JABbering Stooge

Modern “Journalism” In America:

The perils of dashing off observations on the microblogging site were brought into sharp relief Monday when several overeager ABC News employees — including “Nightline” anchor Terry Moran — rushed to tweet that President Obama had called Kanye West a “jackass” for interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards on Monday.

The problem: Obama made the comment during off-the-record chatter as he was being miked for an interview with CNBC anchor John Harwood.

How exactly did ABC News get wind of it? The broadcast network’s Washington bureau shares a network fiber line with CNBC, and so ABC staffers in D.C. watching CNBC’s feed heard the exchange. What they didn’t hear, apparently, was the explicit agreement CNBC made with the White House that Obama’s chitchat was off the record.

The president weighing in on the biggest pop culture story of the day was too delicious to ignore. Soon, e-mails about Obama’s comment began circulating internally at ABC. Before news executives had determined whether the material was publishable, Moran and a handful of other ABC News staffers posted the remark on Twitter.

“Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a ‘jackass’ for his outburst at the VMAs when Taylor swift won,” Moran tweeted. [The offending tweet has since been deleted, but it lives forever on the Intertubes. — Ed.] “Now THAT’S presidential.”

So basically, ABC was “accidentally” listening in on an off-the-record interview with John Harwood of CNBC and, thinking they had just heard some juicy dirt to dump on the president with, rushed off to do the journalistic equivalent of tattling on him to the principal. Memo to Terry Moran — here’s what the dictionary has to say about the word “jackass:”

jackass — n.

1. A male ass or donkey.

2. A foolish or stupid person; a blockhead.

Example: Terry Moran was being a complete jackass in his tweet about President Obama’s comments on Kanye West.

Note that the definition is not labeled as “vulgar slang” the way words like “shit” or “fuck” are. Not that that matters to the jackasses at ABC.

MY COMMENT ABOUT OBAMA ON WALL STREET

• LOL! Epic Logic FAIL! I’m not comparing B. HUSSEIN Osama X The Usurper to a child molester in that infamous tweet, but since he’s just as dangerous to Wall Street as a child molester is to kids, they are comparable in a way. Stupid libtards!

“Shorter” concept created by Daniel Davies, perfected by Elton Beard and given a beneficial mutation by the fine folks at Sadly, No!
I am aware of all Internet tradtions.™

I haven’t seen logic this bad from Boortz since he declared Kerry voters were just as dangerous to America as all Muslims Al-Qaeda.

Just think folks, this moron used to be a lawyer.

After spending seven tweets devoted to engaging in one particularly egregious libel of Sen. Kennedy, I think it’s safe to say that Andrew Breitbart has earned the right to be slapped with this:

Spending two whole days shitting on Ted Kennedy’s corpse suggests that, despite your protests to the contrary, you don’t think he had ANY redeeming qualities whatsoever.

If you’re wondering why I’ve been taking part in a flame war against Andrew “Combs are a Commie plot to sap my precious bodily fluids” Breitbart, let me point you to this tweet of his:

How I calculated WHEN to attack TK: Multiplied time he spent trying 2 save MJKs life & to be safe multiplied it by billion. But still got 0.

So I went to the Ratscrews Division of JABbering Stooge LLC, and put them to work developing a corresponding mathematical formula. Here’s what they came up with.

Formula for Determining When to Respond to Andrew Breitbart’s Tweets About Ted Kennedy:

t_C = t_BHDQ x k

Where t_C = time until counterattacking Breitbart and
t_BHDQ = total length of time Breitbart’s Basic Human Decency Quotient rose above a threshold value of 6.626 x 10^-34 in the first 24 hours after Sen. Kennedy’s death was announced
(k is a constant value)

Studying this formula for about a day, I discovered an interesting corollary:

Given:

t_C = t_BHDQ x k

Then:

∀ k ∈ ℜ s.t. k > 0, t_C = 0

Trust me, I tried — even with k = 6.02 x 10²³.

* Cf.

Andrew Breitbart, Dean of the Zhdanov School of Conservative Correctness, for using Twitter to leave a Cleavland Steamer* with the consistency of anal leakage on Sen. Kennedy’s corpse.

* Cf.

If it will stop your inane bitching (and Glenn Reynolds’ retweet-quality blog posts) on the subject, we’ll refrain from naming the health care reform bill after the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. In return, we want you to stop naming everything that’s nailed down after your heroes St. Ronnie The Red-Ink Raygun and The Most Holy George W. Christ The Infallible.

I’m posting this from my laptop because the hard drive on my desktop bought the farm just a few minutes ago. Unfortunately, as is typical for me, I hadn’t backed up my data in a loooooong-ass time, and the initial diagnosis suggests that any data on afflicted hard drive will be very difficult to recover, if it’s at all possible.

While much of the data on there is of personal import, I don’t think it’s anything I can’t live without. Besides, a fair bit of it was there from the last time I backed up my computer.

Ain’t modern technology grand?

Just another “ordinary citizen”, merely expressing his opinion.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Reacting to some strange Weirdpress errors, John Cole asks:

Are you all getting a bunch of wp errors?

The first comment is priceless for those who know SQL:

Select answerID
From ResponseToJohnColeQuestions
Where Question = “Are you all getting a bunch of wp errors?” and answers = “yes”