Mark Bossingham

Holiday season off to slow, fast start

WELL, I guess it depends on which news service you believe. But since I don't trust either, I'll ignore both. These stories crossed the wire within five minutes of each other.

Reuters - The holiday shopping season got off to a slow start ...

AP - The holiday shopping season got off to a surprisingly solid start ...
 

Thanksgiving in Tokyo

WE ARE all thankful at this little house in Tokyo. Celebrated Thanksgiving a couple of days late because we don't get Thanksgiving off. The dog didn't care, she was happy to eat herself silly, regardless of the date. That's her dinner in the making in the little dish to the left, next to the gravy boat. Menu: Turkey, creamed spinach, corn, mashed potatoes and stuffing, corn bread, homemade cranberry sauce, gravy. Kiyomi did most of the work, but I made the gravy.

Victory in Iraq Day

I AM a few days late to the party, but I would like to offer my thanks to the troops and everyday Iraqis who made victory possible.

Right wing rage II (0.9 kilos)

Complications

I MANAGED to stay up to speed through the VHS player, deploying a sat receiver and tuner, but the addition of the a digital hard disk recorder, a secondary sat feed and a digital terrestrial input has finally outpaced my ability to untangle the seemingly dozens of cables growing out of the wall. It doesn't help that the directions and the machine cables are in a language I do not read well. Here is a picture of the back of the now-dead RD-XD92 HDD recorder  from Toshiba. It has been replaced with another 1 TB machine, also from Toshiba. My wife, who felt it was a more urgent priority, swapped out the machines in the dead of night while the rest of us were sleeping.

'Right wing rage' and the 'Fairness Doctrine'

THE LATEST liberal hallucination, "right wing rage" may be idiotic and counterintuitive on the face of it, but its perpetrators are on a mission: close talk radio, silence their opponents and use the unfair "Fairness Doctrine" to do it.

Global warming cools off

I BELIEVE we are entering into the last phase of the man-made global warming scam. The warmists keep getting caught in lies; they've refused one too many debates; and the general public is turning into those very "deniers" they revile. Of course, the issue will hang around for awhile--meteorologists will not willingly give up their rock-star scientist status and return to being weather forecasters on TV. The latest incident in in which NASA's GSIS cooked the books to boost October's temp to the "hottest in history" (it wasn't) will eventually be seen as a major tipping point.

Hugh Jackman—Hollywood's biggest ham?

ADS FOR the movie "Australia" keeping showing up on TV. It's difficult to make a major release look bad in a 30-second spot, but they've managed. The first time I saw clip, I thought, "Yeah, who is that guy? He's really irritating." It's Hugh Jackman, an actor who can't help himself. To his credit, he consistently overacts. He's not going to surprise you with a subtle performance. Kid of amusing.

California wants OPM (a bailout)

THIS IS a scream: The speaker of the California Assembly wants taxpayers in Alabama, Illinois and any other state you care to name to give their money to the people of California. It goes without saying that she is a Democrat, and her pathetic begging is the result of a state fiscally run aground by the permanently entrenched, gerrymandered one-party legislature. This kind of thinking, if you can call it that, is a cousin the legislation passed by Congress that requires taxpayers nationwide pay retirement pensions to UAW workers in Michigan. It's undeniable that these macho, beer-swilling auto workers are actually just welfare recipients. I digress. Here's what the California speaker, Karen Bass, had to say:

"We think that with the state of California about to go over a cliff, we ought to be part of the bailout as well. Can we have $5 billion or $10 billion?"

I read this and would like to think that she is being sarcastic. But then again, when was a Democrat ever anything but serious about appropriating Other People's Money?

Honeymoon's over, dude

SO MUCH for Obama's grace period. He has told Bush he is against the Colombia free-trade pact and demands Bush bailout the UAW, the union that put American automakers in the toilet in the first place. And, yes, GM's Job Bank (union workers paid NOT to go to work) is still alive and well. You notice the automakers not located in Detroit (they employ 113,000 workers in places like Alabama and Tennessee) are not asking for a handout.  Both positions are awful economic policy. As one of the 58,000,000 Americans that didn't vote for Obama, I did the right thing.