Top Entrecard Droppers for January

Now that I am back to being an active, participating member of Entrecard, I thought I would take the time to thank the top visitors to my blog through Entrecard.  Thanks for dropping by.

1. Confessions of a Psychotic Housewife
2. Photography by KML
3. Thrifty Momma Ramblings
4. First Door on the Left
5. Dwayne360
6. Rambling Thoughts in SMK Serian 
7. Bouncing on Words
8. my kids are my world 
9. Picture to People 
10. Frugal Healthy Choices

There's Something About Mitt

Image via Wikipedia

Today, voters in Florida have headed to the polls to vote in the Republican Presidential primary.  Most are expecting Mitt Romney to come out the winner tonight.  Newt Gingrich is expected to finish second, and most likely, Rick Santorum in third and Rob Paul bringing up the proverbial rear.

If I had to vote today, I would most likely vote for Rick Santorum.  In my mind, he is the most solid conservative still in the race.  My second choice would be Gingrich.  Today, I would probably give Romney a slight advantage over Paul, primarily because of Paul's foreign policy beliefs.

I will be blunt.  There has always been something about Mitt Romney that I just do not like.  It has been a little difficult for me to put my finger on it, but the last couple months have really crystallized it for me.  I don't want to come right out and say he seems phony to me, but there is something disingenuous about him in my mind.

When the entire process to determine the GOP nominee for President, I wrote a post about the negative ads that were being run in Iowa.  In Iowa, Gingrich ran positive, patriotic ads.  On the other hand, Romney, and to a degree, Paul ran primarily negative ads, mostly attacking Gingrich.

Image via Wikipedia

Going into the Iowa caucus, Gingrich was polling ahead of Romney.  The barrage of negative ads from Romney, Paul, and their Super PACS had the desire impact on the results, with Gingrich dropping all the way into 4th place.  Santorum ended up slightly ahead of Romney when the final votes were tabulated.

Gingrich had been calling on everybody to run a positive campaign, but after Iowa, he decided to fight fire with fire.  He has started to run his own share of negative ads against Romney.  The two of them have gotten extremely personal.

In the past few debates, there have been a few incidents where Romney has appeared, well, less than fully honest.  In one debate, when answering a question about inaccurate attack ads, he claimed not to have seen any of the ads, but then went through and detailed one of them.  In one of the Florida debates, he claimed not to have knowledge of a particular ad, but then Wolf Blitzer pointed out the ad ends with Romney citing his approval of the message.

Today, while driving home from work, I heard a report stating that the Florida primary race has been the most negative in history.  Not one of the most negative, but the absolute most negative ad in history.  Out of all of the ads that have been run, 92% have been negative.  Some reports have stated that the Romney campaign and Super PACS have out spent the Gingrich camp 4 to 1.

The report says that 99% of the ads run by the Romney campaign were negative.  100% of the ads from his SuperPAC were negative.  Not that the Gingrich campaign was much better, as 95% of the Gingrich campaign ads were negative.  However, the Gingrich SuperPAC had only 53% of their ads considered negative.  There were nearly three times as many negative ads run against Gingrich as compared to Romney.

The negative ads are bad enough, but they obviously work.  Here, though, is another example of what I would consider less than forthcoming.  Romney is claiming that the only reason he is running negative ads against Gingrich is in retaliation to Gingrich running them against him in South Carolina.  The truth is that the Romney campaign started the negative ads in Iowa.  Every time they start to fall behind in the polls, their knives come out.

If Romney does end up being the eventual nominee, I will go into the voting booth on November 6th, hold my nose, and vote for him.  As much as I dislike him, I still would prefer him to the current President.  Of course, after George Soros has come out with statements that it doesn't matter if the President is Romney or Obama because there is not much difference between them, I may have to think twice about it.

Related articles

• Poor one-quarter billionaire Mitt Romney plays the victim card (americablog.com)
• Florida Voters Notice Negative Ads, Wonder What They're Worth (usnews.com)
• Mitt Romney lies about South Carolina defeat: 'We were vastly outspent' (dailykos.com)
• Another Round Of Hand-Wringing Over "Negative Campaigns" (outsidethebeltway.com)
• George Soros: There's not much difference between Obama and Romney (hotair.com)

Music Monday-Al Green "Let's Stay Together"

Ever since Barack Obama sang the first few lines of the Al Green classic Let's Stay Together at a fundraiser, we have been barraged by the news media in playing the clip repeatedly and telling us how cool Obama is.  Even this morning, some 10 days or so after the initial singing by Obama, the news media has been covering it by talking about how sales of the original have been boosted by the performance.  Enough already!

  Perhaps, rather than run for a second term, Obama could try out for American Idol.  About the only good thing in my mind about the whole affair is that it reminds me of how great the original truly is.

Come join Music Monday and share your songs with us. Rules are simple. Leave ONLY the ACTUAL LINK POST here and grab the code below and place it at your blog entry. You can grab this code at LadyJava's Lounge Please note these links are STRICTLY for Music Monday participants only. All others will be deleted without prejudice.   PS: Because of spamming purposes, the linky will be closed on Thursday of each week at midnight, Malaysian Time. Thank you!

Adgitize, Entrecard, and Blogging Traffic

Image by Moshimishie ♥ - Hiatus via Flickr

Like a lot of bloggers who had been using the Adgitize advertising network, I was very upset when Ken Brown announced that he was closing the service down.  At that time, I had decided that I would go back to using Entrecard and give them another try.  Things had been going well the past three weeks.  It had appeared that Entrecard had improved a bit since I last used them regularly.

That is, until last night.  Last night around midnight, I was visiting several blogs using the Entrecard toolbar with Firefox.  It worked well for about 30 minutes when all of a sudden I started getting an error message saying that my search had failed.  I tried visiting the Entrecard website to go into my dashboard and drop inbox only to see the following error.

Entrecard is having technical issues. Any of the following may apply: 

• We may be suffering extreme load (lots of people) 
• We may be upgrading our server software 
• We may be suffering from a serious bug 

We have on-call people watching the system, outages are unlikely to last more than 10 minutes. We apologise profusely for the inconvenience.

That was 14 hours ago and the system still is down. I have been able to do a few drops when I find a blog with a widget, but sooner or later you end up hitting a dead end when the next ad you come across is one you have already visited. I certainly hope that this is a temporary issue with the network and will be back and running soon.

In the distinct possibility that Entrecard has breathed its last, I started looking for some other sites to help build traffic.  One of the things I did was sign up with Zimbio.  I found another traffic exchange that I am currently trying out, but I am not sure if it is going to be using long term.  The site is called Blog Clicker and it is very similar to Blog Explosion if anybody remembers how that works.

You sign into the system and it opens up a browser page with a Blog Clicker tool bar.  You visit the site and a countdown appears in the bar.  When the countdown reaches zero, you earn a credit for every site you visit which is then exchanged for visits to your site. So far, I have not seen quite as many quality blogs as I have seen on Adgitize and Entrecard, but it is early yet.  If you want to check them out here is a link

Related articles

• Adgitize is DEAD! Google to Ban Entrecard Blogs? (dave-lucas.blogspot.com)
• Ode to Adgitize - Goodbye my friend, goodbye (asktheblogster.blogspot.com)
• Can I Comment On Your Blog? | bethere2day (bethere2day.com)
• 65 ways to drive traffic to your blog (by Satrap) (thetaskmistress.me)

Big Oil, Apple, Democrats, and the Media

Image via CrunchBase

The other day I was driving to work when I heard that Apple had just released their most recent quarterly earnings.  For the most recent quarter, they had earnings of over $13 billion.  I thought to myself, "Wow, that seems like an awful lot."

I do know that Apple is a tremendously successful company providing goods and services that people around the globe desire.  As a capitalist, I do not begrudge them one bit the amount of profit they make in the marketplace.  Still, curiousity got the better of me and I wanted to see just how that $13 billion in profit compares to other companies.

What better company to compare Apple's earnings to than one of the greedy oil companies.  After all, Exxon Mobil and other oil companies have been demonized by Barack Obama, his fellow Democrats, and the media every time they release their quarterly profit numbers.  Obama wants to impose a "windfall" tax on their profits and some Democrats have proposed a "Reasonable Profits Board" to regulate oil company profits.

Image via Wikipedia

The most recent quarterly earnings report from Exxon that I could find was released in October of 2011.  During that quarter, Exxon reported profits of $10.3 billion dollars.  Not shabby, but nearly $3 billion less than Apple just announced.  I wonder if Democrats would consider Apple's $13 billion a reasonable amount of profit?

Perhaps a more telling way to look at it would be to look at the profit margin as opposed to strictly the dollar profit of the company.  Now most politicians and members of the media would not know the difference between profit and profit margin if it bit them on the ass.  In simple terms, profit margin is the amount of profit for every dollar of sales or revenue brought it.

Exxon had revenue of $125 billion in order to achieve their $10 billion in profit.  That means that for every $1 in revenue they earned a mere 8 cents on the dollar, a profit margin of 8%.  Apple's $13 billion in profit came from $46 billion in revenue for a profit margin of 28% for every dollar of revenue.  That is 3.5 times the profit rate that Exxon earned.

The Democrats and the media demonize Exxon for their profits implying that Exxon is ripping off customers to achieve their high profits.  However, if any company could be accused of gauging the customer, logic would seem to dictate that the company earning 28 cents on the dollar is more likely gauging the customer than the one earning 8 cents on the dollar.

Now, I am definitely NOT saying that Apple is ripping off their customers.  They make a fine product and have created a demand for that product.  My point is to highlight the hypocrisy of the left.  Rather than comment on how high Apple's profit is, the media talks about how great Apple is. By the way, Apple is one of those companies sitting on a ton of cash (nearly $100 billion) and outsourcing their production to China but you don't hear any outrage about how they could be using that money to produce goods and jobs here.

Related articles

• Apple surpasses Exxon to become the world's most valuable public company (again) (venturebeat.com)
• Apple Beats Estimates Again: $46.33 Billion In Revenues, $13.06 Billion In Profit (fastcompany.com)
• Can We Afford to Forget the Benefits of Oil and Gas? (thefracdog.com)
• Six House Dems Would Confiscate Oil Company Profits (mb50.wordpress.com)
• If Obama's Serious About Jobs, He Shouldn't Punish the Energy Sector (usnews.com)

What a Pain in the Neck

On Friday, I went to the doctor to get checked out after experiencing some numbness and weakness in my left arm and leg.  At the time, the doctor thought that it may be a bulging disc in both my neck and back so he sent me to get some x-rays done.  Yesterday, his office called me to inform me that I needed to come in for a follow up and that the x-rays showed some inflammation in both the neck and back that was causing my pain.

It got me thinking about a book that I picked up when I attended the Natural Products Expo in Anaheim, CA last year.  One of the vendors at the show had Jack Challem in attendance giving away and signing copies of his book The Inflammation Syndrome.  The gist of the book is that chronic inflammation can lead to a host of ailments, aches, and pain.  Since I have been reading most of my books on the Kindle, I have yet to read the book, but started it today.

The book talks about how the foods we eat and drink can lead to chronic inflammation.  If we learn to eat the right foods, we can reverse the inflammation in our system and cure ourselves.  I firmly believe that the human body has a tremendous capacity for self healing.  Of course, having that knowledge and belief is only as good as our capacity for putting the correct behaviors into practice.

In addition to changing the diet to help reduce the inflammation that causes problems in the body, there are a number of different supplements and wellness items that can help. Nopalea is a wellness beverage that is derived from the fruit of the Nopal Cactus.  The fruit of the Nopal cactus has been utilized by the native people of the Southwestern US and Mexico for its healing properties.

Nopalea contains rare and potent antioxidants that have been shown to help the body reduce inflammation.  Right now, you can get a free 32 oz sample bottle of this wellness drink.  All you have to do is call 1-800-203-7063.  There will be a $9.95 charge to cover the cost of shipping.  It can be a first step towards naturally helping your body to reduce inflammation.

School Bus Cameras

Image via Wikipedia

In the past, I have been on the record here as being against traffic cameras.  I have always thought that they are more about generating revenue rather than being a mechanism to encourage safety.  It is not that I am out rampantly disregarding traffic laws.  Quite to the contrary.  I really do try to adhere to traffic laws, especially things like stopping for pedestrians in a cross walk.

Let's take red light cameras for instance.  The concept of the red light camera in and of itself isn't so bad.  After all, who wouldn't want to cut down on the number of accidents in intersections, especially the more serious head on or side collisions.  While there are studies that have shown a decrease in those accidents, there have been studies that show an increase in rear end collisions.

In my area, they have been starting to put in a lot of speed cameras, especially in school zones.  When I drive through those areas, I pay special attention to drive right at the speed limit the whole length of the road.  Unfortunately others will speed through the road until they get into the camera zone, then slow down through the camera zone, and then resume speeding when out of the zone.  Kind of defeats the purpose if you ask me.

Today, however, I heard of a proposed traffic camera that I can actually support.  Montgomery County, a neighboring county of mine here in Maryland, is proposing putting camera on all of the county school buses to catch people who pass the buses while they are loading and unloading kids.  The proposed fine would be $250.  The safety of our children should be our highest priority.

Related articles

• Run A Red Light, Wreck Your Credit Rating? (denver.cbslocal.com)
• The Traffic Camera (fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com)
• Iowa lawmaker's measure would ban red-light, speed cameras (thegazette.com)