Bloggasm

This is just too hilarious that it’s almost unbelievable. Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin has been complaining for days that the media has been cruel to McCain’s VP pick, Sarah Palin. At one point she even declared “Now leave her alone.”

Her knee-jerk defense of Palin grew so ridiculous that she even went after gossip tabloid US Weekly today, devoting her lead post to a “partisan hit job” it did. What’s next? A shrieking post about the alien big foot bias in Weekly World News?

Well, later today, to prove her point, she reprinted this photoshopped cover of US Weekly to “prove” the magazine’s bias by making a John Edwards sex scandal love child joke. But do you notice something about the photo? John Edwards is holding Sarah Palin’s down syndrome baby Trig. Michelle “leave her alone” Malkin used Palin’s son to make a cheap sex scandal joke!!!

The thunder stealers have been high-fiving each other all day. Armed with a newfound enthusiasm for investigative reporting unseen in the last eight years, the media feverishly turned over every stone and lead for the past week, desperately trying to uncover who Obama’s running mate would be. News outlets literally devoted millions of dollars of resources combing through the slim pickings that had been made available. Pundits and bloggers floated every anonymous rumor imaginable, each one adamantly determined to not let Obama fulfill his promise to make his supporters the first to know his choice via email and text message.

Thankfully, their gumshoe tactics paid off. Journalists have been running victory laps today, gloating over the fact that they had scooped Obama by revealing that Biden would be joining the Democratic nominee. This AP article sums up the media’s astonishing accomplishment perfectly: “The text message announcing Biden as Obama’s pick began filtering across the U.S. at 3:02 a.m. EDT Saturday, when most people were asleep. By then, it was old news, by today’s standards. The media had reported the pick more than two hours earlier.”

Yes, the media managed to scoop Obama by two whole hours. Not only that, but they broke the story at 1 a.m., when most of the nation was either already asleep or not watching the news.

Sarcasm aside, who are they kidding? Leading up to that 3 a.m. text message the media managed to float every thinly-sourced story announcing all sorts of decisions that Obama had supposedly made. When I went to bed last night slightly after midnight, the top story on Drudge was that thousands of Obama/Bayh bumper stickers had been uncovered, indicating that the Indiana senator would be sharing the ticket (conveniently that story can no longer be found on his site). Hundreds of blogs and news outlets were heavily promoting this “scoop” as late as 1 a.m. So given this, doesn’t the broken clock axiom — you know, being right two times a day — apply in this instance? After listening to five days of constant bullshit, did the few Americans who happened to be watching cable news at 1 a.m. — when this scoop finally came out — actually take it seriously?

For example, let’s take the conservative pundit who is most well-known for her fact checking: Michelle Malkin. When I checked her venerable website late last night she had up a post not only promoting the Drudge bumper sticker rumor, but also her anonymous sources as well pointing to Bayh: “A good friend of mine just informed me that his good friend in IL has his hands deep into selling political T-shirts and he got word that Evan Bayh from Indiana will be his running mate for VP.”

And then this morning Malkin has the nerve to wag her finger at Obama (as if she does anything else when referring to him) for getting scooped before he could alert his supporters; she even insinuates that the presidential candidate had no intention of telling his supporters before the media.

Will someone please write Malkin a polite email informing her that it’s rather easy to read through her posts from the previous night and then rub her nose in her own freshly-laid turds?

What a bunch of clowns. Let’s face it, millions of supporters got the news of Biden’s VP slot when their cell phones started beeping at 3 a.m. That’s when I found out about it for certain. This running narrative today that the media somehow scooped him is, frankly, bullshit.

(yes, I know “unprofessionalism” isn’t a real word)

So there’s supposedly a new daily paper launching in the LA area. Rather than being transparent about their operations, they’ve been posting “writers wanted” ads in Craigslist without identifying themselves and who their backers are.

A recently laid-off LA Times reporter emailed them with the simple question, “Who are you?” Here was their ultra-professional reply:

right now we are the asking the questions - you are the 1500th respondent…

Sounds like the editor of a defunct non-paying webzine fancies himself a business man. These are the kind of people that start up companies and then don’t answer phone calls or emails asking why employee pay checks haven’t been sent out in two weeks, followed by a quick round of civil lawsuits and bankruptcy.

So send in those resumes!

So remember Donutgate? Possibly the dumbest “scandal” manufactured by the right-wing blogosphere (and that’s saying a lot)? Well before it gets swept into the dustbin of stupidity forever, make sure you watch this clip from a Fox News show. It turns out that nobody informed this guy that Dunkin Donuts was one of Fox News’ sponsors. Hilarity ensues.

I don’t have much time to blog about conservative blogger Michelle Malkin’s latest “scandal,” so I’ll point you to a few other blogs who do a more-than-adequate job of highlighting the inanity. First we have this post from Sadly No!. Then there’s this one from John Scalzi. And to tip it off, there’s this post from Daily Kos.

This is utterly bizarre. A car dealership in Mojave, California called Kieffe & Sons Ford has been running this advertisement on local radio stations:

["Did you know that there are people in this country who want prayer out of schools, "Under God" out of the Pledge, and "In God We Trust" to be taken off our money?"]

“But did you know that 86% of Americans say they believe in God? Since we all know that 86 out of every 100 of us are Christians, who believe in God, we at Kieffe & Sons Ford wonder why we don’t tell the other 14% to sit down and shut up. I guess I just offended 14% of the people who are listening to this message. Well, if that is the case then I say that’s tough, this is America folks, it’s called free speech. None of us at Kieffe & Sons Ford is afraid to speak out. Kieffe & Sons Ford on Sierra Highway in Mojave and Rosamond, if we don’t see you today, by the grace of God, we’ll be here tomorrow.”

First off, they don’t even have the statistics correct. As The Underground Believer notes, only 73% of the U.S. identifies as Christian. Secondly, what the hell does this have to do with cars? The dealership is voluntarily going out of its way to offend a sizable portion of its potential customer base with an advertisement that has nothing to do with its business.

Not only are you directly attacking 27% of the population, you’re also likely offending a good number of left-of-center Christians who would cringe at such unsubtle bigotry.

Here’s one way to strike back: Gather around five atheists in that area. Over the course of the week have each of them go in and show interest in buying some of the most expensive cars in the lot. Then, after they’ve wasted a good 30 minutes to an hour talking to you, bargaining with you, and getting ready for you to sign the contract and give them those great commissions, have sudden epiphanies that this was the dealership that had those offensive ads. Then have them walk out without buying the cars.

This way, not only does this get them thinking they’ve lost out on thousands of dollars in sales, but it also wastes their valuable time they’ve spent tending to you.

So who’s up for it?

Hey Jonah,

You know that “MIT study” that you cite in your column titled “Why we need nukes and Gitmo“? You know, the one that says that homeless people supposedly have twice the global footprint than average? You do know that that wasn’t an MIT study at all but instead was a class project done by a bunch of MIT undergraduates? And that it included in its calculations the carbon footprint of the entire US infrastructure and just basically divided it by the number of US citizens, rather than actually determining the carbon footprint of homeless people?

If you ever need someone really good at Google searches to fact check your articles for you, you can always forward them to me.

Take care,
Simon