Editor’s note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.
This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.
[…]
If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.
If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.
[…]
Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That’s what you claim you do, when you accept people’s money to buy or subscribe to your paper.
[…]
If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.
Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means. That’s how trust is earned.
Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.
Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards’s own adultery for many months.
So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?
Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?
Wow. And I didn’t even quote all of the good parts.
Month: October 2008
Domainr
“There’s a whole world of domains out there—hundreds at the top-level and even more beyond—Domainr helps you explore them all.”
For instance, if you type “retrophisch”, you’ll see the top search item returned, “retrophis.ch” is already taken.
Tags: domain, search, web site
View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia
An end to employer-based health insurance is exactly what the American healthcare market needs. Far from being a calamity, it would represent a giant step toward ending the current system’s worst distortions: skyrocketing premiums, lack of insurance portability, widespread ignorance of medical prices, and overconsumption of health services.
With more than 90 percent of private healthcare plans in the United States obtained through employers, it might seem unnatural to get health insurance any other way. But what’s unnatural is the link between healthcare and employment. After all, we don’t rely on employers for auto, homeowners, or life insurance. Those policies we buy in an open market, where numerous insurers and agents compete for our business. Health insurance is different only because of an idiosyncrasy in the tax code dating back 60 years – a good example, to quote Milton Friedman, of how one bad government policy leads to another.
[…]
Americans who would never think of using auto insurance to cover tune-ups and oil changes grew accustomed to having their medical insurer pay for yearly physicals, prescriptions, and other routine expenses.
[…]
When patients think someone else is paying most of their healthcare costs, they feel little pressure to learn what those costs actually are – and providers feel little pressure to compete on price. So prices keep rising, which makes insurance more expensive, which makes Americans ever-more worried about losing their insurance – and ever-more dependent on the benefits provided by their employer.
De-linking medical insurance from employment is the key to reforming healthcare in the United States.
[Emphasis added. —R]
Not Art. Gospel. at The Plow
“Not Art. Gospel. is an artistic view of each topic on the Sermon on the Mount. Some amazing doors have been opened, and some great conversations have started from this. But what is most important is that the words of Jesus are being discussed. We want to create art that will lead to God, and we pray that this project will be for His glory.”
There is some really nice stuff here.
Tags: art, bible, god, jesus, love
Terminal Tip: Add scroll arrows to both ends of scroll bar – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty on the command line, the title pretty much says it all.
Tags: command line, interface, mac, terminal
View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia
Umbrella Today?
Simple way to find out whether you’ll need to carry an umbrella with you for the day or not. Type in your zip code, get a simple answer. You can also type in your mobile phone number and receive text messages at a time you determine each day telling you whether or not you’ll need your umbrella…
Tags: weather
ProfileMenu
“This is a simple little application which places a ColorSync menu in your menu bar that will allow you to switch between display profiles, see how old they are, reset your video card’s gamma LUT, and clear out ColorSync’s internal profile cache when it starts acting up. Useful for troubleshooting, evaluating calibration packages, and for those times when you just want to change white points on a whim.”
Tags: color, color management, colorsync, mac
Man decorates basement with $10 worth of Sharpie – Health & Family – Kentucky.com
The title is pretty self-explanatory. Pretty impressive.
Tags: art, sharpie
New Buzz on Honey | ScienCentral | Science Videos | Science News
“The next time you’ve got a sinus infection, that honey in your tea might do more than just soothe your cough, says a recent study done by the University of Ottawa. Researchers found that two types of honey are effective at killing bacteria that cause sinusitis and other infections.”
Tags: food, health, illness
View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia
Dr. Wess Stafford, President and CEO of Compassion:
“The cure to cancer might be in the slums of Kenya or Indonesia.”
In other words, you don’t know what the children of today are capable of tomorrow, how God may use someone like me, someone like you, now to change the lives of scores, hundreds, thousands, possibly millions, years from now, just because we help change the life of one child today.
Please consider sponsoring a child.
When asked what the market would do, J. Pierpont Morgan is supposed to have replied, “It will fluctuate.” And so it has always done. For the time being, capital will be tighter than before, restricting credit–which is not always a bad thing–and businessmen will be reminded (as legislators, state and federal, seem never to learn) that neither bull markets nor recessions last indefinitely.
This is a fundamental reality of capitalism that seems never to penetrate the minds of journalists or politicians: Markets expand, contract a bit, and expand again, revenue streams are not always smooth, and for economic enterprise, the cost of overconfidence can be the same as the price of inertia: swift self-immolation. What appears to be huge, venerable, and financially indestructible today can be gone tomorrow.
[…]
The financial markets are unsteady at the moment, and Wall Street is undergoing elective surgery. But change, not stasis, is the hallmark of the free market […]
Today marks the conclusion of six years of blogging at Retrophisch.
Two thousand, two hundred, sixty-three entries.
Two thousand, two hundred, sixty-three bits of myself, revealed for passers-by. Two thousand, two hundred, sixty-three things I thought you might find interesting. Or funny. Or serious enough to care about. Or to do something about. Or just for me to think about. Or to do something about.
Now to press forward in to the next six…
During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.
[…]
Nobody should hold the junior senator from Illinois responsible for his friends’ and supporters’ violent terrorist acts. But it is fair to hold him responsible for a startling lack of judgment in his choice of mentors, associates, and friends, and for showing a callous disregard for the lives they damaged and the hatred they have demonstrated for this country. It is fair, too, to ask what those choices say about Obama’s own beliefs, his philosophy, and the direction he would take our nation.