The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) employees are both annoyed and amused by the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) Director Richard Lobo’s memo in which he justifies bonuses paid to BBG executives as being in line with awards received by executives employed by other federal agencies. As some employees point out, there is a problem with […]

read more from this topic.....

BBGWatch.com - December 20, 2011 - Victor Ashe, a member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), has called for keeping open the radio broadcasting facility on U.S. territory that is capable of transmitting shortwave radio programs to China. Some Obama Administration officials want to shut down the last remaining U.S.–based international broadcast station located […]

read more from this topic.....

A lot of Republican bloggers in the US are rolling their eyes up in mockery at the report that President Obama plans to send in US troops to fight the so called “Lord’s Resistance army” in Uganda.
A typical response is this, from the National Review Blog The Corner:
This is even crazier than getting involved in […]

read more from this topic.....

A high stakes game is playing out mostly behind the scenes in Washington D.C.
The outcome of which will have lasting implications for how many businesses in America can operate.
One of the more controversial portions of the financial reform bill, passed in 2009, established a powerful new agency called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
From […]

read more from this topic.....

The media freedom website BBG Watch reported that the Senate Committee on Appropriations has rejected the Broadcasting Board of Governors’ (BBG) proposal to end Voice of America (VOA) radio and TV broadcasts to China and criticized the BBG for the lack of transparency. The committee recommended $740,039,000 for U.S. international broadcasting operations, for the operating […]

read more from this topic.....

This year, for the first time, our accountant told us we don’t have to pay any US taxes.
So what do I hear in the news? Lots of right wing criticism of those stupid people who don’t pay taxes while the rest of “us” work hard and have to pay.
Time out, fellahs.
For years, my husband and […]

read more from this topic.....

FreeMediaOnline.org Truckee, CA, USA, July 28, 2011 –Press freedom advocates and Ethiopian Americans are declaring a partial victory in their fight with the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a U.S. government agency, over the censorship of the Voice of America radio programs to Ethiopia. They credit massive protests and a demonstration held Monday in […]

read more from this topic.....

FreeMediaOnline.org San Francisco, CA, USA, July 24, 2011 — Leaders of the Ethiopian American community joined by free media advocates are planning a protest rally on Monday, July 25, in front of the Voice of America (VOA) building in Washington, DC amid charges of censorship of VOA news programs to Ethiopia by the Broadcasting […]

read more from this topic.....

I am bemused when the sins that we recognized in the past are now being redefined by the modern world.
Greed, of course, is behind our “addiction” to oil, the war in the Middle East (no blood for oil”)  and the manipulation  of the stock market.
Lust however is still being touted by the NYTimes as good […]

read more from this topic.....

While the economy collapses, the Middle East is on fire, and our beloved President seems to be as unable to communicate with the American people as the previous president, the news stories are full of a tweeting congressman.
Jokes are easy to make about the problem, especially since the congressman’s name is easily mispronounced to resemble […]

read more from this topic.....

Should we ask students to “give back” to society?
Actually, many do: all sorts of volunteers out there, such as the churches and religious groups helping to clean up after the recent tornadoes and floods. A lot of those doing so are following the family tradition. My grandkids routinely work at soup kitchens and in community […]

read more from this topic.....

US President has created a controversy involving Cyber Laws by using “Autopen” to sign a Bill. Mr Obama was abroad at the time the Bill had to be signed and he has authorized application of his signature with the use of the “Autopen” equipment.
The move has been approved by the legal department stating that the […]

read more from this topic.....

Well, this year’s Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally got some publicity today when Sarah Palin and family accompanied them as private citizens. As the mother of an Iraqi veteran, she is entitled to this.
Most of the half million attending the rally seemed pleased.
So of course most of the press coverage was about Andrea Mitchell finding the […]

read more from this topic.....

Last week, my son in law went for the fifth time to Manila to try to collect rent owed and damages for a house we rented out. (We bought it when he was attending university there, and now rent it out).
In the USA, usually after a few months of non payment, you can get them […]

read more from this topic.....

Back in the “good old days”, a lot of states had “literacy tests” for voters. If you didn’t pass them, you couldn’t vote.
Of course, it was a scam: the real reason for the testing was to eliminate black voters, and the fight to remove the laws was part of the civil rights movement to allow […]

read more from this topic.....

If you want to go to Medical schools in the US, you have to take a test called an MCAT. It is to try to figure out if you are smart enough to be a doc or something like that. I’m not sure, since I predate that test.
At least in the past doctors were trained […]

read more from this topic.....

Phllip Jenkins has an interesting article on how fertility is falling in the Muslim world.
In just the last thirty years or so, those very Middle Eastern countries that used to teem with children and adolescents have gone through a startling demographic transformation. Since the mid-1970s, Algeria’s fertility rate has collapsed from over 7 to 1.75, […]

read more from this topic.....

FreeMediaOnline.org Truckee, CA, USA, April 1, 2011– The Washington Times has published an op-ed by Free Media Online president Ted Lipien urging Congress to stop the Broadcasting Board of Governors from silencing the Voice of America radio to China.
A Chinese free labor union leader like Poland’s Lech Walesa could be declared expendable by the […]

read more from this topic.....

TedLipien.com, Truckee, CA, March 1, 2011 — In this series of analyses for Free Media Online (FreeMediaOnline.org) — U.S. International Broadcasting in Crisis– Ted Lipien, former Voice of America acting associate director, examines recent Broadcasting Board of Governors’ decisions, with a focus on the latest controversial plan to completely eliminate Voice of America on-the-air […]

read more from this topic.....

The Washington post discovers that patients can find a lot of medical nonsense on line.
Well, duh. Every conspiracy theory known to man is on line. And the more outrageous, the more “hits” and readers you get.
One “advice” column on how to make money blogging suggested you stick to one type of blogging and […]

read more from this topic.....

I can already smell the bong resin emanating from the radical marijuana legalization crowd that supports Ron Paul to the point of being cult-like, breathing down fire upon my comments section. You would have thought I punched the pope at Christmas mass after my last article on Ron Paul. I feel very strongly that Ron […]

read more from this topic.....

In a previous post, I joked that if the Governor of Wisconsin wanted to fire all his teachers, he could hire a lot of qualified Filipino teachers to replace them.
Yet this is not quite a joke: The cut backs in US medical training have resulted in the active importation of foreign medical graduates to fill […]

read more from this topic.....

FreeMediaOnline.orgTruckee, CA, USA, February 21, 2011 — As reported by PiratesWeek and Kim Andrew Elliott, a Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) employee who publishes his own private international broadcasting website, the BBG-managed Voice of America (VOA) websites were hacked on February 21, 2011, apparently by the “Iranian Cyber Army.” In 2009, VOA websites were […]

read more from this topic.....

I wonder how much of the “red state/blue state” divide is based not on “politics” per se, but on misunderstanding of culture, so that the two groups use words to mean different things.
I’ll start with a quote from President Obama at the recent prayer breakfast, taken from an article by Ruth Marcus in the Washington […]

read more from this topic.....

Protesters fed up with political repression, corruption and poverty have toppled the government of Tunisia. They threaten to do the same in other countries throughout the Middle East as pundits hail the “Twitter and Facebook revolution”. But repressive governments have as much compunction about shutting down communication services as they do about torturing dissidents. Egypt […]

read more from this topic.....

Despite the fact that the shooting in Arizona was caused by a mentally ill person, the spin was followed by a week of Sarah Palin bashing.
With the State of the Union address, it’s calmed down a bit, but nevertheless Time Magazine decided it was important news to complain that Sarah Palin put the flag on […]

read more from this topic.....

In my last essay, I argued that a lot of false assumptions have been made about the political shooting in Tucson, yet several attributing factors have been ignored, including the inability of the public and of public officials to recognize severe mental illness. 
An entertainment culture that glorifies and justifies deviant behavior and violent acts is […]

read more from this topic.....

The “meme” in much of the press is blaming right wing political talk for the tragedy in Tucson. Well, this is not new: I remember a similar paranoia against the right after JFK was killed in Dallas, never mind that his killer was a communist who had earlier tried to kill General Walker, a real […]

read more from this topic.....

Their group was “liberal in wanting to change the way the world was run, we both wanted to. He took it to an extreme I never would’ve.” She said he was a “political radical” long before the teaparty, Glenn Beck, or Sarah Palin came on the scene.
Caitie also said he was a pot head and was into the music of Hendrix, The Doors, and Anti-Flag. “We listened to political punk in high school & agreed with their leftist opinions for the most part. Anti-Flag was our band.”

read more from this topic.....

Over here in the Philippines, we have a lot of political murders, and entering politics can be risky. The dirty little secret is that most of these are against low level politicians, and they are not really about disagreeing with a person’s politics, but about who will control all that lovely money that is funneled […]

read more from this topic.....