Okay, there is a certain irony to my title for this post, but I couldn’t resist. I have long refrained from using Ann Coulter’s name, just so that I can rest easy knowing I haven’t helped contribute to her Google hits, but at this moment I am happy to draw attention to the smackdown she received from Elizabeth Edwards on Chris Matthews’ show:

[Edwards]: I’m making the call as a mother. I’m the mother of that boy who died. My children participate — these young people behind you are the age of my children. You’re asking them to participate in a dialogue that is based on hatefulness and ugliness instead of on the issues, and I don’t think that’s serving them or this country very well.

[Applause]

Coulter’s response? Read on:

C[oulter]: I think we heard all we need to hear. The wife of a presidential candidate is asking me to stop speaking. No.

M[atthews]: No, she asked you to stop being so negative to people individually.

C: Right, as opposed to bankrupting doctors by giving a schyster Las Vegas routine in front of juries based on science — wait, you said I’d have as long as I would have, then you instantly interrupt me.

M: Go ahead, go ahead.

C: As I was saying, doing these psychic routines in front of illiterate juries to bankrupt doctors who now can’t deliver babies, and to charge a poverty group $50,000 for a speech. Don’t talk to me about how to use language.

M: Elizabeth?

E[dwards]: …the language of hate, and I’m going to ask you again to politely stop using personal attacks as part of your dialogue.

C: Okay, I’ll stop writing books.

E: If you can’t write them without them, that is fine.

Say what you will about Elizabeth Edwards, she has class, which is something Ann Coulter knows nothing about.

Plus, people like Ann never know when a “schyster” might come in handy.

This time the loofah-loving loudmouth (I love alliteration!) gets schooled by a 16-year old. Does Bill still have actual fans, or does he exist solely to make an ass of himself?

Yes, I am speaking to you, Daniel Hendricks Simon, for leaving the following comment on my post about Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich:

Kucinich is a short nazi like Hitler… he doesn’t support Israel…. and he looks damn silly with that girl.

Ah, where to begin…it is tempting to go with the ad hominem attacks about the utter cultural irrelevance of Mr. Simon’s blog outside of the New York indie-film scene, but I only read the first few posts, so I can’t say that for sure. Then there’s the whole comparing uber-liberal Dennis Kucinich to the Nazis based on a single issue. I have long thought the whole notion that the failure to fully support anything Israel does makes one automatically anti-Semitic (or even Nazi-like) to be a tired cliche, but it looks like it still has some legs. That’s a topic for another post, though. I think ultimately Mr. Simon may have missed the point of my original post: that a homely-looking short man can land a hottie wife, even without a great deal of power as aphrodisiac, and how that makes my incredibly shallow respect for the man skyrocket.

Getting back to the ad hominem to close this post out, the slams of “short” and “silly-looking” seem odd coming from this guy.

In closing, Mr. Simon, thank you for reading my blog. I hope you bring it next time.

Hey remember when there was supposed to be no question over the meaning of “is” in public discourse? Now we have lectures on the “hortatory subjunctive tense” in a Congressional hearing. Gripping, truly gripping.

First off, if you get the Setec Astronomy reference, you get automatic admission to my Geek Hall of Fame.

Chatterbox has the latest on the oft-amusing way the internet has of keeping people in the public eye from re-writing recent history–currently Repubs trying, for whatever reason, to scrub the ignominious history of pushing “voter fraud” memes.

In a recent Slate column, I noted the strange demise of the American Center for Voting Rights, an organization that sprouted up in the last few years to push the “voter fraud is a big problem” line at government hearings, conferences, and, most importantly, in the courts to defend strict new voter-ID laws. The brains behind ACVR is a St. Louis lawyer, Mark “Thor” Hearne, who has worked for the Bush-Cheney campaign and other Republican candidates for years. Oddly, the organization suddenly disbanded recently and yanked its Web site. Even more strangely, Hearne’s résumé at his law firm, Lathrop and Gage, was scrubbed of references to ACVR. Thanks to the Internet Wayback Machine and blogs like the Brad Blog, much of ACVR’s material still remains available, however. You just can’t erase stuff put out in cyberspace very easily.

But Hearne apparently wasn’t satisfied with just cleansing his résumé. Despite the Slate article and follow-up NPR, National Journal, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch articles on Hearne, ACVR, and his possible connection to the U.S. attorneys’ scandal, someone is working hard to scrub Hearne’s paper trail. And now somebody is going into Hearne’s Wikipedia entry and trying to cleanse it of references to ACVR. (Just about anyone can edit a Wikipedia entry, though the organizers have some methods of quality control.) Moreover, someone’s been trying to clean up Wikipedia’s entry on ACVR itself.

Who would do such a thing? Wikipedia keeps records of the user IDs or IP addresses of whoever changes its pages, and it turns out, astonishingly, that this cleansing was done by someone at one of the IP addresses of Hearne’s law firm.

Get it through your heads, folks, if you ever say something and it winds up on the internet, it is there forever, somewhere. Even if there’s a massive EMP in the stratosphere that fries all electronic circuits in the world, somewhere out there, there is a shielded box contained a flash drive with the MPEG of you lip-synching Clay Aiken. You can’t hide.

Via Salon’s War Room:

“At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [9/11 ], and the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country.” — Arkansas Republican Party chairman Dennis Milligan, who tells the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, coming to us by way of BuzzFlash, that he stands “150 percent” behind George W. Bush on Iraq.

Let me get this straight…more attacks on American soil will increase our understanding of what a good job the President has done, uh, protecting us from terrorism???

Phrased more simply, a flagrant failure to protect us will make us appreciate how he has protected us???

Are we living in a nuthouse???