Fact Zone: “Salmon Killer” Exonerated

DNA Evidence Frees Man Convicted Of Bear Attack

Georgia police were so confident James Marshall was the man who killed young Janet Kelly in a state bear preserve, they didn’t investigate other suspects…

Update: I’ve been chided for not having blogged about this:

Well, there you go. Once again, real life is stranger than fiction… or satire.

Tory Times…

Another video from you-know-who:

It’s perhaps an unhappy coincidence, but the last major economic recession in Canada also occurred during the tenure of a “conservative” regime; namely, that of the great free-trader and profligate spendthrift, Lyin’ Brian Mulroney. Of course, the one prior to that in 1982 had occurred under the “tax and spend” Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau and as such, has been a jagged pill that so-called “Conservatives” haven’t quite been able to swallow for the better part of 30 years. Indeed, it’s one that they still bitterly moan and complain about to this day, even if they weren’t born at the time or were still shitting in their tiny pants when it happened. Well, some things just never change it seems.

But not to worry… there won’t be a repeat of that. Stephen Harper, the Dear Leader and Great Helmsman, is masterfully commanding our economy now and he boldly and confidently assures us (or the right-wing corporate American media, at least) that everything is just ship-shape and that he has “solid plans” to avert any prolonged downturn beyond 4Q of this year and prevent any further accumulation to our national debt And why would we have any reason to doubt Stephen “now is a good time to invest in the stock market” Harper? He is an economist, after all!!!

But about those “solid plans”… What are they, exactly?

Glenn Beck: “Frightfully Strange Man”

If nothing else, this clip from today’s Morning Joe is worthwhile just for Scarborough’s uncontrollable laughter after having watched a compilation of Beck’s verklempt crying jags on his Fox News show. It comes at 1:48 into the video if you want to speed right to that. Oh, and here’s the New York Times article that prompted this little discussion.

According to David Frum, Beck’s success “is a product of the collapse of conservatism as an organized political force, and the rise of conservatism as an alienated cultural sensibility.”

Update: Speaking of strange men…

Another Useless “Factor” Boycott

For reasons that should be perfectly obvious to sentient humans, Spain should welcome the fact that Bill O’Reilly won’t visit their country. As for his call for a boycott against Spanish products, if past is prologue, it should be noted that during the period of his hilariously inept boycott against France (phony reports from the imaginary “Paris Business Journal” notwithstanding), trade with that country actually increased substantially throughout the time of Bill-O’s ban.

Borrrrring

The Junos: Like the Grammys, but even more fantastically irrelevant!

Inadvertent Irony

“I just bought the first ten words, and the first word is ‘persiflage’ and I’ve gotta say, I don’t know what persiflage means, but it’s the start of a great story…” — Toronto Mayor, David Miller

The Lordly Musings of Conrad Black

As incredibly delightful as is the rapier wit of Baron Black of Crossharbour (could a more impossibly wicked name have been invented for the man?), one has to wonder why his correspondent (conservative author and “community activist” Bob Plamondon) saw fit to share Black’s wickedly acerbic barbs about various luminaries of the Canadian political scene with the Globe & Mail’s most vacuous and addlepated ninny, Jane Taber. As for calling Green Party leader Elizabeth May a “frumpy, noisy, ill-favoured, half-deranged windbag”… Sheesh! Talk about “pot meet kettle”…

The Preemptive Race Card

This is kind of a Chicken v. Egg situation, but why is it that those who criticize Barack Obama feel compelled to loudly proclaim that they’re not racists? Or more accurately, why is it they feel the need to accuse those who disagree with them about their criticisms of Obama of having presumed them to have been motivated by racism? I know… it gets quite convoluted. Here, the deep-thinkers at Fox & Friends touch on the issue with regards to criticism of the president by Angie Harmon.

Full disclosure here… I had to Google “Angie Harmon” to learn that she’s a former fashion model and now a “television star” of some repute (I thought right-wingers didn’t care what Hollywood “celebrities” thought about politics; except that is, when they agree with them, it would seem).

Anyway, I find the kind of presumption employed by Harmon to proactively defuse and irrefutably discredit any counterargument on the basis that it’s automatically nothing but a knee-jerk accusation of “racism” to be incredibly perverse and disingenuous. Not only does this conceit attempt to immediately rob any valid rebuttal of legitimacy, but it also effectively insulates and encourages base attacks that are actually borne out of naked, ugly racism.

Survivors of the Khmer Rouge

Prince Thomico Sisowath, the nephew of former Cambodian King Sihanouk talks about the past sufferings of his family and the tribunals that are now underway to hold members of the Khmer Rouge to account for their atrocities.

It seems hard to believe that only now, so many years after the fact, that the Cambodian government is attempting to bring some closure to the painful episode of the “killing fields” where almost 2 million people cruelly died for the sake of a horrific social-engineering experiment carried out in the name of agrarian Communism.

Why Do People Hate NYC?

Oh, I just cannot possibly imagine why…

Maybe it’s just me, but all of the videos the oh-so-precious dilettantes and marvelous fashionistas at New York magazine egregiously poot out of their collective backside onto the Internet make me think of Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time, a book set in an era “where entropy is king and the universe has begun collapsing upon itself.”