The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

A Little Salt For The Democrat Gash

Posted on | November 8, 2014 | 23 Comments

by Smitty

This blog was a huge Christine O’Donnell booster, back when. No regrets. But one can’t let this fact pass un-touted, emphasis mine:

The Christine O’Donnell thing really did happen more or less by accident, because she happened to be in the right place at the right time to catch an anti-establishment wave and win a primary in which she was supposed to be a protest candidate. Whereas the Davis experiment was intentionally designed: She was treated to fawning press coverage, lavished with funding, had the primary field mostly cleared for her, and was touted repeatedly as part of an actual party strategy for competing in a conservative-leaning state. Of course she had a much more impressive resume than O’Donnell, with less witchcraft and real political experience, and in that sense she made a more credible candidate overall. (Though, ahem, O’Donnell actually outperformed Davis at the polls in the end …)

Hat tip: Instapundit

Category: Christine O'Donnell, Democrats

The Anti-War Movement Isn’t Dead; It’s Just Restin’

Posted on | November 8, 2014 | 14 Comments

by Smitty

Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.

Before that I’d had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.

In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.

If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you’d quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.

One topic thread was entitled “What do you view as disgusting about modern America?” The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014.

Those posting messages in this left-wing forumpublicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn’t hold any anti-war rally, because you didn’t hate Obama.

Read the whole thing. Very revealing. And know that the anti-war movement will arise, zombie like, in 2017, unless the GOP fumbles and Her Majesty waltzes in.

Category: Conspiracy Theories

UPDATE: @AmandaBynes Is Crazy

Posted on | November 7, 2014 | 74 Comments

This isn’t necessarily news to anyone who has followed the (literally) insane misadventures of Miss Ultimate Starlet Meltdown:

Amanda Bynes is flat-out admitting it.
She was tired and fell asleep on a couch at her local mall, the Beverly Center.
It’s the latest step in the Amanda Bynes journey. She tweeted that she slept there because she “did not have money” for a hotel. . . .
It’s all part of Bynes’ latest battle over money. She wants control of her finances. Her parents now have conservatorship. She has been tweeting that her lawyer is working to get control of her money back to her.
Access Hollywood reports that conservatorship is soon be divided between Amanda’s mom, Lynn Bynes, and a professional private fiduciary.
Amanda’s conservatorship attorney David Esquibias told Access he will work with the unnamed private trust firm to ensure that the actress’ needs are taken care of more efficiently.
“My goal is to get her permanent adequate housing,” Esquibias said, adding he hopes to have the change made official by the judge in the case as early as Friday.

TMZ has gossip from “sources”:

Sources connected to Amanda tell TMZ … she wants “a normal life,” and she believes working in a bar would achieve that goal.
Amanda says she’s well aware of the obvious impediment — she attracts so much attention it would be hard to function as a bartender.
As for why Amanda is even thinking of getting a job … she desperately needs money. She doesn’t have access to her $5.7 million fortune because of her conservatorship, and only gets between $50 and $100 a day. As for what she wants to do with the money, aside from getting an apartment, she wants plastic surgery because she thinks she’s ugly.

Let your brain process these thoughts: She’s got more than $5 million in the bank, but she only gets $100 a day. She’s sleeping on a sofa in the mall, she’s telling friends she wants to get a job as a bartender and she thinks she’s so ugly she needs plastic surgery. Yet all the liberals who run the cultural industry that warped this poor girl’s mind want to keep telling us there’s a Republican “War on Women”?

Andrew Breitbart always said Hollywood was worse than D.C.

As usual, Andrew was right. Damn, I miss him more each day.

 

 

Category: Andrew Breitbart, Celebrities, Culture

Feminists: They’re Not About the ‘D’

Posted on | November 7, 2014 | 19 Comments

How many times do I have to say feminism is a journey to lesbianism before people start waking up to the truth? Liberal guys need to realize their “male feminist” thing is never going to work:

A male-led campaign to promote affirmative consent for sex at DePaul University — which is nominally Catholic but runs a “Queer Peers” mentorship program — has thrown in the towel.
Or rather, the T-shirt.
Selling shirts emblazoned with “Consent the D” — a play on the school’s basketball slogan “Fear the D” (the Demons mascot) that was widely interpreted as “dick” — came off as “flippant” to campus feminists, who didn’t take kindly to an alternative approach to their signature issue, Jezebel says:

“Unfortunately, the ‘Consent the D’ movement was cut short by forces outside of my control,” founder Randy Vollrath said in a video message posted Tuesday. “T-shirt production has been halted while we work to address the issue.”

Vollrath said he appreciates that people didn’t like the T-shirts but objects to their disagreement being ”misinformed” about the group’s intentions.

Via College Insurrection. Guys, let me give you a little clue, OK? Take a look at the Women and Gender Studies faculty page at DePaul:

The Department of Women’s and Gender Studies faculty members have wide-ranging research interests. Some of these interests include intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality; cross-cultural perspectives; violence against women; women in the Middle East; lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and transgender identities and politics; autobiography; queer theories; immigrant women; globalization; transnational feminist perspectives; antiracism; gender and education; feminist theories and politics; gender and family violence; and performance studies among others.

Do you guys see anything — anything at all — in that description that would lead you to think the kind of feminism taught at DePaul University could ever involve, y’know, “consent the D”?

Unless, of course, it’s followed by “Y-K-E” or “I-L-D-O.”

Pardon my heternormative sarcasm, DePaul guys, but it’s not like I don’t have actual research to support what I’m telling you. The truth isn’t hard to find, but you young idiots are probably too busy playing beer pong and XBox to bother looking for the truth.

Here, let me help you: Professor Ann Russo is director of the graduate program in Women’s and Gender Studies. Your first clue is that there is a graduate program, OK? They’re giving out master’s degrees and Ph.D.s in this stuff at DePaul, so it’s not just a few undergrads picking up a few easy A’s for regurgitating “queer theory.” Having a graduate program in Women’s Studies signifies that a university is a serious Dyke Factory. And let’s see what Professor Russo says about herself, eh?

Areas of Interest
Women, Violence, and Justice
Feminist, Anti-Racist, and Critical Race Theories and Practices
Activism and Social Justice Movements
Constructions of Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality in Media
Sexual Identities and Sexuality Debates

Just in case you DePaul fellows don’t get the significance of terms like “gender,” “identities” and “sexuality,” here’s a hint: Normal women don’t need a Ph.D. program to study how to be normal.

Still, you clever college boys may be thinking, “That old man is just crazy. There’s no way the university would be employing women to promote a totalitarian ideology of hatred toward males.” OK, look at Professor Russo’s list of “major publications” and you’ll see:

Bro: ANDREA EFFING DWORKIN.

Feminists have praised Dworkin — and yes, they consider this praise — “as the Malcolm X of the women’s movement.” Professor Russo and her co-author clearly admire Dworkin as a feminist leader:

Without Apology illuminates the politics and artistic practices of Andrea Dworkin, arguably one of the most daring, innovative, and controversial feminists in the United States. Coauthor of civil rights antipornography laws, life-long political activist, and international lecturer and consultant on issues of sexual violence and exploitation, Dworkin has a prolific and distinguished writing career. She has published thirteen books of fiction and nonfiction, and her work has been translated into twelve languages.This is the first-ever book-length analysis of Dworkin’s feminist politics and the first critical analysis to examine her controversial political ideas in light of the literary dimensions of her prose. Cindy Jenefsky, with Ann Russo, looks at Dworkin’s major nonfiction works — including Woman Hating, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, and Intercourse — in terms of the rhetorical dynamics animating her political ideas. Also included within this analysis are Jenefsky’s lengthy interviews with Dworkin, which focus on her identity as an artist and on the artistic principles guiding her work.The result is a novel reinterpretation of Dworkin’s politics and a brilliantly clear analysis of the political nature of artistic practice for readers interested in literary and rhetorical criticism, feminist theory and activism, the volatile debates over pornography and civil rights, and the relationship between contemporary sexual practices and male power systems.

When a professor of Women’s Studies writes a book celebrating the career of Andrea Dworkin . . . do I have to draw you a picture? Your mental laziness is frightening, DePaul dudes. Because, see, it doesn’t take too much Googling to figure out what Professor Russo is all about. Her co-author on that Dworkin book, Cindy Jenefsky? Also the co-author of a treatise called “Phallic Intrusion: Girl-Girl Sex in Penthouse.”

Hmmm. So, Russo and Jenefsky are disciples of the man-hater Dworkin, and Jenefsky co-wrote an entire paper analyzing fake lesbian scenes in a popular skin mag. Would it help — because I know you DePaul guys are too dumb and/or lazy to Google it yourself — if I pointed out that Jenefsky’s co-author on that paper, Diane Helene Miller, is author of a book called Freedom to Differ: The Shaping of the Gay and Lesbian Struggle for Civil Rights?

Wake up, DePaul dudes: Feminism ain’t about “consent the D.”

Thousands of years of patriarchal domination, and you idiots are going to fumble it away because you’re too stupid to use Google?

You dudes are going get aced out of the action if you don’t wake up.

 

 

This is the latest in the “Sex Trouble” series of articles about radical feminism’s war on human nature. Readers have urged me to produce a book on this topic; since July I have been publishing articles, based on my research and recent news events, as “draft chapters” of this book that I hope to finish compiling next month. Readers have generously supported this project with PayPal contributions, and it is with profound gratitude for this support that I once again remind you of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!




 

Category: Education, Feminism, Sex Trouble

‘Broken People,’ Cats and Prozac

Posted on | November 7, 2014 | 100 Comments

Rebecca Jane Stokes (@Beeswrite) is a columnist for the feminist site @xojanedotcom and by “feminist site,” I mean digital estrogen.

If you want ball-busting radical man-hating, you’ll have to look elsewhere. XOJane is more about pathetic narcissism.

Glenn Reynolds’ remark about “broken people” — made in reference to the radical man-hater Kate Millett — came to mind as I was reading the XOJane biography of 29-year-old Ms. Stokes:

What I Do, Fun-wise: Cook, engage my cats in heady conversation, and perform subpar sexy dances to Hall and Oates

Cats. Of course, she’s got cats. Did I mention she’s 29? And an alumna of New School University (2014-15 tuition $41,836)? Also, you may not be surprised to learn, Ms. Stokes lives in Brooklyn.

See, this is the thing with young feminist writer types nowadays. They can’t go to Podunk State University. No, they must attend one of those private schools where annual tuition is at or near the median U.S. household income. This is the only way to become that glorious being, The Writer. And, probably because as girls dreaming of becoming The Writer, they watched a sitcom or movie about the lives of quirky bachelorettes in Brooklyn, they simply must live there after graduation.

Well, you may ask, what does The Writer write about?

Herself, of course! Do these elite colleges offer a major in Solipsism Studies nowadays? Because Ms. Stokes’s oeuvre is typical of the genre — menstruation, her sex dreams, things that make her cry.

Digital estrogen, like I said. Ms. Stokes has a series of columns called “Crushed,” from which a few samples:

The First Time Someone Liked Me
Seventh grade was when I ruined any chance I may have had of getting laid during my teens. Seventh grade was when I should have been learning to read the silent cues essential to non-platonic relationship dynamics. Instead, the diligent and concentrated effort I aimed at loathing myself distracted me, putting me officially on the late-bloomer end of the welcome-to-sexy-times-adolescents spectrum. It was the first time in my life somebody liked me — and I had no idea. . . .
We rode the bus together, lived in the same neighborhood, liked the same dorky things. I would chatter his ear off on the bus each morning and the poor guy, he listened, even as he was desperate to finish whatever homework he hadn’t managed to get done the night before. He was gawky and sweet and infuriating and he totally liked me and I didn’t get it. Which is classic, because, clearly I was likewise into him, but I didn’t know how to express that. So I didn’t. Instead I publicly declared us mortal enemies. . . .

When I Hit The 8th Grade And
Became Totally Terrified of Men
In science I sat with the smartest kid in class. The boy in front of us was loud, attractive and had teeth like a game show host. He wore Tommy cologne. He sneered a lot and stared at you until you blushed. He whispered a secret to the smart boy next to me. “Apparently,” my irascible deskmate said with a smirk, “he wants to go out with you.”
This is where I was supposed to do something, say something that would open me up to ridicule. I refused to play. Instead I stared down at my desk and said something sarcastic.
Inside I was cringing and mortified and embarrassed. Was it true? It wasn’t true. It couldn’t possibly be true. It was there looking me in the face in an unblinking way stinking of cheap cologne, it was grabbing me by the wrist and pulling me, insisting. My heart went a little faster and I licked my lips raw. I hunched under the weight of big boobs and contemplated the two ample rolls of my fish-belly white stomach with grim certainty: Sex and love are one big joke played on ugly people. I guess it’s easier to doubt something than it is to believe it and be made a fool. . . .

The Year I Fell In Love With
Two Of My Teachers, And A Girl
11th grade. Junior year. Where was I? Well, I lost some weight by reading fiction while using all the machines at the local YMCA and practicing fierce self-hatred. I ran for class president and lost. I discovered the comics of Lynda Barry and Robert Crumb. I discovered the plays of Sam Friel and Harold Pinter.
I did not discover masturbation. I missed that boat. While everyone else was probably frantically flicking the kidney bean to pleasure town, I was wondering if maybe SOMEHOW I was the lost Princess Anastasia. Time travel, maybe?
This is also the year I fell in love with two different teachers and a girl. . . .

College, And How I Learned There Are
Different Ways Of Being Loved
As an 18-year-old in college I fell in love roughly eight hundred times. When I joined a sorority (this is a long and hilarious story that I will save for another day) my nerdy sexless crushes were so well-known that my nickname was “Crush.” . . .
I will forever doubt that I am loved, that I deserve to be. I try to believe it but it doesn’t always fit me well. It’s like your skin when you get out of the shower and wait too long to put on lotion: It gets tight and strange. It itches. . . .

When I Was Nineteen And Deluded Myself
Into A Relationship That Didn’t Exist
. . . Every girl is crazy at least once. I was crazy when I was a junior. The guy was Adam. . . .
How do you explain to a 20 year-old boy that your delusions have almost nothing to do with him? There’s no explanation other than the ones the men in curled baseball hats sipping drinks utter like a sacred universally understood bro oath: “That girl is fucking crazy.”
And maybe she is a little. . . .

To say the very least. Where do they come from, these painfully sensitive writer girls with interior dialogues full of shame and fear?

“Feminine instinct without its proper object or purpose,” my gut tells me, speaking like an old-fashioned psychologist, or perhaps an anthropologist of the evolutionary “brain science” type. In an earlier age — say, 1800 or 1700 — the young Ms. Stokes would have lived on a farm, and at 15 or 16 would have married the 18- or 19-year-old son of a neighboring farmer and, by the time the actual 21st-century Ms. Stokes was getting weird high school crushes, she would have been heavily pregnant with her first child. And then they all would have died of smallpox or a potato famine or some such misery.

Once Upon a Time, you see, people had things to worry about that were more serious than their feelings. If my ancestors had any interior dialogues, these have been lost to posterity because (a) there were no blogs back then, and (b) most of my ancestors prior to the 20th century were illiterate, or nearly so. In the National Archives is a document pertaining to my great-grandfather, Winston Wood Bolt, a young farm boy who fought as a private in the 13th Alabama Infantry Regiment. The document is a receipt for an amount paid to Private Bolt, signed by his regiment’s colonel, Birkett Davenport Fry.

Private Bolt’s signature? “X.”

My illiterate great-grandfather had more serious things to worry about than his feelings. Not long after he signed his X to that receipt, Private Bolt was captured at Gettysburg, when the Iron Brigade outflanked Archer’s Brigade east of Willoughby’s Run, and Private Bolt spent the next two years imprisoned at Fort Delaware, where the prisoners caught, cooked and ate rats to augment their rations.

Hard times make hard people, and sensitivity is a luxury not afforded to those whose lives are a matter of toil and hardship.

Psychological toughness — a determination not easily daunted by difficult circumstances — is what young people really need, but how shall they acquire this if we are afraid to wound their self-esteem?

Our ancestors were all survivors. We forget this, or rather we never learn it and, with no knowledge of the struggles of our forebears, we suffer from not having their example to inspire us. But enough of that digression. Let us return to Ms. Stokes’s oeuvre at XOJane, and another of her series, “Dispatches from the Prozac Rabbit Hole”:

In Which I Stare At My
Naked Body For A Long Time
. . . I think of something my therapist said to me last week. We were talking about how feelings aren’t law. About how they cannot be flipped from an ‘on’ to an ‘off’ position. I jokingly said, “I’m going one day at a time — one hour a time.”
She didn’t think it was funny. She thought it was a good plan. “Less than an hour. Get up and leave here and go to get coffee and see if you can do that. Then, if you can, see if you can turn on your computer. Then the next thing, and then the next thing. Piece by piece.” . . .
I have spent so much time hating my body for being a thing no one could desire — be it to look at, or to touch. How could anyone desire me when I refuse to even run a glancing hand down my own body myself? . . .

My Failed Relationship Is Proof
I’m More Broken Than I Realized
. . . For the first time in my life, I couldn’t sit down and write. I managed a few assignments early in the day, but then the guy I’ve been dating let me know that he wanted to take a break . . . and my usually facile flow on the keyboard became just as jammed up as everything else in my life. . . .
How do people, normal people, meet someone, make a connection with them, and not melt away into their own self-loathing when that connection is tested or severed? I feel like I don’t know how. I feel like an idiot.
It’s harder to cry now that I am on antidepressants. . . .

On Learning To Live With My Sadness
. . . My throat swells and throbs. I remember the train ride home last night and how I squeezed my face so tightly to stop the tears but they came anyway.
“I am falling to pieces,” I said inside as I cried. “I am breaking into a million pieces and no one on this train will even look me in the eye.” . . .

It’s Not About Me, Even a Little
When I visited New York somewhere around the age of ten or twelve, I could not fathom the sheer volume of stories I saw spilling out around me everywhere. It’s funny how it’s only now, exhausted by my own self-examination and with the bolstering of serotonin that my pills provide, that I can see this again. . . .
Right now I’m sitting on the F train. It’s around noon. It’s Thursday. I work from home and once a week I journey into Manhattan to see my analyst. . . .

Well, of course, she’s got an analyst in Manhattan. Every writer in Brooklyn must have an analyst in Manhattan. And also, cats.

There are times I feel rather moody myself, although offering to sell the Hope Diamond for $25 kind of cheered me up a bit. The DSCC pulling out of Louisiana also gave me a nice little emotional boost. Being happy is really just an ability to accept survival as success.

The “broken people” are out there everywhere, inviting us to their pity parties. But I think about my ancestors, and I also think about Muhammad Ali, the best boxer in history. Of all his many great moments, his greatest was a fight he lost. In 1973, Ali fought Ken Norton, a Marine Corps veteran who broke Ali’s jaw — yet Ali did not quit. He went the full 12 rounds and lost a split decision to Norton, but the fact that he finished the fight with a broken jaw is a testament to Ali’s toughness. Howard Cosell once observed that, for all the praise Ali got for his speed and strength, few recognized what was perhaps Ali’s greatest trait as a boxer: His ability to take a punch.

Being able to take a punch, shake off the pain and keep punching back — that’s mental toughness. That’s what makes a champion.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Art the comments:

Her tour at the New School was for post-baccalaureate schooling. Her first tour at higher education was at Sewanee. There, as at the New School, the degree she received was impractical (in theatre). It would appear from the dates on her degrees that she’s 31, not 29.

Thanks for the additional research, Art.

 

Category: Feminism

LIVE AT FIVE: 11.07.14

Posted on | November 7, 2014 | 10 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Sixth Circuit Breaks Ranks: Upholds Gay Marriage Bans In Four States

States affected by the decision

Decision says gay marriage best decided through the political process, not the courts
Back to the Supreme Court





Narendra Modi Visits Varanasi
Opens trade facilitation center for weavers
Asks weavers to utilize e-commerce market
Goa Chief Minister resigns, is appointed India’s new Defense Minister

Euro Struggles In Asia After Falling On Draghi’s Comments
Markets apparently not thrilled by further ECB stimulus plans



POLITICS
Election Results Looked Nothing Like The Polls – How’d That Happen

Pollsters, Larry Sabato wants you to check yourselves now that you’ve wrecked yourselves

A night expected to be full of nail-biters turns into a bloodbath for Democrats


Bin Laden’s Alleged Shooter Goes Public, Fellow Seals Call BS


Boehner Warns Obama On Immigration Executive Action

Idaho Guard Chopper Crashes, Two Killed

Issa: Document Dump Shows Holder At The Middle Of “Fast & Furious”

Detroit Ready For Judge’s Decision On Bankruptcy

Ex-US Diplomat Under Criminal Investigation

Source: Obama’s Letter To Khamenei “F*cks Everything Up”



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Asian Crude Sinks To New Lows On Strong Dollar: WTI $77.66, Brent $82.28
53 Million E-Mails Breached In Massive Home Depot Hack
Stronger Earnings By Corporate Giants Push Dow To New Highs
Bank Of America Takes $400 Million Litigation Charge
Fannie Mae Announces Dramatic Easing Of Mortgage Standards
Mexico Cancels High-Speed Rail Deal With Chinese
Microsoft Offers Free Office To Mobile Users
Amazon: Put This Always-On Wifi Mic In Your House – What Could Go Wrong?
Zuckerberg: Facebook Will Be Mostly Video In Five Years
Scribd Launches Audio Book Library
Internet Archive Delivers 900 Classic Games To Your Browser



SPORTS
Hamilton, Bruins Surge Past Oilers In Third Period

Loui Erickson (#21) congratulated by teammates after scoring during the third period flurry

Boston rallies to beat Edmonton, which hasn’t won against the Bruins since October 2000


Browns Dominate Bengals, 24-3

Ray Rice’s Future In Arbitrator’s Hands As Appeal Ends


Rockets Dominate Depleted Spurs

Sens Shut Out Wild, 3-0

Corbett: Joe Paterno Wrongly Fired

Lightning Snuff Flames 5-2

Beane Protege Named New Dodgers GM

Pens Edge Jets In Shootout

Canucks Tip Sharks 3-2

Nationals Pick Up Span’s Option For 2015, Decline Soriano And LaRoche



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Jessica Chastain Trapped In Publicity Tug Of War

One star, two movies

Nolan’s “Interstellar” blocking her from promoting “A Most Violent Year”

Rachel Bilson, It’s A Girl!

“Toy Story 4” To Hit Theaters In 2017

Britney Spears Confirms New Boyfriend

Taylor Swift Defends Pulling Her Music From Spotify

Mark Wahlberg & Peter Berg Are Bionic Duo On “Six Billion Dollar Man”

Homeless Amanda Bynes Crashes At LA Shopping Mall

Netflix Adapting “A Series Of Unfortunate Events” Into TV Series

Kenya Moore: This Is My “Redemption Season” On “Real Housewives Of Atlanta”

Anne Hathaway On Dealing With Internet Bullies: “I Hadn’t Learned To Love Myself Yet”

PETA Slams “Eaten Alive” Star For Anaconda Stunt

Miley Cyrus Dating Patrick Schwartzenegger

Channing Tatum Eyes “Hateful Eight” Role

Mark Zuckerberg Whines “The Social Network” Hurt His Feelings

Prosecutors Drop Murder-For-Hire Charges Against AC/DC Drummer



FOREIGNERS
Obama Turns To Iran For Help With ISIS
French President Hollande’s Popularity Sinks To New Low In Midterm Poll
German Divisions Persist 25 Years After The Fall Of The Berlin Wall
Chicoms, Japan Agree To Resume Dialogue
Series Of Explosions Strike Fatah Targets In Gaza
Over 600 American Troops Complained Of Chemical Weapons Exposure In Iraq
Libya Faces (More) Chaos As Court Invalidates Parliament
ICC Won’t Prosecute Israel Over 2012 Gaza Flotilla Deaths
Malaysian Court Overturns Ban On Cross-Dressing
Burkina Faso’s Interim Leader Dismisses AU Deadline



BLOGS & STUFF
Proof Positive: Auditioning For The Dustbin Of History
Doug Powers: The Nation And Salon Say Scott Walker Could Never Be Elected President, So Just Put It Out Of Your Minds!
Twitchy: “It’s Over. Let It Go.” Conservatives Keeping Mary Landrieu’s Dying Twitter Feed On Life Support
Sultan Knish: The Unbearable Lightness Of Feminism
American Power: California Scrambles To Deal With Effects Of Proposition 47
American Thinker: Were Women A Factor In The Great Democratic Shellacking Of 2014?
BLACKFIVE: Bergdahl And Tahmooressi – A Tale Of Two Sergeants
Conservatives4Palin: Where Is The Media On The Attkisson Story?
Don Surber: Reset Button Politics
Jammie Wearing Fools: Thanks Obama! There Are Now 357 People Being Monitored For Ebola In NYC
Joe For America: Obama On The Midterm Results – Not ME!
JustOneMinute: In Which I Effortlessly Square A Circle
Pamela Geller: Exhale
Protein Wisdom: The Axis Of Right-Wing Extremism
Shot In The Dark: It’s Getting To The Point…
STUMP: Illinois Election Wrapup – Congrats, Rauner, I Guess
The Gateway Pundit: Terrific! Minnesota Monitoring 48 For Ebola, 12 Already Missing
The Jawa Report: Bask, Jawas, Bask
The Lonely Conservative: Cosmo Is Super Thrilled About All Those Women Elected After Working Against Them
This Ain’t Hell: John McCain Promises To Save The Warthog From Extinction
Weasel Zippers: State Senate Seat Wendy Davis Gave Up Now Belongs To Pro-Life Tea Party Republican
Megan McArdle: Fifteen Things We Learned On Election Night


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Category: Live at Five

Harvard #SexWeek Punch Lines

Posted on | November 6, 2014 | 68 Comments

Years ago, when I was covering education for a newspaper in Georgia — when my oldest daughter (now 25) was in kindergarten and my twin sons (now 22) were just toddlers — I came to the conclusion that “sex education” in schools is (a) morally corrupting and (b) a harmful waste of taxpayer money. As to point (a) just think about your typical public school teacher. Have you seen these people? Have you ever had a conversation with a public school teacher?

Are you aware that students pursuing education degrees, on average, have the lowest SAT scores of any college major?

If you are sufficiently literate to read and comprehend this sentence, congratulations: You’re smarter than a fifth-grade teacher!

If you are more intelligent than the average public-school teacher, why the hell would you trust one of those hopeless dullards to teach your kids about sex? Might as well send your kid to the Post Office or Department of Motor Vehicles to ask a random bureaucrat about sex.

“Hi, my Mommy said you can you tell me where to find my uterus. And what’s this whole ‘menstruation’ deal about?”

No, hell, no. You wouldn’t want a DMV bureaucrat talking to your children about sex, so why let a public school teacher do it? It doesn’t make sense, especially if you can conjure up the mental image of your typical school teacher — not a particularly attractive person, OK? — standing in front a classroom of children, showing them anatomical pelvic cross-section charts and teaching them the Latin words for various parts: Labia minora, vagina, mons pubis, et cetera.

The ONLY Latin they teach in schools nowadays, you see?

Public schools won’t teach your kids a goddamned line of Cicero, but it is crucially important fifth-graders learn to spell “vulva,” “testes” and “glans penis,” because common English slang just won’t do.

Might as well send your kids to the DMV, really.

If you are naïve enough to believe a word any government education bureaucrat says, you might think we live in a culture where facts about sex are hidden in the shadows, suppressed by puritanical prudery, so that it would be impossible for kids to learn about this stuff were it not for “comprehensive” sex education in public schools.

If you’re that stupid, click here and hit my tip jar for $25 and I’ll send you the Hope Diamond via FedEx. It’s just a 45-carat blue paperweight sitting here on my desk, but I digress . . .

No, the Hope Diamond is not for sale. I’m just kidding.

Acidic sarcasm as a means to educational reform is a technique I’ve been using since fifth grade, and all it ever got me was trips to the principal’s office, multiple paddlings and several suspensions.

You’ll notice that al-Qaeda terrorists have never targeted the offices of the U.S. Department of Education. This is no coincidence, and neither is the fact that they didn’t hit Harvard University on 9/11:

Organizers of Harvard University’s “Sex Week” event have added a new workshop this year aimed at teaching students the joys of anal sex. Anyone bothered by the workshop is obviously “repressed” and hates gays and women, says one of the organizers.
One of the organizers of “sex week,” co-president of Sexual Health Education & Advocacy Throughout Harvard (SHEATH) Kirin Gupta, spoke to MTV and denigrated those who have criticized Sex Week in general and her anal sex workshop in particular.
Gupta, who was the 2012 “Global Citizen of the Year,” insisted that anyone who criticized her anal workshop, titled “What What In The Butt,” were just a bunch of haters.
Saying that “What What In The Butt” added “something that was missing” during past Sex Week celebrations, Gupta admitted that there has been some criticism of the workshop. But these critics just hate gays, she decided.
“The conservative backlash speaks to the latent homophobia that society thinks so often it has gotten over, and has not. It speaks to these residual prejudices that people [have] when faced with a reality they’re not willing to acknowledge or respect,” she said.

Got that? Your problem is “residual prejudices toward a practice you’re not willing to acknowledge or respect,” you ignorant bigots. Whereas the problem at Harvard University is, highly intelligent students at that elite institution don’t know how to have butt sex.

What else can I say? I could riff endlessly about this, but Harvard won’t listen because I’m obviously afflicted by latent homophobia, residual prejudices and, also, the Hope Diamond. That useless blue rock is just sitting here on my desk, gathering dust . . .





 

Category: Education, Sex

And @AlecMacGillis Misses the Bus

Posted on | November 6, 2014 | 43 Comments

To quote what I said Wednesday:

The aftermath of a wave election always involves a contest by partisans and pundits to seize control of the narrative, to tell us What It Really Means, although usually the truth can only be known with the advantage of hindsight.

When Democrats sustain a world-historic ass-kicking, as they did Tuesday, a certain quality of unreality in the post-election spin is predictable. The demise of the Democrats’ moderate “Blue Dog” wing means that the party now has few if any sane adherents, and thus liberal journalists trying to explain the devastation of Democrats in the mid-terms are not apt to recognize the symptoms of madness.

Democrats Didn’t Lose Governor’s Races
Because of a GOP Wave. They Lost
Because of Bad Candidates.

So says Alec MacGillis of the New Republic, but it’s difficult to say that this is a distinction that matters, even if it were true. MacGillis talks about the Maryland governor’s race, in which Democrat Anthony Brown was defeated by Republican Larry Hogan:

[E]very single voter I spoke with Tuesday — including several who voted for Barack Obama — at a polling station in a swing district in Baltimore County, just outside the Baltimore city line in the Overlea neighborhood, brought up the rain tax.
The rain tax is a “stormwater management fee” signed into law by Governor Martin O’Malley in 2012 that requires the state’s nine largest counties, plus Baltimore city, to help fund the reduction of pollution in Chesapeake Bay caused by stormwater runoff. The tax is hardly draconian . . .
Yet everyone I spoke with cited it as the crowning example of the nickel-and-diming taxing regime under O’Malley that also includes the $60-per-year “flush tax” to upgrade sewage treatment plants and higher taxes on alcohol, cigarettes, and gas. “The rain tax was the last straw,” said Mike Eline, 64, who does pest control at the University of Maryland campus in Baltimore. “How many taxes can there possibly be?” “It seems any reason they can, they say, ‘let’s tax the people,’” said Daniel, a 63-year-old African-American warehouse worker. “What really upsets me is the rain tax. Rain is something natural that’s just given to us. Nobody has to work for it. But they say, ‘let’s tax it.’”

Permit me to say that when a black Democrat in Baltimore — a bastion of Democrat loyalism, where Nancy Pelosi’s father was once boss of the notoriously corrupt political machine — can see the problem with his party’s policies, they’ve probably pushed it too far.

How is this inconsistent with the claim of a “GOP wave”? It’s not.

In fact, it’s the key to understanding the wave that MacGillis imagines himself to be disproving. The swelling progressive momentum of the Obama Age made Democrats believe they had reached the Promised Land and could enact bad policies without political consequence. No matter how high they raised taxes, no matter how onerous the regulatory regime, no matter how extreme the Democrat Party’s policy agenda, they could never lose — and then they did.

At the national level, pundits and triumphant Republicans are pointing to Republican Larry Hogan’s win over Brown in Maryland as the ultimate evidence of the 2014 anti-Democratic wave. Not only did Republicans win Senate seats in red and purple states, the claim goes, but they won governorships in true-blue Maryland, Massachusetts, and Illinois as well.
I’m skeptical of that claim. No doubt, disaffection and low turnout among core Democratic voters hurt the party’s gubernatorial candidates in blue states as it did Senate candidates in red and purple ones. And anti-Washington, anti-Obama sentiment certainly played a role in the GOP’s Senate takeover. But to explain why some Democratic gubernatorial candidates lost in blue states while others (such as Gina Raimondo in Rhode Island, Dannel Malloy in Connecticut, and John Hickenlooper in Colorado) managed to hang on, one really needs to take into account the state and local context of the races. . . .

You can read the whole thing, and see how MacGillis is employing psychological defense mechanisms — denial, rationalization, minimizing, smokescreening — one would expect to encounter in a family therapy session where the husband has been caught in adultery but wants to avoid personal responsibility for his wrongs. That makes MacGillis the co-dependent wife who is actually enabling her husband’s wrongful behavior. “How’s that working out for ya?”

WAKE UP, LIBERAL MEDIA! You are not helping Democrats by trying to convince Democrats they don’t have a problem. You are being manipulated by a narcissistic sociopath named Barack Obama.

It was as if he didnt lose the Senate, around 14 House seats, blue State Gov races that he campaigned for, and lots of State legislatures.
Condensed version:
People want us to work together.
People want us to get stuff done.
I’ll listen to whatever ideas are out there, as long as they are in agreement with me.
Minimum wage
Greatest economy in the world
Infrastructure
Executive action on illegal immigration
Willing to improve ObamaCare, just not in ways they might want to.
Minimum wage
Illegal immigration
I increased oil production
Budget
Get stuff done
This sums it up quite nicely.

 

Category: Democrats, Election, Media Bias
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