Ungrateful whores, all of you

From today's annual New York Times baffled realization that bloggers matter:

For Ms. Spaulding, 45, who works full time as an IT manager at Duke University Press in Durham, N.C., blogging is her passion, an unpaid hobby she pursues at nights and on weekends. So she called on her 5,500 daily readers to help raise funds: “Send the Blend to Denver” reads the ChipIn widget on her blog’s home page that tracks donations from readers; so far they have pledged more than $5,000 to transport Ms. Spaulding and three other bloggers to the convention.

Why that paper still seems surprised five years after Howard Dean and Markos Moulitsas hammered home the viability and importance of online communities remains a mystery. That said, it's a beautiful Sunday morning and I'm not quite up for shitting on the MSM, so instead I'll call you, the reader, out on your treasonous offenses.

Honestly, it was bad enough when you people refused to underwrite my Public Toilet Acquisition Initiative, but this is just mean. I know for a fact at least three or four people read this blog. If the sitemeter is correct, we've facilitated at least 300 wasted hours at the McGraw-Hill Companies alone. Pay up, fuckers! Matthew and I demand a tithing. Give. Give 'til it hurts, or otherwise it will. You just might be spared in the first wave.

Before I go, I feel I should temper some enthusiasm over the O'Biden affair. Sure, Biden is quick-witted in a three-scotches-into-the-afternoon kind of way. Sure, he lends no small measure of foreign policy experience. But the presumptive Democratic nominee for President of a recession-plagued nation fighting two wars chose to share a ticket with a six-term senator from Delaware who was a driving force behind the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of '05.

Yeah, let's dust off that old piece of economically ruinous legislation and get re-acquainted. You remember our old friend BAPCPA, right? The one that credit card companies dumped about $100 million lobbying in favor of? The one that subjects filers to a loaded 'means' test, prioritizes repaying credit card debt above child support, and forces more bankruptcies out of Chapter 7 and into Chapter 13 (worse for consumer, better for debtors)?

Yeah, your pal Joe Biden was one of the bill's major proponents. In fact, of all contenders for the 2008 Democratic nomination, Biden was the only one to have voted in favor of BAPCPA. Hey, you don't get to be a six-term senator from Delaware without waxing a few lending poles.

I guess it's a small ethical concession on Obama's part, provided middle-aged white women continue to like Biden and maybe, just maybe, start to think that black friend of his looks harmless enough.