

My blog is worth $119,682.48.
How much is your blog worth?

I have just received an email from the venerable Angry White Boy indicating his desire to discuss this topic. However, due to his current physical ailment (or convalescence there-from), he is unable to spend enough QT in front of a computer to properly address this."The Fourth Estate!" Oh my God, I can barely take it! The smug has gotten so thick in here that I'm choking! Absolutely unbelievable.For us, journalism is a sacred thing, a revered calling of a kind that is unique. It is The Fourth Estate, and its practitioners should be held to a higher standard than most who are engaged in other enterprises.For that reason we started MediaWatch seventeen years ago – to help weed out those who don’t belong – who don’t fit – the parameters we feel are paramount to the journalistic creed.In radio, which is primarily an entertainment medium, we look for those who operate with honesty and humanistic élan, and take their broadcasting to fun, sometimes lofty, levels, without being raunchy or crude.Lately, media – legitimate media – is under attack by barbarians, bloggers who think they have the credentials and calling of real journalists. They don’t have credentials and/or credibility of any kind, generally.And so this.....We don’t like philanderers. And one blogger is that. Moreover, this blogger takes material, wholesale, from other sources and presents it as if it were original with him. The deviousness is palpable to those who are astute.One blogger is obsessed with child molesters and child molesting. Psychologists understand this person’s obsession.One blogger is so vile that his blog besmirches his young daughters and wife in ways that are an embarrassment to them and to those who stumble across his perpetually obscene blog.Another blogger is so insipid and banal that she has to take material from other blogs to maintain some kind of relevancy. She has lifted material from our sites, verbatim, and pretended that she came up with the information on her own.One reporter for a weekly paper in town, not a blogger, takes material from other sources, and presents it as his own (no attribution). He has the help of a girlfriend reporter, at a paper in town, who abets his shenanigans.Leo Morris is a blogger, spending more time on his blog than working for his newspaper, The News-Sentinel. He is disreputable as far as we’re concerned, and not just because he’s a slacker of sorts.These bloggers and “reporters” take material, ours and others, and pervert it, to make points that are not salient, snarky, or redeeming in any way. They are like a burglar who enters a home, not just to pilfer, but to damage that which they can never have.So we choose to protect our MediaWatch home as best we can, from intruders and disgusting malcontents, just as we intended to protect local journalism, in our small way, from those who would misuse the journalistic calling.So now, maybe, you can understand our password requirement. We know it aggravates some of you, but we’ve only given the password to a chosen few in the media community; persons we trust and like – persons with integrity and intelligence. And we take it that our password insistence shall be okay therefore.
One blogger is so vile that his blog besmirches his young daughters and wife in ways that are an embarrassment to them and to those who stumble across his perpetually obscene blog.
me...I still don't give a fuck what you think, Rich.
Juan Williams, a senior correspondent for NPR and token black liberal analyst for Fox News has evidently lost his mind (if you use his sleeve-worn liberalism as a benchmark for sanity, that is). In a remarkably (and uncharacteristically) coherent and perceptive editorial in today's Washington Post entitled "Banish the Bling," Williams absolutey derogates the self-imposed "Rap Culture" of the inner cities so prevalent among black and hispanic youth. Granted, Juan really does try to euphemize some of the abhorrent behavior:Their search for identity and a sense of direction is undermined by a twisted popular culture that focuses on the "bling-bling" of fast money associated with famous basketball players, rap artists, drug dealers and the idea that women are at their best when flaunting their sexuality and having babies.Emphasis mine.
who Black America has been spurning for years...you know, the guy who actually values "families" and "education?" Ridiculous, I know, but that's one of the things that lead me to believe that Juan has, in fact, lost his marbles. It is extraordinarily rare for a black man, or a liberal man, to ever agree with Bill Cosby, his ultra-white (read: inoffensive and non-flamboyant) lifestyle, his regular opposition to gangsta-culture bullshit, his support for learning, his respect for women and children...Cosby asked the chilling question: "What good is Brown " and all the victories of the civil rights era if nobody wants them? A generation after those major civil rights victories, black America is experiencing alarming dropout rates, shocking numbers of children born to single mothers and a frightening acceptance of criminal behavior that has too many black people filling up the jails. Where is the focus on taking advantage of new opportunities to advance and to close the racial gap in educational and economic achievement?Sure, it's just Williams quoting Cosby, but I consider it to be a great start. I don't necessarily think I know what's best for inner city black kids...quite to the contrary, I don't even necessarily know what's best for me. I do, however, think it's safe to say that crack cocaine and gunplay are out of the question. I also think it might be a bad idea to sow one's seeds beyond the capabilities of one's pocketbook, motivation or awareness. I don't see how one's ego could possibly be stroked by attempting to sire as many welfare recipients as possible...but I'm just a fat white kid with a bad attitude.
Well aren't we impressed? That's some really hard-hitting "breaking news" there, fellas.
Mother Nature just missed an opportunity yesterday to deep-fry Nicole Kidman's yacht. Ms. Nature's poor aim fell short of her goal and instead juiced a small sailboat moored nearby. Some photographer (who evidently has a four-leafed clover AND a rabbit's foot crammed up his arse) named Gabriel Urbinaga (somehow) caught the action on film in Rushcutters Bay, Australia.
Nature then rebutted, making some disparaging remarks about Lauper's hair, insisting the rain was intended to help.
My next-door neighbors on the right side are a pair of 90-something-year-old women. My wife and I affectionately call them "the old lesbians." [Disclaimer: I have nothing at all against lesbians. We call them "the old lesbians" because they ARE old lesbians, and have lived together in their house since the late '50s.]
He has quite an amusing tale to tell about the lesbians, but his description of the neighbors' dog Bruce is a crackup:Forget about having a barbecue in our back yard. Unless you're deaf, it's pointless. So is playing catch with the kids, or simply sitting outside and reading a book. WOOF. WOOF. WOOF. WOOF. WOOF. WOOF. WOOF. WOOF. Like clockwork.And furthermore, his other neighbor (Sal) who despises Bruce:
Sal wound back and punched Bruce right in the teeth through the fence, yelling at the top of his lungs to shut the $%^&* up, you piece of ^&*)(#.Anyway, it's a great story, and it brings up some interesting points about the way we live...we in the vast tracts of beige-washed vinyl and cute little pushable lawnmowers with the little nylon hoppers in tow, to catch our grass clippings.
morning BM...
Now I'm just rambling, but I don't get it at all. My wife grew up on 9 wooded acres in the country, I in subdivisions. Now, she's the one that wants to play beige-vinyl goddess, and I am flying both middle fingers at full mast walking to the street to get the mail in only my boxer shorts at 1 o'clock in the afternoon...laughing at all of the uptight jackasses that surround me. Sometimes I just want to sit at the end of my driveway (where my kingdom ends and the "community" begins) in those boxer shorts. I would like to take my toaster with me! I would pull an extension cord to the toaster and sit there at the farthest reach of my little kingdom, in my boxer shorts, making blueberry toaster waffles and launching my son's soiled diapers onto the hoods of passing cars...I would show them. All in an attempt to break myself of what obviously is a genetic predisposition to being a suburbanite. If you happen to see me doing this, you have my full permission to zap me with a tazer or mace me or whatever. That will mean that I am in need of therapy, medication or both.



The atheist woman was being introduced to non-denominational contemporary Christian worship by her "host family" with regularity and vigor. She felt as if they didn't understand atheism as she presented it, so she took them to a meeting of local atheists at a coffee shop. The Christian was obviously confused about the concept of people that literally don't believe in the supernatural, so he was lost from the word "Go." One of the atheist men was explaining why they feel that the U.S. Constitution has basically been shit upon with the introduction of religious symbolism within government institutions. He mentioned money, in particular."How would you like it," the atheist asked the vacant looking Christian man "if the Government started printing money that was embossed with the phrase There is no God? Wouldn't you feel as if the Government was overstepping its boundaries by making you carry around something in your pocket that was MY belief and not YOURS?"
The Christian man replied "In God We Trust is on our money. If you don't like it, move someplace else."What a horrible attitude. The question was repeated at least 7 times, the man kept replying with the same "git the hell outta here if you don't like it" response. Suddenly I realized what an absurd argument that our fine Government sparked off in 1956 when they chose this unifying phrase to rally U.S. citizens against the Communists during the cold war (at the time, Soviet law doctrine recognized only atheism).

It means: "From many, one"
I hadn't heard this song in a couple of years...until today on WISU in Terre Haute. I had fogotten what sweet lyrics it had.
rather warm, poorly lit, uncomfortably arranged (the tables were literally butted together in places). There were no fishing poles, no aquariums, no reggae, no parrots or pirates. There were some scaled-down racecar hoods with beer logos on them. NASCAR really seemed to be more the theme of the place than anything else (not that there's anything wrong with that, its just not what I expected, nor really what I wanted). The other thematic element that prevailed was beer. Cheap, American beer. I think most of the decor was freebie stuff that the local liquor distributors give away (lots of stamped Coors signs and so forth).
You'll have to excuse my odd interest in this, but I've followed it closely for over a year. You see, my crazy friend Kevin got burned alive last year in his family's magnesium foundry here in Fort Wayne. He spent almost a year in the hospital getting new skin on 95% of his body. Nobody was allowed in to see him, for the sake of infection prevention (I guess the immune system is somewhat challenged when you only have 5% of your skin to fend off attacking microbes)."Another of those injured, Kevin McNabb, the son of the company’s owners, spent almost a year in rehabilitation with severe burns over a majority of his body."However, when the caption for the above picture was written, here is all they could manage:
"A burn victim from the fire of April 2005 at the same plant watches from the sidelines with firefighters at the National Magnesium and Aluminum Foundry."Impressive reporting, eh? They tell you all about Kevin's long ordeal with some staggering burns, and then can't identify him in a picture that THEY took this week. Typical.
On to the next article from those aces over at JG:Kevin McNabb, son of company owners Robert and Nancy McNabb, was one of the injured employees. He attempted to put dry chemicals on the flames after the combustion, but soon half the room was engulfed.
McNabb was taken to St. Joseph Hospital in critical condition and remained there until this March after suffering burns to 95 percent of his body. He left after more than 30 surgeries and several brushes with death. He still faces months of rehabilitation and will most likely need some reconstructive surgery in the future, doctors said at the time of his release.
One of the workers injured in the 2005 fire was at the scene Tuesday night, Banta said. His legs and one arm were wrapped in gauze still. The unidentified man continues his rehabilitation work, she said.
Emphasis mine.
Now, any dimwit who looks at the picture can plainly see that Kevin has all four (not three) of his extremities wrapped in gauze, or maybe its not him...it might be the OTHER catastrophic burn victim from last year's fire...(there wasn't anyone else burned that badly other than a since-deceased man). Also, unidentified??? How do you figure? In both stories Amanda Iacone goes on and on about the plight of Kevin McNabb, and then fails to identify him by her own description? That's some crack reporting.
I wondered how long Dan could keep his mouth shut about the contrived and paranoid BS emanating from Craig Skinner on the topic of the local GOP website. I guess we have our answer. It's really been funny listening to Craig yammer on and on about "Dan making money off the party" and what a crooked arrangement he thought it to be. It's just plain laughable, considering the whole arrangement has ALWAYS been above board for all to see, but watching Dan patiently bait the lad for the last month has been funny in its own right. I especially like Craig's little post "Investigative Report" where he "exposes the truth." That's some deep stuff, Craig. False, but deep and entertaining...but hey, conspiracy theories go a long way with Democrats 'round these parts. Keep it up, you could start your own religion someday!
OK, so the brainless conglomerate known as the U.S. Congress has decided that the most important thing we need to do with respect to the current skirmish in theocrappolic region of Israelebanonistan is get the limp wristed femmembers of the E.U. to basically join with them in one unified and unwavering voice to label Hezblahblah as a unanimously identified terrorist organization.EU won't label Hezbollah 'terrorist' group
BRUSSELS, Aug. 2 (UPI) -- In a rebuff to Washington, the European Union will not add the Islamist Hezbollah movement to its list of terrorist organizations, the EU president says.
"Given the sensitive situation where we are, I don't think this is something we will be acting on now," said Finland Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja, who is also the EU president.
The decision came in response to a letter signed by 213 members of the U.S. Congress demanding the intergovernmental organization join the United States in branding Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.
Washington had no immediate response.
The 25-member EU could take up the discussion again after Israel and Hezbollah
reach a peace deal, Tuomioja said.
"Everybody in Lebanon should be a party" to reaching a peace deal, he said, suggesting that calling Hezbollah a terrorist organization could risk alienating the Shiite organization and political party, London's Observer reported.
Six countries have designated part or all of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, a label vehemently disputed by other countries.
