Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

People are complicated. Love is not.

To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Their shamelessness is their super power.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

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Reader Interactions

146Comments

  1. 1.

    Jay C

    Especially weird, since the shooter isn’t the usual loser/wacko/yahoo type who typically does these slaughters:

    The officer, Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan [39 or 40], was later shot and killed by security personnel on the base, which is about 160 miles southwest of Dallas.

    Two other soldiers were in custody, base officials said, amid indications that the attack may have been premeditated and well-organized.

    Military officials said that Maj. Hasan was a psychiatrist who had been recently promoted to major and transferred to Fort Hood from Washington’s Walter Reed Medical Center. Maj. Hasan’s professional specialties included post-traumatic stress disorder, combat stress and other emotional issues common to the troops implicated in earlier incidents of military fratricide.

    Via WSJ online

  2. 2.

    conumbdrum

    A law enforcement official identified the shooting suspect as Army Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan.

    Wingnut cries of “this is what happens when you put Ay-rabs in positions of authority,” commence in 3… 2… 1…

    (I’m betting on Pam Atlas to break the tape first.)

  4. 4.

    Midnight Marauder

    It really is an unfathomable tragedy what happened at Ft. Hood today, especially considering that there was a graduation ceremony of some kind planned for earlier this afternoon, prior to the shooting. Even more so if the shooting was caused by the double whammy, as some reports are now indicating, of the shooter getting a poor performance review, and being a few weeks away from having to ship out to Afghanistan or Iraq.

    It’s equally as tragic what certain people will do with the shooter’s name (Major Malik Nadal Hasan) as another tool in their neverending fear-mongering tool belt.

  5. 5.

    JenJen

    How long does it take to make Major from Captain, typically? If he went into the Army as an M.D., he probably hasn’t been in that long.

    What a horrible and tragic story. 13 dead now according to MSNBC.

  6. 6.

    Jay C

    @Jay C:

    Umm, everything except the last line was supposed to be the blockquoted excerpt from WSJOnline

    Thanks again, WordPress.

  8. 8.

    General Winfield Stuck

    Act One

    Winger Poutragefest.

    I know that our president relies completely on his teleprompter and was definitely reading prepared remarks about the attack. But he couldn’t muster one ounce of emotion? One little smidgeon of feeling?

    That onion ate gonna peel itself

  10. 10.

    General Winfield Stuck

    Ya mean empathy?

    Wingers don’t do “empathy” for fear it could lead to helping someone. Emotion is that special feeling they crave just before dropping a bomb on someone.

  11. 11.

    smiley

    @JenJen: According to reporting on MSNBC, MD’s enter at the rank of Captain and if they have advanced training, like in psychiatry, they are promoted rather quickly to Major.

  12. 12.

    Violet

    Heard on NPR that he was disciplined for proselytizing about his Muslim faith while treating soldiers for psychiatric problems. If that’s true…sheesh. Talk about fodder for the wingnut anti-Muslim brigade.

  13. 13.

    Midnight Marauder

    @ericblair:

    Ya mean empathy?

    NO, not empathy, you DFH. Clearly, they are referring to that distant cousin of empathy, Sadnessitudeocity.

  14. 14.

    Ann B. Nonymous

    Some levity: Jonah Goldberg’s brother ran for New York City Council in Megan McArdle’s old neighborhood. Here’s his resume.

  15. 15.

    Shell

    remarks about the attack. But he couldn’t muster one ounce of emotion?

    I honestly don’t know what these people are thinking. He was speaking solemnly about a very tragic event; still in the unfolding. I guess they’ve been watching too much Glenn Beck and expected him to burst into tears.

  19. 19.

    calipygian

    @General Winfield Stuck: An emotion, like lust:

    .Mr. Beck is quite canny about using novels as a vehicle for talking about issues he cares about. When Mr. Flynn was on Mr. Beck’s Fox News program last month to talk about “Pursuit of Honor,” Mr. Flynn’s latest novel, a thriller about a C.I.A. operative chasing Muslim terrorists who kill 185 people in Washington, Mr. Beck zeroed in on a chapter in which the main character, Mitch Rapp, goes before Congress to defend the C.I.A.’s record of using harsh interrogation tactics with suspects.
    …
    “Let me just say, it’s almost conservative porn,” Mr. Beck said.

    Buckle up, things are going to get rough.

    You think the who Muslims as Congressional aides thing was ridiculous? Wait till the wingnuts start to howl about fifth columns in the Army and start calling for adherance to Islam to be grounds for rejection from military service.

  20. 20.

    lamh31

    Anyone else not quite comfortable with the idea that the shooter’s “family members” are giving information to the MSM. I just don’t beleive that if somethign like this was perpertrated by a member of my family, I just can’t see anyone of us speaking to the press so soon?

  21. 21.

    MikeJ

    Heard on NPR that he was disciplined for proselytizing about his Muslim faith while treating soldiers for psychiatric problems.

    He shoulda joined the Air Farce. They love proselytizers.

  23. 23.

    cmorenc

    Scary thing is, it recurrently happens that it’s not just foreseeable nutjobs who abruptly go off the psycho deep end. This is hardly the first time it’s happened where instead, it’s someone whom most everyone who thought they knew the person, who’d been around them, thought they were normal nice, intelliget folks. I had a relative who was a medical professional who abruptly one night, shot his family and committed suicide, came as a complete bolt out of the blue. In hindsight from what I’ve learned, it seems a bit less implausible that he could find himself in a situation where he might get provoked over the edge, but still extremely unlikely.

    It could be someone you thought you knew lots better than that next time something like this happens.

  24. 24.

    mai naem

    Uh oh the shooter was a muslim man. I know this is somehow connected to Barack Hussein Obama being a secret muslim born in Mombasa, Kenya.
    Also too, why does Wall Street get H1N1 shots before the vulnerable do? There better be a f#$king hearing about this or Chris Dodd’s head is going to be on the chopping block if it isn’t already. Sheesh, this country is truly becoming a banana republic.

  25. 25.

    General Winfield Stuck

    @lamh31:

    Don’t know what they are saying, but are likely afraid of being the target of retaliation, maybe. It is looking bad from reports that he is a recent Muslim convert and harshly critical of our wars in Afghan and Iraq.

    This comes from Fox, so grain of salt and all that. But it doesn’t surprise me.

  26. 26.

    mai naem

    @MikeJ: Nope, that’s only if you are proselytizing Christianist Nation stuff not that evil Islamic or Hebrew stuff.

  29. 29.

    ellaesther

    @conumbdrum: They won’t say Arab — at least not very openly, at least not those closest to the “center” — they will say “Muslim.”

    Because it is still ok to hate on Muslims because they’re Muslims.

    Oy. Oyoyoyoyoy.

    My one hope is that this will be an opportunity for Muslim organizations to come out and say loud and clear: This is not our faith. So that maybe the rest of America will hear them. Was Scott Roeder, George Tiller’s murderer, representative of real Christianity? Was Yigal Amir, Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin, representative of real Judaism?

    If anyone’s interested in possible responses to those who know nothing about the American Muslim community and need to be schooled, I wrote an op/ed for the Detroit Free Press in the lead-up to the election in which I attempted to school one Barack Obama. And words are my only sanctuary when bad shit hits the fan…. Don’t Run From Muslims

  31. 31.

    monkeyboy

    Why do all the AP stories, such as this one, pander to racist speculations with such as:

    trying to determine if Hasan was his birth name, or if he changed his name and converted to the Islamic faith at some point in his life.

    From his photo he could be Lebanese, many of whom are Christian, especially those living in the United States.

    But no. It is news to speculate that he is a crazy convert to Islam because all such converts are crazy.

  32. 32.

    ellaesther

    Oh, and this strikes me as a good opportunity to once again recommend former Congressmember Mark Siljander’s book, A Deadly Misunderstanding (from the Publisher’s Weekly review: “Former congressman Siljander began his career as a zealous evangelical Christian, convinced that the Qur’an was ‘devil’s work.’ In this memoir, Siljander recounts his ‘paradigm crash’ after discovering that much of what he’d been taught about his faith was nowhere in the Bible, and that the Christian and Muslim religious texts are surprisingly compatible when studied in their original languages.”)

  33. 33.

    conumbdrum

    @conumbdrum: They won’t say Arab—at least not very openly, at least not those closest to the “center”—they will say “Muslim.”

    I only used “Arab” because I wasn’t yet sure if he was a Muslim or not.

    This is going to be ugly on an earthshaking level. If I were openly Muslim or even had Middle Eastern features, I’d make an effort to be home before dark. Hell, even Sikhs were getting beaten in the streets after 9/11, and this incident is going to enrage the same bigoted chuckleheads who see a brown-complected person and immediately think “I done found me a terrarist.”

  34. 34.

    Zzyzx

    In better news, the Seattle Times is now calling R-71:

    More to come | Voters approve Washington state’s “everything but marriage” law for gay couples.

  35. 35.

    PurpleGirl

    Re Joshua Goldberg… he barely got 20% of the vote. Gail Brewer (the incumbent) got some 26,000 and Goldberg around 5,000.

  36. 36.

    catatonia

    He’s a psychiatrist, didn’t want to deploy to Iraq evidently. Perhaps he was self-medicating? Maybe he was taking psychotropic meds with SSRIs, or who knows, and it sent him over. (Maybe he wanted to be sent over.) The pharmacology is endless, as is the opportunities to mix ‘n match and, therefore, the possible mental conditions that are endproducts of such untrammeled manipulation of neurotransmitters and what not. First thing I thought of, anyway.

    Speculation at this time, admittedly, may be injudicious. Since speculation will happen and will invariably be freighted (given the suspect’s name) with a heaping helping of vitriol directed at generic Islamofascistphdobamasupporters, it’s probably therapeutic to the forthcoming (and inevitable) national hand wringing about this incident, to advance suppositions that aren’t grounded in typical meretricious wingnut crap. Even though they may be grounded in atypical ignorance of brain chemistry.

  38. 38.

    Steeplejack

    @Jay C:

    Just do this:

    Last line of “regular” text above blockquote.
    &#060blockquote&#062
    Paragraph 1
    &#095&#095
    Paragraph 2
    &#095&#095
    Paragraph 3, etc.
    &#060/blockquote&#062

    Those are two underscores in the lines between paragraphs. Also, butting the opening &#060blockquote&#062 against the paragraph above it makes the blockquote come out in normal text, not bold.

    Insert standard rant No. 39–FYWP–but this is what works for now.

  39. 39.

    ellaesther

    @conumbdrum: Ah, no, I’m sorry, I got that! If we were having an RL conversation, we would have been entirely clear — it would have been a: “You know what, even worse, they’ll say-” moment.

    Bottom line, with that name, even if he’s from Mars, he’ll be a Muslin. Like those hapless Sikhs. ALL Muslin.

  42. 42.

    Svensker

    @Bubblegum Tate:

    whoever was involved in this most emphatically does not have a right to remain silent.

    Fuck Mark Noonan.

    No, as a Quaker, I must eschew violence, as much as I would like to beat that little shit’s head in right now. But that is no different than what Noonan himself is calling for.

    God save Mark Noonan, after he has experienced great personal distress.

  43. 43.

    kay

    @Bubblegum Tate:

    Wow. So much for the ticking time bomb scenario. Now we can torture to glean “information” after the fact, from “accomplices”.

    I think the two “accomplices” have been released. Not that it matters. They might have information anyway, and there’s no reason to release them. If we’re jettisoning the 5th, as suggested, may as well jettison the 4th, too.

  45. 45.

    The Moar You Know

    Mark Noonan says it’s time to get a-waterboardin’:

    @Bubblegum Tate: Good lord. I’ve never seen a more fitting example of the adage “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.

  46. 46.

    General Winfield Stuck

    Mark Noonan is the wanker who ran Blogs For Bush and is dumber than three sacks of hammers.

  47. 47.

    Leelee for Obama

    @ellaesther:

    Do American law and American values mean absolutely nothing to these people?

    ellaesther, to these people we are discussing, torture is the answer to all their problems. Not that it solves a damn thing, but the hard-ons they get make them feel like real men. Even the females.

  49. 49.

    calipygian

    Mark Noonan says it’s time to get a-waterboardin’:

    You know, maybe torturing someone to get answers would be emotionally satisfying for certain types of people at this point (or, if you are Glenn Beck, jack off material), this is still the United States of Fucking America, presumably the accussed are still United States Fucking Citizens and they still have Constitutional Fucking rights.

    My only conclusion is that Mark Noonan accepts prosecutorial and investigative procedures espoused by Hitler and Stalin.

    And that is not hyperbole, that is the logical inference.

  50. 50.

    Rathskeller

    I don’t have anything politically astute to say about it. I’m just terribly saddened by the tragedy… really, really pointless. And I wish America didn’t have so many multiple-victim shooting crimes that we immediately go into the analysis mode of “what’s it all mean?” politically, instead of being stunned that this is happening at all.

  51. 51.

    monkeyboy

    @Steeplejack:

    Just do this: …

    Hey, that’s my hack.. Maybe I should trademark it and demand it be referred to as html fuckery.

    But how did you get the blockquote tags with angle brackets to appear? When I wrote it up I tried ampersand encoding but found the parser would treat an encoded blockquote tag as a regular one.

  52. 52.

    4tehlulz

    Mark Noonan says it’s time for someone else to get a-waterboardin

    Fixed that for you. Noonan isn’t the type to get his own hands dirty.

  55. 55.

    cmorenc

    What if YOU were a returning vet from Afghanistan with PSD who was currently undergoing treatment for it under Dr. Hasan? By definition of Dr. Hasan’s specialty and particular role at Ft. Hood, there has to be a group of precisely such soldiers – what in the Hell must THEIR reaction be to their Doc going out of the blue on a psycho homicidal rampage with firearms?

  56. 56.

    Seebach

    What if YOU were a returning vet from Afghanistan with PSD who was currently undergoing treatment for it under Dr. Hasan? By definition of Dr. Hasan’s specialty and particular role at Ft. Hood, there has to be a group of precisely such soldiers – what in the Hell must THEIR reaction be to their Doc going out of the blue on a psycho homicidal rampage with firearms?

    Fascinating question.

  57. 57.

    PanAmerican

    Tragic doesn’t even begin to describe it.

    Did Anyone see another US Army soldier got killed in a bar across the border in Juarez? He was one of six victims in a stone cold drug hit.

    This is the same sort institutional breakdown that happened in the seventies as a result of Vietnam.

    The Big Green Machine is broke.

  60. 60.

    calipygian

    Ohhhh fuck. He was Palestinian-American:
    …
    “Born and raised in Virginia, the son of immigrant parents from a small town near Jerusalem…

    This is going to be spun “terr’ist terr’ist terr’ist” and “MOOOOOOOOOSSSSSLIMS!!!!1!”, but I smell a guy who snapped.

    The NYT article mentions that

    1) He was harrassed for being Muslim,
    2) He got a lawyer to try to get out of the military, but the Army wouldn’t let him buy his way out, and
    3) he didn’t want to deploy.

    I’ve seen people do some crazy shit to get out of deploying, but nothing like this.

  61. 61.

    MikeJ

    Is there a reason why Mark Noonan is so easy on people who rape children? He wants to throw out the constitution to get people who murdered adults, but for some reason, I would never speculate on what that reason is, he doesn’t want the same treatment for raping children.

  62. 62.

    Leelee for Obama

    @cmorenc: Oh thanks, Nightmare seeds. Just what we needed! These kids, and to me, they are all kids, must be in agony. Unless some of them are the victims? I heard that he seemed to be targeting people he knew? Sweet Jesus, it just gets worse.

  63. 63.

    kay

    @calipygian:

    The Army hasn’t confirmed that he was going anywhere. Kay Bailey Hutchinson said he was. She also said he was born in Jordan. She should probably stop talking for a while.

  65. 65.

    HRA

    @ellaesther:

    @27 Thank you for writing it.

    I grew up in a home where everyone who came to the door was welcome, even thought I later learned some of them were of the ethnicity my parents should have barred from entering if they were of a different mindset. Evidently I was given an opportunity not shared by some through by my parents example and I have celebrated it for my entire life.

    As of now we do not have the entire reason or reasoning of why this tragedy occurred in Ft. Hood. I have seen enough comments (4 to be exact) over in the news blogs. They are all certifiable. It’s nothing new. Let’s move on.

  68. 68.

    Anne Laurie

    Hell, even Sikhs were getting beaten in the streets after 9/11, and this incident is going to enrage the same bigoted chuckleheads who see a brown-complected person and immediately think “I done found me a terrarist.”

    I had a swarthy all-American Jewish co-worker who shaved off his mustache after 9/11 because he said he was tired of having people hesitate & back off from getting into the elevator with him. Our office was in a skyscraper, so it’s not like he could have taken the stairs, even if the stairwells hadn’t all been security-alarmed off limits at that time.

    We’ve let a lot of ugliness fester over the last 8 years — hell, a lot of powerful people encouraged the ugliness, added more filth to the national infection of stupidity, jingoism & paranoia — and I’m afraid this craziness is only the start of the backlash. The test is whether we’re able to isolate the incidents, smother the escalation, and not let the worst angels of our national temperament triumph.

    And I’m glad I’m not one of the people who’re going to have to run point on those decisions, either.

  69. 69.

    Calouste

    @calipygian:

    Stalin wasn’t that stupid that he saw torture as an investigative instrument. Sure, he saw it as an instrument to get the confessions he wanted to hear in the show trials, but I don’t think he relied on the information that came out of torture sessions, because torture was used exactly to make people say whatever the torturer wanted them to say.

  70. 70.

    Yutsano

    @cmorenc: This whole damn incident hits way too damn close for me to possibly comment objectively, but this guy could have been any religion on the planet and still would have snapped like this. There are legal channels to fight a deployment, but they are slow and often ineffective. I’m starting to wonder if the whole point was death by government/Army since as a Muslim he couldn’t commit suicide. Of course as a stone-cold murderer he ain’t getting his 72 virgins either.

  71. 71.

    JenJen

    @Bubblegum Tate: Jesus these reactionary assholes piss me off. I mean my God, how black does your heart have to hear such horrible news and then immediately use it as an excuse to lecture liberals on the necessity of torture in a nation of laws?

    Grrrrrrrrr.

  74. 74.

    Steeplejack

    @monkeyboy:

    Dude, no one has a monopoly on the truth. I’ll give you a hat tip next time. Just wanted to get the thing out there quickly and not burn my steak.

    But how did you get the blockquote tags with angle brackets to appear?

    More HTML fuckery, in your phrase. Use ampersand-number sign-060 for &#060 and ampersand-number sign-062 for &#062.

    Lemme see if I can go all meta meta and show it:

    &#38&#35060blockquote062&#38&#35

    Let’s see if that got it. Workin’ without an edit net here.

  75. 75.

    Yutsano

    @SiubhanDuinne: Didja ever notice, in all the epidoses of Star Trek, Bones never said, not once, “He’s not dead Jim!”. But yeah somehow my personal connections to Fort Hood kinda blocked that out (close friend is a staff sergeant there.) either way it still applies, no virgins for you!

  77. 77.

    ellaesther

    @kay: Well, not that I really want to come to Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s defense (!), but I got this from the NY Times story: “[the shooter’s cousin] declined to confirm reports that they were Jordanian, but said the parents, who are both dead, had immigrated from a small town near Jerusalem many years ago.”

    From my experience, this indicates the frequent hesitation among Palestinians to use the word “Palestinian,” preferring to refer to the town they hail from (less likely to result in a stupid nationalist argument). Also, given Hasan’s age (39), my first guess (I stress: A guess) would be that his parents “immigrated”/became refugees as a result of the 67 war, at which time “a small town near Jerusalem” would have, technically, been in what was then Jordan, but the people living there would have considered themselves Palestinians.

    Not that it’s insanely complicated, or anything.

  78. 78.

    Mark S.

    @J. A. Baker:

    Debbie “The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim” Schlussel is already on the case!

    Not clicking that. I’d pay to go see this rather than click Little Debbie.

  79. 79.

    Yutsano

    @ellaesther: They possibly had Jordanian passports for coming to the US since Jordan is the only country that would issue Palestinians at that time visas and such. Slightly tortured English (and really I’m sure you know this already!) but that would explain the Jordanian confusion. It doesn’t keep Hutchinson from being a total douchebag though.

  80. 80.

    Shalimar

    @JenJen: I’m surprised they haven’t started lecturing yet about how this wouldn’t have been as bad if everyone in the country was walking around armed.

  81. 81.

    ellaesther

    @ Yutsano: Yeah… it’s a tale told at millions of kitchen tables all across the Palestinian diaspora, I think. Oy.

    Just by way of bringing a different energy to the conversation, here’s a comedian I really like who happens to be Palestinian-American: Dean Obeidallah. He was part of the excellent Axis of Evil comedy tour.

  82. 82.

    kay

    @ellaesther:

    I got that too, and I assumed the same thing you did, the reluctance to say “Palestinian”.
    I believe Hutchinson said he was “from Jordan”, however, which isn’t even close.

  85. 85.

    KCinDC

    I’m so glad we have 24-hour news coverage so we can get up-to-the-minute false reports. It now appears that (1) there was only one shooter, (2) he’s not dead, and (3) the police officer who (may have) shot him isn’t dead either.

  86. 86.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Yutsano 9:33 pm. Oh actually I was thinking of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, not Star Trek. But you’re quite right and I take your point.

  87. 87.

    monkeyboy

    @Steeplejack:

    More HTML fuckery, in your phrase. Use ampersand-number sign-060 for .

    Let me try that:

    & + # + 60 + ; = <
    __
    & + lt + ; = <
    __
    number form around blockquote = <blockquote>
    __
    lg, gt form around blockquote = <blockquote>

    Got me?

  88. 88.

    Xanthippas

    Jesus these reactionary assholes piss me off. I mean my God, how black does your heart have to hear such horrible news and then immediately use it as an excuse to lecture liberals on the necessity of torture in a nation of laws?

    Well to be fair, I know one liberal blogger who thinks this is a perfect time to discuss how violence is indoctrinated in members of the military.

  89. 89.

    Xanthippas

    Well okay to actually be completely fair…that’s one liberal blogger vs. 10,000 right-wing bloggers ranting about Muslim infiltration. But still, I expect better of our kind.

  90. 90.

    gnomedad

    @Mark S.:

    Not clicking that. I’d pay to go see this rather than click Little Debbie.

    LOLZ, “An Intimate Evening with Pamela Geller”, indeed! The mind reels.

  91. 91.

    Chuck Butcher

    @Will:
    Dumbass, already dealt with in a previous incarnation of stupidity.

    For the terminally stupid, military bases have tighter gun control than cities do, pick your nirvanna of gun control.

  92. 92.

    monkeyboy

    wonderful wordpress. My test to see if I can get a the text “blockquote” with angle brackets around it by using ampersand number encoding was submitted as a comment but doesn’t appear but when I resubmit it I’m told

    Duplicate comment detected;

    Well here is just one short ampersand number test.

    <blockquote>

    got me?

  93. 93.

    cokane

    Horrible incident. I wonder the usual suspects will conjecture that this mass shooting could have been prevented if only there had been more guns available?

  95. 95.

    monkeyboy

    Idiot wordpress. I have two posts testing out ampersand encoding that are not appearing. Here I’ll make a third try in which I leave off the semicolon which is supposed to terminate such encoding

    Line 1
    &#60blockquote&#62
    Line3

    got me?

  96. 96.

    parksideq

    whoever was involved in this most emphatically does not have a right to remain silent.

    Even a cursory glance at an episode of Law and Order blows this theory out of the water. Hey Noonan, ever heard of Miranda rights, asshole?

  97. 97.

    monkeyboy

    @monkeyboy: Jesus Christ on a cracker. In “real HTML” when you ampersand encode a character you are supposed to terminate it with a semicolon character. In what this wordpress thinks, including the semicolon seems to make the post get stuck in limbo.

    Lets see if lt and gt work the same way.

    line 1
    &ltblockquote&gt
    line 3

    Got me?

  100. 100.

    Steeplejack

    @monkeyboy:

    Here is how I did my previous snippet, so you can see exactly what worked for me. Note, since my massive fail in meta meta mode before, I am going to substitute % for ampersand and ! for number sign. Wherever you see % below, put in an ampersand; wherever you see !, put in a number sign.

    Last line of “regular” text above blockquote.
    %!060blockquote%!062
    Paragraph 1
    %!095%!095
    Paragraph 2
    %!095%!095
    Paragraph 3, etc.
    %!060/blockquote%!062

    Resume normal text. (H/T Monkeyboy. All rights reserved.)

  101. 101.

    Sour Kraut

    “An Intimate Evening with Pamela Geller”, indeed!

    No doubt followed by “A Shameful Morning at the Free Clinic”

  102. 102.

    Steeplejack

    @Steeplejack:

    Holy shnikeys! WordPress totally fucked that up. Is there no end to the insanity?! (Rhetorical question.)

    Needless to say, ignore that. I give up.

    If you type in

    ampersand + number sign + 060 + blockquote + ampersand + number sign + 060

    you will get &#060blockquote&#062. So help me FSM.

    (Obviously–I hope–don’t enter the plus signs. Just an ampersand character, a number sign and the three-digit ASCII code all run together.)

    God, I feel like I need to reinvent BNF to deal with this. Crikeys.

  103. 103.

    Mister Papercut

    @cokane: Or what about pontificating that because no one went all Rambo on him and wrestled him down but rather waited for the police, that the victims were clearly the submissive and emasculated products of Libruuuuuulism?

    No, wait: that’s reserved for innocent college kids.

  105. 105.

    monkeyboy

    @Steeplejack:

    I don’t think you need the semicolon if you use three-digit ASCII codes.

    I used two digit codes with no semicolon.

    In the initial test thread, I found that if I used ampersand-lt-semi and ampersand-gt-semi around a “blockquote” it would get parsed twice and turned into a real blockquote division. So it seems that the only thing that “works” is ampersand-number encoding without a trailing semicolon FOR THE WIN.

  106. 106.

    ellaesther

    @ all the block quotes folks:

    This is heart-breaking!

    Just put your quoted passages in italics and be done with it, my friends! You will breathe easier, and your blood pressure will go down.

    Like so:

    OMG y’all, did you see this over at Wingnut Bloggorama?

    Wingnut Politican Doe said outrageous things to lilly-livered Liberal Politician Smith, and good on him!

    Why, Liberal Politician Smith is the best thing to hit Washington DC since sliced bread! This is an outrage!

    (like that!)

  109. 109.

    Steeplejack

    @monkeyboy:

    So it seems that the only thing that “works” is ampersand-number encoding without a trailing semicolon FOR THE WIN.

    Which is pretty much exactly what I said. Good times.

    @ellaesther:

    Back off, lady. Can’t you see we’re sawing sawdust over here?

  110. 110.

    monkeyboy

    @ellaesther:

    Just put your quoted passages in italics and be done with it, my friends!

    SteepleJack’s explanation above is fairly clear and simple.

    We were just trying to figure out the unintuitive quasi-html fuckery he stumbled upon which he used in producing it.

  111. 111.

    DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)

    I am listening to Mick (Jim Miklashevski/NBC) on Rachel Maddow’s show saying that since the initial reporting was contradicted by the General at the press conference that he won’t trust anything the army says until things clear up. You could tell that he was irritated by the fact that the press had few facts when it came to their initial reporting. It clearly sounded like he was pushing the bad reporting off on the fact that the military wouldn’t let anyone gossip with the press.

    I haven’t ever been in a shooting and I hope I never will be but I can’t help but think that there is a lot of initial confusion surrounding something like this, making accuracy in initial reporting difficult even in the best circumstances. This time, since the military had a solid grip on press access, the press had to go on what they do best; misreport the ‘facts’ and make shit up. This time it was reported that the shooter was dead, as was a lady first responder, and both are now undead.

    Now that a press conference has been fed their chow, everything that they got wrong before this wasn’t their fault. It was the fault of the military.

    Isn’t that special.

  112. 112.

    ellaesther

    @Steeplejack: Terribly sorry! I’ll just be over here with the broom and dustpan….

    (Though, given your recent angry exhortation to yourself to “fuck me,” I maybe better should get some Vaseline and a crowbar…. I mean, really, your semi-colon might get a wee bit stuck in your ampersand!)

  113. 113.

    Little Macayla's Friend

    @ellaesther:
    I think they’re actually using some kind of programmers false flag disaster to break John’s heart so that he gives them an edit function.

  115. 115.

    Chris Dowd

    Well, yes- as we all know – when a crazed white man goes on a shooting spree at his workplace (most workplace shooters are white males as are most serial killers) it is indicative of no larger point about white society whatsoever and to entertain such is to invite charges of “reverse racism”. However- when a dirty moooslim goes on a rampage at a military base- killing military personal- that tells us all sorts of things about “Islam” and Muslims in general.

    And thanks for that link to Schlussel’s page. Is there any difference between her rhetoric and that of a Nazi talking about Jews? I love the part where she muses that the town where his parents where from was part of an “encrouchment” upon Israel. Talk about nuts.

    The Boston Globe just deleted a bunch of comment sections on stories about this shooting because they were filled with the usual reich wing nutjobs calling for violence against all moooslims- who apparently haven’t been vocal enough denouncing this shooting. See- all Muslims in the US are supposed to go out into the street and hit their heads until they bleed in grief and denounce this attack at the top of their lungs- anything less means “Islam” is silent on such violence. Meanwhile- when a 100 afghan women and children are killed by the US in a bombing run- no American need feel the need to apologize- indeed- we can scoff and even blame the dirty afghan villagers for making us bomb them.

  116. 116.

    Steeplejack

    @ellaesther:

    I used the italics thing for a while, but the blockquote thing looks better–when it works, admittedly. My @comment above covers it for laypeople. Monkeyboy and I have been engaging in an, er, Talmudic discussion of some of the obscure ramifications.

  117. 117.

    freelancer

    (Though, given your recent angry exhortation to yourself to “fuck me,” I maybe better should get some Vaseline and a crowbar…. I mean, really, your semi-colon might get a wee bit stuck in your ampersand!)

    What the fuck have you kids been doing in here?!

  118. 118.

    Chris Dowd

    I wouldn’t worry all that much about people going on Anti-Muslim pogroms as a result of this attack. The car magnets and stickers are long gone- the “war on terror” is now as institutionalized as the “war on drugs” and Americans are becoming numb to the propaganda.

    Other than the hard reich wing ideologues of the Debbie Schlussel variety (well less than 10 percent of the population)- most Americans are not losing their minds over this.

    People feel no real connection to this “War” and yeah- this might sound cold- but most Americans hear about this shooting and say “hmmmmm – too bad” and don’t care. This “war” has nothing to do with 95 percent of us. And we all know it. Most Americans don’t even have much contact with the military or connection to it.

    So yeah- it is terrible. But the killed were soldiers- and they are fighting an asymmetrical war in which attacks like this will keep happening. And such attacks have no resonance with the vast majority of us. Oh- they will be used to justify more war- of that there is no doubt- but most Americans will forget about this attack in two days.

  119. 119.

    Steeplejack

    @monkeyboy:

    And, by the way, good job on your initial work to solve the problem. I was rushed for time before and just pulled out my boilerplate snippet that I have been using to explain things to people.

    I think WordPress and various add-ons all have mini-parsers competing to mangle incoming comments and any code contained therein. Sometimes I am amazed that any comments get through.

  122. 122.

    Cain

    My heart goes out now to all the muslims living in Texas. God their lives are going to be hell. Poor bastards.

    cain

  126. 126.

    Yutsano

    Just a quick update: talking to my friend the staff sgt and he’s fine but one of his men was shot (just a flesh wound he’s home already) and we’re discussing the events as he knows them. Turns out not much more than what’s being reported on the news. Nothing hugely inaccurate that he’s telling me other than the big goof of the suspect being dead.

  128. 128.

    Keith G

    @Cain: Please don’t do this Cain.

    In most places here Arabic/Muslim folks (citizens and non) are integrated just fine into general society. Yeah red neck punks spew hatred, but those are thankfully exceptions that help prove the rule.

  129. 129.

    monkeyboy

    @Steeplejack:
    Should we get a room? I have a crowbar and maybe you can bring the Vaseline. From the way ellaesther has been talking I think she wants to join us – not because she approves of finding work arounds but just because she seems to be a party girl with intriguing ideas.

    P.S. you were right in your initial explanation but since you didn’t explicitly say to omit the HTML standard semicolon I assumed you had forgotten to mention its presence – thus my tests of standard HTML and eventual realization that the bastard form the WP parser accepts doesn’t obey the standard.

  132. 132.

    Tattoosydney

    @Yutsano:

    I’m not bad. Life has returned to (relatively) normal after the excesses of the weekend …

    (Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!)

    Sorry – flashback…

    Two weeks until I am (unoficially) a married man… so a little nervous, and a lot happy.

    How you?

  133. 133.

    Yutsano

    @Tattoosydney: Boo hiss for not dragging me and wifey along.

    Took today off because the doc shot me up this morning for bursitis in my hip (it’s not quite childbirth but DAYUM!!) and still have a slight headache cause the lidocane knocks me for a loop. At least my bud at Fort Hood got in touch with me and he’s okay.

  135. 135.

    Mike in NC

    I spent a couple of weeks at Fort Hood during a USJFCOM exercise back in 2005 or so. It’s a pretty godawful place under the best of circumstances (a hellhole in July/August), but maybe a decent training ground for the even worse: deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan.

  136. 136.

    ellaesther

    @monkeyboy: Oh man, I want to have a witty rejoinder so bad, but I am laughing too hard!

    @Yutsano: No flame war! What flame war? My heart was aching for them! And I thought a crowbar might help! And Steeplejack had sawdust to saw!

    @Steeplejack: No sawdust-encrusted Vaseline-y crowbars?

  139. 139.

    Chuck Butcher

    @Steeplejack: @Steeplejack:

    reinventing a reinvented wheel.

    I don’t get what we’re curing here. I understand that WP won’t let double spaces stay inside but it seems easy enought to simply blockquote each paragraph when copying and pasting but I’m a duffer at this, I just get kinda get along more than understand.

    Jeeze guy, I did languages in Fortran and Cobol using card decks on a state of the art with a WatBol compiler. Antique enough? I managed to get along with DOS on an XT and then gave the hell up. I bang nails for a living, after all.

  141. 141.

    monkeyboy

    A simple test to see if the WP parser allows me to display relevant ampersand coded characters in their ampersand coding.

    Line 1
    &#38 = &#38&#35&#51&#56
    Line 3

    Using this ASCII chart

    Got me?

  142. 142.

    Steeplejack

    @Chuck Butcher:

    [. . .] but it seems easy enought to simply blockquote each paragraph when copying and pasting [. . .]

    Each paragraph then comes out as a separate blockquote, hindering clarity. And &#060blockquote&#062/&#060/blockquote&#062 for every pareagraph can’t be easier to type than a couple of underscores in the lines between paragraphs. YMMV.

  143. 143.

    monkeyboy

    Steeplejack and MonkeyBoy’s guide into fooling the WordPress comment parser into displaying special characters

    One might think that the WordPress comment parser on this blog accepts standard HTML but instead it is some weird kludge with undocumented rules that attempts to rewrite explicit HTML into what it thinks the authors really meant.

    Above Steeplejack presented the simple workaround to make blockquotes work.

    However in his elucidation he stumbled upon a non-HTML standard way of presenting special characters so that he could present something like &#60blockquote&#62 and not have it be interpreted as a HTML directive..

    The HTML standard gives several ways of ampersand encoding special characters. One involves special names for characters and another uses their ASCII digit encoding.

    Our WordPress parser does not recognize the “special name” form but it does recognize the ASCII digit form, HOWEVER it does not obey the HTML standard of ending a digit string with a semicolon. Using the standard semicolon causes errors or the acceptance of a post that never appears in the thread – the screwed up WP parser only likes pure strings of digits. This makes it very hard to present a special character followed by a digit – The only successful way is to ampersand encode the following digit(s).

    So, if one wants to produce something presumably simple like

    Line 1
    &#38 = &#38&#35&#51&#56
    Line 3

    one actually has to encode it (by looking up all the ASCII codes) as: (I hope this works and is right because encoding it is horribly confusing)

    line 1
    &#38&#35&#51&#56 = &#38&#35&#51&#56&#38&#35&#51&#53&#38&#35&#53&#49&#38&#35&#53&#54
    line 3

    For the above encoding I used the text

    *%38*%35*%51*%56 = *%38*%35*%51*%56*%38*%35*%51*%53*%38*%35*%53*%49*%38*%35*%53*%54

    where “*” stands for “&” and “%” for “#”.

    Got me?

  144. 144.

    Carol

    Oh, I see – so when the census worker was found in KY (an evident suicide now), and Poplanski in Pittsburgh killed the cops and the old nutter killed the guard at the Holocaust museum we had a pattern. Right wingers, Beck fans, etc were all suspect. The folks here who had their panties in a twist over it were being perfectly logical and rational in suspecting something dark and sinister at the root of conservatism.

    But the Ft. Dix 6, the kid in TX, and the Ft. Hood shooter who apparently screamed Allahu Ahkbar before opening up are all just an anomaly (to say nothing of the ’93 and ’01 WTC attacks or the kid who was picked up in CO recently). Nothing to see here, please move along. In fact, let’s mock how the right is overreacting. It’s not like we do the same thing whenever a Beck fan explodes.

    I’m willing to concede that there actually is something dark and sinister underlying Beck’s worldview. But WTF is up with the double standard on this by you people? The indicators pointing towards Islam being a potential root cause behind attacks like this far outweigh the indicators linking Beck’s drivel to right wing violence – and yet you hyperventilate over the latter and bend over backwards to deny any link in the case of the former. You would have more credibility if you showed a shred of self awareness, and at least acknowledged your hypocrisy.

    The far left really is just as deluded and atavistic as the far right. You people bitch and moan whenever Israel stomps on Hezbollah for launching rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas, and then when Georgia gets stomped by Russia for doing pretty much the same thing you look the other way – because the neo-cons were rooting for the underdog. The left has its idols and fetishes just like the right has. Neither side is a friend of logical consistency.

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