LIVE AT FIVE: 06.19.14

Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Charles Boustany Jr., M.D. (R-LA) revealed that the Committee’s early work into “lost” IRS emails show the problem is much bigger than the IRS initially admitted to.
In addition to Lois Lerner’s emails, the IRS cannot produce records from six other IRS employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups. One of those figures is Nikole Flax, who served as Chief of Staff to Steve Miller, who at the time of the targeting was Deputy Commissioner and would later serve as Acting Commissioner of the IRS – a position from which he was fired for his role in the targeting of conservative groups. The timeframe for which Ms. Flax’s communications are purportedly unrecoverable covers when the Washington, DC office wrote and directed the Cincinnati field office to send abusive questionnaires, including inappropriate demands for donor information, to conservative groups.
Camp and Boustany also uncovered that the IRS has been keeping secret for months the fact that the Agency lost these critical records. Ways and Means investigators have confirmed that the Agency first knew of the destroyed emails as early as February 2014 – nearly three months prior to newly installed Commissioner John Koskinen telling the Committee the IRS would produce all of Lois Lerner’s emails. . . .
“Even when the IRS does admit something, they are not fully honest with us. Despite their attempt to bury the missing Lerner emails on page 15 of a 27 page letter that arrived late Friday, we now know documents from other central figures, like Nikole Flax, are missing. The fact that Ms. Flax was a frequent visitor to the White House and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building only raises more questions. Who was she visiting at the White House and what were they talking about? Was she updating the White House on the targeting or was she getting orders? . . .”

(Via Memeorandum.)

Category: Scandal, Taxes

Is Hillary Brain-Damaged?

Posted on | June 18, 2014 | 34 Comments

During the past several months, there have been questions about Hillary Clinton’s health and some speculation she might have had a mild stroke. This speculation comes to mind as I read Jonathan V. Last’s account of Hillary’s bad week:

By just about every account, her book is uninteresting and unreflective, a carefully contrived piece of positioning. Yet instead of owning that, she insisted at an event that she was “done with being really careful about what to say.” And that was before uttering inanities about how “the American political system is the most difficult, even brutal, in the world .” . . .
Then there was her Romney-esque statement about being “dead broke” after leaving the White House and her being so out of touch as to suggest that she and her husband “struggled” to “piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education.” “You know,” she said, looking for sympathy, “it was not easy.” It’s hard to think of a more let-them-eat-cake moment from any Democratic politician in the last 40 years. But what made the line even worse is that it was made in defense of taking exorbitant speaking fees from companies such as Goldman Sachs. You half expected her to explain, hedge funds are people, my friends!
And then there was her encounter with Terry Gross, in which Clinton couldn’t handle the tough questions … from NPR.

Of course, one hates to cite simple gaffes or inept interview performances as evidence of brain damage, because if Hillary’s slip-ups are symptomatic of a stroke, then Joe Biden should be in the ICU.

But the really big blunder was what Hillary said about Second Amendment advocates in a CNN Town Hall event:

“We cannot let a minority of people — and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people — hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.”

Ann Althouse dismantles that in fine fashion.

My gut hunch is that Hillary will not run for president in 2016, and if she does run, she will lose the Democrat nomination again. Whether or not she has a serious health problem, Hillary will face serious challengers for the nomination — I keep hearing Martin O’Malle mentioned — and I don’t think she can stand the heat from the Left.

Category: Hillary Clinton

Young Feminist Has Problems

Posted on | June 18, 2014 | 112 Comments

Erin McKelle Fischer (@ErinMcKelle) is a Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies major at Ohio University whose name I recognized because in February I quoted her denunciation of “heteronormative” virginity:

“The idea of your first penis-in-vagina sexual encounter being something significant and life altering (well, for women anyway) has origins in women being considered property.
“That is to say, virginity is a social construction that came about because of the commodification of women. . . .
“Virginity is heteronormative.
“Virginity assumes that penis-in-vagina sex is somehow a special type of sex that is different from all others.
“This means that there is an assumption that engaging in heterosexual vaginal sex is the standard (and should be) for your sexual activities.
“Heterosexuality is the norm, and virginity just works as reinforcement to this.”

So I was already familiar with Ms. Fischer’s name before I encountered her column today at Everyday Feminism about “the very real struggles that young feminists face,” e.g.:

A lot of it comes down to there not being a whole lot of opportunities for young people to get paid for their work. If more paid internships and fellowships, programming, and feminist-based work designed for young people existed . . . this could help bridge the age gap.

In other words, Feminism, Inc., doesn’t have enough job openings for all the Women’s Studies majors who would like to become full-time professional Marxist lesbian man-haters, but Ms. Fischer declares our belief that feminists hate men to be a “stereotype”:

Unfortunately, because of common stereotypes about feminism, many people think feminists are all just angry people, man-haters, or “killjoys.”

Excuse me, Ms. Fischer, for logically inferring that a woman who expresses hostility toward “penis-in-vagina sex” and the “norm” of heterosexuality might be hostile toward men in general. Also, Ms. Fischer, have your Ohio University professors taught you that your historical analysis — “women being considered property . . . the commodification of women” — is derived from Marx and Engels? If you haven’t yet read Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, you should, so that you understand that those who teach you this stuff are just repeating the errors of 19th-century radicalism. The idea of “traditional sexual relations” as “oppressive and humiliating” to women, of “the woman . . . being humiliated by the domination of the man,” and monogamy as a male imposition required by “economic development” — it’s all right there in Engels. The fact that tens of millions of people were killed on behalf of the insane Marxist vision . . . Well, I don’t suppose they teach that history at Ohio University, do they?

In her column, Ms. Fischer describes her own feminist journey:

I discovered feminism first when I was 15 and read Jessica Valenti’s book Full Frontal Feminism. . . .
My stepmom found out about a program taking place through my local rape crisis center that was geared towards developing youth activists and educators. We would be learning about sexual violence, as well as doing projects out in our communities that we would be compensated for. . . .
This changed my life.
This was what brought me back to feminism, as I would check out hooks, Lorde, and MacKinnon out from their resource library, not to mention learning about gender-based violence, oppression, and privilege. It inspired me and my mentors encouraged me to take action and do more.

Permit me to say that any high-school kid who reads radical feminists like bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Catharine MacKinnon is likely to suffer permanent brain-warp. It’s like Nietzsche. I have long been of the opinion that no one should read Nietzsche until they’re old enough to realize that the syphilitic weirdo was a dangerous madman. Maybe by the time you’re 35, and have a full-time job, kids and a mortgage, you can read Nietzsche without suffering permanent brain-warp. Still, his books should come with a warning label: THIS NOTORIOUS GERMAN LUNATIC DIED OF BRAIN SYPHILIS.

But I digress . . .

In February, Ohio University’s Women, Gender and Sexuality program hosted a conference at which were presented such papers as “Using the Lesbian Gothic to Combat the Male Gaze in Film and Literature” (Alane Presswood), “Is Your Vampire Boyfriend Abusing You?: The Twilight Saga and Perceptions of Intimate Partner Abuse” (Kelly Choyke) and “Bridging the Paradox: SlutWalk, Culture, and the Quest for Identity” (Jennifer Seifert). Erin McKelle Fischer also contributed a conference paper entitled, “‘Am I Pretty Or Ugly?’: Why Online Harassment is the New Sexism.” While I can’t find Ms. Fischer’s paper onlline, the title refers to a much-discussed YouTube video genre in which teenage girls invite criticism of their looks. Ms. Fischer is very much an activist against “lookism”:

Feb. 21: Dealing with Fatphobia while in Eating Disorder Recovery
April 30: Cutting Fatphobic Language Out of Your Life
June 2: How to Support People’s Health Issues Without Fat-Shaming

Why are “Fatphobia” and “Fat-Shaming” feminist issues? Maybe for the same reason the federal government spent $2.2 million for research on why lesbians are obese. And now, Erin McKelle Fischer presents, “5 Ways to Have a Body Positive Summer”:

Category: Feminism

A Failed Slut, A Successful Farmer, And A Pair of Soldiers

Posted on | June 18, 2014 | 16 Comments

— Wombat-socho

I’m going to lead off this week’s book post with a short review of a book which is itself all too short: Kathy Shaidle’s Confessions of A Failed Slut. Ms. Shaidle, proprietress of the Five Feet of Fury blog and columnist at Takimag, has a lot of uncomplimentary things to say about the state of the sexual revolution in America and Canada since the unfortunate 1970s, and she says them in a very entertaining manner. As has been said about Florence King’s Reflections In A Jaundiced Eye and Mencken’s Chrestomathy, the main problem with this book is that the covers are too close together.

This is definitely not a problem with Matthew Harrington’s Godspawn, which would have been a righteous doorstop of a book if I’d bought the dead tree edition, but since I borrowed it from the Amazon Prime Lending Library it was merely a nice long read. Harrington has done a good job of writing a distinctly different sort of fantasy, set in a world where magic works very differently, magicians fall out of the sky periodically, and a farmer’s boy comes back from a mushroom gathering walk in the woods to find all the adults in his village slaughtered, all the children enslaved, and the world’s best bowman searching through the wreckage to see what, if anything, can be salvaged. From that grim beginning stems a coming-of-age novel that’s also an epic tale of revenge involving dragons, an utterly corrupt (but still brutally, effectively, oppressive) Hegemony, a less corrupt matriarchy, and a number of other folks who help our hero on his way. Also, magical oranges that wind up changing the world for the better. All things considered, this is a fun book and well worth the money I’m going to drop on it when I have to give it back at the end of the month.

Equally huge, but considerably more famous, is James Jones’ From Here to Eternity, the classic novel of the prewar Army in Hawaii. This is the restored edition with more of the original obscenities and a couple of sections that were deleted from the original print edition by squeamish editors and lawyers, along with an afterword that discusses those edits, and the whole thing is definitely worth the $3.03 (see what they did there?) Amazon wants for the Kindle edition. I originally talked a lot about this book in the long-ago 21 Books post and really don’t have anything new to add; the restored parts don’t significantly change the plot in any way. I do not, on the other hand, recommend the other two-thirds of Jones’ trilogy (The Thin Red Line and Whistle); Jones was apparently obsessed with using the same characters in all three books despite killing off Prewitt at the end of the first novel, and as a result they wind up being textbook examples of the maxim that most authors have one good book in them, their first, and spend the rest of their careers trying to rediscover the spark that made that first book so special. This is not to say that the latter two books don’t have their moments, because they do, but if I had to do it over again I would have borrowed them from the library instead of buying them.

Category: Books, Kathy Shaidle

Porn, Shame and Suicide

Posted on | June 18, 2014 | 14 Comments

Last month, I wrote about the death of Alyssa Funke, a 19-year-old who committed suicide two weeks after appearing in a porn video:

If you do porn, it’s going to be on the Internet, and if it’s on the Internet, everybody’s going to see it. There is no way you can have a “secret” porn career in the Internet age, so if you’re going to do porn, just get used to the idea that your high school friends (and your high school enemies) are going to find out about it. Your parents, your teachers, your brothers and sisters, your aunts and uncles, grandma and grandpa — everybody you know is going to see what you do, got it?
If that doesn’t bother you, OK. But if you don’t think you can handle the reaction, maybe you shouldn’t be doing porn.

This is just common sense, but feminism is profoundly hostile to common sense, and so the feminist commentary on Alyssa Funke’s suicide was focused on the “slut-shaming” and Internet “bullying” she experienced after her porn career became public knowledge.

Now, Amy Otto is directly attacking the pro-porn feminist argument:

The claim that porn is a “sex positive” activity for women does not reflect reality. Denying the internal shame and trying to re-brand it will not redeem people. . . .
Was this video an act of her “self-expression” or a sign of a girl in trouble? The suicide soon after does imply that whatever theoretical “empowerment” that was gained by allowing herself to be filmed having sex with a stranger certainly wasn’t positive enough to inspire her to continue with that career path.

Read the whole thing at Pocket Full of Liberty.

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Category: Feminism, Sex

Ace on @Milbank: ‘Biased and Giddily Ignorant … Proud to Know Nothing’

Posted on | June 18, 2014 | 13 Comments

Last night, I hit Dana Milbank’s cheap smear of a Heritage Foundation panel about the Benghazi cover-up and thought I’d done a good job. This morning, I woke up and saw Ace’s treatment of the same story and was awed by the work of the master:

Milbank’s original deception is reporting this woman’s charge — a vague claim that the panel was Muslim-bashing — without first stating if the charge was accurate or not.
He reports her charge as if the charge is, itself, a fair one.
But is it? He doesn’t say. He implies it is, without saying so.
Note, however, what this panel was about. It was not about terrorism. It was not about Islam.
It was about the American government’s response to Benghazi, including lying to the public and retaliating against internal whistleblowers.
How would Islam have even have come up, except as a brief tangent? It seems unlikely that it did — and I imagine when the full video gets released, it will demonstrate, as one panelist told this woman, that this questioner was the only person talking about Islam, while all the panelists were focused on the Obama administration.
That is, she hijacked the panel to make her own point and toss out a vague charge of Serious You Guys Racism while doing so. . . .
Milbank’s original column shows him as biased and giddily ignorant. He’s actually proud to know nothing at all about the subject he’s allegedly covering.

Read the whole thing. In one of Milbanks’ “Look at These Crazy Wingnuts” gestures, he includes this:

The accusers’ allegations grow wilder by the day. . . .
[Brigitte] Gabriel floated the notion that Stevens had been working on a weapons-swap program between Libya and Syria just before he was killed.

Does Dana Milbank really think Brigitte Gabriel just made that up? Has he not paid attention? October 25, 2012:

On the night of Sept. 11, in what would become his last known public meeting, Stevens met with the Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin, and escorted him out of the consulate front gate one hour before the assault began at approximately 9:35 p.m. local time.
Although what was discussed at the meeting is not public, a source told Fox News that Stevens was in Benghazi to negotiate a weapons transfer, an effort to get SA-7 missiles out of the hands of Libya-based extremists.

Stevens’ meeting with the Turkish consul in Benghazi is significant because it is believed — not confirmed, because the administration has been stonewalling congressional investigators — that what happened was this: The CIA and State Department were trying to negotiate a “buyback” of weapons they had (secretly) supplied to anti-Qaddafi forces in Libya, weapons which were then being (secretly) shipped via Turkey to anti-Assad forces in Syria. Of course, Milbank might dismiss this as a Fox News conspiracy theory, except that CNN reported the same thing in August 2013:

CNN has uncovered exclusive new information about what is allegedly happening at the CIA, in the wake of the deadly Benghazi terror attack. . . .
Sources now tell CNN dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night, and that the agency is going to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing, remains a secret.
CNN has learned the CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency’s Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out. . . .
Among the many secrets still yet to be told about the Benghazi mission, is just how many Americans were there the night of the attack.
A source now tells CNN that number was 35, with as many as seven wounded, some seriously.
While it is still not known how many of them were CIA, a source tells CNN that 21 Americans were working in the building known as the annex, believed to be run by the agency. . . .
Speculation on Capitol Hill has included the possibility the U.S. agencies operating in Benghazi were secretly helping to move surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels.
It is clear that two U.S. agencies were operating in Benghazi, one was the State Department, and the other was the CIA.

The CIA was reportedly forcing employees with knowledge of the Benghazi operation to take polygraphs, asking if they had talked to journalists or congressional investigators. And this is significant . . . why? Because, if true, it shows that the administration had a covert policy which was neither authorized by Congress nor disclosed to the American people, that four Americans were killed because of this policy, and that the whole farcical charade of claiming that the Benghazi attack was a “spontaneous” protest against a YouTube video was part of a clumsy attempt to conceal the truth, a cover-up that continues to this day.

Dana Milbank is (or pretends to be) “giddily ignorant” of this. Why? Because the Washington Post is actively involved in the cover-up?

“The accusers’ allegations grow wilder by the day . . .”

Category: Ace of Spades, Libya, Media Bias, Terrorism

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.18.14

Posted on | June 18, 2014 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

TOP NEWS
Maliki Stands With Sunni Leaders, Appealing For Unity

People gather at the site of a Sadr City car bomb

Responding to US pressure?
Obama Sending Troops To Iraq After All

Twin Tornadoes Tear Through Nebraska Town
Two dead, at least 19 injured

Israel Considering Expelling Hamas Leaders From West Bank To Gaza
Manhunt continues for kidnapped students; 150 Palestinians jugged

POLITICS
Obama Fundraises In New York While Iraq Burns

A Pittsburgh artist shows Obama his etchings

Gets raucous embrace at gay donor gala

Hillary Claims She Had Doubts About Video Explanation For Benghazi

IRS Knew For Months About Missing E-Mails From Lerner, Other Employees

Sponsors Of Medical Marijuana Bill Meet With Governor Cuomo

“Kissing Congressman” Vance McAllister Considers Run For Re-Election

Rep. Candice Miller Calls For National Guard To Boost Border Patrol

California Mayor Resigns Over Poop Flinging Incident

White House Hails Illegal From India As “Champion Of Change”

THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Asian Crude Mixed After US Goes Back To Iraq: NYMEX $106.74, Brent $113.31
Dollar Firm, Stocks Stall As Inflation Fuels Fed Risk
Asian Shares Mostly Lower, Weak Yen Boosts Tokyo
Solar City Copies Musk’s “Gigafactory” Manufacturing Model
Adobe Rises 8% On Q2 Earnings Surprise
US Home Building Declines 6.5% In May
Facebook Takes On Snapchat With A Slingshot
YouTube To Block Indie Labels As Subscription Service Launches
OnLive And WikiPad Join Forces To Bring Big Games To Mobile Devices
FCC Could Be Blocked From Allowing Internet Companies To Sell Preferred Bandwidth To Content Companies
Oyster Subscription eBook Service Comes To Android

SPORTS
Rising Star Holt Sparks Red Sox Past Twins

Brock Holt

The only productive player in the current lineup?

Lucroy Homers Twice As Brewers Pound Snakes

Cavs Top Horned Frogs 3-2 In 15th; Tied For Longest CWS Game

Yu Can’t Win Them All: Darvish Struggles In 10-6 Loss To A’s

Red Take Series From Pirates With 6-5 Win

Chacin Feeds His Gopher, Rockies Fall To Dodgers 4-2

Davis Hits Grand Slam As O’s Beat Rays

Tanaka Leads Majors With 11th Win As Yanks Beat Jays

Wood’s Bat Helps Cubs Outlast Marlins

Ole Miss Ousts Texas Tech In The Ninth

Nude Photos Distract From Croatia’s Cup Campaign

Angels Overpower Tribe 9-3

Nats Hold Off Astros’ Rally For 6-5 Win

FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Playboy’s Shannon Twins: From Bunnies To Burgers

Not opening their own place, unfortunately

Got to admire the buns on the beach.

Stanley Marsh 3, Creator Of “Cadillac Ranch”, Dies At 76

Storyboard Artists Get Screwed

“Expendables 3” Trailer

Jersey Shore’s Mike Sorrentino Arrested In Tanning Salon Fracas

Justin Bieber And Selena Gomez Back Together For Now

Jay Penske Update

WB Ready To Reboot “Scooby-Doo”

Tracy Morgan Updated To Fair Condition

Paul Simon & Edie Brickell – Domestic Violence Charges Dropped

FOREIGNERS
Pound Loses Ground After UK Inflation Data
Japan Trade Deficit Shrinks In May After Tax Hike
Sunni Jihadis Launch Attack On Major Baiji Refinery
Suicide Bomber Kills 13 In Northern Nigeria
Overloaded Boat Sinks Off Malaysia, 42 Indonesians Missing
Putin Talks Peace With Poroshenko After Gas Pipe Fire
Philippines Seeks Quick Ruling On Suit Against Red China
Top PRC Diplomat To Meet Vietnamese Leaders As Tension Rises In South China Sea
Japan Finally Bans Child Porn

BLOGS & STUFF
Valley Of The Shadow: A Modern Media Mantra With Questions For The Media
Michelle Malkin: Not Just Two Planeloads Of Illegals To Hanscom AFB & Logan – It Was Six
Twitchy: Hillary – We Can’t Let Gun Rights Advocates Terrorize “The Majority”
American Power: The Return Of Christian Anti-Semitism
American Thinker: Obama’s Last Card
BLACKFIVE: Benghazi Suspect Captured
Conservatives4Palin: Governor Palin To The GOPe – Attack Obama, Not Conservatives
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, June 17
Jammie Wearing Fools: Obama Honors Illegal Aliens At The White House
Joe For America: Wait Lists And Veteran Deaths = $10 Million In Bonuses For Phoenix VA
JustOneMinute: Affirmative Action Alternatives
Pat Dollard: Mexican Embassy Claims Mexicans “Illegally” Crossing US Border Not Guilty Of A Crime
Protein Wisdom: We Are The Ones We Were Waiting For
Shot In The Dark: Contempt Of Populace
STUMP: Illinois Politics – Spread The Wealth Of Corrupt Connections!
The Jawa Report: Jihadtube Becomes #1 Platform For ISIS Snuff Porn
The Lonely Conservative: Meat Prices Skyrocket, Beef And Bacon Set New Records
This Ain’t Hell: Whistleblower Retaliation At The VA
Weasel Zippers: Anti-Gun Group “Moms Demand Action” Uses Armed Security During March On Brooklyn Bridge
Megan McArdle: Missing E-Mail Is The Least Of The IRS’ Problems

Shop Amazon – Celebrate 4th of July

Category: Live at Five

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The Other McCain

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

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.19.14

IRS Obstruction of Justice

Is Hillary Brain-Damaged?

Young Feminist Has Problems

A Failed Slut, A Successful Farmer, And A Pair of Soldiers

Porn, Shame and Suicide

Ace on @Milbank: ‘Biased and Giddily Ignorant … Proud to Know Nothing’

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.18.14

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