Overnight Open Thread
Open | Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 10:03:23 pm PDT
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.
— Tom Waits
Shocka
Politics | Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 6:50:45 pm PDT
Washington Post endorses Obama for president.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democrat Barack Obama won the endorsement of The Washington Post in an editorial saying the Illinois senator “has the potential to become a great president.”
World Hearts Obama, Hates Everything Else About America
World | Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 6:21:56 pm PDT
Do you really think electing Barack Obama is going to make these people like us? Foreign poll favours Obama but shows hostility to US.
People around the world are pinning their hopes on Barack Obama in next month’s presidential election, according to an international survey published today.
I found this article through a referral from reddit.com, and get a load of this comment from a seriously deluded reddit reader in Belgium who apparently believes that LGF supports Pat Buchanan and the Vlaams Belang:
We’ve got our share of right wing *ssholes. You should see some of our reader forums-—it would make the littlegreenfootballs crowd envious. This p.o.s. loves Bill O’Reilly (see his ‘weblinks’ on the right), he is an elected representative and a vile populist (muslim bashing, socialist bashing, french-speaking people bashing... you name it, he does it), and his Milton Friedman-loving party stands to gain about 20% of the electoral votes in our elections next year. Add that to the neo-racist 20% that votes for Vlaams Belang, a party that loves to rub itself against the brown fringes of the american conservatives and pat buchanan, and you’ll understand why I fear it’s only a matter of time before we stop being a social-democratic-oriented country.
Tech Note: Minty Stats
Science | Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 4:03:00 pm PDT
A new addition to the site, although you wouldn’t know it unless you look at the source code: Mint, a nicely-designed site statistics package with a slick Ajax interface by Shaun Inman.
Quickie review: very simple to install, and started working flawlessly right away with almost no perceptible impact on the servers. The license is very reasonable; 30 bucks. The code is Javascript-driven, so it’s able to collect data on things like screen and window size, Flash compatibility, outbound links, etc. The disadvantage of the Javascript-based approach is that it doesn’t help identify malicious bots (human or otherwise), but we already have good tools for that.
Mint has lots of nice extensions that build on the core functionality, and it seems to get along just fine with jQuery (on which LGF relies). If you manage a web site, we recommend it. Check out the live demo.
Since we set it up a couple of hours ago, the browsers our visitors are using:
Internet Explorer: 44%
version 7: 34%
version 6: 10%
Firefox: 41%
version 3: 34%
version 2: 6%
Safari: 10%
Joe the Alaskan Plumber
Politics | Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 1:05:18 pm PDT
Oh noes! Joe the Plumber once lived in ... Alaska!
Rove, you magnificent bastard.
Twelve Years Old and Racist
Politics | Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 9:58:15 am PDT
As Barack Obama bashes McCain and Palin for encouraging mob-like behavior, a 7th grader is called a “racist” for wearing a Sarah Palin T-shirt.
VOLUSIA COUNTY, Fla. (WOFL FOX 35, Orlando) — She’s only 12 years old but Ashleigh Jones is feeling the heat of this election year.
That’s because the seventh grader at New Smyrna Beach Middle School was called a racist by classmates for wearing a pro-Sarah Palin t-shirt.
Jones is volunteering at the Republican Headquarters in New Smyrna Beach. The Palin t-shirt was a gift from her fellow volunteers. But when she wore it to school she learned just how tough politics can be.
“Some of the students were calling me racist because I was Caucasian,” she said. “I wanted the Caucasian man to win. And I told them that’s not true. It’s my freedom of speech, it’s my opinion.”
(Hat tip: LGF readers.)
Equating Islam with Terrorism Will Lead to Terrorism
World | Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 9:36:43 am PDT
The Foreign Minister of Kazakhstan addressed yet another “inter-faith” conference today, and announced that “equating Islam with terrorism is dangerous.”
Because it will lead to ... uh ... terrorism.
“It is a great pity that we see incessant attempts to authenticate and unify Islam and terrorism. The doctrinal substance of Islam is distorted. This repulses a big chunk of Muslims who cannot help but be offended by such treatment of the Quran,” said Kazakhstan Foreign Minister M. Tazhin, addressing the conference, Common World - Progress Through Diversity.
“Anti-Islamism is a danger with negative consequences not only for the Muslim community but also for Western countries themselves,” Tahzin warned.
The amazing thing about these kinds of statements, which are issued almost every day by one Islamic leader or another, is that the people who say them have no apparent recognition that they’re tying themselves into a rhetorical knot.
We’ve had a special Yahoo news feed in our drop-down RSS menu for several years now, a search for the word “terrorism.” (You can set up a custom Yahoo RSS feed for any search term, a nice feature.) Over time we’ve seen serious news articles on this subject slowly dwindle away and be replaced by a non-stop stream of this kind of illogical Islamic apologia.
Krauthammer: Who's Playing the Race Card?
Opinion | Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 8:10:06 am PDT
Charles Krauthammer points out what should be obvious to anyone who’s really been paying attention in this election; there’s one candidate who has consistently and deviously traded in race-baiting, and it’s not John McCain: Who’s Playing the Race Card?
Let me get this straight. A couple of agitated yahoos in a rally of thousands yell something offensive and incendiary, and John McCain and Sarah Palin are not just guilty by association — with total strangers, mind you — but worse: guilty according to the New York Times of “race-baiting and xenophobia.”
But should you bring up Barack Obama’s real associations — 20 years with Jeremiah Wright, working on two foundations and distributing money with William Ayers, citing the raving Michael Pfleger as one who helps him keep his moral compass (Chicago Sun-Times, April 2004) and the long-standing relationship with the left-wing vote-fraud specialist ACORN — you have crossed the line into illegitimate guilt by association. Moreover, it is tinged with racism.
The fact that, when John McCain actually heard one of those nasty things said about Obama, he incurred the boos of his own crowd by insisting that Obama is “a decent person . . . that you do not have to be scared [of] as president” makes no difference. It surely did not stop John Lewis from comparing McCain to George Wallace.
Don't Cross Barack Obama
Politics | Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 7:49:42 am PDT
It’s absolutely disgusting what the Obama campaign and left-wing bloggers have done to Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher.
This is what you can expect if you become a serious embarrassment to Barack: character assassination on steroids.
