The latest leftist smear campaign against Rush Limbaugh may have finally crossed the line into actionable defamation.

Jason Whitlock--one of the last sports columnists remaining at the Kansas City Star, features prominently, for a piece he wrote for FoxSports.com.

Ed Driscoll discusses:

I was greeted with a huge front-page box featuring this insipid column from the execrable Jason Whitlock. By way of reminder, Jason Whitlock recently wrote this ridiculous column, which somehow passes for insightful commentary while Limbaugh’s comments about McNabb are evil, thoughtless, and racist. But I digress. The newest basis for the assertion that Limbaugh is an eeeeeevil racist is as follows, according to Whitlock:

Here are two quotes attributed to Limbaugh in a 2006 book, “101 People Who Are Really Screwing America,” by Jack Huberman.

• “You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray (Dr. King’s assassin). We miss you, James. Godspeed.”
• “Let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: Slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back. I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.”

The first of these quotes has already been debunked most thoroughly, long before Rush’s bid to buy the Rams. It is self-evidently the complete fabrication of someone with a wiki account, which was then picked up by the unscrupulous Huberman and reported as fact (with no citations at all) in his book. The other, also attributed to Huberman, has never been sourced, and Huberman has never cited any original article, or even given any indication as to when this alleged statement was made. Of course, these facts make it utterly impossible to refute the claim; without any date or context, Rush cannot even call witnesses who were present during the alleged confirmation to confirm or deny that he ever made such a statement. It is literally impossible for Limbaugh (or anyone else) to offer convincing proof that they have never at any time made a given statement (other than their own denial, which Rush has already given). It is preposterous to ask anyone to prove that they did not make a statement if you cannot even so much as offer a time and place where the statement is alleged to have occurred.

These inflammatory statements were in fact apparently first made by a semi-anonymous blog commenter. Numerous times. On numerous web sites.

Limbaugh has begun threatening legal action. I hope he follows through on that threat.

Limbaugh is a public figure, so "actual malice" needs to be proven.

Somehow I don't think that will be terribly difficult to do. The upside of being hated by the left is that it is pretty easy to prove that leftists hate you. Some of the people in the Old Media who have mindlessly repeated these smears had better pray that they have never before criticized or made fun of Limbaugh--either on air, via e-mail, or in written correspondence.

Legal discovery is a female dog.

My fondest hope is that is that some of the more egregious Big Media purveyors of the current "Limbaugh is a Racist" smear campaign will be found in a court of law to be guilty of malicious defamation with the intent to illegally interfere with his commercial activity--to whit his participation in a group which is offering to buy the St. Louis Rams NFL team. My understanding of defamation law is that the key for public figures to win at trial is for them to be able to prove actual harm.

I'm not a lawyer, but not being allowed to participate in an ownership group for a pro football team would seem to me to be actual harm.

Ironically enough, Rush may wind up owning a good chunk of the Internet. Or ESPN.

As Limbaugh has said: "Lord, thank you for my enemies."

And remember, RAAAAACIST!!! has five A's.

I had a sudden realization the other day.

Inner cities--the ones devastated by leftist, redistributionist, high-tax, high-planning, low-freedom, low-personal-responsibility policies since the end of the Second World War--the ones where the poor, the minorities, the "left behind" of the post-war boom have been consigned to live--the inner cities are the New Plantations.

The New Plantation Owners are almost exclusively Democrats--both white Democrats and black Democrats. Not all Democrats--just those who seem to bubble up to the top of the urban power structure wherever they're allowed to do so. The crop that these New Plantation Owners raise and harvest is not cotton.

The crop is votes.

Most often, the harvest is of black and poor people's votes, fertilized with the manure of promises of government money. But sometimes, in a weird sort of heartless crop rotation, the New Plantation Owners come in and push the poor people aside, building "gentrified" urban neighborhoods--either with or without a big stadium, arena, or shopping complex as its centerpiece. But in either case, the people who "benefit" from these programs never really benefit.

They're just told by the plantation owners that they will benefit--that prosperity is just around the corner. So, in gratitude, the very people who are the primary victims of these programs vote for the politicians who continue to inflict them upon them. But prosperity never comes to the victims of the New Plantation Owners.

If those government programs were effective, why then are the lives of the inner-city poor no better now than they were in the 1960's when Lyndon Johnson launched the "Great Society?" Why has the poverty rate not improved? Why has literacy not improved? Why has not the family in the urban core been strengthened?

The reason is that it's never, NEVER in the interest of the New Plantation Owners to actually make things in the urban core better. They're continually holding the carrot on the string out in front of the residents of the inner cities, and then continually jerking the carrot just out of reach by their taxation and government policies.

And of course, who do the politicians blame for this?

Who do they always blame?

The productive class. The business community. The eeevil, heartless Republicans. The poor. Everybody but the New Plantation Owners themselves.

When I make the comment that socialism is slavery, I'm deadly serious about it. The chains aren't of iron, the chains are of ideas--of ideology, but they're every bit as binding as those that bound the slaves of the past. They shackle the urban poor to a philosophy which is destroys everything it seeks to save.

The only path to freedom for people is freedom. Government can not give freedom. Each individual person can only give freedom to him or herself--by taking responsibility not only for who they are and who they might become, but also for who they have been in the past. Freedom is recognizing where you have made mistakes, learning from those mistakes, and growing as an individual. It is the opposite of the dependency mentality which the New Plantation Owners require of their slaves.

Freedom is not the easy road. But it is the only road that leads to every man and every woman becoming the best person that he or she can possibly be. All freedom requires is that you stop listening to the siren call of the New Plantation Owners, and begin to live your own life, the best you possibly can, and stop depending on the New Plantation Owners for anything. Because history and experience have shown that you can not trust the New Plantation Owners--you can't trust them for anything.

Government never gives freedom. It can only take.

Or it can stop taking. If enough of us say STOP loudly enough and often enough.

While there's still time.

In case you haven't noticed, the New Plantation Owners have taken control of the Federal Government, and are hell-bent on turning the entire country into the same kind of plantation that they have inflicted on the urban core. It's not so much that they're evil people, they're just disastrously misguided. They really do believe that you're better off as a slave on the New Plantation than you would be as a free human being. With them as the New Plantation Owners, of course.

They want your votes. And in exchange, they want to run your life while never quite delivering on their grandiose promises of a better tomorrow. Does that sound like a good trade?

Boing Boing: Judge orders woman to keep her SubGenius books under lock and key.

Dang. I'd better go hide my own Book of the SubGenius.

Oh, wait. I don't have kids.

But it's always to have another argument in my pocket if I need to avoid jury duty, I guess.

The SubGenius Must Have Slack!

Barack Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize?

For real?

For what?

For his "I'm ashamed to be an American" world tour? Is that the criterion? For his ineffable rainbows and unicorns goodness?

What.

The.

Fuc%?

Of course, the Nobel Peace Prize committee has beclowned itself before.

Al Gore.

Yasser Arafat.

Kofi Annan and the U.N.

HA HAH HA HA HAAAH HAA HAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!

LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT!

Morons.

UPDATE: The Times of London agrees with me, by the way.

For some reason, the song "We're an American Band" is now running through my head.

More Cowbell.

Expect quite a few more link dumps in the coming few months, for the reasons I posted about earlier.

If you're lucky, they'll be Annotated Link Dumps. Like this one:

(heh heh heh . . . click the Read More. You won't be sorry. OK, you might. Caveat Emptor.)

Whoo boy. This one's gonna hurt.

Breaking hard, as they say in the business.

Click here to go to the details, but be warned--some of the pictures are quite graphic. And contain Republicans. And raaaaacists.

I said MORE COWBELL!

From the AMA's 2008 National Health Insurer Report Card (pdf)

You actually have to hunt for it a bit, but guess which provider has the highest percentage of claims denied. Just guess.

Yup.

Government-run Medicare.

And you want the government to take over the rest of the health insurance industry? Really? Really, really?

Which old stick?

This old stick.

Ding dong, the wicked Stick is dead!

OK, for those of you too lazy to click through: the article's title is "United Nations pulls hockey stick from climate report."

The "hockey stick" is one of the key props under the pseudo-scientific "global warming/climate change" conjecture.

I call it a conjecture because not only is it not proven, it has already been falsified. Repeatedly.

The world may be warming, it may be cooling, but CO2 isn't doing it.

Item 1: President Obama's hand-picked representative to the (laughably mis-named) U.N. Human Rights Council pushes through a consensus proposal to "protect the human rights of religions."

item 2: The Federal Trade Commission decides that "freedom of speech" doesn't include bloggers who accept compensation--monetary or "in-kind" for blogging.

Item 3: Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Does that sound at all familiar to anyone? No?

For a guy who supposedly "taught Constitutional law," President Obama shows no discernible sign that he's even seen a copy of the United States Constitution, let alone read it or understood any of the smaller words, not to mention the bigger ones, nor does he demonstrate any sign of comprehension of what the various words might mean when arranged in the particular order you find them in that document.

Didn't Obama swear "so help him God" to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States? Anybody remember that? The whole "John Roberts flubbed it up" thing?

And to think we're stuck with this guy for three more long, long, long years.