blogbynight has enjoyed a huge influx of visitors lately, traffic hitting an all-time one-day high of close to 150 unique visitors on Friday, July 23. Typically, this blog has an audience of one or two per day, with a total of probably 4 regular readers made up of friends and family who are barely amused by the authors rants and antics. So what gives? What’s up with the sudden interest in this sad little blog?

Well, there have been somewhere in the neighbourhood of 300 hits since July 15th, almost every one of which came from a search page. Any guesses what the search string was? Well, the post that day was a link to a site with pictures of female sex offenders in a mock-pageant. In that post, I mentioned the name of one of the offenders who was, shall we say, in the ‘easy on the eyes’ column (I won’t mention her name again, lest I inadvertently increase my pagerank for searches for her name… but methinks you, my intelligent readers, should be able to figure it out)

Almost every single hit since then has been from a search for her name. Well, I’m sorry new visitors, but you’ll not find any pictures of her here. I’m sorry if your search engine mislead you, but I am not the authority on hot young teachers aides that sleep with 14-year-old boys. And no, I don’t know where you could find her.

DivaBlog:

“Anyway, the presenter was doing his pitch in a polished way and at one point he said he wanted to show us a “really cool” feature and he looked up into the audience and said “Show of hands…How many of you use Internet Explorer?”. Probably 99 times out of 100 when he asks that question all the hands go up, right? Well first there was a pause and then a giggle and then a whoop of laughter as the audience looked around and realized that NO ONE had raised a hand. The presenter was thrown off his mark, but he recovered and said, “Wow! Okay how many of you wish we’d fix IE so you could use it?”

Still no hands….”

Doonesbury dropped by Continental Features for anti-Iraq sentiments.

Linda Ronstadt gets booed, escorted off premises of Aladdin hotel-casino for calling Michael Moore a “great American patriot.”

Slim-Fast drops Whoppi Goldberg as spokesperson after cracks she made about George Bush

Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!

A pharmacist rescues an ancient pickle.

Under much protest from technology companies and internet providers, Senator Orrin Hatch intends to move ahead with the controversial Induce Act. The Induce Act, would make “whoever intentionally induces any violation” of copyright law legally liable for those violations.

Ostensibly a way to outlaw P2P Networks and designed to overturn an April 2003 ruling that said Morpheus and Grokster were not liable for copyright infringements that took place using their software, the Induce Act has been widely criticized as having the potential to “make hardware makers like Apple and Toshiba–and even journalists–liable for products and reviews that could “induce” the public to violate copyright law.”

During Senate hearings regarding the Induce Act, Marybeth Peters, the head of the US Copyright Office, has taken radical copyright maximalism to a new level by not only supporting the Induce Act, but going so far as to say that the Induce Act wasn’t enough and that Congress should overturn the Betamax decision (which made VCR’s legal).

Scott Ritter, a UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991-1998 on Iraqi resistance since the transfer of sovereignty to the new Iraqi government.

“We will suffer a decade-long nightmare that will lead to the deaths of thousands more Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. We will witness the creation of a viable and dangerous anti-American movement in Iraq that will one day watch as American troops unilaterally withdraw from Iraq every bit as ignominiously as Israel did from Lebanon.

…

“There is no elegant solution to our Iraqi debacle. It is no longer a question of winning but rather of mitigating defeat.”

The Ontario Liberals may have come to power on a slogan of helping “working families,” but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the new Liberal credo is “make the middle class pay” — for everything.

You only have to look at this week’s announcement from Universities Minister Mary Anne Chambers that in future, refugee claimants will be eligible for OSAP.

Meanwhile, if you’re middle class, if your combined family income is more than $54,000, you don’t qualify.

But for those who do qualify for the program, the amount parents are expected to pay towards OSAP is almost halved — to $730 a year. So if you’re a refugee claimant, or anyone else who qualifies for the program you could end up paying $730 a year in tuition — even for a de-regulated course that could cost more than $10,000 in tuition to the rest of us paying the full freight.

But what if the refugee claimant leaves the province before paying off the student loan? What if he or she is ultimately refused?

Either way, it’s a potential double-whammy for average working stiffs. First, they don’t get student assistance for their children. Second, they could be helping to subsidize unpaid balances left behind by refugee claimants or others who default on their loans.

If Chambers had wanted to help the middle class, she would have increased the amount parents are allowed to make and still qualify for OSAP.

It’s the same with expensive drug therapies. If you get cancer, you’d better go on welfare. That way, you’ll have your drugs paid for by the government. Since you won’t have to pay taxes any more, you’ll sleep better.

Middle class? Go into debt or rely on the charity of friends and neighbours to raise the cash for your treatment in the U.S.

We couldn’t do the sensible thing and allow private insurance companies to offer insurance for catastrophic drug claims, because that would be counter to the Canada Health Act, which decrees that no one in this country may pay for health care.

Unless, of course, you’re very rich, in which case you go south to Buffalo or Cleveland for treatment.

It’s the same with the government’s decision to buy out the seven private MRI and CT clinics. Forget the rhetoric about two-tier health care. No one paid cash to use these clinics. It was paid for with your OHIP card, the way you pay for other diagnostic tests in private clinics. This government is so ideologically driven, however, that it will spend our precious health dollars buying real estate.

Meanwhile, the new OHIP premium imposed by the Liberals disproportionately hurts the middle class. Those on welfare — who are getting their medication paid anyway — don’t pay anything.

But the richer you are, the lower percentage of your income you’ll pay. If you make $30,000 a year you’ll see your taxes rise a whopping 23%. If you make $50,000, your taxes still go up a hefty 13%. But if you make more than $200,000, you will pay the maximum of $900 — a 2% hike — chump change for someone in that tax bracket.

And what are they spending all that health premium money on? Why, they’re buying private MRI clinics that were doing a perfectly fine job in the first place.

To add insult to injury, provincial judges are getting a massive 21% pay hike that will cost taxpayers $30 million over three years. (In a news story yesterday, I erroneously reported the amount was $5 million a year.) Okay, it’s not the Liberals’ fault that the commission that sets judges salaries recommended the outrageous increase. And they did appeal the decision.

But they’re asking nurses and hospital staff to hold the line on pay increases — while judges get a $30 million hike?

Even the education tax credit for private schools which the Liberals canned — retroactively — hurt middle class parents. The vast majority were people who gave up vacations, second cars and other luxuries to send their children to private religious schools.

Sure, it was spun as a hand-out to the rich, but the fact is the rich didn’t want, need or care for the credit. Cancelling it mainly hurt low-income and, yes, middle class working people who stretched themselves to the limit to give their youngsters a good start.

Middle class? Over-taxed and under-serviced? It’s a new club.

Come on in and make yourselves comfortable.

You could be here for a long time.

Duke University freshmen will be getting a brand new 20Gb iPod loaded with all kinds of useful information like orientation schedules, calendars, campus tours and the Duke fight song.

How nice that Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government wants to buy out seven private MRI and CT clinics across Ontario. Now for the big questions.

How much is it going to cost us and how will it improve public access to MRI and CT scans?

As a health ministry spokesman noted yesterday, these clinics aren’t like those in Alberta and Quebec where you can buy your way to the front of the line.

In Ontario that would be (and always has been) seen as a violation of the Canada Health Act.

The province doesn’t allow it. So what we really have here is an ideological move dressed up as a promise to improve the public’s access to health care, which it won’t.

McGuinty did promise in the last election to bring these clinics into the public fold. But to do it, he’s going to use the proceeds from a broken election promise, the one he made about not raising our taxes. Instead, he’ll use a portion of the billions he’s raising from that new health tax he imposed on us on July 1, to buy out these clinics.

Ironically, it was a previous Grit government that established the legal basis for these clinics in the first place.

As Conservative leadership contender John Tory noted yesterday, then premier David Peterson’s Liberal government passed the Independent Health Facilities Act in 1988. That allowed private clinics to provide X-rays, blood work, ultrasound, etc., paid for through OHIP.

The Tories simply added MRIs and CT scans to the list.

Now, the Liberals are going to buy out the MRI and CT clinics, but not the others. What’s the point? Again, these aren’t facilities where you can use your credit card to go to the front of the line. Their services are covered by OHIP.

McGuinty’s announcement will please those who believe, purely for ideological reasons, that all health care services should be provided by the public sector. But it will not increase or improve public access to the system.

Nor will it stop “the rich” from queue-jumping, because the province doesn’t allow them to queue-jump now.

As Tory MPP Frank Klees, who’s also running for the Conservative leadership, pointed out, it seems McGuinty’s first major investment in our health care system courtesy of his new health tax, will be to make a purely ideological point about health care — public good, private bad — without making it better. Indeed, since 30% of our health system is privately funded, McGuinty, using this logic, could blow all the cash he’s raising through his new health tax, without actually improving the health system at all. Scary.