From time to time, we create audio cutups. We’ve been doing it for several years now. We made about a dozen of them for former President Bush, and now we have set our sights on President Obama. And so, I present to you, the first two Obama cutups:

October 2009: Stream MP3 | Download MP3

SoTU 2010: Stream MP3 | Download MP3

If you don’t listen to the radio show, this is what you’re missing!

Mike

Tonight is President Obama’s first State of the Union Address. It begins at 9:00 PM Eastern.

If you’re interested in politics, please join us over at America’s Debate tonight during the President’s first official State of the Union Address. We have hosted a lively State of the Union Chat every year since 2002.

Back in 2006, we launched America’s Debate Radio immediately after then-President Bush’s State of the Union Address, and have simulcasted every State of the Union since.

Immediately after the speech, we open up the America’s Debate Radio phone lines for 2-3 hours of your phone calls. We don’t screen calls, we give callers plenty of time to make their points, and we don’t silence people like the big boys of talk radio. We even pay for the call– 888.DEBATE.5.

Anyway, I hope to see a great turnout tonight for the America’s Debate 2010 State of the Union Chat, Simulcast, and Radio Show.

If you’re a regular ADer and you feel like helping us out, please spread the word! Please post about us on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and any of the other social networking sites I haven’t heard of yet. Thanks!

That is all.

I’ve been using Picasa for years now. In the past, it has always been very good. Now, however, it has grown slow and bloated to the sacrifice of essential features, like easy transfer of new images, or scanning for the newly transferred images.

I’m open to all suggestions.

That is all.

The host, Dylan Ratigan, is just terrible. He demonstrates one of my biggest pet peeves on a consistent basis. He constantly stalls by saying “uhh” as he attempts to think while speaking instead of following mom’s advice to think before he speaks.

Mr. Ratigan’s hedging is worse than the standard “uhh” though. His version is more “aaaaah,” as in “stick out your tongue and say aaaaah.” It drives me crazy.

Adding to that annoyance is his cast of characters, including Elliot Spitzer, the overly made-up former governor of New York who was reported to have spent thousands of dollars on prostitutes, and Contessa Brewer, who has been wallowing in overly emotional mediocrity for her entire tenure at MSNBC.

I would love to be able to predict that Morning Meeting won’t last long, but MSNBC seems to be perfectly content with their position as loss-leader in the cable news business. See: cable news ratings. They come in at the bottom of the ratings at the same frequency as Chris Matthews says “hah” or coughs on the air.

I highly doubt that Ratigan will spell ratings gain for MSNBC, apparently securing his job for life.

That is all.

It seems they have teamed up and implemented a program called Tow to Go. The gist of the program is that if you are partying downtown for St. Patrick’s Day and you happen to be drinking, you can call for a free ride home– and they’ll tow your car home as well.

That. Is. Excellent.

Now, if the city could somehow increase the penalty for drunk driving for the period extending 24 hours in either direction of St. Patrick’s Day, I would be even more pleased. I’m thinking a mandatory 30-day impound, a fine equal to 10 times your annual vehicle registration, and about 2,000 hours of community service.

It’s time we put an end to drunk driving, and it’s time that drunk drivers are severely punished.

That is all.

Most of it is caught by my email client, but one came across today that just cracked me up. Here’s a screenshot:

Dude, my car is on fire? Thanks for the email. I appreciate it.

Hah!

Back in July of 2002, Jaime and I had an idea to start a website called America’s Debate. We needed a host and I was clueless, so I reached into the hat and pulled out Burton Hosting.

Over the years, I established a relationship with Matthew at Burton. We had each other on our instant messengers, and chatted regularly about hosting and non-hosting related subjects. We were online friends.

Well, today Burton Hosting, to the best of my knowledge, is no more. Their site is down, and it took my sites with it.

Luckily, I have good backups and data loss was minimal, but still– when you do business with a company for over six years and they just disappear off the face of the planet, it is odd.

Anyway, we had a few stumbling blocks over the years, but Matthew was always reassuring and capable. The rough patches are by far outweighed by the years of mostly-smooth sailing.

A couple of years ago, Burton went downhill. Sharply downhill. Their forum disappeared. Matthew rarely signed in. Support tickets were ignored. The servers were blacklisted because they were apparently friendly to spammers. The service, in general, degraded to the point where it was non-existant.

At Christmas time, our email died. I submitted tickets that were instantly closed because Burton’s servers flagged their own servers as a source of spam. Their phone numbers were disconnected. Their email addresses bounced. Matthew’s SMS was no longer active. Hell, I even sent them a fax. Yes, a fax. In 2008. Anyway, Matthew’s personal email address finally got through. We had no mail for a few days until he got his butt in gear. His response to my many forms of contact was that he had thought he had fixed the problem.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that Burton’s ticket system was down, as was their billing system. My hunch is that they were bombarded by concerned customers, trying to get support and refunds, and so they intentionally shut it down.

Today, around 11:30 AM, Burton went dark. Nothing. No warning at all, besides the degrading service.

I scrambled to sign up with a new host, and then scrambled to move over my sites. I’m still not done, and this is a much-needed break after working for about 14 hours straight.

So anyway, thanks Burton Hosting for six and a half mostly-good years. It’s a shame you went out the way you did. But with they way things trailed off, I can’t say that Burton Hosting didn’t deserve it.

I hope that those who are impacted by Burton’s shutdown have good backups. If not, they should contact GNAX.net to see about paying a ransom for their data. They quoted me $60 plus shipping, but I know that would rise when they realized I had about 20 gigs of data. I passed. I can live without six hours of forum posts from the middle of the night, and a couple of months of blog posts.

That is all.

Note to MSNBC: I don’t care where the hell you sit when you read the news.

That is all.

I dropped five packages off at your Savannah Airport facility on Friday, December 19. I asked if the packages would arrive by Christmas, and was told they would. I told the clerk that I would gladly pay for the next level of shipping if it was necessary, and was told it was not– my packages would be there on the 23rd, the 24th at the latest. I’ve done it exactly the same way for going on a decade, and I have never had a problem. Well, this year, FedEx, you ruined Christmas.

When my packages first appeared in the FedEx system, they had a delivery date of the 23rd. The 23rd came and went, and all my dates were bumped up to the 24th. On the 24th, two of my packages were delivered, one 27 miles from Chicago, and one 52 miles from Chicago. My other three packages were not delivered.

Late in the evening on the 24th, my other three packages had their delivery date moved up to the 25th.

The 25th came, and the delivery date for my remaining three packages was moved up to the 26th, and then it disappeared– no estimated delivery date. I called FedEx to ask why my delivery date disappeared. I was told that my packages were delayed due to “bad weather,” unlikely considering I had packages 27 miles from Chicago, and 54 miles from Chicago in the same time period and shipped at the same time. My family reported clear highways, clear side streets, and delivery trucks in the area.

Even though I remained polite and civil, the FedEx agent on the phone didn’t want to hear how my packages not arriving was an extreme disappointment, and hung up on me mid-sentence. The next agent with whom I spoke was not only sympathetic that my gifts hadn’t arrived, but also sympathetic with the frustration generated when the first agent added insult to injury.

I was told that the station had been contacted, and that I would be contacted with the status of my packages. I was told that the earliest my packages would arrive would be today, Monday, December 29. It turns out that FedEx doesn’t deliver the day after holidays– in this case December 26– even though my delivery date was listed as the 26th.

Just as the 25th came, the 25th went, and so did Christmas. My gifts did not arrive.

On the 26th– the date where FedEx did not deliver, or so I was told– one of my packages was delivered. Its destination was in the Wrigleyville area of Chicago. I received a call from a FedEx agent on that afternoon to tell me that my packages were not lost, were delayed due to the weather, and that FedEx would be delivering them on the 29th. I hadn’t realized that one of my packages had arrived earlier that day, or I would have mentioned that FedEx delivered a package on a day I was told that there would be no deliveries.

On the evening of the 28th, the two outstanding packages were updated with a delivery date of the 29th, a full ten days after I had shipped them. They were both listed as “On FedEx vehicle for delivery.”

On the 29th, one of the two outstanding packages was delivered, 28 miles outside Chicago.

The other package, also listed as “On FedEx vehicle for delivery,” was not delivered. The tracking page stated that there had been a “Delivery exception, No attempt made, delivery scheduled for next business day.”

What exactly does that mean? Did my numerous calls to FedEx not accomplish anything? When the station was contacted, did they not take any steps to expedite the delivery of my much-overdue package?

Now, you may be thinking that this is no big deal. So what, the packages are a little late. Deal with it.

Well, here is part of the contents of the package:

Click to enlarge. What you see are the Christmas Cookies that Jaime and I bake every year. 14 varieties. $150+ for ingredients. An entire weekend of baking– six hours on Friday, twelve hours on Saturday, and twelve hours on Sunday, bringing the total time invested in baking to 30 hours– EACH.

Sixty hours of effort total between the both of us to carefully bake cookies for our families and friends since, even though we couldn’t be there for the holidays, at least a special gift from us– something we made– could.

And as of right now, the evening of Monday, December 29th, the package has not arrived. Jaime just called FedEx and filed a claim so we can get a refund on the shipping, and hopefully recoup some of the ingredient money. Our time– our gift to our families– was wasted. A total loss.

If the cookies arrive tomorrow, they are likely inedible. It will have been eleven days after we shipped them. And even if they do arrive tomorrow, the Christmas-day distribution chain won’t be in place to distribute our cookies to family members across Northern Illinois and Indiana.

What is the likelihood that my brother will drive 89 miles to pickup a $7 plate of cookies? What is the likelihood that I can convince someone to drive another $7 plate of cookies 55 miles to Indiana? Very, very slim.

Sure, there are some gifts in the package that are not perishable. I would love to tell you what they are, but alas they are Christmas gifts and their recipients have yet to open them. As a matter of fact, Jaime and I haven’t even opened our gifts yet. We use webcams to video conference with our family– on Christmas eve– to open our gifts. That way, we can see the reactions as the gifts are opened. Not this year, though. Six or seven years of tradition, broken.

So, FedEx, congratulations on having hauled my Christmas gifts, to this point, a total distance of 820.63 miles in a mere 238hrs 54mins 53secs, an average speed of 3.43mph. Congratulations on taking 11 days to deliver a package. Congratulations on pushing the delivery date of my Christmas gifts a full five days past Christmas.

Screw you, Fedex. You suck and you ruined Christmas!

Relevant quotation:

Mr. Emanuel had one or two telephone calls with Governor Blagojevich. Those conversations occurred between November 6 and November 8, 2008. Soon after he decided to accept the President-Elect’s offer to serve as Chief of Staff in the White House, Mr. Emanuel placed a call to the Governor to give him a heads up that he was taking the Chief of Staff’s position in the White House, and to advise him that he would be resigning his seat in the House of Representatives. They spoke about Mr. Emanuel’s House seat, when he would be resigning and potential candidates to replace him. He also had a brief discussion with the Governor about the Senate seat and the merits of various people whom the Governor might consider.

Question 1. Was it one call, or was it two? In the age of the cell phone, pulling up calling records takes just a few moments.

Question 2. Why, in preparation of a report destined for intense scrutiny and on behalf of the president elect, did Greg Craig not ask Mr. Emanuel for a copy of his telephone records in order to ensure that report cited the precise number of conversations between he and the Governor?

Question 3. If it was one conversation, why did Greg Craig, in his second sentence, state “Those conversations” and not a more ambiguous “the conversation(s)”?

Question 4. Were the conversations on November 6, November 7, or November 8? I mean, technically, if they occurred “between November 6 and November 8,” then the only possibility is that the conversations occurred on November 7.

Question 5. When did Mr. Emanuel contact the Governor to give him the “heads up” regarding his acceptance of the Chief of Staff position. Is that covered in the “between November 6 and November 8,” or is that on a different date?

Question 6. The last sentence I cited is written in an ambiguous-enough fashion to separate it from the calls between November 6 and November 8. Why not list the exact date of the call?

I know my questions seem superficial and possibly even partisan or petty, but I grew up surrounded by Chicago politics. I know when the machine is operating at full speed, as it is right now.

I have a feeling we have not heard the end of this.