Month: March 2007

Dogpile Metasearch Engine Pulls Ads Off Coulter Site

Trish

What a relief! I was muy dismayed earlier this week when I found out my favorite metasearch engine, Dogpile, advertised on Ann Coulter’s web site.

If you’re not familiar with a metasearch engine, also known as an aggregator, check it out. Dogpile — and the rest — put your search terms out there on many, many single engines, like the G-site and the Y-site, for examples, and give you the results from all of them, all at once. Plus, there’s a neat little mascot dog that wags its tail while you type in the box. Can’t beat that.

You can see why I was pretty heartbroken about the skank site ads. But before I unbookmarked Dogpile for good, I sent them an email and asked them to pull their ads from Harpy.com. At first, they said they were still mulling it over. I conferred with Jon, who suggested I help them clarify things by asking if they would have so much trouble deciding what to do if Coulter had used the n-word instead of the f-word in a public forum.

Very quickly, I was informed Dogpile had decided to pull its advertising from the Coulter site. Hooray!

The next time you’re trying to find something online, use Dogpile. I wish they had never been on Coulter’s site to begin with, but I applaud their decision to rectify the mistake.

U.S. Attorney Says He Felt ‘Pressured’ By GOP Pols

Jon Ponder

At congressional hearings yesterday into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys by the Bush Justice Dept. last Descember, David Iglesias, who was the federal prosecutor in New Mexico, accused two GOP members of Congress from the state — Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson — of trying to pressure him on investigations in the Albuquerque office.

Asked by Schumer if he felt pressured by [Rep. Heather Wilson’s] call, Iglesias replied: “Yes sir, I did.”

Iglesias, a Republican, said the motivation of both Domenici and Wilson was political.

About Sen. Domenici:

…Iglesias told senators he felt sickened when Domenici hung up on him after being told that indictments in a corruption case against Democrats would not be handed down before the November elections.

“He said, ‘Are these going to be filed before November?'” Iglesias recalled. “I said I didn’t think so. And to which he replied, ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ And then the line went dead.”

Iglesias said he received the call from Domenici at home on Oct. 26 or 27 and that it lasted two minutes, “tops.”

“I felt leaned on. I felt pressured to get these matters moving,” Iglesias testified. Asked by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., whether such a call was unusual in Iglesias’ experience, the former prosecutor answered, “Unprecedented.”

About Rep. Wilson:

Iglesias told the panel he received a call from Wilson in mid-October in which she asked him about sealed indictments a topic prosecutors cannot discuss. Wilson’s question “raised red flags in my head,” Iglesias said.

“I was evasive and nonresponsive to her question,” Iglesias told the panel, saying he talked generally about why some indictments are sealed. “She was not happy with that answer. And she said, ‘Well I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.” The call ended almost immediately, Iglesias said.

Asked by Schumer if he felt pressured by that call, Iglesias replied: “Yes sir, I did.”

Other testimony revealed that the U.S. attorney in Arkansas was let go only to be replaced by a protege of Karl Rove named Tim Griffin, who has since decided not to stay on in the position because of the “partisan circus” around his appointment.

The committee also released an email from one of the fired prosecutors to his colleagues recounting a phone conversation he’d had with a a senior Justice official in February warning him to keep quiet about the firing or risk becoming the target of a Bush administration smear campaign.

Haggard’s Church Lays off 44 People While Paying Him $130,000 Per Year

Jon Ponder

The True Life megachurch in Colorado Springs that was founded by Ted Haggard, the drug-addled self-hating homo evangelist, has laid off 44 people — approximately 12 percent of its employees — saying the Haggard scandal has negatively affected the church’s fundraising.

“As a pastor he never had to pay for his cars or his house (and he has a huge house with a pool and maids) and he got that 130k salary not to mention all the money he made from his books.
— Former church employee

Haggard was fired last November after it was revealed that he had sex with a gay prostitute and had purchased a large quantity of crystal meth. Yet the church continues to pay Haggard’s $130,000 annual salary, at least through this year.

A former church employee said in comments to Pensito Review:

I just got laid off … from New Life Church … If we weren’t paying him all of this money, people who worked there and weren’t the ones lying and deceiving the church would have been able to keep their jobs.

But no, we are going to pay Ted the one who lied to us all, deceived us all and was the one who did somthing wrong.

As a pastor he never had to pay for his cars or his house (and he has a huge house with a pool and maids) and he got that 130k salary not to mention all the money he made from his books.

This is wrong, it’s all wrong, he has ruined many peoples lives. He has left many people jobless and hurt. I hate New Life church and I am glad that God freed me from that place.

Repost: VP Medical Shocker – Cheney Secretly Underwent Cardiectomy in 2006

Jon Ponder
In light of news yesterday that Vice Pres. Cheney has been diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis, or DVT, commonly known as a blod clot, we are republishing this story about his radical cardiectomy from January 2006. — Eds

Useless organ removed: According to an unidentified source at George Washington University Hospital, Vice Pres. Dick Cheney secretly underwent a radical cardiectomy Monday night. The source said the surgery began about 3:20 AM and took about 50 minutes to perform.

“It was determined that the patient had no more use for the organ,” said the source, who witnessed the removal of the vice president’s heart. “He had not used it in a long, long time. Plus, he needed to lose a little weight.”

The hospital staff member – who declined to be identified due to fear of retaliation – also took a photo of the heart (shown above) which was described as “resembling a lump of coal.”

A spokesman for the hospital, Dr. Raji Guphta, refused to comment on any medical attention given the vice president except to confirm what had been reported earlier – that Cheney experienced shortness of breath and was given an EKG at about 3:00 AM.

However, when asked if a human being can live without a heart, Dr. Guphta replied, “No.”

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity citing “fear for the lives of my children,” would neither confirm nor deny that Cheney had his heart removed.

House Subpoenas Two More Fired U.S. Attorneys for Hearings Today

Jon Ponder

The House Judiciary Committee will now hear from two more fired U.S. Attorneys at its hearings today into the mass firing of prosecutors by the Bush administration in December. However, it is unclear how cooperative the fired prosecutors will be since all of them are Republicans.

The new witnesses, Daniel G. Bogden of Nevada and Paul K. Charlton of Arizona join David Iglesias of New Mexico, Carol Lam of San Diego, John McKay of Seattle, and H.E. “Bud” Cummins of Little Rock, Ark.

Iglesias has charged that two senior Republicans from New Mexico, Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson, tried to influence an ongoing investigation and then had him fired because he would not cooperate with them.

New Governor: Dump “Darkeys” and Faux Florida State Song

Trish

Among the many controversies (and we’ll get to some in later posts) that Florida’s new kinder, gentler Republican-lite governor, Charlie Crist, has brought about is whether to change the state song. Even those of us who never really knew we had a state song can guess what it might be. That’s right, Stephen Foster’s classic, “Old Folks at Home,” popularly known as “Way Down Upon the Suwannee River.”

Pennsylvanian Stephen Foster never set foot in Florida, and his song wasn’t even about Florida until Foster realized that “Swanee” sounded better than “Peedee,” the river in South Carolina he originally sought to memorialize

It all started when Crist — who can’t pass a day without being compared to California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger for his “populist,” centrist, two-month-old leadership — decided to forgo the playing of the state song during his inauguration ceremony. No one seemed to miss it at the time, what with all the other festivities, but later Crist was asked to explain the omission.

”There are lyrics in it that are, in the opinion of some, a derogatory reference to some time in our historical past that involves slavery,” Crist said. ”I can’t condone it.”

Since he said that, people like me who know the first couple of lines and then hum, have been wondering what the actual lyrics are, and how this got to be Florida’s state song. What the research turns up is fascinating.

For starters, Pennsylvanian Stephen Foster never set foot in Florida, and his song wasn’t even about Florida until Foster realized that “Swanee,” as he spelled it, sounded better than “Peedee,” the river in South Carolina he originally sought to memorialize.

Wait, it gets better. Foster wrote the song in 1851 for E.P. Christy and his traveling show, “Christy’s Minstrels.” It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and by the 1880s, was credited with starting Florida’s tourist industry. But a look at the lyrics is enough to make you recoil, or guffaw, or both. […]