Mitch Townsend

I hate to link to this reptile, but here is a quote from Steve Gilliard, who thinks the execrable Atrios was too easy on Instapundit:

I don’t think anyone should call for him getting fired or shutting down his website or anything draconian like that. [ed. perish forbid!]Just inquire as to whether they share his beliefs, if he is a fitting representative of the University of Tennessee’s College of Law, and if that shirt and his public association as a professor at that school represents the values and ethos of his employer, the state of Tennessee.[ed. and maybe they’ll do the right thing …]

After all public employees across the United States have been sanctioned for expressing racially hostile opinions. [ ed. Remember, he said he didn’t want anything bad to happen because of this shirt. Ohnonononono. Free speech is important, as long as you don’t say something wrong.]And you have to wonder why Reynolds, who I assume is tenured, feels that way about diversity. Does he think his minority students are not as qualified as his white students? Does he think diversity has lowered the quality of the student body at the University of Tennessee College of Law? And is that an opinion shared by the dean and other members of the faculty?

I had a few things to say, but after reading this comment, I wish I’d kept my peace:

Does anybody know of any left wing blogs? I’ve looked around but all I find are parody sites like this one.

If you post to blogs using your real e-mail, you’ll likely get more spam. It appears that the robots spammers use to harvest legitimate e-mail have been visiting the comment section of popular weblogs. This is not the fault of the blogger — even banning all robots will not help, since the spammers’ bots ignore this preference setting.

I use a free service called spamgourmet, which gives you disposable e-mail addresses and lets you set a limit on how many messages can be sent to it. It also lets you track the number of messages forwarded, how many can still be forwarded, and when the limit has been reached, how many have been “eaten.” It works quite well, and if you suspect that your e-mail address might be passed on to spammers, you can code the temporary e-mail address to indicate where the spammer got it.

Here are the results from blog comments:
David’s Medienkritik, 38 spam eaten since 9/25/03
The Kolkata Libertarian, 19 eaten since 6/4/03
Brad DeLong, 13 eaten since 4/22/04, a strong showing for such short time.

Again, I’d like to stress that it is no fault of these fine bloggers that spammers visit their comment section. This is just to advise you to be careful. Use disposable e-mail addresses or disguise your e-mail by leaving out the @ or putting in extra characters that a real human will know enough to delete.

And in case spambots are visiting this site, here’s a nice fresh fake e-mail for you:
up.yours.spammer@die.spammer.die.com

I sat through most of your speech and did not hear anything new. We are used to the usual tactic of the challenger: contrast your glittering hypothetical to the incumbent’s messy reality. Maybe you can get Chirac, instead of Blair, to be your poodle. Maybe you would do all the same things as your opponent, but do them gracefully and to the applause of the world. I doubt it, but you are not the first to say it. I’m old enough to remember Nixon’s secret plan to end the Vietnam War. I don’t think your secret plan to make the permanent members of the UN Security Council follow your enlightened leadership will work out much better. Let it go; you don’t believe it any more than I do.

My question is this: if things are as badly awry as you say, what have you been doing about it? Senator Kerry, you have been in the senate for eighteen years. If health care were such an urgent issue, why did you never introduce a bill to reform it? If jobs are going overseas and American workers are not on that famous level playing field, what did you do about that? Every issue you raised in your speech is one that should have been addressed in the US Senate. Let’s stop talking about your Vietnam record. You have been in government for almost all of your life. Other than building your resume, what have you accomplished? Is there a major piece of legislation with your name on it? Please refresh my memory.

And if you have been mailing it in for eighteen years, what makes you think you are the man for this job?

I went into Boston today to see the preparations for the Democratic National Convention. I was hoping to see some giant puppet heads (am I the only one who wonders how flammable they are?), but I seem to have been too early. The anti-war protesters were gathering on the Common and apparently later marched to the Fleet Center, but it must have been a slow march. They were supposed to leave the Common at 2:00, but I left after 2:30 without seeing or hearing them. Since most of them are from out of town, it is quite possible that they got lost.

There are photos, entirely without esthetic merit, on the continuation page.

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Mark F. Pasquale, owner of Halftime Pizza, is a victim of a collectivist government program. The Democratic National Convention is being held at the Fleet Center, directly across from his shop. This would seem like a good thing, on the surface, but it has turned out to be a disaster for him. In their zeal to prove that there really is such a thing, the Democrats are providing a free lunch for the attendees. He will be closing his shop next week until the parasites leave and the free market is again permitted to operate on Causeway Street. He will be playing golf instead, but before leaving, he raised his banner of defiance against tyranny.

Pretty good pies, too.