If health insurance premiums were as cheap as postage

I was watching The Colbert Report at lunch this afternoon and about 1 minute in to the clip of “The Word” something got on my nerves.  Watch for yourselves . . .

Did President Obama just criticize the US Postal Service?  Is the cost of postage stamps really an example of horrible government service at a really terrible price that is gouging the American public? I didn’t think it was, so I looked up some information and found out that not only does the cost of postage stick pretty darn closely to the Consumer Price Index, but also any increase in cost in postage rates pales in comparison to the increasing cost of health care premiums. See the graph and my rant after the jump . . . Read the rest of this entry »

Good Ads

So I decided to put advertisements on my blog, even though I haven’t really been keen on the idea. The reason I did it was to help raise money for the South Asia Tsunami relief efforts. I will be giving my advertisement revenue to Northwest Medical Teams as part of the BlogAid project. So if you see a good product advertised on the right, simply click through and a couple more cents will go to the Northwest Medical Teams.

Read the rest of this entry »

Williamette Week: A day early and a dollar short

I haven’t seen it mentioned around the ORBlog scene yet, but I thought it was interesting to see Willamette Week’s cover story this morning, “Meet the OUTLAWS”. It is a really good series of stories talking about the same-sex marriage controversy, but unfortunately, the paper likely went to press just before the story broke. So you have a well written feature on same-sex marriage, with no mention of today’s big news. Whoops!

War Porn

When the war started my girlfriend and I decided that we wouldn’t watch any coverage of the war and would simply pick up what news we happened upon. During the conversation I called the coverage “War Porn”. I have mentioned it to a few friends and they all seem to think it is pretty funny and a good description of the coverage. Luckily I have had little trouble avoiding the coverage since I don’t get any 24 hour cable news stations and I don’t watch much in the way of news.

Much better than CNN

Earlier I mentioned “Where is Raed?”, IndyMedia and Google News as alternative sources for war news. Here are two more:

The Agonist – minute to minute coverage of media reporting. Only the most important and interesting stuff.

BBC Reporter’s Log – the war will be bloggerized.

These are the first indications that the invasion of Iraq will be the first internet war. Where as the Spanish-American War was the height of newspaper coverage, WWII was the height of radio coverage, Vietnam was the height of TV coverage, and the Gulf War was the height of Cable TV coverage.