As IF Times

link  Holly Thompson Cant Shut Her Mouth After Yawning in Class.

When we were kids, all of us were warned by our parents that if we persisted in making  silly contorted facial expressions that it would stay that way permanently.  Well whaddya know?  Some real life evidence of this!   This may put a scare into some kids that if they keep on doing a certain something to themselves, they will in fact go blind.  The person who proves that will really be embarrassed.

But there must be something to this theory.  Kids should also be warned against saying stupid things as well, or else there’s a good chance they’ll wind up carrying that habit into adulthood.  We can offer up endless streams of stupidness  from many of the people who are quoted in the public space.  Politicians to be sure, as we can cite thousands of examples of obtuse hyperbole that is offered to the public as logical rhetoric.   There is no way they can actually believe what they say.  It must be because they can’t help it.   In fact, our images of many of these people are when they are captured in mid rant.  We’d be hard pressed to recognize them in a photograph with their mouths closed.

Most recently, the heated battle for budget cuts and fiscal responsibility in the U.S. have produced such treasures as,  “they are here to kill women”, oddly enough from a Democrat named Slaughter.   Chris Matthews of MSNBC employ and another who has his mouth regularly in the wind tunnel position,  has expressed that budget cuts will kill half his audience.   Ex-speaker Pelosi expressed that “elections shouldn’t matter as much as they do”.  In San Diego, budget cuts apparently will hurt students’ education according to teachers who are vastly overpaid.  That chestnut has been around for a while, but it’s worth trotting out as a standard complaint.   Apparently, budget cuts will close libraries which will contribute to illiteracy.  That’s debatable.  I can more willingly believe that closing libraries will affect the ability of the homeless to find a place to sleep.

Old people, students, immigrants, minorities, artists, gays, women, religious sects and workers seem to fight a never ending battle against their existence regardless of who is in office.   Logically, it’s best to avoid being part of that group of people if you can help it.  Of course recently, being a bug, a fish or a tree is not so benign either as that group is also apparently under attack.

Much of the wrangling that’s going on now is the usual posturing by both sides, but the arguments from the Republicans at least make some logical sense.   The retort to the GOP budget proposals by the Democrats on the other hand are full of the ‘open mouthed’ inanities that are taken directly from the progressive manual of rhetoric.    The president described the Republican plan for reducing the nation’s debt as one that would ” let roads crumble, accept mediocrity in education, stop caring for seniors and lead to as many as 50 million fewer people covered by health insurance” .  He derided the Republican approach as one that would not invest in “education or clean energy” while giving away tax breaks to wealthy people.  This is the same stuff we’ve been hearing for decades.

At an early age, kids should be warned against making contorted faces or expressing stupid things.  It can only lead to a career in politics.

link AOL and Huffington Post sued by unpaid bloggers | Reuters.

You knew this was coming, it was just a matter of time.  A few months back, America Online decided that the best way to spend their cash horde was to buy the far left wing graffiti, er I mean blog site, The Huffington Post for $315 million dollars.

Kudos to Arianna Huffington for being shrewd enough to create and promote her website as the repository for deranged ideologues.  The Post became the place to be seen for written opinions of the lefty persuasion and included scribblings from noted entertainment personalities which served to even more embellish the Post’s reputation.   For many bloggers who contributed to the opinions, having Huffington Post credentials conferred, to them at least, legitimacy, as if it were some kind of literary achievement.   In reality, most of the content could be found spray painted on the side of buildings as nonsensical diatribe.  The Post however gave voice and a stage to the raving ideologues.

Now that Arianna has gone mainstream, those same bloggers are clamoring for their share of the loot from AOL.  Good luck.  If their logic held any water, Hugh Hefner would have to share his profits with all the girls who had ever graced the pages of Playboy, since it can be argued it was their contributions that really drove the magazine.  These prototypical geeks writing pieces in their mother’s basement in their underwear may feel betrayed by Arianna, since they were supposed to be united against ‘the man’, ie the ‘establishment’.  Now it turns out, she is one of them.  So much for ideology and comrades in arms.

Bloggers write and pontificate on all sorts of things.  In general, nobody really cares unless you happen to have some previous notoriety from real life.  Then, you can spit out all kinds of flotsam and people will drink in your every word.  Think Charlie Sheen.  In America, it’s what sells, not what’s neccessarily good.  So the bottom line is, these shut out bloggers had better start writing something legitimate because their graffiti wall is gone.  Maybe it’s back to the spray can for most of them.