Quote of the Day; or, How NOT to Show your Independence...

There has been a lot of questions about the representation of Gloria Allred of Nicky Diaz Santillan, the former maid of Meg Whitman.  I agree the whole thing looks bad.  I mean this woman is a mother of two children who is risking prison (for falsifying documents) and deportation (for being an illegal alien) by putting a giant target on her head.  Certainly from a financial perspective this makes just about no sense.  But I have argued with others that you can’t really file ethics charges against Allred because she has a ready defense.  She can say that the maid was so mad at Whitman and so wanted to ruin her political career she didn’t care about those potential negative consequences she would personally suffer.  Its dubious but just plausible enough that I don’t think the disciplinary board would even be interested in investigating her.

But you still have to wonder how much Allred truly pushed her in this direction.  So Allred being asked about this several times apparently felt it was time for her client to respond to the cliam that Allred or others are manipulating her.  And the result is unintentional hilarity:

Nicky Diaz Santillan, a Mexican who Whitman says used a fraudulently obtained Social Security card and California driver’s license, dismissed claims by the GOP nominee that she was part of a Democratic smear intended to damage Whitman’s standing with voters, particularly Latinos.

“I make my own decisions and I am not anyone’s puppet,” Diaz Santillan said in a prepared statement she read at the Los Angeles office of her attorney, Gloria Allred. “Nobody made me do it.”

(emphasis added).  I don’t know if the AP writer was intentionally snarking or what.  I mean the AP article goes on to mention a few other harsh facts.  But yeah, that doesn’t exactly help the case to read a prepared statement that you are not being controlled by anyone.  It’s reminiscent of that classic scene in Monty Python and the Life of Brian when the crowd says, in unison, “we are all individuals.”  And yeah, I will post a link to a video of that later.

That being said I have come to think that Whitman should absolutely sue Allred.  Someone needs to hold this woman accountable for her antics.  And I think the malice standard for defamation—necessary in this kind of case—is easily met.  As Greta said the other day, her reading of the facts borders on delusional.

This Friday in FAIL!

First, we have a potential fail in the making with Rahm having left the White House to run for mayor of Chicago.  One tiny problem: he is probably ineligible to run:

Odelson told Roe and Roeper on WLS Radio that when Emanuel leased out his Chicago home he could no longer claim he is a resident.

“He rented his house out in Sept 09 and has not been back since and has no residency in Chicago,” Odelson said.

Odelson says he has been involved in several residency cases in Illinois that “the law is clear.”

But the best fail of the day comes from Rick Sanchez at Cnn, having a surprising anti-semitic flame out.  He was on a radio show, attacking Jon Stewart for being prejudiced toward him as a Hispanic, and the radio host asked him what he would say to the point that Stewart, as a Jew, was a minority, too:

Please, what are you kidding? … I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah. [sarcastically]

So basically the jews—er, I mean, the JOOOOOOS—run the media.

This is what identity politics leads to: bigotry.

Meanwhile, this isn’t quite a fail, but I threw up in my mouth a little reading this puff piece about the fame whore Gloria Allred.

By the way, when Whitman’s former maid is facing lawsuits for fraud and deportation, how good a friend will Allred seem to her?

Well, Now This Sounds Like an Awesome Movie

Remember the Wachowski Brothers?  They made the movie The Matrix and we thought they were going to be genius of cinema for the next 30 years.  And then around the release of Speed Racer, we realized that something went horribly wrong.

And now they plan to give us a movie about a forbidden gay affair.  And wow, doesn’t this sound like quality?  (yes, spoilers are coming.  Oh well.):

[P]art of the film takes place in the future all right — nearly a hundred from now. But its main story is told in Cloverfield-esque flashbacks by digital archeologists sorting through “found footage” from CNN and chips from old digital cameras from the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The heroes are indeed a gay American soldier named (with little irony) "Butch" and an Iraqi soldier turned militant. Butch is endearing, young, and a ravishingly handsome Marine. Our spies tell us that he "just wants to fuck and kill everything" in Iraq — until, that is, he falls in love with the Iraqi.

The two meet while Butch is on a combat patrol in Iraq during the second Gulf War, and soon enough, the two are engaged in graphically described sex (actual line from the script: "They rut like animals behind this fence") albeit while disguised in burqas. The two soldiers’ relationship blossoms, and Butch begins to get to know his lover's family. But after he inadvertently draws attention to their ancestral home, disaster strikes. This tragedy radicalizes the pair and they become convinced that the only way to rid the world of evil is to kill the architect of the invasion, the then-president of the United States, George W. Bush. And so, during one of the president’s secret sorties to Iraq, they attempt to assassinate him.

Wow, that sounds so aweful it might actually be entertaining in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 sort of way.  And I find the message to be a bit confused.  So a gay soldier decides to start having sex with the enemy and that affair leads him to want to kill the President.  Okay.  So is that pro- or anti- gays-in-the-military?

I am being facetious of course.  We know it is pro-gays-in-the-military but what a strange way to advance their cause.  And its good to know that wet dreams about assassinating Bush never go out of style, even if Bush is no longer the president.

Also the cognitive dissonance on display couldn’t be greater.  So the American and the terrorist believe that they should help...  the terrorists.

You know, because the terrorists are so tolerant of homosexuality.  *rolls eyes*

Remember Folks We Must Not Ever Let the Poor or Middle Class Get Vouchers and Allow Them to Escape our Fine Pubic Education System

A real billboard in South Bend, Indiana:

If you are not seeing the problem, look close at the word “Pubic.”

Jammie Wearing Fool has related video.  Amazing.

And by the way, I am wondering if this is really a typo...

At Least He Didn’t Call him his “Bitch”

So Harry Reid decides to tell the world how much he likes Chris Coons, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Delaware.  I guess the theory is that O’Donnell is such a bad candidate, he can afford to say really stupid crap.  You know, like calling him his “pet.”

I’m going to be very honest with you — Chris Coons, everybody knows him in the Democratic caucus. He’s my pet. He’s my favorite candidate[.]

Yike.

Laugh or Cry: DOJ Hiring People to Help Translate from... Ebonics

Apparently when people are speaking "Ebonics" they just can’t understand.

Yes, really.  (I feel like I am saying that a lot recently.)

I especially love The Smoking Gun’s explanation of this, quoting an idiot professor:

“Ebonics pronunciation includes features like the omission of the final consonant in words like ‘past’ (pas’ ) and ‘hand’ (han’), the pronunciation of the th in ‘bath’ as t (bat) or f (baf), and the pronunciation of the vowel in words like ‘my’ and ‘ride’ as a long ah (mah, rahd).”

If you are in law enforcement and you hear a man say “check out mah rad” and you don’t know what he is saying, that is just pathetic.

It all reminds me of when the whole thing first caught national attention when Oakland, if memory serves, tried to claim it was a language.  I remember reading in the Dallas Morning News where they explained that gee, unlike white people, black people will leave out the g in ing sounds, use double negatives and the word “ain’t.”  Let me emphasize this.  They had the nerve to write this in the Dallas Morning News!  That is Dallas, Texas, not Dallas, Michigan.

I remember saying to an office friend, emphasizing in my southern drawl: “Yeah, I ain’t never heard of no white people doin’ that.”  Sigh.

Look, I am not automatically against hiring experts to teach a little slang to the troops.  It’s just the abject P.C. stupidity surrounding what could have been a minor procurement that rankles me.  I mean Ebonics is bullshit.  And its almost like I am allergic to bullshit, or something...

Not Sure Whether to Laugh or Cry

We have heard Congress tell us it is too much trouble to read what a law says before passing it, and that we should pass laws in order to learn what is in them.

Now we learned that Congress apparently can’t be bothered to read the title page.

You see the other day, they passed a law that is entered into the books as “The _________ Act of ____.”

Yes, really.  Yes, literally that.  Seriously, follow the link and you will be amazed.  They passed a law and literally failed to give it a title, failed to even notice they didn’t give it a title, failed to even notice they forgot to enter in the date.

Jesus wept.

Another Liberal Accuses Others of Racism, Proves to be Racist in the Attempt

Let me introduce my reader to a new character.  This will take some verbiage, but I promise you it is fun.  And funny!  And maybe insightful.  Anyway, I know his real name, I even know his nickname, but out of some level of kindness, I will call him Stalker-boy.  You see I first ran into him around 2002-2003 tangling with him on the message boards of Findlaw.com.  Then later I went to a site called Freespeech and blogged there for a while.  And suddenly who shows up?  Stalker-boy.  I quit Freespeech for a while, quit blogging entirely, got busy and then eventually started this blog.  And guess who shows up in my email inbox?  Yep, Stalker-boy.  Indeed, it is apparently his endless desire to find me wherever I am on the internet that earns his nom de plume.

So Stalker-boy and I were arguing about Shirley Sherrod and he made an off-hand comment about Mark Williams being “disgraced.”  Williams, you might know, wrote a piece satirizing the NAACP imagining a letter by their President Ben Jealous saying that “colored people” like them wanted slavery reestablished.  It was satire of the variety Jonathan Swift would engage in, his point being to 1) mock the fact that the NAACP has the word “colored” in its name, and 2) to suggest that by following Obama they were establishing a form of slavery, albeit a race neutral one.  The first joke is feeble, yes, and the second argument is extreme.  But citing it for the proposition that the man is racist, is like citing A Modest Proposal for the proposition that Swift thought human flesh was delicious.

Or gee, its like taking Franken imagining a sexual encounter between Newt Gengrich and an Asian woman, employing many stereotypes of Asian woman, as racist.  I mean if Williams is racist, then Franken is, too, right?

Now, I don’t know jack about Mark Williams, this supposed leader of the Tea Party movement.  I never heard of the guy until the controversy over the letter blew up.  So for all I know, there might be pages and pages of racist shit the guy said.  But this is not the proof of it.

So I said to Stalker-boy that it was just a satire and he replied by saying that there was more evidence of William’s racism, than just the satire.  Like what?  Well, he explained: “Calling Allah, the deity of millions of peace-loving people, a ‘monkey-god’ (i.e., Allah's followers are monkeys) was particularly racist.  Or was that ‘satire’ too?”

Now, for the really hilarious part.  This claim that it was racist to say this, is itself racist.  That is in claiming Williams is a racist, Stalker-boy outted himself as a racist.

Speaking of Hilarious Scandals...

Here’s the laugh line from the latest Enquirer story about Gore and his chakra:

"The therapist claimed that when they were alone, Gore shrugged off a towel and stood naked in front of her.

"He pointed at his erect penis and ordered her, 'Take care of THIS.'"

I have said this several times.  I don’t know who is telling the truth, but I do know one thing for sure.  It’s hilarious.

And to be fair, the Enquirer was right, totally right, about Jon Edwards.

The Shirley Sherrod Story Gets More Hilarious

First, the NAACP purports to release the “full” speech by Shirley Sherrod.  Oh, except watch it.  There are edits there.  So its not the full speech, it’s the NAACP cut.  And even that cut doesn’t exonerate her or the NAACP.  She never condemned her own racism.  And the audience, contrary to my stalker’s opinion, showed approval of the discrimination without knowing she would go back and fix it.

Second, now Ben Jealous is claiming that the video is out of context, that in context it exonerates her.  He then gets all indignant:

“We were snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart into believing she had harmed white farmers because of racial bias,” said NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous. “Having reviewed the full tape, spoken to Ms. Sherrod, and most importantly heard the testimony of the white farmers mentioned in this story, we now believe the organization that edited the documents did so with the intention of deceiving millions of Americans.”

But as Gateway Pundit points out, there is one problem with that story (I mean besides the fact that it doesn’t actually exonerate her or the NAACP):

Mr. Jealous was there.

“Sony has pulled a TV episode from the PlayStation Network after offering it for free and then discovering that it contained naked women, breast bondage, and acid-spitting nipples.”

Says the lede in an article on IGN:

The anime episode Queen's Blade: Season 1: Episode 1: High Spirits – The Vagrant Warrior was rated TV-MA according to the PlayStation Store, but that didn't stop the TV show from being deposited in the video store's "Free TV" section. Once the 322 MB file was downloaded, users could watch the show, which ends after the main character strips down naked, puts on a suit of armor and locks the main enemy in a bear hug so that the foe's nipples can't discharge the acid inside her breasts. The enemy's breasts expand like balloons, explode and kill her. The official PlayStation Store description that ran with the free episode referenced the enemy's demise: "Reina defeats Melona by stopping the acid that shoots from her breasts."

Am I the only one who is dying to see the acid-filled breasts explode?  It’s impossible to imagine that not being hilarious.

Oh, Bill Nye... Why?

You know, I like Bill Nye normally.  I mean I had enjoyed his odd sense of humor since all the way back in his days on Almost Live.  He was just starting this “science guy” shtick with crazy experiments which weren’t very scientific, but were pretty funny.  I particularly loved a bit where he answered science questions.  In one a viewer asked that if you were in a falling elevator, if you could save your life by jumping just before you hit the ground.  He demonstrated that you would be screwed in that situation, by rigging a model elevator with an automatic “pop-up” near the bottom.  Then he puts an egg in, sets the thing off and, well, yolk happens.  It’s probably funnier to see it than I described, but I couldn’t find a youtube clip.

So its more than a little disappointing to see him say it is almost unpatriotic to doubt humans cause climate change.