I don't have enough time to post at two blogs these days, so I'm mostly confining my blogular activities to Rumproast. Please catch me over there. I can also be reached via email at the link on this page, though to be honest, I don't check it as often as I should. Cheers!
Pardon our dustbunnies...
Kevin DuJan: Suckers Never Sleep
The loopy huckster at Hillbuzz, Kevin DuJan, is at it again, dragging random people -- yours truly among them -- into his fantasy world to gin up donations. Backstory here.
Mrs. Polly of Snarkopolitan, another innocent party involuntarily playing Sauron to DuJan’s Hildo Douchebaggins, has responded here. [THWACK!]
I offer the following graphic novelini as MY response:
KEVIN DUJAN: SUCKERS NEVER SLEEP (CHAPTER ONE)
That morning in late November didn’t seem like an especially auspicious day when Hillbuzz.org blogger Kevin DuJan awoke. A stranger's chewed-off arm rested under his head on a pillow, like most Saturday mornings.
He tossed it onto the pile with the others and logged onto his PayPal site.
Blanching in horror at the dwindling sum in the Hillbuzz account, he quickly called a meeting with his co-bloggers, known collectively as The Boyz. (Some people don't believe The Boyz are real, but they totally ARE. Latex is real...)
DuJan and The Boyz discussed how The War Widow Incident had cut into their receipts and readership. All agreed that it wasn’t DuJan’s fault -- that stupid War Widow had it coming for refusing to volunteer for the USO.
The meeting stretched on into lunch, with Dujan and The Boyz discussing ways to get the donations flowing again. DuJan ate most of the pizza.
Well, all of it, actually. But DuJan totally deserved it all since he had the only workable idea: Play the victim card. The Boyz -- Koala, Kevorkian and Juanito -- looked skeptical (well, to DuJan anyway). But the last time DuJan slandered a bunch of strangers in pursuit of cash from the gullible chumps who read his site, it had panned out well.
DuJan's tale of woe and persecution was linked by numerous irresponsible, high-profile wingnuts (including Glenn Reynolds) who didn’t bother to check if his story held water (it didn’t). The money rolled in, as did appearances on Breitbart “TV” and assorted wingnut podcast outfits.
So, even though The Boyz are totally real, equal co-bloggers and not either entirely fictitious or blow-up dolls or something, DuJan's strategy prevailed at the meeting's conclusion. He sent out a press release proclaiming his availability to serve as a bridge between the gay community and religious conservatives. It contained a link to the original “they’re out to get me” lie, once again dragging total strangers into DuJan’s delusions of persecution.
Then, he wrote a post in what he imagined was soaring, Churchillian rhetoric proclaiming that he would never knuckle under to the Alinski Death Star (uh, that would be me and a few other pretty darn obscure bloggers).
His fingers fairly flew across the keyboard as he wrote about an Obama White House plot to silence his shitty little blog and how Rush Limbaugh and other Verah Big, Verah Powerful People would come to his rescue once the Obama Gestapo seized his website.
After that, he posted a bunch of heartwarming photos of Sarah and little Trig -- he and The Boyz privately called this tactic "lighting the Sarah beacon" -- and railed against Obama TSA thugs, Muslims and George Soros, ticking off the wingnut hot-button items from a list compiled from old Glenn Beck episodes.
This was sure to turn on the Fount of Donations!
But the next day when he logged onto his PayPal account, there was even less money than the day before. The donations weren’t coming in. Worse, he found out some of his steady donors had defected due to the fall-out after the War Widow Incident. They had started a blog behind his back to rake him over the coals and unmask him as a phony.
He called another meeting with The Boyz. This time, there wasn’t even enough money for pizza. The Boyz were restive (well, DuJan thought so.). But DuJan knew what to do. He’d go dark! He'd pull the plug on his blog for a few days and blame it on Obama-Soros. He’d already set that scenario up with his Churchillian post. Because he's a far-sighted guy...
The Boyz responded to that idea in the only way they knew how -- with a faint whiff of latex. But DuJan knew he could play yet another round of PUMAs and Palinites for suckers. And the media, to the extent they pay a nano-second's attention to him, never bother Googling "Kevin DuJan" to make sure he's not some kind of raving frootloop or pathological liar. They hadn't yet, and therefore, it would always work that way. DuJan was sure of it!
...to be continued…maybe…
Amy Siskind & The New Agenda: "Prominent" Women Know Best!
Did you ever wonder about the identity of the carefully coiffed lady pictured next to the word “laughingstock” in your dictionary?
It’s none other than Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the jet-setting billionaire who was widely lampooned for calling Obama an “elitist” and throwing her support to McCain in a fit of patrician pique after son-of-a-single-mom Obama clinched the Democratic nomination over her preferred candidate, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
See coverage of that event here, along with two priceless videos of CNN’s Campbell Brown and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow laughing incredulously as our latter day Lovey Howell III sniffs about the “elitism” of a fellow mammal.
According to the Googles, LLFdR has kept a fairly low profile since her second-choice candidate lost. She emerged in HuffPo earlier this year to blame Obama for ruining Martha Coakley’s chances of becoming senator from Massachusetts.
According to LLFdR, there was nothing wrong with Coakley’s campaign. It was totally cool that she went on vacation while Brown rode all over the state campaigning in a truck, and Coakley’s stated aversion to shaking Red Sox fans’ grubby paws in the cold wasn’t an issue either.
No, Coakley lost because of Obama’s attempts to transform America into a “European-style social democracy.” He “scared hard-working American voters with his hard-left rhetoric.”
I guess that explains why private insurance companies and pharmaceutical conglomerates are fleeing to other continents and all the progressive blogs are united in their adoration of our socialist messiah, I suppose.
Amy Siskind: The True Agenda 
Anyhoo, Lady Lynn isn’t even last year’s news, so why am I bringing her up now? Because the outfit that styles itself as “a national organization” and a “voice for all women” has chosen to honor LLFdR in its first ever event:
The New Agenda has some exciting news to report and we invite you to join us!And I suppose the presumably catered event for embittered wealthy women in a tony suburb really was a “Second Seneca Falls” -- if we’re generous enough with our classifications to view the Brooks Brothers Riot as a Second March on Washington. All events involved bipeds, after all, and were political in nature.
We will be HONORING Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who has been an inspirational force in the formation and growth of our organization, on Thursday, May 6th, 2010.
We met Lynn in May 2008 as she courageously led the first meeting of Together4US, a group of prominent Hillary Rodham Clinton supporters who met to continue HRC’s legacy. Many refer to that first meeting, held at a home in Pound Ridge, NY [median household income: $153,208 -- ed.] as “The Second Seneca Falls.”
Now, if I imagined myself to be the heir to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and were holding the first ever event for my 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, I might choose to honor women who showed actual courage like these. Or a woman who comforts the afflicted like this one. Or a woman who has added decades of unique insight to debates over feminist issues like her.
I don’t think a woman whose “bravery” consisted of directing the maids to set out finger-foods for fellow “prominent” ladies as we griped about the Democratic primaries would make the cut. But then again, I’m not as fixated on “prominence” as Siskind is.
On Planet Siskind, “prominent” women with “connections” always know best (unless their connections include Barack Obama, in which case they’re sell-outs). For example, when asked why her organization was orchestrating a campaign to sandbag actual feminist Kim Gandy in her bid for a Department of Labor post, Siskind replied:
…[We] very purposely chose to not list line items as to why we do not endorse Gandy. But suffice it to say that it was unanimous (less one) amongst our Founders group who are prominent women from around the country and perhaps, through our connections, we know more information than you know. Could that be?Lady Lynn, proprietress of Ascott House and self-appointed spokeswoman for “hard-working Americans,” couldn’t have said it better herself.
Crackpot Casserole
Like many distinctive recipes, the Crackpot Casserole has a back story. It’s not particularly interesting. But unlike the typical recipe that features ingredients available in your local mega-mart, you’ll need to know the back story to find the ingredients for Crackpot Casserole.
INGREDIENTS:
- 1 obscure, ethically challenged lefty blogger
- 1 pearl clutching wingnut drama queen with an advanced persecution complex
- 1 ridiculous conspiracy theory
- 3-?? innocent bystanders
- Several handfuls of absurdly credulous wingnut blogs and media outlets
This is a unique casserole in that the ingredients interact with each other to produce various actions -- some deliberately and some as passive elements. Here's how it works:
- The first ingredient initiates contact with the second, which produces a chemical reaction in the second ingredient caused by greed and a desperate need for attention. That in turn produces the third ingredient.
- The second ingredient then adds liberal (heh!) sprinklings of the fourth ingredient to the third to form the basic casserole.
- Then, like a mom hiding Brussels sprouts in a bowl of Spaghetti-O’s, the second ingredient cleverly disguises the fourth ingredient as red meat to make it attractive to the fifth ingredient.
- To complete the casserole, the fifth ingredient has to swallow the concoction described in Step 3.
YIELD:
Albee-esque levels of absurdity, aided and abetted by irresponsible "anchors" such as Breitbart TV's Scott Baker and Liz Stephens, who fail to do even the most rudimentary fact-checking, such as reading or contacting the owners of the blogs they display on their "program" to check if the outlandish claims made by their "guest" are true.
It seems fake pimp James O'Keefe sets the journalistic standards at Breitbart's joint. But anyway, the fully baked Crackpot Casserole can be sampled here starting at around the 27-minute mark. Bon appétit!
Attn: Crazy People
The loopy huckster at Hillbuzz.org is attempting to shake down the simple-minded cranks who read his blog for donations by pretending to be the target of a vast leftwing conspiracy. Since he’s using little ol’ me (among others) as a boogie(wo)man to scare up donations, I thought I‘d respond here for any delusional Hilldos or train-wreck rubberneckers who drop by to have a look around.
[If you don’t know what I’m talking about, do yourself a favor and go read War and Peace or something instead of this long-ass post. It’s about the dumbest controversy in the history of the internet, and that’s saying something. You’ve been warned!]
Anyway, it appears one of the Hillbuzzard nutsacks (if indeed there are more than one – “they” generally employ the royal “we,” but maybe it’s a multiple personality disorder thing…) was targeted by an obscure blogger (BigotBasher) who looked up publicly available whois data on Hillbuzz.org and published the personal information it contained on his obscure blog, along with accusations that the Hillbuzzard dude is a racist and a GOP ratfucker.
Although whois data is freely available, I don’t approve of “outing” people who blog pseudonymously and have neither done so nor tolerated anyone else doing so on any blog over which I have administrative control. I have zero connection with this BigotBasher guy, aside from the fact that he has commented on some blogs I write for and / or comment on. That’s it.
Vast leftwing conspiracy or the fevered imagination of a pearl clutching drama queen?
But on the strength of that flimsy connection, the Hillbuzzard dude has concocted and continues to embellish an absurd conspiracy theory, claiming that I (and other people whose “connection” to BigotBasher is as tangential as mine) are all part of an organized global plot to defame him. Here’s an excerpt from a breathless broadside published shortly after the whole mess broke out earlier this week:
Almost IMMEDIATELY after BigotBasher launched his attack on us, that post was picked up by The Daily Kos and DemocraticUnderground. A host of other Leftist, Obama-supporting sites followed suit, repeating TheBigotBasher story as fact.Actually, it looks like what happened was that BigotBasher published the same diatribe he published on his own blog to diaries he maintains at DailyKos and DU – diaries that anyone with a computer connection can set up. For free. Without personally knowing Markos Moulitsas.
BigotBasher got very little traffic on it until the Hillbuzzard frootloop started bellowing like ruptured cow about the incident. Google it yourself and see if it looks anything like BigotBasher’s post was “distributed to millions of people” as the Hillbuzzard claims prior to his own efforts to publicize it.
Anyhoo, as the week went by, the Hillbuzzard published ever-loopier claims that the Leftist web he imagines goes all the way up to the DNC and Obama himself. He offers no evidence of this, nor of the claims that he’s been harassed and threatened aside from insults and personal info published by a single, obscure blogger.
Hilldos engage in the behavior they decry against innocent bystanders
Why do I care what this deranged loon says? Well, I don’t really, despite the fact that he has repeatedly encouraged his equally nutty readers to scour the internet for clues to my real name and personal information. But by using the “vast leftwing conspiracy” angle as bait, the Hillbuzzard has garnered attention for his outlandish claims from some irresponsible, high-profile wingnuts (including Glenn Reynolds, among others).
Apparently my humble little blog was mentioned and displayed briefly on Breitbart TV today, along with speculation about my obsession with casseroles! Honest to god, these people’s brains are as fried as Durkee French Onion bits left too long in a 450-degree oven.
The whole thing is pretty funny, really, except for one thing. In the numerous, interminable sob-story posts he’s put up on this topic to generate donations and sympathy, the Hillbuzzard whines about the unfairness of being outed online and decries the hideous consequences of said outing – including alleged loss of employment and even being dumped by a boyfriend who ran away in panic at the specter of the Leftist Horde arrayed against the ‘Buzzard. But even as he publicly sobs about his own fate, he encourages the most irresponsible speculation and allows his commenters to publish personal information about completely innocent bystanders.
For example, one of the geniuses in his comments section leapt to the conclusion that since I use the internet handle “Betty Cracker,” I must be the owner of the bettycracker.com domain name. Well, I’m not. But that didn’t stop the fool from publishing the name, address, business site, etc., of the poor dude who actually does own that domain name (to advertise a band that went by that name, from what I can gather).
One of the commenters suggested visiting this totally innocent bystander with a baseball bat. Now, I’m pretty sure that cowardly bunch of blowhards wouldn’t follow through on such a threat – they’d scatter at the sight of a broom-wielding kindergartner, I bet. But still, given the level of derangement on display among the Hilldos, it’s irresponsible as hell to encourage them.
And it’s hypocritical as hell for the person who is presiding over it all to wallow in self pity (and collect donations) for the consequences of his own outing and the alleged threats he's endured (for which he offers no evidence) while simultaneously encouraging the drooling morons who infest his comments section to post information on uninvolved people and tolerate threats against them right on his own blog.
I don’t know whether or not the Hillbuzzard is a racist. But he’s definitely a feckless jerk. And anyone who helps him peddle his foolish story is an irresponsible ass.
Fox, meet henhouse
Holy god, did Obama ever shit in his hat when he called out Fox News! Per NewsBusters:
If the Obama administration's attack on Fox News was designed to diminish the cable network's influence, the White House has failed miserably.Ooookay. We know that, unlike any other cable news network or the American public in general, the majority of Fox News viewers are Republicans. So what are these majority-Republican viewers hearing on Fox News?
In fact, since Anita Dunn's now infamous appearance on CNN's "Reliable Sources" when she claimed Fox isn't a real news network, the cabler has seen HUGE gains in overall viewing AND in the important demographic aged 25 to 54.
If this is Obama's effectiveness attacking a cable network, we should all be concerned about his ability to protect our nation from REAL enemies.
I took a look, and I thought for a moment I had been whisked away in Chic Bob’s time machine, where the dial is always stuck on 2000:
They’re hearing the same shit we pinkos heard in 2000! Just exchange phrases like “the poor,” “the drug war,” and “climate change” with stuff like “the unborn,”“ACORN” and “war on terra,” and the language is practically indistinguishable. I say it’s time to deputize Fox to guard that particular henhouse 24/7.
[Cross-posted at Rumproast]
I smell a rat
So an industry flak organization, America's Health Insurance Plans, releases a report two days before the Baucus bill is expected to pass the Finance Committee. The report says if the bill is enacted, insurers will be forced to dramatically increase premiums so that annual family health insurance costs will equal more than half of the current median household income within 10 years:
The report said selected provisions of a bill from the Senate Finance Committee could increase premiums 18 percent more than they would otherwise rise in the next decade, to an average of nearly $26,000 for families and $9,700 for individuals in 2019.Democratic leaders and reform supporters were quick to denounce the industry-funded report, calling it "distorted and flawed" and "fundamentally dishonest." On the MSNBC yappy heads programs yesterday, some, including the estimable Rep. Anthony Wiener, cited the report's conclusions as further evidence that there needs to be a strong public option to keep the private insurers honest.
If the committee approves the bill on Tuesday, as Democrats expect, Senate leaders plan to combine it with another Senate bill and take the package to the Senate floor, for a debate that could begin this month.
Others (Ed Schultz, for example, and a senate finance aide) went so far as to insinuate that issuing the report now was a huge tactical blunder on the part of the insurance industry -- that by showing their hand so brazenly, the industry has given the Dems the opportunity to frame the terms of the coming congressional debate:
"Instead of creating doubts, the report is actually having the opposite effect and has drawn a lot of ire from those who support reforms," the aide said. "Frankly, it will create a lot of momentum in the Senate to pass reform."Don't be so sure. The insurance industry is greedy, heartless and rapacious. But it's not stupid. I think they have a two-level strategy here: First, to re-arm the GOP naysayers with fresh ammo they can use to scare the shit out of people who already have insurance. In 10 years, half your income will go towards supporting lazy, shiftless bottom-feeders!
The second level of the strategy is to rally the Dems around Baucus' crappy plan as it stands now.. It's a briar-patch strategy that could pay off -- if the Baucus plan passes substantially intact instead of being used as a framework on which to add meaningful cost-control measures like a strong public option, the insurance industry gets millions of new customers, permission to keep screwing those of us who have insurance with skyrocketing premiums and escapes the modicum of accountability a public option would create.
Don't fall for it, Dems.
[Cross-posted at Rumproast]
Subscribe to:
Comment Feed (RSS)
