Points to Ponder:

[T]hose who have comments boxes are capable of manipulating the content there to suit their own agenda including banning people who raise strong enough arguments against the "prevailing orthodoxy" at a given weblog. You would be surprised at how often those who laud their "willingness to interact with others" will put censors on their comments boxes that would make the monitors at Pravda in the days of the old Soviet Union blush and as we do not believe in unnecessary censorship, that means we would inexorably leave out there potentially a variety of assertions that our lack of time to respond to would give the unintended perception of being "unanswerable" by us. Those are the main reasons for our refusal to use comments boxes in a nutshell. [Excerpt edited from the final revision of a weblog post published on December 1, 2008]

Firestorm threatens to engulf Blanche Lincoln (Politico)

Senator Blanche Lincoln whatever else one wants to say about her was the only Democrat on Senator Max Baucus' Senate Finance Committee to vote for Senator Jim Bunning's amendment which would have prevented the attempt to jam Baucus' proposals through without being seen or even read. Those of you who want to call and scream at the Democrats on that committee for being a bunch of unethical f##king cowards who preach "transparency" yet do the exact opposite (in classic 1984 fashion I might add), kindly spare Ms. Lincoln from your wrath. She (unlike the other twelve Democrats on that committee) did the right thing ethically and in principle and for this she deserves to be commended.

On Recent Funerals and Suspending My "No More Funerals" Stance of Recent Years:

I attended another funeral yesterday eleven days ago -my eighteenth in the last nine and a half years.{1} This was despite the fact that I decided to take a "no more funerals" approach to things after attending my Aunt Ceil's funeral in the second part of 2006. At that point, I had attended seventeen funerals in six and a half years and simply could not deal with it anymore. And that was not even all the family, friends, etc. who died in that span of time. But I had to suspend my stand for Jerry Dykstra, a good friend of my fathers and whose eldest son I played soccer with for six of the eight years I played in years past.{2}

I knew Jerry for nearly thirty years and was able to see him in the final weeks when he was getting to the point to where his cancer was becoming unbearable. But he always had a smile on his face, always was of good cheer, and continued to drink two rusty nails a night until recent months.{3} He was a good man and will be missed -most of all by his family of course and I told his sons if they wanted to talk about it to feel free to give me a call. No sooner did I get back than I heard from my mother that my Uncle Don passed away earlier that same day so if his funeral is in the Seattle area,{4} I will again suspend my "no more funerals" policy and go to that one.

I have known Uncle Don{5} literally all my life. I am sure he held me in his arms at least once when I was still in diapers: I note that to give an idea of how far back this connection goes. He was also a good and decent man. I had not seen either Uncle Don or his wife my Aunt Sheila{6} in probably three or four years -I think the last time was at their son Paul's wedding in 2004. But unlike in the case of Jerry of whom we knew was going to have less than a year,{7} Don's death came completely out of the blue unexpected. Jerry died three months shy of his seventy-first birthday, Don two months shy of his sixty-first birthday.

Prayers for both of them would be most appreciated.

Eternal rest grant unto their souls oh Lord and let thy Perpetual Light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. May the souls of Jerry Dykstra and Don Hellstrom along with the souls of all the faithfully departed, through the Mercy of God rest in peace. Amen.

Notes:

{1} In that span of time, I lost thirty-five persons either close family, relatives, close friends, etc.

{2} I covered the subjects of funerals in general around that time and also on the subject of Aunt Ceil in another thread. Here they are for those who are interested:

On Prayer Requests (circa October 3, 2006)

More on Cecilia Flynn (circa October 5, 2006)

{3} Jerry and my father used to drink rusty nails together and after my father died, Jerry would drink two a night: one for him and one for my dad. That was his story anyway and he stuck to it until for health reasons he could not.

{4} It is most likely going to be in Wenatchee, Washington though.

[Update: It was held in East Wenatchee and I did not attend due to the distance. -ISM]

{5} Basically an honourific title: Don was married to Sheila my dad's adopted sister. (It was her mom Jenny whose death in March of 2000 started this long chain of passings but I digress.)

{6} I am sure my dad figured this out years back but when I was a teenager, I had a crush on my Aunt Sheila.

{7} And most likely he was slated to live for less than six months.

journalism died
last year to be reborn by
Giles and O'Keefe
[Written just now]

On ACORN and Corruption:
(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)

I originally was going to post this as a minor posting back around September tenth but was not able to get around to it until now and since the original draft, a lot has developed on this subject so I want to go over it all here. Let us start with the original material of this posting which was to be led off with this link:

Exposed! ACORN Gets Its Nuts Cracked: Teenage Prostitutes, Money Laundering and Tax Fraud (Doug Giles)

Originally I was going to say that the mainstream media would not cover this of course any more than they covered the 11 ACORN persons arrested for voter registration fraud in Florida earlier in the month{1} (one of whom registered "Paul Newman" to vote incidentally enough) or the fact that ACORN is under investigation in twelve states for voter fraud. But bear this in mind: if ACORN was in any way connected with a prominent Republican, the msm would be all over this. Once again though, President Obama's connections with this organization from his community organizing days will likely be ignored.

To get the gist of the story, read the link above because what Hannah Giles (posing as a prostitute) and James O'Keefe (a film maker posing as a pimp) did in the Baltimore branch of ACORN was duplicated in a variety of other ACORN offices. ACORN fired the two employees involved in the sting in Baltimore and also two more who were involved in a similar sting in the ACORN Washington DC office. You can read more on the DC matter here.

Now the rest of the media other than Fox they were as silent as a whore in church initially. But then there was a sting in Brooklyn, New York upon which employees from ACORN there were fired and the Brooklyn DA will pursue investigating ACORN perhaps even under RICO statutes. Then we have the Census Bureau stripping ACORN of participation in the 2010 census, another video emerging out of San Diego, California and another one in San Bernadino where a woman is on camera talking about killing her husband along with the usual prostitution stuff.

ACORN kept trying to play it down and has threatened to go after the film makers but they also fired all their employees involved in the various offices where Giles and O'Keefe caught them on camera giving advice on various ways of breaking the law from advice on opening a house of prostitution to tax evasion to smuggling underage illegal immigrants from El Salvador to work in the house of prostitution, etc. Yet despite all of this (and this is not all there is), ACORN has the aucadity to accuse Giles and O'Keefe of immoral conduct when all they did was trap ACORN's employees on camera endorsing some of the worst kind of filth imaginable!!!

Meanwhile, the Senate voted 83-7 to defund ACORN on September 15th with the House following suit on Thursday with a 345-78 vote.{2} All of this happened not because of the mainstream media but instead in spite of them because other than Fox News, they were all very late to this story and it is not as if they were ignorant of ACORN being a corrupt organization.

There is a reason why your host has for years sought as much as possible to get news from sources other than the mainstream media which is frankly little different (at all) than a state-run media. If anything has made this irreversibly clear, it is the media's woeful performance in the past week in covering stories from the Van Jones resignation to the 912 march to the ACORN scandals: all of which put the Obama administration in bad light. And this means the depths of disgrace to which the mainstream media sunk last year are depths to which they remain.

Notes:

{1} And over 40 since July of this year.

{2} ACORN's Enablers