†  Talentless Nonentity v Obscure Blogger: The Stiletto Blog was chosen an Official Honoree in the Political Blogs category by the judges of the 12^th Annual Webby Awards (the Oscars of the online universe). Other Official Honorees include CNN Political Ticker, Swampland (Time magazine) and The Caucus (The New York Times).

Not too long ago one Heather Robinson - a talentless nonentity who finds it necessary to inflate her meager credentials - called The Stiletto an “obscure blogger.” While The Stiletto is becoming less obscure over time, Robinson remains a talentless nonentity.

How talentless is Heather Robinson? Judge for yourself: A week ago, she put this gawdawful commentary up on The Huffington Post, prompting dozens of reader comments like these (grammar and spelling left intact by The Stiletto):

Aside from the ludicrous content in this article, the writing style (or lack thereof) made me want to vomit.

Well, now I'm convinced that ANYONE can write an article for Huffington Post. This article, from beginning to end, is an insult to the journalistic community.

What a waste of pixels. An analysis be a sixteen year old would have as much intellectual depth, but would be less grating because a sixteen year old probably wouldn't try to adopt a "hip" tone.

Ms. Robinson has all the depth of a sheet of paper.

As Mr. Spock would say, “Highly Illogical.”

I usually like to dissect the intellectual merits of an article, but there would first have to be intellectual merits. So that said, THiIS IS TRASH. Huffpo should start hiring some of us commenters to write if this is what it has come to, just terrible.

Is this supposed to be satire, or are you just incredibly ignorant of political history from the not so distant past?

I think this is supposed to be somehow funny or satirical or something. But really, it is about the most insulting thing I have ever read directed at what I believe to be an intelligent electorate. Maybe “you need your lattes. You need your leg waxes. You need to go to Balthazar or a comparable restaurant every week, you need your workouts, you need self-care.” But your superficial life doesn't faintly resemble mine lady. You need to open your eyes to reality.

How insignificant a nonentity is Heather Robinson? In addition to repeatedly passing her freelance writer’s ass off as a “columnist” for the New York Daily News, she has now taken to referring to herself as the “former managing editor of Town & Village News, a Manhattan weekly newspaper” (see her guest post on Dawn Patrol dated January 11, 2008).

Town & Village News (as in Stuyvesant Town & Peter Cooper Village) is owned by Hagedorn Communications, which publishes a portfolio of real estate trade publications and community newspapers (including Bronx News and Parkchester News). According to a February 2007 article in New York Observer, the current executive editor, Sabina Mollot, is “one of two full-time Town & Village staffers, who also serves as a reporter, photographer and page designer.” The Stiletto called Mollot and learned that she has been the executive editor of the publication for five years, that there has never been a “managing editor” position and that she has no idea who Heather Robinson is.

Heather, sweetie, why don’t you go back to spending your father’s considerable trust fund bequest on manicures and Manolos and leave the punditry to those of us who know what we’re doing? 
 

Hitler wanted to promote his belief in an Aryan master race by symbolically linking the 1936 Berlin Games to the ancient Greek gods and rituals, hence the carrying of the flame from Olympia to Germany. The first relay was chronicled on film by Hitler's propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl.

We bring you this brief history lesson because, as the Olympic torch makes its only North American appearance today in San Francisco, it will be met by thousands of protesters decrying China's human rights record. In response to similar demonstrations Monday in Paris, the Chinese government complained that a "small group" of Tibetan activists was seeking to politicize an event that should have been a tribute to the love of sport.

Nonsense. From its very beginning, the torch relay has been deeply political, a promotional extravaganza for the Games' host country. Chinese officials are well aware of this, having designed the longest relay in Olympic history - an 85,000-mile, six-continent tour, meant to highlight China's vast economic and political might. The protests are a welcome reminder to Beijing that it can't tailor public opinion in the rest of the world the way it can at home.

Meanwhile, Downing Street announced that British PM Gordon Brown will not attend the opening ceremony. For his part, French president Nicolas Sarkozy is conditioning his country's participation in the opening ceremony on China initiating talks with the Dalai Lama.

As of this writing, President Bush is still planning to reward China’s long history of human rights abuses with his presence at the opening ceremony. Like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – but for vastly different reasons – Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), a staunch anti-communist, is also urging the president to boycott the ceremony seeing as how China is “arming our enemies, spying on us, subjugating Tibet, abetting genocide in the Sudan and being an unsporting bastion of tyranny”:

George Walker Bush is bent upon being the first U.S. President to attend a foreign nation’s Olympics. The nation in question is communist China, the shock troops of which are presently bludgeoning Tibetan Monks as if they were orange bathrobed baby seals. …

[O]ur Compassionate Conservative-in-Chief has eagerly RSVP’ed [sic] to the communist dictatorship’s dramatic recreation of the Berlin Olympics. Given “The Decider’s” resolve, hope dims we might disabuse his whimsy that watching a wobbling discus with the wanton butchers of Tiananmen Square can advance the sacred cause of human freedom.

McCotter is trying to convince Bush that “the rogue regime’s transgressions against our nation and others prove … that attending the communist Chinese Olympics will subvert the moral authority of his position as the Leader of the Free World.” 

Yeah, well, Bush already lost his moral authority back in October when he bullied Congress into abandoning a vote on a symbolic resolution acknowledging the Armenian Genocide that was a sure bet to pass. So Bush’s public support of China at the games – really, his tacit approval of its dismal human rights record and its bankrolling of genocide – is quite in character.    

† Fed Up With Farmers: Through the Conservation Reserve Program, the federal government has been giving farmers cash on the barrelhead for the past 25 years to keep some of the land they own fallow. The New York Times reports that in 2007 “more than 400,000 farmers receiv[ed] nearly $1.8 billion for idling 36.8 million acres. That land is “bigger than the state of New York” and comprises roughly 8 percent of the cropland in the U.S. The program was win-win-win for farmers (guaranteed money, no matter how commodity prices fluctuated), hunters (a bigger expanse on which they could pursue their sport) and environmentalists (protecting land that was vulnerable to erosion and creating wildlife habitats). Now, with federal mandates to grow corn for ethanol helping push prices for wheat, soybeans, corn and other crops to historic highs, farmers are opting out of the program. “Last fall, when five million acres in Conservation Reserve came up for renewal, only half of them were re-entered,” according to The Times, and “they took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined.” ND rancher Kerry Dockter, who has some 450 acres of grassland in the program, tells the paper: “When this program first came about, it was a pretty good thing” and now the government payments “aren’t even comparable anymore” to how much he could earn growing feed for his cows or leasing his land to other farmers.