Sadly, No!

ABOVE: Rich Lowry in better times

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Rich Lowry at America’s Shittiest Website™ wants a bailout too:

The annual rite has arrived — the NRO fundraising week (give or take a few days).

Er, the begging started on November 17, so I don’t think “give or take a few days” is quite telling the truth. I’ll bet Rich also tries to convince his girlfriends that 4 inches equals 9 inches “give or take a few inches.”

Believe me, we like asking for contributions even less than you like reading our appeals for contributions.

Probably not, or we wouldn’t be reading this.

I know this isn’t the best time to be asking anyone for help. Times are tough all around, but they are especially tough here at NR and NRO.

In fact, the NR cruise had to be shortened by a day this year.

We’re not complaining.

Liberals “complain.” National Review writers simply point out that their current financial state is requiring them to euthanize their pet dogs because they could no longer afford the kibble.

We’re not here for our shareholders (we don’t have any) or for massive bonuses (never have existed at NR and never will), but to defend our country’s freedoms and its ideals.

Which is why Lowry has magnanimously declined to draw a salary for the next two years and to work completely for free.

I know some of you are thinking, “Well, why don’t you free-market types get out and make a profit?”

Well, now that you mention it, Rich, yes, we were thinking that.

We do everything we can to maximize revenues and minimize expenditures.

Except move to cheaper office space in New Jersey. But, Rich, you’re avoiding the question. Why don’t you make a profit?

We’re a serious magazine and website of opinion. We’re not Vogue or Vanity Fair, with luxury merchandisers lining up to shower us with expensive advertising.

Oh dear, dear, dear. I think Rick just admitted that his readers are in such a crappy demographic that National Review can’t even attract ads from Absolut Vodka or, for that matter, Cool Ranch Doritos or even for those Miracle Pills That Burn Fat Without Diet or Exercise. That, of course, doesn’t prevent Lowry from shamelessly begging his financially-challenged readers to rustle up their last few quarters from under their sofa cushions and send them his way. Trickle-up economics, as it were. Better yet, sucker-nomics.

If it’s any consolation, it ain’t working, and NR reader appears to be finding only Oreo crumbs and funky tissues under their sofa cushions. Here’s the NR thermometer today after more than two weeks of begging.

If the fundraiser keeps up like this, don’t be surprised if you see in the next few days an online bachelor auction of that sly, sexy devil Mark “The Moooosliminator” Steyn.

Gavin adds:

Above: Mark Steyn (not pictured: Hugh Hewitt)

Don’t We Know Archaic Barrel?

Each Christmas season, I notice an increase in traffic to this post, on Google searches for “Pogo Christmas song.” I’m sure the resulting page must frustrate the poor dears a bit, as I only allude to the song and don’t quote it in full.

It’s worth doing, however, as it’s my favorite carol, and I bellow it out whenever the rest of you ginks are assaying “Deck the Halls.”

I anticipate its return will forever displace “The Carol of the Bells” from the house speakers at every shopping mall in America. About time, too.

Only the first two verses come from memory. I had to look the rest of it up. From the magnificently silly mind of Walt Kelly, I give you…

Deck Us All with Boston Charlie

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an’ Kalamazoo!
Nora’s freezin’ on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Don’t we know archaic barrel
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don’t love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

[…]

Above: Dschinghis Khan – ‘Moskau’ with English subtitles (3:20)

Above: Joe Cocker – ‘A Little Help With My Friends’ with English subtitles (4:06)

Above: The Clash – ‘Complete Control’ with English subtitles (3:12)

Above: Twink of e-vil

Enough of Radical Islam

• Enough with the not-exterminating. It is our job to eradicate the Muslims, and to eliminate every obstacle to their destruction.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

For a more thoughtful, or at least a more carefully laid-out rationalization toward the criminally insane murder of hundreds of millions of people (and truly, if much more of this stuff appears, we’ll start to suspect a trend), visit David Yerushalmi at his inaptly named site, SaneWorks.

ABOVE: Kim Priestap

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Kim Priestap, one of the dimmest bloggers at Cheez Whiz? Dang!, has been sitting up in the wilds of lovely Mio, Michigan spitting and fuming ever since that story about Michelle Obama’s secret champagne and caviar lunch turned out to be a hoax. Imagine her delight when she caught wind of the rumor that B. Hussein Muslim X was going to buy Michelle a 300 trillion dollar ring and then install her as head of his harem:

Barack Obama is so thankful for his wife’s support during his campaign that he’s buying her a rare rhodium and diamond ring that costs $30,000. I love jewelry as much as the next girl, but this is a bit over the top. I know, it’s his money, so he can spend it as he wishes, yet this looks a bit…out of touch. Here we are enduring a terrible recession. Investors have lost trillions of dollars in the stock market. Americans are losing their jobs, and at Christmas time no less. Spending $30,000 on a piece of jewelry doesn’t represent the compassion or the hope and change that he espoused throughout the campaign.

Now that’s a story too good to check on Google, Kimbo was no doubt thinking, and so she didn’t. Of course, sooner or later some liberal troll was bound to come by and point out, with linkie and everything, that the story was, like the caviar lunch, a steaming pile of bullshit and CheezWhiz on a saltine cracker.

But, ooooh nooooo, some liberal troll is not going to outsmart a famous CheezWhizDang blogger like our Kimbo, who issues this update in response:

[T]he Obama camp is denying that President-Elect is purchasing the rhodium ring. As I said earlier in my post, this kind of purchase, although completely within his right, is inconsistent with the persona he presented to America during the campaign. I’m not surprised he’s denying it.

In other words: “Liar, liar, American Express Card on fire!” Of course Barry would lie about it. If he lied when he said he wasn’t a Muslim terrorist in order to get elected, you think he wouldn’t lie about a $30,000 ring also?

Needless to say, a trip by the keyboard-challenged Kimbo back to Google would have put a kabosh on her latest spin by revealing that the Italian designer who was supposed to design the ring also called the whole story a steaming pile of bullshit and carpaccio on a bruschetta.

I anxiously await Ms. Priestap’s next update where she says that Barry, who after all probably killed his own grandmother to keep his Kenyan birth certificate under wraps, threatened to kill the ring designer as well if he didn’t keep his big fat Italian bocca shut. “I’m not surprised the pasta-eating pansy is denying it,” she’ll huff. “If Barry X wants to prove he didn’t buy that ring, he’ll have to cut off both of Michelle’s hands. Muslims do that sort of thing, you know. It shouldn’t be all that hard for him.”

In such a churchyard, a wanderer will one day espy a dark and austere headstone, and will thereupon ask her companion, “Who indeed was this, who did provoke the epitaph, ‘Beware The Howling Stupid Which Is Beyond Death?'”

And her companion will shudder and sing to her some version or another of the Ballad of Old John Henraker, at least one collected incidence of which features the line, “Rackin’ his hind in a trailer-home quarter, a dragster front-rocketing from’t,” which will puzzle future ethnographers no further since apparently they have just found the stack of printed-out posts that we left wrapped in plastic under a certain equestrian statue (hello!)

Pulling Some Extra Weight

Michael Ramirez neatly sums up the disadvantage American automakers face in trying to keep up with their more nimble competition; click to enlarge:

A bailout will only feed the beast for a few more years. The only solution, I think is bankruptcy, which Nancy Pelosi says is out of the question. But that is because her concern is the UAW and its constituency of retirees, not the automakers and not present and future workers in the auto industry.

Because, okay, let’s leave our old people on an ice floe; but also, imagine being a conservative and being like, “Hey, that red dragster is certainly lean and mean with its nationalized health care, high wages and benefits, and comprehensive tax-fueled Eurosocialist-style welfare state, not to mention pervasive unionism and up to seven weeks of legally guaranteed paid vacation, growling powerfully from its exhaust headers. But gasp! look at those UAW contracts* the America-colored dragster is towing!”

While you’re imagining yourself trying to think such a thing, imagine the room that you’re in collapsing with a horrible furniture-sucking roar, a hot, wallpaper-stripping howl, into a lightless vacuole the size of a Crenshaw melon. That object is Hinderaker’s head. And while we can take heart in knowing that somewhere, perhaps lighting some great and dark vastness between stars, is an equivalent quasar streaming supercompacted, quantum-shredded smartness back into the universe, it is also the case that that quasar doesn’t have a blog.

* Cf.

ABOVE: A man, a Pam, a canal

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Oh, what the heck, today was ruined anyway:

Parents complain to U.S. Agencies About Mattel “Islam is the Light” Doll

Back on November 25th, I ran this post BOYCOTT MATTEL’S BABY DOLL TALKING DAWAH: “ISLAM IS THE LIGHT”.

There is a movement afoot!

And a door is a jar!

We’re writing to ask for your help with a local citizen’s campaign this December. Our goal is to convince stores to stop selling a Mattel talking doll that says “Islam is the light,” a way of inviting someone to join Islam – also know as “Da’wa.” We have started this campaign in Virginia and Maryland, and we need your help to take it nationwide.

The controversial toy is called the “Little Mommy Real Loving Baby Cuddle & Coo” doll, manufactured by Mattel-Fisher Price. We’ve put up a website to provide resources for parents to download an information packet to give to store managers. As parents, we’ve already started asking store managers to remove the dolls from the store shelves, or to put labels on the dolls stating “Notice: this doll says ‘Islam is the light,’ an invitation to your child to join Islam.”

THE “ISLAM IS THE LIGHT” DOLL IS STILL ON THE SHELVES

You might’ve imagined that the paranoid right had gotten bored with this one already, as they seem to have gotten bored with the theory that Obama is Malcolm X’s secret love child, not to mention with the ever-forthcoming Michelle Obama Tape, Barack Obama Tape, and Other Michelle Obama Tape, not to mention the Obama’s Grandmother Tape and the various secret evidence that Obama was born in various places unremarked on his birth certificate, which is in various ways a transparent forgery.

But no, no they haven’t.

You may have heard about this controversy in the media.

But wait, was it the one directly after the Teletubby doll that said “Faggot, faggot, bite my butt,” or was it between that one and the Elmo book that asked, “Who wants to die?”

It received a lot of print and TV media attention in October and earlier in November. Yet – hard as it is to believe – most stores are still carrying the doll on their shelves for the holiday shopping season.

Zomg, on their shelves.

The doll has no warning label letting parents know that it clearly says “Islam is the light.” In fact, we found one store in Virginia where the dolls had the audio disabled AND the front packaging panel (where the name is displayed) ripped off, which made it harder for parents to know that this was the controversial doll.

This no-audio, no-name doll may have been bought by Muslims and “returned” as a way to strategically damage its packaging, rendering it apparently harmless to parents while all the time it carries the Islam phrase encoded in its very software. Even on the shelf, it is staring crazy-eyed at our children like a bearded and smelly suicide bomber.

A few newer dolls are being distributed without the sound file, but most still say “Islam is the light.”

Bottom line – parents are still buying the doll RIGHT NOW, taking it home, and may not realize what the doll says until Christmas morning when their child unwraps the package and the doll tells her that “Islam is the light.”

And then poof, Christmas is ruined by genies.

MATTEL DENIES EVERYTHING

This cat was caught on tape talking about a dog named Long Johnson. THE CAT DENIES EVERYTHING:

Those who follow the antics of right-wing pseudo-grass-roots organizations may not be terribly surprised to see the ‘About’ page at LabelThatDoll.com, under a ‘Who We Are’ header, where it carefully fudges the issue of who they are and where they came from, and instead recites a familiar, legalistically composed litany of calumnies against Islam. While the conceit is that a group of otherwise apolitical parents in the Washington, DC metro area has been moved to launch a slickly professional media campaign by a doll that seems to invite girls to join a major world religion, when last we checked, almost 100% of the site’s 308 total visits in its one full day of operation came from Pammy. This is like launching a grape boycott by trying to appeal directly to winos.

So who are they? We’d start poking under rocks here, although they declare a special interest in locating ex-Muslims who are willing to be quoted saying bad things about Islam, which is more in the style of these folks, and/or possibly whatshisname. But in whatever case, expect the anti-Muslim rackets (and donation appeals for cynical anti-minority shock campaigns) to pick up briskly in time for Christmas, for the holiday spirit is once again upon us.

Shorter Ed Driscoll:

Above: Run, Mr. Sulzberger, run

Won’t Get Fooled Again

• Thirty years ago, Time Magazine published a cover feature on The Who while dishonestly refusing to mention that eleven people would be trampled at a Who concert soon after the issue went on sale. How then can the New York Times editors use the painting and/or town of Guernica as a metaphor for a trampling at a Wal-Mart, unless they literally cannot distinguish between the Spanish Civil War and a retail trampling? Number 27, Number 27.* Update: Welcome again, Instapundit readers! Number 27!

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

* “One wonders what value the [New York Times] has as an information source to be trusted by their readers.” Cf. Number 859.

Update for the purpose of clarity: Due to the logistics of printing and distributing millions of copies of Time Magazine each week, an issue will be dated a week in advance of its publishing date. For instance, the current issue is that of December 8th, 2008.

Further critical update: Um, the Dec. 17, 1979 issue of Time actually includes a lot of material about the Riverfront Coliseum incident. Thanks to J—, the Goddamn Batman, and actor 212, and abject apologies from me for not reading the whole article as I should’ve. Nonetheless, um, does Driscoll’s argument make any more sense now than it did?

Shorter Editorial Board Member, Wall Street Journal:

Above: Wunderkind Bret Stephens on a wingnut welfare junket

Media Narratives Feed Terrorist Fantasies

• If not for the scheming mailmen, we would not have all these bills for so-called ‘barely legal Asian teen XXX,’ which I obviously could not have ordered because several of those girls were clearly in their 20s.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

* Cf.

I was just watching Obama on the teevee and I have to say that at the very least it will be refreshing to have a president who can speak in complete sentences. That’s not to say that everything Obama does will be super-rosy — his over-reliance on Villagers for key cabinet positions is very problematic, if predictable.

But at least if he fails, he’ll fail eloquently. That counts for something.

Above: Dorothy Rabinowitz

Deepak Blames America
The media look within to explain the sick delusions of the Mumbai killers

• If a certain weary amusement is the only effect worth mentioning, circa 2008, of an argument that some prattlings from Deepak Chopra and a sentence taken out of context from an eleven-week-old New York Times piece are typical of an imagined pro-terrorist, blame-America-first liberal media, then there is still an aesthetic frisson in finding such an argument attempted in the style of a phoning-it-in New Yorker writer of the 1950s (perhaps Brendan Gill, although Ved Mehta might also be mentioned in a spirit of ironic parallelism, viz. with the controversial Mr. Chopra). Ms. Rabinowitz, who is barking mad, was given the 2001 Pulitzer prize in Distinguished Commentary.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™