Back in October 2008 I wrote a post about Joe Lara a real plumber from Southern California who over night literally had his business destroyed.

Google to this day shows over 1,250,000 million pages that have that phrase in a blog post or web page. Most of them vicious attacks against someone whom the media gave the title to.

Yet, these attacks affected so many real plumbers. Since it has been quite awhile or at least it seems like it, I thought I would look at how the search engine rankings had changed for Joe.

In October of 2008 Joe The Plumber Joe Lara’s website ranked #1 in google today it’s lucking to be in the top ten on google.

It would have been really nice if Google, Yahoo and Bing would have created a business listing to show local business in your area. Instead you’ll have to wade through ton’s of garbage to find them.

You have of course Wikipedia which as always tries to capitalize on every search term the can. Followed up by the opportunists who create a site to ride the momentum of that search term.

Today, it crossed my mind again, so I did a check and found Joe’s site at #7 on Google, #2 on Yahoo, and #2 on Bing.

You can read my original post about Poor Joe The Plumber, I hope you’ll take the action I recommend and help to restore their web rankings.

I love marketing, it is what brings products and service to people all around the world today. Yet, some individuals seem to believe that it is perfectly ok and legal to scrape phone numbers off of websites.

They then place these scraped phone numbers into a auto-dialer system and proceed to dial away. Each day I receive an ever increasing number of these types of calls, even to a number that is on the do-not-call list.

The majority of the people are using a software package called Scraper Pro to harvest these phone numbers off the internet.

While the internet and the search engines make it very easy for them to harvest this information, the internet also makes it very easy to report them as well via:

The FTC.gov website…

It is kind of funny that the same people doing this are also extremely upset when a telemarketer calls them to pitch a product…

…And yet they feel it is perfectly ok to for them to pitch their scam or ponzi scheme to you.

It’s nice that there is software that will convert your email address to block it from spam bots, it looks like we’ll need to find a solution for our telephone numbers as well from now on.

Wow look at the attacks on poor Joe The Plumber! I’m not talking about the guy that McCain and Obama are referring to. I’m talking about the real Joe The Plumbers of the world.

Today I did a search and of course there are several websites out there that come up when you do the search for Joe The Plumber The first site that came up in the organic search is for Joe Lara A real Joe the Plumber in southern california.

He wrote on his web site that since the debate he had received over 113,624 hits on his web site and over 200 phone call. The poor guy, as I’m sure that not all of those phone calls where friendly. In fact I’d venture to say that many of them where down right disrespectful.

Having several web sites myself I’ve been on the receiving end of phone calls from angry customers of someone else’s product just because I’d written about it at one time.

I always look at it as some people should not be allowed to have a computer period. The first web site that pops up in the search is the one they call, mainly because they are not smart enough to figure anything out for themselves.

What is really evident here is that there is no healing going on only divide and conquer. This is the ugly side of politics, both candidates will hide and duck the real issues facing this country while providing sound bites, that appeal to the masses.

Anyone thinking that taxes will not go up for everyone, really need to get off the drugs and come back to reality. As long as we continue to allow our government free reign to an unlimited credit card our situation will only continue to get worse.

I really feel sympathy for Joe Lara and all the other Joe the Plumbers out there as this will not go away quickly. I’m amazed at how quickly the media the candidates jumped on this bandwagon to discredit Joe, which I’m sure is being directed towards everyone of them.

So If you live in southern California give Joe Lara some support, send business his way when it comes to plumbing work. For that matter any other Joe the Plumber anywhere send them your business, as they are probably getting attacked viciously right now.

On the other hand, they probably could not have paid enough to get the kind of publicity they are getting right now from all the media. The good thing is we only have 18 more days of this crap and distraction to our everyday lives.

This evening 24 Oct 2008 I received an email from Joe Lara, thanking me for the kind words in this post. He is now up to 255,047 hits on the web page, 5 TV appearances, 3 Radio Interviews, 2 Front page stories in the newspapers, 100′s of phone calls and e-mails, and not a SINGLE service call. If your a web site owner the Joe the Plumbers need your help.

It really irritates me when all the work that they’ve done to get their websites found can be destroyed in no time at all as the news media articles will quickly surpass them in the search engine rankings.

If you can provide links to them, so individuals can find them and not just some hate filled news articles.

Joe The Plumber In Amarillo

Joe The Plumber In Seattle

These small business owners surely did not need to have their businesses disrupted, all for an election!

The entire news media is missing the mark on this financial breakdown. Tonight on just about every news media outlet they state this is happening all over the world. Well it is, and it all goes back to energy.

When you really step back and look at this any of these companies could have survived if it were not for the burden placed on everyone throughout the world with the unprecedented rise in oil prices globally.

Just 3 months ago it was all anyone could talk about, people feeling real pain at the pump, truckers no longer able to afford to stay in business. Everyone cutting back on extras because fuel had become such a burden on everyone.

Yet, all this began when the control of the congress and the senate where handed over to Pelosi and Reid. What I and many others see clearly was a plan to get a Democrat elected as president at all costs. Even if it means the collapse of the U.S. economy to do it.

The rhetoric coming from Pelosi and Reid is no drilling, no way, no how, which continued to drive the energy costs up, they had to have a talking point for the election.

How many airlines went out of business this year? How many trucking companies went out of business? How many people lost their jobs because the higher costs of transportation where passed on to the consumer, forcing layoffs and more.

How much will Pelosi and Reid profit from their investments in renewable energy sources, while forcing the rest of us to suffer? The problem does not just rest on the Democratic side either both parties have their hands in the till, the public is way past the point of being just irritated, we are becoming angry.

If you’ve ever studied the cause of an aircraft crash, it is never just one thing that caused it, but a series of events that led up to the accident. This is what we have here, possibly an economic collapse, with the final straw being the Pelosi and Reid’s refusal to allow a sound energy policy to move forward.

It’s almost funny to watch all the finger pointing, the calls to fire everyone, hold investigations etc. Yet everyone has their hand in the pot of gold, so where do you start.

It really doesn’t matter who gets elected, it will be more of the same! Remember Bill Clinton’s promised tax cuts for the middle income earners? Funny how that all changed to “I Feel Your Pain,” yeah right.

It’s time to clean house, completely! Send them all packing and bring legal proceedings against many of them. It’s time to stop the spin on both sides and come clean.

Why is it that some people have to resort to lies and distortion to support a cause? Is it because they have not done their research, they are just plain lazy?

Or do they hope that with sensational headlines they will further expand what ever cause they are passionate about? I believe we should do everything we can to prevent harm to the environment. Yet, when I recently read a post on The Huffington Post by Bob Burnett, I had to call it as I see it.

Bob Burnett in his post made the claim to support his cause in a post titled "IT’s The Water Stupid" Posted August 14, 2008 here is the excerpt. I’ve placed his lie in bold and underlined.

As the name suggests, the Colorado River is fed by Colorado mountain snow melt, which has dramatically decreased in the past few years. The 1400-mile-long river is the primary water supply for seven states. By 2012, due to increased demand and diminished supply, the Colorado River will no longer be able to meet it’s contractual commitments. Meanwhile, there are signs of impending disaster all along the watercourse: Lake Powell has already gone dry and experts predict that Lake Mead will be disappear by 2021.

 Now I thought this is strange, as my wife and I where there on June 18th of 2008. Of course, we take pictures as we travel the southwest.

Why is it that we cannot get the truth about global warming or anything else for that matter? For this oversight or attempt, to distort the truth Bob Burnett from the Huffingtion Post gets my vote for moron of the month!

Pictures of Lake Powell taken June 18th, 2008   Wow in less then two months it’s gone dry?

You be the judge!

Big Oil’s Windfall Profits – My attempt to get to some of the truth. It’s not always easy with all the political spin out there.

Before you send hate mail, I’m not a supporter of the big oil companies. Yet what really disturbs me is how they have been portrayed as evil for “Record Profits.”

None of the news reports that I’ve read talked about the record amount of taxes these companies have paid. So I decided to do a little myself, it’s pretty easy since they are all publicly traded companies. I took just Exxon Mobile:

In the last Quarter they made:

22,206,000,000.00 that’s twenty-two billion two hundred and six million dollars. Now that is an impressive amount.

The also paid during that same quarter:

10,526,000,000.00 that’s ten billion five-hundred and twenty-six million dollars in Income taxes or 47.4 percent.

Or to look at it another way they paid in taxes after all other expenses:

117,333,333.00 one hundred seventeen million three hundred thirty-three thousand and three hundred and thirty-three dollars a day in taxes.

If you ask me that is a lot of tax revenue and this does not even count the taxes we pay at the pump.

I’ve seen reports that we consume approximately 400,000,000 that’s four hundred million gallons of gasoline alone per day in the U.S.

With statistics that show the the average U.S. Gas tax rate at 49.4 cents Fed – State and Local we find:

Gas generates in the U.S everyday approximately 197,600,000.00 dollars in tax revenue.

We’ve no doubt heard that with the decrease in driving they are already looking to raise the federal gas tax another 10 cents doesn’t sound like much does it.

The question we all need to be asking ourselves is, when we do finally move away from the fossil fuels where will our government with it’s insatiable appetite get the revenue it needs to sustain this spending spree.

Will they begin to charge us for the sunshine we receive to generate the electricity from our solar panels? From the wind that blows across our property?

So in my opinion it doesn’t really matter who gets elected they will continue to drill and produce more oil and revenue for the government.

This will continue until the come up with a plan to replace the tax revenue from oil with a new tax for energy produced by renewable energy sources.

I had an interesting discussion today about which computer to use when doing SEO work. I guess the question should really be which software do you need to run? This is what dictates which operating system to use.

Realistically speaking, I think there is way to much software out there today, which essentially does the same thing to a certain extent. Besides we should be writing for our website visitors and not for the search engines anyway right?

Really there is no perfect computer each has it’s own distinct advantages. For years I swore by Windows in it’s many different versions. Windows Xp was probably their finest product. With so much software written for it your bound to find what your looking for.

When it comes to the Apple’s operating system, the choice is fairly limited but still I’ve managed to find the products that I found real value in had in most cases a Mac application as well. With the advent of Parallels for Mac and VMware’s fusion I have the best of both world on one computer now.

I can run Windows Xp in a virtual machine and have access to all of the Windows software that I want, albeit at a slight performance loss. Yet I’ve found that I’m willing to give up this performance loss with the virtual machine in order to have the ease of use that comes with operating both systems at the same time one one machine.

As each version of Parallels that has come out just gets better. You can now copy and paste share documents back and forth between the two operating system seamlessly. So when it comes to which computer to use, I now recommend the Apple Mac.

For the Desktop version, there are a few choices really depending on how much of a power user you are!

I like the Mac Pro for this with two models 4 core or 8 core you have more power then the average person can really use.

The other choice for a desktop is one of the Imac’s, personally my recommendation would be the 24 inch version.

If a laptop is more to your liking then there really is only one the MacBook Pro Laptop. There is the 15 inch and the 17 inch version with plenty of power to do just about any job you can through at it.

Personally I like the 17 inch version, it is light weight compared to others I’ve used in the same size range. One important fact is battery life is very good, well over 3 hours of use.

The choice as to which computer to use is a matter of personal choice, I used to give one of my business partners a hard time, since he used a Mac. Later he switched to Windows and I migrated to the Mac as my preferred operating system and hardware.

The journey has been a fairly easy one as I’ve found most of the software I really need rest upon my shoulders. The majority of Windows software I’d purchased for SEO work, after awhile I found I didn’t really need it. You get to a point just like anything you do in life that when you do enough of it, it really becomes second nature.