By Jess McCabe | 11 August 2008, 20:01

A vice president at Citigroup has been fired, after the bank realised he was blogging as “Large”, of the hideous blog Take A Report, according to Shanghai Daily.

The newspaper presents the story as “blogger fired, even though money raised went to charity and he didn’t link himself to his company”. Or, in other words, a story about freedom of speech and employers encroaching on the right of employees for free expression.

But Pam’s House Blend does a brilliant job of setting out what Michael J. McCarthy’s blog is actually all about. He’s now publically linked to posts such as this, where he humerously suggests cutting Renée Zellweger’s ears off so she won’t work again (quote: “I don’t hate her enough to want her dead”).

And he has a whole category called “The Tribes”, broken down into racial subcategories. Read at your own risk.

There’s sort of an interesting post, in which he makes a distinction between his offensive posts (they’re jokes!) and his commenters’ straight-faced racist reaction, which he somehow finds hard to stomach:

The reason I write such racist, sexist, and homophobic shit is because I am too much of a coward to say it to anyone face-to-face. And I think the same can be said about the anonymous members of the “Comment Crew”. I’m guessing the average TAR reader does not compete in the Octagon on weekends, so a virtually anonymous forum to vent frustrations during a slow workday is just what the doctor ordered. My grandmother used to always say, “It’s no fun to watch your career slip away, but it always feels nice to make fun of Puerto Ricans.” She was eventually killed by a group of Dominicans, which is kind of ironic when you think about it.

Um, funny. Or not. I would say that he has now been fired, and thus got his comeuppance, but apparently not: he’s been booked to speak at the Dallas Security Traders annual convention.