Sure you think I, CardMart, am brilliant and witty, but did you also know that I’m an award winner? That’s right friends, my blog, Cardinal Martini, has just been named the Number One New Blog of 2005! Let’s give me a round of applause!

My fellow winners for Environmental Republican’s “The Best New Blog Award” are The Recovering Democrat (the kind of Democrat I whole-heartedly endorse), the Louisiana Libertarian (alliterations are fun), and the blog known as ANIMALS (sure he doesn’t know a good college football team when he sees one, but the kid’s got a great blog).

If you’ve grown tired of the same old thing in blogland, these are the new ones to visit. (But DON’T abandon Xrlq! How would it look if, when he comes back from the Bahamas, I’ve scared away all his readers?)

The Washington Post carries the same Ass. Press article as everyone else about the Ohio recount, in which the Democrat, Green and Libertarian Parties wasted taxpayer dollars to conduct a pointless recount that narrowed President Bush’s re-election margin from 118,775 all the way down to 118,457, a netting John L. Kerry a whoppping gain of 318 votes statewide, 285 of which can be attributed to the recount itself. Based on that precipitious drop, which accounted for almost 0.24% of the 2% margin by which Bush carried the state, the Post came up with this brilliant headline:

Recount in Ohio Narrows Bush’s Victory Margin

Um, yeah, I suppose. By the same logic, here are a few headlines they may want to consider in the future:

Recount in Ohio Confirms Kerry Beat Nader, Baradnik

Study Confirms Congo and Cuba Closer to Each Other Than Either is to Jupiter

Experts Agree: Virginia Closer to North Pole Than North, South Carolina Are

Study: Pole Vaulting Brings You Closer to the Sun

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.

…dig faster. If Marky-Mark York had a brain, he’d have let yesterday’s entry go without comment. If he had half a brain, he’d have stopped after I poked fun at him for falsely assuming I was a woman. If he had one-eighth of a brain, he’d at least have quit falsely assuming I was a woman by that point, rather than leave it up to me to mock him a second time over the same stupid assumption,without even attempting to answer Aphrael’s question as to where the hell he got that idea in the first place. Even one-sixteenth of a brain would have been enough to to heed Clark’s sage advice not to argue with me at all. There’s only one thing he clearly would not have done: blame me for his own idiocy.

xrlq

Well that’s enough of this guy: xlrq. [sic] That’s the problem with these right-wingnuts who blog anonymously. No one can read just who they are, so in the sea of links about him I hit the first one that gave me a real name. A female wingnut from the pile on the right. Har har. So he spent the day dissing my school and grades from his cave. Crawl back in troglodyte the coast is clear.

Got that? The first blogger who uses a real name and also links to me is a woman, therefore, I must be one, too. O-kay. Here’s an earlier post, in which he elaborated as to which woman I was supposed to be:

Blogger Infamy

I stirred the pile over at the wingnut blogs and now have an entire link-riddled post devoted to my demise via ad hominem by a vile right-wing female going under the handle Xrlq. Justene Ademec [sic] as near as I can tell. Whatever. The bitch is too stupid to comment on using innuendo and circumstantial ad hominems via my resume, grades and so on, and the fact that I got banned for calling Patterico a jerk for comparing Sen. Tom Daschle to a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Is that something a LA County prosecutor from Fort Worth with an elite Cornell education should do? I think it’s gutteral [sic] and he should be fired for crude public commentary unfit for a public employee.

So they DO hate: “Not to worry, all your York-hating needs can be met here.” The X woman’s website has crashed from onslaught. Such a nice Cal State bashing bunch. Conservatives for Harvard when it suits their needs.

So, the first blogger with a real name and a blog of her own links to me was Justene Adamec. Therefore, it stands to reason that I must be … Justene Adamec! Oops, I mean “Ademec.” No wonder this guy got an A in Logic at the prestigious California State University at Northridge, where he’s about to graduate cum laude (apparently, that’s what CSUN hands out to the 16% of its students who manage to make it all the way through without transferring or flunking out).

After this, I promise to try to return damnum absque injuria to its prior status as a York-free zone. If Marky-Mark manages to post anything new that it is so dumb as to still be blogworthy after this, I recommend he go back to his failed acting/writing career and try to get a contract to write the script for the forthcoming blockbuster, Dumber and Dumbererererererer.

Yet another blogger gets threatened with a frivolous lawsuit. This time, the offender is Joel Thomas, a.k.a., Barking Moonbat Attorney, a commenter/troll who threatened to sue Dean over an allegedly defamatory comment some other idiot left on his blog.

Joel the Troll is a frequent commenter on fellow Bearflagger Michael Williams’s site, but AFAIK, he has not threatened to sue him …. yet.

UPDATE (warning, crude and libelous):
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While gay activists dance on President Reagan’s grave because he failed to wave his magic presidential wand and end the AIDS crisis in the U.S., where he was President, other leftists attack him for spreading tuberculosis in Nicaragua, where he wasn’t. Greg Palast of Working for Change non-explains his theory this way:

People don’t die of TB if they get some antibiotics. But Ronald Reagan, big hearted guy that he was, had put a lock-down embargo on medicine to Nicaragua because he didn’t like the government that the people there had elected.

The mental giant does not elaborate as to whether he was equally outraged last year when President Bush invaded Iraq because he didn’t like the government the people there had elected (twice). He does, however, ask rhetorically what the Sandis would have wanted with Texas, which was a 48 hour drive away, while ignoring the mischief they, with help from their friends the then-existent Soviet Union, were causing in other countries closer than that.

Not content to rant only about his communist friends in Nicaragua, however, Greggy then goes on to belittle the liberation of Grenada from its Stalinist despots as a “little Club Med war” and even “a murderous PR stunt.” As to Iran, he further claims that his hero Jimmy Carter “wouldn’t give an inch to the Ayatolla” Khomeini. Silly me, I thought abandoning support for the Shah counted as a little more than an inch.

Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens reminds us that while he was a good guy on Operation Iraqi Freedom, he is not to be mistaken for a good guy overall. Drudge says Ted Rall is being his usual asstastic self, too, but the link isn’t working right now. Maybe tomorrow’s whinepost will accuse a bunch of right-wing meanies of launching a DOS attack to silence his precious dissent.

Liberals, conservatives, libertarians and others can disagree vehemently on just about everything on which reasonable people can disagree, and then some. Often discussions get heated, partisans bear their teeth, and it becomes exceedingly difficult to remember that the guy you are arguing with is not Satan incarnate, but a fundamentally decent fellow who just happens to see the world differently from you.

We are reminded that most people are decent whenever a national tragedy strikes. In the wake of 9-11, hardly anyone was a Democrat or Republican; we were all Americans, and we were all New Yorkers. No Democrat (or at least, no prominent one) played politics against Bush and Guiliani simply because they were members of the wrong party. Even Al Gore, who has since gone completely batty, was respectful of the President at the time. And, as best I can determine, not one Republican from flyover country said “screw New York, they’re a blue state.”

Still, while most people you may disagree with vehemently are decent people of goodwill, a few of them are not. It is times like these when your fundamentally decent but vociferous opponents separate themselves from the ones who really are the scum that they seem to be. One such example is Noam Chomsky, who, mere weeks after 9-11, wrote that U.S. foreign policy was worse. Another is today’s asshat, Mike Benedetto. While others all across the political spectrum pay their respects to the Gipper (or, at a minimum, judiciously decline to bash him on this occasion), Mikey’s contribution to the blogosphere is to compare Reagan to Hitler, and blame him for the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Well done, Michael. You’ve proven that the rabid Reagan haters never went away, even 15 years after the poor guy left office, and 10 years after he was diagnosed with a terrible disease. Shame on you – though I suspect you don’t have any, else you wouldn’t have posted this vile trash in the first place.

In case this loathesome, hateful jerk of a blogger attempts to cover his tracks by editing the post, here it is, in its entirety, as of 1:50 p.m. PDT today:

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By now you’ve probably heard or read about the criminal behavior of at least six members of the 800th Military Police Brigade. All are allegedly guilty of misconduct which, if proven, would qualify them for a long, long period in prison, preferably under conditions comparable to the ones they inflicted on their prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Such criminality, in and of itself, does not a warrant a ‘Hat, as this conduct proves the person is evil, not stupid. However, one of these alleged criminals, Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Chip Frederick, has told 60 Minutes something so asstastically stupid as to earn himself a ‘Hat whether he is guilty of any crimes or not. Per the BBC:

The station spoke to one of the six soldiers charged, Sergeant Chip Frederick – a reservist whose full-time job is as a prison officer in the US state of Virginia.

Sgt Frederick said he and his fellow reservists had never been told how to deal with prisoners, or what lines should not be crossed. “We had no training whatsoever,” he said. “I kept asking my chain of command for certain things… like rules and regulations. And it just wasn’t happening,” he said. He said he never saw a copy of the Geneva Conventions – which govern the treatment of prisoners – until after he was charged.
[Paragraphs reformatted, emphasis added.]

Time for an informal reader poll.

1. Have you read the Geneva Conventions and/or any Army regulations that supplement them aso POWs or other detainees held by the U.S. military?
2. If your asnwer to #1 was “yes,” skip this question. If it was no, do you believe that Army regulations and/or the Geneva Conventions permit a POW’s captors to:
   • Attach wires to his genitals and tell him he’ll be electrocuted if he steps down?
   • Force him to simulate with other inmates?
   • Sic a dog on him?
   • Strike him, or order another inmate to do so?
   • Write something obscene (or, for that matter, anything at all) on his skin?
   • Take photos of him naked, with a snickering soldier of the opposite sex pointing at his privates?/li>
3. of how you answerd #1 and/or #2, fill in the blank. Ignorance of the law is _______________________.

If convicted, these soldiers should imprisoned by the U.S. military for a long time, and should then be handed over to the Iraqis for any further punishments the Iraqi government may find appropriate. If the eventual Iraqi state happens to be a stable democracy that will treat them with any modicum of decency, great. If not, too bad; perhaps their own outrageous conduct is part of the reason. Either way, and regardless of whether he is convicted at all, Chip Frederick’s incredible stupidity should cost him both of his jobs, and should be permanently enjoined to eschew the handling of any sharp objects without adult supervision.

UPDATE: Roger Stanson, a commenter to Citizen Smash’s entry thinks there has been a “noticable [sic] silence” on this topic in the Blogosphere. I don’t know which blogs Roger read this morning, but I think it is safe to assume that he did not read any of these.

Tim Lambert’s ‘Hat of the Day award has been revoked and conferred on me, instead, for having issued it in the first place. That will teach me to issue ‘Hats to bloggers.

Just as Lambert’s ‘Hat was ultimately revoked, the same can be true of everh other ‘Hat whose holder can adequately demonstrate that it was unjustified. I eagerly await similar rebuttals from Wilmette Police Chief George Carpenter, recently unemployed pharmacist Gene Herr, Colorado Louie, Laurel Eby, that self-centered jerk who refused to return someone else’s dog, and the unrepentant jerks at the “Humane” Society who facilitated that adoption and called it a “wake-up call” for everyone but them. If any of these guys can make at least as strong a case against their ‘Hats as Lambert did against his, I’ll have nothing but crow to eat for the next month, at least.

I’m not holding my breath.

Anyone who reads blogs and is familiar with John Lott has probably heard of Tim Lambert, too. He’s the Australian blogger who aspires to do to John Lott what Clayton Cramer did to Michael Bellesiles. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do a very good job; while Cramer uncovered overwhelming evidence Bellesiles’s fundamental research was fabricated, the best Lambert has been able to do is to uncover a few really stupid things Lott has done on a few isolated occasions. The rest of his rebuttals consist of gratuitous attacks on Lott personally. Lambert seems to be on some kind of “jihad,”^* so the next time you encounter an op-ed by Lott in any major newspaper, be sure to scan Lambert’s blog for a “liar, liar, pants on fire” rebuttal, with an occasional adult argument thrown in here and there for good measure.

As annoying as this “everyone who disagrees with me is liar” routine may be, I’ve largely written it off until now, figuring that it derived either from Lambert’s personal phobia about guns (a charge he denies), or perhaps some kind of personal “crusade”^* against Lott himself. Apparently, I was wrong. Judging by this comment thread on Reason, concerning the British government’s asinine view that it can charge wrongfully convicted inmates for the cost of room and board, impugning his opponents motives is this guy’s MO.

Lambert gives away the game in his first comment (the 6th in the thread), which reads:

I think Mackay’s article is rather dishonest. The victims of miscarriages of justice aren’t getting a bill for their imprisonment. Blunkett is just trying to reduce the amount of compensation they get. Mackay tries to make it look like they are not getting compensation but just a bill.

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