Beldar risks the wrath of the Mark Levins of the world, together with his cynical blogospheric enablers, by arguing why a fight over a few billion here and there is not the big issue. The Presidency is.

A poker analogy is involved.

I agree to an extent, but I think an even bigger issue is passing a Balanced Budget Amendment. The party in power in the Oval Office will change from time to time in the next few decades. But a Balanced Budget Amendment is forever.*

*”Forever” in this context means “until it is gutted by liberal Supreme Court Justices.” Another reason why our presidency is important.

Eric Turkewitz deconstructs what happened here and at various other blogs yesterday, regarding that possible punking of the New York Times.

This was Eric’s brainchild, so click the link to see the various blogs involved and how it unfolded. (If you click the link, you will see an actual explanation and not the beginning of a multi-link wild goose chase. I promise.)

He highlights the most amusing comments as being at Popehat, and specifically mentions Scott Jacobs as one of the funniest commenters. What he doesn’t realize is that Scott is a Patterico reader. But I agree that reading Scott’s comment was probably the most rewarding moment I had all day — one of those moments when “LOL” was not just an annoying acronym but was literally true.

To set up Scott’s comment: Scott followed a couple links from here to Ted Frank to Popehat and started to lose patience, demanding some proof from the Popehat people: “Since it’s them getting pranked, wouldn’t it be possible to cut and paste the entire article for all to read and use the defense of ‘self-parody’?” When someone mentioned the fact that it would not be good to get into a fight about intellectual property with the New York Times, Scott replied: “Would the fact that they apparently have no intelligence be a defense?” Then a commenter called jb said:

Lemon Gloria links to Randazza, who links to Eric Turkewitz, who links to Simple Justice, who links to Patterico, who links to Ted Frank, who links right back here, and none of them have any details or even a link to the paywalled article.

Prank publicizing fail.

At which point Scott wrote the laugh-out-loud funny comment. Because it’s Scott, it’s profane, so I am hiding it beneath the fold for the benefit of those who prefer to avoid profanity. Scott quotes jb, and then replicates his dawning realization in amusing fashion:

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I did a slightly modified version of this post on my own site but I assume most people are pro-life so I’m changing it a little bit. I’m pro-choice but I think that the discussion on this subject is especially bad in a sea of awful. So, I have a few questions and I’d love to hear your answers.

I started thinking about how the issues of race and abortion meet when I was on the road a couple of months ago working on the Pigford story. Eddie Slaughter (one of the black farmers I interviewed) and I had a talk about abortion. Not an argument or a battle; a talk. Think about that in today’s political heat.

He’s pro-life and he told me a personal story about how he came to that position. (Which I won’t repeat because it’s personal.) But he also mentioned that he thought abortion was the modern day equivalent of slavery. This is essentially exactly the same thing that Rick Santorum would say a few weeks later and get pummeled for.

Santorum was accused of ‘injecting race’ into the debate but the reality is that the issue is a real one and it’s just not discussed much.

Is there some contradiction about being both pro-choice / legal abortion while at the same time understanding why some black people might be worried about the disproportionately high number of abortions in black communities?

Why do you think so many pro-choice people seem ADAMANT that it’s wrong for groups to want to reduce the number of abortions in black communities with ads like this?

Is it completely backwards  to call such ads ‘racist and sexist’?

This is discussion worth having, I think. My answers are – no, there’s no contradiction. Nope, it’s not wrong and censoring the ads (as was done in New York) is messed up. And no, it seems the opposite of racist and not sexist, either.  What do you think?