Because I’m Not That Stupid

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Perhaps some readers will recall this noxious video:

When I posted that horrible thing April 24, I warned that “Fark.com has quite accurately described [it] as ‘The worst version of “Sweet Home Alabama” in the entire history of ever.’ ”

Operating as usual in fire-and-forget mode, I paid no further attention until May 2 when I observed that this had become “The Longest Comment Thread in the History of This Blog” and added:

For the record, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of any of what people write in the comments. . . . 
So now I’ve got the blogospheric equivalent of a “Jerry Springer Show” episode in the comments of a two-week-old post that I just put up as a bit of weekend snark. But I guess it goes to show the unpredictable nature of online viral phenomena.

Well, this yammering continued — now 500+ comments — entirely unheeded until today when I received an e-mail “cease and desist” notice:

Submitted to Evidence:
5/10/2010
Case #0014374892010crv
Submitted to: State(s) Federal Bureau of Investigation div. of Cyber Crimes
(New Jersey, Florida, Ohio, Tennessee, Oregon, North Carolina, Texas, North Dakota, Louisiana, Mississippi, Idaho)
Submitted to: Local Law Enforcement Columbiana County Ohio / Cleveland AAU Div. . . .
From:
Blaze Records USA
Department of Legal Affairs
*Please be advised that Blaze Records USA and the Artist’s that it represents Have not posted to this blog.
Any and all information posted here has been tracked, traced, documented and submitted as evidence to the proper authorities.
Legal Issues (AP Press Release) April 27, 2010
We are very pleased to announce that on April 27, 2010 Blaze Records USA has been granted an injunction to file a National Class Action Lawsuit on behalf of Blaze Records USA and the Artist’s that it represents.
Over the past eight months, Blaze Records USA and the Artist’s in which it represents, has endured continues harassment, slander and defamation of character from several individuals and companies.
During the past eight months, the Blaze Records USA Internet Security Team has collected and documented over 6,000 pages of evidence related to this case. They have also collected and documented over 400 cases of Copyright Infringement and Trademark Violations from several individuals.
A legal advisory panel consisting of 11 Attorney’s, 4 Judges and several law enforcement officials has been assembled to ensure the handling of this case and to seek justice for all parties who’s legal rights have been violated.
Both Civil and Criminal charges will be filed against all persons involved and will be filed in the following states: Oregon, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Florida, Texas, Idaho, Tennessee, Georgia, and New Jersey.
Insuring the rights and safety of Blaze Records USA Artist’s, is and will continue to be a priority and this behavior, will not be tolerated nor taken lightly.
Any and all questions or concerns with this issue should be brought to our attention and will be immediately addressed as a priority and handled with confidentiality. . . .

Blah, blah, blah. Although I’m not a lawyer, I’m reliably informed that the so-called “safe harbor” provision of the Communications Decency Act means that I’m not responsible for idiotic comments by idiotic commenters, especially comments I’ve never seen on a three-week-old post.

Certainly, I cannot be accused of malice against people I’ve never met, on the basis of comments I’ve never seen, which were posted by anonymous assclowns.

However, despite its legal and grammatical deficiencies, this e-mail about a “legal advisory panel” threatening me with “Civil and Criminal charges” prompts me to wonder about Blaze Records USA. Does anybody else find it strange that this record company (which nobody ever heard of) should employ both a “Legal Affairs Department” and an “Internet Security Team”? Since they can afford all that stuff, maybe they should also invest in a halfway decent Web site.

Or hire some singers who can, y’know, sing.

Exit Question: Is Champagne Dream the Jackie Mackie Paisley Passey of music?

Lesbian for Life or Gay Baby-Killer? Does Elena Kagan Support Roe v. Wade?

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Privately, she’s gay enough for Obama, and her anti-military record at Harvard should get Elena Kagan lots of kudos from “Blame America First” Democrats. But the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List wants Senate Republicans to get the new Supreme Court nominee’s abortion views on the record:

Today, in response to President Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan to the United States Supreme Court, Marjorie Dannenfelser, President of the Susan B. Anthony List, offered the following statement:
“Elena Kagan has no judicial record from which to determine her position on Roe v. Wade, but she has publicly criticized the 1991 Supreme Court ruling to allow the Department of Health and Human Services to restrict funding from groups that performed or promoted abortion, and has also criticized crisis pregnancy centers. Additionally, President Obama has said he prefers a Supreme Court nominee who would take a special interest in ‘women’s rights’ — a barely masked euphemism for abortion rights. Through the judicial confirmation process the American people must know where Elena Kagan stands on the abortion issue, and it is the responsibility of the U.S. Senate to find out.
“Ms. Kagan’s publicly demonstrated prejudices do not lend themselves well to blind justice. . . . Women will never be served by ignoring the rights of unborn children. When evidence of personal preference appears in any Supreme Court nominee’s judgment, it should give all women pause.”

And here’s Charmaine Yoest at Americans United for Life:

“Elena Kagan has strong ties to abortion-advocacy organizations and expressed admiration for activist judges who have worked to advance social policy rather than to impartially interpret the law. Americans United for Life will oppose President Obama’s attempt to reshape the Court as an activist, pro-abortion institution through which unelected judges will work to impose an out-of-the-mainstream social agenda upon the American people.”

The “Elena Kagan gay” meme has been good for blog traffic today, but most conservatives don’t care what she does in her private life. Before you can have a private life, however, you first have to have a life. So why would Elena Kagan deny the right to life of the unborn innocent?

PA-12 Update: Tim Burns Has the Edge

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The big headline out of Pennsylvania today is the poll showing Joe Sestak pulling ahead of Arlen Specter in the Democratic Senate primary, but the May 18 special election in John Murtha’s 12th District is highlighted at Townhall by NRCC Political Director Brian Walsh:

We’ve seen a great deal of polling information since this race began, some that has had both the Republicans and Democrats in the lead. But one thing is clear – Republicans are close in this traditionally Democrat-dominated district, and Nancy Pelosi and her liberal allies are running scared. Even with Democrats possessing a nearly 2-1 advantage among registered voters, no one is denying that this race is heating up, and even political handicappers Stu Rothenberg and Charlie Cook have moved this race to pure toss-up. Tim’s message of fiscal conservatism and family values is one that’s resonating, and his push for the repeal of Healthcare Reform and the halting of the Obama/Pelosi agenda is one we can all agree on.
This special election comes at a vital time for our country. Democrats have rammed through legislation over the past 16 months that has placed the United States on a road to more bureaucracy and higher taxes – with no end in sight. On May 18th, Americans have a chance to send Washington Democrats a clear message by cutting into Nancy Pelosi’s vote count in the House of Representatives.

Jon Ward at Daily Caller:

House Republicans will be looking to western Pennsylvania, where a special election to fill the seat held by Democrat John Murtha for 36 years looks like a good bet to switch parties.
Many Republicans believe a win there by Republican businessman Tim Burns will mean that they’re headed for a pickup of as many as 50 seats this fall, far more than the 40 they need to take back the House. . . .
If Republican Tim Burns takes Murtha’s seat after 36 years of Democratic control – and despite a two-to-one voter registration advantage in Pennsylvania’s 12th District – some say that means the GOP will hit the high end of estimated pickups this fall.

Conservatives got encouraging news last week:

Democratic special election nominee Mark Critz is headed into the final 12 days of the campaign with a serious cash disadvantage.
Critz reported $73,000 cash on hand plus another $40,000 in debt in the pre-election reports released Thursday.
Businessman Tim Burns, the GOP nominee, reported having more than four times that sum with $308,000 in the bank.

OK, so the Republican has enough cash to go the distance, now what he needs is volunteers to help. As I reported last night in the Hot Air Green Room, the conservative group Code Red is putting out the call:

We are on the ground in PA-12 for the special election. We have called and identified several thousand conservative democrats and independent voters that need to be visited in a door-to-door program this week.
Because of the make-up of the district, this election will be a nail biter and EVERY vote picked up could make a difference in the outcome. Conservative CODE RED is organizing door-to-door efforts around the district. Please come to PA-12 and help us turn out the vote.
You can make a difference! Be a part of history. . . .
If you can come to western Pennsylvania to help out in this vital election, please email me at [email protected] or call me at (740) 792-2400.

You can get the latest updates by checking #PA12 on Twitter, and also by following @TimothyBurns or his campaign’s outreach coordinator, Angela Lash (@Lash3). Learn more at TimBurnsForCongress.com.

PREVIOUSLY:

Lesbian Elena Kagan Will Be Nominated by Obama; Gayest SCOTUS Evah!

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Tonight, I’m reaping the Google traffic bonanza from “How Gay Is Elena Kagan?” (Short answer: Gayer than Rosie O’Donnell guest-hosting the Ellen DeGeneres show.) Now everybody’s Googling for America’s most famous stealth lesbian:

Kagan, 50, served as the Dean of Harvard Law Lesbian School from 2003 to 2009. Obama nominated her to serve in her current post as solicitor general early in 2009, and she won Senate confirmation by a vote of 61-31. She is the first woman lesbian to serve as solicitor general of the United States. . . .
Some liberal critics have said that Kagan’s views on executive power and the treatment of terrorist detainees are too conservative lesbian . . .

Obviously, some editing was required there. Does anyone care what I think of Elena Kagan’s judicial philosophy? No, but they’ll scour every corner of the Internet for “Elena Kagan lesbian” or “Elena Kagan gay,” and it’s been months since I’ve had a Google-bomb winner like that. (If you’re looking for “Elena Kagan nude” or “Elena Kagan sex video,” you’re pathetic and disgusting, but traffic is traffic.)

For some reason, while conservatives are mostly indifferent toward Kagan’s gayness, the Obama administration has acted as if it were a huge scandal, as conservative lesbian Cynthia Yockey explains:

Well, thank Gaia gays and lesbians can count on the left — the gay-lovin’, gay rights supportin’ left — to have their backs. So how are they taking the news? KA. FREAKING. BOOM! SHAME-A-PALOOZA! The White House announced that Kagan is straight and it is all Bush’s fault if anyone says otherwise. HuffPo has declared war on the “Republican whispering campaign.” Human Rights Campaign is decrying discussion of Kagan’s sexual orientation as being “straight out of the right-wing playbook.” . . .
Lesbians and gays are outnumbered on the left by other demographic groups that hate us and want us dead. . . . I believe it is these leftist anti-gay identity groups who are working hard to shift blame for a “whispering campaign” onto conservatives and Republicans.

The purpose of the Kagan “whispering campaign” blame game is the same as the Tea Party “racism” smears: To convince Americans (gay, straight, black, white, whatever) that conservatives are dangerous, irrational bigots. As it becomes starkly apparent that Democrats are incompetent to cope with the nation’s economic and national-security problems, the Left has increasingly resorted to defamation and demonization of their political opponents. It’s the only argument they’ve got.

Beyond that, if you want serious discussion of the Elena Kagan nomination, try Legal Insurrection, Michelle Malkin, Tammy Bruce, Weasel Zippers or The Lonely Conservative. Legal analysis isn’t my specialty. I’m just a blogger trying to make a buck.

ELENA KAGAN IS TOTALLY GAY!

Don’t hate me for being a capitalist.

UPDATE: Hands off my Google-bomb, Donald Douglas!

UPDATE II: Bob Belvedere and Da Tech Guy are not ashamed to covet the lucrative Google-bomb.

UPDATE III: More non-rumors from Cliff at Another Black Conservative and from Jules Crittenden.

Meanwhile, in the comments below, Jennifer from A Conservative Shemale seems offended by my sense of humor. Although National Offend a Feminist Week ended yesterday, permit me to wonder hypothetically whether Jennifer would be offended or flattered if I replied, “Run along and get me a cup of coffee, sweetheart.”

Being oppressed by the patriarchy = acceptance?

Second Half of a ‘W’-Shaped Recession?

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The obverse of “irrational exuberance” is unwarranted pessimism, and market bears run the risk of discrediting themselves by continually warning of a meltdown. Excuse me if you’ve already seen this video of the online stock-market seminar guy who got ridiculously excited about that temporary 1,000-point Dow drop last week:

OK, so that guy was pathetic. However, as to the question of whether trends of the past year represent (a) promising recovery from a “V”-shaped recession, or (b) a dead-cat bounce prior to the onset of the second downturn in a “W”-shaped recession, I’ve always said (b). 

Bearish pessimism is looking a lot smarter these days. The DJIA has lost more than 800 points since closing April 26 at 11,205, while the Greek debt crisis threatens to suck the banking system down the drain:

Europe’s government debt crisis is starting to infect the bank funding system, driving borrowing costs higher from Asia to the U.S. and threatening to slow the global economic recovery.
The interest rate that financial companies charge each other for three month loans in dollars is the highest since August, while traders are paying record amounts to hedge against losses in European bank bonds. . . .
European Union finance ministers pledged to stop a sovereign debt crisis from shattering confidence in the euro as they held an emergency summit over the weekend to hammer out a lending mechanism for deficit-stricken nations. The sovereign debt crisis may end up costing governments more than $1 trillion . . .
“Whether the markets completely unravel depends on whether politicians can stabilize the peripheral government market,” said James Gledhill, who helps manage about 58 billion pounds ($85 billion) as head of fixed income at Henderson Global Investors Ltd. in London. “The tail risk is the stress on banks which stops them from lending to corporates and feeds through to become a real economy problem.”

Translation: Government demand for additional credit, to cope in the short term with the sovereign-debt crisis, will siphon capital away from the private sector and impede recovery.

To repeat what I wrote a year ago:

The stimulus-and-bailout policies have not addressed the fundamental problems of the economy — namely, an excess of debt and a shortage of capital to spur job creation — while the entitlement trainwreck of Social Security and Medicare looms immediately ahead. By piling on new trillion-dollar deficits, at a time when the recession will result in significant tax revenue shortfalls, the Democrats are steering the economy into a stagflation trap.

The extreme neo-Keynesian interventions of the past two years were the exact opposite of sound policy, and I repeatedly predicted in 2009 that the bond market would eventually bring about a reckoning. Investors now sense that this reckoning is much closer, and the latest attempt to prop up the Eurozone won’t change the underlying gloomy prospect.

This doesn’t mean that the Dow will lose another 200 points Monday. For all we know, the DJIA might stage a rally and end the week +500. But real-estate problems continues to weigh down the economy. The FDIC closed four more banks Friday, bringing the total number of U.S. bank failures this year to 68, and we’re likely to see another 100 or so banks go belly-up before the end of the year.

All of this, while the Fed has spent the past 16 months pumping currency at zero interest, meaning that interest rates can only go up from here. Optimists who think we’re already out of the woods and moving inexorably toward the sunny uplands of recovery are idiots.

Lawrence Taylor, a $300 Jailbait Hooker and a Pimp Named ‘Rasheed’ Walk Into a Tabloid Scandal . . .

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OK, I probably should have continued to ignore the statutory rape prosecution of NFL legend Lawrence Taylor, but I just happened to see this story at the New York Post:

The teenage hooker allegedly raped by Lawrence Taylor in a sleazy Rockland County hotel room told The Post yesterday about how her alleged pimp brutally forced her to have sex with the Giants great after she initially refused.
“I told him I wasn’t going to the hotel, and he said, ‘You’re f—ing this up, it’s $300,” the frightened Bronx girl, 16, said Rasheed Davis, 36, screamed at her early Thursday. . . .
Davis then dragged her to the Holiday Inn to meet with the Hall of Fame linebacker, barking instructions at her along the way, she recalled.

Wait a minute. You’re Lawrence Taylor, considered by many football commentators to be the greatest linebacker in the history of the game, and you’re meeting a pimp named Rasheed at a Holiday Inn to pay $300 for a hooker from the Bronx?

Entirely leaving aside the moral and legal issues surrounding LT’s situation . . . Dude. What’s with the bargain-basement approach here?

Yeah, sure, Tiger Woods shagged cocktail waitresses and other low-rent bimbos, but those were freebies. An entirely different calculus applies, if you’re actually going to pay for it. Prostitution is one market in which shopping for discounts probably isn’t a good idea.

Maybe LT’s investments took a hit in recession, but he’s still got his NFL pension. If the guy just can’t do without hookers, he would certainly be better off cutting back on the quantity, rather than sacrificing quality.

Better to do it twice a year with $2,000-a-night high-end call-girls, than to do it once a month with $300-a-night Bronx girls from Skanks-R-Us.

Call it the “Eliot Spitzer Rule.”

But don’t take my word for it, LT. Just ask the New York Post‘s advice columnist. She’s an expert, you know.