[Scroll down for an update - Blumenthal's response!]
Yesterday in HuffPo p0wn3d by FRCblog.com! I passed on the story of Huffington Post writer Max Blumenthal engaging in hotlinking. I wrote, “The question is, will they learn their lesson this time? Frankly, I hope they don’t. I’m enjoying it too much.”
My wish was granted. They didn’t learn their lesson; Blumenthal did it again, taking the time to hunt down the original image and hotlinking to it again, as well as adding it to three additional websites. (Hotlinking is displaying an image on your website which is actually housed on someone else’s server; it displays normally on your page, but every time your page is loaded, it eats up the other server’s bandwidth. It’s not just bad netiquette – it’s stealing.) This is the second time HuffPo has been caught at hotlinking, although the first bandwidth thief was not Max Blumenthal, it was Arianna Huffington herself. That time, an apology was quickly forthcoming, but evidently Blumenthal is above such things. He seems to feel entitled to other people’s bandwidth and is quite shameless about stealing it. Perhaps he thinks of it as a tax; that all the “little people” are obligated to contribute their fair share to the Huffington Post, that arbiter of Truth and Beauty and home of Cheney Death Wish Brigade™. No telling what he actually does think because he didn’t acknowledge his mistake yesterday in any way. Evidently it was not a mistake. Repeating it and adding it to three additional websites pretty much takes that explanation off the table.
I hope he thinks it was worth it, because the folks at FRC have p0wn3d him once again, swapping out the original image with a series of images like this one:
They also created images stating Blumenthal frequents other websites; namely all the ones who linked to the original story. Including Pursuing Holiness. It’s pretty amusing, having the PH header displayed on HuffPo, however briefly. Better yet were the images of the Michelle Malkin and LGF sites; those bastions of ChimporerMcHalliburton support. Will Blumenthal have an aneurysm when he sees it? Will he learn his lesson this time? Is he secretly on Karl Rove’s payroll, and deliberately giving free advertising to conservative sites on HuffPo? Tune in for the next installment… and in the meantime, very well played, Joe. 
Update:
Blumenthal did just about have an aneurysm. His hysterical, unintentionally hilarious, response was to accuse the FRC of hacking. It’s comedy gold.
KKK paypal and friend of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, Tony Perkins, has orchestrated the hacking of this post. In doing so, he has drawn greater attention to his links to and ideological support for white supremacists. The photo of Christopher Hitchens posing with the Family Research Council’s Witherspoon Fellows was scrubbed from FRC’s site today out of fear that I would link to it again. The Family Research Council is a paper tiger that fears me and employs juvenile pranks to attempt to silence me. Father forgive them for not knowing that I won’t stop bringing the pain.
Could he possibly be this ignorant? Why, yes. He could. Here’s a little Interweb lesson for Max… renaming a picture on your own server does not a hack make. He set himself up for this by stealing bandwidth, and he deserved what he got. The first time he did it and had the picture swapped out was more than enough notice that what he was doing was wrong. Doing it again, not once but four times, was beyond foolish. There is no excuse for not knowing, at that point, that what he was doing was wrong. None. FRC fisked the rest of his accusations. What a maroon.
