Some ignorance is not amusing

Sometimes Jessica's ignorance is amusing, Brew City Brawler agrees. Like not knowing "Voila!" from "Whallah!"

But sometimes it is not funny at all, as in her suggestion that the US was on the wrong side in Bosnia.

In that case, her ignorance is frightening.

"Hysterical" ... "Hilarious"

"Hysterical." "Hilarious." -- Jessica McBride.

What's she reviewing?

A report that the State Investment Board invests in and makes money on Big Oil stocks.

What's so hysterical? Well, Gov. Jim Doyle wants to tax the oil companies, see?

Hehehe. LOL!

Excuse the hilarity. Just too funny for words, isn't it?

Jessica has a low hilarity threshold. Perhaps she doesn't get out enough. It must be a laugh a minute around the McBride-Bucher household.

It's easy to tape, but who wants to listen?

Don Imus. Michael McGee.

Who will be the next talker to step in it?

Tim Cuprisin of the Journal Sentinel says the key to calling out both Imus and McGee was that someone began to routinely tape their programs every day.

Jay "Folkbum" Bullock says the way to take on the talkers is to cite chapter and verse, not issue broadsides complaining about their content. But he notes there is no one performing that service, at least so far. Says Folkbum:

This is the blogosphere, people, and the great beauty of it, as I've said before, is that if you see a hole in the middle of it, you have the ability to form a SykesWatch-sized piece to fill that hole. In the meantime, calling someone a "neocrybaby" or demanding "Sistah Souljah" moments just makes you look petty. Aligning yourself with the rhetoric of the McGees makes you look cretinous.

Here's the rub: Creating a McBrideWatch, for example -- since this site is all things McBride -- would require someone not only to tape her programs, but to listen closely, analyze them, and write about them. In a bad week that could mean 15 hours of programming. Mercifully, with baseball season it is a lot less airtime, but still quite a commitment to regularly expose one's brain cells to hours of her scolding and annoying whine.

Small wonder there has been no volunteer. To do all of the right-wing talkers in Milwaukee would be a full-time job. Talk about taking one for the team; that would be the ultimate sacrifice.

In otherwords, deportemall

Grrrrr! First those illegal immigrants take our jobs, and now they're taking our college scholarships.

Marquette has given a scholarship to a Mexican student who is the country illegally, and has been in the US at least for middle school and high school. In other words, he came here with his family at a pretty young age.

McBride would like to deport him, but the "illegal alien lobby" won't allow that, she claims.

You have to give her credit, though. Even while frothing at the mouth, she coins a new word:

In otherwords, they want no borders.

In "otherwords," she's still careless as can be, with the facts and with the language.

UPDATE: That was no typo. She really thinks "otherwords" is a word.

Today's post, ranting about the beer tax, includes:

In otherwords, moderate, responsible drinkers would have to pay for those who abuse the product.

THE BEAT GOES ON. Continuing her crusade to rewrite the language, McBride writes:

In otherwords, it's a tax.

Bucher for supreme court? Puleeze!

Owen Robinson of Boots & Sabers floats Paul Bucher's name for Supreme Court, acknowledging that there are a few problems with a Bucher candidacy, like being an unappealing loser and not being a judge.

There's one sure sign it's not for real. Jessica, the loyal and ambitious spouse, is not talking it up.

Come to think of it, there's another problem with a Bucher candidacy -- her willingness to give him political advice.

Whallah! upside the head

A reader e-mails:

I LOVE the name "Whallah!" for your website: It evokes the sound of a 2 X 4 whacking one "upside the head," as my old man used to say.

However, I think you're being too hard on Jessie McB; she couldn't really be expected to know that she meant "Voila" when she wrote "Whallah." Jessica, as you may know by reading her recent columns, grew up in north central Wisconsin where the school had no extras, no extracurriculars, and probably no running water. (And they learnt just fine, thank you very much.) For certain, the school district offered no French language instruction, or if they did, little Jessie did not avail herself, the French people having been bailed out of WW II by the Americans and failing to show proper gratitude since. Wasn't John Kerry French? Or his wife? There's something unpatriotic about anything French, so therefore we shouldn't associate ourselves too closely. And let's not forget that "Freedom Fries" replaced the "French Fries" in the Congressional Mess (hall).

Back to Jessica's education: My writing teachers and professors--and Strunk and White no less--drummed one lesson into every student's brain: Write in complete sentences. You must know the rule. You must follow the rule. You must become the rule. If you would dare to break the rule, you must be an exceptional writer, a damned good writer, and you must have a damned good reason for violating the trust placed in you by the reader who expects at least a subject and a verb between periods. If you dare to flaunt the rule, you should probably obtain written permission from God as well.

Jessica regularly flaunts this rule. Sadly, her writing is not good enough to justify the frequent incomplete sentences and the resultant loss of meaning from a missing subject or verb. One wonders if she is merely ignorant, or in too much of a rush to declare "Whallah!" Perhaps her declarative style requires a vague interpretation, rather than a specific understanding.

I, too, wonder what she is teaching the journalists of tomorrow with her words and by her example--that if you are imprecise, you can't be held accountable for what you say or write? That if you entwine just a thread of fact with your opinion, you can twist a strand of near-believability? That a journalist writing a column of opinion means never having to verify a fact, support an argument or say you're sorry.

Feds, state? Whallah's the difference?

Just a little confused -- how unusual! -- McBride thinks that a Federal Elections Commission ruling somehow clears Mark Green of any violations of state election law.

Xoff sets her straight.

Jessica solves the unemployment problem

Don't sit there in the central city saying there aren't any jobs.

Look in the classifieds. Whallah! Good jobs for everyone!

Sorry we ever doubted. She's a genius.

The March unemployment figures put the Milwaukee metro area jobless rate at 5.5%, but that doesn't count a lot of "discouraged" workers who are not officially in the pool and actively looking. That rate equals 43,932 people looking for work.

The headline on McBride's post is a classic:

THERE ARE ENOUGH JOBS TO FILL THE CLASSIFIED ADS EVERY SUNDAY

In the same way, I have marveled at the fact that there is just enough news every day to exactly fill the pages of the Journal Sentinel. They never run out, and there's never any extra. Whallah!

Then there's the fact that there are just the right number of every kind of job to match the population -- just enough executive jobs for people who want to be executives, and enough garbage collection jobs for people who want to collect garbage.

This must be what they call Intelligent Design, no?

A convenient untruth

What to make of this McBride post?

DEMOCRATS EMBOLDEN AL-QAIDA

Think I'm being partisan? THEY said it.

Will anyone in the MSM ask the Democrats if it bothers them? Because it really doesn't matter if we hand Al-Qaida a victory to many of the Democrats, does it.

They don't care as long as they can score political points against George W. Bush. The presence of al-Qaida in Iraq is the DEMOCRATS' inconvenient truth.

What McBride references is a video by an al-Qaida leader ridiculing the US, and saying a troop withdrawal will merely deprive al-Qaida of the chance to kill greater numbers of Americans.

Her point, perhaps, is that there are some al-Qaida terrorists in Iraq, and that the group is taking credit for some of the violence there.

Much of it, of course, is propaganda and braggadocio. Only McBride might believe that al-Qaida is running the show or playing a major role in Iraq. She may subscribe to the long-discredited theory that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida jointly planned the 9/11 attack.

Al-Qaida fighters are in Iraq because the US invasion and occupation made it an attractive place to recruit and train terrorists. No one denies there are any al-Qaida members in Iraq. But to suggest that withdrawing from Iraq would give al-Qaida a victory is to suggest that she has no clue as to what's going on there.

She apparently has swallowed al-Qaida's boasts because, for conservatives, al-Qaida's claims are a convenient untruth that allows them to slander Democrats who want to end the war.

Why is She Teaching?

The ignorance and stupidity of this woman is astounding. Jessica McBride links to the story of a young girl stoned to death for falling in love with a boy outside her religious faith. McBride titles the post “The Religion of Peace,” which she and others on the right use as code for Islam.

Of course, if she had read just a bit further, she would have discovered that the young girl belonged to a minority Kurdish religious group called Yezidi, not Islam. The boy she loved is a Sunni Muslim. Of course, in the pea brain that is McBride’s, any group not Christian or Jewish is probably Muslim and not worthy of respect ... just a tinge of racism, don't you think?

Why is this woman teaching journalism? She can’t even get her facts straight.

'Is we lost who won?'

Is it Zen or is it Jessica?

The Brawler knows.

Lock 'em up, Stevo

Can't wait to hear McBride's defense of US Attorney Steven Biskupic, who took time out from prosecuting Democrats to put a Vietnam era veteran behind bars for seeking benefits from the Veterans Administration.

Her rap on Georgia Thompson was that sometimes an aggressive prosecutor like Stevie B. will overreach and put an innocent person away, but, hey, that's what makes this country great.

Michael Leon has the story.

Paul Bucher, lawyer for sale, Part 2

Talk about having it both ways.

WAUKESHA - Paul Bucher was the top prosecutor in the county when his office issued more than 100 felony charges against former insurance agent Nancy Paquette.

But when Paquette learns her fate at sentencing next month, Bucher will be sitting right beside her, having joined her defense team.

In a letter to Judge Kathryn Foster this week, Bucher said Paquette retained him last month to assist at her sentencing. Paquette, of the town of Delafield, was convicted after a trial of all the felony charges against her, which included two counts of theft, 52 counts of forgery and 52 counts of identity theft.

Do you think his days as a lock-em-up law and order politician are over? Seems like Jessica's plan to be the First Lady of Wisconsin have gone awry.

Thug update

Maybe everyone in Milwaukee's 6th Aldermanic District isn't a thug, despite what McBride said earlier, Brew City Brawler notes. Or is that what she's saying? Hard to tell, since she writes in her own special style.

The premise of the new post is that not all minorities are stupid thugs. School Director Jennifer Morales, for example, is wrong almost all of the time by McBride standards, but did a good thing by voting for handcuffs in the schools, she says.

Wonder how she feels today, since Morales was one of the five votes to successfully undo the handcuff policy last night.

Diversity should start at home

Ah, yes, that liberal media again, says Jessica:

AN UNSCIENTIFIC OBSERVATION

Of the top 20 newspapers in the country, only 6 had rising circulation (albeit by small amounts).

Two of those, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal, have content that appeals to conservatives.

I want newspapers to survive. As much as I am excited by the growth of the blogosphere, there's no question that daily newspapers still do much of the reportorial heavy lifting. But maybe all daily newspapers should try to at least diversify their staff opinion ranks so that conservatives don't see them as hopelessly out of touch with common sense.

Just saying.

Perhaps this is part of her campaign to get the Journal Sentinel to begin running columns by Charlie Sykes, Jeff Wagner or -- whallah! -- Jessica McBride. That campaign surfaces periodically.

In the meantime, McBride is a columnist for the Waukesha Freeman. Other voices of political diversity which appear in that newspaper are: Mark Belling, James Wigderson, Owen Robinson, right wingers all; moderate Republican Lee Dreyfus, and, in the diversity slot, Tim Schilke. That's her idea of balance, apparently. Or do you think she's been telling the Freeman editors they need more liberal columnists?

How's circulation of the Freeman these days?

Just asking.