Where would I be without the easy ones?
Huh. I guess the National Enquirer thinks Obama has worms*. I’m not sure. When I click the link, I get “The content of this website is not available in your area.” That happens with Saturday Night Live skits, too.
See? England isn’t all bad.
In other wormy news, did you see the Cheezburger Network got a major capital infusion?
I love the Cheezburger folks, but I don’t know how they’re getting away with this. They pretty much admit they don’t know where most of the photos come from and that’s totally, no-doubt-about-it, not even a little bit legal. You can’t do that. You can’t nick other people’s stuff; it doesn’t matter if they’re amateur snapshots of pussycats and you supply the captions.
I assumed they got away with it because there weren’t any deep pockets involved, but $30M is a respectable pocket. Well, long may they escape the roving bands of aggressive IP lawyers that scour the internet (and ruin my fun on Zazzle).
January 19, 2011 — 10:49 pm
Comments: 16
Misdirection
I was going to play with Loughner’s mug shot, but I couldn’t deal. Never mind the smirk, that boy’s head is full of battery acid and rusty razor-blades and there’s nothing but a long lifetime of prison and scary meds ahead of him. Let him be.
Dupnik, on the other hand, has some ‘splainin’ to do. If Loughner had come to the attention of law enforcement many times — including the morning of the shooting — did they miss any opportunities to get him evaluated? Maybe not. I accept that — maybe not. But my mother used to say you could smell schizophrenia — by which she meant something about the behavior of a psychotic rings every THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG HERE alarm bell you’ve got. Apparently, anybody in Arizona can get anybody else carted off for a psych eval.
And Dupnik sure is yelping like a scalded hound.
January 12, 2011 — 8:28 pm
Comments: 39
A Public Service Announcement from Paul Krugman
Yep. Because restoring civility begins with accusing your opponents of mass murder.
I’m gonna have an outbreak of Tourettes over this. I swears.
January 11, 2011 — 6:57 pm
Comments: 35
Attempted incitement
If you weren’t on Twitter over the weekend, you’re smarter than me. The instant there were reports of a shooting in Arizona, the Left went ugly trying to pin it on the Tea Party. It was a wonder to behold. A giant steaming wonder.
I couldn’t take much. After a while, even the pushback from our side began to feel a little opportunistic, so I just shut Twitter down for a while.
This is part of a pattern since the rise of the Tea Party (helpfully recalled by Legal Insurrection): the Left blamed them for Bill Sparkman’s suicide, Amy Bishop shooting up the University of Alabama, the Fort Hood shooter, the IRS plane-crasher dude, the cabbie stabbing and the Pentagon shooting.
When every one of those perps turned out to be politically neutral or even avowedly liberal, the left stood down…but didn’t substantially back down. I finally worked out why (besides crass opportunism): they really and truly believe their own narrative. They are so absolutely certain-sure the Tea Party is inherently violent, whenever they hear a report of gunshots, they think to themselves, “well, finally. What took them so long?” They must be utterly bewildered when it isn’t true. Again and again.
Look again at my favorite picture of Nancy “Hammertime” Pelosi, walking through the Tea Party crowd carrying a giant gavel. She didn’t have to do that. As I understand it, Congress has a subterranean entrance to the building. She was hoping to start something (I can’t think why else she and Steny Hoyer would be holding hands with…John Lewis, is that?). Give that imaginary hair trigger a tug.
The awful thing is, Jared Loughner sure reads paranoid schizophrenic to me. Which would mean not even the shooter is responsible for the shooting on this one (I’m skeptical of the insanity plea, but not in the case of demonstrable schizophrenia…brrrr that’s an evil-ass disease). Still, his parents may not bear much real blame either. It’s damn near impossible to “get help” for an adult until he clearly crosses the line into batshit dangerousness.
Well, if this is true, maybe Sheriff Douchenozzle has some culpability.
January 10, 2011 — 8:25 pm
Comments: 25
Barack Obama, he mad
Did you watch Obama’s Very Cranky Presser yesterday? You should. Go on. I’ll wait.
One of the most inartful pieces of political theater ever. Somehow he took a fairly wise political compromise and turned it into a complete loser for himself.
He could have been just a leeeetle teensy bit gracious to the Republicans and come off as a reasonable man and a tough negotiator. Nope. He was petulant about Republican opposition right from the start, which somehow made it look like they had pwned him utterly.
He could have appealed to his base, explaining that a deal with this congress has to be a bzillion times leftier than any deal with the next congress could possibly be. Nope. He scolded them for being “sanctimonious” and “pure.”
He could have minimized the whole thing. You know, all this bill does is keep things the way the are for now. No big.
Nope. Somehow, he managed to alienate pretty much everybody, and look like a tooth-gritting, vein-throbbing lunkhead doing it.
I don’t get who he was trying to appeal to. “The American people” he kept invoking — presumably minus the Republican part of the American people and the leftmost section of the Democrat part of the American people. Which leaves — oh, I dunno — maybe a third of the actual American people?
President Sooper Genius not look so smart these days.
And if you don’t recognize the image I’m riffing on, you are an utter, utter Philistine. It’s this famous shot from the always spooky Diane Arbus. After she cut her wrists in the bath in 1971, there were persistent rumors that she had set up a camera on a tripod to film her own death.
December 8, 2010 — 6:02 pm
Comments: 33
*pop*
Man. Was there ever such an international display of utter FAIL as this Julian Assange/Wikileaks shit?
To start, there’s nothing I care about that I didn’t already know in any of the cables published so far. Catty diplomatic chit-chat. Bo-ring. Unless, of course, you were one of the people whose lives were put in mortal danger by the leaks.
Yeah, that’s the first thing we should have done — offered US asylum to anyone endangered by our crappy inability to keep a secret.
I don’t know why the left is so stoked on this guy. His leaks confirm my every ‘winger belief. Israel is reasonable. The entire Middle East is afraid of a nuclear Iran. China is pushy. The UN is useless. Global Warming is a front for wealth redistribution.
Oh, and he has deeply embarrassed and hobbled the foreign policy of the most left-wing government America is likely to have. EVER.
An act of courageous journalism? Please. Document dump. Some journalism.
And now he’s been arrested on the stupidest charge in history — sex without condom. Whether we had anything to do with this silliness or not, whether we move to extradite him or not, nobody is ever going to believe this double shitburger doesn’t have Made in America written all over it.
I can’t see that Assange is any more guilty of a crime than the New York Times is, but I won’t waste any pity on this whispy dumbfuck. Garden variety attention whore; the internet is full of ’em. He didn’t have to put face on the box . If all wanted he wanted was to get the info out there, he could have dropped it on a server somewhere and posted a note to a blogger. The file would have replicated across the wires like plague.
Like the Climategate leaker did. What was his name? Oh, right — we don’t have a clue.
December 7, 2010 — 10:53 pm
Comments: 21
Yeah, I should be so stupid…
You know the most hilarious part of the Sarah Palin phenomenon? All the same people — right and left — who thought Reagan was a complete doofus back in the day are now swearing on huge stacks of Bibles that he was a great man and a bzillionty times more differenter than Sarah.
Yeah. Most common old school media descriptor of Ronnie: Ronald Reagan, star of Bedtime for Bonzo.
Since I can’t watch the show, I went online and watched the trailers for Sarah Palin’s Alaska. Now, I’m a total and complete sucker for a montage, I admit, but I was…mmm…charmed.
Okay, so let me get this straight. The woman wangled eight hours of polished, prime time, slickly-produced, kick ass television time out of a major cable network, and I’m supposed to believe she’s stupid?
Huh.
I was firmly in the “I love Sarah but I don’t think she should run” camp. Every day, I edge closer to the “fuck it — RUN, SARAH, RUN!” camp.
Those of you who didn’t get the bubblegum reference…I’m extremely disappointed in you, that’s all.
December 6, 2010 — 9:57 pm
Comments: 44
Because I can is why…
Jes’ playing around with ImageReady’s .gif animation tools. Because that’s the only animation tool I got.
Yep, my desktop machine is still busted and I haven’t QUITE talked myself into a new one, on account of every time I tot up the bare minimum things I need to enter the multi-core world where all the cool kids hang out, the bottom line makes my eyes water.
And then I see a sidebar ad for Photoshop’s Extended version. It has 3D bits. Droooool.
$999.
Times like this, I really miss my old faceless evil American corporation and her magical bottomless pockets.
December 1, 2010 — 7:39 pm
Comments: 14
All the king’s horses…
Whaddya think? Are they going to make Hillary! walk the plank for the Wikileaks scandal?
Boy, Hill’s life didn’t turn out the way she imagined, huh?
(You think this is grotesque? My first idea was nailing her to a cross. That’s when a little voice in my ear said, “what are you, fucking retarded?!”).
November 30, 2010 — 11:50 pm
Comments: 32
The giant melting head of Kim Jong Il
Yeah. I’m not really going anywhere with this. I got this image stuck in my head and I had to get it out. It’s like an itch. An art itch.
I’m fascinated by the train wreck that is North Korea. I’ve read a bit about it, but I don’t pretend any special insights. This is more of the same old posturing, at a guess. Kim always gets such fabulous prizes when he behaves badly.
I don’t for a minute imagine it’ll be any different this time.
November 23, 2010 — 10:01 pm
Comments: 18