One of the basic principles of blogging is, Know Where Your Traffic Is Coming From. How are readers reaching your site? Are they coming from links at other blogs? Are they finding you through search engines? Social networking? Tweets by Alyssa Milano?
If the object of the game is to increase traffic — and doesn’t everybody want more readers? — you’ve got to have some idea of what your current traffic is all about. So I spend a good bit of time looking at SiteMeter statistics, monitoring traffic, and this morning I spotted something unusual.
I screen-capped the visit to preserve a record of it. “F*** Yeah Chubby Girls” is a “body acceptance” site, not an online dating service. (Sorry to disappoint you, guys.) The idea is that plus-sized ladies submit photos of themselves (and brief notes) so as to express pride and confidence in their chubbiness.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
In fact, I’m all in favor of it. (I’m sure “Chubby Chaser” Dan Collins is also in favor of it.) As I’ve explained before, I totally approve of ladies with “more to love” or, as folks say down home, more cushion for the pushin’. Go right ahead and have yourself another plate of biscuits and gravy, sweetheart. It’s all good to me.
Being supportive of the “body acceptance” movement, I think it’s a good idea to share at least one of the “F*** Yeah Chubby Girls” submissions, so that readers can have an opportunity to express their own supportive responses. Continue reading Not Quite Sure What to Make of This →
President Obama’s take from his Austin, Texas, fundraisers is $2 million, a Democratic source said Tuesday. More than 50 attendees paid $35,800 – the maximum legal limit – to dine with the president at a private residence. Attendance at a separate reception for more than 700 people at Austin’s Moody Theater started at $44 for students and $1000 for floor tickets to watch Obama speak and country artist Robert Earl Keen perform.
Ms. Swift turned her attention to the issue of sexist language when she and Casey Miller, her companion, formed a professional editing partnership in 1970 and were asked to copy-edit a sex education manual for junior high school students.
The stated goal of the manual was to encourage mutual respect and equality between boys and girls, but Ms. Swift and Ms. Miller, who died in 1997, concluded that the author’s intent was being undermined by the English language.
“We suddenly realized what was keeping his message — his good message — from getting across, and it hit us like a bombshell,” Ms. Swift said in a 1994 interview for the National Council of Teachers of English. “It was the pronouns! They were overwhelmingly masculine gendered.”
Read the whole thing, which was sent to me by Dave C. from At the Point of a Gun, who should therefore get all the hate-mail from angry feminists. (And let’s face it: If you weren’t angry all the time, you wouldn’t really be much of a feminist, would you?)
As predicted, the president spoke in El Paso, Texas today, where he conflated legal and illegal immigration, pushed for the DREAM Act, and showed his longstanding contempt for the rule of law as regards our immigration system.
The misleading conflation of legal and illegal immigration — accusing proponents of strict enforcement of being “anti-immigrant” — is characteristic of all open-borders advocates, Democrat and Republican. (BTW, this is a major reason I don’t regret the defeat of that two-faced backstabbing crapweasel John McCain in 2008.) Obama’s El Paso speech was a masterpiece of distortion, distraction and outright lies. From the transcript:
Today, there are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants here in the United States. Some crossed the border illegally. Others avoid immigration laws by overstaying their visas. Regardless of how they came, the overwhelming majority of these folks are just trying to earn a living and provide for their families. (Applause.)
Why the applause? What was Obama’s audience applauding? The people he is describing are criminals, foreign lawbreakers who are, in essence, trespassing illegally in this country. If we are a nation of laws, it does not matter who these people are, where they came from or why they came; what matters is that they are criminals, all of whom should be apprehended and deported. More from the transcript:
Then they wanted a fence. Well, the fence is –
AUDIENCE: Booo!
THE PRESIDENT: The fence is now basically complete.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Tear it down!
THE PRESIDENT: Then we’ve gone further. We tripled the number of intelligence analysts working at the border. I’ve deployed unmanned aerial vehicles to patrol the skies from Texas to California. We have forged a partnership with Mexico to fight the transnational criminal organizations that have affected both of our countries. . . .
So, here’s the point. I want everybody to listen carefully to this. We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement. All the stuff they asked for, we’ve done. But even though we’ve answered these concerns, I’ve got to say I suspect there are still going to be some who are trying to move the goal posts on us one more time.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: They’re racist!
THE PRESIDENT: You know, they said we needed to triple the Border Patrol. Or now they’re going to say we need to quadruple the Border Patrol. Or they’ll want a higher fence. Maybe they’ll need a moat. (Laughter.) Maybe they want alligators in the moat. (Laughter.) They’ll never be satisfied. And I understand that. That’s politics.
Notice that the same audience that applauded the 11 million illegals is now booing and catcalling, demanding that the border fence be torn down and denouncing Republicans as racists. This is the kind of hate-filled sentiment that Obama is actively promoting.
It hasn’t been finished. Just like the illegals to whom the president is pandering, his administration has ignored the law. Sen. Jim DeMint at National Review:
Five years ago, legislation was passed to build a 700-mile double-layer border fence along the southwest border. This is a promise that has not been kept.
Today, according to staff at the Department of Homeland Security, just 5 percent of the double-layer fencing is complete, only 36.3 miles.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’s investigative arm, reported in early 2009 that only 32 miles of double-layer fencing had been built. That means under President Obama, only 4.3 miles of double layer fencing has been built. This is woefully inadequate.
So Obama lied about the fence. Notice, however, that in his speech, Obama only identifies Republicans as advocates of strict border security. Are all Democrats now in favor of open borders and amnesty? Because I seem to recall some Democrats desperately seeking re-election last year who ran TV ads portraying themselves as tough on immigration.
We might get a chance to put the president’s claim to the test, because Senate Democrats are promising to re-introduce the DREAM Act amnesty bill. Let’s see how many Democrat senators facing tough re-election fights in 2012 vote for that. Hell, Harry Reid couldn’t even get a cloture vote on the DREAM Act during the lame-duck session last year, because five Democrats voted “no”: Max Baucus (Montana), Kay Hagan (North Carolina), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Mark Pryor (Arkansas) and Jon Tester (Montana).
So Obama lied about the border fence, he lied about Republicans, and he lied about who it is that’s playing politics with the issue: It’s him.
“He is not only out of touch with what’s really going on . . . he has absolutely no intentions of getting serious about making it a priority [to] empower the states, like Arizona is trying to do to protect themselves. . . . It is ridiculous that the federal government sued Arizona to begin with . . . This is just creating another distraction, which this administration is really good at.”
Inmates help load sandbags onto a truck in Louisiana
River likely to devastate poorest part of country with record-high floodwaters
Obama’s Immigration Speech Offers Nothing New
“Big policy speech” offers no new proposals, no new legislation, and no idea how he’s going to win over a hostile Republican majority in the House
The adult sons of Osama bin Laden have lashed out at President Obama over their father’s death, accusing the United States of violating its basic legal principles by killing an unarmed man, shooting his family members and disposing of his body in the sea.
“I am now disabled and unable to work all because of bin Laden. I could care less about the legality of the US handling of the bin Laden situation. ”
The statement said the family was asking why the leader of Al Qaeda “was not arrested and tried in a court of law so that truth is revealed to the people of the world.” Citing the trials of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, the statement questioned “the propriety of such assassination where not only international law has been blatantly violated,” but the principles of presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial were ignored. “We maintain that arbitrary killing is not a solution to political problems,” the statement said, adding that “justice must be seen to be done.”
Seems like to me your family’s opposition to “arbitrary killing” is just a wee bit too late, fellows.
You may remember in February when “fit fun classy guy” Rep. Chris Lee (R-Stupid) resigned from Congress after being caught trolling Craigslist for dates. That set up a special election to fill the seat, now scheduled for May 24 — two weeks from today.
Republican county chairs picked Assemblywoman Jane Corwin as their candidate, while Democrats picked an obscure county official, Kathy Hochul. This is a strong Republican district in western New York and Corwin, who also has the crucial endorsement of the state’s Conservative Party, should be running away with this.
Alas, there is the Crazy Jack Davis, a once-upon-a-time Republican who, in 2004, 2006 and 2008, ran for the NY-26 seat as a Democrat. Crazy Jack has now managed to get himself on the May 24 ballot as a “Tea Party” candidate. Of course, he’s not in any way representative of the Tea Party movement, and is supported by no Tea Party organizations, but nevertheless — funny how these coincidences happen — Davis has the “Tea Party” ballot line.
Crazy Jack Davis is a millionaire protectionist. As Sam Foster pointed out at Red State, “His signature issue, his raison d’etre has to do with our nation’s trade imbalance . . . He wants to cancel all free trade agreements in favor of something he calls ‘balanced trade.’ ” Which is utter nonsense, of course. (How is it that some people — Donald Trump is another — become millionaires without understanding basic economics?) “Balanced trade” is just a variation of economic nationalism which, in turn, is a straight road to the planned economy. But if you don’t yet understand why free trade is better policy than protectionism, there’s no point in my lecturing at this point: You’re on the wrong blog, pal.
Of far more immediate political relevance is the fact that a substantial number of NY-26 residents appear to be buying the Smoot-Hawley snake oil that Crazy Jack is selling. One recent poll showed Davis playing the “spoiler” role in the special election by pulling independent voters away from the conservative Republican, Jane Corwin. This has enabled the Democrat to eke out a lead:
They fancy themselves the vanguard of a revolution, when in fact they are typical self-absorbed, privileged children used to having their way — now — and uninhibited about complaining loudly when they don’t.
The question conservatives should be asking themselves is, “Why is a transparent fraud like Davis evidently hurting the GOP in this poll?” And the answer, I would suggest, is two-fold:
1. Republicans have done a piss-poor job of articulating the principles of a free-market economic policy, having become accustomed instead to winning elections waged over cultural issues or national-security policy.
2. The New York state GOP establishment, in particular, is inept and out-of-touch.
Talk to conservative grassroots Republicans in New York — and I talked to lots of them during the fabled NY-23 campaign of 2009 — and you will get an earful about the “Albany insiders” and their idiotic idea that the GOP can win elections as an unprincipled “me-too” party.
Despite the fact that 36% of New York residents are Catholic, and these Catholic voters represent the “swing” vote in every close election, state GOP leaders have a profound horror of pro-lifers and other social conservatives. This was why they thought pro-abortion Dede Scozzafava was a good candidate for NY-23 and why, in last year’s mid-term election, a pro-life candidate like Ann Marie Buerkle in NY-25 got very little support from the party establishment.
Of course, fixing the Republican Party in the two weeks between now and May 24 is not an option. The question is how to beat Hochul by rallying support for Corwin and discrediting Crazy Jack. Looking on the upside, the polls probably overstate Crazy Jack’s support. A lot of people who tell pollsters they’ll vote for a novelty candidate won’t actually show up to vote on Election Day. But New York Tea Party activists (some of whom were disgruntled by the GOP’s choice of Corwin) need to get the message out that Crazy Jack is the wrong choice for NY-26.
NY-26 is a winnable district, and a GOP defeat would be interpreted by the media (however falsely) as a repudiation of the conservative agenda. Let’s win this one!
A win by the Democrat in this Republican district — even if created by a phony Tea Party candidate siphoning off votes from the Republican– will be spun as a major victory for Obama. You will hear nothing but how it signals Obama’s turnaround, how it reflects Obama’s new found popularity after the bin Laden kill, and how it signals unhappiness with Republicans.
Someone came here from a site called “F*** Yeah Chubby Girls.”
