Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub passed the 5 million viewers milestone between 9:45 and 10:00 p.m. Central time, March 5.
Thank you.
Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub passed the 5 million viewers milestone between 9:45 and 10:00 p.m. Central time, March 5.
Thank you.
Is the heyday of the blog over? Or did I just foul it up?
At one time Millard Fillmore’s bathtub got about 2,000 hits per day. In the last 16 months, that’s dwindled to just under 1,000 per day.
Still, at that rate, the Bathtub should overflow with the 5 millionth hit, sometime in the next 5 days. It’s funny, but if I counted spam we’d be over 8 million already. 100 spam comments for every real comment, approximately.
No wonder elections turn out so oddly.
For 5 million sincere hits, I thank you, readers, and thank you especially you faithful readers.
Would you tell your friends to come check it out?
For comparison:
Can’t make this stuff up as fast as the unthinking anti-Obama folks can dish it out.
Their criticisms often vaporize at the slightest investigation, though. Why not talk serious policy? They won’t do it.
Wednesday night, President Obama participated in a Google+ ” Fireside Hangout.” These sessions take their cue in part from FDR’s Fireside Chats. In the modern, Google+ version, it’s not just the president talking. He takes questions from a panel of interrogators, and from people who send in questions by Tweet or e-mail. Obama took questions from citizens.
One woman, Jackie Guerrero (sp?) complained that the Obama administration enforces our immigration laws with much more toughness than any previous administration, ever. She said too many people who shouldn’t be deported, are being deported. She asked President Obama to explain why his administration has done that.
Obama said he’s the executive, and he’s required to carry out the laws. He urged the woman to support changes in the laws, but he pointed out that must come from Congress. His answer took two-and-a-half minutes, and he outlined the need for immigration reform. In a few seconds, he started his answer with this:
“This is something I’ve struggled with throughout my presidency,” said Obama. “The problem is that I’m the president of the United States, I’m not the emperor of the United States. My job is to execute laws that are passed.”
You as a reasonably intelligent and perceptive Dear Reader recognize that Obama is asking for citizen pressure on Congress to pass reform of our immigration laws.
You as a reasonably intelligent and perceptive Dear Reader are also well aware there is a group of people loose in America who say that, whatever Obama says, Obama is wrong.
So, what do those Obama H8rs say? Do they complain about immigration reform, saying we don’t need it?
No, they don’t even give their listeners and viewers the dignity of talking about the issues. Here’s how Michael Savage butchered the video of the Google session:
Savage posted this wan explanation:
Published on Feb 15, 2013
In a Google hangout last evening February 14, 2013, President Barack Obama explained that his problem is that he’s “not the emperor of the United States”: “This is something I’ve struggled with throughout my presidency,” said Obama. “The problem is that I’m the president of the United States, I’m not the emperor of the United States. My job is to execute laws that are passed.”
In a very technical sense, that’s accurate reporting of part of Obama’s statement.
But it’s not the whole truth, as you can see. There is no mention whatsoever of the issue at hand, immigration reform, for example. How can they report it correctly, if they don’t even report what happened?
How have others reacted? Our old friend Joe Leavell leapt at the opening Michael Savage provided, with a Facebook post linking to the video:
“The problem is, I’m the President of the United States. I’m not the emperor of the United States.” – President Obama.
This is a problem? Yikes!
Can you tell Joe’s views on immigration reform? On enforcing laws? On not enforcing laws? Just try to pin him down.
One more demonstration we don’t need that people who truly hate Obama with no good reason will make up crap to claim against him, regardless what he says.
Some wag said, “I hope President Obama comes out tomorrow with a warning against eating yellow snow, just so I can see these guys explain the benefits of eating yellow snow.”
I wish they’d just wake up, read the old Boy Scout Citizenship Merit Badge booklet, and be good citizens without all the hoax complaints.
No, Obama did not say he wants to be emperor. No, he did not.
No, he didn’t.
Alas, Joe Leavell on Facebook is not the only one who had what should be embarrassing conniptions over the mined quote.
Wall of shame, commenters who fuzzed up the news and ran with the political smear; count ’em:
Some of you may remember Spike Jones’s send-up of that classic show tune, “I’m in the Mood for Love.” One verse of the lyric is, “Funny, but when I’m near you, I’m in the mood for love.” In Spike’s version, an indignant voice interrupts with, “Funny butt! Who’se got a funny butt?”
That’s rather what Savage and others have done with Obama’s answer here.
How many of those sites do you think would like it if Obama had said, “Okay, we’ll stop deportations of all but criminal and dangerous undocumented aliens tomorrow?” How many of those sites will favor action on immigration reform? How many of them will want their children to know they wrote these things, in ten years?
This cheap and misleading criticism ignored the two-and-a-half-minute response Obama gave to the immigration and deportation question, in which he concisely explained the problems and the urgent need for immigration reform to benefit the U.S. economy. See the complete answer in the video of the entire session, at the bottom of this post.
Obama’s critics don’t dare allow him a fair chance to state his position. They have no answers for his clearly thought-out plans.
More:
See for yourself how Obama’s views were covered up and his meanings distorted. Here’s the entire Google Fireside Hangout, all 47 minutes of it (in HD and stereo); the question on immigration comes about 19 minutes in, and Obama’s answer took about two and a half minutes, all ignored completely by Obama’s H8rs:
Update, post script: CBS’s guy who keeps all the records, Mark Knoller, accurately reported Obama’s words in a Tweet, with just 140 characters; why can’t conservative wackoes get it right with 1,000 words and video? They probably don’t intend to get it right, like Knoller works to get it right every day, day in, and day out.
In the approximately 33 minutes Texas curriculum standards allow to teach the Declaration of Independence, I frequently slip in some biography to help students chunk the knowledge. Of course, biography for the Declaration includes Thomas Jefferson. If one talks of Jefferson, especially with limited time, one is obligated to relate the story of the friendship of Jefferson with John Adams, which descended into partisan squabbling by 1796, and outright enmity in the election of 1800. Then one relates how they were essentially tricked into resuming their friendship, and their correspondence (which makes good DBQs for pre-AP and AP classes), and the always touching story of their deaths, both on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Then a student asks about divine intervention in history. I explain that history is so rich, one can find coincidences on almost every day of the calendar. For two examples, consider the births of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, hours or minutes apart on February 12, 1809; the births of Mark Twain and Winston Churchill on the same date (November 30), and their love of whiskey and cigars.
These coincidences often seem eerie, or pre-ordained, and that is enough of a hook to get that chunk of history into the minds of students so they remember them, or to compare the lives or events involved, to sharpen their critical skills. (Ha! Then just try to dissuade high school students from the eerie or pre-ordained notion; coincidences? Not to the non-critical-thinking high schooler . . . or too many voters.)
So I was interested to find, and it made me smile, that Mahatma Gandhi and Groucho Marx share a birth date, October 2 (Gandhi in 1869, Marx in 1890). That date was also the birthday of the comic strip we know as “Peanuts,” in 1950. (Does a piece of literature, especially a comic strip, have a “birthday?”)
I learned that following a link to the blog of Mark Sackler, who shares the birthday — exactly with Charlie Brown, and the day with Marx and Gandhi.
Following the link over there, to the Millennium Conjectures™, I also learned Mr. Sackler awarded Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub a BLAHS Award, for having a funny name.
Hey, any attention is good attention, right?
I also found there some hope that, at least in some alternative universe, I might be getting a good night’s sleep.
I wonder whether there is any photograph of Groucho Marx and Mahatma Gandhi together. (Neither of them seemed to be using their given first name, you’ll note . . .)
More:
All I know is what I see in this photo and caption I got in an e-mail from Science Blogs:
As Groucho Marx would have explained, how they got on Greg Laden’s blog, I’ll never know. (Does anyone have a few spare commas they can send over the Science Blogs?)
Earlier we discussed the political jabs lacking scientific merit at the blogs that have sprung up to harry and heckle climate scientists, especially a relatively new one called, inaptly, “haunting the library.”
The author and commenters have taken to calling Dr. James Hansen “Beijing Jim,” thinking it a cleverly insulting nickname.
What?
I almost regret asking. Why “Beijing Jim?”
They started it when Hansen wrote an opposite-editorial page piece for the South China Post, urging China to act against global warming anyway, despite the U.S.’s failure to take aggressive-enough action yet.
haunting the library tries to spin the piece as Hansen moving over to China’s side in all issues, a position they seem to think is somehow unpatriotic (and therefore, insulting to Hansen).
Actually, in the article, Hansen doesn’t let China off the hook at all. It’s a patient, well-aimed call to China to do the right things. Only by misreporting and misrepresenting what Hansen said can climate science cranks spin it.
James Hansen takes the honorable high road, calling on the world’s most-polluting nations to take action now to save our children’s and grandchildren’s future. haunting the library issues schoolyard, childish and churlish taunts.
Oh, but Dear Reader, you’re already guessing at the particular intellectual clumsiness I’m getting to, aren’t you? It’s about that taunting name, “Beijing Jim.” It’s unfair and undeserved because Hansen represented America well, and honorably. “Free Enterprise Jim” would be closer to the facts.
It’s also geographically wrong. South China Morning Post is a Hong Kong newspaper, not Beijing. Hong Kong is the Chinese outpost of rampant free enterprise, as you know and the rest of the world knows. Hong Kong is not Beijing.
The climate science cranks at haunting the library don’t know climate science, don’t know newspaper publishing, and flail at geography, too. They’re cranky, too. Cranky cranks. Poetic, almost.
More:
_____________
January 24, 2011: Others are watching, too. Tim Lambert at Deltoid makes gentle correction of an Andrew Bolt column relying on misinformation from hauntingthelibrary. Good discussion there.