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Entries in Ethics (147)

Thursday

Sep092010

Cold Comfort in a Time of Want and Neglect

Thursday, September 9, 2010

This American Lion wonders where the Americans went

Am I for cutting taxes? Yes. Is there a war on? Yes.

What then?

Well, because I am an American first, a businessman second, and a taxpayer third I have to say—you must pay for the wars we are fighting and that means taxes.

Would I raise taxes? No.

Would I cut taxes? No.

There’s a war on, Cletus, and you don’t give people a tax cut when there’s a war on. It’s really that simple. Now, when the war ends, do you cut taxes? Yes, if you want people to engage in constructive behavior. You cut taxes to get people to invest in businesses that will create jobs.

When I read something like this, I wonder where all of the Americans went:

Momentum built Thursday for extending all of the Bush-era tax cuts after President Obama avoided a veto threat and a key Senate Democrat voiced support for the extension.

Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.), a centrist who has been a key vote on several Obama administration initiatives, said Thursday he supports extending all of the George W. Bush-era tax cuts until the economic recovery has taken root. Raising taxes on wealthier taxpayers could hurt the economy, he said.

“I support extending all of the expiring tax cuts until Nebraska’s and the nation’s economy is in better shape, and perhaps longer, because raising taxes in a weak economy could impair recovery,” Nelson said in a statement Thursday.

Earlier in the day, Obama refrained from promising to veto legislation that extends tax cuts not only for the middle class, but also for individuals with incomes of more than $200,000 and families with incomes of more than $250,000.

Wasn’t that Nelson fellow the big boy in the big pants who ruined health care reform? Isn’t he a pantload of epic proportions? How did he manage to appoint himself the Senator of Deep Pockets? He’s from Nebraska. Aside from Warren Buffet, there’s no money in Nebraska.

In this economy, the wealthy are not hurting; I’m not hurting, and I stand to see taxes go up on the portion of my income that is still taxable (hint—not that much). Does it mean I’m going to wallow in self-pity and howl out of the basement window? No. It will hurt, but it won’t hurt as much as watching a millionaire explain why Joe Sixpack has to sit there with his last unemployment check burning a hole through his work pants and suck it up and not resort to “class warfare” when he expresses some sort of displeasure at watching his rich neighbors continue paying taxes that, in relation to the settled, civilized world are still pretty low.

Spare me the outrage; remember what it was like in the 1970s? If not, then come talk to me when you know something about taxation rates and confiscating wealth. Since Reagan, I have done quite well. Many have done quite well. But this is a tough economy for decent, hard-working people. Let’s not talk tax cuts when so many are in need of support.

Did I mention the war? I hope that got across as well.

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Wednesday

Sep082010

My Business Acumen is Well Documented

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Ethics? Who needs them?

For a class, I read an old (1986) paper by Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler on fairness. It’s based on surveys posing various hypothetical situations where businesses can take some action. For example, most people thought that it was OK for a grocer to pass on a wholesale price increase to consumers (Question 7) but not to raise prices because there is a general shortage and the grocer has the only shipment of a certain item (Question 12). In short, people have an intrinsic sense of fairness the authors summarize this way: “The cardinal rule of fairness is surely that one person should not achieve a gain by simply imposing an equivalent loss on another.”

Today in class, the professor posed the first question from the paper:

“A hardware store has been selling snow shovels for $15. The morning after a large snowstorm, the store raises the price to $20.”

In 1986, 82 percent of respondents thought this was unfair. In class, it was about 50-50.

As the professor said, this is probably because there are a lot of business school students in this class. Business school students are classic Econ 101 robots. They know enough to know that if there is a demand shift, not only is it OK to raise prices, but you should raise prices in order to clear the market. In this case, supply is fixed in the short term, so raising the price won’t increase supply; the Econ 101 argument is that raising the price allocates the shovels to people who will derive more utility from them (because they will pay more), thereby increasing social welfare.

I was taught that, if you shifted prices too quickly in the wake of a natural disaster, you were inviting trouble from the do-gooders who would charge you with price gouging.

The smart thing to do is to know the weather forecast, inside and out. If it looks like a big storm is on the way, corner the market by sending some kids out to buy up all of the shovels being sold by your competitors. You may lose a little money on this endeavor since kids don’t do anything for free. Then, when the big storm hits, your shovels are “buy one for $25, two for $35.” That way, you can show that you weren’t profiting so much as you were trying to get people to buy an extra shovel, at a discount, for their shut-in neighbors.

If it looks like you’re trying to be a good guy, you won’t get burned so bad. Bear in mind, I retired early, and I’m still living off the vast amount of wealth I accumulated when I inherited control of my Father’s company, so I do know how business works.

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Wednesday

Sep082010

Banned in Italy?

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Julianne MooreThese wonderful and stylish images of actress Julianne Moore are, apparently, banned in Italy. What gives?

Julianne MooreJulianne Moore

There’s nothing to suggest that these aren’t a little risque, but worthy of being banned? Hardly. When did the prudes take over Italy? I must have missed that event.

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Tuesday

Sep072010

Why Would You Leak This Information?

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Someone in the CIA wants to gin up liberal outrage over torture:

A former CIA officer accused of revving an electric drill near the head of an imprisoned terror suspect has returned to U.S. intelligence as a contractor, training CIA operatives after leaving the agency, The Associated Press has learned.

The CIA officer wielded the bitless drill and an unloaded handgun — unauthorized interrogation techniques — to menace suspected USS Cole bombing plotter Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri inside a secret CIA prison in Poland in late 2002 and early 2003, according to several former intelligence officials and a review by the CIA’s inspector general.

Adding details to the public portions of the review, the former officials identified the officer as Albert, 60, a former FBI agent of Egyptian descent who worked as a bureau translator in New York before joining the CIA. The former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because many details of the incident remain classified.

I will probably reveal a little more of my opinions that I wish to on this subject, but let me say, categorically, we have known that “torture” does not work for as long as there has been torture. Forget the soft-headed arguments of liberals and conservatives in this country—torture is what you do to punish someone when you think they’re not telling you what you think they know. No one tortures a subject when there’s the possibility that killing them will stop the flow of vital information. You torture someone when you want to send a message, tear them down emotionally and physically, or carry out a brutal form of repression against the enemies of the state.

The behavior listed above is torture, of that you can be certain. But it’s the torture practiced, in varying forms all over the world, in police stations and whatnot in order to panic a suspect into confessing or giving up information. Have you ever sat down and watched NYPD Blue? There are, to much lesser degrees, similar interrogation tactics employed there in order to get people to give up vital information when they are holding out; there is no “ticking time bomb” situation that comes to mind, however. The police have a vested interest in getting people to give up information. They can and will stretch propriety in order to accomplish this task. Rights will be stepped on. But, as far as saying “if we don’t torture subject x, there will be a bomb that will go off in city y,” forget about it. That’s a plot device in a bad show or movie.

The technique that “Albert” utilized was un-American, and yet, Americans have certainly played the torture game in wars past. It was used in Vietnam, Korea, World War II, and so on, to varying degrees, and it is all well documented. These are the mistakes of history and we, as the enlightened superpower that we really are, must learn from those mistakes.

Punishing “Albert” was correct; and yet, the situation that he found himself in was nebulous and vague. He likely had tacit authorization to employ certain measures and, given his background, he acted accordingly. The failure here is really bureaucratic and administrative. No one should have allowed him to interrogate a subject unless he had been trained and briefed on the laws at hand, on the ramifications from deviating from them, and on basic human rights and decency. Ethics are rarely instructed to those who are assumed to already have them. In this case, “Albert” and his ethics were barely acquainted. Was this because he was pressured to get information? Or was this because the process of interrogating people was flawed, ambiguous, and not easily understood by the people thrown into a difficult situation and told to produce information?

When an employee breaks the law, there are a number of reasons for it. It could be their own greed, their own ignorance, or a desire to please their boss. I think that, in this case, it was a desire to please the boss. Now, was the boss disciplined? Yes, apparently so. Was his boss taken to task? Hmm.

If the man at the top isn’t responsible, then who is? Apparently, not “Albert.” He’s back on the job. Something about him made the bosses very happy. If so, then leaking this is one boss fighting another boss, and this is a clear attempt to divide President Obama from his base. When the liberal base of the President can point to his hypocrisy on the issue of torture, then someone is accomplishing something we do not yet fully understand. This is a smokescreen, and the real maneuvers are being masked from view.

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Saturday

Sep042010

My Whoring Around is None of Your Business

Saturday, September 4, 2010

A Beer Pong table (will they ban the sale of these from Craigslist, too?)I suppose that there are people who are happy about this, but I don’t know any. I would also gather that there are people who are miserable about this, and I don’t know any of them, either. This is one of those things that doesn’t affect me. If I was the sort of man to go whoring around, I would simply blog about it and be done with it. I wouldn’t whine about it on television or waggle my finger at people who whored around more than myself. I don’t care if you’re offended by what is advertised on Craigslist; I don’t care which half-wit of a hotel whore you’re groping for hundreds of dollars near the airport. It has nothing to do with me, but I will say this—what a crock:

Craigslist closed the adult services section of its website Saturday, replacing it with a black bar that says “censored,” just over a week after a group of state attorneys general said there weren’t enough protections against blocking potentially illegal ads promoting prostitution.

The listings came under new scrutiny after the jailhouse suicide last month of a former medical student who was awaiting trial in the killing of a masseuse he met through Craigslist. Critics have likened the services to virtual pimping, while Craigslist maintained the site was carrying ads even tamer than those published by some newspapers.

Like many other free online forums, Craigslist typically does not review ads before they are posted by users. But in 2008, under pressure from 40 state attorneys general, Craigslist began requiring posters to provide a working phone number and pay a fee for placing an ad in what is now the adult services section. Several months later, Craigslist adopted a manual screening process in which postings are reviewed before publishing.

No one should blame Craigslist for what happened in the incidents where someone was attacked or killed. Men have been killing prostitutes for as long as anyone can remember. Did they shut down the want ads in the London Newspapers when Jack the Ripper was running around? Of course not.

This does nothing to help get people out of the cycle of behavior that creates the socially unacceptable results found in those airport hotels. Men want sex; men can’t get the sex they want. Men who are fat, bald, and gross want to have sex with thin, pretty girls. Thin, pretty girls are in short supply, so anyone and everything, with plumbing attached, detached, or taped down is trying to fit that bill. Thin, pretty girls have options, and they don’t have to have sex with disgusting toads in hotel rooms unless they are down on their luck and need to pay someone a lot of money to maintain their drug habit.

In short, this creates the situation we have in America right now. This creates the added horror of sexual slavery and underage prostitution. Why? Because the men will pay top dollar and the women need that money to either live on or buy drugs. If you legalized drugs, legalized prostitution, and made it so anyone who deviated from an acceptable level of enjoyment of both would be treated or incarcerated, you’d have a less messy situation.

It’s impossible to make things perfect; otherwise, libertarians would be running things and that will never happen. The rights for people to whore around in America have always come into conflict with the rights of people (usually with blue hair and stuffed shirts) who want to whore around but can’t because they’re terrified of exposing their own shortcomings to the world.

Craigslist did not create the problem, nor is the problem solved by this act. From now on, the only way to find a whore or get a whore or find a john is going to be through Twitter, Foursquare, or Facebook. Good luck shutting them down. Good luck trying to figure out how to stop “hooker reviews” on Foursquare. Or Yelp. Did you know that I am on Yelp?

Only a fundamental change in our attitudes towards sex, drugs, recreation, and permissiveness will do that. And, brother, I’m not going to live long enough to see us grow up that much.

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Thursday

Sep022010

Let the Little People Continue to Suffer

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Lake Tahoe, playground of the wealthyThe statement made today by the Obama Administration has to hurt those who are struggling and need help in this sluggish economy:

President Obama’s economic team is looking for ways to accelerate the agonizingly slow economic recovery, but the top White House spokesman on Thursday said a large spending measure is not being considered.

“Some big, new stimulus plan is not in the offing,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.

National unemployment numbers for August will be released Friday morning. While administration officials do not yet know what those numbers will reveal, analysts widely expect the national unemployment rate will hover near 10 percent for the foreseeable future.

I have a vision of what Christmas in America will look like this year. I suspect that, in Wal-Marts all over America, desperate people will fight like cats and dogs over cheap goods as if their happiness depends on it. I expect to see video clips of overweight women in sweat pants tearing the hair out of the heads of perfect strangers over cheap plastic shit made out of toxic poisons in China. We have consumed and spent ourselves into oblivion and now no one can pass up a $35 DVD player made out of fake cheese. Better yet if you can hang it on the wall and have it play back a tape-recorded version of “We’re in the Money” back at you.

If this White House actually cared about the little people, they would be pushing another stimulus. The fact is, they don’t care about their base. If you are a conservative, your natural position is to decry efforts to spend government money on putting people back to work. If you are a liberal, your natural position is to have a plan to spend some of the government’s money to give a handful of people a temporary lift.

In times of great economic distress, government should never be viewed as doing nothing; it riles up the masses. In this case, the government should be doing something, even if it involves shuffling papers, babysitting someone’s kid while they stare blankly at a computer screen at jobs they’ll never interview for, or creating yet another Federal agency (when you do that, you automatically employ 4,000 people in the greater Washington D.C. area, and you help with property values and rent prices in said region).

So even if it’s all for show, the correct political tactic to adopt is feigned interest in the welfare of the little people and to stress that your plan WILL create jobs, even though you’re not ready to talk about whether or not it is an unfunded mandate or a recipe for disaster.

The conclusion that I draw here is this—the White House won’t act when things are bad for the little people and they are too stupid to leave options on the table. This gives their political allies little or no room to maneuver when they are forced to trudge home and face the voters. If you cared about your political allies, the thing you would do is obvious. You’d make it look like you cared so that they could lie to the people who might vote for them about wanting to go out there and make a difference.

Our elites are too easy to peg. They have theirs. You have whatever you’ve cashed in, sold off, or pawned. Shut up and sit down. Vote early and often. Praise Jeebus. And how much do you want to bet that Sarah Palin will have her face on the cover of some magazine next week?

The solution is this—our elites must be driven from power and hounded from office. Vote against every incumbent. Then, in two years, repeat. Throw the bums out just because they’re the same bums who replaced the bums you kicked out when your uncle Norman told you what to do. Continue as necessary. You may stop voting against incumbents only when your home is worth half of what you originally paid for it. Deal?

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Thursday

Sep022010

Conservatives Are Praying For Liberals to Act Like Pussies

Thursday, September 2, 2010

There is a bit of a dispute building in the “liberal” movement over a book written by the young man who set up the “Daily Kos” website. I go over there and have a great belly laugh when I want to come up with examples of things that only a hairy-legged fifty year-old woman with no sense of style or taste would have to say about politics. It’s a site too dismal to contemplate. There is absolutely no humor to be found there, only earnest self-aggradizing and personal absorption on a scale not to be believed.

This fellow “Kos” has a book that compares the nuttier elements of the Right in this country with the Taliban. Aside from cheapening the idea that the Taliban actually do maim and kill people, there is a grain of truth when we compare all fundamentalists to one another; fundamentalism is a sort of totalitarianism that still has a measure of cachet in this world. It’s what you ascribe to when you want people to think you are serious and committed to something.

Anyway, the real lesson here is that “high mindedness” is the real problem that liberals face in this country. They are counting on conservatives to be honest (no one ever made much money by being absolutely, totally, and completely honest) and they are counting on receiving points for being good and perfect. In other words, this is a form of complaining about the refs and hoping that being a “pussy” will help you come out on top. I hate to break it to you, and be so crude as to use the term “pussies”, but there it is:

Listen, I have no problem with throwing punches and fighting the good fight against the forces of wealth and regression. And I won’t hesitate to attack the conservative movement for its sexism, racial resentment and monomaniacal devotion to enriching the privileged. But there’s a vast difference between that, and stressing a moral equivalence between the right and the Taliban. The former is true and focuses our aim for the battles ahead, the latter, as Patrick Appel writes at the Daily Dish, doesn’t “accomplish anything besides juicing book sales and temporarily riling up like-minded folk.”

Hell, Kos admits as much when he describes the purpose of his book, “Because look, this book, ultimately, is a big ‘fuck you’ to every conservative who has ever accused us of wanting the terrorists to win.” Kos isn’t Paul Revere; he isn’t warning us about some incipient threat to our safety; he’s trying to get back at conservatives who accuse liberals of hating their country. Which, as I said in my review, is fair; Kos has never claimed to be an honest broker for the truth. But the fight for progress doesn’t require us to bend the truth or distort our opponents’ ideas; we can wage this war as we always have, by fighting for our values and giving the right the rope it needs to hang itself. Sure, “fuck you” feels good, but the moment you turn to smears is the moment you concede the weakness of your own position.

The conservative movement is a perfect example of what happens when you let dishonesty consume your argument. In its drive to demonize liberals, it has become an incoherent mass of rage and resentment, devoid of anything approximating a governing agenda. The right has become so doctrinaire that it has lost its capacity for self-correction. This year’s Republicans will win because of high unemployment and poor growth, not because the American people have suddenly become more receptive to conservatism (they haven’t).

The headline of the piece that I’m quoting above is “No, Really. We Shouldn’t Adopt Conservative Tactics.”

Really? And don’t you think that the people who oppose you are praying that enough liberals will come out and say such a thing? I guess you don’t want to win, do you? Winning might make you think less of yourself. I assure you—that’s not a problem that your opponent has right now.

Being high minded makes you feel good about yourself while you watch others make decisions about your life. Enjoy oblivion. The fellow who wants it more is going to take this country from you and you will be left to study the dishonest ways employed to beat you.

Actually, if you came out and said “we will beat them only when we play the game better and harder than they do” I would have been shocked. Surely, no one with a deep-seated sense of self-importance would tape nickels to their knuckles and go down to the town square and fight to hold on to their way of life, right? That’s for the little people who donate money to keep your web site up and running.

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Tuesday

Aug312010

You Pull the Trigger, You do the Time

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

I don’t think your fancy lawyer is getting you off, Cletus:

A soldier was fasting to meet strict military weight guidelines and nearly catatonic when he shot and killed a supervisor who denied his vacation request, his attorney said Monday.

Attorney William Cassara said Army Reserve Sgt. Rashad Valmont was dehydrated, exhausted and delirious when he burst into Master Sgt. Pedro Mercado’s office in nearby Fort Gillem in June and shot him six times.

Valmont, 29, faces a premeditated murder charge. The details of the shooting were revealed for the first time Monday at a military hearing to determine if there is enough evidence to go to trial. No immediate recommendation was issued.

The military routinely requires soldiers to pass physical tests and meet body-fat requirements to be eligible for promotions and advanced training courses.

But Cassara said another sergeant, Tracy Mosley, ordered Valmont to lose an additional 3 percent beyond the minimum body fat requirements to attend a course he had long sought. He said his client spent weeks trying body wraps and sauna treatments and starving himself to meet the standards.

“He showed some form of diminished capacity, some sort of delirium in the days and hours leading up to this incident,” Cassara said. “He was in a near-catatonic state, a near trance. And after being belittled, humiliated and berated … you’re on this crash course.”

The thing is, the man did it to himself. If he was out of shape and overweight, then whatever “delirium” he put himself into was a direct result of his own actions. How, then, can you claim any sort of mitigating circumstance? There are wrestlers all over the country who could get away with murder if this were the case.

This is just another case of “how can I get my client to skate?” I don’t think it will work in this case. The situation with Valmont is fairly cut and dried to me. He was too fat for the military. They were holding him to the standards in place. He didn’t like it. He tried to lose a lot of weight with stupid methods. He went berserk and killed that poor man. Now his lawyer is trying to get him off. I hope it does not work.

What about the Master Sergeant who was killed? Isn’t there any sympathy for him? Why is there any sympathy at all for Valmont? I’ll tell you why. There is a belief out there that everything the military does is an evil conspiracy of vicious intent. Most Americans do not subscribe to this, but a subset of radical leftists do. If you don’t believe in personal responsibility, then you probably think some fat little jackass who kills someone because he cannot handle the stress of failure is innocent.

The problem is, the military has to try to stress people out in order to see who can hack it and who can’t. This individual failed to take responsibility for his actions and killed an innocent man. That’s all.

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Sunday

Aug292010

Never Put Your Blind Trust in a Politician

Sunday, August 29, 2010

There are a number of things wrong with this piece:

Chances are that by now you've heard about the August 19, 2010 Pew poll that found that nearly one fifth of Americans (mistakenly) believe that President Obama is a Muslim. Perhaps you think that a terrifying outlier; or perhaps you're a believer, and then you are in good company. Either way, you're wrong: in fact, a remarkably high numbers of Americans believe the most unusual things. Although the portion of poll respondents who believe Obama is a Muslim has risen recently, some of these oddball opinions contain more consistent numbers of believers.

Number one, it is elitist. Number two, it fails to take into account the fact that Americans really do have a bias against certain ethnic groups and certain religions. Number three, it's easy to point out how stupid Americans are because we couldn't possibly have an article in an American media magazine that points out how much stupider the rest of the world actually happens to be. There aren't many articles that talk about witches or ghosts, which terrorize Africa to this day, as a matter of fact, now are there? Nor are there many articles out there about how the complete and utter stupidity of other nations when it comes to money or infrastructure or common sense is in sad comparison to America, now are there?

Of course not; America-bashing sells. Newsweek needs to sell like the dickens in order to maintain the mediocrity we have come to know and love.

If you believe what the media tells you, I cannot assist you in understanding why this is all a self-fulfilling farce perpetrated by a frightened group of clowns.

This is the same country where the Mormon faith of Mitt Romney was all but ignored by people who didn't want to delve into such unpleasantness. The fact remains, Romney has a huge handicap with Republican voters because of it. The fact remains that Catholics still face scrutiny and people of the Jewish faith already know that they are suspect simply because of their affiliations. It's not easy to explain why, but it's easy to tell you that your religion and race still matter in America. I wish that these things did not matter and they do not matter to me.

I don't take President Obama at his word for anything. He's a politician. And there's the principle of oversight and compliance--we don't trust any individual at all because there's a greater chance of malfeasance when we do. We keep an eye on imperfect men and their imperfect actions. Trusting someone typically means that we trust that he or she isn't stealing from the treasury while we check on that fact anyway. But here's something that will blow the mind of the average hairy-legged liberal female blogger who is stoked on outrage and bile--yes, your guy can lie, too. President Obama has lied to liberals left and right. Because they like him better, they take him at his word that he's not lying. Well, we've had eight years of liberals screaming about the lies that George W. Bush had to tell people so he could wage a war against terrorists. If Bush is a liar, then Obama is a liar; in point of fact, they are all liars.

Hence, the possibility exists that President Obama is lying for political expediency. You do not get to be President by telling the truth all the time, nor do you get to be President simply by being a crass fabricator; the American people can see through phonies and the road to immortality is paved with their failed attempts at fooling the voters. We get the President we deserve, and we get the one we vote for, most every time. Our failure to deal with that tends to fall along the lines of who we voter for and if that fellow won.

It wouldn't matter to me if he were a Muslim. It is fundamentally anti-American to use religion or race as a weapon against others. I would say that his religion doesn't matter; there is no Pope of Islam to issue orders or threaten excommunication. If John Kerry were President, his views on Choice would have led the current Pope to excommunicate him. How sad would that be? Bombing the Vatican in retaliation would be a public relations nightmare.

It would matter to the general public, however, because we have mistakenly demonized a religion instead of demonizing the violent ideology of jihadism. We now have no room to move on the issue, and the smart people already know that. It would be like trying to sell the people on the idea that we actually won the Vietnam War; it ain't happening.

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Sunday

Aug292010

This Mommy Blogger Says No

Sunday, August 29, 2010

While it is true that I have sold out--and I would sell out--no one has taken me up on that bet:

Katie Couric once described bloggers as journalists who gnaw at new information “like piranhas in a pool.” But increasingly, many bloggers are also secretly feeding on cash from political campaigns, in a form of partisan payola that erases the line between journalism and paid endorsement.

“It’s standard operating procedure” to pay bloggers for favorable coverage, says one Republican campaign operative. A GOP blogger-for-hire estimates that “at least half the bloggers that are out there” on the Republican side “are getting remuneration in some way beyond ad sales.”

In California, where former eBay executive Meg Whitman beat businessman Steve Poizner in a bitterly fought primary battle in the campaign for governor, it sometimes seemed as if there was a bidding war for bloggers.

One pro-Poizner blogger, Aaron Park, was discovered to be a paid consultant to the Poizner campaign while writing for Red County, a conservative blog about California politics. Red County founder Chip Hanlon threw Park off the site upon discovering his affiliation, which had not been disclosed.

As a Mommy Blogger, I am obligated to list all of the people who pay for advertising on my blogs. It would take big money to make me strip out my Mommy Blogger credentials and roll around on a bed covered with money handed to me by some campaign or organization. I would certainly do it. If you ever see me suddenly saying something nice about a complete and utter jackass, then you'll know that the fix is in and I'm probably naked on a bedspread with hundred dollar bills stuck to my sweaty back.

The full list is as follows:

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When people find out that those specific political blogs with targeted subjects are on the take, nothing will happen. It's almost a given that they are all operating without any ethics. Heard anything from Will Folks lately? Of course not.

I have had a few inquiries to run pop-up ads and specific ads next to specific posts, but I have turned them all down. I have the standard "Google Ads" deal because a web site without ads is immediately deemed suspect. You have to have ads to maintain the same look and feel that all other sites have. If and when several million people flood my site with bile and hatred, I want to be able to cash a fat $100 check and laugh at their insolence. Until then, I will keep being fabulous.