Wingnuts – Page 49

I am The Egg Man, He Is The Walrus

Published on January 6, 2007

Can’t say I’ve been mistaken for Jeff Goldstein lately but I know what Blood & Treasure means.

The long-entrenched media gatekeeprs don’t like it constantly getting it shoved up ’em and it so it pays them to classify bloggers as The Mob.

not in my etc, etc…

I wish people would stop talking about blogging as though it was some kind of coherent movement. I don’t want to be associated with assorted rightwing hacks and propagandists just because I happen to use the same means of electronic vanity publishing. Blogging is developing as a means for professional media to find better and cheaper commentary, which is why so many opinion mongers don’t like it. It’s also a means of expanding the beachhead for the world of propaganda and private facts. In the first instance, it’s the writing, knowledge and research that counts. In the second, you get recourse to pseudo egalitarian reasoning: I must be right because I am part if the brotherhood of the blog. As a rule of thumb, anyone who justifies their arguments or motives at any stage by referencing themselves as a blogger is almost certainly talking shite.

That’s my justification for sitting here in pyjamas and dressing gown at 4 o’clock in the afternoon up the spout then.

Read more Media, Blogs, Blogging, Internet, Domestic wibble

Another Attack Of the Blog-Vapours…

Published on January 5, 2007

One might almost find it too convenient.

Why are people at all surprised that a proven boor has made such a heavy-handed, cheap and worst of all unfunny attack on Firedoglake‘s Jane Hamsher?

That his broadside’s couched in the crudest sort of personal insult that the sort of sad pathetic man whose journalistic goals have included the production of online soft-porn would use shouldn’t be that shocking, surely?

After all, as the man himself once said, over at Dr Mrs. Ole Perfesser’s place:

vanderleun said…

Actually, she’s probably doing all right with this material. As a former editor of Penthouse I can tell you that the market for material concerning “mature” women is vast and varied. It has been for some time. Down in old Kentuck, they’d say “Horses for courses.”

12:52 AM

[My emphasis]

Whatever else, Vanderleun knows his markets: this latest outrage’s all over the posher side of USanian leftish blogosphere like a rash, nicely eclipsing discussion of what the new Democratic Congress will do.

Shorter G. VderL : “Result!”

Read more: Internet, Blogs, Blogging

I Shouldn’t Laugh

Published on January 3, 2007

But ah, what the hell, we all deserve a treat.

Which blogger and Enlightened Feminist Law Professor burst into tears on realising she was intellectually out of her depth at a Libertarian conference?

Bwahahaha.

Read more: Hubris, Nemesis, Althouse

Radiation Prognostication

Published on January 3, 2007

Via PZ Myers, here are the perenially preternaturally prescient Pat Robertson’s predictions for the coming year:

In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson predicted Tuesday that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in “mass killing” late in 2007.

“I’m not necessarily saying it’s going to be nuclear,” he said during his news-and-talk television show “The 700 Club” on the Christian Broadcasting Network. “The Lord didn’t say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that.”

Of course The Lord didn’t say ‘nuclear’, you dumbass. As any fule kno, the Supreme Being pronounces it ‘nucular’.

About Bloody Time

Published on January 2, 2007

I’d love to see more of these kind of lawsuits this coming year. let’s put the charlatans to proof.

Tele-evangelist sued over ‘God can heal’ claim

Ed Pilkington in New York
Tuesday January 2, 2007
The Guardian

Darlene Bishop, a tele-evangelist with a nationwide following, does not do things by half. When she and her husband Lawrence erected a statue of Jesus on the grounds of their mega church in Monroe, Ohio, they made it 62 feet high.

No less gargantuan are her claims about the power of prayer to overcome illness. Through a series of sermons, books and a television show, Sisters, broadcast on religious satellite channels throughout the US and abroad, she preaches that God has the power to heal even the most deadly diseases, including cancer.

But the contention is now the subject of a court action. Four of Mrs Bishop’s relatives are suing her over her claim that God cured their father – her brother – of throat cancer. He died of the disease 18 months ago.

In her book Your Life Follows Your Words, Mrs Bishop tells how she overcame her breast cancer through prayer, and how her brother was also cured. There is no mention of his death in the book, which she says is due to the fact that it was published at a time when he had been in remission for more than a year.

But the volume is still on sale through her website (price $15) under the blurb: “How God healed her of breast cancer and her brother healed from throat cancer”.

Mrs Bishop’s brother, Darrell “Wayne” Perry, was an accomplished songwriter whose work has been performed by big names in country music such as Tim McGraw, and by the Backstreet Boys. For a year before his death in May 2005, aged 55, he was cared for by his sister.

His children, Bryan, Justin, Olivia and Christian, have issued a lawsuit for wrongful death against Mrs Bishop because they claim she persuaded Perry to stop chemotherapy and rely instead on God’s healing. They contend in legal depositions that at the moment Mrs Bishop and her brother were touring the country preaching about the miracle of his recovery, they were both aware that he had been advised by doctors that his illness was terminal.

In a separate legal action to be heard on Friday they also accuse Mrs Bishop of probate irregularities and of mishandling her brother’s estate. “I am the oldest son of Wayne Perry”, Bryan has written, “and I think it’s a damn shame that we have to spend our money fighting our aunt.”

In her blog, Mrs Bishop dismisses the allegations as “complete lies”, insisting she would never tell anyone to refuse medical help. “I encouraged him to listen to the doctors, but he refused surgery.”

There is no sign of Mrs Bishop falling on her sword. The motto of her church, founded in 1978, is: “Because Emmanuel lives, I expect victory every time.”