The Other McCain

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

Millionaire Transsexual Bankrolls PAC for Son’s Florida Democrat Campaign

Posted on | July 30, 2014 | 50 Comments

Martine Rothblatt (left); Gabriel Rothblatt (right).

Next time Democrats claim that Republicans are “the party of the rich” or complain about millionaires using PACs to funnel big money into politics, just mention this weird story about the Democrat candidate for Congress in Florida’s 8th District:

A congressional candidate in Florida is getting a boost from a super political action committee with one donor, which happens to be his dad.
But there’s a twist.
Gabriel Rothblatt’s father, Martine, used to be Martin Rothblatt before undergoing gender reassignment surgery. She — Martine — founded Sirius Satellite Radio and a Maryland-based biotech company that paid her $38 million in compensation last year, according to Forbes. . . .
Records show Martine Rothblatt contributed $225,000 to SpacePAC last quarter. Additionally, SpacePAC’s treasurer is a former federal regulatory lawyer and now influential attorney associated with United Therapeutics Corp., Martine Rothblatt’s pharmaceutical company.
Federal election laws prohibit super PACs from coordinating with candidates, but the close familial ties in this case could easily complicate those restrictions — and already may have. . . .
Rothblatt is endorsed by the Teamsters, a powerful labor union, and the National Organization for Women, a feminist group. The district includes Brevard and Indian River counties, and parts of Orange County.

Now, I’m going to get to Martine Rothblatt’s genuinely weird biography in a minute, but first, here’s a report from local newspaper columnist Russ Lemmon about the “infestation” of campaign signs for Gabriel Rothblatt that covered the 8th District:

As I noted last week, Rothblatt sent me an email in May and he said the signs were put out by SpacePAC, a political action committee that is supporting his campaign. He said election laws prohibit him from having contact with SpacePAC.
I said it was a lame excuse, as he surely knows someone who knows someone who could get the word to SpacePAC.
Which inadvertently set the stage for a humorous email from Curtis Carpenter:
“His excuse that it’s a Political Action Committee that is responsible for their placement might almost be believable except for the fact that his parents founded the PAC!”
Yes, it’s true.
SpacePAC was formed by Bina and Martine Rothblatt, according to the website spacepac.us. (Some interesting trivia from the website: “The Rothblatts created Sirius XM satellite radio in 1990.”)
During our initial email exchange, Gabriel Rothblatt didn’t say a word about his parents’ involvement in SpacePAC. I told him that was a pretty big omission on his part.
“The May conversation was brief and any number of topics could either be considered an omission, or just not relevant to a brief directed response and reserved for a still anticipated in-person conversation,” he said Thursday via email.
Seriously? I’m thinking he should have given disclosure of the SpacePAC relationship a much higher priority.

First, does anyone believe that Gabriel Rothblatt is not “coordinating” with a PAC whose sole contributor is his . . . er, ex-father?

It appears the SpacePAC exists solely as a single-donor money-funnel with the goal of electing Martine Rothblatt’s son to Congress. There’s your grassroots party of the working-class “little guy,” eh?

Now, let’s examine the bizarre biography of Martine (neé Martin) Rothblatt: It’s wrong to call him/her Gabriel Rothblatt’s “mother,” because it appears that after undergoing sex-change surgery in 1994 at age 40, Martin/Martine remained married to his/her wife, who is the mother of their four children, Eli, Sunee, Gabriel, and Jenesis. So I guess that means Martin/Martine is a translesbian.

In 1995, Martine Rothblatt published The Apartheid of Sex: Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender, about which we read:

Rothblatt makes a case for the adoption of a new sexual model that accommodates every shade of gender identity. She reveals that traditional male and female roles are dictated neither by genetics, genitals, nor reproductive biology, but rather by social attitudes that originated in early patriarchal cultures and that have been institutionalized in modern law, and she calls a new acceptance of human sexuality in all its prismatic variety. . . .
Arguing that “the legal division of people into males and females is as wrong as the legal division of people into black and white race,” Rothblatt, an attorney and transsexual, is a proponent of “transgenderism,” which she characterizes as a grass-roots movement whose guiding principle is “that people should be free to change, either temporarily or permanently, the sex type to which they were assigned since infancy.” Using a provocative reinterpretation of historical and legal issues, feminist thinking, and scientific research to defend her belief in continua of sex, gender, and sexual identity, Rothblatt sometimes seems unclear of her intended audience.

Yeah, whatever. And if you think that is weird, try this:

In 2004, Rothblatt launched the Terasem Movement, a transhumanist school of thought focused on promoting joy, diversity, and the prospect of technological immortality via mind uploading and geoethical nanotechnology. Through a charitable foundation, leaders of this school convene publicly accessible symposia, publish explanatory analyses, conduct demonstration projects, issue grants, and encourage public awareness and adherence to Terasem values and goals..

So here’s your Gabriel Rothblatt campaign slogan:

VOTE DEMOCRAT
Elect the Millionaire Weirdo’s Son to Congress!

 

Category: Democrats, Election, Florida

Stuff You Can’t Make Up

Posted on | July 30, 2014 | 35 Comments

From Beca Grimm (@becagrimm):

Have I ever mentioned my insanely obsessive curiosity?

When something catches my attention, it is my habit to research the topic within an inch of its life, pursuing random footnotes and the biographical details of the authors of the works cited in the bibliography, in order to satisfy my maniacal desire to know.

Do not tell me your opinions. Tell me what you know — give me facts, quotes, something genuinely useful to me as knowledge.

Exactly how I developed this habitual hyper-curiosity is a long story. Remember that the Internet did not become a mass phenomenon until I was in my mid-30s, so that by the time I first logged onto the Web, I’d spent more than three decades seeking knowledge in books, magazines and newspapers. Young people — i.e., anyone under 30 — can scarcely imagine that world, where you couldn’t just Google up anything you wanted to know, where being knowledgeable required one to commit facts to memory, to develop skills and habits of checking indexes and bibliographies and learning how to cross-reference sources. At any rate, the development of my mental habits occurred before there was an Internet, and the advent of the online world provided a sort of turbo-boost to my pre-existing curiosity, and the effect is this: My mind is crammed with facts, and I am unable to break the habit of acquiring new facts, so that there is a somewhat disorganized encyclopedia inside my mind, to which I add new information every day.

The name Inga Muscio rang no bells for me, and because I’ve spent the past six months immersed in a study of radical feminism, the fact that I did not recognize the name of this feminist author led me to do some quick research: Here’s her Wikipedia entry, here’s the “About” page of her blog, here is her personal FAQs. You can take the time to scan those pages, and you will then know as much about Inga Muscio as I do. Why would I ask you to undertake that research?

In college, a friend who didn’t shave her armpits lent me her copy of Inga Muscio’s feminist treatise Cunt: A Declaration of Independence. Paging through it instantly gave me a ton of great ideas, like supporting female-run businesses and LGBT rights and checking out my vagina with a compact mirror. Then there were some I wasn’t immediately sold on, like abortion via reflexology and, more specifically, using menstrual blood as plant fertilizer. . . .

Read the rest of that, if you care.

My insane curiosity kicks in: Who is Beca Grimm? It was easy enough to learn she is a music journalist who was living the dream in Brooklyn, N.Y., but is now moving to Atlanta. What I wanted, however, was the specific context of the phrase, “In college …”

Where did she go to college and when?

University of North Florida, Class of 2010, a journalism major. Let’s quote from an article she wrote as a junior in 2009:

The green movement has recently become one of nation-sweeping proportions. Vegetarianism is strongly linked to environmentalism because abstaining from ingesting meat greatly helps our planet. . . .
Of course, one of the most popular reasons people boycott meat is in support of animal rights. Although the meat industry has improved somewhat since the times of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” what with the growing popularity of free-range options, there are still an astounding lack of ethics. . . .

Let’s not be too critical of Beca’s collegiate output, eh? The relevant point is that when she refers to her college days, Beca is a 27-year-old talking about what she did when she was 19 or 20 or 21. One wonders what other books she read in college, or what books she has since read, but somehow this one book gave her “a ton of great ideas” — e.g., gazing at her genitalia with a mirror — and thus Inga Muscio’s Cunt can be described as a formative influence on Beca.

OK, then: Vegetarian environmentalist animal-rights feminist.

Am I the only one who notices how many young people seem to care more about their beliefs and attitudes than about knowledge?

That is to say, despite their intelligence, their sense of themselves is almost entirely about membership in an ideology/identity group — to which they give a cult-like loyalty — and they never pursue knowledge except to reinforce their own beliefs. This is not merely intellectual sloth, but deliberate self-imposed ignorance. They are determined to know nothing outside the confines of their own narcissistic identity bubble, and are therefore so ignorant that they have no concept of how much they don’t know.

It is impossible to educate self-absorbed people who lack curiosity. “Checking out my vagina with a compact mirror” is a  perfect metaphor for the lives of this hopelessly ignorant generation.

 

Category: Education, Feminism, Intellectuals

A Thank-You Note

Posted on | July 30, 2014 | 12 Comments

— by Wombat-socho


This has been an exciting month for me, what with the launch of The Last Falangist and all, and I would like to thank everyone who read Stacy’s excellent review and plunked down their $1.99. Forty of you did so, and another couple of folks borrowed it, some of you even posted glowing reviews on Amazon, and I am very grateful to all of you.


I am also, of course, grateful to everyone who bought stuff through my Amazon links here on the site. It’s interesting to look at the monthly report and see what people like to shop for. Most of what people buy from my links are e-books; I guess that’s not too surprising since they’re relatively inexpensive and provide instant gratification. Top seller this month (so far) is Andy Weir’s The Martian with ten copies, followed by Sarah Hoyt’s short story The Price of Gold (seven copies) and her novelette The Big Ship and the Wise Old Owl tied with Christopher Nuttall’s The Trafalgar Gambit at three copies apiece. People also seem to like Tom Kratman; his new The Rods and the Axe sold a few copies, and someone picked up its predecessor Come and Take Them as well.


Apparently I’m not the only one who likes protein bars around here; someone ordered a box of LARABAR Alt Bar, Cinnamon Apple Crisp and some other Larabar products as well, and we also moved a box of Odwalla Super Protein 2-Ounce Bar. Good eats at a good price!


Major thanks to whoever ordered New MTN Gearsmith Heavy Duty Adjustable Cast Iron Chrome Weight Dumbbell Set. It is so metal, and no doubt will do your body good. Also on the fitness front, an Adidas Flat Bench. Quite the bargain!


Finally, I can’t thank Stacy McCain enough for giving me the opportunity to mongle links and make the occasional semi-coherent post here. The man is a public benefactor, taking in strange crypto-Jewish marsupial sorts and giving them a place to blog, to say nothing of doing an outstanding job pimping my book. He is truly the last champion of Conservative Gonzo Shoe Leather Journalism loose in the land, and you should definitely HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!





Category: Uncategorized

It’s a Man’s (Virtual) World, Baby

Posted on | July 30, 2014 | 79 Comments

Before starting this discussion, permit me to point out that no entrepreneur in conservative online media has been more successful than Michelle Malkin, who launched two digital start-ups — HotAir.com and Twitchy.com — and subsequently sold these Internet properties to Salem Communications for sums rumored to be seven figures each.

The knowledge that this woman’s phenomenal intelligence and hard work have been handsomely rewarded in the marketplace of ideas casts an important light on Issie Lapowsky’s Wired.com article:

Shortly after Kathryn Tucker started RedRover, an app that showcases local events for kids, she pitched the idea to an angel investor at a New York tech event. But it didn’t go over well. When she finished her pitch, the investor said he didn’t invest in women.
When she asked why, he told her. “I don’t like the way women think,” he said. “They haven’t mastered linear thinking.” To prove his point, he explained that his wife could never prioritize her to-do lists properly. And then, as if he was trying to compliment her, he told Tucker she was different. “You’re more male,” he said.
Tucker didn’t need to hear any more. “I said, ‘Thanks very much,’ walked out, and never spoke to him again,” she recalled earlier this year, as part of a panel discussion on “fundraising while female” at the annual Internet Week conference in New York.
It was one of many stories shared during a panel that painted the tech world as a place that—for all its efforts to push into the future with apps and gadgets and online services—is still very much stuck in the past when it comes to attitudes involving gender. Rachel Sklar, founder of Change the Ratio, an advocacy group for women in tech, shared the story of an investor who said he doesn’t invest in women he doesn’t find attractive. Another gave women in the audience a tip for pitching VCs: “Wear a wedding ring.”
As unsettling as they were, these stories only begin to describe the obstacles facing women in the tech world. We’ve all seen the numbers. According to a recent report . . . only 13 percent of venture-backed companies had at least one female co-founder. In the software sector, women-run businesses accounted for just 10 percent of all venture capital deals. . . .

You can read the whole tendentious thing, which is a typical example of how feminists argue: Cite some statistics, tell a few anecdotes and — voila! — they’re victims oppressed by the patriarchy. To dispute their claims just proves you’re a sexist, and so skeptics are either smeared or intimidated into silence.

The core of the feminist argument here is a simple fallacy, the belief that every kind of “inequality” must be the result of unfair discrimination, so that merely by showing a statistical disparity, they believe they have exposed “social injustice.”

This is an absurd species of bad logic. It depends upon the credulous belief, the unstated premise of the syllogism, that male sexism is such a powerful force as to triumph over the profit motive of investors in a market economy. Such feminist claims furthermore depend on another unstated premise, namely that perfect parity — where participation in every field of human endeavor, at every level, is exactly proportional to the general population — is the natural, normal or most desirable state of affairs. Only if one accepts that dubious egalitarian premise is there any reason to believe that the high-tech sector is plagued by wrongful sexist discrimination.

The different proportions of employees in various career fields — whether we analyze the workforce by sex, race, age, nationality, religion or any other factor — may have any number of explanations without prompting a legitimate claim of unfair discrimination. Even where one can cite anecdotal evidence of prejudiced attitudes (e.g., sexist remarks made by investors or executives), it does not follow from such examples that this prejudice is the cause of the statistical disparity. In fact, one can plausibly argue that causality runs in the other direction, and that sexist attitudes in male-dominated career fields are simply a reflection of the fact that most people in these fields are male, so that the normative expectations are expressions of commonplace male attitudes.

We might expect that women seeking employment as construction workers or long-haul truck drivers would face a certain amount of prejudice in those overwhelmingly male trades; it does not follow from this fact, however, that prejudice against women explains why there are so few women carpenters, bricklayers or tractor-trailer drivers. There is a chicken-and-egg question of causality involved, and if truck drivers are (a) mostly male and (b) given to “sexist” beliefs, we cannot presume that (b) is the cause of (a), nor can we rule out the plausible alternative (c) that most women simply aren’t interested in driving big rigs.

It is impossible to overlook the fact that these types of “diversity” claims — where a perceived shortage of women or ethnic minorities in some field is treated as a problem of unfairness or discrimination — are only ever made in relation to career fields that are relatively lucrative or perceived as prestigious. No one has ever cited the percentage of women (or Chinese or Latinos, whatever) employed as short-order cooks or retail clerks as evidence that there is discrimination in these low-paying, low-prestige jobs. Nor is the disproportionately large number of African-American players in the NBA claimed to result from anti-white prejudice, because success in the world of professional sports ultimately comes down to who can best play the game. Where we find claims of discriminatory unfairness, or laments about the lack of “diversity,” are in high-paying office jobs generally requiring a college education and where the superiority of merit between different employees is difficult for any outsider to judge.

Notice that the people who are most involved in pushing these discrimination/diversity claims are usually employed in exactly these kinds of office jobs. They are lawyers, journalists, academics or non-profit activists — college-educated people employed in fields where it is hard to say that judgments of merit are entirely objective. If a certain lawyer is appointed to be a federal judge, for example, the fact that this attorney is qualified, having a diploma from a good law school and having been successful in private practice, does not mean that he is the most qualified candidate for the job. There may be many thousands of lawyers in America whose qualifications are at least as good as the lawyer appointed to the federal bench, but (a) many of those lawyers have no interest in serving as a judge, and (b) even if they were interested, most don’t have the political connections needed to attract the attention and support of those who decide which candidates the president will nominate for a vacancy in the federal judiciary.

By the same token, whatever the criteria by which one judges a journalist, a professor or a non-profit activist, it is very difficult to say that questions of absolute merit in those fields can be determined by strictly objective standards. A reporter who wins the Pulitzer Prize, for example, can usually be presumed to be one of the best practitioners of the trade. However, Janet Cooke of the Washington Post won the Pulitzer for a series of articles later revealed to have been fabricated, and Pulitzer winner Rick Bragg resigned from the New York Times after being accused of ethical lapses. One  could examine the other occupations of diversity-mongers — in academia, for example — and produce similar instances that indicate the absence of an absolute-merit standard.

We return, then, to the alleged discrimination against women in the computer technology field, as described by Issie Lapowsky. Here we need not speculate endlessly about the standard of merit. Ultimately, the market determines whether a technology company succeeds or fails. High-tech start-ups are notoriously risky investments; for every Google or Facebook that turns into a gigantic money-maker for investors, there are countless ventures that implode in a matter of months or which, like Salon.com, seem to stagger along in zombie fashion because “investors” have a non-monetary motive to keep losing money year after year.

Investors and executives in high-tech firms have every possible incentive to attract the very best personnel available. If qualified females are being discriminated against, so that less-qualified males are employed or promoted, then companies could gain a competitive advantage by hiring and promoting women who are victims of discrimination at other firms. Therefore, if the lack of “diversity” in high-tech is the result of unfair sexist prejudice, some companies must be cutting off their noses to spite their faces, forgoing opportunities for profit in the process. Ultimately, then, these sexist firms would lose market share in comparison to companies whose employment practices are based on standards of absolute merit, and firms that hire and promote qualified females would gain economic benefit from their wise policies.

The fact that this has not happened — that the most successful firms in this highly competitive field are founded and managed by men — would logically seem to be adequate evidence that  unfair discrimination is not the norm in high-tech. But if feminists cared about logic and evidence, they wouldn’t be feminists, would they?





 

 

Category: Economics, Feminism

Nice Reputation, Jesse

Posted on | July 30, 2014 | 30 Comments

Ace of Spades calls Jesse Ventura a “conspiracy-addled asshole” and he could have added “selfish,” “dishonest” and “vindictive” to that description without fear of being sued for defamation. The reaction to Ventura’s suing a Navy SEAL’s widow for $1.8 million is ironic: Ventura claimed that his reputation was harmed by Chris Kyle’s book; yet Ventura has inflicted more harm on his own reputation by suing than Kyle ever could have imagined inflicting on Ventura.

Having some direct experience with conspiracy-addled assholes who file lawsuits, and having been a journalist for more than 25 years before convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin had the unmitigated gall to claim I had “defamed” him, let me point out something that is being generally overlooked in the reaction to the verdict in Ventura v. Kyle.

Jesse Ventura’s opposition to the Iraq War, and his paranoid views about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, are a matter of public record, as Noah Rothman says at Hot Air:

Ventura is a noted conspiracy theorist whose kneejerk impulse [is] to blame the American government for everything from the 9/11 attacks, to the raid on the Osama bin Laden compound, to the JFK assassination has netted him frequent appearances on networks like Russia Today.

One can describe Ventura thus, on the basis of information plainly in evidence, without having defamed him. And to voice negative judgments on Ventura’s character — to call him a “kook,” a “crackpot” or a “bully” — is merely to express one’s opinion formed on the basis of readily available information about Ventura, who is a public figure per the Supreme Court’s Sullivan standard.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

How, then, did Ventura prevail in court against Kyle? We can blame the judge and the jury and call the verdict a travesty, yet there is one element of Kyle’s case any newspaper editor would immediately spot as a vulnerability: He asserted private knowledge.

This is a line that no smart journalist would ever cross: To claim to know something bad about somebody, a private fact otherwise unknown, on the basis of information not publicly available.

Any reporter could publish a story about the conflict between Ventura and Kyle — the alleged barroom confrontation at the heart of this lawsuit — and write that Kyle says X, Y and Z happened, including Ventura’s denials that any such confrontation occurred, without fear that his reporting could be construed as libelous.

Kyle’s problem was that, if his altercation with Ventura actually occurred, it was not a matter of public record. Nobody called the cops; there was no police report filed. In fact, it appears that Kyle’s editors at Harper Collins recognized the potential liability involved in publishing that anecdote, so that Kyle’s book referred to Ventura as “scruff face.” It was only in subsequent media interviews that Kyle himself said that Ventura was the subject of the anecdote, and thus the truth or falsehood of Kyle’s version of events — his claim that Ventura said vile things, and that he knocked Ventura down — was central to the defamation lawsuit.

The statements that Kyle attributed to Ventura are certainly consistent with Ventura’s general hostility to the Bush administration and its policies in Iraq. One can easily believe that if Kyle and Ventura got into a quarrel at a bar — and, it is important to note, Ventura does not deny that he was in that bar on the night in question — that Kyle would have taken a swing at Ventura, and it is plausible that the young man in his vigorous prime could have knocked down the older man with a single punch. However, to say that Kyle’s anecdote is credible is a different thing than saying it is provably true. And so it was arguably an unwise risk for Kyle to describe this alleged event as a fact — to assert private knowledge.

All that being said, I do not believe this case was correctly decided. In a defamation case, the burden is on the plaintiff to prove that the defendant knowingly or recklessly published a falsehood. Based on what has been reported of the trial, Ventura and his witnesses cast doubt on Kyle’s story, but did not disprove it, as witnesses for the defense testified that Kyle told the truth.

If lawyers for Kyle’s estate appeal the case, I feel they have a good chance to overturn the verdict. Meanwhile, we are just days away from the next hearing in the Maryland case of Kimberlin v. Walker, et al., in which the Perjuring Pro Se Pipsqueak is suing me and four co-defendants for $1 million. The prayers and continued financial support of readers are most earnestly solicited.





 

Category: R.S. McCain School of Journalism, The Kimberlin Files

LIVE AT FIVE: 07.30.14

Posted on | July 30, 2014 | 9 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
IDF Smashes Symbols Of Hamas Rule

Al-Aqsa TV & radio station under fire by IDF


Gaza’s sole power plant knocked out
Rockets found at UNRWA school for third time
Hamas: No cease-fire without lifting of blockade
Al-Aqsa TV, radio station destroyed by IDF strikes



Top Doctor Dies From Ebola After Treating Dozens
Scientists Struggle To Make Ebola Vaccines, Treatments

Fighting Cuts Off Access To Ukraine Crash Site
US: No evidence Russia trying to help end fighting in Ukraine



POLITICS
Rare Blue Falcon Spotted Outside St. Paul, MN Courthouse

Pretty much says it all.

Jesse Ventura awarded $1.8 million in “American Sniper” defamation case


E-Mails Show White House Adviser Intervened On Obamacare Bailout After Industry Appeals


Federal Appeals Court Strikes Down Mississippi Anti-Abortion Law

“Crush” Bombshell Rocks Opening Of McDonnell Corruption Trial

Senate Bill Would End NSA Phone Records Collection

Senate Passes Highway Funding Bill, Returns It To House With Changes

Immigration Rage Festers On All Sides



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Asian Crude Eases As Traders Await US Stockpile Reports: WTI $100.91, Brent $107.38
NLRB Ties McDonald’s To Labor Complaints Against Franchisees
Federal Reserves Expected To Make Sixth Reduction In Bond Purchases At This Week’s Auction
Twitter Assuages Growth Concerns, Stock Rises 35%
Wall Street Wavers Ahead Of Economic Data
Dollar Bulls In Charge Ahead Of GDP, Fed Tests
BlackBerry Focuses On Security For The Enterprise
OKCupid Experiments May Violate FTC Deceptive Practices Rule
FCC Chairman Tells Time Warner Cable: Bring Back The Dodgers
Netflix Agrees To Pay AT&T To Ensure Smoother Downloads
Microsoft’s WinPhone Dilemma: Sell Cheap Phones Or Great Cameras?



SPORTS
Vin Scully To Return For 66th Season With Dodgers In 2015

Scully throws the ceremonial first pitch to Sandy Koufax on April 4

Longest tenure of any broadcaster with one team in sports history

Denny Hamlin & Team Hit With Major Penalties – Which Will Have Minor Impact

Manny Machado Wins It For O’s In 12th With Sayonara Homer

Qualls Blows Save, Game In 9th As Astros Fall To A’s 7-4

Royals Offense Goes Limp, Twins Win 2-1

Hamels Strong As Phillies Blank Mets 6-0

Liriano Wins Again As Bucs Top Giants 3-1

M’s Offense Delivers, Tribe Falls 5-2

Pale Hose Hammer Tigers With Seven-Run 7th

Alvarez Outduels Strasburg As Fish Blank Nats 3-0



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Martha Stewart: Blake Lively’s Decision To Become Lifestyle Guru “Stupid”

“Isn’t that…what friends are for?
(That’s what friends are for!)”
Martha & Blake acting all chummy in NYC

“Why would you want to be me if you could be an actress?”


Maksim Chmerkovskiy Hanging Up His Dancing Shoes


Sarah Drew Expecting Second Child


J.R. Ramirez To Play Wildcat On “Arrow” Season 3


James Garner’s Cause Of Death – Massive Heart Attack

Bryan Singer’s Accuser Dropped By Lawyer Amid Reports Of $100K Settlement

Beverly Hills Cops School Condo Residents On Bieber Trouble

Zoe Saldana Poses Nude For Women’s Health UK Before Pregnancy News

“Revenge” Casts “S.H.I.E.L.D.” Siren In Recurring Season 4 Role

Legendary Studios Wants Joe Cornish For “Skull Island”

Sherri Shepherd Straps In For “Ride Along 2” After Exit From “The View”

Audrina Patridge, Corey Bohan Split After Five Years

Lady Gaga Belts Out Impromptu Performance After Bennett Show

Orlando Bloom Takes Swing At Bieber In Ibiza



FOREIGNERS
As Sanctions Pile Up, Russians’ Alarm Grows Over Putin Tactics
Red China’s Big Bust Shocks The Nation
After Iraq, Indian Nurses Stuck In Libya Pose Fresh Worry For Modi Government
Clashes In Sinkiang Leave Dozens Dead
In Rare Move, Canada Accuses Chinese Of Trying To Hack Government Site
Genocide Trial Begins For Aging Khmer Rouge Leaders
Turkish Court Arrests 11 More Police in Wiretap Probe
Cameron Unveils Benefit Curbs For EU Migrants Coming To UK
Rural Votes, Old Traumas Drive India’s WTO Brinksmanship
Iraq Lays Claim To Tanker Of Kurdish Oil In Texas Court



BLOGS & STUFF
Doug Powers: Obama’s Economic Patriotism Means We Rise Or Fall Together…Probably Mostly Fall
Twitchy: “Lone Survivor” Marcus Luttrell’s Facebook Page Mocks Ventura
American Power: Illegal Aliens From Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka Caught Entering Texas From New Mexico
American Thinker: Government Is Destroying Our Standard Of Living
BLACKFIVE: Don’t Take The Widow’s Money, Jesse
Conservatives4Palin: Laura Ingraham, Tea Party Giant Killer, Eyes Her Next Scalp
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, July 29
Jammie Wearing Fool: Democrats Can’t Stop Talking About Impeaching President Obama
Joe For America: Islamic Purging Of Christianity
JustOneMinute: Financing Al Qaeda
Protein Wisdom: More 2008 Flashbacks – What Obama Is And What The Future Holds
Shot In The Dark: Pick Your Poison
STUMP: Public Pensions Watch – Tell The Actuaries What You Want To Know
The Gateway Pundit: Nancy Pelosi – “Qataris Have Told Me Hamas Is A Humanitarian Organization”
The Jawa Report: Ramadan Bombathon 2014 Scorecard
The Lonely Conservative: Some Opponents Of EPA’s Clean Power Plan Barred From Testifying
This Ain’t Hell: Ventura Wins $1.8 Million From Kyle’s Widow
Weasel Zippers: Hamas Using Bunker Beneath Gaza’s Largest Hospital As Main Command Center
Megan McArdle: Self-Control Makes For Savvy Saving


Read this book yet? Just $1.99 – or free with Amazon Prime!

Category: Uncategorized

Missing Teen Found Alive; Was Kidnapped by ‘Sexual Deviant’

Posted on | July 29, 2014 | 23 Comments

Police say Nathaniel Kibby (left) kidnapped Abigail Hernandez (right).

Nobody who knew Nat Kibby was surprised when he was charged with kidnapping teenager Abby Hernandez. Kibby, 34, was a sadistic “sexual deviant” as a teenager. He was expelled from high school after assaulting a girl, and was suspected of phoning in bomb threats to the school. A former classmate described Kibby to the Conway Daily Sun:

“This has been a pattern for Nat for 20 years. He’s been a sexual deviant — he was a talented sketch artist who always obsessed about girls with dark hair and drew them with their hands tied behind their backs. . . .
[Randy] Waldron recalled in 1992 on his first day in sixth grade at John Fuller School, he met Kibby for the first time. The encounter did not go well.
“He took me out into Whitaker Woods and beat the crap out of me,” Waldron said and that led to Kibby being suspended from school, but the violence didn’t stop.
“He was brilliant, a brilliant person with a vocabulary out of this world,” Waldron recalled. “Pardon my expression but he was a ‘bad bastard.’ There was a time where I was afraid to ride the school bus because of Nat, he just terrorized me. . . .
Waldron said Hernandez matches the images Kibby used to sketch.
“It was always a dark haired girl and it was always in bondage,” he said.
“I’m 33 years old now and I’m dumbfounded,” Waldron added. “He’s the kid of my nightmares. . . . This was his destiny he was going to do something like this. He was sadistic — this kid was rotten to the core.”

Another former classmate remembered Kibby as a “punk” who was “always in trouble” and “messed up.” You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that (a) Kibby once spent time in the psychiatric unit of the state prison, (b) last year, Kibby pleaded guilty to marijuana possession, and (c) he once described himself as an “objectivist libertarian.”

In other words, your typical Ron Paul voter.

It’s difficult to believe a weirdo like Nat Kibby was running around loose after all these years, just as it is difficult to understand why he wasn’t immediately a suspect when 14-year-old Abby Hernandez disappeared last October. Everyone was relieved when somehow the teenager managed to escape — few details of the case have been revealed by authorities — and Kibby was arraigned Thursday:

Kidnapped teen Abigail Hernandez trained a stare on her accused captor on Tuesday as he was held on $1 million bail at an arraignment even though prosecutors provided no details of the crime.
Nathaniel Kibby, 34, did not enter a plea and did not object to the high bail, which will keep him behind bars until an Aug. 12 probable cause hearing.
Abigail, 15, sat calmly with family members during the brief hearing, feet away from Kibby, who was wearing an orange jail jumpsuit and had his hands shackled.
Kibby, who has a lengthy criminal history and was arrested on assault and trespassing charges in March, is charged with one felony count of kidnapping. Affidavits outlining the case against him were sealed, to the dismay of his public defender, Jesse Friedman.
“Mr. Kibby is entitled constitutionally to this information,” Friedman said. . . .
Abigail vanished Oct. 9 while walking home from Kennett High School in Conway, New Hampshire, and returned a week ago under mysterious circumstances.
Little information about Abigail’s kidnapping, captivity or release has emerged, but NBC-owned station NECN quoted sources as saying she was locked up in a container on Kibby’s trailer-park lot in Gorham.

How many stories like this — an atrocity committed by a weirdo who should have been in prison or a psych ward — do we have to read?

 

Category: Crime

Head ‘Sploding Tweet Of The Day

Posted on | July 29, 2014 | 19 Comments

by Smitty

For reasons of safety, I must put this Yglesias tweet below the fold:
Read more

Category: humor
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