Whiskey Fire

For the Record

I also think HillBuzz is run by a bunch of crazy shyster assholes. 

Besides everything else, egging on your blog's readers to unearth personal information about your Online Foes is a sure sign you're (a) swine and (b) completely fucking nuts.

And no, George Soros didn't pay me to say this. Shit, I pay him.

Ratfuckers in Their Own Minds

by va

Shorter Andrew Breitbart, BigJournalism: As you can tell from these tweets, David Shuster did not treat James O'Keefe objectively. James does not stand accused of infiltrating the office of a sitting Senator to wiretap her phone--he infiltrated the office and committed a different felony entirely. Also, LOUD NOISES.

Shorter Robert Ferrigno (writing as Bo Obama), also BigJournalism: Get it? I'm a wingnut who infiltrated the White House and I'M A FUCKING DOG!!

Proceed below with caution.

I Cannot Emphasize Enough Why This Isn't Funny

By Monica_A:

He's the President of the United States. He's not the Black President of the United States nor is he the President of the Black United States. It traffics in a horrible racial stereotype and it's just downright disrespectful. Thanks to TPM for wading into the muck.

Rowr Rowr Like a Dungeon Dragon

Whatever the future holds for the Wingnut Four, it is now unlikely to include prison yard D&D sessions.

A man serving life in prison for first-degree intentional homicide lost his legal battle today to play Dungeons & Dragons behind bars.

Kevin T. Singer filed a federal lawsuit against officials at Wisconsin's Waupun prison, arguing that a policy banning all Dungeons & Dragons material violated his free speech and due process rights.

Prison officials instigated the Dungeons & Dragons ban among concerns that playing the game promoted gang-related activity and was a threat to security. Singer challenged the ban but the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday upheld it as a reasonable policy....

Singer was told by prison officials that he could not keep the materials because Dungeons & Dragons "promotes fantasy role playing, competitive hostility, violence, addictive escape behaviors, and possible gambling," according to the ruling.

This is perhaps for the best, seeing as how the scroll they were using to cast their Illusion of Telephone Repairmen spell seems to have had a curse on it. Perhaps though if they are model inmates they will be allowed to retain their +2 Hats of Pimping. 

Oh wait I am not supposed to jump to conclusions. After all trying to get access to somebody's telephone by fraudulently claiming you work for the phone company could just as easily be Legitimate Citizen Journalism of the sort the MSM is too unethical to even attempt.

Down the Icy Streets

Remember a couple of years ago when the latest Irrefutable Proof that Global Human-Caused Climate Change is a Hoax came in the form of idiots uploading photographs of temperature stations located next to electrical equipment and so forth? Good times, good times.

You will no doubt be shocked to learn that it turns out it's all a load of shit. 

Via. Sheesh.

Strictly Comedy

The most hilarious part of the story about the ACORN gotcha pimp & his cronies getting arrested for "entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony" is this bit from one of the little shits' lawyers:

Robert Flanagan's attorney, J. Garrison Jordan, said he believes his client works for the Pelican Institute. Asked the motivation for the alleged wiretap plot, he said: "I think it was poor judgment. I don't think there was any intent or motive to commit a crime."

They dressed up like phone company employees and tried to gain access to phone equipment in a US Senator's office. Why they would be doing this without intending to actually do anything to said equipment is rather a mystery. 

If you're wondering also how this is could possibly be twisted into a Wingnut Win, please to enjoy the Jawa Report's take:

Possible silver lining - As mentioned via some Twitter between myself, CollegePolitico and SluBlog, if the media had actually, you know, paid attention to who this guy was when he was demolishing ACORN, it may have been easier for them to report on him now. Since they didn't (they actively ignored it to a large extent), they have to explain that this was the guy who destroyed ACORN and bring that whole can of worms up again. Which doesn't minimize what's apparently happened here, but it's still slightly ironic and snort-worthy.

"Snort" being the correct verb here.

Impractical Thinkers Design the Dream

I am not anything like a Constitutional fundamentalist; in fact, I rather think the American Constitution, in a word, sucks. And I'm not unaware of the need to get us some sort of healthcare something something.

But not for nothing, there is a reason the different branches of government are, well, different branches, and there is a reason there are divisions within these branches. Checks and balances!

This is healthy.

The third-ranking House Democrat said Monday the Senate thinks of itself as a "House of Lords" that happens to be out of touch with voters.

Majority Whip James Clyburn's (D-S.C.) remarks are one of the most significant public shots taken at the Senate by a Democratic leader since healthcare negotiations between the two chambers stalled.

"[Senators] tend to see themselves as a House of Lords and they don't seem to understand that those of us that go out there every two years stay in touch with the American people," he said in an interview with Fox News Radio. "We tend to respond to them a little better."

Beg parsnips, but why shouldn't the House and the Senate be squabbling? Isn't this something built into the original design?

During the last administration the GOP exercised intense party discipline across the different branches. Please recall that this was in terms of actual results for the nation a total catastrophe. 

And remember that the Senate is by all accounts an incredible problem, a disgrace, an impediment to good government, or even mediocre government, and that the bill they produced through their August Deliberations is an absolute stinker.

I'm not following why it should be wrong for the House to refuse to swallow a bad Senate bill without fighting. Again, when the GOP had the House, Senate, and White House, and exercised party discipline over allegiance to everything else, this was bad. It's one of the reasons we're so screwed.

The Senate is a stupid idea, but "party discipline" across all branches is not very bright either. The idea that the House should roll over for the Senate because of a single special election result is just unsound.

MORE. The "freeze" idea is crazy. Why not just have voted McCain?

Bumbles Bounce

Yet once more the British tabloids have proven that Global Warming is a Hoax, because of a botched citation the details of which are sensibly discussed here and here and here and here, and which are not at all discussed sensibly by the British tabloids or Greater Wingnuttia.

Anyway, the current accusation is that climate scientists are Guilty of Fraud, because an error appears in grant applications to the American Carnegie people and to an Icelandic foundation that receives money from BRITISH TAXPAYERS omigod.

The implication of the Times article is that because this error appears in grant applications, spending money on research into the effects of climate change on Himalayan glaciers is some sort of swindle. To wit:

The Carnegie money was specifically given to aid research into "the potential security and humanitarian impact on the region" as the glaciers began to disappear. Pachauri has since acknowledged that this threat, if it exists, will take centuries to have any serious effect.

Oh good grief that is stupid.

Hey look, there are pictures.

Or for the more intrepid there are actual details.

The important actual points to bear in mind are (1) there really is no question that "a threat" exists to the Himalayan glaciers, even if it is not that they will be all gone in a quarter century; (2) there are therefore excellent, even exigent reasons to study the potential impacts of glacier loss in the Himalayas; (3) none of this has anything significant to do with the reality of global climate change and the case for same; (4) if you swallow whole the Times article with its "critics say" and "questions are being asked" crap, you're a credulous twit, and you ought to ask yourself why a newspaper article going after a scientific organization for bad peer review is gleefully doing so using absurdly transparent techniques of yellow journalism.

Though I suppose anyone likely to bother themselves with such questions in the first place would not exactly fit in with the Times' target demographic of hucksters, rubes, comments section bottom-feeders, and all-around idiots. 

Scavenger of Sports

I don't have the slightest idea what this means. It is to do with Charles Johnson suddenly realizing that the American right wing is full of lunatics (who knew), and him becoming friends with someone at Vanity Fair who doesn't like a specific fringe racist idiot (who, praise Jesus, no longer sends me crazy emails). Apparently it also involves sophisticated computer technology capable of detecting that Thomas Friedman is full of shit.

Later this year, we’ll be launching a two-pronged campaign by which we hope to increase both the reach and efficiency of the blogosphere, as well as to bring pressure to bear on the media at large. Much of this effort will involve a loose network of bloggers that we’re now in the process of recruiting in order that we might all coordinate on exposing the failures of certain news outlets, for instance. This campaign is being planned in large part around software that’s currently in development by open-source advocate and information technology specialist Andrew Stein and which we believe will assist bloggers in making better use of their medium’s existing advantages; this system will provide for a measurable advance in the manner by which bloggers may distribute, obtain, evaluate, and build upon segments of information. Between the software in question and that skill set unique to those bloggers who have successfully adapted to the information age, we expect that we’ll have some success to the extent that we receive the assistance of others who are similarly concerned about the manner in which Americans are informed about crucial issues.

Not for nothing, but as soon as I hear the words "skill set" I reach for my checkbook, to see if someone has been withdrawing money from my account without me knowing. This sounds like a load of crap pasted out of a business plan inspired by bong hits.

I remember years ago saying that the problem with Jammies Media wasn't that it was conservative, but that it was clownish. Though who's more the clown, the clown who leads, or the clown who ponies up the venture capital? Whatever.

I also somehow missed this in the NYT, an article about Johnson's boring feud with Greater Wingnuttia, which reads like an uninspired Master's thesis about an especially tedious bum-fight. Money quotes:

“I was such a small fish at the time,” Geller said. “I realized I was basically committing blog suicide by going against him. But he was wrong”... “He really did put a knife in the trans-Atlantic counterjihad movement, for a long time. People were running for cover. Nobody wanted to go against him then. He was the king.”

Yes, that's Pam Geller babbling about "the trans-Atlantic counterjihad movement."

Comment not necessary. The real question is why the NYT has thus far ignored my YouTube war with Tintin, which is far more edifying and indeed consequential. Damn liberal bias again, I suppose.

The Vacuous and the Insane

If you're interested in What Arnold Schwarzenegger has to say to Maureen Dowd, well, I don't suppose there is very much hope for you, but if you can manage to feed and dress yourself unaided, I'd call that a positive step.