As you may know, I recently joined the team over at The Angry Black Lady Chronicles, and she actually gets visitors to her website. Lots of visitors. More visitors in a day than this lonely little blog has received in its entire lifetime.

Please come on over there and read ALL the terrific contributors who make ABLC so entertaining.

I’ll keep this place alive for now, in case there’s something I want to say that just isn’t appropriate for my new venue. But at the moment, I can’t think of anything I could possibly say that wouldn’t be cool with ABL and her crew.

So what are you still doing here? Get thee to ABLC!

Really, who is better positioned inside the Republican Party to stand up to the racism of Rush Limbaugh than Senator Mitch McConnell?

As the Senate Minority Leader and the spouse of Elaine Chao, only he combines the gravitas of senior leadership with a direct connection to the Asian-American community.

Surely a man with his power cannot stand by and watch his wife and children mocked by a circus clown who seems intent on ensuring that the GOP earns zero minority votes. I’m sure that if citizens call this racist routine to Senator McConnell’s attention, he’ll bravely step forward and challenge Limbaugh publicly.

You can reach his DC office at: (202) 224-2541
Louisville: (502) 582-6304

Please use the comments to report on how your call to McConnell’s office went.

Noting that one of them, “Ann Ducket” was described as an attorney and a former candidate for office (as a Democrat!), I figured that there would be more information available about her via the Googles.

And there was.

I wrote CNN via their “report errors” feature with what I learned, and today they admitted, in writing, that their story contained errors.

Woot! Victory!

Umm, not so much.

For starters, CNN misspelled her name. It’s Duckett.

Second, Ann did indeed run for elective office in Colorado. She ran for the Mesa County DA in 2004. As an INDEPENDENT.

Ann lost that election to the Republican incumbent. Subequently, her husband, Stephen Fish, filed a suit against individuals associated with her rival’s campaign over a technical violation of law.

I e-mailed CNN with my findings.

Your story quotes “life-long” Democrat Ann Ducket. A simple Google search confirms that her name is spelled Duckett, and also that she ran for office in Mesa County, CA for district attorney – as an INDEPENDENT – in 2004.

When you pass on the claims of self-professed “lifelong party x member” as if that gives the person extra credibility, then fail to do any research to confirm whether the person in question is blowing smoke up your ass, then you fail as a news source.

This morning, I received the following e-mail from CNN.

Thank you from CNN!

As you know, CNN.com provides our readers with the resources to bring to our attention possible errors on our site. (Even the very talented CNN.com writers are only human, and yes they do occasionally make mistakes!) You recently took advantage of these resources and brought to our attention an error in one of our stories. Thanks to your eagle eye and your willingness to take the time to report it to us, it’s been corrected. This email is to acknowledge your contribution to CNN.com.

We are proud to be able to offer our millions of readers the opportunity to contribute to our reports in a variety of ways, and especially proud of readers like you, who partner with us in our efforts to be the very best. From all of us at CNN.com, THANK YOU! We look forward to hearing from you again soon.

OK, I thought. That’s refreshing. I can’t wait to see what changes have been made.

So I clicked through to the article in question again. Ducket, still misspelled, check. Claim that she ran for office as a Democrat, check.

To be sure, I ran the current version of the article against the Google cache version from April 3. No changes.

All of us know that web content, especially on news sites, is forever. CNN has officially acknowledged in writing that this written record contains errors, even patted a reader on the head and called him a good boy for catching them, but has so far failed to correct its content.

Did I mention that the original article was written by Shannon Travis, a CNN producer on the John King USA show? The program that brings us the commentary of Erick Erickson?

CNN is anticipating Democratic losses in Congress this November, as are all of us.

But CNN is setting the stage to spin it as the resurgence of Republicans, the victory of the Tea Party, and the end of Barack Obama. John King, Erick Erickson and Shannon Travis are there to feed that meme.

CNN: Stenographing the lies of right-wingers.

Cross-posted at the Daily Kos.

Or are the people in charge at Huffington Post all 13-year-olds?

It can be hard to tell sometimes.

Although I thought they would save the reveal until after the election…

There is a video segment at about eleven minutes that is simply flabbergasting.  

I didn’t realize how alienated people have become from the source of their food.

hat tip: tristero

In this video, the cast of American Idiot joins the band in the recording studio on Green Day’s 21 Guns, the song they performed together on the Grammys:

The phrase “phone lines have been jammed” is used by native speakers of American English to indicate that a higher volume of incoming calls are being received than the capacity of the recipient’s phone system, resulting in many callers receiving busy signals.

If you had researched this phrase, you would not now be in jeopardy of serious jail time.

This is an example of the kind of thing you were supposed to be learning in college instead of how to ratfuck your political opponents.