Michelle Malkin, It's Time to Get Serious and Play Ball

Useful person and right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin has been getting angry lately about comments made about her balls. On a recent radio show, left-wing comic Aisha Tyler made a crack about kicking Malkin right in them. It was obviously a rhetorical flourish — Tyler had no way of knowing about Malkin's balls — but Malkin overreacted anyway:

Left-wing female comedians are proving that they can be as crude and stupid as their male counterparts. Who knew that striving for gender equality meant pursuing the dream that one day, someday, liberal women would be able to mock their conservative counterparts’ sexuality with the unfettered vulgarity of Andrew Dice Clay?

Recently, Kathy Griffin attacked GOP Sen. Scott Brown’s daughters as “prostitutes” on her Bravo “comedy” show.

Now, via Brian Maloney at the Radio Equalizer, supposed funnywomen Stephanie Miller and Aisha Tyler make genital jokes

She then goes on to quote the joke, ending her commentary with, "In a follow-up, an indignant Miller defends her friend’s gutter 'humor' and castigates unsophisticated conservatives who do not comprehend their nuance. I hope you are proud, feminists."

Now, I've no doubt that this is a stone bummer for feminism. It's been peremptorily killed by an offhand comedic trope from a relatively unknown commentator, just when Sarah Palin finally got the movement back on track again by having fat American women LARP as the Thundercats and wave guns while complaining about minorities. But there's a bigger issue here:

This is really gonna fuck up my avant garde film.

'Raise your hand if you love freedom. Notice your dead mom didn't move a muscle, kid.'

Here's the story so far: Marcelas Owens is 11 years old and doesn't have a mom. She developed pulmonary hypertension, a potentially fatal but very treatable disease. Because she got sick, she lost her job. Because she lost her job, she lost her healthcare. Because she lost her healthcare, she lost her (potential) access to treatment. Because she lost her access to treatment, she lost her life.

A month ago, Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash) told Marcelas and his mother Tifanny's story to President Obama as an illustrative tale of how fragile people's lives and economies are without healthcare. This week, conservatives responded by telling an 11-year-old that his mom should have pulled herself up by her healthstraps and got undead, like, doublequick. She's just lazy. She lies around on her back all day.

Their response combines the best of ignorance, self-serving fabricated victimization and imperial unconcern with the little things, like whether someone lives or dies. Let's go to the McClatchy article on the subject, which describes their behavior as "ridicule":

An American Nazi and the Rhetoric That Welcomed Him

Shortly after one p.m. yesterday, Twitter became useful. I got a beep on my phone and, thinking it was another observation about how good lunches are, was surprised to see a condensed txt-spelled Web2.0 notice: "Shots at Holocaust Museum." From there, I went to a couple of websites and message boards and began compulsively refreshing, joining in Google searches and sending in email tips.

I'd like to tell you a story about that — about how a handful of Google searches and grassroots reporting pointed up the tacit complicity of the soi-disant liberal media in the creation of and reporting on an American Nazi, and how their toleration, inattention or cowardice creates a national discourse that increasingly imports militant fringe rhetoric that demonizes millions of Americans.

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TIMELINE

1:00 p.m.
An 88-year-old American WWII veteran who styles himself James von Brunn tries to enter the Washington, DC, Holocaust Memorial Museum. When he's seen with a suspicious bag, he withdraws a .22-caliber rifle, shoots and kills an African-American security guard named Stephen T. Johns. Shortly thereafter, other security guards shoot and wound von Brunn.


1:00 - 2:00 p.m.
• FOX News begins its coverage with a crawl that suggests the event is an act of terrorism. On-air personalities speculate about whether the shooter is a radical muslim. Talk flows to liberal permissiveness and moral relativism.
• Von Brunn's name and evidence of his whiteness are released. Shortly thereafter, FOX's crawl re-brands the event as a "shooting" and on-air personalities drop discussion of domestic terrorism.
• Google searches turn up von Brunn's popularity (going back years) on Stormfront.org, the nation's largest white supremacy website.
• Searches of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine reveal hundreds of entries on a site called HolyWesternEmpire.org, to which von Brunn seemed to be the sole contributor.
• Von Brunn's website includes this brief biography (emphases mine):

In 1981 von Brunn attempted to place the treasonous Federal Reserve Board of Governors under legal, non-violent, citizens arrest. He was tried in a Washington, D.C. Superior Court; convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge. A Jew/Negro/White Court of Appeals denied his appeal.

The denial probably stemmed from the fact that von Brunn's legal, non-violent citizen's arrest involved his attempting to hold the Fed board hostage with a hunting knife, a revolver and a sawed-off shotgun. Even during his incarceration, he refused to temper his story, sending this racist and deranged appeal for a pardon to then Naval Secretary Jim Webb.

Liveblogging White America's Inconvenience Tantrum, Part II: An Hour of Glenn Beck, Plus Pictures!

If you haven't read it, please click here for Part I.

This is the worst part. The actual transcription. I tune in early, so I catch the last half hour of Cavuto's show. I'm not sure what it's called. Body-Bag of Freedom, or All 50 States of the Entire World with Neil Cavuto or something. Sounds right. I don't know. The bit I see is revelatory, for three reasons.

One, Neil asks a pre-teen what he thinks about having his future mortgaged by the democratic party, without noticing that his mom's doing a perfectly good job of that already by yanking him out of school to learn lessons in Things That Bear No Resemblance to American History and, of course, How to Fuck Up A Protest. From where I sit, it looks like the kid would be happier scrolling the Facebook feed of all the girls he's in school with who've hit at least B-cups by now.

Lllllet's Get Ready for the Far-Right's Stalinist Purrrrrrrgggesssss!!!

FreeRepublic.com, favored home of the republican party's attack on the coloreds, the queers, the poor, the immigrants, secularism and reverse racism (the sinister liberal conspiracy to make sure The White Man can't catch a break no more), has fired the biggest shot in the opening of the Far-Right Stalinist purge. Today, they called for the boycotting of Fox News. Fox must be punished for "its hatchet job on Sarah Palin." Allegedly beginning today, at 3:00 p.m., Freepers encouraged each other to, for "one week," make sure "no one tunes them in. We will demonstrate the power of conservatives when their ratings plummet dramatically."

The ironies inherent in the gesture are astounding.*
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* — Not really an irony, but it warrants mentioning that members of a site known for patting themselves on their shimmeringly white shoulders for reaching the apex of human civilization are so spectacularly uninformed that they think the viewing behavior of each and every one of them is being monitored by something. Off the top of my head, I'm going to guess that at least 10% of the members believe there's a man on the other end of the wires leading into their TV, watching what they're watching (only backward) and writing everything down.