I am sitting here working while a team of four women clean my home for me. And they’re doing a better job than I would do, too.

Oh, I straightened up and got things out of their way and made the place presentable—but they’re the ones doing the vacuuming and floor-washing and cleaning of windows.

They even cleaned my antique Chinese six-panel wooden screen, which stopped my heart when I saw that the window-washer had sprayed cleaning fluids on it. It seems to have taken no damage, and I will inform them that they must dust it only in the future.

Other than that, except for two missing cats (presumed cowering under something), this is great.

This is the same company I used to clean my old apartment. They were done in an hour. It would have taken me most of the day. And I got my security deposit back. Totally paid for the cleaning crew to come in and save me the effort.

They did the toilets. They did the windows. They even got the cobweb in the corner of the great room that’s, like, twenty-five feet high and impossible to reach without a really, really long extension. They had one. The cobweb is gone.

Nope. I’m never cleaning my house again.

The Free Gaza morons, not having had their fill of being stuck in Gaza (cf: Lauren Booth, and try hard not to laugh when you think of her being turned back at every Gaza border crossing, shrieking, “But I’m Lauren Booth! Tony Blair’s sister-in-law! TONY BLAIR!”), are going to try again. And this time, they’re trying to prevent the utter disinterest that followed their arrival when they didn’t show up with tons of food and goods, like the Palestinians expected. (Must have thought the boat was like a smuggling tunnel.)

International protesters say they are making a repeat voyage to Gaza to bring aid to Palestinians in defiance of Israel’s blockade.

Free Gaza organizer Greta Berlin said 29 protesters will sail from Cyprus on October 28 for the estimated 24-hour trip to the Strip.

Berlin said Wednesday the group has converted a fishing boat to safely ferry the protesters and a symbolic shipment of medical aid to Gaza.

Got that? “Symbolic.” Just in case you didn’t get it, the AP said it twice. They don’t want to raise any hopes.

Berlin said the protestors would be sailing in a fishing boat equipped with a “symbolic package” containing medical equipment and other aid for Palestinians living under siege, similarly to the previous voyages.

Symbolic. The whole trip is symbolic, you see. Fighting against the evil Israelis, and the siege that is destroying Gaza. Why, they’re starving, in the midst of shopping in their well-stocked stores, smuggling tons of goods, including cattle, through the tunnels from Egypt, and living just fine and dandy without any help from Israel. Oh. Wait. Except for the electricity they get from Israel, the fuel they get from Israel, the food they get from Israel, and the other goods they get from Israel.

Yeah, go protest that siege. But don’t protest, like, the fact that Hamas fired all the doctors who went on strike last month, and the teachers before that, and anyone who goes against the Hamas playbook. No. Protest Israel. We’ll leave the “why” to your imagination.

Oh, no we won’t. It’s the Jew factor. I don’t recall seeing any of these ships travel to North Korea in the bad old days when Koreans were eating grass to survive. There are no ships to Darfur. Only the Palestinians, it seems, are worthy of the attention of these fools.

Hot on the heels of Soccer Dad’s post on the media’s anti-John McCain bias I found this little gem. Congress is about to hold hearings on the financial crisis. They want a scapegoat. They will not, of course, hold a mirror up to themselves declaring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to be sound, even though they’re on video declaring it. They’re going to blame—well, guess.

Democrats see the prime culprits as greedy Wall Street executives and lax government regulations under a Republican administration, a view that the administration and Republicans in Congress dispute strongly.

Once praised as the “maestro” of the U.S. financial system during the 1990s economic boom, Greenspan, who was succeeded in 2006 by Ben Bernanke, was likely to find himself defending actions he took that are being blamed for contributing to the current crisis.

Critics charge that he left interest rates too low in the early part of this decade, spurring an unsustainable housing boom, while also refusing to exercise the Fed’s powers to impose greater regulations on the issuance of new types of mortgages, including subprime loans. It was the collapse of these mortgages and rising defaults a year ago that triggered the current crisis.

Greenspan, true to his Republican free-market principles, successfully opposed attempts to impose tighter controls on complex financial contracts known as derivatives, which are largely unregulated and which some see as a contributing factor in the current problems.

Wow. Just—wow. Could the media be any more obvious as the Democratic Party’s water carriers?

(Note regarding the title of this post: Pravda was the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party under the Soviet Union.)

Ad Week recently had a featured article on one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history.

But coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable—and has become more so over time. In the six weeks following the conventions through the final debate, unfavorable stories about McCain outweighed favorable ones by a factor of more than three to one—the most unfavorable of all four candidates—according to the study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

For Obama during this period, just over a third of the stories were clearly positive in tone (36%), while a similar number (35%) were neutral or mixed. A smaller number (29%) were negative.

For McCain, by comparison, nearly six in ten of the stories studied were decidedly negative in nature (57%), while fewer than two in ten (14%) were positive.

Whoops, that wasn’t Ad Week, it was the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism. (How you have the words “excellence” and “journalism” in the same title is beyond me.)

That’s a newsflash for you, the media is biased.

LGF:

It’s just something that sort of happens, I guess, and the media reports on it like they report everything else, without any sense of responsibility or embarrassment. Then they go right back to writing hit pieces.

(via memeorandum)

Given that the newspapers surveyed will undoubtedly all endorse (or have already endorsed) Sen. Obama, this is is one more piece of evidence that the “wall” between the editorial and reporting staffs of newspapers is largely a myth. The reporters look for the stories that will support the editorial position of the paper.

While there’s no doubt that the markets hurt Sen. McCain, is there anything in Sen. Obama’s performance to show that he could handle the meltdown other than his legendary unflappability?

So it comes down to PR that comes not from the campaigns, but from the supposedly neutral arbiters of our society.

Wow, so the media did a study and showed that it’s biased during the time that Sen. McCain slid in the polls. Who would have thought?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Another Palestinian murdered another Jew in the City of David.

A young Arab man murdered a civilian and injured a police officer in Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood on Thursday morning.

The 60-year-old citizen was critically injured and evacuated to the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in the capital, where he died of his wounds. The police officer, 32, sustained light to moderate wounds and was evacuated to the Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital.

The terrorist sustained moderate to serious wounds in his stomach after being shot by the injured policeman. He was also taken to the Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital.

Should have killed him. He’ll be released in an upcoming prisoner exchange some day. Just watch.

The AP spin:

Police: Palestinian man fatally stabs Israeli
A Palestinian assailant fatally stabbed an 86-year-old man and wounded a police officer in an east Jerusalem neighborhood on Thursday, authorities said, in what they called a “terror incident.”

Yes, it’s “what they called” a terror incident. Because it’s not like this is terrorism:

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the attack erupted when a pair of police officers on patrol stopped to question the man during a patrol in the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo.

The man pulled out a knife and stabbed one of the officers, who managed to shoot the assailant, Rosenfeld said.

Rosenfeld said the wounded attacker then grabbed a passer-by and stabbed him before being overpowered.

I’m astonished that the AP named the Israeli spokesman. Normally they just use the words “Israel said,” as if the state were some walking, talking creature. But of course, you can’t have an AP article without the standard pro-Palestinian bias:

Gilo is among a group of Jewish neighborhoods established in east Jerusalem after Israel captured the area in the 1967 Middle East War. The Palestinians claim east Jerusalem as the capital of a future independent state.

I repeat: City of David.

Yes, you people are getting more and more clever. Yes, I’ve almost fallen for your crap more than once.

And yet, you have not gotten anywhere by spamming my comments with links to your blog surrounding your insipid comment that sounds almost real enough to be from a person, not from a bottom-feeder.

Take a hike. We don’t approve your kind around here.

And we’re not nearly as stupid as you seem to think we are.