Blatant Reality

You know, when you’re reading a story or watching a movie, the author or writer normally puts the moral or lesson at the very end so the audience will more likely remember it. Well that is what USA Today seems to be doing with their front page story titled “How Congress set the stage for a fiscal meltdown.” While it puts blame on both sides of the aisle, it seems to heap some extra blame by leaving the readers with these final two paragraphs:

Rep. Barney Frank, then the ranking Democrat on financial services and now the chairman, says he and his colleagues were not soft on Fannie and Freddie. “Yes, they lobbied strongly, but I was one of the most successful ones in challenging them.”

 

Frank had no apologies. Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala., by contrast, offered a rare Washington mea culpa: “Like a lot of my Democratic colleagues, I was too slow to appreciate the recklessness of Fannie and Freddie,” he said in a statement. “Frankly, I wish my Democratic colleagues would admit, when it comes to Fannie and Freddie, we were wrong.”

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but by a Democrat admit they were wrong about Fannie and Freddie seems to set a pretty strong “moral” for the story: Democrats are to blame for this financial mess.

As I have noted in the past, ads linking to Barack Obama’s campaign website have popped up on the Drudge Report which is often thought of as a Conservative leaning website. It should be noted that Drudge doesn’t seem pick his own ads, Intermarkets.net does. Nevertheless, it is still interesting that now they seem to have graduated from running strictly Obama campaign ads to general pro-Obama ads. Take a look:

When you click on that, it takes you the SuperObama.com, a store with everything Obama in it. All I can think about why this may be happening is that people in this election are going to Drudge for the most up to date news, from both sides of the aisle. Therefore, it would make sense from a revenue standpoint to atleast slightly cater to the other side, even if it is mostly a token gesture.

For those of you who might be depressed because you fear that this will be the end of the Conservative’s news haven, fear not, for there is a bright side. Where else on the internet would you be able to see something like this (HINT: Focus on the ads):

Irony, the true spice of life.

Well it seems that more Obama Ads have popped up on the Drudge Report with this being the latest one:

This is the second time I have seen one in just the past couple of weeks ago.

The past two days have been quite a shock for me. In my school’s daily newspaper, The Daily Gamecock, there have been two opinion pieces bashing Obama. Both of them are fairly well written and bring up some less than conventional points. To be quite honest, I’m actually shocked to actually have seen them make their way into the paper.

The first opinion piece came out yesterday, and actually compared Obama’s oratory skills to Hilter.

That said, I’ve seen Obama live twice, and what I saw scared me a little. A charismatic speaker about to take power on the heels of nearly a decade of economic and national security disasters, seducing an audience – and an electorate, for that matter – that is so desperate for something to hope for that they’ll cling to anything.

 

(…)

 

 If you can, find a video of Hitler speaking. If you can put out of your mind for one moment the unbelievable evil he did and just watch and listen, his public speaking manner is absolutely hypnotic. In 1938, when Hitler’s ugly side was starting to show, Princeton University freshmen voted British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain the “greatest living person.” He beat Hitler by one vote.

 

Obama and Hitler both represented vehicles of change (though of obviously different kinds) and have enjoyed meteoric rises to national and international superstardom by being, probably, the two best political orators of the past 100 years.

 

That, of course, is more or less where the similarities end, but the lesson remains: be extremely careful of being seduced by political rhetoric. Hitler was seen as a great man by many Americans as late as one year before the start of World War II. Within seven years, he would start and lose the second-bloodiest war in world history, systematically arrange the murder of 11 million innocent people and change the course of world politics forever.

Interesting to say the least, wouldn’t you agree?

Now the second article questions African Americans on whether they are voting for Obama because of his policy or because of his race.

After examining the polling data done by many news organizations during the current election cycle, I began to see a pattern developing among voting demographics. Above 90 percent of blacks plan to vote for Barrack Obama, while the white vote was much more diverse, with an almost even split. Which leads to the million-dollar question, why doesn’t the black community have more diversity in their vote and when is someone going to give them a lecture? Today, when political correctness reins supreme, white people can be openly criticized. But if you do the same for the black community, you know what’s going to follow – someone chasing you down telling you that you need to take a cultural awareness or racial sensitivity class.

 

(…)

 

Now lets say you’re a student who wants to own a home one day and are troubled by the recent financial woes of government-backed mortgage lenders Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae. If you look at the money senators between 1998 and 2008 have taken, most of it comes from the two companies. Sen. Obama ranks second among elected officials on that list. I am not sure I would really trust Sen. Obama to properly manage this housing problem when he has been taking money from two companies that just created a huge taxpayer burden via the government bailout.

 

Lastly, if I am a student with a car and I am worried about the cost of commuting to work or school and I realize that the oil off the coast of California could be tapped in less than two years, I would wonder which candidate wants to tap it. Well, Sen. McCain supports offshore drilling while Obama and the Democrats are more concerned about protecting the walrus than the blue collared workers and students.

 

Black students have a right to be proud of how far our country has come from the days of sitting on the back of the bus to having someone from their community possibly being our next president. It says volumes about how far this country has come. But I would urge these same students to examine the men not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Like I said, interesting articles that I was shocked to see make it past the editor (not because of their content but because it actually went against the Pro-Obama campus movement)

Remember back in July when Iran was acting especially crazy and decided to test their missile capabilities? Well one of the missiles didn’t go off so the picture was Photoshopped to show four instead of the actual three missiles launching. Courtesy of LGF, here are the real and Photoshopped pictures of the missile launch:

Now here is the Photoshopped version with the similarities pointed out.

This now brings us to the current claim that Times Online used the Photoshopped version of this missile launch two months after it was discovered. Here is the picture:

Yep, that’s definitely the Photoshopped version, just cropped a little.

Here is more on the original Iranian Missile Photoshop Scandal.

Man, what is with online British newspapers making horrible picture choices?

UPDATE:

Now this is embarrassing. Times Online used this ‘fake’ photograph even though they ran a story back in July comparing the real and Photoshopped versions. Unbelievable.

UPDATE:

Well it looks like someone caught the mistake because now the picture has been removed from the article. Good job.

Well this has to be a first. It seems that the Obama campaign has put ads on the Drudge Report, an often thought of right-leaning website. Take a look:

Weird isn’t it?

I don’t know what it is about Telegraph but the photos they pick to show how much trouble polar bears are in just aren’t working. Last time, they had a photo of a polar bear basically drowning in the downdraft of a helicopter. This time, it gets even better. Take a look at this beauty:

Besides the fact that this bear probably killed the photographer a second after he took this, its placement in this story is just wrong. See for yourself

Polar bears and other rare species are in danger of dying out, scientists fear, as latest figures show the Artic sea ice is at record lows.

 

Scientists from the World Wildlife Fund, who are recording the ice cover over the North Pole, said less ice is predicted in the Arctic this year than in any other.

Umm… Is it just me or do those look like trees in the background? I really don’t think trees grow on ice so this picture seems to contradict the whole ‘polar bears need ice’ argument. Wouldn’t it have been more fitting to have one of those classic pictures of polar bears clinging to a lone iceberg? I mean, this guy looks just fine and as I stated about, it seems to have already adapted to hunting on land.

Now, I don’t know about you, but it seemed to me that the camera men (aka the media) had it out for the Republicans at this convention by airing some unflattering shots from the crowd. I mean, you had this shot, which could be misconstrued as a comparison of Obama to terrorists and then you had this:

(Hint: There should be an ‘e’ after the ‘v’)

Obviously the cameramen were focusing on these people in particular and weren’t just panning the crowd. The only logical reason for them focusing on these individuals was for their interesting signs. With Palin’s teleprompter “malfunction” last night, I wouldn’t put it past whoever is running the video feed from purposely focusing on these less than shining examples of the Republican Party.

Exit Question: What is the likelihood that these two incidences could have been plants or protesters in disguise? I mean, they did have one war protester and one code pink member disrupt McCain’s speech so it’s not completely far fetched.

Alright, as of yet I haven’t heard anyone trying to link Hurricane Gustav or Tropical Storm Hanna with Anthropological Global Warming, but I fear this won’t be the case once they hit. Therefore, I have two questions: Which network will mention a link between these storms and Global Warming first and how long will it take for them to mention it?

So this article comes up in my Google RSS feed for “Global Warming” titled “Nine polar bears at risk of drowning in global warming meltdown” and included this picture:

You know what my first reaction to this picture was? That poor polar bear is going to drown. Why is it going to drown? Because the helicopter that was carrying the photographer is causing such a disturbance in the water the poor bear is going to barely be able to swim. See the waves around the polar bear and how its squinting? Yea, that’s caused by a helicopter that is in hover. Compare it with this picture (upper left corner)

It’s not global warming that’s going to kill this bear, it’s the media.

Oh, wait, don’t cry. Please don’t cry, media. You really shouldn’t worry to much about that because the good news is the polar bear population on a whole has doubled in the past four decades.

See? One polar bear, and even nine polar bears, are nothing really to worry about. Just consider this an example of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ theory.