#7 of 10 ways to become a better blogger
by Deb Shinder
Takeaway:
If nobody bothers to read your blog posts, you might as well just scribble your thoughts on a cocktail napkin. But if you truly want to share your ideas and opinions, check out these pointers for crafting an engaging blog and building a loyal following.
#7: Establish a blogging schedule
Blog readers are a fickle bunch. Once you’ve drawn an audience, they expect to find new content when they visit your blog. That doesn’t mean you have to post every day, but you should establish a minimum blogging schedule and stick to it. Let readers know, preferably in a static text box at the top of your blog page, that you will update the blog daily, weekly, on Mondays and Fridays, or whatever. Then do it–even if some of your posts aren’t particular profound or long. Readers will abandon your blog if they think you’ve abandoned them.
If you need to deviate from your schedule (for example, you’re going on vacation for two weeks or you’ll be in the hospital or you have a family or job emergency), let readers know that you won’t be posting at the regular time and give them an idea of when you’ll be back.
Complete article at:
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10881_11-6120257.html?tag=nl.e138
This article is also available as a PDF download.
http://downloads.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=260220 (registration required)
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Limbaugh on Michael J. Fox ad for MO Dem: “Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting”
Rush Limbaugh accused actor Michael J. Fox, who has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, of “exaggerating the effects of the disease” in a recent campaign advertisement for Missouri Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill. Limbaugh added that “this is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting, one of the two.”
Read more
http://mediamatters.org/items/dailyemail/200610240001?src=other
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The top US general defended the leadership of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying it is inspired by God.
At:
http://rawstory.com/comments/21301.html
From: Poacnewsletter
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Next Step for Homeland Security Workers: Keep Bush from Gutting Workplace Rights
by Tula Connell, Oct 19, 2006
In September, the Bush administration announced it would not appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court a ruling that barred its attempt to gut the workplace rights of 160,000 federal workers in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This week, AFGE asked the judge who ruled on that decision to retain jurisdiction and maintain her injunction barring the Bush administration from imposing its new personnel rules. AFGE represents federal workers, including the largest constituency of Homeland Security workers in the coalition of unions opposing the Bush administration rules.
In a meeting with Judge Rosemary Collyer and representatives from Homeland Security and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), AFGE and the other unions involved asked the judge to maintain her prior injunction and send the case to Homeland Security and the OPM in accordance with the U.S. Court of Appeals decision that also found the labor relations parts illegal. Says AFGE General Counsel Mark Roth:
AFGE and its partners in the coalition…believe it is in the best interest for all involved if the injunction stayed intact while DHS and OPM reconsider their future recourse of action. The judge agreed with the unions, remanded the case, retained jurisdiction, and ordered DHS and OPM to provide a status report in nine months.
We hope that by dropping its appeal, DHS is signaling that it is open to taking union issues into concern. Previous negotiations did not go as we had hoped, but we are looking at this as a fresh start.
The Homeland Security rules are just part of a Bush administration move to revamp rules for the entire federal workforce. AFGE and other federal worker unions say the Bush plans would devastate the federal workforce by gutting pay, eliminating bargaining rights, rendering whistle-blower protections moot and wasting millions of taxpayer dollars.
The Bush administration also had moved to impose similar rules, known as the National Security Personnel System (NSPS), on more than 700,000 Defense Department workers. Those rules were blocked by a federal judge earlier this year after a coalition of federal worker unions—United DoD Workers Coalition—filed a lawsuit. The Defense Department has appealed that ruling.
Taking away the rights of workers at Homeland Security and the Defense Department is just part of the Bush administration’s war on workers.
Read more here at the AFL-CIO BushWatch.
http://www.aflcio.org/issues/bushwatch/
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Destroying Social Security to Destroy the Two Party System
October 22, 2006
The Truth about the Trust Fund– Destroying Social Security to Destroy the Two Party System
by Thom Hartmann
At:
Excerpted from Thom Hartmanns newest book, Screwed; The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class — And What We Can Do About It
What do you do when you want to screw only the working people of your nation with the largest tax increase in history and hand those trillions of dollars to your wealthy campaign contributors yet not have anybody realize you’ve done it? If you’re Ronald Reagan, you call in Alan Greenspan.
Taxing Retirement
Through the Golden Age of the middle class– from 1940 to 1980– the top income tax rate for the superrich had been between 70 and 90 percent. Ronald Reagan wanted to cut that rate dramatically, to help out his political patrons. He did this with a massive tax cut in the summer of 1981.
The only problem was that when Reagan took his meat ax to our tax code, he produced mind-boggling budget deficits. Voodoo economics didn’t work out as planned, and even after borrowing so much that this year we’ll pay more than $100 billion just in interest on the money Reagan borrowed to make the economy look good in the 1980s, Reagan couldn’t come up with the revenues he needed to run the government.
Coincidentally, the actuaries at the Social Security Administration were beginning to worry about the Baby Boomer generation, who would begin retiring in big numbers in fifty years or so. They were a “rabbit going through a python” bulge that would require a few trillion more dollars than Social Security could easily collect during the same twenty-year period of their retirement. We needed, the actuaries said, to tax more heavily those very persons who would eventually retire; so instead of using current workers’ money to pay for the Boomer’s Social Security payments in 2020, the Boomers themselves would prepay for their own retirement.
Reagan got Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Alan Greenspan together to form a commission on Social Security reform, along with a few other politicians and economists, and they recommend a near doubling of the Social Security tax on the then-working Boomers. That tax created– for the first time in history– a giant savings account that Social Security could use to pay for the Boomers’ retirement.
This was a huge change.
…
Complete article at:
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New Reports on the Costs of Climate Change Available on the Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE) Web Site
“Climate Change – The Costs of Inaction,” by Frank Ackerman and Liz Stanton, report released with Friends of the Earth UK, October 13, 2006.
This new report demonstrates that the cost of allowing global temperatures to increase by two degrees or more above pre-industrial levels will run into trillions of dollars, while the environmental and social costs will be incalculable. It was produced by GDAE researchers Frank Ackerman and Liz Stanton for The Big Ask, Friends of the Earth’s climate campaign in the UK. The report, which brings together the latest scientific and economic thinking on climate change, highlights the enormous costs that would result if Governments fail to act to keep temperature increases below two degrees. This report received considerable press coverage by major papers in the UK, and around the world including the Mirror, Guardian, Independent, ABC News, Reuters, AOL, Yahoo, PlanetArk, New Zealand Herald, and others.
Download the “Costs of Inaction” report and press coverage online at:
http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/policy_research/CostsofInaction.html
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GOVERNMENT DEATH SQUADS RAVAGING BAGHDAD
By Dahr Jamail, Ali Al-Fadhily, IPS News
Two more morgues are planned for construction in Baghdad as death squad killings have soared — 1,536 were killed in Iraq’s capitol in September.
Complete article at:
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/43335/
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What’s really going on in Iraq
By Joan Vennochi, Globe Columnist
October 22, 2006
SOMETIMES truth is also propaganda. When that happens, should we be watching it on CNN?
That’s the issue surrounding a video — broadcast on CNN — which shows insurgent snipers in Iraq targeting US military personnel. The tape, which the network obtained through contact with an insurgent leader, was aired on “Anderson Cooper 360.” Throughout the broadcast, the label “insurgent video” is clear, so viewers know the source of the images.
Disturbing they are. The tape shows 10 separate sniper attacks. The randomness of assault is especially horrifying. The dead are not necessarily engaged in “battle.” The first victim is casually moving around in a public area with Iraqis. The network went to black at the moment of actual impact.
This video, shot by the enemy, does advance the enemy agenda. So, it is indeed propaganda, as some viewers complained. And to the extent the video and any fallout from the controversy draws viewers to Cooper’s show, it is propaganda for CNN, too.
But CNN was right to broadcast this material, even if insurgents supplied it.
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a strong critic of President Bush’s Iraq war policy, believes Americans should see more truth, not less: “Snipers are a reality. People being blown up is a reality.” Yet, in this war, Kerry argues, “People see almost nothing at all. We see only the aftermath of explosions and bombs. As painful as the images of war are, it’s important to understand what soldiers go through.”
Does footage such as the CNN sniper video help the enemy? “I don’t think you help the enemy to have the truth known,” says Kerry. “This is a dirty war. . . and it’s escalating day by day by day.”
Kerry blames the Bush administration for “a calculated effort to hide the reality of war.” He also notes that media cutbacks in Iraq coverage also mean Americans receive fewer close-ups of war’s brutality.
The debate over how much Americans should see firsthand of US war casualties has been heated ever since the invasion of Iraq. The media are not allowed to photograph coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base, a source of much controversy. The Bush administration calls this a matter of respect, but it is also a way to sanitize a war that has taken the lives of nearly 2,800 Americans and, by one study, more than half a million Iraqis.
President Bush does not attend military funerals because, according to aides, a presidential entourage would cause disruption. But in a recent Washington Post article, the White House took pains to detail Bush’s efforts to offer comfort to those who have lost relatives in Iraq. He writes letters to families of those killed, visits soldiers at military hospitals, and meets with relatives of the dead.
…
Complete article at:
Joan Vennochi’s e-mail address is vennochi@globe.com
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Borowitz Report – Democratic Tradition Shocker
Obama Imperils Democrats’ Losing Tradition, Party Members Fear
Dean Reassures Dems: ‘We Can Still Screw This Up’
The sudden ascendancy of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has many Democratic Party regulars afraid that a White House win by the charismatic politician would destroy a losing tradition that has taken years to build, Democratic leaders confirmed today.
Across the country, polls showing Sen. Obama to have rising appeal across a broad spectrum of likely voters have rattled the nerves of longtime Democrats, who take pride in their party’s record of futility in presidential elections.
“This is the party of Dukakis and Mondale, Kerry and McGovern,” said longtime Democrat Carol Foyler, who still sports a “Kucinich in ’04″ bumper sticker on the back of her Saturn. “We have worked long and hard to build that losing record and we are not prepared to pour it down the drain.”
Ms. Foyler said that if Sen. Obama were to win the White House in 2008, “such longtime Democratic traditions as concession speeches, finger-pointing, and clinical depression would be a thing of the past.”
Perhaps in response to the concerns of party loyalists like Ms. Foyler, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean gave a speech today to reassure Democrats that even if Sen. Obama is nominated, “We as Democrats can still find a way to screw this up.”
“If it looks like we’re going to win, I make you this promise,” Mr. Dean said. “I will open my piehole and shoot our chances to hell.”
Elsewhere, the Malawian man who let Madonna adopt his son said that he only did it in the hopes that rearing him would keep her too busy to pursue her acting career.
http://www.borowitzreport.com/
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three to see
This Modern World: The independent thinker
http://www.workingforchange.com/webgraphics/WFC/TMW10-25-06.jpg
Mikhaela Blake Reid: log-cabin republican
http://www.mikhaela.net/pictures/toons/logcabin.jpg
Bad Reporter(Don Asmussen): electronic voting machines
http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/pictures/2006/10/20/102006-950×315-badreporter.gif
