Google

As Americans celebrate Columbus Day, one of our nation's largest companies, Google, is commememorating the occasion by displaying a picture of the Paddington Bear at its website.

I kid you not.

I guess the good folks at Google feel the 50th anniversary of the creation of this fictional character is more important than the 516th anniversary of Columbus landing in the Americas (via Wikipedia, h/t NBer Priebles):

As I write this on Monday afternoon, the People's House has rejected "the $700 billion bailout."

You won't believe, unless you're a very experienced cynic, where that $700 billion figure came from.

The answer appears to be "out of nowhere."

With no basis.

I'm not kidding.

Here's the evidence, carried six whole days ago at Forbes (HT LAT's Top of the Ticket Blog via BizzyBlog commenter Dan Scott):

What if I told you that sheriffs and prosecutors in, say, Indiana, had formed "truth squads" and "subtly" threatened prosecutions of critics of John McCain?

Does anyone think that the New York Times, Washington Post and Old Media in general wouldn't be putting the news on the front page, even with the bailout-apalooza going on in Washington?

Well, there is a "truth squad." It's in Missouri. It includes prosecutors and sheriffs. Oh, and they have formed their truth squad to threaten and intimidate the critics of ..... Barack Obama.

Here is a transcript of a report from station KMOW in St. Louis (first 1:45 of vid; HT Gateway Pundit) that may leave you wondering whatever happened to the country we once knew:

On PBS's Web site today, ombudsman Michael Getler writes of complaints over an incident during last Sunday's pledge drive.  He describes the cheap shot taken by actor Mike Farrell against vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin:

According to Joseph Campbell, vice president of fundraising programs, here's what happened:

 On CNN's American Morning today, White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux reported on Barack Obama's campaigning in Virginia.  Afterwards, anchor Kiran Chetry had a question:

CHETRY: All right. And Suzanne, what's on tap for the campaign today? And please tell me it's not lipstick again.

MALVEAUX: Let's hope not. He's going to be in Norfolk, Virginia. That is in southeast Virginia, and it's home to the world's largest Naval base. It's one of the most competitive areas that the Democrats and Republicans are fighting over. It's a critical piece of property, piece of land there with folks in Virginia, and they want those voters.

This doesn't qualify as any kind of surprise, but it should be noted nonetheless.

Thursday, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama gave a stunningly downbeat assessment of the nation's overall situation in a response to a seven year-old girl who asked him why he is running for president. Obama's media water-carriers have virtually ignored his very telling response, one that is reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's gloomiest, malaise-based assessments of America during his awful presidency.

Here is a rundown of what happened from Ed Morrissey of Hot Air (direct YouTube link to relevant video is here):

Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, while waffling, has wanted to appear to many of his constituents as being opposed to free trade agreements, or at least wanting to renegotiate the terms of many of them.

On Wednesday, the Department of Commerce issued a press release, the kind of thing you would hope business journalists get in their e-mail boxes. But I found no coverage of this news in a Google News Search on [commerce "free trade'] (typed as indicated inside brackets).

Perhaps it's because the news would be inconvenient for Obama, who is in the midst of an Excellent Overseas Adventure, speaking to fawning crowds who fortunately will have no say at the ballot box in November.

Here is that news:

The good folks at Google are at it again, for if you do a web search for the conservative magazine "The American Spectator," a disclaimer says:

The American SpectatorThis site may harm your computer.
Features opinions, reviews, and an interactive section, as well as archives of the monthly.
www.spectator.org/ - Similar pages - Note this

Click on "The American Spectator" link, and a message reads (h/t Ed Driscoll):

**UPDATE** BELOW FOLD

It looks like Google has officially joined the Barack Obama campaign and decided that its contribution would be to shut down any blog on the Google owned Blogspot.com blogging system that has an anti-Obama message. Yes, it sure seems that Google has begun to go through its many thousands of blogs to lock out the owners of anti-Obama blogs so that the noObama message is effectively squelched. Thus far, Google has terminated the access by blog owners to 7 such sites and the list may be growing. Boy, it must be nice for Barack Obama to have an ally powerful enough to silence his opponents like that!

It isn't just conservative sites that Google's Blogger platform is eliminating. For instance, www.comealongway.blogspot.com has been frozen and this one is a Hillary supporting site. The operator of Come a Long Way has a mirror site off the Blogspot platform and has today posted this notice:

Not really, but neo-luddite Neil Postman wannabe types sure are.

Google News early Sunday morning, at its "Top Stories" front page, posted a suggestive Photoshopped picture of President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair next to a headline about the California Supreme Court's recent ruling on same-sex marriages.

In the picture, Bush and a shirtless Blair are cuddling underneath an American flag.

Accident? Something to do with Google's auto-generation software program?

Maybe. But consider as you examine the following screencap that the article the picture came from wasn't even one of the featured stories (link to larger more legible version here):

The Weather Channel's Heidi Cullen says one of the steps to fight global warming is using images to affect people's outlook.

At the "Covering a Changing Climate: The Media Challenge" forum held at Harvard University in Boston, Mass. on April 30, Cullen suggested using Weather.com and Google Earth to add visual elements to promote the cause.

"[I] split my time between The Weather Channel and this think tank in Princeton and one of the things we've been trying to do is work with Google Earth essentially. And for me, coming from The Weather Channel, the most powerful tool that exists is Weather.com and you type in your zip code and you get a forecast out five days."

Today is Earth Day, and you don't have to look any further than the home pages of the top Internet companies to see it. Green is the politically correct color of choice for firms that want to score cheap environmental points online.

The bias is most blatant at Google and its video-sharing subsidiary, YouTube. Google's logo has gone completely green, and the television screen within YouTube's logo is a snapshot of the earth.

YouTube also has turned over the prime real estate on its home page to earth-friendly videos, with headlines like "5 Easy Ways To Save The Planet" and "Veggie Cars." Oh, and don't forget, "Paris Hilton Is Greener Than You."

Video Below the Fold

Erick Erickson over at RedState tells us all of an anti-Christian video recently introduced with great frivolity by Internet philosopher and Obama technology advisor Larry Lessig. The video introduced at a Google Author series seminar shows Jesus singing the Gloria Gaynor tune "I Will Survive" in a very effeminate, theatrical way. As the song ramps up, Jesus throws off his robe and strips down to a diaper-like covering, then he sashays through a modern city until he gets hit by a bus in an intersection.

The worst thing about this is that this is also another scandal involving a Barack Obama campaign associate showing his disdain for the American mainstream, this time a disdain of Christianity. It turns out that Lessig is a somewhat secretive Obama campaign advisor, serving to assist the campaign on Internet and technology policies. As Erickson points out, Lessig hosts Obama's tech policy on his own lessig.org website.

A Christian group in Great Britain is suing internet search behemoth Google for religious discrimination over its refusal to place pro-Life advertisements.

Oddly, the technology giant doesn't ban ads for abortion clinics or pro-abortion websites.

Interesting dichotomy, wouldn't you agree?

As reported by CNA last Thursday (emphasis added):

Ah, Earf Day. The day when all the Chicken Littles and the occasional boy who cried wolf can get their fifteen minutes of attention. Don't we just love the warm and fuzzies of claiming the mantle of God and "saving" the Earf from global warming? Well, The Washington Times Fishwrap blog reports that Google has joined the fray to save the Earf and they are going to do it by helping Kathleen Rogers of Earth Day Network to shut down the phone switchboard at the Capitol in Washington D.C. with the calls from "concerned citizens" who think that calling Washington on the phone can somehow stop global warming.

A group of environmental activists has enlisted Google to help flood the congressional switchboard with one million phone calls on Earth Day urging lawmakers to enact eco-friendly measures.

I'm tingling with excitement already. If I thought I could alter the solar activities really responsible for global climate change just by making a phone call... well, imagine the power? Maybe I could use my house phone to stop a hurricane or tornado, or better yet, use my cell phone influence the scores of the next few Superbowls. Well, I'd just be in heaven.

As previously reported by NewsBusters, there's an international climate change awareness promotion going on today called Earth Hour, and websearch giant Google is not only participating in it, but advocating its goals.

Presenting the other side of this argument is an organization called The Carbon Sense Coalition.

It wants "to restore balance and reason to the carbon debate, and to explain and defend the key role of carbon in production of most of our energy for heat, light, and transportation, and all of our food."

With this in mind, Carbon Sense on Friday strongly advocated observance of Earth Hour with a slight twist destined to bring a smile to climate realists across the globe (emphasis added throughout, h/t Heartland):

Want some more proof of Google's political leanings.

Well, consider that the websearch giant is participating in Earth Hour, "a global event created to symbolize that each one of us, working together, can make a positive impact on climate change - no matter who we are or where we live."

Here's what Google displayed at its website moments ago (h/t NBer Wilbur747, emphasis added):

In another blow against freedom of speech on the Internet, Fox News is reporting that Google has taken the measure of de-listing the work of an anti-UN blogger named Matthew Lee. For several years, Lee has run the Inner City Press, a small news/opinion site that is focused on criticizing the United Nations. But since Google has teamed up with the UN on recent initiatives, Google has found that Lee's criticism is too much for them to handle.

Mr. Lee has been taking after big targets for a long time, so he is no newcomer to the scene. In 1987 he went after Citigroup with his corruption exposes, but since 2005 the United Nations has been his favorite target. He has especially focused on the "inner workings of what could be called the practical-applications arm of the international organization, the United Nations Development Programme."

As Fox News reports:

(See Update below for correction and clarification re Google News.)

This one has an interesting twist relating to Google News that I will get to later.

It should be no surprise that the so-called "newspapers of record" did very little with the news earlier this week that the actiing director of an Iraqi psychiatric hospital had been arrested for allegedly supplying mentally ill patients for use as, for lack of a better description, unwillingly co-opted "suicide bombers."

Here's the essence of the story, in case you missed it, from the Times of London:

Iraq Hospital Chief Allegedly Supplied Patients for Bombings

The acting director of a Baghdad psychiatric hospital has been arrested on suspicion of supplying Al Qaeda in Iraq with the mentally impaired women it used to blow up two crowded animal markets in the city on Feb. 1, killing about 100 people.

My my, the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) is busy these days -- aiding and abetting those who wish to suppress the human right of free speech and expression.

Even though (or is it because?) the vehicle that enabled and emboldened the CHRC's thought police and those who complain to it was the passage of the kind of "non-discrimination" legislation Congress has considered passing for several years, US Old Media could care less.

Some of the CHRC's targets:

• A Catholic magazine (also noted by NB's Tim Graham last month) --

  In February 2007 Rob Wells, a member of the Pride Center of Edmonton, filed a nine-point complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission alleging that Catholic Insight had targeted homosexuals as a powerful menace and innately evil, claiming it used inflammatory and derogatory language to create a tone of “extreme hatred and contempt.”

  Catholic Insight responded to these charges in its January 2008 issue, saying the complaint consists of “three pages of isolated and fragmentary extracts from articles dating back as far as 1994, without any context.”

  ..... The magazine has continually emphasized that, with the respect to homosexual activity, it follows the guidance of the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church.

  Although I doubt it will happen (yet), it seems "logical" that CHRC could say, "OK, you're right, the entire Catholic Church is engaged in 'extreme hatred and contempt.'"

About a week ago, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown suggested in a UK Telegraph column that allowing hospitals to harvest organs from dead patients without their prior consent or their families' post-mortem consent might be a good idea.

Mr. Brown's occasion for bringing up the topic was telling, and perhaps explains why Brown's proposal got very little coverage in the US:

This year will be the 60th anniversary of the National Health Service: a year to celebrate and thank all the staff who run our hospitals, clinics and GP practices; but also a year in which to renew the NHS for the 21st century, because I believe that only by renewal can we make the NHS even more relevant for future decades than it has been in the past.

..... we may need to do more to encourage more of us to donate (organs. In Britain we have 14.9 million people on the organ donor register - which is around 24 per cent of the population. In terms of actual donors (not just people willing to give, but those whose organs are actually used) we have a rate of about 13 donors per million in our population. This compares with about 22 per million in France, 25 per million in America and around 35 per million in Spain - the best in the world.

That is why I want to start a debate in this country about whether we should take steps to move towards a new system designed to enable far more of us to benefit from transplant surgery - one that better reflects survey findings that around 90 per cent of us are in favour of organ donation.

A funny thing happens if you Google the name of one of America's leading conservative magazines: a warning comes up stating, "This site may harm your computer."

Think I'm kidding?

A screen-capture of the first page of Google web search results for "American Spectator" follows, although readers are strongly encouraged to investigate for themselves (image is blurry due to space constraints):

Well, here is a sad commentary on the fellow travelers over at Internet mega-corp, Google. Their Christmas graphic eschews that evil "Ch_ _ stmas" word giving us a bow and candy cane, instead. Apparently, Google doesn't want to cause any outrage by using the words "Merry Christmas."

Yet, the communists over at China Daily's on line news/propaganda site doesn't seem to have the slightest problem wishing us all a Merry Christmas as the graphic at the top of their mainpage shows!

What a sad commentary when even our Godless, communist enemies can say "Merry Christmas" but an ostensibly western, capitalist company won't do the same!

In 2005, I sensed that journalists in general prefer to call this time of the year in commerce that of "holiday shopping" instead of "Christmas shopping," but that when it came to people losing their jobs, they preferred to describe layoffs as relating to "Christmas."

My instincts were proven correct that year and in 2006, so I chose to track the same items this year to look for any noticeable change or trend.

As in previous years, it was pretty easy to predict the results. But the extent of the disparity might surprise you.

Here are results from the three sets of Google News searches I did during during this year's Christmas season, compared to the previous two years (the Dec. 22, 2007 searches were done at about 2 p.m.; previous 2007 posts are here and here; links to 2005's related posts are here, here, and here; 2006's are here, here, and here):

The improving situation in Iraq is driving certain congressmen and congresswomen to rhetorical depths I don't recall ever seeing.

Though there have almost surely been other instances of offensive excess on the House Floor over the Iraq War, we've recently been treated to at least the following:

• Pete Stark (D-CA), October -- "You don't have money to fund the war or children,'' Stark said. "But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement." Stark, under intense pressure from Nancy Pelosi, later tearfully apologized.
• David Obey (D-WI), November -- Insurgents “are running out of people to kill,” and “There are fewer targets of opportunity.” I do not believe that Obey has backed off of his remarks.
• Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), December -- "They (Republicans) like this war. They want this war to continue." Pelosi later "clarified," saying she meant to say "support" instead of "like."

The latest example, courtesy of Virginia Congressman Jim Moran on Wednesday, may, despite the strong competition noted, take the prize for greatest smear of our president, his administration, and/or our troops -- ever.

When Larry Summers suggested in early 2005 that, as paraphrased by Slate's William Saletan, "innate differences between the sexes might help explain why relatively few women become professional scientists or engineers," the outcry was immediate, furious, and went to saturation level virtually overnight. The controversy ultimately led to his resignation a year later as Harvard President.

On Wednesday, Mr. Summers, a Democrat who was once Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, made a recommendation in his area of expertise -- that is, that a tax cut would be a good idea to protect against a possible recession. (Yours truly doesn't believe that a recession is anywhere near occurring. But hey, I've said since May, and several times since [here, here, and here, among others] that a tax cut is needed anyway to keep the economy chugging along at a good rate. So if panicked pols want to enact a tax cut for the wrong reason, I'll take it.)

Old Media reaction to Summers has been virtual silence.

In 2005, I sensed that journalists in general prefer to call this time of the year in commerce that of "holiday shopping" instead of "Christmas shopping," but that when it came to people losing their jobs, they preferred to describe layoffs as relating to "Christmas."

My instincts have been proven correct for two years running, as you can see below from the results of three different sets of Google News searches in November and December of 2005 and 2006 (links to 2005's related posts are here, here, and here; 2006's are here, here, and here):

Four reports today threw more cold water on Old Media's "The Recession Is Coming, The Recession Is Coming" chorus.

First, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) issued its revised Productivity and Costs Report for the third quarter, saying:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor today reported revised productivity data--as measured by output per hour of all persons--for the third quarter of 2007. The seasonally adjusted annual rates of productivity growth in the third quarter were:

6.7 percent in the business sector and
6.3 percent in the nonfarm business sector.

In both sectors, changes in productivity are higher than the preliminary estimates published November 7, and represent the largest productivity gains since the third quarter of 2003.

Economic growth for the third quarter, which was estimated at 3.9% a month ago, was revised upward to 4.9% by the government's Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The BEA announcement is here.

This of course explains why a Google News search I just did on "recession" has hundreds and hundreds of articles talking about a possible recession, including 481 in the first 20 listings (/sarc).

Key excerpts from the BEA report (bolds are mine):