I'm shocked I tell ya!

New Data Reveals Virtually No Viewers For Time-Shifted Spots:

ADVERTISERS DETERMINED TO RESIST PAYING for ads skipped with DVRs can find new ammunition in Nielsen's new minute-by-minute ratings. An analysis of the so-called "commercial ratings" obtained by MediaDailyNews reveals that virtually no one stops to view a commercial when watching a program in time-shifted mode.

Ya think? The amazing part is actually that 1% did watch the commercials on some recorded shows. Probably passed out on the couch.

The real reason the Donks love illegal aliens

At the Financial Times, Martin Wolf attempts to explain the effects of illegal immigration to the economically illiterate:

In the absence of tough sanctions on employers, the chances of stemming the inflow are negligible. The question is whether such sanctions could be justified. They might be, for two reasons: the first is that uncontrolled immigration of unskilled labour is damaging to already socially disadvantaged fellow citizens; the second is that routine violation of such laws undermines the rule of law itself.

The economist who has argued for the first of these propositions most cogently is George Borjas of Harvard University. According to a simulation exercise by Prof Borjas and Lawrence Katz of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the real wages of US high-school dropouts would have ended up 8 per cent higher if Mexican immigration between 1980 and 2000 had been thwarted, but higher skilled immigration from elsewhere had still been permitted.

Similarly, Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think-tank in favour of tighter controls, argues that the influx of low-skilled immigrants has already harmed native-born competitors. As the proportion of immigrants (both legal and illegal) in the labour force has risen, the proportion of relatively unskilled natives in work has fallen. Moreover, many unskilled natives have left the labour force: they are discouraged workers.

A standard counter-argument, wearily familiar on both sides of the Atlantic, is that immigrants are taking jobs that natives are unwilling to do. This is doubly wrong. First, the supply of labour is dependent on its price. Business people must know this: after all, it is the argument they use to justify soaring executive pay. Without the illegal immigrants, people would have to spend more on nannies, cleaners, farm workers and so forth. Second, most of the workers doing the jobs done also by immigrants are native-born. The obstacle is not the absence of native-born workers, but that they would have to be paid higher wages if immigrants were absent.

Amidst all the whining, that's the bottom line: illegal immigration means the citizens get stiffed. So what happens to them?

If unskilled immigrants drive down wages for such jobs, too, a hapless underclass will inevitably emerge.

Does this matter? The answer depends on whether extreme inequality is compatible with successful democracy. The precedents suggest, instead, that it is a recipe for populism, plutocracy, or a miserable alternation between the two.

And if there ever was a party of plutocrats that wants and needs a dependent underclass, it's today's Democrat party. Of course, it doesn't hurt that with today's lax voting rules they can get all the illegal aliens to vote for them too.

Look who crawled out from under the rock

John Hinderaker at Powerline notes some Strange Bedfellows:

This morning's Washington Times reports the astonishing--to me, anyway--news that last week's massive pro-illegal immigrant demonstration in Los Angeles was organized by International A.N.S.W.E.R. We've written about International A.N.S.W.E.R. a number of times; for example, here. It is a Communist organization and a front for the Workers World Party. The Workers World Party has been around for quite a while. It is one of the last unapologetically Stalinist organizations in the world; it supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. More recently, the WWP and ANSWER have supported dictators like Saddam Hussein and North Korea's Kim Il Jong.

A truly charming bunch and I'm sure they have only the best interests of the citizens of the Republic at heart in promoting illegal immigration. Hinderaker mentions a little digging into their sources of financial support, being as Commies are out of fashion in most circles these days, and "while I could infer that the WWP is kept afloat by donations from a few wealthy donors, I couldn't tell who they were." He suggests it might be fruitful for one of the few real reporters remaining to do a little digging, but I'm not so sure. The wacko wealthy have insulated themselves from their radical dependents quite nicely with money laundering fronts like the Tides Foundation:

The Tides Foundation, a “charity” established in 1976 by antiwar leftist activist Drummond Pike, distributes millions of dollars in grants every year to political organizations advocating far-Left causes. The Tides Foundation and its closely allied Tides Center, which was spun off from the Foundation in 1996 but run by Drummond Pike, distributed nearly $66 million in grants in 2002 alone. In all, Tides has distributed more than $300 million for the Left. These funds went to rabid antiwar demonstrators, anti-trade demonstrators, domestic Islamist organizations, pro-terrorists legal groups, environmentalists, abortion partisans, extremist homosexual activists and open borders advocates.
...
The Tides Foundation is a major source of revenue for some of the most extreme groups on the Left. Tides allows donors to anonymously contribute money to a host of causes; the donor simply makes the check out to Tides and instructs the Foundation where to forward the money. Tides does so. The Tides Center will even manage a left-wing project, for a nominal fee. Drummond Pike told The Chronicle of Philanthropy, “Anonymity is very important to most of the people we work with.” That becomes understandable when one views the list of Tides grant recipients.

Yep, International ANSWER is on the list of recipients and George Soros is one of the more notable contributors to the Tides Foundation.

With tax time coming up this month, it sure warms my heart to see what good these folks are doing with their tax deductible contributions.

Proof of the coming apocalypse

Billboard to Begin Ranking Ringtones Sales:

Music market tracker Billboard said Tuesday it will start publishing a chart ranking master ringtones, the audio snippets derived from original studio recordings that are used to customize cell phones.

The chart, dubbed Hot MasterTones, will be based on data compiled by Nielsen Mobile and represent the top 20 best-selling master ringtones for the week.
...
The weekly publication began publishing a chart for monophonic and polyphonic ringtones - which unlike master ringtones are based on synthesized versions of recordings - in 2004.

Since then, master ringtones have become an increasingly important slice of recording industry sales, particularly in the United States.

Master ringtones have been popular for years in Asia and Europe, where use of handsets with better ringtone fidelity is more common than in the United States. But as more multimedia-friendly mobile phones have entered the U.S. market, users have increasingly opted to customize their phones with master ringtones.

The heck with music - I want one that sounds like Hillary Clinton snorting out truffles!

Today's Hoot!

Brothers Judd has some fun with Al-Jazeera - ODDLY ENOUGH, THEIR ADULT-ONLY CHANNEL FEATURES SHEEP TOO. Be sure to read the comments as well.

Lying Lichtblau gets bitch slapped

Little Sulzberger must be overjoyed at the way Eric Lichtblau's "reporting" accurately reflects the editorial bias of the New York Times. Too bad he's making it all up:

New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau has a considerable career investment (and, I suspect, an ideological investment as well) in the idea that the NSA program is illegal. It would seem that Lichtblau's preconceptions and biases prevented him from accurately reporting what happened in the Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday. His suggestion that the main thrust of the judges' testimony was to "voice skepticism about the president's constitutional authority" is simply wrong; in fact, I can't find a single line in more than 100 pages of transcript that supports Lichtblau's reporting. It's a sad thing when a once-respected newspaper can't be counted on for a straight account of a Congressional hearing.

I'm just trying to figure out the last time the New York Times was respected. The 1800's?

Today's Hoot!

Potfry reveals that Anti-War Hostages Air-Dropped Back into Iraq:

The British military announced today that they had air-dropped former hostages Norman Kembler, James Loony and Harmeet Singh Sooden into the Iraqi desert, just a week after their rescue from a house west of Baghdad. The men had been held by insurgents for four months.

Since their release, the three men, all from a Christian Peacemaker team, have spoken with deep admiration and respect for their captors, while not offering any degree of gratitiude to the British commandos who risked their lives to save them.

“We realize now that we made a huge mistake,” said Captain Ian Coates of the British Army, “and it was time to return these men to the people they love and respect."
...
"To keep it a surprise, we used our commandos to gather the men in the middle of the night," he said. "They were so surprised and excited that we needed to duct tape their mouths and tie them up. But there was no doubt that they were overjoyed to be returning to Iraq. Their eyes were as big as saucers, and Kembler even wet his jammies in excitement!"
...
“The air drop was a remarkable moment, something I was honored to see,” he said. “The men were writhing around, screaming and crying with joy. There wasn’t a dry eye in the helicopter as we rolled them out.”

Much more hilarity by following the link. My only quibble is that these scum really deserve a high altitude drop without parachutes.

Stuff I didn't want to know

Handsets get taken to the grave:

More people than ever are asking to be buried or cremated with their mobile phones when they die, say researchers.

The trend, which began in South Africa, has now spread to a number of countries, including Ireland, Australia, Ghana, and the US.

Martin Raymond, director of international trend-spotting think-tank, The Future Laboratory said that this had started off "in the realm of the urban myth", but was fast becoming fact.

"You hear about it, the idea that people are being buried with their mobile phones, but you can't really believe it," he told the BBC World Service's Culture Shock programme.

Given that it's the BBC and a professional "trend-spotter," I'm still a tad dubious, but rock on:

He explained that the first cases of people asking to be buried with their phone originated in Cape Town, where some people's belief in witchcraft meant they feared that "they could fall under a spell, be put to sleep and actually be buried.

"In fact, they were asking for the phones to be put into the coffins with them in case they woke up."
...
And one service in South Africa will put a number of batteries in the coffin just in case the dead person wakes up much later and finds their own battery has run out.

Sheesh, now I believe it. I'm surprised that they don't furnish an aboveground antenna and a powerplug too. But it's not just the imperfectly civilized:

Mr Raymond said that in Australia the trend was more about affluence.

"People wanted to be buried with the totems that they felt represented their lifestyle," he explained.

"We came across one guy who asked to be buried with his mobile phone and his Blackberry, and also with his laptop."

Maybe there's a special instant messaging icon like a tiny coffin signifying "permanently offline."

He added that in many cases, being buried with your phone is part of what he termed limelight funerals, people wanting to be buried like celebrities.

The phone is put in the coffin along with diamonds, jewellery, expensive suits, and gold watches.

If the relatives and the funeral home employees don't get there first, I guess. More:

"When we looked at this in Chad and Ghana, there was part of that implicit in the burial service - that you were taking things with you that would be useful," Mr Raymond said.

"In Ireland, where we came across this, it was more to do with people being buried with things they liked. One guy we came across was buried with a pack of cigarettes and some matches.

No Guiness and a bottle opener? Over in the USA, the story takes a different twist:

In some cases, they are even taking their mobiles into cremation.

"We came across this in places like South Carolina in the US - people were being burned but unknown to the crematorium, they had left the phones in their jackets," Mr Raymond said.

"If you heat a mobile phone battery, it tends to explode, and the first reports were about explosions, and that's how they started noticing this trend."

I guess I'll have to forget about the Remington pump loaded with double ought buck.

They're selling the Mayor Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool on eBay!

New Orleans to Sell Flooded Buses on EBay:

Starved for cash, the New Orleans school district is taking a long shot and hoping to sell its flooded, unsalvageable school buses on eBay.

Some submerged to their roofs in the black flood waters, the yellow school buses were widely photographed in the days after Hurricane Katrina and have become an icon of the city's devastated school system.

School officials acknowledge the sale of the buses on the Internet auction site may puzzle some people used to more traditional school fundraisers like bake sales.

"There's no shame in it. Not one bit," said school board president Phyllis Landrieu. "This is a new mechanism for selling things. I think it's very upbeat what we're doing."

Does anyone in New Orleans government have even a whiff of a clue?

Baghdad Jim Gets Bitch Slapped

And a nice sound it makes, too:

A federal appeals court ruled today that Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., violated federal law by turning over an illegally taped telephone call to reporters nearly a decade ago.

In a 2-1 opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that McDermott violated the rights of House Majority Leader John Boehner, who was heard on the 1996 call involving former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

The court ordered McDermott to pay Boehner more than $700,000 for leaking the taped conversation. The figure includes $60,000 in damages and more than $600,000 in legal costs.

So when do we get to the trial for aiding and abetting the enemy? And here's a shock, the MSM thinks illegal wiretapping is just peachy when a Republican is the victiim:

Lawyers for 18 news organizations — including ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, The Associated Press, The New York Times and The Washington Post — filed a brief backing McDermott.

Via Michelle Malkin who's not holding her breath for this to appear on any MSM front pages. I think it will show up, but on the editorial pages with lots of "chilling effect" whining.