Sadly, No!

The Ol’ Perfesser’s daily ransom note to intellectual honesty, pasted together with the block letters of others’ thoughts, brings us today to this lovely bit of flim-flammery from gun-porn vendor Orson Scott Card:

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card

… This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

This is either really, really true … or not. Pray continue, Mr. Card:

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can’t repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can’t make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Damn that other party! Damn them straight to Mormon hell! Card doesn’t list all the rules that were loosened by Republicans, but here’s a nice summation. Mr. Card?

Isn’t there a story here? Doesn’t journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout?

Yes! The repeal of Glass-Steagall, Greenspan’s total inaction when it counted on the inflationary spiral in housing, the waiving of broker/dealer net-capital leverage rules — all these ingredients for the current disaster should be exposed! You go, Orson!

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was … the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was … the Republican Party.

Oh. Um … okay, not sure where you’re going with this.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It’s not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Blaming the victims is so not cool. And as Card says, ‘If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.’

Okay, let’s go with this. Real journalists with personal honor would be pointing out that the real victims of this economic crisis are Republicans and mortgage lenders … victimized by the poor people who’ve lost their homes and their Demoncrap enablers who LITERALLY FORCED lenders to leverage mortgage papers 15, 20 and even 40 times … held a gun to their head and said, ‘Take this couple billion dollars worth of risky paper to the securities market and convert it into $60+ trillion of imaginary Ponzi money, thus causing the subprime meltdown and the current economic crisis!

Why, I recall this scene at my local Countrywide branch, circa 2005:

Angry Black Man: Gimme my loan!

Terrified Banker: Please calm down, sir. I can’t punch in the numbers when my hands are trembling from fear.

ABM: Shut up, bee-yatch! You best type in dat numberology and get me dat money!

TB: It’s done, sir. Your loan is approved.

ABM: Damn straight, muh-fuggah. Now listen up, white boy, and listen good! While you at it, you best be swapping derivatives based on the outstanding debt package I’s just provid-o-lated you wif, and den you kin jus’ leverage dem addition-a-mated paper holdings anutha couple dozen times just to be sho’ you getting all de cash-money juice you can while da gettin’s good, so’s we all happy in this here financialical trans-mogrifa-taction!

TB: But … but, sir! That would be a most irresponsible dereliction of this firm’s fiduciary duties! And it would likely lead to economic disaster!

ABM: Honkey, you best be doing what I done tol’ you to do wif regards to yo fiducia-malogical duties, or I will have B-Frank Da Funky Fixah on yo’ gofay ass like white on rice!

TB: I see. Well, excellent advice, sir! Will you be requiring a $100,000 credit line today, too?

ABM: Casper, please! Hells yeah I be needing that credit line!

An honorable media would be reporting the above scene a thousand-fold.

ABOVE: John Hinderaker, the new Anderson Cooper?

---

Two guys with faces made for radio and voices made for newsprint are just the duo to have their own “television show” on the web, right? Well, thanks to the technological miracle that is Butt-Flap PJs Media, John “Butt Missile” Hinderaker and Paul “Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk” Mirengoff bring you the first episode of Powerline TV. Realizing, of course, the infinite possibility for ridicule of these two stooges, Powerline TV won’t allow me to embed the video here on Sadly, No!, so you’ll have to click through the link if you want to see and hear Episode 1: “Butt Missile Talks.” If you don’t want to click that link, then you can just read on for the episode’s highlights.

As the pilot episode opens, we are treated to Butt Missile with a confused look on his face, looking like a male Candy Crowley after a bad night and hiding out in a conference room at his law firm Faegre and Benson, hoping that none of his partners would find him squandering perfectly good billable hours pretending to be a news anchor.

Hey, is this thing on yet? Oh, it is. Okay. Wait just a sec. Okay. Ready. Uh, hi, everybody, I’m John Hinderaker. I’m coming to you, uh, over PJ TV from Minneapolis and this is the first ever Powerline show on PJ TV. We hope it’s gonna become a regular feature. We’ll try to develop, you know, some theme music and so forth.

This is probably a good time to mention that Butt Missile has, rather unaccountably and certainly quite unattractively, two earbuds plugged into both his ears with wires hanging out all over the place. Perhaps he’s listening to his iPod for possible theme music. Something by Ted Nugent would be a good guess. Please feel free to suggest other appropriate theme music in comments.

Gavin adds:

We’ve got an interesting flapdidoodle, uh, controversy going on here in Minneapolis right now regarding my friend Michelle Bachman

Butt Missile is talking about Bachman’s appearance on Hardball where she called Obama “un-American” and called for an inquiry into just exactly which members of Congress were un-American. At this point, the episode of Powerline TV, rather oddly, starts running the video but not the audio of the Hardball segment. Well, not so oddly, perhaps because this clever journalistic technique allows Butt Missile to describe what he wished Bachman said without being confronted by the sad truth of what she actually said.

Chris Matthews immediately jumped in an started trying to goad her into saying something to the effect that Barack Obama is unpatriotic. He started asking her about the McCain Palin campaign’s references to, uh, Bill Ayers blar blar snort snuffle Maoist with faggy earrings bleh blah who is Barack’s gay lover har snort and so forth and Michelle actually did a very good job blar blah sniff huffle puffle crazed Negro preacherman too and so forth and why smorf bah boom snickle poom pah bite me. And Michelle said something along the lines of “Well, you know, I mean you try to blow up the Capitol Building, you say ‘God damn America,’ you know that’s anti-American” blar snort sniffle boom bah look at those great tits that my great friend Michelle has, that photogenic firebrand snuffle huffle pooty! Well, uh, the whole exchange didn’t last more than, I don’t know, four or five minutes, which isn’t long enough to question Barry’s patriotism ‘cuz that would take, you know, weeks and weeks. Bada-bing. Try the steamship round. But the next day the Minneapolis Star Tribune headlined, uh, “Bachman questions Obama’s patriotism.” Har Har Har. She did not. Sis boom bah! WE WIN!! YAY GOP! Rah! Rah! Booyah!

Stay tuned for Episode 2 of the Powerline Show, titled “Sarah Palin’s New Clothes Were Worth Every Penny Because Her Mukluks Were Starting To Look Tattered.”

Dennis “My Son Has a Black, And I Pray to Y*h*w*h, Heterosexual, Friend” Prager agrees with MiniLove: homosex doubleplus ungood! But lest you think that his support of California’s Proposition 8, which would alter the state constitution in order to make a ban on gay marriage magically delicious, is a sign of some kind of anti-gay bigotry, he’s got news for you: you’re the hater. Not him. You.

Above: Caught masturhating

Since Den-Den and all the other opponents of gay marriage are quite aware that any ban on same is flagrantly unconstitutional, they realize their only hope to be spared a future of watching men kiss is to change the Constitution. That’s why he calls Prop 8 “the most important vote in America” next to the presidential election. If only someone had had this idea back in the 1960s, we might have been spared the horrors of Barack Obama altogether.

It will determine the definition of marriage for the largest state in America, and it will determine whether judges or society will decide on social-moral issues.

Dennis doesn’t mention that judges have always helped to decide “social-moral issues”, which is why, for example, black people are allowed to vote, and drink out of white-person bubblers. But he wants to make it clear that this sort of thing is just a bunch of legalistic jiggery-pokery:

First, the attorney general of California, Jerry Brown, unilaterally renamed the proposition as it appears on California ballots. It had been listed as “Amends the California Constitution to provide that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” Brown, a liberal Democrat, changed the proposition’s wording to: “Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry. Initiative Constitutional Amendment.”

Of course, those mean the same thing, but it’s really just some trickery to make it look like barring gays from marriage has anything to do with being against gays.

The reason for this change is obvious — to make the proposition appear as a denial of a basic human and civil right. Marriage has never been regarded as a universal human or civil right.

Whoops! That’s not exactly true. Or, to put it another way, it is!

Loving and living with anyone one wants to live with are basic human rights. But marriage is actually a privilege that society bestows on whom it chooses.

For instance, it could choose to bestow it upon gays, by means of the law. No, wait! It can’t do that!

What Brown did was attempt to manipulate people who lean toward preserving the definition of the most important social institution in society — people who have no desire whatsoever to hurt gays — to now think of themselves as bigots.

So, now, people who have nothing against gays except insofar as they don’t want them to be able to get married or enjoy any of the myriad civil and legal protections that go with marriage are now being told that they’re bigoted, just because of their bigoted behavior against a minority group! That’s the Democrats for you. Just like back in ’68, when everyone was running around calling white Southerners “racists” just because they didn’t want black people to forget their place! Who’s the real bigot here, Mr. Brown?

Any honest outsider would see that virtually all the hate expressed concerning Proposition 8 comes from opponents of the proposition. While there are a few sick individuals who hate gay people, I have neither seen nor heard any hatred of gays expressed by proponents of Proposition 8. Not in my private life, not in my e-mail, not from callers on my radio show.

All the people I have ever met who seek to deny basic civil rights to gay people say that they don’t hate gay people. Therefore, they don’t! Q.E.D.

Why won’t those who favor redefining marriage accord the same respect to the millions of us who want gays to be allowed to love whom they want, live with whom they want, be given the rights they deserve along with the dignity they deserve, but who still want marriage to remain man-woman?

The real haters are the ones who call us haters for wanting to keep gays a marginalized group of second-class citizens. We want them to have all the rights they “deserve”! What’s hateful about that? And what’s really more hateful — massive, institutional discrimination, or calling people bigots when those people really, really don’t want to be called bigots?

Don’t answer yet! We have this fabulous set of steak knives!

One might have imagined a certain relief as having overtaken our pal Janet Folger, following Hillary Clinton’s retreat from the presidential race:

Letter from a future prisoner
Posted: November 20, 2007
By Janet Folger

Nov. 20, 2010

To the Resistance:

I’m writing this letter from prison, where I’ve been since the beginning of 2010. Since Hillary was elected in ’08, Christian persecution in America has gotten even worse than we predicted.

When the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” was signed into law, my radio program was yanked off the air along with all the others that dared discuss moral issues on Christian radio. The networks just couldn’t bring themselves to air a pro-abortion program or one that advocates the homosexual agenda for the government mandated “balance” because broadcasting lies went against their basic beliefs – I don’t blame them.

We knew “Thought Crimes” was in danger of becoming law back when it passed Congress in 2007, but thankfully, President Bush kept his promise to veto it. But, tragically, Hillary signed that most dangerous bill in America – ushering in the criminalization of Christianity. And now, even my book, “The Criminalization of Christianity,” has been banned as “hate speech” just as I predicted when I wrote it back in 2005.

This Orwellian inversion of fact and language (a.k.a. H.B. 1592) was opposed by Folger’s one-woman operation, ‘Americans For Truth,’ through its ‘Stop Hate Crimes Now‘ campaign.

Similarly without any hint of irony or self-awareness, it was explained that the ‘Thought Crimes Bill,’ i.e. the ‘Hate Grandma Bill,’ was devised by homosexuals as a means of targeting elderly grandmothers.

When the “Employment Non-Discrimination Act” (“Thought Crimes” for the Workplace) became law, businesses and ministries were targeted by homosexual activists and were forced to close when they wouldn’t comply with a law forcing them to hire those opposed to their beliefs on moral issues.

This had happened before with the Burn Down Da Muh-Fuh Act of 1964, but so few black and Hispanic people were willing to hold down a job that America soon recovered. Also, all the feminist attorneys quit their jobs to become single welfare mothers (after the Kill All The Handsome, Financially Secure Men With Hair Act became law), so no one got sued for 27 million dollars anymore for saying “Hey, toots!” to their secretary or “Thanks, sweetie,” to the elevator girl.

Ah, but those were delicate times while they lasted. So often, it was humor alone that carried us through.

You: How do you greet a Native American?

Your Friend: How?

You: OMG, I’m turning you in!

[mutual nervous laughter]

Why, I can never help but smile when I remember the time when we… Oh, never mind.

When they canceled my program, banned my book and targeted my ministry, I knew it was only a matter of time before I’d be forced into “prison ministry” against my will. Unfortunately for our nation, that ministry is growing fast. A homeschooling mom was assigned the cell next to me. I try to comfort her, but she cries constantly at the thought of her kids being raised in government foster care.

Item: Someone dense enough to sit in prison and write tell-all letters addressed in plain English to ‘the Resistance’ is probably not a person with whom you’d be wise to share your secrets. On the other hand, this anecdote is lent a certain slice-of-life credibility by the fact that the woman who was assigned the cell next to Janet spends a lot of time crying.

The forced labor here makes me think that I should have done more for our brothers and sisters in China sent to labor camps for the crime of hosting a home church, or those imprisoned in every Muslim country for choosing Christ over Allah.

And all subjects of foreign states who are barred from citizenship because they refuse. . .um, ah, (heh heh).

We should have seen the writing on the wall when Yahoo turned over confidential searches to the Chinese government, sending people to prison, and when Google barred American Christian sites from its search engines as “haters.” Finding allied ministries is now almost impossible…

If only there were, for instance, any Christian ministries in the prisons.

Most didn’t see it coming. I try not to think about how the 2009 “Freedom of Choice Act” wiped out every single pro-life law from parental notice to the ban on partial birth abortion. And how “anti-reproductive rights” was added to the “Thought Crime” statute, which, like California before the election, means a year in jail if someone claims to feel “intimidated” by anything a pro-lifer might do – like express their beliefs in public.

I mean, we laughed when the loony liberals complained that the legal protections guaranteed in the Bill of Rights were being dismantled, but little did we realize that the legal protections guaranteed in the Bill of Rights were being dismantled…

But, like the homeschool mom in the cell beside me, I cry too. I cry mostly because it didn’t have to be this way. Just three years ago – in 2007 – we had a chance to unite and achieve our lifetime goals of restoring protection to children in the womb, and protecting our foundational relationship of marriage between a man and a woman. And now the…

…And the essay also featured several other paragraphs and a particularly self-entitled and reader-contemptuous bulleted list (even!) of Pastor Niemöller knockoff items. “First they came for George Santayana,” one finds oneself thinking, “But I did not remember the past, so, uh, first they came for George Santayana…”

Alas, but 2007 was a more optimistic time — a time when America still dared to dream. Janet returns to us a changed woman: The bandwagon of the candidate clearly anointed by God, Mike Huckabee, has run off the road, causing her hysterical animus against Mitt Romney and John McCain to mellow, even to a point at which she yanked her anti-McCain ads off the Web and acted like they were never there. She returns as Janet Porter, having presumably married someone named ‘Porter,’ and brings us an even more shocking, as well as a considerably more accurate vision of the fate that certainly awaits us, shall we continue our current rickety and steeply inclined soapbox derby. . .to Hell:

Well, this¹ is certainly a riveting turn of events.

———- Original Message —–
From: Ed Hale²
To: William Bower
Sent: Friday, October 17, 2008 7:17 PM
Subject: Audio Tape

Hi Will: I have been in contact with the African Press International, who ran the Michelle Obama story. I have talked to them about releasing the audio tape they have of her. It would appear that this is going to happen. The format will be, I will bring the reporter on and let them tell us how they obtained the tape, and then I will run the audio tape, and bring the reporter back on to verify that it is the real thing. Once I have this done, I will place it on my web site, file for and get a copyright on it. Once I have this done, I will contact you with the link. What I would like for you, since you live in Washington DC, to do is contact CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC and MSNBC. Let them listen to the audio tape. I will then take bid on this tape. The starting bid will be 2 million dollars. Once you have received the high bid, we will break the money down this way, 45% to Bar H Farms Inc, parent copy of Plains Radio network, 45% to African Press International and 10% for yourself. If you can do this, please call me at 806-447-[XXXX]. Thanks Ed

That would be this Ed Hale and this William Bower. And also, as it happens, this William Bower.

If the email is a fake, this game is being played at a level that we can only admire.

But Confederate Yankee, Gateway Pundit, Stop The ACLU, Newsbusters, and the rest of the herd must still be feeling pretty positive about their endorsement of the original API story, given all evidence. And indeed, all of our jollity and sprightly impudence could recurse tragically upon us at approximately 4PM Norwegian time on Monday, October 20th, when the…

…Oh wait.

But apparently, the train keeps-a-rollin’, as it were. Please give a warm hand to our next contestant, Mr. Jerome Corsi:

Author : jerome.corsi (IP: 167.136.[XXX.XX] ,[XXX].com)
E-mail : jerome.corsi@[XXX].com
URL :
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=167.136.[XXX.XX]

Comment:
I intend to serve as a facilitator who will help you draw your own conclusions about Ed Hale. That is, I’ll be your “guide on the side”, not a “sage on the stage”. With my assistance, you’ll soon gain a deep understanding of how Hale’s sense of humor runs the gamut from rude and crude to disingenuous and barbaric. For complete details, I refer you to my forthcoming book on the subject. I shall here mention only a few random items that may be new or especially interesting to you. For instance, Hale appears to have found a new tool to use to help him pander to prolix schmoes. That tool is denominationalism, and if you watch him wield it, you’ll unquestionably see why on several occasions I have heard him state that truth is whatever your grievance group says it is. I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a comment. What I consider far more important though is that Hale has come up with proven methods to subvert time-tested societal
norms. All you have to do is let your guard down.

However sappy the national picture already is, Hale’s wisecracks are based on a denial of reality, on the substitution of a deliberately falsified picture of the world in place of reality. And this dishonesty, this refusal to admit the truth, will have some very serious…

¹ Story background here.
² All IP, phone, and email data redacted.

Shorter Michelle Malkin:

Above: America’s sweetheart

What happened when they “spread the wealth” in Zimbabwe

• Barack Obama’s tax proposal resembles the confiscation of white-owned property by Negroes in the former Rhodesia.

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

D. Aristophanes adds:

Above: What happened when ‘they’ ‘spread the wealth’ in America

Barack Obama wants to hike the top marginal income tax rate by a couple percentage points, and according to Joe the Plumber and his new BFFs John McCain and Sarah Palin, that’s ‘socialism.’ Of course, Joe’s economic illiteracy extends deeper — he’s also for abolishing Social Security and establishing a flat tax.

The trouble is, Joe-think is broadly appealing to many Americans. It’s a kind of Objectivism-lite: Joe imagines he lives in a cocoon of hard-workiness where his efforts are the only agency affecting his ability to accumulate personal wealth — other than the government, which seeks to take his wealth away. He begrudges the need for taxes, but they are always and forever too high, even when they are at historic lows.

Nor does Joe seem to grasp that in the current economic climate, the near-term and possibly long-term prospects of the construction industry, his chosen trade, are bleak indeed without some combination of public and private stimulus. He gives his support to a presidential candidate who promises to reduce government’s revenue further and institute a ‘spending freeze.’ Whereas, the guy who wants to shore up the country’s revenue shortfall so it can spend money on, say, infrastructure projects that might require, oh we don’t know, plumbing … is a ‘socialist.’

But all these are just words. Obama’s plan to readjust the top tax rates back to where they were during America’s last great economic boom under Clinton is better shown in the following graph that a buddy of mine put together last week, which shows the historical top marginal income tax rate all the way back to 1913, as compared to what Obama proposes to do:

Fig. 1

Obama’s proposed hike of the top marginal rate to 39.6 percent doesn’t represent the highest it’s ever been, not by a long shot. Joe the Plumber might be interested to learn that, in fact, when the top marginal rate was lots and lots higher, America did all sorts of cool shit, like win two world wars, invent the Internet and play golf on the Moon.

Now it may be that Joe the Plumber, John McCain and Sarah Palin don’t like kicking Nazi ass, cheap porn, and Tang. But real Americans do, even if they sometimes forget how we got to do and have those things. It took tax money to achieve the national greatness we all know and love. Conversely, when we stopped taxing rich people, lots of terrible crap happened, as this enhanced version of the above chart shows:

Fig. 2

So, Joe — thanks to FDR’s crazy socialist tax policies, you’re not reading the above chart in German while gnawing on a deep fried penny loafer in a hobo camp. Instead, a guy like you can now download anti-Obama talking points over the Internet before flying off in a plane that is exceedingly unlikely to crash, to go sit in a TV news studio that broadcasts your economic misrepresentations to the nation via satellite.

Which isn’t to say that government can solve everything — Milli Vanilli will always be with us.

Better the subjunctive mood

• The real problem with that colored general’s endorsement of Obama is that, like the rest of his people, he just can’t speak proper English.

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

Here the People Rule

• Ignorance is strength.

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

What irritates me the most about Kristol is his smug cynicism. The SOB doesn’t give a damn what “the common people” really think or if anyone in Washington is representing them. He just wants people in political power who want to start more wars. That’s it. And with McCain and Sarah “Moosolini” Palin at the helm, he’ll get just that.

Shorter Dennis Prager:

Above: Accordion undermines American civilization

There Are Two Irreconcilable Americas

• I have made a troubling discovery: The left and the right in America are philosophically opposed on many issues. Moreover, contention between the two sides will result in a winner and a loser.

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