The new LGF Pages re-design is now in launch mode, and the first thing you’ll notice is that it looks a lot like the rest of the site. And that’s a good thing.

The old LGF Pages index had its own design, which actually started as a coding experiment way back in the day. Now it’s completely integrated into the design of the rest of LGF.

It’s more than a design integration, though; I also lavished a lot of attention on the plumbing, the MySQL queries that manipulate the LGF Pages database tables. Many of these queries worked very well as long as the whole list of Pages wasn’t too large — but with the number of Pages approaching 300,000, those queries were becoming unacceptably slow. In the lingo, they weren’t scaleable. That’s why I had to take the LGF Pages index offline when we installed our new servers.

Now these queries are very scaleable; I’ve optimized and refactored the queries and the PHP code behind them to make this new version respond much more quickly — again, like the rest of LGF.

If you’re signed in to an LGF account, some of the stats displayed on LGF Pages indexes are now “live,” updated at 5-second intervals, including the last comment and the page views. The Twitter counter is updated too, but at 90-second intervals.

When you scroll all the way to the bottom of the list of Pages, there’s a big button labeled “Show More Pages.” If you’re so inclined you can just keep clicking this button and showing more Pages until you reach the end, or your browser explodes, whichever comes first.

(Disclaimer: LGF not responsible for exploding browsers.)

Individual authors of Pages have their own indexes, just as in the old version, but again they now appear in a style consistent with the rest of LGF. You can get to any author’s LGF Pages by clicking their username in one of their Pages. The URL for your Pages looks like this (giving you a personal LGF web address):

littlegreenfootballs.com/pages/charles

And… one of the main problems with the old LGF Pages index was the search function. Basically, it sucked, and I say that as the author. Mea culpa. The biggest reason it sucked was because MySQL doesn’t have FULLTEXT indexing for tables of the InnoDB type, but you don’t really care about that. All you care about, and I don’t blame you, is that it’s fast. And the old LGF Pages search feature was the opposite of fast.

The solution: I’ve been noticing for a while that Google is crawling the heck out of LGF, and LGF Pages often show up in Google search results almost immediately after being posted, so I used Google’s “Custom Search Engine” feature to set up a special tool that searches LGF Pages. To use the custom Google search, type your search terms into the field in the left sidebar labeled “Google LGF Pages…”

Google’s search is ridiculously fast. Damned near instantaneous, in fact. Check it out and see how it compares to the old LGF Pages search feature.

Even conservative journalists now think Breitbart.com has become a bad joke, but they can still be inadvertently hilarious. Ben Shapiro’s nutty, painfully incoherent rant against the pro-Obama Lena Dunham video is today’s case in point: Obama Campaign to Girls: Have Sex With Vote for O.

Yes, she just compared sex with voting. And she mocked virgins - “No, I didn’t vote, I wasn’t ready.” And she said that Barack Obama’s the guy she’d rather have sex - er, vote - with. She actually saved herself for Barack Obama (she’s 26) - she could have swiped her V(oting)-card with John Kerry, but he was too limp a candidate, apparently. A real flip-flopper.

So she chose to do it for the first time with Barack Obama, since he “cares about and understands women.” In fact, he understands them so well that he exploits them for insane commercials comparing losing your virginity with voting. Obama has young daughters. But that didn’t stop him from releasing this commercial. Because this is what Obama thinks of your daughters. This is Obama’s official campaign ad. Paid for with his campaign money.

Distributed by his campaign. If this ad were any more demeaning to women - who apparently care only about having sex, if you listen to Lena “You Want To Do It” Dunham — it would be produced by Bill Maher and star Bill Clinton.

These people are very weird.

Also see:
Dunham’s ‘First Time’ Ad Similar to 1980 Reagan Joke

Jon Avlon has a piece at The Daily Beast on the sick and twisted world of the right wing Obama Haters Book Club, where fear mongering and deranged conspiracy theories are a thriving business.

Welcome to the Obama Haters Book Club—a parallel universe of fear mongering for fun and profit. 

Over the past four years, no less than 89 obsessively anti-Obama books have been published, as now catalogued by The Daily Beast. I’m not talking about cool statements of policy difference, but overheated and often unhinged screeds painting a picture of the president as a dangerous radical hell-bent on undermining the Republic by any means necessary. It is hate and hyper-partisan paranoia masquerading as high-minded patriotism.

Here’s the worst part—this steady drumbeat of incitement is having an impact on this presidential election because it has poisoned the well of civic discourse for many voters and those in their radius of damage. It has helped divide the nation beyond reason, distorting the president’s real record beyond all recognition.

By their very nature, books offer the promise of education and enlightenment. These conspiracy entrepreneurs pray on the prejudices of their audience. This is high-priced hardcover bile, boasting titles like:

The Communist; The Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama Administration; Where’s the Birth Certificate?; The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and other Anti-American Extremists; The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama’s War on the Republic; Trickle Down Tyranny: Crushing Obama’s Dream of the Social States of America; Gangster Government: Barack Obama and the New Washington Thugocracy; How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda; The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America; To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular Socialist Machine; The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency; and what is still my personal favorite title: Whiny Little Bitch: The Excuse Filled Presidency of Barack Obama.