Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Eh, that’s media spin. biden’s health is fine and he’s doing a good job.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

We still have time to mess this up!

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Consistently wrong since 2002

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

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79Comments

  1. 1.

    Southern Beale

    Dumbass Americans write Letters to the Editor:

    I would like for the president to explain how he was supported in his youth if there was no silver spoon.
    __
    At age 18, he entered college and after two years took a trip around the world. He went to Indonesia. India, Pakistan and Africa This was followed with two years at Columbia and later Harvard Law School.
    __
    My question is did he acquire a student loan, have a silver spoon or a sugar daddy?
    __
    — John Hine, Springfield

    I guess people who never traveled think foreign travel is some kind of exotic, strange thing to do. Maybe they don’t know about things like student rail passes and youth hostels. I traveled a lot when I was in college and after graduating. It wasn’t expensive because we did what all young people do: we put backpacks on our backs, we stayed at pensions and youth hostels, we didn’t eat at restaurants but instead bought fresh bread and cheese at the local grocery store, etc. That’s how young people see the world. We traveled on an unlimited Eurail Pass, and if we were feeling especially flush we reserved a couchette but usually we just had regular seats along with the rest of the riff raff.

    I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that some people don’t know this, if they never did it. I have no idea how Obama traveled around the world when he was in his 20s but judging by how everyone else I know did it, I don’ think there’s anything especially mysterious or magical about it.

  3. 3.

    gbear

    I thought the entire right wing blogthingy consisted of trolls spamming comment threads in newspapers and blogs.

  7. 7.

    Hill Dweller

    The butthurt is strong with Arianna Huffington. She seemed to take Obama’s jab at her ‘business plan’ on Saturday night personally.

    She was on the TV this morning attacking the Obama campaign for using Willard’s words against him.

  9. 9.

    RalfW

    A quick peek confirms that there were still 15+ Twerps either by or mentioning @michellemalkin in just the last 5 minutes on the Twitbox. So FU blogosphere, republican morons still seem to know how to use and abuse it to whine about being “cyber attacked by the #Gestweepo.”

    Fucktwits going Godwin, no surprise.

  11. 11.

    Citizen_X

    I’m not going there, but does anyone know what the hell the “flag-spam ring” is supposed to be about?

  13. 13.

    gbear

    @Southern Beale:

    Wasn’t Obama’s time in Indonesia spent there with his Mom while he was a schoolkid? He tells the story of his mom getting him out of bed early in the morning to study while he was there. Not exactly a pleasure trip.

  16. 16.

    PaulW

    Rush Limbaugh would miss getting a Boston Kreme in his box of donuts in the morning and by 10:30 am EST the Entire Rightblogothingy would be screaming Kenyan Kommie Konspiracy.

    …I just realized I went full KKK with that pun. Apologies.

  17. 17.

    Ken

    @Citizen_X: At a guess, the reason for the ban on Chris Loesch was that too many people had flagged his twits as spam, pushing him into violation of the twitter terms of service. There may have been a cabal (a much better word than “ring” IMO) doing this; or he may have been pushing cash4gold or postapocalypseseedpak too much, as the Glenn Beck types are wont to do.

    Understand, this is all wild speculation based on the three words you quoted, but this is a political blog and I’m practicing to be the next Matt Drudge after he’s taken down by the Obama death panels that got Brietbart.

  19. 19.

    Mino

    @Hill Dweller: He really did let her have it. A link-whore who never paid for content is pretty accurate.

    If she’s proud of her business model, she should shut up.

  20. 20.

    Mark B.

    IIRC, Loesch pretty much uses his Twitter account to troll other Twitter users. I’d say a permanent ban wouldn’t be long enough.

  21. 21.

    gaz

    God I can’t stand php. The language is terrible, but worse, there’s no decent IDE for it. I’ve got a plugin for Visual Studio, but it stinks. Eclipse is a joke so I don’t even know if it supports php.

    Meh. Python is so much better. I wish the php team would go find a hobby. (Something that doesn’t involve coding – particularly coding last-generation web server environment models, as though the ASP/PHP style is not crusty, ancient and stupid.)

  23. 23.

    Xecky Gilchrist

    I love the “FREE SPEECH!” squeaks. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, therefore a private company like Twitter suspending an account is an attack on a God-given right!

    Are you really sure you want everything privatized, rightards?

  24. 24.

    jibeaux

    I don’t much like Twitter and don’t really care, but it would be cool if they Conservapedia’d it and exiled themselves there.

  25. 25.

    dmsilev

    @BGinCHI:

    The Right should get its own Twitter service.

    ‘Conserve-a-Twit’.

    Unlike Twitter, it will never fail, just go Galt.

  26. 26.

    Mark B.

    @gaz: Python is a joke! Any language which has significant whitespace is an abomination.

    Edit: Seriously, Python is cool, but the syntax is horrible. You can do some incredible things with it. And there are some decent IDEs for it. And I also agree with you about PHP, it sucks.

  27. 27.

    Clime Acts

    Well, I’ll agree with one thing: Twitter is the dumbest, most insanely useless waste of time and bytes so far invented.

  28. 28.

    gaz

    @Mark B.: While I agree that significant whitespace sucks, it’s the closest thing to a popular managed language (outside of java) that will run in a linux environment.

    My assessment of python is a qualified comparison against php. I’m not going to take the entire thread listing the many sins of php as a language. Other than to say that it’s DEMONSTRABLY EASIER to code a web app in C++ than it is in php, and that should say something. (With proper headers it’s less code, more flexible, cleaner, and easier to debug)

  29. 29.

    Jennifer

    I’m getting the red X instead of the pic on this post.

    Oh, and it’s Dana & Chris “Louche”. One of the definitions for “louche” is “disreputable.”

  30. 30.

    tjmn

    Oh, no, don’t suspend Loesch’s account. The more ways to showcase the RWNJ’s wingnuttery the better. Stupidity in 140 words or less. It’s even better when they don’t think we know about screenshots.

  32. 32.

    JWL

    Within the past few days I began receiving annoying pop-up questions regarding twitter accounts, which I’ve dealt with by clicking ‘cancel’. Other people as surely clicked ‘proceed’ instead, and may have run into trouble.

    And, face it, it could be the Feds monkeying around in their pursuit of information. It wouldn’t take much of an imagination for someone who believed that to then conjure up a vast conspiracy, geared to suppress them politically.

  33. 33.

    Forum Transmitted Disease

    I don’t want to be “that guy” but Twitter is proof that giving everyone a voice with their computer has been a terrible, terrible mistake.

  34. 34.

    Mark B.

    @gaz: Python is amazing. You can write a web application in Python, but you can also write a web server in Python. It’s just so damn powerful. Try doing that in PHP. I just hate the ugly syntax.

  35. 35.

    Linda Featheringill

    Twitter is picking on the Right? Hmmm.

    What would happen if I trolled Twitter and targeted certain people as inappropriate?

    On the other hand, I’d have to read that stuff and contaminate my brain. Life is too short for such a waste of precious time. Forget it.

  36. 36.

    Jennifer

    @Southern Beale: I loved Savage’s speech. I loved especially that he addressed those poor tender souls who couldn’t take hearing an opposing opinion and walked out. I would have loved it even better if there had been someone standing at the exit checking the tags on their clothing and administering beatings with a baseball bat to those who were wearing blended fabrics, as commanded by Leviticus. I mean, since they are so certain of Biblical infalliability, and more specifically the infalliability of Leviticus, they should have been down for that, right?

  37. 37.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    @Mark B.: I’m still working on learning Haskell. If you think Python’s whitespace sucks, try Haskell. Python’s rules are indent to put it under the context you want. Haskell’s seem to be not much better than indent until the compiler stops complaining. A few of them make since since they are similar to python, but other times I just can’t figure them out.

  40. 40.

    gaz

    @Mark B.: Sure thing.

    I hate the ugly syntax of both languages. But for my money, php is worse.

    I really wish MS hadn’t spent the better part of 2 decades pissing off the open source community by being litigious asswipes, because frankly, the .NET platform w/ C# is pretty clean. Unfortunately, despite mono, et al – it’s MS only.

    I’ve been dying for a decent unix answer to that model that isn’t java based. Python is the closest I’ve seen.

    And the php team is poisoning the well. If they all abandoned php the open source *nix community might actually produce something more modern. Who knows? It just pisses me off that php is so goddamned horrible.

  42. 42.

    Mickey

    Another right wing dumpster diver (and her husband apparently?) crying out for attention trying to steal some of Limbaughs fading thunder.

  43. 43.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    @Knockabout: I like how every front pager has a personal troll, and you are Zandar’s. I personally suspect that you just autogenerate responses when you see his name. It’s the only good reason I can gather for your comments.

  47. 47.

    gaz

    @Joey Maloney: I did try NetBeans. It’s better, but it still pales in comparison to my “big” IDE because of all of the ancillary features I use in my main IDE. FWIW, if NetBeans made project integration into DevStudio I’d use that any day over vs.php – and vs.php SUCKS, but my experience has been it’s still better than NetBeans, despite being a buggy POS, because I can do more with it – purely for the fact that it’s integrated into the best IDE on the planet which happens to be DevStudio, at the moment (vs2k8 particularly – we’ll see what happens with VS11).

    And no, I’m not saying that due to some MS fanboyism – if Eclipse didn’t suck ass I’d say it would be a fair competitor to DevStudio (in terms of what it tries to bring to the table). Sadly, it’s a piece of shit.

    Netbeans is alright, but it doesn’t have enough ancillary features, and in the end, I’m slightly more productive using VS/devstudio and VS.PHP

    and as good as netbeans is, it can’t fix stupid. and php is still stupid.

  48. 48.

    Mark B.

    @gaz: Come on over to the dark side! Visual Studio [except for being buggy and a little unstable] is really a damn good IDE. MS finally came up with a pretty good implementation of MVC for web apps, and it’s dead easy to work with. WCF [corrected typo] is fantastic for creating service layers, if a little unintuitive at first. I used to do tons of different languages, but now I’m all MS and C# all the time. Except when I write Python scripts for working with ESRI products, and javascript for JQuery or DOJO stuff.

  49. 49.

    Ash Can

    @Yutsano: Knockabout got dumped? Huzzah! Even the thickest trolls can be amusing and can generate legitimate discussion in the threads, but stalkers add nothing, and I for one see no reason not to ban them.

  51. 51.

    Yutsano

    @Ash Can: I’m not sorry for this state of affairs. Personal grudges getting aired over the Internet are boring. Take that shit to Facebook or something. We got our own poutrages here.

  52. 52.

    gaz

    @Mark B.:

    Come on over to the dark side!

    I wish. I’ve argued for it. Unfortunately (and my shop makes a good point) we’ve been absolutely invested in the unix stuff for about a decade before I ever came on board. I’ve sold the main guru who devs there on python – and has been the sole dev that’s been there since the company’s inception – so he’s defacto team lead.

    Still, I do so love MS’s modern webdev model. I wrote part of Visual Studio 2k3 while working at MS, so I’m biased towards it and .NET in general. I’ve already been to the dark side, and tasted their cookies and quite liked them, in fact.

    At the end of my workday I gauge my loathing of php against my 100% telecommute status and find that it’s worth putting up with PHP if only barely. Doesn’t quite stop my bitching when it totally effin fails me.

    A side note: I always prototype code in php that uses XMLReader extensively by creating it in C# and using XmlReader because the API is nearly identical, and C# is actually debuggable – rather than not even reporting line # of errors properly. LOL

  54. 54.

    SatanicPanic

    I like Twitter for finding out what lunch truck is going to be visiting my office park at lunchtime. That’s about all I use it for though.

  56. 56.

    wiscomom

    I like Twitter because they just told me that Paul Krugman is interviewing Ron Paul on Bloomberg TV this afternoon.
    Now, if only I had Bloomberg TV…

  57. 57.

    Joey Maloney

    @gaz: I feel you, man. My current gig is maintaining an application written in php by a Russian speaker who didn’t believe in comments or descriptive variable names, who wrote his own templating system for a half-assed MVC and then proceeded to ignore and shortcut around it whenever it suited his fancy. He went to insane lengths to generalize his functions, to the point where there are so many special-case hacks littered through the code that following it is almost impossible.

    His favorite trick is to concatenate huge amounts of data into a ginormous string that defines a Javascript array, push that through the templating system, and then manipulate it clientside (again without any kind of commenting or explanation).

    Drives me fucking batshit.

  61. 61.

    Roger Moore

    @gaz:

    While I agree that significant whitespace sucks, it’s the closest thing to a popular managed language (outside of java) that will run in a linux environment.

    Perl. Not that Perl is necessarily the greatest thing ever- it’s full of traps for the unwary and has a strong subculture that values cleverness and conciseness over clarity and robustness- but it does have CPAN and uses a more conventional bracketing style rather than Python’s significant whitespace.

  62. 62.

    jl

    @HyperIon: I can’t figure it out either. Who is Dana Loesch? What is Twitter hash retweet tagging abuse stalking, or whatever the fuss is about? What does this have to do with Obama traveling around when he was young?

    I did not know that there were trolls assigned to each front pager though. That’s interesting.

    And thanks to commenter above for King link on taxes.

  64. 64.

    trollhattan

    @wiscomom:

    Wow, that sounds like some kind of potential matter-antimatter incident in the making. Ron Paul is enough of a True Believer that he feels comfortable sitting across from a facty guy like Krugman because he’ll be protected by the magical power of his beliefs. I want a truckload of popcorn, stat.

  65. 65.

    gaz

    @Roger Moore:

    Perl. Not that Perl is necessarily the greatest thing ever-

    Perl is not so much a language as it is an exercise in flinging poo for which Larry Wall (bless his heart) should be publicly caned.

    It has a grammar that’s far too obscene for real programming. At best, it’s a glorified shell scripting tool, IMO. Maintenance doesn’t seem to matter to it’s adherents, but it matters to me.

    Here’s my problem with perl, in a nutshell:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    OBFUSCATION;
    by: Will_Woods;

    obfuscation? listen well, child:
    tell the world, and rejoice;
    for $perl (can-be) {beautiful};

    my $mind = ‘clear’ and my $thoughts = ‘pure’, thus;
    my $perl = ‘readable’.

    $but; if (tired or hurried or lazy) {
    print $perl =
    (split(//,$thoughts))[1].chr(ord((split(//,$mind))[1])+2).$perl,”n”;
    }

    # obfuscation;
    # a perl poem by [email protected]
    # 12/27/2000

  66. 66.

    gaz

    @Joey Maloney: The only real difference I see between that and the codebase I’m working with is the dev still works at my shop, he’s rigorous and his comments are everywhere, + descriptive variable names. It’s the only way maintaining over a million+ lines of php is possible.

    That said, those hacks and one offs? They’re everywhere with php. For being such a pure and process oriented programmer, even my man memso can’t escape the giant kludges. I blame php.

    Part of that is that it’s impossible to adequately factor a PHP project of any real size. And sorry “smarty” (I’m referring to the php extension), the WHOLE POINT of breakout tags is to make them declarative. Why in the hemorrhaging f*ck has nobody actually implemented declarative server side tags in php?!!… meh.

  69. 69.

    Skerry

    For Steelers fans

    Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger already talked with the newest Steelers first-round draft pick, offensive guard David DeCastro.
    Roethlisberger said he phoned DeCastro to welcome him to the team, but DeCastro thought he was talking to a Steelers official who was handling his travel arrangements.
    “He was saying, ‘Did you get those flight plans? Did you get those flight plans?”’ Roethlisberger, with his wife, Ashley, at his side, told an audience of 1,100 Saturday night at the 25th anniversary of the Blair County Sports Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the Blair County Convention Center. Roethlisberger said after a few seconds, DeCastro realized who he was talking to.
    “I can’t wait once we get started to get on him about that,” Roethlisberger joked.

  71. 71.

    handsmile

    Twenty-two men kicking a ball around in Manchester, England is transfixing the attention of a non-trivial fraction of the world’s populace at the moment.

    (My contribution to this thread’s aforementioned inscrutability.)

  72. 72.

    Jay in Oregon

    @dmsilev:

    It’ll never fail because they won’t get more than 20-30 people posting on it.

    I could host it on my Nintendo Wii.

  73. 73.

    Nellcote

    Chris Loesch was responsible for that horrible rap at CPAC.
    Dana Loesch gives CNN cred in the teabagging community.

  74. 74.

    gaz

    @handsmile: LOL, I was thinking the same thing, but I figured – hey you sports junkies get your sports-themed open threads. =) Some of us nerds find them every bit as cryptic as the Perl poem I posted above.

    =)

  75. 75.

    Amir Khalid

    Good, this open thread is still live. Now for some more Bersih 3.0 coverage from Balloon Juice’s self-appointed Malaysian correspondent.
    I might also repost this in the next open thread, in case anyone misses it in this one.)

    The mutual finger-pointing is well underway. Bersih and the Royal Malaysian Police are blaming each other for starting the violence. Inspector-General (i.e. national chief) of Police Ismail Omar says Bersih broke a promise to keep things peaceful.

    Bersih chairwoman Ambiga Sreenavasan and opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim accuse the cops of overreacting to a breach of a crowd barricade, which happened when the crowd was dispersing after the Bersih 3.O rally. The barricade was meant to keep demonstrators from reaching Dataran Merdeka, an iconic public square which is to Malaysians roughly what the Washington Mall is to Americans. (Bersih 3.0 organisers had promised compliance with a court order to keep out of Dataran Merdeka, but on the day some people had other ideas upon leaving the rally.)

    Local corporate media — TV, radio, major print newspapers — are all dutifully echoing the government line, that demonstrations have no place in Nalaysia, that Bersih are out to disrupt oublic order.

    Independent (mostly online) media is taking a more nuanced view. The violence by some young and hotheaded demonstrators after the rally ended is deplored, even though provoked by the police, because to some extent it defeated Bersih’s plan to have a peaceful event. (The cop in the car got overturned, after he apparently rammed some demonstrators in it, had his picture in the papers, with a bandage on his head.)

    There’s a sense that the day was still a net loss for PM Najib Abdul Razak and his Barisan Nasional government. Najib was going to call a general election this year, but now he might want to put some more distance between Bersih 3.0 and the election lest Barisan candidates suffer.

  76. 76.

    dyz

    @Nellcote: Dana is also the radio personality who stated that she would perhaps maybe “drop trou” and urinate on Taliban corpses.

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