From Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air about problems with the Air Marshals program:
al-Qaeda is exploiting these vulnerabilities. […] Buckle up, and be vigilant: they’re [???] watching.
Explain how! Or does Michelle mean al-Qaeda is engaging in drills involving taking McDonald’s bags into airplane bathrooms?
[al-Qaeda? Are those guys still around?]
Well, we’ve talked about this for months but the time has (almost) come. After quitting our job yesterday, we’re going to be quitting Movable Type tomorrow morning (EU-time.) What awaits you on the other side is pure WordPress goodness, featuring the ability to switch styles (no, we’re no kidding!) so fans of the old school white-on-dark can get their fix (and the inevitable headaches that will follow.) But don’t call yet: better (and less capricious) spam control, great plugins, an awesome UI (not that this will matter a great deal to you,) more blogs on the old blogroll, and a totally redone stylesheet are also being touted as great “new” features. (The others are the same old crap, pretty much.)
While the site won’t be down (ha ha, right!) as a result of the switch, we will need to close comments for an hour or two as we move the data and make sure everything is ok. Otherwise, well, we’d lose comments, you dig? Feel free to come watch the mess tomorrow morning around 10AM (Berlin time.)
Added: There shall be no Akismet.
Woof. This one is a real doozy (NOT WORK SAFE!!!!! REALLY NOT WORK SAFE!!!!!). And the best part is, it came from some dude in the UAE! I thought we’d been banned in that country!
Over at Opinion Journal, the Ole Perfesser tries his hand at playing a smart guy with a lot of insights:
But Mr. Gibson’s [oh oh!] slogan unwittingly captures an important aspect of the problem, in the U.S. and other industrial societies, at least: We’ve taken a lot of the fun out of parenting. Or to echo Mr. Longman, the “social costs” of parenting continue to rise, and, more significantly, perhaps, the “social returns” continue to decline.
That probably explains why the crude birth rate in the US in 1975 was 14.0, before reaching a low point of 14.1 in 2005.
As for “Mr. Gibson” — can the Ole Perfesser really be so obtuse as to not know what Gibson was talking about?
You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic.
Shorter Ole Perfesser: I have some theories about babies and parenthood, and my wife, my mother and a woman with a full time nanny agree with me.
Here’s TBogg on Malkin’s latest ragegasm, ‘Another Fake Soldier Tale Debunked’ — a story about an apparently fake Army Ranger, Jesse MacBeth (the spelling of his name varies widely), who claims on video to have committed terrible atrocities in Iraq, and who, pace Malkin, is supposedly a hero to ‘anti-war zealots’:
The closest thing that I could find to a major blog defending MacBeth is here, and the comments are heavily sceptical from the first comment on. Outside of that, it looks like the left-leaning blogs pretty much stayed away from the story, found it laughable, or didn’t find it worthy of comment.
Yuppers. It showed up at Metafilter over the weekend, but was picked up and championed by approximately nobody. A ruse, the video? It would be irresponsible not to speculate, or however that phrase goes: The ‘controversy’ certainly played out in extreme fast-motion, as though the WingNet were pimping for one of its crucial, yet increasingly-unobtainable bwaa-ha-haa moments. (Everyone’s pal Steven Den Beste shows up early in the Metafilter comments already waving evidence of fraudulosity.)
Steven Den Beste, military genius anime reviewer
On another note, it looks like someone left Malkin in the bathtub for too long.
She’s all pruny.
Nothing funny has happened yet today, so let’s see what they’re up to over at NewsBusters. Busting some news, one would imagine.
Is Google Purging Conservative News Sites?
Posted by Noel Sheppard on May 22, 2006 – 09:37.Something frighteningly ominous has been happening on the Internet lately: Google, without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals.
At first blush, one can easily ignore such business decisions by the most powerful company on the Internet as being routine. However, on closer examination, such behavior could give one relatively small technological corporation (when measured by the size of its workforce) a degree of political might that frankly dwarfs its current financial prowess.
So the most powerful company on the Internet shouldn’t be making such unilateral decisions because it’s such a small and weak company. On the Internet.
[creaking noise, tiny footsteps, door slam, squealing tires, distant train whistle]
Excuse me for a moment, that was my brain opening a hatch on my head and jumping out with a hat and suitcase, then running out the door and speeding off in a little car, and driving to the train station and taking a candy-cane train with hoop ladder laugh widgets to EIEIO of sideways the at bonk snausages gz f klgg ook. I’ll get a new brain and we can continue.
At first blush, one can easily ignore such business decisions by the most powerful company on the Internet as being routine. However, on closer examination, such behavior could give one relatively small technological corporation (when measured by the size of its workforce) a degree of political might that frankly dwarfs its current financial prowess.
[creaking noise, tiny footsteps, door slam, gunshot]
Excuse me, my brain seems to have shot itself. Let’s try this again.
At first blush, one can easily ignore such business decisions by the most powerful company on the Internet as being routine. However, on closer examination, such
[marching band troupes through room playing Souza’s ‘Liberty Bell’]
Well, I just can’t concentrate here. Let’s skip to the… Oh no!
Jim Sesi’s MichNews.com was banished on April 12. In Sesi’s case, the three pieces provided as examples of “hate speech� were articles by conservative writer J. Grant Swank, Jr., all about – you guessed it – radical Islam and terrorism.
“In your eyes,
The light, the heat,
In your eyes
I am complete,
In your eyes,
I see the doorway to a thousand churches,
In your eyes,
The resolution of all the fruitless searches…”
A genuinely relevant political article in the New York Times would involve a detailed examination of the sex lives of all non-married members of the Bush administration. Abstinence-only education is a key policy feature of the Bush administration, and it would certainly be legitimate to ask if they are, in fact, saving it.
-Atrios 2:18 PM
Then again, he’s married — so of course his personal life is none of the Times’s business.
In my never-ending quest to give poor PZ Myers cardiac arrest, I bring you MSNBC’s “chief science and health correspondent,” Robert Bazell:
Scientists should stop whining about threats to the teaching of evolution and spend more time discussing values.
Nice idea. It would also help if they quit being scientists and became priests.
The thought occurred to me recently when I was attending my son’s medical school commencement.
And you probably should have kept it to yourself, Bob. (Or at the very least, not drawn it out into a 700-word column.)
Following the well-trod path of a graduation speech, the dean, a highly regarded physician and scientist, told the new MDs they would face many challenges. These included, he said, a world where science endured constant assault as evidenced by the recent attempts to bring “intelligent design” into the curricula of Dover, Pa., and other high school districts.
Yeah, so a bunch of religious nuts are trying to undermine the quality of science education during a time when our children need it desperately due to increased overseas competition… BIG FRICKIN’ DEAL!!!
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Following our stellar performance in last week’s meeting, we knew it was going to be difficult to top that this week.
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You know how, when you’re in grade school, you’re skimming through the “H” volume of the encyclopedia and the entry for the Hapsburgs catches your eye, so you decide to write your next history report about them? Apparently, it must’ve been awhile since Jonah Goldberg dusted off that old set of Groliers down in his mom’s basement:
The ghost of Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn moves me to find a different, more sad, meaning in the Montenegro vote. This signals the true and final demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When my decks are cleared, one of these days, I’m going to take up the cause of marshalling a “two cheers for the Hapsburgs” argument for NR. Certainly one can make the case that the 20th century would have been lovelier with it than without it.
There’s a good reason your teacher insisted that you list more than one source on your bibliography, even in the third grade — and it wasn’t just to reduce plagiarism:
Update: A couple readers offer the narrowly factual objection that neither Serbia nor Montenegro were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. To which I say: this is precisely the sort of nuanced point my future defense of the Austro-Hungarian Empire would take into account! I do know that the Hapsburgs wanted the S&Ms in their empire — and they would have been lucky to be in it! Anyway, I shall hit the books harder before venturing further down this path.
Or perhaps he could find another outlet to express his boyish enthusiasm in those long-ago monarchs. I don’t wanna sound like a dork or anything, but I’ll bet Jonah’s collection of hand-painted Dungeons & Dragons figurines would look pretty fucking sweet in a diorama.
