Candid video — Obama rips Axelrod on dog-eating debacle

I made this video because I could not help imagining Obama’s conversation with David Axelrod over making him a dog-eating meme laughingstock until the end of time.

The Obama campaign is working hard to create distractions from Obama’s record. The image of the Romney’s Irish setter, Seamus, having bouts of diarrhea in his kennel strapped on the roof of the family station wagon during a family vacation in 1983 must have looked like the perfect way to demonize Romney.

Then a Daily Caller commenter named “Flatfoot” ruined everything. He reminded the Daily Caller’s humor blogger, Jim Treacher, that Obama boasted of eating dog meat during his youth in Indonesia. When PETA and DogsAgainstRomney.com tried to whitewash this as cultural and/or a youthful indiscretion, Treacher published a YouTube video of the dog-eating passage being read aloud by Obama himself for the audiobook version of his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. (The link has a bonus video of the “Morning Joe” contributors on MSNBC barely able to discuss the topic for laughing.) Now #ObamaEatsDogs is a hashtag on Twitter.

Ace, et al., have collected some especially delicious Photoshops — here are a couple of samples:

See Treacher for many more hilarious Obama dog-eating Photoshops.

Dear Keith Koffler, the White House reporter who blogs at White House Dossier, has rounded up the best tweets on #ObamaDogRecipes.

Michelle Malkin notes this scandal has given a sinister “new flavor” to the Obama school chant from 2008 — and links to the coverage at her new site, Twitchy.

And Allahpundit turned up a new Downfall parody where Hitler discovers that Obama has eaten his dog:

If you enjoy this video, I would love to make more. However, Xtranormal charges for characters and scenery. I take care of my father for room and board while I’m recovering my health and creating a career that will support me in the future. So if this video made you laugh and you can spare a few bucks, I’ll use the money to cover some pressing medical issues, make more videos and to buy the tools I need to improve this blog and make money. Thank you!

Update, 4/20/12, Fri.: Thank you, Prof. Jacobson, for making me “Post of the Day” at Legal Insurrection. Welcome, Legal Insurrection readers! For my readers, if you click the link, you will see a car bumper decorated in a fashion often seen in areas with high concentrations of openly lesbian liberals. But not one “Obama 2012” sticker. Hmmmmm. I wonder what to make of that.

Update, 4/26/12, Thurs.: Allahpundit at Hot Air features a delicious clip from MSNBC (!) of David Axelrod suddenly eager to change the subject from dogs.

Moe, what you need to know about how to monetize Tumblr

Dear Moe Lane inspired this post by noticing that Tumblr is a thing. How did this happen? Here’s the money quote from the video, which I urge you to watch because the young lady is both witty and wise:

Tumblr is life. Tumblr is probably going to take priority over your friends, homework and other obligations and responsibilities. It’s a Tumblr thing.

A political commentary blog like this one is tough to monetize. One of the reasons I’ve been quiet here is that I have to put my time into activities that make me healthy or wealthy — preferably both. I must become self-supporting while my father is still alive. Failure is not an option. I have a total passion to write this blog and have no trouble thinking of posts I would love to write every day. But you need a ton of traffic to make money from advertisements or affiliate links (such as reviews linked to a product on Amazon).

The other potential income streams are donations, subscriptions and posting an Amazon wish list. The donations to this blog have transformed my life HUGELY for the better and I am very grateful.* And the subscribers give me a huge boost to my morale, far out of proportion to their subscription amount. To make a living from this blog, I won’t just have to find my tribe, I will have to create one — which I’m totally stoked to do, by the way.

A political blogger is selling advocacy, wit and wisdom on spec. We have the business model of hippies — “Donate whatever you feel” — and panhandlers — “Help me with my crisis!”

Or, more accurately, we have the business model of worthy causes — charities, churches, non-profits, political parties and politicians: we must persuade supporters that our value to causes they support is worth their money. Fiscal conservatives fight to keep government small, taxes low and liberty safeguarded so that people have the discretionary income to give to the causes they choose.

Niche bloggers — the ones who have targeted markets that pay money for information products and physical items that they sell and the affiliate programs they promote — monetize their Tumblr blogs as follows (click the link for more details and links — also here):

  1. Contextual ads, such as Google Adsense
  2. In-text advertisements
  3. In-image and in-video advertising
  4. Affiliate programs, such as Amazon Associates or ClickBank
  5. Banner ads
  6. Sponsored posts (someone pays you to write something)

By the way, for a list of the top 10 ways to monetize a niche blog on WordPress, as opposed to Tumblr, dear David Risley is my go-to guy. The only thing I would add is that niche bloggers can build an opt-in e-mail list and use it to promote affiliate products and do joint ventures with other marketers in their own niche and related niches. Check out his podcast, “The Blog Program,” — show #2 lists 11 ways to monetize a blog.

*To the donors who sent me to CPAC: I will be explaining this week what happened to me the day after CPAC that was a big setback in my health and general progress. I still plan to write about it and I’ve just about re-gained all the ground I lost that day. The short version is that my working memory took a big hit, which plunged me into a two-month black hole.

Guy comes out on Facebook and his friends all react by …

… carping that his coming out post linked in his Facebook coming out update should have been more fabulous. Check out the full “guy comes out on Facebook” thread. The following were some of my favorite reactions from his friends — I recommend clicking to read the story because their interaction as they geek out on the stylishness of his coming out post is hilarious (assuming you are a geek):

[Commenter A]: Good work, [gay guy], it takes a lot of guts to post things on a plain HTML page these days. You’re an inspiration to us all 🙂 Oh, and well done on the coming out as well. It’s good to see people accepting things like this. I think we can all agree that gay scientists had it rough in the past.

[Commenter B]: Have you told your family you don’t use style sheets? That’s the hardest part.

This matter-of-fact, no biggie reaction by this young gay man’s friends illustrates why Fox contributor and granddaughter of Pres. Herbert Hoover, Margaret Hoover, devoted one chapter of her book, American Individualism, to telling Republicans why they must embrace gay equality to remain viable as a party. Republicans just won’t attract young people with their current paradoxical branding of, “We’re about liberty and equality, except for you, you and you!” Kids these days! Where did they get the idea that the following statement includes lesbians and gays: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Speaking of the best ways to come out, here’s my nomination for the “Best Coming Out Letter EVAH!”

Note: The above is an affiliate link to Amazon. If you click it and buy anything on Amazon, I get a small commission at no extra expense to you.

About Joy’s advice on how to talk to the now-undecided voter who supported Obama in 2008

Over at the Conservative Commune, Joy McCann has an excellent post on “How to talk to the undecided voter” who voted for Obama in 2008. I recommend reading it. This is the group that is unhappy with the current economy and unemployment rates — especially if their own unemployment rate is 100 percent — but which does not follow political news closely, believes the mainstream media are fair watchdogs rather than unscrupulous propagandists, and has no economic or political philosophy to guide them in their choice of party or candidates. Due to their own honesty and idealism, they feel secure voting for the candidate making the best offer because, ahem, why would he or she lie? Wouldn’t the media catch them?

(Note to any liberals who have wandered in: in 2008, Pravda was mocking the U.S. press for its bias in favor of Obama. Pravda.)

The group to whom Obama promised the most and has delivered the least is lesbians and gays. They may be a harbinger of the behavior of the disappointed Obama 2008 voter in 2012. Judging from the comments on “Obama Advisers Reportedly Debating Gay Marriage,” by John Aravosis, which I recommend you read, gays finally have started to track Obama’s promises and they have noticed they don’t match what he actually delivers. As a result, they are refusing to donate and volunteer for Obama this time around — some are threatening to stay home on election day. So the point I would add to the discussion is that we need to be making lists of when Obama said one thing and did another.

Note to John Aravosis:

  1. Gays are voting for Romney in the belief he will govern as a fiscal conservative and the hope that his social conservative policies will fail. We do not believe Romney is a closet social liberal. We are concerned that he is a closet fiscal liberal and we consider this a bug, not a feature. You really need to get a better grip on the philosophies underlying fiscal conservatism and social conservatism.
  2. What Republicans are saying Obama supports gay marriage? Because all the ones I know like to rub it in that he doesn’t.
  3. Democratic gays and lesbians belong to a party that, in 2012, does not support their equality and has the gall to pose as vacillating instead in order to string them along and keep their money, volunteer labor and votes. The gay community only thrives because it embodies fiscal conservative values of self-reliance and entrepreneurship. If you REALLY want to throw a scare into the Democrats and have some leverage, start making a show of listening to conservative lesbians and gays so they understand you have an alternative and you’re considering it.

In 2012 you can still be fired in 29 states due to your race or religion

Did I say you legally can be fired in 29 states in America due to your race or religion? Dang. I meant sexual orientation. You can be fired because you are gay, no matter how well you are doing your job, in 29 states. In America. While Obama is president and head of the Democratic party, which claims to support gay equality. Even though it did not pass ENDA, the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, which would protect gays from job discrimination, or repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, when Democrats controlled Congress and the White House from 2009 to 2011.

In fact, in September 2009, at the height of their powers, Democrats showed their true colors on gay equality and told gays that they would definitely repeal DOMA and pass all the laws needed to ensure gay equality as soon as hell froze over, but not a minute before. (Democrats do not deserve any credit for the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” because they didn’t do it until it was clear that the Log Cabin Republicans were about to prevail in their lawsuit to overturn the policy.)

And now, true to their word, Democrats are resisting including a plank in the party platform giving unequivocal support just for marriage equality, never mind protection from job discrimination.

Obama’s status of “evolving” on gay marriage took a baby step this week when he was cornered into releasing a statement through a surrogate that he “does not support” — which isn’t quite the same as opposing, is it? — a North Carolina referendum that would “make marriage between a man and a woman the only marriage the state would recognize.” The referendum will be voted on in North Carolina’s May 8 primary ballot.

Come November, Washington state, Minnesota, Maryland and Maine will have referendums on marriage equality on their ballots, so it will be instructive to see how far leftist gays will push Obama and the Democrats to deliver on their promises of support for gay equality. One of the most powerful strategies they could use to succeed in this is to start making a big show of willingness to hear lesbian and gay conservatives explain what fiscal conservatism has to offer the gay community. Show them that gays DO have options. Dear Human Rights Campaign, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, GLAAD and PFLAG: it’s called leverage, and I’m ready when you are.

Handy tips for using Facebook’s new timeline

On March 30, 2012, Facebook will change all profiles to its new “timeline” format. I found a graphic today explaining “10 Things You Need to Know about Revamped Facebook Pages,” but it is not embedding properly so I am just going to link it. What I like best about is that it tells you the dimensions in pixels to use for your photos and graphics. If you check it out, be sure to enlarge the graphic to a readable size by clicking it.

Update, 12/3/14, Wed.: I’ve gotten exhausted caring for my 98-year-old father through a health crisis over the last couple of months and I’ve neglected everything else. He’s feeling better and is stable now. So today I checked my e-mail for the first time in a couple of weeks and found a kind note from Willy Turner thanking me for using his group’s infographic and asking me to replace it embed code he provided. He may have been using boilerplate because his e-mail asked me to link the graphic to its source, as if I had embedded it without attribution. As noted above, I couldn’t embed the graphic and only described it and linked it to Visual.ly, which I thought was its source. However, the source link Willy provided me goes to Integricity Group, which apparently owns the copyright. So I’ve changed the link above to the one he requested me to use, and here is the graphic, thanks to the embed code he sent me (clicking on it goes to Integricity’s website):

Obama’s record on Israel

This video is about 30 minutes, but it is a handy summary of Obama’s record on Israel. It is important because what Obama says and what he promises always have to be tracked. What he says must be checked to see if it is consistent with other statements on that issue — or if what he said was what a particular audience wanted to hear for him to get what he wanted. His promises must be tracked to see what he actually does since he often reneges or he fulfills his promises in a way that betrays its recipients. Obama’s track record on Israel is particularly appalling.

Dear Jeff Dunetz, aka Yid with Lid, asks, “Can you judge Obama by his Jew-hating friends?”

Yes, you can, and that judgment was very influential in my vote against Obama in 2008, thanks to the reporting of Ben Shapiro, who is now an editor for Breitbart.com — and whom I got to meet at CPAC last month (thank you, donors!).

Bloggers remember Andrew Breitbart

I agree with all the praise of my fellow bloggers in this video for Andrew Breitbart — Stacy McCain, Chris “Smitthy” Smith, Sean Hackbarth, Tabitha Hale and others. Dear Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, and his wife, Dr. Helen, came to the memorial for Andrew Breitbart at the offices of Americans for Tax Reform in Washington, D.C., and conducted the interviews. My comment is at about the four-minute mark on what’s next: “I am Breitbart.” We’re all Breitbarts now.

Photo of Andrew Breitbart with Shepard Fairey coloration and the slogan, "Be Breitbart."Joy McCann also has a lovely remembrance post on Andrew with the following conclusion:

The bottom line? Don’t let them get by with lying. That’s it.

And that is Andrew’s legacy: he put the last nail in the coffin of MSM privilege. The jig is truly up.

Michelle Malkin’s newest blog mines Twitter, finds gold

Twitchy.com banner
Twitchy.com's banner.

Check out Michelle Malkin’s newest blog, Twitchy. What Twitchy does with Twitter — explained at Ms. Malkin’s blog here — is similar to what Memeorandum does with blogs and news websites. It’s a Twitter curation blog, which means her editors are pulling news on a spectrum of news categories onto a page that gives you a bird’s eye view of what’s happening in the world.

However, unlike Memeorandum, which gives you a bird’s eye view of what prominent blogs are covering a particular story, Twitchy apparently selects funny or useful tweets that link to a news site providing the full story. So Twitchy is leveraging the smartness — or smartassery — of the selected tweet’s author. I’m betting that there will be tweeters who will become favorites of the editors and will essentially be columnists. I think getting your tweet selected for Twitchy is going to become very prestigious.

I’m also impressed with the opt-in for Twitchy’s newsletter. Getting people to allow Ms. Malkin to e-mail them means she can monetize the blog and make very significant money from it, since the e-mails can contain both the promised news and also advertisements and affiliate offers.

One of the biggest problems that political bloggers have is figuring out how to get paid for all the time they put in writing their blogs. How do you monetize a political news or commentary blog? There are six ways to monetize a blog:

  1. Donations, including an Amazon wish list
  2. Subscriptions and membership
  3. Contextual ads (like Google Adsense)
  4. Affiliate offers
  5. Direct advertising
  6. Selling products.

The problems political news and commentary bloggers face are that we are at the mercy of breaking news, we must be virtually omniscient, our product goes stale immediately and it gets very little traffic after the initial excitement. Contrast that with niche bloggers, who target a niche where people will buy products they create, such as information products or software, and buy affiliate products that pay them a commission. They can write on a decent schedule and their posts will draw organic traffic from Google for years.

So, kudos to Michelle Malkin for figuring out how to mine Twitter for gold.

What I propose to protect conservatives under attack on Twitter

Bill Whittle says he thinks Twitter killed Andrew Breitbart because it let so many toxic people send their poison his way and he took them on directly.

I was worried about just that problem for Andrew and spoke to him about it at CPAC 2010. Re-tweeting tweets that are especially toxic or looney does nothing to stop their senders because they do not feel shame or remorse about their actions — instead they feel a gleeful righteousness and feed on the pain they cause like vampires. It’s like trying to kill starfish by chopping them into five pieces and throwing them back in the ocean. Starfish can regenerate their limbs, so what that does is give you five times more starfish. (The things you learn from the Discovery Channel.) So re-tweeting multiplies your enemies, it does not dismay or destroy them.

What to do?

You destroy darkness by turning on the light.

I told Andrew that I wanted his permission to start a hashtag that I would use whenever I saw him retweeting tweets attacking him. I wanted his permission because doing something like that looks like sucking up. I wanted him to know that I was genuinely expressing love for him. I told him I was concerned about his heart and wanted to know how he would feel about my doing that. He told me he would love it! He said he got pounced on wherever he went by people who wanted to argue with him, so he was constantly embattled. He told me that no one really backed him up with that kind of loving support. (Even though he always leapt to the defense of others.) Again, he said he would love it.

So what I did when I saw Andrew re-tweeting especially toxic tweets was to send him tweets with the hashtag #wol, for “wave of love,” and tell him I was sending him a wave of love. Sadly, I couldn’t keep up, and I couldn’t get anyone else to pick up the meme, and I stopped trying far too soon.

However, now I would like to propose to my fellow bloggers and conservatives that we come up with a better way on Twitter to surround any one of our number who falls under mass attack on Twitter with an invincible shield. I’m especially concerned for Gov. Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. What I suggest is that instead of retweeting any toxic tweets, we bombard their sender with tweets of support for the person who is their target. Here’s the hashtag I propose and how I propose to do it:

@ToxicLeftist, you have generated a #waveoflove for @SarahPalinUSA (or @michellemalkin or @AnnCoulter). BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!* #tcot #tlot

Which comes out on Twitter as follows:

 

*There’s only so gracious one needs to be. Feel the schadenfreude.

Dear gentle readers and fellow conservative bloggers, what do you think?

Update, 3/4/12, Sun.: Thank you, Instapundit, for the link (I urge dear gentle readers not sent by Instapundit to read his post, too), and I welcome Instapundit readers.

Update, 3/4/12, Sun.:

Not for nothing, the #waveoflove for our conservative champions on Twitter complies with Rules 5 and 6 of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals:

Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counteract ridicule. It also infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.

So, regarding “who then react to your advantage”: We just have to do this enough to make it a trending topic a few times to be able to force the mainstream media to cover it. How sweet will that be?

Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, then there is something very wrong with the tactic.

See above: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

And don’t be worried that Rule 13 says the point of the attack is to smoke out the target’s supporters to take them down, too:

Rule 13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. As soon as you zero in and freeze your target and carry out your attack, all of the “others” come out of the woodwork very soon. They become visible by their support of the target.

Don’t worry, not only because we will have a #waveoflove for you, too, but also because of …

Rule 12: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You can not risk being trapped by the enemy by his sudden agreement with your demand and saying “You’re right, we don’t know what to do about this issue, now you tell us.”

They don’t have one and will never have one, as Friedrich Hayek explained in his 1945 book, The Road to Serfdom. You can download the free Reader’s Digest condensed version in pdf here.

I live with my father, who will be 96 next month, and take care of him. I cover my expenses with donations from this blog. If you enjoyed this post, please donate the amount of your choice to send me to BlogCon in April and put more tools for this fight in my hands, like an HD webcam and microphone for making YouTube videos: