New poll: "How many people read Est Quod Est?"

Due to this recent comment, I figured it was high time to set the record straight on how many readers I have.

And just how would I accomplish this, pray tell? Would I look at how many web visits I get per day? Or how many unique visitors I receive? No, of course not. I will take a reader poll. And this is how it will work. Suppose one hundred readers voted, and say that 10 readers voted for "20 or more", 30 readers voted for "Zero", 40 readers said "Five or six" and 20 readers said "10 or more". Then the answer would be settled: Pauli has five or six readers.

This is the best way I know to find out how many readers I truly have, but I don't claim that there might be some possible margin of error.

So as they say in Chicago, "yous guys vote early and vote often."

"The world drags me down"

Sanctuary, baby.

Obama's Disgraceful Attacks on Doctors and Policemen

From Kristol's piece:

First, Obama offered this example of how doctors make decisions under the current system instead of doing what’s in their patients’ best interests:

Right now, doctors a lot of times are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that's out there. So if they're looking and you come in and you've got a bad sore throat or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, "You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid's tonsils out."

Does Obama really think pediatricians knowingly order unnecessary tonsillectomies in order to “make a lot more money?” Isn’t this a rather casual slander of a lot of doctors? And in any case, is this what’s driving up health-care costs? It’s probably as likely health-care costs are high because hospitals have too many vice presidents for government relations making $300,000 a year. But I wouldn’t think it appropriate for the president to single them out for attack either.

No, Mr. Obama, that's what you would do if you were a doctor.

Second, Obama answered a question about his friend Henry Louis Gates’s run-in with the Cambridge cops, after acknowledging “not having been there and not seeing all the facts,” by nonetheless asserting that “the Cambridge police acted stupidly.” Does he really know enough about what happened to say that? Maybe it was Professor Gates who behaved stupidly, or at least arrogantly. He is, after all, a Harvard professor. I was once a Harvard professor, and my instinct is to side with the Cambridge cops. But if I were president of the United States, I might pause before casually accusing other Americans of acting stupidly unless I were confident I knew what I was talking about.

What an asshole we have for a President.

New GOP ad advises saying 'no' to Obama's expensive health experiment

At least do it for the kids.

Sign the Petition: Free Our Health Care Now!

Great news! Last time I posted on this about a month ago, there were about 100,000 signatures. Now there are over 650,000! People are not taking this lying down.

If you haven't already PLEASE SIGN! I'm putting a link at the top over on the right sidebar. Ask all your friends and family members to sign this as well; send them an email.

Football and Life

This is a great article about great men and getting priorities in the proper places within the hierarchy.

Don't hate Tony Dungy because he was a Steeler, Cleveland people.

Governor Bobby Jindal's Common Sense on Health Care

Loved the conclusion Mr. Jindal makes in his exposé of the outrageous health care bill.

Imagine if the president proposed a reform package that made health insurance portable, ended frivolous lawsuits, allowed for pooling, required insurance companies to cover the sick, paid based on outcomes and not activity, used refundable tax credits to increase affordability and incentivized rather than penalized small businesses to provide coverage. Republicans would support those reforms, and the policy would benefit the entire country. True, it wouldn’t be the radical and exciting restructuring that Pelosi is pushing, but it would begin to move us toward common-sense, bottom-up solutions. Solutions! There’s an idea.

But wait, as the late Billy Mays would say, there’s more. Social Security and Medicare, our two biggest entitlement programs in this country, are perpetually underfunded and are always in danger of going bankrupt. Is it even remotely possible that we as a country are now considering adding an entire new entitlement program to our repertoire?

Would the last sane person in Washington please turn out the lights when you leave?

Yes, imagine it because it's not going to happen. He doesn't mention buying across state lines which itself would revolutionize the industry.

Obama Losing Independents

Obama's approval numbers are slipping, especially on key issues such as so-called "health-care reform". It's significant that independents are leading the way since they are really the ones who elected him. Excerpts:

The erosion in Obama's overall rating on health care is particularly notable among political independents: While positive in their assessments of his handling of health-care reform at the 100-day mark of his presidency (53 percent approved and 30 percent disapproved), independents now are divided at 44 percent positive and 49 percent negative.

and

Obama's approval rating on his handling of the deficit is down to 43 percent, as independents now tilt toward disapproval (42 percent approve; 48 percent disapprove).

Why I am a bad blogger

In reading many other blogs in the last few years, I’ve decided that I’m not a very good blogger, at least not very authentic. What I do seems like real blogging, but it isn’t really. What’s more, I don’t intend to do anything to remedy this, for better or for worse. Following is a Top Ten list containing eight sins of omission detailing why I am a bad blogger, in case you didn’t notice or maybe you thought "He's not a very good blogger", but couldn’t quite put your finger on the concrete evidence. They are in no particular order, at least none that I know of.

1. No stated commenting policy. A lot of the big-time bloggers have these. They say things like “Don’t use threatening language toward other commenters or their expensive pets.” Or things like that. I suppose if I had a policy it would read something like “Not responsible for suicides. Please bring your own ropes and petards.”

2. Not enough posts beginning with the word “so”. Maybe I'm being picky here, but it sounds unnatural when I read it and hear it in my head. However I've noticed that this is a common way for real bloggers to start a post or even every paragraph. Example: “So my wife and I went to a nightclub the other night.... (next paragraph) So it turned out that the main act had been canceled due to severe diarrhea, so we had this big dramatic discussion about what we should do.... (next paragraph) So we finally decided to go drink a six-pack in one of the city parks and then go squirrel-flailing...." I don't know; maybe this style sounds perfectly fine to most people.

3. No apologies for not blogging. I seem to be obsessed with the notion that my readers were never charged for the pleasure of reading my work, rather than feeling the immense burden of producing content for the masses of addicts I’ve created.

4. No “true confessions”. Example: “We really did want to kill the entire litter of kittens painlessly, and at first drowning seemed like it was out of the question....” I've always been of the mind that these touching moments are best saved for family reunions where drinking and hugging can heighten the effect of catharsis. But real bloggers far and wide have obviously taken a “why wait” point of view, and just let it all hang out on their blogs as a routine.

5. Lack of misspellings. Just as rabbits produce their trademark pellets, I've noticed that real bloggers leave beaucoup misspellings in their wake. But I use a spell checker, plus I try to read my posts before publishing. I use all the tricks we learned in school, too; if you're amazed that I spelled diarrhea correctly above, I always remember “Two R's for Really Runny”.

6. No announcements of vacations or other times when I won't be home. This annoying omission makes it very hard for net-savvy criminals to loot my residence. I suppose if I ever decide to initiate this dubious practice that I should also announce where the gun traps are.

7. Shortage of one word sentences. I think the medical term for this common blogging tendency would be perioditis. But unlike real bloggers, I haven't indulged in it that much. My guess is that it is sort of like eating potato chips—it easily becomes addictive. Period. End. Of. Story. See?

8. Top ten list only has eight entries in it. Yes, I can count. I'm just done. Call it a top eight list if you must, Mr. Beancounter. I'm simply not a big fan of lists; you can rejoice that you'll never read something like "25 Things You Will Soon Wish I Hadn't Shared About Myself" on my blog, yet another mark of my blogging inauthenticity and maladroitness on these here internets.

These are all very general reasons, but I have future plans to give examples from really good bloggers to support my thesis of how bad I am. I will only accomplish this if my extreme laziness is permitting and my record of following through on promises improves dramatically.

Podhoretz on Cronkite

Lest we forget the Titan who helped screw up the media, J-Pod reminds us. Excerpt:

Cronkite was a key figure in many ways, but foremost among them, perhaps, was the fact that he cleared the way for the mainstream media and the Establishment to join what Lionel Trilling called “the adversary culture.” Cronkite, the gravelly voice of accepted American wisdom, whose comportment suggested he kept his money in bonds and would never even have considered exceeding the speed limit, devastated President Lyndon Johnson in the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive by declaring that the United States “was mired in stalemate” in Vietnam—when Johnson knew that Tet had been a military triumph.

“If I’ve lost Cronkite,” Johnson was reputed to have said, “I’ve lost middle America,” and shortly thereafter he announced he would not run for reelection. This was a mark of Johnson’s own poor political instincts—a president who thought a rich and powerful anchorman living the high life in New York city was the voice of the silent majority was a man out of touch with reality—but it was a leading indicator of how the media were changing. Cronkite didn’t know what he was talking about when it came to Tet, as the late Peter Braestrup demonstrated in his colossal expose of the scandalous media coverage of the battle, Big Story. But he knew that among the people who mattered to him, and who were the leading edge of ideological fashion, Tet was a failure failure because the war in Vietnam was bad, and he took to the airwaves to say so.

Well rest in peace, I guess, since you didn't know shit about war.

The good news the Podman reports is that the internets helped bring down Cronkite's clown successor.

When Rather attempted, in 2004, to bring down a president in the midst of a close reelection bid with a report based on obviously forged papers—a greater journalistic sin than Cronkite’s, by far—he was undone in 12 hours by a lawyer in Atlanta commenting on a blog and a jazz musician in Los Angeles with a blog who demonstrated the papers in question had been produced at least a decade after the report claimed they had. Had there been an Internet in 1968, and military bloggers aplenty, Cronkite’s false conclusion about Tet would have been challenged immediately; we would not have had to wait for Braestrup to publish his enormous book nine years later

Also he points out that the audience for the Cronkite-Rather brand of TV news flatulence has shrunk greatly which is good news.

"Is this real life?"

Well, yes and no. Little Dave is right not to like the effects of mind-altering substances. Some people could learn a lot from him.