they get comments

local blogger torpor indy has received a big bump in traffic after being linked by michelle malkin. if you've somehow been fortunate enough never to have heard of michelle malkin, she resides on the distant shores of far-right-blogistan, so far out there that she can see armageddon from her house (or at least she thinks she can). malkin is perhaps best known for being an avid proponent of the japanese internment during WWII, which some people find particularly bizarre because malkin is second-generation asian-american. but there is lots of bizarre stuff about malkin.

the issue at hand: back in february, torpor wrote a post about ann coulter. the subject line of the post suggested that ann coulter is a "horseface".

then last week, peter hartlaub, writing in the san francisco chronicle's culture blog, wrote about a horse at the SF zoo named coulter "who bears a not-so-subtle resemblance" to ann. hartlaub linked to torpor's post as evidence that hartlaub wasn't the first person to think coulter's features were a bit equine.

enter malkin, infuriated as always. without irony, she accused hartlaub of authoring an "an astonishingly ugly, ad hominem attack" and "then sit[ting] back and wait[ing] for ... blog commenters to pile on". she also linked to torpor and a couple other blogs hartlaub had mentioned. then, she sat back and waited... nay, demanded that her blog commenters "pile on", urging her readers to write to the chronicle and voice their anger.

of course, like many right-wing blogs, malkin does not allow comments herself, so those who would comment at her blog are forced to go elsewhere. they eagerly swarmed to torporindy, where they promptly called torpor a "fag". lovely.

and while i'm meta-blogging about comments, i'd be remiss if i didn't point out the silliness going on in the comments over at advance indiana. i've given gary a lot of flak lately, so i'll spare him here (though i don't think he's offered a smidgen of evidence for any of his claims in his latest screed about matt tully).

if you're not from around these parts, none of this might mean anything to you, but gary wrote a post blasting the commentators on the tv show indiana week in review. the crux of gary's argument seems to be that the commentators should be fired because the show isn't discussing gary's pet issue, but i said i'd go easy on gary so let's ignore that for now.

the fun really started with this mildly crazy comment, immediately followed by full-blown craziness four minutes later. it's hard to know where to begin pointing all the insanity here, so many outrageously absurd claims are made in quick succession. even if all of it were somehow true, only the most intimate insider could possibly know all these things, and the author voice makes it clear that the poster is not and never was on friendly terms with the people being libeled.

since i'm anything but a democratic party insider (i'm not even on tdw's blogroll), i can't even begin to refute these claims using actual evidence; i can only refute them by noting their insanity. and maybe that's the point: the accusations are so completely nutty that they're impossible to refute. for example, how can one disprove allegations of ballot switching from 10 years ago?

Kip Tew was the Democratic Party's Chairman when they illegally elected Carl Drummer to office in the 1996 special election.

It was the same election where Wilson Allen and Tony Duncan switched the ballots and ballot boxes to insure Drummer's victory against Jocelyn-Tandy Adande.

She sued the Democratic Party in Circuit Court January 2, 1996 over the election.

in response, wilson allen, who's been hitting the rounds on hoosier blogs lately as wilson46201, observed that this commenter was probably jocelyn-tandy herself. and then jocelyn-tandy came out of hiding, stopped posting anonymously (for a few minutes), and posted twice under her handle, queen916. the silliness continues in the comments to gary's anti-tully post.

but who is jocelyn-tandy adande? if that name threw up red flags in your mind—enormous, galaxy-sized flags that eclipsed your entire field of vision and possibly induced seizure—then good for you: you're tapped in to hoosier politics.

jocelyn-tandy adande has run for election a bunch of times, but as far as i know she's never been able to win a primary. in 1999, she ran for mayor and was utterly crushed by bart peterson in the primary. her stint as bob kern's campaign manager didn't end much better, though at least kern won the primary:

If Bill Clinton Gets to Stay in the White House, Why Can't a Convicted Felon and Occasional Female Impersonator With an Assumed Name Run As the Democratic Nominee for Congress?

Bob Kern was allowed to stay on the ballot as the Democratic candidate in the 6th Congressional District of Indiana, despite the fact that state party chair Joe Andrew sued to force election authorities to toss Kern off the ballot. Democrats said Kern deceived voters in the primary by not using his given name - Bobby Scott Hidalgo.

As the panel voted to allow Kern to remain on the ballot, he was reported to have "teared up, hugged his campaign manager Jocelyn-Tandy Adande and proclaimed: 'Praise the Lord.'"

Kern received 31,472 votes (17 percent) in the general election against incumbent Cong. Dan Burton (R).

(did you catch the part about kern/hidalgo being a convicted felon? good.)

i know her name primarily from her time blogging at INtouch, which is easily the worst of the indy star's blogs. (even fresh thoughts, which is written entirely by high schoolers and college kids, is better than INtouch. don't get me wrong; there are several reasonable people who blog at INtouch, and several others who have left [more on that in a minute], but the bad apples spoil the whole blog.)

for some reason, jocelyn-tandy no longer writes at INtouch. if you go to INtouch now, you won't see her name in the list of contributors. i'm not sure why; i'd like to think it's because she is utterly insane and the ed board just couldn't take it anymore... but that doesn't explain why john sorg is still there.

like all the star's blogs, INtouch is a bit hard to navigate. there's no archive listing, and posts aren't individually linked, so the only way to browse the archives is to go one post at a time. it's tedious, but if you take the time to go looking for jocelyn-tandy's old posts, you'll discover that she didn't just leave INtouch. she's been excised. her posts still seem to be there (if you can find them), but her name and picture no longer appear. instead, she gets a ghost byline: posted by [blank]. furthermore, her posts don't appear in the next/previous links, either. the only way to find her posts is to go through, post by post, looking at the post numbers. for instance, the official blog skips from 1854 to 1856 to 1881. but three or four of the "missing" posts are still there, if you type in the urls manually. they're just by people who've left the blog.

what's up with that? presumably this is just a bug in the blogging software; removing a contributor's posting rights shouldn't remove that contributor's byline from old posts. and it's not personal: jocelyn-tandy isn't the only person who's been "deleted" from the blog. for just one example, this deleted post about bagels is by chris douglas.

this old INtouch post is one of the few indystar.com results you get when you google JT's name, and only because she got a lot of attention for that post (if you google her name, most of the hits you get are from bloggers tearing it apart). the post is classic jocelyn-tandy: she blasts the city-county council for passing the human rights ordinance that barred discrimination based on sexual identity, ending her post with, "Passage of the ordinance was a mistake. To compare the plight of homosexuals to that of African Americans is an insult to my race."

here are some other deleted hits from JT's time at INtouch:

• more bitching about the HRO. lots more JT in the comments, like:
  • "Fornication, adultry, incest, pedophilia, homosexuality are all sex sins. These are not the only sins, but they are relevant to this debate."
  • " To settle your debate on these issues, please support your beliefs and lifestyle with scripture from The Holy Bible. If you are a non-believer that Jesus Christ is the Son of God Almighty, and the only Savior who can redeem all of us for the remission of our sins, then my views have fallen on deaf ears."
• here JT advocates reparations for slavery, which doesn't go over well with the commenters who usually love her for her gay-bashing
• here's a deleted chris douglas post where the first comment is from JT: " Exactly what is normal sexual orientation? Pedophilia, bestiality, homosexuality, or heterosexuality?"
• here's a post titled Taking Christ out of Xmas. you can imagine the rhetoric here:
  • she begins with "Christians, beware! The anti-Christ movement has emerged in every facet of society."
  • in the comments, she shares "Personally, I pity those individuals who have chosen not to believe in God Almighty and Jesus the Christ."
• curiously, this innocuous post still has a byline and photo (though it's still not in the official archives), but this post with the same title and a similar message has been ghosted

that's just a sampling. i'm sure there's lots more JT nuttiness in the archives to marvel at, but finding the posts is so time-consuming that i'm going to stop looking. if you have any JT links to share, please do!

i'm also curious what other former INtouch contributors think about their old blog entries being pseudo-deleted, in such a way that they're still online, but hard to find and stripped of attribution. i know if i left a group blog, i would either want my posts kept up as-is or taken down entirely.¶