The Silkypony campaign is mortally insulted by Ann Coulter:

Can you help us raise $100,000 in “Coulter Cash” this week to keep this campaign charging ahead and fight back against the politics of bigotry?

Bigotry? Why, what would the Silkypony campaign know about bigotry? (via RWV)

Learned Foot throws down on Rocketman.

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Ryan Rhodes beats Nick Coleman like a baby seal.

…and doesn’t get body-slammed to the ground!

Read the story.

Ed is going to be podcasting on BlogTalkRadio at 9PM Central this evening, talking about the aftermath of the Democrats’ serial press conference debate.

Better than most podcasts, it’s live  – you can actually call in (check Ed’s page for the call-in number). 

If you hear Ed’s show (or mine) and think “hey – I could do this better” – by all means do!  Blog TalkRadio is actively seeking to expand its roster of conservatives on the “air”.  Better yet, it’s not only free, but at some point there’s gonna be some ad money involved.

Anyway – tune in!

Sisyphus, from the putatively-conservative, City Pages (R)-endorsed blog Nihilist in Golf Pants, has posited – he says – a separated at birth:

Local MOBster Mitch “Boss” Berg and Tammanay Hall’s William “Boss” Tweed.

Clearly, there’s some alternative agenda at work here.

Maybe Sisyphus – or the entire Nihilist crew – are working for Paul Demko?

Or – worse – the Minnesota Monitor?

Real answer here.

Rew writes about the same flap I did last week, where Vox Day beat Jeff Fecke like a baby seal (or as the AV Club kids are saying these days, “pwn3d” him, whatever the ph{}ck that means).

She’s found the bit that bugs her about Vox:

Its that he is an obsessive compulsive googler.

I thought it might be true when he quickly found my post about him last month. His response to Fecke yesterday just proved it.

Good to see George Soros’ money all that non-Soros-connected, utterly clean money, yepper, you betcha is paying for such technically-savvy, resourceful bloggers (I kid, I kid.  Rew is a fine human being).

Rew:  It’s called Technorati.  You can find out who’s writing about Vox, or me, or even you.  It’s how dolts like “Jesus General” find that people have been writing about them, so they can dispatch their hordes of drooling anonytards to pollute  your comment section without having to survey every blog on the ‘net.
Technology; now, it does your vanity-googling FOR  you.

i’m tempted to tune in for this interview with Amanda Marcotte and Melissa MacEwan, scheduled for 10AM central this morning.

My hunch; comfortable among what they assume is the friendly confines of a sympathetic medium (BlogTalkRadio is largely a left-of-center stronghold), they’ll be, um, candid.

I’ll download it later…

I’ve been doing this blog for five years.  And I’m not going to stop any time soon.

But even at the beginning of the blogging phenomenon, I figured that there had to be a way forward – a next big thing in citizen journalism.  For me, the next natural step forward would be to do some sort of audio production.  I’ve had plans for almost a year to do a podcast – but the technical overhead of recording, editing, hosting and posting for subscription was more effort than I wanted to bite off.  Still, I figured that someday the technology would come to make audioblogging as easy, rewarding and productive as blogging the written word.

And for me, someday is now.

Ed, of course, beat me to it:  he’s up and going on BlogTalkRadio – a new service that will do for audioblogging what Blogger.com and Townhall.com did for web blogging; make audioblogging simple, user-friendly and (most importantly of all) ubiquitous.  Best of all, it avoids the one big problem I always had with traditional podcasting; it allows live talk, complete with call-ins; it has all the interactiveness of blogging, but it’s live!.

Yeah, I’m stoked.

I’ll be starting a show shortly, too. 

  I’m doing a test broadcast tomorrow, and then will start a regular show on at BlogTalkRadio.com.  I’ll be rolling out a new site for my own podcasts (along with the space available on BlogTalkRadio), hopefully over the weekend.

Here’s the important part; BlogTalkRadio is, (Ed and I notwithstanding) heavily dominated by left-of-center talent.  Ed and I, of course, are looking to help change that. 

More details as they become available (and by all means, listen to Ed’s show)

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…the long-awaited, long-promised podcast site has nearly come to fruition.

More details next week.

Learned Foot gives Mandy Marcotte – and everyone who thinks that shrill shrew was a “strong woman” – the kiss-off they have coming:

The point is, I doubt Your Little Amanda can be accurately described as a “strong woman.” For, I can’t help but notice that in your view, being a “strong woman” entails little more than exhibiting an in-your-face attitude and slavishly towing the Identity Feminism (as opposed to Equality Feminism) line. The like minded womyn and the dickless turds who try and ingratiate themselves to said womyn (and do please give up the act – it’s not going to get you laid) lap it up.

I see this Marcotte weasel held up as some sort of example of what a “strong woman” looks like, and then I look at my wife: her hair falling out from the chemo; constantly queasy; unable to sleep some nights, and on the nights she is able to sleep, it takes all the energy she can muster to get out of bed. When she is able to get vertical, she has to tend to two extremely hyper children. Yet, at the end of the day, she’s still able to joke about her hair.

Strengthwise, to any rational human being, the two aren’t even close.

Give Marcotte and her “admirers” time.  Maybe they’ll figure it out. 

Maybe.

Rent-a-blogger Jeff Fecke constantly tries to ding on Vox Day (where “ding=casually insult”) as in this bit here that tries to beat Day over the head with a facile strawman.
You know this can’t end well – as indeed, for Fecke, it doesn’t:

This is precisely the same argument that Joseph Heller put into the mouth of Frau Scheisskopf:“I dont believe, she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. But the God I dont believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. Hes not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be.”

Any time your argument is so blatantly stupid that it echoes that of a mouthpiece named “shithead”, you would do well to have another think on it. The point that Fecke is completely failing to grasp is that morality is created by God, it is defined by His Will. One cannot judge the Creator by the metric of the created. This is akin to an AI created by a programmer attempting to judge the efficiency of the programmer by the programmers use of CPU cycles; it simply doesnt apply.

There’s more. It’s like watching Christopher Hitchens debate Lindsay Lohan.
Wonder if Soros those unnamed, not-Soros-at-all, nosirree-bob benefactors want their money back yet?

Little Miss Attila on Marcotte:

Actually, deep down I feel sorry for Amanda Marcotte—in the same way I felt sorry for Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s, and Washingtonienne two years ago or whenever: when I was young and did stupid things only a handful of people knew about them.

Now it seems that whenever a young woman behaves like an idiot, everyone knows about it. Forever.

It’s sympathy speaking, though…:

And of course I relate to young Marcotte: the shrill feminism, the all-yang-no-yin personality. The hyper-emotionalism, and its corrosive effect on her writing.

I was like that. Still am, in a lot of ways. But to the degree that I’ve grown up at all, I’m glad I was able to do it out of the public spotlight.

If blogging has done one thing, it’s given idiots, defectives and the grossly immature a forum for making those adolescent mistakes in front of millions.

Although I’d be amazed if Marcotte’s not north of 35. 

Leftybloggers served up the idea of trying to rat out Bill Donohue – the outspoken Catholic anti-defamation activist with the Catholic League who went a long way toward ensuring Mandy Marcotte’s “resignation” from the Silkypony campaign – to the IRS for alleged violations of non-profit organization tax law.

Learned Foot returns the serve with a 100mph slam to the backhand side.  Foot – an actual lawyer – presents a bit of actual law, showing that Donohue and the Catholic League were well within the League’s mission – and, hence, non-profit tax laws – in attacking Marcotte’s hate-drenched writing.

Foot concludes:

Notably absent from any of these statements – incendiary and rage-flecked as they were – was any mention on how people should vote. If anyone would like to take the leap from the “bad press” Donahue is trying to lay on Edwards for hiring these freaks to intervening into a political campaign, I still have a nice big stack of “independently produced” left-wing campaign literature foisted on me through the mail last year by some 501(c)(3) organizations whose own tax exempt status would be in peril given that same standard.

Oh, but I’m sure those were somehow different.

It always is.

But let’s see how many leftybloggers fall for it, anyway…

Amanda Marcotte has apparently resigned from the Edwards campaign.

Malkin links to a number of bloggers who’ve had a very low profile, to date; liberal Christian bloggers.  One such is “Faithful Progressive” from the “Christian Alliance for Progress” blog, who writes:

Little has been written (at least as far as I have seen), about the need for blogs on the left to demonstrate more respect for the majority of Americans who are religious. We have made that point at least five times in widely linked posts. These two posts in particular generated a lot of debate:1.)An Open Letter to Liberal Bloggers; 2.)I’m Not Sick of Atrios or Digby: Building a Team Means Religious and Secular Liberals Hearing Each Other Out. But most of the responses were hostile and the debate generated more heat than light.

No shock, that last bit there.  Crossing the nutroots is a good way to get your comment section pumped full of hot, black, sickly bile.

Rent-a-blogger Jeff Fecke – a local long-time leftyblogger who spent the last campaign season on the payroll of an organization that has never made its finances public (to my knowledge) but that shares office space, agendas and talking points with George Soros’ Media Matters for America – has been working overtime to rationalize Marcotte.

No, rationalizing is the right word.  After spending most of the last week saying “Oh yeah? Your bigots are worse than our bigots! (Note to Jeff: Bill Donohue doesn’t work for a presidential campaign, and never will):

I don’t believe Amanda’s characteristically blunt comments crossed a line, and I certainly don’t believe that one angry line in an angry essay is proof of anti-Catholic bias.  It may be a sign that one strongly disagrees with the Catholic Church, but those are not the same thing, and in a pluralistic society cannot be the same thing; if we are not free to criticize other religions we are not free to practice our own.  Amanda didn’t say Catholics were evil, or weak-willed, or (as my Grandmother was once taught) that they drink the blood of newborn babies.  That’s anti-Catholic bigotry.  Show me where Amanda wrote that, and we’ll talk.

Strawman, of course.  She never wrote that.  She’s spent most of her misbegotten, splittle-flecked career panting about what idiots Christians are; yapping about “godbags”; gargling about how pro-life Catholics just want to create more titheing Catholics. Her entire body of work is suffused with a contempt for christians and Christianity that only the willfully obtuse, or someone who has an interest in obfuscation, or just someone whose entire worldview is slanted that way, could miss.

And while Fecke spent several posts focusing on talking points about one Bill Donohue – a Catholic writer/editor with a way for agitating anti-Catholics – the fact is that Donohue’s anti-Catholicism was just one noxious weed in her boquet.

If you have faith in anything higher than Al Gore, Amanda Marcotte has a problem with you.

Don’t want to call it bigotry?   Fine . Amanda Marcotte has some really sick attitudes about people of faith.

Does she have the right to criticize religion?  Sure.  She can do it any way she wants; she’s chosen to do it in a hateful, cliche-sodden, degrading, insulting way.

That’s her right!

But rights have consequences.  Insult, degrade and hate people, and they have a right to call you on it.

It’s that part that the nutroots seem to have trouble with; rights with consequences.

Barnett on the epidemic of vacuity that’s paralyzed leftyblogs from day one; today, my old kicktoy Ollie Willis:

There actually is a lot of interesting stuff in the left wing blogs. But some of the left-wing blogs serve as a vehicle for their authors to prove their ignoramus bona fides on an almost daily basis. I call this the Oliver Willis School of Blogging. For a wonderful example of this art form, check out Oliver’s mini-post regarding his indifference to the death of Barbaro. Ollie scolds, “The idea that so much ink is being spilt over a horse just kind of appals (sic) me.”

Of course, all bloggers are entitled to their opinions, even when they’re ill-informed or intemperately expressed. What is unfathomable is why a campaign would hire a person who delights in gratuitously causing offense as its representative.

Like so many of us, Barnett tackles Mandy Marcotte:

Amanda Marcotte, the blogresss from Pandagon that Edwards hired, happens to be one of the worst of the lot. In fairness to Oliver who actually comes across as a nice albeit not particularly talented guy, Marcotte is a bitter, angry person who thrives on offering offensive and obtuse observations. Her now infamous post from just days before the Edwards campaign hired her shows Marcotte at her “best”:

The funny part is that none of it is a surprise.

I went through a phase a few years back where I read leftyblogs with an eye partly turned to criticism, and partly to ridicule; there was plenty of grist for both mills.

And then I gave it up.  The vast majority of leftyblogs, with precious few exceptions – even among the big ones – were puerile, sophomoric, pointless…just plain dumb. I found that if I wanted, for whatever reason, a leftyblogger’s perspective, I was better off going with one of the less-stupid, less-insane locals, like Powerliberal or Flash or even the New Patriot Collective For Make Better Distribution of Information for Glorious DFL.  We have knocked heads for years – but they, along with many (albeit not all) local leftybloggers do a much better product than the deranged Kos, the Peter-Principled Atrios, the dumb Ollie Willis, and the angry-funny-without-the-funny Jesus General.

And especially Pandagon.  Although they had the occasional reason to exist when giggly fratboys Ezra “John” Klein and Jesse “Ringo” Taylor ran the show, once the blog turned into a collective, it became essentially a “Kos” wannabee; all of the heat, less of whatever pittance of light “Kos” emits.

One of the band of intellectual midgets that inherited Pandagon from Taylor and Klein was Amanda Marcotte, a fatuous screechblogger with a record of giggly bigotry and purple-faced religious hatred who was recently hired as the Edwards campaign’s official blogger.

Leftybloggers are closing ranks around their own:

I suspect that they are trying to tear her down because they are justifiably afraid that she will excel at her new job.

Um, no.  Actually, I hope every liberal candidate hires a screechblogger; they will provide us a treasure trove of material for the next couple of years (or until they get fired for embarassing their bosses, which would seem likely, sooner than later, in Marcotte’s case). 

How likely?  This bit here is making the rounds:

One thing I vow here and now–you motherf**kers who want to ban birth control will never sleep. I will f**k without making children day in and out and you will know it and you won’t be able to stop it.

At the considerable risk of sounding catty, I don’t think I’m going to be needing to “stop” anything.

But I digress:

 Toss and turn, you mean, jealous motherf**kers. I’m not going to be “punished” with babies. Which makes all your efforts a failure. Some non-procreating women escaped. So give up now. You’ll never catch all of us. Give up now.

It’s not that I want to “catch” anyone, least of all Ms. Marcotte.  Enjoy your life, whatever it may be, by all means!  It’s just that I’m thinking John Edwards isn’t going to be picking up a whole lot of red-state action with that kind of vibe going out on his frequency.

Leftybloggers – some of them – have a curious sense of what’s really important. 

Along with disparaging her on the most ridiculously inane grounds (E.g. “She uses profanity! Holy f**king s**t!”)…

I’ve noticed that from quite a few leftybloggers, big and small, find profanity to be a symbol of accomplishment; with some, the attitude seems “Woo hoo! Let’s see you godbags keep up with this profanity game, m****r******g d****e**g s*****ni-eating s****s!”, as if fluency with profanity is a sign of…anything?  I remember one fairly vacuous former local leftyblogger, writing about an even more vacuous local leftyblogger; “he might drive the wingnuts crazy with the swears!”.  Welcome to fourth grade!

I’ve lived around Chicagoans long enough to say with absolute assurance; I can swear more fluently than any leftyblogger (who’s not from Chicago and also brain-dead).  I don’t take especial pride in it; profanity merely substitutes shock for thought.  Which, with some people, is the only rhetorical tool in the belt.

Including, according to everything I’ve seen, Amanda Marcotte.

Chad the Elder:

When one is suffering the ill effects of a serious cold, it can be a veritable hell. How bad was my return home yesterday?

So bad that I passed on my traditional layover beer at Narita.

So bad that the kindly Northwest flight attendant who brought me cups of hot tea throughout the Tokyo to Minneapolis flight was moved to ask, “Are you as miserable as you look?”

Inspecting myself later in the planes bathroom mirror, I had to agree with her assessment.

Get well soon, Chad.  We need to talk epidemiology on Saturday.

Via Ecker, we have a blogger whose wife has found a great cure for blogger’s block:

In an effort to encourage me to revive this blog, my wife has imposed this “No blog, No sex” rule. The rule is simple: I am supposed to blog at least once a week in exchange for love-making…

Note to self and other bloggers:  Date only non-writers.

Cathy In The Wright:

But hey…you know it’s a great birthday when someone ends up with barf in their hair.

She also has a special guest from overseas.

It was five years ago today that I first posted on this blog.

When I started this thing up, I never expected to find an audience. And for eight months, I was right – I averaged under ten visits a day, in those days when most people thought “blogging” was something that happened after cheap beer and burritos.

Things evolved nicely from there, of course. This blog – and blogging – has taken me from being a cranky single dad and frustrated former pundit writing about the Minnesota legislature in his home office to…well, more or less the same thing, but with a much bigger audience!

And I’ve loved just about every minute of it.

Marty Andrade – celebrated his third blog anniversary this past Thursday – had a superb observation:

It’s hard to maintain a blog for a long period of time. It even looks like that at least in the United States blogging is starting to plateau as more people abandon their blogs. Blogging done right can be very rewarding, but if one focuses too much on traffic and linking and puts their expectations too high they won’t be blogging long. There’s sort of a Zen to blogging, you become a good blogger once you let go of you worldly wants.

Marty’s very right. I sometimes ask myself – would I still enjoy this if my readership dropped back to two a day? Or if, worse, the City Pages endorsed me?

Yes. To the first one, anyway.

My new neighbor Gary Miller’s new mission statement for Truth v. The Machine:

because if you can’t have fun with the impending collapse of Western Civilization you might as well go home and turn on the gas.

Granted, Ryan Rhodes has been doing both for quite some time…

…but point taken.

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JB, that jolly joker, took a zinger at me!

Hahahaha!

Well, we all have fun with these little internecine ribfests. Let’s see how this works:

JB Doubtless’ Resolutions:

13. Absorb the fact that Bruce Springsteen makes $20 million a year, while I get the occasional sixpack for playing bass at the Clodhopper Lounge in La Crescent; therefore, my opinion is worth nothing compared to his.

12. Figure if Joe Carter’s farts smell like petunia or hyacinth.

11. Kill me some of those damn Huguenots!

10. Once and for all, supress his history as a latte-drinking Boston fern-bar denizen who told the birkenstock-clad babes that he really DID dig the Indigo Girls, before word gets out!

9. Hit a layup before Berg does.

8. Find the “cool” kids who used to swipe his lunch money, and exact revenge, thus putting his lifelong demon to rest.

7. Commune with his long-lost soul brother, Jeff Fecke.

6. Get those dang Larry the Cable Guy tickets!

5. Find another big-dollar scotch brand name to drop.

4. Eradicate the last traces of book-larnin’ from St. Thomas-trained vocabulary, pass self off as down-home working-class hero.

3. Stare out window late at night, nurturing the inner child as he wonders if there’s something missing.

2. Find therapist, work out long-standing resentments against Elder. And everyone.

1. Pull head from Vox Day’s butt.

Informed sources tell me he’s already got three of ’em done!

Oy. Haven’t had this much fun since sixth grade.

I’m off to learn the bouzouki. That’ll be 25 and counting, baby!

(Note to JB: “Bouzouki” isn’t an anti-tank weapon. Or is it?)

Side note:  I love Cross Country skiing.  A personal goal for the next year or two – try Nordic Biathlon.  Skis ‘n guns – does it get any better? 

Yeah, but only rarely.

But I digress.  JB Doubtless – a self-admitted hockey player – notes:

Cross country skiers look like the walking dead.

In slow motion.

Is there a dorkier looking activity you can perform in public?

Hm.  Lemme think:

I dunno.  Is there? 

(Read the whole series, naturally)

Kennedy V. The Machine – one of the best blogs of the last couple of years – has finally rebranded itself.

Very appropriately, I might add.

Stop by and wish ’em well!

UPDATE: Ooops – sorry, guys. I got your Technorati ping, and figured that meant you’d gone live.