Nov
30
2006
SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM… SPAM!
Filed Under Internet and Blogging | 2 Comments
SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM… SPAM!
Filed Under Internet and Blogging | 2 Comments
Most people probably aren’t aware of it, but we here at TBR have continued to have problems with pernicious spam. Happily, even the other contributors probably are unaware of that, because MT’s newest upgrade has kept almost all of it off the blog and in the mechanism’s moderation system, which only I have to deal with. Unfortunately, I have had the settings for the tripwire into the junk mailbox torqued up so high, we occasionally have lost comments. And since we were averaging about 25,000 junk comments a month, it’s only been sheer luck when I’ve found a good comment amid all the crap – when I’ve bothered to look at all, which was almost never.
My friend Doug long ago told me to institute a CAPTCHA mechanism, but I could never find an MT plugin that didn’t require modification. And unlike the Generic Geek, I’m not really enough of a coder to want to climb inside the php to do it manually (assuming I could figure the code in the first place).
Well, I think I’ve finally beaten the spammers, because I found a CAPTCHA plugin that actually works relatively out of the box. I had a scare for about an hour while (like every other attempt at CAPTCHA) I was failing to get it to work, and after I found that Arvind stopped supporting his creation. But eventually I got the kinks out and it seems to be smooth sailing so far.
While I was at it, I made a few improvements to the look and operation of the comment and preview templates, including the requirement that all comments have to be previewed before being posted. (This being an extra step against the spammers now that should save me a modification later.)
As always, let me know if you see any problems.
Nov
29
2006
Word!
Filed Under Race and Prejudice | 4 Comments
Word!
Filed Under Race and Prejudice | 4 Comments
Nov
29
2006
To be part of the ‘in’ crowd here, I decided that today, my 34th birthday, would be a great time to post my ‘lengthy introduction.’ Here goes. It all started on November 29, 1972 at Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson, Maryland. Where all the ‘clinic babies’ were born at the time. However, as I was pondering this, I realized that there are nearly ZERO familial influences on my political philosophy. There are, obviously, other factors that led me to become a conservative.
Nov
23
2006
Long live the Chief Justice of the United States.
Think back to the framers who drafted the Constitution. These were people who literally risked everything to gain the right to govern themselves, certainly risked all their material well-being and risked their lives in the struggle for independence. And the thought that the first thing they would do when they got around to drafting a Constitution would be to say, ‘Let’s take all the hard issues in our society and let’s turn them over to nine unelected people who aren’t politically accountable and let them decide,’ that would have been the farthest thing from their mind.I have enormous respect for the authority carried by the people across the street in Congress. Hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people have voted for them and put their confidence in their judgment.Not a single person has voted for me and if we don’t like what the people in Congress do, we can get rid of them, and if you don’t like what I do, it’s kind of too bad. And that is, to me, an important constraint. It means that I’m not there to make a judgment based on my personal policy preferences or my political preferences.The only reason I’m protected from those political pressures is because I’m supposed to make a decision based on the law. And so I don’t think it would be a good idea to turn all the hard issues over to the courts. Those hard issues belong in Congress, they belong in the Executive Branch.The courts have the responsibility to make sure both of those branches abide by the legal limits in the Constitution, but that’s it.
Nov
22
2006
There’s a prickly and somewhat humorous thread at Dean’s World discussing the subject of public nudity. In considering another response, I tripped over the following, from Justice Scalia.
The purpose of Indiana’s nudity law would be violated, I think, if 60,000 fully consenting adults crowded into the Hoosierdome to display their genitals to one another, even if there were not an offended innocent in the crowd. Our society prohibits, and all human societies have prohibited, certain activities not because they harm others but because they are considered, in the traditional phrase, “contra bonos mores,” i.e., immoral.I think I’ve made enough of Dean’s blood boil, but I couldn’t stand wasting such a great opinion – so it ends up here.
Nov
17
2006
A Little Slow on the Uptake
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A Little Slow on the Uptake
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Two days ago on Newsbusters, there was a blog entitled “ABC’s Sawyer Repeats ‘More Racist or More Sexist’ Question”. Yesterday, on the Washingtonian was a gushing exposé on Barack Obama. It took a conversation with my wife to get to the revelation of the connection, but that’s why I love her. What they’re doing in the media is setting up the excuse the loser of the 2008 Democrat presidential primary can use. This, of course, precludes that the 2 media darlings in this case are Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton.
Nov
17
2006
Glenn E. (Bo) Schembechler -
April 1, 1929 – November 17, 2006
I am as big an Ohio State fan as there is on this planet (after all, I was born on Campus!) and this saddens me as much as when Woody left us. Those two men understood.
My sympathies and condolences to the Schembechler’s and the entire University of Michigan family. He was a great man and will be missed.
But I really can’t help but have a rye smile, thinking that Woody just wanted some familiar company for the game.
Nov
17
2006
For those of you who are unaware – or dead! – there is a fairly important college football game tomorrow. The red state versus the blue state, King Kong vs Godzilla, the unstoppable force vs the immovable object, a clash of Titans!
“The Game”
Go Bucks! Beat Michigan!
Nov
15
2006
How much will it cost me to get you to forget it ever happened?
Sonovabitch Lott, you’ve regained your spot as my archnemesis. Assuming you’d ever stopped being.
Also: Michelle is doing a good recap from around the dextrosphere.
Nov
15
2006
Watching the Left Eat Their Own
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Watching the Left Eat Their Own
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I love technology. Don’t you? I have 6 buttons on my Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer that provide me with all the information I need to know every day. One for Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire, one for Congressional Quarterly, 2 that tell me how crappy my portfolio’s doing, one for Fark.com, and one to tell me when I get e-mail from the church’s web page. But I digress. The real point of this post is to point you a nice little page that shows 2 stories of how the left is already beginning it’s consumption of itself.
Nov
15
2006
… we have two choices. We can sit on our hands, or we can fight. I choose the later!
Fighting this battle may just be tilting at windmills, but I’ll take a Don Quixote over a buffoonish Sancho any day.
I’d rather die striving for some lofty yet unatainable goal than to live with the knowledge that I was to much of a coward to try.
Hat tip to Ragnar at The Jawa Report and to Ace for leading me there!
Nov
15
2006
Let ‘em have it with both barrels
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Let ‘em have it with both barrels
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Somewhere along the line, I started getting emails from Bill Frist. I rarely read them, and always wondered what he’d say if he knew how disappointed I’ve been in him since I suggested (in the very early days of The Black Republican) that he take over the Senate leadership. But I never opted out because I wanted to hear what information he wanted to disseminate.
My patience has paid off a little, because he’s got this survey he wants people to fill out. The only thing better than venting on this form would be if they put a straw poll on it and let me rank him as the last person among the expected people running that I want to see as President.
Well… next to last, right before John McCain.
Nov
14
2006
And by “wavering Republicans” I mean myself.
The gang (and I mean that literally, of course) at Ace of Spades HQ is thinking that throwing the Rovemeister under the bus might not be such a bad thing if it nets us 6 To 8 Seriously Corrupt Democratic Senators. Or so the right index finger of Jack Abramoff is willing to point for prosecutors.
Only problem: for some reason, he’s being sent to prison where, for some reason, prosecutors aren’t allowed to talk to him. How much you want to make a bet this is the first “bipartisan deal” of the new Congress?
Nov
14
2006
Standing up for a lady
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Standing up for a lady
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An email sent to a certain Corner contributor on the occasion of a nasty column about her in one of the worst wastes of newsprint in America.
Kathryn,The particular comment irked me because it was recently used against me.Re: “Sex-obsessed”
I’ve never understood this charge when I hear it leveled. How is it that people whose whole world seems to revolve around “sexual orientation”, who apparently spend every waking moment needing it to be accepted and even endorsed by the rest of the populace, and who go on tirades like spoiled little children when someone won’t lie to them and tell them it’s perfectly fine, natural, and wholesome, have the twisted mentality to suggest that anyone who dares tell them to put a sock in it is “obsessed with sex”?
Akin to calling a black person “articulate”, this might just be code for someone who might otherwise be described as a “papist”. Because, you know, we just love to breed. (Something our detractors have a slight problem with, for some reason.)
On a not-entirely-separate note, please post fair warning next time you want me to visit the Village Voice. Now I have to shower.
Nov
14
2006
The downward spiral continues
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The downward spiral continues
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The smartest man in America offers some dispiriting words that invoke The TBR Rule.
It is easy to say “the parties are no different” or “things couldn’t get any worse.”I’ll admit that my last post may end up hyperbole, but for several years I’ve been thinking about the Whig precedent, and in this case the parallel is more than historical reflection – it feels like precognition.People have said that before — and have been proved wrong before. Before the election of 1860, abolitionists said it would make no difference whether Lincoln or a Democrat was elected. But millions of people were freed because that prediction was wrong.
In Germany, the Weimar Republic was nobody’s idea of an ideal government and, in the desperate days of the Great Depression, no doubt many German voters thought that nothing could be worse. But they discovered during the dozen years of Nazi rule just how much worse things could be.
Karl Rove always comforted any fears of mine by telling people that he was following an historic example set by the McKinley administration when they re-established Republican governance for a generation. But that plan has now fallen apart, and as a result the party seems bent on tearing itself apart. The idea that the leadership of my party is so ignorant of the political dynamics occurring within the rank and file is… well, it’s beyond my ability to characterize effectively. Hell, I was even one of the Republicans trying to convince people that comprehensive immigration reform wasn’t such a bad idea, and even I can see that handing the Democrats a victory on that issue now will completely capsize the Republican ship. I suggested to Steve the other day that perhaps the President’s plan might allow us to claim victory over the situation the way the Democrats siezed the Civil Rights mantle in 1964. That’s obviously what the President is hoping for, but – as Sowell points out in his piece – at what cost?
“Maverick” John McCain and social liberal Rudy Guiliani are the leading contenders for our Presidential nomination in 2008. Senator Arlen Spector is telling us we’re too conservative, and we should become just as liberal as the Democrats. And now an Hispanic empty suit is named to be the head of the RNC. Are we trying to ensure Hispanic loyalty to a party that won’t exist in a few years?