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I’ve spent a little bit of time these past couple months lecturing liberals for their whining about President Barack Obama’s foreign policy.  They didn’t pay attention to his campaign, I said, hoping that all his tough talk about Afghanistan and Pakistan was just that: talk.

Now, as much as I don’t want to, I feel the time has come to turn my attention toward the moderates who voted for Obama and are now suffering buyer’s remorse after seeing the stimulus package and his budget.  So, as I said to the liberals: WERE YOU PAYING ATTENTION!?

One thing I noticed, particularly during the debates, is that Obama didn’t seem serious about cutting spending.  Just the opposite.  Despite that fact that we were going through some tough times, he had a long list of spending.  I didn’t tack McCain as too serious on the spending cuts, either, but Obama’s wish list seemed particularly lengthy.  I also found him fairly specific on his tax increase plans: $250,000 and above.

These are the kind of things that Obama talked about often and with great certainty, so I’m not entirely sure how these moderates missed them.  Or maybe they noted what he said but hoped that it was all rhetoric, just like the liberals on his Afghanistan and Pakistan foreign policy.  Yet, aside from a couple things, I’ve thought Obama to be pretty honest with his intentions.  It was this honesty that led him to tell Joe the Plumber to his face that he was going to tax people making more than $250,000, and to do what even John McCain couldn’t and say that an attack on Pakistan’s tribal region wasn’t off the table.

If you’ve been keeping track, you’ll notice that since the election both of these things have happened.  Hey, I also thought that a bunch of Obama’s policy initiatives made sense too, but if you got so wrapped up in the hope talk that you ignored what he was saying on policy, maybe that says more about you than it does about Obama.

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Ah nothing like my lunch hour during a work-at-home day to blog.

So I finally got an opportunity to listen to Rush Limbaugh’s speech at CPAC.  I haven’t heard much Rush before, so going into it I was prepared to hate it all.  Coming out of it, I didn’t hate it, but also didn’t find much to which I could nod my head.

To me, his overarching message was basically that of “remain steadfast to core conservative principles,” “oppose bi-partisanship no matter what,” and “Democrats are destroying America.”  While I’m flexible on the first element, and might be able to somewhat believe the third (when you add Congressional Republicans to it), the second I believe is the wrong approach for conservatives.

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So I’m working a project at work that requires me to show website material on top of the people on camera.  Well, after several failures with screencap programs (the text was far too small), I decided just to shoot the screen with my camera.

The problem came when I needed to put it in to the timeline.  The shots came with a bunch of lines on them.  This is, of course, the thin-film transitor layer that forms the pixels on the monitor.  Our eyes don’t usually see it (except on poorly manufactured monitors), but the camera picks right up on it.  This is a problem.  While this may not be the ideal solution, I have came up with a workaround if you run into the problem if you’re using Adobe Premiere.

Simply go to your Effects panel and choose the “Fast Blur” effect from Video Effects -> Blur and Sharpen.  Apply it to your monitor shot, and slightly notch up the blur.  You should only need to set it at 1.00 or 2.00.  Any more and the text starts to visibly become blurred.  It doesn’t remove the lines, but at the low numbers, it will blur the picture just enough to smooth them out to make them not as noticable.

A better solution may be try and reshoot the picture and adjust the settings on your camera.  When asking at Creative Cow for a better way to fix this problem, user William suggested adjusting the shutter speed.  This didn’t work for me, but my camera is not always…ideal…for everything.  Maybe some of the higher end camera would benefit from this.

So, for now, the slight blur seems to work.  I can see why this wouldn’t be wanted, though, especially if you’re going to output in HD, as the blur will be more visible.  However, I’m currently outputting at SD, so the blur isn’t as much of an issue.

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This article was cross-posted from Poligazette.  And before you ask, yes, I had a lot of fun writing it.

CBS News reports that radical eco-activist Marie Mason has been sentenced to 22 years on charges of arson, setting off an explosive fire in 1999 at Michigan State University’s Agricultural Hall.  Here’s the details:

At MSU, Mason and Ambrose targeted a campus office that held records on research related to moth-resistant potatoes for poor parts of Africa. Computers, file cabinets and desks were doused with a flammable liquid. Vapors contributed to an explosion, and the fire got out of control.

The explosion burned Mason’s hair and prevented her from finishing the message, “No GMO,” on a wall, a reference to genetically modified organisms.

“Pure luck” prevented the couple from being killed, Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagen Frank said. “Did that deter Ms. Mason? Not one bit. She celebrated it. Her community celebrated it.”

Someone innocent could have been killed, and Mason almost was.  Her husband, who turned informant for the FBI, was given nine years.

Of course, the actions are pretty disturbing.  But almost or as much as disturbing is where the apparent facts lead one reading the story.  Mason will serve time in a domestic prison.  Perhaps a high security prison.  And that’s unconscionable.  Because lets not forget: Mason is a terrorist.  And well, as we’ve been told, we can’t have terrorists held on U.S. soil.

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This article was cross-posted from Poligazette.

In the past, I’ve written about ‘militant atheists,” or those type of atheists who spend their time ridiculing and disrespecting believers for their beliefs.  But, I’ve also taken pains to point out that not all atheists are this way.  Not all of them going around laughing at Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc. for belief in a deity.  Some are content to “live and let live.”  Freddie DeBoer, an atheist of the non-militant flavor, ponders the motives behind his more vocal comrades:

I’m left with three possibilities when I consider the atheism of disrespect. Either people like Richard Dawkins, PZ Meyers, Bill Maher, and assorted don’t know that the way they are confronting these issues is disrespectful, in which case they are tone deaf to a frankly absurd degree; or they think that, tactically, the way to get the kind of change they say they want is to ridicule people into believing as they do, in which case they have a dramatically underdeveloped understanding of human psychology and sociology; or they are more interested in producing ridicule than in producing change.

Freddie goes on to say that he really would like to wish that the third choice wasn’t reality.  But, I doubt number one is, since people like Dawkins are far too smart to be unaware of what they’re doing.

(H/T Andrew Sullivan)

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This article was originally posted on Poligazette.

Watching CSI: Miami on Monday, I was intrigued by a question: Do state mandated safety regulations trump free market choice in the medical field?  Or should consumers be allowed to choose to undergo a medical procedure that might cost less than what you could get at a hospital, even though it might not meet all the standard safety requirements?  For those of you wondering what in the world I’m talking about, I’ll see you after the jump, so CSI junkies don’t try and murder me.  For those of you on the RSS feeds, you have been warned: spoilers abound.

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This article was cross-posted from Poligazette.

Andrew Sullivan has been included on Forbes’ list of “25 Most Influential Liberals,” and he’s making a case as to why this just isn’t true:

For the record, I support a flat tax and, as my liberal readers know, find progressive taxation unjust and counter-productive; I’m skeptical of universal healthcare on European lines and have long defended a free market in healthcare and pharmaceuticals; I have no queasiness in fighting a war against Jihadist terror – in fact I have long been one of the most passionate supporters of  it. I just oppose the illegal use of torture, the creation of a de facto protectorate in violation of the Constitution, and war-making without prudence, strategy, foresight or any conception of winning the long war of ideas.

I’ve looked at Forbes’ list, and read their defintion of what makes a liberal, and I have to say, I found it somewhat lacking.

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This article was cross-posted from Poligazette.

Presidential candidates say a lot of things during their long campaigns.  Some of it only turns out to be rhetoric, others must pass through the halls of Congress, but don’t, and yet other promises are kept.  Still, with so many made during such a long period, it can be difficult to keep track of all of them.

Never fear, because the excellent Politifact is here to hold Barack Obama’s feet to the fire.  They recently introduced their “Obameter” that tracks about 500 promises made by Obama during the campaign.  So, if you wish to see progress, or non-progress made on his promises at any given point, you can simply go there and see the status of them.  Politifact has categorized their tracking into “Promise Kept,” “Compromise,” “Promise Broken,” “Stalled,” “In the Works,” and “No Action.”

I first discovered Politifact via some blog during the campaign season.  It’s published by the St. Petersburg Times, but fear not.  I’ve found the site to be quite even handed in its analysis.  So, I think it’s safe to put some trust in this meter system.

(H/T Patrick Appel at The Daily Dish)

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So I’ve had a cold going on more than two weeks now.  This is nothing new to me.  As a sufferer of Crohn’s Disease, taking the immosuppresent Imuran to combat it, I’ve grown to accept that whatever I get is typically a magnitude worse than most people and lasts longer as well.  Yet, about two weeks seems to typify my colds.

This apparently either isn’t a typically cold, or I’m doing something wrong.  That’s because it took a turn for the worse yesterday and around noon today I woke up sweating under my covers, and then shaking as if I had been outside for an hour when I went to the kitchen to take my medicine.  So the problem could be a mix of both severity and improper treatment, but the fact that I haven’t been perfect in treating this could say a lot.

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The article was originally posted at Poligazette.

As Michael noted earlier today, President Barack Obama issued an Executive Order on Wednesday the essentially revoked Executive Order 13233, written by former President George W. Bush in November 2001. 13233 is particularly notable as it essentially made the incumbent president the just about nearly the only decision maker on access to records of former presidents, whereas in the order it replaced, 12667, it was more of a team effort involving the Attorney General, as well as the Counsel to the President, and other agencies.  It also extended Executive privilege claims and review of former records by the incumbent president to former Vice Presidents.

One can see why this would be a problem, of course.  While there are legitimate reasons for Executive privledge (national security and the like, but perhaps others), giving near unlimited control of review to one person means that that one person can decide to keep away a record that may not affect national security, but may be simply embarassing.  Perhaps details of a scandal from a former administation that never gained public light.  Could be anything, really.

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