Editor and Publisher magazine helpfully points out how conservative talk radio drove innocent ACORN workers into the arms of work be child prostitution entrepreneurs by investigating allegations of voter fraud and voter registration fraud and insisting others do the same. Somehow there are no mentions of actual convictions of ACORN workers or ACORN itself in the article.
(h/t)
-elsewhere-
Hope is fading fast – you have to click through for the picture. It is the best use of the Hope poster I have seen.
(h/t)
The NY Times mutable policy on illegally acquired documents -
Am I wrong in thinking that this is a change in policy for the NYT? Hasn’t the Grey Lady published illegally obtained documents on national security and other matters in the past?
Glenn Beck advises troops not to re-enlist – I advise people not to watch Glenn Beck. This is apparently in response to a report that three Navy SEALs are to be court-martialed for assualt on a captured terrorist. I don’t know any of the legal details of the case but given the circumstances and the fact that they were offered NJP first my guess is that after the terrorist was captured and subdued one of the SEALs gave him a whack in the mouth. If that’s the case they were in the wrong and should have just taken their Mast and gone on with their lives. They are the ones who chose a court-martial and I have a feeling it is going to be a bad choice. 1/2 of 1 months pay for 3 months vs. a year or so in the brig. (I say this as someone who attended a couple Captains Masts back when I was a boy and in the Navy)
Andrew Sullivan – “I remain absurdly confident that he (Obama) is on the right path.”
Andrew Sullivan moved from one state of delusion to another this morning, writing -
His numbers are gliding downward (although not by much), his foreign policy gains are structural and have as yet no tangible results, a critical Mid-East ally, Israel, is doing all it can to destroy his credibility with the Muslim world, his health insurance reform is still not passed, the debt is simply staggering (and the GOP’s willingness to blame it all on him is as shameless as it can be convincing to those who know nothing and think less), etc etc.
(…)
I think Obama’s handling of the economic crisis has been about as good as it reasonably gets; I think his handling of Iran is equally adroit; I find his relentless emphasis on reality in Afghanistan a good sign; I suspect the only way to get health insurance reform is the way he has attempted; I think the stimulus was necessary and sufficient; and I think unemployment will be coming down when he runs for re-election. On those issues I differ with him on – accountability for war crimes and civil rights – I can see the cool and cunning logic of his moves so far. The depth and complexity of the problems he faces remain immense. Perhaps he will prove incapable of surmounting them. But his persistence matters here. And we are not yet a year in.
He is strategy; his opponents are tacticians. And in my view, their tactics are consigning them to a longer political death than if they had taken a more constructive course. I could be wrong on all this, of course. History makes fools of us all. But this is my take as of now. And my relief at his being there remains profound.
Between this and your obsession with Sarah Palin’s gynecological history I’m pretty sure you’re around the deep end.
-elsewhere-
Finally – Fox News Management Fed Up by Mistakes – I like Fox’s actual news programming and Special Report but a great deal of what is broadcast there is just embarrassing. Perfect example is Fox and Friends what a bunch of bumbling nincompoops.
ACORN dumping documents before an investigation?
Hot Air – WaPo reports on East Anglia CRU e-mails, global-warming controversy – Surprising
Moe Lane – Yes. That Lamont primary challenge worked out *so* well.
I cannot resist asking: does anybody over on the Other Side sometimes, ah, regret, aiming at a king – and missing?
I wonder basically the same thing every time I see Lieberman on the news.
I don’t have any sort of unifying theme for this weeks Rule 5 it’s just three people who are generating google hits for me
Jean Claude Van Damme
Dita Von Teese
and Cory Everson
Enjoy. Tell your friends – make them visit. I hit 15,000 page views so I surpassed my goal of 5000 for the month but if I could make 20000 that would be better.
Moving up in the world – Four links this week.
Dustbury hattipped me for the link to Hot Atheist Girls
Bill Quick tossed me into the ranks of the ignorati although he did point out my ignorance was honest and not malevolent.
The Classic Liberal questioned my questioning of his authoritah
finally Little Miss Attila joined in my contempt for gaping butthole Thomas Friedman
I dedicate the following song to his understanding of what conservatives believe.
Big Brass Ones – Andrew Breitbart tells Eric Holder “Investigate ACORN or we will release more tapes right before the election”
Oh my goodness there are! Not only are there more tapes, it’s not just ACORN. And this message is to Attorney General Holder: I want you to know that we have more tapes, it’s not just ACORN, and we’re going to hold out until the next election cycle, or else if you want to do a clean investigation, we will give you the rest of what we have, we will comply with you, we will give you the documentation we have from countless ACORN whistleblowers who want to come forward but are fearful of this organization and the retribution that they fear that this is a dangerous organization. So if you get into an investigation, we will give you the tapes; if you don’t give us the tapes, we will revisit these tapes come election time.
How many more tapes can they have? At what point does a good looking girl in a short skirt and a nerdy guy is a fur coat asking about using government funds to start an child prostitution ring start to ring alarm bells?
In any case I am watching for the news conference announcing Andrew Brietbart’s arrest for some heinous crime soon. He will probably be shot trying to “escape”.
-elsewhere-
CNN Poll – Blame for recession shifting from GOP to Dems
A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday morning indicates that 38 percent of the public blames Republicans for the country’s current economic problems. That’s down 15 points from May, when 53 percent blamed the GOP. According to the poll 27 percent now blame the Democrats for the recession, up 6 points from May. Twenty-seven percent now say both parties are responsible for the economic mess.
…
Thirty-six percent of people questioned say that President Barack Obama’s policies have improved economic conditions, with 28 percent feeling that the president’s programs have made things worse, and 35 percent saying what he’s done has had no effect on the economy.
Hacked e-mails prove global warming hoax? – probably not but they throw fuel on the fire.
(more)
Psalms 109:8 – “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.”
The rest of Psalm 109 is quite a bit darker, reading in part –
May his(O) children be fatherless
and his wife a widow!
10May his children(P) wander about and beg,
(Q) seeking food far from the ruins they inhabit!
11May(R) the creditor seize all that he has;
may strangers plunder the fruits of his toil!
12Let there be none to(S) extend kindness to him,
nor any to(T) pity his fatherless children!
13May his(U) posterity be cut off;
may his(V) name be blotted out in the second generation!
14May(W) the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the LORD,
and let not the sin of his mother be(X) blotted out!
15(Y) Let them be before the LORD continually,
that he may(Z) cut off the memory of them from the earth!
People seem to be ignoring that part. For the record I want Obama to lose the next election I don’t want anything physically bad to happen to him or his family.
(Yes I know, Psalm 109 is not God talking. It is someone talking to God but the title “LOL- Some guy in the Bible wants Obama out of office doesn’t work”)
-elsewhere-
Irony – A Chinese court actually enforces intellectual property rights. Against one of the biggest victims of intellectual property theft in China – Microsoft.
Slate publishes and unauthorized index to Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue”
The Washington Post publishes the best book review ever – Ana Marie Cox reviews Going Rogue without reading it
(h/t)
She then participates in a Q and A about the book in which she admits she still hasn’t finished it. One very interesting thing from the interview –
Arlington, VA: Do you think Obabma’s worst nightmare would be a race against Palin? Even with a strong economy, his advisers must believe he’d be in for the fight of his life, no?
Ana Marie Cox: Uhm, no, I don’t think Obama believes that.
More than one WH staffer has pledged to max out to her campaign should she actually run.
So with three years for image revitalization and too come up to speed on national issues they are willing to just write her off like that? That seems a little overconfident.
LA Times – Obama was fine with military commisions way during his short time in the Senate
They really said a brief member of the Senate – same difference. It appears that the luster is coming off faster and faster.
-elsewhere-
The quest for Obama’s birth certificate lives on
No chance of China letting the Yuan rise against the dollar.
Dems finally notice flight of independents
Obama popularity below 50%. – This makes me hopeful we won’t have to put up with this clown beyond 2012.
Thomas Friedman is an ignorant lying scumbag
If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims. One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.
But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. They believe it is much better for America that the world be dependent on oil for energy — a commodity largely controlled by countries that hate us and can only go up in price as demand increases — rather than on clean power technologies that are controlled by us and only go down in price as demand increases. And, finally, they believe that people in the developing world are very happy being poor — just give them a little running water and electricity and they’ll be fine. They’ll never want to live like us.
Yes, the opponents of any tax on carbon to stimulate alternatives to oil must believe all these things because that is the only way their arguments make any sense.
This is the worst kind of hyperbole, because he has to know it isn’t true. These statements are so over the top that it is just unbelievable. I am just going to say before you start throwing accusations you might want to look at who has actually been pushing for things like nuclear plants. The problem with the green energy that Friedman proposes is it isn’t actually green and it is much more expensive than conventional energy.
5000 or so solely on the awesome drawing power of Jean Claude van Damme and Dita von Teese. I don’t know if this is good, bad or average but considering I am just an unemployed girl in Seattle without any real special insight into the world I am fairly happy with it.
What did you guys think? I don’t think she hurt herself any, but I don’t think she helped much either. It was a wash.
Over at Memeorandum I found a review of Going Rogue that kind of sums up the attitude I am perceiving -
Like a lot of people, as soon as I got my copy of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue,” I immediately thought of the German literary critic Hans Robert Jauss.
Jauss is known as the father of critical reception theory. According to Jauss, every book is read in a social context. In his view, the reader’s attitudes, beliefs, values and judgments are just as important as the text. Sometimes more.
(…)
Through no fault of her own, Sarah Palin has become a sort of political lens, refracting the different ways conservatives and liberals see the world. To her supporters, she is, as she puts it, a “common-sense conservative” who isn’t afraid to make moral judgments. To her detractors, she’s a moronic zealot who has no place in American public life. The two interpretations are concrete. “Going Rogue” won’t do much to change any minds. But for what it reveals about our current political culture, Hans Robert Jauss would say it can’t be beat.
(source)
(Some) proof of Continetti’s conclusions can be found just by going through the related articles at Memeorandum.
Andrew Sullivan – hated her during the campaign, obviously still despises her. If she came out tomorrow and announced that in her spare time she had cured cancer and invented a car that runs on the universal ether he would still proclaim her a brain-dead Barbie who faked the pregnancy of her last child.
OK, I can’t prove it now. I had a counterbalancing link to Sullivan’s review but memeorandum updated and I lost it so I am changing my thesis to Some proof. 
Speaking of Palin – Today’s Wall Street Journal “The Rationing Commission, Meet the unelected body that will dictate future medical decisions.”
Like most of Europe, the various health bills stipulate that Congress will arbitrarily decide how much to spend on health care for seniors every year—and then invest an unelected board with extraordinary powers to dictate what is covered and how it will be paid for. White House budget director Peter Orszag calls this Medicare commission “critical to our fiscal future” and “one of the most potent reforms.”
(…)
But a decade from now, such limits are off—which also happens to be roughly the time when ObamaCare’s spending explodes. The hard budget cap means there is only so much money to be divvied up for care, with no account for demographic changes, such as longer life spans, or for the increasing incidence of diabetes, heart disease and other chronic conditions.
(h/t)
Sounds a little like Palin’s “Death Panels” doesn’t it?
-Found the positive review It’s so over the top I almost think it’s satire so you can kind of see what I mean.
