Time and time again, L.A. Dog Trainer “Reader’s” Representative Jamie Gold reminds us all who she really represents, although she doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of representing them, either. Money quote:

I’ll let editors here know that if you were the editor, you would have devoted space to exploring Mintz’s background.

Memo to the Trainer: if your ombudsman won’t “ombud,” you’d do better not to have one at all.

If Jimmy Carter had an ounce of honesty and an ounce of intelligence, he’d be embarrassed by his CBS-like inability to detect an obvious electoral fraud in Venezuela last month. Instead, he’s bragging about it, maintaining that Venezuela has free elections but Florida doesn’t.

One side of me wants to tell Jiminy Carter to go back to building homes for the homeless. Another doesn’t even trust him to do that right anymore.

‘Hat tip: Megan McCardle.

Congressman Tom Feeney responds to the L.A. Times’s childish editorial (but I repeat myself) on H. Res. 58, the boneheaded resolution that would urge courts to apply American law in America. Money quote:

The 74 cosponsors of the Feeney/Goodlatte resolution seek to preserve the sovereignty of the U.S. Americans should not be ruled by foreign court decisions. If The Times believes that this makes us “boneheads,” then I’m sure there will be many that join the Bonehead Caucus.

Indeed.

Via L.A. Observed, Dog Trainer czar Michael Kinsley has stated that if it were up to him, the Trainer would end its 32-year hiatus and endorse a candidate for President.

The real question is, which candidate would they endorse?

Ask-a-Blogger is still open for now, but here are my answers to the questions that have been raised thus far.

1. Rae: Yes.
2. Rae: That wasn’t a question. Also, see #1.
3. Andrew: Upper torso, then face. Sorry if you were hoping for an R-rated answer. Then again, my method does leave both my joseph and my alex in full glory, so I guess you got your R-rating after all.
4. Porter: Exactly what you appear to be doing: blog often, link often, and comment on other people’s blogs. FYI, after two months of blogging, my traffic level was about where yours is now.
5. Al: Splunge without the coconuts. A bit faster with them. I know I walk faster when I’m carrying something heavy I can’t wait to set down. Don’t you?
6. Jody: Yes.
7. John: Time heals all wounds. I was pissed at him for a week or two, maybe a month, and then I got over it and moved on. Nothing worth staying mad over. Even if I had, I like to think that I’d be taking his side of the PayPal fiasco anyway, free speech being a much bigger issue than the blogtarded comments I was annoyed about.
8. Patterico: Baby Xrlq.
9. Hugo: pit bulls (including related breeds), Rottweiler, Boxer, whippet, pug. The only breed I don’t particularly like is the Chow Chow. Great looking dogs, but I just I know too many people who have been bitten by their own Chows.
10. Nanuk: Good question. I like his performance on budget issues, vetoing the minimum wage hike, etc. I’m rather pissed at him for signing AB 50, however. If he vetoes the remaining GFW bills, I’ll forgive him for being a moderate on the issue rather than the pro-gun crusader no one expected him to be anyway. But if he signs them… :mad: As to the Clam, hope springs eternal. He does comment occasionally on this blog, though, so maybe he’ll be able to provide a more c0mplete answer himself.
11. Rae: My family, my friends and myself, mostly. There may be a deeper, more satisfying answer, but I haven’t a clue what it is.

What would possess John Kerry to trash Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi? Many theories are out there, none of them good. Glenn Reynolds thinks Kerry has given up on the race, and throwing some red meat to help out some of his fellow Democrats further down on the ticket. Roger Simon sees no strategy at all, just the desperate flailing of a campaign that doesn’t have its act together. Ann Althouse thinks it was Kerry’s final mistake.

Those are the “innocent” explanations. Kevin Murphy has a not-so-innocent one.

UPDATE: Bill Quick concurs.

UPDATE x2: Bil Keane, by contrast, dissents.

A few weeks back, I posed a few questions to my readers. Now, it’s your turn. Use the comments section to ask me any question you want, and I promise I will answer^* it.

(more…)

The Council has spoken. Congratulations to Athena for the winning Council entry, “The Barrier to Defeating Terrorism,” and to Cavalier’s Guardian Watchblog for the winning non-Council entry, “The Fall of the Media Empire”

After reading Bill Quick’s horror story about PayPal, I briefly considered dumping my PayPal account. Then, after reading some of the comments, I thought it best to hold off for a little while and see how his case played out. Not anymore (h/t: Evil Glenn). Money quote:

On August 23, PayPal gave users via e-mail 30 days’ notice that it could levy a fine of $500 on those who violate its acceptable use policies. Its compliance team will strictly enforce the new acceptable use policy to implement the monetary fines on both buyers and sellers who use the transaction service to trade in items the San Jose, Calif.-based company has outlawed.

Great. The last thing we need is a business that not only plays morality police, but sees itself as a sovereign state with the authority to “outlaw” anything or “fine” people for violating what are in fact mere contractual terms. PayPal must die. [I don't want innocent dogs to die, however; therefore, the PayPal button on my side bar will remain in place until/unless I can convince Underdog to find another company. Suggestions are welcome.]

UPDATE: I just canceled my account. You can too, by logging in first, and then going to their well-hidden cancelation page. Of course you can’t just follow that link and get prompted to log in; that would make things too easy. Here’s the confirmation email I got after advising them that I had canceled because of their censorship policy and their chutzpah in collecting “fines” despite not being a government:

Dear xrlq@xrlq.com,

We are sorry that you have decided to close your PayPal account. With millions of members in dozens of countries across the globe, PayPal is continually improving and expanding its award-winning services.

I guess the definition of “improving” is largely a matter of opinion. Collecting $500 “fines” from unwitting suckers is probably a huge “improvment” for their bottom line, which will more than make up for their loss of legitimate revenue from medium-traffic bloggers like me. Then again, if these fines are illegal, as I strongly suspect that they are, PayPal will soon be on the wrong end of a B&P Code 17200 action, in which case the only long-term “improvement” will be to keep more plaintiff lawyers employed. Either way, their “improvements” will not involve me.

PayPal is the world’s leading online money transaction service for individuals, businesses and merchants.

We can fix that.

[Remaining fluff deleted.]

UPDATE: More smarm here.

Next time you get a virus warning purporting to come from your ISP, be sure to check the headers first. I’m the only person who can access the domain xrlq.com, so I’m pretty sure I didn’t send this message to myself, let alone the fille ATTACH.PIF, which I presume is either a virus itself, or scumware of some other form. Here’s the message I got, in full header format:

Return-Path:
Delivered-To: xrlq@xrlq.user
Received: (qmail 29520 invoked from network); 24 Sep 2004 15:25:46 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO tanya) (69.177.170.102)
by server207.com with SMTP; 24 Sep 2004 15:25:46 -0000
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 11:24:06 -0500
To: xrlq@xrlq.com
Subject: E-mail account security warning.
From: management@xrlq.com
Message-ID:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary=”——–bqfeshfdxkjfmkbqfswo”

——————————————————————————–
Dear user of Xrlq.com gateway e-mail server,

Our antivirus software has detected a large ammount of viruses outgoing from your email account, you may use our free anti-virus tool to clean up your computer software.

For more information see the attached file.

Kind regards,
The Xrlq.com team http://www.xrlq.com