As Ed would say:

"You are correct Sir."

I've spent all summer listening to my co-workers talk about cancelled and scaled back vacations (I'm one of them - no vacation for me this year), putting off large purchases, trouble paying for kids summer camps, bringing lunch in rather than going out and just basically scaling back across the board.

All of that is on top of falling sales, increasing raw material and transportation prices and enormous presure from our corporate headquarters to cut costs, making everybody VERY job conscious.

The real world is not very fun right now. Unfortunately I don't see it getting better any time soon.

Your suggestion would require the MSM actually get off their buts and work. It's far simpler to just make up a meme about each candidate and repeat it over and over again. Do you know how much effort is require to move and click a mouse? These people have manicures to worry about.

I honestly do not understand Viacom’s thinking on this one. Haven’t they learned anything from the RIAA’s disastrous policy of punishing fans?

Yes the RIAA won a number of battles, getting big awards from ‘pirates’, forcing completely innocent consumers into court.

But they’ve lost the war.

On-line music won. iTunes is now the largest music seller in America. There is still an enormous amount of music piracy going on. And the recording industry continues to sink further and further into the mud, losing money and revenue hand over fist.

More importantly they’ve lost the ‘moral’ war. Right or wrong (and I’d agree its wrong) a huge swath of people now think it is completely alright to routinely violate copyright laws. But that ethos was born out of the complete lack of LEGAL alternatives. Alternatives the RIAA fought tooth and nail to prevent from coming to market until it was too late.

Now Viacom is repeating the same strategy. Fight the technology, attack fans/customers, block alternatives.

They will probably win these early battles, but I doubt the war will turn out any differently for them than it did for the RIAA.

I can picture the scenario in my head now. Sometime in Sept/Oct (perhaps timed with Iraqi elections) a ‘deal’ is announced with the Iraqi government that includes a ‘loose’ time line for withdrawal of US troops. Most likely over a period of 2-3 years.

McCain (and his base in the MSM) embrace the plan wholeheartedly. That effectively neutralizes the Iraq issue just enough to swing the election McCain’s way (don’t laugh, a good 5-10 percent of swing voters are dumb enough to fall for this).

Then sometime in Dec or Jan (before Bush leaves) there is a spike in Iraqi violence. Iran, of course, gets the blame. Bush suddenly notices Maliki’s close ties with Iran and decides the Iraqi government is too ‘corrupted by Iranian influences’ and moves to depose Maliki and resume direct US control.

This renders the ‘deal’ null and void and naturally we have to say in Iraq until the situation ‘stabilizes’ again.

I really do.

But I can see it so clearly in my head. I’m almost certain there will be a ‘deal’ of some kind announced in Sept/Oct about troop status. It will include some kind of ‘loose’ time line for withdrawal of US troops.

And MSM will latch onto it. I can see the stories.

McCain Proven Right on Iraq

Stay the Course Worked

Tons of stories about how McCain stood resolute, even in the face of opinion polls, in his stance on Iraq. How it proves his ‘maverick’ status, his ‘patriotism’ and his brilliant take on foreign policy. Another group of stories about how ‘cut-and-run’ Obama would have lost Iraq etc etc etc.

You’re right, people shouldn’t buy it. They SHOULD be smart enough to see through it. But all it takes is a couple of thousand fools in the right swing states (we’ve seen that in Florida)to make it close and the 2008 goes to McCain.

My company is Japanese owned. We have three staff members from Japan who work here full time and routinely have engineers over for projects. ALL of them speak English, most of them learned in grade school.

We also own a factory in Tijuana MX, ALL of the senior staff, engineers and most of the support staff speak English, again most learned in grade school.

We routinely deal with our sister facilities in Taiwan, the Philippines, England (two nations separated by a common language) and China. We have customers in the US, Mexico, Germany, Canada and Turkey (the auto industry is VERY widespread). Again most of our counterparts read, write and speak English and most learned from an early age.

The rest of the world has embraced multi-lingual education as a necessity. They get IT. The United States does not. They start language classes in grade school (not high school). They make proficiency in another language a requirement to graduate.

We live in a global economy. Success means being able to communicate and deal with people from half dozen countries.