Troll-ism
Posted on | April 22, 2012 | 23 Comments
Someone is using Twitter-bots to attack conservative blogs:
Enoch and company have had to rebuild this blog because a nasty script was superimposed here, and the likelihood that it was an accident is much diminished by its also having been foisted on our old blog, POWIP. On Twitter, there’s a rash of direct messages telling me and other righties that people are saying horrible things about us. If you’re dumb enough to click the link, your account also becomes a bot account that will inform other people that they are being libelled online.
Hmmm. Meanwhile, the Lonely Conservative finds herself beseiged by every possible manner of trollish attacks:
Some of the comments this troll (or these trolls) leave include email addresses of other conservative bloggers. They fill up my email spam. They sign petitions in my name. They email spam to others in my name. They send me emails that appear to be from my friends. They go to other websites and leave comments in my name – with my email address and links back to this blog – that are vile and wretched. Thankfully I have some friends who are kind enough to let me know when they see this happening. As much as I would like to leave comments on all of the blogs I visit, I rarely have time. If I did there would be nothing on this blog. I suspect that’s the reason they’re doing what they do – to distract me. To shut me up. They’ve even broken federal law by calling my home using phony caller ID services. The police officer I filed a report with was very kind and understanding. My phone company assured me that once the report is ready they will be happy to provide me with the telephone numbers where those calls really originated. We’ll have to wait and see where that leads us.
Hmmm. Who could be doing this, I wonder? And why?
Unions File Suit Against Mitch Daniel’s Right-To-Work Law And His Hairstyle, But Mostly The Right-To-Work Law
Posted on | April 22, 2012 | 20 Comments
by Smitty
Mitch Daniels came under attack from The International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150, who appear to have smoked a staggering amount of that new ‘Pelosi’ material circulating in Progressive circles. Emphasis mine:
The lawsuit argues that the “defendants have exacted compulsory service and/ or involuntary servitude from the Union through the combination of the passage of the Right to Work law and the existing federal requirement of the duty of fair representation” and that the union is “compelled to furnish services to all persons in bargaining units that it represents but it may not require payments for those services because of the Right to Work law.”
The union also claims the right-to-work law “requires dues-paying members to work alongside non-union personnel, and that is compulsory service within the meaning of the thirteenth amendment.”
via Breitbart
More at Daily Pundit.
Update: in other Hoosier news, what’s with this upstart Mourdock nipping at Lugar’s heels?
From the ‘Too Good to Check’ File
Posted on | April 21, 2012 | 27 Comments
Here’s a tip for you kids who might be considering a career in journalism: Not everything you read on the Internet is true.
In fact, if you spend a lot of time reading liberal blogs — which too many kids who might be considering a career in journalism seem to be doing lately — you might be consuming large quantities of what veteran journalists call “complete dishonest bullshit.”
This point is worth emphasizing in light of a column by Patrick B. Pexton, ombudsman of the Washington Post, that carried this headline:
The Post fails a young blogger
Pexton’s column is a sympathetic account of the unfortunately brief tenure of a 20-something blogger for the WaPo, Elizabeth Flock.
Apparently, it sucks to be a WaPo blogger: The demand for output and traffic is insane. Flock’s blog “was supposed to attain 1 million to 2 million Web hits a month, Flock said, a huge number.” And she was averaging nearly six posts a day — some pretty heavy-duty aggregation, with a bit of actual reporting and fact-checking expected as well, the kind of remorseless grind that makes Nick Denton’s blog empire such a notorious hellhole.
So I was reading Pexton’s column and feeling a good deal of sympathy for Flock until I got to the seventh paragraph and read this:
She did a roundup on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney allegedly using an old Ku Klux Klan slogan in his stump speech — a story that went viral online yet was untrue — and she didn’t call the Romney campaign for comment, nor did any editor make sure she did.
This is what veteran journalists call “HOLY FREAKING CRAP!”
Not exactly a minor typo to falsely accuse a candidate for President of the United States of recycling KKK slogans in his stump speech. Where on earth did Flock find this? From “political commenters,” according to her story, and when you clicked the link . . .
John Aravosis.
Yeah, him — the deranged poofter who makes Andrew Sullivan look sane by comparison. The item by Aravosis got picked up and repeated by MSNBC, which subsequently apologized. Twenty-seven hours elapsed between the time Avarosis posted that and the time Flock “aggregated” it at the WaPo. Flock did not bother to contact the Romney campaign herself, but instead cited the HuffPo, which said a Romney spokeswoman “declined to comment on the matter.”
Believe it or not, after the HOLY FREAKING CRAP incident, Flock was not immediately fired, but continued on until a week ago when, in an item about possible life on Mars, she committed plagiarism:
Flock says that in haste she read about 10 stories about Mars life, including some of the research papers, and forgot to credit and link to the originator of the story, Discovery News. It appears that she copied, pasted and slightly rewrote two paragraphs from the Discovery story. Plagiarism perhaps, but also a perpetual danger in aggregated stories.
After Discovery News raised objections, Flock resigned voluntarily.
Fare thee well, Ms. Flock. And in your next job, if you ever call John Avarosis a “deranged poofter,” please make sure to credit me.
Higher Education Bubblehead: Fisking Another BHO Weekly Address
Posted on | April 21, 2012 | 4 Comments
by Smitty
Another week, another Obama Weekly Address:
A liesurely fisking follows: Read more
Simon Cowell’s Raaaaacist Toilet Paper
Posted on | April 21, 2012 | 3 Comments
by Smitty
Update: the comments say that The Blaze link may have something dodgy about it. I have enough filtration stuff going under Chrome that I don’t get hit, but you are warned.
This story really piles dumb on dumb, but there is an interesting point. First, black toilet paper:

Really, Cowell himself doesn’t matter, and his taste in wipe even less. The motive for this post, though, comes a little further along:
The book paints a picture of a man who struggled for years in the music business, spurred on to success out of a desire to prove his detractors wrong.
“He had 20 years — more than 20 years — of humiliation,” Bower said. “At school he was a total failure and as a music producer he was a total failure.
“But what he did have was charm and an ability to understand the music business because of all this failure.”
This invites the question of whether Cowell could have made it as a blogger.
Jeff Goldstein Isn’t Ready to Don His Saffron Robe and Chant, ‘Hare Mitt-nu’
Posted on | April 21, 2012 | 31 Comments
“Mother, do not wonder that my loyalty is growing weak. . . . I am sick and tired of the disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us.”
– letter from a soldier in the 79th New York Infantry, 1863
Seedubya today was cracking cynical jests on Twitter, whence I derived the headline joke. Speaking of headlines and jokes . . .
Rick Perry endorses David Dewhurst
for Hutchison’s Senate seat
Not a joke, but quite laughable: Alleged populist sides with GOP Establishment against Tea Party-backed dynamo Ted Cruz?
Jeff Goldstein — who has been on a tear lately, as Mike Hendrix notes — decided there were some bridges that badly needed burning:
Crazy how all that online support that started out with Perry (and was simultaneously very vocal in its attacks on Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Santorum, et al.,) seems now to have solidified behind Romney.
I mean, who would have thought it, right? These people go to TEA Party conferences! On stipends! And are given speaking roles. To stand up for conservative principles.
So they have to be conservatives, no? I mean, they are our conservative leaders, if you judge by their online influence.
It’s almost as if certain people were peddling their asses like cell-block punks trying to hustle up the price of a carton of Newports.
NTTAWWT, just don’t kid yourself that the rest of us can’t see what you’re doing. Maybe this will all work out just like you’ve planned it, and on Nov. 7 you’ll be accepting congratulations on the key role you played in Romney’s glorious triumph.
My hunch — and hey, maybe it’s only a hunch — is that this is as tragic a miscalculation as your ride on the Rick Perry bandwagon turned out to be, and all you’ll get is a sore ass, with no Newports to show for it.
Coalition politics in a two-party system requires each of us to decide which compromises we will accept and on what terms, so I try not to be too judgmental or intolerant about such things. What genuinely annoys me is irresponsible incompetence in politics of the sort that permits people to advocate bad policies and strategies which fail, and yet those who bring about such predictable failures — “the fools that bring disaster” — suffer no loss of influence as a result.
Demoralization spreads in the ranks as the troops begin to realize the “leaders” are members of a sort of Old Boys Club, and that their leadership status has nothing to do with actual merit, except in terms of their superior ability to curry favor with fellow club members.
After a while of watching this, you start noticing little things:
Oh, that’s sweet. Even as @NewtGingrich campaign was drowning in debt, it found $12k to pay daughter’s company.
Little things like that you notice, and you remember when Newt was also peddling his ass. But now what’s he got to show for it?
A sore ass. And no Newports.
Us: ‘Nancy, Your Power Grab Looks Like Botched Plastic Surgery’ Pelosi: ‘Are You Serious? Are You Serious?’
Posted on | April 21, 2012 | 9 Comments
by Smitty
CNSNews has a long-standing admiration for Nancy Pelosi, dating back to asking if ObamaCare is Constitutional.
Now, CNSNews reports the Wicked Witch of the West seeks to revive the Sedition Act, in spirit, if not in practice.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday endorsed a movement announced by other congressional Democrats on Wednesday to ratify an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would allow Congress to regulate political speech when it is engaged in by corporations as opposed to individuals.
The First Amendment says in part: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”
Television and radio networks, newspapers, publishing houses, movie studios and think tanks, as well as political action committees, are usually organized as, or elements of, corporations.
Pelosi said the Democrats’ effort to amend the Constitution is part of a three-pronged strategy that also includes promoting the DISCLOSE Act, which would increase disclosure requirements for organizations running political ads, and “reducing the role of money in campaigns” (which some Democrats have said can be done through taxpayer funding of campaigns).
I’ve got this great idea, Nancy: let’s wait and read the SCOTUS opinions on your last steaming loaf of hooey before we even give you the time of day.
It is as though these proto-fascist Democrats realize that, lacking any basis in reason for their bankrupt ideas, they have to go fully Hugo Chavez to regain enough control of the public discourse to retain their fading grip on power.
Keep up the pressure, people.
via Breitbart
Little Green Sheep: A Telling Update
Posted on | April 21, 2012 | 54 Comments
Nothing is more predictable than the herd instinct. Despite their insistence that they make up their own minds, many people are in fact, as psychologists say, highly suggestible, and subject to peer pressure, so that if any trend becomes dominant within the particular herd with which they identify, the average person follows the trend without much conscious deliberation.
If herd membership is dependent on a shared set of political opinions, a shift in those shared opinions requires members either to join in the shift or else risk ostracism by the herd. To be abandoned or rejected by one’s herd is not an experience most herd-minded people seek — why else would they be in the herd in the first place? — and so they conform and follow along, believing all the while that they are thinking for themselves, rather than being influenced by others.
This morning a person I’d never heard of re-Tweeted to my attention a message from one of Charles Johnson’s LGF stooges to the effect that I am a “neo-Confederate wacko extraordinaire.”
Sigh.
Keep in mind that this was someone with 451 Twitter followers re-Tweeting a stale old message from someone with 109 Twitter followers. I’m reminded of an old joke about the flea who decided to rape an elephant. The elephant didn’t notice, but during the act a coconut fell from a tree and bonked the elephant on her head, causing her to groan, and the flea said, “Oh, yeah, baby, it’s good for ya, ain’t it?”
Being intensely curious both by nature and professional habit, however, I noticed that this particular flea had an actual name — Randall Gross — and when I clicked to see what sort of flea he was, I noticed that he’d linked his blog on his Twitter profile page. Of course, Little Green Footballs was listed on his blogroll, and when I checked Gross’s “About” page, I saw this curious paragraph:
I don’t hate liberals or democrats, I just pity them. It must suck to have devolved to the point where your political purpose and platforms are based minute-by-minute on the output of the 24 hour news cycle and a myths so distant from reality that it must recreate itself every five minutes. (Update 2010 — sadly this position and propensity has flipped since President Obama was elected. It is now the right that hangs on every news cycle looking for the latest minuscule point or position to become overly outraged about. The GOP has gone from being the Adult party in Washington to being hysterical children. Strange what a difference one election can make.)
Eh?
Beyond pointing out that he misspelled “miniscule,”* I wonder how it is that “one election” divested Republican of the status they had hitherto enjoyed of being “the Adult party” in Gross’s estimation. He would seem to be referring to what became the Tea Party uprising, the simplest defense of which was expressed by Jennifer Rubin in February 2009: “The opposition party must oppose.”
People whose understanding of politics is shallow, and who had become accustomed to supporting Republicans as the “in” party — the power-wielding authority in a (small-”d”) democratic polity — never really grasped the challenges that confronted the GOP after their successive defeats in 2006 and 2008. The collapse of the Bush-era Republican majority was a cataclysm which the party leadership did not anticipate, and for which they tried to evade responsibility. Explaining “what went wrong” was a process complicated by the defensiveness of the GOP elite (which did not wish to admit their own errors) and by the misleading analyses offered by the punditocracy.
If Republicans in 2009 were going to heed the counsels of, inter alia, David Brooks and Karl Rove, their response to the existential crisis would look a lot like the “centrist” candidacies of Dede Scozzafava, Charlie Crist and Mike Castle. But if, as Rubin said, “the opposition party must oppose,” the first order of business was to start raising hell: Throw a populist wrench into the machinery of the party Establishment that had brought about the disasters of 2006-08, and which was in early 2009 advocating a collaborative stance toward the newly-installed Democrat regime.
Randall Gross’s understanding of the political dynamic was, alas, even less inadequate than Charles Johnson’s. However zany, haphazard and misguided CJ’s shift from Right to Left between 2007 (when he first attempted to purge Pamela Geller from the conservative blogosphere) and 2009 (when Johnson finally “parted ways with the Right”), it was at least an opportunistic sellout in which Johnson struck his own bargains. Randall Gross was merely one of the witless dupes who drifted along in Charles’s erratic wake.
Anyway, it is amusing to see how, during the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Gross’s outrage over the Reuters “faux-tography” incident led him to write a long post denouncing as “gullible sheep” those duped by the mainstream media. It seemingly never occurs to Gross that he (and Charles Johnson and whoever else is now left tending the pixels at LGF) was similarly duped into believing that the conservative response to the GOP’s electoral disasters of 2006-08 was something other than it was.
Randall Gross’s malleable qualities make him a perfect sheep in the Johnsonoid herd, as witness his efforts to provide fodder for the fashionable fanaticism in some samples from his recent Little Green Footballs output, wherein Gross:
- Invokes the magic totems of Southern Baptists and “wingnuts”;
- Denounces “anti-choice terrorists”;
- Abhors Rudy Giuliani’s status as an adviser to Serbian politicians; and
- Deplores the Catholic Church for its “opposition to birth control when the world population is quickly on path to 9 billion and Family planning is the only thing with any hope of stemming the tide of starvation, poverty, and misery that overpopulation brings.”
Well, these are all controversial topics toward which people might have differing attitudes. What must be explained, however, is why Gross is nowadays so ostentatiously interested in these particular subjects – Baptists, “wingnuts,” “choice,” Serbia, “overpopulation” — that were almost certainly of no interest to him five or six years ago.
Obviously these subjects concern Gross now for the same reason Lebanon concerned him in 2006 — they are fashionable topics with the herd – which is the same reason that he suddenly took an interest in me. Having poked one of his fellow Little Green Sheep who libeled me yesterday, I’m the Enemy of the Day, cast in the role of Emmanuel Goldstein in Big (Ponytailed) Brother’s re-enactment of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The Charles Johnson Internet Center for Mediocre Conformity has attracted many inept dullards over the years. Those who are willing to bend their ideas to fit whatever species of fanaticism strikes CJ’s whimsical interests are always welcome at LGF, and only those who have the intelligence to detect falsehood and the courage to fight for firm principle will ever find themselves consigned to the Legion of the Banned.
Standing up against the herd instinct is not conducive to popularity. If what you crave is the admiration of the ignorant, the undiscerning and the dishonorable, nothing is easier than to follow the herd, striving to make yourself conspicuous as a compliant follower.
As the price of his membership in the herd, Randall Gross is willing to show solidarity with the vicious liar Daniel Vergara, and to justify this most dishonorable alliance by telling himself that I deserve to be defamed, in that I am a “neo-Confederate wacko extraordinaire.”
Very well. Let fools think what they will.
Let them choose other such fools as their friends, and never pause to wonder why this unthinking course of action seems acceptable to them. But these fools are sadly deluded if they think they deserve from me any explanation for my own course of action — any excuse, apology or friendly word of warning — as I watch them scurry along, resembling sheep rather less than they do a much smaller species of mammal.
No point praying for the godless lemmings, as they hurtle toward the cliff.
UPDATE: Speaking of throwing a populist wrench into the Republican machinery, the latest update from Professor Glenn Reynolds:
TEA PARTY FORCES ORRIN HATCH INTO PRIMARY. That’s huge. More here.
These “neo-Confederate wackos” are everywhere nowadays.
UPDATE II: Dave Weigel reports on the Battle of Bull Run Sandy, Utah:
The Tea Party movement is alive in Utah. With representatives from FreedomWorks in the audience, delegates at the Utah Republican Convention managed to force Sen. Orrin Hatch into a June 26 primary. He got 59.2 percent of their votes against Dan Liljenquist, a 38-year-old state senator. Hatch needed 60 percent to avoid the primary. He couldn’t do it. In two rounds of voting, he went from 2,243 votes to 2,313 votes. If he’d gotten 32 more votes, he would have wrapped this up.
Thirty-two votes! Allahpundit writes:
59.1 percent sounds hopeless for Liljenquist if it’s an accurate reflection of Republican voters in Utah, but there’s bound to be a burst of tea-party enthusiasm for him now that he and Richard Mourdock are the last best chance to tilt the GOP further right at the federal level.
Oh, hell, yes. Dan Liljenquist just became a hero to millions of people who never heard his name before today. GO GIVE HIM MONEY NOW!
——
* Duly noting that “minuscule” is the older and original (and probably racist) spelling of the word.
FMJRA 2.0: Picking Up The Signal
Posted on | April 21, 2012 | 7 Comments
– compiled by Wombat-socho
Drip, Drip, Drip: “Mormon Mitt” Meme Keeps Popping Up In Mainstream Media
- The Camp Of The Saints
- Wolves In Sheep’s Clothing
- The Conservatory
- Andrew J. Patrick
- The Daley Gator
- Da Tech Guy
- Article 6 Blog
- A Moral Outrage
- The Crawdad Hole
- The POH Diaries
Maslow And The Conversation On Race
If An Academic Says It, That Makes It OK
No, Whoopi, Rosen Said Precisely What She Was To Say
Lena Dunham, Sandra Fluke, Joy McCann
Warning: Brain-Bleach Shortage!
Whatever You Do, Don’t Tell Canada: Muslim Women Have Boobies!
Helping Instapundit See The Sense In What We’re Doing Right Now
Barack Obama Deploys The ‘F’ Word
Misandry, Misogyny and Mrs. Romney
Santelli To Liesman: You Can’t Drink Yourself To Sobriety
Can Anyone Help Parse Dick Cheney’s Opinion Of Barack Obama?
Clarifying Friday’s Trayvon Martin Post
First in War, First in Peace, First on the List of Britain’s All-Time Enemies
Ain’t I Done Told Ya So? (Part III)
‘International Solidarity Movement’ Protester Is Welcomed in Israel
Liz Benjamin: ‘Generally Snarky’
Narrative Arc: Second-Guessing Palin, Santorum’s Story and Romney’s Doom
Romney Booster Jen Rubin Getting Worried About ‘Mormon Mitt’ Meme?
Working the Refs: Axelrod Attacks Gallup; Romney Slams Pro-Obama Media Bias
Illegal Alien Steals 5-Year-Old’s Identity; Mother Will Testify at Hearing Today
A. Bernard Archer and Barack Obama
CNN’s Jack Cafferty: ‘Lingering Questions About Mormonism … Odd and Insular’
‘We’re Here! We’re Queer! And Now, Unfortunately, We’re Unemployed!’
OPRA: Only Problematic in
Republican Administrations
Boehlert vs. ‘Neocons’? (Nudge, Nudge)
Progressivisim Is The Ultimate Comb-Over
Calling A Policy ‘Smart’ Does Not Impart Intelligence
Hey, @Jack: Smear-Troll @Dan_Verg_ Commits Libel With Fraudulent Tweet
Top linkers this week:
- The Guy Who Named The Blogosphere (10)
- (tied) The Lonely Conservative and The Camp Of The Saints (9)
- (tied) Don Surber, DaleyGator, and The Conservatory (7)
- Da Tech Guy (6)
- Dyspepsia Generation (5)
Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline for next week’s FMJRA will be Friday, April 27.
For ‘Debased’ Values Of ‘Self-Respecting’
Posted on | April 21, 2012 | 3 Comments
by Smitty
The rampant idiocy on display for even a short clip like this is astounding.
“. . .Mitt Romney doesn’t even know if he’d sign a bill promising us equal pay for equal work. . .”
- Rarely does a bill focus on a single topic. To say you’d sign any bill, unread, is both stupid and a feature of our modern Congresses.
- In capitalism, meritocracy rules. If a woman is a superior performer, and hits a glass ceiling, then why is she not
- finding a more enlightened employer, or
- starting her own business?
- Legislation is not reality. The notion that Congress is a factory for reality, and its utterances are:
- magically Constitutional, and
- control the world beyond the beltway
really gets at the heart of Boxer’s lunacy.
Get bent, Barbara. Thanks for nothing, California, for returning this fool to blight our government.
via Bluegrass Pundit
Eat Cat Too
Posted on | April 21, 2012 | 22 Comments
by Smitty
Just in case #OccupyResoluteDesk runs low on on his usual four-footed fare, this blog would like to offer a suggested backup plan, via Angus and the boys:
The opening lines: “Dog eat dog / eat cat, too” are great. So much fun in six three-letter words. I suppose there is some jape about metaphorical cannibalism and BHO in here. And maybe a Benny Hill variation, if you wish.
What’s interesting about the whole doggone situation is:
- This really can’t help BHO’s Middle Eastern popularity at all.
- The sheer quantity of abuse directed at BHO on this silly topic could indicate some sort of tipping point. Previously, the usual Hollywood suspects would have popped up to tell us how raaaaacist we are for daring to question Teh One.
- We’ve still got half a year until the election. Given the mix of legitimate and silly lines of argument against BHO, and the likelihood that ObamaCare, Fast & Furious, the various other executive branch scandals (take your pick) and the rest are only going to worsen over the summer, one begins to wonder the exact date for the announcement of the medical condition requiring retirement.
Mitch Daniels Reacts To This Morning’s Comb-Over Post
Posted on | April 20, 2012 | 9 Comments
by Smitty
Indiana Governor and The Other McCain reader (?) Mitch Daniels used
body language to emphasize the proper configuration of the comb-over, whether adorning a conservative or progressive noggin.
It’s OK, Mitch: nobody thinks the less of you because you’ve vast tracts of. . .forehead.
Just go cue ball already, man.
Then again, via Insty, maybe there’s hope.

