Sadly, No!

Well. We’ve had quite a time here sorting through the twisty and actually somewhat ingenious misdeeds of our former mystery blogger, the Discovery Institute‘s own Patrick Bell.

When last we left this story, Bell had gone over to Outside the Tent all like, “Hey, thanks for linking to me!” following a fairly routine snarky post on GOP chickenhawks.

Thanks for the link here are Outside the Tent. Great to have your support, er, whatever. I see you’ve done a profile of sorts on us “Reagankinder�.

Just to be clear — I haven’t ruled out enlistment. I was really just waiting to see if that draft, you know the ones you scared the 18-39 crowd with in 2004, was going to materialize.

I wouldn’t rule out a military career, except for the fact that I’m not exactly up to the military “metrics� :0)

As for the commenter on April 13 @ 1:05pm, I’m already taken, but thanks for the compliment. I live with my partner on beautiful Capital Hill in Seattle ;0)

Comment by Patrick — May 17, 2006 @ 3:11 am

…But he apparently began to seethe that Clif there had made fun of him. And soon a mysterious troll named ‘Gary’ appeared who had the same IP address as Patrick, outing and threatening Clif.

Clif,

I saw some of your photography on your other site. Nice pictures there. I especially liked the sunset view from your apartment building.

Speaking of which, if someone wanted to send you a letter (i.e. cease & desist order) would it be more appropriate to use: xxxx x Street N.W. Unit xxx, Washington, D.C. 20005 or is there another address you prefer to receive mail at?

Also, is the best number to reach you:

202-xxx-xxxx, or…???

Finally, is your full legal name “Clif xxxxxxxxx� or do I have it wrong?

Hope to hear from you soon!

[Edited by site owner to remove personal details]

Comment by Gary — May 17, 2006 @ 3:31 am

Next thing you know, Patrick had posted Clif’s real name, photo, and employer at his own blog, accusing Clif of various made-up offenses, including outing Patrick by mentioning that he works for the Christian-Dominionist ‘nonpartisan foundation,’ the Discovery Institute — which is in fact in Patrick’s own bio.

[Update: instead see here. Bio possibly altered consummate with other attempted sneaky tricks (see comments on this post, etc).]

A few people contacted him very civilly and respectfully asking him to take that post down. Encouraged, he then went totally off the rails and into a bwaa-ha-haa campaign, threatening to expose other left-bloggers, posting under fake names, falsifying things, selectively deleting comments, threatening lawsuits, contacting people’s ISPs, and it’s honestly hard to keep up with it all — because what Patrick is, essentially, is a young GOP ratfucker, a 22-year-old wingnut-welfare operative, reportedly home-schooled (it’s not clear, and we haven’t checked), who sees civility and rational discourse as weakness, and who only cares about ‘winning.’

And as we found out, he’ll do simply anything to win what he sees as a contest, whether right or wrong, true or false.

Above: Making fun of Bell generates threats of lawsuits

Most recently, without provocation, Bell posted details of Pinko Punko‘s employment, location, and name. He’s now threatening to do weekly exposés on left-bloggers, with a short-list of Pinko and (now) myself, and then whoever else he decides to go after.

Shockingly though, comments posted about this biz at the right-bloggo Online Integrity site have been moderated and apparently deleted — as though (it’s hard to imagine, yet bear with me for a moment) the right-blogosphere only cares about making a big, grandiloquent show of ‘civility’ and ‘online privacy’ when it suits them, but will happily cover for grotesque ratfucking when it actually occurs. Also see here, btw: That’s a shot across the Online Integrity crew’s bow by their lefty parody site. It’s funny who’s the more serious about online ethics.

Message to Patrick Bell: Posts redacted or deleted now, please.

John Stossel’s column this week is… erm… well, just read it for yourself:

 

Mississippi has a place for heroes: jails

May 24, 2006 by John Stossel

John Sheperson is a hero. When Hurricane Katrina struck, he turned on the news and learned that people in Mississippi had lost electric power. They desperately needed generators. He decided to help them, while helping himself.

Because helping others is no fun unless you get a cut of the action too.

He borrowed money, bought 19 generators, rented a U-Haul and drove it 600 miles to Mississippi, where he offered to sell the generators for twice what he paid for them.

OK, since the guy paid for these generators on borrowed money, it’s reasonable that he charged money for them. And he also probably needed to increase the selling price a little bit for gas and lodging expenses. But did he have to charge twice as much? Let’s think about it.

The price of generators varies tremendously, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume he paid $500 for each generator, and charged people $1,000 per unit. That means he makes back the $9,500 he borrowed, plus an additional $9,500. Some of that money would go to operating expenses (i.e., gas, food lodging), but I would guess that he made at least $7,000 in profit off this little venture. Needless to say, if he really wanted to be helpful (instead of greedy) he could have sold the generators for slightly above market rate so he could make back the money he borrowed plus pay for his living expenses. That would have been the (dare I say it) CHRISTIAN thing to do, after all.

Eager buyers surrounded his truck. “People were excited,” he said.

“Until I told them what I was charging,” he added. “Then they cock-punched me from here to Tikrit!” Read the rest of this entry »

Hehe.

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Yippee! The jurors have apparently reached a verdict in the Enron trial! Kenny Boy and Jeff Skilling will know their fates by noon today!

BTW, if you’re still having trouble understanding exactly what Enron did that was so bad, I highly recommend checking out the film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. The segment about the manufactured California energy “crisis” is simply mind-blowing.

UPDATE: GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY!!!

Hope you like it.

Here is the start of many notes:

* Comments on earlier posts (indeed, links to earlier posts,) will be ok in a few minutes, once we’re done removing the old archive files left by Movable Type.

* The previous/next entries links that used to be in every archive are gone. We hadn’t thought of that, but figure these can be restored. Added: This has been fixed[.] for the dark background style. Fix for light background style to follow shortly. (Thanks to James).
* WP appears to lack some feature to remember commenters, which forces you to enter your name and email address every time. We don’t know how to solve this one, so any help is appreciated.

* Some people want comments included in the RSS feed. (Heck, even The Poor Man offers that!) We’re waiting for your suggestions on how to achieve this amazing technical feat.

* We did manage to add comment preview, so there.

Well, lots of wine last night postponed the move to WordPress we wanted to start early today…. but it’s on now! So that means comments are closed as of right now while we import/export (just call us Art Vandelay) the entries.

11:58: So far so good… still going…
12:32: Boy, this whole work stuff sure is boring…
13:00: Still bored… we may resume drinking any second.
13:20: The end is near!
13:30: Might be going for a few minutes any second now… See you on the other side.

Drudge aids and abets the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s jihad against Al Gore:

As former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary on global warming fears debuts today, a new video from the Competitive Enterprise Institute tracks Gore’s own “carbon footprint.� CEI’s 70-second video points out that Gore himself is a big user of the hydrocarbon fuels that produce carbon dioxide when combusted.

Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truthâ€? asks, “Are you willing to change the way you live?” The Gore documentary and new book of the same name go on to suggest ways that people can reduce their carbon footprint, yet Mr. Gore has clearly not taken his own message to heart. He even says in the documentary that he has given his global warming Power Point slide show more than 1,000 times all around the world.

The CEI video, which may be viewed at: http://streams.cei.org/, includes footage of Gore and his constant air travel with two CO2 meters running at the bottom of the page that compare Gore’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions with those of an average person.

Hey, guys? How do you propose that Gore travel around the world to promote awareness of global warming if not on a plane? Do you really expect me to believe that you’d respect him more if he drove around in a vegetable oil-powered hybrid car? Puh-lease.

“All the evidence suggests that Mr. Gore is an elitist who passionately believes that the people of the world must drastically reduce their energy use but that it doesn’t apply to him,â€? said Myron Ebell, CEI’s director of energy and global warming policy and the creator of the video.

Versus the folks at CEI, who want the people of the world to dramatically increase their energy use so that oil companies will keep writing them checks.

The Mexlamofascist connection revealed!!!

Al-Qaida has smuggled tactical nuclear weapons and uranium into the U.S. across the Mexican border and is planning to launch a major terrorist attack using a combination of nukes and dirty nukes, according to an interview with Osama bin Laden’s biographer, Hamid Mir, in WorldThreats.com.

Sweet. But I can’t believe gay marriage isn’t involved somehow…

“I came up with this conclusion after eight years of investigation and research in the remote mountain areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. I traveled to Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Syria, Uzbekistan and Russia and met dozens of people,” Mir said.

“This story has been corroborated by every hobo, crank and conspiracy theorist in the Middle East!”
Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, an anonymous left-blogger well known to many of us was outed, with his personal information including his employer and a photo of himself posted at a right-wing blog financed by the Discovery Institute — a fake ‘nonpartisan’ foundation that specializes in junk science and the Christian ‘Dominionist’ agenda.

Here’s the blogger who researched and posted the information.

He refuses to take the information down, instead threatening to expose other bloggers, threatening personal-grievance lawsuits of near-infinite variety, and (most recently) making false complaints to the ISPs of anyone who emails him on this subject.

He’s one of those young, completely dishonest GOP wingnut-welfare operatives who do nasty things to others, but then create whining victim-narratives when there are consequences.

Now, we’ve had quite a debate on ‘civility’ lately, on both the left and the right. It’s time we show that there are consequences for bad behavior.

This post is a last-warning to Mr. X after quite a series of exchanges by many people. In a way, we hope he ignores it. (Comedy gold1!!11)

All you’ve got is this moment. The 21st century’s yesterday. You can care all you want.

Shorter Mary Katharine Ham: In our topsy-turvy moral environment, it’s considered politically incorrect to disparage all Muslims when a deranged Iranian runs his car into a crowd of students, yet a bunch of rich white boys are denied the benefit of the doubt when they’re accused of rape.

Shorter Congressman Scott Garrett: Do you know the facts on medical liability lawsuits? No? Good, because that’ll make my job a lot easier.

Shorter Jeff Emanuel: The law should never subvert the will of a large majority of voters.

Shorter Walter Williams: I’ve had enough of the government intruding into my personal affairs and invading my — whoa-whoa-whoa. Warrantless wiretaps? Phone call database? Slow down just a minute there, my man. I was talking about seatbelt laws.

Shorter Chuck Colson: In Michael Schiavo’s world, autopsies would be performed on the living to find a reason to kill them.

Shorter Michelle Malkin: If this “Jessie MacBeth” character turns out to be as fake as those Dan Rather memos, we can probably dismiss all subsequent questions about troop misconduct in Iraq.

Shorter John Stossel: The poor should pay extra for food, clothing and shelter, because they need those things more than we do.

Shorter Brent Bozell: The Dixie Chicks are only trashing the president because it will help them sell records to all the people who hate him.

Shorter Terence Jeffrey: Passing an “English-only” amendment can’t possibly be racist because Martin Luther King Jr. spoke English.

Shorter Tony Blankley: Let me try my hand at this “humor” business.

Shorter Linda Chavez: You can agree or disagree with Sen. McCain’s politics, but you shouldn’t say you disagree. I mean, not out loud.

Shorter Paul Greenberg: We’ll never fix the immigration problem, as long as people still want to come here.

Shorter Jonah Goldberg: Conditions after Hurricane Katrina weren’t really all that bad, and they would’ve been even more pleasant if it weren’t for the media.

Shorter Thomas Sowell: We should build a wall at the border first, and then deal with all those anchor babies.

Shorter Ben Shapiro: Democrats won’t win any elections by defending the rule of law, preserving civil rights or protecting the environment.

Shorter Jacob Sullum: I’m not so sure that the president’s approval rating is the same thing as national security.