In a tweet, Wonkette announces that their former advertiser, Papa John's, is not only "shitty," but "homophobic." Clarification/Correction: The tweet was by "Wonkette" and not necessarily Ken Layne, as I first assumed. Maybe it's him, maybe it's some other shrieking ninny. I don't know who does their tweeting.

Homophobic = not giving gays a pass on every nasty thing they say or do. That is the only possible definition of the word he can be using to get to this conclusion.

The site was just as gay when Papa John's was advertising on it before. The only difference is that they posted that nasty Trig post.

So the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the gentleman scholars at Wonkette believe that only homophobes could ever hold gays responsible for their actions. Truly enlightened people give them a pass on everything.

Because they're gay.

By the way, I don't know who's gay or not over there. I don't read the site (except for its regularly-scheduled Traffic Drive Outrages like this). But apparently the whole site is gay, because Ken Layne thinks the gay card can be played in favor of anything written there.

Patterico (at the link) also notes that Ken Layne apparently can't count how many children he has -- in an email to one person, he claims two plus another on the way; in another email, he claims four.

In more fallout:

Gutfeld uses a comic approach.

Tommy Christopher (who reveals, purely for context, that he is a father of two special needs children) attempts to cadge some repentance out of the unrepentant Ken Layne.

I deduct a point from Christopher for buying into the whole justification that "Palin uses Trig as a prop." In what sense? That a mother is seen in public with her child?

I do not think the left would give that justification creedance if jokes about a prominent liberal politicians' kids (I won't say who, as that would sound like a threat, and I actually don't mean to be threatening; I wouldn't do it; we wouldn't do it) suddenly became the fodder for nasty partisan "jokes."

But in fact we have seen plenty of some other politicians' kids. To some extent, every politician uses kids as "props" in the sense that they all know that kids = warm feeling. On the other hand, showing your kids is just normal. It's your life, after all, and you're selling not just your policies but the sum total of your life experiences.

I wouldn't attack Barack Obama for granting Access Hollywood exclusive interviews with his daughters. I most assuredly would not attack his daughters, who I assume just do what daddy says.

But the left feels differently. Because they never ask the shoe-on-the-other-foot question. They don't think that applies to them -- they are very comfortable, and very accustomed, to double-standards that work perpetually in their favor and vindictively against their opponents.

The noble tradition of classic liberalism descended into cynical leftism right around the same time they stopped asking the shoe-on-the-other-foot question, which is, at its heart, about trying to create fair and equal standards for all.

When they became the New (Disgusting) Left, they stopped with all that idealistic hokum and just focused on At Any Cost.

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Posted by: Ace at 07:45 AM | Comments (152)
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Immortalized -- someone's bought the domain name of the guy who posted that horrible post mocking Trig Palin and turned it into a redirect for the Down Syndrome Society donation page.

Now, Weasel Zippers calls the guy who did this a "hero." I'm not so sure. If it were a hero, an avenger, I'd guess that hero would want to nail Stuef with a bit of internet notoriety, recapitulating his awful post, before encouraging sympathy and support for those afflicted (and then redirecting to the donation page).

My suspicion is that Jack Stuef already owned his own named domain and is doing this himself as an attempt to placate advertisers.

See, he already added a half-baked, under-the-gun fake apology to his Trig post:

UPDATE: I regret this post and using the word “retarded” in a reference to Sarah Palin’s child. It’s not nice, and is not necessary, but I take responsibility for writing it. For those who came and are offended by this post: I’m sorry, of course. But I stand by my criticism of Sarah Palin using her child as a political prop.

–Jack Stuef

And yet advertisers continue to bail.

Thanks to Alice H.

By the way, I started to read other Wonkette posts, and the whole site is written like a gay gossip site. Every sentence ends in an exclamation point! And every statement is an unfunny campy sneer!

It's exhausting to read that kind of writing. It's not funny. It's just obnoxious.

It's all jumped-up hype! With exclamation points galore! Substituting for actual punchlines! For jokes! Or! Anything of interest, really!

If you can't be witty! Or interesting! Just throw an exclamation point at the end of your sentence! A punctuation-signaled poke in the ribs! So your readers know! That they were supposed to! Laugh!

Forced! Much?!

It is, as Jack Stuef might say, retarded.

That kind of forced are-we-having-fun-yet writing always reminds me of New Years Eve spent with people who don't want to be together. There's often an attempt by the hardier souls to try to convince everyone else they're having fun, when in fact they're all just depressed and would rather be elsewhere.

You know, twirl the noisemaker, randomly encourage people to do shots beyond their capacity, toss out an unconvincing (and also unconvinced) "Whoo-Hoo! Yeahhhhh!" Anything to distract from the dispiriting reality of the situation.

As a palate cleanser for the sleazy, seedy, ugly, useless, no-talent no-name no-account Jack Stuef, here's a guy tickling a baby penguin.
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Posted by: Ace at 06:59 AM | Comments (170)
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William Greider has an amusingly-shrieky piece at The Nation concering Standard & Poor's recent threats to downgrade America's debt. (Note: it was not a downgrade; it was only a threat to do so.) Savor the stupid, but stand back so you don't get hit by the flying spittle:

The deficit panic is itself bogus—poor-mouthing America to avoid raising taxes on the folks who got the money. Naturally, this reactionary approach was first promoted by Republicans, but has been tacitly embraced by the Democratic president and Congressional Democrats. No more talk from them about jobs, jobs, jobs or doing anything real to save millions of families from home foreclosures. Barack Obama promises to do the blood-letting more delicately than barbaric Republicans, protecting Social Security and Medicare and other much-loved programs. But can people believe him? They have been burned before by vague good talk.

How can you tell if a politician is lying? His lips are moving. Americans are fond of blaming those dirty damned politicians when we don't like how things turn out, but we keep sending the same dumbasses to Washington, year after year, decade after decade. People get the government they deserve, ultimately. If we have a horrible political class (and we do), it's our own fault.

"Financial Emergency SWAT Teams?" I envision a CPA version of Jack Bauer from 24: "Why did you declare this trip to Weehawken as a business expense? Tell me now! THERE'S NO TIME!"

Gold could go to $1700/oz. As I said, I believe that this price spike is "fear buying" by investors who don't know where else to put their money. Still, I don't know that gold is in a "bubble": the trendline has been very steady over the past decade. As the fiat currencies of the world weaken, gold strengthens. At some point sanity will prevail and there will be a sell-off, but I doubt we'll see gold dip below $1000/oz for a long, long time -- maybe never, depending on what happens to the USD.

Kevin Williamson at NRO's The Corner asks an interesting question.

S&P, bear in mind, is at the mercy of the federal government for its livelihood: Regulated institutions are required to use federally recognized credit-ratings agencies — it’s not AAA unless a Washington-approved firm says it’s AAA. If Washington should decide that S&P no longer qualifies to be a member of the ratings cartel, it’s basically out of business. It’s one thing to have an angry client threaten to take away his business, but a very different thing to have an angry government with the power to shut your business down making demands.

Atlas Shrugged has become a documentary, not a fictional cautionary tale.

It's good to be the King. It's also good to be friends of the King.

The NYT seems to be advocating for high-speed rail here. I say "seems to", because in the entire piece there really is no actual justification for high-speed rail, just declarations that cutting funding for various rail projects is a mistake. Why this is so we are never told; perhaps the NYT editorial board thinks the point is so obvious that it can be left unsaid. My only take-away from this fingernail-paring of an editorial is this: the lefties really like their choo-choo trains, don't they?

George Will had a recent column on liberal fervor for trains.

To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.

[UPDATE 1]: Tax-hikes ain't gonna do it, folks. Never mind the dubious morality of the "soak the rich" theory -- it won't work.

[UPDATE 2]: You know it's hard times out there when even major-league baseball franchises are going broke. (But this is the legendarily ill-managed Dodger franchise, whose owners managed to bankrupt their team in spite of being in a lucrative market and having a splendid location and home field.)

[UPDATE 3]: Another sign of how bad things are getting in Major League Baseball -- they're now hiring robots to throw the ceremonial first pitch. Downside: we're losing jobs to Skynet already. Upside: at least the robot doesn't throw like a girl, unlike a certain President of the United States who shall go unnamed to spare him the shame.

[UPDATE 4]: The four national debts.
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Posted by: Monty at 05:23 AM | Comments (82)
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Listen and understand. The machine is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever . . . until you're dead.*

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:08 AM | Comments (161)
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Collateral damage:

An Oscar-nominated film director and war photographer was killed Wednesday in the besieged city of Misrata while covering battles between rebels and Libyan government forces. Three other Western photographers apparently working alongside him were wounded.

I understand that that's a good, gripping documentary. But here's the thing: I hope the liberal swells do not take his death as a sudden reason to get ground troops into this situation. Not only would that be a mistake, it would almost be cruel in how blatant the message is sent: Only the important people are important.

The man was British-born, and the British are already escalating their presence there, one advisor at a time. I remember doing that some time ago.

By encouraging and assisting rebel resistance, as George Bush Snr did with the Shias of southern Iraq in 1991, Britain and France risk worsening the plight of the Libyan civilians they are primarily pledged to defend. The UN and concerned aid agencies all agree the humanitarian situation is growing steadily worse, the longer the conflict continues. These considerations have led former British foreign secretary David Owen, among others, to urge the creation of Bosnian or Kurdish-style “safe havens”, starting with an exclusion zone around Misrata defended by British and French troops.

But how long before allied troops so deployed were themselves drawn into direct engagements with pro-Gaddafi forces, be they regular army, mercenary or civilian? Pernicious mission creep tends to blind affected decision-makers to such obvious concerns. “Just as Benghazi was saved within hours, so must Misrata be. We have probably only a few days …” Owen wrote in the Times. In other words, don’t think about it. Just do it.

Not a good idea, definitely not for the US, which has taken on two recent missions to save foreigners from their bad situations and should not be eager to repeat that. And I'd urge the British and French to keep out, too.

Thanks to Jane D'oh.

Posted by: Ace at 06:27 PM | Comments (54)
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Whoever told you that there would be no math on the ONT was lying.

Could You Pass Harvard's Entrance Exam From 1869?

Almost certainly not. And I'm betting that even a contemporary Harvard classics major would have a hard time.

Of course a lot of this is due to the fact that high school curricula are vastly different these days and no longer 'classical' in any sense. But still an advanced high schooler ought to be able to pass the math and geometry sections and do semi-decently on the history and geography parts.

You can see the whole exam here.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:18 PM | Comments (910)
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The prosecution of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri will be the first modern capital military commission:

Military officials allege that Nashiri, a Saudi citizen of Yemeni descent, joined al-Qaeda in 1998 and that he was a long-time associate of Osama bin Laden. The military alleged he arranged for two suicide bombers to pull alongside the USS Cole on Oct. 12, 2000, in an explosive-laden boat and detonate it.

The force of the blast ripped a 30-foot-by-30-foot hole in the side of the ship. Seventeen American sailors were killed, and an additional 40 were wounded.

Nashiri was also charged Wednesday with organizing an attack on a French oil tanker in the Gulf of Aden that resulted in the death of a crew member.

The charges are murder, terrorism, attacking civilians, and causing bodily injury all in violation of the laws of war.

This is kind of a big deal. The military courts martial system has handled capital cases before; it's rare, but the UCMJ sets out how to do it. Under the UCMJ, the President must personally approve each execution before it is carried out. The military commissions rules are different and to a great extent are still evolving based on the district court habeas cases that a very divided Supreme Court allowed a few years ago.

I have no idea what the Guantanamo military commissions are capable of handling or whether the President will have to approve a sentence of death. But even beyond the procedural difficulties, Nashiri is one of the prisoners that we know has been waterboarded and subjected to other forms of enhanced interrogation. Do you want to bet that plays a part in his trial?

Update: Perhaps I didn't make this clear enough, what with that big ol' headline up there and, y'know, the content of the post, but this will be a military commission with DOD as both prosecutor and judge and, come to think of it, providing some counsel for the defense as well.

It will not be prosecuted by the Department of Justice and it does not come within AG Holder's reach.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:02 PM | Comments (252)
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Meh.

Argue away, and open thread.
*updated for clarity*- we only need 270 votes to win outright.
Also, if it went to a 269-269 tie, so long as Republicans retain control of the House after the 2012 elections AND a majority of the states' delegations go GOP in the tie-breaker vote, we win as well. We are likely to maintain the majority, but it comes down to the delegation by state.

Posted by: CAC at 02:25 PM | Comments (142)
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I wanted to mention this earlier but seriously? They do this for attention. They put up this hateful shit just to get linked. Every leftwing website links them, and then every rightwing site does eventually too.

I don't want to mention them. So do I play their game? Nah.

I know that Nick Denton's sites appeal to some people. I guess Deadpsin is his, right? And isn't there a tech one? And the various girl-oriented gossip blogs?

The point is, a lot of conservatives are basically enabling this by going to those sites. Jezebel, the rest of them. Stop going. Not just to Wonkette, which is a relatively small cog in the Denton blog-machine. All of them. Get your celebrity gossip from some other site, and your tech stuff from wherever. But stop patronizing this man's vile sites. Correction: rori says Denton no longer owns Wonkette; I'm looking into that. He still owns the almost-as-vile Gawker, though, the one that did an article on Christine O'Donnell's bush. rori updates to tell me that POS Ken Layne apparently bought out the site and is now the owner.

Okay, that out of my system: There's a boycott on and Papa John's pizza is withdrawing advertising from Wonkette now.

Posted by: Ace at 01:57 PM | Comments (125)
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Always remember that the professional media class who pontificates us has no expertise, or even training, and often not even any basic familiarity with the wide world of subjects they lecture you about.

I do that, too. But I admit it all the time.

Rob Long writes:

Look, the point isn't that Friedman made a stupid prediction. We all make stupid predictions. The point is that we have a pundit class that's uniquely unqualified to pronounce on business, and business opportunities, and yet arrogantly and pompously does so anyway. There's something monumentally irritating about Friedman's flatulently confident assertions, backed up as they are without a shred of experience, knowledge, or skin in the game. It's worth remembering -- especially these days, when business and economic predictions keep erupting from the noisy, nasty, uninformed bowels of the pundit class.

They've done nothing but comment on stuff other (better) people are doing but they're pretty sure they should be ordering the doers to hop to and follow plans of their devising.

A point made a while ago -- forget who -- is that Amazon.com's real value is that it is a trusted medium of exchange on the internet. Entering credit card information is still a wiggy thing for most people (myself included) when going to an unknown, or even known, vendor; Amazon's great value comes from the fact that they've been around so long they've substantially overcome that.

Amazon has a lot of third-party vendors selling through it. Amazon actually does the money collecting, then passes it on to the third party, after taking a nice cut for their trouble. Works out for everyone -- these rinky-dink vendors who no one would otherwise trust get to make their sales, and Amazon gets their slice, and everyone's happy.

So what Amazon is really selling at this point is convenience and trust in their credit-card billing system. People who control stuff like this -- the metastructure of commerce -- that basically have a license to print money. Just take a little slice out of millions of transactions and pretty soon you're talking serious money.

Early on, skeptics said of Amazon, "Well, their profit margins are razor thin; they're basically selling you four quarters for a dollar. There is no money in it and never will be."

Bezos said that wasn't true -- of course we're making a profit, duh, he countered -- but even if he had been operating at break-even or a loss he was piling up what would ultimately be Amazon's power. Just market-share and trust.

Now Amazon can sell you a lot of stuff at prices that either aren't at any kind of attractive discount or even might be a little over-priced but, what the hell, it's easy, let me just push these three buttons and order this thing even if it costs me a few extra bucks.

Anyway, I don't suppose Friedman could have foreseen that in 1999, but then, it's not like he foresaw most of it and just missed that neat twist. He missed it all.

And will continue missing it all. Because he doesn't know anything. Almost none of them do.

Powerline (the first link) gets in a further dig at Friedman by comparing Amazon stock's prices with the New York Times stock's.

Kind of predictable, though Friedman failed to predict it: A company that offers a useful product will prosper and a company that offers dreck will suffer.

Posted by: Ace at 01:48 PM | Comments (51)
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