressed by Warren G who tweeted, “I should have voted for Romney, I want a do over.”

Hilda Brown, a user on Warren G’s Twitter account replied back and said, “You’re entitled to your own opinion but do you really think Romney would have done a better job than Obama?”

Warren G responded, “My paycheck says yes.”

The Examiner article further reports:

Peterson (Hayley Peterson of the UK’s Mail Online news site) also said, “Earners in the latter group will pay an average 1.3 percent more – or an additional $2,711 – in taxes this year, while workers making between $30,000 and $200,000 will see their paychecks shrink by as much as 1.7 percent – or up to $1,784 – the D.C.-based think tank reported. Overall, nearly 80 percent of households will pay more money to the federal government as a result of the fiscal cliff deal.”

Part of the increase in middle class taxes is due to the fact that the Social Security tax is now back to what it had been previously, but other tax increases currently aimed at those making over $200,000 a year may filter down to the middle class fairly quickly as the cost of Obamacare rises.

Punishing the rich is not really a good economic policy. It winds up hurting everyone.Enhanced by Zemanta

JUST A NOTE: The Washington Times also posted a story about the reaction from Obama voters on their decreased paychecks. It is enjoyable reading.

One Of The Dangers Of The New Media

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The credit for this article goes to DaTechGuyBlog. DaTechGuy truly represents the new media–he has his own radio show (Saturday morning 10-12 on WCRN 830 AM or on the internet at wcrnradio.com), he is on twitter, and he will go anywhere to follow a story. He lives in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and was picking up a pizza in a local pizza place recently where the owner was watching a satellite channel in Arabic. The owner was talking to DaTechGuy about the use of violence by the Muslim Brotherhood to suppress the protests. Naturally, DaTechGuy looked into this.

The article posted at DaTechGuyBlog today shows some of the tweets coming out of Egypt describing what is happening. He posts capture shots of some tweets by Sandmonkey.  One of the tweets of Sandmonkey cites another tweeter, Gehad El-Hadd. Sandmonkey claims that El-Hadd is a liar.

My purpose in pointing this out is to show that the new media can be used for bad or for good. DaTechGuy points out that you have to go through five pages of El-Hadd’s tweets before you get to tweets in Arabic. Sandmonkey tweets both in Arabic and in English. So if most of El-Hadd’s tweets are in English, what audience is he aiming at?

An article in the Egypt Daily News posted yesterday stated:

The Muslim Brotherhood is waging a war of perception, not just for domestic consumption but for a western audience, too. Perception is crucial for two reasons: To defeat non-Islamist opponents, who may lose faith quickly when watching the endless number of pro-Morsy protestors in comparison to their relatively lower number in Tahrir and, secondly, to convince western nations that Islamists are the only reliable, powerful force in Egypt and that they are backed by the “majority” of Egyptians.

Eighty years of a mushrooming underground within Egyptian society has resulted in deep mistrust of mainstream establishments. Islamists view members of these establishments and other non-Islamist forces with deep suspicion and consider them elitist, anti-religious snobs. The strict, rules that govern the Brotherhood’s internal structure were partly introduced to protect the group from outside “corruption.”

This combination plus simmering resentment and years of grievance have finally exploded in the recent crisis in Egypt, and it partly explains the abrupt, odd way that Morsy has chosen to deal with it.

The situation as I see it is that Morsi wants to consolidate his power in Egypt and set up his part of the world-wide caliphate the Muslim Brotherhood is planning to build. This will be easier for him to do if he can convince the West that he is actually the good guy and the people protesting him are the bad guys. He will do his best to put down this rebellion against his power grab, but he doesn’t want the West to think that he is creating the caliphate he is creating. Morsi is an expert at propaganda. It is no surprise that he will use traditional and new media for his purposes.

All of us need to be very careful in deciding exactly who and what what we believe.

Quote Of The Week

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From a Brent Bozell column at NewsBusters on September 22:

“One satirist put this hyperbole in perspective. Fouad Ajami recounted a mock Twitter statement by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, presently butchering his Muslim subjects.“Wow, it’s good that I’ve been killing women and children. It’s good I’ve been shelling mosques,” said the fake tweet. “Imagine what would have happened had I made an anti-Muslim video. They would have really come after me.””

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Media Bias?

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I am not on Twitter. One of my daughters set up an account for me, but it took more time than I was willing to give it. That might have to change at some point, because it seems as if there is a lot going on at Twitter.

A website called Twitchy Media is reporting today that NBC and some of the other networks covering the Democrat Convention chose to cut off the coverage of Cardinal Dolan’s benediction mid-sentence and went to commercial. Tacky. Some of the people on Twitter made there feelings very clear. You can read some of the posts by following the link above.

For anyone who would like to know what they were prevented from seeing, LifeNews posted the prayer:

With a “firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence,” let us close this convention by praying for this land that we so cherish and love:

Let us Pray.

Almighty God, father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, revealed to us so powerfully in your Son, Jesus Christ, we thank you for showering your blessings upon this our beloved nation. Bless all here present, and all across this great land, who work hard for the day when a greater portion of your justice, and a more ample measure of your care for the poor and suffering, may prevail in these United States. Help us to see that a society’s greatness is found above all in the respect it shows for the weakest and neediest among us.

We beseech you, almighty God to shed your grace on this noble experiment in ordered liberty, which began with the confident assertion of inalienable rights bestowed upon us by you: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Thus do we praise you for the gift of life. Grant us the courage to defend it, life, without which no other rights are secure. We ask your benediction on those waiting to be born, that they may be welcomed and protected. Strengthen our sick and our elders waiting to see your holy face at life’s end, that they may be accompanied by true compassion and cherished with the dignity due those who are infirm and fragile.

We praise and thank you for the gift of liberty. May this land of the free never lack those brave enough to defend our basic freedoms. Renew in all our people a profound respect for religious liberty: the first, most cherished freedom bequeathed upon us at our Founding. May our liberty be in harmony with truth; freedom ordered in goodness and justice. Help us live our freedom in faith, hope, and love. Make us ever-grateful for those who, for over two centuries, have given their lives in freedom’s defense; we commend their noble souls to your eternal care, as even now we beg the protection of your mighty arm upon our men and women in uniform.

We praise and thank you for granting us the life and the liberty by which we can pursue happiness. Show us anew that happiness is found only in respecting the laws of nature and of nature’s God. Empower us with your grace so that we might resist the temptation to replace the moral law with idols of our own making, or to remake those institutions you have given us for the nurturing of life and community. May we welcome those who yearn to breathe free and to pursue happiness in this land of freedom, adding their gifts to those whose families have lived here for centuries.

We praise and thank you for the American genius of government of the people, by the people and for the people. Oh God of wisdom, justice, and might, we ask your guidance for those who govern us: President Barack Obama, Vice President Joseph Biden, Congress, the Supreme Court, and all those, including Governor Mitt Romney and Congressman Paul Ryan, who seek to serve the common good by seeking public office. Make them all worthy to serve you by serving our country. Help them remember that the only just government is the government that serves its citizens rather than itself. With your grace, may all Americans choose wisely as we consider the future course of public policy.

And finally Lord, we beseech your benediction on all of us who depart from here this evening, and on all those, in every land, who yearn to conduct their lives in freedom and justice. We beg you to remember, as we pledge to remember, those who are not free; those who suffer for freedom’s cause; those who are poor, out of work, needy, sick, or alone; those who are persecuted for their religious convictions, those still ravaged by war.

And most of all, God Almighty, we thank you for the great gift of our beloved country.

For we are indeed “one nation under God,” and “in God we trust.”

So dear God, bless America. You who live and reign forever and ever.

Amen!

The thing to remember about media bias is that it is not only reflected in how the news is covered, but also by what news is covered. The commercial could have waited a minute.

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About That Civility Thing…

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Today’s Washington Examiner reported some comments made by a Maine state legislator on twitter.

The article reports:

“Cheney deserves same final end he gave Saddam,” Kruger tweeted, according to the Maine Wire. “Hope there are cell cams,” he added, indicating a desire to watch Cheney die.

Today, after local media noticed the comment, Krugertweeted, “Twitter is no place for lousy attempts at humor” along with the hashtag “#mepolitics,” in what seems to be an allusion to the Cheney/Saddam tweet.

I’m afraid I fail to see the humor in any of that. Comments like that deserve to have consequences. I doubt there will be any, but Mr. Kruger was totally out of line.

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An Apology Is Definitely Required

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Today’s Daily Caller asks the question:

Has Obama called David and Elaine McClain to make sure they’re holding up ok? They’re the elderly Florida couple whose address Spike Lee tweeted because he thought it was George Zimmerman’s. Presumably because he wanted people to go there and discuss things calmly.

That is the danger of stirring up unrest without bothering to find out what the facts are.

Fox News reported:

An elderly Florida couple have been forced to move into a hotel after their home address was wrongly tweeted as belonging to the man who shot teen Trayvon Martin.

The tweets were traced back to a man in California and the address was also reportedly retweeted by director Spike Lee to his almost 250,000 followers.

The couple, aged 70 and 72, have been harassed with hate mail, been hassled by media and had scared neighbors questioning them since the tweet, their son Chip Humble told the Orlando Sentinel.

Fearful for their safety, and hoping to escape the spotlight, the couple have temporarily moved to a hotel.

We need to take a really good look at this event and, as the President said, do some serious soul-searching.

 
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