Quote of the Day

“Fear less, hope more; Eat less, chew more; Whine less, breathe more; Talk less, say more; Love more, and all good things will be yours.”

--- A Swedish Proverb

Man Sheds 80 Pounds Eating at McDonald's!

Associated Press - June 20, 2008 7:13 AM ET

QUINTON, Va. (AP) - A Virginia man lost about 80 pounds in six months by eating nearly every meal at McDonald's.

Not Big Macs, french fries or chocolate shakes. Mostly salads, wraps and apple dippers without the caramel sauce.

Chris Coleson tipped the scales at 278 pounds in December. The 5-foot-8 Coleson now weighs 199 pounds and his waist size has dropped from 50 to 36.

The 42-year-old businessman from Quinton, Virginia, says he chose McDonald's because it's convenient.

His inspiration came from his two children and from the story of a blind war veteran who rode a tandem bicycle cross-country.

Coleson says his goal is to get back to the 185 pounds he weighed when he married Tricia Summer. Their 10th anniversary is tomorrow.

United States NOT in a Recession (Despite the Best Efforts of the Media)!

As I have been saying all along, the United States is still not in a recession and has not been since 9-11. When you read this article admitting this, notice how disappointed the writer is that we are not in a recession!

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Slight Economic Growth Says U.S. NOT in Recession

It may feel like the U.S. economy is in a recession, but according to new government figures it just isn't so.

The U.S. Commerce Department is reporting that the economy limped through the first quarter of this year at a 0.6 percent growth rate -- the same rate recorded for the fourth quarter of 2007.

That growth rate is small, but it beat expectations and proves that the economy is not in a recession. The generally accepted definition of a recession is six months of stagnant or negative growth.

Still, 68 percent of America's adults believe the United States is heading toward a recession, and 53 percent are cutting their spending and paying down debt as a result, according to a survey released Wednesday by American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Americans' most pressing financial concerns, according to the poll, are escalating energy costs, retirement and education (either a child's education or student loans).

Earlier this year, some economists thought the economy would lurch into reverse during the opening quarter. Now, they say they believe that likely will happen during the April-to-June period.

The 'Recession' Is a Media Myth

Monday, March 31, 2008

By John R. Lott, Jr.

Reposted from Fox News.

During the 2000 election, with Bill Clinton as president, the economy was viewed through rose-colored glasses. According to polls, voters didn’t realize that the country was in a recession. Although the economy started shrinking in July 2000, most Americans through the entire year thought that the economy was fine.

But over the last half-year, the media and politicians have said we were in a recession even while the economy was still growing.

Gas prices are going up. The economy is slowing. Talk of recession is seemingly everywhere. While the majority of people rate their personal finances positively, consumer confidence in the economy has plunged to a 16-year low, well below what it was during the last year of the Clinton administration when we were in a recession.

A Google search on news stories during the three-month period from July 2000 through September 2000 using the keywords “economy recession US” produces 1,610. By contrast, the same search over just the last month finds 50,763. Or, even more telling, take the three months from July through September last year, when the GDP was growing at a phenomenal 4.9 percent. The same type of Google search shows 7,310 news stories.

Over 4.5 times more negative news stories discussed a recession when the economy under a Republican was soaring than occurred under a Democrat when the economy was shrinking.

A little perspective on the economy would be helpful. The average unemployment rate during President Clinton was 5.2 percent. The average under President George W. Bush is just slightly below 5.2. The current unemployment rate is4.8 percent, almost half a percentage point lower than these averages.

The average inflation rate under Clinton was 2.6 percent, under Bush it is 2.7 percent. Indeed, one has to go back to the Kennedy administration to find a lower average rate. True the inflation rate over the last year has gone up to 4 percent, but that is still lower than the average inflation rate under all the presidents from Nixon through Bush’s father.

Gas prices are indeed up 33 percent over the last year, but to get an average of 4 percent means that lots of other prices must have stayed the same or gone down. On other fronts, seasonally adjusted civilian employment is 650,000 people greater than it was a year ago. Personal income grew at a strong half of one percent in just February.

Despite all that, this last week, Barack Obama proclaimed “As most experts know, our economy is in a recession.” Hillary Clinton made similar staements last fall. Yet, as any economist knows, a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth, and we haven’t even had one single quarter of negative growth reported. The economy slowed down significantly during the end of last year, but that was after a sizzling annual GDP growth rate of 4.9 percent in the third quarter.

Housing has obviously been a big drag on the economy, but many other sectors of the economy, such as exports, have been doing well, some extremely well. For example, aerospace exports increased by over 13 percent last year.

The media’s focus on the negative side of everything surely helps explain people’s pessimism. In a recent interview Fox’s Neil Cavuto claimed this bias “is all part of the media’s plan to get a Democrat in the White House.”

Indeed, research has indicated that media bias is real. Kevin Hassett and I looked at 12,620 newspaper and wire service headlines from 1985 through 2004 for stories on the release of official government releasing numbers on the unemployment rate, number of people employed, gross domestic product (GDP), retail sales, and durable goods.

Even after accounting for how well the economy was doing (e.g., what the unemployment rate was and whether it was going up or down), there was still a big difference in how positive or negative the headlines were. Democratic presidents got about 15 percent more positive headlines than Republicans for the same economic news.

Yet, the hysteria created by this coverage can have another cost. It creates pressure for government to “do something,” even if that rush to do something actually ends up hurting the economy. For example, Obama's promises last week “to amend our bankruptcy laws so families aren't forced to stick to the terms of a home loan” will only further drive down the value of mortgage-backed securities, making any unstable financial institutions that hold them even more likely to fail. In the long term, who is going to want to loan money when the contract can be rewritten at a later date?

The news media have generated a lot of fear. Ben Stein has a point when he says “The actual economic conditions are not that bad. I think if we have a recession, if we have a serious recession, a great deal will lie at the media’s feet.” Hopefully a little perspective will enter the picture before even more harm is done.

John Lott is the author of Freedomnomics and a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland.

Older Americans Live Longer and Better that Ever Before (Despite Being Fat!)

Older Americans wealthier, living longer
Thu Mar 27, 2008 7:22pm EDT

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Older Americans have more money and are expected to live far longer than prior generations, U.S. government researchers said on Thursday.

They said the average net worth of older Americans -- those 65 or older -- has increased almost 80 percent over the past 20 years.

And those who reach the age of 65 are now expected to live an average of 19 more years, or seven years longer than people who had reached age 65 in the year 1900.

The findings are part a report released on Thursday called Older Americans 2008: Key Indicators of Well-Being, which features data from 15 federal agencies on trends in population, economics and health issues.

"It gives you a status report of the older population," said Richard Suzman of the National Institute on Aging, a part of the National Institutes of Health.

"We've seen significant improvements in poverty. The percent of those with low income has gone down, education has increased, life expectancy has increased," Suzman said.

"But there are some notes of concern. Obesity has gone up quite significantly. And there are some large disparities. The life expectancy gap between whites and blacks has narrowed but is still large. There is a big wealth gap between whites and blacks," he said in a telephone interview.

The report forecasts that by 2030, the number of Americans over the age of 65 will nearly double to 71.5 million, or 20 percent of the U.S. population, up from 12 percent, or 37 million people, in 2006.

It found that older adults in the United States are far better educated than prior generations. In 2007, 76 percent of those over 65 had high school diplomas, and at least 19 percent had a bachelor's degree, up from 24 percent with high school diplomas in 1965 and just 5 percent with bachelor's degrees.

But much of those gains in education were enjoyed by non-Hispanic whites over the age of 65. Eighty-one percent of non-Hispanic whites age 65 and older had finished high school in 2007, compared with 72 percent of Asians, 58 percent of blacks and only 42 percent of older Hispanics.

And while the proportion of people with incomes below the poverty line fell to 9 percent in 2006, down from 15 percent in 1974, median net worth for households headed by white people aged 65 and older in 2005 was six times that of households headed by blacks.

Not surprisingly, older Americans, like many other groups, are getting fatter, the researchers said. In the 2005-2006 study period, 37 percent of women aged 65 to 74 were obese, and 24 percent of women age 75 and over were obese. This is up from the 1988-1994 study period, when 27 percent of women age 65 to 74 and 19 percent of women age 75 and over were obese.

Despite many studies touting the benefits of exercise, the report found no significant change in the percentage of older people engaged in physical activity between 1997 and 2006.

While the report noted that Americans are living longer than ever before, life expectancy in the United States still lags many other industrialized countries, including Canada, France, Sweden and Japan.

For example, women in Japan who reached the age of 65 in 2003 could expect to live 3.2 years longer than women in the United States. Men in Japan who reached age 65 lived 1.2 years longer than men in the United States.

The report is available online at www.AgingStats.gov.

(Editing by Will Dunham and Philip Barbara)

A Tremendously Sad Day for All "80's Nerds" Including Myself

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (AP) -- Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons and helped start the role-playing phenomenon, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva. He was 69.

He had been suffering from health problems for several years, including an abdominal aneurysm, said his wife, Gail Gygax.

Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 using medieval characters and mythical creatures. The game known for its oddly shaped dice became a hit, particularly among teenage boys, and eventually was turned into video games, books and movies.

Gygax always enjoyed hearing from the game's legion of devoted fans, many of whom would stop by the family's home in Lake Geneva, about 55 miles southwest of Milwaukee, his wife said. Despite his declining health, he hosted weekly games of Dungeons & Dragons as recently as January, she said.

"It really meant a lot to him to hear from people from over the years about how he helped them become a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, what he gave them," Gygax said. "He really enjoyed that."

Dungeons & Dragons players create fictional characters and carry out their adventures with the help of complicated rules. The quintessential geek pastime, it spawned a wealth of copycat games and later inspired a whole genre of computer games that's still growing in popularity.

Funeral arrangements are pending. Besides his wife, Gygax is survived by six children.

Great Article about the World's Most Powerful Journalist!

Matt Drudge: world's most powerful journalist
By Toby Harnden in Washington
Last Updated: 5:27pm GMT 29/02/2008Page 1 of 2



Ten years ago, he was a reclusive, pasty-faced 31-year-old who, bashing away on his laptop in his grungy Hollywood apartment, shot to prominence when he threatened to bring down Bill Clinton's presidency by breaking news of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Prince Harry is fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan The Drudge Report breaks the Prince Harry story Matt Drudge unrepentant about Harry report
Now, Matt Drudge owns a luxurious Mediterranean-style stucco house on Rivo Alto Island in Florida's Biscayne Bay, a condominium at the Four Seasons in Miami and is said to drive a black Mustang. He remains an elusive, mysterious figure but the internet pioneer is arguably the single most powerful journalist – though his detractors even deny that is his occupation - in the world.

Matt Drudge is arguably the single most powerful journalist in the world Drudge is still an outsider, contemptuous of the cosy relationships and closed-door deals that keep the ordinary person from being privy to the secrets of the Establishment. He is the reason why people across the globe are now reading about Prince Harry serving in Afghanistan after he shattered a blackout agreed between Fleet Street and Buckingham Palace.

This week, he posted a photograph of Barack Obama dressed in the tribal garb of a Somali elder during a 2006 trip to Africa, claiming it had been emailed by a member of Hillary Clinton's campaign. It appeared to be a brazen attempt to fuel rumours that her rival was a dangerous Muslim.

Within minutes, the photograph was the talk of Washington news rooms and New York television studios. BlackBerry messages flew back and forth between reporters and political operatives. The story spread across the worldwide web as bloggers weighed in on a juicy item that was suddenly topping the news agenda.

Welcome to the world of the Drudge Report. A world in which the successor to Walter Cronkite and Bob Woodward is a loner with no university education or journalistic background. He is now surreptitiously courted by the media and political elites that once derided him but now fear he has the power to change the course of an American election.

The Lewinsky scandal and the 2008 presidential campaign are the bookends to what could be described as the Drudge decade. At the start, he was the antagonist who came from nowhere – Bill Clinton initially fumbled the site's name, calling it the Sludge Report. By the end, he had become Hillary Clinton's weapon of choice against Mr Obama.

Just as he revealed details of Bill Clinton's tawdry affair with Miss Lewinsky while "Newsweek" editors agonised over whether to publish the story, Drudge posted the news of Prince Harry's front-line service against the Taliban on-line without regard to any niceties. Within an hour, Buckingham Palace had lifted the embargo and Prince Harry was the lead item on CNN.

It all seems a long way from Matthew Nathan Drudge's days as a gifted but directionless schoolboy growing up in the Washington DC suburb of Takoma Park, Maryland.

After stints at a 7-Eleven store and at McDonald's, odd jobs as a telemarketer and New York grocery store assistant, he gravitated to Los Angeles in 1989, attracted by the intersection between media and celebrity that was to become the rich seam he mined to achieve his success.

He worked as a runner on the game show "The Price is Right" before landing a job at the gift shop at CBS Studios – a window into Hollywood – and rising to become its manager.

By 1994, his father Bob, a former therapist and social worker, was worried that the self-described "aimless teen" was becoming a directionless adult. He gave him a Packard-Bell computer in the hope that it might spur him on to achieve more.

The following year, Drudge the elder founded refdesk.com, a site that describes itself as indexing "quality, credible and timely resources that are free and family-friendly" and which Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State, uses as his home page.

Drudge the younger chose a different path. He threw his energies into producing an email newsletter filled with snippets of gossip and rambling steam-of-consciousness opinion. By 1996, he was focusing more on politics, charging an annual $10 fee to his subscribers – which grew from 1,000 to 85,000 between 1995 and 1997.

Today, the Drudge Report attracts more than 600 million visits a month. With an old-fashioned typeface, Drudge primarily links to stories, though he still breaks news using his trademark flashing siren over a banner headline.

So much internet traffic can be directed to an item linked to by Drudge that unprepared websites have been known to collapse under the strain.

For politicians, the effect is akin to a needle injecting information into the media bloodstream. A positive story can give a shot of adrenaline to a flagging campaign. More commonly, negative information can be like a dose of poison being administered.

It has been Republicans who have most assiduously courted Drudge, a conservative populist who passionately opposes abortion and despises taxes. Research directors of the Republican National Committee have made pilgrimages to Miami to pay homage to Drudge.

A 2005 dinner at the fashionable Miami steakhouse Forge in which Tim Griffin, the outgoing RNC research director, introduced his successor Matt Rhoades to Drudge is already the stuff of political lore. Rhoades went on to become communications supremo to Mitt Romney, whose opponents in the 2008 presidential race noted frequently that negative stories about them appeared regularly on Drudge.

American reporters from the mainstream outlets that often dismiss Drudge as a salacious rumour-monger often tip him off about their exclusives or even the stories their editors will not run.

Drudge is very much an outsider amongst political journalists

One of the biggest surprises of the 2008 campaign has been the connection between the Drudge Report and the Clinton campaign, who has reportedly used the former Democratic party official Tracy Sefl as an emissary.

But the attempt to woo the man who came close to being her husband's nemesis appears to have backfired. "The Clinton campaign has clearly had an ability to move negative stuff about Edwards and Obama in a way that we did not have," said Joe Trippi, chief strategists to John Edwards, who recently dropped out of the 2008 race.

"They tried to take some of the tactics that had worked against them and use them for their own gain just when people were getting sick of the kind of politics that's about what's the next bucket of blood that's going to be dumped on Drudge."

Drudge revels in his notoriety, the opaqueness of his methods and his ability to cause trouble. The story about the Obama photograph led to widespread condemnation of the Clinton campaign – prompting some to wonder whether it had been deliberately placed to discredit her.

Alongside his Prince Harry story, Drudge had proudly highlighted the verdict from the veteran Left-winger Jon Snow of Channel 4 News: "I never thought I'd find myself saying thank God for Drudge."