We’ve finally upgraded to the current version of WordPress (after much heartache and a day or so off line), and I wonder if it’s fixed some comment posting problems. (You know who you are.) We turn away so much spam, it’s a shame that some of our favorite readers can’t comment freely. Here’s hoping anyway.
Usually not, but sometimes I love a good pissing match. Especially when one of the micturaters is so humorless and, well, pissy.
If you read James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today column on the Wall Street Journal Online (as I do), you know that his last item is a lighter piece, often humorous.
One Brent Budowsky has a piece in the Hill on ObamaCare and the Supreme Court that is so staggeringly dumb, the only explanation we can come up with for it is that he’s trying to make President Obama look smart by comparison. Here’s the lead paragraph:
President Obama is absolutely right about this: If the Supreme Court rules the healthcare bill unconstitutional, it would be an overreach that would be an extreme example of judicial activism that violates the most core principles of what is called conservatism and, I would argue, would lead to a destructive historical break point in the history of the United States Supreme Court that would tarnish forever the reputation of the chief justice and the conservative majority of justices for centuries to come.
This may be the worst-written opinion piece in history, including college papers.
An opening sentence of 82 words—that wouldn’t pass muster in seventh grade. Nothing about content, so far, it just sucks as writing. It’s not like every sentence I’ve typed is E. B. White, but, holy mackerel, I couldn’t have written that badly with a gun to my head and some sweaty villain commanding me to write like Tom Friedman.
He also tries an appeal to the ladies:
I find it ironic, outrageous and profoundly troubling that a Supreme Court majority of five men would join and at times lead an ideological attack on laws and programs that benefit women. This is unbecoming and unwise for a partisan party in the legislative and executive branches. It is radical, unprecedented and outside of American judicial tradition when a Supreme Court majority of five men wage an ideological crusade that places laws and programs benefiting women, by result if not design, under attack by the judicial branch while under attack by Republican partisans in Congress.
He adds: “My warning to the Supreme Court majority is this: Be careful.” We’re sure the justices are losing sleep over that one.
That’s it. That’s all Taranto wrote. But Budowsky will not be mocked:
Taranto’s angry comments about my column ran in The Wall Street Journal’s online edition and were limited to calling my column staggeringly dumb, an attempt by me to make President Obama (whom Taranto presumably thinks is dumb as well) look smart by comparison, and so forth. Taranto does not answer any of the points I made, so I must infer, and note that his invective without reasoning illustrates why armies of women and Hispanics are supporting President Obama and Democrats.
Republicans, rightists and some who make the Journal opinion page their home have an attitude of contempt, derision and anger toward those with differing views. Stay tuned for an upcoming column that elaborates about this “Republican disease” that leads them to demonize, and at times hate, a succession of Democratic presidents and leaders whom in their contempt for democratic values they do not accept as legitimate.
Oy. But believe it or not, it gets worse:
I stand with the women, Hispanics and others who want to be treated with equality and respect. I welcome the debate, with or without Taranto’s intellectual participation. I can only say to those of his persuasion that there are reasons that so many women and Hispanics turn against the GOP.
The fault, dear Republicans, lies not in your stars but in yourselves, for these voters consider you underlings. You treat them as though they are stupid at your great peril, not mine.
If you’re going to stand with them, Budowsky, you might at least take a shower.
Oh, but that’s just another ad hominem attack from an anonymous blogger. Let me stick with the facts. Women don’t vote for Republicans? That would surprise Rick Santorum. It would also surprise the 50 million women (outnumbering the 45 million men) who voted in the November 2010 election who delivered a Republican (even a Tea Party) majority in the House and put the Senate in GOP reach for 2012.
But let me stick with the most basic fact, as first stated by Taranto:
One Brent Budowsky has a piece in the Hill on ObamaCare and the Supreme Court that is so staggeringly dumb, the only explanation we can come up with for it is that he’s trying to make President Obama look smart by comparison.
That’s where we came in, so sorry to waste your time.
World Ends, Etc.
“Mr. Taranto Goes to Washington; Women, Hispanics Reject Party, Partisanship, Personal Attacks”–headline, TheHill.com, April 10
Which is how I first heard about it. Game, set, match Taranto.
Jungle Trader is back on line!
West Africa
In Nigeria a lion took the lives of two herders.
Posted by DEC at 9:33 AMBrief Marriage
A Russian bride killed her husband on their wedding day.
Posted by DEC at 8:18 AMMONDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2012
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Comedian David Cross snorted cocaine at the White House.
Posted by DEC at 10:49 PM
That would be the Obama White House, if you were wondering.
We get comment spam. That’s about all we get, in fact. But never have we received comment spam in the form of epic poetry. I think he’ selling discount software, but I really don’t care. The IP address is linked to the Republic of Moldova. Whatever he’s selling, he should switch to verse full time. This is Homeric:
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After not being able to get on the site myself since mid-morning, I tried to access the server’s site, email them, and even call them. The server’s site was no more responsive than the blog, my email was never received—even the telephone number associated with the company was disconnected!
I was on the blogspot website, looking to see how easy it was to transfer a blog over, when, somehow, the blog came up. For now!
Strange times.
We get tons and tons of comment spam, as do, I suppose, most blogs. Some make no effort to disguise their commercialism; some aren’t even in English (Polish is popular).
But some try to ingratiate themselves with high praise that would make even the most narcissistic emperor blush. They’re still trying to sell you Japanese electronics or anal suppositories (I get those two confused), but they know, even with their tortured grammar, that flattery will get them everywhere. Except on our website.
But there is the exception:
No matter the ending is perfect or not, you cannot disappear from my world.
[Shudder] I think they were selling shoes. I encourage you to go buy some.
Last year on this date, I was a bit more reflective. This year, I’m just feeling my age.
Six years! As Samuel Goldwyn said, “We’ve all passed a lot of water since then.”
How cheesy can a nativity scene get? You don’t want to know.
My three favorites:
The obligatory dog nativity:
I recognize some of them from the poker painting.
The Who’s Hungry? nativity (definitely not kosher):
And the zombie nativity:
Here’s a bonus scene:
For unto us, a rampaging reptile is born, the living son of Godzilla. (Sorry, sort of, for the sacrilege. You can firebomb my house later.)
Shame if something happened to it.
Earlier this month, a trial attorney employed by the Justice Department’s criminal division sent a formal request to WordPress (the blogging software company) to freeze for 90 days “all stored communications, records, and other evidence in your possession” regarding three climate-skeptic blogs. ClimateAudit.org — written by Canadian Steve McIntyre and hosted on WordPress’ U.S.-based servers — was one of that trio. So was Tallbloke’s Talkshop, written by a U.K. resident and published at tallbloke.wordpress.com.
The Justice Department is interested in WordPress records spanning three days — Nov. 21 to 23 inclusive. At 4:09 a.m. on Nov. 22, someone calling themselves FOIA made a comment on McIntyre’s blog. It consisted solely of a link to a zip file posted online at a Russian Web address. The zip file contained 5,000 emails written by some of the most prominent names in climate science.
Dubbed Climategate 2, these documents are still being examined and sifted. But emails have already come to light in which scientists employed by publicly funded universities in the U.K. and elsewhere discuss the deliberate deletion and removal of records from university computers. (In the U.K., altering or deleting documents in an attempt to circumvent freedom of information legislation is a criminal offense.)
In these emails individuals such as the University of Pennsylvania’s Michael Mann also talk about “the cause” they feel they are advancing. Moreover, these exchanges make it abundantly clear that the experts who’ve been conducting climate research (and writing reports about that research for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) have privately expressed doubts about the robustness of many of their findings.
…
Tallbloke received the link shortly past 9 a.m. and appears to have been the first person to blog about it.
Which may be the reason he has attracted special police attention. Last week, six officers, from three different divisions and armed with a search warrant, raided his Yorkshire home. They spent more than three hours there and although they assured him he isn’t a suspect, seized two of his laptops and an Internet router.
Tallbloke says the U.K. police told him they requested the assistance of the U.S. Justice Department, rather than the other way around. He also says they were “well-mannered and did not overreact” when he declined to give them his WordPress password. “I politely explained that they had a warrant to search my house, not my head.”If the authorities are trying to identify the person who calls themselves FOIA (an acronym often associated with the Freedom of Information Act) who left these links, it makes sense for them to examine WordPress records, since all three blogs are hosted on its servers. But I am aware of no reasonable explanation as to how violating the sanctity of a non-suspect blogger’s home and invading his privacy by seizing his laptops (which, no doubt, contain banking and other sensitive information) could possibly be helpful.
Nor is it obvious why the Justice Department asked WordPress “not to disclose the existence” of its notice to the bloggers themselves. (To its credit, WordPress forwarded a copy of the Justice Department’s letter to those concerned nonetheless.)
This is all rather chilling. It appears that being the proprietor of a blog in which strangers leave links pointing to material on third-party websites now exposes one to being raided by the police.
As a commenter on another skeptic blog has observed: “the mere fact of the raid is ‘intimidating’ (potentially) to many…. Some are braver or better situated than others to handle police scrutiny but NO ONE should have to face police raids merely for having a blog.”
We have a blog. We use WordPress. We are skeptics about climate change, about the Justice Department, about Barack Obama and his entire administration. Just let us know when you’re coming, officers, so we can put the kettle on.
You wouldn’t know it from the rants below, but I love the holiday. I’m working on a few side dishes myself, while others work on the turkey and stuffing. Homemade desserts also await.
Further rants will have to wait until to the post-prandial stupor has worn off. I’d say sometime in April.
All the best to our beloved Bloodthirstani.
It’s not often we get comments to posts 4 1/2 years old, and even less often that I pay any attention to them, but this one is worth a second of my time, if not yours:
Who is one to decide who a terrorist is, and whether to kill them or not. Only The Most High has that power. And since we are profiling people anyway, according to the above paragraphs, who is one to even say that these people are even, I don’t know, TERRORISTS! And the “who”we are talking about, should really look up the definition to the word terrorist before that “who” profiles anybody. With a heart like “who” has, obviously off of mere words, as we can see(read) just above here(last paragraph), shows a beginning stage of terrorism. In case “who” doesn’t know, a terrorist is an individual who uses violence, terror, and intimidation to achieve a result. Wait a minute, isn’t that what the USA does, and is all about. All I am saying to “who”m it may concern, look at yourself before you look at anybody else, cause wishing death upon somebody, (even off Amendment 1), is and always will be a terror act. And last time I checked, people get arrested just by your mere words “who”, to another individual. Do an extensive research before you talk bad about somebody
Okay, what’d I do this time? In my years as a blogger, I have angered Palestinian-Arab supporters, Katrina victims, liberals in general, International Criminal Court advocates, and Buddhists. On the whole, a record to be proud of.
So, what did I do to p*ss off this writer? How did I display the wisdom of kill-’em-all Saul over the wisdom of Sol?
Terrorist Trading Cards
Swap ‘em with your friends:
Israeli daily newspaper of Maariv on Monday published a list of names and photos of Al-Qassam Brigades leaders that the Israeli army intends to assassinate in its targeted killing operations.
The Israeli security cabinet ratified a decision in their Sunday session to liquidate all the Hamas and Islamic Jihad military and political leaders who the Israeli authorities accuse of involvement in “terrorist attacks”.
The most wanted on the list is Muhammad Deif, who is a Hamas-affiliated Al Qassam Brigades leader. The list also contained the current general leader of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Ahmad Al-Ja’bari, the leader in the northern Gaza Strip, Ahmad Ghandoor, the deputy general leader, Raed Sa’d, in addition to Marwan ‘Isa, who is also affiliated to the Al Qassam Brigades, and the Islamic Jihad-affiliated Al-Quds Brigades’ leader, Khalid Mansour.
You’ll see at the site the mugs of the thugs on playing cards. We leave it to the marketplace to decide which is more valuable, a terrorist dead or alive. I know which I’d choose.
I like it when readers challenge us, even 4 1/2 years later. We’re either wrong, and have to correct the record; or we’re right, and who doesn’t love to be right and say I told you so?
The original story was from the Palestinian-Arab news agency, Maan, so I assume there’s no accusation of bias or misrepresentation. It says Muhammad Deif is head of the Al-Qassam Brigades, sometimes known as the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamass. (Do they have another wing?) In addition to shelling southern Israel incessantly (along with their buddies in Islamic Jihad), they kidnapped Gilad Shalit and held him without visits from the Red Cross or other aid agencies for five years. You can read about their other activities here (scroll down to section on Hamass).
I don’t know. They sound like terrorists to me.
In a December 2010 booklet marking the 23rd anniversary of the establishment of Hamas, Mohammed Def, head of the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, wrote: “We say to our enemies: you are going on the path to extinction, and Palestine will remain ours….You have no right to even an inch of it.”
Ahmed al-Jaabari, the acting supreme commander of the al-Qassam Brigades, wrote: “Our eyes will…not be confined to the borders of Gaza. Our plan of struggle shall extend as always, sooner or later, to our entire plundered country….As long as the Zionists occupy our lands, only death or exile await them.”
Senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Haya told al-Hayat on November 11, 2010: “We retain our Islamic, Arab and Palestinian faith that Palestine will be returned to its inhabitants and Zionist existence will conclude….The Jews will have no right there, save for those who lived on Palestinian land prior to the First World War” (meaning that only Jews above the age of 96 will be permitted to live in Islamic Palestine).
And then there’s that Mansour fellow:
“[Condoleeza] Rice is really and truly a succubus, and like Lucifer she deserves to be struck with stones – and as an extra sign of how despised she is – she should also be struck with shoes … that is if the militants don’t hurl something at her even more harmful than stones and shoes.”
By Khalid Mansour
By the way, this does not appear to be the same Khalid Mansour who befriended Barack Obama (though you never know!):
Khalid al-Mansour is black Muslim and a black nationalist who was rumored to have close ties to US Senator and Presidential candidate Barack Obama.
The allegations first surfaced in late March, when former Manhattan Borough president Percy Sutton told a New York cable channel that a former business partner who was “raising money” for Obama had approached him in 1988 to help Obama get into Harvard Law School.
In the interview, Sutton says he first heard of Obama about twenty years ago from Khalid Al-Mansour, a Black Muslim and Black Nationalist who was a “mentor” to the founders of the Black Panther party at the time the party was founded in the early 1960s.
Sutton described al-Mansour as advisor to “one of the world’s richest men,” Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal.
Sutton knew Al-Mansour well, since the two men had been business partners and served on several corporate boards together.
As Sutton remembered, Al-Mansour was raising money for Obama’s education and seeking recommendations for him to attend Harvard Law School.
“I was introduced to (Obama) by a friend who was raising money for him,” Sutton told NY1 city hall reporter Dominic Carter. “The friend’s name is Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, from Texas.”
Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt told Newsmax that Sutton’s account was “bogus” and a “fabrication that has been retracted” by a spokesman for the Sutton family.
There doesn’t seem to be more to the story than that: an allegation and a denial. Not much by way of evidence. So let’s consider that myth busted.
That research extensive enough for you, commenter?
It’s kind of bothered me lately that we’re so negative here—I know I am. It’s negativity with a purpose, admittedly, and in pursuit of a moral cause, but still a bit of a bummer.
I appreciate Aggie’s posts about extreme sheepherding and super alter kockers, and think maybe I should contribute such items a bit more myself. I’m not really such a bitter person; in fact, I can tell a pretty good joke.
Why did the corrupt Democrat, who coddled public-sector unions in exchange for their campaign contributions, and who voted against cutting off funds to the Palestinian Arabs despite their rejection of—and bombardment of—the state of Israel, shortly after “forgetting” to declare rental properties as income, cross the road?
I forget. But it’s killer.
Okay, if I don’t do humor, I can at least do classical music. This is magic:
Many years ago in college, a friend had a single ticket to see Christoph Eschenbach at Carnegie Hall. He was sick and offered it to me. I didn’t even know what was on the program. It turned out to be Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas. The recital still stands as one of the greatest experiences of my life. Each sonata was greater than the last, the performances getting deeper, more personal, completely hypnotizing. When the ghostly last notes of the Opus 111 died away, there was only silence. Awed, devastated, timeless, grateful silence. Eventually, we applauded and he bowed. But there were no encores. There was nothing more to say that night.
It’s nice to see the old boy still has his touch.