Category Archives: blogging

Lily Update 2

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Lily hasn’t been euthanized yet. She appeared to be a bit perkier this morning, so the Vet suggested I take her home and try to give her a few more good days. I brought her home about an hour ago. So far she seems uncomfortable and unhappy, but we’ll see.

I remember Miss Lucy continued to show some interest in life and wanted to be petted and cuddled up till a few hours before she died. But then, she didn’t have surgery to recover from. I put Lily on a big, soft pillow, and now she appears to be nodding off to sleep.

The Vet bill for her diagnosis and care is pretty steep, and donations received will be gratefully appreciated.





A big thank you to everyone who has contributed so far.

Help for Lily (the Last Maha Fundraiser?)

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I haven’t written about Lily before now, but she moved into my apartment a few weeks after the late Miss Lucy died and took over Lucy’s job of household management. Lily is a black and white shorthair, now about seven years old, who is the most people-friendly cat I have ever met. She marches right up to complete strangers and wants to kiss them (or at least smell their faces). Very often when I’m writing she is curled up next to me, purring.

Last week she stopped eating. Saturday a vet looked at her and suspected gastritis. But yesterday she developed black diarrhea, indicating internal bleeding. X-rays and an ultrasound didn’t show a cause, so this afternoon she’s getting exploratory surgery.

Needless to say, this has blown the budget right out of the water.

My other bit of news is that awhile back I decided to give up trying to hang on to my apartment and sell it. I have quite a lot of equity in the place, even in these trying times, so once it’s sold I’ll have some cushion money for veterinary and automotive disasters and perhaps can stop begging for more money every few months whenever my cat gets sick or my car breaks down. I have an agent, and it’s supposed to go on the market officially this week. If anyone is looking for a reasonably priced two-bedroom co-op in southern Westchester County, New York, let me know, and I’ll pass you along to the agent.

So this might be my last fundraiser for a good long while, or even forever. But I’m guessing I’m looking at about $3,000 in vet bills on top of the $900 or so I already shelled out to save Lily. Which is $3,000 I do not have right now. I’m reconciled to giving up my apartment, but I would be very lonely without Lily.

I don’t have any good photos of Lily, but here is a video taken of her by a previous temporary owner:

And here’s the PayPal button. I’m still looking for some other way to pay online, but if you really can’t deal with PayPal, let me know.





All help, however modest, is deeply appreciated.

A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Lose

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There are times the political world is just too distressing and depressing, and I need a sanity break from it for awhile. This week has been one of those times. However, it seems to me that some people missed their sanity breaks.

Rightie bloggers continue to rage about Martians landing in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey “the crucial battle between truth-telling bloggers versus convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin and his band of malicious online thugs,” to quote Little Lulu. Yesterday was supposed to have been a National Day of Silence, and the rightie blogosphere was supposed to “go dark,” but from what I could see most of them blogged about how they were having a National Day of Silence and going dark. (Lulu cleverly changed her site design from black type on white background to white on black, so she could “go dark” without actually shutting up.)

They are pushing Congress to Do Something to protect them from the online thugs who are putting their lives at risk by calling in false reports of shootings so that SWAT teams are sent to rightie bloggers’ homes. Exactly why local law enforcement isn’t investigating these alleged incidents, or why the Right is calling on the United States Congress to save them and not the police departments caught in the hoaxes, has yet to be made clear. Aren’t these people against Big Government?

I nominate this blog post at Yid With Lid for the Too Late for the Sanity Break award. The Lid, as he calls himself, is outraged because the website Breitbart Unmasked repeated some slanders against him that had earlier been published by the “always-crazy Debbie Schlussel.” Well, at least we agree on something. But the Lid — real name Jeff Dunetz — hints darkly that this repetition of the same information on two different publicly accessible websites is some kind of conspiracy. “It may or may not be a coincidence Kimberlin’s cronies’ venom toward me came soon after Schlussel’s madness. I will let you folks decide.” OK.

And no, I’m not going to repeat this nastiness here, partly because I don’t know if it’s true but mostly because I don’t care.

More than anything else the Lid is obsessed with finding a connection between Breitbart Unmasked and Brett Kimberlin. Is the BU blogger a “crony” of BK? Is Kimberlin in fact the same person as the BU blogger? Why, it must be Kimberlin, because who else would repeat old slanders of right-wing bloggers?

At one point Mr. Lid writes,

If the proprietor of the site isn’t Kimberlin or one of his cronies than it must be some sort of psychic because the nameless blogger running Brietbart unmasked posted details of the Kimberlin/Mrs. McCain incident, which “The Other McCain” has never discussed in public or published.

I wasted way too much time looking, and the only information I picked up on the BU site that I hadn’t already read on a right-wing site is that McCain had been living in some kind of “church compound,” whatever that is. My question is, if the “band of malicious online thugs” all turn out to be the same person, can it still be a “band”?

See also Cannonfire and The Troll Wars 6.66.

Yet we are not done. Netroots Nation is going on right now. Usually I’m sorry I don’t have the money to go, but this year, not so much. Metrosexual Black AbeJ reports that the atmosphere at NN is sad.

But what alarms me is this post by emptywheel, about the NN foreclosure fraud panel. You’ll remember that emptywheel made her bones as an A-List blogger by her exemplary work on the Valerie Plame episode.

Anyway, emptywheel believes the foreclosure panel was deliberately sabotaged by both Daily Kos and the White House. Seriously. The panel was in a room that wasn’t set up for live streaming. Worse, President Obama scheduled a press conference at the same time as the panel. Surely, the White House would not have done that if they weren’t in fear of what the panel would reveal. Because you know the White House is coordinating its scheduling with a convention of liberal bloggers, which must be the most important thing going on in the country right now.

Seriously, emptywheel?

Representative comment:

this is netroots nation?

and they don’t have streaming video available for the one topic – the one, single, unique topic – that would sink the obama re-election in a heartbeat if ever raised?

“quelle surprise”, as evye would say.

looks like the kossacks and obama’s rodent are in charge of what really matters.

gentrification comes to all revolutions, none faster than the weblog “progressive” revolution.

The foreclosure scams are the “one single, unique topic that would sink the obama re-election in a heartbeat”? Seriously? I can think of a number of issues on which the President could be vulnerable in November. This is not one of them.

A lot of people need sanity breaks.

Brett Whozits Update: Rightie Blogger Arrested

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Remember I was saying that Brett Kimberlin had filed a request for a peace order against a rightie blogger named Aaron Walker? And the hearing on the request was this morning? Well, RS McCain reports that after the hearing the judge had Walker arrested.

Entire rightie blogosphere to go batshit postal in 5 … 4… 3 … 2… 1 …

The judge became “increasingly hostile” to Walker in the course of the hearing, McCain says.

Just going by McCain’s account, this is all very screwy. According to McCain, Kimberlin’s beef was that Walker continued to blog about him after Walker had obtained an earlier peace order. I’m certainly no lawyer, but I question whether a court can order somebody not to blog about somebody else as long as the contents of the blog posts don’t constitute libel, and if you stick to documented facts you can probably argue it’s not libel.

In an update, McCain says that Kimberlin claims to have received death threats as a result of Walker’s posts. What was Kimberlin’s argument that alleged death threats were directly connected to Walker’s blogging? No way to know.

The peace order conditions I found online and blogged about yesterday suggest that a peace order only prohibits one party from contacting or harassing the other. The rightie blogosphere insists Kimberlin is trying to stop them from discussing his criminal past, which is already in the public record and has already been discussed in Time magazine and a book issued by a major publisher.

One suspects we’re not getting the whole story. One also suspects the judge, whom McCain names, is about to learn the meaning of “blogswarm.” I doubt this will help Walker much, though.

Update: A copy of the court order issued today. Apparently the recent blogswarm against Kimberlin was one factor that caused the judge to rule in Kimberlin’s favor.

Update: Some Gateway Pundit commenters are certain the judge was acting on orders of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. Samples:

So now the judges rule according to what the government wants, not what the actual laws are.

Hello Banana Republic.

For good or ill, arresting someone who disagrees with this administration is now legal precedent. No longer does there need to be even a figleaf of someone being a suspected terrorist to be snatched and incarcerated without trial.

This is tyranny of the first water.

Good times. I still don’t know what Walker was arrested for, specifically, or if he was charged with something like violating a previous peace order. I suspect the latter, and I suspect he’s already out on bail by the time you read this. If so, that doesn’t exactly constitute a violation of habeas corpus.

I’m getting all information about this from right-wing blogs; I have no idea if Kimberlin or any associate of Kimberlin has posted his side of the story. Someday we may learn what’s being not said.

Kimberlin Update

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I learned from R.S. McCain — blogging from an undisclosed location, I assume — that there will be a court hearing Tuesday regarding a peace order requested by Brett Kimberlin (background) against one of the rightie bloggers he allegedly has been terrorizing. I take it a “peace order” is something like a restraining order.

The part of McCain’s post that jumped out at me was the claim that Kimberlin’s alleged attempts at terrorism were intended “to suppress the truth about his violent criminal past.” This is the same criminal past prominently discussed in a 2007 Time magazine article.

In the belly of the voting-reform movement is a man who personifies this paradoxical lack of credibility in the service of a credible cause. Brett Kimberlin was convicted in 1981 of a series of bombings in Indiana. By his own account, he dealt “many, many tons” of marijuana in the 1970s. Most famously, he is the man who from his prison cell alleged that as a law student Dan Quayle bought marijuana from him. Quayle repeatedly denied the charge, and it was never substantiated. In e-mails and Web postings from Kimberlin’s two organizations, Justice Through Music and Velvet Revolution, he intersperses occasionally useful pieces of information about the problems of e-voting with a hefty portion of bunk, repeatedly asserting as fact things that are not true. Kimberlin, in short, is an unlikely candidate to affect an important issue of public policy.

So the criminal record wasn’t exactly hidden.

Time goes on to say that Kimberlin had been instrumental in the movement to stop Diebold electronic voting machines from being used in elections, and that Brad Friedman (of BradBlog) and Kimberlin had co-founded a “netroots voting-reform website VelvetRevolution.us.”

Kimberlin may very well be as unhinged and dangerous as the righties are making him out to be. Or not. I don’t know the man at all. I haven’t seen anyone on the left blogosphere speak up for him, including Brad Friedman. This suggests that either he isn’t that well known in blogging circles (again, I don’t recall I’d ever heard of him) or that those who know him think he may be guilty as accused.

However, I noticed that commenters have been calling out Friedman’s alleged ties to Kimberlin for several years. For example, this is from 2008:

Search engine for Brett Kimberlin. Why no story on him, Brad? You don’t want your readers to know you are partners with a bomber and admitted drug dealer? He even had his own little tinfoil 15 minutes of fame when he said he used to deal pot to Dan Quayle.

This all suggests to me there was nothing hidden about Kimberlin’s criminal record. After Kimberlin was paroled in 1994 and until the current accusations against him there’s no indication I could find that he was doing anything illegal, which begs the question why it was so all-fired important to stir up hysteria about Kimberlin in 2012.

And the answer is that he got involved in leftie political movements and organizations, which means he can be connected by association to all kinds of people on the Left who hadn’t done anything wrong.

Essentially Breitbart et al. were waging a defamation campaign against anyone who could be tied to Kimberlin, directly or indirectly, through any leftie organization he was associated with. This is right out of Joe McCarthy’s old playbook and a blatantly unethical thing to do. It doesn’t justify violent retribution, but it certainly isn’t blameless.

Two other names that keep coming up in the word-salad ravings are Ron Brynaert and Neal Rauhauser. Google their names and you get page after page of right-wing blog posts accusing these two of terrorism and attempted murder (example). Otherwise, I have no idea who these guys are and what the evidence is against them. [Update: It appears that last November Rauhauser was promoting the Occupy movement.] They may indeed be very dangerous guys, or they may have done nothing more than speak up for Kimberlin. It’s a mystery to me.

But this all begs the question why these alleged terrorists’ victims are not the ones seeking restraining orders against Kimberlin et al. instead of the other way around, and why the criminal justice system isn’t being otherwise called upon to investigate and prosecute the alleged perpetrators and protect the allegedly innocent. Lynch mobs, even virtual ones, make me queasy.

Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest

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Somebody explain to Tim Graham of Newsbusters that an “exposé,” by definition, is a news story that exposes something for the first time. Information that somebody already admitted in a book published years ago is already exposed.

Richard Mourdock, the teabagger who defeated Sen. Dick Lugar in the Indiana primaries, compares his outrage that 47 percent of Americans not paying income taxes to Lincoln’s outrage over slavery.

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon managed to lose $2 billion on one risky trade, it was admitted yesterday. Dimon has been known previously for his loud objections to banking regulations, particularly of a sort that would have stopped him from making that trade. He was in Washington just last week to personally lobby the Federal Reserve to weaken the Volcker Rule.

Dumb!

Google?

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Is it just me, or is Google having issues this morning? I can’t get into Google mail or news.

Update: Everything back to normal now. No idea what went wrong.

Charles Pierce, God of Snark

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I am in awe —

… if there’s one thing that Chuck Grassley is noted for, it is that he is the most spectacular box of rocks, the most bulging bag of hammers, in the history of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body. If brains were atom bombs, he couldn’t blow his nose. If his IQ was one point lower, they’d have to water him. As the great Dan Jenkins once put it in another context, if the man had a brain, he’d be out in the yard playing with it.

It’s almost poetry.

Wonders on the Web

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I was going to give a “Well, Aren’t We Just Too Precious” Clueless Self-Absorption Award to Meghan Daum of the Los Angeles Times, but Jonathan Chait found another emotionally stunted wonder who may deserve it even more.

The blogosphere is all a-twitter today about this blatantly racist screed by NRO’s John Derbyshire. Here’s an abridged version if you don’t have the stomach to wade through the whole thing. “The talk” somebody should have had with Derbyshire is that if you can’t rid yourself of your bigotry, at least have the grace to not pass it on to your children.