Year: 2010

Little Miss Attila: Blogging Guidelines

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by Smitty

LMA has an excellent start on a list of guidelines for blogging. Absolutely nothing technical here; this is the etiquette piece that is sadly lacking.

It is also not a practical traffic guide, like Stacy’s How To Get A Million Hits piece.

One thing I’d add is to hold before yourself the bandwidth limitations of the medium. The bulk of the time, when someone has pissed you off personally, the problem has roots in misinterpretation or simple failure. Take your readers, your stories, other bloggers seriously. Yourself? Don’t be a doormat, but strive to under-react, and see if what’s ailing you doesn’t reveal itself significantly smaller on third or forth glance.

If You Don’t Like Avatar and Anderson Cooper, You’re a Kook

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That’s the basic message of Jonathan Kay’s Newsweek column:

Like all populists, tea partiers are suspicious of power and influence, and anyone who wields them. Their villain list includes the big banks; bailed-out corporations; James Cameron, whose Avatar is seen as a veiled denunciation of the U.S. military; Republican Party institutional figures they feel ignored by, such as chairman Michael Steele; colleges and universities (the more prestigious, the more evil); TheWashington Post; Anderson Cooper; and even FOX News pundits, such as Bill O’Reilly, who have heaped scorn on the tea-party movement’s more militant oddballs.
One of the most bizarre moments of the recent tea-party convention came when blogger Andrew Breitbart delivered a particularly vicious fulmination against the mainstream media, prompting everyone to get up, turn toward the media section at the back of the conference room, and scream, “USA! USA! USA!” But the tea partiers’ well-documented obsession with President Obama has hardly been diffused by their knack for finding new enemies. . . .

Read the rest. Kay goes on to list his own enemies — Joseph Farah, Roy Moore, Pat Robertson — and seems to proceed on the assumption that all populist resentment of the elite is equally baseless and illegitimate, without regard to either (a) how the elite gain their influence, or (b) what the elite do with their influence.

Grassroots protest movements often attract “militant oddballs.” Opportunistic charlatans will seek to piggyback their narrow agendas on popular movements. This is nothing new.

But have you ever seen Newsweek (or any other major media outlet) make a big deal about the Marxist organizations who turn out at every left-wing protest event? Ten years ago, I covered the “A26” anti-globalization demonstration in Washington:

Once you got past the Socialist Workers, there were still more entrepreneurial leftists, hawking the Worker’s Vanguard. Then there was the guy selling yellow “Mumia Must Live” buttons for a buck each. . . .
The place was positively brimming with rage against corporate capitalism, from T-shirts (“Mean Corporations Suck”) to handmade signs (“Corporate Press Is Not Free”). At the International Socialist Organization table, you could get a nice blue-and-white sign reading, “Workers of the World Unite and Fight.” Another group distributed red T-shirts lettered in black: “Abolish the World Bank! End the IMF! Dissolve the WTO! Socialist Party USA.” . . .
I’m not up to date on the various Marxist outfits represented at the A16 rally — League for the Revolutionary Party? International Action Center? — so I don’t know which ones are Trotskyists, which ones are Mensheviks and which ones are Maoists, but I know the original Big Red when I see it. The colorful banner proclaims, “People & Nature Before Profit$ … Young Communist League USA,” and the kids at the table are handing out the People’s Weekly World, official organ of the CPUSA. The Bolsheviks — who seized power from a backward czarist regime and actually managed to make things worse, who spent more than seven decades proving the murderous futility of revolutionary socialism — are still at it.

The major media never mentioned the kooks and commies who infested the anti-globalization movement, who also infested the anti-war movement during the Bush years. Yet Newsweek‘s columnist insists that the Tea Party movement is defined by kooks and conspiracy theorists.

And the media elite wonder why we don’t like them . . .

Financial Autarch Chooses To Share Thoughts

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by Smitty

CNSNews summarizes Ben Bernanke’s latest proclamation:

Under the threat of a major snowstorm, the panel postponed its hearing scheduled for Wednesday. The hearing was intended to review the Fed’s plans for withdrawing its emergency supports. Bernanke chose to release the prepared testimony, given the interest of investors and others.

Deciding when and how to remove all the stimulus is the biggest challenge for Bernanke in his second term, which started last week. Reeling in the stimulus too soon risks short-circuiting the recovery. That could send unemployment up.

Yet the Fed keeps its stimulus measures in place for too long, they could help unleash inflation.

As the snow melts away this Spring, the Progressive snow job will remain. The 63rd Congress’s satanic hate child will continue to promulgate the fiction that such a beast should exist without explicit Constitutional amendment.

If not for the snow, we can thank Vice President Albert Gore, Jr. for the internet. By the power of the shiny tubes, we can make sure that all Tea Party candidates are aware of HR1207, and the need to do something that is sane, transparent, and befitting of the country that so many have fought and died for, not this Federal Reserve.

Thoughts On Tancredo’s Speech

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by Smitty

One very minor kerfuffle associated with the Tea Party Convention was the Tancredo speech, about which Media Matters and the sinistrosphere blew a gasket. Media Matters has the clip, plus Tancredo’s utterly incendiary calls for…something or other. For example:

People who could not even spell the word “vote,” or say it in English, put a committed socialist idealogue in the White House, name is Barack Hussein Obama.

Somebody from Tancredo’s area, who actually helps conduct elections, tried to offer some moderate, dispassionate context as to the nature of the challenge.

Tossing in my own opinion, I’m in favor of the common-sense national security and rule of law arguments. Don’t have laws merely honored in the breech. Get a real bill that is in keeping with the Federal Governments rightful role of preserving the country.

That said, if I wasn’t using my spare language time learning German, I’d focus on Spanish. Among that blessings the country enjoys today is the English language. It’s as important to the country as the opposable thumb to the flesh. But it was born after Hastings, when Norman French ran roughshod over Anglo-Saxon.

I predict, by the power of the rectal pluck, that in another 400 years or so the slow merger of English and Spanish shall be shown to have been an overall win. That many more markets for goods, that many more readers to hit the tip jar, when Stacy is reduced to nothing more than a funny-colored brain, cranking out gonzo posts, like in the Star Treck episode.

Why Wait For Green Police: Fashion Police Already Here

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by Smitty

The wardrobe imbroglios of the 2008 campaign were insufficient. Now we must regulate all of Governor Palin’s body markings and accessories. Professor Jacobson points to some classless ponce, Yale Graduate School student Eric Robinson, an Iraq/Afghanistan veteran, and possible miniature John Kerry.

Robinson: it’s her son, arm, and metal. For you to say that wearing a bracelet with her living son’s name on it is:

demonstrates a horrifying contempt for those who gave their last full measure of devotion or an almost unbelievable ignorance of the importance of symbols in American history.

This statement marks you both a tool and a clown. Understood, you’re a grad student, and this could help your progress through Yale in un-obvious ways. Yes, that’s how it’s done. By lesser men.

Robinson: you are admonished to consider silence. Serving your country and then going Winter Soldier is not the path to honor.

OK, I Found The Moderate Part

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by Smitty

There is moderation, and I’ve emphasized it.  However, using the word ‘unprecedented’ in the same participle made my shizzle fizzle.  But this is just one post; we should look at a substantial sample space, and let the conclusions form themselves.  This is part of the effort to help these poor folks recall what ‘moderate‘ means:

Before a new blizzard brought Washington to a standstill, Barack Obama made another effort to dig out of the Republican snow job and verbal high winds that have disabled his efforts to govern.

After a two-hour meeting to clear the path for legislation, the President told White House reporters, “I won’t hesitate to embrace a good idea from my friends in the minority party, but I also won’t hesitate to condemn what I consider to be obstinacy that’s rooted not in substantive disagreements but in political expedience.”

“Expedience” is a polite word for what the GOP has been pursuing for the past year, voting uniformly against every Obama initiative from the stimulus to health care. In effect, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have chosen not to practice traditional politics but act like a government-in-exile, retreating to the sidelines and sniping until they can return to power.

At yesterday’s meeting, the President’s patience worn thin, and he accused Boehner of just wanting to kill all his initiatives, setting off what was reportedly a “testy exchange.”

Even after conceding that the Obama White House has made many mistakes in strategy and tactics over a year of unprecedented challenges, it’s remarkable that GOP opposition has been so total and unyielding.

Where are the yes votes of “moderate” Republicans–Lugar, Voinovich, Snowe, Collins or the “maverick” McCain–on any single issue? Such a solid bloc of “no” precludes any conclusion that philosophical or ideological differences are involved. The GOP is in a full tantrum, holding its breath and refusing to budge until it can get its way next November.

A Call To Help Moderate
The Moderate Voice

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by Smitty

Valley of the Shadow has issued a blog-wah (a fatwah against a blog) for The Moderate Voice.

VotS feels, to use my own words, that TMV is to ‘moderation’ what Planned Parenthood is to life. VotS holds forth Ann Althouse as an exemplar of moderation, and entreats the Right-o-Sphere to help fisk TMV’s authors along paths of righteous moderation.

This blog relays the call, and puts it to the readers to figure out if TMV is really a poorly labelled Huffington Post, merely a mis-understood collection of misfits trying to fight for the American Way, or if VotS was socially jilted by someone there*.

Everyone, take a moment to review argumentation theory before going in with dull rhetoric. You know what that was like, because you’ll never forget what it was like to be over Macho Grande.

*VotS got back to me and said:

My anger at TMV has nothing to do w/relationships but the fact that I’ve been a partisan (for both sides) on and off since I was 15. I learned from Old machine hacks how to argue and debate. The best line that stuck with me is: If you argue with someone and can’t share a beer after words, you lose more then the argument.