Chris Parry of The Vancouver Sun highlighted some of the comments on the mainstream, hard right-wing blog/news aggregator Free Republic. Among them, a picture of Michelle talking to Malia Obama with the caption: "To entertain her daughter, Michelle Obama loves to make monkey sounds." Classy. These mouthbreathing, borderline morons then kept piled on:

"A typical street whore." "A bunch of ghetto thugs." "Ghetto street trash." "Wonder when she will get her first abortion. "Could you imagine what world leaders must be thinking seeing this kind of street trash and that we paid for this kind of street ghetto trash to go over there?" wrote one commenter.
"They make me sick .... The whole family... mammy, pappy, the free loadin' mammy-in-law, the misguided chillin', and especially 'lil cuz... This is not the America I want representin' my peeps," wrote another. Such was the onslaught of derision on the site that the person who originally complained about the slurs, a Kristin N., claims only one comment in the first hundred posted actually criticized the remarks as inappropriate.

FreeRepublic claims to be a site that "does not advocate or condone racism, violence, rebellion, secession, or an overthrow of the government." Yet, the thread went down, and back up with the original comments in tact, and then some, notes Chris Parry, the story's writer. Parry was careful and kind enough to - maybe unnecessarily - note the few reasonable voices in the crowd who were conservative, on Free Republic, and not racist. But there're always going to be a few exceptions to the rule, which, as far as you should be concerned, are absolute swamp creatures. Pardon any political incorrectness, but I think you'll agree if you happen to go over and dip your toe in what's mostly a bog of contagiously slimy invective and general retardation.

It gets worse, though. Chris Parry, it appears, has advocated on his Daily Kos blog any number of egregious offenses, among them: posting hate speech on sites like Free Republic and blaming it on conservatives. Parry posted under the name "hollywoodoz" on Daily Kos, where his signature was "Fool me once, I'll punch you in the fucking head." Parry outed himself as hollywoodoz here, where he discloses the company he helped start. In essence: Parry, the journalist, found his story right where he'd been circling it for a very long time, and reported it as news. Sigh.

Bottom line: Parry's noble intentions are paving him a road to hell, by taking the same one the slimeball majority at Free Republic employs. They're probably going to cheer a "mainstream," centrist blog pointing out the offenses of a liberal reporter trying to expose hate speech, but they shouldn't get it mixed up. A quick glance at Free Republic and you'll probably see the same thing I did: some of the most egregious examples that lend credence to the idea that some people just shouldn't be allowed near a keyboard, or to open their mouths, no matter what their political affiliation. Or, as some would have it: STFU.

Conservative Free Republic blog in free speech flap after racial slurs directed at Obama children [Vancouver Sun]

Update: Since this post was penned, we heard from Chris Parry. "You accuse me of advocating the planting of hate speech on right wing websites, but you don't link to any such thing, and I'm unaware of having ever said such a comment in my many years at dKos. If you could point me to any evidence of same, I'd appreciate it. If you can't, can I ask you add a note stating as much?" The off-putting issue was Parry's signature, and the acronyms he posted at DailyKos. Both of these places can be rabbit holes of liberal/conservative baiting, and Parry - a journalist at a newspaper - clearly had something against the posters at Free Republic from the get-go (rightfully so, I should add: they're generally terrible people, as evidenced by what I've seen). These were first indicators that something was arguably off: someone employed in a traditional news outlet who also was a commenter on a far-left liberal blog. The acronyms - however facetious, which is the context I've now seen after spending time in said rabbit hole - were a (mild) advocacy, in my eyes: the "truth to every joke" idiom goes in, here. That being said, there's nothing to prove he actually planted anything. The headline was the only inaccurate part of this post, and it's now been changed from Hate Speech Against Malia Obama On Conservative Blogs Reported By Hate Speech Planting Journalist to Hate Speech Against Malia Obama On Conservative Blogs. Because, at the end of the day, who reported it isn't nearly as interesting as what's being reported, and the trend it's evidence of: respectively, a bunch of racist mouthbreathers calling this little girl a whore, and whatever the opposite of human evolution is.

"They come to us, expecting us to give them free publicity, and we do, but it's not a two way street," Jane Hamsher, the founder of FiredogLake, said in an interview. "They won't do anything in return. They're not advertising with us. They're not offering fellowships. They're not doing anything to help financially, and people are growing increasingly resentful."

SoapBlox grew out of Scoop, the software used on DailyKos, Markos Moulitsas's left-of-center superblog. Paul Preston, its developer, found himself running 25 different sites — the likes of My Left Wing, Blue Hampshire, West Michigan Rising, and Swing State Project. (All politics is local!)

And yet SoapBlox remained a one-man band. So when still-unidentified hackers infiltrated SoapBlox's servers, causing them to be taken offline, Preston despaired:

(+) SoapBlox is Dead
by: pacified
[subscribe]
January 07, 2009 at 08:15:46 MST
It was a good ride, but it's over.

Thanks for all the fish.

All these hackers messing with our stuff, and we here at SoapBlox have no clue what to do. We don't have enough knowledge, time, money, or care to fix it.

So I hope the Hackers are happy.

If you want the data from your blog, we will get it. But we are not going to try and restore anything.

Consider this the "We're Out of Business" post.

Most of the servers have been taken off line because they were being used to hack and exploit other websites. The hackers install this crap on servers after they get in. SoapBlox's ISP then takes the servers off line.

We do not know when they will come back online.

We do not know if they will come back online.

Since then, a groundswell of grassroots support has lifted Preston's spirits, and he's working on restoring the service. But how did so many sites come to depend on such a fragile operation in the first place? One argument is that other blogging services didn't offer SoapBlox's features, like the ability to feature a casual user's contributions on a site's homepage with a single click.

That's hardly true: Drupal, a popular piece of software used on Fast Company's website, has long offered a similar tool, as do the latest versions of Movable Type and WordPress. But what SoapBlox offered that they lacked was the comfort of familiarity, and DailyKos's stamp of approval.

For its liberal bloggers, too lazy to research alternatives, it was the — how to put it? — politically correct way to publish. And why should they have bothered looking elsewhere, since it was a fine choice for their purposes? But I suspect their built-in biases against market mechanisms played a role. SoapBlox's customers never bothered to ask whether Preston really had the financial resources to support it. That's far too capitalist a question for the left-wing blogosphere to have pondered.

Nate Silver started writing about how wrong polls were in a little Daily Kos diary, and lo and behold, he ended up predicting the primaries better than anyone! Then all the pros were like, who is this kid? When he revealed himself as a Baseball Prospectus writer, a very thin slice of stat geeks were all like, "ZOMG unbelievably awesome!"

Imagine if you found out that Richard Lawson had been selected as the new announcer on Monday Night Football. That's the level of thing that I'm talking about here, people.

So of course New York did a big story on this kid, what with his acceptable level of quirk. He's basically the smartest pollster in America now, amazingly. And we'll cut through all the technical mumbo-jumbo and give it to you straight:

As of October 8, the day after the town-hall debate, Silver’s simulations had Obama winning the election 90 percent of the time.

Brevity! [NY Mag; pic via Chicago Reader. To better understand this issue, read everything at Fire Joe Morgan immediately.]

• Wendi Deng Murdoch, MySpace China
• Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, MySpace
• Max Levchin, Slide
• Robin Li, Baidu
• Markos Moulitsas, DailyKos
• Elon Musk, SpaceX
• Ali and Hadi Partovi, iLike
• Mika Salmi, MTV
• Dmitry Shapiro, Veoh
• Quincy Smith, CBS
• Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times
• Peter Thiel, Clarium Capital
• Evan Williams, Twitter
• Andrew Zolli, PopTech

After four posts related to Edwards — and to the blowback from his initial Kos diary — Stranahan found himself banned from the site, unable to post diaries or even comments. Kos overlord Markos Moulitsas (pictured) has rubbished the scandal as "tripe," and what little discussion of it he has allowed has been of similar tone.

It's amazing that, given how the traditional media telegraphed lies about Iraq and any number of other subjects over the past decade (and beyond), left-leaning rabble rousers still marginalize stories simply for existing outside that same media's too-often corrupted worldview, diminishing their own power in the process. Amazing but, given the extremes to which ideologues of all stripes will go to ignore inconvenient topics, hardly surprising.

[Lee Stranahan]

Pelosi and Obama particularly can put an end to this mess. Rockefeller and his band of merry appeasers have too much power, making life really difficult for Reid. But if Reid holds firm and refuses to take up the bill on the Senate side first, then Hoyer has got to try to figure out how to get it through the House—a tougher proposition. But Pelosi could be a leader and say "no." Obama could make one phone call—whether to Hoyer, Pelosi, or to his friend and supporter Rockefeller—and say "no."

This "mcjoan" blogger is talking about FISA, but I'd just as soon have Alberto Gonzales grappling-hook his way into my living room because I said "Muslim" on the phone than have to read through that perspiring and heaving paragraph again. What mess has Nancy Pelosi ever put an end to, praytell? And couldn't mcjoan wait until the bill in question were passed or defeated before obsessing about it like that? I'm beginning to worry about her family's unwillingness to wage a C-SPAN intervention on her behalf.

"But you don't get it, Weiss! We have to stop the Bush-Cheney junta until term limits force it from office like all juntas!"

Yeah, yeah. At least Michelle Malkin sis-boom-bahs and Andrew Sullivan claps to Muppet videos.

I am depressed, and it's got me feeling nostalgic. Not too long ago there was a great Entertainment Weekly for the ivory tower called Lingua Franca, in which a celebrated essay by one Jim Miller was published under the title, "Is Bad Writing Necessary?" Miller held up two leftist intellectuals — Theodore Adorno and George Orwell — as examples of opposing prose styles that the modern lefty political writer would invariably adopt. Broadly speaking, one was difficult and esoteric, the other common but by no means vulgar. Adorno thought "lucidity, objectivity, and concise precision" were tricks perpetrated by "ideologies" of service mainly to money-grubbing editors and writers (he was kind of a Marxist); real culture demanded jargon and allusions that only a select readership would understand. Orwell, meanwhile, dug lucidity and concision — he would have agreed all writing was subjective — and thought you couldn't change people's opinions unless your stuff was universally comprehensible. Brute facts mattered, as did a window-pane transparency of meaning. Sexing up language to the point where it lost all semantic value was the stock-in-trade of totalitarianism. For the muddled democrat, it was a sign of insecurity ("Maybe my opinions are weak after all. If I hide them, no one will notice.")

The updated version of Miller's thesis, in this our dread age of blogorrhea, surely concerns the mirth factor. Postmodernism is dead, but tragedy is not. Even when the lefty blogs try to be cute or amusing, they fail horribly. When did "wanker," MyDD's epithet of choice, become a mordant insult? Two days ago, Think Progress teased me by promisingly titling a post "McCain Hates Condoms” (kudos to Cindy if they're even relevant in the marriage anymore) and then ending on this note: "Indeed, McCain is not what women want."

Indeed, no one saw that movie and Mel Gibson's not what they want anymore, either. Stop perusing Congressional testimony and update your fucking Netflix queque.

Perhaps the problem is that a sense of humor is innately conservative, as G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Kingsley Amis (after whom I named my Cocker Spaniel), Christopher Buckley, Judd Apatow and others have either explicitly or implicitly attested. Even Mark Twain was at his best when he was fusty and backward-looking.

Though that lets the other side of the aisle off too easily, I think. Feel free to use the space below to compile a list of great progressive wits and satirists for today's Balloon Juicers and Firedoglakers to model themselves on, or at least steal better nicknames from. Help put a smile on a Gitmo detainee's face.

[Daily Kos]
[Think Progress]

One thing all the sites at the extremes have in common: the more partisan the appeal of the site, the less attractive its proposition to advertisers. That doesn't matter too much to owners like Matt Drudge: his news link site still only employs two people. But, once the election campaign is done, sites like the Huffington Post—worth $200m, we're told—will struggle. ($200m? Guffaw.)

[Source: Nielsen, January 2008]

Top 30 Online Current Events & Global News Destinations, ranked by Sessions per Person
Brand or channel; sessions per person; unique audience (000)
1. drudgereport.com; 19.9; 3,445
2. Daily Kos^; 8.9; 1,204
3. Fox News Digital Network; 8.3; 10,177
4. CNN Digital Network; 7.9; 37,181
5. AOL News; 7.7; 21,119
6. Yahoo! News; 7.4; 35,274
7. MSNBC Digital Network; 6.4; 34,013
8. ksl.com^; 6.0; 796
9. Breitbart.com; 5.3; 2,674
10. Google News; 5.3; 12,050
11. Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division; 5.1; 13,998
12. NYTimes.com; 4.9; 18,975
13. Netscape; 4.8; 2,709
14. Townhall.com; 4.7; 1,152
15. Media General Newspapers; 4.6; 1,761
16. GTGI Network 4.5; 1,345
17. Star Tribune; 4.3; 2,108
18. TWC News Websites; 4.1; 840
19. NewsMax.com; 4.0; 4,054
20. Zwire^; 3.9; 1,089
21. Cox Newspapers; 3.9; 5,197
22. washingtonpost.com; 3.8; 10,441
23. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; 3.8; 1,259
24. The Buffalo News^; 3.7; 502
25. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; 3.6; 1,472
26. MediaNews Group Newspapers; 3.5; 5,850
27. USATODAY.com; 3.5; 10,571
28. WorldNow 3.5; 10,588
29. IB Websites; 3.4; 7,565
30. St. Louis Post Dispatch^; 3.4; 1,022

^ Indicates Home and Work audience duplication projections did not meet minimum sample size standards. Combined home and work audience estimates for these sites may exhibit increased variability month-to-month as a result.

This data, also from Nielsen Online, shows the monthly traffic and other data for newspaper-based Web sites for February 2008:

66,456,096 - monthly unique audience for newspaper sites, an increase of 13.2 percent (year over year)
41 percent - active reach, an increase of 9.4 percent (year over year)
3,064,613,644 - total page views on newspaper sites, an increase of 8.5 percent (year over year)
46.05 - page views per person

• Exciting! Exclusive! News! The former governor was seen wearing a windbreaker in his lobby!
  
• Since there's actually a hotly contested Democratic primary, the Daily Kos bloggers are whining at each other instead of whining at the Republicans.
  
• TMZ says Madonna might be leaving London and moving back to New York. No word yet on whether or not she's dropping her affected British accent.
  
• In San Francisco, even the strippers are a bunch of hippie Communists.
  
• Ashley Alexandra Dupré hung out in the Hamptons with Eliot Spitzer's friend and donor. Billionaire hedge-funder James Chanos says he partied with Dupré, but that he never dated her. He also denies having introduced her to Spitzer.
  
• The web site for Reliance Construction Group, the company responsible for the luxury condo crane collapse that left four people dead, says they specialize in "fast track scheduling" and boasts of their "willingness to take on assignments with deadlines considered virtually infeasible."
  

The day after the injunction, Wikileaks' web servers (hosted in Sweden by the company who used to host the world's most infamous site for illegal downloads, The Pirate Bay) caught fire. Apparently that's under control now, so you can still read secret documents like the US Rules of Engagement for Iraq, secret CIA funding for torture research, records of the U.S. violating the chemical weapons ban, FBI pedophile symbols, and operating procedure for Guantanamo.

(A technical note: What the government shut down was the domain, not the actual web host; if this happened to a bigger brand-name site, losing a domain could be devastating even if the site moved elsewhere. Plus this could lead to censorship of domain names themselves.)

Strangely, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the legal org which basically exists to scream bloody murder about this sort of censorship, hasn't written a thing about the shutdown; not even a link on their blog. It'd be nice to see some attention, since if this shutdown goes unchallenged, it sets a precedent for shutting down sites at the whims of their critics. Which would put a slight crimp on Gawker's style!