Category: Uncategorized

by Smitty

What can I say? I voted for Perot in ’92.

Dan Collins is just askin’ questions:

So, eyewitnesses are saying that not only wasn’t the movie the cause of the attack, but that there wasn’t any protest of the movie prior to the attack. Suspicion now falls on an al-Qaeda operative who was sent from Gitmo to Gaddafi in 2007, after Gaddafi agreed to keep him jailed. Instead, Gaddafi released Sufyan Ben Qumu to appease Islamists in 2008. When Congress was considering Obama’s strategy of engaging with the anti-Gaddafi rebels, NATO told them that there were al-Qaeda among those rebels . . .
What this means is that the primary target might not have been Christopher Stevens*, but rather retired Navy SEAL Glen Doherty, who was tasked with trying to get shoulder launched anti-aircraft missiles out of the hands of militants. And it also prompts the question, “Who supplied those armaments?”
I’m not saying that the administration did. It would have been madness for them to have supplied shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles to rebels among whom were elements of al-Qaeda when US was engaged in enforcing a no-fly zone in Libya, in order to help those rebels get rid of Gaddafi. Still, given the variety of very obvious lies we’ve been fed by this administration, and given its fecklessness on other occasions, it seems to me within the realm of possibility.

Read the whole thing, because I think Dan’s definitely onto something here, and I’ll go him one further: It is not necessary for the U.S. to have directly supplied the weapons in order for the administration to be at fault for having indirectly supplied the weapons:

1. U.S. supports rebels.
2. Rebels capture weapons from Libyan military.
3. Rebels use captured weapons to kill Americans.

It’s not exactly like shipping weapons to Mexican drug lords, but still the word “feckless” comes to mind. I mean, hey, let’s help some ragtag desert savages to overthrow their dictator, despite warnings that there are al-Qaeda terrorists among these ragtag savages — what could possibly go wrong?

Commenting on some recent events, and quite interesting:

How many of the purported Republicans and/or conservatives that have been pronouncing Romney a sure loser in the last three weeks are among those that, during the primaries, said the GOP had to nominate him because he was the only one who could win?
Of those, how many have close ties to Jeb Bush?
If Jeb ever wants to be President, Romney needs to lose this election.
As Stacy sometimes says, “I’m just askin’ . . .”
But I do think it would make a hell of an interesting blog post for someone that had time to trace it down.
-Bert

This would imply a Bushian conspiracy for dynastic revival.

Crazy? Yeah. But never trust those Bushies . . .

Did I ever mention that I’m a professional journalist who’s been at this business since 1986? I think I did.

And probably I’ve also mentioned a time or two that I started out at $4.50 an hour for a 6,000-circulation weekly in Austell, Georgia, working my way up from there by ceaseless toil.

It ain’t bragging if you can do it, and yet there are still punks out there who think they can come rolling in on me with threats and expect me to run away scared. They’re wrong.

Most of the time, I ignore crap like this, because there’s no point callng attention to the gnats hovering around the elephant’s ass.

Every so often, however, I’ll swat the hell out of one, just to provide an example for the rest. So it was with a certain graduate student and occasional HuffPo contributor who decided that it would be a smart move to jump into somebody else’s blog war in an attempt to blow it up into the Scandal of the Century.

Fail.

This Alex Brant-Zawadzki spent a day or two on Twitter hyping up his Shocking Exposé of Ali Akbar, produced in cooperation with a notorious bullshit artist named Matt Osborne and a couple of trolls named Bill Schmalfeldt and Melissa Brewer. When they finally pushed it out — thud.

So I went on Twitter and remarked to Alex B-Z that this was all a long run for a short slide — an old baseball analogy — and he got all snarktastic in his response to that, with his troll friends jumping in to provide a chorus of insulting noise.

When such clustered Twitter noise is being directed at you, it’s possible to mistake it for something meaningful, unless you’re smart enough to realize that trolls lack what the social-networking gurus call “reach.” Most of them don’t have 1/100th my number of followers, because they never Tweet anything worth reading, but instead produce feeds that are nonstop chattering negativity about nothing. Nevertheless, there are people who freak out over the troll-swarm, and start getting into arguments with the trolls, thereby directing their own readers toward these pests who might otherwise be easily ignored.

Well, what to do? Unlike his troll fanboys, Alex has a publicly available e-mail address and some prospect of an actual career, so I felt it might be helpful to offer him some advice.

The first piece of advice I’d offer anyone like this is to leave me the hell alone, because if I decide to answer your insults, the answer is likely to be memorable enough to deserve publication (OBLIGATORY STRONG LANGUAGE WARNING): Continue reading Alex Brant-Zawadzki (@Beezling) Gets Blunt Words About Wild Goose Chases →

Interviewed Sunday on KKTV in Colorado, President Obama was asked to grade his presidency and gave himself an “incomplete.” Maybe he’s grading himself on the curve, but Paul Ryan isn’t impressed with Professor Obama’s academic rigor:

CBS News:

Republican vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan said in regard to the comment, “Four years into a presidency and an incomplete?”
Ryan complained that “[t]he president is asking people just to be patient with him” before attacking Mr. Obama for “picking winners and losers in the economy” and borrowing and spending money.
“That doesn’t work,” he told CBS News’ Charlie Rose. “So, I think the incomplete speaks for itself, and that is why I think we are going to win this and get this country on the right track because we’re offering solutions.”
Added Romney Campaign Spokesperson Amanda Henneberg: “If President Obama can’t even give himself a passing grade, why would the American people give him another four years?”

I’m reminded of Bluto in Animal House: “Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the f–king Peace Corps.”

“You’ve got an obligation to your children and grandchildren to make sure Barack Obama goes back to Chicago … because we can’t stand four more years of this. Eight years of Obama is not twice as bad as four. There is an exponential damage that is done to our country if he gets four more years.”
— Haley Barbour, speaking Sunday at Blog Bash

It is reported that the Village Voice has laid off three staff writers and reduced a senior editor to part-time status. And there are also reports of about 20 layoffs at NBC’s Tonight show:

Leno is paid approximately $30 million. He last reupped his contract in 2010 after reclaiming the Tonight Show from Conan O’Brien. The show currently employs between 150 and 200 people, according to a network source. . . .
Meanwhile, the program’s weekly budget will be cut from $2.3 million — the amount allotted for Leno’s primetime show that carried over when he took the Tonight reigns from O’Brien — to around $1.7 million, back near where it was during the host’s first late-night run, the Los Angeles Times reports. The paper notes that Leno is taking a sizable pay cut in the process.

I’m sure Mitt Romney will be blamed for this, somehow.