Nightly Ramble:Friday

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

• AL GORE… RED COURTESY PHONE PLEASE… I’ve mentioned a couple of times over the years that if we ever managed to get into some of the internal documents, and the real behind the scenes discussions of the global warming crowd, that the whole thing would be clearly revealed as a fraud.  Turns out, I was right.  Watt’s Up With That broke this story open this morning and the Usual gloating and denials have both been coming down hot and heavy ever since.I guess that it should be a surprise to nobody, the timing of this thing.  We are what, a week or  two way from Copenhagen?
  As to who is responsible for the hack?  I really don’t care.  I’ll submit that this is the left’s equivalent of ‘The Pentegon Papers”… from the Nixonian point of view.If you forced me to guess, it would seem the most logical response would be that it’s somebody internal to the place and someone who knows their way around a server, who could no longer morally deal with the lies. Maybe a backup tape found it’s way out of the building. I’ve seen that happen several times over the years.
  However, in all honesty I wouldn’t put it past anybody at this point, including the Obama administration who is finally facing up to the fact that they’re not going to be able to maintain the empty promises they made during the first European apology tour of Obama’s campaign.  Copenhagen, if nothing else, was going to be a major some in the eye of the Obama administration, and it’s empty environmentalist rhetoric.  Now, not only does he not have to follow through while he “investigates”, but he can blame the whole thing on the right.  Amazing how that works, isn’t it?

  In reality, the contents of these emails should put the stake through the heart of the global warming nonsense.  Thing is, it won’t.  The same leftists, remember, who are pushing the global warming mantra, are still convinced that Communism will work, if given a chance.  Ignoring, of course, that it never has. The roundup at the moment looks like this: Michelle Malkin, Examiner, BBC, Shout First …, Pajamas Media, The Other McCain, QandO, Tim Blair, The Corner on National …, Riehl World View Classical Values and Hot Air.

• LANDRIEU … ANOTHER VOTE FOR OBAMACARE BOUGHT? Sure looks like $100 million was the asking price.
• PRESSURE ON TIM GEITHNER TO RESIGN? As far as I’m concerned that calls for this idiot  to resign our overdue.  He should have been gone a long time ago.  Indeed, it should probably never have been allowed in the place to begin with.Agreed, that there were a number of Republicans who joined the rush of getting him into place , and in my view those people should also be on the street looking up at where their office used to be.   Glenn Reynolds snarks that He thinks the republicans probably want him to stay on until the election.  Certainly, the election would be even more of a lead pipe cinch than it is now, for the Republicans if he were to stay on. trouble is, I’m not convinced they want the reminder that Geithner actually had Republican support .  Further, there is a question about whether not the country will survive economically until the next election with this more on still holding the reins of our economy.  I begin to think it won’t.
• WHEN EVEN CNN ADMITS IT…. Looks like the country is waking up, moving the blame to the Democrats for our economic condition. If nothing else, this is an image problem for the Obama administration.  Not only are Americans out of work, and an increasingly alarming rate, but now the Obama administration has gotten themselves caught lying about what a good job they’re doing.  I refer to you the text of the “Special Report” panel on Fox the other night as an example of the lies:
  

  STEVE HAYES, SENIOR WRITER, THE WEEKLY STANDARD: Well, you know, the federal government said that $5 million in stimulus money was spent in the North Chicago public district, creating some 473 jobs. The problem was there were only 293 jobs there — right now in existence.
  They asked the superintendent of the schools how did this happen, and she said I don’t know where the number comes from. It was a similar thing in Wilmette outside of Chicago.

  You are seeing these reports pop up again and again and again.

  BAIER: They’re trickling out from every media outlet.

  HAYES: Everywhere. Everywhere. Sure.

  I have to say, a lot of the very good reporting on this has been done by local newspapers at a time when local newspapers, smaller papers don’t get a lot of credit. They’re doing really good work on this kind of thing and I think demonstrating their value.

  But what’s interesting to me is that all of the mistakes seem to be going in one direction. We’re not reading stories about how there were 10 jobs created and then, oh, accidentally we reported only 10 but really 100 were created or 500 were created.

  So what this gets to is the credibility of the reporting and credibility of the Obama administration. I think it was farcical at the outset to say jobs would be saved and created and that you could count that in any sort of meaningful way.

  But what this does I think is will make people question going forward, including Democrats in Congress, what do these numbers mean and why should we ever believe what they’re saying?

  Well, guess what?  It’s to the point now where they’re not believing the administration.  They are now convinced… and rightly… that the Democrats are lying to them.  But let’s consider something larger than this.  These are the people were going to turn health care over to?  Based on ….. what, exactly?  these are the people that we are going to trust when they say there is a global warming problem? Based on ….. what, exactly?  In every major instance of leftist policy being thrust upon the American people, the trustworthiness of those pursuing leftist policy is shown as wanting.  The American people are beginning to wake up to that fact.  Possibly, too late to do anything about it, but there it is.

• BLOG NOTES: In case you didn’t notice, the performance on the web site is far better than it was, because of the new server that we have moved to over the last few days.  Our apologies for being down.  I’ve put up with a crop the performance for quite some time because frankly I didn’t want the site to be down for that long.  But, given the contract was up as of the nineteenth, it seemed a reasonable time to do it.With the performance were getting right now, I begin to wonder why in the hell I didn’t do it before.  One of the reasons for moving the site over to the new server was to allow us to run page caching to increase the performance still more.  Trouble is that’s causing some functional issues.  I haven’t nailed down the causes of those yet so we’ll be running without caching for a while.  As it stands, we’re still better than we were.  I’m still playing with the thing, so few see some weirdness on the site over the next week or so, particularly this coming weekend, you’ll understand why I’m sure.
• GET TRUCKIN’ A final note on things around BitsBlog; I’m in the process of going through a bit of a career change.Like a lot of Americans, I found myself out of work for an extended period time starting in August.  Information technology, particularly the kind that I spent nearly twenty years of my life doing, has changed rather dramatically over the last few years.  Between those changes, and my advancing years, I will be starting on or around the first of the year spending a good deal of time on the road, driving 18 wheels. Yeah, that’s quite the change.

  Assuming that I can get a laptop with an air card, I will continue to write for this blog, and will also continue to write the occasional article for Pajamas Media. I certainly plan on no less, given that I’ve just got through renewing this website for another year on a better quality server than what I was on.

  My new position may prevent me from doing the same kind of job I have been doing on this blog, in terms of the Nightly Ramble every night. It may not, as well.  If I am able, I will certainly continue to produce Rambles evey day as I have for a couple years now.  We will have to play that one by ear. I guess it depends on my ability to obtain a completely mobile computer setup.The upsides to this career change are many.  It certainly steady work. In the Obama economy that’s worth it’s weight in gold.  The pay is good, the work isn’t hard, and as long as I’m physically able, I can continue to drive regardless of age.  I need not worry about being pushed out by the young kid fresh out of computer school. I’ve spent twenty years doing contract work.  I have grown very tired of that, and this will allow me to work directly for a good company.

  It will also allow me to fulfill what I will admit to you has been a dream since childhood.  What young boy doesn’t give at least a passing fancy about driving truck across the country?
  One thing I did not know about the industry is that there are a lot of husband wife teams going out on the road these days.  Empty nest types, a lot of them.  They are to a point in life where they want to go out and have a little adventure and still make a buck.  I am intrigued by that aspect, as is my wife, Donna, given that our older is 19 an dthe younger a freshman in High School. We’re not too far off that stage ourselves.  We may team up like that, we may not.  But it’s nice to have the option.I will keep you posted, of course.

• BITSBLOG BUMPERSTICKER OF THE DAY: Found at Free Republic: