WPITW: Orly Taitz Limbaugh!

This is great… Not only does Rush get inadvertently punked by railing against President Obama based on a fictional version of his doctoral thesis lifted from a parody website, but when he finally gets busted for doing so, he nonetheless stands by his prior bloviations on the ground they were entirely valid because… get this — there had to have been an element of truth in the comical spoof to have made it funny in the first place and therefore worthwhile satirizing. Hence… it was essentially TRUE (even though it wasn’t at all).

Now, whatever else you may think about Limbaugh, you’ve got to admit that was nicely played. Which, of course still doesn’t mitigate the fact he’s still an ignorant jackass and, as always, a big fat idiot.

Rassemblement des retraités de Nortel

This may draw flack from a lot of folks, but here goes… Stop already with this painfully forced bilingualism!

Here, watch this example, and then we’ll pick up things after the clip.

Look, we get that you can pretend to speak French (kind of… rather awkwardly, it has to be said — much in the same way that Harper muddles through on this score), but please — for the love of God, stop interjecting it in your speeches at every opportunity.

This redundant, French-English nonsense is just deeply silly and immensely annoying. For those of us without that much facility in French (or especially your particular version of it), these pandering linguistic diversions simply come across as pretentious affectations that are, quite frankly, weirdly alienating and immensely offputting.

John Micklethwait on Canada

Economist Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait recently interviewed by McGill’s Karl Moore on Canada, Michael Ignatieff and Stephen Harper.

Not much to say about this, really… Some interesting observations about Canada coming from the editor of a staunchly conservative publication, expressing as he does a certain degree of admiration for our universal healthcare system and multi-cultural diversity insofar as this fair-minded attitude effectively puts him quite at odds with the lunatic fringe of so-called “conservatism” in this country that’s represented online by the loose collective of right-wing nutjobs, religious kooks, racists, fearmongerers, fatuous bigots, hysterical maniacs, simpering ninnies, and intellectually whoring camp followers that operate together as the Bloggin’ Tories.

But then, moderate (that is to say sensible and pragmatic) Liberals have always had a lot more in common with traditional Progressive Conservatives (and even old-school Tories) than the extremist and radicalized factions of both those parties, consisting largely as they do of outspoken cranks that have been perverted by eccentric forms of prejudice and/or strongly influenced by rather hopeless political ideologies of one sort or another.

I quite liked the description of Harper as “a strangely resilient character.”

Siding with the Geeks

How “Alice in Wonderland” is it that the man who until quite recently couldn’t even use a computer without his wife’s assistance is now telling American’s how to craft the future direction of the Internet with a piece of legislation that completely turns the idea of net neutrality on its head?

Rachel Maddow talks to Boing Boing editor and partner Xeni Jardin (great name) about the perversely named Internet Freedom Act of 2009 currently being pushed in Congress by Sen. John McCain — who just happens to be “the single largest Congressional recipient of campaign contributions from the telecom industry from Jan. 2007-June of this year.” Gosh, what a coincidence.