Bent Corner

After a recent CNBC Republican candidate debate, CNBC threw a poll of on their website asking readers who they thought won the debate. Ron Paul supporters responded by flooding the poll with votes for Ron Paul in an attempt to skew the poll’s results. Ron Paul won by a whopping 75%. CNBC responded by removing the poll from the website. This from the CNBC website:

And the computer logs showed the poll had been hit with traffic from Ron Paul chat sites. I learned other Internet polls that night had been hit in similar fashion. Congratulations. You folks are obviously well-organized and feel strongly about your candidate and I can’t help but admire that.

What’s to admire? I didn’t realize that being “well-organized” and “feeling strongly about something” were necessarily traits to admire. Nazis were well-organized. Nazis felt strongly about something. Should they be admired too? Not that I am comparing Ron Paul fanboys to Nazis. Even though at least some neo-Nazis are Ron Paul supporters and it seems that at least some of the people helping to flood these online polls in Ron Paul’s favor have goose-stepped over from antisemitic white supremest websites.

What about substance? Having fans on the Internet that spam online polls and vote for every Ron Paul story on Digg aren’t things to brag about.

Also from the CNBC website:

But you also ruined the purpose of the poll. It was no longer an honest “show of hands” — it suddenly was a platform for beating the Ron Paul drum. That certainly wasn’t our intention and certainly doesn’t serve our readers … at least those who aren’t already in the Ron Paul camp.

I don’t know what Ron Paul’s über fanboys expect when they do stuff like this. Sure, they may get some momentary personal pleasure by throwing the results of an online poll, but all they are really doing is making their candidate look bad. Manipulating Internet polls just makes their candidate look weird. That’s something Ron Paul doesn’t need any help with.

He already has that down pat.

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Ann Coulter is losing it. I realize most of the time she says stuff just to get attention, but sometimes I really wonder if there is something wrong with her. It’s like she has a tumor that is pressing on some part of the brain that makes one say totally asinine things in public.

Ann Coulter was on Donny Deutsch’s CNBC show, “The Big Idea,” and she said that the U.S. would be a better place if there weren’t any Jewish people. She said that they needed to “perfect” themselves into Christians. Media Matters has the entire transcript. It’s worth a read.

At least she didn’t talk about invading Poland.

Texas Republican/Libertarian Congressman Ron Paul is running for President and he thinks the above photo is that of a human being. It’s a fertilized egg. He believes it is a person like you and me.

I was listening to Air America Radio yesterday and heard the host conduct an interview with Ron Paul.

Ron Paul is at his core a Libertarian which means he thinks the government shouldn’t pass laws that prohibit people from doing things unless doing those things impede or intrude on the rights of others. Unless it’s something Ron Paul personally doesn’t like. In that case, he’s all for laws that prohibit that.

Ron Paul is against abortion. I heard him say so on Air America Radio. Normally I would tell someone who is against abortion to simply not have one. In Ron Paul’s case, that’s not very practical advice because he doesn’t even have a uterus.

He wont ever need to have an abortion.

That’s not good enough for Ron Paul. He doesn’t want anyone else to get an abortion either. He said in the Air America Radio interview that he is an OB/GYN doctor and over the course of his career he has delivered close to 4 million babies. Maybe it was closer to 4 thousand babies. I don’t remember. The point is, because he has delivered a whole bunch of babies, he doesn’t want a woman to have a choice when it comes to something as important as her own reproduction.

He wants to make that choice for women everywhere.

Ron Paul even authored legislation that sought to define that human life begins at conception. He not only believes a fertilized egg is a person, he wants everyone else to believe that too. He wants it to be a law.

That doesn’t sound too Libertarian to me.

I was reading an article in the Baltimore Sun about Hagerstown’s refugee situation. I found a couple points somewhat interesting. The first was something said by Mukhabbat Gilmanova, a Russian Turkish refugee now living in Hagerstown. I think it illustrates one of the main problems with bringing refugees to Hagerstown:

“I really like Hagerstown. I really like the U.S.,” said Gilmanova, 21, who lives with her husband and in-laws and is studying to be a nurse. “I like packing … I like paycheck … I like everything.”

She and her husband live with his family. Many of the refugees resettled in Hagerstown are living in similar situations. Married couples live with the husband’s parents and in some cases, the husband’s grandparents. This might be the norm in Russia and other parts of the world, but it’s not typical here in Hagerstown. I don’t think that is the type of living arrangement most Americans want.

Because refugees are willing to blended families with parents and grandparents, they are able to work for far less then a living wage. Bringing refugees to Hagerstown creates a cheap and ready workforce for local businesses. It helps to drive wages down.

This too is from the Baltimore Sun article:

“To be honest with you, we’ve had a hard time finding people who want to work here from the Hagerstown area,” said Cheryl Eyler of Parker Plastics, who has hired about eight refugees. “The refugees have a great work ethic. They’re here every day, they don’t call in sick and they work hard. … They’re extremely thankful for having a job.”

Eyler currently has a few openings for $10- to $11-an-hour packing jobs. She would like to hire more refugees, she said, but now that is unlikely.

It’s hard to find employees to perform strenuous, manual labor jobs when you are only paying $10 an hour. Especially for employees with a great work ethic and that don’t call in sick. It’s hard to get by in Hagerstown on $10 an hour. That’s probably why many of these refugees sought financial aid from the city and the county. If they were being paid a living wage for their hard work, they wouldn’t need help from local taxpayers. The Virginia Council of Churches decided to quit bringing refugees to Hagerstown because city and county officials refused to assist refugees with money for housing.

If the refugees were earning a living wage in exchange for their hard work and good work ethic, they wouldn’t need help from the government.

Hagerstown has been in the news lately. A religious organization that works in refugee resettlement called the Virginia Council of Churches has announced that they will no longer resettle refugees in Hagerstown. They have determined that Hagerstown is just too unfriendly to refugees.

The Virginia Council of Churches’ announcement caps 12 months of sour relations. Many residents of the western Maryland city of 39,000 didn’t know that nearly 200 refugees had been placed in their community until last October, when emergency medical workers, lacking an interpreter, mistook a Burundian woman’s morning sickness for a chemical or biological threat and set up a decontamination tent on a downtown street.

Since then, despite regular monthly meetings with local officials, the group’s requests for funds to help pay refugee housing costs have been denied by the city and Washington County.

The emergency medical technicians mistook a Burundian woman’s morning sickness for some type of biological threat because she called to 911. Maybe women in the Republic of Burundi call 911 when they have morning sickness. Woman in Hagerstown do not.

When the emergency medical technicians arrived on the scene, they had no idea that they were called because a woman was experiencing a bad case of morning sickness. They thought she was severally ill. After all, she called 911. As fate would have it, none of the EMT’s spoke Kirundi and the woman didn’t speak English. None of the refugees spoke English. The other refugees in the home mistakenly conveyed to the EMT’s that they too were sick.

The EMT’s believed the refugees may have had a communicable disease. Can’t say I blame them. Hazmat units were sent to the area, and the 12 African refugees were briefly quarantined.

Up until the historic morning sickness 911 call was made, nobody in Hagerstown even knew the Virginia Council of Churches had placed 12 non-English speaking Burundian refugees in our fine city. Maybe they should have told someone.

Some people in Hagerstown have wondered why a religious group from Virginia placed African refugees here in Maryland. I can’t really blame them.

Looks like there may be some scandal brewing at Oral Roberts University. Richard Roberts, president of Oral Roberts University and son of it’s founder and name sake stands accused of being illegally involved in a local political campaign. He is also accused of spending donated money on lavish luxury items including home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter’s senior trip to the Bahamas, and fancy cars for his wife, Lindsay.

The most interesting thing in all this is something his wife is accused of.

This from the AP story:

She is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding nonacademic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit as “underage males.”

What is this woman doing sending text messages to underage males? There is nothing new with evangelical men of God misusing donated money intended for The Lord. It’s to be expected. If you donate money to one of these charlatans, you had better just expect them to blow the money on something stupid. Don’t be surprised if they use your money to buy a golden toilet or vacations for their spoiled children. Just be thankful they don’t use it for crystal meth and gay male prostitutes.

Having wives trolling for boys is something fairly new for these crooked evangelical men of God. Normally you expect them to be the ones just a little too interested in the underage boys. You don’t expect such activity coming from their wives.

That is what I call a well camouflaged soldier. No matter where the fight takes our military, the men and women in our armed forces are ready for the challenge. Whether it’s the mountains of Afghanistan or the sofa in Grandma’s living room, our fighting men and women can blend into almost any environment.

(photo stolen borrowed from Imager.cc)

LIMBAUGH: Another Mike, this one in Olympia, Washington. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER 2: Hi Rush, thanks for taking my call.

LIMBAUGH: You bet.

CALLER 2: I have a retort to Mike in Chicago, because I am a serving American military, in the Army. I’ve been serving for 14 years, very proudly.

LIMBAUGH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER 2: And, you know, I’m one of the few that joined the Army to serve my country, I’m proud to say, not for the money or anything like that. What I would like to retort to is that, if we pull — what these people don’t understand is if we pull out of Iraq right now, which is about impossible because of all the stuff that’s over there, it’d take us at least a year to pull everything back out of Iraq, then Iraq itself would collapse, and we’d have to go right back over there within a year or so. And –

LIMBAUGH: There’s a lot more than that that they don’t understand. They can’t even — if — the next guy that calls here, I’m gonna ask him: Why should we pull — what is the imperative for pulling out? What’s in it for the United States to pull out? They can’t — I don’t think they have an answer for that other than, “Well, we just gotta bring the troops home.”

CALLER 2: Yeah, and, you know what –

LIMBAUGH: “Save the — keep the troops safe” or whatever. I — it’s not possible, intellectually, to follow these people.

CALLER 2: No, it’s not, and what’s really funny is, they never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and talk to the media.

LIMBAUGH: The phony soldiers.

CALLER 2: The phony soldiers. If you talk to a real soldier, they are proud to serve. They want to be over in Iraq. They understand their sacrifice, and they’re willing to sacrifice for their country.

LIMBAUGH: They joined to be in Iraq. They joined –

CALLER 2: A lot of them — the new kids, yeah.

LIMBAUGH: Well, you know where you’re going these days, the last four years, if you signed up. The odds are you’re going there or Afghanistan or somewhere.

CALLER 2: Exactly, sir.

Transcript from Media Matters

I didn’t get into it until it’s third season, but it quickly became one of my favorite TV shows. Paramount has come up with a new way of getting more money out of the few fans the franchise still has by offering the complete series in one DVD box set. The individual seasons have been out on DVD for years. This is the first time all seven seasons have been sold in one set.

The set is scheduled for release on October 17. I don’t know what that works out to be in Federation Stardate.

Wal-Mart and Amazon are both pre-selling it for $305. That comes out to be less then $50 a season. On the other end of the spectrum, the official Star Trek website is of course selling it for $440.00. It’s as though Paramount never misses an opportunity to make money off of Star Trek fans.