Apparently MSNBC (and their hosts like the delirious Keith Olbermann) simply were not turning enough of a profit to warrant Comcast continuing to carry them on the basic package. Now if you want MSNBC you will have to pay the freight that the station could not do on its own and get a more expensive upgraded package.

It’s so sad. FOX News remains however and liberals in the Pittsburgh area will no doubt be screaming for “fairness” and about how Comcast must be in the pockets of the right-wing with such a decision.
Nope. What it is is just another instance of the free markets dictating that liberal points of view are not wanted by the American public. Not even in a bastion of liberalism like Pittsburgh.

Some of the reporting on this issue is so biased it is almost laughable. Take, for example, this article in the Times Argus:

Comcast drops stations from standard package as part of shift to digital
Some customers are unhappy
July 23, 2008

By Bruce Edwards Rutland Herald

The state’s largest cable television company has shuffled its channel lineup, much to the dismay of some customers.

Comcast dropped Oxygen, EWTN, truTV, CN8, NECN and the popular MSNBC from its standard cable analog package and moved the channels to its digital starter package. C-SPAN2 was moved to the digital tier last fall.

The emphasis there is mine. The “popular” MSNBC? You’re joking right?

This is a station that can’t even crack a million viewers!

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann – 994,000
…
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews (Hardball) – 756,000
MSNBC’s Abrams - 735,000

“Popular” my left butt cheek!

(CNN)– A German magazine quoted Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Malikias saying that he backed a proposalby presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months.

“U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months,” he said in an interview with Der Spiegel that was released Saturday.

“That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes,” he said.

But a spokesman for al-Maliki said his remarks “were misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately.”

Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the possibility of troop withdrawal was based on the continuance of security improvements, echoing statements that the White House made Friday after a meeting between al-Maliki and U.S. President Bush.

It should be noted that Al-Maliki is STILL supporting the strategy proposed by President Bush which is that as the situation betters itself, American troops will come home. This is NOT the same as Barack Obama’s plans which amounts to a policy that he does not care what the situation is and that he wants the troops home on a fixed time table.

But the initial story will be useful to liberals who actually think that there is an imperialist effort underway in Iraq and the President Bush does not want to see American soldiers come home but rather occupy Iraq.

This is not the first such attempt at the news media attempting to spin Al-Maliki’s position. Previously just a little over a week ago, the AP attempted this same story.

In this article, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, spelled out that the President’s plan was always that troops would be withdrawn from Iraq as security improves:

“We’d all like to see U.S. troops get out of here at some point in time,” Mullen said. “However, from a military perspective I need the laws and the regulations and the agreements from the government of Iraq in order to continue operations beyond the 31st of December of this year.”

So really there has not been much change in anyone’s position that I can see.

Of course the reason for all this huffing over such comments is because, as The Source reported, information has been circulating around Congress that the situation is so vastly improved that accelerated troop draw downs was a possibility.

In the end, the policy for those that believe in liberty (and the Iraqis as well) has been win the war and improve security and bring the troops home as that happens. For liberals the problem is now that that is happening, how do they spin it as a victory for themselves even though they have opposed the effort nearly every step of the way!

Cops to IndyMac customers: Remain calm or face arrest

Police ordered angry customers lined up outside an IndyMac Bank branch to remain calm or face arrest Tuesday as they tried to pull their money on the second day of the failed institution’s federal takeover.

At least three police squad cars showed up early Tuesday as tensions rose outside the San Fernando Valley branch of Pasadena-based IndyMac.

Federal regulators seized Pasadena-based IndyMac on Friday and reopened the bank Monday under the control of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Deposits to $100,000 are fully insured by the FDIC.

Worried customers with deposits in excess of insured limits flooded IndyMac Bank branches on Monday, demanding to withdraw as much money as they could or get answers about the fate of their funds.

Is this how it ends? The men with the guns coming to control us all at the behest of those that screwed us?

Recently several prominent liberals have pushed for opening the Strategic Petroleum Reserves (containing a supply equivalent to 33 days of total U.S. oil demand) to try to relieve some of the pressure on oil prices. Why? Because they do not see the contradiction? Nope.

They are pushing for the reserves to be tapped because they know that doing so will have little (or even no) effect on the price of oil so they can grandstand later saying, “See! Increased supply did not work! Now do things our way!”

Of course anyone with an ounce of brains in their head sees the problem with the theory of using the petroleum reserves to lower prices. The problem is that tapping already recovered supplies does not elevate long term demand and solve long term supply shortages. And it is long term demand that is driving the price of oil.

Putting a few hundred thousand or even a million barrels a day into the economy from the reserves only means that that oil will have to be replaced to refresh the reserves from artificially limited supplies. And if that is the case and there is no truly new supply then the same shortage coupled with high demand continues to exist, traders and investors see this and the price on long term contracts remains unchanged.

It is a cunning ploy which, if implemented would surely fool a sizable segment of the population. But all it is is just another dog and pony show put on by liberals trying to manipulate enough people into seeing things their way and further harming our country with lies.

It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure this sort of stuff out. The reason why, when you walk into your favorite store, you see that rack of clothes that are 50% off is because the store could not move the stock they bought at the existing price. There was not enough demand and there was an excess supply. So what they do is mark the leftovers down low enough and hope you might become interested on impulse and get the damn things out of their store.

But on the opposite end of the scale, think about the whole Tickle Me Elmo fiasco of a few years ago. Remember how people were lined up around the block for a crack at one of these hard to find gems to make their child happy on Christmas morning? Remember how many people were buying them only to be resell them on the internet for $1,000 or more?

Now, put those two extremes together and you have a great model about how supply and demand works to drive prices up and down.

The answer to high oil prices is to get more oil than we need. That means mostly drill and recover more. It also means partially conservation of existing supplies. But what it does not mean is federal subsidies for gerbil power.

By moving both the supply curve up and the demand curve down just a bit you can effect oil prices greater than most liberals understand.

July 15 (Bloomberg) — Congressional Democrats are considering a second round of rebates to taxpayers, saying the benefits of the first checks sent to more than 100 million households this year are being eroded by rising energy prices.

“We will be proceeding with another stimulus package, and we once again hope we will work in a bipartisan way,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said after House Democratic leaders met with a group of economists to discuss the spreading housing crisis and rising gas prices.

Pelosi and other House Democrats said that in addition to more rebates a second stimulus package would probably include additional spending for roads and other infrastructure, expanded unemployment benefits, home-heating assistance for low-income families and aid for states struggling with budget deficits.

I have no problem with the government giving money back to those that paid it in taxes in the first place. However when it goes to people that do not pay the freight of supporting this country financially, that is where I draw the line.

On Monday, The New Yorker magazine tried dipping its toe into broad satire involving Senator Obama with a cover image depicting the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and his wife, Michelle, as fist-bumping, flag-burning, bin Laden-loving terrorists in the Oval Office. The response from both Democrats and Republicans was explosive.

Comedy has been no easier for the phalanx of late-night television hosts who depend on skewering political leaders for a healthy quotient of their nightly monologues. Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and others have delivered a nightly stream of jokes about the Republican running for president — each one a variant on the same theme: John McCain is old.
But there has been little humor about Obama: about his age, his speaking ability, his intelligence, his family, his physique. And within a late-night landscape dominated by white hosts, white writers, and overwhelmingly white audiences, there has been almost none about his race.

“We’re doing jokes about people in his orbit, not really about him,” said Mike Sweeney, the head writer for O’Brien on “Late Night.” The jokes will come, representatives of the late-night shows said, when Obama does or says something that defines him — in comedy terms.

“We’re carrion birds,” said Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show” on the Comedy Central channel. “We’re sitting up there saying ‘Does he seem weak? Is he dehydrated yet? Let’s attack.’ ”
But so far, no true punch lines have landed.

Why? The reason cited by most of those involved in the shows is that a fundamental factor is so far missing in Obama: There is no comedic “take” on him, nothing easy to turn to for an easy laugh, like allegations of Bill Clinton’s womanizing, or President George W. Bush’s goofy bumbling or Al Gore’s robotic persona.

“The thing is, he’s not buffoonish in any way,” said Mike Barry, who started writing political jokes for Johnny Carson’s monologues in the waning days of the Johnson administration and has lambasted every presidential candidate since, most recently for Letterman. “He’s not a comical figure,” Barry said. 

Hold on a second here. I am just putting on my hip waders because it is getting deep here. No “comedic take” on Obama? Nothing to “turn to for an easy laugh”?

Now this is spin of the highest order!

Ok, let’s see if we can get their creative juices flowing with some topics:
- A birth certificate sworn to be authentic yet contains no elements of a legitimate birth certificate.
- A couple decades in a radical church listening to anti-American and racist rhetoric.
- A book with several references about how Barack Obama sees white people and being white as a problem.
- The fact that he stumbles and stammers in search of a coherent thought any time he does not have a prepared speech in front of him.
- His association with the corrupt Tony Rezko.
- His association with an avowed and unrepentant terrorist.
- The fact that his name appeared on a FARC computer and that he was talked about in correspondence in a positive light and as potentially good for the terrorist organization if elected to be president.
- His flip flops on Iran being a not serious and then a serious threat.
- His umpteen positions on Iraq.

Any of this striking a chord yet with you so-called “comedians”?

Let’s be honest. You guys are scared. You are scared that if you poke fun at the guy who is sensitive about his ears that when (God forbid) he becomes president you might have a visit from some guys in black suits asking serious questions about where you loyalties lay.

BEIJING, July 15 (Xinhua) — If bad weather threatens the August 8 opening of Beijing’s Olympic Games, then meteorologists may change the weather, according to a Chinese meteorology official.

Chen Zhenlin, a vice director with the China Meteorological Administration (CMA), made the statement Tuesday afternoon at a press conference held at the Beijing International Media Center.

Meteorological departments will consult with the Beijing municipal government whether or not to change the city’s weather, should there be any unfavorable weather on August 8, Chen said.

He said meteorologists have made preparations for artificial weather modification since 2003, especially on reducing rainfall, but admitted that the technology still has limitations.

“Artificial weather modification could be useful when a drizzle occurs,” he said. “But in case of a heavy rainfall, no one can help.”

Come on, why wouldn’t they believe they could control the weather? They have been controlling the minds of the Chinese people and their economy for decades! So why not just add the weather to that list?

Now Congress has flipped, thus proving that no law – even ones they themselves passed – are safe:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In what likely is the last big showdown between President George W. Bush and congressional Democrats over the popular Medicare health care program, the U.S. Congress on Tuesday voted to override his veto of a bill to keep doctors’ payments from being slashed.

By enacting the measure over Bush’s objections, Congress rescinded an 11 percent reduction in government payments to doctors treating elderly Medicare patients.

Just hours after Bush vetoed the legislation, the Senate voted 70-26 to overturn him, following the House of Representatives, which voted 383-41 to override. The bill now becomes law.

Twenty-one Republicans in the Senate and 153 in the House broke ranks with Bush and joined majority Democrats to overturn the veto in this election-year vote.

Isn’t it great to know that we can count on Congress to keep their promises? Except when it is an election year and they need to shore up votes from people on the federal dole that is …

This is why we have a Constitution. And if we would have stuck to it, we never would have to worry about how much money government pays for people to go see the doctor because government would not be doing such things.

As thousands of customers waited hours in the heat Monday to withdraw deposits from failed IndyMac Bank, investors dumped the stocks of many mortgage lenders, precipitating the steepest one-day decline in banking shares since 1989.

Southern California fixtures Downey Financial Corp. and FirstFed Financial Corp., specialists in the nontraditional mortgages that fueled the housing boom, were among the hardest hit, with their stock prices down 24% and 19% respectively. Shares of Washington Mutual Inc., the biggest savings and loan, fell nearly 35%.

Keefe, Bruyette & Woods bank analyst Frederick Cannon said one big fear for the banks was that depositors, seeing what was happening on Wall Street, would begin to pull their funds out. That, he said, could create risks for even a reasonably healthy bank in a hurry.

Branches of Pasadena-based IndyMac, which federal regulators seized late Friday, were thronged by customers, many of them elderly, seeking to withdraw deposits, even though most were fully insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Heck, the second I heard (or even sniffed) that a federal agency was taking over any bank I had funds deposited it, I would rush down there and withdraw my money too! This is the government we are talking about here. You know, the same institution that violates the Constitution on a daily basis and then crashes the programs which it instituted (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) by violating the Constitution?

Yeah, get you money and run!

More Americans are likely to suffer from kidney stones in the coming years as a result of global warming, according to researchers at the University of Texas.

Kidney stones, which are formed from dissolved minerals in the urine and can be extremely painful, are often caused by caused by dehydration, either by not drinking enough liquid or losing too much due to high heat conditions.

If global warming trends continue as projected by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, the United States can expect as much as a 30 percent growth in kidney stone disease in some of its driest areas, said the findings published in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The increased incidence of disease would represent between 1.6 million and 2.2 million cases by 2050, costing the US economy as much as one billion dollars in treatment costs.

“This study is one of the first examples of global warming causing a direct medical consequence for humans,” said Margaret Pearle, professor of urology at University of Texas Southwestern and senior author of the paper.

Only one problem … there is little evidence of any real global warming and no evidence of man made global warming. Opps. Forgot to mention that important fact! So even if the Earth warms and the rate of kidney stones increases who are you going to sue for you pain and suffering? Mother Earth? The Sun?

Just one more thing for the hypochondriacs out there to worry about.