Ironically enough ...

Our old pal, Ed Vielmetti, ongoing champion of all things Internet, appears in print this month, in the AA Observer. Patrick Dunn leads off an article on blogs and blogging with a Profile of Ed and the
Vacuum blog he writes.

Six bloody years

On the off chance that anyone cares, this month is the sixth anniversary of this blog. In that time, it's been viewed (gasp) 10,479 times. That's 1750 hits, more or less, a year. Man, we're burnin' up the net.

Oh, and the guy in the next office reminds me that the sequel to Many Believable Lies is in the pipeline. This one's gonna be called Clash by Night, and he really, really hopes to have it out on Amazon by the end of June. He says it's gonna have steampunk mayhem, more civic corruption, a climactic event in the middle of the Ann Arbor Art Fair, a budding romance, and -- more doggie bits! Who reads this stuff, anyway?

Is there a "red line" for political cartoonists?

Let me say that although Barack Obama is not, in my personal opinion, the greatest President we've ever had (for the record, that would be FDR), he's so much better than the two mindless idiots who ran against him and the mindless idiot who preceded him that there was never any question about who I'd support. I don't object to people criticizing him, though, when deserved and when conducted with either factual analysis or wit.

Likewise, although I don't always agree with him, I usually think Pat Oliphant is one of our better political cartoonists.

But his recent bit, showing Obama with none other than Richard Nixon, is over the top. Equating somebody with Nixon is not much more a) inflammatory and b) irresponsible than connecting him or her with Hitler. It's Internet-blog-commenter stuff. Oliphant was around for the Nixon years, and he should know better.

Frankly, if the White House did sic the IRS on the TeaBaggers, well, my left brain says "Oh, dear. That's not very good." But my right brain whispers to me that I'd have done much the same thing, except that it might have been Seal Team Six, not the IRS, that I'd have unleashed. This is why, as I've said over and over again, I will never run for office. The conflict between doing the right thing and the thing that feels right would kill me.

I know you'll be as shocked as I was

The Detroit Emergency Financial Manager says that things are lot worse than anyone thought. Especially those people who claimed that Detroit was turning itself around and didn't need no stinkin' Financial Manager. Astonishing.

Not the fake ad

If you read The Ann Arbor Observer and like to search for the fake ads they run every month, here's a tip. It isn't the one advertising a book called Many Believable Lies, written by some hack named McConnell. That one's real.

Don't mention the war!

I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it.

Visualize John Cleese in his role as Basil Fawlty, Director of Customer Satisfaction at Fawlty Towers, doing his Hitler imitation for a bunch of visiting Germans. Then read this piece about L. Brooks Patterson, doing his version.

The man is -- unique. That's all I can say. I especially like the picture of him using a comb to simulate a Hitler mustache.

Ha! You thought I was making that up! Made you look!

Inevitable, I suppose

The Internet has come of age, now in its twentieth year. A woman over in West Michigan is accused of setting up a FaceBook account for the purposes of ... wait for it ... harassing herself. Read about it here, if you want. Personally, I'd rather skip the details and know nothing more than the bare fact.

Lazy

Too lazy to bother trying to expand on or embellish this hatchet job done on Ron Paul by James Kirchick. There is apparently no limit to the insanity Dr. Paul is capable of -- and if there is, he has people who will exceed it for him.

OK, you figure this out

Thad McCotter, the former Republican Presidential Candidate, former Republican Congressman from Livonia, and former, um, I guess that's it, who flamed out of the 2012 GOP primary like a gift camel from Mali, is suing his former (there's that word again) aides for -- not making this up -- deliberately committing fraudulent acts in order to keep him from running for Congress again. (At least that's what the sketchy story on MLIVE says -- I thought he wasn't running for Congress again, due to his involvement with the Presidential race, but maybe he was just hedging his bets.)

Now, let me go back over that, in case you're as baffled as I was: McCotter is suing two of his ex-staffers for deliberately (he says) falsifying signatures on his nominating petition, specifically to keep him out of the race. That is, knowingly doing things that were illegal and that could (and did) get them (them, not McCotter) prosecuted. Motives are not mentioned.

Let's see, here. Who could have put them up to such a dastardly deed? Of course, if you're a Republican, you might assume that the Democrats did, striving to keep a brilliant, effective flag-bearer of the party from opposing them in the crucial race for a seat representing that powerhouse of commerce and culture, Livonia. Or, if you're a Democrat, you might be inclined to believe that the GOP told McCotter to keep his cotton-pickin' hands off the Presidential race (he did say some uncomplimentary things about the GOP, during the twenty minutes or so that he was a candidate), and suspect that they acted to spank him for interfering with their carefully-orchestrated Romnapocalypse. Either way, the whole thing is so spectacularly stupid that it only makes sense in a state whose GOP Party Chair thinks homosexuality and alcoholism are parallel constructs and whose Democratic Party couldn't find anyone to run against Rick Snyder except a guy named "Virg."

But at press time, odds were running twenty-eight to one that it was North Korea, attempting to get Dennis Rodman a foreign service appointment. Go ahead, look me in the eye and tell me it makes any less sense that way.

Idle hands are the devil's iPad

Having several ELP (extremely low productivity) days this week, due to a cold or something along those lines, I'm seeing more amusing video than usual. Here are two examples, which should be watched in sequence:

One has to do with goats screaming like humans.

The other has to do with humans screaming like goats.

Don't bother to thank me. It's all in a day's work.