Sterling Ambivalence

Has anyone else here started getting a daily deluge of spam comments?

I screen comments, so they're only annoying in that I get the emails when they post. They don't appear under the public posts here.

Remember this revoked license plate from two years ago on this wonderful truck? Well, at the time, the owner argued it was just a huge misunderstanding. The license plate numbers weren’t a coded message declaring his support for white supremacy but messages declaring his support for NASCAR.

“There is absolutely no way I’d have anything to do with Hitler or Nazis,” [Douglas] Story [owner of the truck pictured above] said Wednesday. He contacted The Washington Post after an article about his plate appeared last week; the state, citing privacy rules, had declined to release the identity of the plate's owner. “My sister-in-law and my niece are Jewish. I went to my niece’s bat mitzvah when she turned 13 three years ago. Does that sound like something an anti-Semite would do?”

Well, what has Doug Story done since being forced to replace his wrongfully-deemed-racist license plates? Oh, posting his thoughts on President Obama, law enforcement and cultural tolerance on a few message boards. Oh, and buying some hunting guns, too.

A detention hearing will be held Monday for a self-described racist from Virginia who allegedly made threats against President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder before illegally taking possession of a machine gun.

Douglas Howard Story, 48, of Manassas, Va., was arrested Wednesday by the FBI in a shopping mall parking lot, after taking delivery of a semi-automatic AK-47 assault rifle that he had paid $125 to have converted to fully automatic, officials said.

In a November 2008 comment on Stormfront, where he posted as “Confederado,” Story describing his AK-47 as a potential “homeland defense rifle should I need to protect micelf [sic] and my wife from rioting neeegroes [sic].” The same month, he described the president as “brown-filth mulatto,” and wrote, “Now I’m not advocating violence against him, I’m just saying there are White folks out there that are none to [sic] happy with his ‘election.’

Yeah, yeah, but look? He even says he’s not advocating violence. And anyway, he's not an anti-Semite. He even went to a bat mitzvah. That doesn’t sound like a racist Jewophobe to me!

The FBI opened its weapons investigation last August after learning Story was posting comments on an Aryan Nations Web site and asking about how to convert a semi-automatic assault rifle to a fully automatic machine gun, court documents say. As the investigation unfolded, an FBI informant engaged Story in various conversations on white supremacy websites. According to an affidavit, “The conversations and posts were reported to the case agent and show the propensity for hatred and violence toward African Americans, Jewish Americans, other minorities and a number of political figures.”

But, hey. Have you seen the deer in Virginia? You NEED a semi-automatic weapon to take those suckers down!

The affidavit also quotes Story as having written, “I think there’s one way Obummer would be proven as a mere mortal … if someone puts a 30.06 round into the base of his skill [sic], huh ya think?” In a post referring to the attorney general, Story predicted, “Holder will likely be removed when the administration changes in 2012. Although, personally, I’d prefer removing him from office with a 30.06.”

Another patriot gets sent to jail.

For what it's worth, I'm glad LiveJournal has been flagging suspicious comments and hiding them from view, but I wish when I get the email alerting me to the comments, the links to delete them actually worked.

Also, I wish there was some place to see all screened comments so I can see if they're spam or not and deal with the accordingly.

Typepad is the least cost-effective blogging platform out there. Excuse me... Typepad is probably the most expensive blogging platform out there. Nobody with any financial sense chooses Typepad.

Typepad Micro, which only exists because Six Apart mismanaged Vox so remarkably badly they had to shut it down, borders on useless. It's so bad, I'd rather be blogging on Geocities where you had to hand-code each page and upload it manually, and... oh yeah, Geocities is dead! Note how they barely mention Typepad Micro on the homepage...

To think, while all of America was losing her mind, Barack Obama and our security team kept calm and carried on.

Win by a 'mudslide'? The idiom is 'win by a landslide'.
The thing that surprises people is that the United States presidency doesn't doesn't confer upon you powers as all encompassing as suggested by this question. There's no ability to unilaterally change much but at the edges, and as Schoolhouse Rock taught me, laws are born in Congress (although the president can 'lobby' for bills he'd like to see introduced).

Now, if I had won by a landslide, I can only presume that the agenda I ran on was popular and would work to implement it as best I could. That said, I doubt my preferred agenda would give me an electoral landslide. (Not even Obama won by a landslide -- counting the popular vote he had a good but not overwhelming 7 point victory. That was augmented by the collapse of the economy on George W. Bush's watch.) I would absolutely raise taxes and close various loopholes that let companies like General Electric pay zero taxes. I would put this money into a program to repair our infrastructure and invest in mass transportation, clean energy, and education. This would be Stimulus 2.0 This would be hard to sell to a population that thinks that the government funds mostly waste and foreign aid. It's not true, but it's a myth that makes people think you can balance the budget and cut taxes and preserve "the stuff I like".

Obama took a crack at reforming healthcare which is a good start, but I would continue pushing toward a universal healthcare system like Medicare for all -- so we aren't the last civilized country in the world where children can die of a rotten tooth because mom couldn't afford insurance. Despite what the Republican Party has been saying, reforming healthcare will save money, and do so without kicking families off heating assistance.

I'd lobby for citizens in the District of Columbia have voting representation in Congress. This is one place where I will not pretend the Constitution is a divinely inspired and perfect document. It is wrong here, and if it needs amending to grant citizens in DC the same representation I get by living just five miles away, I will lobby for that.

I can already see my landslide slipping to a squeaker. If I get a victory at all.

I will support the right of members of the same sex to get married and serve in the military. Yep, there goes the vote of the religious right.

It's nice to know that the spammers haven't forgotten about me and this weblog.



















Frikken pill pushers1

What I find impressive in this statement from Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa is the sheer number of inaccuracies implicit and explicit are packed into a paragraph.

The framers did not consider the babies of illegals when they framed the 14th amendment because we didn't have immigration law at the time so they could not have wanted to confer automatic citizenship on the babies of people who were unlawfully in the United States.

1. Usually when "Framers" is used in the context of the US Constitution, it refers to the fifty-five delegates who were at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1786-7. None of those people were alive when the 14th Amendment was drafted.

2. Also, these Framers, and generally everybody who lived in the early United States were only a few generations removed from people who immigrated from Europe, if they haven't arrived newly themselves. Everybody pretty much gained citizenship by arriving in America on or before it declared independence. (Slaves excluded.) They all were essentially "anchor babies".

3. The people who did draft the 14th Amendment specifically wrote the amendment in the way so that there would be no political considerations concerning who got citizenship -- they were trying to grant all rights of citizenship to the former slaves. That is why they chose birthright citizenship. You can't contest place of birth.

It's nice to know the former Six Apart kept its promise and did get the redirect working. ( http://sterlingnorth.vox.com → http://sterlingnorth.typepad.com/blog/), but Typepad Micro is not a very good platform. Of course, they want $9/month for their quality blogging platform, which is comparatively a poor deal. Now I'm paying $10 a month already for a domain that I haven't gotten around to using yet. It might be a good idea to migrate to that.

Note: I post a lot of my brief thoughts on Twitter

It will be ironic that LiveJournal -- the redheaded stepchild during its ownership by Six Apart -- will carry on many of the legacies of Vox, which will disappear into the ether on September 30th. Most of the fancy journal designs were commissioned for Vox, including the old penguin design and the new calligraphy pen design which was the design I had for the Vox page.